Now & Then

by Jacqueline Sheehan

  “Don’t be put off by Donal,” Glenis went on. “You’ve seen how gentle he can be with children, and those children are not even his; they’re Maura’s grandchildren. The girls’ parents died from consumption and he took in this lot. He’s furious at me right now, but it has nothing to do with you.”

  “Yes, it does. I distinctly heard him say that he didn’t want to be saddled with me. Do you know how horrible that feels?”

  Glenis’s cheeks were flushed, and a light gleam of moisture on her face and neck made her glow. The sun danced off her hair, with its strands of red, brown, and ebony twined together in one harmonious blend. Glenis mounted O’Connell as if gravity held no claim to her. Already she and the horse were one creature, a two-headed animal that was glorious to behold, exploding with energy. Anna was sure that she had never seen anything as beautiful as Glenis at that moment. And she could not recall being more set adrift, abandoned, and angry.

  As Glenis rode off, Donal and Anna were left with the silence of her exuberant departure. Anna cleared her throat and said, “Well, there she goes.” She did not face Donal full on but stood at an angle to him. She stole a glance at his profile, waiting for the “now what” to happen. She had been in sight of Glenis since she had arrived nearly six weeks ago. An uneasy fear began to grip her, freezing the tips of her shoulder blades. She was suddenly exposed and naked without Glenis. Anna had not spoken one full sentence to this man since she’d arrived, and now she was left in his charge. How could Glenis have done this?

  She watched his Adam’s apple slide up a notch and then down again as he swallowed.

  “She was always like this,” he said, more to himself. Then he turned to Anna and said, “Glenis wouldn’t tell me exactly, but I have a feeling that she is going on your account. I hope you are worth the risk.”

  Anna was shocked out of her sadness. “That was the rudest thing I’ve ever heard. You don’t know one thing about me. And I had no say in Glenis coming or going. If I had my way, I’d be with her right now and not with you. If you’re related to her, it is not through your good nature.”

  She glared at him, refusing to stalk off. His eyes were darker than brown, and he looked down at her from an advantage of half a foot. His shirt caught a breeze and expanded like a sail, like an animal making itself bigger, with the extra sleeve suddenly coming loose from its pinning and snapping like a flag.

  “If you’re not using that extra sleeve, you could at least stop it from flapping,” she said. She held her ground until Donal turned and headed back to the house.

  Without Glenis, Anna was a free-floating boat, no oars, no sail, and not much of a rudder, just a vessel subjected to the whims of currents and wind.

  If Anna had thought she could talk Glenis out of her leave-taking, she had been wrong. Glenis was gone, and Anna was left standing between house and stable. She straightened her shoulders. Donal had been the one to stalk off, which had pleased her in the tiniest way. He had promised Glenis that he would take Anna back to Kinsale, so she only needed to occupy herself for a few days, then ride into Glengariff and back. She was confident that an extra set of hands was welcomed, even her unskilled hands. She walked into the house and sought out Maura, the matriarch of the group.

  “Can I give you a hand with anything while I’m here?”

  Maura glanced at Anna but returned her attention to her husband, with whom she was sitting knee to knee. He looked considerably older than Maura. His face was deeply lined in a pattern that looked designed by the wind, as if the old man had stood on the cliffs facing out to sea and allowed the northwest winds to wear away at him. Anna detected a scowl, the tightness of his lips, the stare past Maura’s shoulder, shunning his wife momentarily. Maura sighed and patted his gnarled hand.

  “Look now, this is the way it will be, and I’ll be back before you can forgive me for leaving.” Maura stood up and turned to Anna, saying, “Anna, there is something you can do here. We need to take the thatch to Glengariff…and…well, Glenis said she explained a few things to you. It would look so much better at this time if you joined Donal and me. An old woman accompanied by her son and daughter, that’s what we shall say. And you being the quiet one, if we are stopped. Can you do that? Oh, better yet, you’ll be the fevered one, that should keep the curious at bay. With a smear of dark ashes around your eyes, we can make a perfectly pathetic fevered one out of you.”

