For Lyra McKee.

When he was young, Tadgh knew little of the form and shape of death, and how we acknowledged or ignored it. Wee Nina McKernan had never attended a wake when she was interred, unmarked, in the corner of her family plot, plunged back into the soaking black earth to which she was still a stranger. She was sixteen and loose change, when they found her on the shore. At the time, most pinned her passing as accidental; a freak tragedy in which a blossoming young woman slipped over the shore wall and into the aggressive squall. They thought her slender arms incapable of sparring with the tide. This image stuck with Tadgh; the girl with whom he had enjoyed summer school, cutting cloth for tents, and ratcheting tensions between classmates, did not seem like she could misplace her unabated breath. The boy, at first, felt insulted. He was positive that no hand, even that of Nature itself, could have dragged her under the brine, with such maleficent efficiency.

***

Old Bobby Roach had been the first to croak that winter, and his death marked the opening of the wake-houses for the season. Attendance was expected from Tadgh’s family, and at seventeen he was old enough to play the role of envoy. His mother sent him off to the wake-house with a dusty bairín breac and a mass card as cargo.

The town and country were there, pouring out condolences, like the dregs of a pint. The townspeople seemed to peel from the comforts of home for only a divine, select, set of occasions: birth, wake, and funeral. Mourners moved like riptide, heaving in and out of the house in waves, leaving a foam of stiff white roses and wilting lilies resting as shore-stains on Roach’s beech coffin. It almost seemed that with his death, a part of their livelihood had passed away: some cog now paused in the archaic, coal-fired machinery of their collective memory.

Tadgh was troubled by this mindset. Roach had been ancient; his death seemed less like a tragedy than an unwelcome affirmation of reality. There was a certain rationale to it. It wasn’t like Nina. Her orbit was fractured, half-spent, and incomplete. There was neither pomp, nor ceremony, when she was buried. Her father was forced to sneak her body into the sanctified ground. Hessian conformed to her posture where a casket should have corrected it, and the wet earth made up her face. Tadgh had not been afforded an opportunity to see her resting, like Bobby, starched and powdered white as a porcelain doll. All because she had punched her own ticket.

He marched up the lane towards the Roach homestead, navigating the stream of comers-and-goers. The damp, sodden, bark-chip path exhumed in his tracks. The lane was flanked by orchards on both sides, a tunnel of apple and plum trees. In the evening’s blustering swell their form was obedient, bending and whimpering to the corporal wind. He stood for a moment. He thought of the captive fruit, and how their sweetness would remain tacit for another few seasons. Some would fall prematurely; bruising and rotting in the quilt of leaves that mulched and made fertile the ground underfoot. It wasn’t their fault; we all watched them slip from the bough. Still, we complained about wasting all that gritty flesh, chastising ourselves, and wishing to have celebrated it more.

At the top of the lane, Tadgh paused once more; this time to catch his breath. He squinted, hoping his eyes would catch a sliver of a familiar face. He was disappointed when he saw none of interest. Reams passed through the exposed seams of the house: stitching themselves to alcoves and corners. Mrs. Roach, the widow seamstress, wandered wistfully along the front porch, crocheting with hand and needle the fine fabric of conversation. Tadgh gently approached, hoping that his ambassadorial mission could be carried out stealthily, that he could slip in, for just long enough to deposit the mass card. His fortune stalled; Mrs. Roach beamed at him through her damp shawl, deposits of mascara clinging to her veil. She took off towards him, untying her pious hands from their set holy formation. “Master Dinsmore, thank you so much for coming out. Your parents have certainly raised a fine young man. Handsome, to boot!”, she wheezed.

She was still smiling at Tadgh who, for a second, was puzzled by her tone. He had initially thought her bombsite visage a watercolor painted by tears, not the rain and chiding wind. Indeed, Mrs. Roach herself seemed to be at the point of acceptance.

“My condolences Mrs. Roach; it’s an awful tragedy. I remember him working in Havern’s when I was a sprog, like. He was class, pure class- an absolute gentleman-”

She embraced him, pulling up her crooked posture. Tadgh could hear the scraping of bones and the wheezing of dusty joints. He was instantly acquainted with the trials that age set her body’s every slight action; the afterthought of youthful breath seemed a chore to her. She slowly reset herself from Tadgh’s torso and stood halfway up.

‘‘Now, now; these things happen so they do. All for a reason. He’s up there with our Seamus and Caoilte now, laughing at us miserable sods.’’

Tadgh nodded and wore the suggestion of a smile. He held his hands out, offering the mass card and bairín breac, to which Mrs. Roach seemed overwhelmed, and almost delighted.

‘’God bless her wee heart! Your mum shouldn’t have. Take yourself on in there and leave them in the kitchen, like a good lad. Thank you so much.’’

