The Night Stages

by Jane Urquhart

  “Yes,” she said, squinting in the direction of the hill opposite. “Perhaps that’s why, after all.”

  “Are you still working on the footpaths?” she asked, and the memory of coming into the house from work that night took hold of him so that he thought he might not be able to answer.

  “No,” he said finally, “not anymore.”

  She became quiet then, as if she understood his embarrassment and recalled her own part in it.

  There had been rosary beads hanging from the little concrete cross on the top of the child’s grave. The string had broken and some of the beads were on the ground beside the spot where she had put the flowers. For a moment he could think of nothing sadder than that broken piece of string.

  “I like the look of that small basket,” he said. And then, “When I was smaller my mother told me baskets like that were called Belleek. I thought she said bleak.”

  She laughed wonderfully at that, and he felt himself brighten, knowing he had in some way pleased her.

  “I should go now,” she said.

  “Yes,” he said, and then, “the baby, did he have a name?”

  “Kieran,” she told him. “His name was Kieran.”

  “My own name,” he said, surprised.

  She nodded. “Yes,” she said.

  “I’ll be leaving the parish soon,” he said. “I am going on a sort of retreat where I’ll be by myself for some time.” He was amazed that he had told her this.

  “Are you going to Lough Derg?” she asked. “Are you making a pilgrimage?”

  “No,” he said. “It’s not like that.”

  “My mother went to Lough Derg, once, after the baby died. She was gone for three days.” She looked troubled by this distant memory. “And three nights,” she added.

  He did not know what to say to this.

  After a few more moments of silence, she spoke again. “I am glad that we came across each other here,” she said, “that we were able to speak to each other a little.”

  She turned then and walked toward the stile. He watched as she climbed the two steps, her white hand against the dark stones of the wall, steadying herself. He continued to watch as she walked away from him down the road, the blue flame of her skirt visible at times, then hidden by the hedgerows. Over and over like that until she went round a corner and passed out of his view. He thought she was like a piece of blue paper being blown down the road.

  When he could no longer see her, he ran the conversation in all its brevity again and again through his mind. She had been kind to him, even after what he had seen, she had not run away and she had not dismissed him. Kind to him. And once he had let that thought settle, to his discomfort he began to weep, an act so unfamiliar to him it seemed to have come from a place far enough away he couldn’t name it. Tears had never been a part of the tantrums, never even part of his sorrow. He wiped the moisture from his face with the heels of his hands, then sat down on a nearby headstone and wept some more, coughing with the effort of it.

  She had not mentioned Niall. Not once. And he believed that that had been a kindness as well. It seemed significant to him that it was she whom he had spoken to just when he was on the edge of the retreat: the unlikely chance of it feeling to him like the working of a powerful destiny. He would be able to take more of her, that blue skirt, and the way she had said his name, with him into his aloneness. He would be able to take her infant brother as well, something large and important he now knew about her. The graveyard was alive with the small orange lilies he knew as montbretia. He left a fistful of them on the baby’s grave before he climbed the stile where her foot had been, mounted his bicycle, and rode away.

  Kieran woke in the night knowing the place where he should spend the months ahead. He could almost see it in the dark, the way it would be.

  At dawn he dressed and tied together a bundle of extra clothing, leaving two sleeves of a shirt hanging so he could knot them at the front of his neck when he was on the bicycle. He had a satchel as well, which he now removed from a nail on the wall so that he could fill it with food from the kitchen. A few moments later, helping himself to apples, potatoes, biscuits, and one tin cooking pot, he experienced a pang of guilt, and decided to leave a message on the calendar beside the door, it being the only paper in the house. Gone on retreat, he wrote. Back in two months. He knew Gerry-Annie would puzzle over this, knowing him to be the farthest thing from religious, but this was all he could muster at the moment, never having been one for explanations. And he was anxious now to be gone.

  He had ridden on recent weekends all over County Cork, along its coastlines and deep inland, looking for the right spot, and while he could justify the hundreds of miles of searching as part of the training, he was not satisfied by anything he had seen. There was a pastoral feel to this neighbouring county, probably like the English countryside, he thought. What he felt was that it wasn’t wild enough for him, too cultivated and kept. While he moved smoothly through the better maintained roads near Georgian houses, he sensed an absence of privacy on the land. And he would need isolation. He had hoped to find something near the cycle track he had heard about at Banteer in North Cork, but once he had laid eyes on the track itself, it seemed pointless to him to circle round and round on a flat surface – what could be gained by that? And the surrounding fields spoke to him of lushness and domesticity. It wasn’t what he wanted.

  The sky was a dusty plum colour when he stepped outside and was whitening toward the east. He recalled the morning when he had cycled past Susan’s house, the discomfort of that, though no one had seen him. But now that he had spoken with her, he recognized the desire to repeat that small journey, as if she might welcome him. But he pushed the notion aside and pointed the bicycle in the opposite direction, then pedalled off on the familiar route he had taken each morning, years before, to school, passing through Island Boy and Killeen Leacht, heading for Derriana Lough. Everything was still, as if dreaming. Nothing paid him any mind. Even the windows of the school seemed withdrawn and muted, uninteresting to the young man he had become. The lake when he reached it was so still the adjacent hillside was crisply mirrored there, an upside-down world.

