Burnt Mountain

by Anne Rivers Siddons

  “I guess I could. Next quarter, maybe. This is just a summer program. I’ll suggest it. It just doesn’t seem that Coltrane is a very… mythic place. Life is real; life is earnest.”

  “How about some kind of private tutorial thing?” I said. “Maybe here, at night?”

  “Yeah. Maybe.”

  He did not seem to want to pursue it, so I didn’t. But his unhappiness lodged itself in my soul, and its shadow went before me everywhere I went in this new green river world. Even the house seemed darker, as it did on cloudy days.

  I told Carol Partridge about it one day when we were down at the river watching Bummer swim. The river just above the old iron bridge was shallow and sun dappled at its edges, and fairly gentle. Out in its middle it ran deep and straight toward the falls below the bridge, but these shallows were made for swimming or, rather, for thrashing and dabbling. Upriver there were a few other children minnowing about in it, just as Bummer was, all watched by tanned women in shorts and halters. I wondered if anybody on Bell’s Ferry worked. I would begin teaching in the fall at a new charter primary school nearby, and I knew that Carol spent a couple mornings a week working at the Junior League consignment clothing shop. I also knew that it was volunteer work. Walter Partridge had paid pretty dearly for the privilege of pursuing young women. Carol and the boys lived well, if not lavishly.

  The day was rich with sun and the clean fishy smell of wild-running water. Sun sparkled off the whorls of the river and lit Carol’s tousled hair to white-gold. Bummer’s wet-seal body glistened all over. I felt the sun deeply on the top of my head; the smell of sun-heated hair was thick in my nostrils, and my shoulders were just before burning. Wild honeysuckle starred the darker woods; its heartbreaking fragrance rode to us on the little river wind. Deep, swift joy bubbled up in me, as it does sometimes when you are a child. I still could hardly believe that this world had been given to me. I closed my eyes and smiled, and felt my cheeks stretch under the bite of the sun. I would have to go in soon.

  Not yet, though.

  “Aengus isn’t happy with his job,” I said to Carol, my eyes still closed. That way I wouldn’t have to see the day dull with my words.

  “Why on earth not?” Carol said. “It sounded perfect for him to me. Coltrane is an awfully good school.”

  “He mostly supervises,” I said. “There’s no time to teach. I didn’t realize he was so plugged into all that Celtic mythology stuff, but it’s really painful for him not to… live it, I guess. It’s as though he’s lost his tribe, or something.”

  “He’s head of the department,” she said. “Surely they’ll let him teach at least one class on whatever he wants.”

  “I thought so, too. It didn’t seem to cheer him up. I’ve never seen him quite like this.”

  We were quiet for a while, and then she said almost dreamily, “I have an idea.”

  “Shoot.”

  “Bell’s Ferry has this block party thing every summer, around Midsummer Night. I know it sounds awful, but it’s sort of fun to get everybody together. Mostly people just drink and eat hors d’oeuvres, but there’s always some kind of entertainment. We’ve had our kids’ bands so many times we’re about to throw up, and once or twice we’ve had some kind of dance thing, but we’re all getting tired of the kind of stuff we can do without having to pay for it. It’s at my house this year—lucky me—and I’ve been putting off even trying to think about entertainment. But what if Aengus would come and tell some of those old legends and myths, or whatever he’d like to do? He’d be a sensation! I’m sure he’s charmed every single soul he’s ever met….”

  She looked at me expectantly. My heart sank. There was no way I was going to ask Aengus if he’d come be the entertainment for Carol’s block party.

  “Oh, Carol, I don’t know…. He’s pretty private about that sort of thing…,” I began.

  “Nonsense! It’s an inspiration. I’m going to call him right now. Is he home?”

  I knew that he was, it being Saturday. I imagined that he’d be on the veranda reading the New York Times. I almost lied about it, then sighed.

  “Yeah. He’s home. But really, I don’t think…”

  She got up and trotted up the bank a few paces to where she’d left her purse and her cell phone. She didn’t come back for quite a while. I sat and watched the river play with itself and smiled at Bummer. If Aengus didn’t want to do it, he would tell Carol. No harm done.

