Lake of Sorrows

Charlie slipped into the fresh shirt his mother had left for him on the chair near the hallway. He removed his dinner from the oven, using a towel to protect his fingers from the hot plate, and set it in the place laid for him at the table. He knew his father’s illness would not let him live much longer. For a time they’d all tried to pretend that it wasn’t so, but what was the point of denying it now, with the tubes and oxygen tanks, the death rattle at the bottom of his watery cough? In the meantime, someone had to keep the place from falling asunder. It wasn’t a large farm, but there was still a load of work to do each day when he got home from the bog: feeding the calves, getting the hay in, not to mention keeping the house in good repair and the tractor running. He fell into bed exhausted every night and was up again at six in the morning for his shift on the bog. There was no end to it, ever. He deeply resented the position he was in, and still felt guilty for not doing more. He wolfed his food, eager to fill the gnawing void in his belly and be off. One boiled potato remained on his plate when his mother emerged from the sitting room, bearing a tray with his father’s half-eaten dinner; each day he ate a bit less than the day before. The treacly music coming from the radio suddenly cut out, replaced by a heavy drumbeat signaling the seriousness of what was to follow:

“And here’s the latest news from Radio Midlands. Gardai have launched an investigation into the death of a man whose well-preserved body was found in Loughnabrone Bog this afternoon. The body was found by archaeologists working at the site, and has not yet been identified. A postmortem examination will be carried out in the morning, and Gardai are looking into missing-persons cases from the area.”

The newsreader’s reassuring murmur continued, talking about shrinking dole queues and rural road construction grants, but Charlie’s attention was concentrated on his mother’s expression as she unloaded the tray full of dishes into the sink. She was someplace far away from him, away from his father, away from this place. He had studied her so often, tracing their similarities and differences: they had the same skin, pale and lightly freckled; the same cheekbones, nose, and hairline. There were times when she seemed to be illuminated from the inside, but there were also times like this, when she was unreachable, like something seen through a dark window that showed only his own reflection when he approached. Perhaps, like him, she had no idea how to gather up all those shape-shifting, unformed thoughts and begin to translate them into words. All at once he was back out on the bog, staring down at dark, wet peat cradling the dead man’s misshapen head.

“I saw it,” he said.

She turned to him as if she’d just awakened from a dream. “What?”

“That body in the bog. All black, it was—”

“For God’s sake, Charlie! I don’t want to hear that.”

“It’ll be on the television and in all the papers tomorrow. But they didn’t even mention the strangest bit. I was there. I saw it. He had a leather cord around his neck with three knots in it—and he was wearing a watch.” His mother’s hands stopped suddenly, and she stood staring down at them, immobile in the soapy water. She spoke only after a long pause.

“What sort of watch?”

“I don’t know—just an ordinary sort of wristwatch with a metal band. I couldn’t see very well and it was all corroded.”

Why had he told her about it? He’d developed a habit of telling his mother lies just to provoke a reaction. The story he’d just told her sounded like one of his more outrageous tales—except that it was all true. He hadn’t told her what had unsettled him most—that the leather circlet around the dead man’s neck was almost identical to the good luck charm he’d fashioned for himself from a length of cord.

Charlie stood and carried his plate to the sink. He knew his mother was watching him from the kitchen window as he left the house and walked toward the fencerow at the back of the haggard. He couldn’t help it; he had to get out of the house, to take the fresh summer air deep into his lungs. Sometimes he began to feel suffocated in those rooms, weighted down with the silence. He wanted to cast it all off, all the expectations they had of him, and especially the desperate, killing worry about what people might think. He crossed the field behind the house in long strides, making his way toward the whitethorn tree in the corner, where he’d slip through the fence and follow the path up across the next small hill to his apiary.