The dead cat didn’t help. The dead cat couldn’t be a good sign. Lafferty ran over the poor creature in the rain, driving Cleery’s rattletrap of a car back into the village from the tumbled-down ruins of the cottage where he and Mary used to go to play their games.
It was the last place he’d gone to search for the penny. He’d looked everywhere and come up empty, come to the realization that the penny was not to be found. He was making his way back over all the bumps and ruts and holes in the little lane when the sky opened up and the bottom fell out. And then the flash of something moving quick followed by the thump that was bigger than all the others in the legion of thumps.
He got out of the car in the lashing rain. It was loud, the thrum and rumble of it causing a turmoil in his ears, slapping the wee leaves in the hedgerow senseless, taking great leaps and bounds off the bonnet of the car. He was soaked in an instant, the raindrops like cruel little blows. Behind the car in the mud lay the cat, dead indeed. Ran right out the bloody hell in front of him. A suicide maybe? Another?
He stood there looking down at the thing. Couldn’t bring himself to look away. Why would a man stand in the pouring rain looking down at a dead cat? The cat put him in mind of something. Of someone. The scrawny, balding, mangy fur, the bulging, hollow eyes.
Tommy Hogan was who.
Sure, the likeness was uncanny. Wasn’t Hogan every bit as skinny and scrawny and bald and hollow-eyed? He’d known him since they were wee gurriers growing up in Dublin, best mates ’til Lafferty’s discovery of the charms of the feminine gender had pried them apart. And why would he think of him now, standing there in the lashing rain looking down at the dead cat, the likeness notwithstanding? To be sure, he must have laid his eyes on plenty of scrawny, mangy, bug-eyed cats in years gone by and never thought a thing of it, never thought of the oul bowsie Hogan at all. A nostalgia thing?
Or something more? An omen of some sort?
***
Back into the car, dripping. What had brought him to this moment, sitting sopping wet in a dead man’s car, obsessing like a lunatic over the fate of an ancient penny?
It was months ago he’d followed his erstwhile wife, Peggy, to the little village of Kilduff, deep in the heart of County Nowhere, for want of keeping her roof over his head. There, he’d begun to frequent Cleery’s pub. Cleery was a gruff one, a hard one, a man of mysterious history and a scar and a limp to prove it. There it was too he’d fallen for Cleery’s neglected and abused wife, Mary, a shy, clumsy angel of a woman possessing a fragile-skinned beauty that Lafferty often felt he was the only one could see.
On an evening not two months back, doesn’t an old farmer named Foley, a regular, come strolling into Cleery’s to change the world. He’d unearthed an ancient, three-sided coin while out digging turf—an archeological treasure, it turned out to be worth a hundred thousand quid, maybe more. The long and the short of it: Cleery stole the three-sided penny—no hint of a denomination on the thing at all, and so Foley called it a penny—and didn’t your man Lafferty, interrupted in a moment of intimacy with Mary, steal it back again.
But Cleery, nobody’s fool, sussed it out.
The confrontation took place at Foley’s derelict farm, only a week or two after Foley, the old scut, had taken his own life in despair over losing the penny. Cleery had thought to hold Mary under threat of abuse to force Lafferty to hand the penny over, but Lafferty turned the tables in a happenstance of rare serendipity, freeing Foley’s malicious old bull, Cromwell, who promptly dispatched Cleery at the end of his bloody horns.
Weren’t he and Mary free as wild sparrows then, free to do as they pleased, and the wealth of the penny to lift them, ease them over the trauma of the violent, albeit just, decease of her husband? But alas. Didn’t the happy ending turn sideways?
When Lafferty woke the next morning with the first light, the bed beside him was empty as his heart. Mary was gone. And the three-sided penny gone with her. Lafferty waited, hoping she’d hid the penny for safe-keeping and stepped out to Connor’s for a box of milk and a loaf of bread for their breakfast. He waited and waited ’til he knew he was waiting in vain and then he waited still. Finally, he slipped out the back to fetch his bike. Peddled through the village, ignoring the hails and calls of the neighbors, peddling on and on through the countryside toward Foley’s.
