The Music Lesson (6 page)

The cottage was finally wired for electricity not quite six months ago. They didn’t exactly go wild with it. The only light in each room is a single bare bulb, but I’ve gotten used to that, just as I’ve become accustomed to the strangeness of electrical outlets that have to be switched on, making toast under the gas grill, and drying my tub-washed laundry on the fireplace fender, which infuses my clothing with a not-unpleasant smoky smell of peat. (But I had never before appreciated the softness that tumble drying confers on sheets and towels.)

There is scalding-hot water, though not much of it, and it’s hard to get in the habit of planning two hours ahead for a bath (there’s no shower). I keep forgetting the little switch on the wall for heating an entire tubful of hot water; otherwise, there are just five gallons of near-boiling water ready for dish washing or anything else. When I commented on the awkwardness of this arrangement to Kieran O’Mahoney, he nodded in agreement,
saying, “ ’Tis awkward all right. Many’s the time when I thought I wanted a bath, but by the time the water was heated, I found I’d lost the urge.”

I have learned to use a dishpan, to stop running all my hot water away washing dishes under the running faucet. What an abstemious country this is, I think at times; but then, what a wasteful country I come from, I think more often. Mickey told me that, as it happens, it was his brother Sean, who works for O’Donovan in Skibbereen, who was sent out to install the copper electric hot-water cylinder just the day before I arrived.

A feeling of Denis O’Driscoll is still about the place in myriad ways; on the mantel, there’s a briar pipe with charred tobacco still in the bowl, holding down a stack of curling religious postcards (all sent by Sister Ann, whoever she was or is, from a pilgrimage to Knock, a devotional shrine north of here, in 1989), and there’s an old walking stick, its bent handgrip worn smooth, by the door. Burn marks fleck the scrubbed top of the kitchen table at one end, probably from pipe embers. The two knives in the kitchen drawer have been honed so many times that the blades have worn away in a tapering curve.

There’s a wooden settle in the room Nora O’Driscoll calls the kitchen, which is to say, it was the kitchen in the days when all cooking was done in the fireplace, and now it’s more of a sitting room. The settle is like a church
pew, but the bottom is a hinged box and opens into a bed, of sorts. When I opened it, I was surprised to find a stained and narrow old blue-and-white-striped mattress, so it has been used for sleeping in recent times.

Apparently, people used to hide in these settle beds. Though it seems obvious enough, Nora has told me with great drama that the Black and Tans didn’t know that they opened, and when they raided a farmhouse in pursuit of someone, if there was an old granny peeling potatoes in the corner on the settle, who would expect to find a fugitive or two beneath her?

Perhaps Denis slept in the settle at the end of his life—he might have preferred the warmth of the fire, and he might not have wanted to climb the steep stairs. Living in this cottage, I have begun to feel that Denis O’Driscoll must have been a methodical man, and a kind man, though I may be romanticizing completely. It must also have been a fairly harsh and lonely life. An old black bicycle stands where Denis left it, against the wall inside the shed that holds kindling and sods of turf for the fire. The bicycle’s front basket is an amazing object woven from the remains of a donkey basket, plastic fertilizer bags, baling twine, and fishing nets.

There’s a sincere yet pointless thrift everywhere I turn, from a collection of little lengths of baling twine saved from the fields and hedges that hangs on a nail in one of the little falling-down outbuildings, to a drawerful
of screw tops from bottles of Power’s and Paddy’s and Jameson.

There’s an ingenuity, as well, in the thoughtful way a nail has been lashed with baling twine to make a latch on the shed door. The old ladder hanging in one of the sheds has rungs fashioned out of old soap boxes; if you look carefully, you can piece together an antiquated Fairy Soap logo. There’s something very beautiful about the Mondrianesque arrangement of driftwood boards fitted together on the ground like paving that Denis or his brothers fashioned to smother the weeds by the kitchen door. Pete would love this place. I think of him all the time, and I keep feeling at odd moments as if I’m here for him, as if he could see it through my eyes.

The celebration of domestic virtues in Dutch genre paintings honors these sensibilities. But there is everywhere here an Irish wildness in the crags and bluffs and boreens, perhaps a disordered wildness that the O’Driscoll brothers tried to defend against with their methodical arrangements. The flatness of the Dutch polders, all those fields of tulips marching off in soldierly rows to the horizon, that order and symmetry—surely, those straight lines contributed to the Dutch way of seeing, the Dutch way of describing.

