The Night Stages (30 page)

Once the sun was fully up, the coughing began, the coughing and the almost continual retching. He thought of the dogs in his Irish town, how one of them would bark and then another and another, a contagion of sound. It occurred to him now, dogs were more sanitary. He despised himself for the thought, but there it was, present in his mind, refusing to be banished. By now he had covered one side of the street and was about to cross, to make a similar tour of the sidewalk opposite. His level of distress was so high he believed for a moment that pandemonium might break out at any moment, this in spite of the fact that nothing about the bodies that lay like dark boulders in the seams of the streetscape suggested an aptitude for pandemonium. He remembered Gerry-Annie talking about the famine, how she’d heard that the men and women walking down from the mountains in search of the Ballagh Workhouse had died in such numbers on their journey that the roads were made impassable because of the piles of corpses. Families, she’d said, would huddle together when they were dying, children lying atop their parents, their arms and legs braided together so they could never be separated.

A man a half a block away was using both arms to attempt to push himself into a seated position. Having achieved this by the time Niall reached him, he swung a mostly empty bottle in Niall’s direction. “Want some?” he asked.

“Cage Hotel?” Niall asked. At least this one appeared to be alive.

“Cage Hotel,” the man repeated.

“Yes.”

The man was swallowing what was left in the bottle. When he was finished, he looked at the label for several seconds as if trying to memorize the name of an unfamiliar fine wine. Then he opened his fist and let the bottle fall to the sidewalk, where it did not break but rolled instead at a sedate pace into the gutter. “Which one?” the man said.

“The
Cage
Hotel,” Niall repeated.

“They are all cages.” The man opened his arms as if to embrace the street.

“But … why would …?”

“Rooms with wire mesh ceilings.” The man removed a stained cap and ran his fingers through a substantial mop of hair oiled by sweat. “Ventilation,” he said. “Lets the air through, smells also, and sounds. I prefer pleine aire.” He looked at his crumpled trousers on the sidewalk. “Outside,” he translated, “fresh air.”

Niall said his brother’s name. Then his nickname. “Kieran the Wheel,” he said.

“You’re Irish,” the man said. “A Paddy. Magnificent drunks, the Paddies.”

“Do you know him?”

“Maybe,” the man said. “Probably I do, if he’s been here any time at all. He could be in any one of the cages, but even if he is, he’ll be out here soon enough. Or he might be on the street right now. Depends on the day’s work.”

Niall wanted to know about the day’s work.

The man gave Niall a look that suggested he had never met anyone quite so thick. “Drinking,” he said, “and begging,” he added, holding out his hand.

Niall pulled an American dollar bill from his wallet, placed it in the man’s palm, then turned and walked away.

He hadn’t covered a half a block before the man was calling him. “Hey, Paddy,” he shouted, “he’s probably dead, anyway, whoever he is. Most of us are.”

T
he summer of 1954 was uncharacteristically dry and bright, but times were lean and work was scarce for the kind of casual labourer Kieran had become. As he had done for the past several years, he spent an August week booleying in the mountains with Donal the sheep farmer, whose hair was turning toward grey now but who was no less strong on the climb to the highest pastures and no less nimble on the rocks.

For the first time Tim the Sky did not venture out to greet them when they came to his elevated fields. He had died the previous winter, and the dog, the Cloud, had died shortly thereafter. Of grief, Donal said.

“Those things Tim saw and that the Cloud saw with him will never happen again,” Donal told Kieran. “Remember them, and remember the parts of the heaven he pointed to when he spoke: the heaven above Knocknagrapple, the heaven above Drung. And remember the way the Cloud
moved when he was leaping up the mountain to greet us.” Ean, who had been running wildly searching behind boulders, circling the house, and scratching at the door, now sat with his head lowered and his back to them. “It’s a terrible disappointment to him,” Donal said, looking with fondness at his dog, “not to have the Cloud among us.”

Tim’s house appeared to Kieran to be dissolving into the textured surface of the mountain, the way houses did in this district when they knew they would never be lived in again. Sometimes, even though you were aware of its existence, it was difficult to spot the house at all among the rocks and the ferns. And then, quite unexpectedly, a particular slant of light would make Tim’s green door shine as if it had been painted only minutes before.

“It is the past’s way of saying goodbye,” Donal said when Kieran remarked on this. “A sudden gleaming and then the dimming down. It will speak to us quite a few times like that now,” he said, “and then next year, only once or twice. By the third year it will be as if it has never spoken at all, though we’ll never forget it, or Tim in it, nor the Cloud either.”

It was like that in the mountains, Kieran thought. Very often features of the landscape would appear and disappear. Sometimes it seemed that Michael Kirby’s insistence that he remember each detail of every road he cycled was an impossible demand, for what was revealed by the low light of a particular mountain morning might be removed the next afternoon by shadow or by mist. He had once
ridden for days back and forth on a long stretch of a rough bóithrín, searching for a small grotto that he was certain he had seen the previous week, and that eluded him for more than a year, returning when he was looking for something else altogether.

In the early autumn, for two slightly madcap weeks, Kieran cycled from house to house with Davey the tailor, who had added house-painting to his array of skills, tailoring being so seldom in demand in what Davey called “the ongoing scarcity.” During this period, as they stood on their ladders, Davey insisted that Kieran learn all the emigration songs that he, Davey, knew, shouting them from one gable end to another. The title of each song begin with the word
Leaving
and was followed by the name of an abandoned townland, or sometimes mountains, lakes, or rivers, so that you had “Leaving Cappanagroun,” or “Leaving Cillin Leath,” or, in the case of rivers, “Leaving the Cummeragh Side,” or “Leaving the Banks of the Carhan.” The songs were splendidly long, and each of their verses was filled with sorrow. Some verses did nothing but list the people, places, and occasions their composers knew they would never encounter again: cross road dances, peat fires, mothers and fathers, baby sisters, walks to market, mass in the church, views of the bay. Other verses detailed the terrors of the long journey by ship in surprisingly vivid detail, storms holding a particular place of honour.

