Country Girl: A Memoir (45 page)

Signing books in Kennys Bookshop, Galway city, 1978.

After weeks of bedlam in the garden, with foxes coming and going, I at long last located a company willing to take them to the country. Two men came to survey the scene. They looked shifty as they walked around, sniffing and following the tracks.
They called me by my first name all the time. They would bring cages, they said, and they did, or rather, one of them did. Big cages for the parents and littler cages for the cubs.

The bait was chicken wing, slightly bloodied, and suspended on a metal hook at the far end; the ruse being that, when a fox reached it, a spring snapped and the trapdoor was shut. The view in the garden was grim: ugly, squat cages, seven in all, and the bloodied chicken bait, which would get more rank by the day. I foresaw what was to come. Foxes in cages and those who had been crafty enough to avoid incarceration coming in sympathy to bay. There would be ongoing laments out there. Except that it did not turn out like that at all. Everything became weirdly quiet. At what hour of night, I asked myself, did the unsuspecting fox, perhaps the mother who had often outstared me, walk into her doom? Because next morning, treading my way, I saw a haunch—mahogany-brown and weirdly still. I froze, then hurried back to ring the man, asking him to come at once, except there was no answer from either phone line. When at last he came and picked up the cage, the fox was delirious, jumping back and forth, letting out mewling cries, which he answered with soft aspirations, the almost
o
’s and the almost
a
’s, as he put the cage in the back of the van for the long drive to the somewhere in the country.

Each morning after that, I went out to find trapdoors closed but no fox inside. They had twigged. When I rang, he said it could be gusts of wind, but I did not believe that, because several foxes had returned, treading in and out between cages, and I both feared them and waited for them. Then, about five mornings later, there was another fox, much younger, though not a cub, in a cage, under the fig trees, silent and seething. It kept looking at me, the gaze so fixed, so remorseless, that it brought to mind something I had put away, the gaze of the father to whom I was not reconciled.

We were in the nursing home, a friend called Agatha and myself, with my father. Our visit was just coming to an end, and he sensed it. It had not gone badly, but it had not gone well either. Questions and answers: “Why won’t you eat in the refectory with the other patients?” “I told you I won’t and I told you why. Mohawks, nothing but Mohawks. When are you going back?” I said I would be returning to England in a day or two, but hoped to be back by Christmas. “Christmas Day, the loneliest day of my life.” “But you wouldn’t eat with the others and pull crackers and things.” “I told you I wouldn’t and I told you why. The loneliest day of my life.” We edged out of that small room somehow, Agatha and I standing and he now standing in furious silhouette. We went down the corridor, and I knew that he followed. He caught up with us in a big room that was the concert room, as I imagined, as there was a baby piano, a guitar, and a mural of ballerinas in the sickliest purples. Dipping from a low white cord were birthday cards, all with the word “Grandpa” in every conceivable lettering and color. There was even one that twinkled on and off. How many hours’ twinkling did it have left in it? I wondered. He had caught up with us, and he dragged one of the many chairs along the floor, scraping the stone slabs. He sat down and started to sing “Danny Boy.” “The pipes, the pipes are calling…” He sang it right through, and there were tears in his eyes, and when he had finished, he looked up with a desperate, imploring expression. I knew that he wanted me to go across and throw my arms around him, and I wanted to, but I couldn’t, and the solitude closed in around him in that cavernous room.

The foxes had left by June.

Connemara had the worst frost and snows in many years. The gardener in the hotel said that the frost would burn the spring grass and “do” for the fuchsia bushes and the weed on the river. The river was glassy and frozen, except under the narrow bridge where the water squeezed its way with a whoosh and then fanned out into a dark, supple flow. From the overhanging fir trees the melting snow hung like panels of frayed lace, the little saplings a dainty gossamer. Connemara ponies were rolling and reveling in the snowed-on mountain grass.

Connemara is one of my favorite places, where the epithets of “wild, picturesque, and rugged” are still true and where visitors went to get a glimpse of both the “natives” and the leprechauns alighting on tufts of bog.

I had spent the previous night in Ballynahinch Hotel, where I found a small, leather-bound book with a vivid account, by the author Maria Edgeworth, of her visit there in 1834. Her companions were Sir Culling Smith, baronet and philanthropist, and his young wife, Isabella. They set out from Galway city, ignorant of the perils on the road ahead. They traveled in a fine barouche in which there were wells for holding writing-boxes, dressing boxes, and maps, except that the maps proved useless, as the roads stopped and there were no signs to guide them onward. Before long the rugged beauty ceased to impress them, and Sir Culling, though full of schemes and improvements for the Irish peasants, had to appeal to some of them, since the horses he had hired in Galway would go no farther. Out of nowhere men and young boys, “bog trotters,” appeared, wild
and excitable, speaking in a tongue that the visitors did not understand. With bare arms they seized the carriage, standing, then jumping from stone to stone, a giant of a man called Ulick lifting the ladies as he might a doll, then the men in their frieze coats, and lastly the horses, and setting them down on terra firma. Sir Culling’s philanthropy did not, however, extend to meeting the bog trotters’ demands of a shilling each for their labors. He thought sixpence was reasonable. They screamed, they cursed, they scolded, while the women, understandably unnerved, threw coins in their way, so that they could be safely escorted to Ballynahinch Castle.

