The Carnival at Bray

by Jessie Ann Foley

  It might have occurred to Maggie to say no—or even to be insulted for being asked. It was a Saturday evening and she was sixteen—she might have plans! But she didn’t, of course, and her new stepfather wasn’t the type of person to pretend any different in order to protect her pride.

  Socially, there had been possibilities at the beginning of the school year. Maggie had ridden along in the exodus of Saint Brigid’s open campus lunch policy, when the girls would eat hurriedly in the canteen and then, for the extra half hour they had free before classes resumed, roll up their skirts to expose their thighs and head out to roam the town in search of Saint Brendan’s boys. The Irish girls in her class, Maggie found, weren’t a whole lot different from the American girls she knew back home. Around guys, they acted shrill and shrieky, pushing their crushes playfully and unable to hide their wounded hearts when the boys made offhandedly cruel jokes about their heavy legs or too-bright lipstick. Maggie wasn’t good at flirting, and as a result, had never been kissed. Being around the shouting boys in their loosened ties both excited and intimidated her. When she joined her classmates on these boy hunts, she became practically mute. She didn’t bring anything to the table—didn’t make anyone laugh, didn’t attract more attention—and so by the time the fall bank holiday arrived, the little buzz she’d garnered by being a Yank had subsided, and she couldn’t blame the small pack of girls she’d made inroads with when they stopped inviting her to come along with them. It was almost with a sense of relief that Maggie returned to the canteen for the whole lunch hour with a smattering of other unimportant girls: the fat, the dandruffed, and the shy, working on their French conjugations and trying not to be embarrassed for each other.

  The owner of the dog was Mike O’Callaghan, who was the nephew of Dan Sean O’Callaghan, Bray’s most famous resident. At ninety-nine, Dan Sean was one of the oldest men in County Wicklow, but according to Colm, that was not what made him so notable. It was the fact that he was still in such good health for his age that he gave the younger members of the town hope that they, too, might grow old with dignity, avoiding the piss-smelling retirement homes or the palliative care center in Dun Laoghaire. Though frail, Dan Sean still lived on his own, free of oxygen tanks or babbling dementia or wheelchairs. He still went on pilgrimages every year to various Catholic holy places: Knock and Croagh Patrick in the Irish Republic, but also as far away as Israel and Medjugorje. On doctor’s orders, he’d grudgingly quit smoking at age ninety-five. He’d flatly refused to quit drinking.

  Dan Sean’s only child, a daughter, had died fifty years earlier of tuberculosis. Five winters after that, his wife went out to the shed to water the cows and was knocked down and trampled to death by their polly bull. For the near half-century that followed, Dan Sean had lived alone at the top of the hill, and now Mike and his wife, who were themselves nearing seventy, lived at the bottom and looked after him.

  All of this old-fashioned tragedy—murderous bulls, tubercular infants—was totally alien to Maggie; it did not seem possible that in 1993, she could meet a man whose past read like a Charles Dickens novel; who, as an eighteen-year-old, had ridden down to Cobh to wave his handkerchief at the crowds on the deck of the Titanic as it disappeared to its doom on the high North Atlantic. But, Colm explained, this is why it was essential that after they went to see the puppies in Mike’s barn, they climb the hill to pay their respects.

  “For such a tiny island, you wouldn’t believe the massive changes that have happened here even in these past few decades,” Colm told her as they set off through the back field, their boots making farting noises in the mud and stomped grass. “Dan Sean was here for all of it. Any day now, he might pass, and it’ll be another light that goes out in our history, one less voice to remember the way things were. Do you know he’s never even driven a car? Only a horse and carriage. Jesus, what do you think he’d make of these Chinese taxi drivers with Dublin accents?”

  As they crossed the field and found the narrow road that led toward the O’Callaghan farm, Colm and Maggie fell into a comfortable silence, broken only by the intermittent bleating of a neighbor’s sheep or the occasional passing of a car. It began to drizzle as they approached Mike’s barn, which really wasn’t a barn at all, but an A-frame shed, packed with farming equipment and stacks of turf. Inside, the close air was heavy with the smell of new life, unmistakable and not unpleasant, but somehow too intimate for Maggie and her new stepfather, who, feeling it too, moved away from her in the darkness. Raindrops thrummed on the peaked roof and Maggie could hear the rustling of six wriggling puppies, vying for space at their mother’s side. They were so small they looked like baby birds, their skin hairless and puckered pink. The mother, a large gray sheepdog, half-lifted her head and watched Maggie and Colm’s approach with one eye, then, losing interest, rested her head back on the wooden slats of the barn floor.

