Rosie O'Dell Page 5

  I wasn’t sure how to react to this. I glanced at Rosie. She was already looking at me sideways and gave an indulgent shake of her head.

  “It was delightful to see,” another man now orated semi-comprehensibly between what could be sniffles or chortles, “that our departed poet betrayed his readers utterly by the manner of his dying. For whereas Joyce O’Dell’s verse celebrated the positive life force of erotic desire, his mode of death on the other hand—that is to say, falling into a river while performing a crude bodily function in the dark—is a clear metaphor for the victory of dross over emotional refinement. Hence, no poet could have found a better way to raise his readers into a higher level of aesthetic consciousness and to honour their intellectual integrity than by stabbing them all in the back like that at the end.”

  I was by no means getting all of this but the drift was clear enough, and I began to be mortified for Rosie’s sake. I pushed closer to her.

  Now someone else opened up. I recognized him as a man I’d seen with Mr. O’Dell many times years before in his home. As a personal friend of the deceased, maybe this guy would say something sensible. For the first minute his words did sound appropriate as he spoke of the freshness and vigour of language that the late poet prided himself on. But then he broke down in snorts of laughter over what he described as “the charming irony of Joyce O’Dell, the poet of fresh and vigorous language, dying from the one and only cliché in his life: the wild Celtic bard who drank the odd drop too much.”

  Amid the general laughter, I could not look at Rosie in my embarrassment for her. On the radio news that morning, I’d heard the police confirm that, though no foul play was suspected in the drowning death of Professor Joyce O’Dell, they felt obliged to caution users of lakes and streams about the role of alcohol in fatalities on the water. Now I felt Rosie’s hair graze mine as she bent from her superior height to whisper words of comfort in my ear: “It’s okay, Tom, they’re all just heartsick, that’s all.”

  “FOR ME, JOE,” S A I D my mother behind the closed door of the master bedroom that evening. “You’ve got to do it for me.”

  “I haven’t been in a Catholic church for years,” my father answered. “I wouldn’t know when to flop down on my knees, when to hop up again, or what to bawl out. I wouldn’t mind being back a bit in the church hidden among the crowd, but no, Gladys, not in the front pew with everyone watching me make a complete idiot of myself.”

  Listening in my bed, I expected Mom to answer, as she had done one time last year, “Why the sudden change, Joe? Making a complete idiot of yourself never stopped you before.” She’d even forced a laugh out of Dad with that one then, but tonight she said, sounding extremely earnest, “Well, I’ve got to be there with her. She asked me to, asked us to, and she needs the support. I can’t leave her up there all by herself with two young girls and old Mrs. O’Dell.”

  “What? Old Mrs. O’Dell? In the same pew? That clinches it for me. I’m not going near that. She’s liable to say or do anything, for the love of… Hasn’t Nina got any family who can be there with her? What about that sister from Corner Brook who came in with Rosie? And what about that crowd from the university? There must be one sensible person in the whole lot.”

  “Joe. Nina asked me and you to be there with her. She has always admired your steadiness. I think she needs a strong, firm arm she can lean on going in and out of the church and at the cemetery. And Tom wants to be there with Rosie, too.”

  “Wait now. I had in mind for Tom to sit back in the church with me.” There was a pause and I waited in my bed. Dad was awful stubborn when he didn’t want to do something. But he loved Mom a lot too. Then he burst out, “What the hell are they doing, having the funeral in a church, anyway? I thought Joyce O’Dell was supposed to be an atheist. He spent half his time raving on about being a bloody atheist and now here he is having holy water fired at him and magic spells chanted over him in the Basilica Cathedral of St. John the Baptist, of all bloody places. No. I will not join him in his final hypocrisy.”

