Second Prize: The Nearer Realm

My neighbor Mrs. Mawley was a believer in unseen things. Her house and mine were the only ones around for a windswept mile down the Enniscrone road. People said living as far out as we did made a person odd. But Mrs. Mawley had been kind to my mother before her passing, and I kept up the habit of stopping to chat when I passed her front gate. Sometimes, she’d press me to come in for a cup of tea and, having little better to do and no one waiting at home except my flock, I’d agree.
 
One spring evening, I’d woken with an odd ache in my chest that wouldn’t fade, like some pain had come home to roost. My mother used to say such pains were the tax we paid for keeping our bodies in use for so long. I was nearly sixty. Mrs. Mawley assumed a dour look. She’d spoken to me before of past lives. Now she informed me that not only did we have lives piled up behind us, each of us had a whole series of other lives, lived by other selves in realms that mirrored ours.
 
“Any strange ache you’ve felt lately, John, that’s your body in the other realms suffering,” she said.
 
“Is that so?”
 
“I wager your nearest counterpart has a weak heart,” she said, with a bit of accusation. “You’d better hope he starts looking after himself.”
 
“Why’s that?” I leaned back in my chair, more curious than worried. “Sure, his dying wouldn’t kill me.”
 
“No. You’d feel an end to pain from that realm, but there’d be an emptiness, see, yawning around your chest afterwards. And such a feeling has been known to hasten the death of people with melancholic dispositions like yourself.”
 
When she said such things, they were neither compliments nor insults, but merely her way of seeing the world. I knew not to take it personally.
 
“It’s a shame I’ve no way to tell him to keep himself out of trouble,” I said, swallowing the last of my tea. Mrs. Mawley brewed it strong and stinging with cream instead of milk to take the edge off. The slick of it stuck to my lips.
 
“You can try asking him, John. Emotion can travel between the realms as well, but only in particularly trying or sensitive cases. My Neave, she has one of the strongest connections I’ve ever encountered. She’s been plagued with heartache since she got here, on account of a broken engagement in the Nearer Realm.”
 
“Oh,” I said. “I’m sorry to hear that.”
 
Odd though it was, this explained a thing or two. Neave was Mrs. Mawley’s niece, or so she said, as it was easy shorthand for the real relation between them—second or third cousins with a removal and a few “by-marriages” thrown in. It was enough distance that they didn’t resemble each other in the least. Mrs. Mawley was all pink-and-white and soft-edged whereas Neave had full, dark hair, brown eyes, and a figure that a strong wind could knock down. A few folks in the village whispered that Neave was foreign and didn’t speak any English, but that was only because she was a shy thing, who seldom spoke in any language.
 
I’d heard her speak on one occasion, as I was mending the wall of my far field. It was near-dark, that pale purple dusk that stretches spring evenings out but breathes winter down your throat. I should have gone in long before, but once I start a job I like to finish it. I was placing the last stones when I saw her coming along the path that bordered the southern edge of the field and led down to the beach. She was singing a song in Irish to herself with a hand pressed tight to the flat of her stomach, as if she was holding down her breath. She never once raised her head and saw me. She was a pretty one, but strange.
 
“How’s she settling in?” I asked. The singing incident had been two weeks back. She must have been there over a month by then.
 
“As well as you’d expect.” Mrs. Mawley paused a moment then nodded. “Yes, all things considered well.”
 
“I hope she isn’t bored. It can get lonely out here for a young person.”
 
“Speaking from experience?” she asked, batting my knee. “Don’t talk as if you’re not still young. You’ve plenty of life in you yet.”
 
I felt my cheeks go pink. She was only a few years younger, and I worried that I’d insulted her. I looked around for some other topic of conversation and noticed a hairpin sticking out of the rug. It was one of the straight, sharp, old-fashioned ones, the kind my mother used to wear, cool and black as iron. I picked it up and held it out to Mrs. Mawley.
 
“Yours?”
 
She peered at it and frowned. “Likely not.”
 
“Your niece’s then?”
 
She shook her head. “I’ve never seen her put her hair up.”
 
