the pump. For the first few moments of their arrival their attention was claimed by the distressed dog, a black- and-white sheepdog like their own two. Dust had risen from beneath the Volkswagen’s wheels and was still thick in the air as they stepped from the car. The dog was running wildly across a corner of the yard, back and forth, and back and forth again. The dog’s gone mad, Mrs McDowd thought, something’s after affecting it. Then she saw her daughter’s body lying by the pump, and a yard or so away her daughter’s bicycle lying on its side, as if she had fallen from it. Beside the bicycle were two dead rabbits.
‘My God,’ McDowd said, and his wife knew from his voice that he hadn’t seen his daughter yet but was looking at something else. He had walked to another part of the yard, where the dog was. He had gone there instinctively, to try to calm the animal.
She knelt down, whispering to Maureen, thinking in her confusion that her daughter had just this minute fallen off her bicycle. But Maureen’s face was as cold as stone, and her flesh had already stiffened. Mrs McDowd screamed, and then she was aware that she was lying down herself, clasping Maureen’s dead body. A moment later she was aware that her husband was weeping piteously, unable to control himself, that he was kneeling down, his hands on the body also.
Mrs McDowd did not remember rising to her feet, or finding the energy and the will to do so. ‘Don’t go over there,’ she heard her husband saying to her, and saw him wiping at his eyes with the arm of his jersey. But he didn’t try to stop her when she went to where the dog was; he remained on his knees beside their daughter, calling out to her between his sobs, asking her not to be dead.
The dog was crouched in a doorway, not barking any more. A yard or so away Mrs Butler lay with one of her legs twisted under her, blood on the ground already turned brown, a pool of it still scarlet. Looking down at her, Mrs McDowd thought with abrupt lucidity: Maureen did not fall off her bicycle. She went back to where her daughter lay and behind the two tin barrels that stood by the pump she saw the body of Lancy Butler, and on the ground not far from it the shotgun that must have blown off Mrs Butler’s face.
O’Kelly of the Garda arrived at a swift conclusion. Old Mrs Butler had been as adamant as the McDowds in her opposition to the match that her son and Maureen McDowd had planned for themselves. And there was more to it than that: Mrs Butler had been obsessively possessive, hiding from no one her determination that no other woman should ever take her son away from her. Lancy was her only child, the single one to survive years of miscarrying. His father had died when Lancy was two years old, leaving mother and child to lead a lonely life on a farm that was remote. O’Kelly knew that Mrs Butler had been reputed to be strange in the head, and given to furious jealousies where Lancy was concerned. In the kind of rage that people who’d known her were familiar with she had shot her son’s sweetheart rather than suffer the theft of him. He had wrenched the shotgun from her and by accident or otherwise it had exploded. A weak man at the best of times, he had turned it upon himself rather than face the reality of what had happened. This deduction, borne out by the details in the yard, satisfied O’Kelly of the Garda; the people of Drimaghleen arrived themselves at the same conclusion. ‘It was always trouble,’ McDowd said on the day of the funerals. ‘The minute she went out with Lancy Butler it was trouble written down for poor Maureen.’
Drimaghleen was a townland, with nothing to mark it except a crossroads that was known as Drimaghleen Crossroads. The modest farms that comprised it, each of thirty or so acres, were scattered among bogland, one separated from the next by several miles, as the McDowds’ and the Butlers’ were. The village of Kilmona was where the people of Drimaghleen went to Mass, and where they confessed to Father Sallins. The children of the farms went to school in the small town of Mountcroe, driven each morning in a yellow bus that drove them back to the end of their lanes or farm tracks in the afternoon. Milk churns were collected in much the same way by the creamery lorry. Bread and groceries were bought in the village; fresh meat in Mountcroe. When the men of Drimaghleen got drunk they did so in Mountcroe, never in the village, although often they took a few bottles of stout there, in the bar beside the grocery counter. Hardware and clothes were bought in Mountcroe, which had had a cinema called the Abbey Picture House until the advent of television closed it in the early 1960s. Drimaghleen, Kilmona and Mountcroe formed a world that bounded the lives of the people of the Drimaghleen farms. Rarely was there occasion to venture beyond it to the facilities of a town that was larger – unless the purpose happened to be a search for work or the first step on the way to exile.
The children of the McDowds, whose search for such work had taken them far from the townland, returned heartbroken for their sister’s Mass. All four of them came, two with husbands, one with a wife, one on her own. The weddings which had taken place had been the last family occasions, two of them in Kilmona, the third in distant Skibbereen, the home of the girl whom the McDowds’ son had married a year ago. That wedding was on their minds at Maureen’s Mass – the long journey there had been in the Volkswagen, the night they had spent in Tierney’s Hotel, the farewells the next day. Not in the wildest horror of a nightmare could any of the McDowds have guessed the nature of the occasion destined to bring them together next.
After the funeral the family returned to the farm. The younger McDowds had known of Maureen’s and Lancy Butler’s attachment, and of their parents’ opposition to it. They had known as well of Mrs Butler’s possessive affection for her son, having grown up with stories of this maternal eccentricity, and having witnessed Lancy himself, as a child and as a boy, affected by her indulgence. ‘Oh, it can wait, Lancy, it can wait,’ she would say a dozen times an hour, referring to some necessary chore on the farm. ‘Ah, sure, we won’t bother with school today,’ she had said before that, when Lancy had complained of a difficulty he was experiencing with the seven- times table or Brother Martin’s twenty weekend spellings. The people of Drimaghleen used to wonder whether the farm or Lancy would suffer more in the end.
‘What did she see in him?’ Mrs McDowd mused sadly at the funeral meal. ‘Will anyone ever tell me what she saw in him?’
They shook their heads. The cheeks of all of them were still smeared with the tears they had shed at the service. Conversation was difficult.
‘We will never recover from it,’ the father said, with finality in his voice. It was all that could be said, it was all they knew with certainty: for as long as the older McDowds remained in this farmhouse – which would be until their own deaths – the vicious, ugly tragedy would haunt them. They knew that if Maureen had been knocked from her bicycle by a passing motor-car they could have borne her death with greater fortitude; or if she had died of an illness, or been the victim of incurable disease. The knife that turned in their pain was their memory of the Butlers’ farmyard, the barking dog running back and forth, the three still bodies. There was nothing but the waste of a life to contemplate, and the cruelty of chance – for why should it have been simple, pretty Maureen whose fate it was to become mixed up with so peculiar a couple as that mother and son? There were other girls in the neighbourhood – underhand girls and girls of doubtful character – who somehow more readily belonged with the Butlers: anyone would tell you that.
‘Why don’t you drive over and see us?’ one of the daughters invited. ‘Can’t we persuade you?’
Her father stared into the table without trying to reply. It was unnecessary to say that a drive of such a distance could only be contemplated when there was a wedding or a funeral. Such journeys had not been undertaken during Maureen’s lifetime, when she might have looked after the farm for a day; in no way could they be considered now. Mrs McDowd tried to smile, making an effort to acknowledge the concern that had inspired the suggestion, but no smile came.
Being of a nature that might interest strangers, the deaths were reported in the newspapers. They were mentioned on the radio, and on the television news. Then everything became quiet again at Drimaghleen, and in the village and in the town. People wrote letters to the McDowds, expressing their sorrow. People came to see them but did not stay long. ‘I am always there,’ Father Sallins said.
