The Dancers Dancing

by Eilis Ni Dhuibhne

  On she goes, along the road traversed last night by Pauline, a road that is as well-known to her as almost any other in the world, and that in the morning is a romantic idyllic ribbon, winding its way through a green-and-gold patchwork of fields, past hedges dripping with roses and fuchsia: here is the well, here is Marley’s shop with the old hb pennant hanging from the tree as the only indication that a shop is there, hidden down a lane. You have to knock at the door to get Mrs Marley to come and open the shop and serve you. The shop smells of flour and grain, there are sacks of them lying against the back wall. And just a small wooden table covered with boxes of chocolate bars. Dairy Milk. Whole Nut. Turkish Delight. No Mars Bars. It’s not the North of Ireland. But Orla feels a huge surge of desire for the goods on offer, nevertheless. She aches for a slab of Whole Nut. She can taste, almost, the deep satisfying chocolate, the dryish slightly bitter nuts. If she had some money she’d get one on the way home as a reward.

  She sees a few people she knows as she walks along – it is inevitable, since she knows everyone who lives along this road, and most of them are in some way related to her – close cousins or distant cousins, she never knows which, since Elizabeth likes to acknowledge those who are better-off and pretend that the others don’t exist. She sees her cousin Denis Black cutting hay with a scythe in the field in front of his house. Denis lives in a thatched cottage, perfect in every detail, on a farm that is probably run along the same lines as it was a hundred years ago, or maybe even a thousand years ago. Well, he has a tractor. But otherwise he is growing hay and corn, potatoes, cutting turf on the side of the mountain and bringing it home on a donkey, raising five cows, and farming sheep up in the hills. He lives with his sister. That is the only flaw in the ointment. His sister, Orla’s cousin also, Maisie, who is fresh-faced and beautiful, quick and lively as a kitten, the perfect Irish farmer’s wife. She is the sort of woman who never perms or dyes her hair. It is cut in a snow-white bob. She is the sort of woman who always wears white next to the skin, at least when she is dressed up, and who in the house has a clean overall. Her big hands are always busy churning or cleaning, baking bread, feeding their flocks of chickens and ducks and geese and turkeys. They are the sort of farmers who have a duck pond and ducks as well as boring old chickens, the sort who have a pony as well as donkeys, the sort who have busy lizzies on the inside windowsills (at this stage, nobody in Donegal, perhaps in Ireland, puts potted flowers on the outside windowledges) and a rambling rose, palest most translucent most heartbreaking pink, around the door. The half door. They are the kind of people who still have a half door, a settle bed in the bed outshot, a crane hanging over the open fire, a big black kettle always boiling. Stone floors, white walls, that smell of grain, a dry clean nutty smell. They could be in an open-air museum, everything is so spic-and-span and perfect. But they are not. They are living here, efficiently and economically, and doing well enough, apparently, although it takes a lot of work to keep the whole enterprise going.

  Charming. Denis is six feet four, brown, with a long face, a bit simian actually, large-jawed like those cartoons but unlike them very handsome. And very Anglo-Saxon in his wiriness and height. He could be American. He could be from Nebraska or Nevada or Minnesota, a weathered farmer of the grainlands. Or from Massachusetts or eastern Connecticut. And Maisie could be a star. Little house on the prairie. She has a Laura Ingalls Wilder face, rosy and clean, wide-smiled, blue-eyed, a Sound of Music face.

  Never married. That is a problem, but they are just a statistic, a brother-and-sister arrangement, common maybe in these parts of Ireland in the past. A kind of economy of incest operated, although probably not real incest, not in their case anyway. Their libido, their sexuality, must have found its outlet in work. You have to work eighteen hours a day, hard, to keep that little cottage and farm in perfect shape. And it is in perfect shape. It is, even Orla can realise, perfect of its kind, a monument to the way of life that is just ebbing away now from Tubber. The tide going out. Willow basket making and the bed outshot. Duck ponds. Scything hay, that long graceful stroke, the strength and endurance required to do it. Hay ripening in the July sun, lying in swishing delicious pale swathes on the ground, stacked, the shape of Christmas puddings, the colour of the sun, in the corner of that field opposite the door of the cottage, the home field, the kind of little field close to the house all farms have. Where the haystacks are, the calves, the ducks, the carthorse, the home field where the house and the land meet and mingle. Muddle: there is the old coulter, the ploughshare no longer used.

