The Night Stages

by Jane Urquhart

  Standing by the winter river, Kenneth recalled that as he had begun to walk back to the village that summer night, while young men and old had been floating the components of the transitory night bridge back toward their own shore, he had seen the girl sitting patiently in one of the rowboats. He had waved to her and she had lifted her arm in return. Then, before he turned away, her father, back in place at the stall, had called out the words “Auf wiedersehen” and had lifted one hand as a kind of benediction, his white apron gleaming in the morning light. Moving away Kenneth had known he would forget neither of these two figures.

  He painted the girl, now, in the background of the scene, a cherished but almost forgotten memory, and then he painted her again seated in the foreground, with fruit in her lap. Her father was more central to the scene, his white apron glowing, his large torso dominant, birds diving into the pastry he held aloft in his hands. Kenneth rendered, as well, one of the young men who had built the miraculous makeshift bridge, placing him in the foreground. The binoculars he held in front of his eyes were focused on the far shore of future seasons. And there, in the insistent bronzes and coppers he chose for the scene, was the forceful atmosphere of Ehrenbreitstein, the bright stone of honour.

  THE MOUNTAINS

  Gerry-Annie said, “You can, of course. But not until after your hour with that book.” She pulled the grey volume out from under the tea cosy where it was kept and handed it to him. “Soon I’ll be demanding that you tell me everything that is written there.”

  Kieran had been asking about the bicycle and had no wish to be pinned to a table by a book. “I’ve seen too much of this book,” he said.

  Annie’s expression became stern. “How can you say that? Did you never hear of Tomas Rua’s sorrow at the loss of his books? Did no one ever sing you that song?”

  No one had.

  “ ‘Amhrán na Leabhar,’ ” she said, “a lament for the books the poet had lost at sea. He was a schoolmaster, as well, long ago now. Gerry knew that song. As do I.” She began to sing quietly, a tune so beautifully mournful that Kieran became lost in the cadence and felt he could see the sinking books and feel the poet’s torment about losing them.

  But he would not have lamented the loss of this book. He could have recited certain pages verbatim – the instructions for writing a letter to a prospective employer, the population of Bolivia or Peru, the ports of call for the PNO line – but the possibility of the bicycle put all these facts out of his mind. “I’ll give the bicycle back to the man who owns it, I promise, if he comes back,” Kieran said, imagining someone who had made his fortune – a tycoon, perhaps – walking to the cottage door and demanding his bicycle.

  But Annie did not answer and her look was troubled and faraway. She was pouring a kettle full of boiling water into the tub Kieran had filled for her early that morning at the pump. It was wash day and Kieran knew, because the day was fine, she would soon hang his shirts, three or four versions of himself, he thought, on the line to dry. She had sung all eleven verses of “Amhran na Leabhar,” but now there was no song. No song, his mother was saying in his mind. The song is finished.

  Kieran was trying to concentrate on the list of the colonies of Great Britain, but he could not do it. There was some sorrow around Annie that came between him and the letters on the page, and he didn’t believe that sorrow was about the schoolmaster and his lost books.

  “You know, Kieran,” Annie said slowly, “I am thinking there are men, yet, up in the mountains, talking.” She pulled herself upright from where she was bending over the tub on the table, but her head was down and her shoulders were rounded. She appeared to be looking at her hands, which remained in the water, but there was something about the way she stood that made Kieran suspect that she had gone out of herself. And suddenly he understood: these men and their talking was something Annie actually heard in some part of her mind. The men, and Gerry among them, were whispering to Annie in the same way his mother whispered to him. It had been his suggesting that someone might come back that had put it in her mind, he thought, and that being so, he wished he had said nothing. Still, he was curious. “What are they saying, Annie?” he asked softly, the British Empire moving back to the distant parts of the world where it resided, even the bicycle dimming a bit in his mind.

  Her face was pale. “They are saying there is to be fighting, that there will be killing.”

