The All of It: A Novel (8 page)

He laughed. “Go on; go on.”

“I never supposed you’d be so interested, Father.” Her smile was brilliant. “Well, Mr. McEvilly’d put a big dot on the map by the place he’d told Kevin was Roonah Quay. Kevin told me, ‘All that blue colour beyond the dot is the
sea
, and where that dot is is where we’ll be heading.’” Her face, at
this moment, took on the look of a mischievous child: “Now, Father, where the dot was on the map was the length of
several
daisy petals from where Kevin said we were standing in Westport, and when I asked him how long it’d take us to accomplish the trudge and he told me he figured three days, four days at the most, I hooted! It was then he lost patience with me.” She paused.

“Don’t stop, Enda!” he begged, leaning forward, drawn by her lit eyes and freshly pinkened cheeks. “Take me through to the last step!”

“Father dear, that you
care
so!” she opened out her hands to him.

The sweetness of her gathering gesture charged him through with joy. “You’ve netted me with your telling,” he said with a rushing sense of elation and, instantly, was more conscious of himself than of her.

She gave him a smile of the purest appreciation, then took up with: “As you’d suppose he would, Kevin had us to start off the next day at first light…. It was an overcast kind of a morning, very cool, the wind being up and the sky filled with those thin uncertain clouds that has tails to them—”

“‘Kite-clouds,’ we called them when I was a boy.”

“Aye,” she nodded. “Beautiful they are too, sail
ing so fast over your head, one after the other, racing.”

He remembered lying in the grass, faced heavenward, playing at the solitary game of picking out the speediest….

“That day, it was like we were tied to them, Father,” she mused quietly on, “like they were pulling us along, there was such a hurry in us and no hint of tiring…. Usually when we were on the move, we’d speak between us of what we noticed on the way, flowers and trees, different birds and creatures and the like.” She stopped; then, in a rushing way: “Did you know, Father, that Kevin fancied kestrels? Indeed…. Since he was very small…. He was forever looking up, searching them out in the sky. What always took him, he said, was the way they
sit
, so high up, you know, with an entire view of the world before them yet with nothing in the world to ransom or fetter them…. The morning I’m speaking of, though, he was so arrowed for Roonah Quay he was blinkered to everything but the straight of the track before him…. As for myself, Father”—she brought her hands together in a cupping way, as if she were holding something fragile and alive—“I was near crazy with excitement! I can’t tell you!” She laughed richly: “I had this certain picture in my head of a cottage with pink dog-roses and hollyhocks at the door and a cow lying in the shade
of a stand of alders and sheep grazing in a pasture that let down to cliffs and the sea beyond, and inside the cottage, a blue tea-cloth spread ready on a table…. It was all so clear to me, being as it was a dream of the
desiring
kind—”

He marvelled at the word she’d chosen to emphasize and nodded his head in a deep, according way.

“You do see the state I was in!” She met his gaze with luminous eyes. “Well, we went all that day, happy as larks. That night, we sheltered in a rock-set very like a cave. It was at the top of a cliff that let out over the sea…. It’s beyond me to tell you how it stirred us, the
air
, and, at last-light, the homing seabirds letting out those cries that fill you so with the feel of your own privacy…. Just before he fell off to sleep, Kevin told me, ‘I think we’re getting near to where we belong.’ There was fields of stars over us, and below us waves skurling in and breaking on the rocks in that patterned way you can count by…. When I said my rosary, I could hardly think for the spending of all I was feeling.”

Her prowess still, he thought: unkillable, emanating from her like heat.

“Father? I’m going on too much.”

“No,” he protested, “no. Just the contrary.” And, in the clutch of a near-forgotten sense of intimacy and concentration: “It’s years since I’ve engaged
in such close talk with anyone. It makes me—happy.” He might have said “sad” if he hadn’t caught himself in time, then wondered whether, for what he
had
said, she’d think him ailing.

But: “A talk of the confiding sort,” she said simply, “it’s not everyone a person can have it with.”

As to a gift, he responded: “
Thank
you, Enda dear, thank you…. Go on for me, please.”

“Well, the next day it was a race between the sun and us, which would be up first! We had our breakfast of biscuits and water on the road…. The going was harder than it’d been the day before—”

“The long slopes,” he said.

