Rain on the Wind, page 24
He approached the smoke. It was on the far side of a tall cluster of rocks so that he could see nothing of it but the smoke rearing high and being scattered then by the shifting wind. He got on top of the rocks and looked down. For a few beats his heart didn’t go at all and then it went on steadily and faster than was its wont.
‘Hullo,’ he said, looking down at the men under him who were around a fire.
The big man looked up at him. Something stuck in his mouth. It was open and then it was closed and he swallowed.
‘Hello, Mico,’ said Big Micil.
Mico jumped down on to the small sandy beach that was like their own.
‘We lit a fire,’ said Micil. ‘ The Táilliúr is gone blind on us. The sleet got at his eyes.’
‘Is that Mico?’ asked the Táilliúr, who was squatting there with a once white handkerchief tied around his eyes. He had lost his hat. His hair was very grey and thin and there was a white band around his forehead which the sun never saw for the cap. But his moustaches were dry and were standing out from his pale cheeks. ‘We’re glad to see you, Mico,’ said the Táilliúr.
‘How are ye, men?’ Mico asked the others.
‘We’re alive, thank God,’ said the Táilliúr’s son, John. He was a tall young man with a great width of shoulder. ‘Bartley Walsh has got his hands bad. Look at them. As big as sods of turf they are.’
Mico looked at the hands of the old man. Big and swollen.
‘Uncle James’ hands are the same,’ he said.
‘We got the boat back too,’ said Micil. ‘Look at it!’ pointing to where it was drawn up on the beach.
‘Yeh, but we lost the oars or most of them,’ said Mairteen Delaney, a big man with a wet bainin and huge red hands and long teeth in low-hanging gums.
‘And the nets,’ said his son, Pakey.
‘To hell with them,’ said the Táilliúr. ‘We better go now.’
His son helped him to his feet. Micil kicked the burning embers of the wood fire into the sea.
‘I feel the better for the heat,’ said the Táilliúr. ‘I couldn’t ha’ moved a step without heat. Are we right now, men?’
‘We are,’ said the men, moving up the beach after them.
‘We found a man above,’ said Mico then, a bit louder than he meant. ‘ He’s up above.’
‘Oh,’ said the Táilliúr. They all paused for a moment with their gaze fixed on the ground and then they went on.
Micil walked with Mico behind them.
‘You’re all right, Mico?’ he asked, almost casually, without looking at him.
‘I am,’ said Mico. ‘Just a few cuts and things and a bit stiff, but I’m all right.’
‘I never thought ye’d live in that currach,’ said Big Micil. ‘ I never thought ye would for sure.’
‘How are you?’ asked Mico then. ‘Was it bad?’
‘Ah,’ said Micil, ‘ ’twas just a bit risky for a while, but then it was all right.’
Saga of the sea. He reached a big hand and pressed Mico’s arm.
Mico felt like weeping now. It was just a feeling.
‘Aye,’ said Micil, ‘just a bit risky.’
They went slowly to where the men were bent over the body.
Five pitch-pine coffins on the floor of a hall.
A hall that should have been resounding to the spirited music of melodeon and violin and the stamping of heavy boots, broken by wild hurroo cries and flushed faces and the sweating of bodies, with the music of the dance hearing the blood and making it fit for anything violent, love or bloody battle. Instead, five pitch-pine coffins on the floor with the dead men in them: five out of so many was all that the sea gave back to them. Six boats put out from shore and one boat comes back alive and five dead men after them. All day at the seashore the figures of weeping women and old bent men searching, searching, lifting’ the heavy roots of seaweed that had been torn from the farther bottom of the sea. Looking for something more precious in the wreck than the gutted things of sea-destroyed ships. Looking for the bodies of men who were all in all to you a few brief hours ago.