His heart dipped as he came over the hill to see Mary’s own bike by the yellow Peugeot where Cleery had parked it the night before.
And he found her there, where he knew he would, in the shanty where old Foley had hanged himself, Foley’s three-legged stool tipped over beneath her feet.
He sat on the ground outside the door, leaning against the wall, his back to his Mary, trying to pretend he couldn’t hear the flies buzzing behind the door. The sun was in his eyes, so he closed them and soaked in the heat on his face. Saw the steam rising from her morning cup of tea, saw her bringing it to her face to sip, the way her eyes closed, the way her lips kissed the rim so soft.
He resolved not to search for the penny. It was the least he could do. It would be an insult to Mary, to her memory; had she not disposed of the penny as best she saw fit? Her last will and testament. And wasn’t it inconsequential after all, in light of the love and the loss, the life and the death? Wasn’t it nothing but a spit in the ocean?
He held firm for maybe an hour.
Then he saw through to the higher plan, the grander good, the enormous worth of the penny, and he searched and he searched and he searched. But nothing was all he found.
***
Up to his room above Cleery’s pub he traipsed, leaving puddles on the narrow stairway, to the room he’d had to let when Peggy had tossed him out on his ear yet again. Wouldn’t the neighbors and the regulars already be wondering where the bloody hell Cleery was and why wasn’t the bloody place open? And his wife Mary gone as well, as soon they’d discover. And Cleery’s car, of course, his rusty old yellow Peugeot nowhere to be seen—for Lafferty’d parked the thing hidden in a gully behind the hedges out at the edge of the village.
It was only midday, but the darkest of days. He didn’t turn on the lamp by the bed, though he did raise up the torn and dirty shade. Rain hammered at the window. There was a wee wooden chair beside the chipped chest of drawers—them and the bed and the little stand beside it took up nearly the whole of the room—and he sat in the gloom and shadows to drip dry.
He could not bring himself to muss the bed up. Nor to get it wet. He’d made the bloody thing yesterday (as he never had before), tucked the threadbare blue blanket about it neatly, smoothed it out, patted down and fluffed up the pillow invitingly under the headboard. All for Mary. All in the chance he might lure her upstairs.
She’d hinted often she’d love to see the wee room where he passed the minutes of his life without her. But that had never happened, and now it never would, and now the bed had taken on the hushed wonder of a shrine, as if it would somehow be an insult to the memory of her to wallow about on it, to leave it sullied. So the wee chair would have to do. He stared at the bed, then at the rattling smear of the rain on the window, then back to the peaceful bed. Brought to his mind the softness of a coffin awaiting the corpse.
What now? Walking away was not an option. Since his early noble notions, he’d come to realize that no force in the known world could bring him to give up on an archeological treasure of inestimable worth. But where else could he search? His mind was a raging blank. He’d looked everywhere he could think of that Mary might think of.
He gave in to a shiver. Damp and clammy clothing turning cold, clinging over him like dead skin. And to think he’d thought, with the penny in hand, his troubles were behind him, all his and Mary’s troubles behind them.
He was at a bloody dead end in his cold, dead skin. What he needed was something to stir the pot. He needed a bloody pint, warmth and noise, a chinwag, a bit of craic. He needed a sounding board, fresh eyes and ears, an oul mate. The dead cat came to mind.
He headed out to the Pig & Whistle on the outskirts of the village—Cleery’s, his own local, having removed itself from consideration—to call his oul mate, Tommy Hogan.
***
The Pig & Whistle was thick with smoke and people and loud music from the ancient juke box at the back of the bar spewing American country tunes. He saw more than one of Cleery’s erstwhile patrons at the bar, pretending he didn’t.
