The Night Stages

by Jane Urquhart

  He knew about the road that rose above the cliffs and skirted the headland, so he determined to follow the track that curved up into the haze, and had placed one foot on the pedal when he heard a male voice behind him. “I’d have that bicycle for myself,” the voice said, “if you weren’t so obviously fond of it.” Kieran turned to see a very tall, dark-haired figure approaching him.

  The man was broad-shouldered, with long, muscular arms. His carriage was straight and slim, almost graceful, but even his most casual movements suggested an extreme physical strength, a deliberate sort of energy, which was startling on such a soft day. He wore a blue jumper, which matched his eyes, one that was knitted in a traditional pattern common to the region. On his feet was a pair of large, well-worn, but still firmly intact leather boots. His hand when he offered it was rough and clean. “Michael Kirby,” the man said.

  Kieran threw his cigarette on the ground, uncomfortable suddenly about having been caught with it in his hand. The man scooped it up, placed it between his lips, and drew deeply on it. “Ah, tobacco,” he said, “I gave it up over a decade ago. That which one has abandoned always tastes sweeter.” He dropped the cigarette and crushed it under his boot. “I know who you are and have been expecting you. Did Davey tell you about me?”

  “No,” said Kieran tentatively, “he did not.”

  “Well, he told me a great deal about you.”

  Kieran was taken aback by this. He had seen the tailor only infrequently, but once recently, all right, when it was clear that his coat sleeves hung only to his elbows and that a new garment was a necessity. I thought I was supposed to be buried in this thing, he had said to Annie while he attempted unsuccessfully to pull the two sides of it across his expanded ribcage. She allowed that she was appalled by the extent to which he had grown and had sent him off alone on the bicycle to visit the tailor’s house.

  “He said quite a lot about wheels,” the man continued, “and a not inconsiderable amount about velocity as well. And here you are, with two wheels under you, though not as much velocity as I had anticipated.” Mr. Kirby settled himself down on the nearby stone wall. “I suppose the velocity will come to you like. You are built for it, I’d say.” He looked Kieran over. “Small and wiry.”

  Kieran smarted at the word small. He was already eighteen and hadn’t grown as much as he’d wanted.

  “You may still grow perpendicularly,” Kirby said, as if reading Kieran’s mind. “But you are far too high-strung to grow horizontally. I myself grew, perpendicularly, six more inches after the age of eighteen. My mother had to give me regular doses of onion syrup to slow the growing down or who knows where it might have ended.”

  Kieran smiled, taking hope from the story.

  Kirby continued, “I am a fisherman and, as a result, I have four hundred and twenty-three different kinds of skies in my head.” He tapped his skull for effect. “And I am a poet … but only when I am thinking in Irish. When I am thinking in English I am a fisherman and a painter, though admittedly I have not painted anything yet. I will, however, and when I do, I will paint all those skies.”

  “You have that many,” Kieran said.

  “All decent fishermen have those skies,” Kirby assured him, “because of survival. The skies not only tell you what the weather is … they tell you what it will be and that, my friend, is much more important. I would recommend that you gather at least a hundred or so skies yourself because of the bicycle, on which, I predict, you are going to be spending the majority of your time in the next years. One thing those skies have taught me is the value of accurate prediction. I’d have been fish food if it weren’t for them. I also have predicted that, although I will desperately want to do so, once I become a painter, I will never paint a nude. Wouldn’t you love to paint a nude?”

  Kieran was uncertain how to answer this shockingly exciting question. He had never let his imagination roam beyond Susan’s yellow blouse and the cloud of her hair. Well, that wasn’t quite true, but …

  “As for the bicycle, I would recommend that you start training in earnest. You should begin with your mind because you are going to need it more than you know. Next Thursday, which the skies tell me will be calm and bright, I will take you out to the Skelligs. You must spend two days out there, alone in a beehive hut, without the bicycle. This will be your starting point. What do you know about the Skelligs?”

  Kieran had learned in the school that the Skelligs was the name of the two sacred islands that he had seen rising from the sea a few miles off the end of the peninsula. The master had said that in the sixth century there had been holy men out there living a sparse life in corbelled huts on one of the islands’ tallest peaks. Cycling near the shore, Kieran had seen the islands and each time they had looked like formations entirely different from the ones he had seen a few days or a few weeks before.

