Love Begins in Winter (11 page)

U
NCLE
I
VAN HAD ONCE
lived in the caravan that now belonged to Walter. Upon the walls, newspaper clippings the color of salt and pepper displayed the impossible: a white figure flying through the air.

As a child, Walter liked to stand very still in front of each clip and study the expressions on his uncle's face. In the grainy prints, Uncle Ivan always wore a white under-shirt with a number on it, white shorts tied at the front, thin black socks, and black Brogues.

Walter remembered his own bony white body stretching out in the cold water as he learned to swim. His uncle would call out strokes from the beach. Sometimes waxy slabs of seaweed hung in the water. Walter didn't like it. He imagined other things lurking at the bottom. One autumn day while swimming, Walter was bitten on the thigh by a conger eel. At first it felt like something was scratching him—maybe a dumb jellyfish washed in from deep water—then Walter looked down and saw a black head and an impossibly thick body writhing about his legs. Walter remembers his uncle's shirt tied around the wound. Watery blood running down his thigh, dripping off his big toe.

His uncle carried him a mile up the hill at a jog, and then the local doctor came. The doctor was from the north of Ireland and drove a Mercedes Estate. He looked at everyone from under his glasses. He balanced a mint imperial on his tongue during the examination. Several days in bed with the black-and-white television brought in from the living room, and anything he wants to eat, was the doctor's advice.

His uncle sat faithfully at his bedside the whole time, smoking, feeding him sausages, and telling him what a man he was, to have been bitten by a conger and survive—it was unthinkable. Walter still had the scar; a white line, jagged but no longer raised.

Then Uncle Ivan would fry up a dozen pieces of black pudding and they'd eat in front of the television.

His uncle had loved cold weather and kept fit by running in singlet and shorts on mornings too cold even for school.

T
HEN THE RAIN STOPPED.

The landscape stretched before Walter like in a painting—lines of dark green hedgerows, a cluster of bare trees, an ancient gate hung during harvest, dots of hill-sheep and then the fabric of sea.

The morning Walter found Uncle Ivan stiff in his bed, snow had blown in through an open window and covered his body. In his will, Uncle Ivan had left his caravan, the motorbike, and his Olympic gold medal to Walter.

Walter watched the thread of smoke rise up from his beloved's farmhouse in the distance. The medal lay flat upon his chest, inside his shirt. He could feel the weight of it pulling on the back of his neck like an omen of hope and success.

The cake at Uncle Ivan's funeral was in the shape of a trampoline. The baker had made a frame of drinking straws over the cake from which dangled a marzipan figure.

At the burial, someone read a newspaper story written about the deceased in 1972. The story was called “In Mid-Flight an Irish Gypsy Soars.”

Walter was almost at the farmhouse. He repeated the headline over and over to himself, with the voice the priest used when he read from the Old Testament in assembly.

“In mid-flight an Irish Gypsy soars.”

“In mid-flight an Irish Gypsy soars.”

Then Walter thought of his own headline.

“In love with a Canadian girl, a Romany hero soars.”

Walter's leather jacket and trousers were heavy with water. He could feel the last few drops of rain bouncing off his helmet. He'd ridden twenty miles through plump green valleys. Sheep raised their curly heads to see him speed noisily by. The long lane down to the cold farmhouse was full of deep puddles, the moon in each puddle like a small white anchor, and the pale honey of windows in the distance.

Walter imagined her walking around the house, like a beautiful thought wandering around someone's head.

Walter pushed his bike through the gate. He could sense her breathing beneath his, and he felt her hands reach out from the handlebars and curl around his black gloves. He imagined how she would throw aside the basket of eggs and by the time they smashed against the stone floor, she would be kissing him wetly on the lips. In the dark, he might look even more like Morrissey.

By wheeling his motorbike instead of riding it, Walter might have a chance to sit and watch her through the window before knocking on the door and asking her uncle Popsy, quite innocently, if he might want some of the eggs left over from the morning's collection.

Walter had spent the early part of the day picking out the best eggs from the chicken hatch and reciting William Blake's
Songs of Innocence
to the hens, which stared at him angrily, then clucked away in panic.

After laying each egg out by his caravan, Walter found an old toothbrush and filled a bucket with warm soapy water.

As Walter scrubbed the feathers and burnt yellow feces from the shell of each egg, he noticed that his mother, father, and baby brother were watching him through the low window of their caravan. Walter's father was sitting in his wheelchair with the baby on his lap. His mother was standing up in her fluffy slippers. She knocked on the thin pane of glass with her knuckle.

