Donal pressed something into her hand, some version of roasted potato that he had pulled from a covered jug. He guided it to her mouth and she took it in. Saliva, seemingly absent for days, rushed to meet the spud. She ran her tongue over it; it tasted the way Glennie had smelled when they had slept side by side in the open, like fresh sea air and earth and a burst of surprise.
Anna knew what Glennie had meant, that she had to go back home to her own time. Her presence here could be altering the present and the future. Glennie was the only person who’d known, except for this Biddy Early whom Glennie had ridden off to see in Limerick. Somewhere out there, a woman knew Anna was from the future. And she knew how desperately Anna was searching for Joseph.
Donal slipped another piece of roasted potato into her palm as soon as she swallowed the first bite.
“She didn’t know about us, Anna. If she’d known, she’d not have told you to go home. I’ve known Glennie all my life, and if she had but seen my face, she would have known….”
Both of them stopped, suddenly awkward. Anna swallowed the spud and looked at Donal. She placed her hand on his chest, where she thought his large heart sat nested under his ribs. He placed his hand on her loose dress, under her breast, letting it sit like a bird in his palm.
“Glennie was for the living. When my wife and sons died, it was Glennie who kept me from slitting me own throat, or turning to drink. She told me to honor them by living. She said the dead, the fairies, and God, all of them grow sad when we throw away the sights and smells of this life. When we sing, they sing. When we love, they love.”
They fell back on the blanket-covered hay.
“I always knew that it would come to talk of fairies. Should we make them all happy? Will you make love with me?” she asked.
For the first time since the funeral, they lay down in their perch above the animals and made love, shyly, as if everything was happening for the first time now that the world was different, now that Glennie had left them. Donal’s fingers traveled along the buttons of her spine, opening her from back to front, charting her from thigh to throat.
“I can’t imagine what it would be like to make love with you if you had two hands,” Anna whispered.
He continued his methodical journey along her earlobes as he replied. “I would not be as exact. I’m a cartographer, and we chart all landscape, name all the nooks and crannies, the quiet bays, dangerous outcroppings, and the places where riptides will carry you away.” He traced one jaunty nipple. “See here, if I was a ship and trying to come to port and this fine nipple was the bay, I’d most certainly need to know when the bay was soft and shallow, spreading wide and filled with tricks. And just as surely, I must know that if I touched it so…” He placed a firm tongue along one side of the nipple and it rose to ever greater attention, a brown column rising to the dusty roof of the barn. “Then I must know how to navigate at this time as well.”
Anna liked being a map. She raised her head and looked down past her breasts, considerably smaller than they had been two months ago. She turned on her side and Donal placed his hand on her hip, placing his thumb on the front and his palm on the backside. He kept going, measuring, mapping her, leaving no place uncharted.
The next day was a Sunday, and Anna began her school lessons once again with Michael and Mary. She even let little Nuala sit on her lap. Glenis would have wanted her to do this. After two brisk hours of doing fractions, Michael smiled for the first time since his mum had died.
“I think I love mathematics almost as much as I loved me mum. Not that they are the same, mind you, but these numbers set the world right again.”
Anna stopped midstream and looked hard at Michael, hearing the echo of her mother’s words when all the calamity of their family had been tearing them to ribbons. She knew her family came from a long jumble of Irish. What were the chances that she had dropped a mathematical seed into her mother’s side of the family?
“Your mother was proud of you,” said Anna, with a wavering voice. “Let’s get back to the numbers.”
Kinsale was carved right out of the hillside. Every street, except those that ran along the port, was steep and narrow, designed originally for cloven-footed creatures. The cemetery—the Catholic cemetery—was far above the town. The British landowners, the Protestants, were buried right in Kinsale, tucked behind the Church of England, which lavished Irish earth on them even in death.
Anna went to the cemetery every day, sitting next to the freshly turned dirt that blanketed Glenis. This is what old people do, she thought. They huddle around gravestones, bringing flowers. This is not what a young woman does. She wanted Glennie to burst out of her coffin to tell her what to do.
