The Misremembered Man Read online

  The Misremembered Man

  Books by the author

  My Mother Wore a Yellow Dress (memoir)

  The Dark Sacrament (non-fiction)

  Christina McKenna

  The Misremembered Man

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Text copyright © 2008 Christina McKenna

  Cover photograph of thatched cottage in Killanin ©

  Maire Mc Donagh Robinson.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by AmazonEncore

  P.O. Box 400818

  Las Vegas, NV 89140

  ISBN: 978-1-61218-073-1

  To Mr. Kiely as ever

  Everyone has conscience enough to hate; few have religion enough to love.

  Henry Ward Beecher,

  Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit, 1887

  Contents

  Chapter one

  Chapter two

  Chapter three

  Chapter four

  Chapter five

  Chapter six

  Chapter seven

  Chapter eight

  Chapter nine

  Chapter ten

  Chapter eleven

  Chapter twelve

  Chapter thirteen

  Chapter fourteen

  Chapter fifteen

  Chapter sixteen

  Chapter seventeen

  Chapter eighteen

  Chapter nineteen

  Chapter twenty

  Chapter twenty-one

  Chapter twenty-two

  Chapter twenty-three

  Chapter twenty-four

  Chapter twenty-five

  Chapter twenty-six

  Chapter twenty-seven

  Chapter twenty-eight

  Chapter twenty-nine

  Chapter thirty

  Chapter thirty-one

  Chapter thirty-two

  Chapter thirty-three

  Special Note

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Chapter one

  Jamie McCloone rose from his bed, hotly dazed and stiff with undiagnosed lumbago.

  Jamie was not an elegant sight first thing of a morning, most especially after a night of drink and embittered sleeplessness; a night in which he’d tossed and wept and brought the name of Jesus down and cursed his mother, in fact all women in general—nuns in particular—and wished a plague on all children under ten-and-a-half months (this being the age at which his mother had abandoned him, in a Curley’s Discount shopping bag, on the stone steps of the St. Agnes Little Sisters of Charity convent, in the city of Derry, one cold November morning in 1934).

  From that day on he’d always feared waking up in the claustrophobic darkness of some colossal pouch; feared being slapped on his bare bottom by a female hand; feared jangling keys and rosary beads, being locked inside boxes and lavatories, being fed thin gruel from a wooden bowl and cod-liver oil from a spoon. Such were the effects of those seminal events that, over the years, had carved deep pathways into the lumpy geography of his brain, rendering him incapable of forgetting the injury that had been done to him, making him wary of people and anxious of change, and forcing him to live a lesser life, full of empty dreams and broken hope, without much joy, without much meaning, without much love.

  Jamie yawned extravagantly, ran a hand over his stubbly cheeks and tweaked his right ear. It stood up slightly higher than the other, giving him the look of being yanked forever heavenward by a celestial hand. This minor deformity had encouraged bullying in the schoolroom and funny stares on the street. When other boys fantasized about train sets and blazing cowboy guns, Jamie had dreamed of owning a perfect set of ears.

  Sitting now on the edge of the bed, he stared down at his rough, forty-one-year-old feet, wondering idly about their uses; saw them, in that moment, as instruments of brute abuse, for stomping out the vision of the bitch that his mother must surely have been. Jamie was not a violent man, but on this particular morning—perhaps because his hangover seemed more severe than usual—he sat for longer, simply looking down, taking pleasure in the fanciful vengeance that was his, while outside the birds chirped, the rooster crowed, the dog barked, the cows roared (to be fed) and the day broke, sending a blush of hazy sunshine through the window.

  The clock in the hall struck seven, jerking him free of the reverie. He rose carefully and proceeded to dress himself.

  First, the red plaid shirt. Next, his army surplus trousers, zipped and buttoned over his expanding stomach, and needlessly secured by a set of brown suspenders, which he hoisted and snapped into place with a satisfied grunt. Then his Wellington boots, caked and frilled in last winter’s mud, from their station behind the bedroom door.

  In the back scullery he filled the pock-marked kettle, put a match to the gas ring, retrieved a chipped mug from under a pile of dishes in the greasy sink and proceeded to make tea.

  He moved about the cramped quarters with exaggerated caution, as if balancing a hundredweight sack of coal on his head. As if delicate antennae protruded from every part of his body, sensitive to the touch, as if he were made of breakable stuff that needed careful tending and he were a man treading a tightrope made of twisted, shattered glass. Jamie McCloone’s limestone cottage in the townland of Duntybutt was a two-up, two-down structure, which he’d inherited from his adoptive aunt and uncle, Alice and Mick. It had changed little in its one-hundred-and-five-year history. No woman had lasted long enough under its broken roof to clean and polish its roughness; no man of a sensitive nature had ever entered it without catching his breath. Father Brannigan, the parish priest, on his monthly mission to collect his stipend, would often falter on the threshold, flourish a handkerchief and make a show of blowing his nose noisily so as not to cause offense. “It’s the bronchitis, Jamie. Never leaves me, so it doesn’t. The little cross I have to bear.”

