Love Begins in Winter (10 page)

W
ALTER'S FAMILY HAD LIVED
outside the village of Wicklow on the east coast of Ireland for Walter's whole life. Unlike the rest of his Romany family, Walter's had stayed in one place, and contrary to Rom custom, Walter was encouraged to attend the local school and mingle with the people of the village.

Everyone in the village knew who Walter was, and they knew why his family lived on the hill a mile or so outside town.

In 1943, Walter's two sets of grandparents escaped Hitler's murderous dream and came to Ireland. In the early 1960s, at a Rom festival in the south of Ireland, Walter's mother and father met in a sloping field. It was quite dark, but they could see each other's faces. The evening was chilly. She was barefoot. Walter's father asked one of her brothers where they were from. Then later on, he offered her some cake to eat. She took it from his hands and put it straight into her mouth without chewing. They both laughed. Later on she hears a knock on the caravan door. Her brother is reading. She is barefoot at the sink with her sleeves rolled up. Her brother knows who it is. He opens the door and goes out to smoke. The man is holding a guitar. Finally it's happening, and she holds her breath.

Two nights later, they ran away. Then, as was the custom, their families met and laughed and argued in equal amounts. Within a week, bride price was set and Walter's parents (then in their teens) returned home.

Walter's young mother and father journeyed to Wicklow immediately after the ceremony, even though everyone joked about how they'd already taken their honeymoon.

“It's such a fine, wild, and desolate country,” Walter's father said to his bride in the car on the drive. He was still quite nervous because she was a quiet girl. He spread a blanket across her knees. She shivered—though it wasn't cold.

Her camp was near Belfast, while his camp was always moving, mostly around Dublin.

Both families made a living from selling used cars, car parts, and scrap metal, sharpening knives, and laying tarmac. The women told fortunes—a craft developed and perfected over centuries and based on the idea that all humans want the same thing: love and acceptance.

After passing through the village, the young couple parked on a hill and began to pitch a marital tent in a field overlooking the sea. The tent was orange, and its sides were hung over cool hollow poles that fit inside one another.

Once it was up, they lay inside under a thick blanket and told stories without trying. Outside the tent, clouds blew across the field and out to sea.

A rabbit hopped up to the tent, then ran back into the hedgerow.

After they were together, her body trembled. She pressed herself against him. He listened to the sounds of night and of the sea wrapping its cold arms around the thick rocks; the white froth of saltwater; a chorus of popping barnacles.

In the morning, Walter's father cooked a breakfast with food they'd brought—food that wasn't polluted by non-Romany shadows.

As half a dozen sausages thopped and spat, turning brown on one side, Walter's mother heard a tiny splash. She was washing her face beside the hedge. The water was mouse gray. She turned and looked back at the tent; its tangerine orange sides billowed in the wind against the hard green of the hedgerow. She continued washing. It was such a windy day.

Then Walter's father heard something—a feeble scream in the distance. He looked up from his sausages and saw two specks on the cliff several hundred yards away. He dropped his fork in the grass and ran. Two children stood at the edge beside an empty stroller. The older child was heaving violently and looking down at the water.

Then the young child started to scream.

At least a hundred feet down in the sea, something bobbed.

The water was dark green.

Walter's father kicked off his boots and then jumped.

When he hit the water, several bones in his right foot split.

His wife saw him disappear. She opened her mouth to scream, but no sound emerged.

Everyone thought they were dead because there was simply no trace of either of them. The police launched a boat. Not even a sock or a small shoe. Not a trace.

Walter's mother was taken to the children's house by the police and given tea, which normally she wouldn't have been able to drink because of Romany custom.

The mother of the children sat very close to Walter's mother. Eventually they held hands.

The children sat at their feet.

They were still and their faces were empty.

More family trickled in through the thick farm door. People screamed and then talked quietly. An unmarried uncle sobbed into his hand. Then two women of the family approached the Gypsy in the chair. They touched her shoulders, knees, and then held on tight because it was too late—too late for anything except blind, gentle, wordless touching.

Then the sound of breaking glass upstairs.

Men's voices.

The sound of something heavy hitting the floor.

Time unraveling without notice.

Then suddenly—a miracle.

Almost midnight and the police are pounding on the door.

Lights go on.

People in chairs come to life.

The fire is a dark blood orange.

More screaming, but a different kind as a man and small girl are helped from the back of a police car.

The man is dark-skinned. A Romany. The child clings to him.

They are wrapped in thick blankets. They both have messy hair. The child is too afraid to take her eyes off the Gypsy who jumped off a cliff to save her. His face has never been so still. He's not fully convinced they're alive. Not until he sees his wife will he believe it's not a dream—a fantasy prelude to the life beyond death.