  Kieran rose from his seat and walked over to where Annie stood. “Annie,” he said, recalling the tailor’s words, “that was a good long time ago now.” He put his arm across her broad back, his first physical act of premeditated kindness. Through the back door, open to the sun, he could see the shed where the bicycles were waiting. “There’s no need for fighting anymore.”

  Annie sighed. “It’s a way men have, I suppose.”

  “But not anymore. Not now.”

  “There will be no more of it?” she asked uncertainly.

  “No, not now.” He had seen the cross at Ballagh, commemorating Gerry and the others who were executed with him at that spot. As if it were an admission of defeat that she did not wish to acknowledge, Annie, who was so proud of the statue in the town, would walk by this marker without a glance. But though she didn’t look in its direction, Kieran had never known her to continue talking when they were near the part of the road where it stood, and he himself had gone back alone many times to read the names that were engraved on its surface.

  She turned back to her washing. “You may as well have the bicycle now while the weather is fine,” she said to him. “Do you know how to ride it?”

  For the first time the thought struck him that he was twelve years old and had no idea what to do with a bicycle once seated on it. There had been no need for a bicycle if you were a child in the town, and, anyway, once the tantrums began his father would never have allowed one. Niall had had a bicycle once, but the dramatist in him took to stunts, and he was spotted by neighbours riding the vehicle across the Valentia River railway trestle on a dare. The bicycle was confiscated and then given away, and soon football began to satisfy Niall’s need for performance. After that, references to this form of transport were never again made in the house. Though his father had departed punctually each morning on a bicycle, and returned on the same at night, neither boy would have dared to touch the thing.

  “No,” Kieran admitted now, “I’ve never been on a bicycle.”

  Annie pulled her hands out of the water and dried them on her apron. “Well, I’ll have to show you how, I suppose. Go fetch the creature.”

  Five minutes later, Annie was seated on the Purple Hornet, circling unsteadily while Kieran stood, full of aspiration, in the centre of the road. Finally, she dismounted and walked the bicycle over to the place where he stood, and he swung his leg over the bar and straddled the seat. His legs were quite long enough to steady himself with the bicycle upright, but Annie had to hold on to the back fender while he settled his feet on the pedals. “Look straight ahead,” she advised. Then she pushed him off in the direction of town, a few miles away and almost every inch of it downhill, calling after him that he only needed to pedal backwards to slow down.

  As if he had been born to it, Kieran surrendered himself to being transported, every muscle and many of his brain cells knowing instantly what to do, his spine making fractional adjustments for balance, his peripheral vision on high alert, taking in the now blurred and soon vanishing graveyard on his left, a smear of black cows and one donkey on his right, and hawthorn bushes in the hedgerows like trails of white smoke emerging from his shoulders. The speed was like an electrical current entering his bloodstream, and he recognized almost immediately his need for it, and forgot altogether Annie’s instructions about slowing down. He shouted with joy as small houses, stone walls, the ruins of Ballagh Workhouse, tidy and untidy fields, staring sheep dogs, sedentary turf stacks, and two important-looking standing stones swept past him. On the flat stretch leading to the main road that would eventually enter the town, as if
intuiting the boy’s reluctance to cross the line into his previous life, the bike began to lose momentum. When the vehicle began to waver, Kieran jumped off prematurely. Unsure of how to dismount, and having forgotten in the ecstasy of his flying descent that there were pedals that one could use to gain speed and therefore balance, he landed, astonishingly, on his feet. Then he strolled casually back to where the bicycle lay on the road and picked it up by the handlebars, which now felt familiar in his hands. He walked the vehicle all the way back up the four miles of the hill, talking to it as if it were a horse or a dog, something animate and faithful, that had done him a great service and that should be praised and petted for its efforts.

  Gerry-Annie was not on the road when he returned, but he could see his three shirts waving their arms on the line that stretched from a pole to the back wall of the house, his several selves reacting with great gladness to this wonderful transformation that had taken place inside him.