  “Can we touch them?” Maggie asked. She was whispering, though she didn’t know why.

  “We could, but let’s not,” said Colm. “Mike’ll be up at Dan Sean’s, and he’ll know if there are any males in the litter.”

  “Why do you prefer the males?”

  “Better guard dogs. And they don’t get pregnant.”

  As if to apologize to the present company, he squatted down and patted the mother on the head.

  “You can’t separate them for at least a week anyway,” he explained. “They have to be with their mothers until they can see.”

  Behind the barn was a sloping gravel path that led up to Dan Sean’s house, but it was hard to make out as the late afternoon had already dissolved into darkness. There wasn’t much twilight here, Maggie had noticed, at least not in the fall. Gray afternoons just darkened into grayer evenings; only the rolling clouds served as a reminder that the world was moving at all. Colm led the way up the muddy path dotted with clucking chickens, slogging through one tractor tire track while Maggie followed the other. A goat watched the pair of them as they ascended, and nattered at them when Maggie tripped over a rock. Mist clung to the air, and the higher they walked, the harder it was to see anything, so that Colm became just a gray shadow, a blockage of displaced air, somewhere off to her left. His disembodied voice explained to her that the house had been built by Dan Sean’s grandfather in the early 1840s, an era that brought to mind the eerie green quietness of a famine memorial Maggie had seen in Ohio on a trip with Nanny Ei a few summers earlier, when Ireland was still more of a feeling for her than an actual place.

  It was so foggy at the top of the hill that Maggie only knew they had reached it because her calves no longer burned from climbing. She could make out two squares of window hovering in front of them. Somewhere between the windows, a door opened.

  “Over this way!” a voice called, and they followed it until the fog fell away and they were standing at the threshold of a warm, dry sitting room. At first, Maggie thought that this man standing in the doorway, with his wispy white hair and short, bowed legs, must be Dan Sean. But when Colm shook the old man’s hand, he said, “Mike! What’s the craic?” and Maggie realized that Dan Sean’s nephew looked at least a decade older than Nanny Ei.

  A fat brown cat and a filthy dog moved freely about between the sitting room and the dirt yard, tracking mud and chicken feathers on the faded carpet. It needed a good sweeping, but it was cozy, heated by the turf fire that burned in an enormous fireplace. In front of this fire, County Wicklow’s oldest resident rocked slowly in his chair. His wrinkles were deep folds, his eyes milky myopic slits behind thick government-issued glasses. But this was counterbalanced by a jaunty three-piece navy suit and a large fur Cossack’s hat beneath which his turtle-like face appraised the group with an expressionless but not unalert gaze. There was not an air of death about him, or morbidity, just a quiet staleness, like a plant that needed watering.

  “Who’s this!” he demanded, gesturing at Maggie with arthritically puffed hands. Colm made the introductions, and Dan Sean stared at Maggie from beneath his Cossack’s hat.

>   “You’ll have a drink!” he finally yelled, waving at a rusty potbellied stove and a card table lined with a variety of dark liquids: cordials, whiskey, and brandy. Mike went over and put on the kettle while Dan Sean, gathering the gigantic, matted cat in his arms, swiveled in his chair and proceeded to converse with Colm and Mike in a dialect so thickly accented that Maggie mistook it, at first, for the Irish language. She found a chair near the window and the dirty white dog presented himself at her feet, waving his paws to get her attention. She scratched the oily space behind his ears and looked around at the walls, which were crammed with faded photographs of Dan Sean’s pilgrimages. The only other decorations were photos of the Blessed Virgin and the Sacred Heart, velvety and colorful, reminiscent of the Pink Floyd posters in Uncle Kevin’s bedroom.

  The kettle wailed, and Mike poured two glasses halfway with boiling water, then filled the rest with a dark red liquid from a huge decanter. He stirred the drinks with a calloused fingertip, then handed one to Colm and the other to Maggie.

