In the Company of Others (2 page)

Two

The walls ended; the rain slackened; parting clouds liberated scraps of pale light. The hedges now were merely tumbled stones and August bloom twined with ivy, foxglove, scarlet creeper.

Aengus Malone had learned a certain dexterity on his mower; his skill at locating and backing into the previously overlooked pull-off had been brilliant. The lorry driver had given three blasts of his horn as a thumbs-up.

‘That was some scrape you bailed us out of,’ he said to Aengus. ‘Well done.’

‘It’s m’ lucky hat that done it.’ Aengus reached up and patted the thing. ‘Me oul’ mum give it to me.’

‘If it weren’t so dark,’ said Cynthia, ‘we might see a rainbow.’

‘There’s some as see rainbows at night, but those would be fairies.’

‘You believe in fairies?’

‘Ah, no, not a bit. But they’re there noneth’less.’

‘You’ve never seen one, then?’

‘If it’s fairies ye’re after, they’re said to be very numerous in Mayo.’

On a slope in a grove of ancient beeches, the dusky, formless shape of the lodge appeared, its windows luminous against a starless night.

His wife drew in her breath.

Broughadoon.

‘That would be candles burnin’,’ said Aengus. The Volvo rattled over a cattle grate. ‘Looks like th’ rain’s shut down your power.’

‘Stop,’ said Cynthia. ‘Please.’

Aengus braked; the motor idled.

‘It’s the most beautiful sight I’ve ever seen.’

She sat for a moment, bound in one of her spells, then opened the door. A pure and solemn air spilled in; his right foot slipped into his loafer.

She got out of the car and stood looking along the slope to the fishing lodge, at fog drifting among the cloistered beeches. ‘Listen,’ she said.

They listened.

‘Nothin’ much t’ hear,’ said Aengus.

Rain dripped from the shadowed trees, pattered on the roof of the car; a breeze stirred.

He watched as she got back in the car and closed the door and looked at him and smiled. Then she leaned to him and kissed him. Her faint scent of wisteria mingled with the Sligo air. He had never been so happy in his life.

As they drew up to the lodge, figures appeared on the stoop, silhouetted against the light from the open front door. Three barking dogs bounded onto the gravel and squared off with the Volvo.

There was a considerable shaking of hands with innkeepers Liam and Anna Conor, as the dogs ganged a-glee about their feet—two Labradors, and a Jack Russell dancing on its hind legs.

Anna, the striking-looking woman he’d known a decade earlier, gave him a hand-wringing that jimmied his teeth. He admired all over again her tousle of copper-colored hair and, without meaning to, blurted the sentiment aloud.

They were joined by a white-haired old man wearing a tie and cardigan and brandishing a walking stick. In the gabble of greetings, he decried their weather as ‘foul and infernal.’

Somewhere, thanks be to God, something was cooking. ‘Lamb,’ he said to his wife. He could devour a table leg.

He recognized the feeling he experienced on his wedding day nearly eight years ago—as if he’d lost the proper sense of things and stepped outside his body. He was a cannonball fired directly from the quiet desperation of a hired car into a domestic muddle of energy and good cheer.

They were herded through an entrance hall, its walls fairly crammed with fish mounted in glass cases, and into a sitting room lit by candles and an open fire. A half-finished jigsaw puzzle was spread on a table among a loose aggregation of sofas and wing chairs.

He felt at once the keen pleasure of the room: its book-lined walls and good pictures, the impression of ease.

In a corner, three men murmured over a card game by the light of a candle. A distinguished-looking fellow sat reading a newspaper by the firelight and stroking his white mustache; upon seeing them, he stood at once and buttoned his jacket.

‘Heads up, gentlemen ...’ Anna lifted a small bell from the sofa table and pealed it. ‘Reverend Timothy Kav’na and Mrs. Kav’na of North Carolina, meet our anglers—Tom Snyder of Toronto, Hugh Finnegan of Maryland, and there’s Pete O’Malley. Pete’s a Dub who lived many years in Texas.’

‘O’Malley here.’ O’Malley stood, saluted. ‘Welcome.’ The other two pushed back their chairs, stood, raised a hand.

‘They’re with us every August since 1997,’ said Anna. ‘They’re after catching our dinner tomorrow.’

He gave the trio a thumbs-up. ‘Go, Terps,’ he said to Hugh Finnegan.

‘And there’s Seamus Doyle from up the hill at Catharmore, who visits most evenings with the Labs. Seamus is our master of assorted entertainments, chiefly checkers and jigsaw puzzles.’