  It soon became clear that the bicycle could be used as a bribe by Gerry-Annie to make the boy do things he would normally have tried to avoid, and it was in this way that Kieran was persuaded to go to school for a time, to attend mass now and then, and to visit his father in the town when his brother was home from Dublin. But his mother was able to begin her whispering in the house when both boys were there, and to plant this whispering deep enough in Kieran that it would be two or three days before he would awaken empty of her. When he told Annie, then, that he couldn’t go back for a long time, she was wise enough not to ask why.

  The school, five miles away at Derriana Lough, on the other hand, proved to be a surprising delight for the boy. He had no trouble at all with lessons in history or English, and even the mathematics lost its power to disappoint once he had novels by Dickens or Wilkie Collins to look forward to, the poetry of Yeats, and a view of a silver lake and blue and ochre mountains to turn to if the days were long. The western arm of the mountain of Knocknagantee reached out to embrace the lake on its southern side, and the play of light on the rocks, bogs, and pastures on days when there was sunshine, or the passing squalls of rain and fog on wet days, provided a carnival of stimuli, and there were times when he simply could not turn away. The mountain stood upright like a wall made entirely of rocks and vegetation, changing with the seasons from greens to yellows, from browns to purples, the colours visibly intensifying when under a coat of moisture.

  The master, a mild young man not much taller than some of the bigger boys, often suggested walks to his pupils if the day was decent, and in this way Kieran discovered two green roads tucked into the seams of that mountain. It was not uncommon on these roads to find the remains of a village with a few old people still there with their sheep, two dogs, and a donkey, living a life that seemed impossible with such rough access to the outside world. How did they manage the thatch for their roofs, the turf for their fires? Kieran wanted to know but was too shy to ask such questions – in spite of the courtesy shown to the young scholars by these people, their delight in visitors, evidenced even in their prancing, welcoming dogs. And, as if put there as a deterrent to inquiry, there were also the abandoned houses of men and women who had not been able to survive the isolation, and then the low, collapsing walls of cabins that had been left empty because of death or emigration, at the time of the famine, now just over one hundred years in the past.

  One old man, inviting the class in for tea, told the group that he had carried everything in the cottage up the track on his own back: the dresser, the settle, the table and chairs, which were tied to the table legs and dragged behind on the broken road, and finally the bed for his bride, a large four-poster that Kieran could not imagine the man paying for. “She died in childbirth,” the man told them, “in that very bed in which I sleep each night of my life, and where she was by my side, she the flower of Coomavoher.” The child, he added vaguely, was now a solicitor in Killarney.

  Died, Kieran’s mother whispered, but so softly he almost didn’t hear. A mountain stream rampaged past the east wall of this man’s house, turning one whole room, floors, ceilings, walls, green with moss, and in that room Kieran spotted a bicycle, also emerald, the spokes of its wheels furry with moss. “Ah the room of the damp,” the old man said when he caught Kieran looking, “and my brother’s bicycle I haven’t the heart for.”

  And so the notion of riding his own bicycle three miles up this slippery ruined road was planted in Kieran, something he was to do almost every day from then on before the lessons began. When the winter came he pedalled in darkness, negotiating his way around unconcerned flocks, toward the two candlelit homes and then beyond them to the empty sites of Dughile and Coomavanniha, where he stopped until he saw a light in the schoolhouse on the lower land across the lake. Then he turned the bicycle around and began the bone-rattling descent while the sheep scattered and the dawn smudged the horizon.

