Seven Letters

by J. P. Monninger

  “Well, not to worry so much then. I’m fine.”

  “Milly, let me call you later. Or maybe tomorrow, okay? Then I can tell you what I saw. Maybe we can Skype if I can figure out how to work the stupid thing.”

  “Okay, Katie, go enjoy. You’re my little Irish traveler. My little Irish colleen.”

  “That’s what Gerry called me. I must look the part. Love you.”

  “Who is Gerry?”

  “The guy, the old man sitting near me.”

  “Got you.”

  She said she loved me back. I clicked off the phone. Before I could put it away and sneak past Gerry to resume my place, I saw the old woman standing near her seat. It was a mismatch; the bus was too big and she was too small. She looked frightened and unsteady and unsure of where she needed to go or what she hoped to do. No one seemed to be paying any attention to her. Maybe, like Gerry, the other dandelions were sleeping.

  I walked carefully up the aisle and stood silently until she turned and saw me.

  “Do you need a hand?” I said when I reached her.

  “You don’t mind? We are such a bother, we old folks.”

  “Not at all. Happy to help.”

  “I need to use the ladies’. I’m sorry to impose. My name is Nora, but most people call me Gran.”

  “Not at all. Tell me the best way to go about it. My name is Kate.”

  She was a charming, dear bird. Old people can become softer and kinder, or harder and grumpier. She was the soft kind. She smiled at me; she had beautiful blue eyes—soft and translucent as smoke—that held something about her childhood in them. A childhood of laughter. She possessed the Irish twinkle so many people spoke about. I had made an accurate appraisal of her earlier: she looked to find friends wherever she went. She reached out her hand and grasped my wrist. Her hand had little strength.

  She told me to brace her from the front. I held her under her tiny elbows, walking backward through the aisle. She used the seat backs to steady herself. I backed down the aisle and paused by the bathroom door. The one on the left was available. I held the door open.

  “I’m afraid I need a hand inside as well. I am embarrassed to ask it. I thought I was all set for the journey.”

  I wasn’t prepared for that request, but I nodded and said of course.

  “What a way to get to know someone,” Gran said, touching my wrist again. “Well, into the breach. Nature is master of us all.”

  It wasn’t easy to navigate, but we managed. The bathroom was absurdly small. When I had Gran straightened out, she thanked me again and when I got her back to her seat she invited me to tea the next time fortune would bring us together. She said she lived in Limerick part of the year. She had married an Irishman and had lived half her life in Ireland, the other half in Manhattan.

  “Promise me you’ll visit for tea,” she said and insisted I take a small, ivory card that she dug from the pocket of her jacket. “Are you here for long?”

  “Six months.”

  “Well, then, it’s settled. Have you been to Dingle before, my dear?”

  “No, this is my first time.”

  “Well, you look as if you could have been born here. Where did you grow up?”

  “Springfield, Massachusetts.”

  She regarded me carefully. Then she nodded.

  “Yes,” she said, “that explains it.”

  Then she whispered a phrase in Irish.

  “Doors lead to doors,” she said, which was a phrase I took to mean it was a small world.

  “And an open door has two sides,” I returned in Irish.

  She looked at me and smiled. She patted my hand. Then I returned to my seat.

  3

  So now I had two friends on the bus. Gerry woke when I took my seat again. He rubbed his eyes and stifled a large yawn. Then he leaned a little toward me and looked out. Whatever he expected to see seemed to conform with what his eyes discovered. He sat back. He dug a tin of Altoids out of his pocket and offered them to me. I took one. He shook the tin.

  “Take another,” he said.

  I wondered if I had bad breath, but I thought it more likely that he was simply being generous. He took four and popped them in his mouth. They were the cinnamon kind that burned your tongue.

  “Now, are you here as a tourist or…?”

  He let the ending of his sentence hang so I couldn’t ignore it.

  “I’m a doctoral candidate at Dartmouth. In New Hampshire. I’m studying women’s narratives from the Blasket Islands.”

  “How fascinating. I’ve only read Tomás O’Crohan’s The Islandman. A friend recommended it to me and I loved it. Have you read it?”

  I nodded.

