An Ark of Light

by Dermot Bolger

  It was ten minutes before the dog emerged into the open. He ate the first few biscuits ravenously, then seemed to lose the trail or distrust it. At times he stopped and stared anxiously around before his nose sought out the next one and he resumed eating his way down the length of her field. So far his route had not taken him far from the safety of the ditch, but it now reached a point where the trail of biscuits led across open ground towards her caravan. Timid and uncertain, the dog crawled back into the ditch and lay there, his eyes staring intently at Eva, who remained on display, seated in her window. Five minutes passed before he found the courage to crawl from the ditch. Ravenous now, he eat each biscuit with a desperate hunger, creeping closer until he passed underneath her window and out of sight. Eva sat in silence, knowing that the smallest sound would frighten him. It was now his decision whether to become part of her life or not. She heard him prowl hesitantly around the gravel beside the open door. Then came the sound of him climbing up the first concrete step. He stopped again, still out of sight. Eva could imagine him staring in at her caravan, crammed with books and paintings, and then gazing back at the wet fields that had been his home. An eternity seemed to pass before his paws touched the lino and he entered her world, eating his way along the line of broken biscuits.

  Only once did he stop to look up at her. There was no fear in his gaze, just a bewildered hurt. She returned his gaze and shared that hurt. Tonight he would sleep on this window seat that had once served as Alex’s bed. Eva understood the pain in his eyes and the dog recognised the pain in hers. He limped the final few steps without hesitation and climbed up onto the seat where she could properly see his welts and a cut festering on his face. If he allowed her to place a length of old twine around his neck, they could walk to the post office and purchase a dog licence. He would then officially be registered as her dog when the executioners returned and they would have to put away their guns. The sunlight of Costa Rica would have to wait. After all her decades of trying to fathom what purpose life intended her for – efforts to be an artist, a teacher, a writer, a wife, a mother and a grandmother – maybe all that life could offer was this one simple task: to give shelter to a beaten stray dog and spare him being shot? She would look after him because there was nobody else left who needed her now and because poor Alex would have wanted her to. Johnny gazed into her eyes, then laid his neck on her lap. Eva placed her arms gently on his neck. Neither moved for the longest time until Johnny lifted his head to lick away the tears on Eva’s face.

  Chapter Nineteen

  The Hiker

  Finglas, Dublin & Turlough, Co. Mayo, September 1977

  The eighteen-year-old boy’s journey began at dawn when Donal waited, as instructed, opposite St Canice’s Church at the crest of the sloping main street of Finglas village: a working-class suburb three miles from Dublin. An open-backed truck was due to pass this spot after leaving the nearby Unidare industrial complex to deliver a cargo of spools of heavy-duty electric cable to a building site in Roscommon, one hundred miles away. Donal was familiar with these massive wooden spools, having previously had a temporary job hammering six-inch nails into the slats of wood that sealed each tightly wound coil into place before the spools were loaded by forklift onto lorries. The drivers were forbidden to carry passengers, but Donal’s older brother, who worked in an adjoining office, had arranged this clandestine lift to take Donal across the Shannon and into Connacht. This would leave him with just sixty more miles to hitchhike to visit the seventy-three-year-old lady with whom he had been corresponding for months about his dreams of becoming a published writer. At times such an ambition seemed outlandish, but each of her replies – long handwritten pages crammed with encouraging comments about the typed poems he sent her – felt like beacons of hope, guiding him to take the first tentative steps to try and unearth imaginative worlds which seemed to lurk in his subconscious, if he could find the courage to delve deep enough. Her letters felt like a poultice against the only other post he received: the crushing disappointing rejection slips that punctured his fervent hope that some editor might like his work.

