Rain on the Wind, page 13
‘The kettle is on the boil,’ said Uncle James, ‘if yeh want a sup a tay.’
‘I had tay, thanks,’ said Mico, ‘down in Peadar Cavanagh’s. We et sand-eels too. They were grand to ate.’
‘The same sand-eels are the cause a more poor unfortunate devils bein’ caught in nets than any other source I know,’ said Uncle James. ‘I hope yeh weren’t entoiled be a lassie down there, Mico.’
‘No,’ said Mico, heavily, ‘I was not, Uncle James. Sure what would any girl be doin’ with the likes a me?’
‘H’m,’ said Uncle James. ‘We’ll be sorry when you lave us, Mico. I’ll miss you about the house now.’
Mico raised his head then to look over at him. He was very good to me, Uncle James. He was a great laffer. And at sea, it was great to be with him at sea in the light currach. He was sure of himself. And so much he knew, nearly as much as Gran. Oh, a whole lot of things about Uncle James that you’d only remember when you had time to think it over.
‘You were very dacent to me, Uncle James,’ he said. ‘I was afraid a me life of yeh, comin’. I’ll be sorry now to be leavin’ you.’ He emphasized the you unknown to himself.
‘Did anybody say anything to yeh, down at the strand, Mico?’ Uncle James wanted to know.
‘Indeed no,’ protested Mico. ‘ It’s just! Ach, I’m tired, that’s all.’
‘I see,’ said Uncle James. ‘ We’ll get to bed so, Mico, and sleep it off. Most things can be slept off. Even sand-eels in the autumn. Go to bed, boy.’
‘I will,’ said Mico, and went.
’Tis easy to sleep off many things if you can sleep. But Mico didn’t sleep. Not much. He tossed a lot in his bed, and Uncle James heard him tossing and worried about him, but being a sage he thought he knew what was wrong with him. The curse a God on them, he muttered to his pillow. Even the childer they do be upsetting.
And the moon grew smaller and travelled far and then it became bigger and died, and Mico wished with all his heart that he was at home; and Maeve moved sleepily in Coimín’s arms where they sat and watched the dawn from the comfort of the heather on the hill over the lake.
Chapter Eight
‘THE TROUBLE IS,’ said Peter, beating his fists on the ground, ‘ that we are the lost generation.’
‘How do you make that out?’ Jo asked.
‘I’ll tell you,’ said Peter, sitting up a bit so that he could pound a fist on his knee.
The three of them were lying on an island in the Corrib. It was very peaceful. It was a small island. They were lying in a green clearing near the lapping water. Down from them the rowing boat was pulled up on the shore and was rocking gently to the waves coming from the far side of the lake. They were alone in the world except for an occasional diving tern and a cormorant standing on a rock miles away like an ugly black sentinel. Jo was in the middle, her hands back supporting her head, and Peter uncomfortably aware of her thin summer dress clinging to her flat stomach and outlining the push of her twenty-year-old breast. Her hair was cropped just as it had always been, but she had grown. Her face was attractive if it wasn’t pretty. Her nose was a little too big for that and her chin too firm and her eyes too clear. Beyond her Mico was lying on his stomach chewing a blade of grass. He was very big. If you had been trying to see Jo from the other side of him, his bulk would have hidden both herself and Peter. He wore the blue jersey and blue trousers of coarse cloth. But his feet were bare and he raised them now and again and waved them in the air. His shoulders were stretching the jersey and he had grown a column of a neck down which his hair curled at the back. It was all brown now and constant exposure to the sun had bleached it here and there to a sort of golden colour. Peter was ruggedly built except his skin was red from the caress of the sun, pale skin that looked raw. He was sensitive to the sun on account of his red hair, which was untidy and stood up in a bush on his head. His white shirt was open at the neck to disclose a chest with red hair and freckles, and the flannel trousers he wore were held to his waist by a red and white tie.
‘Go on,’ said Jo. ‘We can’t wait to hear.’
