An Ark of Light

by Dermot Bolger

  Eva nodded. ‘After my son died, I was so busy showing the world how well I was coping that I didn’t realise I was blocking out my true feelings. I think we fool ourselves to protect others, so they won’t feel guilty for not doing enough for us, when in truth there’s nothing they can really do. Time is the only healer.’

  ‘Do you think so?’

  ‘I do.’

  The boy nodded seriously. Eva studied him, aware of a strange symmetry: here was a son trying to come to terms with the loss of a mother, while Eva still struggled on certain nights to come to terms with the loss of her son.

  ‘When I spoke in the interview about wanting to write a book on the supernatural, I think I was trying to make myself confront my fear about anything to do with death since my mother died. You can’t stay trapped by childhood fears forever, so maybe I tried to tackle it head on. But I believe that I was firmly told from beyond the grave to avoid going near the ring fort with those men.’

  ‘You think you were being protected?’ Eva asked.

  Donal nodded. ‘Twice I’ve walked away from accidents where I should have died. One time the ambulance driver was shocked that I’d survived unscathed. Living on my own is lonely, sitting up typing half the night just to hear the keys break the silence. But when I’m truly in trouble, I sometimes sense I’m not alone. There’s someone at my shoulder, not all the time or very often, but at crucial times when I’m in danger. That’s probably stupid to say, because how can the dead look out for us?’

  It was one a.m., the candles almost burnt out. Eva glanced at her photographs of Hazel and Alex and Francis above the window. ‘I don’t think the dead fully leave us. I don’t understand what level they exist on, but I don’t feel I’ve lost them. I think they’re waiting for me.’

  ‘Does death frighten you?’ Donal asked.

  ‘No. I love life but I’m prepared for death. I want to savour it, but not in a morbid way. My mother talked about death as second nature and as a child I was frightfully interested in her beliefs and allowed to read her books on the supernatural. I think I’ll be curious to discover if the experience of death is anything like I’ve always imagined it would be.’

  ‘What do you believe in?’ the boy asked.

  ‘I don’t believe in any organised belief. Instead, I believe beyond all belief. I’ve never read the Bible much, except the Psalms which Mother taught me for their poetry. She would have liked your poems. You’re lucky.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘You know what path to follow. Throughout my life I’ve searched for that, trying a dozen paths without success. But it is late now, time you slept.’

  Eva blew out the candles and let the dog out into the field one last time. After ensuring that Donal had everything he needed, she retired to her small room. She needed to sleep because she did not know who might call unexpectedly to see her tomorrow. Eva noticed that the light was still on in the main room of the caravan. She had shown Donal the chapter in Colin Wilson’s The Occult, entitled ‘The Poet as Occultist’ and could imagine him curled up in his sleeping bag, reading into the night like Alex used to love to read. All these new friendships were extraordinary, but none substituted for the absences that still haunted her subconscious. She suspected that some local women regarded Eva’s refusal to live out her days in mourning as an affront to the dead. But her determination to embrace life was her homage to the spirit of those she had lost, it was her way of keeping their spirit alive. She had few possessions left. All she had to give was her time to people who knocked at her door, her window seat to strangers needing a bed, the breadcrumbs on her bird table to robins and finches who came at dawn, and her companionship to anyone who needed to tell their story or simply sit in silence. Yet even though she cherished her visitors, she was looking forward to winter when her battered ark would be quiet: just her and Johnny and the cats enjoying the peace. Savouring this promise of silence to come, Eva closed her eyes and allowed sleep to claim her.

