I Could Read the Sky Read online

  He hands me an old envelope with his name and address on it. I stand in the road holding it. Joe gets up in the seat beside the man in the pony and trap. Everyone begins to move away. Dermot must still be in the square trying to sell the Banshee. I hope he makes a good job of the place now it’s his for I dearly wanted it for myself.

  8

  WATER DRIPS FROM the roof down into the stone tank beyond the wall. The notes of water hitting water hold under the sheet of tin he’s put over the tank. I heard a sound like it this afternoon on an electronic machine in the Gloucester Arms. They must get those sounds somewhere. The wall is damp and the floor is damp. You couldn’t walk on it without shoes. She’s given me a candle but no lamp. A Sacred Heart on the wall, the glass broken. A chair. That’s broken too. A paper bag with my spare shirt. Mrs Casey keeps the jacket Ma bought me in a wardrobe inside. What was it lived here before me, hens or pigs?

  The work is very stale for no one talks. They measure seven cups of water into the kettle for tea and two thin slices of bread each. I get three potatoes and no butter with dinner. They have a number for everything they give out and it’s always small. I’ve to eat in the barn. He’s near 180 acres and three men apart from the three sons. Joe said after I’d been hired I should have gone with a small farmer.

  There’s a place beyond to walk to called the Doctor’s Dam. Some terrible thing happened to a doctor in it so no one goes near it. I don’t know the names of places here. The hired girl who works with Mrs Casey in the house won’t look at me when she speaks.

  When I lie in bed in the evening I think ever and ever of money and of Kate Creevy. What is the distance between me and her? I see her walking ahead of me in the town. She’s a basket on her arm and she’s wearing a hat. A hat! It wasn’t Sunday. She’s a long stride but it’s very light. I can see the line of her leg under her skirt. Sometimes her foot turns on a stone in the path and she has to right herself. I’d be there to catch her if she fell. She has gloves on a colour grey like a pigeon’s breast. Her hair pinned up, the sweep of it over her ear, the long lines of her neck. The heartbeat is booming in my head. I take the tin box out from under the bed. £1 2s. 6d. I lost a pound on a Sunday in the gambling pit. I begin to count. I can put four shillings in the box each week. Times four. Sixteen shillings. Times twelve. £9 12s. for the year. I give names to the numbers as I think of them. Bonham. Blade. Set of delft. Horse. Black frieze coat to keep her warm. Whitewash. Barrel of porter. Bed. What is the distance between me and her? She stops and looks down at her foot. The black bootlace a scrawl in the dirt of the road. She lifts her foot up to a ridge in the wall and lifts her skirt away from the boot. She lifts it so that the edge of it rests on her knee. The skin of her leg is the colour of a peach. I see her fine bones moving as she balances. Her mouth is open a little. The long line of her neck. Her fingers as she works the laces. Small bones like the bones of hens moving in her hands. What matter, I had Maggie all those years. But not then. The thought of Kate Creevy. I could circle the whole of her ankle with my hand. When I reach her by the wall she leaves her skirt where it is on her knee. She looks up. The green of her eyes. Flecks of gold. How can I speak? The words turn inside out in my head. The distance. I walk with her a little way along the road. I take in all the air around her. My chest is on fire. Would I take her in Casey’s cart to the station so she can visit her sister in Dublin? Her father’s refused. It’s the Gaoler he should be called, she says, not the Tailor. I would, I say. You’re a good friend, she says. The distance between me and her. I rattle the tin box. There’s no horse nor farm nor bonham nor bed in it. The distance. Wouldn’t a dog be a friend like that?

  9

  WHAT I COULD do.

  I could mend nets. Thatch a roof. Build stairs. Make a basket from reeds. Splint the leg of a cow. Cut turf. Build a wall. Go three rounds with Joe in the ring Da put up in the barn. I could dance sets. Read the sky. Make a barrel for mackerel. Mend roads. Make a boat. Stuff a saddle. Put a wheel on a cart. Strike a deal. Make a field. Work the swarth turner, the float and the thresher. I could read the sea. Shoot straight. Make a shoe. Shear sheep. Remember poems. Set potatoes. Plough and harrow. Read the wind. Tend bees. Bind wyndes. Make a coffin. Take a drink. I could frighten you with stories. I knew the song to sing to a cow when milking. I could play twenty-seven tunes on my accordion.

