Away

by Jane Urquhart

  Granville, no longer distracted by his composition, began to pace, noisily, around the wooden perimeter of the room beyond the edges of the carpet. He cleared his throat a number of times, and now, flourishing a silk handkerchief, he blew his nose. He looked forward to rent day enormously, as it gave him a chance to scout for more folklore and to enquire into the quaint and amusing events that made up his tenants’ simple lives. At that moment he was beginning to feel like a child whose friends had failed to materialize for a long-anticipated birthday celebration.

  “Would it be too much to ask,” said Osbert testily, “for you to sit down and stop fidgeting?”

  Granville collapsed into a chair of red damask much worn by previous generations of Sedgewicks. “That microscope,” he commented, “what does it really tell you about life … I mean beyond those sad, barely discernible, wriggling animals you showed me in that drop of water?”

  Osbert neither answered nor looked up. He had discovered that the eyes were missing from one of his father’s butterflies. He wished he had been able to witness the various stages of their decay. When was the moment when they disappeared completely, and did they depart simultaneously?

  “Can you see, for instance,” Granville continued, “how they survive and what exactly it is that they eat?” He rose to his feet once again and, forgetting his brother’s admonition, walked towards the window with his hands clasped behind his back. “And when that drop evaporates, that drop of water they inhabit, do they then also become vapour? Perhaps they are mysteriously catapulted towards another drop. Vapour returns to the clouds, doesn’t it? So perhaps the little wriggling creatures move up there, reassemble their families, and return to the earth as rain.”

  Osbert was now sketching vacant eye-sockets.

  “What a life!” Granville exclaimed after a long silence. “You must say, what a life! Floating up to the clouds,” he waved his right hand heavenward, “only to be flung back down to earth. And no control, of course. The animals would have no control over any of it.” He narrowed his eyes and peered through the window, down the drive. “What on earth,” he finally whined, “can possibly be keeping them?”

  Osbert pushed his microscope away from him and turned the sheet of drawing paper face down on the table. “I don’t know,” he said, folding his arms and leaning back in the chair. “Has this ever happened before?”

  “You know it hasn’t, not ever.”

  “Have you spoken with any of them recently?”

  “Not for some weeks – I’ve been reading galley proofs. Have you?”

  “I haven’t been out and about … the weather, you know. Are they going about their labours as usual?”

  “Yes … I suppose … I haven’t really noticed.” Granville returned to the damask chair. “Surely they wouldn’t rise up, would they, against us? Not when we appreciate their history and all those songs and stories and the like. They haven’t gone and joined secret societies or anything like that, have they? Not the Molly Maguires or the Hearts of Steele or those other ones, those Whiteboys. Have you seen words like BEWARE CAPTAIN MOONLIGHT or any other such nonsense scribbled on walls? Has anyone said anything?”

  “Not to me, they haven’t. But then they wouldn’t, would they?”

  Granville was becoming agitated. “There’s no need for societies like that here. We live here. There’s no middleman and we’ve always been fair. Furthermore, I, for one, understand the sorrows of Ireland. I, in fact, have given a voice to the sorrows of Ireland.”

  Osbert recalled the woman on the beach. “There has been hardship –” he ventured.

  “But, as you said,” Granville interrupted, “not here … not in Ulster. Or, at least, not great hardship.”

  “There is never great hardship in Ulster.”

  “Never!”

  “Could we have the day wrong?”

  “No.”

  “Well then …” The brothers, embarrassed by this aberration, did not meet each other’s eyes.

  “Do I remember correctly,” Granville asked suddenly, “that O’Donovan’s to be married tomorrow?”

  “Yes … I believe so.”

  “So they’ll be having a sort of ball – fiddle music and the like, dancing and drinking, of course – in O’Donovan Senior’s barn.”

  “Most likely.”

  “I believe that we should attend.” Granville had begun, again, his nervous pacing. “Doesn’t that seem to you like an excellent suggestion?”

