Your father, Mother said, and smiled, as if the words had special meaning known only to her. She sighed. Your father. And I nodded; I had always known how much she had loved him in spite of her protests. She would love him always, and I felt I should be saddened by this, resentful that she thought of him now, even though he had left us for America. It was my sister and me who were here with her now, and for all these years, there had only been the three of us. But I was not as angry as I expected to be; it seemed right and good that she could still love him. It meant that we could as well.
What do you see? I wanted to ask her. What do you see? But she had already closed her eyes again and returned to that place where there was no pain.
Aunt Una came in looking frowsy and worn, her shoes shuffling the floor. She closed the door softly behind her and lowered herself onto one of our sleeping cots. After a moment she looked at Mother and told her in a firm and precise voice that the doctors here had done all they could, that there was nothing more they could do, but that they had arranged for appointments with specialists in London who could help. Do you hear me, Moira? she said. We have to go to England. Do you understand? We’re taking you home now.
Mother’s eyes fluttered and then were still. Molly and I held her hands as she fell into sleep. Una muttered in the shadows, cursing the stillness, the hour, the dead. Once more, the city was turning toward night. In the distance, rain was falling from gray clouds like dark whips, horns were moaning from the docks, and ships were moving silently far across the Irish Sea.
The drab olive Land Rover rumbled along the Barrow road in the dark blue predawn. It was raining softly, and its wide tires tracked the road heavily, sweeping leaves into the ditch. The wipers thumped as uniformly and as precisely as the speed the vehicle maintained. It was followed by two armored personnel carriers from Stephen’s Barracks in Kilkenny, full of soldiers sitting solemnly in parallel lines and wearing dark flak jackets and light green peaked caps or black berets, Browning guns at their sides. A fourth vehicle belonging to the Gardaí, with Foley at the wheel, rushed to keep up.
I’d like to say that I was there when they took my uncle, but I was miles away. We’d brought Mother home from the hospital the night before, and I was sitting in front of a fire I’d woken early to light because I couldn’t sleep and a she-fox had been wailing out in the fields all night searching for its mate.
I looked out at soft rain that was misting everything, thinking of the river and of Lugh, then looked toward the clock over the mantel and heard in that resonant ticking the soldiers in the armored carriers loading their gun chambers, hobnailed boots snapping upon metal running boards and then macadam.
They cornered him at Greelish’s house, caught him in the act of loading the guns from the shed. The Land Rover blocked the narrow laneway and the armored carriers barreled through the gates of the surrounding fields when Uncle Brendan made a run for it, sprinting off across the countryside. He’d always been good at running from the fishing authorities, he knew every inch of the land, but he didn’t run as well as he used to, and his smashed legs gave out on him. He fell in the high, sodden wheat fields and the soldiers dragged him along the ground, through the muck, back to the armored cars.
I could see Brendan struggling and cursing until they’d bloodied him into submission. I was sure that Foley put in the boot a couple of times as the soldiers held him; my uncle didn’t have a weapon on him, but I knew if he had, he would have taken a few of them with him. For all his talk, I knew Brendan could never stand prison, and for all his wildness, I knew he was a coward, just like me. I doubted that Mother, even at the height of pain-induced fugue, could ever have imagined her son an informer.
Someone must have tipped off John Delacey; he was home when they came. They banged in the door and stormed the stairs and found him hanging from a rafter in the bedroom where he’d killed his wife. I never imagined that he would go in such a way, I thought he’d resist until the very end, but I suppose he wanted to take one secret with him to the grave. Instead of a wife killer, he’d be considered a martyr for the Cause.
I was glad that Oweny wasn’t alive to see it, glad that I could believe he had no part in the things that Brendan did, in the things that made up our family’s history. When the clock chimed the half hour, I placed more coal on the fire and blessed myself. I said a prayer for Brendan as I imagined the dark cell where he’d count off the last of his days. I waited as the room grew warm, then went and brewed the tea for my mother and sister who had yet to arise, determined that I would not let anything touch us ever again.