“Well, perhaps it fell through from another realm,” I said with half a laugh.
 
She fixed me with another serious look. “You’d best keep it then, John. It seems to want to belong to you.”
 
“Oh. Right.”
 
For lack of anything better to do, I tucked it in the pocket of my waistcoat. Upstairs, the floor creaked with soft footsteps.
 
“That’ll be Neave up. She’s been feeling poorly all day. I’d best check on her.”
 
“Of course. I should be getting on myself.”
 
“Look after yourself,” she said, and after a moment, as if deliberating, “If the other realms communicate again, tell me.”
 
I promised I would and, putting on my cap, stepped out into the evening. Sheba, my sheepdog, had been waiting beside the door. She stood as I appeared, stretching the stiffness from her joints. It was a chill spring that year. Mist hung in sheaves from branches like sheets on a line. The leaves of the ash trees that bordered the lane were just starting to come in, snips of black against the purple sky. I remembered when I was a small boy, I used to think every tree got to choose what it was and come back as something different each spring. The ash trees only stayed ash trees because they liked it so. Or perhaps they were stuck in their ways.
 
I stuffed my hand in my pocket and fingered the points of the hairpin. They bit into the pad of my thumb with a sharp, steady pain, an ache I could grit my teeth against and savor. My mother had read once in a magazine about people who stabbed themselves all over with needles. It got their circulation going. I wondered if there might not be some wisdom in reminding your blood to keep moving. I popped the edge of my thumb in my mouth and sucked away the drop that had welled up against the pin, something I hadn’t let myself do since I was a boy. My blood tasted the same now as then, iron and salt, and I felt a swoop of disappointed relief.

*

 
I walked the house room-by-room when I got in. It was an old habit from when my mother was alive. She feared that living up on a hill as we did, with the sea just over our shoulders, we’d be a target for smugglers or thieves. She made me do a thorough check of all the doors and windows every night. As I passed through the parlor, I used the edge of my sleeve to swipe a bit of dust off the china figure of the Child of Prague who smiled beneficently over the room. He was a wedding gift from my mother’s people, and she cherished him. When she had one of her spells, she might sit in the parlor for hours, looking at his cheerful face and moving her lips in prayer.
 
I wondered, when I came in from milking and coaxed the kitchen stove to life, whether I ought to give the whole parlor a going over with the dust cloth, now that spring had come. Though for myself, I only used two rooms of the house—the kitchen and the narrow addition off it that had been my bedroom since I was a boy. Upstairs were two drafty vaults of bedrooms, one of which had been my parents’ and the other set aside for guests who never came.
 
At my feet Sheba snuffled about for biscuit crumbs. When my mother was alive, we’d kept all the dogs out in the barn, but I liked having a bit of company.
 
“The sea will be a white froth tonight,” I told her. “Good thing we put the lambs and ewes in the barn, hm?”
 
Sheep could get disoriented in weather like this, wander too close to the cliffs, and tumble in. Fishermen found their carcasses.
 
“The sea swept on and cried her old cry,” I muttered, a bit of a poem my mother had liked. The rest of it escaped me.
 
I felt the ache in my chest coming on worse as the storm grew. I shut Sheba in the kitchen and put myself to bed early. No matter how I shifted, the pain didn’t ease. I ended up flat on my back, feeling the tight dark corners of my room press in on me. The wind howled with a curious rhythm, moans rising and falling. I thought of the waves breaking on the cliff and worried for the slates on my roof.
 
I startled awake hours later to a shattering sound so close it seemed to come from inside the house. For some reason, my mind flew to the Child of Prague. Someone had broken in and smashed him. I hobbled to the parlor on aching legs. He was there, all right. Nothing broken in that room, not even a window. I leaned against the mantle and let out a slow breath. Sheba whined behind the kitchen door.
 
“Easy now,” I told her. “We’re all right.”
 
In the morning, it turned out to be nothing more than a chimney pot that had blown down and smashed itself against the side of the house. I picked up the shards, feeling silly for my middle-of-the-night fears.
 
