The Night Stages (12 page)

“That would be thievery,” Annie told him. “Riding another man’s bicycle and him not knowing about it. Did you hear anything about an uprising while you were above? Those Mulcahey boys, now, they would be talking about something like that.”

Kieran had heard about nothing but sheep and about one particular ram who belonged, they said, to Padraig O’Connell and who had broken out of a field and run off and been spotted only infrequently, gallivanting around in the company of two wild female goats.

Annie snorted at this. “That could be code,” she said, “for a traitor in the vicinity. Men love to fight,” she added darkly.

But there had been no fight in the elderly Mulcahey brothers. They had invited Brendan and himself to their cottage for sandwiches, but the notion of the visit had been interrupted by a sighting, and then the capture, of the wayward ram.

“We caught that ram,” Kieran told her. “He was real enough, and he’s now in Padraig O’Connell’s cow byre.”

“Is he now,” said Annie, “and what of those wild goats?”

There were none to be seen as far as Kieran could tell.

“As I thought,” said Annie. “They were code for something else. Gerry himself was called the Red Fox on account of the colour of his hair.” She was putting washed dishes onto the shelves of the dresser. “And didn’t they shoot him down just like a fox in the end,” she said.

One morning, while Kieran was busy with the washing up, Annie announced they would be visiting the tailor called Davey who lived on the other side of Mastergeehy, three miles away.

“Your father has given me money for a winter coat,” she told him. “For you,” she added, “in case you are confused about that.”

Kieran’s hands became motionless in the warm suds. He knew that Annie still went twice a week to clean in the house in town, but since she rarely spoke about this, it had been easy for the boy to forget. He himself went there as seldom as possible, though he was happy enough to have his father and sometimes his brother visit him at Annie’s on a Sunday afternoon. Something now about his father and this intended coat made him recall the dark, formal rooms of the house, and the sense that everything there was waiting. Even now, more than two years after the worst had happened, there was this terrible waiting that greeted him if ever he stepped over the threshold. Lifting the pan out of the dry sink, he walked toward the open door and threw the greyish water into the yard. A fork and a spoon he had overlooked bounced on the
grass. As he bent to pick them up he consciously shook the rooms of the house in town out of his mind.

“And so today,” Annie continued as he re-entered the cottage, “we will be sorting out a coat for you.”

“I don’t like coats,” Kieran offered, hanging the tin pan on its customary nail. He had always felt restricted by this second layer of clothing, embraced and therefore imprisoned by it. “I won’t wear it.”

Annie ignored this. “Your father wanted me to take you to the shop in town. But I told him that the shop had the same coat for everyone. And what was the good in that, I said to him. A coat needs to be yours through and through or it won’t warm half enough and you’ll be dead of a fever before January. A coat needs to know it’s yours or it’s a good-for-nothing piece of cloth.” She gazed with fondness at her own two coats hanging on hooks Gerry had screwed into a board beside the door. The one with the lambswool collar that she wore into the town and over to the church was a source of great pride. The other, a plainer garment that she wore out to the hen house, the turf shed, and any time it was raining, was a source of great comfort. “Davey will make certain that your coat knows you. He’s done that for everyone in the parish. And now you’ve come to be among us, you’ll be needing a coat like that too.”

It was dull but dry that October day. They had only walked a half a mile when they found themselves confronted by a flock of Joe Shehan’s sheep. Driven by dogs between the high hedgerows, the animals roiled around them. Then there was the red face of Joe himself. A conversation blossomed
between the adults concerning the merits of Davey’s coats, and those of his father and grandfather before him. “Almost everyone is buried in old age in the one they bought in their youth,” Joe confided to the silent boy. “They are a rare protection against fever, and they never wear out.”

“He’ll grow out of his,” said Annie. “But he is almost thirteen, so I suppose he’ll only be needing one more after this.”

“And that one will look fine in his coffin,” Joe said while his sheep fed on the roadside grass. Two dogs danced beside the animals, eager to get them moving. Kieran knew the whole flock would be going down to the market in the town. He could hear his mother’s footsteps on the road behind him and, faintly, a song she used to sing when he was much younger, before she stopped singing altogether. Then, remembering the tantrums, he allowed an inner picture of the Purple Hornet to form in his mind to encourage calm. The conversation ended and Joe Shehan blessed them both and moved on. The road, when the sheep had left it empty and his mother had faded, ached for a bicycle, Kieran thought.