  IN THE FRONT PEW at the funeral mass in the Basilica, Mom sat on Nina O’Dell’s left and on her right sat Dad. To Mom’s left sat Nina’s sister and Pagan and Rosie and Gram O’Dell, and on the outside, me. I had originally felt proud about taking my place at the front of the overfull, awe-inspiring cathedral, although my unexpected job assignment of escorting old Gram O’Dell was unnerving. As I’d walked alongside her to the pew she’d muttered out loud: “They’d better tell the truth about that boy or, by Judas, they’ll hear something.” And during the mass, as I was trying to figure out how the priest could regard dying at the age of forty-two, nearly four times as old as me, as dying very young, Gram frightened the wits out of me by leaning on my arm as if she was about to push herself to her feet. But then she expelled a big breath and settled back again. Rosie looked at her and smiled and covered her grandmother’s hand with her own.

  After we’d followed the coffin outside the Basilica, Dad sneaked a look at his watch and offered to spare old Mrs. O’Dell the long walk and the standing about in the cemetery by driving her directly home. With a furious shake of her head and a scrunched-up face, she muttered, “Listen, buster, I’m goin’. I’m not finished yet.” Dad and Mom exchanged a glance as the cars revved up to pull into line and snake through town to the cemetery. Gram had her mind set on doing something by the grave.

  At the graveside, Gram O’Dell took the closest position to the hole in the ground, and the rest of us stretched out from her. I stood next to Rosie. The immense crowd of mourners pressed behind and around us. I saw the doctor guy from the funeral home standing on the other side of the grave in plain view. The day was sunny and still. The priest’s voice was low and integrated into the quietness. I was drifting into a meditation of sadness over Rosie’s loss of her father when, as the casket began its descent into the earth, I heard Rosie’s voice shattering the stillness like glass. But Rosie was standing right there beside me, not making a sound. Yesterday, I’d told her, “Your grandmother sounds just like you sometimes.” And she’d replied, “Daddy always said that our voices were identical except that mine was a violin and Gram’s was a viola.” And that was what I was hearing now, an old viola, clear, loud and querulous. I leaned forward a little to look.

  “I begged the young rascal,” the old lady sang out, shaking her gnarled, arthritic fingers at the disappearing box, “not to name his second daughter Pagan. Call her Sheila or Colleen or Deirdre or something that would go good with O’Dell, I said. What next, a name like Pagan in front of a name like O’Dell? Haven’t you got any religion in you, at all, my son? The Catholics and the Protestants will take turns throwing their bombs at you if you call her that. But did he listen to me? Oh yes, watch out now! He slews around and says to me, ‘But it’s your name, Mom, your own maiden name, Payne. They’re the same word. Payne is just a modern corruption of the old pronunciation Pagan, that’s all.’ I ask you all here today assembled, is there a son among you who would drag his own mother’s maiden name down in the dirt like that? I think not. And that was on top of naming his first daughter Rosie. Not Rosemary like her mother Nina wanted to but never had the backbone, as usual, to put her foot down about.”

  Here the widow Nina O’Dell let out a moan of profound suffering, though whether from grief or mortification was not clear to me. Mom gave Dad her heart-melting “Do something” gaze. Dad returned his best “Are you mad? I’m not going near that!” glower.

  Old Mrs. O’Dell turned at the moan from her daughter-in-law and smiled benignly as if she had just bestowed the highest compliment on her and spoke on, “And then he had to go ahead and give Rosie the second name Gudrid after some Viking slattern who was supposed to be the mother of the first European born in North America, some little brat of a boy by the name of Snorri, up there in L’Anse aux Meadows. Snorri! It was a good thing my son never had a son of his own to name, that’s all I can say, because this would’ve really sounded good, wouldn’t it: Snorri O’Dell?” />
  Smothered snorts rose from the mourners, and the old lady looked around and nodded and smiled her acknowledgement. Two male colleagues of Professor Joyce O’Dell’s from the university, familiar to me from the funeral home, now approached and towered awkwardly over Gram, looking at each other. Then they crouched and spoke gentle words of encouragement that she come along with them to the car.

