Cait had the strongest voice besides Martin, and when she arched to reach a note her breasts swelled beneath her raggedy school jumper, her lips parted, and I saw her sharp uneven teeth, the chipped enamel from fighting with her older brothers. Scars from the barbed wire shone long and pale on the underside of her raised chin—a shattered cobweb of fine white strands. She punched Martin when he missed a verse or when he sang her part and they laughed.
Come on now, why aren’t you singing? Cait shouted during the chorus.
I shook my head and said: I can’t sing.
Go on out of that, sure I’ve heard you—you’re a beautiful singer. Her eyes were the same dark blue as her blouse and skirt and the sky falling outside.
Ah, go awn, sure you have the voice of a little angel, Sheila Power mimicked and Patsy Whelan jeered and blood warmed my face. We reached a rise in the road, the valley falling away below us, the bus shaking and shuddering, Fitzy cursing, struggling with the stubborn gears, and the sun burst against the glass and Cait dissolved in amber light as Martin bellowed out the words to “The Gypsy Rover.”
At the Falls Cait and I were the last off the school bus. She pulled me back as the others walked ahead. Wait, she said, and stepped into the bower, lazily picked wild blackberries and raspberries from the hedgerows, pushed them into her mouth. Let them go on, she said.
They rounded the bend in the lane, and Cait leant her hip in toward me, pushed moist, dark-stained lips on mine. We stood there, resting our lips on each other’s, pushing, and testing. Our lips parted and our mouths opened. Our hands tightened within each other’s grasp.
A dog barked. A tractor was making its way up the lane. There was a gun blast from across the fields, someone out hunting hare. I could hear my heart. We were breathing hard together; everything was moving around us and beyond us but we were still. I reached up and touched the center of her chest with the palm of my hand, my fingers splayed on the rise of her breasts, and I could feel her warmth and her heart there, as loud as my own. When we pulled back it was to catch our breaths. She opened her eyes, and the lashes curled darkly to her cheeks. We stared at each other, and the world seemed very far away.
There was a sudden rustling amongst the scioc and a man stumbled off the sty and out into the road carrying a shotgun and a gunnysack. He wore a belt of gun shells, high hunting boots, muck-encrusted jeans, and a raggedy green jumper. Startled, we stepped apart.
Carry on lads, he said and scowled at us. Carry on. He passed into the next pasture, cursing as he clambered over the loose stone wall, blood-spattered ears poking from his sack. From the wall, we followed his progress until he was a dark figure on the rising horizon. We stood smiling across from each other, watching the other’s expression, and waiting.
You taste like jam, I said stupidly.
Cait grinned and took my hand again and together we walked back up the lane without a word.
Blaggard. That’s what Mother used to call my uncle Brendan. By the time I was thirteen he’d been blacklisted from almost every pub in town and had been sent down for numerous fishing violations on the river; he collected the dole yet worked openly; he populated the town with his offspring so that you saw familiar shaggy-headed blue-eyed babbies everywhere; and he joked that the welfare allotted for the extra children made him the drinker he was.
The truth was that most of Brendan’s children were children lent from one family to the other, so that the whole town had a surplus of unidentifiable boys and girls wandering around. One day their name was MacGuire or Power, the next, Furlong or Dylan. The council workers couldn’t keep up with their faces and names, not in New Rowan. I assumed that one day the children would forget who their real parents were just as the real parents would forget to reclaim them in the end, and then they would be true exiles, roaming endlessly across the quay, up and down Mary Street, searching the pubs and betting offices and churches, and wandering forever like some lost tribe of Israel.
The back door slammed and Uncle Brendan came running down the hall, his boots clapping the lino, and we cheered from the kitchen table when we saw his flushed face, his wide grin, and the sack he’d taken from his shoulder. It was less the salmon and more the surprise of him, of his misadventures, his close escapes with the law, and his imminent capture that excited us, and about which we created imaginary stories long after he was gone. Brendan threw his sack onto the table and the fish slid out, bloodied.