Anna stood up and dusted the dirt off her skirt. She walked down the hill from the humble cemetery, past Tom and Glennie’s house, and kept going toward the village. After several miles, her feet met the cobblestones of Kinsale, where the sounds of commerce began to jostle her—the cobbler, the stables, the ting of horses being shod, a boy rolling a barrel down the hill, the tinker’s wagon clattering as pieces of tin collided into each other.
She continued down the curving streets, careful to miss the fresh piles of horse dung, until she came to the port, with its lapping sounds from the sea, its air thick with gulls calling for hunks of fish tossed off by the fishmongers. The steady presence of the troops, some leaning against the strong timbers of the piers, made her wary. She welcomed the blistering distraction that the village offered.
She looked at the ticket station. One could buy a passage to England or the Continent. As if she truly could leave, as if she could book passage home. For no reason at all, she approached the ticket station, with its massive doors. Suddenly she was caught off guard for a moment by a dog chasing a set of gulls that had been savagely ripping strips of flesh from the discarded hunks of fish. Everyone wants to live, she thought, we all want life when given the option. Glenis had been right.
She looked up and reached for the door. Tacked to one side was a sheet of paper, an announcement.
Wrestling Match. Canadian Champion, Joseph Blair challenges Cork Champion. Cork City Centre. Saturday Afternoon.
Her hand rested on the gleam of the door handle. Wrestling? Joseph? No, she didn’t want to make connections where there were none. Joseph? She paused and remembered her first law class. “Keep it simple,” her professor had said. “Don’t ignore the obvious.” She spun around and grabbed the notice, ripping it from the wall. She rolled it tight and held it in one hand. She began to walk back up the hill, then she walked faster, then she loosened into a run, not caring that grown women did not run here. Then she pounded the cobbled stones, her legs stretched long, a bit of her skirt held in one hand.
By the time she reached Tom’s cottage, the late afternoon sun had just plunged below the horizon and Donal had just returned from wherever he had gone. When he saw her coming, he halted in midmotion, his hand on the wooden gate. Anna had the notice about the wrestler from the Canadian provinces, a Joseph Blair, rolled tight in her hands. She snapped it open before Donal. Her skirt had been gathered up in one hand.
He read the poster and looked at Anna, whose chest was still heaving from her run up the hill.
“These boots are giving me fits,” she said between gulps of air.
“You’ve taken a sudden interest in wrestling. It’s a fine old sport, but why now?” Donal asked, one eyebrow lifting.
“Not sudden. This could be my nephew. He could be using another name. I can’t explain why. But I’ve got to find out. How far is Cork from here?”
She let the edge of her skirt fall in place again and it fluttered around the tops of her shoes. She knew he could tell her precisely how far away Cork was. He was the cartographer.
“Twenty-three miles from the center of Kinsale if we travel inland a bit. The coastal road is full of vistas that will tear at your heart, but the way is longer. Did you know that you look like a ten-year-old boy when you run?”
“
I have to go to Cork. This is for Saturday. What day are we on?” Anna asked. She had lost track of days although she had sworn she would not do so.
“Friday. The match is tomorrow,” said Donal.
“I’ve got to go. I’ve got to see if it’s him. Have you ever heard of this wrestler before three months ago?”
“I can’t say that I have, but I can’t say that I’ve had my mind on the lads who wrestle. And I’m not eager to travel to Cork City. I’ve not been back there since my wife and boys were taken by the fever two years back. I left my work, I left everything, you see. I’m not eager to go.”
This was the first time that Donal had backed up, hesitated. She had not allowed the full weight of his loyalty to his dead wife and young sons to register. They were still foremost in his heart. Of course she would never compare; the dead were the real ones for Donal. She would forever be Other, an add-on. Even if she stayed with him, she’d be the secondary one. Who had she been kidding? She should have recognized his hesitancy instantly. Instead, she had been waiting, panting like a teenager. Anna straightened her shoulders and steeled her abdominals, the way she’d done so many times at the firm. The way she’d done when Steven had left her.
