This Is Happiness Page 11
With the placid air of a hexed husband, Ganga said precisely the wrong thing: ‘You don’t need them at all, sure. Aren’t you grand?’
If there was a cup to hand it might have flown. Doady made do with a dart of her eyes. Ganga felt it land and stick into the flat of his forehead. He opened and then closed his mouth and retreated to the obscurely Easter business of washing all the wellingtons.
Doady was left to her own devices, which in the end consisted of twists of letter-paper soaked in a saccharine concoction of sugar and egg-whites which, when twined about wet hair, gave an appearance of small Swiss rolls or a gateau-ed experiment of the French aristocracy. Trying the small reserve of her patience, she sat in the garden, her wet head inside the giant cylindric hairdryer of the blue sky. While the sun cooked her hair, I was posted as lookout. Later, when it was time to leave for the Vigil and the lighting of the Lumen Christi, Doady undid the twists to reveal a hairstyle so sprung that Ganga beamed like a boy with a candied toy, not for the first nor last time forced to concede an undeniable truth: women are always right.
The styling had an underlying urgency I wouldn’t be aware of until the following day. It was wrapped in a headscarf for the journey to the village.
When they were gone I fell again into that place of lost faith. My grandparents went to the church without thinking, it seemed to me, without question, and I envied them that. That year’s Easter Vigil could be threaded on to all the others they had attended down the years and, though they would not have thought of it in these terms, these things were footholds and, to the man I was then, seemed both to belong to them and give them belonging.
These things are no more, and the feeling I am telling here, of the entire parish gone to church to await the lighting of the Easter candle, and what it felt like to know that and not be going, may have perished too. It felt like a tide had gone out and taken all the ships with it, and you were left on a shore, a debris.
The quiet of the country can sit on your heart like a stone. To lift it, to escape the boundaries of myself awhile, I took down the fiddle.
One of the things about Irish music is how one tune can enter another. You can begin with one reel, and with no clear intention of where you will be going after that, but halfway through it will sort of call up the next so that one reel becomes another and another after that, and unlike the clear-edged definitions of songs, the music keeps linking, making this sound-map even as it travels it, so player and listener are taken away and time and space are defeated. You’re in an elsewhere. Something like that.
Which, I suppose, is both my method and aim in telling this story too.
Anyway, I was playing, not well, not wonderful, but for myself and inside the solace of it, playing at the table outside in the garden when Christy returned.
I wasn’t aware of him at first. He stood at the small gate listening. Because I was playing to escape myself it was some time before he found a gap and clapped.
‘You’re a fine player.’
‘I’m not.’
‘Have you heard Junior Crehan play?’
‘No.’
He looked at me a moment and the look said I had been cycling past the Pyramids and never seen them.
‘Neither have I. We’ll go hear him next week,’ he said, as though it was already decided.
Because he had gone away, and without saying, and because I only then realised I had the stupid bruise of it, I was cool with him.
He put down his case. He pulled a palm down his beard, which like all of him had been barbered. I knew he was waiting for me to ask where he had been, and because I knew I said nothing.
He paced some, not far, he was large and unswift, a few steps over and back. He hunted in the pockets of his blue suit, found a foiled mint he had not been seeking, picked it free of pocket fur, popped it in his mouth. He stood, eyes glittering. The haircut had made him not younger exactly, but edged.
‘She buried the chemist,’ he said, snap, like that.
I found the fiddle strings needed tuning.
‘Three years ago. Annie Mooney. She’s a widow.’
The river behind him, he waited for my response. I had known and not said. I ran my finger across the strings. He drew his lips tight together. He put back his shoulders and let the solid block of himself roseate in the sunlight. In moments his face ran a riot of freckles. He had resolved to say no more, I am sure of it, but he couldn’t help himself, he had the affliction of the infatuate for which the only salve was to say her name again. ‘Annie Mooney.’
It was inexplicably tender, the slightly abashed boyishness of a big man in his sixties.