It was September 29, the feast of St. Michael, and our last night in Ireland. The cold woke me sometime after midnight. A hard scatter of branches thrust against leaden windowpanes, wind trilling through the eaves. I climbed from the bed shivering, wondering how it could possibly be so cold. The floor was like ice, the water in the basin on the nightstand freezing. The sound of the wind seemed deadened and I stood there listening to it, waiting for a sound from my mother or sister from down the hall, or of something from somewhere in the countryside beyond. Only then did I realize that although it was autumn, and though it would seem impossible, it was snowing.
I padded the hallway and checked on my mother. A small fire burnt in the grate, a few laggard coals turning to orange embers and then sifting to the glowing ash below. Standing before the flickering shadows, I listened to my mother breathing softly; it was a warm and pleasing sound, comforting in the way that I remembered being comforted by the sound of her when I was a child.
The embers glowed brighter as wind pressed down the flue; snow shifted on the roof and thumped to the courtyard below. I moved before the window, eased the bulky cloth back. Gray light pooled at my feet, and I blinked slowly to take everything in. There was no discernible landmark anywhere. White hills rose to a black sky, from which the snow came in heavy sweeping gusts and drove down out of the clouds as if on slanted tracks. Wind rattled the glass, and I hugged my arms about me. I was nine years old again staring out at hillsides and fields covered with the small frozen bodies of lambs, hundreds of them, and there was Lugh throwing them into the back of his lorry, their bones popping like kindling.
In the kitchen I put on the tea and started a fire in the grate. In the electric light, the room seemed even colder, the space between window and everything beyond ever wider and more remote. I imagined the fields spreading back in a vast emptiness around us so that we became smaller and smaller. And the light of the kitchen was a spark in the snow-crushed darkness, pulsing faintly through the dark body of the storm.
Una stirred in the room above, stoking Mother’s fire, and Molly was up washing herself with cold water from the basin on the dresser. I stepped about the kitchen as I prepared breakfast, keeping my back to the dark rectangle of window, trying to ignore the sense that, right there, just beyond the tempered glass, lay a cold, vast, inexorable thing just waiting to press us to its heart.
I closed the doors between hallway and kitchen to keep the warmth in. And to keep from looking at the suitcases already packed and staggered in rows, waiting by the back door. At the sound of distant church bells, I looked up. Almost imperceptibly, the sky had lightened. Snow lay in drifts at the corners of fields like the crooked seam within a vast quilt, and only for the drifts could I tell there were fields at all. All boundary and geography were gone. There were no longer hills and valleys. Trees bowed under the weight of snow and the wind tore at their tops so that they seemed like great silver whitecapped waves cresting and then falling, crashing down without sound.
Mother padded into the kitchen in her slippers, followed by Una and Molly, whose face was still pressed by the pillow. She rubbed her eyes and then squinted out the window as if she were still dreaming. But they were dressed and ready to go. Mother unhooked her slippers and stepped into her freshly polished shoes. Her footsteps were loud in the silence, snapping the lino with a cadence that made me think we were about to march into battle.
The back door slam
med and the second door opened wide. Wind whipped down the vestibule to the scullery. My cousin Canus stamped his boots on the mat. Jaysus, it’s a bastard of a day, he said and shook snowflakes from his black Crombie, ran his hands through his brilliantined hair. When he was done he clapped his hands together and looked from Mother to Una, to my sister and to myself. Are you right, then? he asked.
Mother nodded.
Canus stuck his hands deep in his jacket pockets, rounded his shoulders.
Will you not sit down and have a cup of tea? Una asked.
If I have any more tea, Una, I’ll burst. He patted his stomach, then turned and squinted out the window. He watched the snow as it came down and his mouth opened and closed and I couldn’t tell whether he was praying or cursing. Finally he stamped his feet again. I think we’d best get a move on before it gets any worse, he said. Sure, the boat may not be leaving at all.
Oh it’s leaving all right, Mother said, placing her teacup firmly, resolutely on the countertop. If I have to get out and push it meself, it’s leaving. I’ll not be here one day longer. Will your car make it?
She’s a tank, Moira. It’d take more than this to stop her.
