The Night Stages (32 page)

The sound of his name in her mouth.

“Why are you here?” he heard himself say.

“For my brother,” she told him. “He died as a one-year-old baby. Sometimes …” She glanced away from him.

“Yes,” he said.

She was still not looking at him.

“I know,” he said. And then he wondered why he said it, for he knew nothing at all beyond the way her hair was moving in the wind at the back of her head. And then there was her face, and her eyes not looking at him.

“You came on your bicycle,” she said, “for your mother.”

“No,” he said quickly. He didn’t want his mother in his mind. Not now. Then suddenly understanding, he wanted to tell her his mother was buried in the town, and as he thought
this he could hear again the sound of the first fistful of earth hitting the oaken coffin. He could see the open ditch of the grave where they had put her.

“Why then?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” he said truthfully. Everything in him wanted to touch her and he was trying to evict the feeling. This was not the chance encounter he had been imagining, but it was a chance.

He fought with his mind for something to say. “You make those baskets,” he said, “out of china.”

“Yes,” she said, surprised, almost laughing, “I do, I did, but only one or two a season anymore. Now I just make brooches. They are easier. And I like to paint the flowers.”

She was so mild in her answers to him that he thought she would not have been felt around the house when she was a child, not in the way that he himself, with his sessions of rage, had been felt around his own house. The speech of the country people had entered the cadence of his own thoughts, he realized, knowing that a phrase like
felt around the house
would have been their way of expressing what he was thinking. He would not say this out loud, to her.

“I made half a dozen baskets,” she said, “when I was younger. And only very small ones. But it’s my father who has made most of them, and all the larger ones. He went to the north, one summer, to learn how. And later he taught me when I asked.”

He was aware that this was a famine burial ground: most of the graves were unmarked, or marked only by the roughest
of broken pieces of local stone. Only the tombs around them were large and important-looking, and her family’s plot was one of these. There was a flat stone slab resting on four short pillars, with the names of long-dead relations inscribed on its surface. She had brought flowers and put them in front of the child’s small headstone, which was situated near one of the pillars.

“There’s still one though,” he said. “A small basket. I saw it in the window. It had a flower.”

“Yes,” she said, smiling. “It never sold.”

He knew his mother’s grave was toward the west corner of the town graveyard, near the ruin of the Penal Church that was now just a pile of rocks. He had stood in that location when she had been lowered into the ground, though he had never been back to it. A headstone would have been placed there long since and he imagined it would be modest, not calling attention to itself. “An accident,” the priest had said, allowing her to be buried there.

“It looks like a bed,” he said of her family’s tomb. Then he immediately wished he had not said it.

She laughed at that, however. He focused on the glass jar full of small pink roses she had left near the baby’s stone.

“Someone way back,” she said, “someone in the family liked this view. Or we would have been in the town as well.”

The land sloped down at a steep angle from the edge of the graveyard’s far wall, then flattened out into an expansive floor of bog, long strips of which had been recently worked. And then there were the hills beyond, with irregular bright
fields climbing up them. He wondered what it would be like to have a baby in the house and then to have that baby gone from it. She had been perhaps the same number of years older than this baby as Niall was older than him. He looked across the wide valley and saw that her house, a white pebble in a vast green pasture, was just visible above Carhan Wood. “And you can see your house from here,” he said, realizing, after he said it, that he had revealed that he knew where she lived.

“Yes,” she said, squinting in the direction of the hill opposite. “Perhaps that’s why, after all.”

“Are you still working on the footpaths?” she asked, and the memory of coming into the house from work that night took hold of him so that he thought he might not be able to answer.

“No,” he said finally, “not anymore.”

She became quiet then, as if she understood his embarrassment and recalled her own part in it.

There had been rosary beads hanging from the little concrete cross on the top of the child’s grave. The string had broken and some of the beads were on the ground beside the spot where she had put the flowers. For a moment he could think of nothing sadder than that broken piece of string.

“I like the look of that small basket,” he said. And then, “When I was smaller my mother told me baskets like that were called Belleek. I thought she said bleak.”

She laughed wonderfully at that, and he felt himself brighten, knowing he had in some way pleased her.

“I should go now,” she said.

“Yes,” he said, and then, “the baby, did he have a name?”

“Kieran,” she told him. “His name was Kieran.”

“My own name,” he said, surprised.

She nodded. “Yes,” she said.

“I’ll be leaving the parish soon,” he said. “I am going on a sort of retreat where I’ll be by myself for some time.” He was amazed that he had told her this.

“Are you going to Lough Derg?” she asked. “Are you making a pilgrimage?”

“No,” he said. “It’s not like that.”

“My mother went to Lough Derg, once, after the baby died. She was gone for three days.” She looked troubled by this distant memory. “And three nights,” she added.

He did not know what to say to this.

After a few more moments of silence, she spoke again. “I am glad that we came across each other here,” she said, “that we were able to speak to each other a little.”

She turned then and walked toward the stile. He watched as she climbed the two steps, her white hand against the dark stones of the wall, steadying herself. He continued to watch as she walked away from him down the road, the blue flame of her skirt visible at times, then hidden by the hedgerows. Over and over like that until she went round a corner and passed out of his view. He thought she was like a piece of blue paper being blown down the road.

When he could no longer see her, he ran the conversation in all its brevity again and again through his mind. She had
been kind to him, even after what he had seen, she had not run away and she had not dismissed him. Kind to him. And once he had let that thought settle, to his discomfort he began to weep, an act so unfamiliar to him it seemed to have come from a place far enough away he couldn’t name it. Tears had never been a part of the tantrums, never even part of his sorrow. He wiped the moisture from his face with the heels of his hands, then sat down on a nearby headstone and wept some more, coughing with the effort of it.