‘For her I once ate a dozen purple tulips,’ Christy said, and in the blueness of his eyes you could see he was amazed by and not a little admiring of his younger self, who entered the garden on that statement and strode through, all innocence and earnestness, a wildly impetuous boy with small boots, glitter eyes and tufted hair, in love with Annie Mooney.
He was as present as I am here. Maybe you’ve seen that sometime sitting with an older person, the youth they were passes through their eyes, and is in silence acknowledged, hopefully acquitted. The Christy who ate the tulips would knock you down if you tried to stop him, I got that. His adamancy, certainty, his belief in what the poet called the holiness of the heart’s affections, these I’d like to think I understood then without the vocabulary or experience, but maybe I only understand them rightly now. He was a boy with heart blown open in the amaze of the world and the largeness of his own feelings, that I can say, and for long moments he was there amongst us until Christy lost sight of him again and shook his head slightly and said, ‘To what end exactly I can’t remember.’
To counter the airiness of sentiment he sat heavily on the windowsill. I offered the box of matches and he smoked a cigarette. ‘Play a tune for us.’
‘I’m not good enough, I only play for myself.’
‘Play for yourself and I won’t be here.’
But you are there, I probably said, but will absolve myself of that stupidity here.
He smoked. The sun parcelled us in dazzlement. Licensed – I use that word too often, but can think of no better – by the light, Eastertime, and perhaps the word April, the river ran like a child-river, free, and for a time talk vanished into the place where all the world’s conversations have gone.
I knew where Christy’s mind was, or thought I did, until he held the second cigarette out from him and said, ‘The morning I turned sixty I was in a boarding house in Boston. I was lying in the bed and was gifted one clear, cold realisation, like a glass of spring water.’
I didn’t ask what it was.
‘You’ve still time, Christy. You’ve still time to go back and right all the mistakes you’ve made. That’s what it was.’ He looked at me, his face lit as if he had won a prize.
On that morning he had become possessed by a single idea, simple and fantastical both, and he had set out on a personal crusade, to make what amends he could, and this was what had brought him to Faha.
I didn’t know what to say. My first thought was: he is a simpleton. Or, in Doady’s vocabulary, a dudaire. It was absurd, naïve, childish, and sentimental. You can’t correct the mistakes of a lifetime. You are your own past. These things happened, you did them, you have to accommodate them inside your skin and go forward. Even if you could – and you couldn’t, can’t – there was no going back. Something like this was running through my mind.
Christy watched the smoke, there, and not there. ‘I am resolved on a career of reparation,’ he said.
‘And have you? Made amends?’
‘It is one of the tragedies of life, that life keeps getting in the way of good intentions. I’ve made some. I’ll make more.’
I looked away and left him eating the purple tulips of memory.
‘Annie Mooney,’ he said after a time.
Because words failed me, and because the air was angular and awkward with emotion, I lifted the fiddle.
15
That evening, above in the room, Christy began preparations in earnest for his approach to Annie Mooney. Whistling softly, he took off his blue suit, hung it off the rafter, appraised it as though it were a suit of armour. With cursory flicks, he backhanded dust from both lapels, brought over his glass of water from the bedside and, dipping three fingers, towards the thousand wrinkles shot a general dousing. It had an air of benediction. With the palm of his hand he ironed the more grievous of the rumples, finding some stubborn, flicking more water at them, pressing harder, flicking and pressing, flicking and pressing until at last the suit reached an assessment of Pass, and for a moment he considered it and saw himself in it in Annie Mooney’s eyes and the whistling slowed just for a tick and I knew his heart had bumped against the idea of what she would see after so long a time. Just for a tick there was a broken-off lump of his heart in his throat, then he swallowed and the whistling came on again.