  The Main Street was deserted apart from some Premier Dairies milk floats passing by. A former classmate shouted out a greeting as he sat amid crates of milk bottles for delivery. Donal nodded to the old age pensioners hurrying for half-seven Mass. He still could not enter that church without recalling his numb bewilderment at eight years of age, when its aisles overflowed with mourners after his mother had passed away four days before Christmas. This bereavement left him feeling as if his childhood and personality were severed in two. He could subdivide every experience into those that had occurred to the naïve, secure child he was before her death and the boy who had needed to grow up quickly afterwards. However his tough protective persona could not disguise how even an innocuous glimpse of anyone being buried in a television programme still left him ambushed by paralytic terror. As the Unidare lorry rounded the corner from Jamestown Road, he pulled up his collar and nodded almost imperceptibly in reply to the driver’s nod – their exchange so discreet that no passer-by would notice the lorry momentarily halting as a passenger climbed illicitly up into the cab to commence a journey across Ireland.

  Little traffic drove along the narrow side road that wound past the tiny Protestant Church, but for safety’s sake Eva always kept Johnny on his lead until they reached the entrance to Glanmire Wood: hidden from the road and marked by an old rusty iron gate. To this she had affixed a hand-painted sign that would have affronted Freddie: ‘Nature Sanctuary. No hunting. No shooting.’ When leaving the caravan for their daily walk, Johnny had guessed, racing around in circles to show his delight, that the woods were today’s destination. Yet even though his tail wagged with increasing vigour throughout their companionable stroll here, he never strained at his lead, because he knew how Eva could only go at a certain pace and his nature was too gentle to rush her. But once he saw this rusty gate he became so overcome by excitement that all restraint vanished. The woods allowed him the chance to chase rabbits and Eva knew it was cruel to detain him for more than the few seconds needed to slip off his lead and watch him bound in a paroxysm of trembling anticipation into the undergrowth. Perhaps it was contradictory to let a dog loose in a nature sanctuary, but it didn’t seem so to Eva. It was in Johnny’s nature to chase rabbits and if he managed to catch one, such a death would be part of a natural cycle, in a way that Freddie’s shooting parties had never been, when they slaughtered everything that flew simply to prove their manhood. Besides, just as surely as Eva knew that she would not see Johnny again for twenty minutes until he re-emerged, panting loudly and rolling about on the daffodil lawn to shake off the twigs and brambles that would attach themselves to his coat, Eva also knew that Johnny possessed an singular inability to ever come close to catching a rabbit: a continual failure that never affected his enthusiasm to try again and fail again every time he accompanied her up here.

  This morning’s visit to Glanmire Wood needed to be shorter than their usual expeditions when she and Johnny often happily spent hours lost in their private world here. Today a young poet was hitchhiking from Dublin to stay with her. It was impossible to predict how long any journey which involved hitching lifts could take, and so it was important to return home early in case he arrived unexpectedly. Eva still wasn’t sure what had compelled her to send this poet a postcard some months ago, after he was interviewed in The Evening Press about a tiny debut collection of poems he had just produced, which was being sold at 30p a copy by his friends and relations in local factories, pubs and offices. The interview made great play about Donal being an unemployed school-leaver who had found a back-lane printer to print four hundred letterpress copies of the collection, in between the printer’s usual jobs of printing football pools coupons for amateur league soccer teams. Perhaps Eva had sent the postcard because the journalist’s slightly mocking tone reminded her of feeling hurt, a quarter century ago, when an Irish Times journalist wrote a similarly patronizing piece
about her dreams for her child art studio. Donal, likewise, seemed to be trying to start something new with an arts movement in Finglas, bringing together local poets and musicians to stage events in any makeshift space they could find.

  Or maybe what caught her eye was Donal’s mention of a book about the supernatural, written by her old Kiltimagh neighbour Dermot MacManus. Donal had expressed a desire to hear from anyone who had experienced supernatural occurrences because he wished to write a similar book about the paranormal. The boy’s reference to MacManus’s long-forgotten book brought back precious memories of the night in Mount Elgon National Park when Hazel surprised her with a first edition of that book: Alex climbing onto Eva’s knee to study its photographs of Mayo. But maybe she wrote to this young poet because he was the age that Alex would be, if poor Alex had lived, and the mixture of vitality and vulnerability in his photograph in the newspaper so reminded Eva of her granddaughter that she had needed to close her eyes and sit still to let the buried ache in her subconscious settle back so that she could breathe again.

