The Night Stages

by Jane Urquhart

  Though he was small, Kieran was strong enough, and he found holding on to the handles and pushing the empty barrow up a slope to be thrilling in a way he wouldn’t have been able to explain. Controlling the object when it was heavy with stones and bent on a rapid descent equally absorbed him. It was his initial encounter with transportation, and with an object driven by gravity, and he was for a time obsessed by the notion that, like him, the vehicle seemed to have a mind of its own. At one point he loaded it with rocks and set it free on a particularly steep slope just to see what it would do, amused by the way its unwilling hind legs bounced awkwardly after the momentum of the wheel until the whole thing came to a halt in the bog. The barrow was unharmed, having been unable to gather much speed under the weight of its burden. But Annie had seen the whole performance and forbad further experiments of this nature. He was disappointed by this but always obeyed her in a way he had never been able to obey anything or anyone else.

  The length of broken wall was fixed in three days. Kieran had discovered by himself that rocks could be made to stay in place with the help of small stones used as wedges, and all seemed to be stationary and firm. Annie had nodded three times – an indication of full approval – when she came out to the front of the house to examine the completion of the job. Still that night, when the wind came up, Kieran’s sleep was disturbed by worry and his mother was whispering in his mind. The wall had become a kind of daylight home to him in the past few days, and it was as if in placing them one atop another he had come to know forever the peculiarities of each stone so that when he closed his eyes he saw patterns of lichen and granite. Cliffs of stone, his mother whispered. There was something in him, even at that age, that dreaded the collapse of anything he himself had completed, and he rose early and anxious for a full week, running outside in the dawn in order to assure himself that the wall still stood.

  It was toward the end of that week that the bicycle appeared. There it was in the morning sun, leaning up against the road side of what both he and Gerry-Annie were now calling Kieran’s wall, neither beautiful nor new but a bicycle nonetheless. Beads of moisture clung to the parts of the fenders that still had paint. The leather seat was greyed and cracked with age and the rear wheel was missing several spokes. A bent wire basket hung from the rusted handlebars, and a flat metal platform, from which several pieces of frayed rope trailed, jutted out over the back wheel. Though he had never owned one, Kieran had known bicycles all his life. The streets of the town were filled with them. His own father came and went to the weather station on such a vehicle. But the fact of this specific bicycle leaning up against the part of the wall he had built himself, placed there while he was sleeping, seemed magical to the boy, portentous.

  It remained there all morning while he hauled water for Annie or bent over a small leather volume called the Vest Pocket Library, which contained a dictionary, a parliamentary manual, general information, a few maps and tables of numbers, and a literary guide, and which had been sent, decades ago, to Annie’s family as a Christmas gift by a relative who was working in London. It would be all he needed, Annie had said, until he decided to go back to school. When he told her he was never going back, she said we’ll see about that. She herself had never learned to read, nor Gerry either, she told him. They had both regretted this, she added, when he did not reply. I already know how to read, he informed her. Yes, she said, but you’ll keep at it every day for an hour, in case you forget.

  When he pointed to the bicycle and asked if she had seen it, she replied that whoever had left it would be back for it soon. “It’s nothing to do with you,” she told him, “so you’ll be leaving it alone.”

  In the afternoons, if there were no further chores, he was free to roam around the hills because, as Annie had said, boys needed to be aired. He had found a collapsed beehive hut a couple of miles from the farm and, with his new masonry skills, was trying to build it up again and finding it more difficult than his work on the wall, though even more compelling, especially after Annie had told him old stones like that were sacred and not to be meddled with. “I’m only fixing it,” he told her, and she seemed to be placated by that.

  When he came down to the house again in the dusk he could see that the bicycle was still there. “Could be someone after a lost sheep,” Annie ventured. “Did you see anyone when you were above?”

  But he had seen no one and believed the bicycle had no owner. He became more certain of this the following day when the morning light revealed it to be in the same location, untouched, leaning against the wall.

  It was still there three days later. “Put it in the turf shed,” Annie said. “There is some fierce weather coming in and, whoever he is, he won’t want his bicycle lifted up by the gale and thrown down on the rocks.”

  Kieran stepped outside, went to the road side of the wall, and placed his palms on the handlebars. When he walked the bicycle toward and then into the shed it felt to him as if he were stabling a courteous and cooperative animal, one who was grateful for the attention and the shelter. He stood in the gloom near the large stack of turf, patting the old seat. Then he moved outside and closed the door. The moonlight whitened the road that lifted itself up the mountain, and something in him, something fated, wanted to slip along this silver track. He thought of roads he had known, the streets of the town, and the main road by the sea that had taken his brother, Niall, away to the university in Dublin, removing him even further from the life that he himself was living in the hills. Long sad roads, his mother said in his mind, and then she said it again in the voice of the wind, which was high and coming at him from all directions. He turned and headed back to the house, to the one lamp he could see in Gerry-Annie’s window with the flame in it still lit.