I was in the bed over, reading the amber pages of Augustine by the lamp, noting the passages about his mother’s death and thinking maybe Father Walsh had method in him when he gave me the book. I was watching and not watching as Christy stood sidelong in vest and underpants and improvised a calisthenics, informed both by an absolute non-acquaintance of exercise and the vexed attrition of a long-lived-in body. Softly whistling all the while, he held in both hands the bulk of his belly and tried in vain to push it inside him. When this failed, by pressing from the top he tried to send it south below his beltline. He pulled up the underpants to try and arrange a meeting. Abandoning this, he sucked in his breath and stood to his full height and with both hands again pressed his belly in and upward, as if its rightful place was in his chest cavity. It remained there for five seconds, and for five seconds he was delighted at the figure he cut, the vanquishing of time, gravity and human sinkage.
‘What do you think?’ he hissed, chin up, shoulders back and chest out like Conway’s cock.
He tightened his everything another touch and occupied that illusion until it exploded in a gasp.
He was not defeated. ‘I am a loose-strung fiddle, but she’ll know the head of me.’
‘How long is it since you saw her?’
‘In the flesh? Near enough fifty years.’
I nearly laughed.
‘But in every other way, some time every day since.’
And that stopped me. That was one of the things about him. He walked this line between the comic and the poignant, between the certainly doomed and the hopelessly hopeful. In time I came to think it the common ground of all humanity.
A thing I didn’t consider then was that he was over sixty years, that getting up, getting down, twisting, bending, flexing, in all the moving bits of him, could no longer be taken for granted, and twinges, pulls and strains in the elasticated parts were matched by aches, clunks and creaks in the skeletal. I pardon my ignorance by the fact that no one then spoke of their ailments, there was a now depreciated philosophy of offering it up and half the people of Faha were dead before they thought to complain of a pain.
In his vest and underpants, Christy took a position and did a push-up that did not push anything up, except neck and head. His body remained magnetised to the floor. He was not dismayed, but carried on, raising and lowering his head and perhaps imagining the rest of him in lift-off. He counted ten of these, rolled over and did the reverse, straining to get his head off the ground, but nothing else, in his version of a sit-up. He stood then, pushed out and back both fists, as though pressing an iron bar with weights. To flesh out the impression, he puffed with each effort, went directly into an exercise of arm propellers whose force was such his face went bright red, and I worried what Ganga and Doady must have thought.
Despite the dubious value of this programme, once he had finished, Christy had the lustre of well-being and the added gleam of the virtuous. He drank back in a gulp the rest of his water. ‘If we go to all three Masses tomorrow we’ll catch her,’ he said.
‘What?’
‘She’ll be there. Probably at the ten o’clock, but to be sure we’ll go to the eight first, and if she fails the first and second, she’ll be at the noon. When I go up to Communion, you’ll come behind me and watch her, you’ll see if she knows me. I won’t embarrass her by stopping and looking. I’ll just pause and you’ll see her reaction, you’ll watch for any sign, and we’ll know where I’m starting from.’
He’d considered it closely and in telling it now his face was alive.
‘I’m not going.’
‘It’s Easter Sunday.’
‘I’m not going.’
‘Even the thieves go Easter Sunday.’
‘How will you even know her? Mrs Gaffney,’ I said, obscurely knowing that the name would hurt him. ‘After fifty years, how will you know her?’
‘I’ll know her.’
‘Well, I can’t help. I’m not going to church. I don’t believe in God.’
‘Sshhh.’ He patted down the thought with both hands like it was a small fire. He came closer, whispered: ‘Don’t say that. He could lame or blind you. Just to prove Himself.’
How do you answer that? I put down the book and extinguished the lamp. Christy got into his bed, crossed his hands on his chest. ‘For both of us, wonders are coming.’
I couldn’t let that go. I leaned up on an elbow. ‘How can you say that? It’s nonsense. How do you know?’
‘Only God knows. But He is old and needs reminding.’ He raised his voice and to the thatch said: ‘Wonders coming for Noe and Christy.’
16
In Faha, the three Masses of Easter Sunday would all be full. For any number of reasons, family tradition, habit of sleep or sleeplessness, urgency to worship or be done worshipping, different congregations chose different Mass times and generally stuck to them.
