The Night Stages Read online

  All that winter the house seemed to fold in on itself while the dark and the rain pressed up against the windows. Niall, who was now seventeen, had gone mad for Gaelic football and was often not there after school, busy instead on a drenched field, in the company of a group of noisy teenaged boys of his own age and height. When he came home, it was as if he brought the fresh sea wind with him. This energized their father, who would talk then about the tournaments of times past in places as far away as Clare or even Donegal. This talk sometimes set off a tantrum in Kieran, though he wouldn’t have been able to say why. But even when he was at his worst, his mother would remain in her chair so that her husband and Niall, if he was home, would be required to deal with him.

  Still, sometimes, on a Saturday or a Wednesday afternoon when there was no school, he would walk quietly beside his mother in the town so that he could help her carry whatever she bought at the food store or the butcher shop. Once or twice they went to the chemist to buy seltzers for his father’s indigestion or plasters for Niall, whose knees were often a mess because of the football. The man Kieran had seen in the parlour was courteous but unsmiling. Behind him was a collection of small wooden drawers, each one bearing an unpronounceable name, Plumbacet, Capcisi, Ichthyoc. Will that be all, Mrs. Riordan? he would say, solid in his white coat, handing a white paper bag to her over the counter. His mother said nothing. She put the payment beside the cash register, placed the package in Kieran’s hands, then turned toward the door. Once, the chemist had run after them, shouting, and Kieran’s heart had become huge and demanding in his chest, but the man had only wanted to give them change for the punt note his mother had left behind. The boy saw the coins dropping from the man’s naked, freckled hand into his mother’s gloved palm. “Deirdre,” the chemist began, but she took Kieran by the shoulders, pointed him in the direction of home, and they both began to walk. He could hear the sound of the man’s footsteps then, becoming fainter and fainter, moving in the opposite direction.

  Later his mother had prepared the evening meal in silence and had eaten next to none of it herself. His father and Niall discussed football. Kieran left his chair, went to his mother’s side, and placed his hand on her arm. Then, when she didn’t react, he tugged at her sleeve, which was silken and inert. Niall stopped talking to their father in mid-sentence and sent a hard look across the table to his younger brother. “Leave her,” he said. “Don’t pester her.” The whole room became silent, as if it had filled with water during the few moments the boy had been touching his mother. Kieran returned to his place and ate and drank everything he could in order to stun or drown the dark animal he could feel squirming inside him. He succeeded more or less. But, as he was nearing sleep, the foreign-looking names on the chemist’s drawers floated through his mind. The tantrum was pacing at the periphery of the rooms he walked through, and while he was sleeping it attached itself to a nightmare that catapulted him from his bed in the middle of the night.

  Kieran had been to Valentia Island only once on a class expedition with Father O’Sullivan. The old bus on which he and the other children rode had lumbered onto the ferry at Reenard Point a few miles out of the town and then had been driven sedately onto the island shore only ten minutes later. He had been delighted by the brief journey over the water and, released for a few moments from the bus, had run with the other boys back and forth across the deck.

  Once they were on the island, the old priest had wanted the children to understand the geography they were passing through and the historical and religious significance of the spot they would be visiting. “One of the most westerly points of land in Europe,” he told them, swaying beside the driver at the front of the bouncing vehicle, “and St. Brendan himself departing from there in his skin boat. Glanleam,” he said vaguely, naming the places they passed by. “Gortgower, Coarha Beg.” The yellow wins were being replaced by bursts of hawthorn in the hedgerows. Now and then there was the startling pink of a rhododendron.

  Each child had a relic to place at the Holy Well, where they would stop to pray, a saint’s medal from Lourdes or a small plastic statue of the Virgin. Kieran had only two coins in his pocket, his mother having forgotten to give him anything else, but he had seen the money pilgrims had left at grottos and he hoped that no one would notice his shame when he placed coins rather than tokens at the rim of the well.