When Hogan arrived, Lafferty watched him pause, bewildered, in the doorway—bewildered was how he remembered him best—as he looked about the room trying to spot Lafferty. When spot him he did, a look of bald joy came over his face, and Lafferty couldn’t recall the last time he’d caused joy in any beholder. Peggy’s was long since dead, and Mary’d been always afraid of the joy. Afraid it might turn on her and attack.
Hogan made his way over, five years older, but still skinny and scrawny and balding, with only wandering wisps of hair, too flimsy to have even earned a color. And his big wide pools of eyes the color of stones in the rain, full of wonder—not the marveling, would-you-look-at-that kind of wonder, but the what-the-hell-just-happened kind of wonder.
After the hugs and backslaps, Hogan says, “Jesus, Terrance, I can’t believe you’re standing here. The middle of nowhere—do you remember? The middle of nowhere you said you’d never step foot in if your bollocks depended on it.”
“I’m nothing if not flexible, Tommy. Green acres is the place for me.”
“And how’s Peggy?”
“Don’t ask.”
Hogan needed no further encouragement to not ask. “Can we get a bloody drink around here?” he said. “My poor stomach thinks my throat has been cut.”
Pints of stout, black and foamy and scarcely touched before Hogan got to the point—to lure him from the city out to Kilduff, over an hour away, Lafferty’d had to bait the hook well. “So tell me more,” Hogan said, “about this missing penny yoke.”
Lafferty told him more. Told him about Cleery the publican and Mary, his wife. He had to fairly shout it, such was the clamor and clatter of the merriment about them, two old farmers having produced tin whistles, another a bodhrán, and a room full of singers joining in, and the session well underway, ragged and lively—there was no fear in Lafferty’s heart of the wrong ears overhearing.
He told Hogan about the three-sided penny. Told him about the worth of it, about the well-deserved murder of Cleery by the mad bull Cromwell, and about the tragic ending of poor Mary. And the tragic vanishing of the penny.
Hogan’s eyebrows hoisted themselves high up on his brow early into Lafferty’s story, and they never came down again. “By God, green acres is the place to be,” says he.
Hogan ordered fresh pints. The news of the penny would take some time to digest. They chatted amid the clamor of the crowded pub, for after all, wasn’t there five years of non-penny news to catch up on, the antics of Hogan’s beleaguered wife Bridie, his job selling pots and pans up and down the east coast of Ireland, and wasn’t there an entire roster of memories from their school days in Dublin to revisit. But didn’t every venture into the years past always lead roundabout back to the penny. And what could be done. For Lafferty was far from finished when it came to lamenting the penny, and talking about the penny, and wondering where on God’s green earth the penny could be.
But there was only so much could be said about the bloody thing. Hogan asked him had he searched here, had he searched there, and Lafferty said yes to here, yes to there, yes to every-bloody-where. Would it do any good to go back and search it all over again? Sure, couldn’t he have missed it first time through in all the fuss and hurry, the deaths so fresh, the mind so gobsmacked, such a wee thing it was after all. Maybe, allowed Lafferty, though the time was short. How much of a grace period they might still have, he couldn’t be certain. Sure, maybe Cleery and Mary had already been found out at Foley’s decrepit place.
Hogan said, “We should look up the brother superior—what was his name, Brother Francis, Brother Joseph, I lost track of ’em by now—we should have him do the search. Sure, he’d ferret out the bloody thing in a hurry, wouldn’t he?”
Lafferty knew the memory Hogan was referring to. “The time Kevin nicked the medallion from the new boy,” he said, “they turned the whole school inside out, looking for it. Brother Joseph, Brother Francis, Brother Needledick, whatever the feck his name was, at the head of the pack.”
“Ha! Do you remember the snout on the man? A yard long it was, and the bristles of a pig sticking out of it.” The pair slapped at the bar, laughing.
“Like a bloody root-hog he was. Sniffing out truffles and medallions.”
“But by God, they never found it.” Hogan laughed.
“No, by God, they didn’t.”
