The Night Stages (41 page)

For one moment she pictures the artist finishing up, descending from the scaffold, stepping back, and looking at the long sweep of what he had done. Something would have struck him then, a sense of loss: the knowledge of an ending. How intimate he would have been with the skin of the wall,
with every square inch of it. For months maybe, the way he touched and changed that surface would have been the only real relationship in his life. Still, he would have collected his brushes and his paints. He would have climbed down from the scaffolding. And then he would have had to walk away.

Year after year she had feared that each meeting would be their last. That they would be spent, or were already spent and not admitting it. But still they met, and still the flesh leapt to life, as if an essential transfusion were taking place. Whatever complicated collection of moods she had amassed during their time apart would be swept aside like an irrelevant detritus in a swollen river, drowned by engagement and communion. And afterwards she was elated or filled with grief. She could never predict which.

Then, after years of restraint, the relationship had slipped over an unacknowledged edge and quietly deepened for her so that everything they had missed – a child, shared sleep, the comfort of morning rooms – began to feel like possessions wrenched unfairly from her rather than those she had never owned. It was as if they had made grave errors of judgment, she and Niall, and the grief – for her – was almost unmanageable. Alone she composed the perfect sentences she would never say to him about this, sentences about how she couldn’t bear to watch him walk away one more time, or the horror of suspecting that when all was said and done, he had decided against her in some crucial way. Still, he had always returned,
and when he returned, there had always been those moments of joy. “This mystery,” he had said once. She remembers him saying that.

She opens her handbag and searches for her ticket and her chequebook. When she finds them, she stands and moves away from the bench. At the counter, the man with Niall’s accent is absorbed by other travellers. There would be a new schedule for the day that is clarifying beyond the windows, a new list of passengers. The silver skin of the two waiting planes is something she is familiar with, that, and the almost-erotic desire to board one of them and to own the hand that operates the controls. Barely imagined, and never to be realized, the life in New York fades and withdraws, and she knows, suddenly, that Niall’s mercurial brother is not in that city. He is alive somewhere, with his own peculiar history active in his mind. The long narrative Niall had presented to her was not finished, not yet. “It’s not finished yet,” she wants to say to Niall, now, “not any of it. And there is no fault, no blame.”

The passenger who had been standing in front of her moves to one side. When she places her hand on the counter, the ticket agent looks up. “Shannon,” she says.

HE PEDALLED ALONG THE ROAD FROM CAHERSIVEEN
, past the birthplace of Daniel O’Connell, the Great Liberator, over the Fertha River at the bridge at Carhan, then past the lichen-yellowed ruins of the old workhouse at Ballagh. The road began to rise slightly now, but Kieran barely noticed; each indentation and every hint of elevation was so familiar to him that the features of the road’s surface might have been extensions of his own body. A glimpse of the painted iron gates of the long-gone landlord’s house and splashes of pink, the surviving roses from the landlord’s abandoned gardens. And then to his right, the empty Gothic window of the church ruins, fragile over the potent shadow thrown by its own darkened walls. And all around it, the undulations of the burial ground, and those teeth of stone, unembellished markers for the graves of the poor.

It was the gable end of the house he saw first, still painted blue, the shape of the chimney with some of its plaster gone and the stones showing, two orange chimney pots, strangely new-looking, but with no turf smoke moving out of them and over the valley. There had never been a lane – except the one that led back to the five fields Gerry O’Connell had built – and the grass had always grown right up to Gerry-Annie’s stoop.
This grass was long now, and once he dismounted from the bicycle, it began to soak his shoes. The red paint he himself had put there years ago had peeled and faded, and the door was slightly ajar. Not knowing what to do or how to let his new self enter, he came to a halt in front of the threshold. He had torn in and out of this door as a boy but now hesitated to announce the man he had become. He saw that the white paint on the window trim was missing in most places, and he thought he would fix that in a day or two. He hadn’t yet noticed that one of the panes of glass was smashed on the ground beside him.

