The Boatman and Other Stories

by Billy O'Callaghan

  ‘Don’t stay long. Martha will be wondering where you are.’

  ‘Sure, she knows that if I’m not home I’m either in the fields or up here. She’ll not worry.’

  The old woman watched him pull a mouthful of ale from his bottle. Except for the life in her eyes, the focus, she was little more than husk. The glass of beer, still to be tasted, rested on one knee, gripped in her left hand, its colour deepened by the shadows, apart from a skin of white foam across its surface, the burnt, glassy brown of amber or old wood.

  ‘How is she?’

  ‘Ah, she’s grand. The same, you know. It hurts her a bit to swallow, and some nights she keeps me awake with her whistling. It’s the goitre, she says. Her grandmother had it.’

  ‘Plenty of milk, then. And periwinkles, if she’ll eat them. Tell her don’t look further than the old cures.’

  He and Martha were easy with one another. Love wasn’t a word that generally entered their equation, though only because there’d been someone else, a long time ago, and he found it hard to give away again what had already been given once and broken. But then he hadn’t been Martha’s first choice either, and in time they’d both come to understand that love wasn’t everything. During the first few years, when so much still seemed possible, they made the best of their situation. Having no illusions simplified matters. They were partners, sharing the workload, surviving together. And it was good to have someone. Over the years, they’d learned one another’s ways, and had each grown comfortable with how the other filled space and effected the silence. Now, more than half a lifetime on, they rarely argued any more, and routine gave them not only balance but an identity. Sometimes, much more so during the early years of their marriage but occasionally even still, lying awake in the small hours, each of them listening to the hushed draw of the other’s breathing, it was easy to give in to the thoughts that kept them lit, and lovely in such moments to take her into his arms and to let himself be guided in a way that met both their needs. The heart wants what it wants, but will often learn to settle for what it can get.

  He hit the bottom of his bottle unexpectedly, and his thirst remained unquenched. There was beer left in the pantry but the room’s reverie was such that it didn’t feel quite right to move, and so he remained in his armchair, gripping the bottle and trying to enjoy the coolness of its glass against his calloused palm. Across from him, the old woman’s eyes were slipping relentlessly shut. Every few minutes she struggled to revive herself only to be soon or quickly dragged back down under another wave of drowsiness.

  ‘I’m sorry.’ She cleared her throat, and stirred a little. ‘It’s this weather. It has me beat. I can’t seem to keep awake.’

  ‘You’re lucky,’ he said. ‘I haven’t slept properly in weeks. There’s too much light out. And with Martha gasping for air alongside me I can only lie there, watching the window for the dawn. And I get to thinking. You know. About all kinds of things. That’s the worst of it. I tell you, it makes the short nights feel very long.’

  A fresh wave of sleep broke, and this time threatened to drown her. She went under and remained there, down at the bottom. In the armchair, she looked very small. Her feet, he noticed, tucked into square-toed shoes the leather colour of bog turf and with steel buckles that had years since lost their sheen, barely reached the linoleum. Nothing moved, and he found himself leaning forward in search of some hint, however slight, that would signal the continuance of life. The way he and Martha had, taking turns, with the infant, Michael, all those years earlier. Not that it had made any difference in the end, because nights always kept a part of themselves hidden, and even if you succeeded in remaining awake there were still oceans’ worth of things that got missed. He stared at the old woman, and for a while there was nothing to see but skin like tree bark and long, silky wisps of hair whitened to translucence by the spill of light from the nearest window. But then her mouth clenched and her tongue flashed across her thin lower lip.

  ‘I dreamed of your father,’ she said. ‘All night long. I closed my eyes and there he was, the way he always was of a morning after getting the fire lit: in his shirtsleeves and braces, his cheeks and chin dirty with a night’s stubble. He turned on the wireless and we danced around the room, just like when we were first married. Slowly, hardly moving, I feeling small and safe in his arms, his body strong as a reef inside his clothes. I knew the whole time that it wasn’t real but it was so vivid I could smell the oil of his skin, and I didn’t want it to ever end. When I finally woke, I wept, because my mind had carried his voice in whispers back through into the morning with me.’