Three guttering candles held aloft as the evening fell, and the lids of the coffins are raised and the people pass them by to look at their dead. Is this my son or my father or my husband or my lover? The smell of candle-smoke guttering in the air. The shuffle-shuffle of feet on the boarded floor. And then a cry that rises above the wind, and there is a woman bowed and bowed with grief, and the black shawl pulled orer her head Every home is bereft. Old men are left without their sons and old women without their husbands. And children crying on the night air.
And the lids go back on the coffins and they are screwed down and they are raised on the shoulders of the few men who have remained from the holocaust, and a long train of sorrow stretches for three miles to where they are placed row upon row in the little church over the hill.
They might have been cardinals or kings, lying in the aisle under the light of the candles and the faint aroma of incense. They had company for the night as if they had been the greatest in the land. And the people placed their foreheads on the smooth wood of the lids and they placed their hard hands on it and they prayed if they were able. It was hard to pray and say it is the will of God, with Peadar Cavanagh somewhere out there waving to and fro with the lift of the tide. He was too young to die. And in the house of the aged dead you had Tadhg. He was old right enough, but what were you going to do without him and his outrageous yarns, and the laugh-wrinkles round his eyes dug in deeper than a furrow under a plough? And what’s little Bridget going to do without her father, Michael Tom?
The long line stretching across the yellow sands of Omey. The coffins on the backs of men, canted to their size, and the sea at either side of you there to applaud jeeringly. All my own work. Clapping its hands greenly at the behest of the dying storm.
The grave is big and they lie together, side by side, the men who died. And the priest prays for them, with tears in his bewildered eyes, feeling for the moment his inadequacy. The Latin words intoned on the clear air and the soft fall of the yellow sand on the glistening coffins. So the graves are filled and the green grass is laid over them, and some time, some day there will be a modest headstone raised with their names on it, but there can be no monument at all to the men who are waving out with the weed at the bottom of the sea.
And the people straggle back across the great strand away from the green grass of the island, and then the small houses swallow them, and over the fresh mound in the island the great gulls wheel and swing and cock their heads sideways, wondering at the rectangular disturbance in the green grass, and come down from their great height and peck at the descending worms, before they burrow below to humble mankind.
Mico closed the door and leant with his back against it.
She was sitting at the fire. It was burning slowly and it lighted the side of her face nearest to it. She was sitting on the stool, and her hands were falling listlessly between her knees. She didn’t look up at all. Not even when he lifted the latch; not even when he closed the door. Maybe I shouldn’t have come at all, he thought.
He went over to her then, his feet barely kissing the floor, and he got on his knees in front of her and he reached for one of her hands. It was cold to the touch.
‘Maeve,’ he said.
She raised her eyes slowly and looked at him. She barely saw him, he knew. Her eyes were not red from weeping. They were nearly as cold as her hand. What could he say. now? Wasn’t he just a great big lout that was as useless as if he didn’t even have a tongue at all? She waited for him.
‘I’m sorry, Maeve,’ he said. Oh God, was this all he could say now?
‘What happened your face, Mico?’ she asked, her eyes on the sticking-plaster holding the split in his cheek, right in the middle of the mark on his face.
‘Nothing,’ said Mico.
‘It’s all right, Mico,’ she said. ‘It hasn’t touched me yet. Don’t be sorry for me now. Save it up until I need it. ’Tisn’t as if he was one of those that was buried in Omey. ’ Tisn’t like that at all. Maybe he isn’t gone, Mico. Maybe he’s on some desolate part of the coast and that he can’t get home to me for a day or two. It might be that, you know. Couldn’t it maybe be that way, Mico?’
He saw one of the bodies lying in a coffin. It had been found off the Cleggan pier with a length of net wound tightly around it. He had been a man who had been in Coimín’s boat.
Her voice rang hollow in the house. Over her head hanging on a nail was a coat and a cap. Mico looked at them, and he knew that Coimín would never fill them again.
