The Night Stages (20 page)

Once, Kieran took Niall out to see the bicycles that were still, all these years later, being kept in the cow byre. Many of the tires were flat and rust now coated the spokes and rims of the wheels.

“It’s odd, her in there always talking to our father about waste,” Niall said about Annie, “and these out here unused in the byre.”

“She honestly believes that those who left them will come back to claim them.” The sound of spring lambs calling for their mothers could be heard coming from the valley as they turned from the bicycles and stepped outside. “But I know
the truth,” Kieran said, pulling the rough door shut behind him and fastening it with a dark iron bolt. “I’ve met fellows about to emigrate. They swear they will come back. But they hardly ever do. Mostly they go to London or Liverpool and get stuck there.” He walked to the side of the byre and pointed to one then another of the cottages visible in the fields below them. “Or they go to New York. One went from there,” he said, “and all three from there.”

“But they’d be making money on the building sites,” Niall said, “and they could use that to come home.”

Kieran regarded his brother with amazement. It was obvious that he had no knowledge of what the country people were up against. “They send the money home,” he told Niall. “There’s hundreds in the hills that wouldn’t make it through the winter if they hadn’t a son or nephew abroad working on the sites.”

Niall shook his head. “A pity, that,” he said, “and a bloody shame. They ought to be given a chance, those boys. A fighting chance for a life of their own.”

“It’s not possible,” Kieran insisted, “not with the way things are.”

Niall dismissed this. “I don’t accept that,” he told his brother. “Anything is possible if you want it badly enough.”

Much later Niall would tell Tam about these times at Annie’s cottage. Listening to his brother talk about people so far from his own experience was both surprising and comforting to
him, in that it made his brother – this stranger who had come to know other strangers – more vital to him. “As if I might come to know him,” he said.

“But I closed the conversations down somehow,” he admitted. “I thought I was more knowledgeable than him. And, of course, he sensed that.” He paused. “And he withdrew.”

In the midst of tight, mannered, and increasingly infrequent Sunday afternoons in the house in town, Niall told her, while the parlour slowly darkened between them, or later, at the evening table with their father, he had come to feel the distance between himself and his brother. All talk was halting and formal and never initiated by Kieran, who seemed both wild and restrained and as palpably suspicious as a fox. Sometimes the quietness in the room was so filled with tension Niall almost wished for the return of his brother’s tantrums, anything to break through the forced calm of the board games they played with their father, and then the awkward, silent meal, a shepherd’s pie most often, prepared by Gerry-Annie on Friday to be heated up later.

Years before, when Kieran had begun to attend the Derriana School, the conversation had sometimes centred on this, his father asking what he was studying and whether or not he liked his teacher. But these questions had brought only monosyllabic answers from Kieran, and it wasn’t until Niall mentioned the bicycle that any expression at all had come into the boy’s face. Once, Kieran had become almost animated as he talked about the replacement of a bicycle chain: what it had cost and how much easier the cycling had become
once this was accomplished, that and the purchase of the light that was affixed to the handlebars and that guided his evening return to the dark hills behind the town. In subsequent years Niall would try to convince himself that he had not mentioned his own bicycling to his younger brother because he had wanted Kieran to have something that was his alone. And his own bike in Dublin, he told Tam, would have been so much better outfitted; how could he have spoken of it? “Kieran was so bloody proud of that one tin light,” he said.

Lying in bed later in the night, Niall had sometimes thought about this light moving steadily upwards like a star rising through the trees of Carhan Wood and appearing at the top of the small mountain they called Garrane. He had held in his mind until he slept this one small, travelling candle, the most lonely and tentative flicker of light that he could imagine, in spite of knowing that Kieran would have entered Gerry-Annie’s lane less than twenty minutes after leaving the house and a full hour before he himself had gone to bed. It was in this way, he would say to Tam later, he had come to understand that he missed his brother and that some part of him wished the younger boy could stay home, even though he himself was almost always in Dublin. He had not discussed the boy’s absence or even his brief Sunday presence with his father, and knew he would never do so, in the same way that, once his mother was gone, her name was rarely mentioned. Oddly, it was Kieran who had once slipped the word
Mother
into a silence at the table. “Mother says,” he had begun. Then he had stopped, as if he hadn’t been aware that
he was speaking in company. Niall had felt a shadow of discomfort move through him. He resented the younger boy suddenly using the word
Mother
. And he was shaken by the spectrum of possibilities in that unfinished sentence.

