The Light of Evening Read online

  It is only a matter of minutes before Nurse Flaherty has arrived with two sleeping pills in a little plastic cup, which she rattles gaily like a child with its first fallen tooth, rattled for the fairies.

  “Oh no, oh no, I don’t need them things,” she says, but the nurse will have none of it. Them things give such a lovely peaceful sleep and such lovely dreams, “moonlight in Mayo” time. Dilly is adamant. She never takes tablets and does not intend to.

  “Well, you’re taking them now because you’re up to ninety,” she is told.

  “Even a spoon of a cough bottle dopes me . . . it’s one of my rules,” she says.

  “Except I make the rules here,” Nurse Flaherty says, decisively.

  “You see they don’t give a natural sleep,” Dilly says half placating.

  “How would you know . . . you never had a one in your life.”

  “I did when I was in hospital years ago and I was befuddled for a week.”

  “Modern medicine is different . . . streamlined . . . six or seven good hours’ sleep and you wake refreshed.”

  “Don’t ask me, nurse,” Dilly says, close to tears.

  “Look, don’t you rise me because when I’m risen I’m a divil.”

  “The doctor didn’t say I was to have them.”

  “The doctor does his job and I do mine . . . that’s how things work in St. Joseph’s Ward.” And filling the tumbler of water from the bedside jug, she proffers the two turquoise capsules from the palm of her hand. Dilly swallows one. It tastes bitter and the aftermath bitterer still, as she retches in indignation.

  Already the nurse has the second one to her lips, outlining them as with a crayon or a lipstick. One is not enough, one botches the whole procedure, it has to be two or nothing.

  Dilly took the second one and scarcely had she lain back before the swoonings began. She clutched at the rungs of the bed, only to feel them soften and the bed itself beginning to sink as before her eyes there galloped a riderless horse and the consultant who had examined her is wringing the neck of a dead Rhode Island cockerel. I am Dilly and I am not Dilly, she says, clutching the strings of her nightgown, up-down, down-up, like milking a cow, and the last lucid bit of her mind going, going, gone as the tablets begin to wreak their worst. She pleads with herself to stay calm. She even believes that she is mastering these onslaughts, yet at that moment some ultimate door in her has been broken open and is swinging crazily on its hinges, then a burst as in childbirth and the floodgates flung open. I am I amn’t I amn’t. Feel for the bell feel for it Dilly it’s somewhere, find it squeeze it Nurse Nurse. She can’t hear me. They’re not listening. Is this how I die is this how one dies no one to give me the last sacrament all alone didn’t I rock the cradle like many another mother. Oh good God I’m slipping I’m slipping. Well . . . If it isn’t himself that’s in it if it isn’t Gabriel, eyes the softest brown the brown of the bulrushes, the lake reeds never boast a bulrush but the bog reeds do, cottony at first before they don their stout brown truncheons. Men are queer fish hard and soft both all pie when they want you so sweet and whispery sweeter than a woman then not. Distant. Wild irises beyond in that field they’re kinda swaying. Hard to beat them. The upper part of your face is kinda familiar and so is your good navy suit. You scamp you. Nothing is forgotten. Up to the time he was seven St. Columcille was a very unruly boy. Things miscarry. Letters. Gifts. The waistcoat I was making for you that black Christmas I sent posted it to Wisconsin to the wilds where you sawed trees all day long from dawn till dusk you and a Finn. Lost two fingers there. The pressed jasmine and aster that you stole in the municipal park that Sunday in Brooklyn, I have had framed. A simple dark green frame on a bed of white silk, ruching. You might have written. Every bit of your daily life interests me. I wrote this day fortnight but it was returned. Tampered with. Are you by any chance dead. A post office mistress has a specialty for opening other people’s letters. Not easy for me making time to write I have a man very hard on socks and workmen need three meals a day with jugs of tea and bread in between. My darling you will always have a message from me if only a postcard when I cannot make time for a letter. I would know if you were dead. Perhaps you are on your way here. Be sure to bring a candle a Christmas candle we need a bit of light to shed on things. So many misunderstandings. I was going across to you you were coming across to me but I was motioned back told to sit down and wait and that you would be with me seven years from this day. If you would get yourself photographed front face and silhouette and send it to me I will send postal order by return. Make sure the photographer catches the spill of your hair and your trim black beard. I have been told that you will be with me openly seven years from this day. Better call at night after the lights are out. Sometimes a well-dressed lady on horseback rides by here with leaflets to distribute, things on her mind I reckon. Once there was a child with her riding double. Walk right round the house in case of spies and then tap on the window a good smart rap and I’ll sit up. We could go to the boathouse in Googy Park, boat half rotten but we’ll be safe enough off over there on the island no one to split us asunder. Write to me I am weary weary of the pen weary of asking.