“That Joe Shehan has a terrible quantity of talk in him,” Annie said as they resumed walking. “He could talk the hind leg off a chair.”

The road rose under them and soon Kieran could see the whole valley – from the edge of the sea in the west clear over to the Dingle Mountains in the east. Far below there was a warm, rich blanket of bog and long geometric strips where the bog had already been cut. Annie pointed to a small house situated in a little gully with the top of its gable end flush to the
road. “That is the house of Eithne of the Streams,” she said. “When I’m going to mass I stop there to wash my boots if the road is full of mud. She has a coat with a lambswool collar, something I have myself. Yes she has that, but her house is full of damp because of the streams.”

Kieran could hear the faint hissing of the water but he could not see it because of the thick hedges that bordered the road. By now the village of Mastergeehy was directly beneath them and they were looking down at the slate roof of Annie’s church. The smell of turf smoke from cottage chimneys reached them, that and the noise of children out for recess in the National School’s playground.

“That’s not the school you will be going to,” Annie said, “when you get over your stubbornness. All that noise! I’m thinking they teach shouting and screaming there.”

Kieran said nothing. He would not respond to her humour. He would not look toward the school. He would not wear the coat. He was full of refusal.

Before they reached the tailor’s house Annie stopped to pray at the grotto that marked the crossroads. Kieran stood to one side and looked toward the little Cummeragh River, which moved under a stone bridge then looped behind the white shape in the distance that Annie had told him was the tailor’s house. He was suspicious of grottos, which always brought into his mind the memory of the two coins he had not offered at the side of the well four years ago.

“The Virgin says you’ll wear the coat,” said Annie, closing the grotto’s iron gate. “She says that once you know Davey, you’ll want to wear it.”

Kieran didn’t want to talk about the Virgin. At the bridge he stopped to look more closely at the river. Long green and brown weeds moved in it. He thought he saw a fish as well and a suggestion of the dark skirt his mother had worn the last morning he had seen her. Then Annie tugged his sleeve, bringing him back.

“Knocknagantee,” she said, naming the mountain directly ahead of them. “Coomcallee.” She pointed to a wall of rock to the south so huge it filled over half the sky five fields away. Kieran could see that it was busy with jumping waterfalls.

“And on this one short road, four townlands,” Annie was saying. “Cushcummeragh, Namona, Cappanagroun, and Cloonaughlin.” They passed by a minor hill, part of which had been removed to have gravel for the road. “The travellers sometimes come there and stay for a time,” Annie said. “Then they go away again.”

“Could the travellers have left the bicycles?” Kieran asked his first sentence of the morning.

Annie laughed. “No sensible traveller would leave behind something as useful as a bicycle.”

There were two delicate ash trees in front of the tailor’s house and between them sat a slight man on a green chair. “That’s himself,” said Annie as the man rose to his feet. “He is wondering who you are, as he’s never seen me with a boy before.”

Kieran noticed that the man had a violin in one hand and a bow in the other. He set both down carefully on the chair as they approached and came halfway down the lane to meet them. He shook their hands, Annie’s first and then Kieran’s.

“I said to myself,” he confided to Annie, “that it wasn’t Brendan O’Sullivan and it wasn’t Jonnie O’Sullivan and it wasn’t Sean Shea and it wasn’t Micky Shea and it wasn’t Cormac O’Connell and it wasn’t Donald O’Connell and it wasn’t Eugie O’Connell and it wasn’t Niall O’Connell and it wasn’t Tim O’Connell.” He paused, thinking. Then he continued. “It wasn’t Jimmy Curran and it wasn’t Matt Curran and it certainly wasn’t Des Curran. So, I said to myself, it has to be a stranger.”

“It’s the son of the weather man I work for,” said Annie.

“He’s mine now.”

“Yours, is he?”

“So to speak. He’s now living with me.”

Davey seemed unsurprised by this. “And does he have a name?” he asked.

“He, does, Davey. He has a name and he has a temper something awful.”

Kieran looked up, taken aback. Since he had left the town neither he nor Annie had spoken about the tantrums.

