The Ghosts of Kerfol (14 page)

Kid.

Was that what she was?

Ethan pulled a plastic baggie from the pocket of his denim jacket and started rolling a cigarette on the chair arm. Meg rolled away and off the pillow in disgust. She pressed her hot cheek against the lime-green hospital wall, and it felt cool and blank, like a blessing. She knew Nick would recover but that she would never see him again, that his brother would be forgiven, but she would not be. “Yes,” she agreed, writing Nick’s name, her best friend’s name, on the wall with a bruised finger. “He’ll be fine.”

D
A CAN RANT ALL HE WANTS
—“Gavin, this,” and “Gavin, that”— when he’s pissed, but he backs off when I fix him with a look. My Old Testament stare, he calls it, as in
I Will Smite Thee,
and let’s hope it works on roofers.

I fired them today, his cronies, because Da’s not here and I am.

Erik and Denez had just finished the burnt-out section of the west wing. Rebuilt and retiled the roof completely. Fine job, too, and Da thought to keep them on some, give them heavy lifting, stonework, what have you. But with him down for the count, I can’t see spending another week on-site with these guys, much less the month or more the job will take. They’re good with a hammer — and loyal to my da — but better at stuffing their mugs with their wives’ lunches and trolling for porn on Erik’s laptop. After a bit of that, they sit around smoking with Brie on their teeth and flicking their butts all over the new lawn I’m laying from seed. They’ve no use for a deaf seventeen-year-old boss. And I’ve no use, anymore, for them.

All the while I’m fighting to look them in the eye while I fire them, Clio’s sprawled at my feet panting like the sweet, dumb mutt she is — her tongue a flapping flag of surrender.

“You’re sure about that, Gavin?” Den can sign and knows it’s easier for me. Almost all Da’s friends can sign some —
because he says so.
But I also read lips, thanks to Mum, who thought I’d do better in the bigger world that way. “Bagad won’t like it,” Den adds regretfully.

“Yeah,” Erik puts in. “Your father won’t like it.”

I breathe in, storing up for the garbled adventure that is speech, since Erik’s not one of Da’s that learned to sign. “He’ll see my side.” They don’t wince, but you can see it in someone’s face when you have to modulate, so I lower my voice. “I don’t need you now. Too many cooks in the kitchen.”

Den holds out his cell, but I pat my pocket. “It’s all set,” I lie. “He’ll be in touch about the place in Normandy.” I fish in the back pocket of my jeans for the postdated checks Da wrote. At breakfast, I penned in today’s date and forged Da’s initials. “Here.”

They just stare at me, and I stare back.

I’m not brave, but I’ve never been especially afraid, either. I saw no use in fear once Mum died. The worst had happened. I don’t have nightmares like my sister, Sondra, does still, flailing and fussing about the dark. My mind’s like still water, and most of the people in my life know not to cast stones into it.

“He’s a mad little dog,” Uncle Sean once spat, when I was eleven and nearly brained him with a shovel while we were digging Sondra’s cat’s grave and he unwittingly made her cry. “It’s the runt quiet ones, not the big barkers, you have to worry about.” He’d ducked just in time, and my uncle looked shaken, but he forgave me at once. I could see that. “They pounce, those quiet ones, and won’t let go.”

Finally Erik takes the check, his hand striking like a snake. Beady eyes search out the amount, and when he finds it, he sucks his teeth and shrugs. “So.”

Den doesn’t give in as easily, but in another minute Erik grabs the other check, too, spits on the ground, and nudges Den off toward the shuttered stables, where our trucks are parked.

I don’t notice them drive away, but when Clio leaps up to chase them down the gravel and out through the gates onto the main avenue, I relax.

I don’t wait for her to come back. She always does, good old girl, always comes when I whistle. We understand each other, and I’ll never punish Clio with a leash unless she crosses me. I yawn and think about taking a nap. After a lot of cajoling from Da, the historical society agreed to let me board for the duration in the abandoned cottage at the far edge of the property, beyond the chapel, stables, dovecote, and the near-ruined orchard. The orchard is next on my list. There’s no task I know more satisfying than pruning.

