Michael had been through the Burren only once before that he could remember. The campsite was a short stretch of earth and wind-eaten grass cordoned off by the government in an attempt to keep travellers off the roads. As Michael looked off into the distance, the limestone clints and grikes backlit by the setting sun, he realized that this might be the last stretch of grass for many miles, and when they started moving again, it would be up to the animals to find knots of green at the side of the road.
Normally, Dermot did not like to stop at these camps. He didn't like the particular designation, the poles set up special for tethering animals, the stones already arranged in neat circles to hold traveller fires, a well to the back of the site with the hand pump painted red in case they would miss it. "Only one half step until they've pushed us into flats in Ennis," Dermot usually complained, but this time he whistled to the boys who'd gone ahead and used his thumb to jab the air, just once, in the direction of the camp. "Two nights," he said to Michael as he took off his cap and rubbed his head.
It was evening, almost completely dark, and within five minutes of turning off the road, the youngest boys had already set to work milking the goats. The women with infant children sat down on the sparse grass and unbuttoned their blouses as they pulled their babies into their laps. The oldest woman of the group—Grandmother, they called her, though to most of them she was a great-aunt—continued her work on a piece of lace for the bride-to-be. The rest of the women peeled potatoes and carrots. One woman unwrapped a large section of smoked pork loin from the grub box and began dividing it into portions. As they prepared supper, they discussed what would have to be done once they arrived in Kilkee. There was a wedding cake to be made and the ingredients to be begged. For fifty guests they needed two dozen eggs, two pounds of sweet butter, eight cups of sugar, and five pounds of flour just to make the inside of the cake. For the frosting, ingredients would have to be bought. And they'd have to protect these ingredients as they gathered them. The little ones would take spoonfuls of the sugar and pour it onto their tongues if they knew no one would catch them. Michael, who was far too old for such theft, had been caught and boxed for eating a spoonful of sugar as recently as his sixteenth birthday. Then there were the cake decorations: colored paper flowers, enough satin ribbon to circle the base of each tier. As the women fretted over what they might be forgetting, they also discussed how in their day a wedding cake always meant a fruitcake, which could be made six months ahead and tucked into the bottom of a trunk until the wedding day came. Not anymore. The young ones now had their heads turned by shopwindows that displayed pure white three-tiered cakes that looked like they'd blow away in the wind as soon as they met with the blade of a knife.
In addition to planning the ingredients they'd need, the women also reminded the bride-to-be of the things she absolutely musn't forget, just as they'd been reminding her since the day the arrangement was made. Go on, laugh at your old aunties, they told her, but mind you do what we say. "First," Grandmother said, taking the girl by the wrist and pulling her close to the sharp angles of her face, her breath like the dank bottom of the grain barrel, "you'll eat the oatmeal with your husband before any celebration begins. No matter what's going on about you, you'll eat it, and well salted too, for the salt and the oatmeal together is what protects. They're pure useless on their own, you see. Three big spoonfuls of it, and then carry on. Him too. It'll be your first duty as a wife. Second, if there's dancing—and I never saw a wedding where there wasn't—mind you keep one foot on the ground all the time. If you were to jump or hop or do any sort of thing where both feet are off the ground, like if he lifted you up in the air—some husbands do it without thinking, though his people should have him warned—or if one of your brothers should swing you. Fairies love all beautiful things and nothing so much as a bride. Don't smirk at me, girl. You're not too big for a slap on the mouth. Not today, not any day while I'm alive, married or no, are you too big for a slap. You think I'm blind as well as slow? I survived this long because I am wise. As you, please God, will be wise one day. Third, remember not to sing, even if you love the song, even if everyone else's throat is burst from singing..."
Michael looked at the bride-to-be, a second cousin, and wondered if she knew what this wedding meant for her. She would be lashed to her husband's people just like a new animal bought at the fair. He stood and strolled away from the light of the fire to where he'd tossed the tarp he'd sleep on. It was a clear night so far, and he decided to chance the weather until morning without building a tent. The rest of the men were busy constructing their low shelters, and as Michael watched the others tap long stakes into the hard earth, lug jugs of water from the well, talk, stir, chop, feed, he wondered if any of them had ever lain awake at night and thought about settling.
There were eighteen in the group now, including the babies, and for supper they divided among three separate fires. "Soon it will be your wedding we're off to," Dermot said to Michael as he tucked his fork and knife into his pocket and took his wedge of pork in his hand. "Did you hear me? Don't you want a warm body next to you at night? Don't you want someone when the wind finds a way beneath the tent flaps?"
