Burnt Mountain (17 page)

“Why do you want to be a child?” I said. “What were you like as a child?”

“Very much like I am now,” he said.

I thought this might be true. I could almost see him, a grave, dark boy totally absorbed in whatever he was doing, his black
head cocked to one side, his lips pursed in a soundless whistle. And then the head raised and the quick white grin. I had
seen him so many times. I had also seen him come out of a deep, still study and snatch me up and whirl me around, or burst
into a fragment of hideous song that he swore was an authentic Irish folk tune, or do a swift intricate shuffle,
also purported to be
the
original Irish Jig. It was a part of the magic that was Aengus. For Aengus did have magic. I think that when I discovered
him I also rediscovered magic.

Grand felt it, too. She adored Aengus, as he did her. But sometimes her eyes were thoughtful as she regarded him, and once
she said to me, “Don’t let him go too far into the Irish thing. Don’t let him take you there with him.”

“Grand, it’s one of the things I love most about him,” I protested. “It’s who he is.”

“No,” Grand said. “It’s
what
he is. He doesn’t know who he is yet. You’re a strong and resilient woman at heart, Thayer. He’ll depend on you to tell him
who he is. Otherwise he’ll be gone in a puff of sea mist and moonbeams and you’ll never know him. Keep him in the world with
you.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I hope you never do.”

At first, even after the day that he cupped my face in his hands and I cried, I would have little to do with him. I told myself
that his pure exuberance, his passion, was off-putting, almost unseemly. He spun such lilting and dazzling stories of gods
and poets and heroes and horsemen and rainbows that his class crackled with them like wildfire. They were unlike anything
I had ever heard, in a classroom or out. My father had loved the myths of the Norsemen and the Greeks, but he had told me
none about the beautiful wild, murderous Celts who rode out of the north adorned in golden torques and took the heads of those
they slew in battle and carried them on their saddles. Aengus himself admitted that though
the Celtic empire covered a great deal more territory than Ireland, it was there, in his homeland, that he preferred to chronicle
them.

“You can find all you like about them in their other haunts. The library’s got it all. But it’s Ireland where they bloomed
like stinking roses. More than two million people still speak Gaelic.

“And my God, what a spectacle they must have been, charging into battle in their chariots! They fought naked, and they whipped
themselves into a wild bloodlust; the Romans called it furor, the Germans
Wut.
Their swords were masterpieces of carving; one of them, the Caladbolg, passed on down to King Arthur, who called it Caliburnus,
or Excalibur. Yeah, the same one. And the songs and myths! Today I’m going to read you ‘The Tale of Bulls of Cooley.’ For
the weekend I want a paper on the Celtic beliefs about death; use the
Book of Leinster
for background. I’ve got enough Xeroxed copies if you share. You’ll hand them in on Monday.”

Someone would groan, and Aengus would flash the white grin and say, “What better have you got to do of a weekend up here on
this goddamn mountaintop?”

Aengus was like a lightning bolt that clove the quiet Mountain. Students followed him everywhere. Some of the faculty did,
too. I came to think later that it was partly because I did not that he singled me out. In truth, he frightened me. I felt
instinctively that his brush-fire energy could crack the carapace of my content like an eggshell. I skipped his class the
next few days but realized that I would have to go back or lose my credits and I could not graduate without them.

The day that I went back he asked me, when class was over, if he could walk me back to my dormitory. By the time we got there
I was laughing so hard that I did not realize, for a moment, where we were.

We sat down on a stone bench outside my dormitory and he said, “Now that wasn’t so bad, was it?”

“What wasn’t so bad?”

“Spending ten minutes in my presence outside the classroom.”

“Why on earth would that be bad?”

“You tell me, Miss Thayer Wentworth. She of the mahogany hair and eyes like amber. Do you have a fly in your eye, Miss Thayer
Wentworth? Do you have a middle name?”

“Antonia,” I said gloomily.

“Are you kidding? It was my mother’s name! Antonia Maeve Murphy O’Neill! My grandfather first fell in love with an Antonia
before he married my grandma, and so my mother got stuck with the name of Granddad’s old flame. How did you come by it?”