I would have liked to have known the O’Driscoll brothers—the lads, as they are still remembered in the village, though they all lived well into their seventies and reputedly had long white beards. Kieran O’Mahoney
told me that from the time he was a little boy he knew of them, but glimpsed them only rarely. They did things the old-fashioned way, he said with respect in his voice, they eschewed modern convenience at every turn, wearing traditional jackets and neckties and caps every day of their lives. They were my second cousins twice removed, I think. An extremely close tie, when I consider it.

The lads never went down the two miles I walk nearly every day into the village. Not once in the past thirty years. Only Denis would venture beyond their own pastures to walk as far as the now-defunct creamery for a few supplies now and then. They were “shy.” Which is to say, they were practically hermits, but no one would judge them for their eccentricities, or maybe the difference is that they were not merely tolerated; they were respected. Their kind, and apparently there are a few more scattered about the countryside, are dying off, never to be replaced.

A cottage like this, perched on the edge of this unspeakably beautiful cove, will soon enough belong to a rich American, or German, or, at best, a Dublin Yuppie. After I spent my Kelly inheritance on my education, I never imagined that I would have serious money in the bank someday. The money gives me freedom, but I hate it because of what it represents and so I rarely use it, and so it sits and grows. I give away a lot, anonymously, to charities that help children, usually. I meet for about an hour with a lawyer four times a year and decide how I
want the money used. But maybe, someday, I will take some of that blood money and buy a cottage like this. Would I want to live out my days in a place like this? Maybe yes.

And then there’s the very lean marmalade tomcat with an enormous cabbagey head who glares at me from under the fuchsia hedge beside the door. Tiggy is his name, according to Nora O’Driscoll, the farmer’s wife from up the road who keeps the key to the cottage. Much of my information comes from her—I get milk, eggs, and potatoes from her, and we have an easy ability to slip into a few minutes of conversation each time we meet. With very little prompting on my part, Nora has provided me with a great deal of local history. I imagine that talking to me beats talking to herself.

Nora is pyramidally huge, but seemingly built of solid muscle under many grimy layers of farmer’s clothing. She does the work of a man. I have no sense that her husband and sons help very much with her cows. They’re always off doing something in some remote field, unless they’re spreading exceptionally noisome slurry, which they seem to do exclusively in fields directly upwind of me.

I’ve only glimpsed Nora’s husband, Pat, from a distance, on a tractor. He’s a dour farmer, hardworking but a bit joyless, according to Willy, the postman. The O’Driscoll sons are indistinguishable to me, big farm lads
between the ages of sixteen and twenty-two, with red faces under their pulled-down caps; they’re called Liam, Vincent, Joseph, and Connie.

She was no relation to Denis, Nora insisted on telling me as some obscure point of order, or pride, at our first encounter, offering an elaborate (nearly insane) explanation of the “upper O’Driscolls” and the “middle O’Driscolls” and the “lower O’Driscolls” and which are which in the village. (Of course, ultimately, they’re all related. Nora is undeniably some kind of a cousin to me, as well.) She identified the cabbage-headed creature as Denis’s cat when she let me in the morning of my arrival.

“Get away, Tiggy. Get away off the ditch!” she commanded out the window over the sink as she was showing me how to light the old gas stove (she calls it “the cooker”), when he flattened himself on top of the wall as if to spring in through the kitchen door. (Adding to my confusion in my first days here is the way people call a wall a “ditch” and a ditch a “dike.”) Tiggy’s gone wild just lurking around the cottage these past two years, poor loyal thing, rather than find another home. Denis died very unexpectedly, I learned just today from Annie Dunne, who was, I think, trying to spook me.

“You’re above in Denis’s place, missy. He was found floating on the tide, you know,” she said not two hours ago, cocking her head vaguely in the direction of the cove.

“Some say he threw himself in, but the official verdict was accidental drowning. Maybe a heart attack, maybe a fall, but definitely a drowning. He was alive when he went into the water, they could tell that much—’twas drowning killt him all right.”