  ‘It’s just a dream. We all have them. Even ones like that.’

  ‘I suppose. But they can leave such a mark. Honestly, I haven’t been right all day.’ She shook her head and, noticing the glass of beer, lifted it to her mouth and sipped. Froth clung to her lip and the tip of her nose. ‘Can’t you go, boy? Martha will have a crust on your dinner trying to keep it warm.’

  He sighed. ‘All right. I suppose I better. But sure, I’ll be up along tomorrow. And Martha will give a call in the morning. Is there anything you need, at all?’

  ‘Nothing for you to be fretting about.’

  He hesitated, then stood, stepped close to her and kissed her cheek. Her skin was cool and rough, not as he remembered. ‘Bye, Mam,’ he whispered, against her ear.

  She closed her eyes again and the smile deepened on her mouth. ‘Bye, love. And don’t forget to tell Martha what I said about the periwinkles. Tell her I said my boy is lucky to have the likes of her. Even if he doesn’t always know it.’

  Outside the evening seemed brighter than before, golden and lazily alive, clotted with birdsong. The sky now was clear of cloud from edge to edge, and the warm, mottled turquoise of a blackbird’s eggs. He started back down the road. The slope made walking easy at first, but the gradual accumulation of gravity soon began to feel like a hand against his back, and wherever the stretch turned particularly steep he had to fight to keep from quickening into a run.

  To his right, wherever the ditches broke or dropped below eye level, he caught sight of the sea glittering in the sunlight. The blueness made him think again of Hannah. She’d lived on the other side of the island, the land side, and at fifteen, and for the couple of years that followed before taking the boat to the mainland, then to England and from there to who knew where, she’d never missed an opportunity to hold his hand. He remembered her hair jagged as whin, and her heavy-lidded eyes the Spanish colour of a burnt dirt that clenched shut in laughter, and for the better part of their teenage years they’d walked together, danced in fields, kissed whenever they thought no one was looking, traded hopes and secrets and made the best and most of any hidden places they could find.

  She left, the way so many did, and once all hope of a return was lost, gone became the same as dead. But the ghosts lingered. The sight of the sea on a good day always made him recall her with a mixture of wonder and the old sadness, and if the bad days tended to heavily outweigh the good then there was still usually an hour, or five minutes, or a single heartbeat, during which the sun would seep into view and keep memories alive, and there was the constancy of the water, the waves pulling towards the land, to smash against the rocks and shore.

  Without thinking, he dropped to his haunches and began to pluck more wildflowers. Bees scurried among the foxgloves, so he gathered whatever came to hand, harebell, columbine, cowslip, spools of honeysuckle, sweet violet. At home there’d be a dinner waiting on a plate, potatoes, cabbage, maybe a bit of mutton, and a bottle of something sweet to drink cooling in a water bucket in the shade. And Martha. On days like this, he had no appetite, though it would be nice to sit outside and wait for the light to fade. She’d wonder about the flowers, but wouldn’t remark on them, except to smile, and if he kissed her she’d kiss him back, probably laughing as they came together. In another month, he’d turn fifty, and when he closed his eyes it was as if the years had meant nothing in their passing. He could
tell himself, and believe, that he was who he’d always been, in one breath an old man, in the next still very much a boy, and he kept his losses close because time’s barriers were soft.

  Segovia

  The temperature of the day had been her excuse, if she’d needed one, to step inside the bar. She’d come up that morning by bus from Madrid, with loose plans to stay a night or two, a sketch pad and a box of charcoals and pencils in her rucksack. Having seen only pictures of the place, of the castellated old town and the ancient, hulking aqueduct, her head was thick with a kind of fantasy as to what it would be like, but even in around the narrow granite and sandstone laneways there was no respite from a fiery July noon. The bar she chose was small but cool, at least by comparison with the streets, and she stopped a moment to let her eyes find their focus, then took up a position at the end of the counter, half sat and half stood against the first of the four high bar stools, and waited until someone in service appeared. Five minutes later, a youngish man did, dressed in a cold white shirt and navy slacks, his face and body thin as a matador’s and as slow in his movements. ‘Cerveza,’ she said, holding an index finger unnecessarily in the air, her voice sounding all at once weary. He considered her for a moment, then nodded and poured the beer, filling a large glass to the top. After he’d set the glass down on a folded paper napkin and walked away, vanishing back through the side door from which he’d initially appeared, a white cap of froth formed on the beer and continued to expand until it spilt in relatively delicate fashion over the rim. Now that she had what she wanted, she held back, heightening the anticipation, then took the glass by its handle and drank to a slow depth.