“My father fell in love with Willa Cather.”

He laughed again.

“Literature will do you in every time,” he said.

“Literature or the teachers thereof,” I said, looking up at him from the corners of my eyes.

“I shan’t do you in, I promise,” he said. “Do you? Now that’s another matter entirely.”

“Dr. O’Neill! Aengus! If you think that’s funny…”

“I apologize,” he said ruefully. “Entirely inappropriate.”

He fell silent beside me on the bench.

“Actually…,” I said. “When did you have in mind?”

He stood up and wriggled a small leather book out of the hip pocket of his tight-fitting jeans. I watched him in the long
shadows of the late winter afternoon. It was not cold; winter sometimes allows you a breath from long-dead summer on the Mountain.
He had on a blue oxford-cloth shirt with the sleeves rolled midway up his arms; like his face, they were tanned dark and peppered
slightly with black freckles. His hands were long and well shaped. Aengus always had beautiful hands. I wondered how they
would feel on my flesh and felt my face scald. I looked down so that he would not see the blush.

He thumbed through the little book.

“Teaching tonight and tomorrow night,” he said. “I seem to have Friday night free, though. Does that work for you?”

“It works fine,” I whispered. I could not seem to get any breath behind my words.

“Friday it is, then,” he said, swinging me up from the bench and giving me a light kiss on my flaming cheek. He grinned, whether
at my hot skin or at the sheer audacity of arranging an assignation on the steps of a girls’ dormitory I do not know. He touched
the comma of dark hair over his eye and swung off into the rapidly falling dusk toward the English department. I stood in
green shadow for a long moment, every inch of me seeming to quiver as if he had already touched me. Midway up the stairs my
legs buckled and I sat down hard. I buried my face in my hands and laughed helplessly. I think I cried a little, too. So this
was what it was to
want a man. I had loved what Nick and I had done together, but this was entirely new and uncharted territory.

I could scarcely look at Aengus in class the next day, nor the day after. He did not look at me, either. He concluded the
class with another of Yeats’s poems. It ended:

Still he did not look at me, but I knew that he had read the poem for me. When I left my room that night to meet him at the
end of the Steep, I was trembling so hard all over that my roommate said, “Are you coming down with something? You don’t look
so hot.”

“I’m pretty sure I’m coming down with something,” I said, and ran from the room so that she could not see me laughing.

“Or somebody,” I added aloud, letting the door swing shut behind me and giving myself to the high January night wind.

The Mountain was a font of winds. Tonight’s seemed to howl and swirl and bite from all directions at once. When I reached
the lip of the Steep there was no one there, but the wind was a living presence, seeming to roar straight up from the valley.
It almost lifted me from my feet.

“We can’t do this!” I cried into its teeth.

“No question,” Aengus said from behind me, wrapping his arms around me. The wind could not sway me, pressed hard against him,
but I knew that if we broke apart it would have us both on the ground.

“Don’t you have a room or something?” I shouted.

“I do, in the home of an iron widow with all the virtues stamped on her face and a sitting room beside the front door. It
smells of cat pee and canned English peas. We may go there later, but I want this first time to be on the side of a mountain
with all the stars in heaven above us. Come on; I know a place….”

I’ll just bet you do, I thought, but I let him pull me along to the edge of the Steep and into a small, dense grove of birch
trees. It glowed in the dark like a little citadel. Inside the grove there was a floor of emerald moss scalloped with ferns,
and on the moss lay a rose-flowered quilt and a hamper with the necks of two bottles poking out of its lid.

“The widow’s grandmother’s prized Leicestershire quilt,” he said. “When she lies under it again, she won’t know where the
little tickle came from. And two bottles of champagne. Not bad stuff. Not great, but pretty good for a teacher’s salary….”

The wind could not reach us here, and there was a cold, fresh silence like you sometimes hear among winter trees. He sat down
on the quilt and reached for the hamper.

“A little nip, for before?” he said.

“No,” I whispered, almost choking on my own audacity. “For after.”