But before I can relax into that or anything else, I should text Da and fess up. He won’t be pleased, especially that I advanced their full month’s wages, but I’ve worked hard to prove that I’m capable of making this kind of decision.

There’s no telling if he’ll look at his text messages anytime soon. He isn’t expecting to hear from me until the weekend. The insurance has been giving him hell on account of his back, and though Sondra squawked, we got rid of the landline to save money. The three of us are pretty good about texting.

As it turns out, there’s no cell access anywhere on the grounds. Yesterday I had luck up by the road, but I’m not making that trek right now. I’ll fetch supper later at the cybercafé in town and text from the road or e-mail Da when I get there.

As I say, I’m rarely afraid. Sondra says it’s because I’m too logical, but a couple of weeks before I drove up here in Da’s loaded flatbed from Quimper, I’m in the waiting room at the dentist’s reading an article in a movie magazine. It’s an interview with some Italian director, and he’s going on about soundtracks, how a movie soundtrack can paint the mood for almost any scene. The drums tell the heart to beat. The strings set your nerves on edge. So I form this theory. Maybe I’m not afraid because my world is buffered by silence, sort of unspoiled.

I have no soundtrack, I guess you could say, but I remember music. I’ve only been deaf a few years. What’s more, I come from a musical family. It’s hard to be deaf in a family like ours, though no one, least not my Mum and Da, ever purposely made me feel the loss. But back when Mum was still with us, it shook the floors some nights, made the chair under me shiver. I could stomp along all right, but I’m no Beethoven and will always be off the rhythm, out of key.

But speaking of reception, it’s funny that since I’ve been here, my inner ear, the one that works on memory — not vibration, as for others — has been on a tear. I keep hearing snatches of fiddle. Sean or Da would call it “violin,” nose in the air; all three brothers play, or used to, the old-timey music, stomp-to reels and the sad old ballads,
gwerziou
and
sonniou
about drowned lovers and such. They fiddle.

This is a bleak, worked-up tune, gypsy-wild but also refined, repeating over and over, and I’m hearing it — or a memory of it — tuning in and out again all over the grounds, especially near the building.

My mind may be like still water, but sometimes a thing lights on it like a leaf, and there’s this ripple, this storm of rings. That girl I thought I saw this morning behind the chapel, for instance, bending by a tangle of briars. This land is rich and overrun, and locals must find plenty to poach: rabbits, berries, whatever. But this morning’s trespasser seemed mystical, like a deer you meet on a path in the woods when you aren’t hunting, aren’t looking. She wasn’t real, couldn’t be real — she was dressed funny, for one thing, like an old-fashioned maid with pleated, poofy skirts, an apron, a little cap — so maybe I made her up to pass the time. She reminded me of that song Mum liked to sing. “She Moved Through the Fair,” I think it was called. Now
there
was haunted — whether because Mum’s gone now or just because she had the right voice for those lyrics — and Da accompanied so solemnly, sweetly, on his fiddle, as if to urge her gently toward the place where the song led. As if he saw the future.

Da more or less gave up his fiddle after Mum passed. “It’s God’s gift to you, man,” my uncle Sean grumped. “You have to use it.”

“You mean the same God that took my wife?” Da challenged. “And my son’s hearing?” Sometimes even now he forgets I read lips. Or maybe Da wanted me to get that, wanted me to know what I’d cost him, what Mum had cost him, though he’s never been spiteful that way.

“What song and why — if not for them?”

Sean winced and shook his head, pouring another cup of coffee for them both.

The not speaking seemed to physically weigh on them until Da said, “There, now. Shaddup, Sean,” meaning go on and talk about football or some shop-woman’s fabled backside, and my uncle obliged.

