A Country of Eternal Light

by Darby Harn

  “If you’ve got three, the first two should suffice to account for the good of everyone else. No black hole, peace on earth and a personalized check for one billion Euro hand delivered to me by Helen Mirren in a black lace teddy.”

  “You’ve thought of this before,” I say.

  “I’ve plenty of time to think out here.”

  I follow the arc of his lure across the shale horizon. It’s been weeks, maybe longer, since I’ve seen the azure blue of day or the royal blue of night. Since I’ve seen the stars or the trouble the black hole had made of them.

  “How’s Iris, then?”

  I sit on a shelf of rock. “She’s close now.”

  He nods. “I’m sorry.”

  “I was ready, you know. To do it. For both of us.”

  “Aye. And now?”

  “All I want is to be there in the cemetery with Ma and Da and… I can get out there, at low tide. If I stay, the water will sweep me away and I think that’s what I should do. I should bring Ma down there and we can both…”

  I stifle my cry in my hand.

  Colm reels the line back in. He bends over to his tackle box – knees not bending at all – and switches out lures. The old man is always tinkering, adjusting, trying to make things work. He keeps going over the same thing again and again, certain he’ll figure it out. He’ll find life in the line again.

  “I’ve told you about Katmandu,” he says.

  “You have.”

  “The Hindus, burning the dead on the river.” He scratches his chin. “In Hindu thinking all the universe is divine, and everything in it is a manifestation of divinity itself. A manifestation of God. You can predict a Catholic man’s response to this. The question becomes, is death divine? Brutality? Indifference? Cruelty? All of the suffering in the world. And the answer is, in the end…”

  “You have to say yes to it?”

  Colm reels in his line, slack, and then slings it back to the water. “You have to accept it.”

  “How can you accept any of this, Colm?”

  “Because it is.”

  This flash of heat goes through me. The cold gone, in a snap. All the soreness in my body. It is what it is. Easy for him to say. He’s lived his life.

  “People were starving before all this,” I say. “People were dying, every day for some war or some disaster somewhere else in the world. Was that just the way it was?”

  “It doesn’t mean do nothing, Mairead.”

  “What does it mean then?”

  “It means live. Participate. This is. You are. This is who we are. This is what’s happening to us. We have to say yes to our story, our failures and our regrets, or else we don’t have a story.”

  “Is that what you think about Declan?”

  Colm reels in his fishing line, and rests the rod against the stone as he sits beside me. The wind blisters us with spray. I shield my face but he doesn’t. His cheeks are raw. Red. His hands white. Calluses across his palms. He’s as naked as the rock out here, and as battered. As persistent.

  “I have to accept what happened,” he says. “I can’t change it. If I could go back in time and make it so it never happened… would I go back and make it so he was never born? Your father never died, and the two of us were never drunk and lonely? Would I change it you were never born? I wouldn’t. I can’t. I can’t untangle our joy from our misery, Mairead. No one can. I have to accept it.”

  I shake my head. “I can’t…”

  “And once I had… once I embraced the pain… I could see beyond it. I could see the good memories again. The joy. All the good he brought in my life and he was there again.”

  I look behind me, toward the shore. “He’s waiting…”

  “This is all there is, Mairead. You already know that. You’ve always known it. That’s what spurred you to New York, and what drove you through the doubt of raising that boy. This is life. This is living. Our joy and our eternity is here, now.”

  “He’s waiting for me…”

  “He’s here,” Colm says, his voice breaking. “He’s with you, wherever you go. Just like your father. Iris. Gavin.”

  A cloud of birds morph through a series of increasingly frantic shapes over the manic sea. Something is dead down there, beached on rocks swamped in foam and seaweed and tide. The ocean swells beyond Inishèan. Waves build and crest toward clouds, distorting the horizon and shrinking it seems the distance between the island and an America I imagine quiet. At peace.

  I take Colm’s hand. “Aren’t you afraid?”

  “Terrified.”

  “But you accept this?”