  But he did. She came scrambling back down the bank grinning.

  “He’d love to. He said something about the summer solstice and the Beltane Fires and… I don’t remember the rest, but he sounded really enthusiastic about it. Maybe I won’t have to get everybody so drunk.”

  “Well… good. I’m glad. You must be a sorceress.”

  “I whined.” She laughed.

  “Are you really going to do it?” I asked Aengus when I got home. He was eating a sandwich and reading Jonathan Carroll.

  “Oh yes,” he said, smiling. “I’d love to do it. This is the time of year for most of the big fire festivals. I think I can do the Celts proud.”

  “Without cutting off any heads?”

  “Not unless I absolutely have to.”

  “Will you need anything special?”

  “Not really. I can build what I need. I may borrow her odious kids’ band, though.”

  Later that afternoon he went down into the basement and would not let me come with him. I thought I heard him banging around with wood and metal, but he would not tell me what he had been doing when he came back up, and forbade me to go into the basement until after the big event.

  “Rats,” I said. “Just the thing I wanted most to do.”

  “I want it to be a surprise for you, too.”

  On Midsummer Night we got to Carol’s house about seven. Since it only involved walking through a hedge, I’d had time for a long soak in the tub and a nap, and felt cool and festive in floaty, flowered cotton voile, ready for an outdoor party on a summer night. Aengus had been shut up in his den all afternoon. I could hear him talking and sometimes chanting but paid it no mind. He often did both, almost absently, as you would whistle through your teeth.

  “Where’s that thing you’ve been working on all week?” I said.

  “Took it over there this afternoon. Carol promised nobody would peep at it.”

  Carol’s backyard was beautiful in the last of the slanting light. There were small white lights strung in some of the big oaks, and she had lined the grassy area in front of the pool with pots of flowers and other plants, so that it seemed a kind of dance floor. Beyond it, beside the pool, long tables were set up with candles flickering on them and platters of pick-up food, and bottles of wine. One of them served as a bar, laden with bottles and glasses. Apparently everyone’s children came to this block party; the lawn and pool were full of them, laughing and shouting and acknowledging the adults with curt, mulish nods. Everyone wore summer finery and laughed and thronged the bar table. Music thumped from somewhere, rock ‘n’ roll, but better than any of these kids’ bands, recorded, undoubtedly. We stopped at the lawn’s edge and looked, silently. It struck me how very beautiful even the most ordinary suburban yard is on a summer night, the lapping surges of green and the fresh smells of new-mown grass and blooming flowers, the tender gold light deepening toward dark blue, the sweet, heady feeling of dark falling down over you. Anything could happen on a southern summer night. Magic could come; mystery could live. I felt tears stinging my eyes.

  “I wonder if I should have brought something,” I said, mainly to break the silence.

  “You brought the entertainment,” Aengus said. “Who could ask for more?”

  “Who indeed?” I said, and we walked into the party.

  A good party can literally drown you; it is what I love and hate most about them, depending on my mood. This one swallowed us instantly and whole. We sank into a living mass of convivial humanity and did not really come up until after full dark. I know that someone or ot
her kept my glass and plate full and everyone spoke warmly and interestedly about Aengus and me and our lives, and I know that I ate and drank and laughed and answered and felt warmly connected to these people who would be our nearest, if not dearest, for a long time. I got separated from Aengus early on but did not worry about it; I had seen him work a crowd before. But as the dark outside the circle of light grew dense, I began to wonder about him. Wasn’t he supposed to do some entertaining?

  I was just about to excuse myself from the bristly mustached man I had met before and go in search of Aengus, when a drum boomed once and echoed into the night. Silence fell.

  “Listen up, y’all!” Carol Partridge called out. We all turned toward her voice. She stood at the head of her driveway with an overhead spot trained on her. Beside her sat a three-legged stool and a big portable metal fire pit. The pit was full of crossed twigs and limbs piled atop charcoal.

  “It’s time to entertain you-all, and you’ll be happy to know that I didn’t bribe any of our kids’ bands or hire a mambo instructor.”

  There was laughter and clapping.