  “Oh, I’ve already promised Glenis that I would help. I’m pleased to hear that you’ll be coming also. Where is Glengariff? Are we going further west?”

  “Quite a bit more, yes. And it’s a stronghold of the English. They’re fond of the castle, the forest, the hunting, but with a sickly traveler, they should give us a broad pass. No one wants to examine someone with the fever,” said Maura.

  “And once we deliver the wagonload, then we can come back here? Then Donal will drive me back to Kinsale?”

  “Oh, he shall. Aye, our return journey will be lighter. There’s others to take over on the far side of Glengariff.”

  Anna did not see a vast array of choices. She looked at the old man with the foul dark mood, the children who would need tending, and gained clarity.

  “When do we leave for Glengariff?”

  Maura smiled. “In the morning, dear, and not at the first light of dawn, but after my bones have warmed.”

  Midmorning the next day, Maura seemed to take some pleasure in dabbing Anna with soot around her eyes.

  “I think she looks poorly, don’t you?” the older woman asked Donal.

  “Poorly indeed, as if the plague itself was set on her. Quite poorly. And could you scratch your head as if you had a goodly amount of lice?” asked Donal as he hoisted the last of the provisions to the front of the cart. They expected to be gone for two days.

  Anna bristled at Donal’s too quick assessment of her sickly looks, which had been designed to repel a close inspection by troops.

  “Perhaps you should be the sick one. And the quiet one who doesn’t speak.”

  Something like a smile, the beginning twitches around the edges of his lips, formed. He turned his head away for a moment, then said, “I’d not fit nearly as well as you do, stuck behind the bench seat on your own sick pallet. Come on now, hop aboard, my dear sister, while I sit next to our sainted mother.”

  Donal extended his arm to Anna as she stood contemplating her travel strategy.

  “Tis a great honor to have you aboard. Now could you give us a show of your phlegmatic cough?”

  They had agreed that the most unquestioning configuration was for Maura to be their mother, with Anna and Donal as the devoted siblings. Anna did not imagine that the total trip would last long, since Glengariff was not but twenty miles. And if law school had taught her anything, it was that she could endure the most excruciating circumstances as long as she knew there was an end. She could easily see the end of this mission.

  They had fashioned a small nook for Anna directly behind the bench seat, where she could either lay crossways with her head behind Maura’s generous rear, or she could sit up with her knees crammed hard into the bench seat. She had tried both options as they’d packed and prepared for the journey.

  Anna gathered her skirts in one hand and accepted Donal’s hand to climb up. She noticed that his arm held her steady, as if it had been a banister, firm and carved, burnished from use. Did all of his strength from two arms run into his one arm? Glenis had told her that he’d lost his arm as a child, in a skirmish with the British.

  Anna glared at Donal, knowing that she looked nothing short of hideous with her eyes dramatically hollowed by Maura’s application of peat soot.

  She settled into a position that allowed her to sit sideways with her hips squashed between the canvas-covered thatch in the back and the bench seat. Donal and Maura climbed up, and the procession to Glengariff began. Maura talked on about people they knew, their children and their desirable and not-so-desirable traits. Anna heard more than once, “What is the world coming to
? Those children! I never could have carried on that way when I was a child.”

  Had every generation since the beginning of time despaired over the younger generation? Perhaps there had always been some perception of children as some alien species, one devoid of social graces. Anna had to admit that she thought this was absolutely true of her nephew. How could he have been arrested? But she considered Maura’s commentary as convincing evidence that perhaps every generation really wasn’t worse than the former because it just wasn’t possible. She pictured herself behind a podium in a lecture hall, perhaps Boston College. A PowerPoint presentation glowed in back of her, showing an Irish family in 1844. “When I was in Ireland in 1844, people were already complaining about the ruin of civilization because of their children. So you can see that this firsthand knowledge of historical/social mores leads one to see this pessimism more as a stage theory of adult development. At some stage we all despair of the next generation. Are there any questions?”

