Four Letters of Love

by Niall Williams

  Father and daughter walked home, each of them swaying slightly under the different burdens of their lives and neither of them speaking. Muiris rehearsed entire speeches, opening sentences, slow approaches to the boggy ground of Isabel’s other life on the mainland, but he could not quite bring himself to speak. But why not? he thought; why can I not just say it to her, make a beginning? He turned over a phrase, prepared it, but let the air take it away. It was hopeless, he couldn’t risk whatever this warm yet wordless glowing was between them and as they came near the house and Margaret opened the door he knew that what passed in an instant between them was never to be his.

  Isabel hugged on to her mother, fitting tightly like a piece in a puzzle.

  ‘He’s not well, Isabel,’ Margaret said, standing back a little while Isabel went into Sean’s room. With Muiris standing alongside, witnessing the deep tenderness Isabel showed to her brother, Margaret Gore could not yet tell her daughter that she feared she was wrong to have read her son Isabel’s letter. Now she couldn’t explain, and the mother and father stood there mutely gazing as Isabel cradled her brother’s head and whispered greetings that she could not be sure he received.

  The wind whistled about the windows, the night fell. When Isabel came in to the kitchen for her supper and Muiris disappeared out the gale-swept door, sailing swiftly starboard to the pub, Margaret asked her for the first time how she was.

  ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘Is it so hard to tell me?’

  ‘Tell you what?’

  ‘That you might marry him.’

  Isabel spooned the soup in front of her; her mother’s voice was low so that Sean mightn’t hear in the next room.

  ‘He’s asked me.’

  ‘I know that. I know that. And what have you said to him?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘I said I’d tell him in a week.’

  ‘And when’s that?’

  ‘Today.’

  ‘So, you’re not sure?’

  Margaret knew as soon as she had said it that she had crossed into a place she had not meant to, that her own desperate longing for her daughter was sweeping through the room and about to wail like a demon at the advent of grief and error. Why, why, all that time ago, had she not stifled this love when she had had a chance?

  ‘I’m never sure about anything,’ Isabel said simply. ‘Sometimes I am and then the next day I’m lost. Then I say to myself, are you ever sure about anything?’

  ‘You can be sure what you feel for him.’ Again Margaret felt her insistence like a metallic ring.

  ‘Can you? I can’t.’

  ‘Then you shouldn’t marry him.’

  There, she had said it; she had released the words that risked turning her daughter from her; she could feel herself already the man’s mother-in-law, that disapproving figure out there on the island he would never want to visit. She was already his enemy now, and should her daughter choose him, there seemed no way back; for the part of Isabel that loved Peader must surely hate her. She was foundering in the knowledge of how hopeless was her situation when Isabel answered her with a question.

  ‘Were you sure?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said quickly, flying back to Donegal and being the girl carrying the basket with the letter down the street, remembering with bittersweet pain the fleetness like wings in her feet coming back from seeing him.

  ‘Yes, yes I was,’ she said, ‘and you need to feel that sureness, Isabel, for all the things that’ll be ahead of you. You need that. Because there’ll be trials, and you’ll need to know that you were sure he was the one when you face them.’

  Sean moaned from the room, the sound small as dust, but Isabel stood up to go to him.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said, and moved away.

  6

  The rain lifted the following morning and Isabel brought Sean outside in his battered and rough wheelchair. The roads on the island were more like ancient pathways and bumped him jerkily as they moved away from the house and out into the broader gusting of the sea. He sat silently to an angle and Isabel felt the dead weight of him as she pushed, struggling almost at once, even as they were only heading out from the village. Still she drove him on, moving him away from their home as much for her own sake as for his. When she awoke that morning the air in the house had been suddenly tight with the echoing questions of the night before. She had lain in her childhood bed and opened her window on the voices of the night sea. There had been no stars and the coming and going darknesses of the clouds above drifted like brooding ghosts. Her sleep was ragged, and at breakfast the feeling that she had arrived at a precipice in her life at once translated itself into a desire to take Sean to the sea.

