The Light of Evening (11 page)

a faraway smile. Two dwarfs in neat suits shook hands with pass-ersby to entice them into the Hall of Freaks. They were either brother and sister or husband and wife, because they had the same name. Above a booth, the letters in scarlet, twinkling on and off, madam cassandra, and an assistant assuring us that if we went in, we would come out knowing who our husbands would be, because Madam could predict the very moment when we set eyes on him. We were all for it but Kitty intervened, said hordes of people were rooked, taken in by that bluff.

He stood out because of being so very tall and the fact of his wearing a heavy overcoat in the boiling heat. He looked aloof, like a preacher, his lean bearded face tilted, looking up at the figures on the Ferris wheel, going skywards, screaming with terror, their hands clutching the side chains, then dipping down and those that had been below sent up to face the music. Kitty tapped him from behind
—
“If it isn’t the Angel Gabriel himself”
—
and he turned and smiled, taking us all in, a bearded man with searching brownish eyes that seemed to listen as intently as to see.

“Are you afraid you’ll catch cold?” she said.

“I was just on my way,” he said, that bit awkward.

“Sure, you’re always on your way and here’s four lovely lassies for you to dance with.”

They bantered. Was he married yet? No. Was she married yet? No. Maybe he was married on the sly to some wild woman, an octoroon, out there in Minnesota or Wisconsin or wherever, with not even a priest to hear the vows. What happened to the words of the song that she was to send him? What happened to the dance he failed to show up at on St. Patrick’s night? The two of them scolding one another and Noreen, feeling the nap of his coat: “Aaragh, shure, isn’t it all marvelous.”

“Can I get ye a cup of tea?” he asked.

“We’d rather ices,” Kitty said, speaking for us all.

She linked his arm and they walked ahead, us lagging behind,

the crowds milling, as the next train and the next arrived, the ice cream sweet and thick like a custard deliciously cold and the biscuit taste of the cone.

It was from that to the open-air shooting gallery, men shooting like billy-o, some with caps, some without, their eyes looking down the barrels of the guns, so intent as if they were in a war.

The spare guns were tethered to the counter for anyone to join in, and Gabriel paid for us all to have a round. How we laughed, how we protested, him teaching us how to hold it, swivel it, and how to sight the targets, which were tiers of unflurried white ducks.

“Don’t forget to breathe,” he said laughing, and we were off.

The atmosphere so heady, what with us shooting and the spectators, mostly women egging on their husbands or their boyfriends, the muzzles of other guns maneuvering this way and that across the counter, the music from the carousel nearby, various bands and the slight
ping
as the bullets hit the wings of the falling ducks, so fast and furious, then a faint after-smell as of something having been singed.

“She’s a good shot,” I heard Gabriel say after I hit the target three times, flabbergasted that I had done it, and Mary Kate said tartly that it was because of my brother, one of the mad Fenian men.

Gabriel and another man a few guns away were such crack shots that the official called for an impromptu competition, knowing it would draw a crowd, and it did. That was the first time that I noticed he had a finger missing and only a stump for a thumb.

Such a sense of thrill, ducks on three levels came cascading down, their falls fast and free, that and the booming as one or other hit the gong that hung from a long swaying pendulum, spectators taking sides, caps thrown into the air, people jostling for a better look and sparring.

Yet the two men shook hands cordially when it was over.

Gabriel was given a cranberry jug as a prize, the gallery owner’s name in gold lettering swimming inside the rich crimson waves of the blown glass.

“It’s for ye all,” he said, and Kitty took it and began to polish it with the swag of her dipping sleeve.

It was she who proposed getting in the water for a paddle. I didn’t want him to see my white legs, which was why I volunteered to mind the things, the shoes and stockings, his overcoat and the jug. Sitting there on a knoll of scorching sand, people all around so carefree and loud, men in awful flannel swimsuits smoking pipes and women in knickerbockers lifting their backsides to be photographed, not minding how foolish they looked, yet the whole world when I looked at it through the waves within the jug seemed rose-colored.

