The Night Stages

by Jane Urquhart

  Late on the sixth day, Kieran entered the house quietly, as he always did at night, not wanting to waken his father. He closed the door softly behind him, took off his shoes, and walked to the parlour. They were there, side by side on the sofa – neither had heard him enter the room – and the girl was in his brother’s arms. Her cardigan and her blouse lay on the cushions beside them and Kieran stared at these garments for what seemed to him a long period of time before letting his eyes move to the cream of her bare arms and her breasts, and when he did he was certain that the girl’s gaze met his with an understanding of his suffering. Then she gasped and Niall twisted toward where he stood in the doorway. Kieran moved away and stumbled up the stairs. He was trembling as he undressed for the night. Both his mother and the chemist were speaking in his mind now, but he couldn’t see them, the girl’s look, and the paleness of her skin, crowding every other image out of his mind.

  Kieran descended the stairs the following morning. It was not quite dawn. Certain parts of the room were coming into focus, the table, and the tap that hung over the sink, but the corner where Niall stood was dark enough that Kieran did not notice him until it was too late to withdraw. “I was waiting for you,” Niall said. “I thought we should talk.”

  Kieran said nothing. The stove was on and there was a smell of something spilled on the burner, smouldering in an unwholesome way.

  “I am in love with Susan,” Niall told him. “We are to be married next year. You could stand up for me,” he said. “You’re my brother, and that is what is supposed to happen, what you are supposed to do.”

  The window over the sink was open. Kieran could hear birdsong and the strident, impudent calling of a crow. Now, now, now, the bird seemed to say. He wanted to ask his brother how he had arranged such miraculous impossibilities, the betrothal, the removal of a blouse, but there were no words attached to the questions in his mind. He wanted to inquire about being near a girl like that, how to gain the necessary permission to savour each aspect of her. To look at her, to hear her voice, and to know that what she was saying was meant only for you, to be able to touch her: all this was so foreign to him he could barely believe he was in any way related to his brother. He heard his father stirring in the room above, lonely and distanced, beginning another day. “Did she say she would marry you?” he asked. His voice was thick and hoarse, and for the first time he realized how seldom he used it.

  “Yes,” said Niall, “yes, she did.” He was pouring boiling water from a kettle into the teapot. Steam clouded his hands. “And about last night,” he said, not turning toward Kieran, “she is not that sort of girl.” She had gone home, he added, shortly after, filled with mortification. He had tried to walk her back, but she wouldn’t let him. He, Kieran, should forget about the whole incident.

  “Will you forget it?” Kieran asked.

  Niall pulled out a chair and sat down at the table with his cup. He had left the teapot on the counter, however, and the cup remained empty. “Of course,” he said. “We will all three act like it never happened.”

  “But it will happen again,” said Kieran. The kitchen was filling with light. The pain he felt was laced with anger. He was looking at his brother’s hands on the cup.

  “Not like that,” said Niall.

  The next night Kieran cycled back to Gerry-Annie’s in the dark, unwilling to return to the house that felt tainted now with all the disarray of its various relationships. He knew that the hardship of caring for someone was the way that caring insisted on punching through the skin of even the most ordinary day. It was a dark, moonless night, but he did not lean forward to turn on the bicycle’s light, preferring only to smell and then identify the drowsing herds and flocks behind the walls on either side of him, and to feel the road rising under his wheels.

  Kirby had told him to do this not two months ago, this unlit night-riding, maintaining that it was the only way to coax the other senses to compete with sight. “The only way to give the other senses a fighting chance,” he had said. He told Kieran that he must learn to hear the road’s surface when he was riding, so that the road could speak to him, and that he must remain attentive to the way the surface of the road made itself known by shaking the handlebars and the seat. The scent of things was important as well: the vegetation in the hedgerows, the dung in the passing fields, the newly cut hay. “You must smell the peat in the bog,” he said, “and then the smoke of peat fires that tells you when you are approaching villages and towns.”