  Or had her impulsive decision to drop him a card stemmed from Eva’s memories of her own purgatory of waiting for post – any post – when trying to become a published author, sending off stories to editors from that posada in a Pyrenean village twenty years ago? Maybe she had sensed that – although no substitute for an acceptance letter from an editor – a postcard from a stranger to wish Donal success might serve as a quiet token of encouragement to a writer just starting out. But for whatever reason, she had written to tell Donal of her desire to buy a copy of his poetry collection, adding that she had known the late Dermot MacManus, and if Donal ever visited Mayo he was welcome to stay with her for a few nights as she possessed a wood where he might enjoy doing some writing. The boy’s reply was floridly written, like an adolescent trying to sound grown-up. But Eva felt that his true essence came across in the unpublished poems he enclosed, reminding her of verses Francis wrote at eighteen, although Donal’s words were more intense. In the letters exchanged since then, Eva had grown to admire his quiet resoluteness in being fixed on his own course.

  Donal would not be the first poet to sleep on the window seat. Two months ago, a young Canadian poet named Teresina had spent three weeks in the caravan while travelling around Ireland. Valerie O’Mahony, who had moved to Canada, had put Eva in touch with Teresina who was wonderful company, joyously telling Eva how she loved to wake at night and savour the feel of The Ark swaying in the breeze. On most days she had taken a flask of coffee and some fruit up to Glanmire Wood, spending hours working in the fresh air on her first poetry collection. A local scandal even ensued when Maureen’s brother-in-law, Jack, found Teresina sunbathing topless on the daffodil lawn when he came up in search of fencing posts.

  As Eva reached the overgrown lawn now, she paused in her walk to turn in a slow circle, savouring the warmth of the morning sun. It seemed extraordinary to think that four decades had passed since she came here as a bride, knowing as little about men as she’d known about life. There had been times here when she’d felt isolated and overwhelmed by despair, but also sunbursts of great happiness, as if happiness were a comet whose elliptical orbit no astronomer could calculate. This past year felt like one such sunburst, because after all the anguish and soul-searching of recent decades, all the bereavements she had been convinced she would never recover from, who could have predicted that now, in her early seventies, she would be experiencing this plateau of equilibrium and tranquillity? Maybe it came from recognising that there were no stepping stones left: her sole task was to simply accept this benediction of sunlight and the companionship of Johnny who, at any moment, would come tearing out from the undergrowth as if returning from the most tremendous adventure. She would gladly have forfeited her life to give Francis or Hazel or Alex the chance to stand here, relishing this sunlight. But fate denied her any chance to make a heroic sacrifice. Eva needed to accept that, for some mysteriously unjust reason, she was the last one left standing and needed to live this moment on their behalf. Her final remaining duty was to treasure life to its last breath for their sake, because only she could keep alive the memory of how Hazel had loved certain pieces of music; only she could tend to these woods that were precious to Francis; only she remained to laugh freely, knowing that each time she did so she heard an echo of Alex’s laughter somehow still living on within her.