When they came back, so glowing, he said I wouldn’t be able to say I had been to Coney Island unless I got in. I was alone with him then, the water so silken over the ankles, but my footing unsteady because of the shifting sand and seaweed tangled in the toes. Across the bay was a jut of land suspended in sunshine that he said was named after a flock of sheep that once grazed there. Then he asked where I came from and if I missed it. Was I homesick for Ireland? No. His mother and father had been youngsters when they left, meeting up on the boat, sweethearts from then on, but they had died young, too young, and so it was in his bones. He knew the locality, which was near a mountain named after a warrior. He asked me to repeat the names of the townlands where I came from, as they were poetry to him, which they weren’t to me and yet as I recited them I could see drills of cabbage in our bit of garden at home, slugs on the green and blue-green outer leaves, and into my head came the bawling of stray cattle on a road.

Torick

Derry Gnaw

Kilratera

Coppaghbaun

Pollagoona

Bohatch

Derrygoolin

Glenwanish

Alenwanish

Knockbeha

Sliabh Bearnagh

Sliabh Aughty

We’d waded far out. I saw the breakers vault up and head toward us and I knew that I was falling and so was he. Inside the water he held me. I held him. Swaying like dancers but clumsier and that wild happiness, hoots of laughter all around, people getting drenched, keeling over, a woman’s shout, “Pick her up, Dwight, pick her up,” the child hoisted up, the waves like big barrels rolling in over us, the foam in our faces and he saying, having to shout, “You’re all right, we’re all right,” borne back in, half swept, half cresting, without ever letting go of one another.

They were raging. Mary Kate ran to squeeze the water out of the tail of my dress, saying I’d catch pneumonia, and Kitty remarking that a person could be excused for thinking we’d got engaged out there. He laughed it off and sat to put on his shoes, half smiling, already gone, thousands of miles distant, to the untamed world of the bush, to the wilds where he worked as a lumberjack, far from us and the hurly-burly and the cheek-to-cheek dancing on the open marquee.

Only by a sort of hidden smile when he stood in front of me to say goodbye could I tell that it was not nothing out there in the ocean, that it was something. How I longed to be alone, to relive every second of it, the swoop of the waves, the way he held me, the spume over our faces, my wet clothes wetting my ribs, clinging to each other and the water trying to suck us down.

“I bet he’s not going out west … it’s too early for logging,” Kitty said, reckoning that he would be somewhere in the city

that night, seeing some old flame or going to a dance, whereupon she and Mary Kate sparred over the different girlfriends he’d had, a Rita Thing-um-bob who’d given him Irish lessons, a barmaid the time he worked in a bar, a nurse from Roscommon, different girls, different Gabriels, and guessing at my elation, Mary Kate thumped me and said, “Don’t you go getting soft on him, he breaks hearts he does,” as poor Noreen hailed some drunken passersby to say, “Aaragh, shure, isn’t Gabriel a love barrel all to himself.”

A Ghost

the two other girls in the room, Mabel and Deirdre, said I imagined it. But they were wrong. My brother appeared to me there. A beam of light from the streetlamp lay in a crooked zigzag along the floor, toward the bed, and my brother stepped onto it, his face pensive but not crying, dressed as he might be for a wedding, his good suit, his collar and tie, and not a mark on him, no bloodstain, yet I knew it was not as a bridegroom he had appeared. He was dead and he had come to tell me so. After the first shock of seeing him I spoke, I said, “Michael, Michael,” but he did not answer. I asked him what was wrong, was it dead he was, but he did not answer. Then he was gone. The next day came the telegram from my mother, saying that her darling son had been shot by enemy fire and that a letter would follow.

