That weekend of voluntary activity, with the St Vincent de Paul volunteer liaising with the utility providers and the social services, made her famous in the district. In the months afterwards, the five-bar gate into the field constantly creaked as elderly farmers shyly brought small housewarming gifts with an apologetic shrug, saying, ‘It’s the least we can do and you a lady.’ Sometimes the gifts were household items from Glanmire House, purchased at the auction held by that Castlebar builder in 1962, but now being returned to their original owner.
The move into this field opened another chapter in her life, with Eva resisting the easy option to remain paralysed in perpetual mourning. Her mother’s ghost seemed to haunt The Ark, reminding Eva of her promise to strive tooth and nail, no matter what blows life dealt her, for the right to be happy. She refused to become one of those elderly widows, permanently dressed in black, whom she often saw sitting alone in the window of cafés in Castlebar, like fossilised relics from a forgotten era. Despite all the grief her heart had endured, she was somehow still alive and did not possess the right to refuse this miraculous gift of life. One morning in April as she woke, she felt she heard an inner voice relaying a psychic message, insisting that she had no option but to embrace whatever possibility of happiness life might still hold, even at the age of seventy-two. Her anguish at losing Alex would never ease, no more than the pain of having lost a son and daughter. She was essentially alone. But on that April morning, Eva rose to write into her diary the words of the Indian poet and philosopher, Sri Aurobindo: ‘Joy; yes, if we have the courage to want it! The laurel and not the cross should be the aim of our conquering soul … but men are still in love with grief … therefore Christ still hangs on the cross in Jerusalem.’
In the eight months since then, these words had become Eva’s mantra against any urge to suspend herself on a cross of sorrow. The grief of the living could imprison the souls of the dead, holding them back on their journey from this world. Alex once sang her a Joni Mitchell song about all human beings being stardust in search of a path back to the garden. As last summer bloomed, Eva kept seeing Alex’s spirit in cherry blossom petals and spurs of dandelion clocks drifting across the fields. She refused to yield to any loneliness or self-pity that might entrap these infinitesimal remnants of her granddaughter’s soul. Eva had kept herself busy by commencing a daily routine of long walks up into the mountains to seek out old friends and make new ones. She took an equal interest in everyone and felt no envy at what other people possessed. Being poor felt like a blessing, as she realised that the secret to serenity was to let go of every possession that might complicate the inner simplicity of life.
While she came to know everyone within a twenty mile radius, the truest friend she made last summer was an ungainly old ewe among the flock of sheep who grazed in Eva’s field. The ewe’s hind legs had once been hobbled, leaving her with the uneven gait that first elicited Eva’s attention. Trust was slow to come, but eventually the ewe allowed Eva to feed her by hand in the field. By summer’s end, she had taken to scrambling up to the concrete steps twice a day. Eva’s cats always bolted for safety when the caravan shook as the ewe padded clumsily over to where Eva sat. These visits only lasted for a few moments as the ewe chewed on the proffered bread and allowed Eva to rub her uncut fleece. But the contact was important to them both: two old mothers who had seen their offspring taken away.
Their unusual friendship only became problematic last autumn when Eva caused a terrible scene, sobbing inconsolably after she returned from a walk to discover the ewe being herded onto a truck with the other sheep for slaughter. This loss was miniscule compared to the other losses Eva had endured, but even such a small loss could trigger the accumulated pain of previous bereavements. The farmer was embarrassed by her tears and over the following days Eva was careful to remain indoors when she felt swamped by unassailable grief: aware of just how tenuous her position was – her tenure in this field being dependant on his goodwill. Since September, the field remained empty and only in recent weeks had Eva started to truly feel that she was reaching home when opening the five-bar gate. This feeling took longer in some places than others. As a young bride, her soul had never felt it belonged in Glanmire House. Yet when travelling in her sixties, sometimes a shabby pension in Tangiers felt like home within hours, as if she had been born to the trapped heat and raised voices shouting in Arabic on the street.
Fewer visitors called to The Ark in winter, but Eva did not mind because January was when she got her proper reading done, perusing books with snail-like slowness, until each layer of meaning filtered down into her bedrock. By day she wrote letters to old friends like Alan and Valerie O’Mahony. But she always welcomed dusk creeping across the sky because it heralded the time when she could light a candle, add more turf to the stove, turn off the harsh electric light and commence her true inner life. Every evening since Christmas, Eva had allowed herself to digest a chapter of The Bell by Iris Murdoch, with Hermann Hesse’s collected poems beside her bed for company. Often a sentence in Murdoch’s book would stir a memory, making Eva close her eyes and meditate in that rich silence broken only by wind and rain.