  The bar was laid out long and narrow, with windows only to the front, on either side of the open doorway that allowed the light to penetrate no more than five or six paces into the place. Fine sawdust clogged the cracks between the plain floor tiles and congealed where something had earlier been spilt. From a half-turn, she scanned the length of the room and somehow missed that she was not alone until, just as she was raising the glass to her mouth again, a man, far down in the shadows along the wall to her back, cleared his throat, and said, in a quiet voice that she could almost feel against her, ‘Buenas tardes, señora.’

  She turned, but there was still little to see. Instead of answering, she smiled, not knowing if the gesture could penetrate the dimness, and lifted her glass. A newspaper rustled, and then there was an odd sense of a part of the floor bearing a footstep, not a sound exactly but a shift to some balance. She brought her attention back to the bar and, after another sip, set the glass down on the counter. There was really nothing to fear.

  ‘Inglés?’ he asked, moving to her right side, but not yet taking a seat. ‘English?’

  She shook her head, glanced across at him without committing to a turn. ‘No, sorry. Irish.’

  He was tall and thickset, fat probably, in better light, and middle-aged coming on for elderly, a big man with a strong, wide face and a high forehead stubbornly refusing the surrender to baldness. Steel-wire hair tufted the sides and top of his head in small clumps. ‘What brings you to Segovia?’ he asked, without expecting a reply, because a hand waved as if to dismiss his own words. ‘This time of year, it is the sea you want. There at least you have the chance of a breeze. Here, you could boil eggs in our wells. It is too hot even to think.’

  She smiled to herself, and didn’t answer, but stared again at the glass in front of her. The froth that had spilt in the pouring had turned to clear wet coins on the varnished counter.

  ‘But you have the right idea, at least,’ he said, and when she looked at him again he nodded towards the beer and grinned, showing a row of small bottom teeth, with one missing just to the left of centre. ‘It takes the Irish to educate us in sensible behaviour.’

  He stepped between two stools in the centre of the bar and settled himself onto one, keeping a polite distance from her. ‘Juan,’ he called, lifting his voice. ‘Dos cervezas, por favor.’ The bartender appeared in the doorway again, the same unhurried look about him as before but with something else, a certain obedience, evident now. ‘Dos cervezas,’ the man repeated, and watched while the beer was drawn from the tap, carefully, this time, so that there was no spillage.

  When the two fresh glasses were set on the counter, the man stood up from his bar stool and moved one of the beers across towards where she was sitting. She hadn’t looked up, yet had observed everything, but now she turned a few degrees on her seat, and shrugged a slight thanks. He nodded his head, and his mouth tightened a little in lieu of words.

  As soon as they were alone again, they set to drinking. The man drank deeply and without hurry, his eyes, fixed to a point behind the bar, growing more distant with their focus. She had to finish her first glass before starting in on the next, but that was no hardship because her thirst was wide.

  ‘I need to leave soon,’ she said, after a while. The surrounding silence, and perhaps the beer, reduced her voice to almost nothing. In this climate the alcohol settled with quick heft. ‘I still need to find a place to stay.’

  The man looked at her and nodded again, so she knew that he was listening. He might have recommended somewhere, and the fact that he didn’t made him hard to read. He had already gone halfway down his glass and she’d yet to touch her second.

  ‘It won’t be so bad further north,’ she added. ‘But this is worse than I’d expected.’

  ‘You could boil eggs in our wells, it’s that hot. Did I already say? Well, it’s true. Or almost. Are you going north? Get to the sea. That’s my advice.’

  ‘I am thinking about Bilbao. In a few days. But I also want to visit Burgos. There are cave paintings. That interests me. Have you seen them?’