‘We were all born,’ said Peter, thinking it out, his eyes now closed, now open to the spark that was in them, ‘at the tag-end and bobtail of freedom. We grew up singing Kevin Barry and Wrap the Green Flag Round Me, Boys, not knowing what the hell it was all about. Well, heroes were winning freedom for us, unknownst to us. All we knew was that the bobbies disappeared and we got the Garda Siothchana in place of them. That was the outward sign of freedom to us. Then we grew up and we looked around us and what did we see?’
‘You’re telling us,’ said Jo.
‘We saw bloody nothing,’ said Peter.
‘The heroes of yesterday,’ said Peter, warming to his theme with a vein sticking out at the side of his neck, ‘became the politicians of today. They lost their sense of adventure. Here they were, men who had gone and fought and played with death peeping over their shoulders, and the very minute they had their snouts stuck in the flesh-pots they went and forgot the great adventure they had gone through. What an opportunity they had, and how they missed it! They could have really set the people free. They had the people of Ireland in a sack and they could have upended that sack and spewed them all into real freedom, and instead of that they closed the mouth of the bag with bunches of green tape and long-term promises. Is it any wonder we’d be the lost generation? The generation of cynics that grew up to see their heroes with fat stomachs. What do you think, Mico?’
‘I’m a poor hand at the thinking, Peter,’ said Mico.
‘No you’re not,’ said Peter. ‘You can think when you want to, only you’re damn lazy, that’s what.’
‘He’s not,’ said Jo, indignantly. ‘He’s not lazy. I didn’t notice you giving much of a hand to pull us up the lake. Five miles Mico rowed and not a hair astray on him.’
‘I’m speaking,’ said Peter primly, ‘ about intellectual laziness.’
‘Anyhow,’ said Mico, ‘they’s a lot in what you say, but sure, Peter, boy, the world is made like that, and we have to put up with it.’
‘Oh God, don’t say that,’ said Peter. ‘We have not got to put up with it. We should go out and fight and defeat it.’
‘How?’ asked Jo.
‘Well,’ said Peter. ‘Ah, damn it, there’s no how now. It has to be thought about and talked about and the people must be roused to a welter of revolution. That comes after.’
‘Well, you have a hard job on your hands,’ said Jo.
‘I know,’ said Peter, falling down on the grass despondently. ‘Hopeless, because who is there that you can talk to? So that’s why I’m going to become a scientist.’
‘What’s that got to do with it?’ she asked.
‘If I can’t help the people the way I want, through revolutions, because I don’t think I have the staying power for that, I’m too volatile, then I’ll find other ways to help them. I want to find the secrets of life so that things can be got from the air and the sea and the earth and made cheaper for people to live. Oh, I don’t know. It’s all very confusing.’
‘Who are you telling!’ ejaculated Jo.
‘What do you think of your own life now, Mico?’ Peter asked. ‘What does it feel like to you? What do you make of it all?’
‘Oh, I like it,’ said Mico.
‘Aye, so you do, but why?’ Peter persisted.
‘Ah, now,’ said Mico, ‘I haven’t your tongue at all. How can I say why?’
‘Well, dammit,’ said Peter, ‘ you can try!’
‘It’s easy for you,’ said Mico. ‘You have education behind you. It’s so little I know.’
‘And yet,’ said Peter, ‘ in a way you know more than I, Mico. Because the things you know are knowledge, while so far I have only an education.’
‘Ah, now,’ said Mico, ‘don’t be bottlin’ me up before I begin. I have always known that there was only one thing I wanted to do, and that was to be a fisherman like me father. That’s clear enough.’
‘But why?’ Peter asked, rising on an elbow. ‘Why a fisherman? Is it just because your father was one and that was good enough for you?’
‘No,’ said Mico, ‘I don’t think so. I never thought about it. I never wanted to be anything else. If I was to sit back and think now what I’d like to be if I wasn’t a fisherman, I couldn’t tell you. I thought I’d never get out and at it, and then I did, and it wasn’t all that I wanted it to be.’
‘Ha-ha!’ ejaculated Peter.
Jo punched him in the side with a small fist. ‘Can’t you let him go on?’ she said.