  Everything felt strange about being in this caravan when Donal turned out the light and tried to sleep. The way that the cat dropped down through the skylight to nestle at his feet, the dog’s breathing in the dark and the silence of the fields. Something seemed to push against his brain, revealing a different way of seeing things. This old woman had stripped away everything that might burden her soul. Seventy-three sounded impossibly ancient, yet she radiated the sense of being young. The Ark had its own unique smell: a blend of incense and turf smoke. But what excited him most was the attention with which she listened to his poems, making him repeat certain verses, willing to engage with his imagination. The seriousness with which she took his dream erased the sting of jeering voices occasionally heard on the street, the rejection slips from The Irish Press, the two a.m. loneliness in his father’s empty house as he repeatedly retyped the same lines of verse like a code he needed to crack. This old woman made him feel that he wasn’t stupid to live by his dream. Donal knew that whenever he needed refuge or wrote a poem that particularly excited him, she would be waiting here to listen with two candles lit and the world locked out. The cat stirred, then settled back down in the crook of Donal’s knees. He reached out to stroke her, then slept.

  The darkness was so black – almost pressing down on him – that when he woke he felt scared before remembering where he was. A plaintive, weak cry had woken him. Was it the old woman, upset by all their talk about the past? Or – the thought unnerved him – the ghost of her granddaughter? The cat was alert, listening intently and Donal knew that Johnny could also hear the cry, close by and yet muffled. Putting on his trousers, Donal knocked softly on the woman’s door and heard Eva say, ‘Yes?’ in a sleepy, puzzled voice.

  ‘I think there’s a child crying.’

  He waited while she dressed in her tiny room. Johnny licked his hand, disturbed by this continuing crying. Eva emerged and listened.

  ‘You’re right,’ she said, ‘but I don’t think it’s a child.’ She opened the caravan door and called out into the dark. ‘Hello?’

  Donal looked past her, across the field towards where one solitary streetlight illuminated an isolated gable. The stars seemed unnaturally bright. Taking a torch, Eva stepped down onto the grass. The crying became more urgent.

  ‘It’s under the caravan,’ Donal said.

  Both knelt to peer in past the cement blocks that propped up the structure. There was a hosepipe for water, some cables and rubble and nothing else. Then the cry came again and, as Eva swung the flashlight, they saw a young cat. A car must have run over her. Her fur was caked in blood and, from the angle at which she was lying, her hind legs seemed broken.

  ‘Do you recognise her?’ Donal asked.

  ‘I’ve never seen this cat before.’

  Donal reached in but the cat shrank back, hissing.

  ‘Let me try.’ Eva slowly stretched her hand under the van. The cat crawled towards her, inch by agonising inch, until Eva was able to gingerly lift her out. Carrying the injured animal into the caravan, Eva asked Donal to fetch an old white jumper in which she laid the cat.

  ‘How did she know to crawl here for help?’ Donal asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Eva replied, ‘but every inch must have been excruciatingly painful. Some motorist just left her for dead. How could anyone do that to such a beautiful creature?’

  Eva’s voice held no anger, just concern for the cat. Donal felt almost excluded from this scene, sensing an affinity between the cat and Eva that he could not fully comprehend. Murmuring softly, Eva stroked its fur. Now that she was inside The Ark the cat had ceased its crying, but her eyes never left Eva, who finally looked up at Donal.

  ‘We can’t save her,’ she said. ‘All we can do is put her out of her pain. Comfort her for me.’

  Eva slipped into her room, leaving Donal holding the cat, who stared past him towards Eva’s room. The boy didn’t know what to do. He had never seen a creature die and the cat’s eyes frightened him. Eva returned with a small bottle and
a handkerchief. Johnny lay on the window seat with his tail down. Queensly had disappeared.

  ‘What’s that?’ Donal asked.

  ‘Chloroform.’

  Eva let some poison soak into the handkerchief, then gently placed it against the cat’s nose. There was no struggle. The cat breathed in, each breath growing more peaceful until her breathing faded away. Throughout this, Donal stroked the cat’s fur and Eva brushed her neck softly. There was such a sense of repose in the caravan that gradually Donal sensed that – for all his fears since his mother’s death – death was nothing to be scared of. Knowing that her time had come, this cat had instinctively sensed where to go for help. Eva covered the bruised body with the old jumper and laid it on a chair.

  ‘Are you okay?’ she asked, concerned.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Tomorrow you might dig a hole in the field so we can bury her. Isn’t life strange? Good night, Donal.’