  Dilly struggles for air, for breath, her eyes refusing to peel open, the very same as if they’ve been glued together, pandemonium, shouting, “Get Counihan, get Counihan.” She is fighting someone off, a nun, a nun’s face, and a nun’s white habit, stiff as plaster of Paris, the voice telling her, “You’re all right, you’re all right now,” and she is being led back from the stairs, back to her own bed, hoisted almost, two of them, one on either side helping her, not able to feel the ground, not caring, their laying her back in the bed and such a look of consternation on the poor nun’s face.

  “I think I was in Yankee land,” Dilly says apologetically.

  “Only for Nurse Aoife finding you, you’d be in Kingdom Come . . . thank the good Lord and our Blessed Lady and His angels and saints . . . I’ll get Doctor Counihan to come and see you.”

  “It was those pills, they sent me sky-high . . . I’m back to myself now . . . I don’t need a doctor at all,” she says and wonders timidly if there is a chance of a cup of tea.

  No longer agitated, just a little wanderish, she sees her life pass before her in rapid succession, like clouds, different shapes and different colors, merging, passing into one another, the story of her life being pulled out of her, like the pages pulled from a book.

  PART II

  Mushrooms

  WE WERE BEYOND in the bog footing turf, three girls and Caimin and me. The small brown stooks like igloos in rows along the bank, gaps in them for the wind to circulate, to dry them out. When we’d finished someone said that the tinkers had been driven out of the Caoisearach, sent packing in their caravans, themselves and their children and their ponies and that there was bound to be mushrooms because wherever there were horses or ponies the mushrooms always sprang up.

  Creena was the smartest of us at finding them. She had eyes in the back of her head and the minute she came on a crop she commandeered them, folded her bib to make a pouch, to bring them home for her mother to cook in milk as a broth. There were two kinds of mushrooms, the domes like eggcups, snug in the grass, and the taller ones with smudgy brown mantles that quivered. We devoured them raw, but Eileen said they were gorgeous roasted on hot coals, held at the end of the tongs and flavored with a pinch of salt.

  The Shannon Lake way below and suddenly Caimin was shouting, calling, “There she goes, the ship bound for America,” and we looked and we couldn’t see it because there was nothing whatsoever on that lake, only round towers and islets, but we pretended, we all pretended that we saw the ship and waved to her.

  “Westwards . . . in her beautiful white cloak,” he said. He was going to cross the Atlantic Ocean in a boat all by himself like Brendan the Navigator and be a hero and go down in the annals.

  Maybe I decided then or maybe not. There was always so much talk about America, every young person with the itch to go. Nothing for us in the rocky fields, only scrag and reeds and a few drills of potatoes.

  Little did I dream that one day I would be lemon-oiling the banisters of the stairs of Mr. and Mrs. P. J. McCormack in their mansion in Brooklyn and dusting the treasures on Mrs. McCormack’s dressing table, the tiny glass pots with their silver tops, the silver-backed brush and comb set, the silk pincushion skewered with her hatpins, Matilda, with corsages of violets and strawberries pinned to her bosom.

  Creena was making us all laugh with a dance that her aunt had taught her. Her aunt Josephine had been home from Boston, cut a dash every Sunday with a change of style for Mass, telling people that America was out of this world and that no sooner did a craze for one dance catch on than another dance took over, all crazes, all fads.

