Jan Karon - In the Company of Others

He wanted to ask what happened when William returned to Lough Arrow those years ago-he wanted Liam and Anna to know the truth. But how could even William know it?

Evelyn Conor was the only one truly intimate with such a truth.

‘Ye need to know I dearly loved Anna’s mum, but in a different way. We can’t love every woman as I loved Evelyn McGuiness, or ’t would kill a man, burst open ’is heart, so. Thank Jesus there’s never but one like that in a man’s life.

‘Pray for Evelyn McGuiness, if ye’d be so kind. I’ve seen those as try to give up th’ drink, an’ ’t would make ye weep to witness such persecution. ’

He heard voices-Feeney, Seamus, Liam-coming quickly along the hall. Nothing so bad it couldn’t be worse, he thought, seeing the look on Liam’s face. Feeney and Seamus were nearly running for the door.

‘Paddy called-it’s Mother. Will you go, Rev’rend?’

‘Cynthia,’ he said.

‘I’ll send Anna up, please God.’

At the entrance hall, he turned and looked at William, whose face expressed a plea for them to fix things if they could.

‘The stepstool, of course,’ said Feeney as they crunched across the gravel to the car. “Had to happen. Bloody inevitable.’ Feeney tossed his house call bag onto the backseat. ‘Paddy said she wasn’t drinking; she swears that’s why she fell.’

‘God love ’er,’ said Seamus.

‘They’ll be wanting you home nights, Seamus. But you’ve been expecting that.’

‘Aye.’

‘What do you need me to do?’ he asked Feeney.

‘Be there. Just be there.’

He waited in the entrance hall, eyes closed, praying.

Voices at the end of the hall.

‘Did you get her off the floor?’

‘Aye.’

‘Who is that person?’

‘The Rev’rend Tim Kav’na,’ said Seamus.

‘What’s he doing here?’

‘Dr. Feeney asked him up.’

‘Why in God’s name would Feeney ask up a Protestant…?’

‘Th’ gravity of the matter at hand, I believe, and ’t was all we had. Dr. Feeney wants him riding with your mother in th’ backseat, no need to get the ambulance out, he says. I’m just after ice to keep th’ swellin’ down.’

‘Have you packed her things?’

‘I’m comin’ to that.’

A door slamming.

He was willing enough to be all they had, to be here, waiting.

He looked at the broad staircase rising to two floors of ruined and vacant rooms and thought how Fintan O’Donnell’s own rooms abovestairs had stood vacant. He wondered whether the O’Donnells had kept a fire on the hearth in this great hall, how they found comfort in the pestering drafts of winter. He thought of the kitchen smells coming out to greet the senses of those who waited here generations ago.

Someone had said a house is a history book, his own former homeplace near Holly Springs being an example from 1853. He had often felt the temper of past occupants in the house and fields, and had, on rare occasion, smelled the cook fires of the slaves who had lived and labored there long before his arrival. Once he had heard laughter-not the ordinary sort of laughter heard from the living, but laughter from a time long vanished. It had seemed as known and familiar as the cooking smells, a palpable link to those gone before.

Feeney came up the hall, charging the air with haste.

‘I need you to ride with her in the rear seat, we’re taking my car. It’s both wrists, and some injury to her left leg, I’m not sure what. It needs the three of us to get this done.’

He followed Feeney along the dark hall to her room. A single lamp burning; a muted television in the corner; the old Lab on a cushion next to a bed with many pillows, and Evelyn Conor sitting in a chair in a nightgown, shocked by pain.

‘What’s to bundle her in, Seamus?’ Feeney had bound her wrists with what appeared to be kitchen towels.

Seamus brought a shawl from a chair, placed it around her shoulders; took an afghan from the foot of the bed and handed it to Feeney, who swaddled her in it, carefully tucking her arms close. She moaned, cried out.

‘God above,’ Seamus whispered.

‘I’ve given her morphine for the pain. Because of the leg, we’ll have to carry her. Slippers? We need slippers.’

Seamus went down on both knees, searched along the side of the bed, brought up slippers, gently placed them on her feet. ‘My God!’ she said, agonized.

‘Tim, go ahead of us to the car, get the rear doors open, clear the seat of my jumble; we’ll bring her down. And ask Paddy to come and speak to his mother, for God’s sake.’

‘Where will I find him?’

‘First door on th’ left as we pass up th’ hall,’ said Seamus.

Seamus and Feeney lifted her; it was a clean maneuver. She did not cry out, but was wrenched and silent, tears shone on her face.

He passed quickly along the hall and through the open front doors and down to the Rover as the Labs came racing up the driveway from Broughadoon. He did as Feeney asked, tossed the jumble behind the rear seats, left the doors open, and headed back to the house at a pace, passing them on the steps.

‘Water,’ said Feeney, ‘bring a bottle of water. And my bag from her bedroom, and her things in the duffel.’

He knocked; there was no answer. An angry blood beat in him and he opened the door. Paddy Conor-standing in the middle of a paneled room lined with empty bookshelves- grim, glass in hand. It was the man in the portrait, in the flesh.

He said what Feeney had said. ‘Come and speak to your mother, for God’s sake.’

He went to the kitchen and looked in the refrigerator. No bottled water. In the corner, an open case of it. He put a bottle in each jacket pocket, one for the injured, one for the resident diabetic, then crossed the hall to her bedroom, to the open leather bag with its antiseptic breath of injury and healing, snapped it shut, and collected it with the duffel.

Paddy waited in the hall, affronted. ‘There’s Seamus and Feeney and yourself. You’ve no need for me.’

‘Come,’ he said, meaning it.

He crawled into the backseat. Seamus stowed the bags, closed the door, signed the cross. The dogs sat watching. On the other side of the Rover, Paddy peered through the closed window. ‘Mother,’ he said. She didn’t hear or see him.

Feeney took it easy along the rain-pocked lane, but held nothing back on the highway to Sligo.

In his years as a priest, he’d driven or accompanied more than a few sick and suffering to the hospital. Each ride had been desperate in its own way, but this seemed something more-or perhaps something other.

‘Reverend,’ she whispered.

He knew this was not an appeal, not a conversation opener, but some way of connecting with the man who rode beside her, their bodies nearly touching, the heat of their flesh intermingled.

He rang his cousin on Tuesday morning. He had dreaded this.

‘You’ll never guess,’ he said.

Walter guessed. ‘How did it happen?’

‘Slipped in the shower, disrupted the healing. So now we wait for the swelling to go down, then on with the moon boot. I think the best thing to do is meet you at the airport, as planned.’

‘How long for the swelling to go down?’

‘Maybe three days. She must keep the ankle elevated. Then he wants to make sure the moon boot is doing its job, that’s a couple of days, and who knows what from there out.’

‘A bloody marathon for her,’ said Walter. ‘Doomed from the beginning, this trip.’

‘We hate it for you and Katherine. I know it’s been a bust.’

Somewhere near the kitchen, fiddle music; at the other end of the lodge, the faint tap of Liam’s hammer.