Four Letters of Love

by Niall Williams

  8

  By the time Nicholas and Sean reached the school the children were already outside to meet them. The Master made it only as far as the door and stood feeling the wind on his wet face and watching as the children ran forward and yahooed the little herd of arriving donkeys that had come trotting up behind. The children kept looking at Sean’s legs but he kept his eyes on his father and walked steadily in the gateway of the school. When he was within fifteen feet of him he stopped, and then hurried forward as Master Gore collapsed in hard and uncontrollable spasms of released grief. He slid down to the ground and his body convulsed and the cries that escaped him rent the air and stilled the children. (The Widow Liathain stirred from her fire when she heard them and went immediately for her boots.)

  It was too much; it was simply too much for him. The Master was racked with it and reached up his hand blindly and took his son’s warm fingers for the first time in years.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Muiris said, and crumpled like an old newspaper, showing dark water stains on the front of his shirt.

  Nicholas and Sean helped him up. The commotion outside the school had already caught the attention of several of the islanders and as the three men headed back to Margaret in the house there was a gathering cluster of old fishermen and widows and children about them. They looked at Nicholas as much as Sean for the evidence of the miracle and followed across the stones in a whispering throng that was flecked with the giddy cries and yelps of the freed schoolchildren. The Widow Liathain came out to meet them and sucked in her cheeks as if receiving blows. It was a minor holy carnival, this moving crowd with the three men at the front. Muiris was walking a few inches above the surface of the island, carefully placing his feet and taking each step across the air with the concentration of a tightrope walker. He mustn’t fall down, he mustn’t fall down and wake up now. He must make it to the house. He reached out and held on to Nicholas’s arm to keep himself from floating any higher and let his swimming eyes go without blinking as the world turned watery before him.

  What was this? What was happening? In the windy walk from the cliffs to the school house and then back to the cottage, the impossible questions flapped like sheets in the two men’s brains. Nicholas was sure he had done nothing; he had not touched Sean nor prayed nor even been thinking particularly of him when he had stood up. It was nothing to do with him; it was idle chance. It was random and wild, and yet as he was walking in the garden gateway and feeling the crush and trample of the people behind him he could already feel interpretation and judgement alighting like blackbirds on his shoulders.

  With a joint sigh the three men arrived at the cottage door and were on the instant of knocking when Margaret Gore swung it open and threw up her arms to air her son’s wheelchair blanket. It blew sharply westward out of her view and left her dumbstruck and staring at the crowd in her garden.

  ‘Mother,’ said Sean as she came inside the hoop of his arms with such fierce strength his face reddened. She pulled back after a moment, took a sniffle from the air and drew the three men inside the doorway quickly before turning and closing it sharply with her backside even as the islanders were stepping forward to come in.

  9

  The crowd stayed in the garden; as if the after moments of miracle might still be descending on their heads like dust or fire. They bundled in hope and faith, but with little charity, each of them privately wishing their own separate redemption, their victory in the Lottery, the glut of fish or the house falling down on their enemy. The widow gave out her predictions like black missalettes; nothing could come of this. It was something very strange, very wrong. What had the stranger done to him? She was happily dispensing gloom when Father Noel arrived looking for his housekeeper and the explanation for no morning tea.

  ‘What is it?’ he asked.

  ‘Sean Gore walked, Father.’

  ‘The Dublin man made him walk.’

  ‘He did. He did, Father.’

  The priest shushed them, and waved them hopelessly back towards the gate. He was a quiet man who sought quietness, and was suddenly alarmed at what had landed in his parish. Panic prickled in his lower stomach like a bag of needles. It was the kind of thing you wished on your worst enemy, this: miracles. Let the Bishop have them, give them to Galway, but not here. Why were they always happening in out-of-the way rural places? God! His shaven jaw stung in the salt wind and he rued the new blades he had bought at O’Gorman’s.

  ‘Outside,’ he said to the faithful. ‘You should get outside. You should all go home. Go home now and . . .’ He wasn’t sure of his words; they were caught on needles. ‘Go on. ‘I’ll . . . I’ll find out what . . .’

  The crowd moved back outside the gate but did not go home. They were like a wave returning when Father Noel turned his back and stepped up to knock on the door. Miracles! This family, they were odd people, you could put nothing past them. He palmed the door firmly and kept his back turned from seeing his power over the congregation fade as they came forward in a surge to see. He let himself imagine he was the figure of order in all this, going in to set things right, and kept himself upright and proper at the cottage door. When it did not open he knocked again a little louder. Of course there was commotion in the house; they were excited and noisy, most probably. He stood and moved his stomach to the left to relieve the sharpness of anxiety, but kept his back to the fishermen and children. He waited, the wind played with his trousers. The smoke from the fire within made the air grey as the sea, and looking upward Father Noel thought to himself that this was one of God’s little tricks. One of His little trials. Oh Yes. Just wait, and knock again. Be patient.