Christy and I took the bicycles while Doady was milking Gerty and Ganga polishing his polished boots. My grandfather was too much a gentleman to pass comment, but just as I knew his spirit was wounded by my staying away from the church on Good Friday, so too I knew that it was in some ways healed that I was going with Christy. This life is full of hurts and heals, we bruise off each other just by living, but the hope is some days we realise it. Ganga and Doady would hitch Thomas to the car for the ten o’clock.
The early morning of Easter Sunday in Faha was a serene and flawless creation. Absurd as it might seem, the sun over the fields, the sky in slow but irrefutable bluing, it was impossible not to feel the countryside concordant in the feast day. And although back then I’d have mocked myself for thinking that, that morning you’d have been a stone not to have felt it. Stillness, like a thing laid out.
We cycled slow and silent out of the townland, Christy, scrubbed and Imperially scented, charged with the gravity of his quest and employing a wide pedal to guard his trouser legs from the capricious chain. What he was thinking, how exactly he expected it to go, was unknown to me, but I was now aware that he had orchestrated everything, the job with the electrics, coming to Clare, to Faha, and to Doady and Ganga’s, so as to be at the altar-rails of St Cecelia’s on Easter Sunday to see Annie Mooney.
It was too big an idea for me to digest at the time. People’s lives were small and everyday, I thought, the last great gestures of heart probably vanishing with Yeats.
In the fields, cattle, memories dissolved by so many liquid mornings, noons and nights, had forgotten they dreamed of April grass and, by a clemency reserved for those who live placid in a perpetual now, standing in a green sweetness forgot the cold muck-grazing of February. On the roads, on foot, bicycle, cart and car, the small but steady traffic of the early Eastering, complete with a passing of the nods, near- and full-, the looks, half- and quarter-looks, smallest of head-lifts, shoulder-lifts, full-hand, half-hand, or just forefinger-raises that among passers were, in mute eloquence, all translated the same, ’T
is Easter.
We parked the bicycles by the forge. With two short tugs, one front one back, Christy righted his suit, palmed flat his beard. ‘How do I look?’
‘What?’
‘How do I look?’
‘Tired. Flushed. In the face, red.’
It was small encouragement for a valentine, but he sidestepped reality by sucking in his stomach. ‘It’s the sun. A glow is healthy.’
He marched off down Church Street and I hurried after, aware that that morning I was as much a novelty as he, and that to the Christians already planted on the post-office windowsill I was the first story of the day. If I stayed for all three Masses, what Faha would think, God only knows.
Because she could be stationed either in the Women’s or the Main Aisle, Christy chose a pew halfway up the church. We settled in on to the outermost edge and were at once engulfed in a white floral ambrosia.
As decreed by a Church authority supremely oblivious to the reality of climates beyond Rome, for Easter lilies were paramount. Throughout Holy Week, Mrs Queally, small woman, one large coat button, had been on her fraught annual mission to secure the best of the ‘white-robed apostles’, a mission vexed by the fact that Mrs King, large woman, three small coat buttons, over in Boola, was on the same hunt, and that nowhere was an actual lily in bloom. Expeditions were undertaken, promises made a year ago called in, as Mrs Queally attempted to find an absolute minimum of twelve of the white trumpets. But there is a hierarchy inbuilt even in geography; the florists in Ennis preserved the best blooms for their cathedral, the second best for St Joseph’s, third for the friary, and the fourth best, with only a small white lie, Mrs King had been assured were the finest altogether when she secured them for Boola. What about some nice daisies, dear? With a slightly lesser view of humanity but an undiminished zeal, Mrs Queally unearthed a cousin of a cousin of her husband’s who worked in the Buttermarket in Limerick, took the bone-shaker two hours to the city, from the personal abundance set aside for the Bishop’s Palace purloined a portion, and came back on the bus with an archangel’s look of victory, the front four seats bedecked with lilies.