The Night Stages

by Jane Urquhart

  Late one summer, he was hired on by a farmer called Donal O’Shea, who held two thousand acres of commonage in the mountains with three O’Sullivan brothers. Donal had been a particular friend of Gerry’s but, as Annie said, one who had never taken to politics and was therefore still alive.

  “Perhaps I was a coward, Annie,” he said when this was explained to Kieran in Annie’s kitchen, “for I believed in what they fought for but never fought for it myself.”

  But Annie disagreed. “You were too far into the mountains,” she told him, “to do the necessary talking. Those men went up the mountain, all right, but they never went as far into the Reeks as your sheep are. There would be no point in that, all the fighting being in the town, or near enough to it anyway. It’s why I want Kieran to work for you. He’s gone sixteen, you see, and there is a man coming out in him. There will be no talking that far into the mountains. He won’t end up bleeding and ruined at the side of the road, or off in some jail yard in Dublin.”

  “But does he want to go with me, Annie, that’s the question.” Donal looked doubtfully at the boy. “Does he want to go with me for the little I have to give him?” His dog, Ean, named, Annie had told Kieran, for the way the animal seemed to fly above the sheep when he was herding from one part of the mountain to another – looked doubtful as well.

  “And shall I take the bicycle?”

  “There’ll be no need for a bicycle where we are going, no chance of that.”

  Kieran cast a sad glance at the shed where the Purple Hornet was waiting.

  “It is only a week or so, Kieran.” Annie was already packing a bag of supplies, clothing, and some food.

  “And your legs will be stronger for it,” said Donal. “They’ll be stronger after all the climbing.”

  What he saw up the mountain: the chain of lakes below him that Donal said were known as the Pater Nosters, the rosary beads. You could pray with those lakes at the end of your arm, looking at them from a distance, and the shining of them, the silvered mystery, made you want to do it. More lakes, each one with its name in Irish, and each Irish name a story that is being told less and less, Donal said, as the people moved away from the language and gathered elsewhere. Donal, silent before these bowls of water as if he had never seen them before, turned to Kieran and said, “The hardness of this life, and then the beauty.”

  And he saw the four rivers – Inny, Cummeragh, Caragh, and the Sneem – named for the way the water moved through the land, rising together at the top of the Teermoyle Mountains, the booleying places, places where one man died and another prospered. “You can turn your back on it or you can set your face toward it,” Donal announced. Ean, who trotted beside them, who tore off and looped around straying sheep and who responded only to Irish, was less condescending with Kieran now that the boy had entered the mountains but was still not fully approachable.

  “That dog doesn’t have a word of English,” Donal said when Kieran tried to coax or command the animal. “He doesn’t trust you with those sounds in your mouth, and anyway, it’s me he knows.”

  They climbed higher, the dog running away from them, circling the flock, then returning, filled with purpose and quivering with the joy of some private accomplishment, brushing Kieran’s pant leg before hurrying off in the opposite direction. A second dog appeared. A leaping, mock-biting reunion ensued, followed by a further chase.

  “Where did he come from?” Kieran asked Donal.

  “That would be Scamall, the Cloud, Tim’s dog,” Donal said.

  A few minutes later Tim himself approached and introduced himself to Kieran as Tim the Sky. “I am so named,” he said, “because mine is the house highest in the mountains.” He pointed to a stone cottage, hardly bigger than a turf shed. “There is no one higher living here,” he added, “and I’ve seen things at this height that none of the others will ever see.”

  “He once saw three suns in one sky,” Donal confided.

  “And flying ships,” Tim added.

  “You mean airplanes,” Kieran said.

  “No, I mean flying ships. A full fleet of them sailing over Teermoyle. I’ve seen lakes turn to blood.” He pointed to a small bowl of water far below and surrounded by sheer rock. “Iskanamacteery, it was, the Lake of the Wolf. And once there was a shower of grain so plentiful every blade of the grass and every bush of the gorse was covered with it like snow.”

  “He baked bread with that,” Donal said.

  “I did,” Tim confirmed. “I ground it with stones and I made four fine loaves of bread.”

  “He’s had a black gable more than once from gorse burning in the mountains,” said Donal.

  “Sometimes those fires were my own. Sometimes they were the fires of the valley people, fires that came up the mountain. And I’ve seen other fires,” Tim insisted, “fires from long-ago times. I’ve seen armies crashing in the air.”

  “You mean the men talking in the mountains,” Kieran said.

  “No, I mean armies from so long ago, nobody could say whose armies they were. I am well above the current talking.” Tim pointed toward the heavens. “I own the sky.”

  “There’s the mountains, and then there is the rest of it down there,” Donal told Kieran when they were approaching the end of a day. They looked toward the lowlands, where small white houses grew in the fields like safe flowers. “There are those who go into the mountains with sheep, and there are those who can barely leave their hearthstones,” Donal said when they had moved far enough into the mountains that even the house of Tim the Sky was no longer visible. There was nothing judgmental in this remark: it was a statement of fact.