Tadgh nodded and did as she asked. The kitchen was just to the right after the front door, which opened into a parlor, where Bobby’s body took pride of place in the center of the room. A Child of Prague was cornered by burning myrrh and consecrated candles at the foot of his coffin. Tadgh drew a cross in the air in front of his forehead and whispered a Hail Mary. He had no desire to hold Bobby’s cold hands, so he headed straight for the kitchen. He heaved though the mass of bodies pressed wall-to-wall towards the open alcove that morphed into kitchen. The kitchen table was proudly adorned with mass cards, like a mantlepiece decorated with trophies and plaques. Tadgh set his pieces down and drew a long breath. He’d shown his face, and as that was all attending a wake essentially required, he could now execute his exit strategy. He headed for the back door; if he slipped out there, he could walk the long way home over the fields and have a smoke before he got back. His hand clasped the door handle, primed to twist. Suddenly, the packed bodies tore apart to reveal Nina’s father, Mr McKernan, throwing his ring finger against the torso of Canon Magee like a punch. He was blind drunk, swaying uncontrollably and barking whiskey words at the priest’s face.

“You’re fucking full of it! What fucking God wouldn’t take my child in? Is she damned? Is she?”, he screamed.

Canon Magee wore an expression caught between fury and embarrassment. He pushed Mr. McKernan back towards the kitchen door, where he was grabbed by Bobby’s son John.

“Mr McKernan, you’re drunk. For the love of all that’s holy show some respect. A man has died-”

“Get out of my fucking face.”, retorted Mr. McKernan, jostling himself free from poor John’s protective clutches.

“You’re a fucking joke, Canon. My wee girl’s as dead as Bobby. Cunts like you are the reason she did what she did, and you still have the gall to tell me she’s unworthy of a graveyard. Not a drop of fucking empathy in ye!”

Each head focused on Bobby’s resting form splintered, attempting to withhold from view the slip of their interested eyes towards the argument. It had only recently been made public that Nina’s death was neither natural, nor murder. She had thrown herself into the sea. Canon Magee, ever the Papal loyalist, had refused to bury her on account of Catholic doctrine. They didn’t even wake the body. The two men furiously continued to exchange words as Tadgh slipped out the back door. He needed that smoke more than ever.

***

Light slipped out of the kitchen to kiss the verges of the garden; the rainclouds had broken, so the moonlight poured through their retreating ranks, and half-lit the grass. Tadgh snuck along the back of the house, slipping out to the left where he was obscured from any prying eyes. A bench lay ahead of him, and in front of it a shucked ebony skull, forgotten in the maelstrom of mourners; friends longstanding and fair-weather alike. Time harried its jaw and cheek bones into the earth, making esoteric its pronounced, identifying features. Tadgh ogled the spent skull, its curved hollows protruding in his mind’s eye. He thought, then, of his own eyes and their sullen droop, and the smooth sockets that housed them. This anatomical view alarmed him. When stripped of the biological certainty of pupil and retina they seemed so callous, inorganic. Tadgh’s head stooped slightly, as he hunched to light a cigarette. He thought again of Nina, and how her amber eyes would fade when the soil finally reclaimed them.

Tadgh looked back to the house after every drag, cautious of a family friend glimpsing and catching him in the act. Back-lit by the kitchen lamp, he saw a man stepping out, his alabaster complexion betraying his features in the hard-white light. The man staggered towards Tadgh, unabated by the wind, with a hunchback Woodbine clutched between his haylage teeth. Anticipating the figure’s arrival, Tadgh looked down, scrunched up his cigarette and stuffed it in his shirt pocket; painting his red thumb black with ash.

“Did you ever hear tell, young man, of the Wheelbarrow Cross?” the man whispered, standing now behind Tadgh.

Tadgh spun his head around to examine the voice behind him. It was Mr McKernan. The stench of alcohol was pungent, but he seemed slightly more sober than when Tadgh had last seen him. Tears were streaming down his face, as regular as rain.

‘’No, sir. Unfortunately, I’ve never heard tell of it.” Tadgh replied, quietly. Mr. McKernan cut a sorry sight in this state, and Tadgh could feel nothing but pity. He knew Nina, and was mourning in his own right, but Mr. McKernan’s grief was so much more.

“Ach, it was back in the auld days, when there was no tell of cars. A fella’s mother said in her will that she was to be buried in a wee village thirty or forty miles away from theirs. She dies, and he takes it upon himself to do it. He hadn’t a pot to piss in, and the neighbours wouldn’t lend him horse nor trap. So, he wrapped her in a sack and stuck her in a wheelbarrow- honest to God- and marched her to this village in the pissing rain. A day or two later, he arrives. Now, as I say, he’s not a shilling to his name. Not a penny. Anyway, he buries her in the family plot in the dead of the night. So, says he, I haven’t so much as wood for a cross. So, he breaks the wheelbarrow down with his bare hands, and makes one. A wheelbarrow cross.’’

The tears became still on his cheeks, and Tadgh felt like embracing him as he had Mrs. Roach. Mr McKernan’s eyes wistfully locked with the half-buried skull as silence overcame the pair. The shape of death revealed itself there to Tadgh, but he still couldn’t comprehend its form: it was as deep and winding as the roots which now cradled Nina, in her forbidden resting place.