So this music, it fades in and out, like cell-phone reception. The signal comes and goes depending where I stand. Do I remember this tune? Wouldn’t I remember this tune? I have a little mental card catalog of stored music, a treasury I draw from without warning. I can rarely call something up when I need it, but tunes come unannounced and knock me flat. Maybe this music is something I’ve heard, one of Mum’s CDs — she wasn’t hardened against “the violin” like Da and sometimes listened to old-guy composers with names like Ciconia or Corelli or What-Helly.

I’m worrying about Clio now and start whistling for her. What if she galloped into the road and under the wheels of a car? What if Den and Erik dognapped her for spite? She always comes when I call. Always.

I wait an agonizing while and then whistle again, loud, though of course I can’t hear a thing; I just feel it, a wind in my ears, a storm in my head, and a few minutes later she blows past my legs at a canter, gleefully twisting in play. It’s what she does when I walk her in the park and there are dogs there, when they run circles round each other, snapping and sniffing each other’s rear ends. Only here there are no other dogs. It’s sort of eerie and fascinating, something I’ve never seen her do before.

Clio tears past again, and I watch her curiously, sitting on a stone bench and fishing my cold egg-salad sandwich from the morning’s wrinkled café bag, feeling the damp, and taking in the expanse of the grounds. It’s a fine old place, despite how run down it’s gotten; I can see why the historical society hired Da once they got their grant. He charges a fair deal more than some contractors but has a reputation for restoring, not just renovating. He’s got the authentic eye, people say, and now I do as well, after years of early mornings, of Da giving the blanket and my rear a boot, and when I roll over, signing, “You can’t quit, man. It’s a family business.” Sondra, who keeps the books, hears her version of same.

I do carpentry and stonework, but Da saw it was the green I do best. It’s that shaping of the unruly natural world into something formed, the crafting over of chaos — never doing away with it, which is impossible, I know — but scissoring, snipping, molding. So at the ripe old age of fourteen or fifteen, I became the garden and landscape department of Da’s “authentic” operation. He sent me to Versailles to study the gardens there. He advised long Sunday drives, said mind what the wealthy do in their gardens and why. He taught me devotion to and respect for what’s humble: the worm, the bee, the frost. It’s a modest life and it suits me, which is more than most sons-in-line-for-the-family-business can brag.

It’s making me uneasy, Clio tearing up and down the lawn like she’s in some sort of crowded dog park or something. They say animals and babies see angels and ghosts and whatnot, which makes me think of that girl again, her mouth stained bright with berry juice. After I stopped hearing, I found I still needed to use words hearing people take for granted, words like
loud,
only I used them about verbs or colors. The red on that girl’s face was a “screaming” red.

Maybe Clio saw her, too.

Maybe she’s seeing her still.

Like before, Clio’s running and snapping at the ground like a doggie mime, and I don’t like to admit it, but it looks like she’s having fun
with others,
and it’s making me seriously nervous.

People say this place is haunted. When my friends heard I was coming, they made the mock noose and the finger-slicing-the-neck and the bug eyes and said I’d be dragged into the homely bowels, never to be seen again. I was stoical about this. People say the same about a lot of the old houses, and forgive me, but my friends are dumb as dung. They’re good guys, patient — those who stuck around after I lost my hearing even learned to sign a little — but a few clowns short of a circus.

I don’t doubt it’s haunted, but the grounds seem peaceful enough to me. Not kind or welcoming — nature isn’t that, in my experience — just indifferent. But I’ve no ill will with the dead. When your own mum’s dead, you don’t.

For me, living in a hearing world’s something like living in a world with ghosts anyway. Everyone’s on the other side of a veil of silence, speaking mystery. They just are.

Clio’s barking furiously. I don’t hear this. I see it. When I go to investigate, I see she’s been digging up chunks of my new lawn. I’m furious and confused — Clio’s not a digger — and I point at the hole and kick it with my boot, and give her a little crack on the nose. “No,” I say.

No.

Later, when I come looking for my water bottle, she’s been at it again. Another crack on the nose. Another “No.”

The next time I find a chunk of the lawn torn up, I leash her and tie her to one of the hedge boughs.