I Could Read the Sky Read online

  The click of the wheels on the tracks. It sounds different in England. Heavier maybe. Warrington. Manchester. Stockport. Rows of tiny houses joined up together. Sheds out the back with bicycles and mattresses and trunks up on the roof. John Joe’s talking to me the whole way about the tunes of Leitrim and the uncle that could play them all on his fiddle. I can see a woman frying fish in a pan. Her hair looks like it’s made of wood. The great rush on them all when they get to the stations. What will they sound like? What way will I talk to them?

  I take out the bit of paper Da gave me. “The Duke of Cumberland, Lincoln”, it says. It’s wearing away from all the times I’ve looked at it since leaving home. I fold it again and put it away into my pocket. What would Da be doing now? Maybe looking out over the land, the sun lighting up his face. The pale girl with the black hair who was unwell on the boat is by the window across from John Joe and me, looking poorly again. She has a handkerchief up to her lips. I see on the floor under her seat a little pool, mostly tea, where she’s been sick. She hasn’t anyone with her. A huge tall man in a railway uniform comes into the carriage. He’s a red beard, a nose like a baby tomato, and eyes as red as the inside of a mouth. The hat is sitting back on his head so you can see the whole of his face. He pulls up when he sees the sick on the floor. He looks right, and then left. He looks straight at the girl. “Who made this mess?” he says. His voice booms and rattles. The whole carriage is silent and watching. The girl is shaking now. She lifts her hand up to her mouth like she’ll be sick again. But he keeps his stare on her. Then John Joe throws his coat over the back of the seat and pushes the sleeves of his gansey as high as they’ll go. Christ, the arms on him! They’d collapse a bull. “I did,” says John Joe. Your man wheels around. John Joe looks right into his eye, the arms across his chest like two logs. I look into his eye too but then turn away for it’s like looking at rancid meat. Everything is moving in John Joe’s jaw and neck and arms. His right leg is going up and down like he’s marking time to a reel. He’s looking right at your man and smiling. One brush of a feather and he’d go off like a land mine. It’s like the air is made of glass, John Joe and your man eye to eye. “Don’t do it again,” says the railwayman and moves off down the carriage, beat. The door slams behind him. John Joe winks at the girl. She laughs, high and light. She laughs in a way that I think she didn’t expect.

  I was with John Joe until Chester, and then I got onto another train to Sheffield. The names I never took to. There isn’t much movement in them and they are closed off at both ends. They remind me of iron. John Joe hadn’t a clue where he was going and neither did I. “Where’d you get arms like that?” I said to him before I got off. “I’m a plasterer,” he said. “You get them from holding the hawk.”

  Inside the Duke of Cumberland, sitting at a high stool at the bar, a cigarette burning away in his hand and a pint and the paper from home before him, is P.J. Doran, Matt’s nephew. His hair is slicked down with oil. Christy Mangan, Dick Lally, Conor Dowd and his brother Peter, Jimmy Burke and Dan Ryan are all in a gloomy corner playing cards. The last time I saw Dan he was coming up from the quay with two lobster pots and the wind nearly blowing him back into the sea. A Kerryman name of Florrie Clifford I recognised from a photo Da showed me is making his way to the bar. I’d been two hours in the streets of Lincoln looking for the place. I was afraid to speak in case I’d be jeered at. The handle of the case nearly opened a wound in my hand. I all but fall on them when I see them.

  It is here that I mix up the money Ma gave me. They fire pints at me but there is no food. They’re pints of bitter topped with brown ale. I play them “The Good-Natured Man”, “The Whistler from Rosslea” and “The Humours of Tulla”. The money drains from my pocket. When I come out of the Gents I trip over the step at the door and open a gash on the bridge of my nose. I look at myself in the mirror until I stop the blood. There’s a reel in my head. I have to keep a grip on the basin. I have trouble believing it’s myself looking back at me.