“There’s no need for you to come with me. I’ll ask Tom if I can take O’Connell to Cork. The horse has had a good, long rest, and I can find my way there,” she replied. People did not stay with her; she needed to carve this into her palm. So this would be good-bye. She should not have leaned so far into this man, should not have taken the taste of him into her mouth. First Glenis, now Donal. She understood being alone. She would have to forget the brief respite of feeling attached to Donal. It had been an illusion. She would just find Joseph and go from there.
Donal’s dark eyebrows pulled together as his cartographer’s eyes measured her.
“You jump from rock to ledge like a bloody rutting ram! I said I’d not been there in two years. Where did you leap to? Cork is filled with spies and thieves and militia, and you’ll not go there alone. And O’Connel shall have to carry the two of us.”
Anna’s shoulders softened minutely, her belly relaxed with an exhale. She pushed away the thoughts that had cascaded over her, so ready to destroy her.
“‘Bloody rutting ram’? Would you say that again? I’ve never been called that before. And is that the worst you can think of, or is there more?”
“Oh, there is much more for the likes of you. Rascal, scoundrel, smuggler, wild woman. Beloved.”
They rose in the hours before dawn. As Tom lent them the powerful O’Connell, he said stoically, “Never let a horse remember the ride of the dying. They’ve got to ride forward into life.”
Michael solemnly handed Anna her walking stick. “You should take this along with you.”
Anna stopped her preparations. “Michael, I want you to keep this for me until I get back. Will you watch over it? And will you keep doing your computations?”
The boy nodded and moved closer to his father as Anna and Donal completed saddling O’Connell.
Anna had never ridden farther than a trail ride along the beaches north of Puerto Vallarta in Mexico, where she’d gone on spring break. When their trail guide had called out, “Let’s let these guys gallop!” she had nearly fallen off.
Donal let her step on his thigh to launch herself on the horse’s back, then he swung up behind her.
“I’ve never ridden much,” she said.
“Both the horse and I have noticed,” he said.
Anna felt her back enveloped by Donal, her legs shadowed by his. An unfamiliar sensation came over her. This is what it feels like when someone has your back, she thought. This is what love feels like.
Donal stopped every few hours to let Anna get off and stretch her legs, but only long enough for her to do some unladylike squats and hamstring stretches.
“Do you have an ailment? Can I help you in some way?” asked Donal after he returned from a discreet visit to the bushes.
“No. This is preventive; this will keep my muscles from tightening up.” As soon as she said it, she wondered if everything that she did looked slightly out of whack. He had already noted her tooth flossing.
“You look like you’re eating your own fist,” he had said when she’d flossed after stopping for a bite to eat.
On their third rest stop, Anna lifted her skirt and peered down at her knees. The skin on her inner thighs had turned bright red from rubbing against the saddle. She tried every way imaginable to wrap her skirt around her legs, but by the next stop, the skin on the inside of both knees and thighs had gone from a blossoming red to angry blisters.
“I could lay you across the backside of O’Connell,” suggested Donal.
“How about this? How about you slip off those pants and I’ll give you this skirt. Let’s see who gets blisters then. This is exactly why everyone should wear pants.”
Donal put a protective hand on his belt and backed away from her.
“I can’t say that I’ve ever seen a lass with britches on. But it is a pity about your legs. We’ll get them attended to in the next village. Lard will do the trick.”
They arrived in Cork City in early afternoon.
“You must have a lifetime of friends here,” said Anna, glad to be off the horse. She refused to leave O’Connell until she saw that he was properly stabled, wiped down, and given all that he needed. She had seen some horses treated badly in Kinsale, and she wanted nothing bad to happen to Glennie’s horse.
