Tin Kettling

Everyone got older.  The son came home for good.  Ginty retired and sold the crane.  He got diabetes and wasn’t happy about it.  He had to cut down on the drink.  Kel got cataracts.  She had surgery then threw her glasses away.

They moved to a different house, smaller, sunnier, and their life was good except all Ginty’s injuries came to revisit.  He got painful osteoarthritis and a rare form of Parkinson’s disease.  His knees seized up.  He lost weight.  He never got the shakes, but he dropped things and he fell over when his brain signal shut his legs down.  When he fell in the house, tiny Kel found the strength to get him back on his feet again.  When he fell in the street, people would walk past him muttering, “Silly old drunk”.  One time he fell in the bath and found a reason to be very grateful for his son-in-law.  Because he was still a big man, he broke a lot of furniture this way, but no bones.  That, he’d tell anyone anyway.  

They managed together.  Ginty had to stop driving.  Kel hadn’t driven a car since they moved to the city.  He gave her lessons.  She took the test and passed first time.  She drove everywhere until she broke her arm and some too busy doctor set it badly, crookedly.  She’d told them it looked strange and they ignored her.  When the plaster came off they told her it would have to be re-broken.  She said no thanks and decided to live with it, but it made driving and playing the piano difficult.  Ginty got her a small organ instead; it was easier to play and she loved it.

Time passed.  Then the son got wet in a sudden rain storm and contracted meningitis.  He died.  He was too young and it was too sad and his lover blamed Kel and Kel blamed Ginty even though it was no one’s fault.

It was inevitable: Ginty became increasingly crippled.  Then he got pneumonia.  He was very sick.  It was the night a famous golfer walked into the propeller of a plane and severed his arm and half his face off.  They couldn’t get an ambulance to come.  Ginty almost died while they waited for help.  When they carried him out of the house on a stretcher, he waved to Kel, just his fingertips, the hand with the finger he set wonky and its closest stiff friends.

He didn’t want to be treated.  His body had given up on him and there was no cure for that.  He wanted to take his chances, see what happened.  He drank smuggled cocktail bottles of brandy and charmed the nurses into letting him have his way.  One day his granddaughter visited.  She was nervous, because she knew he was dying.  She asked him a stupid question.  She said, “What did you do today?”  He opened one eye and looked at her.  He said, “I went fishing.”  

A nurse told the granddaughter not to worry, that her grandfather was delirious.  But she knew he wasn’t because he was always going to see a man about a dog, and there never was any dog, or going fishing when he’d never owned a rod.  

Ginty died.

There was a wake.  People got fall down drunk and told incredible stories about the things Ginty had done because he was one of those larger than life people.  It was assumed Kel would spend time with her daughter, starting from that night.  She refused.  The granddaughter was sent to persuade her.

Kel said, “All my life I’ve lived in the house of my father or the house of my husband.  If I don’t sleep in the house on my own tonight I might never be able to,” and she pushed the granddaughter out the door.

The granddaughter was amazed at her strength.  She’d always thought Ginty was the strong one even though his body was weak, but she came to learn it was little Kel who had the heart of giant.

You see, they had a pact.  They knew each other so well.  Ginty knew he couldn’t live without Kel, but that Kel was strong enough to live without him.  And Kel agreed.  So they planned for him to die first.  Kel was grateful that was the way things turned out.  It was what they both wanted.

Kel got older and frailer but she never stopped reading her magazines.  She was an expert on the royal family and Hollywood movie stars.  She gave up playing the organ but she was the first person in the family to have a CD player.  The day her granddaughter set it up for her she made a strange comment.

They were talking about loneliness.  The granddaughter said listening to the CD player might help when Kel felt lonely.  Kel told her she never got lonely.  “What, never?”  

No, you see, she wasn’t alone.  The granddaughter asked Kel to repeat what she’d said, because her grandmother had lived alone for years, but Kel clammed up.  The granddaughter prodded and finally Kel said she wasn’t lonely because she wasn’t alone because Ginty was still with her.

The granddaughter was shocked speechless.  

Kel made her promise not to tell anyone what she’d said, especially her daughter, because everyone would think she’d lost her marbles, but she was perfectly sane.  She knew it sounded odd, and Father Francis would think she’d blown a gasket, but Ginty was with her in the house, keeping her company.  She knew he was, she could feel him there.  He didn’t re-arrange furniture or rattle the blinds, and she didn’t go around making him cups of tea or talking to him out loud.  It wasn’t like that.

The granddaughter wanted to know what it was like and Kel said it was comfortable.  Not like some silly ghost movie, not like that, no.  It was just comfortable.  Ginty could hear her thoughts and she could hear his, and no one needed to worry about her being lonely or afraid. 

The granddaughter, who was the reason Ginty stopped being horrible to his son-in-law, never told anyone about this, but she understood why Kel rarely wanted to spend a night away from the house in a way her mother never did.  Kel was married to Ginty for more than fifty years and in all that time, he’d never been fond of travel.

Kel lived by herself for eight years after Ginty died.  And she was never lonely.  When she died it was suddenly and without warning.  She’d spent the night with her daughter and she didn’t wake in the morning.

Everyone was upset, but the granddaughter was also worried.  What if Ginty didn’t know?  

The granddaughter had often walked around her grandparent’s house and tried to feel the spirit of her grandfather.  It never worked; it made her laugh to think it might.  The day Kel died, the granddaughter went to her grandparent’s house and sat quietly by herself.  

She thought about the piano, the eggs taped to shoes, Ginty’s ripped pants and the tin kettling.  She thought about how her grandfather could barely read or write but told the most wonderful stories; there was always a fire engine, chocolate biscuits and ham and pickle sandwiches in them.  She thought about how her grandmother never seemed old at all and was the easiest person in the world to get along with.  And the strongest person she’d ever met.  She thought about her father’s car being rocked onto two wheels. She thought about her uncle dying and the four kegs at her grandfather’s wake.  She opened the wardrobe and looked at her grandmother’s clothes, so stylish, and her shoes; she still wore heels.  She cried a little in the house on her own.  

And nothing spooky happened.  

Because it already had.  

Ginty found Kel.  Kel found Ginty and they’d lived and loved a long time together, and even when he wasn’t physically around, she believed he was with her. 

A love that strong, that deep, that undisturbed didn’t mind a little awkwardness, a little noise, a little pain, sadness, and separation, and it certainly didn’t need the granddaughter’s help to go on.

Quietly, comfortably, endlessly, despite all the racket in the world, it just would.