  ‘Good night, Eva.’

  Putting out the light, he undressed and got into his sleeping bag to lie again on the window seat. As a child, he was once present when three older youths had dug up a cat who was several weeks’ dead and forced him to stare at the decomposing corpse. Did that brief glimpse into a plastic bag start his terror about death? In the months after his mother died, Donal secretly refused to accept the reality of her death, inventing an imaginary world in which he waited for her to return: a fantasy universe where he could pretend there had been a mix-up in the Richmond Hospital; another body had been placed by mistake in her coffin while she was still wandering the streets, suffering from amnesia. By concocting such fantasies he had started to live in his head and became a writer by accident. Tomorrow he would bury this cat, still wrapped in Eva’s old white jumper. Now it felt almost as if he had been led to this caravan so that he could witness how death was a simple passing on from one state to the next.

  The way in which Eva had listened to his poems made him feel like a true writer, even if for now she was his sole audience, beyond his sisters and some local factory hands who had parted with 30p but probably binned his book after barely flicking through it. In two days’ time he would pack his haversack and hitch back across Ireland. There was so much to be done: poems to write, gigs to stage in local halls. But after this trip he would never feel foolish again when walking the streets at night to beat out lines of verse. This old woman had given his dream validity. Like her other friends whom she had talked about, Donal knew that he would always be welcome in this ark amid the fields. He would not even have to make the journey here to be warmed by this sense of belonging. He would need only to close his eyes to imagine the darkness being broken by a square of light as Eva opened her door and stood on the step, laughing as she exclaimed, ‘How marvellous you’re here! Isn’t life exciting?’

  Chapter Twenty

  The Darkest Midnight in December

  Kilmore, Co. Wexford, Christmas Eve 1990

  It was late on Christmas Eve night by the time the young man from the small shop located a mile from Kilmore village drove his car across the muddy gravel to park as close as possible to Eva’s caravan. The Ark was now situated in a small field behind the old schoolhouse which her friend, David Sumray – the young man whom Eva had now come to regard as being like a great- nephew – was restoring: transforming half of the classrooms into a studio for local artists and the rest into an independent hostel for backpackers. Eva opened her caravan door when the headlights lit up the tall piles of wooden rafters that were salvaged from a demolished local asylum. David had stacked these old beams between clusters of wild nettles in a far corner of the overgrown field. This weather-beaten timber was about to be given a new life by being recycled into elegant floorboards, when David found the time between the myriad other tasks he was always undertaking. Four months ago – after hiring a truck to drive to Mayo and carefully transport Eva and her Ark back to Wexford – David’s first task had been to cut a path through the long grass to let Eva walk up to mix with the artists and guests who used the old schoolhouse and allow cautious visitors to gain access to this: the latest place for Eva to call home.

  The young man from the shop raised a hand in friendly greeting: his way of acknowledging Eva, standing in the light spilling out from her doorway. She saw him open his car boot and lift out three bales of peat briquettes that would keep her warm over Christmas. Until recently she had kept her stove alight with a mixture of turf and small logs that she chopped slowly and methodically, using a small axe kept for this purpose. But arthritis made it much harder to grip the axe handle, and the young artists coming and going in the makeshift studios were so busy leading their own lives that she was anxious not to make them feel obliged to run down to help when they heard the soft blows of her axe interrupting the quietude of this field. Therefore she now only burnt peat briquettes. They were safer because they never sparked and Eva liked how the scent summoned up memories of the turf fires she used to light as a source of inspiration for wide-eyed children in her art classes.

