by Jack Hodgins
He was thirty-six and still poor, and still very much alone, when his father died and his mother demanded his presence in the mountains west of Cork. Two months after his thirty-seventh birthday, with the help of a bank loan, he drove a rented car up the Lee Valley to Macroom and then farther up the winding road to the mountain village where his mother’s house nested like a squat white hen between the roadside garden wall and a high rock-strewn hill patchy with heather and stunted furze. The air was thick with the sweet turf smoke from her chimney.
“Burning peat?” he said. “In this century?”
Which showed how much he didn’t know of things, she told him. She hammered dark brown bricks of turf down into the firebox of what looked to Halligan like an ordinary wood stove standing under the chimney hole at the end of the room which had once been an open fireplace. Then she sat at the wooden table in her apron and rubber boots while they had a “sup of tay” together. She looked, he thought, like someone who had tried with all her might to copy the people he’d seen in the tourist booklets, just so she could fit in.
“But I do not fit in at all,” she complained. “They won’t let you fit in.”
“Except for those few months, you’ve lived here all your life.”
“I have, yes. And I could live here another hundred years and not change a thing.”
Halligan went to the front window, set deep in the thick stone wall, and peered out at the countryside. Across the road, beyond a fringe of trees, a hill rose up like a perfect dome, criss-crossed with green hedges and crowned with a heap of stones. “It’s a wonder to me that you’ve stayed, then, if that’s the case.”
“I wouldn’t know how to live anywhere else,” she said, and rattled an open tin of cookies across the table towards him. “A fish out of water is what I’d be in any corner they put me. There’s some that’s not meant to fit in.”
“Nonsense,” he said. “It’s that church. They’ve chased everybody else out but themselves. They’ve probably forgotten that it’s possible to be anything else.”
“Hush hush hush hush hush,” she said, checking each of the windows for hidden villagers. “You’ll not speak of my neighbours like that.”
“But your family’s been Irish for three hundred years! There isn’t a thing about you that seems English to me.” Not even her speech. She’d gone peasant right down to her thickened tongue.
She raised one eyebrow, as if to say “That’s all you know about it” and poured more tea into her own thick mug. She had become an old lump of a woman, he saw, wrinkled and dry. The skin under her eyes sagged in a series of overlapping folds; her upper lip was covered with coarse black hairs. Her teeth had been pulled out and replaced with a new set which was too big, with white unnatural gums and black stains on the fake enamel. For most of that first day she sat at the table, drinking tea and talking about his father. Sometimes she stopped in the middle of a sentence to gaze out of the window for a while, and looked astonished to find him still sitting there across from her when she shook off whatever memory had carried her away.
“’Tis sure by now you’re a true Canadian, over there on your island. You’ll be finding the old land here a poor poor place beside.”
It was a fine beautiful island he lived on, he told her. Especially when the dogwood trees were blooming or the pink arbutus bark was being shed. But you wouldn’t find a castle in your backyard there.
“And what is a castle now but a pile of stones and a handful of history? ’Tis not much value to the cows.”
She would not leave the house with him to walk through the village or to show him the valley, which he had not seen since a brief visit in his university years. She was no tourist, she said. It would be as pointless as poking around in the familiarity of her own skin.
He walked alone in a soft almost imperceptible rain past the houses and the few little shops in the village. Past the tall-spired church with its lawns and flowers and past the dull grey fenced-in National School. The few people he saw nodded shyly at him and glided by as silently as cats. The famous friendly Irish, he thought, buttoning up his heavy coat. They looked as if they expected him to bite. Or thought he’d come to spy.
He remembered St. Gobnait’s shrine. On his last visit he’d crept up to it silently, hoping to witness some pilgrim stand up from praying, throw crutches or wheelchair into the hedges, and walk away. It had been a disappointment, of course; most of Halligan’s expectations disappointed him sooner or later. Nevertheless the little shrine had fascinated him and he found himself, now, almost without conscious decision, leaving the highway and following the little road that crossed the narrow stone bridge and led up the slope beneath the thick leafy trees. Smelling the harsh throat-burning odour of urine, he went on up past a farm where cows, standing ankle-deep in muck, stared at him through their clouds of circling flies.
The shrine looked pretty much as he remembered it. On the high side of the road a tall graceful statue of a woman stood amongst shrubs and flowers by the doorway to the little excavated stone hut. Four white cups, half filled with rain water, sat on the stones at the holy well from which, he’d been told, pilgrims drank before kneeling to pray. The base of the statue was cluttered with things: a dried-up wedding bouquet, a miniature plastic doll in a cradle, a pen, a rosary, a half-dozen plastic statuettes and crucifixes. Halligan smiled, and thought of the fun that would be made if such a thing could be found at home. Plastic babies and wedding bouquets!
A little man appeared, suddenly, from within the walls of the stone hut. He stepped out, leaning on a walking stick, his tiny red face cracked by a wide gap-toothed grin. “Once a year,” he said. “On my birthday. I stop by here to have a word with the man above. This is my eighty-first.” He put his right hand out, pointed a finger. “I should be in the next world, long ago, but I’m not in any hurry at all to get there.” He shook his head, held up a finger as if to add: Aha, that was a good one! Didn’t I tell you so! His grey tweed cap was torn, his wide loose pants were spattered with mud and cow manure.