  There were twenty-one children of all sizes in the school, almost all of whom spoke Irish, though they were admonished by the master for doing so in the classroom. Lessons were taught in English only. Still, the master, an Irish speaker himself, was from only ten miles away, and he was Republican enough to want the old legends to be alive in the children of the parish, and encouraged them to speak about them. So it was the high-pitched voice of a very small girl that told Kieran about Oisin and the Fianna, and how the pass that led out of the mountains and into the world was called Ballagh Oisin. He would always remember this child reciting the stages of a story that had been spoken for a thousand years, the music of it, and the wonder, the English words breaking apart as the rhythm of her Gaelic accent entered them, while many one-syllabled words opened in the middle to two or three different sounds as if they were being sung. Kieran listened, rapt, as she recounted the tale of the ancient warrior, seduced by Niamh, returning after three hundred years to this high place where he searched for his long-dead hunting companions in the land below him. No woman, not even Niamh, had ever been able to compete with his affection for them. Oisin could see the whole world from there, the child said, the bays of the sea and the headlands on either side of them, the oak forests, and the lakes and rivers, and the fields climbing halfway up the hills, but he could not find those of whom he was so fond because they were long dead, though he was slow to come to know this, believing, as he did, that he had been gone only three days. And it was St. Patrick – out of courtesy the saint came to meet him at the summit of the pass – who told him what the day was and the year, and tried to comfort this old son of an old chieftain when he wept. I will instruct my monks, Patrick said, to write down your stories and those of your kin so they will not be lost, though your world has been vanquished by my world and will never come back.

  When the school was dismissed for the summer, Kieran asked Gerry-Annie how far it was to the pass they called Ballagh Oisin. She told him it was not far unless you were going there with local sheep who knew where they belonged and had a tendency to turn back to their own mountain pastures. Gerry’s father, she told him, had been a drover for the landlord when he was a boy, taking the landlord’s flocks great distances when they had been sold. “And he had the devil’s own time of it,” she said, “those sheep belonging to Cappanagroun and them insistent on it.” If he as much as turned his head they were gone back in the direction they had come from and then he would have to chase them and climb the pass with them one more time.

  “But on the bicycle?” he asked.

  “No time at all,” Annie said. “Though a terrible climb to get there.”

  But his morning training on the rough green mountain trails opposite the school made the ascent to the summit of the pass a fairly easy pedal once he went there. And when he reached the top he saw that what the child had said was true, he could see the whole world from this height; the world of the mountains where he lived and the world of the lower lands and the towns beyond it. He could see the four booming strands of the Iveragh, and the islands beyond them. He stood on the pedals of his bicycle, balancing and lookin
g for several moments. Then he began the exhilarating descent.

  During the next few years, when he wasn’t busy with school or chores, Kieran cycled everywhere he could. In the beginning he rode all over the parish, visiting every road, bóithrín, and even the roughest of tracks, following the latter until they petered out, often in an upland bog. Eventually he moved farther afield, into the neighbouring peninsulas of Dingle and Beara, where the mountain roads were unfamiliar and more thrillingly daunting. He was always happiest on higher ground, where the view was extensive and the path was demanding. Often he would return to Gerry-Annie’s fully drenched, wind-blown, and spattered with mud. She would scold him then, but there was no real anger in her admonitions. “You’re a climber,” she told him. “Always heading for the sky. No wonder you have all these collisions with wind and rain.”

  He liked it when she said that, savouring, as always, the way that Annie explained him. There was something about the word collision that was just right as well, for when he was on the bicycle, mountains, pools of rain water, gullies, groves of trees, all of this exploded around his swiftness. Closing his eyes just before he went to sleep, the images of the day would rush toward him, and he would collide with them, but softly, as if they were made of nothing but light.

  After he had left the Derriana school, Kieran had fully ignored his father’s requests that he return to town in order to study at the Upper School there, preferring to hire himself out on occasion as a temporary labourer, a spalpeen, to farmers needing the extra help. Sometimes there was a hiring fair in his own town, but more often he would ride as far as Killorglin or Tralee. Because of the bicycle, he was able to travel far enough that he had some kind of work more often than not, in spite of the time being one of scarcity and the fact that many young men his age were leaving Ireland to search for employment abroad.