Opened Ground Part 19

I.

A hurry of bell-notes flew over morning hush and water-blistered cornfields, an escaped ringing that stopped as quickly as it started. Sunday, the silence breathed and could not settle back for a man had appeared at the side of the field with a bow-saw, held stiffly up like a lyre.

He moved and stopped to gaze up into hazel bushes, angled his saw in, pulled back to gaze again and move on to the next.

'I know you, Simon Sweeney, for an old Sabbath-breaker who has been dead for years.'

'd.a.m.n all you know,' he said, his eye still on the hedge and not turning his head.

'I was your mystery man and am again this morning.

Through gaps in the bushes, your First Communion face would watch me cutting timber.

When cut or broken limbs of trees went yellow, when woodsmoke sharpened air or ditches rustled you sensed my trail there as if it had been sprayed.

It left you half afraid.

When they bade you listen in the bedroom dark to wind and rain in the trees and think of tinkers camped under a heeled-up cart you shut your eyes and saw a wet axle and spokes in moonlight, and me streaming from the shower, headed for your door.'

Sunlight broke in the hazels, the quick bell-notes began a second time. I turned at another sound: a crowd of shawled women were wading the young corn, their skirts brushing softly.

Their motion saddened morning.

It whispered to the silence, 'Pray for us, pray for us,'

it conjured through the air until the field was full of half-remembered faces, a loosed congregation that straggled past and on.

As I drew behind them I was a fasted pilgrim, light-headed, leaving home to face into my station.

'Stay clear of all processions!'

Sweeney shouted at me, but the murmur of the crowd and their feet slushing through the tender, bladed growth had opened a drugged path I was set upon.

I trailed those early-risers fallen into step before the smokes were up.

The quick bell rang again.

II.

I was parked on a high road, listening to peewits and wind blowing round the car when something came to life in the driving mirror, someone walking fast in an overcoat and boots, bareheaded, big, determined in his sure haste along the crown of the road so that I felt myself the challenged one.

The car door slammed. I was suddenly out face to face with an aggravated man raving on about nights spent listening for gun b.u.t.ts to come cracking on the door, yeomen on the rampage, and his neighbour among them, hammering home the shape of things.

'Round about here you overtook the women,'

I said, as the thing came clear. 'Your Lough Derg Pilgrim haunts me every time I cross this mountain as if I am being followed, or following.

I'm on my road there now to do the station.'

'O holy Jesus Christ, does nothing change?'

His head jerked sharply side to side and up like a diver's surfacing after a plunge, then with a look that said, Who is this cub anyhow, he took cognizance again of where he was: the road, the mountain top, and the air, softened by a shower of rain, worked on his anger visibly until: 'It is a road you travel on your own.

I who learned to read in the reek of flax and smelled hanged bodies rotting on their gibbets and saw their looped slime gleaming from the sacks hard-mouthed Ribbonmen and Orange bigots made me into the old fork-tongued turncoat who mucked the byre of their politics.

If times were hard, I could be hard too.

I made the traitor in me sink the knife.

And maybe there's a lesson there for you, whoever you are, wherever you come out of, for though there's something natural in your smile there's something in it strikes me as defensive.'

'The angry role was never my vocation,'

I said. 'I come from County Derry, where the last marching bands of Ribbonmen on Patrick's Day still played their "Hymn to Mary".

Obedient strains like theirs tuned me first and not that harp of unforgiving iron the Fenians strung. A lot of what you wrote I heard and did: this Lough Derg station, flax-pullings, dances, fair-days, crossroads chat and the shaky local voice of education.

All that. And always, Orange drums.

And neighbours on the roads at night with guns.'

'I know, I know, I know, I know,' he said, 'but you have to try to make sense of what comes.

Remember everything and keep your head.'

'The alders in the hedge,' I said, 'mushrooms, dark-clumped gra.s.s where cows or horses dunged, the cluck when pith-lined chestnut sh.e.l.ls split open in your hand, the melt of sh.e.l.ls corrupting, old jam pots in a drain clogged up with mud '

But now Carleton was interrupting: 'All this is like a trout kept in a spring or maggots sown in wounds for desperate ointment another life that cleans our element.

We are earthworms of the earth, and all that has gone through us is what will be our trace.'

He turned on his heel when he was saying this and headed up the road at the same hard pace.

III.

I knelt. Hiatus. Habit's afterlife ...

I was back among bead clicks and the murmurs from inside confessionals, side altars where candles died insinuating slight intimate smells of wax at body heat.

There was an active, wind-stilled hush, as if in a sh.e.l.l the listened-for ocean stopped and a tide rested and sustained the roof.

A seaside trinket floated then and idled in vision, like phosph.o.r.escent weed, a toy grotto with seedling mussel sh.e.l.ls and c.o.c.kles glued in patterns over it, pearls condensed from a child invalid's breath into a shimmering ark, my house of gold that housed the snowdrop weather of her death long ago. I would stow away in the hold of our big oak sideboard and forage for it laid past in its tissue paper for good.

It was like touching birds' eggs, robbing the nest of the word wreath, as kept and dry and secret as her name, which they hardly ever spoke but was a white bird trapped inside me beating scared wings when Health of the Sick fluttered its pray for us in the litany.