Right so, Mother said and tugged at the hem of her jumper. She pulled the screen before the fireplace, then stood at the threshold flicking the electric switches off and on, then off again. We waited as she stared into the darkened rooms. Finally she said, Right! and we put on our coats, picked up our luggage, and trudged toward the cold. At the end of the hall, my mother dipped her fingers into the holy water font and blessed herself while Una mouthed a prayer to the Virgin. After a moment, I did the same, and turned, looked the length of the shadowed vestibule, smelling the damp stone walls, the kitchen and my mother’s cooking, and the odor of blood-let from the gutted carcasses of rabbits or salmon that would hang there in the summers. I looked at the pegs that held our jackets and jumpers, the mat where we wiped our Wellingtons. I closed the door to the house and pulled it tight so that the bolt resounded in the lock behind us one last time.
We were going to the boat in Uncle Oweny’s old Morris, which looked as if it belonged in another century, with its dull gunmetal panels, shielding, and splayed wheel wells—the wide-set heavy glass windows, the flat shed of a roof. Like his father, Canus was immutable in the face of everything. Like his father, he had been a fisherman, worked on trawlers all up and down the coast. He moved slowly but gracefully, as if he were climbing down slimed rocks to the river of an evening. He didn’t much look like his father though; whereas Oweny was wide and stocky, Canus was slender as a straight tree limb.
And I’d never heard Canus tell a story. Oweny lived for the telling and the retelling of stories—tales, myths, local foolery. But Canus was a quiet young man who seemed to measure every word spoken as if it pained him to speak at all, as if by speaking he might cause himself some great injury. Yet the sight of snow seemed to force upon him some unusual urgency; this morning he wouldn’t be quiet at all until he’d said what he needed to say.
He grimaced. This is bad, so. He glanced at me briefly, then back to my mother and Una. You know what happened the last time we had a storm like this. It’s just bad.
Canus, Mother said, we all know what happened.
Just bad, it is, that’s all I’m saying.
Well whisht with your saying, I have enough to think of. I’ve got a splitting headache altogether. She half turned. Michael, did you collect the last of the money we were owed for those bales? Did you lock all the sheds?
I nodded and she paused as she thought of something else to say, but then, feeling the tires of the car sliding and catching again, she turned back in her seat and held tight to her handbag. I looked at Molly, already fast asleep and curled beneath a blanket next to me.
Oweny’s old Morris did move like a tank. Its motor rumbled heavy as the wipers plowed the snow across the windscreen, creating a dull quarter circle of glazed light upon the glass. The sky was boiling and the snow, wind-whipped but silent, fell fast and furious from the heart of it; so great was its projection that I had the sense of heat, of something brilliant and bright and full of burning intensity, in the way that I imagined a star would be to the touch, or poison rushing through one’s veins.
Canus slowed at the bend of the road where Shea Murphy’s car lay in the ditch against Flaherty’s stone wall. One of the Murphys was towing the car out of the ditch with a tractor. Canus rolled down his window, and what heat there was left us in a moment. Howya, Shea! Are you set there? Shea tested the chains to the undercarriage of the car, then hopped out of the way as the tractor reared back, pulling the car with it. He nodded and waved, shouted something I couldn’t make out over the wind, and Canus said, Right so, rolled up the window, and put the Morris in gear. The rear tires slipped for a moment, the car slid then caught, and we drove on. Canus shook his head. God, this is quare bad, he said. Sure, I don’t ever remember anything like this before. He glanced at my mother, but her jaw was set and she remained silent.
My head rocked against the panel of the car window and it was as if I was half dreaming. I saw Cait and me in our school uniforms walking through the fields together. It had been a dry, cold day in February and the smell of coal smoke hung on the air. Great groups of crows huddled in the bare trees. The earth was brown and plowed and the farmers were spreading silage—we were almost home.
Passing a mound of yellow-and-umber straw, thatch, and leaves piled for burning, we threw ourselves, laughing, onto it. We rolled and tumbled as if we were sea wrack upon the foam. My body fell over hers, and I held her. I touched her face, traced her eyebrows, the ridge of her nose, her cheeks, her jaw. She leant her head back and I rubbed my nail against the scars on the underside of her chin. I remembered the wire that cut her and how as she waited for the hooks to be removed, she never cried. I’d always remember that, Cait not crying, not then, not even at her mother’s funeral. Then my mouth was on the cold, wet angle of her neck and she wrapped her hands around my head and held me there, the two of us breathing fiercely.