  “I did better than that,” she continued. “Tonight I’m proud to present to you our new neighbor Dr. Aengus O’Neill. I can never tell anyone what I had to do to get him to agree, but he’s going to tell you some of his very special, spine-chilling, heartrending Celtic myths and legends, for which he is justly famous on three continents. I guarantee you will never forget them.”

  There was more applause and cheering. Carol took a lighter from the pocket of her dress and knelt and touched it to the fire pit, and flames leaped into the darkness, showering sparks. As they settled, Aengus walked out of her garage and came and sat down on the stool. He was wearing white pants and a dark blue tee shirt, and the firelight danced on his sharp-planed face and lit his blue eyes nearly to phosphorescence. He leaned a wheel-thing against the stool and smiled and said, “Oscar Wilde said that we Irish are too poetical to be poets; we are a nation of brilliant failures. But we are the greatest talkers since the Greeks.”

  His brogue, rising out of the night and the fire, was almost as alien as Greek; there was a small murmur from the crowd.

  “And so,” he went on, “I am going to talk.”

  And he did. Into the firelight he spun the stories of his beloved Celts; some I had heard, but many were new to me.

  “Out the Kilronan/Kilmurvey Road, beside the holy well at the Church of the Four Beautiful Persons, called also the Ceathair Aluinn…,” he began.

  He slid directly into the Tain Bo Cuailnge (The cattle raid of Cooley). Next he told of the wanderings of Oisin, the ancient Celtic pagan hero who met with Saint Patrick to defend the old pagan order against this new Christendom.

  And on and on. Kings, warriors, hermits, ghosts, druids, holy mountains, the waves of the Irish sea, madmen, saints… there was nothing for an hour in the summer-sweet air of Carol Partridge’s backyard but the tapestry of Aengus’s Celts, nearer and realer to us by then than the partygoers standing beside us.

  He finished up with the tale of Hazelwood, a peninsula of Lough Gill between Annagh Bay and Half Moon Bay, where Yeats had imagined that the wandering Aengus, the ancient Celtic master of love and the god of youth, beauty, and poetry, had finally grown old.

  He stopped. There was no sound. Then, one by one, people began to clap, and then to whistle and cheer. The din went on for fully two minutes. Through it, Aengus smiled.

  “Now,” he said, “I’m going to end up with a celebration of the midsummer fire festivals that flourished wherever the Celt lit his torch. The most portentous of these festivals took place at mid-summer, when the sun, which the fire celebrates, both is at its highest and begins diminishing. To pay allegiance to the sun was to invite its blessings, without which people could not survive. Many people carried lit torches abroad in the night; many built bonfires and leaped over them, or danced about them. The Celts took it a bit further. Often they built a gigantic hollow man of wicker, filled it with human enemies and miscreants, lit it, and burned them alive. I shall not do that tonight. I seem to lack wicker.”

  There was a hushed whisper of laughter from the crowd. It was distinctly nervous and died out almost immediately.

  “But,” Aengus went on in a stronger voice, “I will give you the Celtic custom of the burning wheel.”

  He reached down and picked up the thing he had been working on all week, which he had secreted in Carol’s garage. He held it aloft. It was about the size of a bicycle wheel and seemed to be fashioned of strong, thin limbs bent into a circle, wrapped with smaller vines and straw.

  “By rights it should be ignited by a fire made by rubbing together two pieces of wood, preferably the oak, sacred to the druids. I will make do with the fire we already have. Watch the wheel carefully. If it burns strongly as it is rolled downhill until it comes to rest and continues to burn, all here will be blessed with growth and prosperity, as shall their crops and the beasts. If it goes out before it gets downhill… make an appointment with your doctors and take your cats and dogs to the vet. Behold now the need-fire of the Celt, the Fire of Heaven!”

  In total silence we watched as Aengus skinned his tee shirt off over his head. Lit only by the dying flames in Carol’s fire pit, his body was dark and coiled with muscle, gleaming with sweat or some sort of oil… I had no idea which. Around his neck a golden sort of neck plate gleamed. A Celtic torque; he had told me about them. I could not have spoken even if I had had breath, which seemed to have gone out of me. This dark, firelit figure before me was nobody or nothing I had ever seen before. The suburban backyard around me had morphed into any wild place at any time on the earth. I could hear little breathing; I supposed everybody’s breath was held, as mine was.