  “Mikey, she’s only sixteen,” Colm interjected.

  “It’s only a drop of port!” shouted Dan Sean, so that the mangy cat leaped off his lap and disappeared behind a basket of coal. “To keep off the chill!”

  “It will only go to waste now if she doesn’t drink it,” Mike pointed out. “This isn’t America; a girl can have a drop of port to keep off the chill, can’t she?”

  “Oh, go on then,” Colm relented. “Just don’t tell your mother.”

  Maggie held the hot glass in her hands. It smelled like the potpourri Nanny Ei filled her apartment with at Christmastime. It tasted sort of like wine, which she’d had before, stealing sips from her mother’s glass during the dark times between boyfriends.

  Once all the men were settled with their drinks, Dan Sean took a poker and stirred the fire, so that sparks showered onto the hearth, dangerously close to the oblivious dog’s fur, and launched into a long story that Maggie could tell was a sad one. Colm and Mike sat leaned forward, legs spread, elbows resting on knees, and every once in a while they would stop to nod solemnly or light a cigarette. Sometimes, Dan Sean would stop what he was saying and catch Maggie’s eye. Maybe it was that small gesture, or maybe it was the port, or the heat of the tiny, smoke-filled room, but as she listened she felt a part of the conversation, a part of these men, and it didn’t even matter that she knew nothing of football or farming or the Scanlon woman up the road whose sister in Antrim had a brain aneurysm, God rest her soul.

  Later, the phone rang. It was Laura: her shift had ended, and she needed a lift.

  “I suppose we’ll be going,” Colm said, rising to wash his cup in the aluminum sink. “Ready?”

  But Maggie, dreamy and dizzy from the liquor, felt welded to her seat. With Nanny Ei an ocean away, she missed being around old people and their directionless conversations, their stale smells. The glass of port warm in her hands, the soft lull of the conversation, the salty bog smell of the fire, held her in her chair. “I’ll walk home,” she said, “if it’s okay with you.”

  Colm shrugged, a bit surprised.

  “Well. I suppose it’s only down the hill.”

  He wiped his cup and placed it on the drying rack, then shook hands with the men and left. As soon as the door closed, the cat leaped onto Maggie’s lap, shedding hair all over her jeans.

  “You’ll have another drink,” Dan Sean demanded, pointing at her empty glass with a fingernail that needed cutting. He insisted on pouring Maggie’s second drink himself. Slowly, he unfolded himself from his chair, took her glass, and tottered over to the card table. He poured a splash of hot water from the kettle, then filled the rest with the ruby liquid.

  “Fuck’s sake!” Mike jumped from his seat. “Dan Sean, that’s too much!”

  “Ah, the glass is fierce narrow,” said Dan Sean, sidestepping Mike with impressive agility for a man of his age and handing the drink to Maggie.

  “This is why I usually pour the drinks,” said Mike, winking at her. Then he leaned over and whispered, “He does that for people he likes—pours ’em strong so it takes ’em longer to drink. Means he likes your company.”

  Maggie blushed. “But I’ve barely said anything,” she said.

  “A man like that, who’s been around for nearly a hundred years? He don’t need you to say much to know what you’re about.”

  Across the hearth, Dan Sean raised his glass of port, and they drank together.

  A half hour later, the phone rang again. Mike’s wife wanted him to come home; dinner was on the table.

  “Be back in an hour with a plate for you,” he promised Dan Sean. “Nice to meet you, Maggie.”

  He closed the front door softly as he left. Maggie and Dan Sean, and the eighty-three years between them, watched Mike as he crossed the yard and was swallowed by the fog. They sat for a while with their drinks in their hands, watching the fire like old friends. On the mantelpiece was a large framed photo of a young couple sitting in a horse and trap. The man was dressed in wool trousers and a cap, and he was staring down the camera as if to tell the world that he was not the type of man who smiled in pictures. Next to him, leaning on his shoulder, was a woman with dark, wavy hair. She was grinning for all she was worth, as if to make up for her husband’s serious expression. Her lips were brightly painted, and one black eyebrow was arched flirtatiously at the camera. May, 1919, was penciled in the corner of the frame. Was everybody just more beautiful back then, Maggie wondered, or was it just a trick of old film?

