Jan Karon - In the Company of Others

‘We’re definitely alike in our faith, in our taste for poetry-anything more remains to be seen. He’s a half-brother. We haven’t known each other long, scarcely two months.’ He saw the decaying barn outside Holly Springs, saw himself climbing the ladder to the loft, shouting Peggy’s name, busting a gut to find her, trying not to step on rotten floorboards that would eject him into the cow stall below, out of earshot of any living soul and maimed for life. Sixty years would pass before he discovered why his mother’s maid had left, saying nothing to anyone. He’d been devastated by the loss, unsure of himself without Peggy’s measured way of reining him in or letting out the rope, always at the right time; she had been his second mother.

Liam gave him a sharp look. ‘If I don’t say it now, ’t won’t get said. The only place I know to start is at th’ beginnin’.’

‘The best place.’

‘I’ve never confessed to a Protestant.’

‘I confessed once to a Catholic when I was a young curate; thought I might be struck by lightning. He was a wonderful man. Confession is for reconciliation with God, it has little to do with denomination.’

The muscle of Liam’s jaw clenching. ‘’t is likely William is my father.’

He wasn’t expecting this.

Liam raised his voice, as if he hadn’t been heard. ‘Anna may be my sister.’

‘Why would you think that?’

‘I remember th’ oul’ people sayin’ you could tell whose young was whose, by eye color.’

‘I’ve heard that. It’s not scientific.’

‘Brown and blue make blue. Mother’s eyes are brown-William’s are blue and so are mine.’

‘Ah, but brown and brown can also make blue, and your father had brown eyes-if the portrait I saw is accurate. The eye color business is wildly uncertain-the only thing you can count on is that blue and blue make blue.’

‘My Christian name is th’ diminutive of William.’

‘There’s many of both in this country,’ he said, feeling a mild nausea.

Liam’s anger flared, a third party suddenly between them. ‘An’ here’s a known fact-William came home to Lough Arrow nine months before I was yanked bawlin’ into th’ world.’

Liam appeared to want something of surprise or condolence. He could give neither.

‘He’d never say so to me, but one of his claims to fame is bein’ swain to my mother when she was a girl-and who’s to say he wasn’t at it again when she was a married woman with Paddy just six years old an’ his ears big as pitchers? It appears I’m livin’ under th’ same roof with a man who makes me a villain in th’ eyes of th’ law an’ a heathen in th’ eyes of th’ church.

‘But th’ worst of it is, th’ man I loved as a father is but a man who raised an’ provided for me an’ talked to me about life as if ’t was a good thing instead of th’ bloody terror I see it as bein’.’

He’d heard the sound before, the upheaving of rage and grief long hammered down, loosed in a crucifying howl he found chilling. Liam pressed his hands to his face, sobbed.

There was no saying, It’s all right, you aren’t making love blood to blood, your father is one of the sepia figures in a photograph, perhaps the one in tweed knickers holding aloft a brown trout. He had no right to say what Anna had told him. Indeed, there was no saying that at all, for the truth, if that’s what it was, could be more mocking than the lie.

‘Jesus, Joseph, an’ Mary.’ Liam wiped his face with the palms of his hands. ‘I knew William an’ my mother had feelin’s for each other when they were young. I knew she hated his guts because he left an’ never came back to marry her. He was a proper stuke about all of it, or maybe he knew he was dodgin’ a bullet by stayin’ away. But nobody ever said he’d been back to Lough Arrow nine months before I was born.’

‘The nine months could be a coincidence. Where did this information come from?’

‘A couple of years ago, someone William knew in th’ past turned up at Jack Kennedy’s. He was askin’ about William, said he’d driven to Lough Arrow with William many years before. He remembered th’ date because his twin nephews were born while he was stoppin’ here.’

‘What do you know about the person who said this?’

‘Nothin’ more, he was passin’ through to Belfast. Paddy said when he heard it from Jack Kennedy, he flashed on a memory from when he was six years old, said the scene sprang on him clear an’ sharp as yesterday. He remembers comin’ on th’ two of them, Mother an’ a man on a bench Father set in th’ woods. He remembered th’ scar on th’ man’s temple, he said, an’ the odd nose.

‘Th’ man had his arm around Mother, he said, an’ they were talkin’. Somethin’ about goin’ away to Dublin an’ he would give her a fine house. She laughed an’ said she already had a fine house an’ that’s when Paddy marched up an’ demanded the arm be removed from his mother at once or he would knock th’ man’s head off. Paddy was forward like that-I would have run like a hare an’ brooded on th’ shock of it.’

‘You believe Paddy was telling the truth?’

‘Paddy’s ever stickin’ th’ blade to somebody, he’s like our mother in that. But I have a feelin’ I can’t shut away, that he was tellin’ th’ truth.’

‘And so Paddy gets the house, he gets the father, he wins. Is that it?’

He was sick of this Paddy-on-the-hill, king-of-the-mountain business. ‘Let’s say Paddy saw your mother with a man on a bench. And more than a half century later, he meets the older William who bought and moved into Broughadoon. There’s no way Paddy could have recognized the much older William as the young man on the bench all those years ago. Would you say that’s true?’

‘But there’s th’ business of th’ scar an’ th’ nose.’

‘Has anyone confirmed William’s presence in Lough Arrow nine months before you were born? Your mother? William?’

‘I don’t ask that. Maybe I don’t want to know.’

‘Does your mother know Paddy talked with you about it?’

‘No, he says. He remembers she scolded him as a lad, slapped ’is face an’ boxed ’is ears an’ said he’d seen an’ heard nothin’ a’tall. ’t was his imagination bein’ fervid, she said.’

‘Fervid? He remembers such a word as that from the age of six?’

‘’t is th’ word we always used for Paddy’s imagination.’

‘You said you worry about everything. Perhaps you’ve got this out of proportion. An arm about your mother is merely suspicious; you have no proof of anything more.’

‘I know my mother. I never saw any proof of her love for my father. She was a bloody shrew, and yet he loved her. I used to feel embarrassed for him that he loved a woman so hard in her ways. He was gentle with her, he made excuses…’

‘Have you talked to Anna about this?’

‘There’s pressin’ enough on Anna without pilin’ this rubbish on. She was educated in a convent an’ has a proper way about religion-she would think hard of her Da, and God knows what it would do to us. ’t would be an upset of th’ worst sort.’

‘Perhaps you need to risk that upset, trust her to be brave enough to…’

‘She has upset in plenty; she’s ever havin’ to be brave, lookin’ after William-it’s herself that irons his shirts an’ makes ’is bed an’ cuts his hair-then there’s mixin’ it up with Bella an’ runnin’ this place an’ puttin’ up with me, for God’s sake. As for th’ Barret, she was always after insuring it for its full worth-I fought her on it, so there’s that, as well.’

It was a foolish question, but so be it. ‘Can you talk to your mother?’

Liam laughed. ‘You spent an afternoon in her company. You know there’s no talkin’ to my mother. I’ve had no peace, none a’tall; th’ heaviness of it comes between Anna an’ me sharp as any blade. I don’t know how to run from th’ truth like some people do-it’s always there, festerin’.’