With the flat of his hand he pushed on the door, but it didn’t budge so he used his shoulder to nudge it open, then stepped over the weed-choked threshold and into the room. So familiar were the shapes around him it took him some time to realize that the interior had changed, though Gerry-Annie’s belongings were everywhere in the room. Her kettle sat in the ashes of her fire, the iron bar from which it had hung having rusted and collapsed. The pattern on the oilcloth that covered her table was indistinguishable, furred by dust. Two cups and saucers sat on the table, similarly coated, and one was broken, likely by visiting sheep who had defecated, he was beginning to find, all over the concrete floor. In places the rising damp had removed the upper coat of paint from the blue-grey walls, revealing surprisingly vibrant colours that must have come from the time of Annie’s youth, when Gerry himself had still been alive.

A breeze was moving through the window by way of the missing pane he now took note of, and Gerry-Annie’s
disintegrating lace curtains moved with it. One of the curtains was stirring near his elbow and he caught it in his hand and held it there. He was moved even by something as simple as Annie’s stitches holding up the hem. But it was her two coats hanging beside the door that shook him; the one for everyday, and the one with the lambswool collar for Mass, a pair of shoes and a set of fur-topped galoshes neatly placed beneath. Each coat was cocooned in a shroud of pale spider webs, and each was like Gerry-Annie’s ghost standing near the wall. More than anything else it was the thickness of the webs that made him come to realize how long she had been gone.

He found himself in the adjacent room staring at her bed. The quilt she had made from scraps given to her by Davey the tailor was there and one pillow, its slip much stained by leakage from the roof. He glanced at the Sacred Heart still hanging above the headboard, opaque under the dusty glass of the frame, and for a minute he thought he might want to say a prayer, as he knew she would have liked that. But the moment passed. What good had all that been to her in the end with no one left even to clear the most intimate of her belongings from her empty house? He hoped, however, that a proper Mass had been said for her and that some neighbours, at least, had stood by her grave.

Walking back into the room, he realized he had planned nothing beyond this reunion with his childhood, the child he had been and the woman who had loved that child, and now he did not know what to do. He had slept outdoors for most of the previous three months and that, plus illness and the drink, had
altered his appearance, made him look even more the vagrant than he already was, though he rarely thought of this, having little access to mirrors. But now he wondered. Had Annie been sitting near the fire, would she have recognized him as he drew near to her? Without her, there was no avenue of approach to the boy he had been, no way of keeping that boy alive. He couldn’t remember how she had survived, procured the meat for the stew, the bread for the table, or, beyond the tailor’s skill and his own father’s generosity, provided the clothes for his back, even shoes, for he had never gone barefoot except in summer. The tailor must be gone as well. He remembered him as an old man, in spite of his vitality, his expertise with the violin given to his grandfather, allegedly by a landlord, the way the birds had dived in through the door, stood on his knee while he fed them, then flown out again.

The cow byre’s tin roof was loose on the boards and rattling in the wind, but it had held enough of the rain at bay that the spade and scythe he found beneath it were not rusted through. Neither were the bicycles, all twelve of them, though some had fallen and seemed to be clutching at one another on the earthen floor. He turned away from these, shaking his head and remembering.

“Gerry’s spade, Gerry’s scythe,” he heard himself say, touching each object in turn and saying out loud the name of a man he had never known beyond the desperate role described by Annie in her stories about him. There was a metal pail as
well, with only one small perforation in the bottom, and this he took out to the pump, where he moved the handle up and down. He was listening to the crow-call sounds of the pump’s inner workings with such concentration that he was startled when the water gushed into the pail and onto the ground beside it. It seemed like the beginning of something to him, life bubbling out of the earth, and he took some heart from it, and from the small tin cup still hanging from the spout.

His mouth remembered the taste of the water as he drank.