Hogan wiped away a tear. “Same with your fecking penny, no doubt. That bloody thing’ll probably never be found either, sure it won’t.”
Lafferty frowned and sniffed at a sudden thought. “Do you remember why they never found the bloody medallion, yeah?”
“Aye, I do indeed,” Hogan said. “I nearly choked in my hole laughing at the sight of Kevin choking, swallowing that bloody wee thing. With the brothers closing in on him like a pack of wild dingoes.”
This was the moment their dazed and bleary eyes locked in horrible revelation.
***
The bloody thing would just have to stay lost. If Mary’d swallowed it, if indeed she’d hidden it inside her, it might just as well be buried on the far side of the moon under the Great Wall of China in the heart of a raging volcano seven leagues under the sea. If she’d swallowed it, that would be rock solid, lead-pipe cinch confirmation of her last wish, that she indeed wanted it never to be found. Wanted to take it with her.
On the other hand, wasn’t that at odds with what he’d been led to believe all his years on the planet? You can’t take it with you.
At any rate, the price was too high, the blasphemy too big, the desecration of her.
There was no way he could do what would have to be done, even with all the justification in the whole bloody world. There was no way he could take a knife to her, a woman he’d loved. A woman who, he thought, had loved him back as well. A woman who, if it wasn’t for the bad luck in her sad little life, would have had none of the stuff at all.
It was settled then.
***
When the Pig & Whistle finally shuttered, Lafferty took Hogan back to Cleery’s. Not to his room above the pub, a place altogether too dry and too close for comfort, but in through the back of the bar using Mary’s spare key that he’d borrowed from Mary, though she and Cleery never knew of the borrowing. There they drank and talked the night away in the dimness, not lighting a single light, relying on the little that the village of Kilduff sent in through the front window.
What were the odds she’d been so desperate as to swallow the penny?
What if she hadn’t hidden the bloody thing at all?
What if it had only fallen out of her pocket? Somewhere. But where?
Finally, nearly dawn, they fell into a restless slumber.
***
When they got to old Foley’s place the next day to search anew, they were too late. The night before, as they were whiling away the hours at the Pig & Whistle, hadn’t Cromwell the mad, murderous bull come strolling down the main street of Kilduff, lord of the manor, poking his fierce and horny head into whatever doorway he deemed needed poking into, wreaking havoc on the normally calm custom and commerce of the village. The origin of the beast having soon been ascertained, Cromwell was shot and the guards dispatched out to Foley’s.
News of a scale this grand would take days to simmer down. Lafferty and Hogan sat at the corner of the crowded bar in the Pig & Whistle that evening trying to be invisible, as the smoke rose and the rumble and jangle raged around them.
Kilduff’s own Romeo and Juliet was all the talk: Mary, having witnessed the love of her life—Cleery—being gored to death by a rampaging bull of horrific proportions, gored to death no doubt in the act of laying down his own life in defense of his damsel, was tragically moved to do her own self in, at the end of a rope. From the very same rafter of the very same shanty where, only recently, another tragic ending had taken place, old Foley’s own.
Why were they at Foley’s in the first place, Cleery and Mary?
The penny didn’t pass without mention. The three-sided penny was well and widely known. Had Cleery gone there, taken his missus with him, thinking they might turn it up? Was it his searching and rooting about that had driven the mad bull to exact his fierce and deadly revenge?
“Where would she be waked, do you suppose?” Hogan wondered.
“Why? What difference would it make? Why would we care? If she swallowed it, she swallowed it, end of story.”
“I was only thinking you might want to pay your respects.”
“Oh, aye,” said Lafferty. “To be sure.”
Across the room, beneath a plastic Powers clock in the cloud of neon smoke, a red-headed lad and a black-haired girl in striped pants and puffy shirts were handing out flowers, yellow posies of some class or other (Lafferty never knew which posies were which) to whoever in the place might fancy one. In memoriam, Lafferty supposed. He raised his hand, and the girl spotted him. Made her way through the milling throng, her handful of posies thrust out before her like the prow of a ship.