Therefore January should have been an oasis of serenity: the first and quietest month of the year, when she wished for nothing more than silent contemplation. But Eva was unable to find any peace since she first noticed this stray dog in the high meadow. After another few days of watching him crawl through the ditch to halt within sight of the pub yard, famished but still unable to find the courage to raid the bins there, Eva began to leave more food for him near a gap in the bushes where he generally hid. But on the first three nights when she did this, she was unable to sleep, convinced that she could hear him whimpering above in the meadow. She had to remind herself that she was too old for more pets. It was too big a worry, having to fear that they might outlive her and be ill-treated after her death, and yet it caused too much pain in her life when they died before her. To take on the care of yet another animal would tie her down when she needed to be free. A passing car had killed one of her two young cats last October. The other one ventured out hunting a week later and never returned. This just left Queensly, who was already old when she had wandered into Eva’s life. Queensly would surely die from old age soon. After that, Eva wanted to be ready for one last adventure. Mayo was too damp for her bones and too full of memories. But before she went anywhere else, it was her duty to find a suitable buyer for Glanmire Wood. Any local farmer would simply fell the trees to create more pastureland. She needed to find a buyer on her wavelength, who would retain it as a wildlife sanctuary. When she had accomplished this task, Eva now planned to emigrate to Costa Rica. She had heard that people in Costa Rica were so sufficiently unspoilt that they possessed a gift which Europeans had lost: the ability to genuinely be themselves. Life in Costa Rica would be cheap, the sunshine might help her arthritis and it would be a truly fresh start, an entirely blank chapter. But if she gave her love to this stray dog, she would never be able to leave him or Ireland behind.
It was vital to find him a home. Therefore she set out walking the next morning, calling on everyone in the locality to see if they might take him as a pet. She felt more accepted now into daily life of Turlough than during all her years in Glanmire House. Reduced circumstances eroded social barriers. People addressed her in a chatty way, so different from how they had always been careful when speaking to Freddie, who may have been impoverished but had retained the manner of a haughty Fitzgerald. The women in many new bungalows she called into that morning were curious about what they called her ‘quack beliefs’. While pre-school toddlers lolled before televisions, young mothers asked if she really treated her aliments with herbal remedies and made soup from weeds plucked off the roadside. Often women conceded that there was possibly wisdom in her distrust of drug companies, but they would be too afraid to go against the local doctor by trying any herbal remedy she suggested. For all their friendliness, nobody would agree to give the stray collie a
home, although one elderly woman who seemed oddly petrified that her niece might show Eva into the good front room, offered to phone the dog pound in Castlebar and have the dog taken away.
But the pound was merely a prison camp where listless animals padded, instinctively sensing the approach of death. Eva dejectedly returned home, passing the mobile butcher shop which parked twice a week outside Bridie’s. Dismembered slabs of meat and sides of bacon hung on hooks behind the counter as the butcher served his customers. Unable to avoid glancing in, Eva momentarily envisaged a row of skinned dogs hanging there. Then she shuddered as this mental image was displaced by one of a row of skeletal carcasses of prisoners hanging upside-down, having succumbed to beatings, starvation and typhoid in a Soviet gulag, with Brendan’s corpse among them.
This nightmarish image now only very infrequently recurred in her dreams, but Eva had never lost her sense of horror at what her youngest brother surely suffered. Eva found herself shaking on the footpath as she stared into the butcher’s van. Her more recent bereavements preoccupied her so much that they left little time to contemplate her brother’s fate, but even now she remained susceptible to being ambushed by unresolved grief for him. In this moment of epiphany outside the butcher’s van, Eva realised that because she had been unable to protect so many people she loved, she could not bear to fail this stray dog and see him put down. She entered Bridie’s shop for advice. The huge television blaring on the shop counter was the elderly shopkeeper’s sole concession to the passing years, the only feature that was different from when Eva first stood there forty years ago. Bridie rarely said much during their daily chats, beyond passing acerbic comments about the world, though Eva generally talked enough for them both. But today when Eva mentioned the stray dog, the shopkeeper warned her that local farmers would take matters into their own hands before he started to worry their sheep, especially now that Eva had notified the whole neighbourhood about his existence by seeking a home for him.
Eva knew that Bridie was right. She had witnessed the kind side of country life, the fundamental decency which had resulted in neighbours banding together to supply her with electricity and water. But country life possessed a tougher, practical side: a necessary ruthlessness in dealing with any creature who might threaten their farming livelihoods. Shooting the stray collie would be seen as the only practical solution, because even the most placid dog could grow savage once he smelt blood. Eva felt certain that this collie was no killer, but by leaving food for him beside the bushes in recent nights perhaps she had inadvertently endangered his life, encouraging him to linger there where he would be a dokhodyaga, as they used to call a prisoner so wasted by exhaustion in the gulags that he was a goner, an easy target for his executioners when they came. After leaving Bridie’s shop and opening her gate, she saw a stir in the bushes and knew that the dog was watching from the undergrowth that divided her field from the high meadow, hoping she might leave food up there again tonight. Eva felt like running towards the bushes with a stick to try and frighten him away, but she simply did not possess such violence within her.
But perhaps she should have scared him away, because dusk was setting in and it was starting to rain heavily when the slam of a car door alerted her to the arrival of two strangers. She saw them open the car boot to remove guns. They spread out – one at the top of her field and one in the high meadow – stalking their way down the length of the long bushes. The furthest man could have been Freddie’s ghost: his gun held in the same way and even his cap pulled down at a similar angle. Opening her door, she hurried up towards the bushes. The nearest man saw her and called out.