  Like the schoolmaster, the groom’s father, Jim O’Donovan, was a smallholder; a man who, in the past, had managed tolerably well on his few acres, feeding his family on eggs, milk, potatoes, and oatmeal, and having his income supplemented by his wife’s spinning and occasional weaving. His lease was renewed annually when he paid rent from the supplemental income, and, in his heart he felt, if not entirely free, at least somewhat independent with two cows, a donkey and cart, and one small plough.

  Only one of his sons would inherit the holding, subdivision being something he could not agree to, due to the meagreness of his land. The remaining boys had moved, or would likely move, to Belfast or Derry to take their places behind the power looms that would eventually put their mother out of business altogether. His two daughters would, with luck, marry the inheriting sons of other smallholders such as himself. The bridegroom in question was to inherit the farm, though in the past he had earned his keep as a labourer on the vast Sedgewick estates.

  O’Donovan Senior was not pleased with the match his son had made; the girl being the daughter of a cottier, or one who had been allowed to rent a cabin and potato plot in return for permanent labour in the Sedgewick corn and grain fields, and hence part of a social order lower than his own. But he was a romantic and rather than have his son mooning around pubs singing songs of love and death – as he, himself, had done at a similar age – he gave his consent to the marriage and agreed to allow the wedding feast to take place in his modest barn, the girl’s father having no barn at all.

  Except that, times being what they were, there would not be much of a feast, the O’Donovan family having been forced to drop to two meals a day of milk and potatoes, and were it not that his own parish priest was a friend to Father Quinn on the island there would have been no whiskey at all. But Quinn had agreed to contribute a small amount of his hoard as his own people, he said, hadn’t the heart or the strength to drink it.

  O’Donovan Senior, moving now with the wedding party, down the rocky, ill-repaired road from the church at Ballyvoy to his barn, had little strength of heart left in himself. He looked at the couple who walked in front of him, his son Hugh dressed in trousers far too short and the bride dressed in a gown that her mother had made for her from a bedsheet that had seen better days and the mother’s own tattered veil which mice had obviously nested in. During the Mass, he had prayed, heretically, that the ragged bride who walked before him would be barren, knowing her to be another mouth to feed at his own table. His wife had wept through all the Latin prayers and the couple’s vows. There was no joy in her tears.

  They had invited few of their neighbours to their barn. The schoolmaster was asked because he had once said to O’Donovan that Hugh was quick at his studies and had filled the father’s heart with great hope. And his quiet wife who had been away, Father O’Brien from the church at Ballyvoy, of course, and Father Quinn as a result of the generous donation of drink, and an old bachelor, by the name of Kavanaugh, friend of the family and well-known fiddler. O’Donovan, even in these grim times, had insisted that there should be some music and some dancing, were the company’s spirits to rise as a result of the whiskey. At first the old man said he would not come, until O’Donovan, in desperation, had shaken his feeble shoulders and shouted “We’re not dead yet!”

  The small party made its way past silent cabins where no one sprang to the doorways to watch, past plots filled with the black leaves of ruined potato plants, past meadows decked with the ironically healthy wildflowers that decorated the brid
e’s head, into O’Donovan’s barn where a scant supper of oatcakes, cheese, and stringy hens’ meat lay waiting. For many this would be the last time they would taste wholesome food. It was fallen upon almost immediately and without conversation and washed down, by old and young alike, with whiskey.

  The old fiddler was the first to look up and then rise from the table. Repeating the line that had brought him to O’Donovan’s barn, he announced in Irish and in a voice disproportionately strong in comparison to his wasted frame, “We’re not dead yet.” Then, with a surprisingly graceful gesture, he picked up his fiddle and bow.

