Chapter Six
After half an hour of peeling wallpaper in the dim light of the front room, with only the wind outside and her breathing inside, Lassi set down her wet paintbrush.
Outside, the rain had turned to a drizzle— a “partly sunny” steeped in sarcasm kind of moment.
“I could use some exercise,” she declared, performing a stiff, painful squat to emphasize her point. “I think a walk is in order. Maybe I’ll head into town to discuss the real estate transaction with Father Ward.”
Nodding at her clever excuse to go see the man who had only left an hour ago, she strode toward the closet to don appropriate weather gear.
The oiled leather box seemed to wink at her from its place on the floor.
“What, you’ve got a better idea?” She stooped to retrieve the map. “You want me to find the grave? Good idea, Mr. Box, but I wouldn’t want to destroy the contents you’ve been keeping close all these years. If I take this brittle, inked map outside in the drizzle, well...” She shook her head. “That would make me too dumb to live.”
She fished her phone from her pocket and took a snapshot of the map. Satisfied, she tucked the paper back into the wooden container, slid her phone into her pocket, and set off out the door.
Normally, the lush green of the hills, the sheep with the painted dots on their rumps, the stone fences, and other typical signs of the Irish countryside, gave her cheer. But, here in Bally, the pull of gravity in this fecking village seemed to have its way with the clouds, dragging them down like they weighed tons. Even the tall grasses seemed bent from the weight of the oppressive clouds, as if they couldn’t be bothered lifting their heads.
She glanced toward the village which lay at the top of the hill. It seemed to scrunch in on itself, like an accordion smashed between the beefy palms of a fat man. The whole thing made her feel cramped and unable to take a full breath. In Dublin, she never felt claustrophobic. There’s too much life and movement and change. But here, in Bally-nowhere, shite doesn’t change except every thousand years.
Eager to get somewhere she could breathe, she headed down the slope of her great-aunt’s property, toward the beach. Once there, she let out a long sigh. At least the ocean doesn’t seem weighed down by the clouds. It’s far too vast.
She fished out her phone and peered at the photo of the map. Her head swiveled back and forth as she tried to get her bearings in relation to the faded markings of the hand-drawn diagram. An X marked the position of several huge standing stones. She eyed the landscape, having no doubt which stones the map indicated. They were huge, enormous sentinels. On the map, what looked like an arrow pointed away from the standing stones. The arrow ended in a blotchy smear, leaving Lassi clueless as to whether to go straight and left, straight and right, or simply straight.
“Okay, Lassi,” she muttered. “Root around.” She stomped about in the high grasses, examining every pile of rocks. When she found a likely cluster, she stared at the screen of her phone and tried to match the location. “Nope, this isn’t it. Not this one either. Be the Wonder Woman you know yourself to be, girl.”
Tromping around near the shore, she pictured herself as a super-hero.
Positioning her body as if she held out a sword and shield, she cried out, “Take that, you feckers of Bally.”
She kicked her leg, stumbling when her foot caught on a rock. She turned to curse at the stone, then stopped. Stones and rocks, big and small, lay piled in haphazard shambles underneath a wizened tree. One lichen-covered stone looked like a grave marker. Her eyes grew wide. “Good Christ, Lassi, I think you’ve found it.”
Her fingers trembled as she shook her phone to activate the flashlight. Holding it before the headstone, she read, “RIP Maggie Strongbow.” She couldn’t make out any other writing from the time-worn grave marker.
Sadness mantled her shoulders, no doubt the results of the gloomy clouds pressing from the sky. Her stupid eyes grew moist.
“This is real. It’s not a nonsense myth about a vampire. This is a poor young girl who died, and this is the condition of her grave?” she whispered. “I can’t stand it. I’ll bet she got knocked up by a local asshole and some ancient bullshit law declared her a whore. It still happens today. I deliver their unwanted babies, and my heart breaks for both mother and child.” As a teen, she’d been accused of being loose and immoral for fucking Ryan Murphy and Sean Kelly, both jocks on her high school football team. While they got paraded around as local heroes and bad boys for scoring with the stuck-up redhead. Hence, the moment she exited the headmaster’s office, having been chewed out and shamed in every way possible, she carried around a cause for equal rights and fair treatment of women who chose to enjoy their sex lives, not tuck them inside a bag of morals.
Her chest grew heavy, like the stones weighed in on her, not the bones beneath the soil. If she could erase any memory it would be the reality of having to help a young mother deliver a baby she didn’t ask for and didn’t want.
“What a lot of bullshit calling her the Dearg-Due red-blood-sucker. People and their stupid superstitions. The Dearg-Due was probably some early serial killer...or tuberculosis. And they assigned the name to this poor lass.” Hands on her hips, she stood staring at the grave of Maggie Strongbow. The wind blew her hood from her head, tossing her strawberry-colored hair about her face. “You fecking wind,” she yelled. “You fecking rain and fecking shitty village.” She shook her fist at the sky. “Fecking idiots who cast a person’s soul to hell for doing what’s right and natural, namely, screwing your brains out.” Tears streamed down her face, making her feel like an idiot child who’d lost her ice cream on the sidewalk. She couldn’t explain the cause of her sorrow. “I’ve got to do something. Poor Maggie can’t continue to lie under a pile of bloody uncared-for stones, because of some fecking superstitious, ignorant villagers.”
She searched around looking for something to help her move the massive boulders. “Whoever got them up here in the first place must be a goddamned giant. How did they do that?”
A sturdy stick seemed to call to her from a few yards away.
She muttered, “They used levers, of course. Well, that, and elephants or horses or something to cart the rocks.” She trekked toward the stick—more of a driftwood tree branch—stooped to pick up it up, and hefted it up and down. Then, she curled her fingers around it and tried to break it. It held fast. She nodded, satisfied.
Cheered by her decision, she set to work levering the stones out of the way. She did her best to arrange them in a circle, commemorating Maggie, rather than hiding her. When she finished moving the rocks, she cleaned the headstone as best she could. Then, she lowered herself to one knee, kneeling like she was about to be knighted. She crossed herself, which seemed foolish as she had no love for the Lord. Not the way Father Ward does. In her work as a Labor and Delivery nurse, she’d seen too many deaths and too much tragedy to assume there was someone running the show. When she rose to standing, her heart seemed to float.
The wind had picked up, however, assaulting her cheeks and hands with its frigid breath. The temperature had plummeted to near freezing. White caps formed on the horizon while the waves beat angrily at the shore, as if some wild god punished her for her good deed.
“Good Christ, it’s biting cold.” She tugged her coat around herself. “It’s like Ireland, only worse,” she joked. Which is exactly why Barbados sounds so appealing. She spun on her heel and scurried up the hill, reminding herself, the sooner I get the wallpaper from the wall, the sooner I can leave Bally-nightmare behind. The only thought tugging insistently—besides the lure of Father Ward—was the steaming pile of mysteries gathering in her mind—mysteries like the grave she’d tended and the wondering why it had been left a disgrace.