Rain on the Wind, page 17
‘I’ll be off now, Biddy,’ he said.
‘God bless you, God bless you, God bless you,’ she said, bending over her kettle. ‘You’re a good boy, Mico, Mico, even though you near kilt one a me geese. Ah, well I remember. Sometimes I can remember well and sometimes I can’t remember as well as I’d want to remember. Goodbye, goodbye, and close the dure after yeh. Nobody can ate bite or sup in this place with snotty noses stickin’ their heads around the door to see what you are havin’ for your breakfast.’
He closed the door after him and walked away, her mumbling following him. Why should I be getting so many reminders today? he wondered. Biddy would die, and when she did they would pull down the decaying thatch of her cottage and they would level the walls so that the row would look like teeth with one pulled out. They were talking already. We must destroy the Claddagh and give them houses fit to live in. Biddy would be first. They would wait for her to die and then lepp and destroy her house that had been there since the beginning of time near. Maybe ’twas as well. Maybe it would be good to have a new Claddagh.
‘Oh, Mico, Mico!’ he heard the call and raised his head. To his surprise he saw Jo running across the grass to him. He waited for her.
‘Mico,’ she asked, breathless, ‘have you seen Peter? Where’s Peter?’
Mico’s heart went into his boots.
Chapter Eleven
HER EYES WERE wide and frightened. He put his hand on her shoulder and he could feel her trembling under his palm. Her hair was tossed and he could see the white of her face under the flush of her running. She was wearing a blue coat, the belt of it tied in a knot.
‘What’s wrong, Jo?’ he asked. ‘How could I see him? I’m only after gettin’ in now.’
‘Oh, my God,’ she said slumping, ‘and I thought he might be with you. You were my last chance. Now I don’t know where to look.’
‘What happened, Jo?’ he asked her urgently.
‘Well, you know the way he has been,’ she said. Mico nodded, not able to keep the pain out of his eyes.
‘He was to meet me last night at eight,’ she said. ‘I waited and waited and he never came. Then I went over to his house. He hadn’t been home at all. So I waited there awhile, just talking, to put them off. And he hadn’t come, so I went home. And he never came home. I was down there this morning. They had waited up all night for him. He hadn’t come home. So his father took the car and went one way and I came out on my own. I’ve been everywhere, everywhere that I could ever think of that he might be, and I can’t find him. What are we going to do, Mico, what are we going to do?’
‘We’ll look again,’ said Mico. ‘Come on.’ He took her arm and turned and walked by Biddy’s house and headed out for the road that led by the sea. ‘We’ll just have to think again. Maybe you passed him. Maybe he was one place when you were another and ye just missed.’
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I just don’t know now, Mico,’ her head falling down and her hands in her pockets. There was little he could do to comfort her. He was too tired. His heart was heavy enough as it was without having to jump into this. But jump into it he would have to do. Because something was terribly wrong with Peter.
It was like something that grew.
It was fun when be was in hospital. Going up to see him, feeling foolish being so big and a small bag of oranges under your arm. He’d be lying up in the bed, a white bandage around his head, his skin very clear. ‘That’s the bagpipes, Mico, oul son,’ he’d say, and then explain the repulsive details of how they scoured you like a hose working on the insides of a ship. They were very fond of him. He got many presents of things but he always gave them away. There were two rows of beds in the ward and they were all lying there, men and boys with all sorts of diseases and broken bones. But they liked Peter. You could tell that from the smiles in their eyes. He’d make a cat laugh, they said, and the nurses weren’t backwards about liking him either, and the doctor that did the marvellous operation on his head came to beam on him, nearly patting his head, ‘I’m his favourite operation,’ Peter would explain to them. Laugh. It was a great laugh.
And they brought him home and it was like a bonfire night. All the neighbours and friends were there. ‘Hah,’ said Peter, ‘ if I wasn’t here now this would be a magnificent wake,’ and he looked exactly the same, except that he was a bit thinner and finer drawn, that was all. He was active as ever. Only a few blinding headaches he’d get, and when he got them he’d go up to his room and shut the door and swallow aspirin tablets and come out again pale and drawn with purple under his eyes, but that was all. In a short time he would be as right as rain.
And it was summertime, so he could lie in the sun. And go swimming. He went up the lake often too with Mico pulling the boat, and they swam up there and caught trout and cooked them in wet newspapers in the hot ashes of the wood fire. It was grand. And he loved Jo. They had never been as nice to each other as they were then, and that was something to remember. He became brown and fit-looking and the headaches, he said, weren’t as bad at all now when they came. And it was a pity about missing his exams, but it couldn’t be helped. Next year. Or maybe in the autumn he’d have a crack at them. It was great to know Tommy had got his. First knobs all the way. Several prizes and things for this and that. First places in everything, so that the professors were going around rubbing their hands and proud of him, ‘Good job for him I got the knocker,’ said Peter, ‘or he’d have had a run for his money’; laughing.