  The day was fine and the priest asked the driver to stop by the side of the road so that the company could walk the mile or two of green road heading for the coast. An almost indistinguishable ancient trackway crossed their path at one point, one made so long ago the priest couldn’t say just when. Among the fields there were three or four abandoned houses with the thatch on them ruined and sagging and the glass in their windows gone altogether. “Off to America, I suppose,” the priest said, though no one had asked him. “Couldn’t make a go of it.”

  After they had climbed over a stile at the end of the road, three stone crosses came into view, and the slabs surrounding the Holy Well beside them. The land tilted up from the spot, making a clean line against the sky and giving the impression that the earth was faintly unbalanced, awry.

  Kieran couldn’t see the ocean from where he stood, but the sound of it was loud and constant in his ears. Several of the boys were preparing to run to the edge of the cliffs, but the priest put an end to it. “Too much danger in it,” he said, “we’ll stop where we are.” There followed a lengthy sermon on the voyages of Brendan. “But how did he get into the sea, Father,” one of the boys wanted to know, “it being so dangerous?” “It was God’s pleasure that he do so,” the old man replied. “It would be God guiding him.” And then, relenting, he told them they would go a little farther so that they might glimpse the very sea that Brendan had sailed toward the west. The priest’s few remaining strands and the thick young hair of the boys was moving in the wind. The grass bent under the force of it. It was a brisk wind but not strong enough to cause discomfort.

  When they had walked for five minutes, Kieran spotted a jet of white water rising like an energetic fountain above the land and pointed to it. The priest explained that there was a long, narrow crack in the cliff into which the sea pressed with a force so great it exploded above the land. “Culloo Rock,” he said. “Very dangerous!” The boys regarded the rising column of water with collective curiosity, drawn to the danger.

  “There are those who have been lost there,” the priest added sombrely, with no suggestion in his voice that he was likely to pursue the topic in any satisfactory kind of way.

  On the returning bus Kieran put his hand in his pocket and touched the two coins he had not left behind. There had been a scrum of boys at the moment of presentation and no one had noticed his own hand being absent from those at the edge of the well. The following day he spent the money on four jelly doughnuts, eating three and saving one for his brother, for this was during a time when he worshipped Niall, who mostly ignored him but was never unkind.

  That had been two years before, in advance of his mother’s long withdrawal and before the tantrums had taken up residence in him. But he recalled the jet of water and the Holy Well on the May afternoon when he walked into the house and heard the words Culloo Rock being spoken in a stranger’s voice. “Didn’t his own father go off the end of Culloo Rock,” the voice was saying. “And now this.”

  His mother had been missing for two days. She had slipped out of the house on an autumn afternoon when her husband was at work and the boys at school. That first night no one had eaten supper, waiting instead for her to reappear. At eleven o’clock their father had gone to the telephone to call the guards, then had wandered from room to room extinguishing all the lights except the one in the front bay window and the one that shone above the door. He stood in the gloom with his head bowed as if he were filled with a terrible sense of shame. “Go to bed, boys,” he eventually said, “she’ll very likely be here when you wake in the morning.”

  But she was not there in the morning; not then, nor on
the morning that followed that one. There was the rain and wind outside and a bleak calm indoors. Even Gerry-Annie, who came in from the hills to help with the housework, was silent and grim. She stayed to prepare the meals and slept on the parlour sofa now, and Kieran heard her weeping and praying in the dark. But she made the boys go to school the following day and packed the lunches they would take with them.

  Kieran had awakened on these two mornings exhausted by dreams he could not remember and longing to stay in the vicinity of Annie. But he stepped out the door with Niall when she told him to do so. Neither he nor his brother spoke on the walk to the corner, where his brother would turn away to head up the hill to the Upper School while he, Kieran, proceeded toward the Lower School, where there were no more stories attached to numbers.

