by Sara Dillon
I first saw Ireland when I was sixteen. My parents wanted me away for a while, that was part of it. Because of Miles Bradford. I went to Spain and spent time with my brother. It was during the Vietnam War and he was in the navy and lived in an apartment building that rose up on a cliff overlooking the beach. I left Andalusia after some weeks and went by train alone—first to Madrid, then to Paris, all alone. Then on a boat train to Dublin. My parents must have been out of their minds.
I went all by myself, my face pressed against the glass of the train windows. Everyone talked to me then, I suppose because I had young, lovely eyes. I was pretty, petite et sexy, kogata bijin. There were dozens of different motifs along the way; types of conversations and kisses and various forms of pretence. Then I was in Galway and it was grey and still and perfectly beautiful, its medieval boundaries still intelligible, countryside meeting the grey edge of the city with finality. The sky, the land and the walls all breathed together; inhaling and exhaling in unison.
Clement, Gramma’s cousin and a Christian Brother, asked his supervisor to take the monastery car and fetch me. I was waiting in the Imperial Hotel in Galway at Eyre Square. Galway City was quiet then; it had its beginning and its end, you could hear the water lap lap against steel drums at the harbor. The matching click click of shoes on the grey stone.
Clement was filled with joy that I had come. He had arranged everything for me. He told me he had a motorbike for the fine weather and promised we would ride all over on it.
The houses were plain and stark then, each one surrounded by trees and vines. The houses were serious about their role in the countryside. I was told that people didn’t dare knock down famine houses.
At the inn in the morning, I heard cattle bash into the wall downstairs that fronted the road, heard them as they passed from one pasture to another in the mist. I woke up to the sound of the mooing and the sticks whipped through the air to get them moving again.
More than twenty years later, in the 1990s, having no idea what else I should do, I accepted a post as they called it in the Law Faculty in Dublin. I bought an old grey Opel Kadett, and just as if I had brought bad luck or an ill wind with me, they started to take the country away from me. The whole thing. There was such determination to build all over it, huge houses in pink and white, with turrets and fairy tale staircases, as close to the road as they could, all lined up in a row, for mile after mile. They knocked down the ancient stone walls and stood about laughing, putting up concrete Dallas fences, whose posts would fall down after a few months, and stay dangling forever after.
There were more and more houses, larger and more preposterous, at the edge of every town, spilling out into the countryside, each one calling out for attention, six bedrooms, eight bedrooms, all ensuite. Some were modeled on Graceland, with huge gaping windows. The famine houses and the Land Commission houses began to be knocked down. I wanted to buy them all and save them, but finally settled on one at Park Baun. One day, as I drove into the nearby town of Turlough, I saw that all the trees and hedgerows had been ripped out, leaving fields of mud along the road. I ran into the hardware shop and demanded to know what was going on. Tis the new Turlough greenbelt, I was told.
No one seemed to know or care what I was talking about. With each trip to Turlough, there were more and more planning permission notices in the fields. They know what they’re doing, Seanie’s mother said to me, her eyes blazing.
Seanie. Well, that’s another story.
I rented a flat in Dublin and went out to Galway every weekend, or nearly, for the first while taking the train as far as Roscommon, and then later driving in my old Opel Kadett, by way of Mullingar. After a while, the car knew the road so well, it more or less went on its own. It had its own personal track from Ranelagh to Park Baun, Park Baun where the trees sheltered the house and the garden sloped down into lower, wet ground and the old pine tree made a low pitched sighing noise. The fox hole was near the base of the pine tree, with white feathers stirring in the wind near the opening.
There was always a new threat of something—that all the foxes would be culled for eating the birds, that the badgers would be hunted down because of TB in cattle, that a thousand new houses would be going up in all directions, that the roads would be widened, or better yet that fifty new roads would be slipped into the County Development Plan, that the largest equestrian center ever seen would be built, that Turlough would be the new site for all of Europe’s rock concerts. That Galway would be a place for cruise ships to call, that a million square feet of retail would be built. And still, for a long time, for years, I kept on going out.