  ‘No. I’ve been to Burgos many times, but not for some years now, and never to visit caves.’

  ‘I paint. Not seriously, I don’t mean seriously. But it’s just something I like to do. And, in fact, it’s why I’m here. I want to draw the castle.’

  ‘Many come for that purpose, yes. It’s famous. They say it’s the castle that inspired Walt Disney, the one that opens his cartoons. Perhaps that is true, perhaps not. And perhaps it doesn’t even matter as long as people think it’s true. But there are better things to see in Segovia than rocks and rooftops.’

  ‘That depends. We all have different needs.’ She could feel herself speaking slowly, but whether because of the shadows or the beer she didn’t know.

  ‘And you need fairy tales, is that it?’

  She looked at him and felt, all at once, the press of tears. But he hadn’t meant to challenge her, and his voice was soft, thickened by whispers, as if he had been too long around sick people. She finished her first glass with a last long swallow, then manoeuvred the second into place between her resting hands.

  ‘Of course I do,’ she said. ‘Who doesn’t, at my age?’

  ‘What are you talking about? You’re what? Early thirties?’

  ‘I’ll be forty-two next month.’

  ‘Well, still. So what? That’s no age. You’re a beautiful-looking woman, a flower in bloom. And you’ve got a whole long life ahead of you. Take it from an old fool who knows too well what he’s talking about, and be grateful for that.’

  ‘Of course.’ She glanced at him again, in a small way, and lifted her glass to her lips. The man was right; she had a kind of beauty. Men had always looked, and always thought so.

  Hair the sand-blonde of old hay styled short but full and carelessly loose, with the finger-combed fringe that suggested at once coyness and daring, a small mouth, slender nose and morose eyes the dirty blueness of a daytime just ahead of storm. Since girlhood, she had been a draw for those who cared to look closely, and she’d always made the most of her appeal. But this heat discouraged the facade of make-up.

  ‘I am actually a stranger here myself,’ he said. ‘I was born in Ávila. It’s not even an hour away now by car but, back then, miles had more distance about them. I lived for a while in Salamanca and
a while longer, after the army, in Madrid, thinking that I needed to be in a big city, one of those places where I could live and be lost at the same time, if I was ever to make anything of myself. It was in Madrid that I started to learn English.’

  ‘You speak it wonderfully.’

  ‘Evening classes. And since then, from books. Hemingway, Chandler. The English writer, Graham Greene. Women, too, occasionally. After more than forty years, I am still learning.’

  ‘So what brings you to Segovia?’

  ‘Oh, the same as you. Fairy tales.’ He showed her his teeth again, a grin so comfortable in its place that his face should have looked emptier without it. But this was not so. She sensed that he would have been equally himself in any expression. It was one of the things age gave to a certain type of man. ‘I followed a woman here. A girl, really. Isn’t that the best reason to do anything? Of course, I don’t mean yesterday or last week. I was twenty-five, she was seventeen. Forty-two years ago now. 1974. She’d snared me in Madrid, at the cafe where she had found summer work and where I went every single day after first seeing her there. By September, I had a choice to make: to either come here after her or lose her entirely from my life. But we were already lovers by then, so it wasn’t really much of a choice at all. And she knew how weak I was for her.’

  ‘That’s a nice story.’ She drank again from the glass. The beer dug cold channels into her, yet didn’t seem to touch her thirst. The void that had defined her these past few months was swallowing everything. ‘I hope it ended happily ever after for you both.’

  The old man shrugged. ‘Ever after is asking too much. Can a life without its downs as well as ups count as fully lived? I don’t know. But yes, we were happy, I think. If I am forced to answer, I will say so. Maria was a good woman and an even better wife. She’s been dead four years, and I still wake every morning expecting to find her beside me in our bed. Being with someone at first is like a slow dance. You are conscious of every moment, and of taking a wrong step. For years, when you’re alone, you are the person you think yourself to be. But love changes everything. You come to understand, though not always in words, that the other person makes you complete. Maybe it is because you have given away your heart. And once you’ve grown used to having them there, so close, their absence opens a hole that can never again be filled. You have to go on, of course, but you never quite regain your balance.’