“And how’s that bicycle training up?” Davey asked once while they were eating lunch between bouts of singing and painting. He jerked his thumb in the direction of the Purple Hornet, which was lying near them in the grass. “Is it faster now that it has thousands of country miles in its bones? We’re counting on it to win the Rás. In the spring, I think I recall Michael saying. Less than a year now.” He threw a crust to a flock of robins that had gathered in the vicinity the moment they knew he was there. “I saw you down there in the town a couple of months ago when this year’s Rás came through.”

“Mm,” said Kieran, nodding, his mouth full of Annie’s bread. The riders had proven themselves to be both a thrill and a disappointment. The cyclists, when they had appeared, had been like a colourful ribbon in a strong wind, almost all of them there and gone before his mind could grasp what it had seen.

“They were all in a tight group,” he said to Davey. “Except for the one lad who came along after.”

“Ah yes,” said Davey philosophically, “the Red Lantern, I heard they call the one holding up the rear.”

Kieran had been troubled by the last rider, had felt pity for him. He had also felt a wave of dread come over him as he glimpsed the exhaustion in the boy’s passing face.

Davey stood and his birds flew away. “That’s a fierce lonely place to be, all right,” he said, as if sensing Kieran’s thoughts. “Fierce lonely. But it is an experience you will never have, that’s one thing certain. No fear of that.”

Fierce lonely
, thought Kieran. It was true that he was becoming more confident about the Rás. But
fierce lonely
described the rest of his life very well.

For ten days that previous June, before he had gone out to work with Donal, Kieran had managed to find a job in the town installing concrete footpaths. The hours of light were long enough that he and the men he worked with had started at six in the morning and did not lay down tools until eleven o’clock at night. Annie told Kieran it was madness to work like that all day then cycle back to her in the dark, though for years now he had had a light on the bicycle, and enough training in him that a ride like that would have been a trifle. But he had agreed during this time to stay with his father in the house he had left as a child. Now his brother was home for a stretch and Kieran thought he might see the girl; that Niall might bring her to the house and he might glimpse her.

His father had not seen Niall since Christmas, though his brother’s time had been so taken up with Susan that he had spent most of his holiday in the house on the hill with her and her parents. Annie said it was cruel, Mr. Riordan being alone like that during the time around the holidays, and she had insisted that Kieran go into the town every second day during the season to be with his father. As always, she had cooked the Christmas dinner for the house and had stayed to eat at the long dining room table. Susan was at the table as well; her and her dark hair and her presence had made Kieran peculiarly aware
of his own chewing, the way he held his fork. Once she had asked him a direct question and the fact of her looking at him had caused him to feel so uncomfortable he hadn’t been able to grasp what she said and had merely mumbled something in reply. The entire meal was an agony, but even so he wanted to see her again.

It was unlikely, Kieran’s hours being what they were, that this would happen during these ten days in summer, but even the faint possibility, though it filled him with a mixture of dread and longing, was enough. While he was behind the shovel, however, he would not allow himself to look up to the wooded hill where he knew her house was visible – startling and white, shining among dark trees – or down the street to her father’s shop, where sometimes, he had heard, she stood behind the counter. Instead he concentrated on the concrete covering the footpaths with a smooth, wet paste.

During his breaks, Kieran visited the various shops he had become fond of as a child, each one a small theatre in itself, its proprietor surrounded by the bright colours of what was on offer – be that tools in the hardware, or candy or cabbages at the grocer’s – and a monologue ready to be delivered on any subject relevant to the day. Kieran, being taciturn himself, took pleasure in these adamant revelations of character and opinion, often political but sometimes social in nature, in that they provided him with something like company, and demanded only a nod of his head in return. He avoided the jeweller’s shop, however. He could not make an active move toward Susan; any encounter would have to be
determined by chance. And what would he have said standing there in his muck-covered overalls in such an establishment, the bell on the door jingling behind him, his clumsiness evident, and no accomplishment in him? He had seen her on the street once or twice heading toward or moving away from the shop. Always there was the same response in him, the panic, the thrill. One time she stood entirely still on the street, looking for something in the bag she carried, her beautiful head bent, completely absorbed in the search. He thought he would die with his shovel in his hand if she didn’t find it, whatever it was, and disappear out of his view.

For the first five days in the house he saw no one but his father, who would be up early in the morning. Niall, having graduated in science from University College Dublin, was working for a stretch at the station before entering graduate studies in meteorology in the fall. But not yet being responsible for the balloons, his workday started somewhat later, and Kieran had seen little of him.

His father, however, would talk about Niall, how McWilliams had taken a shine to him, and about how Niall seemed to have a temperament well suited to the work. The young man would go, uncomplaining, out to the instruments in all kinds of weather to read the graphs, his father said. And being one for the trees, he had arranged to have six sycamores, identical to those at observatories in Britain and on the continent, planted on the grounds so that the effects of climate on vegetation might be compared all over Europe. This study was called phenology, his father said, something new
that few scientists knew anything about, and McWilliams was impressed that Niall would bring the knowledge of something like this with him to the station. Listening to all this, Kieran wanted to ask about the girl whom he feared Niall was going to marry. But his father never mentioned her, and he hadn’t the courage, really, to raise the subject himself.