Seamus of the white mustache crossed to them for another round of hand-shaking. ‘How long will you be in Ireland, Reverend?’

‘A couple of weeks.’

‘They say a couple of weeks makes a habit.’

‘We wouldn’t be against it. Not a bit.’

‘I spent a lot of years in the States. Always good to see someone from the oul’ country, as I call it.’

He surveyed the room and those in it—a whole universe of life and pluck at the end of a narrow road in the middle of nowhere.

Somehow, the two three-suiters, the umbrella, and the glasses case he’d left on the backseat got toted in by Liam. Then came Aengus, tailed by the two Labs, schlepping the carton of books, their carry-ons, a flashlight, and the box of raisins. Off they went across a sitting room carpet worn to the lining, and along a hall, where the lot of them vanished into the gloom. A young woman with a nose ring and cheek tattoo offered hot towels; the Jack Russell sat at his feet, looking up, a chewed shoe clenched in its jaws.

It was all a dazzle. After years of talking, planning, and idle speculation, they were here. He wanted to sprawl before the open fire like a lizard and lose consciousness.

Cynthia had stepped away to look at a painting he remembered—of men in curraghs spearing basking whales in the treacherous seas off Arranmore.

‘It’s good to have you back,’ said Anna. There was an honest country style about her garb of shirt, skirt, apron, and clogs.

‘It’s great to be back. The trip is my wife’s birthday present.’

‘’t is no surprise your wife is beautiful.’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Inside and out.’ He wasn’t likely to get over his pride in showing her off. That they were married at all still waked an astonishment in him. ‘We’re both needing a few days to unwind. There’s no better place to do it than here.’ The most excitement he could recall from his first visit was a wandering cow in the kitchen garden.

He wiped his hands with the towel and replaced it on the tray. ‘Many thanks,’ he said to the server, who cast a cool glance beyond his.

‘We’re so sorry about the power being out, but it happens often with the big rains.’ Anna turned and spoke to Cynthia. ‘I hope you don’t greatly mind candle power, Mrs. Kav’na.’

Cynthia came to them and slid her arm in his. ‘Not in the least. I love candle power.’

‘Such dreadful weather, it’s been raining for three weeks. I do apologize.’

‘Please call me Cynthia, and you needn’t apologize for anything at all. I love rain.’

The old man stumped up with his cane. ‘A villainous rain!’ he declared in a loud voice.

‘Meet my father, William Donavan, he’s our keeper of the fire at Broughadoon. The Kav’nas are from the States, Da. North Carolina.’

‘Rev’rend, missus, good evenin’ to you. We’re destroyed by th’ rain entirely.’ William removed a handkerchief from his vest pocket and gave his nose a fierce blowing.

He reckoned William a handsome man, even with a once-broken nose that had been badly set. The rope of an old scar crossed his left temple.

‘Now, now, Da, not entirely. But no one goes hungry,’ she assured them, ‘our Aga is fired by oil and there’s a lovely rack of lamb roasting for your dinner.’

‘I’m desperate with th’ hunger,’ said the old man.

‘Our own lamb,’ she said. ‘We hope you’ll approve. The dining room in thirty minutes, then, straight down the hall and to the right. Flashlights and chamber sticks on the book table.’

‘Chamber stick,’ said Cynthia, not knowing the term.

Anna laughed. ‘Something to stick a candle in and light the way to your bedchamber. Oh, and when you’re ready to retire, we’ll bring buckets of hot water so you can have a wash.’

A good-looking woman brimful of energy, just as he remembered. Ten years ago, she appeared to run the place virtually single-handed. He didn’t remember meeting William before, or Liam.

‘And what may I get you in the meanwhile?’ asked Anna. ‘Whiskey? Glass of wine? Cup of tea?’

‘A cup of tea,’ said his wife. ‘I’ll just find the powder room first.’

‘Ditto,’ he said.

‘Straight across there, next to the sheep painting. And behind the sofa there’s the honesty bar and a box for outgoing mail.’

Aengus arrived at his elbow. Something looked very different about their driver, though he couldn’t say what. A brown fellow, wrinkled as a dried apple.

‘Bang-up, Aengus. Thank you.’

‘Ah, well, we didn’ get drownded, so.’

Owing to the criminal diminution of the dollar, this would be no mean gratuity; he dug into his pocket and pressed more than a few euros into Aengus’s hand. He was in turn handed a business card troubled by age and a series of phone numbers crossed through in pencil.