Michael knew he was only teasing. Men got married later than women; Maeve's husband was thirty-one. Lately, Dermot's teasing had touched on everything related to females. What kind of shape did Michael like in a woman? What color hair? At every question, Michael shrugged and Dermot laughed. Marriage was practical, Michael knew. It was the way things were done. But for a long time now he had been wondering where a partnership left a person except chained more tightly to the camp and to the wagon. Dermot spoke of the travellers' life as if theirs was the only way to live, as if they were the only ones who truly saw the world because they were up to their necks in it, not only when it was dry and fair but also when it was wet and miserable. To Michael it felt like all they ever did was go round and round, with fair days few and far between. A few months back, on the way from Bantry to Kinsale, the caravan had passed a construction site—three identical squares dug into the ground, three wood frames, and two men pouring wet cement from buckets. And just like the gray splatters that had already hardened on the toes of the workers' boots, the concrete foundation would also harden and become an anchor for these structures, keep them from being blown away in the wind. It would be easy to build a house like that, Michael had thought as the group passed by and the two men stopped their work to watch them, and the thought had prodded him forward like an iron taken from the fire and pushed into a goat's flank. Also like the hot iron, the thought marked him, and later, when Dermot shouted for him to hurry up, Michael flinched.
In the morning, Dermot decided they should send a letter to the husband-to-be, letting him know they'd be a few days delayed. Bitty Ward, who'd married Dermot's brother, was the only one among them who could read and write, but she wasn't around to put the letter down for them. Dermot guessed that she'd walked up to the closest house with two of the other women in hopes of getting flour and eggs. The Christmas month in Galway was the only time of the year when travelling children went to school. Officials came down to the riverbank, asked the adults for the names and ages of the children under fourteen, and then directed them to a schoolhouse on the other side of the river. Each year, Dermot Ward went mad at the idea and forbade his children to go. They could already add up what was in the cash box. Why should they go to a goddamned schoolhouse all day to be called names and told all the things that are wrong with them? Before she died, Julia had always found a moment to speak softly to Dermot, to assure him it was no harm for the children to go learn a few things. But after she died, Dermot stood his ground, and Michael was sorry for it. He liked sitting in the schoolhouse. He liked the warmth of the stove, the huge pot of porridge the teacher made for them, the passing around of bowls and spoons. In school, they learned about letters and making words.
Dermot usually gave Bitty money to buy a paper whenever they passed a shop, and at night she would read it to th
em around the fire. Another few Christmases, Michael believed, and he'd have been able to tell what the sheep and donkey were saying to each other in the comic that ran on the back page.
"Michael," Dermot said, "let's go to that pub and see will anyone write a letter for us."
Dermot came up behind Michael to hurry him as he splashed his face with water and changed into a fresh shirt. "Quick, before the women ask us to help hang up the wash."
As they walked the two miles back toward the pub, Dermot with his arms crossed over his chest and his hands tucked into his armpits, as comfortable as if he were stretched out on soft ground, Michael with both hands shoved deep in the pockets of his trousers, Dermot told him about a girl he would meet at the wedding. Dermot had never seen the girl, but she had a motorized camper she'd bought with her own money, and she was looking for a husband. Her father had a painting business—houses, fences, signs, wagons—but had all daughters and needed a young son-in-law to help. The girl was twenty-two and had already been engaged, but that had fallen through for reasons Dermot said Michael should find out.
"I'm only eighteen," Michael said. Surely, all that jabbing around the fire the evening before about his wedding being next was only teasing. Only the same old teasing that had been going on since he was twelve. Everyone knew that males married older than females. His older brothers had not married until their late twenties. Michael's pace slowed, and Dermot's slowed beside him. Michael looked at his father and saw that his eyes were closed. He had once told Michael that he could sleep while he walked, because his feet knew to follow the road. Michael had tried it and ended up slipping on a fresh cowpat.
"There's no right age for marriage. You marry when the time is right," Dermot said. He opened his eyes. "You might see that motorized camper and decide now's the time."
"I won't," Michael said, and Dermot smirked, threw up his hands.
"You're handsome, you know," Dermot said, as if he hadn't heard Michael's protest. It was something he'd been wanting to point out to the boy for some time, in case he wasn't aware or in case he didn't know it was important to some women. "I'm not good at seeing these things myself, but the women talk, and it's a point they've agreed on. And you know as well as I do what it means when the women agree. Michael Ward is easy on the eyes."
Dermot looked over to see how Michael had taken this news about himself, but they were just coming up to the ruins of a stone fort they'd passed the day before, and Michael stopped to look. The day before, it had seemed a natural part of the landscape, as permanent as the limestone and the rivers flowing under their feet. But now Michael could see that there was logic to the arrangement. Choices had been made by men, not nature. There was a hole, three feet wide, three feet deep, that could have been a cooking pit. There were mounds of stones piled here and there around the periphery of the site, some arranged in intricate and intentional patterns, and Michael knew that these were burial cairns. There was a long slab of stone set upon two smaller ones, which could have been an altar.
"This has been here since Brian Boru," Dermot said, stepping carefully around the crumbling walls. He picked up a smaller stone and cracked it against another.
A thousand years, Michael thought as he tried to imagine the fort as it must have been once. He had long ago stopped asking his father how he knew things, never having been to school, never having read or written a single word. "I know because I have eyes to see and ears to listen," was all Dermot would say. And then he would ask, as he had asked before, "You think something has to be written in a book to be true?" Michael went over and stood in the center of what looked like the foundation of a small building—a dwelling for people or for animals—and thought about how even then, even in this place, so old and hard it didn't even look like the earth anymore, people had felt the need to build four walls and a roof to lie down in at the end of each day. They remembered their ancestors, whose graves were marked with stones set into patterns. And when they were far away finding food or fighting battles, they thought of a single place on the face of the earth, a specific place with walls of a particular thickness, land of a particular slope, and when they spoke of this place, they used the ancient word for home.