  The rural idyll, real Ireland. You sense the wholeness walking through the door, or imagine that the neatness and activity and beauty and naturalness mean wholeness. Maisie and Denis don’t seem to worry about money. They have enough. They don’t seem to worry about anything, but they obviously have high standards. Living up to their high standards, which are different from anything else in this valley, keeps them happy. They must have sad moments, at the end of dark winter days when there is not so much to be done and nothing, after work, to occupy them. But these moments are apparently few, and visitors would never be aware of them.

  Denis and Maisie. It would be nice to acknowledge them, it would be nice if they were her true aunt and uncle instead of her third cousins, and if the house she stayed in with her parents were their cottage instead of Auntie Annie’s dour grey stone house. Orla is not ashamed of everyone in this place, just of Annie. But still she has not visited Denis and Maisie either. She hasn’t even been ordered to do that. It is as if everyone knows that they have enough common sense not to expect a child to pay a call to them. And Annie has not got that much sense.

  Maisie and Denis don’t speak Irish either, for some complicated reason to do with a mother from another area, something like that. They didn’t speak Irish to their mother, and when they were nine or ten they were hired out as farm hands to farmers in Tyrone. Hired girls and hired boys, they were. And of course everyone spoke English in Tyrone, only English. That was where Denis and Maisie had learned to be such excellent farmers, such neat housekeepers. Professionally trained by the hardworking Presbyterian farmers of the Lagan, and their neat thrifty wives. The thing about Denis and Maisie is that their place is perfect because it is not, strictly speaking, typical of Tubber. It is a Protestant farm on a Catholic hillside. Its influences manifest themselves in the cut of the kitchen, the neatness of the yard, the clean worn ancient utensils. The tidy golden thatch. Keeping things, acknowledging and cherishing what you have rather than abandoning and replacing it, is the key to the ethos. Most people Orla knows are constantly reinventing themselves and their environments. But the old Protestant country attitude is to conserve. So Maisie and Denis’s farm is the only one in Tubber still to look exactly as it must have looked a hundred years ago. It looks like that but still remains in pristine condition. Hard work is necessary to stand still. The result could be an exhibit in a folk museum. Someday this house will be lifted, stone by stone, and rebuilt in a park near Belfast. But for the moment it is the home of Orla’s cousins, safe in its niche under the hills.

  Orla waves at Denis and he waves back. But he doesn’t really recognise her. He would wave at any stranger. Country manners. Orla walks on, not unrelieved, and hopes she doesn’t meet anyone else.

  She doesn’t.

  It is not such a long road, maybe a mile long, and soon she is turning the corner into Aunt Annie’s street. It spreads before her like a framed picture. Balm of Gilead is a phrase that comes into her head. She does not know why, or even where it comes from. Not from the Bible, with which she is totally unfamiliar, at least directly. She has read this phrase in some novel, maybe Little Women or some novel like that. Spreading eucalyptus trees. There are no balm of Gilead trees here, or eucalyptus, of course there are not. But there are spreading trees of some kind – sycamores – at one side of the street, and at the other, where it bends and goes out to meet the road again, a cluster of Scots pines, dark as green can get before becoming black. In
between are the byre, white with red wood trimmings, the cobbled street, with the hens and a few ducks scrabbling among the stones, the house flanked by the stables on one side, the barn on another, like two arms reaching out. It looks, Orla sees for the first time, quite nice. Quite large and generous and old- fashioned and nice. Nicer than the Dohertys’ house, if not quite as nice as that of Maisie and Denis. She stands and looks at it admiringly. Maybe, once, there was a buzz of life around this house. Warm family life: nice-looking women and children, tough, competent men, moving across the yard, in and out of the barn and stable. Action, laughter, talk. Song. Even song. Even music. Nobody in Orla’s family, now, sings or plays an instrument or even listens much to music. Maybe ...