  My mother found the note I’d written and hidden under the mattress. It said, “I want to go to America where I can have nice clothes and a better life than I have here” and was signed Dilly. She beat me for it and ripped an old straw hat that I was decorating with gauze. She was furious. I would stick at my books and stay home and be useful, I was a good pupil, the way she was a good pupil before me. Again and again she would tell it how when she was in the school she prayed for rain, downpours, so that the teacher would let her spend the night in the school because it was too far to walk the four miles home barefoot. She would tell how she used what was left of daylight to keep studying. Why should America claim Ireland’s sons and daughters, Ireland needing them, so many that had died on the scaffold and many more to die including, though she did not know it then, her own son. Had I no nature to want to leave, to bolt? We were always at loggerheads, my mother and me, both being very stubborn and strong-willed.

  The night before I left home, there was the wake in our kitchen as was
the custom for anyone going so far away. The kitchen was full of people, two men left their flash lamps lit during the dancing. Boys danced with me, said that they’d miss me, boys that had never thrown two words to me before, over a ditch. The older men sat on the settle bed with their bottles of porter and the one bottle of whiskey that they passed around and when they got up to dance they staggered and had to sit down again. The women were by the fire consoling my mother, consoling themselves, fearing that I would never come back. Some neighbors had helped with the passage money and I was sent around the kitchen to shake hands with them and swear that I would repay them. My things were packed, a black oilskin bag with twine around it, other clothes in a flour sack, and a long tin box with the name of a whiskey and the picture of a stream near where it was malted. My brother Michael sang “The Croppy Boy” and there were floods of tears over it, tears at my going and tears at the poor Croppy Boy who innocently went to do his Easter duty not knowing that the priest in the confessional was an English yeoman in disguise who would have him hanged for his insurgency.

  We left in the sidecar at dawn and as many as would fit got up with us, others walking behind, the young men haggard from the night’s enjoyment, slipping off at their own gates, cows waiting to be milked, a day’s work to be done. I’ll never forget my mother, Bridget, kneeling down on the dirt road to kiss my feet and saying, “Do not forget us, Dilly, do not ever forget your own people.” My brother came with me to wait for the mail car. He took off his brown scapulars and gave them to me, it being his way of saying goodbye. “In your letters, better not mention politics,” he said. He had a secret life from us, he was a Croppy Boy, so many young men were, but dared not speak of it for fear of informers.

  In the mail car I kept touching my belongings, feeling for the two coins: the sovereign and a florin that my mother had stitched in the hemline of my coat, wrapped and rewrapped in cloth so as not to look like money. People waved from gateways and walls, knowing that the mail car was bringing people bound for America.

  A bumpy ride over the wintry roads and where bridges had collapsed we got out and walked, then back on again and the coachman belting the two horses with all his might, because we had to catch the train to get us to Queenstown in time for the ship.

  I thought of our dog Prince and he knowing for certain that I was leaving and of my mother crying into the black lace mantilla that had come from Salamanca. I thought too of the secret places where my brother hid his weapons, his revolver and shotgun wrapped in straw, like the figures in a manger.

  Little Bones

  FOR NEARLY TWO WEEKS a world of water, pounding and sloshing, great waves full of ice crashing against the portholes and a horizon that could have been anywhere, home or Canada, or Timbuktu, or anywhere.

  Down below where we were incarcerated the fumes were terrible, fumes of cooking and cooking fat and oil from the paraffin lamps that had to be lit all day. A hole. People bickering and fighting and brokenhearted. Some had brought their own provisions and would elbow each other for a place at the one stove, the contrary cook hitting out with her tongue or a ladle or whatever instrument she had to hand. It was her stove, her domain. The staple diet for most was dry biscuits and salt fish. I nearly died of thirst. The thirst was the worst of all. I kept thinking of wells at home, imagined putting the bucket down and drawing up the clean water that had come from the mountain and drinking it, drinking a mug of it there and then. The water casks had run out after the third day and we had to use salt water for our tea and for all else. Stewards came twice a day from up above, cursing and shouting, telling us to clean our slops, to clean our messes and the contents of chamber pots, slop buckets and cooking pots were tossed over the railings, the water a sheet of gray, mile after mile of it, the waves mouthing away, like the mouths of the millions of fishes that the sea harbored.