  10

  I LIFT THE flap of hide over the gap in the wall. The gap is not much bigger than the size of a fist but light falls through it onto the pig. He looks up at me from the ground, eye to eye. The pig’s eye is like the eye of the priest. Very calm and sure. I am no longer sure of anything. Looking at the eye of the pig with his blond lashes you’d think he could do sums quicker than you. The eye of the horse makes you warm. The eye of the cow makes you sad. The eye of the sheep makes you think you might grow stupid just looking at it.

  I go out into the road to have a look around. Tom Connor’s new wife is hanging up sheets on the line. Wherever did he get a fine girl like that? He keeps pigs in the wreck of a motor car. The postman glides up on his bicycle. He’s something for the Connors, for us and for Matt, but he passes by the Tailor. The Tailor is in the doorway in his underwear. He hasn’t anything on his feet and his hair is standing on his head. He steps out of the gloom of his house a little way into the yard. He hasn’t whitewashed the house since Kate left. He shakes his fist at the back of the postman. “Fuck you!” he shouts. “Fuck you and fuck your bicycle!” There’s a line of spittle on his chin. He goes back into the house. Matt says he sleeps on a chair in the kitchen under newspapers.

  Matt crosses the road carrying his long blade and we go back into the yard. Matt says he’s lost track of where I am now. I tell him a family named Keenan out the Ballyconnor road. “If you owned all the acres you’ve worked you’d be as rich as Lord Masborough,” he says. Ma is washing down the table in the centre of the yard. Mary is filling the stan Joe Connor and his brother brought over with water and salt. Dermot comes out, then Da. Da has a bottle of whiskey with him. He winks over to Matt and leaves it down on the window-ledge. Brid is in the fields for the last time she saw the white carcass of a pig hanging in the turf house she thought it was a ghost.

  Dermot lets the pig out into the run. The eye isn’t so calm now that it sees all of us. Da makes a lunge at him but falls in the dirt. He’s slow to pick himself up while the others make grabs at the pig. There’s a rattling down in Da’s lungs. He rubs his shoulder where he fell on it. He looks around and laughs but I can see when I look in his eye that he’s lost. He’s a red shirt on with the sleeves rolled up. The power in his arms. His smile in the photograph with the straw hat. He could smile like he owned the world and would give it all away. Why didn’t I help him to his feet? Why didn’t I ask him who he was?

  I have hold of the pig around the middle. When I used run my hand along his flank he’d lie down like a dog. His heart is going off like small bombs in the massiveness of his chest. Matt has him by the ears, Joe Connor by the tail. Dermot gets the grin around his snout and tightens it. Da pushes from behind. We heave him up onto his back on the table, Da and Dermot at the back legs, Joe Connor and his brother Tom at the front, me holding back the head. The pig is making more noise than the whole of a city. Matt with his blade in his hand looks around at everybody and says as he always does that the pig is the only animal can see the wind. Then he cuts a Sign of the Cross into the throat of the pig. “Now,” he says to me. “If you can find all the notes in ‘Lord Gordon’s Reel’ you can find the aorta of the pig.” He hands me the blade.

  The day I found Joe in the abattoir in Ipswich. Men with white hats kicking pigs and putting paper numbers on their backs. Blood running down the white tiles. I put my fingers in my ears against the pigs’ screaming, some down on the floor given up, others running over them in the pens. The smell of death dense in the air like clots. There’s a man beating pigs with sticks towards their deaths. There’s a man putting hooks through their heels so they can be hung
upside-down. There’s a man sending currents through their brains. Where’s Joe? Con said he’d heard he was sleeping in the bushes in Hyde Park. Another that he’d gone on the Merchant Marine out of Glasgow. And another that he had a big family in Birmingham. It was Pat Creevy told me about the abattoir. I walk through the white room covered with blood. The thud of the electric shocks. The boiling water. The sound of the saw splitting carcasses. In a cubicle at the end of the room, astride a grate, covered in sheets drenched in blood, a long blade in his hand, is Joe. The hooked pigs move along on a chain in the air and when they stop before him he sticks them. He waits while the pigs empty themselves through the grate. He cuts no Sign of the Cross into their throats. We have crubeens and bottles of stout in his room that night but when I go to see him a month later he’s gone.