  “I have to,” he says. “Doesn’t mean I like it. Doesn’t mean I won’t come out here to get as much fish as I can for as many people as I can. Doesn’t mean I won’t imagine slipping and falling and being relieved of my worries. But I get up in the morning, because the morning is there. Just like you do. Just like you will, so long as you’re able.”

  “Colm…”

  He squeezes my hand, and lets go. Colm throws his line out again, as he has done since he was a boy. Hours we’re there on the ledge. These fish, they’ve caught on.

  Every day the same: breakfast with Aoife, sit with Ma, walk down the road as far as the tide allows. Some days I sit at the crest of the hill going down into the cemetery. Some days I fall into long trenches of remembering you, deeper and darker the further I go, your voice echoing back and forth between the narrowing walls of my hope and my fear. Some days I find myself knee deep in water without remembering how I got there. Some days the sound of my own voice jars me out of my fugue, and I look at Ma, stranded in her bed somewhere between life and death. Consciousness and dreams. We’re stranded. The sky never loses its red. The sea its anger. The island its secrets.

  Ma calls out to the dark. “Weialala leia…”

  She doesn’t eat. I keep a bedpan nearby for her, but Ma passes nothing but nonsense. Her hands shrivel to knots of bone. Her cheeks sink and her face becomes riven with the lines of her age, the stress and endurance of her life, the surface of her tortured and stretched, pulled and pried apart from the collapse of human will within.

  “Wallala leialala…”

  “Ma…” I brush her thin hair. “Ma, do you hear me?”

  “Weialala…”

  “Do you remember?” I say. “The day he was born? Only time I ever saw you cry. I had to fight you for him.”

  Drool courses the channels in the corners of her mouth to pool in her chin. I wipe it away. I caress the hair out of her eyes, clenched shut, and put my hands to her cheeks, constantly inflating and deflating with random noises and sounds.

  “Maybe I put too much on you, asking you to look after him. I should have had you all at the home, like. I don’t know.”

  “Maaaaaa…”

  “I don’t know anything anymore.”

  “Raiiiiii…”

  “Colm talks about saying yes to this, but… I just want us to be together. I close my eyes and I see Declan. The sun in his hair. He’s reaching out to me. I don’t know. What if there’s nothing else? What if this is it? We should act like it. I should have acted like it. We could have all been together. I think I’m going to be the last person here. I’m going end up like one of these shells out on the beach. Just pieces. Picked up and left here from God knows where. Powder.”

  Ma gulps. I squeeze her hand. The engine keeps on chugging.

  “You’re so strong,” I say. “Whatever strength I had was your strength. I need your help, Ma. I need you to look after him again. Would you look after him for me? For now?”

  Her breathing slows. The fierce pumping of her cheeks and the mashing of her gums. This sound sighs out of her. I wait for her breath to pick up, but it never does. What peace there is in our house breaks with my sobs. This scratching at the door.

  Fire eats the roof of the house.

  In minutes it’s gone. The home I grew up in caves in on itself. I stand on the road with the dog in quiet observance. Neighbors come wit
h pails. I wave them off. The trickle of people up the high road becomes a funeral procession. Iris was well known on the island for her cantankerousness; if anyone would make it to the end, she would. Even in her sickness, people saw the island in her. Strong, battered, defiant against the tides. The old rock of Inishèan.

  Is folamh fuar e teach gan bean.

  All who can stand on the low road in the snow and wind and rising tide and hold hats and hands to their slowing hearts for what has passed and will never come again. Their voices rise like glasses in toast, tired, ragged, one at a time and then all at once.

  Fainne oir ort! Slan, Iris.

  Inishèan has lost its strength. The end comes quick now, like death on a body void of will.

  Chapter Fifteen

  At low tide, I go down to the harbor to fill bottles.

