She wanted to go home. She wished like a child fatigued of fun to see Ireland again.
‘I’d like to take off soon,’ she said to Joseph but she saw coming across his face a villainous look. He was drunk with red wine and wandering by the sea like an old man in Leenane. ‘I want to go,’ she told herself, ‘I want to go.’
Summer edged in. She plucked wild flowers and wondered about her children and her children’s children and asked herself if this her cup had not brimmed too high. ‘Was it all folly?’ she demanded of herself. Was it a madness that drove people littler than herself into Ballinasloe mental hospital to enquire daily if they were saints or sinners? She began to wonder at her own sanity and placed wine bottles full of wild roses on the sands of Carmargue before crying out, ‘Am I going mad? Am I going mad?’ They brought her first to a priest, then to a doctor in Marseilles. They left her alone in a white room for two days.
‘Joseph Finnerty I curse you,’ she said. Then he came and took her and placed her on a horse and rode towards their caravans in Camargue. ‘We’re going back to Ireland,’ he said.
They arrived on a June morning and they set tracks to Connaught. The day was fine and on the way they heard that O’Rourke, king of the Tinkers, was dead. ‘You’ll be the next king of the Tinkers,’ Eileen said.
She arranged he fight Crowley his opponent in Mountshannon. Women stood by with Guinness and cider and children paddled among the fresh roses and geraniums. She saw her lover strip to the waist and combat a man his senior and she recalled her father’s words, ‘Lucky is the man who wins ye.’
This man over the others had won her.
She wrapped a shawl about her as they fought and fell to the ground. In the middle of combat her gaze veered from fight to lake where birds dropped like shadows. ‘I have travelled at last,’ she said. ‘There’s a hunger and a lightness returned to my body. A grandmother and mother I’m not no more but a woman.’
After Joseph fought and won they drove off to a pub pushing out from a clump of rhododendrons and celebrated.
‘Jesus, Mother,’ said Mary. ‘Have you no sense?’
‘Sense I haven’t but I have a true man and a true friend,’ she said.
She was held in high esteem now and where she went she was welcomed. Age was creeping up on her but there were ways of sidling away from it.
She’d jump on a horse and race with Joseph. He was a proud man and faithful to her.
Also he was a learned man and conversed with school teachers.
In Cairo he’d had tuition from French Jesuits. He spoke in French and English and Romany and could recite French poets or Latin poets.
When it came to his turn at a feast he’d not play the whistle but sing a song in the French language.
Finally he grew younger before her eyes as she grew older. In France she’d fled because it was a bad match. Here there was nowhere to go.
It was lovely, yes, but her eyes were becoming criss-crossed like potato patches.
‘I have reached an age that leads towards the grave,’ she wept to herself one evening, ‘I am an old banshee.’ Joseph comforted her, not hearing, but maybe knowing.
She watched him bathe in the Shannon and knew he should be with a woman younger than her but that yet she loved him and would cut her throat for him. She saw in his eyes as he looked from the water the stranger that he was and the stranger that he was going to be.
In 1957 he fell from a horse in the fair green in Ballinasloe and was killed.
She remembered the curse on him in the South of France and knew it to have come true.
She watched the flames burning and coaxing at the wake and recalled his words in France. ‘Our secrets are the secrets of the universe, a child, a woman with child, a casual donkey. We are the sort that Joseph was when he fled with Mary.’He was educated by French Jesuits and held comers in his tongue and twists in his utterances. He was a poet and a Tinker and a child of the earth.
She recalled the lady in the manor long ago who’d befriended her, to whom she’d go with bushels of heather on summer evenings.
Why was it that woman had been haunting and troubling her mind recently?
It had been so long since she’d known her yet she bothered her. Had it been warning of Joseph’s death? All her life despite the fact she was just a Tinker she’d met strange people.
From the woman in the manor who’d asked her to tea one day, to the French Gypsy who’d become her lover as old age dawned upon her. He’d been the strangest of all, brown face, eyes that twinkled like chestnuts in open pods. Yes, he’d been a poet as well as a lover. He’d been of the earth, he’d gone back to it now. He’d possessed the qualities of the unique like the cockney music-hall girl who’d attracted the attention of an Irish peer and came to live in a manor, finding a friend in a Tinker from a hovel of tents and caravans.