  Anyone standing a mile away on the slopes that led up to Knocklayd Mountain would have been astonished by what was about to take place in the still landscape before them. The day was sultry, overcast, and almost entirely silent – not a breeze to turn a leaf on a tree. Coolanlough, Ballyvoy, Craigfad, and Doon, and all of the Sedgewick estate seemed frozen and abandoned, it being evening and the field labourers having crept dispiritedly home to their cottages. Then, gently, a ribbon of pure sound emerged from the door of one whitewashed barn and wound over the blackened plots, around the ancient raths, under the hawthorn hedgerows. Two hawks, gliding over the valley, seemed to pick up this ribbon in their beaks and carry it on their wings until the whole region was filled with the terrible, beautiful tune borne of an old man’s heart and hands.

  It took only a few moments for people all over the area within hearing distance to emerge from the doors of their cabins, for they were hungry, not only for food, but for the music they thought had left them forever. Out of the dark interiors the ribbon of music drew them, old women leaning on sticks and babes who had barely learned to walk, pale young girls and young men, too, whose strong arms had grown thin. Some of the elderly had not staggered into the light for weeks and now stood blinking at the white sky before lurching forward in search of the song. Soon there appeared several streams of moving flesh which joined to become a river travelling slowly towards O’Donovan’s barn. Without exception, each person was weeping.

  In a short time a dark lake surrounded one whitewashed building and held still for some minutes. Then, like a biblical sea, it parted so that the old man could enter it and stand, still playing, at its centre. When he had finished he lowered the bow and the fiddle. The hawks circled overhead. At the door of the barn the small wedding party looked silently at the crowd of equally silent neighbours, until, from the midst of the crowd, one woman’s voice was heard singing alone.

  O bonny Portmore, you shine where you stand,

  And the more I think on you, the more 1 think long.

  If I had you now, as I had once before,

  All the Lords in old England would not purchase Portmore.

  It was not of her own landscape – the earth beneath her feet – that the lone woman sang, but of a lost world that encompassed all losses. By the second verse five or six other women had joined in and the fiddler had begun to pick out the tune with his bow. Mary, knowing this to be a song about the vanished woods of Ireland, remembered the forest that the other one had shown her, and the song pushed its way out of her mouth before she was aware that she had joined the chorus.

  O bonny Portmore, I am sorry to see

  Such a woeful destruction of your ornament tree.

  For it stood on your shore for full many a long day,

  Till the long boats from Antrim came to float it away.

  There was great sorrow in the song and great joy, also, that the privilege of sorrow had not yet been cast from the people who sang it. The land they stood on had heard songs such as this before and it would hear them again, for it was the music that could not be starved out of it. The women knew that their bones would sing in the earth after their flesh had gone, and the men, who now joined them, knew that the song would make its way through the coming generations.

  The birds of the forest do bitterly weep,

  Saying where shall be shelter, where shall we sleep.

  For the oak and the ash are all cutten down,

  And the walls of bonny Portmore are all down to the ground.

  This was the anthem that greeted Osbert and Granville as they rode in the carriage towards O’Donovan’s barn. Their driver, an old man himself, stopped so that the music would be undisturbed by the sound of horses’ hooves and squeaking axles. Inside, the brothers looked at each other for some minutes, then regarded the floor, embarrassed by the tears that, for reasons they did not understand, were beginning to fill their eyes and by a confused longing that they felt must be evident in their faces.

  “I believe,” said Osbert, when the song had finished, “that they are unable to pay. I believe that’s why they didn’t come.”

  “Yes,” agreed Granville, wiping perspiration from his forehead, “yes … that must be it. Should we turn back?”

  Osbert wanted to turn back; back to the cases of kept things, to the Cave Walk, the long rooms of Puffin Court. But he was suddenly ashamed of his desire to avoid the misery. “I think we should go,” he said quietly. “I think we should give them this.” He jostled a small leather bag full of coins.

  But, as they came nearer to the people, the bag in his hands seemed to shrink until its insignificance was painful to look at, to hold, or to offer. “No,” he blurted, just before they were to turn down the lane that led to the barn. “No … you’re right.” And, tapping on the glass, he motioned for the driver to turn around.

  “These are very bad times,” said Granville.

