Petty Magic

by Camille DeAngelis

  Fisher drove carefully and without comment, and when we got out of the car half an hour later it was snowing still more furiously. We trudged down the lane that led to the abandoned farm, and Jonah’s face was pale as the fourth horseman’s in the moonlight. I reached for his hand, and for a few wonderful moments I could pretend we hadn’t a care in the world apart from the chill in our toes.

  Back in the hayloft of the old stable, Jonah hung the drapes and lit a candle as I opened a steamer trunk to find the rations Albrecht had left for us. Suddenly I was ravenous. The beef was tough and the cheese was hard, but I tucked into my share with little thought of how long it was meant to last me. My pockets would be brimming with chocolate again just as soon as I’d gotten some sleep. “Aren’t you hungry?”

  “I’ll eat later.” He was busy setting up the radio; the matchbox and lighter fluid were poised at their usual place on the edge of the table.

  I took a sip from the milk jug and almost dropped it at the sound of thunder. A flash of lightning broke through a crack in the curtains. “Jonah, you can’t use the radio tonight.”

  He didn’t answer me for a long moment, just helped me onto my pallet and tucked the blanket under my chin.

  “It isn’t safe, Jonah. Not here, not tonight.”

  He sat on an overturned dairy crate, put his elbows on his knees, closed his eyes, and pinched the bridge of his nose with his thumb and forefinger.

  “I mean it. Promise me you won’t.”

  “Confound it, Eve! I’ve got to transmit what we’ve learned tonight as soon as possible!”

  I was losing my grip on consciousness, but I managed to give him a reproving look.

  “How do you know?”

  “There’s a direction-finding car out tonight.”

  “But it’s New Year’s!” He paused. “Did you see that Saint Bernard again?”

  I shook my head.

  “Well, then—”

  “Snow and lightning always bode ill for me. Always, Jonah.”

  “But how do you know that’s what it means?”

  “I just do. There was lightning in a snowstorm the night my mother died.”

  He sighed. “When, then?”

  Lightning illuminated the scene outside the window once again, and I held up a finger as I waited to hear how long the rumbling would last. “Tomorrow night,” I said. “But after midnight.”

  What haunts me is this: why didn’t it happen sooner, while I still had the strength to do something about it? Maybe there were portents falling like a hailstorm all around me and I was just too thick to notice, or maybe I never got a clue because I couldn’t be trusted not to run from it.

  I turned my head on the pillow and saw him duck beneath the tent that kept the light in. I wanted to warn him one last time not to use the radio, but then sleep rose up and swallowed me.

  I BIT BACK my panic when I didn’t wake up where I’d passed out, on the pallet in the stable loft. I was curled up under a wool blanket in a dark and narrow place, so cold I couldn’t feel a thing apart from the hideous crick in my neck. Sunlight shone through the slats in the wall, illuminating every dust mote. I’d been there quite a while.

  Jonah wasn’t nearby—I could feel his absence as acutely as the hollow in my stomach. I noticed something in my hand and brought it up to my face to examine it in the dim light: a pocket watch. His pocket watch. Then I noticed something sticking into my side, and I raised myself up on my elbow and looked down to find his dagger in its leather sheath. On the overturned milking pail by my feet I spotted the little metal case containing the radio crystals. I felt space beneath me, as if I had been hidden away on the highest shelf in a cupboard.

  All at once I knew where I was, and an awful feeling crept over me, cold, slithering, as if something had happened that was irreversible.

  A Night in Connemara

  26.

  I love the smell of a graveyard … ’tis a sweet and peaceful smell.

  —John B. Keane (screenplay by Jim Sheridan), The Field

  A FEW NIGHTS later, on a Friday evening, I ring Justin’s doorbell with a pocketful of euros. While I’m waiting for him to answer I take a look at Lucretia’s new window display. It features two of Olive’s marionettes inside a toy stage that, while not half as nice as the Harbinger family heirloom, will nevertheless make quite a splendid Christmas gift for some lucky tot. I stand by that talking-to I gave her for selling her puppets to Lucretia, but I can’t help marveling at her handiwork: the puppet on the left is dressed as a court jester, all gaudy stripes and jingling bells, with a pointy nose and cleft chin, and on the right is a fabulous Renaissance angel in a gold lamé gown, with shimmering papier mâché wings and a tiny lute, strung and varnished, fastened between her hands. The workmanship is exquisite.

