Where Old Ghosts Meet - Kate Evans [27]
“Frank Roche was from a place called Ballina in County Mayo. He was a grand man. Every night around eleven o’clock or so, when he thought we were all asleep, I’d hear Frank’s door across the hall open and close quietly, and he’d disappear down the corridor into the dark with his blanket rolled tightly under his arm. One night, I followed him. He went over the wall with his bundle and disappeared into the night. He’s a priest now in Boston. I met him a couple of times, but to this day I don’t know where he went every night, or if he knew that I knew.”
Peg paused at her knitting. She observed the change that had come over his face: his teeth biting down hard on a tense, rigid jawline, eyes bulging against the rim of their sockets. She wanted so badly to lay down her knitting, to reach out and take his hand into the warmth of her own.
“Tom Murphy was another fellow,” he continued, as if to himself. “He was from Mallow in County Cork. He had the room next to me. Every night was the same. After lights out, I’d listen to him turn and twist in the iron bed and every night he’d cry himself to sleep… like a child. One night I went to him, creeping along the corridor like a thief, speaking his name softly as I entered the room. I sat on the side of his bed in the freezing cold, staring at the putty walls, drenched with condensation. Someone had written with a finger on the wet surface in large uneven capitals A M E N. Heavy drops of water ran down from each crooked letter, making a shiny path all the way to the floor. I shook him then. ‘Tom,’ I said, ‘you have to go. For God’s sake, go now, before it’s too late!’ I was whispering in his ear, shaking his shoulder gently. Under the grey blanket the tight ball uncurled slightly and a dark terrified eye appeared above the rim. ‘I can’t,’ he said, the words hanging in a fog of breath. ‘I could never go home.’ He curled up again into a tight bundle.”
The fire shifted and spat a chip of burning wood onto the floor at his feet. He crushed it with the toe of his boot. “Six o’clock every morning, in single file, carrying a jug, we’d walk to the well at the end of the garden to collect water for washing. One frosty morning a few days later, we found Tom, in the well, face down.”
He began to rub one palm against the other, back and forth, back and forth. “The church forbids Christian burial to those who take their own life. The official word was that Tom had accidentally fallen down the well and drowned.” He became very still. “I was tormented by Tom’s memory. I cried for him. I cried because I hadn’t done enough to help him and I cried over the whole rotten mess.”
Peg set aside her knitting, aware suddenly that the kitchen was unusually quiet. Anxious, she looked towards the window. The wind had dropped, and the snow, just a flurry earlier on, was coming down in thick, heavy flakes and had packed in along the narrow window ledges and against the door frame, cutting out the drafts and quieting the rattle of loose boards and hinges. She turned back to where Matt still sat, transfixed. Tentatively she reached out and touched his arm, but he remained perfectly still, the muscles rigid under her fingers. “Matt,” she began, hoping to say the right thing. “Maybe–”
“Others began to notice the change in me,” he said, ignoring her and at the same time picking up where he’d left off. “Secretly they’d whisper, ‘You’re not thinking of waxing now, are you,Molloy?’ ‘No, no,’ I’d say. ‘If I leave this place, I’ll first tell them what I think of them and then I’ll walk out the door, in broad daylight, my own man.’” He crossed his legs, locking his fingers tightly about his knee. “‘That’s the spirit,’ they’d say, ‘no slippin’ away in the middle of the night. Face up to it.’Those nights, there were times I never undressed for bed.”
He turned to face her, as if suddenly realizing she was there. “I’d take off my shoes and get in under the blanket still fully clothed in the black cassock and try to pass the time