  During the two weeks that Kieran was with Donal, the weather was mild and calm. After each rain there would be a full rainbow joining one mountain to another, and then the sun. Some nights were so still the stars shone as brightly in the still lakes as they did in the sky. Sometimes you could see the stars in the dog’s eyes. As they bedded down at the end of the last day, Kieran heard Donal say a poem, his voice so private and quiet it was as if he were praying.

  I came unto him

  The sheep were gathered by him.

  There were Soldiers of rain

  Marching on Knocknacusha and Knockmoyle

  And the great broken hill of Drung

  With his sheep gathered to him

  He spoke slowly of his townland

  A place with its name split apart

  And the remnant sounds of it

  On one side or another

  What he knew of travel was this

  The distance he was able to plough in one day

  And the distance a cow’s lowing, a lamb’s bleating

  Can be heard on high mountains

  Or a stone marker can be seen

  Fainter and fainter

  These frail measurements

  Myself in his arms

  And the rain coming down on us

  Kieran sat up in his blanket. The poem went deep into him and made him alert to a kind of thrall that he suddenly knew he had always been susceptible to. It was not like the poem about the books that Annie had sung for him in Irish, then later recited in English, though he felt there was certainly a lament in it, or some sadness he couldn’t name. He sensed that his mother was nearby, though he could neither hear her nor see her. He knew it wasn’t her that he wanted, but something, someone, as yet undefined for him. He thought he might weep and his voice was unsteady when he asked Donal what the words meant.

  It’s a poem I keep in my mind, Donal told him. It was said to me long ago by a girl I loved.

  She had left her home at dawn, Donal said, once when he was for the first time booleying alone. And she had climbed and walked all through the mountains until she found him, bringing food, but mostly bringing herself to him. “I remember when I saw her I said, Come here to me, and she did that. It was all I was to know of women,” Donal said, “and it has been everything I have kept with me always.”

  “What happened to her?”

&n
bsp; “She went to Africa with the nuns, she having taken the vow herself. And before she left, she said that poem to me.”

  “Could you not make her stay?”

  “I could not. She had received the call.”

  Kieran lay down again, the thought of the girl in the mountains who had gone to Africa fierce in his mind.

  As he was sliding into sleep, Donal added, “We were both very young, and yet she knew me well. And she said the poem in Irish, which made it much more beautiful. But I said it tonight in English so that you would understand.”

  II

  SEARCH

  There is no suggestion of either day or night out on the tarmac now. The interior lights of the airliner have been shut off and the shape of the fuselage is now barely discernible in the fog. It is as if this weather pattern is attempting to extinguish the length and breadth of time, to make it immeasurable. Tam looks at the clocks, wondering as she does so which hour she inhabits: the afternoon of the place she has abandoned, the early evening of her intended destination, or the midpoint of this waiting room stasis. She feels wretched, too exhausted to fight the futile and mostly painful longing, sometimes bordering on panic, that has always been a part of her involvement with Niall. No amount of thought on her part, no amount of examination or interpretation had been able to explain it, dismiss it, or satisfy it. It has followed her across the ocean and is seated beside her here on this leatherette bench. All this humiliating, helpless sorrow.

  She closes her eyes and finds herself listening to the sounds around her. The couple directly behind her are arguing: she can hear the blame in their whispered exchanges. A baby begins to cry then falls silent, comforted, Tam assumes, by food or by being held. Nearby someone is pacing: the subtle tap-tapping of their footsteps slowly increases then just as slowly decreases in volume. There is something palliating in this sedate form of advance and retreat. Her head begins to nod.

  When she opens her eyes, she is drawn once again to the stories the painting tells, and notices, for the first time, that although oranges and yellows are plentiful, these are actually night scenes set against a midnight blue sky. The exception is the part on the far right of the picture, which she has now come to call the arrival zone. There the figures are bathed in theatrical morning light: the maternal woman who put her in mind of her lost nan, the bird standing guard over the two eggs in her nest. And yet the children who are gathered there are still shadowy, even under the assault of such radiance and in the midst of such an eruption of blossoms. She considers the possibility that they might be hiding.

  In late May 1944, just in advance of the invasion of Normandy, Tam had been required to conceal each of the ten Spitfires she delivered from factories to a variety of airfields to protect them from being seen from above by those who would want to destroy them. She recalls now the strangeness of this; the bumpy journey of the grounded aircraft lumbering away from the smoothness of the runways toward a landscape in full flower. One Spit was placed in an orchard. Another was squeezed between rows of poplars, its beautiful thin wings only inches away from bark. She had loved these aircraft because of the solitude of their single seat and their apparent lightness in flight. She loved their manoeuvrability. But on the ground they became less organic, more ungainly and machinelike. She abandoned them under willows, beside ancient oak trees, and once in the centre of a famously tall growth of rhododendrons. At night she dreamed anxiously that the moonlight, or even the starlight, might cause a metallic glow to emanate from them, silvering the trees and bushes from within rather than without, and alerting the enemy. But by day she would forget her night fears and set out once again on a round of deliveries, and of camouflage.