  Gram O’Dell listened impatiently for a few seconds and then shouted, “Oh shag off, ye frigging dirtbags! It’s the likes of ye up there in that Department of English who are encouraging my boy to write that filthy poetry all the time, every syllable of it down in the gutter.” Fiercely, she twisted her tiny body back and forth, delivering sharp and painful blows to their faces with her elbows. “I told him long ago to stop writing those dirty verses,” she said in a lower register as the cowed academics slunk from her holding their heads. “And he puts that face on him that gets him off with murder every time and he says, ‘And just how would you happen to know my poetry is so dirty, dear Mother? You wouldn’t be reading it on the sly, would you?’ leaving his own mother without a word in her cheek. His own mother! What was the little frigger like at all!” She shook her head with a big smile of remembrance. “Now where was I before I was so rudely interrupted by those two porno prof types? Oh yes, Gudrid the Viking slut and the little brat Snorri O’Dell.” She raised her face and held forth again. “Sure, it’s a known fact that the Irish were over here in Newfoundland centuries before those Viking pirates came across. St. Brendan himself sailed across the wide Atlantic Ocean in a tiny curragh when your famous Norseman was still only raping and pillaging Ireland and happy enough to have that little bit. But I digress. Now you may well ask yourself assembled here today, why is she prating away like this about names? Sure, the old bag is not even Irish and didn’t she turn around and name her own son, Joyce? But that was not me. His father went to work and did that. I wanted to name him Adrian after the popes, and me a Protestant, for the love of God! But oh no, that man, his father, who was born and lived and worked all his life over here in Newfoundland without so much as ever setting a lawless foot upon the old sod, goes ahead and names his son after—how did it go?— ‘the greatest writer produced in this century not just by Ireland but by the entire human race, ’ so that this selfsame son could come home crying from school because the boys were saying, ‘What kind of a name is Joyce for a boy? What are ya, a fruit?’ and his father would say, ‘Go back and show what kind of a boy you are: rip their jeesly heads off and shove them so far up their arses that no one would even notice they were ever removed from their shoulders in the first place.’ Ha-ha-ha. And people wonder where his son Joyce got his poetical talent! And now these two little girls are left right at the worst age without their own dad. But then again, how long could our merciful Father in heaven be expected to put up with the way my boy Joyce was forever carrying on?” Here, old Gram O’Dell raised her two tiny fists in the air, tilted her head till she was looking straight up, and screeched, “Are ya happy now, ya bastard in the sky?” It was harrowing. Then she lowered her head and softly explained to the audience as an aside, “That was James Joyce’s term of affection for God, ‘the Bastard in the Sky.’” She turned her eyes abruptly up again and raised her voice many decibels, “I’ll give you happy, ya big bastard bully in the sky, when I get up there next to you in a little while. I’ll scratch the eyes out of that inflated holy head.” Now she folded her body forward as if she’d been punched in the stomach and started wailing like a banshee over her knees, “The boy was brazen, yes! He was fit for anything bad on the go, yes! But he loved his friends and his fine words and his finer whisky and, finest of all, his wife and his two little girls, and if that’s not good enough to curb the vengeance of God Almighty”—here her crescendo reached its shrieking apogee— “what in the name of bloody goddamn hell is?” Now she stopped and remained as still and quiet as a statue.

  Mom slowly exhaled. At last it seemed to be over. But no one looked sure. Then, while the crowd stood there wondering what to do next, Rosie touched my arm and stepped away from me and walked by Mom and Nina and Dad and Pagan to her grandmother’s side. There she bent a little and said in the quietness, “That was really good, Gram. Dad really liked that.” The old woman’s ravaged face turned towards her and spread into a smile that hinted at the beauty that had caused fights among rival men, Rosie had told me yesterday, on the sandy beaches of the St. Barbe coast sixty years ago. Rosie pulled one of Gram’s ancient claws out from where they were jammed between her bent knees and held it, yellow and sere, in her pink and cream hands, and gently led her away. No one else stirred for a few seconds until Mom put her arm around Nina O’Dell’s shoulders and steered her towards the path out. Nina looked behind for Pagan, and seeing her beside me, she clutched Dad’s arm and sobbed as she walked disconsolately away from her husband deep in the hole in the ground. It was a sight that branded itself on my brain, the huge crowd coming alive to follow the young girl leading the old woman by the hand, both walking slow, one bent and crooked and halting, the other upright and straight and sure.

