The Collected Stories (27 page)

The solid world, though, was everywhere around him. There was the lake, the road, the evening, and he was going to call on Gillespie. Gillespie was sawing. Gillespie was always sawing. The roaring rise-and-fall of the two-stroke stayed like a rent in the evening. When he got to the black gate there was Gillespie, his overalled bulk framed in the short avenue of alders, and he was sawing not alders but beech, four or five tractor-loads dumped in the front of the house. The priest put a hand to the black gate, bolted to the first of the alders, and was at once arrested by showery sunlight falling down the avenue. It lit up one boot holding the length of beech in place, it lit the arms moving the blade slowly up and down as it tore through the beech, white chips milling out on the chain.

Suddenly, as he was about to rattle the gate loudly to see if this would penetrate the sawing, he felt himself (bathed as in a dream) in an incredible sweetness of light. It was the evening light on snow. The gate on which he had his hand vanished, the alders, Gillespie’s formidable bulk, the roaring of the saw. He was in another day, the lost day of Michael Bruen’s funeral nearly thirty years before. All was silent and still there. Slow feet crunched on the snow. Ahead, at the foot of the hill, the coffin rode slowly forward on shoulders, its brown varnish and metal trappings dull in the glittering snow, riding just below the long waste of snow eight or ten feet deep over the whole countryside. The long dark line of mourners following the coffin stretched away towards Oakport Wood in the pathway cut through the snow. High on Killeelan
Hill the graveyard evergreens rose out of the snow. The graveyard wall was covered, the narrow path cut up the side of the hill stopping at the little gate deep in the snow. The coffin climbed with painful slowness, as if it might never reach the gate, often pausing for the bearers to be changed; and someone started to pray, the prayer travelling down the whole mile-long line of the mourners as they shuffled behind the coffin in the narrow tunnel cut in the snow.

It was the day in February 1947 that they buried Michael Bruen. Never before or since had he experienced the Mystery in such awesomeness. Now, as he stood at the gate, there was no awe or terror, only the coffin moving slowly towards the dark trees on the hill, the long line of the mourners, and everywhere the blinding white light, among the half-buried thorn bushes and beyond Killeelan, on the covered waste of Gloria Bog, on the sides of Slieve an Iarainn.

He did not know how long he had stood in that lost day, in that white light, probably for no more than a moment. He could not have stood the intensity for any longer. When he woke out of it the grey light of the alders had reasserted itself. His hand was still on the bar of the gate. Gillespie was still sawing, bent over the saw-horse, his boot on the length of beechwood, completely enclosed in the roaring rise-and-fall of the saw. The priest felt as vulnerable as if he had suddenly woken out of sleep, shaken and somewhat ashamed to have been caught asleep in the actual day and life, without any protection of walls.

He was about to rattle the gate again, feeling a washed-out parody of a child or old man on what was after all nothing more than a poor errand: to tell the Gillespies that a bed had at long last been made available in the Regional Hospital for the operation on Mrs Gillespie’s piles, when his eyes were caught again by the quality of the light. It was one of those late October days, small white clouds drifting about the sun, and the watery light was shining down the alder rows to fall on the white chips of the beechwood strewn all about Gillespie, some inches deep. It was the same white light as the light on snow. As he watched, the light went out on the beech chips, and it was the grey day again around Gillespie’s sawing. It had been as simple as that. The suggestion of snow had been enough to plunge him into the lost day of Michael
Bruen’s funeral. Everything in that remembered day was so pure and perfect that he felt purged of all tiredness, was, for a moment, eager to begin life again.

Making sure that Gillespie hadn’t noticed him at the gate, he turned back. The bed wouldn’t be ready for another week. The news could wait a day or more. Before leaving he stole a last look at the dull white ground about the saw-horse. The most difficult things always seem to lie closest to us, to lie around our feet.

Ever since his mother’s death he found himself stumbling into these dead days. Once, crushed mint in the garden had given him back a day he’d spent with her at the sea in such reality that he had been frightened, as if he’d suddenly fallen through time; it was as if the world of the dead was as available to him as the world of the living. It was also humiliating for him to realize that she must have been the mainspring of his days. Now that the mainspring was broken, the hands were weakly falling here and falling there. Today there had been the sudden light on the bits of white beech. He’d not have noticed it if he hadn’t been alone, if Gillespie had not been so absorbed in his sawing. Before, there must have been some such simple trigger that he’d been too ashamed or bewildered to notice.