‘Well,’ said Mico, ‘it’s not easy. It’s a very hard life. I found that out quick enough when the first few trips were over. It’s not that I mind hard work, mind ye, because a big fella like me needs to be doin’ hard work to be able to live at all. It’s just that I came to see why so many of the young Claddagh fellas’d be willin’ to do anything else at all, sweep the roads even, before they’d become as they say their oul fellas’ galley slaves.’
He thought for a moment of the way his romantic ideas had gradually faded under the spell of the hard work. It was grand early on. You loved every minute of the important going down to the quay, carrying a net or the bit of food or fishing lines, whistling, looking around to see if everyone was noticing that you were off at last with your father and what a man you were. The creak of the sail, the slither of the water against the rounded bow. All that was terrific, at first. Being on the sea alone, until the rains came and deluged you and the sea rose and tossed you about and you had to learn to hold her in a gale and what to do to meet all sorts of contingencies; what it was to be caught out and to have to run into one of the small little places along the coast for shelter; to hunch up in the small forecastle, crouched over the turf fire burning there, and try and cook and eat and be dry with two very big men like himself and his father squeezed in there, and Gran as well. Maybe for twelve hours; maybe for days. All that. Was it any wonder the lads of the village thought there was no future in it? Give us a fast covered-in motorboat, they said, and let us fish and catch a lot of fish and get home then in the evening in time for the pictures and we’re your men. But that other thing! That lying out like a duck! No, thanks. You can shove that up your jersey. You go out and break your heart and suffer worse than if you were in hell, for what? For smart alecks that don’t know the front from the back of a boat and care less, for fellas like thim to come down and take the fish off your hands and sell it at three times the price they give you for it. Where’s the reward in that? Where’s the profit in that?
They are right too, Mico thought, how right they are! But, he went on, there are ways to change all that. And there were people worse off than they.
‘The men I saw out in Connemara,’ said Mico out loud. ‘Them is the men you might call poor. Not that they aren’t cheerful under it. They are indeed, but look, they fish out there from heavy rowing boats. They can’t afford to buy a sailing boat and do you know what they pay for their nets?’
‘What?’ asked Jo.
‘Four pounds,’ said Mico.
‘That shouldn’t break them,’ said Jo.
‘Ah, God,’ said Mico, ‘that’s what you don’t understand. If they lose a net with a basking shark, or have to cut one away in a storm, they’re finished. As true as God, because it would take them nearly a year to find four pounds for a new one. That’s true.’
‘That sounds bad,’ said Jo.
‘Is it any wonder,’ said Peter, ‘that what we want is a revolution? There’s more poverty than peace in this country. Ah, the whole thing is wrong, I tell ye, and what’s the good of lying down here on an island in the Corrib on a Sunday evening and just saying it’s wrong. We should be up and doing something about it.’
‘Aye,’ said Jo, ‘what are you going to do? You’ll do like all the rest of the intelligentsia do, you’ll talk about it until it comes out through your eyes and then you’ll go back to Cowper or Shelley or whoever you have on your course for your BA and that’s all, because that’s all you can do. You can write letters to the paper, or you can make speeches to Mico and myself, but what’s the use of pouring your heart out to the converted? It’s like that. It’ll be always like that.’
‘Aye,’ said Peter, ‘until the poor bloody heroes are dead and buried and the old comrades have fired the salute over them, and the bugle has blown over them, and they have passed from life as weary spun-out old gentlemen and take their place in a history book as the strong upstanding young men with lights in their eyes and guns in their hands and adventure burning in them before they became free and staid and cautious. That’s that. Requiescat in pace. Well, maybe I’ll do something. Maybe when I’ve got me BA and have gone on and got me BSc, maybe then I’d start to speech out of me on platforms up in the Square. Not the kind of things they’re used to, the platitudes that even stick in their own gullets or the clichés that they have been using since they became politicians. I don’t care if they lock me up in a home. I’ll say things that have never seen the light of day. I’ll stand up and say them. If I only have two boys and a mongrel dog listening to me first, it doesn’t matter. I’ll say it and I’ll say it over and over again, until that square above is jammed black with people, and when it comes to that I’ll say, How many of you down there are with me? And there will be a thunderous roar from the throats of the young and we will get a new flag, one that was never in a battle and we’ll march with that and we’ll clean the country as clean as the flag.’