“Walter, you cleaning the eggs now, is it?”

“Do you want a cup of tea?” his father shouted from his wheelchair. After reaching for something too heavy, he'd fallen the wrong way. He lay there for several hours wondering what his life would be like.

Birds filled the sky before anyone came. Then a coworker discovered him.

A doctor in Limerick believed that within ten years, they'd have the technology to fix him. He wasn't paralyzed, they said—it was something to do with nerves. Everyone said it was the fall from the cliff—that his back had never been the same.

Walter liked to push his father along the road. The thin black tires glistened after rolling through thin puddles. Cars would slow down at the sight of them, and each face would stare blankly out.

The last time Walter had pushed his father to the new supermarket a couple of miles from the caravan, Walter noticed how the hair on his father's head was very soft. On the way back from the supermarket after a lunch of doughnuts and strong, sweet tea, his father's thinning crown made Walter want to cry; the vague idea that the seated figure before him—the king of dads, hunched in his chair—was not Walter's father but his son or his brother; and that life was a lottery of souls.

Walter took his business with the eggs into his small caravan and continued his work earnestly. When each egg was so shiny that it balanced a smaller version of the caravan window upon its shell, Walter sat on his Honda 450, which he kept inside next to his bed (a very un-Romany thing to do), and smoked one of his Players cigarettes. He liked the way his motorcycle looked under the single hanging bulb.

The corners of the ceiling were softened by thick cobwebs. The caravan had once been Uncle Ivan's. It now belonged to Walter, and Walter loved it, as he would love no other house for the rest of his life, no matter how grand or expensive or unique.

Walter was nine when Uncle Ivan decided he wanted electric lights.

Walter's eggs sat in a line upon the table, touching one another so as not to roll away. The table had once supported the weight of his uncle's elbows as he studied the lightbulb on that long-ago afternoon.

After hours of wiring and cursing, Uncle Ivan slowly screwed the bulb into its neat socket. Walter's mother and father were summoned from their caravan. Ivan had wanted Walter to push the switch that would bring it to life, but in the end he was not allowed. Uncle Ivan was an Olympian, not an electrician, Walter's mother had said.

They all cheered as the bulb suddenly glowed with the push of a button.

“What a miracle,” said his uncle. “It's like there's a slither of sun in there.”

“It's about time you got the electric in your van, Ivan,” Walter's mother had said.

The four of them sat under it for some time without a word until his mother finally said:

“Look at us sitting here like idiots.”

Uncle Ivan stood up and turned the switch on and off several times before they all went down to the pub for an early drink from glasses the barmaid was happy to keep away from the other glasses. You must understand that the Romany rituals of cleanliness are symbolic, not practical.

Walter wondered why he had thought of the lightbulb. And then he realized that his heart was also small and bright and hot. He would deliver the eggs that very afternoon, lest the bulb mysteriously flicker and die.

Walter turned around and saw his mother standing in the doorway.

“So who are the eggs for?”

“Nobody,” Walter said.

“A girl, is it?”

Walter nodded.

His mother kissed him on the cheek.

“Your dear father was the same way for me,” she said. “But he never polished me an egg a day in his life.”

She handed Walter a cup of tea.

“Just don't start that thing up unless you've strapped your helmet on. I don't know why you keep it in here—your Romany ancestors would turn in their graves.”

As she shuffled back past her small garden in her slippers, she stopped to unpeg several socks hanging on the line. Walter saw his oily handprints on the back of her blouse.

A few moments later, Walter heard laughing from their caravan.

Then Walter imagined his mother lying down with her husband and closing her eyes, the baby in a soft sleep in the back bed. Everything warm and dark. Raining again outside. The tapping of it against the window.

Then later, the baby quietly awake in his crib, playing with his feet and watching clouds move like gentle friends.

Walter leaned his bike against a tree and crept up to the kitchen window. He slowly lifted his head to see inside.

“Oh, my love, my love,” he gasped, and his gaze like a net reached over her.

Walter pressed himself against the cold stones of the house as close to the glass pane as he dared. In her outstretched hand was a half-eaten apple. The white flesh glistened. She chewed slowly, occasionally touching her hair.

Walter longed for something to happen—a fire, a flood, some biblical catastrophe that would afford him an opportunity to rush in and rescue her.

Her uncle tended the fire dispassionately, and then sat down again. They were watching a black-and-white television and not talking. With their eyes safely fixed upon the screen, Walter wiped the window with his sleeve, but the mist was on the inside.

