The Night Stages (17 page)

Gerry-Annie was not on the road when he returned, but he could see his three shirts waving their arms on the line that stretched from a pole to the back wall of the house, his several selves reacting with great gladness to this wonderful transformation that had taken place inside him.

It soon became clear that the bicycle could be used as a bribe by Gerry-Annie to make the boy do things he would normally have tried to avoid, and it was in this way that Kieran was persuaded to go to school for a time, to attend mass now and then, and to visit his father in the town when his brother was home from Dublin. But his mother was able to begin her whispering in the house when both boys were there, and to plant this whispering deep enough in Kieran that it would be two or three days before he would awaken
empty of her. When he told Annie, then, that he couldn’t go back for a long time, she was wise enough not to ask why.

The school, five miles away at Derriana Lough, on the other hand, proved to be a surprising delight for the boy. He had no trouble at all with lessons in history or English, and even the mathematics lost its power to disappoint once he had novels by Dickens or Wilkie Collins to look forward to, the poetry of Yeats, and a view of a silver lake and blue and ochre mountains to turn to if the days were long. The western arm of the mountain of Knocknagantee reached out to embrace the lake on its southern side, and the play of light on the rocks, bogs, and pastures on days when there was sunshine, or the passing squalls of rain and fog on wet days, provided a carnival of stimuli, and there were times when he simply could not turn away. The mountain stood upright like a wall made entirely of rocks and vegetation, changing with the seasons from greens to yellows, from browns to purples, the colours visibly intensifying when under a coat of moisture.

The master, a mild young man not much taller than some of the bigger boys, often suggested walks to his pupils if the day was decent, and in this way Kieran discovered two green roads tucked into the seams of that mountain. It was not uncommon on these roads to find the remains of a village with a few old people still there with their sheep, two dogs, and a donkey, living a life that seemed impossible with such rough access to the outside world. How did they manage the thatch for their roofs, the turf for their fires? Kieran wanted to know but was too shy to ask such questions – in spite of
the courtesy shown to the young scholars by these people, their delight in visitors, evidenced even in their prancing, welcoming dogs. And, as if put there as a deterrent to inquiry, there were also the abandoned houses of men and women who had not been able to survive the isolation, and then the low, collapsing walls of cabins that had been left empty because of death or emigration, at the time of the famine, now just over one hundred years in the past.

One old man, inviting the class in for tea, told the group that he had carried everything in the cottage up the track on his own back: the dresser, the settle, the table and chairs, which were tied to the table legs and dragged behind on the broken road, and finally the bed for his bride, a large four-poster that Kieran could not imagine the man paying for. “She died in childbirth,” the man told them, “in that very bed in which I sleep each night of my life, and where she was by my side, she the flower of Coomavoher.” The child, he added vaguely, was now a solicitor in Killarney.

Died
, Kieran’s mother whispered, but so softly he almost didn’t hear. A mountain stream rampaged past the east wall of this man’s house, turning one whole room, floors, ceilings, walls, green with moss, and in that room Kieran spotted a bicycle, also emerald, the spokes of its wheels furry with moss. “Ah the room of the damp,” the old man said when he caught Kieran looking, “and my brother’s bicycle I haven’t the heart for.”

And so the notion of riding his own bicycle three miles up this slippery ruined road was planted in Kieran, something he was to do almost every day from then on before the lessons
began. When the winter came he pedalled in darkness, negotiating his way around unconcerned flocks, toward the two candlelit homes and then beyond them to the empty sites of Dughile and Coomavanniha, where he stopped until he saw a light in the schoolhouse on the lower land across the lake. Then he turned the bicycle around and began the bone-rattling descent while the sheep scattered and the dawn smudged the horizon.