  I’m clad in dungarees and a light jumper, but when Justin opens the door he looks at me just as if I were wearing my gown of peacock-blue velvet. Then he remembers himself, looks down at the sidewalk by my feet, and frowns. “Where’s your suitcase?”

  “We’re only going for the weekend,” I reply with a shrug and a laugh. “I pack light. It’s the European way, you know.”

  “But you don’t have any luggage at all! Not even a backpack!”

  “I’ll be fine” is all I say, and he looks at me doubtfully.

  “When’s the shuttle coming?”

  “What shuttle?”

  “To take us to the airport? You said you’d call for a shuttle.”

  “Oh, yes. It won’t be here for a while yet. Let’s go upstairs and wait for it.”

  Inside the apartment I spot his heavy-duty hiking pack, studded with patches from a dozen countries, on the hallway floor all ready to go. Won’t be needing that. I make straight for the bathroom, not paying any attention to Justin calling after me to wait, and when I open the door I let out a gasp of horror.

  “Toilet’s backed up,” he mumbles behind me, oh so helpfully.

  “Oh, no.” I turn round and find him lurking sheepishly in the hallway. “Don’t you have a plunger?”

  He shakes his head. “It just happened and I figured I didn’t have time to borrow one before you got here. If you’ve really got to go I can give you the keys to Fawkes and Ibis …”

  “But we don’t have time!” I moan. “I need a toilet that works!” Then I remember that mysterious door in the sitting room. I must be smiling a grinchy grin, because Justin looks alarmed.

  “There’s a bathroom downstairs,” I point out.

  “You can’t go downstairs—that door is locked,” he says as I walk across the sitting room toward the door with my hand out for the knob. “Come on, I’ll open the door to the shop. If the shuttle comes it’ll wait for us.”

  I mutter a few words and the knob yields with only a little creak. “See, it isn’t locked. I’m not doing any harm, just using the toilet. It’s a cosmic law that only one toilet at a time can ever clog in any given building. Come down with me if it makes you feel better.” If I look particularly mischievous he’ll surely accompany me, which is exactly what I want him to do.

  “Just don’t touch anything, all right?” he says as he follows me down the darkened stairwell. “You said it yourself, Lucretia Hartmann is a stickler.”

  I laugh. “ ‘Stickler’—ha! I’m quite sure I used a more colorful word than that.”

  We open the door that brings us to Lucretia’s office, and I lead him by the hand to the loo and flip the light switch. Potpourri on the top of the cistern, for Pete’s sake, and a plunger in the corner that looks like it’s never been used.

  I shut the door behind us and draw the Connemara postcard from my back pocket. “Um, I don’t need to watch,” Justin says.

  “Don’t worry, dearie.” I squeeze his hand. “You won’t remember a thing.”

  A FEW SECONDS later he knocks his head against the wooden door of a toilet stall. We can hear the strains of bladder relief and crude masculine laughter coming from the far end of the room, and cigarette smoke
wafts through the narrow window at the top of the wall. We’re here! I’ve been through the loo flue a million and one times, but I still get a thrill every time I go someplace new.

  “Didn’t bump your head too hard, I hope,” I whisper.

  “I’m all woozy. Where …” He pauses to mull over the vague memories I’ve just blinkered him with: of a shuttle ride to Newark, a long flight, and a bus trip with views of rolling green countryside through a fogged-up window. “Hey, why did you follow me into the stall?”

  “Couldn’t bear to be parted from you for even a moment. Shh, we can’t let them know we’re in here.” I relax as I hear the door slam and the voices recede. “Okay. We can come out now.” Seems the WC is in an alley behind the pub. I lead him inside and down a narrow hallway toward the front room. We edge past Irish folks of all ages chatting in twos and threes, and I nod at everybody whose gaze I meet.