  They moved out beyond the houses and the morning greetings and were a pair of hushed figures, brother and sister, retracing the journey of years earlier when the accident had happened and Isabel had first begun to believe that hers was to be an inheritance of damaged dreams. She was angry with herself for not knowing what to do about Peader, and then despised herself for the littleness of her worries when she looked down at her brother in the wheelchair. Life, she thought, was a reasonless mess clotting around her and all the excitement and wonder of her girlhood on the island was now gone on the tide: Sean had not returned to health, Peader was like a brightly painted liner, half-sunken in the water, leaking an ugly spillage that it seemed she had to repair. The two seemed intimately connected in her mind.

  They moved along slowly towards the precipice and the edge of the island. Isabel was not sure if Sean could even remember the accident. Certainly he had not been back in years, and although his sister could not quite explain why, she desperately wanted that morning to return both of them there. The gulls flew up from underneath the edge and made a raucous laughing overhead as Isabel struggled hard now to get the wheelchair over the stones. The sky was broken with clouds and the wind made the air glassy. The seabirds hovered and fell, rising again through marvellous curves as if following along the invisible tracks of God’s heart. Breathless and flushed, Isabel clicked the brakes on the wheelchair and sat down on the rocks, her hair gagging her mouth before she tossed her head free and looked across at her brother.

  ‘Do you know where we are?’ she asked him. ‘This is the place we came that day after school.’ She looked out to sea. ‘That was the day everything started to go wrong.’ Sean moved to one side in the chair and fixed his eyes on the faraway horizon.

  ‘Nothing was ever right for me after that. No more than it was for you. I just wish you were all right again, you know? Just that you got better and stood up and said. “Howya, girl” or something and we could walk back home and I could tell you about Peader and you would help me. I know you would.’

  She let her words trail off into the wind, and sat there a while suddenly realising that she had come expecting a miracle. That was what she was waiting for, waiting for the moment God was passing by the cliffs once more and gave the nod of recovery to Sean. For in that moment the crack in her world could heal and marriage to Peader would be the dreamsweet heaven she had once imagined. It would be the sign she was waiting for.

  ‘You know he’s asked me to marry him,’ she said. ‘I know you know that. Mother thinks that’s why you’re so unwell now. Is it, Sean? Because I don’t know that I will marry him. I haven’t decided. I don’t know if I ever will. In some ways I love him and in others I don’t. Not at all. So, I guess that means I shouldn’t marry him. What do you think?’

  Sean made no movement and Isabel said nothing more, waiting in the slow moving morning and gazing out at the changeless horizon on that western sea for any sign of God coming. Since she had left the island she had abandoned the habit of going to church and never said any formal prayers. Still she believed God was somewhere out there in the uncharted skies, visiting even now the life of some unsuspecting innocent. It was superstition as much as faith that kept her on the cliff edge, hoping for a sign, something to resolve this clot of h
er life. An hour passed. And another. They grew cold. Even the gulls gave up and flew away. Come on, come on, come on, Isabel urged in a mute pleading that willed the heavens to crack and let down mercy. Come on, come on.

  Nothing came but the afternoon and hunger, and the ghosts of despair. Sean made no sounds and sat without moving, his eyes fixed with a kind of entranced rapture at the empty air, as if all the time encircled by angels.

  7

  Isabel gave God every chance. She pulled the wheelchair home behind her that afternoon, Sean travelling backwards from the scene, and swore that if the day was fine tomorrow she’d take him back there.

  And she did.