There were twenty-one children of all sizes in the school, almost all of whom spoke Irish, though they were admonished by the master for doing so in the classroom. Lessons were taught in English only. Still, the master, an Irish speaker himself, was from only ten miles away, and he was Republican enough to want the old legends to be alive in the children of the parish, and encouraged them to speak about them. So it was the high-pitched voice of a very small girl that told Kieran about Oisin and the Fianna, and how the pass that led out of the mountains and into the world was called Ballagh Oisin. He would always remember this child reciting the stages of a story that had been spoken for a thousand years, the music of it, and the wonder, the English words breaking apart as the rhythm of her Gaelic accent entered them, while many one-syllabled words opened in the middle to two or three different sounds as if they were being sung. Kieran listened, rapt, as she recounted the tale of the ancient warrior, seduced by Niamh, returning after three hundred years to this high place where he searched for his long-dead hunting companions in the land below him. No woman, not even Niamh, had ever been able to compete with his affection for them. Oisin
could see the whole world from there, the child said, the bays of the sea and the headlands on either side of them, the oak forests, and the lakes and rivers, and the fields climbing halfway up the hills, but he could not find those of whom he was so fond because they were long dead, though he was slow to come to know this, believing, as he did, that he had been gone only three days. And it was St. Patrick – out of courtesy the saint came to meet him at the summit of the pass – who told him what the day was and the year, and tried to comfort this old son of an old chieftain when he wept. I will instruct my monks, Patrick said, to write down your stories and those of your kin so they will not be lost, though your world has been vanquished by my world and will never come back.

When the school was dismissed for the summer, Kieran asked Gerry-Annie how far it was to the pass they called Ballagh Oisin. She told him it was not far unless you were going there with local sheep who knew where they belonged and had a tendency to turn back to their own mountain pastures. Gerry’s father, she told him, had been a drover for the landlord when he was a boy, taking the landlord’s flocks great distances when they had been sold. “And he had the devil’s own time of it,” she said, “those sheep belonging to Cappanagroun and them insistent on it.” If he as much as turned his head they were gone back in the direction they had come from and then he would have to chase them and climb the pass with them one more time.

“But on the bicycle?” he asked.

“No time at all,” Annie said. “Though a terrible climb to get there.”

But his morning training on the rough green mountain trails opposite the school made the ascent to the summit of the pass a fairly easy pedal once he went there. And when he reached the top he saw that what the child had said was true, he could see the whole world from this height; the world of the mountains where he lived and the world of the lower lands and the towns beyond it. He could see the four booming strands of the Iveragh, and the islands beyond them. He stood on the pedals of his bicycle, balancing and looking for several moments. Then he began the exhilarating descent.

During the next few years, when he wasn’t busy with school or chores, Kieran cycled everywhere he could. In the beginning he rode all over the parish, visiting every road, bóithrín, and even the roughest of tracks, following the latter until they petered out, often in an upland bog. Eventually he moved farther afield, into the neighbouring peninsulas of Dingle and Beara, where the mountain roads were unfamiliar and more thrillingly daunting. He was always happiest on higher ground, where the view was extensive and the path was demanding. Often he would return to Gerry-Annie’s fully drenched, wind-blown, and spattered with mud. She would scold him then, but there was no real anger in her admonitions. “You’re a climber,” she told him. “Always heading for the sky. No wonder you have all these collisions with wind and rain.”

He liked it when she said that, savouring, as always, the way that Annie explained him. There was something about the word
collision
that was just right as well, for when he was on the bicycle, mountains, pools of rain water, gullies, groves of trees, all of this exploded around his swiftness. Closing his eyes just before he went to sleep, the images of the day would rush toward him, and he would collide with them, but softly, as if they were made of nothing but light.

After he had left the Derriana school, Kieran had fully ignored his father’s requests that he return to town in order to study at the Upper School there, preferring to hire himself out on occasion as a temporary labourer, a
spalpeen
, to farmers needing the extra help. Sometimes there was a hiring fair in his own town, but more often he would ride as far as Killorglin or Tralee. Because of the bicycle, he was able to travel far enough that he had some kind of work more often than not, in spite of the time being one of scarcity and the fact that many young men his age were leaving Ireland to search for employment abroad.