The mother loses a shoe as she runs for the frightened bundle of child. The child reaches out, then once buried in the familiar bosom explodes with tears and shrieks.

Walter's mother slaps her husband across the face, then kisses it all over.

More headlights turn into the driveway.

The rattle of teacups from the kitchen.

Joy fills the house.

Men grab the hair on one another's heads.

Screaming and jumping.

The sound of breaking glass.

Singing.

The Gypsy and the girl were found together walking up the cliff road toward town. They had been swept several miles from the spot where the child had fallen in. The outgoing tide had pulled them away from the rocks.

His arms were raw, burning.

His black eyes blazed with the fury of staying alive.

Soaked clothes weighing them down.

Finally man and child dumped upon a shallow sand-bar, then carried up the beach on the spreading foam of a breaker.

Walter's father had lost all sense of time. Perhaps years had passed. Perhaps they were the only two people alive on earth. Perhaps they would live together from now on. Such thoughts entered his mind as he watched the child cough and cough and cough.

Walter's father removed all her clothes and tucked her frigid body under his clothes so that only her head stuck out. As her body sucked the heat from his, she quieted and fell asleep.

She was not dead, he knew that. He could feel her breathing. He could feel her life attached to his.

Finally a car in the distance. Walter's father signaled weakly.

“Fuck off, Gypo,” the driver shouted through his window.

More walking.

Then an old farmer with a wagonful of sheep.

He had been in the war and recognized immediately that desolate look of the figure in his headlights.

The farmer saw that the man walking up the dark road was soaked through. Then he noticed a second head. He pulled to the side of the road and hurried them into his wagon, freeing several sheep to make room. Then he drove back to his house without stopping to close the gate.

His wife found blankets. Sugar lumps dropped liberally into china cups.

The farmer watched the fire and wondered if they might stay.

It wasn't until Walter had stopped shivering that he told the farmer how the little girl wasn't his—that he'd simply found her beneath the surface in the swirling black, in the cold, their arms like vines destined to forever entangle.

The farmer looked very serious.

His wife telephoned the police from the hall phone.

The next day, as Walter's father and mother were packing up their orange tent, several old Land Rovers turned in to the field through an open gate. Then several more cars. Even a police car. Walter's mother helped her husband stand. His leg was bandaged. The pain was like fifty wasps trapped inside his foot.

A large group of people walked toward them, headed by the children from the cliff and their parents. They stopped walking several yards off and the little girl's father approached Walter's father. He stood opposite and extended his hand. When Walter's father went to shake it, the young man simply leaned forward and hugged him. Several people in the group started clapping. The policeman removed his hat. Women made the sign of the cross upon their anoraks.

The man handed Walter's father an envelope.

“For what you done, Gypsy,” the man growled. His cheeks glistened.

Walter's father looked at the envelope.

“It's a letter from me to you, and a deed. We're giving you this here land we stand on.”

Walter's father had been warned about getting mixed up in the affairs of non-Romanies.

“Take it,” the man insisted. “Mary, Mother of Jesus, take it, man.”

Walter looked up at the sky and exhaled.

What would his family say if he started deal-making with non-Romanies.

Then the father broke down. Two men stepped forward and propped him up.

Then the sister of the saved child ran over to Walter's father and took his dark hand.

“We don't care that you're Gypsies,” she said.

Walter's mother stood by her husband.

“You can bring your whole family here if you like,” the girl continued. “We can all be together—it'll be like heaven.”

And so the orange tent was never taken down. Instead, the camp was built around it, and they became known as the “Gypsies on the Hill.”

And when the father of the saved girl decided to move his family to the safety of Dublin a year later, he made a sign in his metal shop and erected it on the cliff one windy afternoon.

It read:

 

 

About the time the sign went up, Walter was conceived.

W
ALTER LOOKED AT HIS
motorcycle on its side in the puddle. He imagined firing up the engine and riding at full pelt toward her house. In the distance waves crashed against the point: the foam, the black rocks—two equally determined forces. Walter felt such forces alive within himself. He thought of his father's daring rescue before he was born.

Walter was headed for the very same farmhouse his mother had been taken to after her husband tossed his body off the cliff into the sea.

After the saved child's family moved to Dublin, a middle-aged man moved in and began to farm the area around his cottage. Now, strangely, it was the home of Walter's beloved. The orphan from Canada.

Walter lifted his bike off its side and continued toward her house. Only a mile or so to go.

He wondered if he might even find out her name—that would be a brilliant start, he thought. He imagined riding his bike off a cliff and screaming her name in midair.

Walter was riding his motorbike the first time he saw her in the village. He veered off the road and almost hit an old woman.

