Where Old Ghosts Meet (11 page)

“Yes, yes I do. It's just not what I expected to hear.”

“I know.” She chuckled weakly and looked directly at Nora. “My father was right, I suppose; I had a liking for wanderers and drifters. But I'm tellin' you now,” her voice became serious, “I have no regrets. No, my dear, not the one. I've been lonely in my time and I've cried my fill, but I've never been bitter or felt hard done by. Though there's many a one will tell you different. But I knows the truth of it and I didn't care then and I don't care now what anyone has to say or what they thinks!”

Nora threw a worried glance in Peg's direction just in time to catch a fierce flash of defiance in her eyes, and then it passed and her usual calm returned.

“I don't know, girl, if you can understand what it was really like back then. Times was so hard, always the same, day in, day out, hard work, sickness, poverty, death. They came and went like the tide and there wasn't a whole lot of anything else. I wanted to get away from it all, to be free. I'd have gone to St. John's, gone in service, anything, but it was a dream, nothin' more. There was no way out for the most of us.”

She shifted in her chair. “When Johnny went off at the beginning of the war, I envied him. I wanted to go with him. I knew from the talk of people coming back and forth to the island that women were going to France too. War girls. VADs they called them. Voluntary Aids, something like that. They helped with the war, even at the front! I thought I could do that too; I could look after Johnny and the other young Newfoundlanders, and more besides. I was young and strong, able for anything, better able than Johnny maybe. But, I'd promised my mother before she passed away that I'd take care of my father, no matter what, so what was I to do? I told Johnny to go on, thinkin' how he'd come back with all the stories and excitement about England and France and the war. That's how innocent I was. Well, it didn't work out that way, now, did it? The young fellas was killed by the thousands and the ones that come back, the stories they had to tell was enough to give you nightmares. Leavin' the island didn't seem like such a great idea after that.”

She finished her drink and poured another. Nora passed her glass.

“Back in those days I used to believe that Johnny knew, when he met Matt, that he wouldn't be comin' back no more, so he sent him to me, special like. By and by, I come to think it was just fate, that all along this is what God had planned for me. Matt's ways were strange sometimes, but he brought me what I wanted most of all, the outside world. He knew about everything it seemed. He was full of information, full of stories, real and not so real. I said to him one time after he told me a few of them Arabian Nights yarns, ‘Matt,' I said, ‘sure, you're for all the world like that missus Scheherazade, yarn after yarn and no end to it!' He laughed then, or I should say he made a kind of noise like a laugh. He never laughed, not really. Then he just said, ‘You'll not chop my head off, if I run out of tales, I hope.' ‘I might an' all, so you best look sharp,' I said.” She laughed again.

“Not indeed that there was much time those days for tellin' stories. But evenings when the work was done and my father was to bed and I'd have a bit of knittin' on the go, it's then he'd tell the stories or read. Best part of the day it was, that hour before bed. My dear, could he tell a story. Oh, you wouldn't believe! Mind now, there was many on the island those days could tell a good story, especially the old people. We did that all the time at the house parties, especially in the winter. But now Matt, he was different. The voice on him! I don't know where it came from. He wasn't a big fella but, my dear, it rumbled about inside of him like a great swell and when it come rollin' out, well, the power of it! He could command an army with that voice, he could, or be soft enough to put a child to sleep. It was wonderful to hear. And a memory! He never needed a book for the words; it was all in his head, every word. Now times he'd use a book. Said he liked the feel of a book in his hands. I used to watch his long fingers, so elegant, turning pages thin as a butterfly's wing; they'd make a little crinkling sound as he touched them. I liked that sound. Oftentimes when he wasn't around, I'd pick up one of them books with the thin pages, open it up and do the same thing just to see if I could get the same feel.”

“And could you?” Nora was amused but touched by the simplicity of the disclosure.

“Yes, girl, but, well, I just wanted to watch him.” Peg looked away. “It sounds foolish, I know.”

“I don't think it's foolish,” Nora reassured her.

