Russell Fee is the author of the multi-award-winning Sheriff Matt Callahan mystery series. His short fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in numerous literary journals and magazines such as Star 82 Review, Literally Stories, Spank the Carp, Bright Flash Literary Review, Short Circuit, Spaceports & Spidersilk Magazine, Sci Phi Journal, and Hemingway Shorts Literary Magazine. Russ and his wife are dual citizens of Ireland and the United States. To learn more about Russ and his writing, visit his website at outerislandpress.com.
Divining the Demise of Declan O’Shaughnessy
By Russell Fee
Liam and Patrick were moorland hill farmers, twins, widowers, childless, and brittle in body and spirit from age and demeanor. They kept their herds of sheep apart by a wire fence dividing the two plots of adjoining land that each rented separately—a predicament brought about by their parent’s death and their own stubbornness.
Liam contended that he was the first born with Patrick arriving three minutes later. Thus, the family farm was his. Patrick asserted that, “No,” the family farm was his as he was the first born with Liam arriving the three minutes later.
“Mam said so and a mother would know,” was Liam’s proof.
“Sure she was too roiled by the pain and contortions of labor to know a pig from a sparrow. Da was there and said ‘twas me that was first,” was Patrick’s counter.
“Sure the old fart was knee-crawling drunk as usual and useless as tits on a boar. He’d know nothing,” was Liam’s parry.
And so it went as the family plot lay barren and choked by moor grass and bracken, neither brother willing to divide the land but wanting it all. Until a solution presented itself in the form of a wager.
If the three minutes separating them at birth was a preoccupation for the brothers, the eternity of death was an obsession. Not their own mortality. Their eventual passing rarely crossed their minds. Instead, they concerned themselves with the demise of others: when, where, and by what means the Grim Reaper would arrive at someone else’s door. The only books that decorated their shelves were of catastrophes that took scores of lives: train wrecks, circus and theatre fires, floods, avalanches, wildfires, pandemics, earthquakes, plane crashes, and maritime disasters. Their hours in front of the telly included every episode of The Clinic, Brain Doctors, Beaumont Hospital, A Doctor, and Trauma: Ireland’s Medical Emergencies. Between them, they knew in excruciating detail how a human could die by drowning, freezing, plunging from almost any height, suffocating, bleeding, gun shots, lightning strikes, electrocution, animal attacks, parasitic infections, and a hundred different diseases. The list was endless.
Each scrupulously investigated the physical and emotional well-being of his neighbors, friends, and acquaintances, and speculated on the severity of any perceived infirmities or risks associated with physical undertakings. When they inquired of your health, they demanded a detailed answer and probed to the point of embarrassment if they didn’t get one. “They’re saints, so they are,” intoned the villagers. “So concerned for others.” The brothers would then each secretly predict the when and how of a person’s demise with an almost mathematical accuracy. And, of course, each believed with certainty he was better at it than the other.
As it happened, the primary focus of their joint probing was a hill neighbor by the name of Declan O’Shaughnessy. Declan was an inveterate alcoholic, chain smoker, low level miscreant, professed insomniac, and obese diabetic, who survived on social welfare after falling off a tractor, and who wrestled a rusting motorbike to and from the local pub each evening without a helmet. It was generally agreed that Declan wasn’t long for this world. The only questions were when and how he would leave it.
Debates between the brothers involving Declan’s lifespan became so heated—each positive of the how and when of his dive into eternity—that a wager was proposed. They bet the farm. Liam gambled that cirrhosis would kill Declan within six months. Patrick wagered he would perish in a motorcycle accident before the first day of summer.
As summer approached, Declan was hospitalized twice for alcohol poisoning. Liam felt ecstatic. Patrick was frantic. With only six days until the first day of summer and seeing the family farm falling into Liam’s lap, Patrick decided to take matters into his own hands. One night before Declan saddled up for his ride to the pub, he snuck into Declan’s shed and filed through the front brake line of Declan’s bike. “He’s a goner anyway,” he said to himself. “Tis no sin to offer a little assist,” he added and made the sign of the cross. Then he waited in hiding at the intersection of the hill’s rutted lane and the paved road to the village for events to unfold.
A short while later, Declan wheeled the bike out of the shed, staggered as it almost toppled over, righted it with a groan, and then hoisted his leg over the seat and stomped on the starter pedal. The bike bucked, wobbled, and then turned down the lane, sputtering and coughing. At the intersection, Declan shoved onto the road and toward the village, jolting from one side to the other in an erratic effort forward. When Declan started to round the bend ahead, the headlight beams of an oncoming bus set him alight like a burning torch; and Patrick saw their two fates about to clinch. Suddenly Declan spun the bike around and headed back up the road, gaining speed at an ear-splitting whine as he approached the intersection. Just before he reached it, the rear tire swung left. Declan wrenched the front wheel to the right, causing the bike to leap sideways and skid onto the dirt lane where it flipped, sailed into the air, and smashed into the hiding Patrick, sending Declan rocketing over his sprawled body.
The bike crushed Patrick’s chest causing a splintered rib to slice through his heart. He died instantly.
Declan survived. He was drunk, of course, and was charged with manslaughter. On his conviction, he received a ten-year sentence, which everyone knew was a life sentence for him.
Liam suspected that some devilment by Patrick may have boomeranged but kept it to himself. He gave his brother a grand wake as he should have. The farm was now his. Patrick’s death had printed the deed in his name.
Ten years later, Declan miraculously showed up in the village having fully served his time. No one could believe it was him. He was unrecognizable. He’d been sober for ten years, he’d stop smoking, he’d lost eighty pounds, he had a toned muscular body from regular prison exercise, and he was no longer diabetic. Word quickly spread that Declan looked good enough to live to a hundred. As recompense for Patrick’s death, Declan transferred the deed to his land to Liam, gratis. Thereafter, he left town and was never seen or heard from again.
As the saying goes, “One good deed deserves another,” even if a bit twisted in this instance.
*
Liam was not a contemplative man, but every now and then, the irony of his brother’s death, Declan’s metamorphosis, and the serendipitous acquiring of the farms did set him thinking. But not for long. There were the sheep to tend to.
And of an evening, he would buy a pint for all at the pub to keep the crowd talking and listen closely to the old ones like himself as they regaled him with their precious ailments. “A saint, so he is. So concerned for others,” was on their lips as they wended their way home.
The Galway Review 