  It was a kind of vigil, and each morning of that week Isabel stayed on the island her mother watched her wrap Sean in the blanket and push off out the front door. Margaret imagined what was happening and grieved silently at the desperate loving and hope that was scalding her daughter’s heart. She knew that this too was part of the wretched puzzle of life, the insoluble mystery of why things are as they are and why we seek to match and pair events into the thinnest fabric of meaning. She packed biscuits underneath the blanket and said nothing, knowing that it was something that Isabel had to do and that the human need to feel one can cure another is more powerful than fire. She watched them go off into the mid-morning and knelt by the range and said her own prayer.

  When Isabel and Sean passed along by the school house, Muiris put the students at an exercise and watched out the window. The sight of them lacerated his heart, for he felt Isabel’s pitiful hope with the freshness of his own years earlier when the accident had first slashed open his life and he had worn out the knees of his trousers with beseeching. He was wounded all the more now for knowing that her wishes and prayers were hopeless and that each day’s vigil at the cliffside was tearing another rent in the innocence of her heart. For her now, as much as for Sean, he wished something might happen, and while they were away he taught his classes with his mind floating on half-formulated prayers that he might be struck dead and his son get up and walk.

  The students finished their exercises while the Master was away in his mind. They marked their desks or fired inky paper pellets, some of which fell with a small splat against the painting on the back wall that Isabel called The Treasure, that great hurly-burly seascape framed in oak and painted by William Coughlan.

  Muiris allowed a minor riot to fill the classroom before he brought his attention back from his son and daughter. He snapped the air with his eyes as if with a strap and over the bowed heads considered all kinds of divine bargains. The day was interminable, the clouds matting in a slow foreboding and the sea endlessly churning about. There was no escaping it and in such moments, Muiris thought, it was far worse to be on an island. It was as if the all-surrounding sea was the implacable and unfathomable heart of Life itself into which his questions fell and sunk like stones. He wished he could see away into another vista and suddenly told the class to put down their pens and listen to the fable of Moses and the Red Sea. While he told the story – even though he had told it to the older pupils once before – he could himself momentarily imagine the sea to the mainland parting open: he could imagine the fabulous need and prayer that might cut and spread the waters like a knife; he could see Isabel and Sean on the cliffside, the wheelchair glistening in the windy light and her asking for a sign, and then suddenly the majesty, the moment, Think of it, he said, Think of it, he said again, leaning forward on his high chair and sweeping an arm out to the Atlantic that ringed their lives, holding his hand there so that Cronin and O’Flaherty stood in their seats to look out the high window with expectation.

  ‘The instant when,’ he grimaced at the awful faith required, ‘when, against all the odds, when it seemed more hopeless than hopelessness itself, when the world seemed most a godless blackness into which there would be nothing but bloodshed and horror, right then, the sea, boys and girls, the sea opened and they were saved.’

  He let the school off early and sat alone in the empty building, hearing the vanishing cries of the excited children and looking out on the deepening grey of the sea. It was a cooler afternoon than the one before and yet he hadn’t seen Isabel and Sean return from the cliffs. He sat in his place feeling a reasonless fear creep over him that something dreadful had happened. He had a locked cupboard beneath the window and went across to it now, took out a bottle and poured himself a half-tumbler of whiskey. He drank it standing beside the painting that was a reminder of his wife’s love and tried to wash away the fear. Why was it, he wondered, that he seemed to be awaiting tragedy? He could not quite pin down the feeling and instead of helping him reach any closer definition of it, the whiskey blurred the premonition into various shapes and colours, none of which came close to the truth. For, not that afternoon, nor the one after, nor any of the days or nights of that week did Muiris know that his daughter was on the cusp of a new life, and that the thing he was dreading was nothing but that. He waited until the sky was growing darker to decide to go to the cliffs and bring his children home. Yes, he would go out and get them, he was their father, he could steer them safely in out of the danger. Right then, he said to himself, shambling down the classroom. Right then. When he opened the school house door to step out a flock of gulls screamed overhead and the whiskey lit suddenly inside him, making momentarily a glittering and glassy resolve out of the shards of disappointment. He stumbled and was sharp with himself to stand upright and not act the fool. Anything could have happened. Something had; he knew it had. Damnit in Christ, he knew. He knew something had happened, and started with a jerky and uncertain haste toward the far shore, for all the world imagining that he was about to encounter the dreadful and awkward hand of God in his life once more.