She watched the flames dance and saw again the white horses of Camargue, flurrying in uncertain unison, and would have walked into the fire ablaze had someone not held her and comforted her and satiated her as her moans grew to the sound and shape of seals in bays west of Ballinasloe.
‘Eileen wake up. Do you know what’s happened? They’ve killed an old man.’
Eileen looked at her daughter. ‘Who?’
‘Tinker lads.’
Eileen stared. So death had come at last. They’d killed an old man. ‘May they be cursed,’ she said, ‘for bringing bad tidings on our people. May they be forsaken for leaving an old way of life, for doing what no Travelling people have ever done before.’
As it happened the old man was not dead. Just badly beaten up.
Some Tinkers had gone to rob him, took all and hit him with a delft hot-water jar.
‘The Travellers have already gone from the green.’
‘Ballinasloe fair week without the Tinkers,’ Eileen said. ‘What a terrible sight the green must be.’
She saw more Tinkers than she’d ever seen before.
They came like apostles as a priest rummaged with broken words.
‘Is it dying you think I am? Well, it’s not dying I am,’ said Eileen.
She saw five children like the seven dwarfs. ‘These too will grow to drink cider outside the Gresham in Dublin,’ she thought, as candles lit and the priest talked about the devil.
Her great-grandson Owen was living with a rich American woman in an empty hotel in Oughterard. ‘What next?’
Her head sunk back.
She saw Joseph again and the flames and wanted again to enter but knew she couldn’t. She woke.
‘If it’s dying I am I want to die in peace. Bring me to the crossroad in Aughrim.’ A Pakistani doctor nearly had concussion but the solemn occasion speeded up as a nun intervened.
Young nurses watched Eileen being carted off.
They laid her on the ground and a Galway woman keened her. The voice was like sharp pincers in her ears.
Now that they were saying she was on the verge of death ancient memories were budging and a woman, the lady of the manor, was moving again, a woman in white, standing by French windows, gazing into summer.
She’d had fuzzy blonde hair and maybe that was why she’d looked at Joseph more closely the first time she saw him. She had the same eyes, twinkling brazen eyes.
She heard again the lady’s voice. ‘No, I won’t go in,’ answering her husband. ‘It’s not evening. It’s just the afternoon.’
Eileen woke.
The stars shone above like silver dishes. The bushes were tipped with first frost.
She stirred a bit. ‘Is it better I’m getting?’ she wondered. She moved again and laughed.
Her bones felt more free. She lifted her head. ‘They might be killing old men but they won’t kill me.’
She stirred. A girl heard her.
Women shook free from tents and gazed as though at Count Dracula.
In the morning she was hobbling on a stick.
She hobbled down the lane and gazed on the Galway road. ‘I’ll have
duck for dinner,’ she said. ‘Ye can well afford it with all the shillings you’re getting from the government.’
At Christmas she was able to hobble, albeit with the help of a stick, into the church, crossing herself first with holy water.
The Man from Korea
Afterwards it had the awkward grace of a legend; a silence when his name was mentioned, an implied understanding of what had happened. Few know what actually happened though, so to make it easier for you to understand I will make my own version.
I was five when he came to town, a child at street comers. I was an intensely curious child, a seer, one who poked into everyone’s houses and recalled scandal, chagrin and disgrace. I know all about the Hennessys and if I don’t let me pretend to.
He came in 1956. He was a young man of twenty-nine but already there was something old about him. He recalled the fires of the Korean War. He’d been an American pilot there. I’m not sure what he saw but it left his face with a curious neglect of reality; he stared ahead. Sometimes a donkey, a flying piece of hay, a budding tree at the end of the street would enthral him but otherwise silence. He kept quiet. He kept his distance. He shared very few things but he talked much to me. By a fire in the Hennessys’, flames spitting and crying out, he talked of the sacred places of Asia, shrines to draconian goddesses, seated statues of Buddha.