  His father, and his brother, had been too close at hand. He wanted to cycle out of the range and the scent of them.

  In late September, his training began to intensify. He would need to withdraw completely, he would have to embrace the unfamiliar, live alone, and become intimate with discomfort. The wild part of his nature would be made available to him now, in a more organized way. He wanted to be able to summon it, the power of it, during the stages of the race. He knew he would no longer stand on the edge of wildness or have that wildness come spinning out of him in the midst of tantrum, as it had when he was a child. From now on, Kirby would be his only adviser, and he would approach even him less and less, as he became more and more reliant on aloofness. The training would be everything, he realized, and he would emerge from the effort and pain of it rinsed clean, and ready to present himself to the Rás, and then, triumphant, to the girl his brother said he was going to marry.

  “The question now,” said Kirby, “is where you will decide to go for the retreat part of your training. Have you any money saved?”

  Kieran was looking at the inside of Kirby’s boat, a jungle of nets, sinkers, and floats. He couldn’t meet the older man’s gaze, this fisherman, this poet who knew everything, it would seem, about him. He sensed that Kirby was aware he had seen the girl, parts of her he had no business to have seen. He believed that Kirby apprehended that there wasn’t anything now he could look at that did not bring thoughts of her with it. Even the bicycle, vehicle of escape, had become connected to her. The desire for privacy was deepening in him.

  “Well, you’re the only one who will be riding the bicycle,” Kirby was saying, “you won’t be able to take me along, except in your mind of course.” He dragged some new netting to the edge of the pier, jumped into the boat, and pulled the nets after him. “You’re very quiet this morning,” he said. When Kieran didn’t answer, he told him that he himself had gone through an uncharacteristically quiet period when as a very young man he was in America for one year. “A sort of linguistic withdrawal came over me,” he said, climbing out of the boat and back onto the pier. “I was in Canada, in fact, working for a French farmer on the St. Lawrence River. He spoke no English, but even if he had, I’d have had no conversation to give him.”

  There was a barrel full of skate near where they stood. “Why Keating even bothers with that mess is a mystery,” Kirby said, plunging his hand into the stringy soup of it, then taking it out again and wiping it on his trousers. “The starving could not be persuaded to eat it, I’d say. He says he sells it for cat food, but even cats have more sense than to eat the likes of that.”

  “I have a little money saved,” Kieran said.

  “Good,” said Kirby, “good. But can you build a hut? Do you know anything at all about wattled shelter?”

  Kieran did not answer, and Kirby went on. “That farmer,” said Kirby, “the one in Canada, he never really spoke to me, but he was suspicious, I’ll tell you that. He had some kind of idea I was going to steal his boat, and the thing was, he wasn’t wrong.” Kirby seated himself on a coil of rope near the edge of the pier. Kieran sat down beside him, legs dangling over the edge. He would have to leave the man, but not yet.

  “So every night he put the oars in a locked shed. I was hoping to go to New York, you see. I’d cousins there I’d never seen, but I had their addresses. They were all working on skyscrapers, way up, halfway to heaven. They’d get me some kind of work, I had decided. Anything was better than this suspicious farmer. I knew New York w
as somewhere south of where I was, somewhere on the other side of that river. I wanted that boat to get me across. The farmer had some kind of lumbering operation going in the winter and had me loading logs onto sleighs that were to be drawn by horses over the snow toward some saw mill. I never knew where. When the ice went out of the river in spring I knew what to do. So I waited until a night with a moon, then I took two brooms from the barn and rowed myself across the river with those.”

  Kirby gently punched Kieran’s shoulder, as if to awaken him. “You’ll have to be resourceful yourself, with the bicycle during the eight days of the Rás. There may be times on some stage of it or another where you have to tie the machine together with string or elastic bands. You may be required to steal the wheels from a baby buggy, or a seat from a passing tractor, you’ll have crashed that often. You’ll have your teammates of course, and they will be helpful to you and you to them. But in the end it is the inner resourcefulness that matters, the inner problem-solver.”