  “There were monks …” Kieran offered.

  “Not only monks.” Kirby waved the holy men away with his hand for the time being. “Absolutely terrible weather, the sea, the birds of the sea, and down at the edge, the fish of the sea, stones, beehive huts, an oratory, a burial ground, one donkey, which is the only thing you will be riding as there are absolutely no bicycles. And this donkey has been dead for thirteen centuries, so for you it will be the donkey of the imagination. You will be riding the donkey of the imagination, a very good donkey to ride, I’d say.”

  “I’m not sure I can go.”

  “And when I say absolutely terrible weather, I mean terrible in the true sense of the word. Awe-inspiring weather! Great bolts of sun slicing through the clouds, rains that drown, winds that roar and shake the island from within, impenetrable fog – not like this fog” – Kirby swung his arm in the direction Kieran intended to go – “but fog that blinds and deafens and causes that stillness that is the true beginning of velocity, followed by the kind of clarity that causes you to wince.”

  “I might have to work that day, in town.”

  “Your father should have completed his training out on Skellig Michael, but I fear he did not. But that man he works with, McWilliams, he knew enough to go out there now and then.”

  Had his father ever been out to this island? Kieran did not know.

  “We must respect the weather station, though,” said Kirby, his mind having moved for a moment away from the islands to the shore. “They have those extraordinary balloons that go places we can’t go – except on the donkey of the imagination, of course – and see things we cannot see. And then there is McWilliams, who as far as I’ve heard knows everything about everything. They say he knows about poetry, they say he knows about painting, but that he is completely disinterested in these things unless they relate to weather. And then your own father, who works there, and his extraordinary punctuality. It was him, thirty years ago during the time of the shooting, it was him who had the courage to walk out to the balloon house and to set the balloon free while the fighting was going on in the street above. Such a young man at the time, as well, just starting.” Kirby sighed, as if mourning the young man that Kieran’s father had once been.

  “Yes,” said Kieran, remembering his father’s dependability, how those balloons had to be launched each day at an exact time, without exceptions. His mother’s voice came back to him then, the words suddenly clear. He launched them even on the day of my death, his mother whispered, reminding him, even then. And the day he discovered my death as well. “Yes, that too,” Kieran added, looking away into the fog.

  “What too?” asked Kirby.

  “Nothing.”

  “Well, nothing is the right place to start when it is extreme velocity you’re after.” Kirby stood, ready now to allow the monks into the conversation.

  Humble Anchorites

  Your ravaged cells

  Are prayerless tonight

  But flagstones

  Whisper yet,

  And kittiwakes

  In the cave

  “The last verse of a poem I wrote,” said Kirby, “but useles
s without the melodious Irish I wrote it in. Of late, I have been composing poems of farewell to everything I know, animate and inanimate, in event of my death. You look surprised? You are correct: I have no intention of dying any time soon. But I have been intimate with so many things, so many, it will take decades for me to give everything its due. I began with the first thing I remembered: a cup that my own children have since used. After that it was a particular flagstone on the floor. We had a flagged floor, you see, many did not. And that flag’s still there up at Cill Rialaig, though the rest of the house is in ruins. Nothing ruined about the view out the window though, and there is a poem about that as well. You would be wise to try some poetry yourself, to say in your mind during the race. The old ones could compose and then memorize twenty thousand lines at a time. I have not yet decided whether you should compose before … out on Skellig Michael, for example … or during the race. Perhaps both. A dreadful pity that you don’t have the Irish. But perhaps this English language serves you better, though that is difficult to believe.”

  Kieran found himself focusing on the man’s face, the intensity of his eyes. He knew he himself would not be composing poetry. “What race?” he asked.

  Kirby looked surprised. “The Rás Tailteann, of course,” he said. “Davey allowed as you’re the only one for it, though you’ve only two years to train. It is a hard thing, the Rás, but you are the only one for it. All around Ireland, you’ll cycle, stage by stage. By the time you’re fitted up and strong enough for it, the Rás will be in its third year. The first one was a glorious free-for-all with the boys from Tipperary quarrelling with the boys from Mayo, and everyone quarrelling with the Ulster Constabulary in the North. But the third Rás will be more settled-like, more dignified. And it is important that you win.”