  No, nothing that she heard or saw could be mentioned if she ever found her way home again. If she made it home, she’d be muzzled. This very bumpy journey to Glengariff would exist only in her mind. But what about Glenis, Donal, and Maura; surely they would remember her? There would be no one to tell, except for Joseph, if he was alive. If she could find him.

  By nightfall, they were within five miles of Glengariff. Donal unhitched the horse and allowed her to graze.

  “It’s not a good thing to drive a horse into the ground,” he said. “This draft horse will do anything I ask her, but in return, I shouldn’t ask her to go beyond her mark.”

  Anna wondered why she had been asked to go ridiculously beyond her own mark. Donal arranged the camp for the night. Anna watched his movements. Had he done this one thousand times? Was setting up camp as normal to him as getting in her car and driving to the Cumberland Farms was to her? He flipped open the carefully rolled canvas that had protected her from the rough thatch. She noted the muscles in his neck popping to attention as he focused on a project that as yet made little sense to her. Then, as he pushed and pulled and arranged, she suddenly saw their accommodations. He’d set sturdy rocks on either side of the wheels and draped a long swath of canvas from one side of the loaded cart to let it flow to the ground.

  “There. That should keep the mist off you throughout the night.”

  Anna peeked under the wagon and saw that he had extended another layer of canvas to cover the earth. Anna sighed as she pictured how hard the night would go, sleeping on the ground, catching scraps of sleep on her side until that went numb, then turning over to try the other side, then on her back until her tailbone howled, then some variation on her belly. All of this would have gone better with Glenis. They would have leaned into each other, somehow relieving the pain. Now she imagined all three of them flip-flopping through the night, with chances for sleep dramatically remote.

  “Please tell me you don’t snore,” she said to Donal.

  “I’ll tell you nothing of the sort, and you won’t be finding out on this night if I snore like a foghorn from hell. I’m walking into Glengariff over the hills to make sure our next man along the way is ready for us in the morning.”

  “You’re leaving us?” asked Anna, suddenly alarmed.

  “There’s nothing to harm you out this way. A few hedgehogs might sniff at your toes, nothing else. Oh, the magpies will screech you awake with their complaining, but I should be back before then.”

  After a supper of potatoes heated in a small fire, Maura and Anna crawled beneath the cart and arranged themselves. Donal had disappeared into the darkness, setting out at a crisp pace. Maura arranged herself like a dog, turning, sighing, and farting over and over until she was satisfied.

  “Tis a good thing for an old married woman like me, grandmother to seventeen already—seventeen who lived, I won’t count the dead ones—to run off now and then to let Himself grow a little fonder in the heart, if you take my meaning. Old men can, if they live long enough and if the drink doesn’t take their minds, get stiffened and unnoticing like old trees; the birds nest in them and they forget to say please and thank you kindly.”

  Maura had loosened her white hair, which was accented with a few brilliant reminders of red, a combination that Anna realized would have been lost to the twenty-first-century obsession with looking young and using hair coloring to hide any signs of aging. Maura was soft in the hips and breasts, and Anna caught a pleasing scent from the older woman that was nearly hidden beneath the strong unwashed odor that permeated nearly everyone. Beneath all that, Maura smelled of fresh air and simmering potato soup, a combination that could stop armies in their tracks and make them fall to their knees and moan with longing.

  Maura spoke again. Anna had been sure that the older woman had fallen asleep.

  “I’ll head home tomorrow, and the whole way I’ll picture his craggy head as he holds a blade to the grinding wheel or tightening a door pull in the cupboard. It is a sweetness missing someone you love, a privilege from the heavens. Good night, Anna.”

  Had she ever missed her husband Steve like that, before the miscarriages, before the affair, the divorce? Or had they been two automatons working 80 hours per week at their respective jobs, clamoring for their lawyerly ascent? Could she remember his head, the bristle along his closely shaven neck? As Anna dropped off to sleep, she recalled the way that Donal had snapped the heavy canvas, shaking it hard with his arm, making a long arc from his legs past the tips of his fingers.