  And then he was home again and a stranger’s voice was saying, “Didn’t his own father go off Culloo Rock?” When he stood in the doorway that led to the parlour he saw the men gathered there: the priest, the coast guard man, a couple of the guards, and a few of his father’s friends. And then from above him came the sound of his father’s heavy footsteps on the stairs. He was dressed for the outdoors and had his hat in his hands. If he noticed Kieran he showed no sign of this but waited quietly in the hall until the man from the coast guard, the two guards, and the priest joined him. They paused for a moment. Then they all walked out into the wind.

  Kieran looked out the front bay window and watched the men depart. Just after they had opened and closed the wrought-iron gate, Niall appeared on the sidewalk, and the father fell weeping into his arms. The other men moved as a group respectfully to one side. Kieran could tell from the way his brother’s shoulders were moving that he was weeping as well, and it was only then that he himself began to cry, recognizing as he did so that the sounds he was making came from the same faraway part of him where the tantrums lived.

  It would be years before he found out what had happened. He was living in London by then and had stopped for an evening drink at a pub near the worksite where he was employed. As he ordered his pint, an older man at the bar turned abruptly to look at him. “You’re from Kerry,” the man said, “it’s in your voice.” Kieran named the town where he was born. “Yes,” said the man, “it’s as I thought. You are one of the Riordan boys. I was at your house that afternoon. I was in the guards then, though I gave it up later to come here.”

  Kieran knew the afternoon the man was referring to but remained silent, focusing on the wood grain of the bar.

  “A terrible thing that,” the ex-guard continued. “I suppose you don’t know when you start something like that how it will take you. And him with everything so close at hand, so tempting like. They say she began to use it after a difficult childbirth. We found some needles near the rock.”

  Kieran put his hand on the man’s arm, worried he would remove himself without explaining.

  “You don’t know then,” the man said, surprise and embarrassment all over his face. “Sorry, I wouldn’t have said except I thought that you knew.”

  “No, I didn’t,” Kieran said, remembering the words in the guard’s mouth that afternoon.

  “The chemist’s own father went off Culloo Rock, you know, twenty years before. But it wasn’t the drugs with him. And it wasn’t love. Just despair.” The man was silent for a while. Then he sighed and said, “It’s the way the apple pulls the earth toward it, I suppose.”

  Kieran thought about this sentence while he worked on the latest London office block. Four and five storeys up, walking the criss-crossed tightropes of the girders, he thought about it. He thought about it later when he went north for employment on the motorways they were building there. While he operated the machine that scraped the landscape clean of its vegetation and its history, he ran the sentence through his mind, the apple pulling the earth toward it.

  It came to him then that it might not be the tragedy itself, but rather the intensity of reaction to the tragedy that mattered. Was his reaction supposed to have been measured or immeasurable? He had no answer for this.

  He knew about magnetic force, though, and the apple’s helplessness in the grips of it. He knew about love, all right, the way it pulled you toward it, until nothing about you was predictable, even to yourself. How afterwards you could never return to anything like the reliable neutrality of your previous life. And he knew he was still angry.

  COMMISSION

  The Gander Airport commission would be a godsend, and Kenneth had known this from the beginning.

  He had been living for three years with his wife and young children in the small prairie town on the edge of the small prairie city. He had built a studio and his paintings had sold reasonably well. But the going was tough and he wondered, sometimes, if he could continue to manage. A part-time teaching job in the prairie city – the reason he had come to this province in the first place – helped, but it took time and concentration away from what he wanted to do, away from the making of art. Normally he was a prolific painter; canvas after canvas appeared as if by magic at the end of his brushes. Then they were stacked against the studio wall and every now and then sent out to a dealer or patron. The job slowed his output, but it didn’t stop him. He worked in the early mornings. And he worked at night.