At Park Baun, I would open the door and smell the must and the cold walls and the turf fire from the last time I’d been out. In one of the bedroom drawers, I had a collection of old religious pictures salvaged from now defunct and fallen in cottages, one copy of the Proclamation of the Irish Republic, and a framed postcard of Padraig Pearse and his company of revolutionaries, all seated around what looked like a picnic table, and as if they’d all just come from the barber shop.
If only they’d done it the way Michael Collins once imagined—everyone speaking real Irish, with the curses and blessings, not the Ros na Rún kind of language, and wearing Celtic dress for formal occasions. I would even have gone for a king and queen.
I kept asking people, why is it that when we think of the Irish past we get stuck with a portrait of a nineteenth century farm worker? What did Irish people look like at that moment in the murky middle ages, when they realized, Hey, we’re cooked. It’s all over. No more fire leaping. I kept asking everyone I thought might have some clue about this; that is, why the visual blank? But then I gave up. No one seemed to have considered the looks on faces and the haircuts and such of the fourteenth or fifteenth century. Only the late nineteenth century fellow with a cap on his head and arms folded, or cycling off to mass.
I had wanted someone to agree that the loss of a nomad’s life was a particular heart breaker; and that there might be analogies with the traveling people of the present time.
To say that no one showed any interest in such matters is quite the understatement. These were topics for Irish Americans, a laugh. In one of the legal writing program hypos constructed by my Law Faculty colleagues, a foreign lecturer came to Ireland to study bovine law, but found that she was forced to teach contracts instead. And who might that have been? The meanness of it.
I so wanted to do up that house at Park Baun. For a long time, I wasn’t able to accomplish much but hang curtains and slap a coat of paint on the woodworm eaten table. I swept the concrete floor and huge clouds of dust arose. I ran my hands along the wooden mantle pieces in the bedrooms, hand-carved with archaic looking hearts and stars, and the heavily painted green metal grates.
I liked best to stand in the doorway, holding a cigarette. Or just to saunter around the house, on the concrete walkway, same as the ones that encircle all Irish houses of that type, kicking at the grass that tried to invade the cracks. The sun would disappear as quickly as it came, and sheets of rain move in in the blink of an eye—just as used to happen twenty or twenty-five years earlier.
The blue phone would ring almost as soon as I parked the car in the front garden and opened the door. As I talked, I saw the front gate, disused and tied together with string, at the end of the equally disused path, one vanishing point that ended in the road, and then somehow the raised green fields beyond.
But I was so scared at night, scared to death. I would leave my cousin Bridie home and drive back to Park Baun on my own. Despite all the local building, there hadn’t been a dent made in the darkness on these back roads. The fog still swirled in and out at the edge of the car’s headlights, and as I turned from the main road to the side road, to the dirt track leading to Park Baun, the likelihood of being attacked seemed greater by the second. I felt I was being watched as I opened the door. My hands shook. I had my last cig and a swig of red wine in the cold and dark and tried to relight all the fires. This cou
ld take until well into the middle of the night.
As I lay awake, I would hear cars approach, at ten or fifteen minute intervals. I’d creep over to the enormous front window, as old as the house and completely unrenovated, crouching down and watching the road so that I wouldn’t be seen. Each car would slow on the bend; I’d think it was going to stop. This is it, I would think, the big one; I should have had that panic button installed after all. Then the car would drive on; these were only the cars of the half drunk, the curious, the locals taking a short cut.
Not infrequently, it took me until the first light of day at four or five to finally fall asleep; the first reddish streak over the trees was my signal and I would be in a deep sleep within seconds.
