The sun was well up, and Scotty was gone. They had made love repeatedly for what had seemed half the night and probably, he knew from his past performances, had been more like half an hour. Maybe what they had done had carried over into the dream, but still… The seance seemed very far in the past. As convinced as he had been of what had happened the night before, he now regarded the incident with some skepticism. Maybe he had been drunker than he had thought. He had seen the girl twice, and he hadn’t been entirely sober either time.
Howell rolled over and put his feet on the floor. As he stood, a needle-like pain shot through his back. He grabbed the bedstead and straightened carefully. He was clearly out of shape for sex, he thought. His back muscles were as sore as a boil. He stood under the shower for a while, directing the hot water onto his spine, trying to let the muscles relax, and they seemed to. Then, as he was shaving, he bent slightly to dip the razor into the water, and it was as if a tiny hand grenade had gone off in his lower back. The pain became worse when he tried to straighten, and he forgot his half-finished shave and struggled to the bed. When he had lain stretched out for a few minutes, panting, the pain subsided, but when he tried to get to his feet, it overwhelmed him again.
He struggled painfully into some clothes, trying to stand as little as possible. It wasn’t so bad as long as he sat or lay down, but to stand up was torture. He managed to get some coffee made, and sat down on the piano stool to drink it. He looked around the room. The cups and glasses from the night before were still scattered about. Thank God they had moved the table back to its usual position. He shuddered at the thought of what it would be like to try and move it in his condition. As the pain subsided again, he doodled a few bars on the piano, then flipped on the player. The old machine turned and wheezed and began to play “I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen”.
That was too sentimental for this early in the morning. He removed the roll and inserted another, the Gershwin one. Immediately, the piano began again to play “I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen”. Howell stopped the mechanism and looked on the roll. “Gershwin Plays Gershwin” was clearly printed on the paper. Surely, George Gershwin had not written the old Irish-American tune? Puzzled, he tried another roll – Earl Hines. Same tune. Howell shut off the piano. The goddamn thing must have some sort of mechanical memory that got stuck; now it was repeating itself, like a windup music box. He suddenly needed a drink. Forgetting his back, he started for the kitchen and the bottle, then fell to the floor, shrieking, as the pain swept through him again.
When he could move again, he got gingerly to his feet and, using a peculiar, Quasimodo-like gait, he made it to the station wagon and pointed the car toward Sutherland. He had passed a doctor’s office half a dozen times, and now he needed a doctor. After half an hour with old Readers Digests and Guideposts, he was ushered into the doctor’s examination room, where he related what had happened to him.
“What the hell is the matter with me, Doctor?”
“Incipient middle age,” the doctor replied, filling a syringe.
That was not what Howell had wanted to hear. “So what can you do about it?”
“Not much, to tell you the truth. I’m going to inject a muscle relaxant into the area, and I’ll prescribe a pain killer. After that, hot baths a couple of times a day and plenty of bed rest.”
“For how long? When is this going to clear up?”
“A few days, a few weeks, who knows?” The doctor stabbed at him with the needle.
“Jesus, what kind of prognosis is that?” Howell howled.
“Best medical science can do, I’m afraid. I’d send you over to the local chiropractor for a little wrestling match, but I just sent him down to Atlanta for a laminectomy the other day.”
“For what?”
“Back surgery,” the doctor grinned. “Last resort, of course.” He scribbled something on a pad. “Take one of these every four hours for the pain. They’re a sort of artificial morphine, so don’t get too enthusiastic with them. Come and see me in four or five days if you’re not better, and we’ll give you another injection.”
Howell hobbled out of the place, got the prescription filled, and stumbled into a booth at Bubba’s. The place was buzzing with locals in for mid-morning coffee, and after a moment the lawyer, Enda McCauliffe, plopped down across from him.
“How’s it going, John?” he asked.
“Just terrific, Mac,” Howell replied, popping one of the pain killers into his mouth and washing it down with coffee. “I’ve just come from the doctor’s, and I think I’m crippled for life.” He told the lawyer what had happened to him.