  The next morning the air was dense with what Annie called “soldiers of rain” advancing over the fields. Looking out the window, Kieran announced there was another bicycle filling the spot left vacant by the first. His voice was loud with excitement. Annie said it couldn’t be so, threw the shawl over her head, and went out to the turf shed to make certain that the original vehicle was still there; that it had not been moved, somehow, in the night. But Kieran knew this was an altogether different bicycle when he went out into the weather to inspect it. This one was gleaming with fresh, unchipped purple paint and was in comparatively good repair. Not one of the spokes was missing from the wheels, there was no rust anywhere on it, and, most wonderfully, it had a bell. Outside in the weather, Kieran stood beside the new bicycle for some time, pushing the bell’s small silver lever with his thumb transfixed by the sound, as if it were the most powerful music he had ever heard. Rain fell on his head and ran down the inside of his shirt, but he hardly noticed. Finally Annie marched out to fetch him. “Put this one in the shed as well,” she said. “Make no mistake. These men are booleying up in the mountain, or perhaps preparing to burn off the gorse, though how they can do so in the midst of such rain God alone knows.”

  Annie was astonished when Kieran said he didn’t know what “booleying” meant. For a thousand years at the end of summer, she told him, the animals have been taken by their keepers to pasture for a time to the highest parts of the mountain where the grass remained green and sweet.

  Two days passed. The wind finally abated, and the sun came out, changing the wall from the dark slate colour it had become under the rain to its usual soft grey. The weather was dry for the following two days and then, as if aware of Annie’s theory, once the sun went down, Knocknadobar and Canuig Mountain came volcanically alive with thrilling rivers of fire.

  “As I said,” Annie offered, “burning gorse. They’ll be down for the bicycles in a day or two, if they don’t fire themselves to cinders.”

  She was afraid of the fires, though not of the men who lit them. “Pray to God we won’t be getting a black gable,” she said. Gerry himself had been trapped inside his family’s cottage when he was a child, Annie told Kieran, the ground outside livid with fire and his father ready to kill the neighb
our who had lit the blaze but unable to step outside to reach his intended victim.

  A few nights later the mountains resumed their customary large black shapes in the evening and there was no smoke in the air. But no one came to claim the bicycles. “Men can stay on the mountain for a long time,” Annie said, and when Kieran asked her why, she replied with four words: “Because they are men.”

  Half a week later another two bicycles were leaning against the wall. By now even Annie was becoming perplexed. She was not a woman who was used to an abundance of anything except the arrival of wind and rain and other people’s babies, and she wondered out loud if perhaps there might have been a spell of sorts placed on the bicycles of the parish so that they might multiply indefinitely. As if to prove her point, three bicycles materialized the following week, four the week after that, and by the end of the summer twelve bicycles were safely housed in the turf shed out back and in an unused cow byre at the far end of the yard. Annie had taken to glaring at the mountains suspiciously. I don’t like what those men are up to, she muttered repetitively, and when Kieran asked what she meant, she said that Gerry himself would still be alive if men weren’t so frequently up in the mountains talking and planning things.

  When Kieran was much younger, Annie had taken Niall and him to see Gerry’s name written into a list on the stone of the small monument near the town library. His name was the only word she knew how to read, being unable even to print her own on a piece of paper, and she had pointed to it and said, That’s my man. Kieran, being too young to understand really, had believed that the stone figure with the rifle perched atop the plinth was what Annie was referring to and after that, even when he knew better, whenever he passed the monument he thought to himself, There’s Annie’s man.

  Once, after he had come to her house in the hills, she let him look in the little painted box where she kept her treasures: a rhinestone brooch Gerry had given her, four holy medals, including one a neighbour had brought back for her from Lourdes, an inch of frayed green ribbon attached to a small metal bar, and the twisted silver bullet the town doctor had removed from Gerry’s lung just before he died. Kieran was fascinated by this small object and often begged to see it, but Annie had to be in a soft mood before she would open the lid. Once she had been so wistful she had let Kieran hold the bullet in the palm of his hand. “Bent by passing through bone,” she had whispered to him, before beginning to weep. Bone, his mother said softly, bone.

  Kieran thought about the bicycles all summer long. He thought about the first few bicycles, the early arrivals, in June while he helped the neighbour, Brendan Shea, cut the two small hayfields that had once belonged to Gerry but that Brendan now sowed. He thought about them in August when he went into the mountains with Brendan to move the sheep from one grazing area to another. He thought about them in the loft at night and every time he went back to work on the beehive hut. Whenever he walked out to the turf shed to collect fuel for the fire, he spent some time with the second, beautiful purple bicycle, and eventually he was able to narrow his thoughts and to think only of that one. Annie had told him to stop ringing the bell. Convinced it had only a certain number of rings trapped inside it, she was fearful, she said, that he would wear it out before the bicycle owner came down from the mountain and the dire undertakings he and his mates were planning up there. But she could not stop Kieran from looking at the vehicle and patting its seat in a proprietary fashion. He even gave it a name: the Purple Hornet.

  “I’ve been up and down the mountains all summer, Annie,” he said finally when he came back into the house after a session of communion with the Hornet, “and there were no talking men anywhere.” Brendan had introduced Kieran to the Mulcahey brothers when they had come across them, some of their sheep, and two of their dogs at the summit of Knocknagantee. “But they told me their bicycles were safe at home,” he said, “and there is no one else up there. I promise. Could I not ride just one of them?”