  Jamie poured the tea with a quivering hand and carried the mug and his aching carcass to his armchair by the banked hearth fire. He reached for a Valium and swallowed it. The medication was his defense against too much reality, too much reflection on the past. Since his uncle’s death, he’d been forced again and again to wade through the quicksand of his childhood. The pills helped him keep his head above the mire.

  The demanding voices of the farmyard came to him in a muffled discordance; each one demanding feeding, each one reminding him of the work that lay ahead.

  “I’ll be out in one wee minute!” he shouted. “You’ll be fed soon enough, all right.”

  He leaned over to poke the slack-filled fire into life. It responded with a slow hissing—the divil rousing hisself, thought Jamie. Without warning it spat out a chip of coal, which flew across the floor, ricocheted off a table leg and bounced under Jamie’s armchair, where it joined a slew of others, adding to the accumulated detritus that was his home. He replaced the poker on the hearth, sat back in the chair and stared down at his lap.

  There was a tear in the left knee of his trousers. Two weeks earlier he’d snagged it on a spur of barbed wire while tethering the goat to a post in a hillside field. Every morning since this small accident Jamie would sit, study the rent fabric, put his forefinger into the hole, wiggle it about a bit and think that maybe he’d need to put a stitch or two in it before it got any bigger. His eyes would then drift guiltily to the glass case where, propped against a green-rimmed plate, stood a fan of sewing needles in a gaudy packet c
ut to the shape of a flower-filled basket. He remembered buying them from a tinker woman, who’d gripped his arm after pocketing his penny and said: “God’ll reward yeh, son. Dere’s darkness round you but dere’s brightness if you look for it.” Her gypsy eyes glittered in the noonday sun and a gold tooth winked in a cavernous mouth.

  Jamie pondered the image of the old woman for a minute and concluded that since it was a good while ago maybe the needles would be rusted by now. Even if they weren’t rusted, where would a body get a bit of thread? And at the end of the day, sure, wouldn’t it only be the two cows and the pig that would be seeing him anyway?

  Thus mollified, he sighed and smiled to himself, the matter of the torn trousers and the needles and the tinker woman bundled back into that “It’ll-wait-another-wee-while” box that sat tightly fastened at the back of his mind. A box that grew weightier with neglected jobs and weak intentions carried along by the wifeless Jamie, a man possessed of a thousand petty deferments.

  He would have deferred the farm work too, but since Uncle Mick was no longer around to tighten the fences, scutch the corn, fill the troughs with J.J. Bibby Farmfeed, and switch an ashplant off of a cow rump when required, the work fell to him. He saw the onerous toil of the day stretch out before him. And, as was his wont, he believed in the efficacy of having a good wee rest before he got going. However, the longer he sat, the more urgent the notes from the farmyard animals grew.

  After ten minutes he rose abruptly, drained the last of his tea, gave the mug a hasty lick under the tap, returned it to the sink and shuffled back to the bedroom to groom himself.

  Jamie’s ablutions consisted of fixing his hair—his oh-so-unsuccessful hair—and giving his face a rub (quite literally with his hand as opposed to a damp cloth). He lowered his eyes to the pockmarked piece of mirror that sat on the tallboy and looked at himself in dismay. His comb-over fell down on his left shoulder like a she-ass’s tail. A deep scar ran from under his right eye to the jawline, as if all the pain of his life had been cried and cut there. His long nose and morose mouth stopped him from being handsome, but his blameless green eyes made one forgive the imperfections of his face.

  He sighed at the image that stared back at him; an ancient prophet with a scalp condition. Every morning he experienced a pang of regret for his lost locks, followed by a sharp admonishing voice—“Jezsis, look at the state of ye!”—before fixing his hair.

  Thus deflated and thoroughly depressed, he hurriedly arranged the precious strands over his balding crown, held them carefully at one side, and shoved on his cap to anchor all in place. With that distasteful act accomplished, this son of the soil was ready to face the day.

  Personal hygiene did not feature in his weekday routine, which took Jamie from bedroom to barn in five minutes flat. On Sunday mornings, though, he made a special effort with a razor, comb and a basin of soapy water, before facing his Maker at Mass.

  He was not to realize, however, on this fine summer morning, that he, Jamie McCloone, would soon be making such an effort with his appearance that even his Maker would have to be content with second place.

  Chapter two

  Lydia Devine folded her slate-gray, V-necked sweater (50% angora, 33% wool and 17% polyamide/acrylic) into a tidy rectangle and laid it in the bottom drawer of her chiffonier with an air of cautious contentment.