“Well, I like that in a child,” said Davey. “It shows character – a mind of his own, like.” He turned toward Kieran. “What makes you angry? Whatever it is, it’s something you care about in a powerful way.”

Kieran realized that he had no notion of what made him angry. The tantrums, when he had them, had been like visitors
who had taken up residence inside him, not like blood relations. And not like his mother was now. “I don’t know,” he said.

“Come now,” said Davey, “not everything can be perfect. What has disappointed you then, since you came to be with Annie?”

Kieran looked at Annie timidly. “Say it, whatever it is,” she advised.

“Having many bicycles and not being able to ride any of them.”

Davey turned to Annie and raised his eyebrows questioningly.

She cleared her throat. “There is the odd bicycle around the place,” she admitted. “Do you remember the raid of the bicycles, Davey?” she suddenly asked. “Gerry himself once had ten or more in his possession. And they all being from the barracks in town. It was the only time all the young men in the parish had bicycles and they’d leave them by Shehan’s gate when they went up the mountain to do their talking.” She closed her eyes. “And to do their drilling and marching as well. They were talking and training in the mountains, Davey, as were you yourself. Do you remember?”

“Of course I remember,” said the tailor, “but that was a good long time ago now, Annie.”

“But not so long it couldn’t happen again. It’s a way men have, I suppose.”

“I suppose,” said Davey uncertainly. “But that was a good long time ago, and at the moment there is not much of it left in us, I’d say.” He looked thoughtfully across to the distant
waterfalls of Coomcallee. “Nor in the young folk either who have no work.” He turned again to inspect Kieran. “What did you say his name was, Annie?”

“I didn’t say, but I will now. His name is Kieran.”

“That explains it.” Davey picked up the fiddle and bow and began to walk toward the open door of his house. Annie and Kieran trotted behind him. For a small man, an old man, this tailor was surprisingly swift.

“St. Kieran,” said Davey, ushering the woman and the boy inside, “was the son of a wagon maker. ’Tis how the wheel got into the Irish cross and stayed there.” Kieran, he told them, had a lifelong love of the wheel, and all named after him would have the wheel and the love of it in them. St. Kieran had this love and he had the anger brought about by the unused wheel. “What in blazes,” he was wont to say, “is the good in a wheel that is unused?” Davey motioned his guests over to the settle by the fire. “I can feel that anger in this boy,” he said.

Kieran was fascinated by this but suspected his anger, or what was left of it, had little to do with wheels. He glanced upwards. The room they sat in had a high ceiling made of tongue-and-groove boards. There was no loft, but beside the fireplace there was a door that led into another room.

“It was the roundness of wheels that led St. Kieran to dwell on islands, which as we know from looking toward our own sea and the Skellig Islands in it, are round at their base.” The tailor began a precisely described verbal tour of various holy islands, of the circles with which the monks began the construction of their beehive huts, of the round towers he
confessed to never having seen, and of the turning wheel of the mill where St. Kieran had ground magically multiplying oats. “They’d say of St. Kieran, Columcille himself was heard to say of him, that he was anxious for the useful wheel.”

While Davey was delivering this speech, three small cows walked sedately past his back window, startling black against the bright green of the grass and moving west. There was something about them that was not unlike the dark garments hanging from hooks nailed into a piece of the wooden moulding that was fixed like a plate rail around the perimeter of the room. Kieran had never before been in a room so occupied by the presence of absent others, their arms and shoulders, and occasionally their legs, outlined against the whiteness of the wall. He felt examined, as if the people for whom these garments were destined were watching him and waiting, expecting something from him. Outside the front window the light changed and the mountain called Coomcallee appeared to step two or three fields closer to the house, as if it wanted to examine him as well. He looked again out the more predictable back window, where a fourth cow had paused to graze.

“Are you looking at my cows, Kieran?” the tailor asked. “Aren’t they lovely?”

Kieran, embarrassed, studied the ashes in the grate.

“On the subject of our cows,” the tailor continued, unaffected by Kieran’s silence. “Bo Chiarrai,” he said. “Kerry Cow.” Then he stood. “ ‘In the histories they’ll be making they’ve a right to put her name / With the horses of Troy and
Oisin’s hounds and other beasts of fame/ And the painters will be painting her beneath the hawthorn bough/ Where she’s grazing on the good green grass my little Kerry cow.’ ” He sat down again, smiling.