  As he began the ascent up and away from the water’s edge, he could feel the energy flowing from his torso to his legs and the pleasure of this sensation travelling the arteries that branched into his arms and along his spine, the electric physicality of the effort. The road, a track really, became rougher once he left Coomavoher behind, and the few cabins he passed were vacant and had been so, it appeared, for a number of years. The roofs were gone but the chimneys still surmounted open hearths. He could have chosen a small, empty structure, roofed it with wattles, and set up housekeeping, but he had a mind to build his own shelter in a place where no one had done so before, and he would stick to that. He knew the place, having been there once or twice when he was younger, and the memory of it had come to him in the night and had claimed him.

  The track came to an abrupt end at a small stream that cut in front of him, then leapt over the edge of the steep hillside, heading for the lake below. He dismounted and began to walk the bicycle along the bank on a path made by mountain sheep. The land had flattened out here, but he was aware of the subtle incline that allowed the water to travel at considerable speed over a bed of stones. He was high enough now that when he turned to gaze down at Derriana Lough, it appeared to have the same dimensions as the basin of water he washed with, mornings at Gerry-Annie’s house. It wasn’t long before he reached Tooreenbog Lough, the first of five lakes that climbed up the mountain like jewels on a necklace, each one smaller than the one before, beaded together by the thread of the stream and knotted by a succession of diminutive waterfalls, not one of which was taller than his shoulder. Around him, nothing but high bog lands, heather, and sedge grass, and a few brave foraging sheep. He walked by Lough Adoolig toward the farther lakes that no one, ancient or otherwise, had ever bothered to name, coming at last, after a final water-fall no higher tha
n his handlebars, to the small shield of water that was the source.

  The entire watercourse, a miracle of geography, was available to him now. He could see the path of the stream, lined at its lower leg by oak trees before it entered Derriana Lough. The dark perimeter of this opened at its western edge to the narrow Cummeragh River, which made its way past the tailor’s house, then moved sinuously down a long valley until it reached Lough Curran six miles away. And then there was the estuary where that lake narrowed and the water fanned out through marshlands into the Ballinskelligs Bay and the sea. The arm of Hog’s Head on the left, and the arm of Bolus Head on the right. It was a tremendous view: seven lakes and the sea, the irregular fields, the old walls, and the strips of harvested bogs drawn on the landscape by the labours of men long dead. He thought of Tadhg, the last old man of Europe, of his wife, out there at the final reach of Bolus Head, but he knew there were no ghosts here where he planned to build his hut. Perhaps his own ghost sometime in the future, but no ghosts now.

  He leaned the bicycle against the one small oak that had somehow rooted in this windswept place, knowing that its trunk would be the corner post for his hut. He removed the axe he had strapped to his crossbar, walked down the slope toward the fourth lake, where he had noted a grove of sallies, perfect in height for wattles, then brought back two bundles of these on his return, using the thicker pieces for upright posts that he pounded into the ground at two-foot intervals with the blunt end of the axe. After some thought, he decided that he would make the dwelling eight feet long and six feet wide, leaving two feet of open space in the east wall for a doorway. Then he began to weave the thinner sally branches back and forth between the posts, and the walls began to grow. Sometimes the wattles broke. Experimenting, he found that if he twisted the sally branches with two hands when he came to a corner, the fibres would give rather than snap. It wasn’t until the walls were about three feet high that he realized he was using a method of weaving similar to what Susan must have used when making her Belleek baskets. He felt this connected the two of them in some way and was warmed by this.

  By the end of the next day the walls were up. He could have finished them more quickly, but he knew he needed to continue his cycling so as not to lose strength in his legs. The following morning he set out on a hundred-mile ride, tearing down into the valley, pleased about the climbs he would have to make once he reached the bottom. On his return trip he removed timber and tin sheeting from the roof of a disused cow byre and, when he had pocketed all the nails he could pull from the timber by hand, tied the materials messily together, attached the end of the rope to the bicycle, and pushed the vehicle and all that trailed behind it up toward the last of the lakes. He had made the south wall of the building taller than the north by about eighteen inches so that his roof, when he had it in place, would have enough of an incline that the rain would run off. One of the vacant cottages had a clay pot on the top of its chimney, and he would cut a hole for that in the tin in order to have a decent flue, and a small chimney of his own, when he needed to make an indoor fire.

  After the roof was up he began to make the daub, which was easier than he had thought it might be, because of the non-stop defecating of a flock of nearby sheep. He used the dry ends of rushes for the straw, there was plenty of mud in the vicinity, and water was everywhere. Once he had added the dung, he beat the mixture with his boots in a kind of joyful dance until it reached the right consistency, then applied the resulting paste to the wattled walls one handful at a time, while the sheep watched him with a bemused curiosity. The child in him loved the process, and the next morning, when he saw the walls had hardened, he was ridiculous with pride.