Her body was warm beneath me, my legs tight between her thighs, and we were moving slowly against each other and the light was beginning to fall. Taking her hands, I blew into them to warm them, wiped dirt from her face, and she watched me, her breath turning to mist in the chill, thin air. When she leant forward to kiss me, her broken teeth bared, I closed my eyes, then felt the sensation of leaves plunged deep inside my coat, and when I looked again, Cait was up and running across the dun-colored fields, a blurred shape disappearing and reappearing and then gone. And then, as now, I felt only emptiness.
Snow howled against the old car’s running boards and shotgunned in the wheel wells, sounding like dull explosive charges. Mother coughed harshly and held her handkerchief to her mouth, waiting for the hacking to subside.
Canus banged on the dash and fooled with the heater.
You right there, Moira? Una asked.
Mother gasped for air, and only with an effort did she begin to breathe properly again. Aye, Una, she said breathlessly after a moment. I am. I’m fine. She put the handkerchief back to her mouth; her chest rose and fell sharply. Canus’s jaw tightened and he nodded solemnly without taking his eyes from the road; he just kept squinting and blinking and muttering, Jaysus, Jaysus.
A large tree limb had fallen under the weight of the snow and settled itself across the road. As Canus tried to pass he nudged the ditch with the rear tires and came to a stop. He fiddled with the gearshift and frowned. We slip into the ditch and that’s that, he said. We’ll need a tractor to get us out.
It seemed there were trees down everywhere. Canus said that all the electric lines must be down. Normally we’d be able to see the lights of Rowan, but not now.
Canus and I got out of the car, bowed our heads into the wind and the snow, shards sharp as gravel stinging our faces. Canus grunted, Here, help me with this, and reached beneath one end of the stump. The tree was heavy and my hands were soon numb. Canus suddenly s
eemed much bigger than me and for a moment I did not think I was strong enough to move it. I looked up, and through the snow and the glass and the yellow interior light of the car, I saw Mother, and her features were blurred and misshapen. She watched as we struggled with the tree limb and then lowered her head into her hands.
When we got back in the car Mother had yet to raise her head and Molly had woken. Why are you crying? she asked, but Mother shook her head and Molly leant back into her seat. Canus closed his door. We cleared the road, I said, it’s fine, sure we’ll make the boat. Canus sighed and banged on the dash and we started moving again. Molly pressed her head against the cold glass as I had done, and I knew she was thinking of everything we were leaving behind.
We passed a hay shed, a long gabled horse barn, an odd darkened farmhouse—black coal smoke lacing the sky like ribbons, and all along the road men working in the ditches with chain saws on fallen trees. They glanced up briefly as we passed, squinting into the snow, their saws biting almost soundlessly into the wet puckered flesh of the tree, their mouths and noses covered with scarves they’d pulled up around their faces. Strangely, over the snow, I smelled the sharp scent of pine, alder, and ash. No sound but the color of smells. The sparks of wood chips flew and churned in the wind, blinding the cutters as much as the snow itself, and then both disappeared behind us.
For the first time I noticed how dark it had grown in the interior of the car and how bright the snow looked falling across and rushing into Canus’s headlights: trees and hedgerows, the fence posts and stone walls, the gutter of ditch sharply sculpted in black, and at their edges, stretching for unknown distances, fields and fields of snow.
The car made its way down the rutted lane toward Delacey’s. To my right, a group of men struggled to climb the sloping rise of a field. Using thick branches as walking sticks to aid them, knees rising and falling in military fashion, their coats and wrappings black against the snow and blown about them, they resembled an ancient cathas of warriors heading to war. I closed my eyes, not wanting to see the Delaceys’ home, but then, relenting, I opened them quickly, anxious that I really might miss seeing her one last time. Slow, I whispered, go slow. We rounded the bend and the house came up quickly on the right, but Canus didn’t touch the brake on the bend for fear that it might put us into a slide.
In the Province of Saints Page 25