It would have to be dealt with, though. I’d need to replace it if I didn’t want anything nesting in the flu. It happened that the chimney pots were old, ornate things, put up by a great-grandmother who had a taste for fine details. Nothing you’d find in the common way. I wrapped the shards in paper, dropped them in the bin, and set off for the post office to see about sending away for a new one.
 
Brian Gallagher was leaning against the post office counter reading the paper as I came in.
 
“How are you getting on?” I asked.
 
He straightened up when he saw me and exclaimed, “Christ, but he’s risen!”
 
I frowned. “The storm wasn’t so bad out my way. No danger of me being blown out to sea, surely.”
 
“I wasn’t talking about that.”
 
He laid the paper out on the counter, open to the death notices, and pointed one out. I stared at it a minute, trying to make sense. Sure enough, there was a notice with my name on it.
 
“Must be another John O’Connor somewhere,” I said.
 
“But sure, isn’t that a picture of you?”
 
It was—a clip of my head taken from a larger shot of the members of the Cattle and Sheep Farmers Association last autumn. I skimmed the article.
 
“It isn’t me,” I said. “Look. The first words are ‘Devoted husband and father.’”
 
“That’s still your picture, though. Could cause a lot of confusion.”
 
Cliona, the postmistress, came out from the back and asked what had me looking so serious. Brian slid the article across the counter for her to examine. Her eyes gobbled it up in shock.
 
“How did they ever print such a thing?” she said. “It’s plain untrue.”
 
“Are we sure?” Brian asked, thumping me on the back. “Do we need to get Father Flood down here to witness a miracle?”
 
“That’s near enough blasphemy for me,” Cliona warned. Then turning to me, “I’m ever so sorry, John.”
 
She offered to phone the newspaper office and set it straight for me, going so far as to threaten to cancel my subscription if there wasn’t a redaction printed. She said the whole thing smelled of trickery and the worst sorts of schemes which, to her, meant schemes to get someone else’s inheritance.
 
“Who stands to inherit anything from me?” I asked.
 
“You can never be sure. These people come out of the woodwork, all sorts. The same happened when my father-in-law passed. And you’ve got a good bit of property to your name.”
 
I smoothed the paper out and looked over the other notices. The people I’d been printed alongside were parents and grandparents and business owners, some of them people of substance and grandeur. Fortune-hunters could find better targets than me. I told Cliona not to bother phoning.
 
“Are you sure?” she asked, a bit of disappointment folding between her eyes. She loved the chance of an argument with anyone official-sounding. But I shook my head. She gave me my own paper, I’d no other mail, and I gave Brian back his. I tucked mine under my arm and left.
 
The road home bore all the marks of the storm’s violence. Snapped twigs and clothes torn off wash lines had been tossed about like flotsam. I wondered where such things came from and how far their owners would have to travel to recover them.
 
At home, I unfolded the paper on the kitchen table and read every notice on the page again, as if they could offer some clue to how I’d ended up amongst them. The other John O’Connor, not pictured, was near enough to my own age. Heart attack. He seemed to have been a farmer as well, perhaps I’d even met him at the Association meetings. His notice ended with a hearty list of “survived by” which included five children, a grandchild, and a wife. Below them was a notice about the service the following week. I thought about what my own notice would say at the end. Probably just “Lately of Ballyclogh Cottage.” The old place would be the only thing to outlast me.
 
I left the paper as it was and walked away, then thought better of it, came back, and flipped it over. While I went about my day, the thought of it throbbed in my head. A bad omen, perhaps. A sign of things to come. I imagined Mrs. Mawley saying that with her grim, faraway look. She was the only person around I could bring such a thing to who wouldn’t think my fears were silly. I resolved to walk over and get her considered opinion on the matter.
 
She answered the door with a kerchief in her hair and a broad blue apron over her blouse. I rarely called before tea time, and I feared I’d interrupted her housework. There was a spattering of pink stains across the bib of the apron.
 
“Butchering chickens, are you?” I asked.
 
She looked pale around the mouth, smaller and less substantial than she’d looked the day before. Her eyes were very dark.
 
