The Lost Souls' Reunion Read Free

now came down to one man and that one man had closed off all but a few rooms to light and to habitation, not just because of cold. There was dark in him, a weight put on him from the first breath of his life.
    The father and mother of Joseph Moriarty had put all their hopes on to the one child they could have, along with the burden of their ill health and dwindling prospects. He was left to work at what he did not want to be, a farmer who did not have a farmer’s instinct, not the first one of the Moriartys to be born that way. The best fields had been sold over four generations, leaving him with the ones that brought more in the way of work than reward. His only means of income, unless he would walk into the world with nothing, was to work them. They could not be sold. He turned his back on anything like hope for a future. He turned his back on the reputation for romantic notions the Moriartys were once famous for and it did not make his farming any better.
    A wife had never fitted into Joseph Moriarty’s plans. There had been no one willing to take on the sourness and the lack of prospects. Until Noreen who, like Joseph, was afraid to leave the town for uncertainty. Though brave within it, she had spent little of her life beyond it. What could not be seen, well, it was glorious until you came to live it, so those who had been to beyond and come back had said.
    Noreen had wanted to go beyond, but only with company. None had offered to take her. So Noreen stood in front of Joseph Moriarty long enough for him to notice what there was in her he needed. Some said that she had already got reason to need to be wed. If she had, she had lost it by the time Joseph looked back at her. She fooled herself at the prospect of the big house and the fields with the fine views of sea and harbour. She had romantic notions about helping Joseph in them and turning his bad temper around. Noreen was a fish gutter, not a farmer’s daughter. Any farmer’s daughter would have told her fields with fine views of sea and mountains are bad fields. No farmer wants the soil such scenery offers.
    They had been married after ten o’clock Mass, with only her family in attendance. His were all dead and other relatives wanted nothing to do with him. Noreen paid for tea and scones for the women in the Harbour View Hotel. The men bought their own pints. Joseph sat among them but did not speak. She had thought they might go somewhere for the day afterwards. But he was keen to be home.
    â€˜There’s a bed in the back room for you,’ Joseph said, sitting down at the kitchen table, not offering to carry her small suitcase.
    A cloud of dust rose from the sheet when she lifted it on to the mattress. Fine echoes of laughter and loving times rose along with it. This bed had not been used in a long time. There was to be no pretence of love. Joseph Moriarty had married Noreen for the work in her. In that same night she would beat out the dust of lives gone and her own hope of times to come.
    â€˜Where will I find a wardrobe?’ she called out to him.
    â€˜Your family might give us one as a wedding present,’ he laughed without joy. ‘Haven’t I given the roof?’
    Noreen née Byrne, now Moriarty, put an apron over her new dress to make a start. She had expected nothing and got worse than that.
    â€˜Have you any kind of soap?’ she asked him, standing over the sink, staring at her reflection in the clear water. It seemed it had changed since morning.
    â€˜Have you not brought any soap?’ he enquired. ‘Do you not wash yourself?’
    â€˜Household soap, Joseph, for the kitchen.’
    He pointed to a press.
    She wished now she had gone off with one of the casual labourers who came into the town, or one of the actors in the fit-up theatres who spoke so well.
    â€˜Well,’ she thought, six hours after marrying him. ‘There’s always the hope that he might die before me.’
    And he did,