  We stand on the threshold of the pub’s main room, a cozy little space with an open turf fire and a group of crusty old men nursing their pints along the bar. I lift a finger to get the bartender’s attention and flash a winning smile. “Two pints of Guinness, please.”

  I look about the room, at the rusted tobacco ads on the walls and the rosary dangling from a shelf lined with bottles of Jamesons and Tullamore Dew. I wonder if Jonah ever came here—and if he did, was this place the same then as it is now? I glance at Justin, who is also looking about the room with all the delight I feel.

  One of the old men standing at the bar turns round and looks me up and down. “Is that an American accent I hear?”

  “It is,” say I.

  He takes a sup from his pint glass and eyes me thoughtfully. He wears a tweed cap and a jacket with elbow patches, and the hand that holds his pint glass is gnarled from a lifetime of heavy farmwork.

  “Where in America are ye from?”

  “New Jersey.”

  “Ah,” he replies. “I’ve a cousin in New Jersey.” He drains his glass, places it on the bar, and abruptly leaves the room. Justin looks at me quizzically.

  “Suppose you can’t expect much in the way of conversation from a man who’s only got cows to talk to all day. Say, can you find us a place to sit?” Justin spots a free table at the far corner of the room and carries our drinks over while I’m paying for them.

  A man sitting alone at a table by the fire leans over as Justin lays down our glasses. “Sorry,” he says, “but ye can’t sit there. It’s reserved for the musicians.”

  I come over to the table as Justin’s picking up our drinks again. “Ooh! So there’ll be a session tonight?” I take a quick appraisal of the stranger: somewhere in his thirties, I’d say, and not altogether bad looking. Pleasant face. We could do worse for a drinking partner.

  He nods. “Sit with me, if ye like. I’m not waiting for anyone.” He tells us his name is Billy Byrne and Justin introduces us in turn.

  Well, we soon find out why Billy Byrne is sitting alone: the man will not shut up. It’s probably his curious penchant for ancient gossip that’s keeping him at a table by himself even though the room is filling quickly. He seems to know all the dirt about every soul in the place, even the little old lady behind the bar who levels the head off every pint with a butter knife, then licks it on both sides as she hands over the glass. “That’s Oonagh Coyne. She stole her sister’s husband. Of course, they weren’t married yet. But ye can’t imagine the falling-out when it came time to divide the inheritance.”

  “How do you know all that?” I ask. “She must be well past eighty.”

  “A good scandal never goes stale,” he replies with a shrug.

  I tell Mr. O’Blatherty this is my first trip to Ireland. “Mine too,” Justin says, piping up. “So I guess you’re from around here, Billy?”

  “Ballybeg.” He clasps his mitts round his pint glass, though he doesn’t take a sip. “It’s just up the road.”

  At first glance I’d judged Billy Byrne youngish and harmless, but as I study him further the two-day stubble and the crags under his eyes give me pause. He turns his face to the fire, and his profile assumes harder edges in the flickering light. Then I look down at his fingers and realize he can’t be in his thirties—it takes a long time to acquire such dark tobacco stains on one’s fingers, even if he smoked his first at the age of nine. It isn’t often I come across such a slippery one—I can’t get a handle on him at all.

  Soon the musicians arrive, their Gore-Tex jackets dripping rain onto the floorboards. They set down their cases and a barmaid arrives with a round of pints for the newcomers. There’s a fiddler, a drummer, and an accordionist. They take a while tuning up, during which time Billy Byrne regales us with more odd tales that, by rights, should have been buried in the local churchyard along with the parties involved.

  Billy Byrne zips his lips when the session starts. This isn’t like most music I’ve heard in taverns, where the musicians are appreciated primarily for the sake of ambience. Nobody speaks while these windblown middle-aged men are playing; the whole room lapses into a companionable silence, and hands and boots softly keep the four-four time.

  Then a pretty local girl treats us to an interlude of ballads, romantically grim in the tradition of this country. The seal woman, tamed by an island man, finds her coat and returns to the sea. A dead lover taps on her windowpane in the middle of the night.