At that time the castle was privately owned by Thomas Martin, and the visitors were somewhat surprised to find a stonework, barely whitewashed, a pigsty, and a dung heap adjoining the premises, rooms sparsely furnished, windows without curtains, windowpanes that rattled, and yet, as Miss Edgeworth said, the supper was such that the bon vivants of London would have blessed themselves with surprise—venison, salmon, lobster, oysters, and game, along with champagne and the finest wines from France.

I arrived late at night, the taxi going slowly up the winding avenue, where stones painted a stark white bordered the grassy verge. The castle was faintly lit, its walls and turrets taller than the tall trees that surrounded it. As I pushed the hall door in, I found a young man in his shirtsleeves, on a ladder, reciting to himself. It was Hamlet’s soliloquy, with the “too, too solid flesh” and the “little month, or ere those shoes were old/With which [Gertrude] follow’d” his poor father’s body. Turning, he saw me, suddenly stopped, got down, pulled his tie from inside his shirt, and pointing to the blue bucket and the wet, stringy mop, he said, somewhat abashed, “This is what I do,” and introduced himself as the night watchman. I was led from the hall to the Hunt Room, where the fire that was laid for the morrow
was soon crackling and wine and fruitcake set down before me. I was being entertained with more flowing passages, rapturous and melodramatic, so that it was not simply a room in Connemara with a picture of a boar hunt on the wall but a pavilion in France where Constance, wife of Geoffrey, is claiming that she is not mad but wishes to heaven she were, or with Margaret of Anjou, the she-wolf of France, leading her army in the Battle of Tewkesbury, or Thomas Jefferson’s dialogue between head and heart. Soliloquies that he had memorized kept him company, as he mopped floors, cleaned teapots, polished shoes, and prepared the breakfast trays. He had, as he put it, his own little theater to while away the worst of the night.

Later we stood at the open door to look out. A navy-blue sky spanned the snowy fields, and the mountain peaks gleamed with a heavenly, an other-world splendor.

Now that Ireland had lost its mojo, what would become of her?

“Poetry,” he said, with the crazed fervor of a mystic, poetry that Ireland had been the cradle of.

“ ’Tis there…’ tis still there,” he said, pointing to such staggering beauty, and it was difficult in those transcending moments to doubt him.

His name was John.

It was morning and I was setting out with the artist Dorothy Cross, who had agreed to come and photograph Drewsboro, enticed by my description of it. Mother Nature, according to my nephew Michael, was now supreme, briar, dock, ivy, nettle, and even little, scutty ash trees with tiny shoots making their way in the crevices of the mortar and the rotting window frames.

It was still vacant.

Dorothy was an artist who sometimes took photographs, and the one of her dog Louis was the loveliest and loneliest image of isolation and indecision that I had ever seen. Louis was on an empty track, under a blue sky, with bluer mountain behind, the pebbled seashore covered in a net of ragged green weed. Louis’s head was turned sideways; he was unable to make up his mind whether to go backward or forward.

She had traveled the world, the Andes, Antarctica, Tahiti, where she worked with pearl farmers, and in Papua New Guinea she had heard the shark callers, the sorcerers of the sea. Her sculpture
Virgin Shroud
was the one that had made her known, a virgin covered with the skins of Friesian cows, their teats like the Crown of Thorns, sunk in the uddered head. In contrast, the virgin might have been setting out for a ball, draped as she was in satin and veiling that Dorothy had found in her grandmother’s trunk. It was both primitive and ethereal. As a young girl in County Cork she had read something in the
Farmers Journal
that haunted her—
The darkest place in the world is the inside of a cow.
Her work sometimes drew criticism, but she laughed it off. One farmer was reported as saying that the silvered glass goblets she had affixed to some male apostles for a convent in Madrid were a ladylike version of a “fella’s hard-on.” Yet she was the one who had come back to live in Ireland and I was the one who had stayed away.

Now she was queen of five acres of land, which she had acquired through pure luck, having lost the lease on her studio in Dublin to one of the property sharks. She was driving along this isolated road in Connemara when she saw a handwritten sign that said
FOR SALE
and got out of the car. From the boot, filled with junk and scrap that she collected for her artworks, she took her lucky horseshoe and buried it in that ground, while an inquisitive cow looked on at her. The five acres circled a bay that opened into the rolling reaches of the Atlantic, stretching
to the New World beyond, with small islands off the coasts of Galway and Clare, glimpsed through mist, like floating basins of meshed green.

For the first six months, while she waited for the planning permission to restore the house, she slept in a little tin hut by the water’s edge, her protectors being her seventeenth-century Burmese Buddha, an otter who drank from a spring each morning, and the cow that had first stared at her and whom she named “Hairdo,” because of the crown of its head being so frizzy. She had saved Hairdo many times from the slaughterhouse by doing favors for the local farmer, who naturally believed that good grass could be put to better use. Her one friend, after she moved there, was a man called Mickey, an old man whose hedges she clipped, Mickey holding the ladder, calling her “Mrs. Darlin,” boasting that his cottage garden would surpass the Gardens of Babylon. She would visit him in the evenings, alone in his cottage by the fire, his long, thin fingers, as she said, like pincers on the crook of his stick, not lonely, not waiting for anything, not lamenting either, a hardy Connemara man who had traveled the world and had come back to settle on the western rim of it.

Because of the frost, the drive was hair-raising, the swerves sudden, as we skittered off the road many times, almost landing in one of the big Connaught lakes, whose waters, cold and choppy, swished over the edge. Dorothy talking, talking. Admittedly the view was beautiful, the snow on the mountain slopes shone with mineral brightness and their summits pinkish-gold, the way heaven is always depicted in holy pictures.