  Teammates? This was the first time Kirby had ever raised the subject. Kieran knew about the cycling clubs of Kerry but had always assumed that when he approached the Rás he would do so as an individual.

  “The Kerry team, of course,” Kirby said when Kieran asked. “You’ve been up this county’s mountains and along its rivers and strands, you’ve walked with its sheep and gotten to know its dogs. You’ve even been out on the seas of it. And you’ve come to understand its country people in a way few of its town boys have. You would want to be part of the team. Or you will want to be part of the team, two months from now, once the period of retreat is over. By then you will have trained twelve hours a day and you’ll have your confidence up. You never had much in the way of conversation, but what you had will come back to you after the period of retreat. And perhaps a little more, I’d say.”

  Kirby was studying Kieran’s face. “It will be better with the girl too, whoever she might be,” he said gently, “if you take some time apart from the world; if you devote yourself fully to the training.”

  Kieran said nothing. He didn’t want Kirby knowing the way the girl inhabited him. The image of his brother with Susan, his hands on her white skin, flared in his mind, but he pushed it away. He stood up, wanting to be gone.

  “Before you go,” Kirby said, “promise me you’ll come down to me eight weeks from today. Come down to me from wherever it is you decide to retreat to. By then I’ll have all the information about the team. The manager is Sean Corkery, if I’m not mistaken. And he’s out of Killorglin. You’ll be a fine climber for them, that’s one thing certain. They’ll be climbers themselves, all of them being Kerrymen, but they’ll not be like you.”

  “No, they’ll not be like me,” said Kieran, dreading the camaraderie, and all the talking, remembering Niall and his teammates from the football who had sometimes been around the house when he was a child. “I’ll not join a team,” he said. Even Kirby would not be able to coax him out of his recalcitrance. It was to be his race, his alone.

  Kirby was looking at him in the quizzical way that he had, his eyebrows slanting toward his nose. Then he sighed and turned away. “You’re likely right,” he finally said. “I see nothing of the collaborator in you; you’ve no time for relationships. I’m sure you can enter as an individual if you like.”

  Kieran said nothing so Kirby returned to the subject of the hut. “The wattle is easy,” he told Kieran. “It takes a long time, but it is a simple task. You put poles in the ground in a rectangle, then basket weave sally branches around them. Don’t forget to leave a space for the doorway. But most important is the daub; you must cover the outer walls with it once you are finished with the wattle. Mud, straw, water, and a great quantity of the most important ingredient of all.”

  Kieran shrugged.

  “Animal dung,” said Kirby. “You have to mix prodigious quantities of it into the mud and straw and water. Hardly anybody,” he said, “understands how essential shit is to holding things together.”

  KIERAN WALKED TO THE END OF KIRBY’S PIER, THEN swung his leg over his bicycle and rode into the hills, the individual in him, he believed, safe from the complications of others. Climbing, he was alert to the details of the passing road. It was the most beautiful time of the afternoon, late, practically evening, and the stones of the hedgerows caught the light and held it in a way they never did earlier in the day. He moved now in an almost leisurely way, hugging the left side of the road so close to the warmth of the walls he could put out his hand and let it brush the firm leaves of ivy and holly. He passed the wrought-iron grill of a closed gate with a sign marking Dromid Burial Grounds. Twenty yards or so beyond it there was a stile, giving an easier entrance to the site than the latched gate. He had passed the graveyard often, and others like it: there was Sugreana Burial Grounds very near Gerry-Annie’s and he sailed past it almost every day, but he would never stop to explore.