  Osbert did not answer. He was trying to remove from his mind the disturbing idea that his brother looked ridiculous in his velvet breechcoat, the lace cuffs of which danced in the jolting carriage; that and the even more disturbing idea that he was his brother’s mirror image. He removed his handkerchief and held it to his mouth and nose as they passed a particularly putrid potato plot.

  “What are we going to do?” he asked as he pocketed the piece of cloth. “We must do something. I didn’t tell you this because I didn’t believe it, but the talk is that they’ve been fainting in the fields … from hunger.”

  “There’s too many,” Granville thumped his knee with his fist, “I tell you, there’s always far too many of them! There ought not to be weddings like today – it ought not to be allowed. How are we to manage?”

  When Mary had seen Father Quinn rolling a barrel of the island’s whiskey towards the barn, the morning on the beach three years before came into her mind with such clarity she believed she could recall each wave that had brought the darling one to shore, though she knew this was impossible – nothing being more complicated or unique than the breaking of the surf. Still, the inner picture had caused her to join, emotionally, with the other women in the singing of the sorrowful song. She, like them, believed that they would all soon die and she believed that death would sever her, not only from the world that included the straw under her feet and this pathetic whisper of a wedding, but also from the other world that it had been her privilege to visit, and so she doubly mourned.

  The crowd had begun to organize itself into the various activities that accompanied such occasions, though at this time their celebrations were subdued; the dances quieter, more courtly and resigned. Couples circled each other warily and left a space between them for the third dancer that they knew was among them. Hands touched tentatively or did not touch at all. The girls, especially, danced as if in the grips of some great physical pain, bending over their own arms at the waist or twisting at odd angles away from the young men dancing near them. Faces were almost always averted.

  With Brian beside her, Mary walked away from the agony of the dancing, across the barnyard, towards a group of young men who were quietly arranging themselves into a pattern she did not recognize. Concentrating fiercely, they were seated on the ground with their backs straight and their legs extended in front of them. In two long lines that gradually converged at each end they faced each other, while, in the centre of the shape they made, which was almost that of a diamond, a
tall man and a boy loitered, slouching, their hands in their pockets, a much-mended bedsheet on the ground between them. Two older men surveyed the group then turned at intervals to search the sky.

  “What is it that they’re doing?” Mary asked.

  “Waiting for the wind …” said Brian, “I think they’re waiting for the wind.”

  “But why … why should they be waiting for the wind?”

  “I’ve only seen this at wakes,” said Brian as if he were talking to no one but himself, “and indoors. But now I see that it’s different … and that will be what the sheet is for.”

  “And what –”

  “Wait and you’ll see.” Brian shook his head. “It’s a sad pass,” he lamented, “when the games for wakes come to be acted out at weddings.”

  The fiddler had begun to play again, this time a livelier tune, and the old men were coming forward to take their turns dancing with the bride – a wraith composed of bones and bed-clothes. One gentleman, diminished and ancient and totally dependent upon his stick, seemed to waltz with that object rather than with the girl. The wind, absent all day, appeared and unfurled her bridal veil which, in its fragmented state, looked like a collection of torn clouds.

  Then the shout raised by the young men thundered across the crowd and echoed from the four principal parts of the land-scape: the town of Ballycastle in the distance, Knocklayd Mountain, the Sedgewick demesne, and the moors that rose up to the cliffs. The fiddler lowered his bow, the bride stopped dancing, the whole company froze, then turned.

  Having leapt onto the shoulders of the tall man, the boy stood there balanced perfectly. With one hand over his head and the other by his side he clutched the sheet which had opened itself to the wind. The men who formed the diamond shape had locked arms, and their bodies sloped back from their hips. Mary stared, confused. Her husband cursed – then laughed. Just as she was about to ask him again she understood: the men had used their slim bodies to construct the hull of a ship, their legs for the thwarts, their torsos for the sides, their arms for the gunwales, the young boy and tall man for the mast. Only the bedsheet – the inanimate – moved; a sail twitching in the wind. After the initial shout, the men held motionless; even their faces were entirely still.