  “That would be thievery,” Annie told him. “Riding another man’s bicycle and him not knowing about it. Did you hear anything about an uprising while you were above? Those Mulcahey boys, now, they would be talking about something like that.”

  Kieran had heard about nothing but sheep and about one particular ram who belonged, they said, to Padraig O’Connell and who had broken out of a field and run off and been spotted only infrequently, gallivanting around in the company of two wild female goats.

  Annie snorted at this. “That could be code,” she said, “for a traitor in the vicinity. Men love to fight,” she added darkly.

  But there had been no fight in the elderly Mulcahey brothers. They had invited Brendan and himself to their cottage for sandwiches, but the notion of the visit had been interrupted by a sighting, and then the capture, of the wayward ram.

  “We caught that ram,” Kieran told her. “He was real enough, and he’s now in Padraig O’Connell’s cow byre.”

  “Is he now,” said Annie, “and what of those wild goats?”

  There were none to be seen as far as Kieran could tell.

  “As I thought,” said Annie. “They were code for something else. Gerry himself was called the Red Fox on account of the colour of his hair.” She was putting washed dishes onto the shelves of the dresser. “And didn’t they shoot him down just like a fox in the end,” she said.

  One morning, while Kieran was busy with the washing up, Annie announced they would be visiting the tailor called Davey who lived on the other side of Mastergeehy, three miles away.

  “Your father has given me money for a winter coat,” she told him. “For you,” she added, “in case you are confused about that.”

  Kieran’s hands became motionless in the warm suds. He knew that Annie still went twice a week to clean in the house in town, but since she rarely spoke about this, it had been easy for the boy to forget. He himself went there as seldom as possible, though he was happy enough to have his father and sometimes his brother visit him at Annie’s on a Sunday afternoon. Something now about his father and this intended coat made him recall the dark, formal rooms of the house, and the sense that everything there was waiting. Even now, more than two years after the worst had happened, there was this terrible waiting that greeted him if ever he stepped over the threshold. Lifting the pan out of the dry sink, he walked toward the open door and threw the greyish water into the yard. A fork and a spoon he had overlooked bounced on the grass. As he bent to pick them up he consciously shook the rooms of the house in town out of his mind.

  “And so today,” Annie continued as he re-entered the cottage, “we will be sorting out a coat for you.”

  “I don’t like coats,” Kieran offered, hanging the tin pan on its customary nail. He had always felt restricted by this second layer of clothing, embraced and therefore imprisoned by it. “I won’t wear it.”

  Annie ignored this. “Your father wanted me to take you to the shop in town. But I told him that the shop had the same coat for everyone. And what was the good in that, I said to him. A coat needs to be yours through and through or it won’t warm half enough and you’ll be dead of a fever before January. A coat needs to know it’s yours or it’s a good-for-nothing piece of cloth.” She gazed with fondness at her own two coats hanging on hooks Gerry had screwed into a board beside the door. The one with the lambswool collar that she wore into the town and over to the church was a source of great pride. The other, a plainer garment that she wore out to the hen house, the turf shed, and any time it was raining, was a source of great comfort. “Davey will make certain that your coat knows you. He’s done that for everyone in the parish. And now you’ve come to be among us, you’ll be needing a coat like that too.”

  It was dull but dry that October day. They had only walked a half a mile when they found themselves confronted by a flock of Joe Shehan’s sheep. Driven by dogs between the high hedgerows, the animals roiled around them. Then there was the red face of Joe himself. A conversation blossomed between the adults concerning the merits of Dave
y’s coats, and those of his father and grandfather before him. “Almost everyone is buried in old age in the one they bought in their youth,” Joe confided to the silent boy. “They are a rare protection against fever, and they never wear out.”

  “He’ll grow out of his,” said Annie. “But he is almost thirteen, so I suppose he’ll only be needing one more after this.”

  “And that one will look fine in his coffin,” Joe said while his sheep fed on the roadside grass. Two dogs danced beside the animals, eager to get them moving. Kieran knew the whole flock would be going down to the market in the town. He could hear his mother’s footsteps on the road behind him and, faintly, a song she used to sing when he was much younger, before she stopped singing altogether. Then, remembering the tantrums, he allowed an inner picture of the Purple Hornet to form in his mind to encourage calm. The conversation ended and Joe Shehan blessed them both and moved on. The road, when the sheep had left it empty and his mother had faded, ached for a bicycle, Kieran thought.

  “That Joe Shehan has a terrible quantity of talk in him,” Annie said as they resumed walking. “He could talk the hind leg off a chair.”

  The road rose under them and soon Kieran could see the whole valley – from the edge of the sea in the west clear over to the Dingle Mountains in the east. Far below there was a warm, rich blanket of bog and long geometric strips where the bog had already been cut. Annie pointed to a small house situated in a little gully with the top of its gable end flush to the road. “That is the house of Eithne of the Streams,” she said. “When I’m going to mass I stop there to wash my boots if the road is full of mud. She has a coat with a lambswool collar, something I have myself. Yes she has that, but her house is full of damp because of the streams.”