  “What was your wife’s name?” she asked.

  “Hah?” Dan Sean squinted, leaning forward.

  “Your wife’s name?”

  “Hah?”

  “Your wife. Her name?” Maggie shouted, not knowing whether Dan Sean couldn’t hear her, or just couldn’t understand the nasal cadence of her Chicago accent.

  He shrugged, shaking his head so forcefully that the Cossack’s hat drooped down to a jaunty angle and perched on the rim of his glasses. He didn’t seem to take any notice, so Maggie got up to gently reposition it. The potency of the booze kicked in the moment she stood up, and she lurched toward him on sea legs. Bending down to fix his hat, she could smell embedded smoke, shaving cream, and very faintly, the vinegar dribble of urine. She felt a sudden tenderness for Dan Sean and this tiny house, filled up with a half century of loneliness. She kissed the furry top of his Cossack’s hat. It took three careful steps for her to return to her own chair, and when she sat down, she saw that he had fallen asleep.

  Maggie sipped her drink with the cat draped across her lap and the dog curled at her feet. The only sounds in the room were the crackling of the fire and Dan Sean’s shallow snores. There were no CDs to play, no radio, no television. There was nothing. She was just sitting there in silence, getting drunk. It occurred to her that a person’s first drunken experience should be in the basement of a friend’s house, in a forest preserve, behind the bleachers of a football field. Certainly not in the company of a sleeping ninety-nine-year-old man. She giggled a little and wondered what Uncle Kevin would make of it. “Hot port?” he would say. “Very impressive, Mags. I would have thought you’d be more of a wine cooler type of girl.”

  Swallowing the last of her drink, she lifted the cat gently to the floor and tiptoed over to the sink. She washed her glass, put on her jacket, and opened the front door slowly so that its creaking hinges wouldn’t wake Dan Sean. Stepping out into the fog, she reached back to close it behind her when the old man’s eyes snapped open behind his thick glasses.

  “Nora,” he said. “That was my wife.” Then he crossed himself, a gesture that, for him, seemed as autonomic as blinking, and fell immediately back to sleep.

  Maggie descended the dark hill on unsteady legs. The fog blotted out the sounds of the town below; no airplanes flew overhead. Animals peeked out of wooden lean-tos and hens pecked along behind chicken wire, watching her with idiot interest. It could be any year, any century. It seemed suddenly possible that a world of ho
rse-drawn traps and the cries of tubercular babies could not be far away, could not, even, have passed on. In the month she had lived in Bray, Maggie had felt pockets of this—this slowing down of time, these reverberations into the past. In America, everything was replaceable; old stuff was thrown away quickly and entirely to make way for the next thing. But in Ireland, the ruined castles that dotted the landscape, the crumbling stone walls that crisscrossed long-held family fields, these all provided the sense that the past drifted, but did not disappear. It was all around you, like mist.

  As she neared the bottom of the hill, Maggie began to wish she had gone home with Colm. Night had collapsed on the countryside; the air was pitch black, cold and brackish on her cheeks. She had an awful thought: how close was the water from here? Where do all these green slopes lead? What if in this darkness she walked straight into the ocean, the seaweed filling her shoes, her liquor-heavy limbs immobile and useless? Of course, she thought, stumbling down the path, of course this is how it would happen. Just when I’m starting to like it here, I accidentally drown.

  It was at this moment—when she was really starting to freak out, when the dulling effects of the alcohol were burned off by fear, when she could no longer feel her toes inside her sodden Converse—that in this empty field, blotted from sound as if in a great, green closet and seemingly out of nowhere, the vision appeared.

  “Hi,” said the vision.

  Maggie hiccupped.

  “You lost?” He was about her age, maybe a little older. It was too dark to tell if he was cute or not.

  “Um. Maybe? Do you know how close we are to the ocean?”

  “You don’t live around here, do you?”

  “I just moved here. My mom married Colm Byrne. We live near the Strand Road. I’m Maggie.”

  “Oh! Right. I heard about that. I’m Eoin.” He peered down the hill. “You going for a swim?”

  “No,” she said. “I was coming home from Dan Sean O’Callaghan’s, but I lost my way.”