  Such memories made for good companionship at night when her eyes grew too tired to read and her fingers too stiff to hold a pen to write campaigning letters for animal and human rights causes. Eva had no idea how many handwritten notes she had written over the decades. Most had probably been shredded or filed away unread. Powerful leaders could ignore such letters, but they could not stop the annoying trickle of such letters which kept coming from people like her: unimportant and unnoticed but undeterred in their insistence to one day make their voices heard. Such a day occurred last February when Eva stood at the counter of Bridie’s shop in Turlough, mesmerised by televised images of Nelson Mandela walking free from prison, twenty-seven years after she was verbally abused on the streets of London for campaigning against his detention. Perhaps her years of addressing postcards about Mandela’s incarceration to Hendrik Verwoerd and P. W. Botha, to Johannes de Klerk during his chillingly repressive reign and, more recently, to his more conciliatory son F. W. de Klerk, had counted for nothing. But just maybe each one of her cards – like the thousands of other letters from thousands of other unknown people – had been like the ostensibly ineffectual weak blows of her axe against the logs she still kept trying to chop for kindling until a few months ago: no blow seeming to have the slightest impact until the first almost imperceptible fissure appeared and eventually, and only after infinite patience, did the log split asunder.

  There would be no logs this Christmas, just the warmth of these briquettes, which the young man was now carrying with some difficultly across the flattened grass. Two months ago, she would have run forward to take one of the heavy bales from his hands and lighten his load. But a recent fall on the frosty concrete steps up to her caravan had shaken her confidence. She had not confided in anyone about the fall because no bones were broken, the bruising was on parts of her flesh that nobody else ever saw, and she knew the importance of not alarming people. But she also knew that she needed to resist her compulsion to help this young man. The important thing was to stand in her doorway and look sturdy as she called his name in greeting, knowing how blessed she was by his simple act of kindness and how vital it was not to cloud his Christmas by leaving him with the slightest worry about her. Johnny left the sanctuary of Alex’s bed, where he now spent most of his time asleep, and padded over to stand protectively at her feet, gazing out across the moonless nightscape. The dog’s arthritis was almost as bad as Eva’s, but he wagged his tail, recognising a kindly soul who had come bearing gifts of briquettes and friendship that were as wondrous as myrrh and frankincense.

  Now that the young man was almost at the steps, Eva realised why he was carrying the three bales of briquettes so awkwardly. He was dressed in his Sunday suit and was trying to hold the briquettes as far away as possible from his clean shirt and tie. He must be going directly from here to the Catholic church to rehearse the singing of the first Kilmore carol at Midnight Mass. Eva had never heard of the thirteen Kilmore carols until David Sumray rescued her f
rom the prospect of being made homeless in Mayo by bringing her to this small village. When tourists sped past en route to visit the famous fishing village of Kilmore Quay, three miles further along this twisting road, all they saw of Kilmore itself was a small huddle of shops and pubs, a church and an old convent converted into a nursing home. But in this quiet village, two hundred and forty years ago, these unique carols – composed on his sickbed by a priest named Devereux – were introduced into the Christmas services in the local church. Since then an unbroken tradition existed where six local men, including one member of the Devereux family, sang eight of these unique carols over the Christmas period: the first one being sung at Midnight Mass and again at first Mass on Christmas morning.

  ‘There you are now, Mrs Fitzgerald.’ The young man smiled as he placed the briquettes beside the steps. He used a sheet of plastic to cover up two of the bales, then carried the third bale into the caravan, placing it down beside the stove. Aware of how stiff her fingers could get, he used a penknife to cut the stiff plastic strip holding the briquettes in two rows. ‘We’ll have you as snug as a bug for Christmas.’ He knelt to affectionately rub Johnny’s fur. ‘And Sir Lancelot here can keep you safe from all harm.’ He stood up. ‘I’ve more stuff in the car for you, or at least tins of dog food for Johnny, food for the cats and a bag of nuts for the winter birds. But you ordered in very little for yourself. Are you sure you’ll have everything you need? It’s no trouble to go back and reopen the shop if there’s anything you’ve forgotten.’

  Eva smiled her appreciation. ‘If you have most things on my list, I’ll have more than enough, and even if you don’t I’ll have enough to make do. I’m just sorry that you’re still working at this late hour. If I’d known I was putting you to this much trouble I’d have never phoned in my order.’