  “I’m not usually a reader,” Gerry continued. “Not like some people. I taught middle school algebra for thirty-seven years, so I tend to stick to measurable facts. But I like a good story. I liked reading about the way life used to be on the island. I wanted to read it before I came to Ireland.”

  “It’s a wonderful story.”

  “It’s tragic, too, of course. Very tragic. They lost an entire way of life when the Irish government moved the Blasket Islanders off their land. Is that your area of study?”

  “My father’s people lived on the Blaskets.”

  He leaned back a little to appraise me.

  “Oh, I see. But you didn’t grow up here.”

  “Many of the people from the Blaskets moved to Springfield. My father was a fireman as his father was before him.”

  “I’m starting to understand you now. This is a personal interest as well as a scholarly one, we should say.”

  I nodded. Gerry had it right. Not everyone I met understood my area of study, but Gerry comprehended it at once.

  “Do you speak Irish? I can’t quite get the hang of saying Irish. It was always Gaelic when I was growing up.”

  “Yes, I do. It was a family language. I’m not fluent by any means. But my father spoke it with his people. Many people in Springfield spoke it. I’ve studied it.”

  “Is your father still alive?”

  “No, I’m afraid not.”

  Gerry patted my arm. The cinnamon mints burned the top of my mouth. The bus suddenly gave a wheeze and pulled into a small parking lot. We had only been underway for an hour and a half, if that. Rosie grabbed the mic at the front of the bus. She pointed to her right, up a green, steep hill, at a series of stone huts. The huts, she said, had been built as primitive shelters long before memory. They were laid up without mortar. She said historians and paleontologists held various theories about the exact origins of the people who inhabited the huts. We had a half hour, she said, to explore the site. Restrooms and coffee were available at a small canteen built into the side of the mountain. She said the driver would jingle a bell when our time was up. She said to be careful walking because the morning dew could make the steps slippery.

  I was glad for the chance to get off the bus, but given the age and mobility of the passengers, it did not happen quickly. Gran did not bother disembarking. I smiled at her as I passed. Gran smiled back.

  “Do you need anything?” I asked when I was almost past her.

  She shook her head. I smiled and followed the slow, orderly line of dandelions filing off the bus. I felt tired to the bone. I realized, as I shuffled forward, that I had miscalculated my itinerary. Any halfway intelligent human being would have stayed a day or two in Limerick, got themselves situated; then, when they felt less exhausted, they would book a trip down to Dingle and the cliffs looking out to the Blaskets. But not me. Even after Milly had suggested exactly that course of action, I had assured her that I knew better.

  I’ll be fine, I told her. I want to get to see them as soon as I can.

  That much remained true. But when I stepped off the bus into the misty morning light, I realized I had overestimated my stamina. The last step onto the ground nearly tripped me. I caught myself easily, but at the same time I realized I had a dozen loose ends ahead of me. I still had not booked a pl
ace (I’ll find one, relax, B&Bs are all over Ireland) and did not honestly know where I was going. I knew the town and location names; they had been imprinted on me forever. Yet knowing a name, and knowing what it is to stand on a foreign land, tired and wrung out from travel, is a different thing altogether.

  Maybe that was why I began to cry. I blamed it on fatigue. But what caught me unawares was the simple beauty of the clochán, or beehive huts, that stood just twenty yards up the hill beyond the bus. The clochán were simple stone structures, primitive yet beautiful. Behind me the sea spread like a blue bib around the neck of the land and sheep, hundreds, thousands, moved like clouds fallen to land across the green acres that sloped to the sea—yes, a cliché, but how could I not resort to cliché?—and the stone huts of the ancients, the Irish before the Irish, stood quietly and waited for our inspection. I cried because here, almost magically, the land that I had studied, the stories that I had been told from the knee, now began to come true. For practical purposes, I should have stayed in Limerick to compose myself, but instead I stood at the beginning of all Ireland, in a way, and the work of their hands still caught the sea air and morning mist.

  “No mortar, can you believe it?” someone—a man in a tweed cap—said beside me. “Can you believe that? And still standing? For six thousand years, they’ve given shelter to the island’s inhabitants.”

  “Amazing,” a woman beside him breathed.

