Novelties & Souvenirs (33 page)

“Well yes,” she said, a sort of plain light going on in her backbrain, in many another too just then in many places, so many that it might have looked—to someone or something able to perceive it, someone looking down on us and our earth from far above and yet able to perceive each of us one by one—like lights coming on across a darkened land, or like the bright pinpricks that mark the growing numbers of Our Outlets on a TV map, but that were actually our brains,
getting it
one by one, brightening momentarily, as the edge of dawn swept westward.

They
had not made a promise,
she
had: good will. She had said yes. And if she kept that promise it would all be all right, with love, afterwards: as right as it could be.

“Yes,” she said again, and she raised her eyes to the sky, so vacant, more vacant now than before. Not a betrayal but a promise; not a letting-go but a taking-hold. Good only for as long as we, all alone here, kept it.
All all right with love afterwards.

Why had they come, why had they gone to such effort, to tell us that, when we knew it all along? Who cared that much, to come to tell us? Would they come back, ever, to see how we’d done?

She went back inside, the dew icy on her feet. For a long time she stood in the kitchen (the door unshut behind her) and then went to the phone.

He answered on the second ring. He said hello. All the unshed tears of the last weeks, of her whole life probably, rose up in one awful bolus in her throat; she wouldn’t weep though, no not yet.

“Lloyd,” she said. “Lloyd, listen. We have to talk.”

In a far frae land

When she turned away from the seaward windows and looked through the window that faced the rocky way leading down toward the village she could see that someone was coming up toward the house. He was having some difficulty; at times the rainy wind snatched away his cloak entirely and he seemed on the point of taking flight, but he hauled it in and wrapped it around himself again, and, pulling himself up on stones and planting his feet heavily, he made progress up toward her. The rippled diamond panes of the mullioned window, streaked with rain, made the little figure seem to shift size and nature continually; sometimes when the wind threw a mighty slew across the window he disappeared from view entirely, as though he had been drowned.

Cormac,
she thought. He was coming all the way up from the village to tell her what she already knew: that was like him. She, who always knew first whatever happened in the surrounding country and on the sea, because her house stood high up above the village and surveyed not only the road that wound down from the
hills to the east but the sea road and the long spit of beach as well; she who had little to do but watch, anyway. Yet he would always come to her with the cold news. That a curragh, which had gone out with four brothers in it, had come back on the tide, stove in and empty, and lay overturned on the beach. That a line of English soldiery was coming from the east, with pieces of ordnance and a man in armor at its head. “Yes, Cormac,” she would say patiently, for she had seen them already at dawn, and counted their cannon, and seen the armor glint in the red sun. It was only that he loved her, not that he was an idle gossip; the fiction that he was bringing her news was understood by both of them for what it was, and she didn’t dislike him for it. Yet she did feel, as she turned away from the window, a small irritation. Why hadn’t he more sense than to climb up here uselessly in a storm?

Out the seaward windows she could see that the great ships were coming, helplessly, nearer the shore. The black, white-fringed waves rose so high that now and then the ships were lost to sight entirely, as though swamped and sunk already, but then they would appear again: one, a fleck of white sail only, far off; the other due west and straining to keep to the open sea; and the third, seeming to have surrendered to its awful fate, nearest the land, near enough for her to see the red crosses on its sails, and its shrouds torn away and waving rhythmically, or was it only the spray of rain cast off its spars as it creased the storm? The waves that bore it landward seemed to rise with an unreal slowness, like the great crushing waves that sometimes rose in her dreams; they seemed to rise endlessly, black glass circled with pools of froth, each one shattering against the tormented beach only at that last moment before its movement upward would become unceasing and it would rise up and drown the world.

She, who had watched the sea most of her life, had never seen a catastrophe anything like this one, had never seen the sea attempt to destroy men on such a scale. She had seen storms as bad, and worse, but they spent themselves against the land, which she knew could always bear it. And the sea even in a mood of mild petulance could kill the fishermen of the village, singly or in pairs, and suck their curraghs to its bottom; and then she would feel a sickening anger at the unfairness of the sea. But she had never seen ships the size of these galleons, like mansions put to sea. There would be dozens of men aboard them; she could see now, with a thrill of terror, that tiny men actually clung to the masts and rigging of the nearest ship, trying to cut loose the luffing sails large as meadows, and as the sea canted the ship over suddenly, one man was flung into the sea.

What should she feel? Pity for them? She couldn’t. Horror at the destruction of the floating castles? The pride of them, even in destruction, forbade it. She could only watch, fascinated, the two monstrosities, sea and galleon, contend.