August

Dear Dilly,

You got my wire. My Michael is gone. A bullet from an enemy transport lodged in his chest, which in less than an hour occasioned his death. He lay in the market square, people too afraid to come out to him for fear of more gunshot. It was a boiling day. The blood caking into him. He had gone into the town to get medicine for a comrade when a member of the garrison recognized him as being part of the ambush. He was just let lie there in the hot sun. Even the sparrow finds a place to die, even the swallow wherein to find his rest, but not my

son Michael, my darling light. Be sure to have Masses said for  the repose of his soul and for us.

Your loving mother,

                                                             Bridget

September 15

Dear Dilly,

We went to the military barracks in Tipperary town. We asked to see the officer in charge and had to wait all day. A tall standoffish fellow came out and led us into an office. He opened a big ledger, then read it out to us
—
cause of death hemorrhaging. Cause of death Murder. He said the incident was looked into and the army were in their complete rights as our son, your brother, was a felon and execution was what felons were dealt. We came out of there broken and dumb.

A man wheeling a bicycle walked behind us for a good bit, so as not to arouse suspicion, and then told us that he would bring us to the house of the woman that had run to succor our darling Michael, at the very end. She was too frightened to show her face in the town ever since it happened, in case she would be arrested as a conspirator. She hid in her own house and the man with the bicycle brought her a sup of milk or a bit of bread every three or four days. She was a washerwoman, she took in washing. She told us how she had been walking up the market square, taking washing back to a hotel, when she heard a human cry. She heard him before she came on him. The square was empty, people having fled into their houses once they had heard the shots. She knelt and saw that it was a dying man and listened to his last words, his last words asking God to accept him in the final resting place and asking his mother to forgive him the suffering he had caused her. She saw that he was ebbing and then he said he would like her to remove his miraculous medal and give it to his beloved mother. It’s all I have of him. Sweet Jesus, was not the blood of the Savior enough to turn mankind away from slaughter.

Your broken mother,

Bridget

Ma Sullivan

i had secured a place in a big store as apprentice seamstress, thirty or forty of us down in a basement, the whir of the sewing machines all day long, so brisk and businesslike, baking hot in the summer with the steam from the irons and the windows never allowed open in case dirt or grime got on the precious bales of silk or satin, pelts of chamois like little carcasses, their edges brown and shriveled and curled up. A supervisor like a spitfire, walking around, making sure we didn’t idle or make mistakes with our sewing and not allowing us to go to the bathroom, only when we clocked in and before we clocked out. My specialty was sleeves, collars, and bastings, along with buttonholes, cross-eyed from doing silk buttonholes, doing them in my sleep, the stitch slanting, the little knot, then down, then up again, in matching threads for ladies’ outfits. Every morning I set out with my thimble, my spools of thread, my big scissors, and the bread for my lunch, but it mattered not, because I had Ma Sullivan to come home to.

God shone on me the day I knocked on Ma Sullivan’s door. “You’ve come to the right house anyhow,” she said and brought me in. She needed a girl, part-time, to help with the dinners when her boys, as she called them, came home in the evening. She kept eight lodgers, her wild geese, all from home and ravenous when they got back from the building sites and the railway lines where they worked, often miles outside the city. She was mother, landlady, nurse, and banker to every single one of

them. She hid their wages so’s that they could save to go home, got them up for Mass of a Sunday, and saw to it that they were in bed early weeknights. Whatever ailment they had, she dosed them with castor oil, castor oil was the cure for everything, including, as I was to discover, a broken heart.

She and I slept in the same room, a room with twin beds, a big brown wardrobe, and a tin washstand with a china basin and ewer. She had had a son that got drowned up in Long Island and though he was never mentioned below stairs, she and me prayed for him every night, each at the end of our own beds, praying for our departed. He was a Michael too, same as my brother.

Her dances one Saturday a month were famous all over. The big kitchen would be turned into a dancehall, chairs and stools pushed back, the long table with a white cloth for a buffet supper that was either bacon and cabbage or mutton stew, the entrance charge half a dollar per head. Christy, a famous concertina player, provided the music. His concertina was kept in its folded box on the mantelpiece as she did not trust him to take it away, in case he pawned it for drink or left it in some dive.