The Heather Blazing (3 page)

Sometimes they spoke in hushed voices, as though he, the boy in the back of the car, might listen to what they were saying and repeat it elsewhere. He tried to follow the conversation. Agreed, agreed, his father said, agreed. He repeated the word to himself until it lost all its meaning and became just a sound. They were silent in the front of the car. Now, he thought, if he concentrated enough, the priest would start up the engine. But once more nothing happened. Why did he not start it? What were the two men thinking about? They drew on their cigarettes without saying a word; they both
seemed to be thinking about something. He listened as they began to speak. They were talking about a woman, but he could make no sense of their conversation.

“Is Father Rossiter Fianna Fail?” he asked when they came home.

“Priests can't join parties,” his father said.

Soon afterwards, there were often long silences in the car; Father Rossiter would drive them to the door and the two men would sit there discussing something for a while before falling into a long silence. His father began to go down town in the evenings to meetings and Mrs. Doyle came over from Pearse Road to mind him. “How lucky you are,” she told him, “just to be here on your own. Think of all the houses which have ten or twelve in the family without enough clothes to wear, or even enough food. You're lucky too that you're living in this nice house and your father's a teacher, because otherwise in a few years,” she said, “you'd have to go to England to get a job.”

She left the fire set for them every evening, or if it was very cold she would light it and leave the fireguard up against the hearth so that when they came in from school the back room would be warm. Eamon had to take charge of it, because his father sat at the table absorbed in what he was reading or writing. His father never noticed anything, even a spark on the rug which could, Mrs. Doyle said, burn the whole place down. His father would let the fire go out. He would stand up and look at the embers and the ash and then point to the rug, laughing to himself. “
Rugadh é in Eireann
,” he would say, as he knelt down to try to get the fire going once more.

He remembered the Woodbines in Mrs. Doyle's hand and the smoke in her voice, just as he remembered the long silences in the car, and the radio coming slowly alive with sound, and news of the war and Mrs. Doyle one evening telling him that his father was going to buy the Castle.

He waited until they were walking home from school together.

“Are we going to sell the house,” he asked, “because I don't want to live anywhere else.”

“We're not going to sell anything,” his father said.

“The Castle is too big for us. Is there electricity in the Castle?”

“What has you going on about the Castle?”

“Mrs. Doyle says that you're after buying it. It's too dark and old. No one goes near it.”

“But it's for a museum, it's not to live in,” his father said.

Soon, as he lay curled up on the back seat of Father Rossiter's car, he heard them talking about a museum. But the two men mumbled too much for him to catch any more of what they were saying. He asked them, but they continued talking and he had to ask again.

“It's for old things, historical things, like old books, old letters,” his father said. “People can come and look at them on display.”

*  *  *

Mr. McCurtin next door showed him a map of the world. Mrs. McCurtin said that he should be in his bed, but he waited up to hear the news on the wireless and he studied each country in Europe and down into Africa to see which was in German hands and which was still held by the Allies.

“He's too young to be telling him about the war,” Mrs. McCurtin said. His father and Mr. McCurtin drank bottles of stout and waited for the next bulletin, the sounds from the radio came in waves as though they were being carried in by the sea.

There was a big reading room in the Athenaeum with a fire blazing and a big table full of newspapers and magazines. There was a rule about silence and even if you wanted to whisper you had to go outside. One day he heard his father telling a man that they were going to buy the Castle from Dodo Roche.

“Does she live there?” he asked his father.

“When she was younger,” his father said.

“I thought that Spenser lived there?”

“That was in the fifteen hundreds. You're getting everything wrong,” his father said.

“Is Dodo Roche going to give you old things for the museum?”

His father had the big key to the door in the garden wall of the Castle, and other keys to doors and presses on a ring.

“Can I carry the big one?” Eamon asked.

“Be careful with it or we'll all be locked out,” his father said.

They walked down to the Castle; it was a cold day and the men waiting at the gates were shivering and stamping their feet with the cold. Mick Byrne, who was in Eamon's class in school, was there too with his uncle. Eamon went up to him and showed him the key before handing it to his father.

“Is Father Rossiter not coming?” he asked.

“No,” his father said. “He's out on a call.”

It was quiet suddenly when they closed the old heavy gate and stood inside the garden of the Castle. None of them had been here before, except to deliver a message to the side door. Mick Byrne and Eamon exchanged glances as though they were trespassing and could be caught at any moment. When his father turned the key and pushed the front door they could see that it was dark inside. Eamon had expected old furniture and cobwebs; instead he could see nothing. One of the men with his father lit a paraffin lamp, illuminating a huge hallway with a low ceiling. There was a sharp, sour smell.

“There's an awful stink,” Mick Byrne said. No one else spoke. One of the men went across the room and pulled back the shutters on a side window and a pale, dim light came into a corner of the hall. His footsteps echoed as he walked back to join the others who were standing there looking around them, as though afraid to move.

Eamon stood close to his father. One of the men had
opened the shutters of another window and it was now bright enough to see the flagstones.

“This is the old part,” his father said as he moved across and pushed a door which led into a room the same size as the hall, but brighter and with a higher ceiling. It was completely empty.

“This is the part the Roches built,” his father said.

Another door led into a kitchen where there were still tables and chairs as though someone had been living there. The men who had come with his father still looked suspicious and nervous, and they restrained Mick Byrne when he began trying to open drawers and presses.

“We can't go upstairs,” his father said, “because some of the floor is rotten.”

“There's a lot of work needed all right,” one of the men said.

*  *  *

As the spring came his father and the priest sat in the car more and more and talked to each other, smoking all the time. Mrs. Doyle would go out to look through the front window, and come back shaking her head. “They're still talking. They're going to talk all night. You'd better go to bed before your father comes in and catches you up.”