  Kieran was silent, not knowing what to make of this. He had never thought about winning anything.

  “With that in mind, I make an appointment with you to meet me at the pier Thursday next, seven in the morning, and we will set out. You must get Gerry-Annie to pack enough bread and cheese, some apples as well” – he laughed – “for the donkey.”

  Kieran remained silent, not wishing to verbally comply. And yet he knew he had already decided to go.

  “But Tadhg out on the end there” – Kirby gestured once again toward the road Kieran had chosen – “will have more advice to give you on this and various other important subjects. He is a great one for the advice, Tadhg is, being the last old man of Europe and all, as he’ll undoubtedly tell you himself. Off you go then, off to Bolus Head. Stop by the collapsed Anchorite site on the way, if you can find it. There are some huts there looking toward the sea, and a little chapel as well, though it is all just piles of stone now.” He looked toward the west. “And once you get up there far enough, you’ll come to a green road you’ll want to take for the view of the Skelligs that can be had from there. There is an abandoned barracks as well.” Kirby paused. “In fact, you won’t be able to take that road, now that I think of it. Its gate will almost certainly be closed against you.”

  Kieran sat on the leather seat of his bicycle and Michael Kirby gave him a push as he headed up the hill in the mist. As he drove his feet into the pedals, he heard Kirby call after him. “No one has been able to get it open,” he shouted, “no one.” And then as if an afterthought, “Until Thursday.”

  This is what Kieran could not see as the road under his wheels rose through the haze toward the top of the headland. He could not see Ballinskelligs Bay, or Horse Island curving like a smile in its centre, or the old castle walls on a smaller island near the shore. He could not see the ruined abbey or the many graves that surrounded it, the cliffs that stood angry and dark, and the inlets that narrowed toward hidden sea caves. He passed between the few huddled houses of Cill Rialaig, where the sound of soft Irish voices and the smell of turf mingled with the crunch of his wheels on loose stones. A little farther up, he slipped by large shadows in the shape of gables: the ruins of a previous Cill Rialaig, whose citizens, years before, had walked away; driven mad, some said, by the wind. Minutes later the shape of a small National School was evident. The yard, which hugged the road, was filled with the singing racket of children out for recess. As he pedalled past, the sound of the master’s hand-bell was in the air and the children fell silent.

  When he rounded a bend that took him higher again, the fog began to thin. Kieran could now pick out the features of the landscape on either side of him, though he could still not see the ocean, which, though breathing noisily below, remained invisible. The dark exclamation mark of a standing stone in a downward-sloping field caught his attention, and then another, several yards away. He stopped, dismounted, leaned the bicycle against a wall, and climbed the stone stile into the site.

  He had always avoided such places. The death of his mother was knit into his memory of visiting St. Brendan’s Well on Valentia. And yet, these stones before him now seemed benign. He half expected his mother would speak to him here, but she did not. Instead it was the girl who came into his mind. Leave a token now, she said, leave a love token. He pictured her in his brother’s arms and was angered by the persistence of her image, as if she were pestering him in some way or another. Still, fumbling in his pocket he found the shell of a snail he had picked from Gerry-Annie’s wall the previous day, and he placed this on the oratory steps. Sensing, as he did so, how foolish he would seem to the girl, could she see him doing this, he quickly left the place and remounted his bicycle.

  Alone on the road Kieran considered the mysterious third Rás, how the fact of training for it was emerging from the mist and tapping him on the shoulder, what Kirby had said; the conviction in him! It was as if Kirby had been intimate with him for years and was certain of exactly what it was he should do. He looked down at the bicycle, and as he did a flicker of what he would later come to know as ambition moved through his nervous system. But the sensation was so foreign to him he couldn’t say precisely what it was. Only that he was happiest when he was on the bike with the road gliding under him.

  As he moved upwards and away from the Anchorite ruins, the fog lifted sufficiently so that he could see the end of the headland. One arm of the road bent to the left and ended at a small farm, the shape of the house only faintly visible through the fog along with the lines of ancient and irregular fields filled with the soft, pale smudges of sheep. Just in advance of this, the green road Michael Kirby had spoken of climbed to the height of land where the barracks squatted against the sky, a vaguely rectangular shape. Kieran predicted that the view from there could not be had on such a misty day. Another cloud of mist crept between him and the road. And then he heard the voices, tender, sorrowful, an old man and an old woman speaking Irish.