Up in the hills at Gerry-Annie’s, this young man, this stranger-brother whose voice had taken on the soft accent of the country people with whom he lived, had tried to describe the plight of a workmate who had, indeed, returned from America. “The only one I ever heard about, came back,” he said, “was Brian from Garreiny, far back in near Lough Iskanamacteery. They say he came home because his mother was dying of a broken heart.” He had kicked a pebble with his boot. “It’s a dark place back in there with the mountains so close to one another,” he said, explaining the mother who had needed her son to return. “The roads are never dry, even with three full days of sun in summer.”

Both brothers had fallen silent again, at the reference to the mother. But within that silence Niall came to understand that, unlike the angry, sad younger brother he had lost, this quiet labourer was someone with a discrete set of experiences that he could seldom share. He was aware as well that the landscape they were looking at – a landscape that he, Niall, had never taken the trouble to learn – was now, and would likely permanently be, his brother’s geography.

In the middle of Easter week two years later while Kieran was painting window frames, he paused to open a fresh can, then
realized he needed to go into the house to fetch a knife. As he walked back outside with the tool in his hand, he caught sight of his brother at the curve in the road, and beside him, not his father, but a stranger, a woman, in a blue skirt and what appeared to be a yellow blouse of some sort. On top of her head was a wealth of wavy dark hair, lifting in the wind. Niall was not looking at the house as he approached but rather at this woman to whom he seemed to be explaining something, moving his arms as if he were demonstrating an expanse of space or a length of time. The girl, for Kieran could see now that she was not a woman but a girl, walked with her arms crossed and her head down, obviously taking very seriously whatever it was Niall had to say. For the first time in months, Kieran heard his mother’s whisper coming from somewhere very far away, but he couldn’t make out what she was saying. He put the knife in his back pocket, picked up the paint can and the brush, and moved quickly around to the rear of the house, the shyness in him about the girl with his brother rising in his blood.

Because the weather was so glorious, he had ridden the bicycle for three hours that morning, down to Waterville and along to Ballinskelligs, over the mountain and down into Port Magee, then swiftly back again because he had promised to paint the window frames. But now he wished more than anything that he was back on the bike again, heading up and over the rough road to Port Magee or in the opposite direction, over the Coomakista Pass and along the coast to Sneem. While he stood behind the cottage he heard the girl laugh as she and Niall came up the lane. It was unlike any sound he had ever
heard before, and his mother was whispering about it, though vaguely, and in the new language she had that was barely comprehensible to him. And then he heard his brother laugh in a way that was full of happiness. He realized that he himself rarely laughed, even when his workmates teased or joked with him, and he wondered now about the origins of this spontaneous expression. The word
delight
came into his mind.

He opened the can of paint and began to work on the outside trim of the window, through which he could see Gerry-Annie’s one table, and while he was working he saw Niall enter the dim interior, with the girl stepping lightly behind him. He could hear Gerry-Annie’s effusive welcome and the bustling noises that always accompanied her greetings. “Is it yourself then, Niall,” she was saying, “home from the city?” And then to the girl. “Welcome, welcome, Susan, to the parish of Dromid, to the townland of Garrane, and to the house of Gerry-Annie. What a treat on this bright day. Now, where has your brother got to? I’ll just step out a moment to find him.”