  The air rank with the rotten egg stench of seaweed the tides left behind last night. The sky the gauzy brown on marshmallows before they catch fire. I never understood marshmallows. Such a strange taste to them. Of course I want one now. I want just about anything. I reach in my jacket. It’s a shit picture of Gavin on the passport. The flash brings out all the red in his skin. His eyes. Still and all. He smiles. He’s excited. He’s hopeful, Gavin. Is it involuntary, this hope. Could we deny it, if we wanted to. We must not be able to. People can survive fucking cancer. They can survive losing limbs. Being lost at sea. Going without food for weeks.

  People can’t survive losing hope.

  I hear this scratching. The dog, I figure, but when I look across the water, it’s not the Collie. A raft bobs against the swamped pier. Inflatable. I get this start in me.

  Gavin.

  I go down the pier as far as I can. The raft is big enough for five or six people. An outboard motor on the back. Serial numbers along the sides, along with strange backwards letters. Angry waves roil in Galway Bay. The mainland a blur beyond. No one came across, not in that thing. A rope tethers it to a stake in the concrete. A tripod-like thing. Machined. More serial numbers. More strange letters.

  Russian. I think it’s Russian.

  Colm slouches on the stool next to the car in his garage, staring off into space. Bottom lip droopy as that pot belly of his. Nothing left to tinker with. He sees me coming up the drive and he near hits his head on the open hood of the car.

  “I found a boat,” I say. “Down at the pier.”

  “What kind of boat?”

  “Military. I think. A raft, like.”

  “Not Irish, I take it.”

  “Russian. I don’t know.”

  “The tides washed it ashore.”

  “Absolutely not.”

  He scratches his chin. Whatever spirit he got from seeing me alive and well drains out of his face.

  Colm goes into the back of the garage. “Ever fired a gun?”

  “No…”

  He lifts the tray out of an old toolbox. A revolver and a semi-automatic pistol underneath.

  “Where did you get guns, Colm?”

  He checks the chamber on the revolver, and then he hands it to me. “You understand the safety?”

  The gun weighs in my hand. “I do.”

  “Blind man’s guess, it’s supplies they’re after. Food. Medicine. They’re on foot. They’ll be going house to house.”

  I grab his arm. “We have to get back to the home.”

  There’s gas enough left in the car to get us down the high road to Kilbanna. We creep along, looking down the hills at the houses below, looking for Russians. What would they look like, anyways? What would we do? Colm’s riding down the road with the gun in his lap like he’s John fucking Wayne, and any Russians we find are sure to blast us to smithereens the second they see us. The fuck am I supposed to do with this thing? What’s happening. Why is any of this happening. Lord God. What did they do.

  A man stands outside the entrance to the nursing home, layered in black and slung with a machine gun. The instant he sees us pull in the car park, the soldier grabs at the walkie-talkie hooked to the belt crossing his shoulder.

  “Colm,” I say. “Jesus.”

  “Stay calm,” he says, and parks the car like he does any day he comes up here. The soldier stands at the door, watching. Waiting. All I can see of his face are his eyes, blood red and frayed. Another two soldiers come out the home. Christ.

  Colm gets out the car. “How can we help you lads?”

  Blood Eyes says something in Russian.

  “I spent a week in Moscow once,” Colm says. “I took the train, all the way from Paris. Didn’t pick up any Russian, unfortunately. Well. I might have picked up a girl or two.”

  “Yeda?”

  “Any of youse speak English? English?”

  “Yeda,” Blood Eyes says.

  “We don’t understand,” Colm says. “I’d invite you all in for a big sit down but you’ve already helped yourself, I see. I trust disciplined men like yourselves have been good guests.”

  Enough of this bollocks. I get out the car. “What are you doing in there? The fuck are youse doing? Aoife? Aoife!”

  The soldiers all grip their guns. Colm reaches for his and Lord God we’re all going to get fucking shot in a car park and at the last second Colm thinks better. He puts his hands in the air as the Russians shout at us both. I’ve no clue what they’re saying. Blood Eyes points at the ground.

  I’m on my knees. I’m going to die on my knees.

  Colm goes to his, gingerly. “Just go along.”

