I Could Read the Sky

  She was a woman. There was no part of her that was less, her step when turning a corner, her voice when close to you, her rings, her touch, her look when waking. I try to bring her here. Her rosary is here, her dress with the bluebells, the photographs. Her leg narrows in a long line from the knee. Her skin is the temperature of new bread. It glows a little like polished wood around her shoulders from her time in the sun. If she lifts her shoulders when explaining something the bones in her neck make hollows. The skin has a smell, of sun, of the bed and of lavender. Her laughter comes not from her throat but from within her centre. I see the sweep of her lines, the patterns in her skin, her movements. I follow them. I am enclosed within her. Then I cannot help myself. I see the sunlit street with the high plane trees with their bark the colour of ash, the motorcyclist roaring past, the dog moving out ahead of me. Maggie is in a crowd coming towards me. I see this again and again and again. She puts one hand on the top of her hat and waves with the other. The hand stalls, then drops.

  34

  WHEN DERMOT PICKS the field he will give us we begin to think of the caravan. We think of how it will look and where it will be placed. At the back of the field is a rockface of white stone streaked with grey. We will place the caravan here to keep it from the wind. Across the land as it slopes is the river where it breaks into the waterfall. The sun will rise over the back of the rockface and set over the river. Maggie talks of the gold light on the water at this time of day. There are blackberries along the stone wall that borders the lane and whitethorn, ash, wild cherry and sloe between the fields. Across the river are apple and pear trees in the orchard left behind by Lord Masborough. There are wild orchids there and you can see fish bones and the blue shells of crayfish left by otters. I am to put down potatoes and carrots and cabbage, and Maggie will look after the flowers and the mint.

  If you follow the lane up over the hill behind the caravan you come to a turning. To the right you go down to the sea where Matt’s nephew Hugh passes the days with lobster pots and winkles and dulse. To the left just a mile from the turning is Honor Casey’s with its sides of bacon and rubber boots and pints. We can go there any evening we like for the work will be behind us. There are to be two rooms in the caravan. We’re to have flowers through the summer and curtains bought in Belfast. We’re to bring the bed made of oak Maggie’s mother slept in in Monaghan. We know the plates we will eat from, the glasses we will drink from and the pictures we will look at on the walls. We know how it will look through the bedroom window on a clear morning. We know how the whitethorn will look in May and the rowan berries in September. We know the smell and the light and the feeling of the air. When I was young I had no future and no past. After that I had work. I paved roads, I broke up concrete, I dug under houses and I shifted muck. I counted shovelfuls, I counted potatoes and I counted bricks. That was the time I got a past. The past was heavy, like the blocks used for ballast in a boat. Without a past I would have fallen. I thought I had a future too but I could not see it. It was in the things I lifted and carried and in what I was given for doing it. This was a future that flickered and darkened whenever I tried to look at it. Then without warning there was Maggie and there was light and there was a road ahead to receive us.

  35

  THAT SUNDAY EVENING as I walk out with the dog to meet Maggie the sun drops below the clouds and fills the street with light. The newspaper was on the table and a teacup beside it where she’d left them to go to Mass. When I get to the street with the high plane trees very thick that year with leaves I see from the people walking towards me that the Mass is over. People walk slowly after Mass. I hear from the park the sound of a tennis ball being struck. It is a beautiful evening in early August with the evening light a very rich gold shining on the white shirts and the dresses and in among them I can see Maggie in her hat walking towards me and the dog. I never in all the time I knew her could get used to the sight of her. There was always something in how she held her head or lifted her hand to arrange the trail of hair across her face, the bones in her hands, the sound she would make before laughing, the lines breaking around her mouth, her foot tapping lightly to a rhythm she was making in her mind, the graceful way she could bend or turn, the way she could listen like the words or the music were water falling over her, the way she could see into the root of what people did, how amazed she could be. Sometimes she would seem like a scientist the way she looked at how people were, the moves they made. These things about her were always new and they were always her. Nothing she did reminded me of anything I had seen before. How in all the world did I ever find her? She puts her hand on the top of her hat to hold it in the breeze and she waves. Her stride lengthens a little, and quickens. Then her hand stalls in the air, and drops. She looks like she has forgotten something. She moves to her right like she’s going to fall, but she rights herself. She balances by the tips of her fingers on a low wall. Then twisting slowly in a long movement that seems to hold the whole of the day, her arms going out to the side while her head drops, she falls to the ground. I see her head bounce once on the paving stone. I see her hat twist and roll in the breeze down the street back towards the church as I run towards her.