There you are, Moira, two for you and four for Quinn the fishmonger. The next time you’re in town you can settle with me. The boys are on me tail today, haven’t been able to lose them the last hour.
Brendan Dolan, if they had any sense, they’d have given up on you by now. Mother took the two fish and placed them in the sink.
If they had any sense, they’d just let me fish, the effers. What comes from the river is for anyone’s taking.
That’s not what the law says.
Fuck the law.
Brendan threw his cap on the table and pulled up a chair. Mother had already placed a cup of tea before him and a plate of rashers and eggs and he attacked it, knife and fork flashing, with the force of someone who hadn’t eaten in days.
He shoveled the food into his mouth, plowed the plate clean with bread, then wiped at his mouth with the back of his hand. Whisht, he said and bent his head like a dog. We sat still and listened to the silence. Faintly, when the wind banged against the door, there was the sound of men’s voices.
For fucksake, Brendan said, the effers haven’t given up the bloody chase yet. It’s that fucker Mitchell and his gang, he’s been policing the river for twenty years and it’s his own private vendetta to get me. He put back his tea and pushed away from the table, looked at my sister and me. Well, lads, I’m off. He pulled his cap low over his brow, then picked up his sack. I’ll see you in the town on Thursday, Moira, and we’ll settle?
I’ll be at the co-op at nine, you can wait for me outside if you like.
With the women? I will in me arse. If you want me, I’ll be in Sullivan’s on the quay with the lads.
You and your lads. Mother shook her head.
You always stand by your lads, they’ll never let you down—isn’t that right, Michael?
That’s right, Uncle Brendan, I said.
Brendan winked, then clattered down the hall. A gust of cold air blew in and then the door slammed after him.
I imagined Brendan running across the fields, long legs moving him forward through the unthreshed fields so quickly he is a blur amongst the green, the sack of salmon banging his back. The sun is lighting in the west and he’s been running for half an hour and there’s still no slowing him—if anything he’s running faster. The fishing authorities are far behind. He can no longer hear their curses, their rants of rage. He hurdles a low wall and lets out a holler—he knows they will not catch him—not today; today he is much too fast. The green fields spread out before him. Light bends and arcs in the V of the valley. Along the riverbank, down small dead-end boreens, through pigpens, and across farmyards, dogs snapping and snarling at his heels, Brendan never stops running, and we’re glad for him—this bandit, this outlaw—he is one of us, he’s family.
Will they catch him? I asked Mother, and grinned.
Catch Brendan Dolan? She considered this for a moment, looked out the window over the distant fields.
She shook her head. They won’t catch him. But someone will.
The Grand Hotel lay half a mile outside of town, crumbling slowly into the riverbank. In other days, boats and barges had docked there to enjoy riverfront dining, and had then continued down the Barrow to Waterford, or up further, to the three rivers. It had held fine banquets and even finer dances. Mother often spoke of it, of how Mickey Boyle and the Dublin Brass would come down from the city of a weekend once a month. She said that if the dances at the Grand Ballroom had continued, she would have been married off long before she ever had the bad luck of meeting my father.
That summer, when the old, d
ilapidated, and long-vacant hotel was purchased, no one gave it a second thought. Properties around New Rowan had been bought before with the promise of work, of renovation, and of jobs, but the money had never made it to the town; the developments never happened and the Barrow continued to churn dirty and lazy down to the Flats; nothing changed. But then, a prospective land developer had never come to actually live in New Rowan either, not until the American, John Longley, came with his wife and young daughter.