“Aye, and the steep,” she nodded solemnly.

“
But
,” he breathed, the grandeur of the view from the impetuous coastal cliffs springing up in his mind’s eye, “did you not feel like one of Kevin’s kestrels eyeing the world?”

“Of course!” she affirmed. “You know, Father, before Kevin got sick, we’d take the walk to Leegans Head on a fine day and be thrilled over and above all the times we’d ever been there before. It’s nothing, I mean, you can ever get used to.”

“Never.”

“And it’s there, of course,” she went on, “you’ll see every kind of seabird, gulls and coots, them especially, and ducks. I’ve always thought for
queerness, cormorants is it, the way they ride the water and circle their heads about….”

“But for charm, it’s curlews,” he put in. “And at Leegans Head, have you noticed too, Enda, how tame the land-birds are? The tits and whinchats? I had one land on my head one day.”

“No!”

“Indeed! It’s the seeds of the high-growing grasses that attract them in such numbers, I read somewhere once.” Then, almost shyly: “There’re harebells up there too.”

“Carpets of them.” Her eyes gleamed.

He’d come on the violent blue of them hiking, five years ago, his first summer at Roonatellin, after putting in that particularly terrible four-year stint in a profoundly troubled district of County Louth where he’d been sent by the Bishop because, as the Bishop’d told him, “I can trust you not to mix God and the Church in with the politics of the region.” Still, during the time he was there, in the lash of the terrorists’ narrow-eyed hatred, two of his older parishioners had been kneed and three of the younger ones—mere youths—murdered. “You’re overdue some peace,” the Bishop had written at last, and sent him then to tend the flock of usual-seeming beings that was Roonatellin’s.

He had never spoken, nor ever would he, except in the broadest way, of his days in County Louth.
But now, to Enda, he said, “The first summer I was here, I don’t know if you remember, I wasn’t in good health—”

“Of course I remember, Father. It was an ulcer wasn’t it you had? Dr. Jason let it out that you did to Huey Slieve. Huey had one too, and you know Huey, he blathered it abroad faster then any decent woman would have.”

The irony: himself and Huey Slieve coupled by ulcers…. “I was tired out, too. I don’t mean to go into it”—certain he mustn’t—“but I mention it because I’ve always thought I was cured more by the heights of Leegans Head than by Desmond Jason’s doctoring.”

She gave him a conspirator’s grin and lapsed into brogue: “Him was a bad ’un. And us at his mercy…. Dr. Mansfield, now, he’s of a whole other cut.”

“Indeed. But,” he peered at his watch, “we’ve gotten off your telling.”

“Ah. I’ll go on…. Kevin and myself, we started down into Roonah Valley, not knowing its name then of course, and we got about halfway down the mountain—just below that knob, you know, that sticks up over Keogh’s land—when the path we were on crossed another that was a bit wider and more travelled-looking, and Kevin said it’d likely be the better one for us, so we took it. We rounded the road-bed by the stream, just as you do today,
only then it wasn’t the road that it is now, only a well-earthed cart-track, and there before us, set back from the track, well, there was—
this
!” She trilled out the word emotionally at the same time she flung open her arms to the four walls of her home. “Forty-eight years ago last August!”

“Jubilation!”

She laughed. “Oh, Father, such as it was!” She sat straighter, terribly intense, remembering: “A more sorrowful ruin of a place you can’t imagine, the thatch rotted and caved in onto the floor in places, not a pane left to a window, raspberry bushes so snarled over the yard-wall you’d have the skin taken off you if you tried to get through them. I can still see us, the way we just stood by the wall looking at the place, our tongues in our pockets for the woe of it. Still, though, there was something about it that called to us—”

“The way it nests in its own glen, would it have been?”

“That. And the slopes behind. And the sea so close, of course. But…it was more the
feel
of the place, ruined even as it was”—she brought her brows together—“that in its time, it’d been a glad thing—”

“And could be again,” he put in.

“Aye! That’s what we said when we finally did speak, that while it was sad it’d been allowed to go so far to pieces, still, there wasn’t a hint of
anything unnatural about it, of a haunt or the like, you know, and how, if it was fixed up and cared for, it could be ever so wonderful again.”

“Did you go into the yard then and there, or did you come back to it at a later time?”