  I’ll not be leaving Kentish Town now except in a brown box and when I do I’ll be going to Labasheeda to lie with Maggie. I’ve left the instructions. The girl who lives in the flat downstairs knows what to do. The governor of the Gloucester Arms. The woman whose dog I walk on weekday afternoons. And I’ve written it all out on a paper that’s on the table beside the bed. There’s the key to the box that has the money. How many feet of tunnelling to buy a coffin? How many to send me to Labasheeda? These hands. Battered and scarred like all of our hands. What travels through the tunnels? Who drives over the roads? What happens within the brick walls? Do the people there think of the men who built them?

  After the funeral in Monaghan I hire a taxi to take us to Labasheeda. I believe the soil here is only an inch deep and after that it’s blue clay. There’s hills rolling and the sound of rushing water as everywhere in Ireland. I look at a hill and I see Maggie rushing down it on the back of a horse as a young girl and it’s like I’ve touched a raw wire. What is there to think of but her? Over everything I see there is the colour of her death.

  Across the border and along it as we drive, set among the hills just like those hills of Monaghan, are the high towers of the English with their guns and helicopters and electrical instruments. There are fires burning too in the hills, bonfires. I think of the fires we built at Hallowe’en to drive away the spirits that fly. The roads here leading over the border end in heaps of concrete where they were blown up by the soldiers that live in the towers.

  What is it to miss someone? It is not the throbbing ache of a wound. It is not the pain you get under your ribs from running. It is not a befouled feeling, the feeling of being in mud. It is the feeling of being in a strange place and losing direction. It is the feeling of looking without seeing and eating without tasting. It is forgetfulness, the inability to move, the inability to connect. It is a sentence you must serve and if the person you miss is dead your sentence is long.

  I stand where the road rises over Labasheeda after burying Maggie in the graveyard. I hear again the black earth falling over her coffin. Then the silence. There is no comfort or no ending of anything with the earth settling over her where she rests but there is pity and there is peace, or maybe a picture of a peace that will be one day. The sky is black and deep blue and very still. I see all the grains in the paving of the road, the yellow-painted stripes where once there were tracks of gravel and dirt. The yellow is glowing. There is thistle blooming purple by the side. I begin to walk. The cries of birds sound against the low sky. I pass the house of Philly Concannon who was a good footballer, the green iron gate rusted now and faded from sunlight and rain, bindweed stitched through the gaps and the path where they walked no longer to be seen for it’s grown over now with high grass. My walk is strange as I go along the road, slow and halting li
ke I’ve stones in my shoe. I can hear the river. It is softer now than it was for the banks too like the paths are thick with grass. On the hillside by Knocksouna there are sheep, a man walking towards them slowly with his dog. There are cows. I can see three and I hear another in a field below. But the animals are few. Fields wet and covered with rushes, the walls falling. This is the time of day when once it seemed I knew where everyone was. I pass the pump, the concrete around it stained with rust, the handle dangling like a broken arm. I walk on towards the bend in the road. The silence is very heavy with only the birds calling as they pass. Away on the ridge by the path that leads down to Killycolpy I can see three houses. They are shells, black shells now at the end of the day with the dim light going. Here then were Brennans, Murtaghs and Dolans. Everyone gone now. I lean over onto a wall by the side of the road and light a cigarette. A car passes behind me, taking the bend slowly. I watch after it. It passes the Tailor’s house, the roof gone there too, grass growing up from the kitchen floor around the legs of a table standing alone. It passes Dermot’s house, the little house he built in the field where Ma kept the hens and then painted pink. His car is parked in the drive. There’s a big tin saucer beside it for receiving television signals. The car that passed behind me winds past the houses and stops in the road before the three houses standing on the ridge. I see a man step out from the back seat and hand money to the driver. He walks up the path towards the houses. I stand away then from the wall and begin to move after him. I hear small stones break beneath my feet. I hear myself breathing. As I pass I look in through the window of Matt’s and see that the kitchen is filled with potatoes, eggcups full of nails and Matt’s pipe still sitting on the ledge. I stop in the road and turn to look at the house where I was born. The door is blue now, hanging by a hinge. If I could draw music from the air I would place it behind the door. I would fill the rooms with people. I would look into their faces and listen to their speech. But I cannot find them. They are passing. There is only the sound of the river drifting through grass, the wind rising. There is the smell of wet ash and wet wood. On the ridge beyond I see the man moving around the forsaken houses. He is wearing a brown suit that is too small for him and he drags his right leg. Again I begin to walk. The names of the places around me begin to weaken and fade. The car where Tom Connor kept his pigs is still in the yard, rusted to its axles. At the lane leading to the long field I meet Baby. She has a new pram, high wheels and the chrome gleaming. “You’re still here, Baby,” I say. “If I wasn’t here who would there be to leave footprints?” she says. We walk along together. We are heading without reason to where the man is moving around the houses on the ridge. The wind picks up a little more and Baby feels it might rain. “The cruel wind of the north,” she says. When we get to the spot where the man got out of the taxi we stop. We watch through the gaps in the walls as he moves through the middle house. “Do you know him?” I say to Baby. “I do,” she says. “Tommy Murtagh. Went to England long ago and cuts grass in the parks.” He comes out then from behind the house and moves down through the yard. He stumbles over the wet stones. When he gets to a tree he stops. The tree is low, the branches black and tormented looking from being lashed in the wind. He kneels down then in the long grass before the tree and he folds his hands. “Comes back once a year and haunts the house,” says Baby. “Haunts the tree too.” She smells of leather and soap. Lower, blacker clouds roll in from the north and with them comes the rain. I lift the jacket up over my head and watch the man as he looks down at the roots of the tree, the rain pouring over him. Birds scream in the sky and the man looks up. It is as though he has not heard this sound before, as though he does not know where he is. I get the smell of leather and soap again and Baby’s face is before me. “Would you know now what’s under the tree?” she says. Her face is fallen in around the mouth where the teeth have gone. She looks like she might laugh. “I don’t,” I say. “Tommy Murtagh’s twin brother. Born dead and never baptised. So they buried him under the tree.” She nods once at the strangeness of this knowledge. I look past her to the man. He’s up now and looking around. He turns his collar up and he goes out onto the road.