  Over the past eighteen months, her chief task when trying to maintain these woods was the endless chore of repairing its boundaries. Glanmire Wood had been deserted for so many years before her return that some local farmers grew accustomed to neglecting to mend gaps which appeared in bushes and barbed-wire fences. Until recently this meant that – despite Eva’s painstaking efforts – cattle regularly pushed their way in through such openings to damage trees and graze on the daffodil lawn and overgrown avenue. It proved impossible for one elderly woman to herd these cows back through the gaps. Her only chance of removing stray cattle from her land had involved long walks to farmers’ houses, where she was greeted with endless cups of tea and excuses, especially in poor weather if farmers were anxious to avoid the expense of bringing bales of silage up to the fields adjoining Glanmire to feed their cattle. For over a year Eva exhausted herself in this struggle to repair gaps in bushes, often returning a few days later to find her barriers of branches spirited away by unknown hands or physically kicked in. One dank winter afternoon, when physically drained from trying to shoo trespassing cattle off her daffodil lawn despoiled by cow pats and hoof marks, she decided to sit quietly on the steps of her former home and ponder how Mahatma Gandhi might have peacefully resolved this problem. The solution which came to her was so simple – like all true solutions – that it had never crossed her mind before. That evening in the winter dusk, she ceased trying to herd the cattle back into their field. Instead she summoned Johnny to her side and walked home, leaving open the gate at the end of her avenue, as if by accident. Within hours the cattle had meandered down the avenue. They grazed on grass verges along local roads, halting passing traffic until their owner was alerted and had to spend all night frantically tracking them down. After this, only once had a farmer tried to use Glanmire Wood for free grazing again, with Eva responding in the same way. Since then, Eva rarely discovered breaches in her boundary fences and knew – from a sly comment by Bridie – that Eva had risen in some farmers’ estimation by outwitting them without any need for confrontation.

  A burst of excited barking disturbed her thoughts now as Johnny emerged from the trees, defeated but not discouraged by his daily rabbit hunt. He rolled about in the long grass before bounding over to sit at her feet, as if reporting for duty in their regular boundary inspection. But Eva could tell that no cows had forced their way in during recent days, nor had any nocturnal intruders tried to enter the house and scavenge material to sell as scrap metal. She would be powerless if confronted by such men, but her fear was more for their own safety due to the weakness of the floors, rather than for any further damage they might do to the house. She knew that the countryside was never as deserted as it seemed, and news of Glanmire Wood having a custodian, even one as frail as herself, would discourage thieves. Not that she wished to discourage anyone else from enjoying her woods. On several occasions she caught glimpses through the trees of courting couples hastily rearranging their clothing when they heard her approach along the avenue. She never betrayed any sign of having seen them, but would call Johnny and turn back as if she had forgotten something, affording young love the privacy it needed. On other occasions she encountered foreign backpackers who wandered in out of curiosity and with whom she shared her flask of black coffee and squares of vegan chocolate made from coconut and cocoa butter. One afternoon, upon climbing to the most remote part of the wood, Eva startled a middle-aged local widow, initially too embarrassed to speak, but who then confessed to often visiting this clearing where three old oak trees grew when she could not bear to be alone in her house. The woman explained how she fou
nd it preferable to sit amid the trees, even on cold days, rather than sit alone on public view in coffee shops or pubs in Castlebar, where other customers eyed her with sympathetic glances or avoided acknowledging her presence and where men sometimes made unwanted and inappropriate approaches. Eva wanted to explain how this spot had been her own refuge decades ago, a place where she’d had the privacy to cry, but the woman’s expression told Eva that she did not want commiseration or invitations to call into The Ark anytime she needed to speak to someone. She made it evident that she wanted no association with Eva, whom she regarded as a crank. Since then, Eva had seen this widow cross the street in Castlebar to avoid making eye contact with her. Eva did not feel offended because grief seized everyone differently, but she now rarely ventured near those oak trees lest she intrude on the widow’s privacy, although she was unsure if the woman still visited.

  Today Eva felt certain that nobody was about. Her main purpose in coming here was to give Johnny a run because after, she would be confined to the caravan until the hitchhiker showed up. Calling Johnny, she began to walk back, pausing occasionally to collect plants and herbs to use when cooking her food later on. She had told Donal in a letter that, although a vegan, she had no objection to guests cooking meat, provided they did not ask her to do it for them. Everyone had the right to live according to their own beliefs and she was no proselytiser. Indeed proselytising was the only thing she did not allow in her caravan, as she was forced to gently explain to two elderly Jehovah’s Witnesses who often visited her, when she discovered them discreetly leaving behind copies of their Watchtower magazine for other visitors to find.