  “Makes you think, doesn’t it?”

  The woman nodded. I climbed higher to get closer to the clochán. It turned out Rosie was correct about one thing: the morning dew turned the steps slippery, and I clung to the railing as I climbed, the only passenger from the bus who bothered to test her legs.

  When I reached the first level, I felt a jumble of ridiculous emotions. Call it too much travel in too short a span, but I felt emotional when I turned to see the Irish landscape spread before me. The sea sent its air up from below and the hills met it with a chill of their own. My hair blew in the wind, and it was not difficult to imagine other women, women through the ages, standing here to watch the day break on the land or their livestock mowing the green grass or the men plying their boats below. I felt a swell of gratitude that I been permitted to come to Ireland, that I had time in front of me to study the people dearest to me, that the stones of the clochán still stood true and proper after all these decades.

  At the first hut, I put my hand on the stones and felt them. They were unexceptional stone, thick as dictionaries. Still, I liked putting my hand on them. I looked back around me to make sure no one had followed me, then I closed my eyes and whispered a poem that my father had taught me long ago as he put me to bed. I recited it in the Irish, the old language.

  “Bless those minding cattle / And those minding sheep, and those fishing the sea / While the rest of us sleep.”

  A few moments later the bus bell jingled and called us back. But now at least I knew why I had not stayed in Limerick and grown comfortable. I wanted to be raw and open to this land. I removed my hand from the stones and walked carefully down to the dandelions who stood in a clump at the door of the bus.

  4

  I slept for part of the remaining ride. But it was an uneasy sleep, peppered with a hundred emotions. I woke frequently to see the landscape passing by, and several times I had difficulty remembering it was not a dream at all, but that I was on a bus traveling to Dingle. Above me I saw fields that had not been replanted since the potato famine of 1845; I saw more beehive huts beside random spears of stone stuck into the hillside as if in defiance of nature. When we rounded Slea Head, the most western point in Europe, Gerry said to me, “The next parish over is Boston.” I smiled and nodded and fell asleep, and I didn’t wake again until we pulled into Dingle proper, the streets closing on us, a misty rain shutting off the sun and making the village quiet.

  “Here we are,” Gerry whispered to me. His breath smelled of more cinnamon.

  I sat up and rubbed my eyes. The whining sound of the lift being raised filled the coach. The dandelions now stood, most of them opening the bins above them. Rosie came on the public-address system and began talking about lunch, room accommodations, and the attractions Dingle afforded.

  “Are you staying here with us?” Gerry asked. He was, I realized, the kind of fellow who waited while others disembarked. It wasn’t a bad tactic, but I felt eager to get off, to find a place to stay, to eat a bowl of soup.

  “No, I couldn’t afford it.”

  “B&B, then?”

  “That’s the plan.”

  “I looked into that myself. I’ve heard good things about St. Joseph’s. It’s run by a woman named Mary something or other. Well, of course, it would be Mary, wouldn’t it?”

  “Thank you. I’m sure I’ll find a spot. It’s off-season, at least.”

  Finally we had room to stand. Gran, I saw, had already been off-loaded. I leaned over to see what had become of her, but she had apparently drifted off into the mist. Maybe she was a fairy woman. I would have been more curious if I had not been exhausted.

  It took a while, but finally I found myself standing on Dingle soil, my backpack a weight behind me, Gerry shaking my hand.

  “Good luck,” he said. “It was a pleasure meeting you.”

  “Likewise. Have a great trip.”

  “That’s my plan,” he said, referring back obscurely to the statement I had made a few minutes before. It took me a moment to get it, then I nodded and walked away.

  I am here, my whisper said.

  I could have wished for a better day, however. Rain fell in a slant, sea-driven and salty. I heard Milly in my head saying something about misty rain being good for my complexion. But it didn’t feel that way. It felt wet and cold and I wondered again why I had not been more attentive to details. I should have made a reservation. I should have been walking toward my rest. Something a little reckless had made me travel freelance. It wasn’t my typical behavior. I tended to be orderly, or at least levelheaded. Maybe, I thought, Ireland afforded me a chance to indulge fortune in my life.