“You’re all right?” I asked.
 
“We’ve had a bit of trouble this morning.”
 
“Oh?” I looked at the blood on her apron and wondered if her cat had gotten into a fight or attacked the henhouse. “What’s happened?”
 
She frowned like she was making up her mind about something. “It’s the realms, you see.”
 
“The . . . what?”
 
“Neave’s given birth in the Nearer Realm, and a bit of the afterbirth has fallen into ours.”
 
Alarmed, I followed her into the house. The kitchen looked and smelled like spring cleaning—washcloths on a line and the blinding smell of bleach. The kettle had been left screaming on the stove, hysterical beads of water running down its sides. I let her lead me to the bathroom tacked onto the back of the kitchen and looked in the toilet bowl. Sure enough, there was something ragged and red at the bottom, suspended in water that had gone pink with gore.
 
“What do you say?” Mrs. Mawley asked.
 
“Smells like birth, sure enough.” I knew the sharp tang of it from lambing season. But I was afraid to take a second look at the lump in the bowl, in case it might take shape as something more solid in my mind. “How’s she?”
 
“I’ve tucked her up in bed with a hot water bottle. The pains started last night. She thought it was just her monthly come at last, but I know birthing pains.”
 
She was speaking fast and not quite looking at me. They must have had some night of it, the pair of them.
 
“Should you not call the doctor then?” I asked.
 
“What good can he do?” she snapped. “No. No. We just have to take the best care of her we can and hope the message reaches across to that realm that she’s being well looked after.”
 
“And what of,” I jerked my chin down at the lump in the toilet, “it?”
 
She thought a moment. “We’ll have to take it out and bury it.”
 
“Where?”
 
“Would you mind using a bit of your far field? I think putting it under the hawthorn tree would settle its energies.”
 
I could think of no argument to this so I nodded. She reached in with rubber gloves and grasped the thing at the bottom of the bowl. Stringy webs of blood dripped off it like egg yolk clinging to the shell. I’d nothing else at hand, so I held out the paper, open to the death notices. Mrs. Mawley placed the small pink-and-blood thing in the middle and folded the edges over.
 
“Are you sure Neave will be all right?” I asked. “It’s nothing serious?”
 
Mrs. Mawley nodded. “These things are best left to nature’s course.”
 
I agreed. The gory smell of the house beginning to get to me, I hurried out with the newspaper bundle. Mrs. Mawley promised she’d join me when she could and say a few “settling words” over the hole before I closed it up.
 
I felt proper strange carrying the bundle down the lane with me, ducking under the fine row of ash trees as if their leaves were disapproving eyes, ready to drop down on me. As a bachelor, I’d never had anything to do with birth, and here I was carrying a bit of it in my hands, the world of women parting for a moment to admit me. I remembered once as a boy having to run for the midwife when my mother went into labor early. It was the first and last chance I had of a sibling. Afterwards, it was all over in her body and between her and my father as well. He left a year or so after. That was the start of her absent spells. When, forty years later, they found the tumor that killed her, she asked if perhaps it might be left over from that time, a remnant of the child, but they shook their heads and told her that wasn’t the way things worked.
 
The ache started to rise in my chest. I hurried on, suddenly unsure how much time I had before nightfall. I locked Sheba in the house and retrieved a shovel from the barn, one-handed, loath to put the bundle down. It seemed to have grown in both weight and fragility on my walk. A bit of blood was leaking through the paper, turning brown where it mixed with the newsprint.
 
I closed the shed and walked up through the fields. I was scarcely across the first when I saw the two men walking towards me. I weighed the merits of running off. But I recognized one, even at a distance, as the bald head and long coat of Father Flood, and he’d seen me. He raised a hand in greeting, the other man doing the same.
 
I laid the bundle down in a tuft of grass and placed the shovel beside it. There was nothing to be done about the rusty stains on my hands though I tried to wipe them on my pants.
 
“Afternoon, John!”
 
“Afternoon, Father. Mr. Doyle.” I recognized the second man now as the town’s solicitor.
 