In a flash Peg's head came up, their eyes met and her index finger began to tap a determined rhythm on the table top. “It's true just the same; it's how it was.” She averted her eyes but not before Nora had seen the glint of unwelcome tears.

“It's important, Peg. It's part of your life,” Nora urged. “I want to know.”

“Yes, girl, I know but it's …” She struggled for a moment, trying desperately to hold on to her composure, then she sat forward in her chair, straightened her back slightly and said, “Never mind, let me get on with it.”

Nora was thinking that maybe a break might be a good idea when Peg found her voice again. It was strong and purposeful. “You know by now he loved books. It's what he lived for. You saw below in the room.” She pointed vaguely in the direction of the spare bedroom. “Beautiful books.”

“They are beautiful, and valuable.” Nora looked at Peg, wondering if she understood that.

“What you saw is only a part of it,” Peg said. “He never stopped collecting them. Some of them have names of famous people written in them, like they gave them to him for a present. It was a job to pack them up and take them with me but I had to do it; it's what he would have wanted.”

She nodded her head several times and sipped her whiskey. “After he left home and ran away off, he did what he should have done in the first place, went to Dublin. It was there he really got into the plays an' all that. He used to talk a lot about the Gaelic League and the Abbey Theatre and all of the goings on in Dublin. I remember him talkin' about a pair of actresses called the Allgood sisters. At the time, they were big stars by all accounts. Like them Beatles today! They'd arrive at the theatre every night, a flower pinned to their coats, given them by the flower sellers in the streets. I used to love to hear all that old stuff, all about the fancy clothes and the like. The very idea of sellin' flowers in the streets amused me.” She laughed heartily. “They were just ordinary girls, he told me, but they had great talent and worked hard and the people loved them. One girl, Molly, I believe, married the famous man who wrote all the plays, John Synge. But you'd know all about that, Nora, comin' from there.”

“No I don't, Peg. Most of it is news to me.” Nora was enthralled, her attention now spinning between the collection of books in the spare room, the story of the Abbey Theatre, and to thoughts of her sister and what she might think now of her crazy old grandfather and the fabulous collection of rare books, some of them signed, all stacked in the room down the hall.

“Well, girl, I heard it all that many times I thought I knew them too. He was right in with that crowd, it seems. He had a little job evenings at the theatre just helpin' out with things. He didn't get paid or nothin'. He just liked to be around and I suppose he understood a bit of what was goin' on too. He was there the night they had the big racket in the audience.” She threw a glance in Nora's direction to see if she was still interested. “It was the second night after the opening of the play called
The Playboy of the Western World
, you know, the one Matt and I used read together, with Pegeen in it, the one you saw below in the room.”

Nora nodded eagerly.

“Here, when it was only halfways through, up she went! Seems the crowd started shoutin' and bawlin' and makin' the biggest kind of a racket… didn't like the way the ordinary people of Ireland was bein' talked about in the play. It got so bad you couldn't hear a word was being said. In the end the police was brought in to clear the decks. That was how it was every night until they shut her down altogether!”

He had been there, Nora thought, this hobo grandfather of hers, there in Dublin, right at the heart of that great revival of Irish literature and culture. She tried to picture him, to put him in the middle of all this excitement. A thought occurred to her. “Did he ever say if he'd met any of the writers, Synge or Yeats or O'Casey? Did he ever talk to them?” She leaned forward, willing a positive response.

“I don't know, girl, but just the same, he said he saw the fella Synge or so he told me.”

“He did?”

“Yes, well sort of. There was one night he was in back of the stage helpin' with the curtain. You know, haulin' it back and forth at the right time. Well, standin' in the shadows, right across from him on the other side of the stage, he sees this dark figure of a man. He just stood there watching what was goin' on and then he disappeared. Now the man Synge was dead and gone at the time, but Matt said he knew it was Synge, by the look of him.”

“You mean he saw a ghost?”

“Yes, girl. That's what he said.”

“And did he tell anyone what he'd seen?”

