The Nature of Water and Air Page 16

  “Clodagh, wait. Don’t go,” he said.

  “It’s a fine day,” he said. “Please. I just want to talk to you a bit. Please.”

  I stopped in my tracks. The air blew the folds of my summer skirt fanning it out wide, then convoluting and twisting it around my legs. The air was full of light, the water glittering.

  “Such a sweet, gentle girl you are,” he said, coming up behind me. He touched my hair and it caused me to shiver. I pulled away and looked at him archly.

  His skin was so clean, so lightly freckled. He emitted a fragrance of white starch and civilization. There was no filth lining his fingernails.

  “What do you want?”

  “To say I’m sorry. I was a bastard last week.”

  “Yes, you were.”

  “I’ve come to say I’m sorry for that. You took me so off guard.”

  “That’s no excuse.”

  “You’re right. And I want to say good-bye, too. I’m off tomorrow for the Isle of Wight for a month.”

  “Good-bye,” I said.

  “Where’s Mrs. O’Dare?” he asked, his eyes flashing away from mine.

  “In town. But I’ll never do that again with you.” I moved off ahead of him. I was thinking about Angus Kilheen, remembering the wisps of his mustache curling into his upper lip. I touched the coarse string that bound the package.

  Finian came up behind me carefully putting his arms around me, leaning his face down into my neck. “A sweet, gentle girl,” he whispered into my hair, and a chill rose over my skin.

  I pulled loose of him. “Go away, Finian!”

  He followed me to the door and I slammed it shut. A lightness filled me as I walked back to the blue room, thinking of the expression of dismay on his face as the door closed before it.

  I sat on my bed carefully unwrapping the package, and finding a strand of copper-colored hair stuck in the knot of the string, I ran it along my lips and closed my eyes, remembering the man’s smell of wind and dead fires.

  · 19 ·

  I WENT THROUGH THE DREGS of My mother’s old china and found a discolored teapot painted with violets, the inside surface etched with hairline cracks. I wrapped it in the paper that Angus Kilheen had wrapped my sugar bowl in and went to the traveler camp to find him.

  The early afternoon sky was overcast as I crossed the fields, a smell of rain on the wind. The camp was quiet except for an old woman sitting on a rock near a dead fire, banging with a hammer on a piece of tin. The rhythm of her hammer slowed as she watched me walk to Angus Kilheen’s caravan at the bottom of the hill. The wind shuddered in the flap of black vinyl that served as his window shade. The horse, disengaged from its harness, stood in a clump of grass, switching its ears and tail at me.

  I knocked on the caravan door three times and when there was no answer, I opened it. Standing at the threshold looking at the interior, the wind rushed after me, blowing the black shade open and closed on the small unfastened window. Against the farthest wall a bed on a scaffold of boards was covered with a blanket; something Arabian-looking: a fraught pattern of dark reds and black. A dull fleece lay rolled up at the bottom of the bed.

  On a wall above the bed hung a holy card depicting the Virgin of the Sea, meek, Spanish-looking, in a crown and a great dress, suspended over the tides. With every gust through the window the picture twisted on its nail and fluttered against the dry wood where it was posted. On a small shelf rigged to the same wall stood a plastic statue of the Virgin Mary missing one of her praying hands, a votive candle in a dark red glass, and a framed black-and-white photograph of a nun with glasses and a wide crooked smile. The presence of all the religious images confused me, not fitting with the man I had imagined.

  I looked on the shelves where his things were arranged: an open carton of milk sitting in a bowl of water, a bit of carton with two eggs in it, boxes of matches and tea, a vial of paraffin. On another sat a box full of contraptions and tools, tin bowls and pots, some half made, some dismantled.

  The wind blew in intermittent gusts, rocking the caravan on its hinges. Except for the sound of an occasional car on the distant road everything was quiet. My nerves fine-tuned themselves to the place. This far inland I barely heard the sea. I leaned back against an area of wall and watched the horse grazing in the high grass. After an hour of waiting, a light rain began. The horse whinnied and I reached my hand out the door to him. He came up close, pushing his great, sweet head against my chest and stomach. I stroked him awhile and he moved away, looking out into the empty field, resigning himself to the rain. Having slept little the night before, I lay down under the roughly lined sheepskin. The bed had a beautiful, familiar smell of wet earth and fire.