  He knocked again, trying hard to make the action seem even gentler and more mild-mannered than before. He shifted his weight, looked down at his knuckles, checked his watch, felt the eyes of the islanders on his back and quite suddenly realised he could hardly breathe. They were crushing him from ten feet away with expectation and judgement. He raised his fist and banged on the door again. And again. Damnit. Come on, come on. Again he raised his hand and beat there on the wood, growing hot and dizzy and wild with anger and impatience as the wind off the sea blew at his back and his cheeks reddened and bled high colour around to the thickness of his neck. He felt the door locked against him and kicked out at it with his polished right shoe, getting no reply, and feeling the bag of needles explode in all directions within him as he turned away and walked falteringly through the parting crowd and out of the garden.

  10

  It was Margaret who had locked the door, and had the three men sit mute in the kitchen while the priest banged outside. She was too dumbfounded to react, but knew instinctively this was one of the moments of her life. She could feel the enormity of a presence in the house and blinked the water that kept welling in her eyes when she looked across at Muiris holding onto Sean’s hand. She put on the kettle for tea and drew the curtain. She tried not to look at Nicholas, but kept catching the strange pale face of him like a light beam as she took out the mugs. Who was he? What had brought him here? And what had he done to make Sean come alive so?

  ‘I’m fine. I feel grand,’ said Sean replying to no question, but feeling swift flights of them like arrows coming over the air.

  ‘I didn’t touch him,’ said Nicholas, turning towards the mother his own dumb amazement, the blankness of himself. ‘It was nothing. I was talking and then . . . He was just fine, like you took a blanket off him or something. I didn’t do anything.’

  ‘Of course you did,’ the Master told him. ‘Who else did it? There was nobody there. And he hasn’t . . .’

  ‘Stop!’ Margaret turned sharply from that part of the wall she had been studying. ‘Stop. I don’t want any talk about it. It’s not right. It’s bad luck. Just. We’ll just. You’re feeling all right now, Sean?’

  ‘Yes, Mam.’

  ‘And you’ve no pain?’

  ‘No.’

  What she was going to say, how she was going to marshal the events into a code of pra
ctice, a line of interpretation, the man never knew. For she came across the kitchen like a flowing tide and fell about the neck of her son, clasping on to him with gratitude and grief and letting the salt of years run free from her.

  That evening, while the crowd lingered outside the locked house, and novenas ascended like fireflies into the moony Atlantic night-time, Sean played the fiddle for Nicholas and his parents. Muiris brought out the visitors’ whiskey from the parlour and mother and father danced in a red-cheeked gaiety they hadn’t known for decades. The kitchen swayed, its floor thumped in rhythm, and shortly the little house itself sailed off on the music. It was hypnotic and free; the slides and reels turning the air into spun thread and the feet stepping away on a journey that went round and round the floor and off into the place beyond thinking.

  Nicholas sat across from Sean and watched him like a puzzle. It made no sense. It had been nothing, and yet inside the house it felt like a miracle. He took a sip of the whiskey and let it burn down his throat. Muiris stepped free of the dance and topped up the glass, turning back to Margaret within the beat. And so, on it went, the parents dancing, Sean playing and Nicholas drinking a hasty road into oblivion. By the time he collapsed on the table, everything in the house was dancing, chairs twirling tables and pictures jigging on the walls. He closed his eyes and his mouth gaped at the wilder visions in his brain, then looking again he saw the table crashing upwards to meet him.

  By midnight the crowd outside had moved to Coman’s and only the widow next door was watching the house for wings descending. She felt a blow of disappointment when the lights were shut off and the music stopped. The island settled in a whispering and excited night-time, and within each cottage the story of Sean Gore left husbands and wives sleepless in their beds, feeling the sudden chill knowledge that while they were thoughtlessly churning through the day perhaps God Himself had passed along the island roads.

  11

  For two days and nights Sean did not leave the house. The Master stayed at home and the school was closed. Then, on the Friday morning before six o’clock, the fisherman Seamus Beg took Sean and Nicholas in a small boat to Galway. It was Sean’s idea; he wanted to be there to meet Isabel returning from her honeymoon. He wanted the mischief of the surprise and told Nicholas he’d have to catch her when she fainted. The Master and Margaret agreed on the plan, only because they found it impossible to say no. Events were swimming along at their own pace; there was a quickened sense of plot, an air of verb, and the mother and father felt themselves pulled along within it. What could they do? Tell their son that they didn’t believe he could manage himself off the mainland when he looked like a grown man? Tell him they couldn’t be sure to trust the humble and quiet visitor who seemed to have brought about the miracle? It was impossible; the parents found all arguments blocking up within them. Besides, they agreed, with Sean and Nicholas gone for a couple of days they could go about and dilute the thick reverence and superstition that was smelling like incense all over the island.