  “DO YOU KNOW THAT English doctor by the name of Rothesay?” Mom asked Dad at the supper table.

  “No, but I know of him,” Dad replied. “One of my partners did the accounting work for the doctor who retired and sold his practice to him two or three years back. But I’ve never met him personally. Why?”

  “He was at the funeral home yesterday.”

  “Was that the tall dark handsome guy I saw hanging around you?”

  “If only!” laughed Mom. “He came over to say hello to Pagan and I happened, by a stroke of good fortune, to be there with her. It was the first time I’d talked to him. I’d seen him at the General last year, but I’ve never seen him once at the Janeway where I am mostly these days, which is strange.”

  “Maybe he doesn’t like kids.”

  I was about to spit back at Dad, “Don’t be so foolish. He was really nice to Rosie and me.” But I let it pass.

  “Nina said she’d never met him before yesterday and he told her he’d only met Joyce once in his life. I saw him at the Basilica and at the cemetery too. Doesn’t that strike you as odd for a busy doctor who was not even an acquaintance?”

  “What better way for a new doctor to establish himself than to go to big funerals and cluck over the corpse about how he’d still be alive if he’d only had the sense to be his patient?”

  “An ambulance-chasing doctor. That’s a new one. Someone should tell him that over here doctors don’t have to chase ambulances, ambulances have to chase doctors. How come he’s here in Newfoundland, anyway, do you know?”

  “Here’s a shot in the dark. Moolah. They can make way more money under medicare here than under their national health scheme, so they’re all coming to Canada. The country is maggoty with them. When was the last time you heard a doctor being interviewed on the national news who didn’t have a limey accent?”

  I forgot for the moment there was something about Rothesay’s effect on Rosie that I hadn’t liked yesterday, and vented my irritation with my dad: “How come you always think everyone is only out for themselves all the time? That Dr. Rothesay came over to talk to Rosie, and he was really nice to her. He admired Mr. O’Dell and his poetry greatly, he said, and was sorry he didn’t have the chance to become friends with him before the tragedy. What’s so strange about someone being nice?”

  They both annoyed me further by exchanging a smile before Mom said, “Maybe you’re right, Tom. It’s okay to wonder about people’s reasons for doing the things they do, but maybe we were being a little too cynical.”

  Dad reached over and put his arm around my shoulders. Then he rose to his feet, gently squeezing the nape of Mom’s neck with one hand and my shoulder with the other. “I’m going to nip down to the office. After those surreal scenes at the funeral parlour and the cemetery, I need to come down to earth with a bankruptcy file.”

  “There were some hairy moments, all rig
ht,” said Mom. “But Nina and the girls managed to get through it okay. Especially Rosie. I’ve never seen such poise and self-possession in a young person like that.”

  My mother’s opinion contrasted with Rosie’s own earlier that afternoon. Sitting slumped on the side of her bed, she had looked lost and defeated. She murmured, without lifting her eyes to mine, “I’ve got to find some way to stop this hurting inside me, Tom, or I’m going to end up doing something really weird like Gram. I’m going to go right around the bend, I just know it.”

  “I would too,” I had replied, “unless there was someone…” And I made her a promise that I was going to be the one person she could always and forever depend on, no matter what or where or when. She looked up and nodded, trying to smile, and I sat down on the side of the bed next to her. She leaned against me and I put my arms around her and held on to her for a long time. Sometimes I felt no movement from her at all, and sometimes I felt her shuddering as she wept anew.

  Since arriving home for supper I’d been meaning to tell my parents the decision Rosie and I had made for me to stay here in St. John’s, but I hadn’t had the nerve. I was braver now that their talk had started to bug me, and an opportunity came as Dad left the table. “We’re going to have breakfast at A&W tomorrow morning on the way,” he said. The plan made with Brent’s parents was to drop me back to Twillingate for the week that Mom and Dad were to be in Bonne Bay. “It’ll save your mother the trouble of cleaning up before we leave,” concluded the gallant knight.