“Oh, then and there! You couldn’t have kept us from looking the place over.” She drew her hand through the air. “We found the thinnest spot in the raspberry tangles…. The yard, though, it was but one stone-heap after another—them, and old hay-mounds beaten down by the weather, and knots of vetch and thistles…. The door was screened over with bolted roses, but of course, the windows being out, we just stuck our heads through the frames for a peek inside. As I said, the thatch was on the floor in places, but from one of the window-openings there was a clear view of the hearth, and that set my heart to beating faster….” She leaned forward. Her eyes came together in slits: “That image, Father, I’d had of the blue tea-cloth spread on a table? Well, you’ll not believe it, but for me, it was there…. It, and a lit fire. Not the rubble and mess, but
order
, the truth, you know, of the way it could be.” She spoke the last words deeply, like a proven sibyl.

He nodded vigorously. Truly, she was marvellous. “Keep on,” he urged.

“Well, it wasn’t till we went full around to the back of the house that we took in the cattle-fold….
We’d seen a hint of the roof of it from the front, it’s slate you know, but the fold itself doesn’t really show from there, so we weren’t prepared for the full wonder of it.”

“It ’tis a fine one. Unique of its kind,” he affirmed.

She beamed. “That’s the word for it, Father!
Unique
. And it’s a fact that just as perfect as it is now, it was then—the walls stout, laid solid, and every stone of it dry as a bone…. Kevin let out a whistle over it, it charged him so. He said it was built to last a thousand years…. The door of it was opened in all the way, and we figured a gale’d blown it so a long while back as the hinges’d rusted to a point where there was no swing left in it…. Kevin ventured to walk over the sill. Have you ever noticed the sill, Father?”

“Noticed it and admired it, both. A prize beauty of a stone it is.”

“Aye,” she nodded in dreamy satisfaction. “Well, as I was saying, Kevin stepped over the sill and called to me over his shoulder, ‘Will you look at this,’ awe-struck like. I didn’t know what to expect, good or bad, so I stepped fast to him. Of course, the minute I was inside I wondered he was able to talk at all, the
fineness
of it, Father! The
fittings
! Stalls and pens and hay-racks, even a saddletree, and turned holding-pegs set in the beams, and all along the far wall that lovely deep bench! There was a grand tinker’s lantern too, hung just
inside the door. Birds’d built in it; a jackdaw, likely. They’ll take over anything, bold as they are.” Her brows came together again: “There were cobwebs thick as fish-nets between the beams, and daubers’ nests galore, and that smell bats let off that gives their presence away, and, well, all such-like as you get when a place hasn’t been used for a long time, but somehow all that seemed as nought…. To me, what
ruled
was the mindful way the place had been left…. You couldn’t, I mean, but see how dearly it’d been tidied and of feeling that whoever had had to leave it had suffered a regard for it that must have made the parting from it a torture.”

Who did he know, other than herself, who would have said that? And with such an immediate pity as to cause now, in the wake of her perception, himself to imagine a fate-struck man separating from such a plum of a place; and to conjure the man’s last, wrung look into the orderly, silent, creatureless interior, and the squaring of his shoulders before the stoical stop put on his sorrow with the putting on of his cap…. Kevin, surely, had bade a like, cherishing farewell to the cattle-fold.

There was a rustle of sound.

He saw that Enda had moved, had turned in her chair, and was staring at Kevin’s blank, lifeless face, but in such a way as to defy a reading of her emotions. And he, in turn, as a man would at a portrait of a woman whose countenance bespoke
of, if not other, then of earlier, unrealized yearnings whose resonances still could stir, stared at her with a wistfulness whose essence mystified him.

Discordantly—out of the mists—he heard her voice: “Dead faces,” she said whitely, “they’re all the same…. They don’t, I mean, tell of the person as they were alive.”

It was her saddest moment. He saw it in her dry eyes and in the drop of her shoulders and in the proud, vulnerable stretch of her white neck. He said, helplessly, “My dear Enda—” That was all.

Of course, right then, he should have urged her to put off the end of her telling; and he was about to do so, to suggest that now, in the time left before the mourners were due, she should rest, gather herself…. He’d go for a bit of a walk down the lane, give her a chance to be alone.