On the day of the celebration he couldn’t face, yet again, completing the jigsaw of Windsor Castle or the Battle of Britain, or playing patience with the three of diamonds drawn on the back of an envelope, or listening all day to cheery disc-jockeys. He practised preaching, all the time seeing the woman in the orchard instead of the sallow features of Jesus or a cantankerous-looking God, white-haired and bearded, frowning through the clouds.
From time to time he looked at his watch and on each occasion established the point the march had reached. The Kissane girl and her sisters waved. Cars drew courteously in to allow the celebration to pass by. McCourt’s Hardware and Agricultural Supplies was closed, the village street was empty. Beyond the school and the Church of the Holy Rosary the march halted, then returned the way it had come, only making a change when it reached McCourt’s again, swinging off to the left.
Mrs Leeson unlocked the door and handed in a tray, and Milton imagined the chicken legs and the sandwiches in the field, bottles coming out, the men standing in a row by the hedge. ‘No doubt about it,’ his father said. ‘Dr Gibney’s seen cases like it before.’ A nutcase, his father intimated without employing the term, but when he was out of hearing one of the men muttered that he knew for a fact Dr Gibney hadn’t been asked for an opinion. In the field the shame that was spoken about spread from his father to the men themselves.
Milton tumbled out on the card-table the jigsaw pieces of a jungle scene and slowly turned them right side up. He didn’t know any more what would happen if they opened the door and freed him. He didn’t know if he would try to walk to the towns, if he’d feel again the pressure to do so or if everything was over, if he’d been cleansed, as his father’s old uncle would have said. Slowly he found the shape of a chimpanzee among the branches of a tree. He wished he were in the field, taking the half-bottle from Billie Carew. He wished he could feel the sun on his face and feel the ache going out of his legs after the march.
He completed the top left-hand corner of the jungle scene, adding brightly coloured birds to the tree with the chimpanzees in it. The voices of his mother and Stewart floated up to him from the yard, the incoherent growling of his brother, his mother soothing. From where he sat he saw them when they moved into view, Stewart lumbering, his mother holding his hand. They passed out of the yard, through the gate that was pad-locked when he did the milking. Often they walked down to the stream on a warm afternoon.
Again he practised preaching. He spoke of his father ashamed in the field, and the silent windows of the village. He explained that he had been called to go among people, bearing witness on a Saturday afternoon. He spoke of fear. It was that that was most important of all. Fear was the weapon of the gunmen and the soldiers, fear quietened the village. In fear his sister had abandoned the province that was her home. Fearful, his brother disposed of the unwanted dead.
Later Milton found the two back legs of an elephant and slipped the piece that contained them into place. He wondered if he would finish the jigsaw or if it would remain on the mildewed baize of the card-table with most of its middle part missing. He hadn’t understood why the story of Dudgeon McDavie had occurred to him as a story he must tell. It had always been there; he’d heard it dozens of times; yet it seemed a different kind of story when he thought about the woman in the orchard, when over and over again he watched her coming towards him, and when she spoke about fear.
He found another piece of the elephant’s grey bulk. In the distance he could hear the sound of a car. He paid it no attention, not even when the engine throbbed with a different tone, indicating that the car had drawn up by the yard gate. The gate rattled in a familiar way, and Milton went to his window then. A yellow Vauxhall moved into the yard.
He watched while a door opened and a man he had never seen before stepped out from the driver’s seat. The engine was switched off. The man stretched himself. Then Garfield stepped out too.
‘It took a death to get you back,’ her father said.
On the drive from the airport Hazel did not reply. She was twenty-six, two years younger than Addy, small and dark-haired, as Addy was, too. Ever since the day she had married, since her exile had begun, the truth had not existed between her and these people she had left behind. The present occasion was not a time for prevarication, not a time for pretence, yet already she could feel both all around her. Another death in a procession of deaths had occurred; this time close to all of them. Each death that came was close to someone, within some family: she’d said that years ago, saying it only once, not arguing because none of them wanted to have a conversation like that.
Mr Leeson slowed as they approached the village of Glenavy, then halted to allow two elderly women to cross the street. They waved their thanks, and he waved back. Eventually he said:
‘Herbert’s been good.’
Again Hazel did not respond. ‘God took him for a purpose,’ she imagined Herbert Cutcheon comforting her mother. ‘God has a job for him.’
‘How’s Addy?’
Her sister was naturally distressed also, she was told. The shock was still there, still raw in all of them.
‘That stands to reason.’
They slid into a thin stream of traffic on the motorway, Mr Leeson not accelerating much. He said:
‘I have to tell you what it was with Milton before we get home.’
‘Was it the Provos? Was Milton involved in some way?’
‘Don’t call them the Provos, Hazel. Don’t give them any kind of title. They’re not worthy of a title.’
‘You have to call them something.’
‘It wasn’t them. There was no reason why it should have been.’
Hazel, who had only been told that her brother had died violently – shot by intruders when he was alone in the house – heard how Milton had insisted he’d received a supernatural visitation from a woman. She heard how he had believed the woman was the ghost of a Catholic saint, how he had gone to the priest for information, how he had begun street-corner preaching.
‘He said things people didn’t like?’ she suggested, ignoring the more incredible aspect of this information.
‘We had to keep him in. I kept him by me when we worked, Garfield wouldn’t address him.’
‘You kept him in?’
‘Poor Milton was away in the head, Hazel. He’d be all right for a while, maybe for weeks, longer even. Then suddenly he’d start about the woman in the orchard. He wanted to travel the six counties preaching about her. He told me that. He wanted to stand up in every town he came to and tell his tale. He brought poor Dudgeon McDavie into it.’
‘What d’you mean, you kept him in?’
‘We sometimes had to lock his bedroom door. Milton didn’t know what he was doing, girl. We had to get rid of his bicycle, but even so he’d have walked. A couple of times on a Saturday he set off to walk, and myself and Herbert had to get him back.’
‘My God!’
‘You can’t put stuff like that in a letter. You can’t blame anyone for not writing that down for you. Your mother didn’t want to. “What’ve you said to Hazel?” I asked her one time and she said, “Nothing,” so we left it.’
‘Milton went mad and no one told me?’
‘Poor Milton did, Hazel.’