I always nodded with understanding.
I suppose that’s why he trusted me. Because, although a child of five, I was used to lengthy conversations with fire-brigade men, painters, road-sweepers. So he and I discussed Buddha, Korea and sunsets that made you forget war, long raving sunsets, sunsets of ruby and a red brushed but not destroyed by orange. The air became red for odd moments in Korea; the redness stood in the air, so much so you could almost ensnare a colour.
He had blond hair, sharpened by glints of silver and gold, a face tainted by a purple colour. It was as though someone had painted him, brush strokes running through his appearance, a glow, a healthiness about it, yet always a malign image before his eyes that kept him quiet, that compelled an austerity into eyes that would otherwise have been lit by handsomeness in the middle of a strange, arresting and, for an Irish small town, very distinctive face.
He came in April, time when the hedgerows were blossoming, time when Tinkers moved on and anglers serenely stood above the river. Light rains penetrated his arrival; talk of fat trout and drone of drovers in the pub next door to the Hennessys in the evening.
The Hennessys were the most auspicious young ladies in town. Margaret and Mona. They’d been left a small fortune by a father who won the Irish Sweep Stakes once and the pools another time. Their father had spent his whole life gambling. His wife had left him in the middle of it all. But before he died he won large stakes of money and these passed to his daughters. So his life wasn’t in vain. They made sure of that, gambling and feasting themselves, an accordion moving through the night, taking all into its rhythms, sound of a train, flash of a bicycle light. The Hennessy girls sported and sang, inflaming passions of spinsters, rousing priests like devils, but retaining this in their sitting room, a knowledge of joy, a disposition for good music and songs that weren’t loud and sluttish but graced by magic. Such were the songs I heard from bed up the road, songs about the Irish heart forever misplaced and wandering on Broadway or in Sydney, Australia, miles from home, but sure of this, its heritage of bog, lake and Irish motherhood.
The Hennessys had no mother; she’d gone early but their house was opened as a guesthouse before their father won his fortunes and so it continued, despite money and all, less a guesthouse, more a hospice for British anglers and Irish circus artistes. One travelling painter with a circus painted the Rock of Cashel on the wall. A fire blazed continually in the back room and the sweetness of hawthorn reigned.
You don’t bring hawthorn into the house, it’s bad luck; but the Hennessys had no mind for superstition and their house smelt of hedgerow, was smitten by sound of distant train, and warmed by a turf fire. Karl came to this house in 1956.
He meant to stay for a few weeks. His stay lasted the summer and if he did go early in autumn it was only because there was hurt in his stay.
The girls at first kept their distance, served him hot tea, brown bread, Chivers marmalade. He spent a lot of time by the fire, not just staring into it but regulating his thoughts to the outbursts of flame. He had seen war and one was aware of that; he was making a composition from war, images of children mowed down and buildings in flame. He came from a far country and had been in another far country. He was a stranger, an ex-soldier, but he was capable of recognizing the images of the world he hailed from in the flames of a fire in a small town in Ireland. I suppose that’s why people liked him. He had the touch, just the touch of a poet.
Margaret and Mona nursed him like a patient; making gestures towards his solitude, never venturing too far but the tone of their house altering; the parties easing out and a meditativeness coming, two girls staring into a fire, recalling their lives.
Their father had brought them up, a man in a coffee-coloured suit, white shirt always open. They’d been pretty girls with ribbons like banners on their heads. Their father would bring them to the bog, bring them to picnics by the river, bring them on outings to Galway. Not a very rich man, he was a rent collector, but eventually won all around him and left them wealthy.
Karl when he came sat alone a lot, walked the limestone street, strolled by the river. His shirt, like their father’s, was white and opennecked, his suit, when he wore it, granite grey but more than often he wore jeans and shirts, dragon-red with squares of black on them.
Even his eyebrows were blond, coming to a sudden quizzical halt.
He often smoked a cigarette as though it was a burden. Sometimes a bird seemed to shock him or a fish leaping with a little quiver of jubilation. The mayfly came, the continual trespass of another life on the water.