  Joe Connor sings “The Rocks of Bawn” while Ma fries the griskins and pig’s liver in butter. The bottle of whiskey is half empty. In Joe’s voice there is more than one sound. There’s a deep drone like from the pipes and above it pure sweet notes. You never know until he sings them where they’ll come from. A stone dropped in a well. Rocks forming in the earth. How does Joe know so much about the hurt of this man with land that cannot be ploughed? I have a sound on the accordion I know is mine but that I cannot yet reach. It seems red and gold and full of light. It’s fast and sure.

  We eat the meat from the pig. I think of his trotters pawing at the air like he’s trying to run as the blood pumps out of the wound I made into the basin. When we finish Matt orders more music. Da plays a tune on the flute, then me on the accordion. We play a pair of reels together. Then Matt calls on me to play “The Moving Cloud”. I have some whiskey in me. There’s something about the way Matt is tapping his foot and cocking his head, the way he draws the music into him this night. He’s like a man with a plate of stew after a long day in the fields. When I hit the first notes my hands take off like a pair of birds. I can feel the tune spilling itself out inside me. I can see all the notes like they’re small coloured stones you’d find on the strand. I can look at all sides of them and find the right place for them to go. I could go to the well and back between each of them. Ma sits down by the fire. Mary leaves down the plate she was washing. Brid comes in from the yard. I’ve never been in this place before but I know all about it. Da is watching my hands. I could keep them flying for a month. I finish the tune and put the accordion down onto the floor. The kitchen seems to ring as though the tune is leaving slowly. Then it’s quiet. “You’ve never played like that before,” says Matt, “and maybe you never will again.” Da goes to the table and pours out a whiskey for himself and me, then hands the bottle to Joe Connor. He brings me the glass. He looks like he’s just had another child. “You’ve passed me out now,” he says. “It was time for you.”

  11

  SOMETHING MOVES IN the kitchen and I wake up. It sounds like the leg of the table against the floor. All night I’ve slept for ten minutes and then lain awake for an hour. I wonder is my ticket for the train in my pocket or in the drawer. Light comes in from the kitchen under the bottom of my door. I can see a pair of shoes and the edge of my suitcase.

  I go out into the kitchen. Da is lying on the floor in front of the fire with his arm around a sleeping calf. He looks up.

  “What’s wrong?” I ask him.

  “Swollen navel,” he says.

  He lies back down with the calf then.

  12

  I OPEN MY eye. First there’s the dryness. I can’t get anything to move in my mouth for it’s stuck. Then the pain. It’s like there’s a small animal with feet made of fire running inside my head. Then the feelings of poison and of shame. I look at the grey pillow, the coverlet, pink wearing away. It was a colour Maggie liked on some things. There’ll be no comfort in the bed this morning.

  I was, let me see, five hours in the Gloucester Arms yesterday evening. I went in at five and came out at ten. What else am I to do after I’ve walked the dog? I must have said something to the Greek over the game of dominoes for when he left he never spoke to me. I was out the door and down the road before I remembered I’d left the dog tied to a leg of the chair. I had nine pints and a cheese sandwich. Strange white cheese I never ate before. I can’t take the drink the way I did.

  On the first day I thought England was all grey walls running with water.

  When the boat pulls into the harbour we put away our instruments and fold up the chairs. The big iron doors they left open to give us air draw closed, the grey water churning. The sky looks like pork gone off. The noise of the engine crashes through the hold. The lorries are dark and still as cows waiting for rain. There were six of us playing tunes like we were all raised under the same roof, and another thirty maybe watching. We go up onto the deck to have a look at England, the vile taste of the tea they gave us on the boat still with me. If you could see the brightness on their faces when the tunes were playing you could see nothing now. Just the look of waiting. The look of people waiting in a hospital.

  We glide in silence through the docks. Rust. The walls pitted and streaked with green slime, water running down them. The lock gates open before us and then we rise up the walls. The lock is a pure marvel to me but I can’t think why it’s needed. We stop. The lock is like a tomb. A girl with black hair and a blue raincoat, face very pale, is gripping the rails. She has her suitcase between her legs. Her eyes are wide and she’s pulling at the air. It’s like she’s drowning. The sound of it is all we can hear as we wait in the water. She doesn’t seem to know what’s happening to her. I want to go to her but I don’t. Then when the boat rises again in the lock she seems to be all right.

