No Dominion The Walker Papers - By CE Murphy Page 0,108
stop themselves, not with what they called Auntie Sheila’s magic plasters. Auntie Sheila herself called them Band-Aids sometimes, because she’d lived in America for a time and that was the American word for plasters. Cat’s youngest brother was certain the magic of Auntie’s plasters was that they came from America, where everything was better, and so of course no matter how soon a lad took the plaster off the wound beneath was healed.
That, of all things, that was the moment that came back to Caitríona over and over as she stood at her auntie’s graveside. None of the other times, none of the hunting thigh-deep through mucky bogs for ancient bodies whose spirits Auntie Sheila said needed laying to rest, not the hundred times Cat had asked again what lay inside Sheila’s heart, not the digging for herbs or the winding of holly and hawthorn together for protective boughs to hang above a door. Those things did come back to her, sure and so, but it was the magic plasters that she couldn’t stop thinking of. She had plasters in her purse now, ones she always carried so she would always think of Auntie Shelia.
And thinking of those plasters was safer than thinking about the tall lean American woman who was Auntie Sheila’s daughter, and who had no tears in her eyes as she stood alone at the grave, for all that the whole family stood together. Joanne Walker still remained apart, her jaw set in a way that reminded Caitríona of Auntie Sheila, though they didn’t look so much alike as all that. Cousin Joanne wore her own black hair short and had shoulders like a man, broad and strong in the black knit turtleneck that fell over faded blue jeans. She wore shoes like Auntie Sheila had favored, heavy boots for walking in, and at her throat glimmered the silver necklace Auntie Sheila had always worn.
Caitríona wanted nothing more on the earth than to ask Joanne the story of Auntie Sheila and himself, the man not one of them even knew the name of. Joanne’s father, who’d stolen Auntie Sheila’s heart and never given it back. Cat was the oldest of the Irish cousins and only seventeen, so she had no memory of Auntie Sheila’s pregnancy. It was something the sisters barely spoke of, and only when they were certain Sheila was nowhere within hearing. She’d fallen in love, they said, and come back to Ireland to bear a child when a baby out of wedlock was still a shocking and shameful thing. She’d shown not a whit of shame, they said, but before the child was born something happened, and not one of them knew what. Sheila had grown reserved and cool, given no sign of joy when her daughter was born, and in the dead of night six months later she had left Westport for America, only to return days later with no babe in arms. She’d said not a word about it, either, save that Siobhán was with her father now, and that was the end of it.
And now Siobhán, who called herself Joanne, was here, because Sheila had announced months ago that she was dying, and she’d say no more about that than Joanne’s father. She called Joanne to her and they’d disappeared together, touring Europe, Caitríona’s mother said. Learning to know one another before it was too late, though from the look of it they’d not known each other well enough for Joanne Walker to weep over her own mother’s death.
The whole of them, all the clan who were MacNamarras once and O’Reillys and Curleys and Byrnes and some few MacNamarras still, they stood together as one, left behind by the American cousin who turned and walked away with the first fistful of dirt thrown onto the coffin, and that was that, so. The end of Joanne Walker as much as the end of Sheila MacNamarra, and the one left a hole because it left them with nothing at all of the other.
And sure, as Cat’s da would say, and sure if Caitríona wasn’t still thinking of magic plasters when she reeled off the train early on a Monday after the St Patrick’s craic in Dublin town, and sure if those thoughts didn’t bring her to visit Sheila’s grave first, before going to the Reek herself, as she’d done a dozen times since her aunt’s death.
And sure and if she didn’t pass Joanne Walker on the way, and another woman, calling herself Maeve,