  It is all so empty, like the schoolhouse, although much more appealing, even empty, than any schoolhouse. What dwelling house would not be?

  She walks, without too much effort, down the street to the door of the house. The house is whitewashed now, and the door and windows are painted red, the favourite colour for doors and windows in the locality. There is no knocker on the door, just a latch. Usually you open the latch and walk in. But when she tries the latch it doesn’t engage. The door is locked.

  She rattles on it a few times and then knocks on the wood with her fist. There is no response. She goes to the window of the kitchen and peers in. Through the curtains she can see most of the kitchen: the square stone floor with a bit of worn linoleum in the centre, the black range, the electric ring, battered pewter or tin, with its coils of tubing like a spiral drawing in the Book of Kells, on the table just inside the window. The red chest for layers’ mash. But no sign of Annie.

  Irritated, disappointed, she bangs once again at the door, with a stone this time. But she knows it is pointless. If Annie were at home the door would be open – she knew the minute she lifted the latch and felt it flop back limply against the door that the fateful encounter was not going to occur.

  She puts the brown paper package of wool, and the paper bag containing the stockings on the stone slab beside the door. She notices the texture of the slab: grey stone, a sort of grey sandy concrete, with small pebbles and stones mixed through it, not rough but soft and bumpy under her knees. It is surrounded by a border of grey slate. Somebody bothered, once, to go to the trouble of setting this slab outside the door, and decorating it. And then there is a path of stones from the door to the byre, where women go to the toilet and where they also milk the cows. The path is not cobbled but made of stones set on their sides like half moons and cemented into the ground. Not comfortable to walk on but interesting to look at. Somebody had gathered the stones, hundreds of them, probably on the beach, and set them carefully one by one into this path, which is the kind of path a child would like to make. It is like the work of setting shells in the sides of a sand castle. And somebody has done that too, on the portico surrounding the door. It is carefully encrusted with barnacle shells and oyster shells, so that the entire surround is shining and shimmering. A bit silly-looking, Orla has often thought. A bit childish and a bit in bad taste.

  She looks at the packages standing on the stone and on second thoughts removes them and places them on the windowsill. The scrawny cat, a cat without a name, so unimportant is she, comes along and rubs her legs, and then jumps up on the windowsill to investigate the parcel.

  Orla walks away from the door through the street, which is the name given to the farmyard. Orla is not planning to go to the beach but she walks out by that way rather than doubling back on her tracks. She feels disappointed, and this feeling shocks her. Why should she be disappointed at evading what she dreaded so much? She walks slowly along the cobbled street, feeling the round edges of the stones bite into her sandals.

  Passing the barn she hears a small sound. The big red door is ajar and she looks inside.

  Dim, dusty, smelling of dry hay and leather, the barn is dominated by a huge old threshing machine, which looks like a clumsy Cinderella coach. It hasn’t been used in thirty or forty years but it lies there, with some bits of hay around it, along with the old harnesses for long-dead horses, the broken donkey cart, the rusty plough. The cats live in the barn. When Orla played there she was often surprised, frightened even, by the sudden appearance of a cat or a kitten, skinny and half-starved, emerging from some secret nest and peering at her with curious eyes before dashing away again. They were half-wild, the cats, hunting animals, terrified and terrifying.

  There was something else in this barn. The chemical toilet. A plastic bin that you sat on in the middle of the huge dark room, much too big for comfort. Toilets should be small and hidden, even cats know that much.

  Orla can’t see much through the crack in the door. She can see the big outlines, though, the thrashing machine, the cart. She can see, since her eyes travel to its position quickly and automatically, the toilet, in its central position.

  On the floor a figure, lying.