  Niall told her it had taken him five stubborn years before he would allow himself to begin to look for his brother. Embarrassed about his need to do this, and unnerved by his sudden fear of disgrace, he said nothing to anyone: nothing about what he was thinking and nothing about what he was planning. Even when nothing of the sort was going on, he would say he had a meteorological conference or some other kind of appointment in London rather than admit to the sense of shame that prompted his search.

  “Your father,” Tam had said when he told her this, “your father would have known there was no conference.” This insistence on secrecy and shame was confusing to her.

  But his father was retired by then, he told her. After years and years of launching weather balloons and drawing up charts, he had turned away from meteorology as if it had never existed for him. He had become an older man. He sometimes worked on the Irish Times crossword; occasionally he went for a pint in the pub at the end of his evening walks. Now and then he would ask his son how things were going at the station, but not as often as one might think.

  McWilliams, however, as chief at the station, would give help and advice at every opportunity, and in such a warm way that Niall would only realize later that the wide conversation he had with the man had been laced with instructions. Niall adored him, and would eagerly comply with anything the older man wanted him to do. He told her that McWilliams knew everything about everything, that he was animated, life-enhancing, a born teacher, a sage. As his own father greyed and withdrew, became hard of hearing and querulous, this other, more ebullient man became, for Niall, an essential guide.

  Yes, McWilliams knew everything. He talked about the blue rays in the sky, how they scattered toward the earth, diverted from the direction they had intended to take. He said that Irish lakes were dark because of the molecules of peat that intercepted the path of light. He could name the date and duration of each of the most famous gales of the Iveragh going back two hundred years. He knew about fogbows, rainbows in various shades of grey made of fog, the droplets composing them being too small for the spectrum of colour. He had anecdotes about ice: a French cavalry, two hundred years before, had captured the Dutch fleet brought to a halt by being deeply frozen into a bay. The only naval victory won on horseback! He knew that there were twenty thousand windmills in Germany in the mid-eighteenth century. He could list the artists who best depicted storms, and remarked how few of them could paint rain. He would conjecture the numbers of thousands of miles one wave had travelled before it broke on a Munster shore. He claimed that several of the colourful birds he kept in cages throughout his house had been blown into his hands during a gale that was the result of a hurricane in the Caribbean. “Blow-ins,” Niall said to her. “Like you.”

  A few years later there actually was a conference. Niall, visiting her after a month apart, told her this as he was leaving her house. London, he said, in May.

  She asked him if she could go with him and he was silent, thinking.

  “One night,” she said. “One morning. Waking up together.” The tone of her voice was humiliating to her, the supplicant in it. She would not say it more than once.

  Three nights, he eventually agreed. But not London, somewhere near Gloucester instead. There was a village there, he told her, where Francis Drake had lived in a large house that was now an inn. McWilliams had told him it was rumoured that Drake had not written his The World Encompassed there because that book had been assembled by his great-nephew, another Francis Drake, thereby leading to centuries of confusion. “The old slave driver,” Niall had added, though whether in reference to the elder or the younger she wasn’t sure. And it was right on the estuary of the Severn River, this village, at the very bottom of a forested gorge, Niall had assured her. Its climate would be detached in some way or another, a self-perpetuating system. She suspected he wanted to take the story of this isolated weather back to McWilliams.

  She stands up and walks across the room to the painting and looks at the black plastic plaque beneath it, hoping to discover its title. But only the artist’s name is printed there: Kenneth Lochhead. “Kenneth Lochhead,” she whispers. The Scottish name suggests lakes, rocks, and ominous skies, and yet the mural she is in front of right now looks like a dusky riverbank rather than a lake. There is the long stretch of it, and the pe
ople gathered at the shoreline, as if waiting for some kind of a water-related flotilla, a procession of royal watercraft, a ceremonial advance. Or are they witnessing a retreat? Yes, something is moving away from them. They watch this withdrawal, whatever it is, with great dispassion, neutral in the face of their own powerlessness.

  “My brother might be near there,” Niall had added, almost as an afterthought. Then he had quoted Drake: “ ‘There must be a beginning of any great matter, but continuing unto the end until it be thoroughly finished yields the true glory.’ ”

  “And what is that?” she wondered.

  “Self-congratulation,” he had said.

  Getting there was complicated. She took a train to Dublin, a boat to Holyhead. Then she boarded a series of further trains, secondary and tertiary lines, eventually halting at a sizable town where she hired a cab. Then there was the approach to the village; a wooded lane that back-switched into the deeply forested ravine at the bottom of which stood seven or eight structures, all of them ancient, beside an embankment or burn. The inn, which had been the house in which Drake was rumoured to have lived, was large and almost empty in this off-season, and the hall she walked to the riverside room Niall had rented was uncarpeted and echoing. And there was no river, anyway, the whole waterfront having been dammed up to provide the bed for the same railway that she had travelled on to get there.

  The river moved along at the bottom of the opposite side of the embankment, as she discovered while taking a walk that led her through a tunnel and to its edge. It was indeed an estuary, and the tide was out. She wanted to romanticize the estuary but found herself more concerned with mud. It was everywhere, a particular kind of mud that lived half of its life underwater and clung to her shoes.