The same winds that carried the ships toward shore tormented the house, hooting in the chimney and rattling the windows in their frames. Small winds, wet and salt, were in the house, couldn’t be kept out. In the silences which came momentarily when the wind turned round she could hear her father, in the loft, praying.
Ave Maria gratia plena Dominus tecum benedictas tu in mulieribus.
If her father died this night, that would be right; she, caught up in the vast wasting of human life by the sea and somehow fiercely indifferent, unable to feel pity or shock, wouldn’t feel then at her father’s death all the guilty anguish she had long expected to feel when at last his strong mad ghost gave up its body. She almost, wrapped in a sudden draught of cold sea air, almost wished for it.

The nearest galleon had begun to break up on the drowned stones of the causeway that lay beyond the spit. Farther off, the seaward ship had lost its battle, and, a loose sail flapping with slow grace like a handkerchief, swept down toward the cliffy places to the south. The third she could no longer see. The sea had thrown it away.

At the other end of the house the unbarred door was opened and shut again. She felt a gust of wind that made her shiver.

“Bar the door, Cormac,” she said. She turned with reluctance from the window and went into the narrow tangle of hallway that led to the door. “You’re a fool, Cormac Burke,” she said, not quite as gently as she had intended, “to come all the way up here in this weather, and to tell me about the ships, is it?”

She stopped then, because the man who turned to face her from barring the door wasn’t Cormac Burke. She didn’t know him. The water coursing down his mantle and the brim of his hat spattered rapidly on the floor; there was a puddle around his booted feet, and when he stepped toward her the boots made a sodden sound.

“Who are you?” she said, stepping back.

“Not the one you named. One very wet.”

They stood facing each other for a long moment. In the darkness of the hall she couldn’t see his face. His Irish had a Scotch intonation, and sounded wet as well, as though the water had got into his throat.

“Might I,” he said at last, “claim some hospitality of this house? A fire, if you have such a thing? I wouldn’t trouble you long.” He held up both hands, slowly, as though to show he wasn’t armed. The two hands seemed to glow faintly in the dark hall, as silver objects or certain seashells do in dimness.

She came to herself. “Yes, come in,” she said. “Warm yourself. I didn’t mean to refuse the house.”

He stripped off his wet mantle, heavy with water, and followed her into the comparative warmth and light of the main room of the house. He stood a moment looking around him, seeming to take inventory of the place, or as though trying to remember if he had ever been in it before. Then he went to the chimney corner and hung his mantle and hat on a peg there.

“We get few guests,” she said.

“I think that’s odd,” he said. His hair was lank and gray, and his face was white like his hands, though now in the light of the fire and the rushes they seemed not to glow spectrally as they had in the hall. His eyes were large and pale and with some melancholy humorousness in them that was disconcerting.

“Odd? We’re far off the traveled roads. It’s a long climb up.”

“But it’s the finest house nearby. A traveler who put out the effort might be likely to find more than a cup of water for himself.”

She ought to have resented this calculation, but she couldn’t, he said it so frankly. “You must be a skilled traveler then,” she said.

“Oh, I am.”

“And from where?”

He said a mouth-filling Scotch name she didn’t recognize and said his name was Sorley.

“A kinsman of Sorley Boy?”

“No, not of that clan,” he said with a faint smile that made her wonder if he was lying, and then wonder why she wondered. “And what’s your name?”

“Ineen,” she said, and looked away.

“And right too,” he said, for Ineen is only “girl” in Irish.

“Ineen Fitzgerald,” she said. To another that would have
stopped further inquiry. She felt it wouldn’t with this Sorley; and in fact he asked her what one with such a name did living in this northwestern place.

“There’s a tale in that,” she said, and turned away to the window again. The Spanish ship was stove in now, the breach in its side was evident, it was shipping water and seemed to pant like a dying bull as it rose and fell on the foamy waves. There was flotsam, boards, barrels. Did men cling to them? With a sudden fear she realized that the sea might not take them all, not all those dozens. Some might live, and gain the beach. Spanish men. Spanish soldiers. What would happen then?

“They are only men after all,” said Sorley.

So intent was she, had she been all that day, on the ships that she didn’t find it odd that he seemed to have read her thoughts.

“All up and down the coast,” he said, “from Limerick to Inishowen, they’ve been putting in, or trying to; breaking up, most of them. Most of the men drowning.”

“Why have they come? Why so many?”

“No reason of their own. They never wanted to. They meant to sail and conquer England. The sea and the wind drove them here.”