Stealthily and quickly he went down the dirt-track by the lake till he got to the main road. To the left was the church in a rookery of old trees, and behind it the house where he lived. Safe on the wide main road he let his mind go back to the beech chips. They rested there around Gillespie’s large bulk, and paler still was the line of mourners following the coffin through the snow, a picture you could believe or disbelieve but not be in. In idle exasperation he began to count the trees in the hedge along the road as he walked: ash, green oak, whitehorn, ash; the last leaves a vivid yellow on the wild cherry, empty October fields in dull wet light behind the hedges. This, then, was the actual day, the only day that mattered, the day from which our salvation had to be won or lost: it stood solidly and impenetrably there, denying the weak life of the person, with nothing of the eternal other than it would dully endure, while the day set alight in his mind by the light of the white beech, though it had been nothing more than a funeral he had attended during a dramatic snowfall when a boy, seemed bathed in the eternal, seemed everything we had been taught and told of the world of God.

Dissatisfied, and feeling as tired again as he’d been on his way to Gillespie’s, he did not go through the church gate with its circle and cross, nor did he call to the sexton locking up under the bellrope. In order to be certain of being left alone he went by the circular path at the side. A high laurel hedge hid the path from the graveyard and church. There he made coffee without turning on the light. Always when about to give birth or die cattle sought out a clean place in some corner of the field.

Michael Bruen had been a big kindly agreeable man, what was called a lovely man. His hair was a coarse grey. He wore loose-fitting tweeds with red cattleman’s boots. When young he had been a policeman in Dublin. It was said he had either won or inherited money, and had come home to where he’d come from to buy the big Crossna farm, to marry and grow rich.

He had a large family. Men were employed on the farm. The yard and its big outhouses with the red roofs rang with work: cans, machinery, raillery, the sliding of hooves, someone whistling. Within the house, away from the yard, was the enormous cave of a kitchen, the long table down its centre, the fireplace at its end, the plates and pots and presses along the walls, sides of bacon wrapped in gauze hanging from hooks in the ceiling, the whole room full of the excitement and bustle of women.

Often as a boy the priest had gone to Michael Bruen’s on some errand for his father. Once the beast was housed or the load emptied Michael would take him into the kitchen. The huge fire of wood blazed all the brighter because of the frost.

‘Give this man something.’ Michael had led him. ‘Something solid that’ll warm the life back into him.’

‘A cup of tea will do fine,’ he had protested in the custom.

‘Nonsense. Don’t pay him the slightest attention. Empty bags can’t stand.’

Eileen, the prettiest of Michael’s daughters, laughed as she took down the pan. Her arms were white to the elbows with a fine dusting of flour.

‘He’ll remember this was a good place to come to when he has to start thinking about a wife.’ Michael’s words gave licence to general hilarity.

It was hard to concentrate on Michael’s questions about his father, so delicious was the smell of frying. The mug of steaming tea was
put by his side. The butter melted on the fresh bread on the plate. There were sausages, liver, bacon, a slice of black-pudding and sweetest grisceens.

‘Now set to,’ Michael laughed. ‘We don’t want any empty bags leaving Bruen’s.’

Michael came with him to the gate when he left. ‘Tell your father it’s ages since we had a drink in the Royal. And that if he doesn’t search me out in the Royal the next Fair Day I’ll have to go over and bate the lugs off him.’ As he shook his hand in the half-light of the yard lamp it was the last time he was to see him alive. Before the last flakes had stopped falling, when old people were searching back to ‘the great snows when Count Plunkett was elected’ to find another such fall, Michael Bruen had died, and his life was already another such watermark of memory.