  In the rain the land seems to let go of what it carries. Who now can there be to know what the fish does in the well, where Joe Roddy took his heart attack, how much sand Matt hauled up on his donkey to build the field? Who will know the stories of who lies beneath the stones in the graveyard? I walk now with nothing along with me, no sounds, no pictures, nothing of what was in happiness or in pain. I walk in forgetfulness, all that I pass seeming to vanish as I go.

  36

  IN THE ROOM now a breeze comes in through the window and on it there is the smell of spring. Downstairs the girl turns on her radio. I lie in the bed and listen to its music. There is a time after long work when you can look for strength and there is nothing there. This is a time of forgetfulness and after comes a time when you know again what you can do. There can be a time too when the work is complete.

  In the morning light I let go.

  Acknowledgements

  Many Irish emigrants were generous with their time and their stories. These include Willie Barratt, Ann Connolly, James Dunleavy, Dermot Grogan, Mary Hall, Martin Hayes, Evelyn Haynes, Maureen Heston, Joseph Hynes, Gerry McLaughlin, Peggy Moore, J. M. O’Neill, Tim O’Sullivan, Jessie Stafford, Michael Sullivan, Peter Woods and residents and staff at Arlington House. Peter Woods also granted permission to reprint his poem. Others who, in different ways, provided help include John Adamson, Jackie and Campbell Bruce, Zelda Cheatle, the Clifford family, Willie Collins, Hannah Dawes and Gary McKeone of the Arts Council, Seamus Deane, Catherine Eccles, the Faherty family, Vince Goodsell, Chris Jones, Declan Kiberd, Phillip Kirwin, Dewi Lewis, Gordon MacDonald, Christy McNamara, Metro Imaging, Michael Mitchell, Chrissie Redmond, Mark Sealy, Sarah Westcott, Jonathan Worth, and the people at the Harvill Press. Dermot Healy was an inspiration. John Berger fathered this book through his collaborations with Jean Mohr and his writing about migrant labourers. He read it and advised about its presentation, as well as writing the preface. Nichola Bruce collaborated valuably in finding the connections between the pictures and the words.

  Many others not named here, including the subjects of the photographs, have been helpful in the production of this book, and the authors would like to express their gratitude to them also.

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

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  Harvill Secker is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.

  Text copyright © Timothy O’Grady, 1997

  Photographs copyright © Steve Pyke, 1997

  Preface copyright © John Berger, 1997

  Timothy O’Grady and Steve Pyke have asserted their right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  First published by The Harvill Press in 1997

  This book is published with the assistance of the Arts Council of England

  Timothy O’Grady acknowledges with gratitude his award from the National Endowment for the Arts, Washington DC

  Timothy O’Grady and Steve Pyke acknowledge with gratitude the financial assistance of the Cultural Relations Committee of the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs

  Sections of this book fi
rst appeared in Force Ten

  None of the photographs in this book are intended to represent any of its fictional characters

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library