And Jo got through too, very distinguished. So now she was finished with College and she was going to teach. Where? She didn’t know. But she would teach. ‘How could you?’ Peter wanted to know. ‘I love teaching,’ she said. ‘I love children.’ ‘Don’t be giving me bad ideas now,’ And she would get prim and he would have to soften her up again.
Oh, grand!
It was Jo who noticed his oddities then. She would be talking to him about something. You know the way you are talking away to a person and you don’t look at them at all. Most of us are that way. And suddenly she would be conscious of a terrible silence and her words would trail away and she would look at him and his eyes would be fixed on something distant and his teeth would be clenched and the knuckles of his hands would he white and she would shake his arm and say, ‘Peter, did you hear me? Peter! Did you hear what I was telling you?’ And the first time she shook him like that she felt his arm rigid and he didn’t hear her. And she got very frightened, because people don’t go away like that for no reason, and she got to her knees and shook him again and called in his ear, ‘Peter! Peter!’ and after a little the glazed look left his eyes, and his teeth unclenched, themselves, and he looked at her and said, ‘Yes, yes, Jo, what is it? What’s this you were saying?’
If only she could have explained then! Maybe she should have told him then, and about how frightened she was so that she felt the blood drained out of her face. But she didn’t, because he looked so pale himself and there were purple shadows under his eyes, and he let his head drop in his hands, and he said, ‘Oh, Lord, Jo, I have a pain in my head.’
Then other times it was more frightening.
Because it would happen to him, the tenseness and the silence, and he would come back to her, maybe after ten minutes, and he would have no headache at all. But he would not remember that he had been away, and that was what sent the cold shivers up her back and the fear buried deep into her heart. She said, ‘ What was wrong with you?’ ‘With me?’ he asked ‘What’s wrong with you to be asking questions like that? What’s holding up the conversation?’ and it only began to dawn on her then that when he went away like that he didn’t know it. So she went to the doctor, and the doctor called around to him and kidded him into going back to the hospital for an X-ray to clear up the headaches, and he went and they took their pictures of his brain and they looked at them and they could see nothing wrong. ‘It will pass, my dear,’ they said to her, ‘it will pass,’ and patted her hand. After all, if you got a blow on the head like he got you’d be a dead duck long ago. He had a heart like a lion and a head like a six-foot wall.
Mico noticed him worse, the first time.
They were going out Salthill on a summer evening, when Jo was in the middle of her exam and wasn’t seeing even Peter.
You know what happens to a town on the sea in the summer. It changes very much. People from other parts of the country who don’t have the sea come and see the sea, and people from other lands curious about this one come and see it too. All seaside places are like that. Well, this one was no different. People thronged its walks and paths and roads in the summer so that you could hardly breathe or see the sea, but it was lively and all along by the promenade they strung fairy lights on the poles, and in a big field they brought crazy things, swinging boats and men barking and games, and there was blaring music and the lapping of the sea and crowds and crowds of people, young people and old people, with all sorts of most peculiar dress on them and red faces and brown faces and peeling faces. And Mico and he walked one night out here to view the throng, and they pushed their way into the park where the games and things were, and they went from one to the other with their hands in their pockets just watching, and the music from the loudspeakers was very loud, and Mico saw Peter putting his hand up to his head, so he caught him by the arm and pulled him away through the crowds and out of the field and on to the wide promenade in front of the sea. Out here there was a long seat and people sitting on it, and people leaning on the wall looking into the field, and other people passing, and others just idling and Peter pulled his hand away from his head and his arm from Mico’s hand and he stood out in the middle of the road and he talked. In a loud voice. So that people stopped and looked at him.
Mico felt the sweat in the crooks of his legs and on his face. It poured down his face. The circle of grinning people cut him off from Peter, he was so petrified with the surprise of it. Strangers that were grinning there at the young man in the neat grey suit, the red tie, and the white shirt, with a high polish on his shoes. Was he drunk or what? ‘You know nothing, you idiots,’ Peter told them, his fists clenched until the white showed on his knuckles. ‘You don’t know that when the magnet is deflected, having been suspended in the earth’s field by another magnetic field, the direction of which is perpendicular to that of the earth, the deflecting force is proportional to the angle of the deflection. I bet you don’t know that, you stupid idiots.’
Mico had reached him then.
Had taken him into his arms and practically lifted him up, and his body was as rigid as the body of a dead fish, and around the corner from here there was a quiet lane where couples went to court after they had clicked, and he went down this lane with him and he didn’t stop until the lights were well behind them and he could no longer see the curious heads of the people pushed over the wall.
There were other things too.
The day of the fair in the Square.
Jo had spent a solid hour in the church praying for Peter. Then she went up the town and was passing through the fair and she saw a circle of people and she was impelled to go over, and there was Peter in the centre with his shoes encrusted with dung and an old ragged street merchant without a shirt standing behind grinning, and there was Peter marching around in that circle of farmers and potboys and tinkers and he playing the man’s tin whistle for all he was worth. He wasn’t playing it. He was puffing out his cheeks and the noises that were emanating from the piece of tin were half sobs from his drooling mouth and half the plaintive wail of the tin.