Late one summer, he was hired on by a farmer called Donal O’Shea, who held two thousand acres of commonage in the mountains with three O’Sullivan brothers. Donal had been a particular friend of Gerry’s but, as Annie said, one who had never taken to politics and was therefore still alive.

“Perhaps I was a coward, Annie,” he said when this was explained to Kieran in Annie’s kitchen, “for I believed in what they fought for but never fought for it myself.”

But Annie disagreed. “You were too far into the mountains,” she told him, “to do the necessary talking. Those men went up the mountain, all right, but they never went as far into the Reeks as your sheep are. There would be no point in that, all the fighting being in the town, or near enough to it anyway. It’s why I want Kieran to work for you. He’s gone sixteen, you see, and there is a man coming out in him. There will be no talking that far into the mountains. He won’t end up bleeding and ruined at the side of the road, or off in some jail yard in Dublin.”

“But does he want to go with me, Annie, that’s the question.” Donal looked doubtfully at the boy. “Does he want to go with me for the little I have to give him?” His dog, Ean, named, Annie had told Kieran, for the way the animal seemed to fly above the sheep when he was herding from one part of the mountain to another – looked doubtful as well.

“And shall I take the bicycle?”

“There’ll be no need for a bicycle where we are going, no chance of that.”

Kieran cast a sad glance at the shed where the Purple Hornet was waiting.

“It is only a week or so, Kieran.” Annie was already packing a bag of supplies, clothing, and some food.

“And your legs will be stronger for it,” said Donal. “They’ll be stronger after all the climbing.”

What he saw up the mountain: the chain of lakes below him that Donal said were known as the Pater Nosters, the rosary beads.
You could pray with those lakes at the end of your arm, looking at them from a distance, and the shining of them, the silvered mystery, made you want to do it. More lakes, each one with its name in Irish, and each Irish name a story that is being told less and less, Donal said, as the people moved away from the language and gathered elsewhere. Donal, silent before these bowls of water as if he had never seen them before, turned to Kieran and said, “The hardness of this life, and then the beauty.”

And he saw the four rivers – Inny, Cummeragh, Caragh, and the Sneem – named for the way the water moved through the land, rising together at the top of the Teermoyle Mountains, the booleying places, places where one man died and another prospered. “You can turn your back on it or you can set your face toward it,” Donal announced. Ean, who trotted beside them, who tore off and looped around straying sheep and who responded only to Irish, was less condescending with Kieran now that the boy had entered the mountains but was still not fully approachable.

“That dog doesn’t have a word of English,” Donal said when Kieran tried to coax or command the animal. “He doesn’t trust you with those sounds in your mouth, and anyway, it’s me he knows.”

They climbed higher, the dog running away from them, circling the flock, then returning, filled with purpose and quivering with the joy of some private accomplishment, brushing Kieran’s pant leg before hurrying off in the opposite direction. A second dog appeared. A leaping, mock-biting reunion ensued, followed by a further chase.

“Where did he come from?” Kieran asked Donal.

“That would be Scamall, the Cloud, Tim’s dog,” Donal said.

A few minutes later Tim himself approached and introduced himself to Kieran as Tim the Sky. “I am so named,” he said, “because mine is the house highest in the mountains.” He pointed to a stone cottage, hardly bigger than a turf shed. “There is no one higher living here,” he added, “and I’ve seen things at this height that none of the others will ever see.”

“He once saw three suns in one sky,” Donal confided.

“And flying ships,” Tim added.

“You mean airplanes,” Kieran said.

“No, I mean flying ships. A full fleet of them sailing over Teermoyle. I’ve seen lakes turn to blood.” He pointed to a small bowl of water far below and surrounded by sheer rock. “Iskanamacteery, it was, the Lake of the Wolf. And once there was a shower of grain so plentiful every blade of the grass and every bush of the gorse was covered with it like snow.”

“He baked bread with that,” Donal said.

“I did,” Tim confirmed. “I ground it with stones and I made four fine loaves of bread.”

“He’s had a black gable more than once from gorse burning in the mountains,” said Donal.