Erin Hart: Haunted Ground

“Right,” she said with a wry half-smile, but evidently relieved that his plans were at least settled. “I’m off, then.” He watched out the kitchen window as she backed her sleek new silver sedan out of the narrow drive.

As he took the hot plate of food from the oven, Devaney told himself once again how glad he was that Nuala enjoyed her work. They were certainly better off financially since she had begun working, and he was proud that she was the best auctioneer in this part of the county. But it also pained him that she had no time for the music; he winced at her insistence that the children pursue things that would be—in her words—“more useful.” For all her acuteness in reading people on the verge of buying property, he sometimes felt that she could no longer read him—or maybe she didn’t want to. Music was all he had to pass on. He’d nothing at all of any value, except for the tunes and stories he’d collected in hours spent drinking cups of tea and pints of porter with thick-fingered old men in baggy-kneed trousers who never washed but once a week, if that. He thought of the hollow ruin of a thatched house Nuala was showing tonight, and the sheer quantity of culture that was wiped out whenever any one of the old players was laid to rest. How often had he traveled up the road when he was younger to have a few tunes with Christy Mahon, God rest him, a grizzled old fiddler who had the time—and above all the patience—to sit and go over the tricky part of a tune with him, making sure he got the notes and the ornamentation just right. Their musical companionship had to do with something neither of them could begin to put into words, and thankfully, they didn’t have to; the music did it for them. A wild, lonely melody could carry him back to a place beyond his own lifetime, when music and poetry had been kept alive in secret, carried on in defiance of death and despair. Through him, this music was his children’s connection to the joy and pain of a past all too easily forgotten or denied.

Devaney thought of his children. His firstborn, Orla, whose name meant “golden,” was fair-haired like her mother, poised and intelligent. At seventeen, Orla was already a champion debater; she’d make a fine president, he thought, then revised himself. Why settle for a figurehead job like president? Give her another few years and she’d make a better prime minister than some of the fucking magpies they had running the country today.

Padraig, whose dark looks reminded him of himself as a boy, was fifteen this year. He had only recently been transformed from a bright and talkative boy into a hollow-chested, silent teenager, whose entire life seemed to revolve around acquiring the latest computer game or piece of athletic gear. Devaney had felt himself diminish in his son’s eyes these last two years. It was inevitable, he supposed, remembering how his own father had suffered a similar reduction in stature. Padraig had once shown a bit of interest in the fiddle when he was younger, but he didn’t have the gra for it, the hunger and thirst for music that would have kept him going.

His younger daughter, Roisin, who had just turned eleven, was still a riddle. Dark-haired, thin of face, and serious beyond her years, Roisin still called him Daddy, as she had when she was small, and was the only one of the three who seemed to value his company at all anymore. Perhaps because she was the youngest, he felt his age most at her growing up.

Padraig was at football practice this evening, and Orla and Roisin were in their rooms doing schoolwork. Devaney found himself alone in the kitchen as the evening light waned, sipping on a lukewarm mug of tea. He’d always been restless, but the feeling had increased since he’d given up smoking eighteen months ago. This is a lovely new house, Nuala had said, please let’s not have it reeking of cigarettes. He’d complied, partly because he knew he ought to give them up anyway, and partly to keep the peace. But it was devilishly hard to quit, and he wished right now for the familiar sight of a fag in an ashtray beside him, and the feeling of smoke filling his lungs. He took another drink of tea instead, looking out his back window, imagining Dunbeg just a few miles down the lakeshore. Strange to think how much he knew about all the people in the town. Even though he worked out of the detective unit fifteen miles away in Loughrea, being any sort of a policeman in a small town was a bit like being a priest: receiving and keeping private confidences was part of the job, whether you invited them or not. It went both ways, of course. They all knew about him as well, or thought they did. They knew he’d seen his share of city policing, perhaps more than his share, in seven years on the murder squad in Cork. Many of them knew the recent transfer to Loughrea had not been his own idea.

But none of them would ever fully grasp the twist of fate that had brought him to this place. Devaney himself, despite all the thousands of times he’d relived every second of that pursuit gone fatally wrong, could never put his finger on it. Had it been a conscious decision or pure instinct that made him ultimately responsible for the deaths of two people? One was a suspect he’d been after for months, a twisted piece of work named Johnny Comerford, who had terrorized and battered to death an elderly couple in their own home. The other was a seven-year-old child named Julia Mangan, the daughter of Comerford’s sometime girlfriend. On his way home from the Anglesea station one evening, he’d seen Comerford leaving a pub along the quays, so he’d followed, not expecting the bastard to take off. The girl was so small he hadn’t even seen her in the car. Once outside of town, Comerford missed a turn at a T-junction and plowed head-on into a stone wall.

Although Devaney himself hadn’t been injured, he’d been placed on mandatory medical leave for the duration of the inquiry into the crash. He wasn’t charged, but when his medical leave was up he was told his choices were Loughrea or leaving the Guards altogether. He had taken the transfer—which was in essence a demotion—because he had not known what else to do. And in the weeks he’d spent on leave, the music had been his only solace, the only thing that could replace the memory that kept replaying in his head, of approaching Comerford’s silent, demolished car, and the sinking horror of finding that child’s shattered body in the passenger seat. Perhaps that’s why Nuala disliked hearing him play, he thought, if it brought back to her that terrible time, without knowing that in playing the same tunes, the same sequence of notes again and again, he found a kind of release, and that release—not his family and not his work—was the one thing that kept him from being slowly crushed to death by the weight of remorse.

As he drained the last of the tea from his mug and got up to set his dinner plate in the sink, Devaney realized that he’d been plagued the past couple of days by the turn of a reel that had been traveling through his head. He crossed and took out his fiddle from behind the pine dresser. It was in an old-fashioned case, not the new molded-plastic variety, but a wooden box, wide at one end and narrow at the other, the precise shape and size of a miniature coffin. He always thought of the instrument as Christy’s fiddle. The old man had handed it on when the arthritis had got into his fingers and he could no longer play. After applying rosin up and down the length of the bow, Devaney took up the fiddle and played easily through the first part of the troublesome tune, feeling his way around the contours of the notes, knowing that as he played each one, his fingers would remember their places the next time it came to him. He attacked the irksome phrase again and again, until he finally made it through the turn, the music spilling forth from his bow, flowing like the water of a stream that has finally found its way through a rocky crevice.