  Then I am in a car. An Englishman I’ve never seen before is driving. The men are breathing like cows from all the drink. They tell me there’s an old lad from Tyrone who is too weak to pick potatoes any more so they’ll put him up on the tractor and I can take his place in the gang. I know nothing of what is to happen to me but I ask no questions. We drive in the darkness out of the city and along the lanes of the countryside of Lincolnshire, houses and hedges and trees thrown behind us with our speed, the sky growling like a dog watching something he doesn’t like. P. J. whistles “James Connolly”. We get out then and I follow them up a muddy path towards a dark shape. Peter Dowd slips and slides down the slope on the arse of his trousers. How was it I was so incurious about what was to become of me? The drink maybe. More likely the fear of being shamed somehow.

  We come then to a door in a building made of stone. The door is black, the paint flaking, and is held closed by twine stretched between two nails. We are at some kind of an outbuilding on a farm. I am feeling cold while we wait for P. J. to unwind the twine and let us in. The door opens and we file in silently. Where are we going? Inside there is heat and movement and the air thickened with some kind of life. P.J. lights a lantern hanging from a nail in the wall. Stretched in front of me now I see pigs. The room is filled with pigs from one end to the other. The men move towards a length of wooden stair that reaches from the dust of the floor to a hole in the ceiling. The pigs watch us as we make our ascent.

  Above in the loft there are twelve sleeping places made of straw along the two walls, with a wash-basin on a stand below a tiny window at the gable end. P. J. hangs the lantern on a nail and points to where I should sleep. The men are making ready for bed, but I stand still at the top of the stairs. I can taste the brine of tears coming into my mouth. My breath is short and the blood seems to be moving at such speed within me that I think I might be thrown to the floor. But I let on nothing. The pigs are moving below. I am standing above them taking in their breath. I feel in my pockets. I wonder have I the fare home and if I can find the way. I think of the bed I left in Labasheeda. Outside it is dark and the road full of twists I know nothing of. There is no way back now. I am to pick potatoes and lie down at night in this loft. I am to be in England living with pigs.

  13

  I THINK OF potatoes as made of mud. Or wax. Or dead leaves. If I look up from the ground I’m picking them from the field seems to stretch forever before me. It would be the size of four farms at home maybe. It’s November and coming out from under the covers in the morning is like entering the cold sea, but the work is so fierce we have our shirts off by mid-morning. The field is all mud. There’s mud on my trousers, mud on the sack and mud up my arms. There’s mud gone down into my boots. If I hold a potato in my hand I can make no sense of it. I try to think of a piece of it buttered and salted at the end of a fork. But I can’t.

  The Yorkshireman comes in full of drink and pisses into the mouth of a pig. I can hear him roaring about it below.

  I am in the bed. I can’t move, my arms and back and my legs still flaming from the work. P. J. is sitting in the bed beside mine reading a book about astronomy. I am thinking a little hazily of the lovely flowers on the half-acre of potatoes at home. Then I think of the big field we’ll face in the morning. How many potatoes for a shirt, a ring, a nice gold watch for Ma? How many before I’d have something to say to Kate Creevy if ever I met her on the road? How many did Da pick to get the accordion for Joe?

  P. J. snaps shut the book and leaves it down beside the bed. “I can’t think how God can have a spare thought for us with all that’s going on in the universe,” he says.

  He tries to look out through the little window at the night sky.

  “Did my father ever work this farm, P. J.?” I ask him.

  “No. But he worked at Appleforth’s, just two miles to the east. I was there with him. He was great at the hay-making because of the strength in his arms. How’s he keeping?”

  “Because of the leg Dermot has to
do all the work. That bothers him. But my mother says he’s started teaching the flute to a young lad named Wilson comes in to him on a bus from eleven miles away. He’s the son of a Protestant minister.”

  “It was an awful shame about the leg.”

  “What was he like that time?”