‘You’ll have no vehicle a’tall ’til th’ cousins come. Best give us a shout if there’s need.’

‘What if you’re mowing?’

‘We’ll send a cousin of our own, we’ve thirty-odd, m’ brother an’ me.’

‘Thank you, Mr. Malone,’ said Cynthia. ‘Be safe out there. Not too much backin’ up, if you please.’

Aengus grinned, a sudden and remarkable sight, and hurried out.

‘You first.’ She nudged him toward the sheep painting.

‘Ladies first.’

‘What’s that smell?’

‘Turf. They’re burning turf. Takes some getting used to.’ He remembered how much he’d learned to like the pungent odor.

Liam bounded up. ‘Everything is in your room, Reverend. I hope you’ll be happy with us. Welcome again to Broughadoon.’

‘Thank you, we’re thrilled to be here.’

A lean, handsome Irish face, he thought, with intense blue eyes and hair graying at the temples. ‘I don’t believe we met when I visited a few years ago.’

‘I was helping rebuild the west wing of the oul’ place, and keepin’ my head down. There’s still work going on, I hope it won’t disturb you. Anyway, you’ll see more of me this trip, I’ll be givin’ a hand with dinner and cookin’ your breakfast.’

‘The full Irish breakfast I so fondly remember? ’

‘And skip the blood pudding, Anna says.’

‘Correct. My wife, however, is eager for the blood pudding!’

Liam laughed. ‘Is she Irish?’

‘Her maternal double-great-grandmother was from Connemara, but we know nothing about her except she was very cheerful-looking and played the fife.’

‘I expect you met the lorry coming in.’

‘I’ll say.’

‘Sorry about that. It was my wine wholesaler, he was held up by the storm and finally had to run for it. By the way, the delay of your cousin and his wife opened up the room they requested. Always the silver lining.’

‘Always,’ he agreed. ‘The books. I don’t recall seeing so many books last time, or paintings.’

‘My father’s library passed to me years ago; we finally got the shelves built last spring.’

‘Beautiful millwork on the shelves.’

‘Thanks.’

‘You did it?’

‘My da was a builder, I grew up with a hammer an’ saw. I wanted his books to have a good show. A few good pictures also passed to me, including a Barret you’ll see in the dining room—it’s a beauty in afternoon light. Anyway, books and pictures for me, and the house up the hill for my older brother, Paddy, thanks to God.’

‘Thanks to God!’ Sitting nearby with Seamus, William thumped his cane on the floor.

‘Refresh my memory. What’s the meaning of the name Broughadoon?’

‘From the Irish,
both an dún
—hut of the fort.’

‘This being the hut, and the fort being ...?’

‘Catharmore—on th’ hill above.’

‘So. It’s a pleasure to see an open fire.’

‘Ireland’s gone modern, I’m afraid, though Anna and I try to keep some of the oul’ ways. Speakin’ of oul’ ways, sorry about the power, ’t is usually back on in no time.’

Through the open window, he glimpsed the taillights of the Volvo disappearing along the road. And there, on the antlers of a mounted deer head, hung Aengus’s hat, as shapeless off as it had been on.

‘Aengus Malone forgot his hat,’ he told Liam. He felt oddly remorseful.

‘So he did. We’ll leave it just there ’til he comes again.’

They had no plans for Aengus to come again, as they’d be traveling with Stirling Moss in the future. ‘A pity he left it,’ he said, ‘his old mum gave it to him.’

‘Aengus Malone forgot his hat,’ William announced to Seamus. ‘Leave it just there ’til he comes again.’

Seamus was filling his pipe. ‘Aye,’ he said, looking up and smiling. ‘Will do.’

On going in to dinner, he spied a large, well-thumbed book lying open on a table by the dining room door. Names lined the pages.

‘Want to sign the guest book?’ he asked Cynthia.

‘I’ll do it tomorrow; I’m famished.’

He couldn’t resist. Squinting in the dusky light of the candle sconces, he picked up the pen and made the inscription.

Timothy A. Kavanagh, Mitford, North Carolina.

There. His Irish name in an Irish book, on the heels of an Irish rainstorm. It was official.

Three

They found extra blankets, and piled covers on until the pair of them were pressed flat as hoe-cakes. It’s the way he’d slept as a boy in Mississippi, beneath the heavy homemade quilts of his Grandpa Howard’s country house bed.

‘Wonderful dinner,’ she murmured. ‘Lovely people. Great pillows.’

‘Happy?’ he asked.

‘Happy.’