  Blood Eyes drives his knee in Colm’s stomach. He folds over and the soldier shoves him to the asphalt. He takes the gun tucked behind Colm’s back in his belt and searches him.

  He comes to me. “It’s in my pocket,” I say.

  Blood Eyes fishes the revolver out of my jacket. He hands it off to one of the others and then starts patting me down. His hands not as quick as they were with Colm. Tosser. He searches through every pocket in the jacket inside and out.

  Blood Eyes stabs a finger at me. “Ty amerikanets?”

  “What?”

  He shoves the passport at me. “Amerikanskiy?”

  The passport confuses Blood Eyes. Colm. Blood Eyes gets on his radio again. We sit there waiting on our knees on the pavement with guns in our faces and I could have done it. I could have walked out to the sea and taken control and now I don’t have any control. He has such anger in him, Blood Eyes. The passport bends and wrinkles in his closing fist. His breath clouds the air between us. His breath frosts to my skin.

  Another soldier comes out the home. The leader, I take it. He rubs away the soreness from his grayed temples, forcing out a long, angry sigh. Blood Eyes says something in Russian and they go back and forth, the leader acting like What are you bothering me with this for? and Blood Eyes hands him the passport.

  Now’s he interested. The leader kneels before me, flipping casual through the pages of the passport.

  “Husband?”

  “He’s gone,” I say. “He left.”

  He smiles. “Without passport?”

  Colm spits out blood onto the pavement. “Fuck off back to Russia and leave us be, Boris.”

  Blood Eyes drives the butt of his rifle into Colm’s back. Inside I hear screaming. Aoife. Saidbh. They’re at the windows. More soldiers inside. Two or three of them.

  “Are you trying to start a war?” I say.

  The color drains out of the leader’s face. He stares at me, his eyes small in his head, like the rims of bullets. “You not know?”

  “Know what?”

  He rubs his chin with his thumb. “Where is he?”

  “He’s gone,” I say. “Just take whatever you want and go. We don’t have anything, but take what there is. Leave us alone.”

  “You Mairead?”

  “What?”

  “You head nurse?”

  I look at the windows. Aoife quaking with sobs. “I am.”

  He smiles, like it’s all just a big misunderstanding. He takes my hand, and helps me to my feet.

  “Yelch
in,” he says. “Captain Yelchin.”

  “Céad míle fáilte.”

  “Preevyet. We need nurse. You help us.”

  “Fine. Fine. And then you go.”

  He wraps his arm around my shoulders and guides me to the door. “Inside, yes? We go inside.”

  Aoife’s every movement in the mirror casts a shadow on the door of the staff loo. The dog rests on the end of the cot with me, head crooking with each interruption of candlelight.

  I scratch behind his ears. “Do you believe him?”

  Her voice is still hoarse from crying so. “Those men are starved… grieving. They’ve nowhere to go.”

  “He didn’t know how it started, though. Why.”

  “Would he?”

  “You don’t think New York, though. You don’t think Dublin.”

  Aoife comes out of the bathroom. “Christ.”

  “Maybe it was just a few. They stopped it, before…”

  She sits on the end of the cot with me. “You should have told Gavin you were pregnant.”

  “For fuck’s sake, Aoife.”

  “What did you let him go for?”

  “What did I let him go for? Are you high again? Gavin needed to be home with his Ma.”

  “This was his home. He told you.”

  “It’s my fault they’ve done it, is it?”

  “You knew it was all going to shit – ”

  “It had all gone to shit, Aoife!”

  “ – and now they’re going to rape us and kill us – ”

  We fall into the cot together, exhausted from our grief. I cradle her close. Brush the hair out of her eyes, wet with all her tears and snot and always a mess, Aoife. I should be a mess. I should be running around like a chicken without its head. It’s over. They’ve done it. Everyone out there in the world is dead.

  Aoife holds me close. “You’re not going out there, are you?”

  Better I go with them back to their submarine than have over a hundred Russian sailors come to shore. I don’t know what they think I can do for them. We’ve nothing left in medicine or supplies for their injured. I don’t know what choice I have.