  Then she sings a song, unaccompanied, about her man going off to fight in the Easter Rising and how she’ll never see him again. Someone so young really hasn’t any business singing about things she knows nothing of, and yet the heart she pours into those lines is so uncanny that I have to second-guess my assumption of her ordinariness. She stands up from the table amid a round of warm, familiar applause, empty glass in hand, but when we meet eyes I see no flash of kinship, no glowing moon on my thumbnail.

  Justin gets up to order us another round with the euros that have just materialized in his wallet, and Byrne glances after him. “Now, tell me one thing,” he says, leaning closer and placing his paw on my knee. “Have I any chance at all?”

  I choke back a laugh. “Certainly not, Mr. Byrne. Oh, no offense,” I say quickly. “But you must know what they say about Irishmen.”

  He leans closer still, and I turn my head to avoid a whiff of his bog breath. “What’s that?” he asks.

  “All potatoes, no meat.”

  Billy roars with laughter. Must be even drunker than he looks.

  I watch Justin standing at the bar, leaning in to listen to what the old farmers are saying and then tossing his head back in genuine amusement.

  When he finally comes back to the table I flash him a teasing smile. “Look at you, hobnobbing with the locals.”

  He nuzzles my neck and doesn’t notice that I’ve just spilled a bit of my Guinness in his lap. “I’ll hob your nob.”

  The stout drips down my glass and I laughingly lick my fingers. “Ooh, you dirty boy!” I glance over and notice Byrne’s gone off to the loo.

  The musicians pause for a sup, and the fiddler leans over and taps Justin on the knee. “Did no one tell you about that table?”

  “Oh, was this table reserved as well?”

  The man shakes his head. “It’s bad luck to sit at that table.”

  “Why?”

  Again the fiddler shakes his head. “Worse luck for me if I told you.”

  Justin gives me an uneasy look, and I shrug. He decides to answer with a laugh. “You aren’t through yet, are you?” he asks the fiddler.

  “We’ll do a few more.”

  “Any more ballads?”

  “There’ll be ballads if you’re up for singing ’em.”

  “Oh, not me,” Justin says with a laugh. “But my girlfriend has a marvelous voice.” (It’s the first time he’s ever referred to me as his girlfriend. I smile a secret, bitter smile at this. First times and last times should never be one and the same.)

  A hush falls awfully suddenly on the crowd in this little room. “I don’t know any Irish songs,” I sa
y, “but I can sing you one in German.”

  I turn to my right and see Billy’s back in his seat, gazing at me with a rather unnerving intensity. “Do,” he says, and the musicians respond encouragingly as well. “We’d love to hear it.”

  So I take a deep breath and sing a song they used to play at the cabaret at the end of the night, “Irgendwo auf der Welt”:

  Somewhere in the world there’s a little bit of happiness,

  and I’ve been dreaming of that for a long, long time …

  Justin doesn’t take his eyes off me—not once—and after the last line’s passed from my lips I take a breath and revel in the enraptured silence. Then there is applause, cheers and whistles even. I begin to feel a little delirious with all the attention, laughing inordinately at the musicians’ jokes and responding a little too warmly when Justin puts his arm around me. I need some fresh air.

  I look to Billy Byrne. “Is there anyplace we can get something to eat at this time of night?”

  “There’s a chipper van just up the road. We’ll leave by the back way.”

  So Billy leads us past the toilets, through an alley, and back onto the main street a few doors down from the pub’s front entrance. To our right there’s a row of thatched whitewashed cottages. To our left, twenty yards down the road, we see a big white truck with a side counter where a woman is handing out cans of cola and burgers in paper boxes. The cold fluorescent light casts a shimmer on the rain-slicked road. The image is stark as a Hopper, and the quiet on the street is broken only by the drone of a small generator on the ground by the rear tires.

  Justin joins the queue and asks our companion if he’d like anything. “Nothing for me, thanks,” Byrne replies.

  “What do you think I should order? I want the real Irish junk food experience.”

  “If I were you, I’d have the curry chips.”

  So that’s what Justin orders, along with a burger for me and a couple cans of soda, and the woman behind the counter hands him down a big box of French fries doused in brown muck. I give Justin a look—half doubt, half disgust—but he smiles and tucks in with good cheer.