She went in and took his arm and took the thing from his mouth and handed back the whistle to the man, and they made an opening for her in the sudden hush that had fallen on the cheers and the jeers and the drunken hurroos, and she walked him out and he was talking, many things mixed up. She brought him down where the river flowed cleanly beside tall trees and she sat down there with him and the tears pouring down her cheeks and despair in her heart until she saw the reason coming back into his eyes and he looked at her and said, ‘Why, Jo, old dear, what are we doing here?’
They thought of all this now as they walked the road.
It was not pleasant thinking.
‘And the worst of it is,’ said Jo, suddenly breaking their silence, and first having to clear her throat before the words would come clear, ‘the worst of it is that I think he knows.’
‘What do you mean?’ Mico asked.
‘When he has come out of them lately I have seen him looking at me in the strangest way, trying to gauge from my eyes; trying to see in them what was wrong.’
They went all the way along by the sea out past the houses and the cultivated seashore, with its sands and rocks tastefully laid out for the tourists. All along the miles-long promenade and the diving-place at the end of it, and they left this civilization behind them and they walked the lonely beaches as well, where wild duck rose and fled away and the grazing cattle looked at them inquisitively. And they searched the lonely places under the low cliffs and they came on nobody that they were looking for. Sometimes they stood with their hearts pounding when here and there they caught a glimpse of red hair on a lonely strand or on a beach or high up, reclining on the side of a steep hill, and they approached only to be disappointed.
And they swung wide from the sea and did the great circle of land around the town where Peter had often walked with Jo. Up on the bog road by the Barna village into the bleak land around Lough Inch, past the white monument in a bog to the memory of a murdered priest, and on the hills over the flint roads into the lonely lands of the bogs, thinking that maybe he would have come back here to be alone and to be thinking. But not even the ghost of him walked there, and they went on, tired and dusty and hopeless, and they came back in a swing to the town, past the Rahoon graveyard with its cypress trees, and all the ass carts and horse carts coming back home again with their empty rattling milk churns.
They even went to the island of the thorn tree and stood on the shore and scrutinized it from there. The tide was in so that they couldn’t cross into it, and they were glad, and anyhow it was easy to see that there was nobody there, so they turned and crossed the railway line and went into the wood.
Peter often frequented these woods. He would ride out there on his bicycle or pinch his father’s car, and study when the mood came on him. It was very lonely. Nothing but the sough of the trees and the scampering of blackbirds through the bushes or the scolding of the birds. Underfoot the decaying vegetation giving off a smell of all sorts of seeds and herbs. Your feet cushioned by the carpets of leaves, year after year of them, layer laid over layer. But it was as bare as the sky on a clear day and nothing disturbed it except those things that belonged to it, with the rabbits abounding.
So they walked back again and there was a confession of failure in the droop of their bodies. Their thoughts were not sharp, because the day’s thoughts and searchings had blunted them, so that they had little to talk about. What could you talk about? Eventually they sat on one of the seats that fronted the sea overlooking the Bay on the Grattan road, when they had been back to the Cusacks and had drunk tea in the kitchen and felt their hearts sinking when they looked at the red eyes of the mother and the bewildered hurt look of the father.
The sky was blazing when Mico saw the smoke in the distance pouring from the funnel of the little Aran steamer, chugging its way home as importantly as ever, the black smoke bleching from it with the sun going down at the back of it, dying in the sea between the Clare hills and the Islands.
Jo felt her arm being grasped so hard by Mico’s hand that she had to pull in her breath with the pain of it.
‘That’s it!’ said Mico, ‘ as sure as God.’
‘What, Mico?’ she asked, holding her bruised arm.
‘The boat,’ said Mico, pointing with his arm, standing up, his legs spread wide. ‘He was on that boat, I know he was on that boat. I should have remembered. This morning coming home. There were people on it and a flash of something red in the early morning. I’ll swear me solemn oath that he was on that boat.’
‘Come on,’ she said, not pausing but running towards the Claddagh.
He followed her and caught up with her easily. The boat was bigger now, nosing its way in past the Lighthouse.
If only I hadn’t been so tired this morning, he chided himself. If I hadn’t been thinking of Gran and all the rest of it I might have looked closer.
‘He just went out there for the day. There’s where he’d get the places to think it over without a soul near him, only the people in the island of America. That’s it now,’ he said. ‘We’ll get him on the boat.’
They went fast, past the Claddagh, and their hearts were much lighter. Jo even felt like a smile. They talked about all the walking they had done and all the searching. How many miles! The poor feet of me, said Mico, that hate walking worse than anything else in the world near. And the people we saw and all the rest of it, and we would have been better employed at home doing nothing at all, just waiting for him to come back.
They raced down the Long Walk when they crossed the bridge, and Mico’s thoughts flashed back over the years to a day when they had been fishing for mackerel and they had to fight their way past the boys at the Spanish Arch. He grinned, remembering it, and how Peter with his socks and neat clothes had behaved, and the way they were rescued by Pa.