Most of the time they talked about the museum but they also talked about the war. They talked about how difficult it would be to get the work done with most of the men in England. Some of them were now starting to take their families over, Father Rossiter said, even with the danger. He hated to see people emigrating, he said, he hated it. A lot of the men were in the Local Defence Force as well, but if they were ready to give up a bit of their time, the ones who knew anything about wiring and plastering, then that would solve the problem.

They began to run a raffle on a Saturday night and a dance on a Sunday night to raise money for the museum. Eamon went down to McCurtin's and waited for the news so that he
could check on his atlas and mark any changes in the areas held by the Allies and the Germans, but after a while he lost interest in the radio; there were too many men talking, and sometimes the sound was too unclear, but Mr. McCurtin listened all the time; he knew everything about the war.

*  *  *

One evening when the sky was bright he went in the car with his father and Father Rossiter towards Oulart. They had put a notice in
The Echo
asking if anybody had old things in their houses which might be of historical value. People had written to them from all over the county. His father wrote back to each person, putting a tick at the top of each letter he had replied to, and then gathering them in a bundle at the back of his scrap book.

A mile before reaching Oulart they were to turn right, Father Rossiter said; these were his instructions. But he was unsure which turn to take, and they halted at several farmhouses to ask for directions, the priest jumping out to be met by a few sheepdogs or a small barking terrier. One woman came out with him to the car, peering in to see who was in the passenger seat and the back seat, her curiosity clear and undisguised.

“Is it Phil Byrne?” she asked. “Is he sick? I didn't know there was anything wrong with him. Are you sure it's him you're looking for?”

Father Rossiter was not sure.

“Are there any other Byrnes in the area?”

“There's Liz Byrne. Is it Liz Byrne you're looking for?” the woman asked, squinting her eyes as she looked at him.

“I know that there's a brother and sister living together,” Father Rossiter said.

“Oh, that's Phil Byrne and Mai,” the woman said. “And have you never been up there before, Father?”

“Which turn do I take?”

“Oh, you'll have to turn back now, it's the turn on the left after the crossroads. Will you be around long?”

“No, we're just making this one visit,” Father Rossiter said as he got back into the car.

After the crossroads there was a lane to the left but they did not know if this was the correct turning. They tried the lane, which became increasingly rutted and overgrown, seeming to lead nowhere, and becoming even narrower as they came to a brightly painted gate. His father got out and opened it, held it as the car went through, then closed it and got back into the car. Suddenly the lane began to widen again; they reached a clearing and saw a small farmhouse with a galvanized roof.

“It's hard to imagine,” Father Rossiter said, “people living so far from the road.”

A sheepdog ran from the house and started to bark at the front wheels of the car. Two old people were now standing at the door; they were both watchful, almost furtive. The woman was wearing a cardigan and had her arms folded.

He waited in the car with his father while Father Rossiter went to speak to the couple at the door. They were still unsure whether they were in the right house.

“Do they have old things?” he asked his father.

“They have pikes from 'Ninety-eight,” his father said. “That's what they said in the letter anyway.”

“Did they find them?”

“Stop asking questions now,” his father said.

Father Rossiter returned to the car and motioned for them to come into the house. The dog had now stopped barking and wagged his tail as they passed.

“We thought that there was something wrong when we saw the priest,” the woman said when they got inside the small kitchen which had a huge blackened fireplace and a table up against the window.

“We have no tea, you can't get any tea around here at the moment,” she went on. “Milk is the only thing I can offer you. We have plenty of that, thank God.”

Eamon sat down beside the table, running his finger along the plastic oilcloth with its pattern of flowers. The woman put a mug of milk in front of him. There were strange web-shaped cracks in the mug, which he inspected first before tasting the warm milk.

“They came down by here,” he heard the man saying to his father and Father Rossiter. “No wonder they left whatever they were carrying, sure weren't they bet? Didn't the English have muskets?”

The sheepdog came stealthily into the kitchen and lay in front of the fire with its eyes fixed on the man as he spoke, and its head resting on its paws. Suddenly, the man shouted at it and the dog slithered off back to the yard.

“They were hard times all right,” the woman said. The man went into a room at the side and came back with a wooden pole with two curled metal hooks at the top of it. Father Rossiter and Eamon's father stood up and examined it eagerly. The hooks looked sharp and dangerous.

“The wood's new. I did it myself,” the man said, “but I didn't have to touch the metal.”

“Do you have more of them?” Father Rossiter asked.

“Aye, I've twenty or thirty of them in there,” the man said.

“Our grandmother now on our mother's side, she was brought up here. It was the time of the evictions. Sure, they used to own from here out to the road, the whole way, including the two big barley fields. She knew about the men of 'Ninety-eight,” the woman looked into the fire and then back at the two visitors. “She would have been too young to remember it, but they told her about it, or she heard about it, and it was she who always said that they came down this way and that was the end of them then. That's all I remember now. There was a man used to come here and they used to talk about it.”

The room was filling up with smoke from the fire; Eamon watched a small piece of soot falling slowly through the air
and landing on the surface of his warm milk. It had a shape of its own, a curly, black shape. He did not want to swallow it. He studied it for a while, as the others talked and then put his finger into the milk and fished it out. He dried his finger on his trousers, having checked that no one was looking at him.

“Sure, they're no use to us at all,” the man said. “We'll be gone soon.”

His father told him to help them collect the metal pike tops and put them in the boot and the back seat of the car. The wall of the room where they were kept was all damp, the plaster had fallen off in places, leaving the bare clay visible. When they had taken all the pieces, they shook hands with the brother and sister who stood at the door watching them as they got into the car. It was darkening now, and the sky had clouded over. Father Rossiter had to switch on his lights as he drove along the lane back towards the main road.