He was a bit grand and kept apart from the world, but he gave me a kind enough nod in answer to my greeting. “It’s a chill day to be out for a walk.”
 
“We’ve come to look in on you,” Father Flood said. “Cliona Mallon had quite the story for me today. She said the papers have declared you dead. I thought I’d be doing a poor job if one of my own parishioners were to die, and I took no notice of it.” He chuckled.
 
“Oh. Aye.” A line of sweat was working its way down my back. I shifted my feet, taking care not to tread on the end of the shovel.
 
“What’s that?” Doyle pointed to the bundle of newspaper. The blood was clearly soaked through it now.
 
For a moment, I let myself imagine some scrambled version of the truth coming out, spouting off about the other realms and heartbroken young women and toilet bowls.
 
“A lamb,” I said. “One of the ewes miscarried this morning.”
 
“It’s not the season for it,” Doyle remarked. “I thought your lambing finished weeks ago.”
 
“Aye. Poor thing. I didn’t even know she was expecting.”
 
Father Flood nodded. “Amazing how these things can go unnoticed, even to an experienced eye. Sometimes, they stay in the womb long after they’ve died.”
 
“And you mean to bury it all the way up here?” Doyle frowned, surveying the muddy field with its half-dead hawthorn tree.
 
“I don’t want the smell of it to upset the rest of the flock. They’re knowing about such things.”
 
“Well we’re glad to see you out and above ground,” Father Flood said. “This business with the papers must’ve shaken you.”
 
“I’m sure it’s just a misunderstanding.”
 
“Well I’d say it’s worth setting straight,” Doyle said. “It might cause any number of troubles for you with creditors and relatives coming forward.”
 
“I’ve none of those,” I said, the pain winging through my chest again. “The house isn’t mortgaged.”
 
“All the same.”
 
“Thank you.” I stuck out my hand to shake. He seemed affronted, and I wondered if I’d been too abrupt before I remembered the stain across my palm. I quickly shoved my hand in my pocket. “I appreciate you coming all the way out to see me.”
 
“We’ll not trouble you any further,” Father Flood said. “You’ve work to do around here. Let us know if you want Mr. Doyle to give the papers a call.”
 
I nodded. The pain in my chest was tightening the more I spoke, racing its way down my arm. I fought off a grimace. “I will.”
 
Father Flood gave me a pat on the shoulder that might have been encouragement but felt more like pity. Doyle only gave me one of his cold frowns and set off. I set to breathing and stilling my heart again. The burning throbbed in my chest. I shut my eyes and tried not to think of the other John O’Connor and what the first signs of his heart attack might have been. Instead, I bent over the shovel and got to work.
 
I was spared, at least, any meeting between Mrs. Mawley and my guests. By the time she arrived in my far field, cutting through a shortcut from hers, the hole had been dug and filled in again and the sun was starting to streak low shadows over the grass. She knelt beside it, whispering unfamiliar words.
 
I stepped back out of a feeling of respect. If someone had come upon us then, we would have looked like a witch and a potato farmer. I looked out across my fields where the lambs pranced in the melting sun.
 
“Penny for them?” Mrs. Mawley said, rising to her feet.
 
I struggled a moment, deciding how to phrase it. I was thinking about the whole course of my life, the things I might have done differently that landed me where I am. I asked her if there was a realm in which I was married.
 
She said our lives in the other worlds seldom differ much from the ones we inhabit. But in my case there was one in which I’d had a wife and two sons, one of whom had gone off to join the Navy after I quarreled with him. I thought about the period, three summers back, when every time I looked out to sea, I’d get a queer hollow feeling in my chest. I thought there might be something in it.
 
Mrs. Mawley patted her chest. “All my other selves have died of embolisms. I felt the last one pass last week, poor dear. I’m the only one left.”
 
“So you’ve won out then?”
 
“Another such victory, and I’ll be undone.”
 
I didn’t know how to reply to someone’s announcement of their own selves’ deaths, so I asked the question that popped into my mind: “How does it feel?”
 
“Queer,” she said. “Like a cord’s been cut, and I’m all untethered, like a boat without an anchor.”
 
