Opened Ground (6 page)

The sandmartins’ nests were loopholes of darkness in the riverbank. He could imagine his arm going in to the armpit, sleeved and straitened, but because he had once felt the cold prick of a dead robin’s claw and the surprising density of its tiny beak he only gazed.

He heard cheeping far in but because the men had once shown him a rat’s nest in the butt of a stack where chaff and powdered cornstalks adhered to the moist pink necks and backs he only listened.

As he stood sentry, gazing, waiting, he thought of putting his ear to one of the abandoned holes and listening for the silence under the ground.

The drumming started in the cool of the evening, as if the dome of air were lightly hailed on. But no. The drumming murmured from beneath that drum.

The drumming didn’t murmur, rather hammered. Soundsmiths found a rhythm gradually. On the far bench of the hills tuns and ingots were being beaten thin.

The hills were a bellied sound-box resonating, a low dyke against diurnal roar, a tidal wave that stayed, that still might open.

Through red seas of July the Orange drummers led a chosen people through their dream. Dilations and engorgings, contrapuntal; slashers in shirt-sleeves, collared in the sunset, policemen flanking them like anthracite.

The air grew dark, cloud-barred, a butcher’s apron. The night hushed like a white-mothed reach of water, miles downstream from the battle, a skein of blood still lazing in the channel.

I moved like a double agent among the big concepts.

The word ‘enemy' had the toothed efficiency of a mowing machine. It was a mechanical and distant noise beyond that opaque security, that autonomous ignorance.

‘When the Germans bombed Belfast it was the bitterest Orange parts were hit the worst.'

I was on somebody's shoulder, conveyed through the starlit yard to see the sky glowing over Anahorish. Grown-ups lowered their voices and resettled in the kitchen as if tired out after an excursion.

Behind the blackout, Germany called to lamplit kitchens through fretted baize, dry battery, wet battery, capillary wires, domed valves that squeaked and burbled as the dial-hand absolved Stuttgart and Leipzig.

‘He's an artist, this Haw Haw. He can fairly leave it into them.'

I lodged with ‘the enemies of Ulster', the scullions outside the walls. An adept at banter, I crossed the lines with carefully enunciated passwords, manned every speech with checkpoints and reported back to nobody.

It kept treading air, as if it were a ghost with claims on us, precipitating in the heat tremor. Then, released from its distorting mirror, up the fields there comes this awkwardly smiling foreigner, awkwardly received, who gentled the long Sunday afternoon just by sitting with us.

Where are you now, real visitant, who vivified ‘parole’ and ‘POW’? Where are the rings garnetted with bits of toothbrush, the ships in bottles, the Tyrol landscapes globed in electric bulbs?

‘They’ve hands for anything, these Germans.’

He walked back into the refining lick of the grass, behind the particular judgements of captor and harbourer. As he walks yet, feeling our eyes on his back, treading the air of the image he achieved, released to his fatigues.

WELCOME HOME YE LADS OF THE EIGHTH ARMY.
There had to be some defiance in it because it was painted along the demesne wall, a banner headline over the old news of
REMEMBER
1690 and
NO SURRENDER
, a great wingspan of lettering I hurried under with the messages.

In a khaki shirt and brass-buckled belt, a demobbed neighbour leaned against our jamb. My father jingled silver deep in both pockets and laughed when the big clicking rosary beads were produced.

‘Did they make a Papish of you over there?’

‘Oh damn the fear! I stole them for you, Paddy, off the Pope’s dresser when his back was turned.’

‘You could harness a donkey with them.’

Their laughter sailed above my head, a hoarse clamour, two big nervous birds dipping and lifting, making trial runs across a territory.

In a semicircle we toed the line chalked round the master’s desk and on a day when the sun was incubating milktops and warming the side of the jam jar where the bean had split its stitches, he called me forward and crossed my palm with silver. ‘At the end of the holidays this man’s going away to Derry, so this is for him, for winning the scholarship … We all wish him good luck. Now, back to your places.’

I have wandered far from that ring-giver and would not renegue on this migrant solitude. I have seen halls in flames, hearts in cinders, the benches filled and emptied, the circles of companions called and broken. That day I was a rich young man, who could tell you now of flittings, night-vigils, let-downs, women’s cried-out eyes.

Light was calloused in the leaded panes of the college chapel and shafted into the terrazzo rink of the sanctuary. The duty priest tested his diction against pillar and plaster, we tested our elbows on the hard bevel of the benches or split the gold-barred thickness of our missals.

I could make a book of hours of those six years, a Flemish calendar of rite and pastime set on a walled hill. Look: there is a hillside cemetery behind us and across the river the plough going in a field and in between, the gated town. Here, an obedient clerk kissing a bishop’s ring, here a frieze of seasonal games, and here the assiduous illuminator himself, bowed to his desk in a corner.

In the study hall my hand was cold as a scribe’s in winter. The supervisor rustled past, sibilant, vapouring into his breviary, his welted brogues unexpectedly secular under the soutane. Now I bisected the line AB, now found my foothold in a main verb in Livy. From my dormer after lights out I revised the constellations and in the morning broke the ice on an enamelled water-jug with exhilarated self-regard.

On my first night in the Gaeltacht the old woman spoke to me in English: ‘You will be all right.’ I sat on a twilit bedside listening through the wall to fluent Irish, homesick for a speech I was to extirpate.

I had come west to inhale the absolute weather. The visionaries breathed on my face a smell of soup-kitchens, they mixed the dust of croppies’ graves with the fasting spittle of our creed and anointed my lips.
Ephete,
they urged. I blushed but only managed a few words.

Neither did any gift of tongues descend in my days in that upper room when all around me seemed to prophesy. But still I would recall the stations of the west, white sand, hard rock, light ascending like its definition over Ranna-fast and Errigal, Annaghry and Kincasslagh: names portable as altar stones, unleavened elements.

I went disguised in it, pronouncing it with a soft church-Latin c, tagging it under my efforts like a damp fuse. Uncertain. A shy soul fretting and all that. Expert obeisance.

Oh yes, I crept before I walked. The old pseudonym lies there like a mouldering tegument.