‘And that,’ said Jo prosaically, ‘ is how new political parties are born.’
‘You never know,’ said Mico. ‘Maybe in God, Peter would have it in him.’
‘Maybe, maybe,’ said Peter, sinking dispiritedly back on the grass. ‘What a hope! But I’d do it in a minute, and if I feel like it in three years when I’m finished, maybe I’d do it then. Maybe I would, too.’
‘And where do I come into all this?’ asked Jo, surprising his thoughts out of his head, so that he rose on an elbow and looked at her. Her eyes were wide open and she was looking at him. Looking at him strangely. Peter felt his heart coming up in his throat and sticking there. He thought her breast was rising and falling more rapidly than it had been. There was a silence between them and suddenly the green grass under them vanished away and the rippled water of the clear lake became like the sky and the trees behind them cleared away too, and big Mico went farther and farther away as if he had been on a magic carpet that had suddenly taken off into the blue. Just green eyes and a heaving breast covered with a light frock that did little to hide the sudden strain that was on it.
Here it is again, Mico thought, as he rose to his feet and walked away. He had been with a feeling like this once before. Yeh! Facing a reach of strand under a moon and another girl and a boy that had looked at one another and talked about a house on the side of a hill and how it was to be built a stone upon a stone. Never for me that, he thought, that a number three will be shut out like the night when you pull a blind on it. He walked through the trees, pushed his way through the blackberry bushes, climbed a low wall, frightened two goats and a huge hare that ran and ran as if they were chasing one another and he came out on the far side of the island. The wind was coming from the west so he looked back there, back the length of the long lake where it reached into the mountains. You could see them dimly, lightly blue away at the end, and he saw in behind them, saw the sweep of the Maam Valley with the gigantic Maamturc mountains closing it in, and he saw the long winding road on this side of the valley how you went on and on, past the lakes with the solitary boatmen in them, past the bogs and the small towns and the villages and the clinging cottages until you came to the sea, and there she was.
He sat down on the rock, with his eyes fixed on the distant mountains. He thought of her letter. It was nonsensical for a grown man to be feeling that way about a girl he had known when he was fourteen or fifteen. How many years ago? Six say. Six years. It scalded you to read her letter; about the house at last; the description of the toiling and moiling that had gone to its making; the planning and contriving and scratching and making do; the anxious watching of the growing brothers and sisters so that they would be able to take their place and free them for each other. So they were free. Could Mico ever come? No, Mico couldn’t come. There were fish to catch and a hard world to survive in. But he didn’t need to go. He could see the house looking on to the strand. And he could see them standing up there in the church with the purple light pouring in from the window over the altar. Coimín would have on a blue suit and maybe a collar and tie in honour of the day. And his big face would be clean and shining and fresh-looking and she would be in a blue dress with pink dots (he preferred to think of her that way) and getting married even in her bare feet, because why not since it was his own thinking and he could do what he liked with it. All right. She would be smiling up at Coimín, and probably even there on the altar Coimín would be pretending to be cross with her or not to be hurrying and to be lazy and all the time the quiet eyes of him would be enveloping her. And all the village would be there. Uncle James commiserating with Coimín dolefully and making them all laugh; and Peadar and Mary Cavanagh, with little Nuala who would be quite big now; and Mrs Coimín would be there crying her eyes out, and Coimín’s father, Tadhg, would be there telling outrageous yarns about Coimín’s strength or maybe he had new ones now, and the Táilliúr and Tommeen Tady and all the rest of them each passing before his eyes with their smiles or sly jokes or crinkling eyes or moustaches, just the same as if it was yesterday he had been with them. And there would be great doings in Maeve’s house. All day and far into the night. The porter that would be drunk! The dances that would be danced! The food that would be consumed! All to be paid for tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, when a good catch was caught or two good catches or even maybe three. And then Maeve and Coimín would walk arm in arm down the lane to the beach and they would turn up a new small lane that Coimín would have made by this and they would look at the cottage they had built with their own hands, and then they would bend and take the key from under the stone and they would enter.