  The night passed more quickly than she’d imagined it would. From her vantage point between wheel and canvas, she periodically noted the clockwise turning of the stars ticking across the canopy of sky. Maura snored in a soothing way, with puffs of exhalations that came rhythmically, like the ocean.

  It was Donal, not the magpies, who woke them.

  “Come awake, Maura, there’s trouble. Come on now.”

  Anna heard the tang of urgency in his voice, and she rolled out from under the wagon into a crouch.

  “What’s wrong?” she said, standing up and dusting off her skirt. She slipped on her jacket.

  Donal’s eyes betrayed a night without sleep; a shock of jagged red lines stared back at her.

  “We’ve lost two men in town. One was killed outright, and the other is on his way to Cork to the almighty new prison. He’ll wish he was dead. Maura! For God’s sake, come out from under there.”

  The glint of mist hung on Donal’s cap, and his shoes were muddied up to his ankles. The magpies began their morning song, and their gleaming black bodies soared over the camp. He ran to the slight rise where the horse was tethered and brought her back, injecting his sense of impending danger into the animal.

  “Help me, Anna. We’ve got to get this wagon into Glengariff and beyond. We’ve got to drive straight through to the far side of Beara Peninsula.”

  Maura crawled out from her sleeping nest. Donal paused in his labors to extend a hand and pull some grasses from Maura’s long nest of hair. Anna watched as Donal gently picked out the debris with care. An abandoned place in Anna’s throat swelled and sweetened, tasting of light maple syrup. Maura grabbed Donal’s hand for a quick pat and began to twist and wrap her hair.

  “You know I can’t go that far; I’ve got to go home. I promised I would. The old man is waiting, and all he has left are my promises.”

  Donal backed the horse into place to be hitched to the carriage. She threw her head up to catch even more of Donal’s fear-laden scent. The horse’s eyes were wide. He murmured to her, soothed her with some Irish words that Anna could not understand, but the sound of them coated her rising adrenaline as well. What ancient words could do that?

  “Then you’re in luck, because the stage from Glengariff to Skibbereen runs three days a week and today is one of them. We’ll put you on it; no promises to an old man will be shattered today,” said Donal.

  They were silent for the ride into Glengariff. Only the brisk trot of the horse marked time. Once they crossed a small
bridge, Donal brought the cart to a halt by a whitewashed inn. Two men and a boy waited outside with rucksacks. Maura immediately brightened.

  “Look now, if it isn’t John Murphy and his sons waiting for the stage. I’ll have a fine ride to Skibb with the likes of him. I’ll learn all the gossip that’s true and all that’s storied up by John.”

  They said their good-byes to Maura and left her at the stage stop, already engaged by the alleged storyteller. Glengariff was dominated by the presence of English soldiers, who looked eerily like every other occupying army: proprietary, disdainful, vigilant, and armed. Anna rode next to Donal. Anyone would assume they were husband and wife, but neither of them had spoken of it, neither of them had said they would pretend to be so. After they rode through the town, Anna wiped all the soot from her face; they had decided that it had only made her look filthy, not sick.

  “Where exactly are we going?” asked Anna from her perch on the horse cart.

  Donal took up considerably more space in every way than Glenis had. When he sat on the bench seat, he spread his knees wide, immediately carving out more area, the way men do, with legs, shoulders and elbows. He lifted his right elbow to give a lazy snap of the reins and nearly smashed into Anna’s face.

  “If I told you exactly, what would it matter? You don’t know the Beara Peninsula in any way. If I said three miles inland from the boggy glen, would you know where I meant? And this is for your own protection. You are protected by your lack of knowledge,” he said.

  He wore his cap, a brown wool weave, from which came a scent of damp wool, body oil, and peat smoke, all sent steaming from his head. Anna’s nostrils flared slightly to make room for the size of this particular smell, then she caught herself and rubbed at her nose with her fist, as if she could rub him away. Donal turned to look at her.