But when I was in Ireland at sixteen, that first time, I was never afraid of that pea soup darkness in the countryside. I would walk all night down bog roads by myself; I would even hitchhike in the dead of night. But twenty years on from then, there were stories almost every day of women attacked in their houses in the West of Ireland, elderly women and divorcee artists alike, down roads just like the one to Park Baun. My neighbor, on her own for thirty years and counting, locked herself in her upstairs bedroom at night; she would come to see me when I arrived from Dublin and recite the prayer she always said at the top of her voice for protection before going to bed.
Maybe the protective spirits had gone, withdrawn.
The little people, leaping from one stone to another, holding tiny lights in their hands. They decided to go, to clear out.
All four houses in Park Baun got telephones at once. At least we could phone out now, we said. For a time I felt that I had brought some life back to the disappearing village. On the other hand, many of the stories of assaults had the culprits cutting the phone wires.
They would have to climb high up a tree or over the roof itself, but they might chance it; it was not out of the question
The piano; early 1970s
When I was fourteen, I said a kind of goodbye to the sordid surroundings of that public school in Vermont. When we left New York, we had to leave Catholic school as well, and the new public school was not only a shock, but ugly. I walked to school on the first day with new yellow knee socks held up by rubber rings, and a white corduroy jumper. Suddenly, in this new place, all the talk was of breasts and slam books; the books were ugly as well, set to color coded reading levels.
But at fourteen, I said goodbye to it; the smell of beer, parties in deserted cabins along the lake.
I am going to stay in, all the time, I announced to Gramma and Daddy. I started to teach myself piano. I had known a bit as a child, but now I became obsessed with the piano; sitting at the bench for hours every day. I listened to recordings of Rubenstein playing Chopin, over and over; rather as I now read the same books over and over, year after year. The Sun Also Rises every other spring. Howard’s End.
To the Lighthouse and Lily Briscoe’s unfinished painting.
Daddy came into the living room with his newspaper to listen. I love to hear you, honey, he said, so innocent, too generous. I did so well so fast, then couldn’t improve beyond a certain point. That is so like me, a quick ride to something that seems like brilliance, then a fading away. No cashing in on anything, ever. I have never cashed in on a thing, in fact. I saw others spin straw into gold, routinely, but not me. No recognition. Why was that, how bizarre it was. There are no random patterns, Una would say, you must be making this happen. Maybe it was the mystical thing, but it did not seem to be a coincidental pattern; it was just something about me; zoom zoom zoom based on an obsession, then fading out of sight like a comet.
That summer when I was fourteen was like an old pathway down a backyard from my very young childhood, all lined with heavy peonies, pink and white. Piano in the evening, my job on the ferry boat serving hot dogs, and the beach at the lake when I could, baking in the feeble Vermont sun, dreaming of my great goodbye to all those who were beneath me.
I would go to high school and everyone I had known before would be gone or ignored. I would reinvent everything. I went to Aunt Olive’s house with Gramma and Daddy every Sunday afternoon; an hour’s drive to Hyde Park at the edge of the Northeast Kingdom. It was like a dream for them, as if I’d reverted to a small child, compliant and polite. Even Una had reached a stage when she would resist these Sunday trips, but I reveled in them.
Aunt Olive had never married, but had taught math for decades. As for marriage, Those who would have me I wouldn’t have, she always said, and more tellingly, but those I would have had wouldn’t have me.
I was all ready for high school; my clothes were all picked out. I was too hasty, as usual; I was dressed for the real cold when it was only early September, with work boots and a plaid jacket from the Johnson Woolen Mills. That was in keeping with the times; the days of the Vietnam War, and Burlington’s City Hall Park packed with vagrant teenagers. They sat in circles, the girls with long dresses fanning in the breeze.
I signed up for some of the very hardest high school courses I could find; the most difficult and obscure English and writing and history. On the other hand, the math and science were just normal, ordinary. I hated the smell of the chemistry lab, all those silly numbers and letters to be memorized from that chart. I couldn’t see the signs on the periodic table relating to any real objects; I only pretended to go along with it.