  With the school year finally finished and summer wafting warmly through the bedroom window, she felt it was high time to put her winter wardrobe to bed. This realization, this moment which marked the transition from cool days to warm, gray skies to blue, from work to well-earned leisure, was the highlight of Lydia’s year. It wasn’t that she did not enjoy her job; she did. It wasn’t really that she adored the sun; in fact, she hated getting sunburned. It was simply that her summer holiday afforded her some time to herself, to indulge her passion for reading novels, writing letters and taking long walks in the country lanes.

  She sighed with pleasure at the prospect. With a light heart and a head full of joyous ideas, she danced to the mahogany closet, and—like a magician’s assistant—flung the doors wide open. Inside, lay a stack of neatly labeled boxes containing the much more attractive lightweight blouses and frocks which signaled the insouciant nature of the next two months.

  Nothing pleased Lydia more than an orderly environment with everything in its proper place. Too many years in the classroom instructing children to be clean, orderly, to sit up straight and keep their desks tidy had, of necessity, forced her into being a diligent practitioner of correctitude.

  She dressed herself carefully at the cheval mirror, pleased that her figure still allowed her to zip herself effortlessly into the shift-dress. At forty and still unmarried, she felt a certain obligation to retain a youthful silhouette. Men, she knew, who could not find a beautiful face, often settled for a beautiful figure instead.

  Pleased with herself, she sat before her dressing-table mirror, only to experience an all-too-familiar twinge of annoyance on seeing her face. There was little to admire. Her nose was too long, the mouth and eyes too small. An ever-deepening crease between her eyebrows bespoke years spent listening to her young pupils’ problems and dilemmas. The cheeks were too red, the winter wind having much the same effect on them as the summer sun. No matter: She could remedy this flaw, as always, with a liberal dusting of Max Factor Sheer Beige face powder.

  Her make-up routine did not take long. She had read once in the Dorothy Dibbit’s beauty column of Woman’s Realm that lipstick and eye shadow should only be used to accentuate the beauty of one’s lips and eyes, not underscore their defects. She had wisely taken the advice. A carefully powdered face and well-groomed hair then became her priorities—and really the only improvements she felt she could make.

  She rose satisfied, smoothed down her dress, neatly replaced the satin stool in the bay of the dressing table, and left the bedroom. The preparation of her mother’s breakfast was already a priority.

  When Lydia pushed into her mother’s room with the breakfast tray all of twenty minutes later, she was surprised to find the old lady already sitting up in bed, furiously knitting at the cuff of a Fair Isle sweater.

  “My, you are early this morning, Mother!” She tended to tune her voice to its brightest note first thing in the morning, in order to leaven the atmosphere. She felt it necessary, because, like facing her pupils, facing her mother always carried with it the same faint twinge of dread. She placed the tray before her on the bed.

  “Thank you, dear.”

  Elizabeth Devine removed her eyeglasses and stowed the knitting in a tapestry bag by her side. She was a plucky seventy-six-year-old, still very much aware of her position as matriarch. Like her daughter, she was careful about appearances.

  Sitting up in the bed she resembled a geriatric doll, an elaborate, baby-pink bed jacket, festooned with satin ribbons and crocheted rosettes, adding to this impression. The bright blue eyes that followed the daughter’s every move remained focused, alert and cataract free, despite her years.

  Only the aquiline nose—a feature prominent in the maternal family line which Lydia was grateful she had not inherited—spoiled the childlike effect. In her younger days, seen face-on, Elizabeth was a princess; in profile, she was the pantomime ugly sister.

  “Did you have a bad night, did you?” the daughter asked, concerned.

  “The sun woke me up.” She looked up accusingly at Lydia. “You didn’t draw my curtains properly last night.”

  “Oh really, Mother? I am sorry. Still, it’s a nice morning to be up, isn’t it?”

  She planted herself as usual in the Jonas chair by the bed and waited for her mother to complain about some aspect of the breakfast or her daughter’s appearance. Both women had become so used to this ritual—the one accusing, the other defending—that their first meeting of the day had come to resemble a lively session in the local courthouse.

  Today, however, it was not the breakfast that was at fault, but Lydia’s glamorous apparel.


  “What are you all dolled up like a dog’s dinner for? Are you seeing someone or what? That headmaster is a married man, you know.” She noted the daughter’s cheeks redden visibly, even through the protective layer of face powder.

  Mrs. Devine’s greatest fear was that Lydia might find herself a husband and abandon her. Her own dear husband had died a year earlier, and this tragedy, coupled with her advancing age, had caused her to loosen her grip on reality. She sensed that, freed finally from her father’s stern grasp, the daughter might assert herself and seek her independence.

  Reminding Lydia of the evils of men seemed the only weapon she had left in the battle for her daughter’s affections. At every available opportunity, she wielded her sharp views on the weaknesses of the male species and the unfavorable estate of marriage.