“Dear God in heaven,” he muttered to himself as his eyes followed her from shop to shop. “What a beauty, mother of Jesus.” The old woman glared at him and waved her stick.

Walter assumed the girl was an American tourist, one of the many who would appear (usually in late summer) with their children and announce themselves in the pub as descendants of so-and-so.

Walter watched her stroll through the village quietly, lingering at shop windows. Then he smoked and pretended not to watch her wait for the N36 bus, which deposited its passengers about the northern part of the countryside every time it pulled to the side of the road.

Walter considered following the bus into the country, but his bike was so noisy it might irritate her, and there was the fear that the bus might end up going faster than he could.

Walter resolved to discover who she was and where she lived from the people in the shops, who between them knew everything that was happening within a twenty-mile radius.

At the newsagent, Walter asked for a pack of twenty Players cigarettes and casually mentioned that he'd seen a stranger in the village—a girl walking alone like a single cloud in the sky—but then his breath shallowed suddenly and he was unable to continue talking.

“You should really think about cutting down,” the newsagent said, holding up the cigarettes. “You're only a lad to be smoking so much; look at you, Walter—you can barely breathe.”

Before Walter left the shop, the newsagent suddenly remembered what Walter had said and called out.

“Ay, the girl you're talking about, Walter. She's been in, nice girl she is, and very tall, and a bit too old for you, me boy, if you know what I mean—a little too experienced.” Then he laughed to himself. Walter shrugged and felt his blood turn cold with embarrassment.

“I'm actually getting on in years,” Walter exclaimed.

Just as he was about to step outside, he heard the newsagent add, “And very sad what happened to her and her sister.”

Walter poked his head back around the door.

“What's that you say?”

“Very sad, Walter—what happened to her ma and dad.”

Walter stepped inside the shop again. It was brighter this time. He reached for a pint of milk and took it up to the counter.

“I bet you didn't know she's Canadian.”

“Canadian? That's nice,” Walter said, pretending not to care.

“And she arrived in Ireland with her sister sometime last month. Popsy met them at the airport—”

“How does Popsy know them?” Walter asked.

“I heard it was the first time Popsy had been to an airport, and he asked the Aer Lingus girl where exactly on the runway did the people come out.”

The newsagent cackled.

“What a daft bugger he is, eh?” the newsagent said.

Walter rolled his eyes.

“So what happened to her family?” Walter said, taking his change and tucking the milk into his jacket.

“Well, me boy—they all perished in a fiery car crash outside Toronto.”

“In Canada?”

“Ay. Now all that's left of the family is the tall girl that you saw, her young sister—who's the spitting image of her—and daft old Popsy.”

The newsagent sniggered.

“That man's lived alone his entire life—and now he's got two girls to take care of. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph—what next?”

“Ay, it's strange, it is,” Walter said.

“But something tells me he'll do all right,” the newsagent admitted in a gesture that was particularly Irish—to cajole, mock, embarrass as a prelude to love.

“How's your da?”

“He's fine,” Walter said.

“Still in the wheelchair?”

“Ay—but it's grand how he gets around.”

“Ay—they don't make 'em like your da anymore. Give him my regards.”

“Ay, I will,” Walter promised.

Walter slipped from the bright shop and stepped out into the dusk. His motorcycle headlamp was on and cast a web of yellow light across the black concrete.

Walter had never talked directly with Popsy but knew who he was. The man had never married. He lived alone in an isolated farmhouse on the cliffs. He was occasionally seen in the pub—generally in the summer—talking amiably in his soft voice and telling his dog to lie down. Walter didn't know his real name but knew he was a master carpenter. Walter's father had once said that what Popsy did with wood made it stronger than steel.

Walter continued in the rain along the wet farm road with his basket of eggs in the back. A bird dipped alongside him and glided forward, landing on the road ahead to gulp down a worm.

When Walter was seven, he learned to swim on the incoming tide, watched vigilantly by his uncle, who'd come to live at their camp when Walter was a baby. His uncle had wanted to marry a non-Romany girl from Sethlow, but she eventually left him for an Englishman who worked on an oil rig. However, Uncle Ivan didn't seem particularly upset when the girl one day turned up with her new boyfriend at the camp in a brown Rover. In fact, Uncle Ivan had laughed and shaken the new boyfriend's hand vigorously.

Walter (now that he was older) believed the real reason that Uncle Ivan came to live with them was because of Walter's father's accident, which left him partially paralyzed. Walter's father could feel his legs and stand on them (with great pain), but he was unable to walk—or to work. Uncle Ivan had the sort of energy that enabled him to do two men's work in half the time. And he was also a celebrity. Uncle Ivan was the only Gypsy (and Irishman) in history to win a gold medal at the Olympics.