I sank to my knees and held my arms out to him and he came into them, murmuring something under his breath
that I thought to be Celtic. He never did tell me what he was saying. For a long space of time there was only dark fire, and
the earth under my hips and the fierce fullness and rocking, and the cries, soft and then louder, and the great slamming explosion,
and then only our breathing again, fast and hard, and the old, sly laughter of the wind.

After a much longer time we did drink some of the champagne, but we did not finish the first bottle, and Aengus left it and
the unopened second one at the foot of the largest birch “for whatever gods tend this grove. By rights I should be burning
an offering. But I’ve nothing precious enough to leave here.”

“Nor do I,” I said, “but I wish I did.”

“And I’ll be asking about the one who took that precious thing one day, but whoever he is, he doesn’t matter this night,”
Aengus said softly.

After a long time, I said, “No. He doesn’t.”

Student-faculty relationships are frowned upon on the Mountain, but Aengus was so charmingly correct about ours that little
was said. He knew how, among other things, to be perfectly discreet and intimate at the same time. Oddly, I never learned
a great deal about him before he came to America. His parents were both dead. He promised to take me back to Ireland one day.
In the meantime, my family was, he said, all we needed.

They soon turned out to be more.

The second time we visited my mother and Grand in Lytton, it was mid-April and by then Aengus and I knew that
we would marry at the end of the spring quarter. Grand was delighted.

My mother was patently not. My sister, Lily, was back home without Goose for the first of what would be many times, her face
puffed with tears and her underlip far out with injury at whatever misdeed Goose had perpetrated upon her. During all Aengus’s
and my talk of a June wedding, my mother looked pointedly at Lily and then at me.

“I wouldn’t be so quick to jump into it if I were you, Thayer,” she said. “Not many marriages turn out the way you expect
them to.”

Lily burst into tears and fled, and Aengus grinned his wolf’s grin at my mother.

“We expect nothing from ours, Mrs. Wentworth, except that it will make us both very happy,” he said. It was rather sweet.
Even if I hadn’t known him well I would have been captivated by it. I think Grand was; she laughed softly. Mother was not.

“I suppose you’ll have it in that chapel,” she said. “It’s a pretty enough little place, but it looks like Church of Rome
to me.”

I stared at my mother. I had never heard her say “Church of Rome” before. I still don’t think she ever had, or has since.

“More like Church of England,” Aengus said. “But no. It will be an outdoor wedding. There’s a little grove of silver birch
trees on the lip of the Steep; it’s a place that means a lot to us.” He slewed me a wink.

“Under a tree,” my mother snapped. “How like Thayer. So will your canon or priest or whatever do the honors?”

“No, a friend of mine from Ireland. She’s just come over to work in Washington. She’s ordained. She said she’d love to do
it.”

“Ordained in what? Not one of those newfangled tree-worshiping sects, I hope?”

“Oh no. It’s a very old and respected religion. You’ll see. It should be a very… gentle ceremony.”

My mother did not answer. She got up and followed Lily to the kitchen, from whence we could hear fresh sobs. My grandmother
sighed.

“You might as well be married on elephants with fireworks,” she said. “She isn’t going to approve, no matter what. But she’ll
behave at the wedding. I promise you that.”

Just then my mother called to Aengus from inside the house, and he got up and excused himself and went off to find her.

“Now what?” I said, exhaling a long breath.

“Who knows?” Grand said. “But she sounded pleasant enough. She’d like him if she let herself. It’s almost impossible not to.”

“Is it that he’s Irish?” I said. “Or a schoolteacher? Or both? If not him, what on earth did she want for me?”

“The incoming president of the Piedmont Driving Club,” Grand said lazily, and we both laughed.

I’m glad I have that moment. I did not laugh often with Grand again.

My mother and Aengus came back out onto the porch. She was carrying fresh iced tea and smiling winsomely. He was carrying
a plate of cookies and looking as though he had swallowed something large.

On the way back to Sewanee I begged him to tell me why she had called him into the kitchen.

“Nothing much.”

” ‘Nothing’ crap, Aengus! She was grinning like a Cheshire cat and you looked like you’d swallowed a bug.”