At a loss for words Halligan looked up at the sky. White clouds were moving past quickly, and bits of blue were opening up. “It’s going to be a nice day after all,” he said.
Again the sudden finger, the cocked head. “Oh, it’s a fine day altogether.”
“Plenty of magpies around here.”
“There ’tis, yes.”
“And pigeons.”
The little man told him that St. Gobnait came down here in the seventh century to found a nunnery right there, right across the road there in that graveyard, in those old falling-down stone walls. He said that was the saint’s grave, that mound with the big slabs of slate on top, and that building beside the grave was a Protestant church.
“Yes, ’tis,” he said, as if this too were a great joke on Halligan. “But ’tis all boarded up now. There’s only one family of them left in the valley.”
When Halligan told him he’d come here from British Columbia to visit his mother in the village, he said nearly everyone in the valley had a son in America, that he himself had two over there (besides eight in various parts of Ireland), one in Chicago, and the other in New York. “But it’s a lovely boy ye are, to be coming home like this. Those two bostoons of mine have not been seen in this land since they caught the ship that took them away.” The finger went up again, and the eyes twinkled, as if this too was a joke on Halligan he hadn’t been able to foresee.
When he told his mother about the little man at the shrine she nodded, smiled, said Yes that would be old Michael Donegan, a fine gentleman. And yes, she had been up to the shrine herself once, years ago, but it had all been overgrown with weeds. And it had been embarrassing to see someone down on his knees right out in plain view of cows and farmers and any tourist who felt like driving by. These people, she said, just take it for granted that everyone else is the same as they are.
“Will you come home with me now?” he said. “Will you come live with me?”
She shook
her head, slowly and, he thought, sadly. “’Twill be lonely here without the man. But I’ll have my friends here, all the same, and the familiar places.”
Relieved in a way that surprised even himself, he became more genuinely concerned. “Isn’t there a cousin?” he said. “Don’t I remember some mention of a cousin, somewhere in the country?”
She looked square at him. There was no way he was about to spoil the enjoyment of her misery. “Cousin Polly turned,” she said. “A convert. Of course she was always a wee bit crazy in her head, and it was a way of being cared for. The nuns have got her in a home in Cork where she won’t be coming to any harm.”
“It’s likely a good thing you’re not coming home with me,” he said. “It would only upset you to see the way those people race through life trying to grab all they can. It’s a land of greed and ignorance.”
“Find another place so,” she said. “No one is forcing you to stay there.”
Yet he did stay. He showed up at the bookstore the day after his plane landed, re-arranged some of the books which had got out of place on the shelves, filled in an order for a hundred new paperbacks. He loved the shop. He loved the books: the feel of their covers, the patterns of their words. He wished he could force the whole population of the island to read every one of them. Perhaps then they would discover what they’d been missing. Maybe some of them would even begin to buy books and help put a little money in his pocket.
But he worried. He worried about his mother’s loneliness. He felt guilty if he got busy in the store or involved in a conversation and forgot about her for a while. It was almost as if he believed that everything that added something to his life was taking something away from hers. Yet he couldn’t help knowing that while he was concerned about the old woman’s loneliness he was actually worrying about his own.
Bickham’s sister told him, “For a mother who deserted you so young she’s sure managed to turn you into a momma’s boy.”
“You’ve got too much time to sit around feeling sorry for yourself,” Bickham said. “What you need to do is get busy with things, get involved.”
The sister’s idea of getting involved was to take him on an overnight hiking trip down the lifesaving trail on the west coast. He went, more or less just to please his friend, and came home scratched, bruised, and totally exhausted. He spent the next two days in bed recovering, his head spinning with the roar of the open Pacific, the smell of pines and hemlock and sitka spruce, the sight of gigantic cliffs and the foaming spray of the waves that crashed against the rocks below.
And then, at the age of thirty-seven, after all those years of despising the sister with her coarse bush manners across Matt Bickham’s dining-room table, he found himself growing fascinated by her against his will. There had been plenty of time, following her down that long trail, to get used to the width of her backside and the masculine harshness of her laugh. Her face, with its weather-beaten skin and pinched beak nose, had not become less homely from familiarity but at least there was a good deal of life in the bulging eyes that mocked him from under their little hood-like lids.
“The trouble with you bloody Englishmen, even today,” she said, “is you expect to come out here like colonizers and let the natives do all the dirty work while you sit around enjoying what you call ‘culture.’”
She laughed at his reddening face and added: “Foreign culture.”
One evening Halligan invited the Bickhams and the sister, whose name was Babe, to dinner at his apartment. He rented the second floor of a square white pioneer house that stood on a hill looking down over the town. It had been built a hundred years ago by a carpenter just arrived from England and was filled with furniture and paintings brought over on the boat by the present owner’s grandmother. Halligan had searched the town for some place with a little class and decided that this houseful of Victorian clutter was as close as he was going to get. At least there were chandeliers and some antimacassars and plenty of old books.