  On a bit of a shelf nailed into the wall within arm’s reach of the bed, lay a deeply worn paperback, The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats. I opened randomly and read:

  “All dreams of the soul

  End in a beautiful man’s or woman’s body”

  When I woke my heart was racing. I sat up, flustered, rearranging my skirt over my knees. The copper-haired man sat on a wooden chair at the foot of the bed, his long legs stretched out, his feet almost touching the opposite wall. A lamp lit the space behind him. He looked at me intently, almost sadly. There was a great calm to him. I wondered how long he’d been sitting there looking at me.

  “You’re the girl who has the sugar bowl,” he said.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, swinging my legs around so my feet were on the floor. “I was waiting for you a long time and fell asleep.”

  “What’s your name, lass?”

  I almost told him the truth but hesitated, feeling suddenly wary about conjuring my mother between us. He may have known her, or at least known of her. I felt a fierce urge not to include her. To claim him for myself.

  “My name is Mare,” I said.

  “Mare?”

  “Yes. Mare Grogan. I’m here to thank you for the sugar bowl. I’ve brought you something.” I pointed to the package on the table.

  “What’s Mare short for? Mary, is it?”

  “No. It’s just Mare.”

  “Like the female horse?”

  “Yes,” I said with conviction.

  He smiled at my seriousness and I pointed again to the package on the table.

  He glanced at it, then back at me. “Where do you live?” he asked.

  “To the south. On the Greystones Road,” I said, describing the area where Letty Grogan lived.

  “How old a girl are you, Mare?”

  “Nineteen,” I said.

  “Are ye now?” he asked, winking at me. “You don’t look it.”

  “Look at the present,” I said.

  He unwrapped it, his weathered hands turning it gently in the lamplight. “Isn’t this a fine creature?” he whispered.

  “Look inside it,” I said.

  “Ah. Little maps of sorrow lining its insides.” His low-pitched voice resonated in the soft of my stomach.

  He held it again in the lamplight. “Look here,” he said, and I approached, bending over him, the ends of my hair grazing his face. The light deepened the breaks, casting hundreds of little shadows.

  “So many little breaks,” I said quietly, the magnetism between us exerting a pressure on the air. Neither of us moved until he got up suddenly, brushing past me, and set the teapot on a shelf. Little pulses throughout my body beat like drums.

  I stared after him but he faced away from me with a serious, thoughtful expression. He gathered some things and went out to build a fire.

  The wind made a tentative howl reminiscent of a human voice. It stopped and started, whipping at the linoleum shade and dropping it suddenly. “A south wind,” he said. “They say a south wind fills people with exhilaration, Mare.”

  I felt a twinge in my gut when he called me Mare.

  “We’ll see if I can get a fire up in this fickle wind.” He squatted down, raking the old ash bed and replacing the coals. I stayed inside, standing at the open caravan door. I caught m
y reflection in a piece of sheet metal and though it was faintly distorted I saw that I wore the expression I associated with Mare; the mouth slightly tense at the corners.

  He turned to me from his place before the coals. “Will you have a cup of tea?” he asked.

  I answered overreadily that I would, a high dissonant pitch to my voice that made me cringe. He kept his eyes on me a moment and smiled faintly. He knew the power he had and it seemed to amuse him. His restraint mesmerized me.

  He told me to come down and join him on one of the rocks near the fire. The wind rose as I did and the new flames leaned and crackled.

  I faced him in the firelight.

  “You look at me like you know me,” he said.

  Once in the throes of love for Finian, Letty Grogan had said that their destinies tied them together. I had liked the sound of that and sitting there, not knowing what to say to him, I said, “I think you and I are tied together by destiny.”