  I stopped in Foxy John’s, a lovely pub that doubled, during the day, as a hardware store. It was not a destination; it simply rose up before me and the thought of a cup of tea seemed the perfect thing to ward off the wet. I thought, too, that I could get directions to St. Joseph’s B&B, or at least ask the proprietor for a recommendation. It was off-season, October, and the town looked quiet and settled on its shoulders.

  * * *

  “You’ll not do better than St. Joseph’s,” the bartender, a stout Irishman with a handlebar moustache, told me when he delivered my tea. “Would you like me to call ahead for you?”

  “Would you do that?”

  “Why wouldn’t I? I’ve known Mary Langley these past fifty years. I’ll give her a jingle. Shouldn’t be a problem.”

  I sat beside my first peat fire. It could not have been more welcome. I did not feel any less exhausted, but my fatigue had transformed into a thin line of static electricity that seemed to spark and sputter inside my head. It almost felt enjoyable, like being slightly dizzy on wine. The tea was excellent. It tasted darker and richer than the tea I drank at home. For pleasure, I put a dot of cream in it as well. The cream blossomed in what my father called cows’ lungs of white. I had no idea where he got such a term, but it felt appropriate in this setting.

  Before I had finished half my cup, the bartender returned with news that I was welcome at St. Joseph’s and expected whenever I came free of the fire. I thanked the bartender and nearly asked him to sit with me, but he seemed to have things to do and I relished the moment to gather myself.

  I texted Milly.

  Sitting in a tavern called Foxy John’s. More Irish than you can imagine. Almost settled for the night. I am sending you a picture.

  I turned the camera around and snapped a few photos of the interior. I also leaned close to the peat fire. It smelled of soil and dampness and something else, something elusive and hard to name. Fire and heat, of
course. I knew fire from New Hampshire, but this had a different cloudiness, a mood to go along with its warmth. I decided I liked peat fires and promised myself I would sit beside them whenever possible.

  I sent the pictures to Milly, then slipped my phone back into my pocket and finished my tea.

  5

  I woke to the sound of a curved knuckle tapping on my door. To my surprise, I didn’t feel the typical dislocation. I knew exactly where I was, and I knew exactly who had knocked.

  “Kate,” Mrs. Fox said. “I’ll be putting breakfast away in thirty minutes. I thought I should inform you.”

  “Yes, Mrs. Fox, I’ll be there.”

  “I’ll hold the tea, then.”

  Mrs. Fox reminded me not so much of a fox, but rather of a badger, one I had seen once in a childhood book. A chubby, fleshy woman, she had met me at the door of the St. Joseph’s bed and breakfast with a great gust of welcome. She had dark hair set in some sort of permanent wave and a crisp way of slashing her hands against the air when she spoke. Mrs. Langley, the inn’s owner, was in Italy, she told me, so she, Mrs. Fox, would do for me. Mrs. Fox had shown me to the room, asking at my back if it was satisfactory. It was satisfactory, but not a great deal more. It came with my own bathroom and a window looking out on a backyard where a bird feeder hung askew from a clothesline. It was clean and tidy, and the truth was I would have slept on the floor if that had been my option. The bed, however, had been downy and good, and I slept like two stones under the earth—another of my father’s sayings—and stayed under dreamlessly until the knuckle had tapped on my door. I had slept nearly halfway around the clock.

  But I was hungry. Sharply so. I washed quickly, patted my hair into the semblance of an electrocuted cat, then bent to the mirror for a closer look. Yes, I looked like an Irish colleen. That was impossible to refute. But my face was narrow and angular, with sharp cheeks that guarded blue eyes. Years ago a boy in my elementary class said I looked like a happy eraser, and whenever I examined my own appearance, the phrase came back to me. No, I reflected, I was not a happy eraser, but he had gotten at something by the phrase. My redness made me smear at the edges as if I joined with the world too easily. I was the mild, flesh-colored crayon in the crayon box. My coloring was a lie, really, because I was definite in my views and opinions. I resembled my grandmother on my father’s side. I would have looked at home in a Victorian gown, high-necked and flowing, so that sometimes, wearing jeans and a fleece, I felt like a time traveler.