Chapter Thirteen
On a fine clear morning a week later, Charity Bostwick and Jessica left Easter Hill for Donegal, the northernmost county of Ireland, traveling in Miss Charity’s open roadster with their suitcases on the luggage rack and bundled up against the coastal winds in tweeds and scarves and leather-palmed driving gloves.
Fluter followed them to the end of the long beech-lined lane, the breeze stirring his heavy gray ruff, but stopped obediently and raised his head for a last look at the bright green car winding into the hills. Then the big collie barked at the gulls riding in on thermals from the sea, and trotted back to the house and the figures that stood on the terrace of Easter Hill — Lily and Rose, Mrs. Kiernan, old Flynn, Capability Brown, and Kevin O’Dell, who still had a hand raised in the air.
They traveled up the coast to Galway and Connach and Mayo, stopping at inns along the way, and dining in lounges with handsome plates displayed on wall racks and swords crossed above big fireplaces. They reached Sligo when fogs covered the old town and the darkness was sprinkled with city lights.
In a cemetery there, Jessica brushed a film of gray moss from the letters carved on William Butler Yeats’ headstone. And when she read the words, she felt a stir of nostalgic affection for the poet and for all the other souls stretching away from her in the reaches of the old graveyard.
Cast a cold eye
On life, on death.
Horseman, pass by!
They visited famous views and landmarks and ancient monastaries, great grey dolmens and crumbling shrines. And in the little town of Glendrum, they learned through an innkeeper of an elderly couple named Mallory — no kin of Jessica, but the old man, Liam Mallory, was well known for his strangeness, his stories and the deep poetry of his speech.
They spent an evening with the couple in their cottage high in the wooded hills above Glendrum, a dwelling of one huge room with an earth-packed floor and a tall stone fireplace where Corinne Mallory, wrinkled and shy in her black shawl and bonnet, sat knitting while her husband talked and an immense silky wolfhound lay at her feet.
During their long swing up and down the western coast, Jessica managed to write postcards at every stop to the staff at Easter Hill and to Andrew and Dr. Julian in the United States. And between gathering rock specimens, having roadside picnics, and taking the wild-bird count for Miss Charity’s records, Jessica also absorbed a fair share of Irish history, partly from her own observation of the land and its landmarks and in part from Miss Charity’s rambling, disconnected anecdotes, which ranged from the time of the British Tans to the present troubles with intervening accounts of the activities of her own family and of Capability Brown and the other residents of Ballytone.
Yet among all the crowded, vivid memories of the trip, the one that stood out most clearly and distinctly from all the others in her mind was the one of old Liam Mallory and the strange and marvelous things he had told her, the way he had looked at her when he’d said goodbye — a huge figure of a man with a staff in one hand and tendrils of sea mist curling around his white beard and streaming hair.
“You were sent back to this soil to replenish your gifts,” the old man told her. “We need all the wild geese, the second sights, now as never before, not just for this poor, tortured country but for the whole world.
“Once we lived with our gods and were close to them. But man with his bricks and buildings and motor cars and science is always building Towers of Babel that are doomed to drown out the true language of the human spirit.”
“And if the gods aren’t close to us anymore,” she asked, “are they lonely for us?”
“Ah, you’re a wise child,” Mallory said. “They’re lonely for us, dearie, like fathers and mothers for lost, crying bairns. But it’s the nature of things. We must go and seek them. You see that, don’t you? And for those like you and me, with the gift, that search and its need gives us the power of the elements, the strength of archangels.”
“How do we know that that strength is wise?” Jessica asked him.
“You’ll know, child. You’ll know when the time comes...” and he thrust his staff against the roaring winds and held it there as a shield for the two of them.
This was the way Jessica would remember him in all the years to come, a patriarchal figure struck from the myth and rock of Ireland, as dauntless in the face of time as the elements themselves.
The morning after she returned from Donegal, Jessica breakfasted with Andrew Dalworth, who had flown into Shannon the night before. Then, with Fluter wheeling about her- in excited circles, she ran down to the stables to tell Kevin O’Dell that she was back at Easter Hill.
O’Dell was working in the blacksmith shop, his collar open and his sleeves rolled up, and Jessica was proud of the look of strength in his arms, muscles coiling as he shaped a horseshoe with powerful hammer blows. He listened with interest as she told him of Sligo and Connach and Yeats’ grave, the old churches and the inns and pubs they had stopped at, and raised her voice to make herself heard over the clanging hammer and the explosive hissing sound when O’Dell plunged the white-hot horseshoe into a bucket of water.
At first, he smiled at her enthusiasm, seeming to relish her account of the journey. But as she recounted what Miss Charity had told her of Capability Brown and the troubles and of the time they had spent with the old couple above Glendrum, his mood changed, and he shook his head in obvious exasperation.
When she finished her account of that hillside visit, trying to recreate for him the fantasy and wonder of old Liam’s visions, Kevin put his hammer down on the anvil and looked directly at her, a controlled impatience in his expression.
“What is it, Kevin?” she said, “What’s the matter?”
“Jessica, this talk about charms and spells and elves dancing on shamrocks or whatever you’re saying, it’s a lot of nonsense,” he said.
“You wouldn’t talk that way if you’d heard Liam Mallory.”
“He wouldn’t waste his time or breath on me, Jessica. Those old-timers save their talk of leprechauns and widows’ curses for children and gullible American tourists.”
“Just because you’re growing a mustache, you think you know everything, Kevin.”
Kevin looked embarrassed, but he continued. “I’m sorry, Jessie, but it’s true. Those old people may be harmless enough but in a way, they’re the curse of Ireland. They’re living in a past that never was or truly existed. They don’t contribute anything to us except superstition and ignorance. They’re simply not part of the real world.”
“If they’re not, then what is the real world?”
“I can show you where that is, Jessica. Just take the Number Ten bus south from Shannon to where the German-owned factories are today. It took foreign brains and foreign capital to teach this old country about reality. Our choice was always to half-starve, digging for potatoes or finding a boat to take us to America or New Zealand. So there’s your real world, Jessica: my brothers in factories making tools and goods, not old men in the mountains believing that every sparrow coming in a window was chased by the Devil.”
He didn’t understand, Jessica realized. It wasn’t the literal sense of what the old man had told her that was important. That the seventh son or a Mac or a Mc had the powers to cure sickness in farm beasts. “A Mac can spit in his own hand and wipe the pain from a mare’s flanks,” old Liam had told her. And he had spoken that night, his voice rumbling like the waves below them, of priests hidden away in the homes of the Catholic faithful, of the Black and Tans spying on men in pubs or out searching the houses, of a chance word or drunken whisper often leading to the betrayal and death of loyal countrymen.