‘Go back inside now, like a good woman. This isn’t something a lady like you should see, and if the beast makes a break for it you’d be putting yourself in danger from him. Those wild dogs can be savage.’
His eyes regarded her with pity. The whole neighbourhood knew about her hysterical response to the elderly ewe being taken to be butchered.
‘The dog is doing no harm.’
‘He’s not doing any good either, the poor creature. He’s wild entirely and a famished dog is dangerous.’
A gunshot from the far side of the bushes startled them. The man speaking to her called over the bushes to his companion.
‘Did you get him, Joe?’
‘I think I wounded the cur,’ his companion called back. ‘If I did, he won’t get too far and even if he tries to hide he’ll leave a trail of blood. Now please ask Mrs Fitzgerald to get back into her caravan for her own sake and you watch from your side of the bushes because I’m no sharp shooter like her husband was. If Mr Fitzgerald was still alive, he’d have killed this dog with one shot.’
‘That’s true.’ The first man nodded. ‘He’d have put a bullet clean through one eye and out the other. They say Mr Fitzgerald was an equally fine shot, whether he had a bad dose of the shakes or not.’
Both men went quiet, fearing that their attempted compliment to Freddie had strayed into dangerous familiarity. They began to move carefully down each side of the bushes, looking for any hint of blood while Eva fretted as she slowly walked backwards towards her caravan. She was dreading the sound of a second shot, but the man who fired the shot continued to curse as he tramped about in the high meadow, kicking the bushes. Something – not a movement because the dog was utterly still – made her glance towards the ditch that led down to her right towards the pub yard. The collie was there, immersed in freezing stagnant water, closer that he had ever been to her. For one awful second she feared that he would climb out and limp towards her, endangering his life by revealing his position to the man still searching the bushes a hundred yards away. But he just stared reproachfully and loped away to slink out of the ditch where it went behind The Ark, and silently hid behind the bins in the yard, unnoticed by the men who eventually gave up searching for him.
Lying awake in bed after the men left, Eva knew that she had only one day left before they returned the following evening to shoot her dog. Her dog? The phrase was unintentional, but Eva realised that this was how she now viewed him. Not as her possession, but as her equal: someone else who was alone and seeking sanctuary in these fields. She arose from bed in the middle of the night to open her door, letting an arc of light flood out like a beacon across the dark field, but she knew the watching dog lacked the courage to approach. Pulling a coat over her nightgown, Eva stood on the gravel, staring into the dark. Poor Alex had christened this caravan The Ark. Since her death, the name had seemed redundant but maybe this was what it could become for her and for Johnny. Eva did not know where the dog’s name came from, just that Johnny suited his gentle nature. The rain had cleared and the stars looked huge. Frost would have formed in the wet bushes where he was lying. Taking a flashlight, she walked up towards those bushes, calling his new name softly, then turned off her flashlight and waited in the dark, hoping he might emerge.
When the freezing cold finally drove her back inside, Eva knelt by her bed – constructed from boxes of old books with a mattress on top – to stare at an ancient picture of a small child kneeling beside a bed. It was a childhood memento which she had managed to hold on to, ever since taking it down from her Donegal bedroom wall on the night before her wedding forty years ago. She tried to clear her mind to let the Infinite Being enter her thoughts and inspire her if he wished. The plan that came to her was childishly simple, but simplicity was the only thing which life had taught her to trust. She slept peacefully after that, underneath two blankets and an old coat. The field was white with frost when she woke: the water from the hosepipe almost frozen. A thin trickle emerged before an icy spray eventually splurged forth. After breakfast she walked to Bridie’s to purchase two packets of Mikado Biscuits.
‘Visitors in January?’ Bridie asked in surprise.
‘No.’
‘I heard a gunshot yesterday evening. The poor wee dog.’
‘They missed him.’
Bridie shrugged, unsurprised by the news. ‘Those same two fellow
s couldn’t hit a bucket if they were sitting on it.’
When Eva reached the five-bar gate, she saw that the dog had risked coming out into the open, frantically rooting on her side of the bushes for any trace of food. He turned his head to stare when he heard the clang of the gate, but quickly slunk back into the bushes as Eva climbed up through the scraggy field towards him. Reaching the bushes, Eva opened the first packet of biscuits and threw one towards where she had seen him disappear. She stepped back and broke a second biscuit in two, dropping one half on the grass there and the other half a few feet behind her. The collie never emerged from hiding as she worked her way along by the side of the ditch that led down past her caravan, leaving a trail of broken biscuits in her wake. Only time would tell if hunger might tempt him to scramble out and follow the trail. Eva opened the second packet, extending the long biscuit trail so that it led right up to her caravan. Relieved that Queensly was prowling elsewhere, Eva left a full biscuit on each of the three concrete steps up to her door and a trail of crumbs along the floor inside the caravan, right up to the window seat where she sat and waited.
An Ark of Light Page 32