  So, on the Friday morning, Margaret woke the boys in the darkness. Muiris rose in his suit, bed-wrinkled and tuft-haired, and prepared the ten pound notes for Seamus Beg. They sat together for the last sausages in the house and took tea in gulps. Sean was giddy and drummed his knife and fork lightly. When the three men were about to leave for the boat Margaret turned off the lights before opening the door. She dipped her fingers for the holy water that had dried up on the little sponge in the font and so blessed their heads drily in the doorway. The wind came in the house, the sea was broken and bits of it flew on the air. In the half-light beyond the garden wall something moved and for an instant it might have been the waking camp of the vigil; it was the donkeys. Margaret pressed Sean to her, and slipped into his coat pocket a letter for Isabel. She turned to Nicholas and felt her words blow away; she wanted to say, For whatever reason and however you have come into our life you are welcome and that nothing they could do or say could repay whatever it was that had been done to bring about this miracle, she wanted to say that she felt his goodness like shawl about her and that she had not slept a single moment since it happened but had beseeched God and the stars and the sky that whatever it was, whatever fall of light or opening door, that it would not close or darken again. She blinked her eyes and the men stepped from her.

  They hurried down to the pier like spies and met Seamus Beg in his woollen hat spitting for the wind. He blessed himself when they came.

  ‘He won’t sink my boat?’

  ‘He won’t.’ The Master offered the money. ‘He hasn’t been saved to drown. You’re safer with him than anyone else.’

  The fisherman scowled into the weather. ‘Get in so.’

  ‘You’ll come back to us,’ Muiris told Nicholas, holding his hand before the water separated them. ‘I’ll give you the painting.’

  The passengers sat in on wet benches and felt the frailty of the boat as the engine gave an oily cough and shuddered. The sky was still dark and bruised heavily with clouds, the mainland lurked in a gloom, and as the boat pulled away the Master held his arm up in a slow wave, his fingers reaching for the unknown heavens and his mind wondering what could happen next.

  Six

  1

  Some things do not bear much telling. I think my father knew this. I think he knew how words can sometimes flatten the deepest emotions or pin them like wild butterflies stunned out of magnificent flight, flimsiest souvenirs of what moved and coloured air like silk. Better to imagine it. Imagine music playing, imagine light falling through clouds into the morning street and the scent of the island following us as we walked to find the shop. Imagine there was nothing unlovely in the world, and that we walked as proof of miracles, our feet barely touching the path and smiles playing on our faces as the thousand birds sang in the sky. Imagine goodness floated from us into the city air and cars slowed to unwind windows and breathe the thick perfume that smelled like white candles and fresh linen. Imagine one of the aches of the world had secretly mended, and music heralded the news, rising along allegro with notes like joy and laughter pealing as we opened the door.

  This is how I came to see Isabel Gore for the first time.

  Seven

  1

  When Nicholas returned to the island with Sean five days later, Margaret Gore saw in a moment that the worst had happened. She did not need to make enquiries; she brought the two of them their tea in the kitchen and as she slid the plate of buttered toast down before Nicholas she detected in the air about him the smell of crushed roses. She knew, and without further ado began planning how she would hide the news from Muiris. He was a man, she reasoned, and less likely to detect anything; but it was the poet in him she worried about, the part that was neither man nor woman, but more a solidity of scented air. If he sat alone with Nicholas for any length of time, surely he would see it too; the man was in love.

  At the tea table Sean was quiet and ate ferociously, wolfing the toast and nodding to the bits of news his mother told him. Father Noel wanted to see him. There had been a mass for him. Nobody in the place had been talking about anything else since he left; and of course they blamed her for letting him away.

  ‘Your father’s useless of course, can’t speak up for himself. Unless it’s to roar at somebody and then it’s the drink talking and not him.’

  She brought fried eggs before them. ‘Eat them now.’

  She stood back a step and watched how Nicholas pulled away a fraction from the eggs, confirming her suspicion that love was making butterflies in his stomach.

  ‘Perhaps you’d prefer something else?’

  ‘I’ll have that.’ Sean tilted the other plate and slid the eggs together. ‘He’s a bit queasy after the boat.’

  ‘Just tea, then,’ said Margaret, pouring him another mug and looking down at the hopeless figure of him, slouched there at the table. She knew without asking. She felt she had known all along, as if the moment he first stepped through the door she had half-read the signs, the something ab
out him that was not ordinary, that was equally touched in some sense with tragedy and miracle. But she had only half-read them then. Now it was all clear to her, he had been smitten by Isabel. Even as he was sitting there staring at the table she knew he was thinking of her, sickening for her and breathing down all the channels of his being the bruised and rosy scent of her daughter. She longed to ask, but could not, and so stayed about the kitchen while the two men ate, running her cloth over the taps and along the sink while the sea in the distance frothed with laughter.

  ‘So you both had a good time?’

  ‘Brilliant.’

  ‘That’s good.’

  ‘Galway’s great when you can walk in it,’ said Sean. ‘Anytime I was there before was only for doctors. This time, though, it was great. Just great. Is there another egg, Mam?’

  When she saw Muiris coming towards the garden, Margaret felt a lump of dread rise in her throat; he would come straight in and ask about Isabel and the truth would come out. He had finished school an hour earlier and his arrival now meant only one thing; he had stopped for the two or three drinks that burned away the tiredness of the teaching and left him in a quickened, excited state, liable for anything. She saw him coming from the window and turned to the boys.