  Slowly he swung the wheel up and into the fire pit. After a moment it burst into flame.

  “Teintean!” he cried, and swung the flaming wheel underhanded, straight down Carol Partridge’s driveway.

  No one made a sound as the flaming disk rolled steadily down the middle of the long driveway. Aengus ran beside it, his white-clad legs pumping steadily, the gold torque blazing in the flickering light. He ran quietly. The wheel made no noise except a faint hushhhhhh. Occasionally its fire leaped high and crackled. At the bottom, out on the dark street, it tipped over, bounced a bit, and lay still, flaming higher into the night. Aengus stood beside it, one arm raised high, fist closed. It was by far the most surrealistic thing I had ever seen, a circle of fire blazing below me, a tall, half-naked man with a collar of gold standing beside it, arm raised, face lifted up to the dark sky. Just at that moment the half-moon of mid-summer broke free from the sheltering oaks and poured its white light down on the wheel and man. As if given a signal, the crowd burst into a single roar.

  By fire and moonlight Aengus lowered his arm and turned his face to us.

  “Blessed be,” he said.

  By the time he had stamped the flaming wheel out and come back up to the stool and pulled his shirt back on, they were still cheering…. Someone snapped the outside lights back on and Aengus stood in the driveway, nodding agreeably to the people hugging him and pounding on his back and shouting into his ear. He looked now like nothing more than my husband being congratulated by an agreeable crowd of people. I walked off, out of the light, to a spot under the nearest oak canopy and leaned against the trunk and tried to breathe deeply and normally. I was so dizzy that I felt that I might faint.

  “Holy shit,” someone beside me said in a quavering voice, and I turned to see Carol leaning against the other side of the trunk. She was breathing heavily, too.

  “What is it that you have married?” she said.

  “Before God, I don’t know,” I whispered. I looked back at him, still surrounded. “But I think I’m going to be a little afraid to get in bed with him after this.”

  “Afraid?” Carol laughed. “I think you’ll have to beat off half the women on this street.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Serious? With
out his shirt? In that gold necklace thing he had on? Jesus! I’d jump on him myself if I didn’t like you so much.”

  “That’s a torque,” I said foolishly. “The Celts wore them into battle. They fought naked except for that.”

  “Oh, God, please! I’ll never think of Aengus any other way but that. I’ll bet half the men here are thinking maybe they’ll surprise their wives some night soon by popping into bed naked, with one of those torque things on. Can you even imagine?”

  I could. Carol and I collapsed together in each other’s arms, laughing almost hysterically.

  Much later, as Aengus and I walked home through Carol’s hedge under a high-risen moon, I said, “You can’t possibly have any idea how you looked.”

  “Yeah, I can,” he said, grinning. Energy like electricity still swarmed off him. “I practiced in front of the mirror.”

  “Aengus…”

  “There’s no use doing a thing unless you mean to do it well,” he said.

  CHAPTER 14

  I had thought we’d sleep late after Carol’s party, but when I rolled over at first light Aengus was gone. The pajama bottoms in which he sometimes (but not often) slept were crumpled in a ball on the Kirman, and I did not hear him in the bathroom. Yawning, I looked at the bedside clock. Six thirty? I sat up. Could he be sick?

  I pattered barefoot down the stairs; he was not in the kitchen.

  “Aengus?” I called, my voice thick with sleep.

  “Out here.”

  I found him on the lawn just beyond the veranda. He had on a pair of denim cutoffs but no shirt or shoes. I remembered his body last night, both in the firelight and later in bed, and shivered slightly. In both, Aengus had literally burned with exuberance and passion. I could remember no night quite like it.

  Afterwards, as we lay in the moonlight, I had said so.

  He reached over and took my hand, and said to me: “O I’d make a bed for you / In Labysheedy, / in the twilight hour / with evening falling slow / and what a pleasure it would be / to have our limbs entwine / wrestling / while the moths are coming down.”