In church of a Sunday, you couldn’t help but notice the Americans. They came up in their new Range Rover and they always wore different clothes. Mr. Longley passed through the throng of men smoking and stamping their mucky Wellingtons outside the church, and, as always, he said hello and wished them well. Some of the men, or perhaps their children, worked for Mr. Longley at the hotel, or on his acreage with his horses and dogs. Some were builders or contractors who’d worked on his house and the remodeling of the Grand Hotel. Some were farmers and fishermen whom he deferred to in matters of breeding and hunting. On weekends he sometimes went to watch the dogs coursing, or he might even be seen with his daughter at the stock-car races that were put on in large fields, where young farmers raced old Leyland Minis and Morris Minors and Fiats around the muck and grass, thumping and grinding endlessly into one another to hundreds of local cheers. He seemed to be open to everything and he wanted to know all the things that he did not. In that way, people believed him different from other Yanks, and they respected him for it.
On one side Mr. Longley held his wife’s hand, on the other, his daughter’s. Her bright blond hair was thick and curly and shone with the unnatural sheen of a wig, but the girl herself seemed pale and sickly. Her footsteps were measured and slow, and her father hugged her to his hip. He did not seem concerned about the way people looked at them, and there was a grace in this that I envied. But they were also outsiders, so talk could never hurt them the way it did if you were from the town or the country. If you were an outsider, you could escape the tongues because they did not hold you to the same rules, secret laws, and exactions. The Longleys seemed far removed from all that as they trod the gravel to Mass. As Mr. Longley raised his daughter up, held her in the crook of his arm, and together they dipped, extended their arms, and reached their hands into the dark holy water font, I saw them as hope and as a reprieve from everything I knew, from all the mute estrangements that the country imposed.
Whenever I lit candles at church for my mother, and for my father—wherever he was in America—I also lit one for the Longleys’ ailing daughter, and I did so with a faith stronger than I’d had before. Good things were happening and they were happening for a reason: we all deserved it. Certainly the Longleys seemed to deserve good things happening to them. And because they recognized the goodness in us, and were aware of everything that was good here, they reminded us of it as well.
The Longleys seemed to have such a grace about them that it was, at first, not easily recognizable, for it was not something I saw in any other. In a way, they seemed much too kind and tender to be in the country. They seemed exotic and untouchable, and suggestive of all the kinds of things that were possible if only you were American. But while that sense of possibility was beautiful, it also seemed naive and dangerous. No matter how much we wanted to believe in such a thing, we knew that, ultimately, we met the Longleys with disdain, for they reminded us of the softness of newborn things in the country in spring, before they learnt to grow hard and coarse and mean, if they were to survive at all.
the hidden country
June 1980
Aunt Una used to say a lack of moonlight meant that witches were at work. If the cows did not give milk, and they sometimes didn’t, she’d say the Host were on the wind and no one was safe out on the roads or fields that night. On such nights, if you were caught unprepared and you could see no lights, you shouldn’t listen to the sound of your footsteps in the dark; it was a trick the Host used to make you go round in circles until you were outside of this time and lost to the world forever.
Una said it was easy to spot those who’d once counted their footsteps at the urging of the Host. They were always walking in the wrong direction or looking like they had somewhere else to be. Their minds were never in the here and now. They took to the fields instead of the roads and they often forgot where their homes were.
She said that was the problem with my mother—she’d once followed the sounds of her own footsteps in the dark and now she was so often confused because she was under their spell. Only by going to them completely, by stepping out of this world and into that other, would she be herself. But there was no coming back from that. Once there you could never return. And although she never said it, I knew that my aunt considered that a kind of death as well.
Once, as she’d recited this tale, I’d shouted, as if I had caught her in a lie, You said Mammy was cursed because she’d broken a sacred promise! You didn’t say anything about footsteps!
Aye, I did, she said. There’s a geis on your mammy, and she must have broken its demands upon her. She must have —.
Well then? What about the footsteps? You said it was the footsteps that made her the way she is.
I don’t know. Bless us and save us, Michael, I wished I did, but I don’t.
You don’t know anything! I screamed. I was on the verge of tears. Mammy is not cursed, so she’s not. She’s not. She’s not! You’re just a thick, stupid old woman!