“I think I might go to a doctor about the pain in my chest,” I confessed. “I think there’s something wrong.”
 
I’d expected some shade of disapproval or disappointment for going against her advice. But she only nodded. “I worry for you, John.”
 
“Me?” I should think someone who’d just died in four realms out of five would do better worrying about herself.
 
“You’re on your own too much,” she said. “It’s bad for the soul. The other realms,” she tapped her collarbone as if that was where the signal came from, “they worry for you as well.”
 
“Sure, I’ll be fine,” I said on impulse. “It’s only . . . it’s just . . .”
 
But the words started slipping away from me. I couldn’t find a way to say that there was nothing the matter that hadn’t been wrong for most of my life. She reached over and wrapped a hand around mine. “You’re all right.”
 
The following week, I went to a funeral out of town. When I came home, someone was leaning against my gate. The air was full of mist, thin and fine as lace, and drops of it gathered in her hair turning the dark of it to silver. She turned as I approached. I saw it was Neave, swaddling in a waxed cotton coat with the collar turned up. I fumbled with the latch to let her in.
 
“I’m sorry to have kept you waiting,” I said. “Have you been here long?”
 
She shrugged. “It’s my own fault. My aunt said you didn’t go out much. But I shouldn’t have assumed.”
 
Her speaking voice, heard for the first time, was nothing like her singing. It startled me, deep and clear and sturdy. Color had come back into her face as well. I could see a bit of her aunt in the pinkness of her cheeks. I let us into the kitchen and put the kettle on. She stood a moment in the doorway, letting her coat drip onto the mat.
 
“Let me take that from you,” I said, remembering my manners and hanging it on the rack. “Would you like to wait in the parlor? I’ll bring the tea things through.”
 
I gestured clumsily towards the door, and she crossed through. Making the tea took me longer than it ought to. I hadn’t had someone in the house since my mother’s wake, and even that had been sparsely attended by Father Flood, Mrs. Mawley, and a few women of the parish who came on the basis of doing good works. One of them must have put the tea tray and good spoons away in an unlikely place, and I had to search for them, as the kettle cooled and a skin formed on the cream.
 
When I finally carried it in, Neave was drifting around the edges of the room, looking curious and bored. I was startled all over by the realness of her, the sight of her young face in the dim of the parlor. I wished again that I’d dusted.
 
“That’s a lovely statue,” she said, lifting her head and pointing to the Christ Child on the mantle.
 
“My mother’s,” I said. “She used to have long conversations with him.”
 
Neave blinked, and I realized my oddness with a painful flush. I held out a cup of tea to her.
 
“Is your aunt doing well? Has she sent you on an errand to get something from me?”
 
“No. I came myself. I wanted to thank you for doing what you did the other day.”
 
Her eyes flicked up to mine. They didn’t have the wild, doe-ish look I’d expected but were steady and strong. I swirled a drop of cream into my cup.
 
“It was nothing,” I said. “Are you feeling all right now? No damage done?”
 
Her free hand hovered over her stomach. “None. Just an absence.”
 
“Well that . . . that’s good, isn’t it?”
 
“It came on natural, you know.”
 
“Oh.” I cleared my throat and felt my cheeks warm.
 
“I didn’t try to bring it on or anything.”
 
“I didn’t doubt.”
 
She nodded.
 
“Will you still stay the summer with your aunt now?”
 
“No. Not now that it’s over.”
 
“So you’ll be going home?”
 
“I think so,” she said, though there was no certainty in it. She may as well have said, “If they’ll have me.”
 
“I could show you the spot where it is before you go, if you’d like.”
 
The idea of taking a moment’s vigil up there had entered my head on the way to the funeral that morning. It seemed a fitting thing to do.
 
Neave paused a moment to think about this, one hand steadying herself on the mantle, then shook her head. “It’s enough to know that it’s there. But thank you.”
 
“Take care.”
 
I walked her out and stood in the doorway as she strode down the path, drowning in her oilskin. At the gate, she turned back and waved. My chest twinged a bit, harmless, as I lifted a hand to her.