“That I don't know, but he said there was others talked about seeing a strange figure around the stage after that and they all thought it was the same man.”

Peg saw the look on Nora's face. “My dear, he was full of them stories.”

“And you remember so well, names, places, everything. I never knew any of this.”

“Oh, I don't suppose I remember it all, but it was so interesting, see, and he could tell it so well and make it real. He showed me the old program from that night, all the names and the fine picture of Cuchulainn and his hound on the cover. How could I forget? They're all below in the room, in the drawers, I believe.”

The hush in the little kitchen was soothing, dark and cool like the night, but inside, Nora was beginning to be aware of a deep sense of loss.

“I wish I'd known him, Peg. I wish he hadn't run away.”

“I know, girl. I know what you mean.”

“Did you love him very much?”

The woman beside her tensed slightly. When she spoke, the words came slowly and guardedly. “Yes, I loved him.” There was a brief pause and then she added, “In my own way.” She was picking her way carefully along a difficult path. “To this day, Nora, I'm not sure that I know rightly what love is. What me and Matt had wasn't like what I had with Johnny, or again, not like what my mother and father had.” She stopped to consider the latter. “The way they were, you knew there was something special, something about the way they looked out for each other and for me. But Matt …” She stopped to consider for a moment. “He was all the world to me. That's all I can tell you and nothing can ever change that.”

Peg had found the little groove in the table again and was rubbing gently, staring at her busy finger with unseeing eyes.

Love. Nora followed the movement. How often in the past few months had she pondered this same question, looking for a simple answer when in fact there was none.

“To begin with, being around him was enough. I just wanted him to stay, but after the racket with Father when he said I should look at marrying the Murray fella, I knew I had to do something. Matt and me were spending a nice bit of time together in and around the house but never outside. Whenever there was a dance or a time to someone's house, I'd always go on my own; he had no interest in that kind of thing. I was content just the same. But with Father's talk about ‘getting clear of Buddy' that was enough to get me thinkin'. I decided I had to try and talk to Matt and see what he had to say. So I made a plan. It was simple enough, but the best I could think of at the time.”

She sipped her drink, replacing the glass carefully and precisely on the table. “It was getting towards the end of summer, berry-pickin' time. Matt liked to roam the hills so I suggested maybe we'd go together Sunday evenin' and get a few berries to set down for winter.”

“We'll go this way.” She didn't look back to see if he'd heard but took the path to the left that led to a rocky outcrop and a grove of alders. Her pace was quick and resolute as she led the way up over the grassy slope at the back of the house.

It was warm and close amongst the tall bushes. The sunlight, filtering through the leafy branches, made dappled shadows on the path. Peg knew this spot very well, this little corridor of peace and tranquility with its tiny windows on the sky. To be able to hear the soft crunch of their footsteps on the dry grass thrilled her. Farther along the trail to the left, a robin had nested. She had watched for hours one day in late spring as the little creature busied herself with mud and straw and twigs, crafting the age-old, cup-shaped design of her nest. She had raised two broods during the summer and now it lay deserted. She turned and touched Matt's shoulder lightly, pointing to the nest hidden deep amongst the greenery. He crouched slightly, his face drawing close to hers, his head dodging this way and that as he searched. There was a light rustle of leaves, the robin arrived and perched tense and alert on a nearby branch. She heard Matt's quick intake of breath. Her finger came to her lips in a silent shhh! They stood together, motionless, watching, waiting. Her hair brushed his cheek and he tensed, abruptly pulling back. The robin's head swivelled, beady eyes watchful, her feathery throat thrust forward as she called out. In a frenzied flutter she took off and disappeared. The moment was gone.

They walked on through the alders and emerged into the fading sunlight. “This way.” She pointed to the right. “The path will take us to the top of the hill and down over the other side to the partridgeberries.”

The climb was steep and rough, pocked with grooves and gullies. They grabbed at roots and scrubby undergrowth, pulling themselves upward. Halfway up they stopped to rest against a huge boulder.