  He seemed surprised. He gazed a few moments at the fire before he smiled and let go a soft laugh. “And what makes you think such a thing?” he asked. I felt ridiculous and looked away into the field. Declan was coming toward me, his head raised, his nostrils searching the air. When he reached me he nuzzled me with his head.

  “This creature’s mad for you,” Angus said. “It must be because your name is Mare. Get out o’ here, Declan!”

  The horse whinnied at him and Angus bent into himself with laughter. “You’re more human than horse, aren’t you, ye bastard?” He stood up and gave the creature a pat on the backside, laughing as the horse turned and almost knocked him down. He took the creature’s head in his arms and kissed it. The sweetness of the man sent a thrill through me.

  The sun was going down while we drank our tea, and he said, “This is my favorite time of the day. Light and dark touch for a few moments.”

  A few red clouds streamed westward.

  “I used to wish dusk would last longer, but its quickness seems to add to making it special,” he said.

  “Special things shouldn’t be brief,” I said.

  “Ah, but that’s not the nature of the world now, is it, Mare?” There was, in the easy tone of his voice, that same assumption of intimacy I’d heard the day before.

  “There’s an island north of Donegal where, if you stand on a cliff at the north point you can see glaciers in the distance. One afternoon, deep in the winter there, I saw the red ball of the sun seeming to float on the surface of the sea. I waited and waited for it to go down, but it didn’t.”

  “Is it like that there every night?”

  “No. It has to do with the position of the earth. It happens for only a few nights every winter.”

  “Do you travel to that place often?”

  “Oh no,” he said, taken a bit off guard by the question. “I was in Holy Ghost Orphanage not far from that place I described to you. On an island. Did you see the photograph of the nun inside?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s Sister Margaret Mooney, the nun who ran the orphanage.”

  “She must have been kind to you . . . that you keep her picture.”

  “Sister Margaret Mooney is my mother in this world.”

  I thought of asking what had happened to his own mother, but he’d grown a bit far away at the mention of the nun, gazing at the light in the western sky. “Is that place in Donegal your favorite place in Ireland?”

  “No,” he said softly and emphatically. “Have you ever been to the west, Mare? To Galway and Clare? And to Kerry?”

  “No.”

  “The coasts there are the edge of the world. The cliffs fall sheer hundreds of feet to the sea.”

  Voices rose up from the camp behind us. A baby cried sporadically.

  It grew dark as he told me about the Aran Islands, and the Isles of the Dead, which appeared and mysteriously disappeared on the horizon west of Dunshee Beach. Dunshee, he said, the place he traveled to most springs and autumns, was a crossover place between worlds. Right near Kinvarra on the coast of the western sea, and not far from a grouping of megalithic stones believed to be the prehistoric tombs marking the graves of the Irish chieftains.

  “I’ve heard of Dunshee Beach,” I said.

  He gave me the fervent eyes and asked, “From whom?”

  I paused. “A friend’s mother lived there once,” I said.

  He was quiet and I thought he was about to ask a question. Instead he looked into the fire.

  Sitting near Angus Kilheen with the firelight in my face, the world felt exciting and undiscovered. “I have a desire to travel,” I said. Sparks rose before me into a black column of air and the fire popped and huffed. “I want to move through strange landscapes. I’m sick to death of places too familiar.”

  “You see the beauty in a place if you can leave and then return to it,” he said softly.

  He went inside a moment and brought out a picture of some western cliffs torn from a magazine.

  “Lovely,” I said, surprised by the jagged height of the cliffs in comparison to a tiny boat in the water near them. “They almost don’t look real.”

  “Oh, they’re real! They’re more real than most things in this world!” He switched on a radio that sat on the makeshift table where he had displayed his crockery the day before, fiddling with the reception until he got an air of fiddles with a staticky, crackling background.

  He sat down on a stone closer to me and went thoughtful with the music. Though I kept my eyes on the picture of the cliffs that I held on my lap, I felt him looking at me.

  “Why do you park your caravan at a distance from the others and facing away?”