By mid-afternoon, having found Gerry-Annie’s broom behind the door standing handle end down so that the bristles were not bent, he had swept all evidence of sheep from the room and had thrown four pailfuls of water across the floor. It seemed neither the paint nor the concrete had deteriorated, and an ox-blood red colour emerged after the third pail. He found a filthy rag near the fireplace, washed it under the pump, and began to wipe the dust from the table’s oilcloth, which revealed itself to be decorated with the fishing scenes he remembered liking as a boy, and then, after carefully removing the dishes from the open shelves of the dresser, he took them outside. Five minutes later, washing the dishes in the pail, he admitted to himself that, even without Gerry-Annie’s warm presence, he had come home.

By evening he had found a pitchfork, removed the old grey straw and the mice nests from Gerry-Annie’s bed, scrubbed
the headboard and slats with the cloth, and had surreptitiously borrowed fresh, dry straw from of one of the small stooks he had taken note of in a nearby field. He had one candle with him in his pack, and this he lit as the darkness deepened, recalling gratitude. Then he removed a bundle of torn cloth and began to carefully unwind it until a small Belleek basket emerged. This he placed on a shelf near the bed, where he knew he would see it when he woke. He pulled a frayed blanket from the bottom of his pack, wrapped himself up, and settled into the place beside the wall that had held his child’s body in the past when, for those brief, but vividly recalled first few weeks, he had slept with the comforting plump warmth of Gerry-Annie beside him, lest, she’d said, there was some kind of fracas in the night.

Just before he closed his eyes, he thought, as always, of his brother, simply because the habit of thinking about him had outlived the anger that had first accompanied those thoughts. He’d go to the weather station, he decided, maybe not tomorrow but soon. Blood, he thought, but in relation to their being siblings: there was not the whisper of a feud left in him. He would be able to separate now the girl he had loved from the woman who, for years now, would have been his brother’s wife.

He awakened in full dark to the sound of animal hooves and soft lowing accompanied by quiet laughter and speech; girls bringing cattle down from the mountains to the morning
market in Cahersiveen. Annie told him she herself had performed this task, each week, from the time she could walk until she married. It was a struggle at first, she had told him, to keep up with her older sisters. But she’d wanted to do it, and so they’d let her come along.

He recalled then the miraculous Rás Tailteann, how the last old man of Europe and his wife had been there to celebrate him at the finish, and beside them his mother, insubstantial but radiant with no warnings on her smiling mouth. Michael Kirby, the actual, with his fist in the air, Davey the tailor, Donal from the mountains, Gerry-Annie herself, his own father all present, all cheering him on. And Susan as the girl she had been, how he had collapsed toward her, how they had fallen together then, and fallen apart.

And now, the light of a lantern beam on the wall, the sound of a switch brushing an animal’s flank, the music of old Irish words carried on a girl’s breath: all of this enveloped him as he lay in the dark with the light of one star reaching him through a hole in the roof. It was these things that made him come to know it was morning, and that the day about to break was Wednesday.

T
his book is a work of fiction: all characters, situations, relationships, and sometimes settings are products of the imagination or have been worked on and transformed by the imagination. There were several instances when I felt I needed to keep the actual name of the person whose life had contributed to the makeup of the character I was creating, mostly because I wanted to honour the person in question. This was especially true of the Canadian artist Kenneth Lochhead whose mural
Flight and Its Allegories
remains a fascinating fixture in Gander International Airport in Newfoundland. But it is also true in the case of poet, fisherman, and Gaelic scholar Michael Kirby, whom I had the great privilege of coming to know in Ballinskelligs, Ireland, in the 1990s. The verse on
this page
is from his book
Skelligside
(Lilliput Press, 1990). His bicycle coaching is an act of my imagination. The meteorologist, McWilliams, is partly based on the
Irish Times
’ extraordinarily gifted weather forecaster
and writer of weather lore, Brendan McWilliams. Alas, I never met Brendan McWilliams, but I was – and remain – a great admirer of his
Weather Eye on Literature
, and
The Illustrated Weather Eye
, the beautiful book his wife, Anne McWilliams, compiled after his much-too-early death.