  “He loved the card school on a Sunday. He couldn’t get enough of it. Sometimes I’d see him putting a pile of money in and I’d try to caution him. He had a saying for that. He’d look up at me and wink and say, ‘You have to speculate to accumulate.’”

  I am lying very still for there’s nowhere that I don’t feel pain. I try to think of how I’ll look coming up the road towards home when I’ve money saved. I look at myself from all the angles.

  “I would love to have a telescope,” says P. J.

  He is up on one elbow now studying the sky. I never saw him from this side before, where I couldn’t get a look at his eyes. He looks older that way.

  “How long have you been working in this country, P. J.?” I ask him.

  “Seventeen years this past June.”

  “What’s it like?”

  He keeps looking out the window for a while, then he turns back and puts out the lantern. I don’t know if he’s heard me. I can hear him settling down in the straw.

  “It’s like you’re trying to talk to somebody out of a deep black hole,” he says.

  14

  TO THE SOUTH is Orion. Across I find the Plough, the Seven Sisters, the Bear. There’s Venus, with a very white star above, and Cassiopeia. The wide streak of the Milky Way like an exploded spine. Lyra, Pegasus. I am sitting against the wall of the pigshed smoking a Woodbine and thinking about the mathematics of space as taught me by P. J.

  Dick Lally comes up with such a light step I don’t notice he’s there until he’s beside me. He doesn’t speak much but his mouth is nearly always open. His lips are wet and he has the eyes of a child, or an old woman whose mind is gone. The work is hard on him, poor man, and his back is bad.

  “Look at what the brother sent me today in a box.”

  He holds up a small glass bottle with a cork in it filled with a clear liquid, sparkling very gently in the starlight.

  “It’s not from Lourdes.”

  He pours out two glasses and we follow the hot track of the poitín as it runs down our throats.

  “John O’Hagen’s still producing it, Martin tells me. He has the worm right inside the house. I saw him doing it once when I was a lad, all the men standing around staring at the drip-dripping of the poitín as it fell into the bottles. It was like they were watching a cow calve.”

  Conor Dowd’s taken to calling Dick “The Jacket” since the right sleeve ripped open up to his oxter. It’s blackened at the elbows and blackened where it falls onto his hips. It has one button in front and none on the sleeves. There’s a tear up the back and he has that one and the one on the arm fixed with pins.

  He shifts a little where he sits in the dirt and pours us each another glass.

  “I wonder would you ever do us a small favour,” he says.

  He looks at me with those eyes.

  I would of course, I tell him.

  “It’s because of the letter from Martin,” he says. “He had some bad news for me. You can see for yourself. It’s Sheila. You know the way it is with me and the writing. You’ll know what to say to her.”

  He tells me what he wants said and leaves me the letter from his brother. Then he goes back into the shed.

  Dear Sheila, I wrote. I enclose one guinea from this week’s pay together with an extra two bob for each of the two girls so they can have something special for Hallowe’en. How are they, and yourself? It’s a long while since I’ve heard from you. My health is holding up and even the back is not too bad, thank God. All the men from home are also well. P. J. is talking about a big roadworks near Birmingham and some of the lads are thinking of going on there when the taties are finished, but I want to be back for Christmas to be with you and the girls. Sheila, I had news from Martin today that disturbs me greatly. He says Brendan Flannery has been around to the house nearly every day since June. He says he’s seen the two of you walking in the lane in the evening. He says he thinks there’s something between you that’s not right, Sheila. The whole of Oola is talking about it, he says. I never thought such a thing could happen to us, Sheila. You mean the world to me, you and the girls. When I’m here on the farm I’m thinking ever of us all together in Oola. I know it’s hard to be the wife of a spalpeen, but it’s for yourself and the girls that I came here. I would love for you to tell me that it isn’t so. I would love to find out it’s a lie or a bad dream, but I fear the worst. Now I have to ask you, Sheila, is the child that’s coming before Christmas mine, or is it Brendan Flannery’s? I love you with all my heart. Your loving husband, Conor.