Julia Ward hadn't wanted to settle any more than her husband, but she had sympathy for the travellers who tried it. She wished them well. And when they failed, she welcomed them back and never held it against them. She also saw more similarities between country people and travellers. Michael recalled being on the road with her one day and seeing two men stop their work to pull bottles of porter out of a cool bog hole. There were no houses nearby, no bicycles, and Julia told Michael that the men must have come over the mountain from one of the bog houses on the other side. "God bless the work," Julia had called out to them. "God bless," they'd answered. When they passed again, the men had built a small fire and were eating their supper. "Well, look it," Julia had said. "Everyone does what they have to do in this world, don't they, Michaeleen?"
Since Julia's death, the caravan had avoided that part of the country where she was buried. Dermot didn't want to camp out in that direction anymore, didn't want to pass the place on the road where she'd died, didn't want to see those people who had taken her into their cottage and propped her up on a bed and watched his every move as he removed her from the dwelling and took her back to the camp. Also, he pointed out, that sea ledge in Ballyroan was too remote, too far from the village, too abandoned to make a living. If Maeve wondered about their mother's grave—whether it had grown over with weeds, whether the headstone was still standing straight—she never mentioned it. Dermot either, and perhaps, Michael thought, they carried Julia around with them in other ways. They didn't think of her grave, because that was only her body, only the skin she walked around in. And maybe that marker by the high sea ledge in Ballyroan meant no more to them than any other place they'd been. Maybe his father, who'd known Julia longest after all, recalled his wife equally in every place they'd been together. But since 1956 Michael couldn't forget that his mother was not in all of these places. She was in one place, in Ballyroan. By dying, she'd made herself a country person.
What could be so difficult about settling, Michael had been wondering since seeing those houses built on the Kinsale Road. Not difficult for other people, but difficult for travellers in particular. There were places that had been hard to leave, so what would have been so difficult about deciding to stay for good, building a house, planting a field, seeing the seasons in one single place? Dermot always said it had to do with blood, with something very basic inside them that had nothing to do with the brain or the human ability to reason things out. It was outside of reason. It was just the way things were. A cousin of Dermot's, Peter Ward, had tried settling and had lasted for two years. When he came back to the camp, he said that every night when he went to bed, no matter how cold or wet it was outside, and how grateful he should have felt, and how his wife had gotten used to storing her dishes in the press, and her sugar and flour on the kitchen counter, he always felt as if someone had gotten a rope around his neck. And oftentimes, in the middle of the night, in his warm bed and his dry clothes, he woke up with a feeling that someone was standing on his chest, tightening the noose.
But I'm not like the others, Michael thought as he walked alongside his father. "Go on, boy," the older men would urge when they went to the market and he set up his smithing tools. He was supposed to call out to passersby, draw people down to the stall with his voice, but he was no good at yelling and calling. Sometimes he opened his mouth and drew a long breath, but when he went to speak, he didn't know what to say.
The pub was empty except for the bartender, who stopped what he was doing the moment they entered.
"Lost?" he asked, and then glanced over his shoulder to a door that led to a back room. Michael could hear plates being stacked, something heavy being dragged across the wood planks of the floor.
"Never," Dermot said as he claimed a stool. He ordered two pints, and the bartender waited u
ntil he'd put his coins on the bar before he brought them over. Dermot didn't like asking favors of country people, but when he did, there were certain rules he always followed. First, show them they can trust you, which was why Dermot put his money on the bar. Second, show them that you don't trust them, which was why he waited until the man brought back his change before taking his first sip. When he was younger, Michael used to wonder how people always seemed to know right away that they were travellers. Now he guessed it was just something in the way they carried themselves, tired from all the walking. From the back room a second man emerged and wiped his hands on his shirt as he watched Dermot tip his glass to his mouth.
"I wonder can I ask you a question," Dermot said to the bartender once he'd drained his first pint. "Do you have any kind of knack with writing?"
"Why? You need a letter put down?" the man asked. Dermot put another coin on the bar, and the man went to the back room and came back with a biro, one sheet of paper, an envelope. He placed them in front of the man who'd earlier emerged from the back. "Will you put down a letter for them, Ethan?" Ethan shrugged, rolled up his sleeves, licked the tip of the biro, and tested it on the back of his hand. Dermot pushed his glass away and straightened up in his stool as if he were preparing to address a large crowd. He cleared his throat. "To Mister Liam Costello who is to marry Miss Aoife Ward," he began. When Dermot finished his dictation, he told the man to address it to the post office in Kilkee. "Right there on the front, just put the word Hold," Dermot instructed, and looked closely at the letters the man drew, as if he were making sure.
The Walking People Page 13