‘You don’t think so,’ she said, her voice disappointed, as if he had failed her. Wouldn’t it be worse for her to be getting a notion like that and waiting every day in this lonely little house by the shore, waiting for the sound of a foot on the gravelled path and the lifting of a latch? Wouldn’t that be far worse for her? Mightn’t she stay here an old woman for ever and ever waiting for the sound of a latch to lift?
‘Maeve,’ he said, ‘ if he was anywhere in the world he would be home now.’
‘Nobody can help another person, Mico,’ she said then, her hand up to her forehead. ‘ Nobody at all. You’d want to be given a new mind when things happen to you, so that it would be clean and new and more misfortune could be written on it. I used to think that we were too happy, that we hadn’t a child because we were too happy and that God didn’t want to give us any more happiness, that we had enough as it was. Now I have no child and I have no happiness and I have nothing but an empty house, that was once a lovely dream, and if I can’t have the sound of the lifting of the latch, then I have nothing, nothing at all. So I will wait for that. It might come. It might come tonight or tomorrow morning or in the middle of the noon or tomorrow night or next summer. That’s all I have to hold on to is the lifting of the latch, and if I haven’t that I haven’t anything at all.’
Her head was in her hands.
He raised one of his big hands then and rested it on her hair, lightly. Her hair was as smooth as the web of a spider, but it had lost its glisten, it was dull.
‘Maeve,’ he said, ‘ I’m a useless class of a fella when it comes to the feelings of people and their minds. I can’t know enough about these things at all to be able even to speak about them. But I am big and strong and I can do things materially, like. If ever you want Mico to move a mountain for you, or to kill a man for you or to work for you or to do anything else for you, let you remember me. Maybe some day Coimín will come back. Maybe some day the latch will lift for you. I don’t know. If that’s the way you want it, maybe it will happen that way.’
He got to his feet then, and looked down from his great height at her bowed head.
‘Goodbye now, Maeve,’ he said then, softly. ‘I’m no use to you now. Maybe I never will be. But like you waiting for the liftin’ of the latch, I’ll wait for some day that maybe you will find some way for me to help you. I don’t write much, ’tis only but the few lines I can put together and that same is hard on me, because I was of rare use in school, but maybe you wouldn’t be insulted if I was to write to you. Sometimes when we’re at sea there does be a chance of a night when we are in a little place and we do be hunched in the small place in out of the rain. Maybe sometime I will write to you and you won’t mind.’
‘I won’t mind, Mico,’ she said, but she didn’t look up at all.
He left her then. He walked backwards to the door and reached for the latch and raised it softly so that it made no sound at all, and then he opened the door so that the fresh wind, with its dying whistle around the headland, could be heard there, and he went out, and he saw her there with her head in her hands and her hair falling about her face and the flickering fire lighting up one side of her, and then he closed the door so that the latch would not click and he walked so that his feet made no sound on the gravel and then he went away.
On the morning tide they left the pier.
There were some of the people there to see them off. Even at this time. Uncle James was there with the bandages around his hands, and the Táilliúr was there with his eyes red and raw, but a little of the seeing coming back into them, and his son and a few of the others. They even joked a little with them. About the yacht and the two Claddagh gents that had finished their cruise in the Connemara waters and were now returning to their mansions in the capital. They even laughed. But Big Micil couldn’t whip up a laugh at all. He just stood big and dumb winding a rope.
And they waved their hands and they pushed away.
They saw the people on the pier with their hands raised and then they traversed the Bay. It was playful now. The waves were dancing. The sun was shining on them benevolently. The waves slapped the black boat, gently and chidingly, and the boat soughed softly as it glided over the great graveyard.
They should change the name of it now, Mico thought, and call it the Bay of Tears. There were enough of those to fill it.
And they sailed into the Atlantic and the sun was warm and the air was fresh, and over the bodies of the dead men the sea was as peaceful as the heart of a nun.
Chapter Seventeen
IT WAS A Saturday morning and it was nearing Christmas.