They lay facing each other in the light from a candle in the chamber stick.

‘You’re trembling,’ he said. ‘Shall I close the window?’

‘No, I’m just excited by it all. I’m glad it took so many years for us to get here.’

‘You’re glad?’

‘That it was long delayed and hoped for makes it all more precious. I love Broughadoon, it’s just right for us.’

He felt the blood beating in his temples; blood removed to America by his ancestors in 1858, and now returned. ‘What would you like to have from this trip?’

‘Time to enjoy being in my skin. There’s something by Thomas à Kempis: “Everywhere I have sought rest and not found it, except sitting in a corner by myself with a book.” I want to sleep in tomorrow—sit in that lovely old chair in the corner and read, and listen to the sounds of this place, and speculate.’

He was not keen on her speculations; they led to rearranging rooms, writing and illustrating books, painting kitchens and hallways, having fifteen yards of topsoil hauled in.

In the distance, the bleating of a sheep. Rain rustled in the downspouts.

‘One of the poems is coming,’ she said.

One of the Yeats poems she had worked for weeks to memorize and which he hadn’t yet heard.

‘It must be recited,’ she said, ‘or it might go away.’

‘You don’t want to wait for a bench in the garden or a stroll along the lough?’

‘Are you too worn to hear it?’

‘Never. Count me never too worn.’

I went out to the hazel wood,
Because a fire was in my head,
And cut and peeled a hazel wand,
And hooked a berry to a thread,
And when white moths were on the wing,
And moth-like stars were flickering out,
I dropped the berry in a stream
And caught a little silver trout.

He lay looking at her in the sheen of candlelight, realizing again that he was fond of the lines at the corners of her mouth.

‘Moth-like stars,’ he said. ‘Yes, go on.’

When I had laid it on the floor
I turned to blow the fire aflame,
But something rustled on the floor,
And some one called me by my name.
It had become a glimmering girl
With apple blossom in her hair
Who called me by my name and ran
And faded through the brightening air.

She had worked hard to memorize poems by the Dublin-born poet besotted with Sligo, had used them as a litmus test for the memory that sometimes failed and left her anxious. ‘We all lose thoughts and words,’ he told her. ‘I can never remember romaine when I’m thinking of lettuce.’ It was a paltry confession; she deserved better. Did he often think of lettuce? she had asked.

Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands,
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.

He lay quiet for a time, moved by the words and the way she delivered them, as if she lived in them and had opened a door and invited him in.

The trembling was running out of her like a tide.

‘Glimmering girl,’ he said, brushing her cheek with his fingers. ‘Brightening air. Thank you. Well done.’

He kissed her.

‘Very well done.’

‘He wrote it for a woman he was mad about, but she married someone else.’

He recalled the briefest image of the tall, polished Andrew Gregory on Cynthia’s porch, ringing the doorbell like a schoolboy lover. He had thought Tim Kavanagh’s number was up—but no, she had preferred the short and balding country parson.

Again, the distant bleating. He got up and closed the window, snuffed the candle flame with his fingers, and got back into bed.

‘So amazing,’ she said. ‘Open windows with no screens.’

‘No bugs.’ They were pretty buggy back in Carolina. ‘Coffee or tea in the morning?’ Liam said the first pot would be brewed at seven; breakfast from eight ’til ten.

‘Coffee. Thank you. I love you.’

‘I love you back,’ he said, quoting the thrown-away boy he’d been blessed to raise from age eleven. ‘And I don’t want to hear another word about your memory going south.’

‘What’s a Dub?’ she asked.

‘Someone from Dublin.’

‘What’s a Terp?’

‘The Terps are the University of Maryland’s football team.’

‘I’m destroyed by these pillows entirely,’ she crooned. She turned away, then, and backed up to him, assuming what his grandmother called ‘the spooning position.’ ‘I’ll just be backin’ oop.’

She would try on the Irish accent ’til kingdom come. He buried his face in her hair, in the smell of it. ‘I have a poem.’

‘You’re the sly one.’

‘This is something we’ve both known for a long time. To you before the close of day . . .’

‘Yes. Good.’

‘Creator of the world, we pray ...’

She recited with him the verses of the old hymn, the one they sometimes prayed together at night:

From all ill dreams defend our sight,
From fears and terrors of the night . . .

Her slight, whiffling snore, then, and the faint chiming of a clock somewhere down the hall.

He lay unmoving, sensing fields rolling beyond the window like a green sea, opening out to his memory of Ben Bulben’s shadowed hulk, the ragged etch of Classiebawn against a lowering sky, the road winding along the coast of Connemara.