No cook, Halligan had learned how to prepare only the things it was necessary to keep him alive. For his company he ordered a meal over the telephone, to be delivered in a truck, ready to be put on the table. All he had to do was put out the cutlery and china and chill the wine. It was necessary first, of course, to haul all the books off the chairs and up off the middle of the kitchen floor and stack them over in a corner. Unlike many booksellers he was not content just to be surrounded with books at work or to read from the shelves at the shop, but bought copies for himself to read and thumb through and keep at home. As a result, the shelves behind the glass doors had been filled for years; the books had spread out all over the room.
When he opened the door, however, only Babe was there, standing at the top of the staircase in plaid pants and a calf-hide cape. She raised one eyebrow. “Matt felt sick at the last minute so Terry suggested I come alone.” When she tossed her head he saw there was a huge gold ring hanging from one ear. Suddenly, she laughed, the way Halligan imagined loggers laughed at the dirty jokes they told each other in the bush.
“I don’t know how you keep that hotel of yours in business, you spend half your time down here.”
“I may be the soul of the place,” she said, and stepped inside, “but when I’m away the flesh still seems to hold together and continue without me.” Beneath the cape, which she flung off in one swirling motion, she was wearing a blouse cut so low she looked ready to fall out of it.
Halligan was completely useless in unforeseen circumstances. “But I ordered enough food for four people.”
She whisked two plates and a handful of cutlery up off the table and winked. “Then I’ll just have to stay long enough for us to eat twice.”
Which she did. They ate slowly all that they could of the fried chicken, washing it down with a bottle of Australian wine, then put the rest in his little refrigerator until five o’clock in the morning when they took it out again and called it breakfast. Between the two meals she taunted him for his stand-offish attitudes and he criticized her for being so raucous and unladylike; she laughed loudly at his notions about educating the local population, and he listened scornfully to her stories about the loggers and fishermen who visited her hotel; she told him a son had no obligations towards a mother who’d abandoned him as a baby, and he said knowing it was one thing but feeling it was another; she sneered at his attempt to remain an Englishman though he was obviously planted firmly on this island, and he told her at least he had some clearly defined roots, which was more than could be said for her. Before long she had shown him that what she had instead of roots was a quick mind, a body she knew exactly how to handle, and a determination to make the most of both. And he had shown her that he was perfectly willing to be seduced out of his attitudes for the sake of her continuing company. When she left she’d agreed to put him up in her hotel for a week and take him fishing in the mountain lakes that lay close by, and he’d agreed that on their honeymoon he’d take her to Ireland to meet his mother and visit a few castles.
“A married man can’t be content to stay a bloody pauper,” she said. “Especially if he plans to travel. You better smarten up that business of yours, make some money. Start buying things, furniture, get yourself a car, start looking at property.”
When she had gone he went out too, and walked in the pale pre-dawn light down the hill into town. All was silent, grey. The trees in the pioneer graveyard were as motionless as the headstones below. He walked on the painted concrete sidewalks past block after block of stores, reading the advertisements in their darkened windows. He kicked a piece of loose newspaper away from the door of his own shop. When he came out at last onto the high grassy park above the harbour and sat on a bench near the painted totems, a breeze had begun somewhere out over the strait and plucked small waves out of the surface of the water, and the sun was just appearing over the peaks of the mainland mountains. Halligan wondered what on earth was happening to him.
He sat there for more than an hour, until a drunk stumbled up t
he steps from the sea-edge path and offered him a drink from his bottle. “Don’t forget,” the man said, and burped. “Don’t forget today’s the, is the day of the loggers’ sports. Don’t forget to be there.” Halligan, starting away, promised that he wouldn’t forget, though he told himself he would kill himself first. There was a matinee performance of Rigoletto across the strait that afternoon, and if he hadn’t been so tired he would be catching the ferry across, certainly not watching axe-throwers and men with chain saws.
But he slept through most of that day, and when he awoke it was too late to catch the ferry. Babe telephoned and invited him to the dance that followed the loggers’ sports. “It’ll be a real eye-opener for you,” she said. He didn’t want his eyes opened that way, he said, and took her instead to the cocktail lounge of the Coal-Tyee Hotel. They met some of her friends there and within an hour had moved upstairs to the beer parlour where fifty or sixty people from the Island’s west coast were celebrating.
Their honeymoon was a short one, financed by Babe’s savings account. They flew from Vancouver to Toronto, ran through the airport and caught another plane to Shannon. With a rented car picked up at the airport they drove south through the patchwork hills, stopped long enough for Babe to climb up the spiral stairs of Blarney Castle and stare in horror at the people who nearly broke their backs in order to kiss a piece of stone slimy from other people’s lips, drove slowly through the wide curved shopping street in Cork, and then headed west into the country. She made him stop and tramp with her across farmers’ fields to inspect every crumbling castle and prehistoric standing stone and tiny shrine along the way. She raved about the difference it would make to her hotel to have one of those in her back yard and complained that all she had to offer was a lot of thick bush and a lake full of deadheads. When they pulled up in front of his mother’s cottage she leapt out of the car and took three photographs, saying she wished she could cut this piece of village out and take it back home with her just the way it was.