  In the evenings the sound of the orchestra drifted down as the first-class passengers danced and sat down to their five-course dinners.

  Earlier we were allowed up on deck to do our own dancing and a fiddler from Galway played with a gusto. Mary Angela surpassed herself, knowing all the steps, and was tossed from one young man to the next like she was a feather. Only Sheila suspected that all was not right because of the big skirt Mary Angela wore and the loose apron that she never took off. She said her stomach was swollen because of the salt water and the gruel. At night she sat with the men, drinking grog with them in the dark, lewd laughter and sounds, the tiptoeing to different berths, men vying for her.

  I had not taken my coat off in all that time nor ventured under the blanket in the berth my parents believed they had paid for. It turned out to be a quarter of a berth, the remaining three quarters occupied by a family that turned it into a pigsty and never stirred from there. The son had frog spawn in a jar and there were frogs scurrying about before we docked.

  Mary Angela was the one that struck fear and foreboding into us all.

  It was the night of the storm. Wind and rain battering the hatches, the ropes creaking, the timbers of the ship groaning as if they might snap apart, a crew half delirious, shouting orders to one another up above, as the ship pitched and rolled, delved down into the depths then vaulted up, water cascading in and we thrown in heaps on the floor, everything wet, our blankets wet, our clothes wet, crockery and utensils and fletches of bacon falling about, a woman pleading with us to say the rosary because the ship and the unborn child and its cargo were in death’s grasp.

  Mary Angela roaring her guts out and Sheila, who was not a midwife, trying to tend to her. Word had been sent up for a bed in the infirmary, but an answer came back that there was no room, as several people had been struck down with the fever and all the beds were taken. Sheila kept telling her to push, in Jesus’ name to push, and the one lamp that had not blown out in the storm swung above her on its metal chain, swinging crazily, back and forth, the bowels of that ship like some inferno. Some prayed, some shouted for the roaring to stop and at the very last minute, when the screaming rent through us, a nurse appeared in a white coat carrying instruments and a bucket and Sheila hung a blanket on the handles of two brooms to serve as a sort of screen. There came then that piercing sound, with life and despair in it, the sound of an infant coming into the world and those who had been praying stopped praying and those who had been cursing stopped cursing, all now ready to rejoice, believing that the birth boded good luck for them.

  “It’s a boy, it’s a boy,” the word went round and there being no priest on board either among us or in the state rooms, a very old woman in a shawl produced a bottle of holy water and a sponge and gave it a lay baptism, wetting the lips, the forehead, and the chest, repeating some Latin prayers.

  For two days mother and child did not show themselves. They lay in the curtained corner, a yellow sheepskin rug that smelled lay over them, hidden from all, the mother’s hand reaching occasionally to take a biscuit or a mug of tea, the sound of the infant sucking and burping as she rocked it to sleep.

  The day she reappeared she looked frail, her face chalk white but her eyes huge like lusters, the infant wrapped inside a blanket. What had she had called it? Fintan, she said. Fintan, they said. She was going up for air, going up to show off Fintan to the wild sea, to the roar of the waves, to the gulls and ravens that followed with their eerie cries. No one actually witnessed the happening so that afterward there was debate and bitter argument as to the truth of things. The young men who had been ogling her and who had danced with her were now boiling with hate, ready to lynch her, older men having to hold them back from throwing her in. The first news of it came as a shout, a series of shouts, a sign that something terrible had happened. It took only minutes for a crowd to gather up there, fear and molten hatred in some eyes. Others stood silent, bewildered, disbelieving. How could she. How could she. There were men scuffling her, women goading them on, the little slut, the little bitch, their faces smack up against hers telling her the black fate she was about to meet. She stood with a peculiar half smile, her blue-black eyes startled, insisting that it was dead, it had been dead for days. No one believed her. Why had she not gone to the purser and have it buried with weights in a sail cloth, the way they had buried an old man three days previous? She had done it to save her own skin. A mother with an infant but without a father was not welcomed in the new world.