  They could both be dead, he thought. They could be already drowned and I sitting there in the bloody classroom. They could have jumped. She could have done anything, she seems so. So. Hurt.

  He had walked four hundred yards on the flame of whiskey, in the full expectation of meeting disaster. He felt so lit that he imagined as he hurried that he might pull down the very angels that bore his drowned children away into the sky, pull them down and wrestle free from any far and glowing heaven their wild island-made souls. If they were taken, he thought; if they were taken he would; he would.

  Then there they were, returning along the stony ground, as if from the Kingdom of the Dead. Isabel was pulling the wheelchair behind her and Sean, cheek-burned from the day’s wind, was leaning to one side, only his head visible so that at first it seemed his sister carried an infant on her back. There had been no tragedy. Nothing of the marvellous or the doomed had parted the sea and changed the world and as Muiris came to a stop before them he burst into tears. He put his arms out around the awkward grouping of them and hugged on, unable to ring his children within his embrace as he once had, unable to make the inviolable fort of his arms that hooped them to his heart, but holding on nonetheless. He held and wept against them without speaking. He bent and kissed his son’s face and held it in his two hands and shook it slightly with the charge of his emotion. God, I love you, he thought, the simplest words and the feeling running through him sharply, parting him there between the force of loving and the hopeless inadequacy of his ever truly expressing it. Muiris hugged on to both of them. He pressed his forehead down on the crown of his daughter’s lowered head, hoping to leave there like laurel-leaves his gratitude for her and his understanding of her taking Sean to the cliffside. The whiskey sweetly raging, Muiris held his children on the stony path in the late bluster of the island afternoon, full of a sense of apology and love and grief, his eyes running, his limbs shaking, and feeling closer to both of them than he would ever feel again for the rest of his life.

  8

  The following day Margaret Gore told her husband about the wedding proposal. Muiris went to school and said nothing, and Nora Liathain, throwing a handful of breadcrumbs to her clutch of hens as he passed, hardly noticed he was snapped like a wafer.
>
  9

  Isabel stayed on the island for a week. She spoke to Sean and waited for the miracle until at last she no longer believed it was coming. Still, she took her brother to their place each day and tied more tightly the knot of her life with the pain of his. Of all the bargains she could coin in those hours on the cliffs, one stood out: if you don’t want me to marry him, then make Sean all right. On the Sunday, after Mass in the small crowded church, she decided to wait one more day and then go back to Galway. If something was to happen it would happen now wherever Sean was; she didn’t have to bring him to the cliffside, and so instead she went to her bedroom and packed her case. From the small white chest of drawers with the broken metal handles her father had promised often to fix, she took out clothes that were pieces of her girlhood, skirts and dresses that released into the bedroom air her own self years earlier. There she was, Isabel at twelve years old sitting on the bed in that ancient patterned crosswork of green and red. There were books and photographs and scraps of the kind of things that were stored away in drawers for the dust of their memory to accumulate and be blown gently now into that Sunday afternoon.

  Within an hour she was surrounded by herself. She took things from the drawers as if they were the lost treasures of a shipwreck and laid them on the bed, on the hard chair, and finally on the floor itself, the room transforming into a collage of her life. The more she emptied the drawers the more apparent did it seem to her that she was that afternoon marking an ending; that the girl summoned by the old clothes was no longer her and that already she was able to look back as if at a stranger. She got a plastic bag and began to fill her past into it. She wanted to keep nothing and made jumble of the old essay copies and spelling tests and favourite cardigans her mother had stored away there for some fond time in the future. When she had cleaned the place of everything and the bedroom was like a levelled site with the black plastic heap to one side, Isabel lay on the bed exhausted.