That was why Mico was finding it so hard to push his way through the crowded streets. They were packed from side to side with cars coming and buses going and all of them honking impatiently at the slow men with the horses and carts and asses and carts who were tangling up the traffic in an incredible confusion of hee-hawing asses and honking cars and the horses with their heads pulling at the reins, and the gobble of the tied-down turkeys in the carts and the squealing of confined bonhams and the cackling of indignant chickens.
There was a great smell of fresh porter pervading the air from the pubs, mingled with that of the fresh droppings of the various animals on the streets, and the blue smoke that rose in the air from noisome but sweedy pulling pipes. Big women with the baskets and soldiers on leave and under-the-breath-cursing Civic Guards trying to reduce order from chaos. It was very colourful and necessary, but modern civilization hadn’t caught up with it yet, and would be standing back scratching its head, wondering how on earth it would ever be possible for it to blend with the primitive invasions of unaccountable things like asses and horses, and iron-shod wheels. Had these people never heard of the pneumatic tyre? Didn’t they know that the horse was on the way out ten years ago?
Mico enjoyed it all and exchanged loud shouts with the people he knew.
He felt like shouting. He was dressed in his Sunday suit although it was only Saturday. It was a double-breasted sort of reefer jacket suit, and the tailor’s creases were still on it, and he swelled it out well as he pushed his way through the throngs. His neck rose from a blue-striped shirt with no collar that was as clean as a sheet in the sun. He wore no cap and his thick hair was unruly on his head. He was freshly shaved, the side that could be shaved, and the other side looked a little peculiar with the white scar-tissue dividing it. He was a very big man, but it would hardly be noticed here when the countrymen were in practically undisputed possession of the town, and there were big men there from all parts, from Spiddal and Barna and Furbo and out from the Moycullen and Oughterard direction, and from the Clare-galway side too, and they were dressed in bainins and ceanneasna trousers and in rough homespuns, and the Aran men were about with their shuffling pampooties and their ash-plants, and their blue rough clothes, and there were men in frock coats and frieze coats, and coats that had been made in modern multiple stores, and there were tinkers with any sort of clothes they could get on them, with their great hairy chests open to the December winds. All big men, that was about the only thing they had in common; their clothes were different and their accents were different and their voices were different.
A great sight it was.
The shops were bursting with people and many citizens were to be seen trotting home with a turkey grappled by the neck or the heels and its head trailing in the dust of the channels; and there were geese too going home under an arm with their legs tied with bits of rag and their heads proudly erect as if they were facing the thought of the chopper like Christian martyrs. The whole place was bulging with people and it was an effort to get through them. Mico cast an anxious look at the town clock as he passed but its face assured him that he had plenty of time yet to meet the bus.
He had never met a bus in his life before, because he had had no reason to. But this was worth having waited for. The bus would stop and he would be there with his eyes glued to the door and then Maeve would step down and look around her. How would it feel to see her again? How would she look? Would it take them long to get used to the feeling of meeting again? He didn’t want to take up where they had last left off. No fear! But that was just over two years ago now, and no mind can hold a tragedy fresh for ever no matter how long you hold on to it. It must dim surely. The mechanism of memory would have to dull or how would you be able to live at all? He just knew her from the odd letters she wrote to him in answer to his own. He had seen the change coming in her. Had sensed it although he didn’t know much about sensing people from scratches on paper. He thought that well over a year ago she had stopped waiting for the latch to lift. And then he had read the emptiness. In a word here or a word there. Maybe he could understand that. How empty the house of theirs would seem, how empty the whole place would seem; how terrible a thing it was to be looking at the sea that still held the body of your husband.
Ah, well, that was over now, and God rest it. So at last she could not stand another Christmas there. She would have to go. Where would she go? Mico thought the sky had fallen the day he read that. Where would she go indeed? She had a little money, a few pounds from the Disaster fund and a little here and there she had collected from the sale of the house and the bits and pieces that were in it. Now what?