“Would you like a flower?” She was a pretty girl, though her eyebrows were thick as a hedge.
“I’d love one, Love.”
“Isn’t it awful, then? Did you know ’em well at all?”
“Aye. Well, her I did. Where is it she’s being waked at?”
“What I heard is she’s no family they know of. They’re trying to find a next of kin.” Then she looked at him sideways. “Are you kin to her? Do you know her kin?”
“No, no, not at all. Do you know where she’s keeping the night?”
“I would think at Rossa’s, if the cops have done with her. It’s the only mortuary about.”
“I would think.”
“Would you like a flower?” she said, sticking one under Hogan’s nose.
“It’s Bird’s-foot is what it is,” Hogan said.
“What is?” Lafferty said.
“The flower,” said Hogan. “Bird’s-foot-trefoil, to be exact. Common.”
“Jesus, Tommy. What are you doing knowing that?”
The girl said, “She’s part of the flower now, Mary is. She’s no longer in her body, her body is only an empty vessel, a shell that she’s shed, and now she’s part of everything that’s glorious and beautiful in the world. The flowers and the sunshine and rainbows. She’s all the colors of the rainbow.”
“I couldn’t dispute it,” Lafferty said.
“That’s a tall order,” said Hogan.
The girl’s smile faltered for only a moment, and she withdrew the flower that Hogan hadn’t touched. “Peace,” she said.
“Of what?” said Hogan, confounded.
“Thanks for the posy, Love,” Lafferty said as the girl shied away.
“Bird’s-foot,” corrected Hogan.
***
“Are you going in with me, or are you going to wait out here?” Lafferty said. They were in Hogan’s Austin, in a row of cars parked for the night in front of the greengrocer and newsagent’s shops, both long since shuttered for the night. Across the street at the corner of the little lane sat Rossa’s Funeral Home, a plain, decent-sized house, puffed up by a grand cornice along the roofline in front. There was a plum tree in the yard. Lafferty’d never have known the kind of tree it was, but Hogan had kindly pointed it out for him. Rossa had turned out the lights, locked the door, and walked away down the lane an hour ago, an hour after last call at the Pig & Whistle. The front seat of the wee Austin was getting smaller.
“So, you’re going in, then? You made up your mind, have you?”
“I don’t know,” said Lafferty.
“Then what are you asking me for?”
“I was asking in case I do decide to go in are you coming with me or you going to wait out here in the bloody car?”
“I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it,” Hogan said. Reaching into the sack in the backseat, he pulled out two more bottles of stout. “Here. For courage.”
“It’s not courage I need.”
“Then what is it you do need, Terrance?”
What was it he needed, indeed? He needed to know it was right. He was not a devout man, not a spiritual man, he seldom made Mass of a Sunday, but he needed to know it was not a mortal sin. He needed justification. A clear conscience. He needed to know how it was at all possible in this world for a man to take a sharp instrument in his own hand, the same hand that had caressed and comforted the same woman, a woman he’d loved, and insert that sharp instrument into the body of her. And then to stick in his hand and grope all about.
All right then, he needed fecking courage. “I don’t know what I need.”
“You couldn’t take the knife to her. Sure you couldn’t, anyway.”
“Could you?”
“Me?” Lafferty felt Hogan’s wide and beggaring eyes wheel around on him in the dim light from the streetlamp. “Where would a question like that even come from?”
Good question. He remembered watching the heels of his mate fleeing the scene, himself not two steps behind, to avoid battle whenever any scuffles, tussles, or kerfuffles had threatened to break out and upset the harmony of their youthful existence. He remembered Hogan nearly fainting at the sight of blood from the gash on the noggin of the lad who’d fallen off the monkey bars at the playground. Lafferty looked over at his mate, who was staring bug-eyed at Rossa’s again, as if the building itself might break loose of its foundation and try to tip-toe off.