The Hunger Road, they called it; he wanted more than anything to show it to her. The sight of the road itself, however, had not been as galvanizing as the photograph on a postcard among the papers in his father’s locked desk.

As a boy, he’d been careful to know when the lock was off, and had gone at once to the photographs, to read the faces and try to imagine something of the line down which his blood flowed.

The shot of the road had been taken roughly a century after the 1840s when emigration numbers were at their highest. The road was empty of people or cars, curving along a bleak winter coastline where mountains jutted abruptly from the sea. Tens of thousands had walked this road to ships they believed would carry them from a hell of loss and betrayal to America and Canada and Australia and freedom. For many, that was true. For nearly as many, the vessels became known as coffin ships in which countless numbers of Irish perished in the crossing or sank with their boats while scarcely out of view from shore. And the worst wasn’t over—in ports where officials refused to allow debarkation, typhoid took its toll in ‘many a foul steerage.’ A labored paragraph on the back of the postcard had told him this.

There was no one whom he could ask why, or how it had happened; his father never mentioned his Irish heritage, nor did his grandfather, who, to his death, expressed a strange and often embarrassing inflection in his southern speech. Ireland was off limits, big time; Tim Kavanagh’s lineage was a myth not to be examined.

At some point, he stopped looking at the picture on the card, and looked only at the images of strangers wearing odd clothing—one fellow with his trousers rolled above his knees, standing proudly with a cow outside a thatched cottage; another wearing a rough-cut suit in front of a limestone church and cemetery; two boys playing in a walled garden, and a cat curled on a crooked bench; a woman with dark hair and sorrowful eyes, very beautiful; a man with a large mustache overlooked by a large nose.

He took his watch from the night table and squinted at the illuminated face. Ten-thirty. It was five-thirty in the afternoon in Mitford. He ran the figures in his head—an hour to the Hickory airport in Puny’s station wagon, with their luggage and her double set of twins; an hour’s wait with a two-day-old copy of
The Charlotte Observer
; roughly a two-hour flight to Atlanta in a plane the size of his carry-on; in Atlanta, a two-hour wait and a seven-hour delay; then seven and a half hours to Dublin with a two-hour wait before boarding an hour’s hop to Sligo, followed by a half-hour in baggage claim and the dicey trek with Aengus Malone.

Roughly twenty-five hours in motion, and no sleep to speak of. He was wrecked, but not ruined—with a few good hours tonight, he could easily get in sync with the time difference.

He was not a man to part easily from home, from his dog, from his now legally adopted son, Dooley, who was twenty-one going on forty-five. Such things need watchful tending, like a cook fire. One mustn’t go long away from connections lest something fragile die out. One could not fetch that particular fire from neighbors.

He’d noticed that she was carrying a couple of sketchbooks in the red handbag as big as a Buick. Why was he surprised? She was an artist, he should expect her to carry sketchbooks. While rummaging for a granola bar in the depths of that mess kit, she had set the watercolor box on the seat beside her, innocent of his stares.

So. Sketchbooks and watercolors. Just in case, of course.

Last week, she showed him the e-mail from her editor, James, in which she was exhorted to ‘get a book out of Ireland.’

She hit reply. ‘James—the only thing I intend to get out of Ireland is pleasure. Your devoted author.’ She handed over the printed declaration. ‘There, darling,’ she said, ‘remove that worried look from your face.’

Such intentions were all well and good, but books had a tendency to pop out of her like a jack from a box. He had never liked jacks-in-the-box.

Out of the blue, the mania would take hold, and for months following she would be cut in twain: half for him, half for the book. She gave it all the tenderness and passion of a mother toward a child, and at times all the brooding of a woman toward a lover. She would be there and not there, all at once—the way he had been, perhaps, during so many seasons of his priesthood. There and not there, all at once.

‘Fire and ice,’ someone had said of him in the days when he was searching for God and trying to make up the emptiness. And even when, into his forties, he had at last been found of God, it was the very same, except then he was absorbed utterly in the telling of the truth and sparing nothing, least of all himself.

He didn’t want her committing her soul to another book, not now. He didn’t want to be on this trip alone, though at her side daily. After more than sixty years of bachelorhood, he had discovered a terrible truth:

Without her, he was beached.

He scooped her closer to his chest and belly and into the curve of his bent knees.

Silver apples of the moon, golden apples of the sun.

Together with the sound of her light snore, the rain dripping from the leaves was his cradle song.