  They appeared before him, emerging from the atmosphere as if at the end of a long journey. In English, the woman said, “I’ve hurt my hand and my heart trying to do it, and I cannot. And he says that he cannot.”

  “I cannot,” the man said, turning to the fence that fronted the green road. “And she cannot either.” He fingered his wife’s shawl affectionately.

  Kieran did not know how to respond. “Cannot what?” he asked.

  “Cannot open the gate,” said the man. “It has been sealed shut forever by winds and rains. And haven’t I cattle up there going astray, right at the very end of Europe? And me, the final old man of Europe, unable to reach them, unable to go to the edge, unable to herd my own kine. There’s a pity in that.” He shook his head sadly. “I might, for all they know, have gone to Chicago, there’s that much separation between me and them.”

  “One might have calved,” said the woman.

  “Yes, there might be a calf. Or one might have died over the winter. It’s a terrible thing not to know the condition of your own small herd. They are some beautiful, those cattle.”

  Kieran dropped his bicycle on the road and sprinted toward the gate. There was this fierce desire in him to rescue the man’s cattle. “I will climb the fence and bring th
em down to you.”

  “Ah no,” said the man, “it’s myself they know. They, being the final cattle of Europe, out there on the farthest western edge of everything and all, would never permit themselves to be driven by any other.”

  Kieran was grasping the gate so tightly he could feel the roughness of it pressing into his palm.

  “I live down there,” the old man continued, throwing his arm behind him toward the houselike form that Kieran had previously noticed, two fields from the road, “and those cattle know that. My name is Tadhg and I live with my wife, Tadhg-Sheila” – he bowed ceremoniously in her direction –“and those cattle know her as well. Those cattle want nothing to change; I can assure you of that. And they are lonely for me, by now, those cattle. No stranger could console them. They’ve been waiting for a terrible amount of time.” He sighed. His wife bent her head and examined the hand she had hurt, wincing as she did so.

  Kieran had never felt strong. He was small, but some said, Kirby had said it, wiry. Suddenly, in the face of the couple’s sorrow, there was this eager potency in him. He grasped a large stone at the side of the road, ran to the gate, and, lifting his arms over his head, pounded the orange-coloured latch for what could have been minutes, or could have been hours: he would never be able to accurately say later. At last the bolt fractured and the gate sprang open.

  The woman let out a cry, whether from gladness or from shock Kieran could not decide.

  Then she began to sing, or to pray, in Irish.

  The man walked toward him with his hands in the air, jubilant. “What you have done for us! What you have done for us! I thank you! My wife thanks you. The beautiful final cattle of Europe thank you! The last pasture at the very end of Europe thanks you!”

  Kieran was silent. Opening the gate had taken more strength than cycling Ballagh Oisin Pass at full speed, and he was gasping for air.

  “I have some advice for you, boy” said Tadhg. “At Puck Fair in Killorglin, there is the day of the gathering, the day of the fair, and the day of the scattering. Far too many think it is the day of the fair that is most important, and they will tell you that over and over. But Tadhg has been placed on this road to tell you that, in your life, there will never be anything more important than the day of the gathering. The anticipation, the training, the goal! The day of the fair is nothing but a pale ghost announcing the day of the scattering. If I could, I would be your coach and we would prolong the day of the gathering as long as we could, and postpone, as far as possible, the day of the fair. But didn’t you open the very gate that keeps me here on this road where I am saying this? And now don’t I and my darling” – he touched his wife’s shawl again – “have to pass through it to greet our kine, the final few cattle of Europe that have been expecting us for so long? Goodbye my liberator,” he said, “the race is yours to do with what you will.” He took his wife’s arm and they began to climb the road. Just before they disappeared from view Tadhg turned back to Kieran, who was still recovering from the exertion necessary to move the gate. “What a fine coach I would have made, being a man with advice and all,” he called back to him, “but there is no time for that now. In my absence I appoint Michael Kirby. He’ll do the job well.”