The snow lay eight feet deep on the roads, and dead cattle and sheep were found in drifts of fifteen feet in the fields. All of the people who hadn’t lost sheep or cattle were in extraordinary good humour, their own ills buried for a time as deep as their envy of any other’s good fortune in the general difficulty of the snow. It took days to cut a way out to the main road, the snow having to be cut in blocks breast-high out of a face of frozen snow. A wild cheer went up as the men at last cut through to the gang digging in from the main road. Another cheer greeted the first van to come in, Doherty’s bread van, and it had hardly died when the hearse came with the coffin for Michael Bruen. That night they cut the path up the side of Killeelan Hill and found the family headstone beside the big yew just inside the gate and opened the grave. They hadn’t finished digging when the first funeral bell came clearly over the snow the next day to tell them that the coffin had started on its way.

The priest hadn’t thought of the day for years or of Michael Bruen till he had stumbled into it without warning by way of the sudden light on the beech chips. It did not augur well. There were days, especially of late, when he seemed to be lost in dead days, to see time present as a flimsy accumulating tissue over all the time that was lost. Sometimes he saw himself as an old man children were helping down to the shore, restraining the tension of their need to laugh as they pointed out a rock in the path he seemed about to stumble over, and then they had to lift their eyes and smile apologetically to the passersby while he stood staring out to sea, having
forgotten all about the rock in his path. ‘It’s this way we’re going.’ He felt the imaginary tug on his sleeve, and he was drawn again into the tortuous existence of the everyday, away from the eternal of the sea or the lost light on frozen snow across Killeelan Hill.

Never before though had he noticed anything like the beech chips. There was the joy of holding what had eluded him for so long, in its amazing simplicity: but mastered knowledge was no longer knowledge unless it opened, became part of a greater knowledge, and what did the beech chips do but turn back to his own death?

Like the sudden snowfall and Michael Bruen’s burial his life had been like any other, except to himself, and then only in odd visions of it, as a lost life. When it had been agreeable and equitable he had no vision of it at all.

The country childhood. His mother and father. The arrival at the shocking knowledge of birth and death. His attraction to the priesthood as a way of vanquishing death and avoiding birth. O hurry it, he thought. There is not much to a life. Many have it. There is not enough room. His father and mother were old when they married; he was ‘the fruit of old things’, he heard derisively. His mother had been a seamstress. He could still see the needle flashing in her strong hands, that single needle-flash composed of thousands of hours.

‘His mother had the vocation for him.’ Perhaps she had, perhaps all the mothers of the country had, it had so passed into the speech of the country, in all the forms of both beatification and derision; but it was out of fear of death he became a priest, which became in time the fear of life. Wasn’t it natural to turn back to the mother in this fear? She was older than fear, having given him his life, and who would give a life if they knew its end? There was, then, his father’s death, his acceptance of it, as he had accepted all poor fortune all his life long as his due, refusing to credit the good.

And afterwards his mother sold the land to ‘Horse’ McLaughlin and came to live with him and was happy. She attended all the Masses and Devotions, took messages, and she sewed, though she had no longer any need, linen for the altar, soutanes and surplices, his shirts and all her own clothes. Sometimes her concern for him irritated him to exasperation but he hardly ever let it show. He was busy with the many duties of a priest. The fences on the past and
future were secure. He must have been what is called happy, and there was a whole part of his life that, without his knowing, had come to turn to her for its own expression.

He discovered it when she began her death. He came home one summer evening to find all the lights on in the house. She was in the living-room, in the usual chair. The table was piled high with dresses. Round the chair was a pile of rags. She did not look up when he entered, her still strong hands tearing apart a herring-bone skirt she had made only the year before.

‘What on earth are you doing, Mother?’ He caught her by the hands when she didn’t answer.

‘It’s time you were up for Mass,’ she said.

‘What are you doing with your dresses?’

‘What dresses?’

‘All the dresses you’ve just been tearing up.’

‘I don’t know anything about dresses,’ and then he saw there was something wrong. She made no resistance when he led her up the stairs.

For some days she seemed absent and confused but, though he watched her carefully, she was otherwise very little different from her old self, and she did not appear ill. Then he came home one evening to find her standing like a child in the middle of the room, surrounded by an enormous pile of rags. She had taken up from where she’d been interrupted at the herring-bone skirt and torn up every dress or article of clothing she had ever made. After his initial shock he sent for the doctor.