  The top step of the stile shone, and beyond it he glimpsed a blue skirt. This slight break in the wall, and then this pennant of blue, caught his attention as he wheeled slowly past. Not visiting graveyards had always been as natural to him as sleep or water. He had always refused to stop there, or even to slow down: his awareness of any kind of gathering of the dead was too much like a promise he never intended to keep. There were ghosts enough in him without that. He knew his father went to the grave in the town, had seen him walking along the Main Street in spring with tulips and daffodils in his grasp. His brother, he suspected, would have been now and then at his father’s side, if his brother were at home for a time from the city. But he himself had never gone, would never go.

  Ahead of him the mountains were brown velvet. He slowed the bicycle, stopped, then turned around and climbed over the stile.

  She had a brown jumper over her blue dress, likely because of the wind. “Hello, Kieran,” she said.

  The sound of his name in her mouth.

  “Why are you here?” he heard himself say.

  “For my brother,” she told him. “He died as a one-year-old baby. Sometimes …” She glanced away from him.

  “Yes,” he said.

  She was still not looking at him.

  “I know,” he said. And then he wondered why he said it, for he knew nothing at all beyond the way her hair was moving in the wind at the back of her head. And then there was her face, and her eyes not looking at him.

  “You came on your bicycle,” she said, “for your mother.”

  “No,” he said quickly. He didn’t want his mother in his mind. Not now. Then suddenly understanding, he wanted to tell her his mother was buried in the town, and as he thought this he could hear again the sound of the first fistful of earth hitting the oaken coffin. He could see the open ditch of the grave where they had put her.

  “Why then?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” he said truthfully. Everything in him wanted to touch her and he was trying to evict the feeling. This was not the chance encounter he had been imagining, but it was a chance.

  He fought with his mind for something to say. “You make those baskets,” he said, “out of china.”

  “Yes,” she said, surprised, almost laughing, “I do, I did, but only one or two a season anymore. Now I just make brooches. They are easier. And I like to paint the flowers.”

  She was so mild in her answers to him that he thought she would not have been felt around the house when she was a child, not in the way that he himself, with his sessions of rage, had been felt around his own house. The speech of the country people had entered the cadence of his own thoughts, he realized, knowing that a phrase like felt around the house would have been their way of expressing what he was thinking. He would not say this out loud, to her.

  “I made half a dozen baskets,” she said, “when I was younger. And only very small ones. But it’s my father who has made most of them, and all the larger ones. He went to the north, one summer, to learn how. And later he taught me when I asked.”

  He was aware that this was
a famine burial ground: most of the graves were unmarked, or marked only by the roughest of broken pieces of local stone. Only the tombs around them were large and important-looking, and her family’s plot was one of these. There was a flat stone slab resting on four short pillars, with the names of long-dead relations inscribed on its surface. She had brought flowers and put them in front of the child’s small headstone, which was situated near one of the pillars.

  “There’s still one though,” he said. “A small basket. I saw it in the window. It had a flower.”

  “Yes,” she said, smiling. “It never sold.”

  He knew his mother’s grave was toward the west corner of the town graveyard, near the ruin of the Penal Church that was now just a pile of rocks. He had stood in that location when she had been lowered into the ground, though he had never been back to it. A headstone would have been placed there long since and he imagined it would be modest, not calling attention to itself. “An accident,” the priest had said, allowing her to be buried there.

  “It looks like a bed,” he said of her family’s tomb. Then he immediately wished he had not said it.

  She laughed at that, however. He focused on the glass jar full of small pink roses she had left near the baby’s stone.

  “Someone way back,” she said, “someone in the family liked this view. Or we would have been in the town as well.”

  The land sloped down at a steep angle from the edge of the graveyard’s far wall, then flattened out into an expansive floor of bog, long strips of which had been recently worked. And then there were the hills beyond, with irregular bright fields climbing up them. He wondered what it would be like to have a baby in the house and then to have that baby gone from it. She had been perhaps the same number of years older than this baby as Niall was older than him. He looked across the wide valley and saw that her house, a white pebble in a vast green pasture, was just visible above Carhan Wood. “And you can see your house from here,” he said, realizing, after he said it, that he had revealed that he knew where she lived.