She turned to him. The fire behind him seemed to edge his gray hair with light, to give him a faint, wavering outline.

“How do you come to know so much of it?” Ineen asked him.

“Travel with eyes and ears open.”

“You came up from the south, then.”

He answered nothing to this. The wind rose to a sudden shriek, and the rain made a fierce hissing in the thatch of the roof. Outside, something loose, a bucket, a rake, went blowing across the yard, making a noise that startled her. In the loft, her father groaned and
began the Commination:
“Cursed be he that putteth his trust in Man, that taketh Man for his salvation…”

Sorley looked up toward the dimness of the loft. “What others are in the house?”

“My father. Ill.” Mad and dying, the word meant. “Servants. Gone down now to the beach, to watch the ships.”

“When the Spanish come on the beach, they will be murdered. Half-drowned they’ll come out of the sea and each be struck by a mattock or an axe, or be stoned or sworded to death, till all those not drowned will be just as dead.” He said all this calmly and with certainty, as though it had already happened, perhaps years ago. “Ill luck to come up out of the sea, alive, and speak no Irish.”

“They never would!” She—a Geraldine, a Norman, of the oldest and highest Norman aristocracy Ireland had, however she might have fallen—had no illusions about the villagers below her; but to murder the Spanish, their true friends, only because they were Spanish—that was too monstrous, too ridiculously savage. Sorley only smiled, his thin fixed smile; she had begun to think he smiled only the way hawks frowned, out of his nature somehow and not his mood.

“Would you have anything to eat?” he said. “I seem to have come a long way on yesterday’s dinner.”

Called to herself again, reminded of how inhospitable she’d grown in her long exile, she blushed, and went to see what might be in the house. On an impulse she drew a jug of red wine from one of the remaining tuns. When she returned with this, and some herring and a loaf, he was sitting on a stool by the fire, looking at his long pale hands.

“You see how much sea has blown in today,” he said. She looked more closely, and saw that his hands were dusted with a
fine white glowing powder. “Salt,” he said. His face was dusty the same way. She accepted his reason for this without thinking that, while stones and driftwood left long in the sea may become salt-encrusted like that, she had never been, though she often spent whole days walking in sea spray along the beach. She brought him a bowl of water, and he dipped his hands into it; it seemed to hiss faintly. When he withdrew them wet, they had again become glistening and faintly opalescent.

“Now it’s seawater in the bowl,” he said. “Look into it, Ineen Fitzgerald.”

She did look in, apprehensive and not knowing why. The bowl was old dark crockery, thick and cracked. For a strange moment she did seem to see the whole sea, as though she were a gull, or God, looking down on it; the ripples Sorley’s hands had made in it lapped its edge as tides lap the edges of the world. She saw something moving over the face of the waters, indistinct and multiform, as though the creatures might be rising to look up at her as she looked down; then she saw it was only a faint reflection of her own face.

She laughed, and looked at Sorley, who was smiling more broadly. Her apprehension was gone. She felt as if she had been playing a children’s game with him, and it seemed to make an intimacy between them; an elation almost like the elation of nakedness, of childhood games played naked. It was the same fierce indifferent elation she had felt watching the ships. She was vaguely aware that a charm had been worked on her, a charm like the charm in fast sea breezes and scudding cloud, a charm to make her free.

Stop it now, mad girl, she told herself, too much alone, stop all that. She pulled her shawl around her. Sorley ate herring and
bread, delicately, as though he didn’t need it for sustenance. He poured wine into a battered cup and tasted it.

“Canary,” he said. “And fine, too.”

Without really considering it, she took a cup for herself and filled it. “What do you do abroad, Sorley?” she said.

“Looking for a wife, Ineen Fitzgerald,” he said, and drank.

I am a man upon the land

On the beach, Cormac Burke stared helplessly at the oblique lines of waves folding together and dashing against the beach with a noise like a rising but never climaxing peal of thunder. His voice was raw from shouting against it. A few shards and pieces were still coming in on the tide: a window frame, a barrel stave. Strung out across the beach in tight, self-defensive knots, the villagers ran from one to another of these treasures and exclaimed over them.

He had tried to organize them into a troop of sorts, armed men in front, then other men, the women to salvage, a priest for the dying. Hopeless. He had tried to explain to them that there were three things that must be done: aid should be given to the hurt; the goods should be rounded up and put in piles; the soldiers must be disarmed and, for the moment, made prisoner, for the English would certainly see them as invaders and any Irish who helped them as rebels. Their arms could be taken from them and hidden; later…But it was useless. The sea was mad; and there was no organizing these kerns. They went their own way.