  He thought it would be good to do some off-bicycle training as well to increase the strength of his torso and arms, and remembered an article he had furtively read in a magazine he had seen in a shop in the town while the shopkeeper was serving a bevy of customers. The men pictured in the black-and-white photos were jumping with muscles, having apparently made use of the barbells advertised here and there in the pages. He determined to make himself a set of these with the materials at hand. A bough, three inches in diameter, was lying to the side of the oak tree, having been torn most likely from the trunk by a gale the previous winter. He seized this and chopped at the branch end until he had a strong pole about five feet long. Then he sought and found two stones, each the size of a man’s head. These he tied to each end of the bough with the rope, but they slipped from their rigging no matter the knots he employed. Eventually he bought some wire in a hardware store in town and that, along with the rope, did the trick.

  While he lifted the barbells early each morning, under varying degrees of rain, or on the few fully clear days, he thought about what he would call the unnamed lakes. Or he thought about Susan, how she would feel about his new strength, whether or not she would notice the fine cut of him when he won the Rás. And him a single rider. Independent. Unique, he liked to think, savouring the sound of the word. He would never be part of a team.

  He eventually decided on Wattle Lake for the name of the fourth lake because he had used the sally branches near its shore for his shelter. The third lake was round and pleasant and he wanted to call it Gerry-Annie Lake, feeling that was the least he could do for the other mother he had so abruptly left behind. But his own lake, the smallest, his neighbour, was more complicated. He knew it better than the other two, was beginning to learn its moods. It was fully black at some moments, but then he would look again and it would be gleaming under the touch of light or a shift of wind. At the remotest point of it you could see the continually spreading hand of the source. Each day, just after dawn, there was a heron that flew slowly and with great dignity up the valley, then settled down to fish in the lake’s shallows near the source, paying no attention to the animal with long arms and three heads that he, Kieran, became when he was lifting his makeshift barbells. For a time, he considered that the nearby water should be called Heron Lake, or Source Lake, but the names never really took. It was the girl making herself felt in his mind, how she would still be sleeping at this early hour. While he prepared his body for her, and for the Rás, she would be dreaming, her hair spreading across the pasture of the pillow like the dark fingers of the source. There was that field Gerry-Annie had told him about. He wondered if he would call this water the Lake of the Dreaming Girl, but as he became more intimate with it, he settled on the Lake of the Dreaming. He would be the only one that would know what the dreaming meant.

  THE CORNER THAT SHE TURNED

  Kenneth had found he wanted some sunlight in the right-hand side of the picture. The piece, he decided, had unwittingly become a night journey, and should be completed by a blazing zone of morning arrival; a redemption of gold after a dusky departure. There would be nothing dubious in this region, only clarity and luminescence. Everything would bloom. Everyone’s arms would be open. He had almost finished, could see the full composition now. Still, as the afternoon shadows moved across the tile floor of the unfinished passenger lounge in which he painted, a memory from the last part of his own travels settled in his mind.

  He had wakened in a European room he didn’t recognize. Sunlight was moving in yellow bars through the slats of the shutters, then scattering, like bright, shivering amoebae, across the walls and over the ceiling. Barely awake, he had watched this, wondering where the light would have settled had it not been trapped in a room, and then the room’s shadowed furniture began to take shape, and he recalled his arrival at the hotel the night before, and the journey that led to the arrival, and finally the reason he was there. This was where they were going to meet.

  The train had been crowded and hot and, after leaving Milan, it had passed through one dispiriting industrial town after another. He had had trouble believing that the still lake and the quiet mountain scenery she had described could be anywhere near this part of the country, but eventually the window beside him blackened until all he could see in it was the reflection of his own face, and
he knew they were leaving the more populated part of the north. Some teenaged boys got onboard at one stop or another, rough, jostling one another, and paying loud, gleeful attention to him. But still he had looked out and into the darkness, and toward the intermittent faraway lights that must have come from isolated farmhouses, or the traces of villages climbing up a slope.

  An hour later, after stepping off the train at the tiny station at Orta, he had walked through badly lit, shuttered streets toward the faint sound of lake water splashing against what he imagined was a stone abutment or pier. The hotel, she had said, was on the lake, and she hoped they would have a view. There were mountains all around the lake, she said, and a monastery on an island that could be reached by a ferry that shuttled back and forth all through the day. He had had a sense of neither mountain nor monastery as he approached the broken sign over the hotel’s door, only this slight breathing sound of lake water that he could hear right now in the room, though the windows remained closed.

  He had taken the room for three nights, using up a considerable amount of his remaining cash to do so, as she had been uncertain when she could get away, whether a Wednesday or a Thursday would be possible. He was anxious to see her, believing he was in love in a way he had never been before, though he knew that she was not free and that any thought of a future was a thought that must be banished from his mind. He was too inexperienced and uncertain to even conjecture how she might have felt about him, so he had flung himself into the circular wholeness of being completely alone in love. Everything he saw, even something as simple as an abandoned flower on a sidewalk, or a dead bird near a lamppost, was examined by him in the light of this innerness that was both exhilarating and disturbing, though not yet as painful as he would have expected.