  We go out through the gate towards the dock. There’s a newspaper, a child’s doll in a pink dress and the tyre of a motor car in the water. The doll is missing an arm. We all walk out onto the dock with our suitcases. If anyone’s thinking twice about where they’re going they’re letting on nothing. I look around without any reason to see is anyone here to meet me. The wind is blowing hard and it surprises me. I always thought it would be dead calm. I think of a wind at home that had such force it lifted a cat and threw it over a wall. Everyone scatters, but a young lad named John Joe who played the mouth organ goes with me to the train. A long tunnel, the dark walls sweating an oily kind of water. Then the high cuttings as we pass out of the city. Black bricks, moss and streaks of water. I am in England now.

  I roll over onto my side. The wardrobe door is open, Maggie’s dress with the bluebells hanging there. It’s the only thing I won’t give away. What had I with me when I stepped out onto the docks? A suitcase of clothes. The accordion. The note Da gave me to tell me where to go. £4 6s. I’d saved and Ma’s £2, that was £6 6s. What have I now? I look for my trousers. They’re in a heap on the floor where I walked out of them last night. I’ll have to put some order into the place. £1.27 in the pocket. And the pension won’t arrive until Thursday. What will I do today? I’ll lie in bed thinking of the grey walls of Liverpool running with water.

  The day I left Da went out very early with the sick calf and wouldn’t come near the house. Ma fries me two lovely eggs she brought in that morning. She gives me a rosary and sandwiches. She goes to the press, takes out a box and hands me £2. It’s a fine little box made of pine that was full of cigars when Martin sent it to Da from New York. That winter when the men came visiting at night they lay on their backs on the stone floor with their feet to the fire and smoked cigars instead of pipes.

  I ate the last of the sandwiches waiting to get on the boat at the North Wall. I kept the £2 until I forgot which ones they were. I put the rosary into the coffin with Ma.

  I go to the door and look for Da. He has a sheep up on his back and he’s walking away from the house past the well. He tips his hat to Baby just like Matt as she labours up a small hill with her pram. “It’s well for her she’s in Labasheeda,” he’d say, “for the city would crush her.” I hope he won’t fall under the weight of the sheep. Ma goes to put the sandwiches in my s
uitcase but the lock snaps open and my clothes spill out onto the floor. She runs a length of twine around it. Dermot brings the cart and we head out the road. The sun pours through a gap in the clouds and lights up the townland. All the colours of Ma’s shawl as she rests against the white wall. Her hair red and going to white some places, her fingers red too from work. The fuchsia and the new thatch, the emerald fields ringed in grey. The clouds close over as we head out. A photograph.

  I stand up in the cart and look for Da but I can’t find him. He’ll be behind a hedge maybe, watching. What did I do along this road? I drove cattle. I hid from the Master. I danced a hornpipe. I waited for Da to come home from Lincolnshire. One day I’ll come back along it in a new suit filled with banknotes.

  Dermot leaves me down at the station like I was a sack of grain and turns the horse away. I watch after him but he doesn’t look back. He takes his cap off and makes a swat at a bluebottle and I see a circle of bare skin the size of a florin at the back of his head. That’s the first I ever saw of it. I fear for my own hair then. I run my hand through it but it feels all right. Would I find a fine-looking woman in the dance-halls of England before the hair lets me down?

  Cornelius Breen is on the platform with his Ma and Da and sister Agnes. His Ma gets thirty dollars every month from his brother Paul in Philadelphia and maybe six pounds from Declan who’s working on roads in England. She’s a coat with fur around the collar she had sent up from Dublin. They widened the house to make a parlour and they have the priest in for tea. She’s been running a campaign this past year with Cornelius to get him out from beside the fire and into the world making money but he wasn’t having any of it. Matt calls him the Potato That Was Boiled Too Long, for he’s soft. His Ma bought him a suitcase. Then she bought him a suit. Good investments, she thought, but still he wouldn’t shift. Finally she said she’d give him twelve pounds and the price of his ticket along with it and he agreed. The Da’s there with his cap off and a sorrowful look on him like he’s at the side of a grave. I can see the smoke from the train. I look over to the bench where I sat with Kate Creevy. Cornelius’s Ma starts to cry. “Don’t leave me, son,” she says, reaching out her arms. I suppose she thought she had to. The train is upon us now. “Don’t leave me, Cornelius,” she says again. “All right, Ma,” says Cornelius, “I won’t refuse you,” and he walks back to the cart, throws his suitcase into it and sits down. Ma told me in a letter that he was three days in the town drinking away all the money she gave him.