Reegan was sent to the town to make the funeral arrangements, and it was the first chance he got to think what had happened since Casey came to the bog with the news. There was such a bustle of activity about the death, and he felt just a puppet in the show. When he got home from the town and undertaker the house was full of people. The wake would last till the rosary was said at midnight; and a few would remain in the room afterwards to keep the early morning vigil, the candles burning close to her dead face while it grew light. All Reegan had to do was stand at the door and shake hands with those offering him their sympathy, answering the customary, “I’m sorry for your trouble, Sergeant,” with what grew more and more idiotic to him as the night progressed, “I know that. I know that indeed. Thank you.”
The next evening she was coffined and taken to the church where she was received by the priest and left beneath the red sanctuary lamp, surrounded by candles in tall black sticks, till she’d be taken to the graveyard in Eastersnow after High Mass the next day.
Cars crept jerkedly in low gear behind the hearse at the funeral, a few surviving horse-traps that seemed to belong more to museums than the living day followed behind the cars, the bicycles came next, and those who walked were last of all. A funeral’s importance was judged by the number of cars behind the hearse and they were counted carefully as they crawled past the shops: Elizabeth had 33 cars at her funeral. The most important funeral ever from the church had 186 cars, it was the record, and labourers hired out for their lives from the religious institutions that reared them to farmers, homeboys, were known to have as few as 5 cars behind their deal coffins, so Elizabeth’s funeral with 33 cars was considered neither a disgrace nor a remarkable turnout.
Mullins and Casey rode in the fourth car behind the hearse, just after the mourning cars, but they had told the driver not to wait for them afterwards, and escaped from the throng about the grave in the first drift-away during the decade of the rosary. They didn’t want to face back to the barracks and relatives and last grisly drinks and sighs with Reegan standing silent like a caged animal, they had more than enough of the bustle of death in the last three days.
By the back way, around by the Eastersnow Protestant church, they escaped, this part of the graveyard thinly populated because there were few of any other religions outside Catholicism left in these western districts. Not till the grave scene was shut out of sight by the church did they feel at ease or speak, the way the little whiskey bottle that held the holy water had shivered to pieces on the corner of the bright brown coffin when the priest threw it into the grave and the scraping of the shovel blades against the stones in the clay and the hollow thudding on the coffin boards still too close, and their satisfaction, “It’s Elizabeth that’s being covered and not me and I’m able to stand in the sun and watch,” not able to take the upper hand in their minds till they got the bulk of the stone church between themselves and the grave.
Before the church door was the King-Harman plot, the landowners of the district before the New Ireland had edged them out, the deer parks of their estate split into farms, the great beech walks being gradually cut down, their Nash mansion that once dramatically overlooked the parks and woods on one side and the lake with its islands on the other burned to the ground, and here Casey and Mullins stopped to light cigarettes, Casey’s attention attracted by some of the inscriptions on the smaller headstones in a corner of the plot and he read:
Thomas Edward, killed in action in Normandy, 4th August 1944 and was buried in an orchard adjoining the churchyard of Courteil, South of Gaumont.
Capt. Edward Charles, Irish Guards, killed in action 6th Nov. 1914 at Klein Billebecke near Ypres and has no known grave; greater love hath no man than this that a man lay down his life for his friends.
Chains hanging between low concrete piers girdled the plot, a concrete path ran down its centre to where a pair of great cypress trees rose, one in each corner, and to the right of the path stood the three baronets’ headstones, large Celtic crosses in old red sandstone, on each of them two fingers raised from a hand clasping a crown to point sky-wards with the inscription:
spes tutissima coelis.
“It’s easy to see who those gentlemen belonged to,” Casey remarked as he read the inscriptions and then he derided as he saw the fingers point to the heavens, “They might get a hell of a land; whoever told them heaven was in that direction anyhow!”
Both of them laughed at the sally, their fear fast going. They gazed a while at the plot, and crossed the stone stile out of the graveyard.
“Though it is up,” Mullins said. “They’re right in that. It was up Jesus Christ went on Ascension Thursday.”
“But how do you know it was that way up?” Casey laughed as he set himself to argue. “The world rotates, it does a full circle every twenty-four hours, in twelve hours it’ll be down where Australia is now and it’ll be pointin’ in the direct opposite direction then.”
“It’s to Mulloy’s we’re goin’, isn’t it?” Mullins halted the argument, but he was not beaten. Mulloy’s was a small pub down the Eroona road, out of the way of the mourners who’d return to the village.
“That’s where we said, it’s a long time since we had a drink on our own, and where there’s more than two people you can never get any satisfaction out of talkin’,” Casey said.
“To get back where we left off,” Mullins said, “in twenty-four hours the earth’ll be back where it is now and it’ll be still the same direction. I think the Ascension is the important thing.”
“But the world rotates round the sun as well,” Casey countered and they both squared themselves. It was plainly a problem that’d not allow itself to be solved in a moment, and when they were not putting on a show or face before people they loved few things better than to feel themselves garbed in the seriousness of these philosophical arguments.
When they reached the road they quickened their pace, their speech grew more excited. Away to their right the plains in the summer swept greenly down to the river and village and woods. There was a shimmer of heat in the fields of young oats and the powdery white dust of the road dulled the shine on their boots as they walked, it was the time of year for pints of cider.
8
There’s nothing to lose! Nothing to lose! You just go out like a light in the end. And what you’ve done or didn’t do doesn’t matter a curse then, wore itself into Reegan’s bones in the next months.
He’d won and sold his turf, fulfilled all his contracts, but he hadn’t near the money he’d expected to have, the expenses of her last illness and burial eating up most of the profit he had calculated on as well as all her savings, the savings that had meant so much to her now only a pathetic little sum against the flood of bills.
And would he have to knuckle down and grin and bear the police till he died or was forced to retire at sixty, or the children were able to fend for themselves.
“No, no, no,” the whisper grew more savage as the autumn wore to winter and the end of another year of his life. “No, no, no! There’s nothing to lose! Nothing to lose! You just go out like a light. And what you did or didn’t do then doesn’t matter a curse, so do what you want, what you want to do, while you’ve still the time.”