At the end of the day, no—he couldn’t picture Hogan wielding the knife.
Could he picture himself?
Hogan looked over. Lafferty could almost see the lightbulb light up over his head. “Maybe it’s only just under her tongue,” says he. “I wonder did they look there.”
Lafferty said nothing, staring at Rossa’s. Wagged his head.
***
He told Hogan to wait in the car. He wanted no one there to witness his failure of courage if he was unable to bring himself to do it, nor did he want any witness if he could, any witness at all, to the mortal desecration. He told himself Mary would understand. That if he could talk to her, he could talk sense into her, persuade her it was for the grander good. He told himself she’d only just been out of her head with the shock and the grief and the depression. Told himself what a fine tombstone, bollocks, a monument, a bloody fecking mausoleum he would buy for her grave, so she’d never be forgot.
He felt calm enough passing under the plum tree in the faint reaches of the streetlamp, dew licking his brogans. On the streets of Dublin, he’d learned invisibility. Other skills he’d picked up there as well, and the soft tinkling of breaking glass scarcely made a dent on the night, and the wee glow from the skull-and-bones nightlight—Rossa’s savage sense of humor, he supposed—in the hallway was plenty enough to skulk by, to the stairs, down to the cellar mostly by touch alone, the steps groaning mournfully, where another soft light of a blue hue on the wall showed the empty coffins, lids yawning open and hungry. Two lumpy gurneys covered with sheets. He lifted the sheet over the lesser lumps. On a nearby counter, Rossa’s instruments lay gleaming and grinning.
***
She’s no longer in her body. Her body is an empty vessel. A shell she’s shed. No longer in her body, only an empty vessel, a shell she’s shed. No longer in her body an empty vessel a shell. A hundred thousand quid. Empty vessel, a shell she’s shed. A hundred thousand quid. A shell… a hundred thousand… a shell… a hundred thousand quid…
***
A different man came out of Rossa’s than the man who’d walked in before. A space man in a space suit walking across the dark side of the moon, he made his way slowly across the lawn, beneath the pear tree, across the lane, up to Hogan’s car. He leaned against the door of the Austin for the longest time, head hung down. Hogan stared up at him with the question in the wide pools of his eyes. Lafferty only shook his head.
“Pity,” says Hogan.
Lafferty slumped into the car. “The awfulest thing,” was his only murmur.
They headed up to his room above Cleery’s pub, Lafferty quiet as a spider. He pulled the shade before turning on the wee lamp on the stand by the bed, scarcely light enough to fill the little room. He sat roughly on the side of the bed, the bed he’d made up for Mary, her shrine, not caring now in the least if he despoiled it.
Hogan sat on the tipsy chair by the chipped chest of drawers to wait. He hadn’t a baldy notion what he was waiting for.
She’d wanted to see his room, Mary had, but never got to, and Lafferty, now, a different man than before, clenched at the edge of the bed, his blood beginning to stir and rise again, volcano-like. Hogan sitting patient, a patient waiting for the bad diagnosis.
“Feck her,” Lafferty said.
“What?” said Hogan. “Who? Mary?”
“The bitch.”
“Bitch? I thought you were sweet on her. All this yabbering about love. I thought you could barely stand to… to, you know, do what you did. Do what you had to do.”
“That was then. To think I loved the bitch. Well, there’s no way she could have loved me, or she’d never have stole the thing from me. From us. It was my penny, I had it in my possession, I offered it to her, to share it with her, bollocks, to share a life with her, and what does she do? She steals the fecking thing. She takes it. I don’t give a fecking toss what state of mind she was in. There’s no bloody excuse. I’m glad I took the fecking knife to her.”
Hogan, the bug eyes of him desperate to help. “Did you look under her tongue?”
Lafferty stamped his foot and gave out with an animal howl, and picked up the pillow to hurl at his mate. There, tucked tidily under the pillow, lay an object all wrapped in white linen.
A three-sided object at that.