  15

  WHEN I HEAR about the death of Roscoe I am washing my socks and thinking about the way Da played “Anach Cuain” on his flute. He’d always get great silence when he played it because he’d lift the flute very slowly, draw it up to his mouth, close his eyes and wait for a beat of five before he made the first note. At the start it would be light, slow and gentle, almost faint, like the first smoke rising from kindling. Then he’d build it. It was best when he was sitting in a chair on his own against the yellow wall, for you’d want to see only him. But then everything was away anyway once he was into the tune. He’d drive the whole world away with his music. As he built the tune you would feel it moving into you, twisting and curling like a wild vine running on a wall. The face would never change. The eyes down. Maybe once you’d see a flicker across the brow. I’d heard the tune since before I could walk but I never knew where the next note would come from. Always it seemed a surprise. But it was as right and sure as the flight of a hawk. At the height of it you were away too. You were only music. When he finished the world would come back again but it was different. Whatever it is that has us walking in the world but not noticing it was away. Everything around was on you like a storm.

  Conor Dowd comes in and tells me he’s heard Roscoe died in a pipe by the side of a road near Brighton. It was a big pipe waiting to be put underground. Roscoe was in the gang and seemingly he couldn’t get digs. He was living in the pipe. They found him dead there in the morning.

  “We are the immortals,” says P. J. He has a few jars on him. “We have one name and we have one body. We are always in our prime and we are always fit for work. We dig the tunnels, lay the rails and build the roads and buildings. But we leave no other sign behind us. We are unknown and unrecorded. We have many names and none are our own. Whenever the stiffness and pain come in and the work gets harder, as it did for Roscoe, we change again into our younger selves. On and on we go. We are like the bottle that never empties. We are immortal.” He lays down into his bed then and lets out a long sigh.

  “I’m awfully sorry about Roscoe,” Conor says to me. “He was a gas man. He could make up a limerick in two seconds.”

  There was no lament for Roscoe. I like to think of Da standing by the side of his grave, drawing out his flute and playing “Anach Cuain” over the coffin. The way he could make the ache of it so beautiful. I hear “Anach Cuain” sometimes when I go to sleep. Then if I wake in the middle of the night it’s still there.

  16

  WHAT I COULDN’T do.

  Eat a meal lacking potatoes. Trust banks. Wear a watch. Ask a woman to go for a walk. Work with drains or with objects smaller than a nail. Drive a motor car. Eat tomatoes. Remember the routes of buses. Wear a collar in comfort. Win at cards. Acknowledge the Queen. Abide loud voices. Perform the manners of greeting and leaving. Save money. Take pleasure in work carried out in a factory. Drink coffee. Look into a wound. Follow cricket. Understand the speech of a man from west Kerry. Wear shoes or boots made from rubber. Best P. J. in an argument. Speak with men wearing collars. Stay afloat in water. Understand their jokes. Face the dentist. Kill a Sunday. Stop remembering.

  17
<
br />   I TURN ALL the way around and look at the men. They are kneeling, their heads bent over their flat caps and their rosaries. I cannot see the faces of any of them, but Matt is there for I know his shape well. Their heads are very still. The heads are like the eggs of a giant bird balanced in a line along the back pew. The skin on their heads is dry and papery and white, some maybe with faint brown marks from age. You would only see this skin when the men are in church or in their beds for at all other times they are in their caps.

  Between the men and me are the people of the parish. They do not shift on their knees or whisper or cough the way they would at an ordinary Mass. Their eyes are on the priest. If anyone sees I am watching them their heads drop slowly before rising again to the altar. The faces of young lads and girls who were children when I left now have angle and shape. In their eyes instead of simplicity there is sureness or doubt or preoccupation. In the eyes of Sarah McCabe there is a look of awakening. The eyes of my Aunt Rosemary hold tears.