She had not mentioned Niall. Not once. And he believed that that had been a kindness as well. It seemed significant to him that it was she whom he had spoken to just when he was on the edge of the retreat: the unlikely chance of it feeling to him like the working of a powerful destiny. He would be able to take more of her, that blue skirt, and the way she had said his name, with him into his aloneness. He would be able to take her infant brother as well, something large and important he now knew about her. The graveyard was alive with the small orange lilies he knew as montbretia. He left a fistful of them on the baby’s grave before he climbed the stile where her foot had been, mounted his bicycle, and rode away.

Kieran woke in the night knowing the place where he should spend the months ahead. He could almost see it in the dark, the way it would be.

At dawn he dressed and tied together a bundle of extra clothing, leaving two sleeves of a shirt hanging so he could knot them at the front of his neck when he was on the bicycle. He had a satchel as well, which he now removed from a nail on the wall so that he could fill it with food from the kitchen. A few moments later, helping himself to apples, potatoes, biscuits, and one tin cooking pot, he experienced a pang of guilt, and decided to leave a message on the calendar beside the door, it being the only paper in the house.
Gone on retreat
, he wrote.
Back in two months
. He knew Gerry-Annie would puzzle over this, knowing him to be the farthest thing from religious, but this was all he could muster at the moment, never having been one for explanations. And he was anxious now to be gone.

He had ridden on recent weekends all over County Cork, along its coastlines and deep inland, looking for the right spot, and while he could justify the hundreds of miles of searching as part of the training, he was not satisfied by anything he had seen. There was a pastoral feel to this neighbouring county, probably like the English countryside, he thought. What he felt was that it wasn’t wild enough for him, too cultivated and kept. While he moved smoothly through the better maintained roads near Georgian houses, he sensed an absence of privacy on the land. And he would need isolation. He had hoped to find something near the cycle track he had heard about at Banteer in North Cork, but once he had laid eyes on the track itself, it seemed pointless to him to circle round and round on a flat surface – what could be
gained by that? And the surrounding fields spoke to him of lushness and domesticity. It wasn’t what he wanted.

The sky was a dusty plum colour when he stepped outside and was whitening toward the east. He recalled the morning when he had cycled past Susan’s house, the discomfort of that, though no one had seen him. But now that he had spoken with her, he recognized the desire to repeat that small journey, as if she might welcome him. But he pushed the notion aside and pointed the bicycle in the opposite direction, then pedalled off on the familiar route he had taken each morning, years before, to school, passing through Island Boy and Killeen Leacht, heading for Derriana Lough. Everything was still, as if dreaming. Nothing paid him any mind. Even the windows of the school seemed withdrawn and muted, uninteresting to the young man he had become. The lake when he reached it was so still the adjacent hillside was crisply mirrored there, an upside-down world.

As he began the ascent up and away from the water’s edge, he could feel the energy flowing from his torso to his legs and the pleasure of this sensation travelling the arteries that branched into his arms and along his spine, the electric physicality of the effort. The road, a track really, became rougher once he left Coomavoher behind, and the few cabins he passed were vacant and had been so, it appeared, for a number of years. The roofs were gone but the chimneys still surmounted open hearths. He could have chosen a small, empty structure, roofed it with wattles, and set up housekeeping, but he had a mind to build his own shelter in a place
where no one had done so before, and he would stick to that. He knew the place, having been there once or twice when he was younger, and the memory of it had come to him in the night and had claimed him.

The track came to an abrupt end at a small stream that cut in front of him, then leapt over the edge of the steep hillside, heading for the lake below. He dismounted and began to walk the bicycle along the bank on a path made by mountain sheep. The land had flattened out here, but he was aware of the subtle incline that allowed the water to travel at considerable speed over a bed of stones. He was high enough now that when he turned to gaze down at Derriana Lough, it appeared to have the same dimensions as the basin of water he washed with, mornings at Gerry-Annie’s house. It wasn’t long before he reached Tooreenbog Lough, the first of five lakes that climbed up the mountain like jewels on a necklace, each one smaller than the one before, beaded together by the thread of the stream and knotted by a succession of diminutive waterfalls, not one of which was taller than his shoulder. Around him, nothing but high bog lands, heather, and sedge grass, and a few brave foraging sheep. He walked by Lough Adoolig toward the farther lakes that no one, ancient or otherwise, had ever bothered to name, coming at last, after a final water-fall no higher than his handlebars, to the small shield of water that was the source.

The entire watercourse, a miracle of geography, was available to him now. He could see the path of the stream, lined at its lower leg by oak trees before it entered Derriana
Lough. The dark perimeter of this opened at its western edge to the narrow Cummeragh River, which made its way past the tailor’s house, then moved sinuously down a long valley until it reached Lough Curran six miles away. And then there was the estuary where that lake narrowed and the water fanned out through marshlands into the Ballinskelligs Bay and the sea. The arm of Hog’s Head on the left, and the arm of Bolus Head on the right. It was a tremendous view: seven lakes and the sea, the irregular fields, the old walls, and the strips of harvested bogs drawn on the landscape by the labours of men long dead. He thought of Tadhg, the last old man of Europe, of his wife, out there at the final reach of Bolus Head, but he knew there were no ghosts here where he planned to build his hut. Perhaps his own ghost sometime in the future, but no ghosts now.