They walked along a river path that led to a college. Anna noticed the absence of women but said nothing. Or at least she intended to say nothing; that would have been the wiser thing to do, but instead she said, “We have colleges where women attend.”
“Oh, do you now? That seems as good an idea as any I’ve heard. Do they not mind being tossed in with so many lads?”
There, she shouldn’t have said anything; it was just PMS stalking her. She could feel the prickly belligerence, the vigilant search for injustice that rolled in with the monthly changing guard of hormones. No, if she said any more, she’d say too much and she’d drag Donal into her world—the future—and he couldn’t be there. He’d never be there; he’d never see the view from an airliner, never sit in front of the TV in his underwear mindlessly surfing from one basketball game to another, never drive a car or receive a vaccine. And yet here he was and here she was.
“The men and women did all right together at college,” she said, capping the topic. “Where will the wrestling tournament be held?”
Lowering his eyes, Donal followed two British soldiers without turning his head, keeping them in his field of vision as long as possible.
“Past the college, up the slight hill there, as far from the church as they could make it.”
They walked briskly, propelled by Anna’s belief that her nephew Joseph might truly be alive, be a wrestler going by another name, but alive all the same. As they approached the plateau, the bustle of people, men and women, pressed into the atmosphere of a country fair. The day was sunny, an aberration for late fall, and warm enough for her to unbutton her jacket. A bank of thick clouds approached from the sea.
She was taller than a good many people, but she still had difficulty seeing into the center area where the wrestling took place. There was one noticeable difference with this crowd that surprised Anna: it was thick with British militia. She quickly assessed the women’s footwear—fine kid leather—and their ornate hats and realized that these were part of the wealthier strata of the population. As if acknowledging her understanding, Donal shook his head and gave a slight shrug of his shoulders. They had already established a shorthand language of lovers.
They inched their way forward, stepping between wagering men.
“Who’s holding the bet? No, not Paddy, he’ll make off with it.”
“Put it all on the Canadian lad, he’s not lost one match.”
“I’ll put mine on the big fella. He’s a fine specimen of a man.”
Anna f
elt the skin along her neck prickle. It couldn’t be this easy. Could Joseph suddenly appear after nearly three months? If he was here, she’d simply grab him and go. And then what? She’d think of that later.
Donal’s lips brushed her ears.
“Be careful now. Something is off the boards here.”
A stout man came to the center, and his voice resonated with a practiced bellow.
“We’ve one more elimination round before the main event. A lad from Waterford has come all this way to contend with our own Walter Downing. They are goodly matched. The rules stand. They must stay within the boundaries at all times. The first man pinned is the unfortunate loser. Gentlemen?”
“Something is wrong here,” said Donal in a whisper. “Either I’ve been away from Cork for too long, or there’s a new wind blowing. The crowd is too massive for a wrestling match. Would you stay put, Anna? Can you be proper and still while I look around?”
Anna stood directly in front of him, looking as demure as she could as she pressed into him and slid her palms up his thighs.
“Is that proper enough for you?” she asked.
He grabbed both of her hands and brought them to his lips.
“Aye, properly wicked. But stay put, I beg of you.”
Donal pulled out of the crowd and moved to the perimeter. He was judging differences, politics; he understood the players and she did not. There was little point in Anna’s trying to assess the political climate. She had eyes only for the wrestlers, and she did not see Joseph anywhere. Anna had never intended to stay put. She stood on her toes, twisted her body to the left and to the right, straining with her neck. She collected fragments of conversation as she wove among the crowd.
“He’s turned the matches into his own bloody war.”
“Irish against English. Why did they have to poke into our wrestling?”
Anna began to observe the simple obvious details. She stood among people whom she could now easily identify as Irish. The men’s hands were thick with calluses, their shoes were patched, and the woolen vests were threadbare in places. The few women wore dresses and skirts that were as sturdy as her own, made of rough buckram cloth.
Now & Then Page 23
