Once the man from Connemara sat up out of his sleep and stared at the American girl pinned to her chair across the room, as if he saw somebody desperate who had left her husband once, endangered herself among strangers, been turned back, and was here for the second go-round, asking again for a place to stay in Cork. She stared back motionless, until he was a starfish again.
Then it was morning—a world of sky coursing above, streaming light. The Innisfallen had entered the River Lee. Almost at arm's reach were the buff, pink, gray, salmon fronts of houses, trees shining like bird wings, and bells that jumped toward sound as the ship, all silent, flowed past. The Sunday, the hour, too, were encroaching-real. Each lawn had a flag-like purity that braved and invited all the morning senses, even smell, as snow can—as if snow had fallen in the night, and this sun and this ship had come to trace it and melt it.
It was that passing, short, yet inviolate distance between ship and land on both sides that made an arrow-like question in the heart. Someone cried at random, "What town is this?"
To wake up to the river, no longer the sea! There was more than one little town, that in their silent going they saluted while not touching or deviating to it at all. After the length of the ship had passed a ringing steeple, and the hands had glinted gold at them from the clockface, an older, harsher, more distant bell rang from an inland time: now.
Now sea gulls paced city lawns. They moved through the hedges, the ship in the garden. A thrush could be heard singing, and there he sang—so clear and so early it all was. On deck a little girl clapped her hands. "Why do you do that!" her brother lovingly encouraged her.
On shore a city street appeared, and now cars were following the ship along; passengers inside blew auto horns and waved handkerchiefs up and down. There was a sidewise sound of a harmonica, frantic, tiny and bold. Victor was up where he ought not to be on deck, handing out black frowns and tunes to the docks sliding into sight. Now he had to look out for his brothers. Perhaps deep in the lounge his guardian was now sleeping at last, white and exhausted, inhumanly smiling in her sleep.
The lovers stood on the lower, more shaded deck—two backs. A line of sun was between them like a thread that could be picked off. One ought not yet to look into their faces, watching water. How far, how deep was this day to cut into their hearts? From now on everything would cut deeper than yesterday. Her wintry boots stiff from their London wet looked big on the ship, pricked with ears, at that brink of light they hung over. And suddenly she changed position—one shoe tapped, pointing, back of the other. She poised there. The boat whistle thundered like a hundred organ notes, but she did not quake—now as used to boat whistles as one of the sea gulls; or as far away.
"There's a bride on board!" called somebody. "Look at her, look!"
Sure enough, a girl who had not yet showed herself in public now appeared by the rail in a white spring hat and, over her hands, a little old-fashioned white bunny muff. She stood there all ready to be met, now come out in her own sweet time. Delight gathered all around, singing began on board, bells could by now be heard ringing urgently in the town. Surely that color beating in their eyes came from flags hung out upon the looming shore. The bride smiled but did not look up; she was looking down at her dazzling little fur muff.
They were in, the water held still about them. The gulls converged; just under the surface a newspaper slowly went down with its drowned news.
In the crowd of the dock, the lady in the raincoat was being confronted with a flock of beautiful children—red flags in their cheeks, caps on their heads, little black boots like pipes—and by a man bigger than she was. He stood smoking while the children hurled themselves up against her. As people hurried around her carrying their bundles and bags in the windy bright of the Cork dock, she stood camouflaged like a sportsman in his own polychrome fields, a hand on her striped hip. Vague, luminous, smiling, her big white face held a moment and bent down for its kiss. The man from Connemara strode by, looking down on her as if now her head were in the basket. His cap set at a fairly desperate angle, he went leaping into the streets of Cork City.
Victor was shouting at the top of his lungs, "Here I am!" The young wife, coming forth old but still alive, was met by old women in cloaks, three young men to embrace her, and a donkey and cart to ride her home, once she had put Victor with his brothers.
Perhaps regardless of the joy or release of an arrival, or because of it, there is always for someone a last-minute, finger-like touch, a reminder, a promise of confusion. Behind shut lids the American girl saw the customs' chalk mark just now scrawled on the wall of her suitcase. Like a gypsy's sign found on her own front door, it stared at her from the sensitized optic dark, and she felt exposed—as if, in spite of herself, when she didn't know it, something had been told on her. "A rabbit ran over my grave," she thought. She left her suitcase in the parcel room and walked out into Cork.
When it rained late in that afternoon, the American girl was still in Cork, and stood sheltering in the doorway of a pub. She was listening to the pub sounds and the alley sounds as she might to a garden's and a fountain's.