She had waited until the only other customer, an old woman from the village in a moldy black overcoat, who always nods to me and mutters, “Dirty weather!” by way of a greeting, had paid and left before she imparted this nastiness. I didn’t want to give Annie the satisfaction of a reaction and so was silent, thinking that I had been right to sense her malevolence. This was definitely my last visit to her shop. (How hard could it be to bake my own scones, anyway? I must ask Nora for her recipe.) She had rung up my total and I had paid and was halfway out the door, unsettled by this information (about which Mickey has told me nothing), when Annie added under her breath, “Some say he was thrown off the cliff above. Or pushed.”

“Why would anyone murder an old man?” I countered. I didn’t want to get into it in any depth with her, but I was startled and somehow irritated, defensive. I also felt a little deceived, kept in the dark by Mickey, and not for the first time. I stood in the open doorway and waited for her reply, knowing the cold draft would annoy her. People here are obsessed with avoiding cold drafts.

“He was original IRA, you know,” Annie hissed. She has some very long chin whiskers, which occasionally
glint in the light. “Some say he knew about the ambush. Was involved, like.”

I shrugged as if this meant nothing to me, my heart racing, and stepped out into the wind, trying not to look rattled. When someone in West Cork says “the ambush,” only one thing is meant by it: Beal-na-mBlath, just a few miles from here, where Michael Collins was murdered in 1922 by his own people, who turned on him as a traitor for signing the 1921 treaty, which left the six counties of the North under British rule.

Is Annie Dunne a madwoman, or could there really still be retribution and infighting about the treaty that would lead to the death of an ancient original IRA member, all these years later? I don’t suppose I’ll ever know whether or not Denis O’Driscoll was involved with Michael Collins’s murder—it’s possible, but he would have to have been a boy, a lad—even if he was actually involved in the IRA at all, though it wouldn’t surprise me. I wish I could talk to Pete about this. He’d have some good detective’s thoughts, and he’d be intrigued. Mickey probably knows, but he wouldn’t tell me if I asked—that much I’ve learned. The only truth I can know with certainty is that this is the sort of thing people say to one another in the village of Ballyroe on a weekday morning in January.

Tiggy subsists on handouts from the farms along the road—old Mary Carew up the lane is his principal benefactor,
I’d guess—and hunts down the occasional mouse or rat or baby rabbit, as well. There are plenty of rabbits. That first morning almost three weeks ago, I went out the kitchen door to talk to him and he flashed away under a hedge. Having sorted me out, Nora was in a hurry to get back up the road before her husband and sons were in from the fields (“time to get the dinner”) and she asked me to come back into the cottage to see her out the front door, because she wouldn’t leave by the kitchen door. She seemed shocked that I didn’t know what bad luck it could bring if you exit a house through a different door than the one you entered. She was shocked again this morning, by my recidivism, I suppose, when she saw me at the edge of her field gathering some fallen willow branches to use for kindling.

“ ’Tis always bad luck to burn willow for warmth,” she admonished with exasperation. “Surely they know that in America?”

More than one of Denis’s nephews borrowed money from him habitually, according to Willy Hayes, the postman, who brings me a letter from Pete every few days. Willy is young and bright, and he always seems to have time for a good chat, leaning in the doorway out of the rain, the motor of his little green An Post delivery car running. He might be flirting with me, but I really don’t
know that. When I asked him the other day how he can possibly deliver the post in a village without street names, populated almost entirely by people named O’Mahoney, Hayes, and O’Driscoll, he simply laughed uproariously, a high-pitched Cork trill, as though I had made an exceptionally funny remark, though I was serious—I’d really like to know how he does it.

Yesterday, when Willy handed me a letter from Pete, he said, “Here’s a little reminder of yer real life,” and I found myself replying, “No,
this
is my real life. My real life is here. Now.”

Willy also had a separate packet of forwarded mail from Pete—bills mostly. I can hardly believe that the phone company and Con Ed and all the rest still click right along, unchanged. It’s as if my life is going on back home without me.

I don’t miss my work. I thought that I would. I love what I do and I’m very good at it. Being a research librarian means that I never know what century I’m going to be working in from one week to the next. Essentially, I assist scholars with their work. In those hectic days of making the plan with Mickey, at the library I was focused on finding sources for researching the clothing worn by Fragonard’s subjects, assisting a professor leaving for Venice with a study group on material for his Bellini lecture, and helping an architect find the material she needed to re-create a room originally designed for
Madame de Pompadour. Dr. Calabresi, the chief librarian, who hired me, said that I was ideally suited to the job, knowing, as I did, “something about everything, and everything about something.”