“Well, that’s just awful,” McCauliffe commiserated. “You know what I’d do if I were you?”
“Suicide?” Howell asked.
McCauliffe shook his head and seemed to suppress a laugh. “Not yet, anyway. Mama Kelly.”
“Mama Kelly?”
The lawyer nodded. “The old lady has something of a reputation in these parts for healing – you know, warts, cross-eyed kids, the lame and the halt – that sort of thing. Of course, none of your better people would ever stoop to that.”
Howell blinked at him. “You’re kidding, aren’t you? You’re not really suggesting that I do that.”
“Seems to me you come under the heading of lame and halt, and anyway, you’ve had an invitation, haven’t you?” McCauliffe sipped his coffee and grinned a wicked little grin. “Couldn’t hurt.”
“I don’t think I’m that bad off,” Howell replied. The pill was beginning to work, now, and he was feeling a little light-headed with it. “Don’t worry, I’ll tap-dance again.”
“Suit yourself. I’ve seen folks down for months with that sort of thing, though. 'Course, being a writer, you make your living on your ass, anyway.“
“With my mind, buddy.” Howell ordered some eggs and another cup of coffee. “Say, you’d have loved it up at my place last night. We had a regular seance up there, some people from across the lake and I.”
“Oh?” McCauliffe looked both interested and wary.
“Oh, sure,” Howell said. He told the lawyer about meeting the two couples on the lake and about their experience after dinner. He didn’t mention the girl at the window. As he spoke, McCauliffe’s expression began to change from interest to derision.
Howell continued, “The bloody dining table, which must weigh two hundred pounds, actually spelled out a name – a word, anyway. Came right off the floor at one point. And this morning, all my player piano will play is ‘I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen’.”
McCauliffe put down his coffee cup, suddenly irritable. “Oh, come off it, John, who’ve you been talking to?
“I kid you not, Mac, that’s just the way it happened.”
“What was the name or word the table spelled?”
“Rabbit. As in bunny.”
McCauliffe was still irritable. “Now look, John, you’ve had your fun, but this has gone far enough. I don’t want to talk about this any more.” He picked up his check and started to rise from the booth.
Howell put a hand on his arm. “Look, Mac, I’m not telling you all this to get you riled. It honest to God happened, at least, I think it did. Could I make all this up?”
McCauliffe slumped back into the booth and mopped his brow. “No,” he said cautiously. “No, you couldn’t make it up.”
“Mac, is there something you’re not telling me? Has anybody else around here ever had a run-in with this sort of thing?”
McCauliffe gazed over Howell’s shoulder through the window and out across the mountains. “Not for some years,” he said finally. “At least, not that I’ve heard about.”
“Tell me,” Howell said, not entirely sure he wanted to know.
McCauliffe looked back at him, then out the window again. His eyes seemed to go out of focus. “I’ll tell you a story,” he said. “True story, not a ghost story. As much of the truth as I know, anyway. As much as anybody knows, I guess.” He called to Bubba for another cup of coffee, and when it came, he sat back and started to talk.
“I told you about the Irish community that used to live in the valley. My family was among them, Bo Scully’s, several others hereabouts. Well, just after the war, late ‘46 or early ’47 it was, I guess, Eric Sutherland started to put together the land for the lake, and, of course, that meant all of the valley. There was a lot of resistance in at first, and for a while, it looked as though Sutherland might not make it. Since it was a private, not a public project, he couldn’t take the land by eminent domain, he had to buy it outright. He had a couple of Atlanta banks behind him, though, a lot of money. One or two families capitulated, then, finally, the rest of them. All but one, a family called O’Coineen. They wouldn’t budge.”
“I suppose Sutherland brought pressure to bear.”
“Oh, he had been doing that all along. The local bank was with him, of course, and they held a lot of paper in the valley. The worst pressure on the O’Coineens came from the other families, though.”
“Why was that? I mean, if they’d all held out in the beginning.”