  The figure is just a heap, a heap in the darkness. It might be anything. It might be an old sack. It might be a bag of rubbish or a bag of turf or a sack of potatoes. There is no reason to believe that it is anything else, nothing in its shape or movement to indicate that it is anything other than one of these, or something else entirely. The dog, Murphy the dog, asleep.

  Except that Auntie Annie wouldn’t keep sacks of turf or potatoes or even rubbish there, in the barn, next to the toilet.

  And Murphy would not choose it as a place to lie down, for more reasons than one. The cats. The smell. The dryness. The dark. None of these things appeal to him.

  Orla shuts her eyes and then she closes over the door, just a little. She doesn’t fasten it up. Usually when Auntie Annie leaves the house it is fastened, locked with a stick which you pass through a loop. Orla looks at the big stick, dark grey with tiny bits of red paint still clinging to it. She sees herself picking it up and passing it through its loop, something she has done often before, and something she always enjoyed doing, passing the big heavy stick through the loop, feeling its lovely smoothness, hearing the little almost inaudible click it made as it slotted into place, firmly fastening the door. (Why? Anyone could open it from the outside, there was no lock. What it could do was prevent any animal or any person inside the barn getting out.)

  She sees herself performing this action.

  But maybe she does not do it. The picture of the stick passing through the loop is in her head as she runs down the lane, out onto the road to the shore ...

  The burn scene four

  The burn runs by the side of Aunt Annie’s road, wide and quiet here, a deep sweet thoughtful river, not a burn any longer, although they still call it the burn anyway. The same name, or non-name, sticks to it right along its course, no matter what it looks like.

  There is a bridge over the river just by Aunt Annie’s, a humpbacked stone bridge, and Orla has often played on this bridge on holidays with Elizabeth and her father. The same game always. Putting sticks in the river on one side of the bridge and catching them at the other, trying to catch them as they floated out. It wasn’t always easy, since the current got stronger just after the bridge and then they got borne swiftly downstream. Lost. But usually she caught them. It is one of the best games she has ever played, she thinks now, crossing the bridge. The stick game, a game without a name but one that all children who ever come near a bridge must play. The sticks were like her happiness, thrown onto the stream and floating along underground in dark damp green places. Elusive, darting like little animals, little fishes. Little birds. You had to catch them, you had to stand and wait and catch them as they surfaced, and you had to be quick or you would lose some. But you could always go back and try again. As you watched one stick bob off, disappear in the river, you could turn and go right back to the bank at the far side of the bridge and throw in another stick. There were lots of them and each one had the potential to make you feel great as you sent it off on its precarious journey, as you waded in the deep cold water and retrieved it. Dogs must feel like that when they ca
tch ducks, cats when they catch birds. Catching sticks, catching anything, is catching joy. So it seems.

  Micheál is standing in the burn. She doesn’t see him at first he is so quiet, standing there close to the bank with his eyes on the water, waiting. Like Alasdair further upstream. But he does not look like Alasdair. He looks like the playboy of the western world or something, the hero of some historical romance about Ireland, or even Italy. Orla looks at him standing there and realises that he is the most beautiful boy she has ever seen. He is tall and well built, with brown eyes and brown skin, brown from being out of doors all the time. His mouth is full and red, and his hair is dark red and glossy, curling over his head and down over the nape of his neck. He is wearing a white shirt rolled up at the sleeves, and blue jeans which are not rolled up and must be wet through. When he steps onto a flat rock for a minute she sees that his feet are bare, and she can see the shape of his feet on the flat golden rock – they look bony and golden, long narrow graceful feet, unlike any male feet she has seen before. She stands on the bridge for a few minutes, two or three minutes. Then he glances up and sees her. He is obviously taken aback: it must be clear to him that she has been staring at him for a while; now that he catches sight of her he remembers that he felt eyes on him all the time, as his eyes were on the fish he is stalking. But her eyes have forced him to take his off his quarry, something he never does. He stares back at her for a moment: he recognises her immediately, he has known her for years although she has never really spoken to him. They look at each other and Orla smiles and raises her hand a fraction from the bridge in something that is about one tenth of a wave. He doesn’t smile or make a gesture.