  He, whose most intense periods of growth had unfolded in the vicinity of hills, rivers, and trees, then later on the streets of cities, was often out of step with the apparently limitless horizons and exaggerated weather of the prairie. But he was moved by the openness around him as well, particularly at night in winter when starlight alone would occasionally provide sufficient ambient light for him to walk by. Sometimes he circled the unlit house, knowing those he loved slept inside the walls. Sometimes he followed the line of the railway away from the safety of domestic buildings and toward the howl of wolves, coyotes. These long, collective announcements from distant animals astonished and delighted him: he could feel the seductive pull of that wildness, and then the resistance, the refusal in him. And he was grateful, both for the pull and for the refusal. When he passed the railway station, the stillness and the sound of his footsteps in snow made him remember that Tolstoy had died in such a place.

  In spring and summer he often sketched the same tracks he had followed in winter, softened now by weeds at the edge, and leading toward the rest of the world. For these drawings he used the toughest grain of pencil, creating slender lines, wanting to emphasize the delicacy of prairie grasses flourishing near steel. And then the narrowing lines of perspective, the thrust toward everything that existed beyond the picture plane and the place where he stood.

  Kenneth worked throughout the winter on sketches for the submission. The mural was to adorn a wall of the passenger lounge in a new air terminal being built by the federal government in Gander, Newfoundland, where almost all transatlantic flights stopped to refuel. “Crossroads of the World,” as the announcement of the competition had put it. He made dozens of watercolours, keeping the composition miniature, yet fully rendered, both in his mind and on the pieces of paper – some not much larger than a bookmark – on which he worked. He was developing a visual metaphor for flight, one that would not be specific to flying machines –there was to be no reference to Leonardo, or the Wright Brothers and those who followed them, and he avoided even thinking about Icarus. He was drawn to more natural modes of flight, but he didn’t want untransformed birds to dominate. Increasingly, however, when he attempted to fuse bird, machine, and myth, almost everything resembled a missile or a bomb.

  He was not unhappy with this, but he also wanted to depict paradise, wanted the tale being told to unfold in an Edenic setting. He would choose this rural landscape he now inhabited, and was coming to know, as the setting. But it would be torn by departures, ripped apart by entrances, exits. Flight and Its Allegories is what he would call the mural, were his submission to be chosen, though he knew the title bordered on pretension. It was the phrase that most often came to him when he was in the planning stages, and he sensed it would a
ppeal to the panel in Ottawa.

  The characters emerged slowly, working their way out of the basic shapes and colours he had chosen, as if each human being were an animal revealed by firelight on the uneven wall of a cave. The birds arrived more swiftly, their flight made evident from the beginning by the sharp angles his pencil drew, and the left-to-right motion implied by the long dimensions of the mural itself, so the eyes of the onlooker would be swept from one side of it to the other. The flight of the birds that occupied the better part of the central panels was the gesture of the piece, the forward momentum.

  As the months passed and intermittent skeins of snow were blown by the wind across the glass of the studio’s windows, he thought about the various human emotions connected to flight. There was the burst of freedom. But there might also be a fearful backward look, a sense of pursuit. He sketched one figure opening his arms to new experience, and then another, a fugitive with a hunted look. Children seemed to want to be in the picture. He drew one boy holding the bluebird of hope, and another juggling apples in a tribute to chance, skill, and gravity. There would be a suggestion of memory attached to the adults in the scene. Almost all of them would be based on people he had observed during his own earlier travels, men and women he had not known well – in many cases he had not known them at all – but whose arrivals and departures had struck him as poignant, heart-wrenching, or sometimes abrupt and cruel. He knew that the backward look could also be filled with longing or regret, and sometimes a desire to recover the past.

  All of this was to be executed in egg tempera. Combining the pigment with the egg yolk each time he used a new colour would make the project protracted and complicated from a technical point of view. But there was something about the busy velocity of the subject – all that speed and change – that drew him toward a medium that was painstaking. He estimated that it would take him ten full days to prepare the ground and prime the panels – thirty-six in all, each four by six feet. It would also take a considerable amount of time simply to assemble the materials: plywood, pigment powders, various brushes, eggs. He knew he would need carton after carton of eggs to do the job. He fervently hoped that there was a great quantity of chickens in Newfoundland.