  “I like a measure of privacy,” he said. “I travel alone most of the time, but among other travelers for the fairs.”

  When the music waned I heard sheep bleating in the distance somewhere, and the voices of men and women from the darkening camp, Angus’s caravan like a luminous shell on the field.

  The static from the radio broke and a lone uilleann pipe began to plead with the air. The music built in pitch: long, climbing notes. I felt his warm hand on my hair, his fingers sweeping strands back from my face. Tingles of electricity ran over my skin, a soft nervous thrill thrumming through my body.

  “Why did you come to me?” he asked. He had gathered my loosened hair in one hand.

  “To give you the gift,” I said wanly.

  “Why do you say we’re tied together by destiny?”

  I looked into his face, longing to feel the weight of him on top of me. Hardly breathing, we held each other’s eyes.

  The pipe stopped almost suddenly and a lamb bleated from the fields. Angus dropped my hair softly and looked into the fire. His restraint cast its shadow between us again. In spite of the fear I now felt hurt, desolate at what felt like a broken promise. I wanted to tell him that I was not a virgin. That I could bring myself to rapture again and again.

  I squeezed my mouth tight, then looked at the fire.

  “What’s causing you to fret?” he asked.

  The question angered me because I knew he knew the answer.

  I threw the picture from the magazine into the flames. Startled, Angus tried to read my eyes, but as the page became no more than a smear of red glitter and smoke, he shook his head, smiled and let out a little laugh. I looked away from him, listening to the soft noise of the fire.

  “You have a lad, Mare. I’m sure of it. A boy who loves you.”

  “Yes,” I said. I held his eyes. “One day I took all my clothes off and gave myself to him,” I said.

  He smiled distantly. “The lucky little bastard.”

  I felt suddenly ashamed and he seemed to sense my discomfort.

  Summer lightning began in the distance, followed by muted thunder.

  “Haven’t you a mother waiting on you, lass?”

  “Of course I have a mother. But she’s in Dublin tonight.”

  “And your father?” he asked. “Where is he?”

  “Dead,” I said.

/>   “It’ll be teeming rain before long. You ought to get home to your warm bed,” he said. He stood, taking my hand and bringing me to my feet.

  “Off ye go now,” he said.

  But I stayed where I was, swaying in the night air like a reed. “I don’t want to go,” I said in spite of myself. He smiled. I imagined he pitied me for my transparency and that caused an ache of fury to rise up in me.

  “Take this lamp,” he said.

  “No. I don’t need it to find my way.”

  “Ah, you’re a little spirit of the night, are you, Mare? I’ll send you home to your bed now, lass. Take this.” He stepped back from me, holding out the lamp.

  “I’ll not take it,” I cried, and ran from him into the black fields.

  • • •

  The next day I returned to the camp. Staring men and women went quiet as I passed. I was stunned to find Angus Kilheen’s caravan gone. In its wake was only dead grass, scorched stones and ashes from his fire. I climbed the hill again looking for Declan, hoping that the caravan had only been moved.

  The mother and daughter from whom I’d bought the tin pot were sitting before their fire eating bread smeared with margarine. As I looked around, I noticed the woman eyeing me.

  “Angus Kilheen has gone to the west,” she said.

  “To the west?”

  “Yes.”

  “He didn’t tell me. . . .”

  “Why would he? A young settled girl like you should stay away from a man like him.” The thin-faced, dark-haired man I’d seen sleeping inside her caravan the day before stood in its threshold looking at me with his arms crossed.

  “Why doesn’t your mother have her eye on you?” the woman asked.

  I turned away from her, my eyes raking the land as far as they could see.

  “Landed girls shouldn’t mix with travelers, Miss.”

  The little girl stared at me, gnawing on a hunk of bread.

  “He’s a friend is all. He tells me about his traveling.”

  “You’re after a stud ram, Miss,” she said, standing up, wiping her hands on her skirt. “I have two eyes and they see clearly enough. If you’re looking for a stud ram, find one that’s kept in a barn, for he’ll make a better husband to a settled girl than a traveler man will.”