His body went limp as he let his eyes explore the length of her body. Her legs were so long, they stretched out almost the length of the table. Her young sister was nowhere to be seen—perhaps in her bedroom playing with dolls, Walter mused. Walter imagined her talking to them, smoothing out their clothes with her small fingers and setting them down at a table of plastic plates and plastic food which she held to their lips encouragingly.

Then a gentle but powerful feeling took Walter, and the boy immediately understood the obsession of the portrait artists he'd read about in his uncle's books; the troubadour poets and their sad buckled horses; the despairing souls who rowed silently at dusk in a heavy sea; the wanderers, the lost, those dying blooms who'd fallen away.

Walter's young mind reeled at the power of his first feeling of love. He would have walked to America if she had promised to meet him there.

From where had these feelings come? Walter thought. For he had not swallowed anything created by her body; neither had there been any physical contact, not even the brushing of sleeves in a crowded market. So these feelings for her—like fires lit in various parts of his body—must always have been within him, waiting to be lit.

And then Walter thought of something else. Could it be that first love was the only true love? And that after those first fires had been doused or burned out, men and women chose whom they would love based on worldly needs, and then reenacted the rituals and feelings of that first pure experience—nursed the flames that once burned of their own accord. . ..

Walter declared in his thoughts that his virginity was spiritual and that he had already lost it to someone he was yet to meet. The physical act, should it ever occur, would be nothing more than blind and fumbling reassurance that man's mortality could be celebrated with the division of spirit through flesh.

Walter wondered what else he was capable of—what other emotions, talents, even crimes might suddenly erupt under certain conditions.

He remembered all those mornings as a child out in the field beside his caravan, watching storms move across the fields below. Eyes glued to the sky until a fork of lightning hit the earth; wind ripping trees from soggy riverbanks; an early morning blizzard like pillows ripped open. Walter suddenly felt that such things were part of his very being. And that for his entire life, the countryside he'd grown up in was a form of self-portrait.

And with his mind churning experience to understanding like milk into butter, Walter thought of Adam and Eve, the inevitable fall—their mouths stuffed with apple; their lips dripping with the sweet juice of it; the knowledge that life was the fleeting beauty of opposites, that human existence was the result of conflict, of physical and spiritual forces trapped within a dying vessel.

Every change in his behavior started making sense to him.

The days after seeing her, Walter took long rides on the roads he imagined she might be out walking. He dreamed of stopping to offer her a lift.

Walter would ride for miles and miles, as far as he could on a full tank—through the wind and pelting rain which lashed his face. Then he'd find a petrol station in the twilight and fill his tank while being watched suspiciously by the cashier from the bright kiosk that sold crisps, chocolate, Pot Noodle, magazines (dirty ones on the top shelf), birthday cards, cigarettes, maps, and black pudding.

The greatest hazard to riding a small motorcycle through the countryside of Ireland was the wildlife—sheep in particular, who when they spotted Walter rattling along would hurl themselves into the road.

The evening matured into night. Walter shivered. It had stopped raining, but his clothes were wet through. Standing at the window, he began to feel cold.

When she laughed at something on the television, Walter laughed too. There was a moment when she turned and peered through the glass, failing to notice the face of a boy upon the pane like an unfinished painting.

What he'd read in books was not right—man did not love with his heart but with his whole body. Every piece of him was involved somehow—he could feel her in his legs, in his fingers, the imagined weight of her shoulders upon his, her head upon his bare white chest. Walter knew he would die for her. And he thought of all the old songs he'd heard, the ancient ones from the days of horses, candles, and hunks of meats spitting on open fires. The songs composed for men at sea, the sweet high voices of girls imploring the Lord to bring home their loves. Walter imagined himself one of these men, called from the frosty woods to her cottage by singing, his horse nodding through the marsh, hands blistered from wet reins, breath in the cold like white fire.

Walter knelt and coughed into the patch of wet grass at his feet. Then he sat down knowing that on the other side of the wall was his eternal love. He could sense the weight of her body in the chair. He wanted to touch himself in the way Father McCarthy had forbidden all young boys to do in assembly—and he would have but for the sense that in some way it would have defiled his pure love for her.

His fingers dug into the soil as he imagined the vibration of her voice touch his body. He stiffened. His mouth hung open. And then he sprang back at the shock of seeing a figure standing a few yards from him.

“Mary, Mother of Jesus!”

“What are you doing out here?” a small, trembling voice said. It was a little girl. The younger sister, wearing an overcoat and orange Wellington boots that were too big for her. A plastic hairless doll hung down from one of her hands.