Anne Bennett - A Sister’s Promise

Stan had refused medication, feeling he owed it to the children to stay alert and in full charge of himself and his emotions, but that meant he had slept badly and in snatches, and it showed in his drawn face and rheumy bloodshot eyes. He was the only one awake in the house when the policeman had called earlier that morning to ask if he could go down to the hospital to formally identify the bodies, and that he would send a car.

No way did Stan want to look on the dead bodies of his son and Nuala, but he knew there was only him and so he nodded. But the children had not woken and he explained that both of them had been sedated the previous evening. There was no way he would go out without telling them, and so it was arranged for the car to come at half-past eleven when he was sure the two would be up and about.

Before either of the children were astir however, a bevy of neighbours were in the door, including Hilda, asking Stan if they could help in any way. Hilda readily agreed to mind the children while Stan went to the hospital. When Kevin woke up, though, and Stan told him of the arrangements, he had been distraught and it had been his cry of distress that Molly had heard.

‘I don’t want to be left behind,’ Kevin was crying to his granddad as Molly entered the room. ‘What if you don’t come back either?’

Molly quite understood Kevin’s concerns and so did Stan. He knew the time was gone when he could have heartily reassured his grandson that of course he would come back. Instead, he said, ‘You are right, Kevin. We will all go up to the hospital and I will just pop round and tell Hilda that.’ And Molly saw Kevin give a sigh of relief.

With the children deposited in the waiting room, Stan followed the white-coated doctor down the long hospital corridor to the mortuary, his heart hammering in his chest. At the door, the doctor said, ‘Before you see the bodies, I think you ought to know that with the impact of the crash, they were both thrown through the windscreen, so their faces were very badly injured. Your son was not too bad, but your daughter-in-law’s injuries are extensive. We have done our best to clean them up, of course, but there is only so much you can do.’

Stan swallowed deeply and then nodded. ‘I understand.’

‘Are you ready?’

Are you ever ready for such a thing? Stan thought, but he said, ‘Aye, yes.’ He squared his shoulders and again tried to swallow the hard lump lodged in his throat. ‘Let’s get it over with.’

Ted’s face was a mass of small cuts and black-grey bruises, and he had one massive jagged cut that seared the whole length of his forehead and another running diagonally from the corner of his right eye, across the bridge of his nose to the left-hand corner of the mouth. But all the blood had been wiped away and, though it was upsetting, Stan was able to nod at the doctor and say, ‘Yes, that is my son.’

Poor Nuala was a different matter all together. When they removed the sheet covering her face, despite the fact that he had been warned, Stan staggered and it was the doctor’s arm that steadied him. Her face was just a blooded mass of putrefying flesh and he felt the bile rising in him even as he nodded at the doctor.

He barely reached the yard outside before he was as sick as a dog, vomiting over and over into the drain until his stomach ached and his throat was raw. Then he straightened up and wiped his face with his handkerchief, knowing he had to return to the children and pretend everything was all right, or at least as all right as it could be in the circumstances.

However, the policeman assigned to sit with the children, took one look at Stan’s haggard face and said, ‘Sit down for a while. You look all in. I’ll fetch a cup of tea.’

Stan was glad to obey and more than glad of the reviving cups of tea the young policeman brought for all of them. He couldn’t remember when any of them had last eaten, for he had not touched the party food and he knew the children hadn’t either.

Some of it was stored away in the cupboards at home – the women had seen to that. Anything that wouldn’t keep, he insisted the neighbours take, rather than it be thrown away. Although he had been too overwhelmed to do anything himself, he had been pleased that all sign of the welcome home party was gone by the time he had got up that morning. The children had wanted no breakfast and Stan, who hadn’t been able to eat either, had not insisted, and so was gratified to see that at least they were drinking the tea.

It was as Stan was draining the cup that he remembered Nuala’s parents and knew despite anything that had gone before they still needed to be told. Of course they both might be dead and gone now, and Nuala’s brothers off to pastures new, but he had to find out. He hadn’t any idea how to go about this so he mentioned it to the policeman.

‘I know so little about them you see other than their name, which is Sullivan, Thomas John and Bridget Sullivan. They have a farm in a place called Buncrana in Donegal. I’m sorry there’s not any more to go on, but there was a falling-out when their daughter, Nuala, married my son, basically because he was a Protestant and Nuala and her family were all Catholic.’

‘In these country districts it will probably be more than enough,’ the policeman said. ‘And, as they are Catholic, if all else fails the parish priest will know who they are. We’ll see to that and without delay, so you don’t worry about it.’

Later that day, there was a smile on Biddy Sullivan’s face as she shut the door on the young guard who had come to the door to tell her of the untimely death of her daughter and son-in-law. She thought Nuala had at last paid for her father’s death. It had taken some time, but since the day she had held her dying husband in her arms, she had prayed for something bad to happen to her daughter.

Tom, was nervous of his mother’s smile. It wasn’t an expression he saw often and it usually boded ill for someone, so he asked tentatively, ‘What did the garda want?’

‘He came to tell me the thing I have wished for many a year,’ Biddy said. ‘Your sister, Nuala, and her husband have both been killed in a car crash in Birmingham.’

Tom felt a momentary pang of regret and sadness. The eldest boy, he had been twelve when Nuala was born, had left school and was already working in the fields with his father from dawn to dusk. He well remembered the tiny, wee child and how she had grown up so slight and fine-boned she was like a little doll. Biddy had never let the boys play with their little sister, but she hadn’t needed to say that to him, he wouldn’t have dreamed of playing with her, he knew his hands were too big and too rough.

And now she was gone, killed in a car crash, and his mother saying it was what she had wished for years. His mother was a strange one, all right, but what she had said this time was just downright wicked.

Tom seldom argued with his mother, but this time he burst out, ‘Mammy, that’s a dreadful thing to say.’

‘She killed your daddy.’

‘You can’t be certain of that,’ Tom protested. ‘And even if it was her news that hastened Daddy’s death, she didn’t know. It wasn’t her fault.’

‘Well, I think differently and I am glad that she has got her just deserts at last,’ Biddy said with an emphatic nod of her head. ‘And if you have eaten your fill, shouldn’t you be about your duties and not standing arguing the toss with me?’

Tom knew there was no use talking to his mother when she used that tone – he would be wasting time trying – so with a sigh he went back outside. And when a little later, he saw her scurrying away from the house, he didn’t bother calling out to her and ask her where she was bound for because he knew she probably wouldn’t tell him.