The Night Stages

by Jane Urquhart

  By mid-afternoon, having found Gerry-Annie’s broom behind the door standing handle end down so that the bristles were not bent, he had swept all evidence of sheep from the room and had thrown four pailfuls of water across the floor. It seemed neither the paint nor the concrete had deteriorated, and an ox-blood red colour emerged after the third pail. He found a filthy rag near the fireplace, washed it under the pump, and began to wipe the dust from the table’s oilcloth, which revealed itself to be decorated with the fishing scenes he remembered liking as a boy, and then, after carefully removing the dishes from the open shelves of the dresser, he took them outside. Five minutes later, washing the dishes in the pail, he admitted to himself that, even without Gerry-Annie’s warm presence, he had come home.

  By evening he had found a pitchfork, removed the old grey straw and the mice nests from Gerry-Annie’s bed, scrubbed the headboard and slats with the cloth, and had surreptitiously borrowed fresh, dry straw from of one of the small stooks he had taken note of in a nearby field. He had one candle with him in his pack, and this he lit as the darkness deepened, recalling gratitude. Then he removed a bundle of torn cloth and began to carefully unwind it until a small Belleek basket emerged. This he placed on a shelf near the bed, where he knew he would see it when he woke. He pulled a frayed blanket from the bottom of his pack, wrapped himself up, and settled into the place beside the wall that had held his child’s body in the past when, for those brief, but vividly recalled first few weeks, he had slept with the comforting plump warmth of Gerry-Annie beside him, lest, she’d said, there was some kind of fracas in the night.

  Just before he closed his eyes, he thought, as always, of his brother, simply because the habit of thinking about him had outlived the anger that had first accompanied those thoughts. He’d go to the weather station, he decided, maybe not tomorrow but soon. Blood, he thought, but in relation to their being siblings: there was not the whisper of a feud left in him. He would be able to separate now the girl he had loved from the woman who, for years now, would have been his brother’s wife.

  He awakened in full dark to the sound of animal hooves and soft lowing accompanied by quiet laughter and speech; girls bringing cattle down from the mountains to the morning market in Cahersiveen. Annie told him she herself had performed this task, each week, from the time she could walk until she married. It was a struggle at first, she had told him, to keep up with her older sisters. But she’d wanted to do it, and so they’d let her come along.

  He recalled then the miraculous Rás Tailteann, how the last old man of Europe and his wife had been there to celebrate him at the finish, and beside them his mother, insubstantial but radiant with no warnings on her smiling mouth. Michael Kirby, the actual, with his fist in the air, Davey the tailor, Donal from the mountains, Gerry-Annie herself, his own father all present, all cheering him on. And Susan as the girl she had been, how he had collapsed toward her, how they had fallen together then, and fallen apart.

  And now, the light of a lantern beam on the wall, the sound of a switch brushing an animal’s flank, the music of old Irish words carried on a girl’s breath: all of this enveloped him as he lay in the dark with the light of one star reaching him through a hole in the roof. It was these things that made him come to know it was morning, and that the day about to break was Wednesday.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  This book is a work of fiction: all characters, situations, relationships, and sometimes settings are products of the imagination or have been worked on and transformed by the imagination. There were several instances when I felt I needed to keep the actual name of the person whose life had contributed to the makeup of the character I was creating, mostly because I wanted to honour the person in question. This was especially true of the Canadian artist Kenneth Lochhead whose mural Flight and Its Allegories remains a fascinating fixture in Gander International Airport in Newfoundland. But it is also true in the case of poet, fisherman, and Gaelic scholar Michael Kirby, whom I had the great privilege of coming to know in Ballinskelligs, Ireland, in the 1990s. The verse on this page is from his book Skelligside (Lilliput Press, 1990). His bicycle coaching is an act of my imagination. The meteorologist, McWilliams, is partly based on the Irish Times’ extraordinarily gifted weather forecaster and writer of weather lore, Brendan McWilliams. Alas, I never met Brendan McWilliams, but I was – and remain – a great admirer of his Weather Eye on Literature, and The Illustrated Weather Eye, the beautiful book his wife, Anne McWilliams, compiled after his much-too-early death.

  There is one reference to fabulous farmer, footballer, and folklorist Padraig O’Connell. He will have to look carefully to find it.

  Significant sections of this book could not have been written had I not come across the highly engaging and brilliantly researched volume by Tom Daly entitled The Rás, published in 2003 by The Collins Press, Cork, Ireland. I owe Mr. Daly a great debt for providing the factual details concerning this demanding and delightful Irish sporting event. I am also indebted to Ted Fraser for conversation, and especially for his beautifully written and insightful Garden of Light, the important catalogue that accompanied the 2005 Kenneth Lochhead retrospective. Turner in Germany by Cecilia Powell (Tate Gallery Publications, 1996) was also a source. Bill Terry in Sechelt, British Columbia, was extremely helpful and more inspiring than he knew when he shared a family story, and Noreen O’Sullivan in the Cahersiveen Library helped me track down some of the places associated with that story. In Gander, librarian Pat Parsons was both welcoming and instructive, as was the staff at the University of Regina Archives where Kenneth Lochhead’s papers are housed.

  A few patient people read and commented on the manuscript in its early stages. Among them I would particularly like to thank Joanne Lochhead for her warmth and generosity, Marilyn Dickson for sharing her expertise concerning aircraft and female aviators, Michael Phillips for his charity, and Mieke Bevelander for listening. As always, thanks to copyeditor Heather Sangster for her sharp eye and her wisdom as she unearthed mistakes, factual and otherwise, and to Lynn Schellenberg who read and carefully corrected the proofs. I am extremely grateful to both, as well as to Kendra Ward for making things circulate among us all. I was extremely gratified by Ileene Smith of Farrar, Straus, and Giroux and Juliet Mabey at Oneworld Publications in the U.K. responding as enthusiastically as they did to the manuscript.

  Enormous gratitude goes to Ellen Levine for her long-term affection and for her brilliant expertise.

  Finally, and as always, I would like to thank my publisher and editor, Ellen Seligman, for her loving attention to this book and all the others, and for a sustaining friendship that has enhanced my writing and my life for thirty years.