I followed Karl, the stranger, watched him sit by the river, close to the sign advertising God. ‘What shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?’
An elm tree sprayed with life in a field. A young man sat on the grass by the river. The Elizabethan fortress shouldered ivy.
Karl spoke little and when he did it was in the evening, in the pub, to the drovers. He was ‘The Yank’, but people tolerated this in him. He had no big car, no fast money, an urgency in his quietness, a distinction in his brows.
Margaret and Mona accustomed themselves to him and brought him to the bog with them. On an old ass and cart. Two young ladies with pitchforks in the bog, bottles of orange juice readily available, plastic bags of ice, and the summer sun at its height above them, grazing their work with its heat, its passing shadows, its sweltering fog towards evening. He helped them, becoming tanned; the complexion of sand on him, in his face, above his eyes, in his hair. He worked hard and silently. The ass wandered by the river and the girls frequently assessed the situation, sitting, drinking orange.
Margaret was the youngest but looked older; tall, pinched, cheekbones like forks on her and eyes that shot out, often venomously, often of an accord of their own, chestnut eyes that flashed and darted about and told an uncertain tale.
Mona was softer, younger-looking, mouse hair on her, a bush of it, and eyes that were at once angelic and reasonable. Her eyes told no tales though.
The river running through the bog was a savage one, foraging and digging, a merciless river that took sharp corners. Donkeys lazed by it; cows explored it; reeds shot up in it; in summer a silver glow on it that seduced.
Margaret and Mona were tolerant of me, using me to do messages, paying me with Goldgrain biscuits or pennies. I talked to them though they didn’t listen. They made a lot of cakes now and I sat licking bowls. Karl received their attention with moderate ease. He was slightly afraid of it yet glad of their kindness.
I felt him to be gentle though I wouldn’t go so far as to say he hadn’t done terrible things; however, what was more than
likely was that he was haunted by the deeds of others.
In mid-July an American aunt came and visited Margaret and Mona, a lady from Chicago. She was from Karl’s city and Karl visibly recoiled, going out more, seeking bog and river. This lady danced around, trimmed her eyebrows a lot, polished her nails.
She kept the girls in abeyance, talked to them as though talking to pet dogs. She had a blue hat that leapt up with a start, a slight veil hanging from the hat. She challenged everyone, me included, as to who they were, where they were from, who their parents were and what their ambition in life was. Karl was unforthcoming. I told her I was going to be a fire-brigade man in China, but Karl said nothing, pulled on a cigarette, his eyes lifting a little.
She wanted to know where in Chicago he hailed from. He muttered something and she chattered on again, encompassing many subjects in her discursiveness, talking about the weather, the bog, her relatives in Armagh, Chicago, the Great Lakes, golf, swimming, croquet, timber forests, Indian reservations, the Queen, Prince Philip and lastly her dog, who’d jumped under a car one day when he’d been feeling—understandably—despairing.
Karl looked as though he was about to go when she left. The girls moved closer then, tried to ruffle him a bit, demanded more of him. He sang songs for them, recited poetry about American Indians. They listened. Mona had a song or two, songs about death and the banshee’s call to death. Margaret was jealous of Mona’s voice and showed her jealousy by pursing her scarlet lips.
They had parties again, entertaining the roguish young clerks. They had dances and sing-songs, the gramophone searing the nights with Ginger Rogers.
Karl went to church with them sometimes. He looked at the ceremonies as though at something difficult to understand, the hurried Latin, the sermons by the priest always muttered so low no one could hear them.
Mona went to Dublin early in September and bought new clothes. Margaret followed her example in doing this.
I went into the sitting room one evening and Margaret had her arm on Karl’s shoulder. He talked about the War now for the first time, the planes, the screams, trees and houses fighting for their lives, the children moaning and the women grabbing their children. He recalled the fighter planes, the village targets; he spoke of the mercilessness of war. People asked for alms. They got war. Margaret recounted her father’s tales about the Black and Tans, the butcheries, the maiming, and Mona philosophically added, ‘Thank God we didn’t have Churchill or Hitler here. Those men were just interested in the money.’
Lark's Eggs Page 5