Aunt Una stared at me, wide-eyed, lips trembling. Then she stared at the ground and paled slightly. After a moment she went back to her knitting, but she wasn’t counting, or watching her rows; she was staring at the glints of light the fire threw across the rods. Her breath was coming in gulps from her mouth, her chest heaved, the knitting needles clicked and clacked violently, and in her large, fast hands, the rows continued to grow and the ball of wool unraveled on the floor like a mealy maggot from a rotten apple.
I stood with Milo and Lugh in the cowshed watching Matt DeBurgh struggle with a birthing cow that was in trouble. He had both arms thrust into her, his face pressed close to her shanks, and he was sweating. Red faced, he cursed and shifted his weight. The cord’s around its damn neck! he hollered. It’s too feckin still. Why didn’t you call me sooner! Jaysus, Milo, sure you know this one never has an easy time of it.
Milo Meaney’s face colored, and he shifted his feet, and finally rested with his weight on one hip. Like DeBurgh, he was a big man who didn’t know what to do with his body when he wasn’t working. Ah, sure I know, Matt, don’t I know myself I should have called you sooner.
The cow bellowed and tossed its wide beautiful neck; its eyes rolled, its legs moved weakly. DeBurgh worked and worked at turning the calf in her womb. The veins stood out on his throat and his neck bunched. It seemed as if he were holding his breath and at any moment he would collapse and lie gasping next to the cow. The cow’s stomach bulged and tremored with unnatural movement. DeBurgh inhaled sharply, cursed, and held his breath again. Something moved violently in the cow’s stomach and then, slowly, DeBurgh eased his arms down the cow’s slick channel. Fluid spilt around his arms and shoulders.
Hold on, he said, hold on now. Here you come, wee one, come on now. Cradled in his hands, the head of the calf, brown and slick and matted, emerged. Once the head was through, the rest of the body slipped out—unmoving limbs wrapped in the mucus sack. A large white patch showed above its pink, still nostrils. Its eyes were closed.
Michael, grab those towels and start rubbing as hard as you can! DeBurgh shouted. DeBurgh held its mouth and parted the pink lips. He cleared the nostrils with a syringe, lowered his head to the calf’s, and breathed as deeply as he could. I grasped at the edges of skin that enclosed it and moved the towel vigorously back and forth across its chest and stomach as hard and as fast as I could. DeBurgh’s big frame shuddered with his breathing. Minutes passed and the sound of it filled up the shed. The cow was quiet—it seemed to have sensed its loss and given itself over to it completel
y. It stretched its neck and stared toward the wall, grunting deeply.
The calf snorted, blew mucus from its nostrils; fluid dribbled past its lips. Its eyes fluttered, and its legs began to kick.
DeBurgh fell back, breathing deeply. The calf bawled. Beneath my hands its stomach rose and fell and I could feel its heartbeat thrumming with new, raw life. I gasped and watched it clamber to its feet, tumble, and rise again. The cow bellowed and turned its head toward the calf, and both moved to each other through a beautiful undeniable instinct.
DeBurgh wiped his hands on his apron and shook his head. It’s a sight all right, makes you think there’s a reason for everything, wha? And he smiled his big stained teeth at me.
August 1980
The Ball at the Grand Hotel was just for the people of New Rowan. It was held in the stately Leintser Room, which seemed bigger than any football pitch I’d ever played on, and it looked as if half the town were there, although in truth there could only have been about five hundred or so. Everything was decorated with green bunting and there were small white lights, like the type you put atop a tree at Christmastime, sparkling off the polished mahogany and brass. Four giant chandeliers made the room seem as if it were lifting up and stretching further and further skyward.
Dancing across the wide shimmering floor of the ballroom, Cait and I stumbled into and around each other; we dipped and we swooned. Her hands were warm in mine and we were both sweating slightly. When we grazed lips, her upper lip was moist, and she laughed as someone dimmed the lights and a spotlight sent a shower of stars spinning across the ceiling.
In the Province of Saints Page 14