It was just how I pretended to learn swimming; I would obey instructions and appear to breathe as part of the stroke, but in fact I was just opening my mouth without drawing air. I’d wait until I couldn’t stand it any longer and just stop swimming. I had no intention of learning to swim properly; I had no intention of understanding what it was the chemical formulae actually stood for.
It was Gramma who heard about a piano teacher, Madame Celeste; in fact, she met her at the department store, where Madame Celeste would breeze in and talk about gorgeous fabrics, and how women should never ever wear jeans. Madame came from France during the war, somehow lost her first husband, and had remarried a good-looking man who sold cars and drank too much. Madame Celeste told Gramma she would like to meet me; in fact, she eventually took some pleasure in planning my life for me. From time to time, Madame even introduced me to skinny teenage boys with European connections.
As well as that, more than thirty years on, I am still laughing at things Miles Bradford said.
It was Miles who made me think that I would have everything. Or, he confirmed my childhood idea that I would. He made it very plain to me: I would have everything I wanted. Not money or anything so crass. But I would ask for something and receive it, without question or struggle. It was, apparently, mine for the taking.
Miles Bradford was the teacher of my Western Civilization class, at the high school. After I had said goodbye to everyone and started learning the piano again, then studying with Madame Celeste.
When he entered the classroom that mild, early September afternoon, he was wearing a tie and a sweater, probably olive green. He walked slightly tilted to one side, as if his briefcase was terribly heavy. He was laughing to himself, at the tie, perhaps, or at the classroom.
He had the face of a Viking; wheat colored hair and a tidy beard, long grey eyes and a hint of freckles across the bridge of his nose.
He was smirking as he entered, that is a better way to put it, as if everything that was to happen, and that would ever happen, was terribly funny.
He made no attempt to conceal how uproarious it all was: the outfit, the briefcase (the briefcase was very old, where had he got it?), the room, the view, the blackboard.
And there I sat in my new work boots, chosen so carefully at a discount store.
I don’t know if I was so pretty then; I suppose I was, though I was very small. I had always been the smallest in my class, but with some sort of charm; what can I call it? I always said that I could take a bath in the sink if need be. Actually, I never knew, then or long after, if I was the most beautiful creature on earth or terribly plan; it was, so
to speak, a fluid sense of the self. For girls, there is the ball and chain of what they look like, beauty being the shorthand route to drama and excitement. Beauty was part of the lazy person’s way of thinking.
I would never have asked anyone in any case; I could not stand to hear myself described in objective terms.
On the good side, I guess it depended on what my look seemed to elicit.
I don’t know, I’ve never understood looks. I’ve never understood the humiliation or the limitation of being tied to one’s looks.
Miles Bradford told us we would cover ancient Greece and Rome, the idea of empire, and all the major isms. There would be socialism, totalitarianism, nationalism; and then he would make jokes by adding, say, defeatism. As to word derivation, think it over, he would say, Autocracy, what could be easier, a self propelled cracy.
His beat up leather briefcase was a bag full of historical events. But about many of these there was no laughing, as they were not funny. The holocaust, the Soviet gulag, refugees from the major wars. He showed us films of farmers burned out of their houses, their fields still smoldering, bodies left lying in the yard. Miles, or Mr. Bradford as I always referred to him, folded his arms and squinted out at the lake.
If I’m not mistaken, he even wore a jacket with patches on the sleeves. And with his brown corduroy trousers, yes, he wore a pair of work boots, too, though not as high up on the ankle as mine.
Of course, I had recently said goodbye to everything, the smell of beer and the talk of cars and dropping aspirins into coca cola; who was pregnant and who had nice legs; I would never again talk to or acknowledge those who wrote each other notes with bad spelling like, yeah I love him to, Jennie. Recall that I had just said goodbye. I was new in this large, sprawling high school. There was my writing seminar, there were tapes of Dylan Thomas reciting, there was Madame Celeste’s house after school, and there was Western Civilization.