A cold draught blew under the kneeling boards.

I thought of walking round and round a s.p.a.ce utterly empty, utterly a source, like the idea of sound or like the absence sensed in swamp-fed air above a ring of walked-down gra.s.s and rushes where we once found the bad carca.s.s and scrags of hair of our dog that had disappeared weeks before.

IV.

Blurred swimmings as I faced the sun, my back to the stone pillar and the iron cross, ready to say the dream words I renounce ...

Blurred oval prints of newly ordained faces, 'Father' p.r.o.nounced with a fawning relish, the sunlit tears of parents being blessed.

I saw a young priest, glossy as a blackbird, as if he had stepped from his anointing a moment ago: his purple stole and cord or cincture loosely tied, his polished shoes unexpectedly secular beneath a pleated, lace-hemmed alb of linen cloth.

His name had lain undisturbed for years like an old bicycle wheel in a ditch ripped at last from under jungling briars, wet and perished. My arms were open wide but I could not say the words. 'The rain forest,' he said, 'you've never seen the like of it. I lasted only a couple of years. Bare-breasted women and rat-ribbed men. Everything wasted.

I rotted like a pear. I sweated Ma.s.ses ...'

His breath came short and shorter. 'In long houses I raised the chalice above headdresses.

In hoc signo ... On that abandoned mission compound, my vocation is a steam off the drenched creepers.'

I had broken off from my renunciation while he was speaking, so as to clear the way for other pilgrims queueing to get started.

'I'm older now than you when you went away,'

I ventured, feeling a strange reversal.

'I never could see you on the foreign missions.

I could only see you on a bicycle, a clerical student home for the summer, doomed to the decent thing. Visiting neighbours.

Drinking tea and praising home-made bread.

Something in them would be ratified when they saw you at the door in your black suit, arriving like some sort of holy mascot.

You gave too much relief, you raised a siege the world had laid against their kitchen grottoes hung with holy pictures and crucifixes.'

'And you,' he faltered, 'what are you doing here but the same thing? What possessed you?

I at least was young and unaware that what I thought was chosen was convention.

But all this you were clear of you walked into over again. And the G.o.d has, as they say, withdrawn.

What are you doing, going through these motions?

Unless ... Unless ...' Again he was short of breath and his whole fevered body yellowed and shook.

'Unless you are here taking the last look.'

Then where he stood was empty as the roads we both grew up beside, where the sick man had taken his last look one drizzly evening when the tarmac steamed with the first breath of spring, a knee-deep mist I waded silently behind him, on his circuits, visiting.

V.

An old man's hands, like soft paws rowing forward, groped for and warded off the air ahead.

Barney Murphy shuffled on the concrete.

Master Murphy. I heard the weakened voice bulling in sudden rage all over again and fell in behind, my eyes fixed on his heels like a man lifting swathes at a mower's heels.

His sockless feet were like the dried broad bean that split its st.i.tches in the display jar high on a window in the old cla.s.sroom, white as shy faces in the cla.s.sroom door.

'Master,' those elders whispered, 'I wonder, master ...'

rustling envelopes, proffering them, withdrawing, waiting for him to sign beside their mark, and 'Master' I repeated to myself so that he stopped but did not turn or move, gone quiet in the shoulders, his small head vigilant in the cold gusts off the lough.

I moved ahead and faced him, shook his hand.

Above the winged collar, his mottled face went distant in a smile as the voice readied itself and husked and sc.r.a.ped, 'Good man, good man yourself,' then lapsed again into the limbo and dry urn of the larynx.

The Adam's apple in its weathered sac worked like the plunger of a pump in drought but yielded nothing to help the helpless smile.

Morning field smells came past on the wind, the s.e.x-cut of sweetbriar after rain, new meadow hay, birds' nests filled with leaves.

'You'd have thought that Anahorish School was purgatory enough for any man,'

I said. 'You have done your station.'

Then a little trembling happened and his breath rushed the air softly as scythes in his lost meadows.

'Birch trees have overgrown Leitrim Moss, dairy herds are grazing where the school was and the school garden's loose black mould is gra.s.s.'

He was gone with that and I was faced wrong way into more pilgrims absorbed in this exercise.

As I stood among their whispers and bare feet the mists of all the mornings I'd set out for Latin cla.s.ses with him, face to face, refreshed me. Mensa, mensa, mensam sang on the air like a busy sharping-stone.

'We'll go some day to my uncle's farm at Toome '

Another master spoke. 'For what is the great moving power and spring of verse? Feeling, and in particular, love. When I went last year I drank three cups of water from the well.

It was very cold. It stung me in the ears.

You should have met him ' Coming in as usual with the rubbed quotation and his c.o.c.ked bird's eye dabbing for detail. When you're on the road give lifts to people, you'll always learn something.

There he went, in his belted gaberdine, and after him, another fosterer, slack-shouldered and clear-eyed: 'Sure I might have known once I had made the pad, you'd be after me sooner or later. Forty-two years on and you've got no farther! But after that again, where else would you go? Iceland, maybe? Maybe the Dordogne?'

And then the parting shot. 'In my own day the odd one came here on the hunt for women.'