Kieran dropped the brush, bent down to retrieve it, then stood and looked through the window. The girl was near the table, near him, close to the window glass, but her face was turned away from the light. He could see it though, her shadowed face, and suddenly it was as if everything he had ever wanted was in the way her eyes were looking at his brother. Niall sat down at the end of the table and the girl walked up behind him and placed her hand on his shoulder. Niall with “his Susan” in Gerry-Annie’s kitchen, and the way the girl’s
hand had settled, white against the dark of his brother’s shirt, and the warm yellow of her own sleeve, her arm inside it reaching for his brother’s shoulder. Kieran wanted that quiet touch, that connection for himself.

Susan
. He allowed his inner voice to taste her name.

Annie was near him now, telling him to come inside. But he could hardly hear her. His mother was whispering something that was both an echo and a premonition, and the sound was coming from somewhere deep in the valley. As Annie spoke behind him, the girl turned toward the window and, for one moment only, her eyes met his, her expression frank and open, a smile beginning to visit her mouth. He turned then and ran to the byre, rattled the bolt, pushed open the door, grabbed hold of the bicycle, and swung his leg over the crossbar. Soon he was on the road that climbed up and into the mountains, attempting to rise swiftly away from everything that was confused and changing inside him. There was no accounting for the combination of sorrow and panic that pumped through his heart, no accounting for his mother’s distant whispered cautions. From that moment on, the girl’s face would burn in his mind.

That night at supper he was both silent and ravenous while Gerry-Annie talked. She asked him to explain his absence and what had got into him to cavort off like that, with his brother bringing his sweetheart up from town to meet him. “You know who she is, Kieran,” she was saying, “the jeweller’s
daughter down in the town. She went away to school so you might not have seen her, but we all know who she is. She would be younger than Niall by some years, I’m thinking, but then wasn’t I myself eleven years younger than my own Gerry. I’d have thought you might have wanted to meet her, she and Niall being so thick.”

And when he didn’t answer, she asked him why he felt that he had to eat his potato and her potato and all the bread in the basket. When he remained unresponsive, she began to speak again, as he knew that she would, about the girl.

He learned then that she was the daughter of the same jeweller whose shop window he had often passed as a child walking on the street with his mother. He could recall now the way his mother had stopped by that window, her body swaying slightly, while she looked intently, but also somehow impassively, through the glass to the bright-coloured stones and gold and silver. He would watch her profile at such moments, and recalled now her fine white skin and perfect eyebrow, an atmosphere of trance around her. Finally she would sigh, as if dissatisfied by what she had seen, and turn away. Remembering this, he could hear the rustle of his mother’s clothing as she began to walk again. He realized that they had never stepped inside the jewellery shop, that its small objects had been only a pause in the gravity that pulled his mother farther down the street under the shadow thrown by the large church and through the door of the chemist’s shop. There was a bell on that door, and that bell was strangely ringing in his own mind here at Gerry-Annie’s table, along
with his mother’s whispers, her warnings sent to him in words he could no longer comprehend.

Then he remembered something else. There had been unusual objects in that window: plates and goblets that, to his mind, would never hold food or water. He recalled thinking they were woven somehow, as if they were made out of rope, and yet something rarer than rope, a property closer to lace, or the crocheted edges of the pillow slips on the beds of the house and the cloths that covered the tables. There were brooches as well, made in the same way. “Belleek,” his mother had said one day when he asked, her soft voice trailing over the word so that the last syllable was prolonged, then completed finally by the delicate cut of the “k.” He had thought she meant bleak, that bowls and plates punctuated by so many holes had a bleak hopelessness about them. They would hold nothing, he had concluded, and would be useless, in spite of their beauty.

It was one of his workmates who told him where the girl lived. While explaining where his own farm was located, he said the words “You pass by the jeweller’s house,” and Kieran heard this, though the words were not addressed to him. Even more taciturn than usual with a shovel in his hands, Kieran nevertheless heard himself shout down the line of labourers, “And where is that then, your place?”

“Near Carhan Bridge, first road to the right, then up a bit,” the young man said. “The jeweller’s is farther up the
mountain, after you leave the woods, and we are the next lane that leaves the road, after his.”