“Well, Sutherland had already paid them three or four times what their property was worth as farmland, and he was smart enough to offer them a hefty bonus beyond that – but only if they all sold. Sutherland was confident enough of the outcome to start building his dam. When the dam was nearly finished – this would have been early 1952 – the O’Coineens were the only holdouts, and things started to get nasty.”
“Friend against friend, neighbor against neighbor,” Howell said.
“Exactly. Donal O’Coineen’s barn was burned and some welldigging equipment destroyed – he had a welldigging business in addition to his farm. Things started to get rough for his child at school – there were two daughters; one of them had already graduated. Donal developed what I guess you’d call a siege mentality. He pulled the child out of school and wouldn’t let his wife shop in the town. They grew most of what they needed and he went over to Gainesville for the rest. There were rumors that Sutherland had offered them more than the others under the table, and that made things worse. The O’Coineens just pulled their heads in, like turtles, and refused to budge. Then Eric Sutherland closed the dam, and the water started to rise.”
Howell sat up straight. “Jesus, how could he do that?”
“Well, it was pretty high-handed, all right, but he had the signatures of all the landholders except O’Coineen, and they’d all been paid everything but the bonus. These people had allowed their homes and farm buildings to be pulled down and their timber cut; they’d found other farms and had money in their pockets. They’d scattered, of course; the old Irish community was gone. So Sutherland had the right to fill his lake right up to the road which was the boundary of O’Coineen’s property. The law prevented him from flooding the road and cutting O’Coineen off, but suppose there was some error in calculation on the part of the engineers? The roadbed was pretty high and formed a sort of earthen dam for O’Coineen’s property. After two or three weeks, the water on the one side of the road was actually higher than the level of his land, which fell away downhill from the road into a sort of hollow. That’s where his house was. He knew that if the roadbed caved in, he’d be flooded. And he still had his wife and daughters there, convinced, apparently, that they were all that was keeping Sutherland from letting the water rise any further. Things were getting pretty tense.”
“So, what happened?”
McCauliffe grinned; he was enjoying the storytelling, now. “What do you think happened?”
“How the hell should I know?” Howell cried. “What happened?”
“One of two things,” the lawyer said. “Some folks believe Eric Sutherland’s story, that he went out to the O’Coineen place one night and talked Donal into selling. O’Coineen signed a deed of transfer for his land and instructed Sutherland to put the money into his account at the bank. Then he took his wife and children and left the county that very night. The water continued its inexorable rise over the roadbed and flooded the farm.”
“And the other thing?”
“Other folks believe that Sutherland never saw O’Coineen. That the roadbed gave way and Donal O’Coineen, his wife, and.two daughters were drowned in the ensuing flood.”
“So? Which of those two things happened?”
“Nobody knows.”
“What do you mean, nobody knows? How could they not know?”
“Because, in any case, the O’Coineen family was never seen again, not by anybody who knew them, anyway.”
Howell was speechless for a moment. “What about the money? Didn’t O’Coineen take that?”
“The money is still right down the street there, in the bank, drawing interest.”
“You mean, then, that Eric Sutherland may be a murderer?”
“I wouldn’t put it as strongly as that. A manslaughterer, maybe. Around here, your view on that depends on how close are your economic ties to Eric Sutherland.”
Howell slumped back into his seat. “Jesus, that’s the most hair-raising thing I ever heard.”
McCauliffe grinned maliciously. “You ain’t heard nothing, yet, John.”
“There’s more?”
The lawyer nodded. “The elder daughter was about my age, nineteen or twenty at the time – she was blind. Her name was Joyce.” The lawyer waited a moment for that to sink in.
The hair on the back of John Howell’s neck began to move around.
“The younger girl, who was twelve or thirteen, I guess, was named Kathleen.”
Howell tried to speak but swallowed, hard, instead.
McCauliffe took a sip of his coffee, put down the cup, and sat back. “And in the Irish language, me bucko,” he said with a sigh, “the name ‘O’Coineen’ means ‘rabbit.' “