She had had her day, her walk, that began at the red, ferny, echo-hung rock against which the lowest houses were set, where the ocean-river sent up signals of mirrored light. She had walked the hill and crossed the swan-bright bridges, her way wound in among people busy at encounters, meetings, it seemed to her reunions. After church in the streets of Cork dozens of little girls in confirmation dresses, squared off by their veils into animated paper snowflakes, raced and danced out of control and into charmed traffic—like miniature and more conscious brides. The trees had almost rushed with light and blossom; they nearly had sound, as the bells did. Boughs that rocked on the hill were tipped and weighted as if with birds, which were really their own bursting and almost-bursting leaves. In all Cork today every willow stood with gold-red hair springing and falling about it, like Venus alive. Rhododendrons swam in light, leaves and flowers alike; only a shadow could separate them into colors. She had felt no lonelier than that little bride herself, who had come off the boat. Yes, somewhere in the crowd at the dock there must have been a young man holding flowers: he had been taken for granted.
In the future would the light, that had jumped like the man from Connemara into the world, be a memory, like that of a meeting, or must there be mere faith that it had been like that?
Shielding the telegraph-form from her fellow writers at the post-office table, she printed out to her husband in England, "England was a mistake." At once she scratched that out, and took back the blame but without words.
Love with the joy being drawn out of it like anything else that aches—that was loneliness; not this. I was nearly destroyed, she thought, and again was threatened with a light head, a rush of laughter, as when the Welshman had come so far with them and then let them off.
If she could never tell her husband her secret, perhaps she would never tell it at all. You must never betray pure joy—the kind you were born and began with—either by hiding it or by parading it in front of people's eyes; they didn't want to be shown it. And still you must tell it. Is there no way? she thought—for here I am, this far. I see Cork's streets take off from the waterside and rise lifting their houses and towers like note above note on a page of music, with arpeggios running over it of green and galleries and belvederes, and the bright sun raining at the top. Out of the joy I hide for fear it is promiscuous, I may walk for ever at the fall of evening by the river, and find this river street by the red rock, this first, last house, that's perhaps a boarding house now, standing full-face to the tide, and look up to that window—that upper window, from which the mystery will never go. The curtains dyed so many times over are still pulled back and the window looks out open to the evening, the river, the hills, and the sea.
For a moment someone—she thought it was a woman—came and stood at the window, then hurled a cigarette with its live coal down into the extinguishing garden. But it was not the impatient tenant
, it was the window itself that could tell her all she had come here to know—or all she could bear this evening to know, and that was light and rain, light and rain, dark, light, and rain.
"Don't expect me back yet" was all she need say tonight in the telegram. What was always her trouble? "You hope for too much," he said.
When early this morning the bride smiled, it might almost have been for her photograph; but she still did not look up—as though if even her picture were taken, she would vanish. And now she had vanished.
Walking on through the rainy dusk, the girl again took shelter in the warm doorway of the pub, holding her message, unfinished and unsent.
"Ah, it's a heresy, I told him," a man inside was shouting, out of the middle of his story. A barmaid glimmered through the passage in her frill, a glad cry went up at her entrance, as if she were the heresy herself, and when they all called out something fresh it was like the signal for a song.
The girl let her message go into the stream of the street, and opening the door walked without protection into the lovely room full of strangers.
LADIES IN SPRING
The pair moved through that gray landscape as though no one would see them—dressed alike in overalls and faded coats, one big, one little, one black-headed, one tow-headed, father and son. Each carried a cane fishing pole over his shoulder, and Dewey carried the bucket in his other hand. It was a soft, gray, changeable day overhead—the first like that, here in the month of March.
Just a quarter of an hour before, Dewey riding to school in the school bus had spotted his father walking right down the road, the poles on his shoulder—two poles. Dewey skimmed around the schoolhouse door, and when his father came walking through Royals, he was waiting at the tree by the post office.
"Scoot. Get on back in the schoolhouse. You been told," said his father.
In a way, Dewey would have liked to obey that: Miss Pruitt had promised to read them about Excalibur. What had made her go and pick today?
"But I can see you're bound to come," said his father. "Only we ain't going to catch us no fish, because there ain't no water left to catch 'em in."
"The river!"
"All but dry."
"You been many times already?"
"Son, this is my first time this year. Might as well keep still about it at home."
The sky moved, soft and wet and gray, but the ground underfoot was powder dry. Where an old sycamore had blown over the spring before, there was turned up a tough round wall of roots and clay all white, like the moon on the ground. The river had not backed up into the old backing places. Vines, leafless and yet abundant and soft, covered the trees and thickets as if rainclouds had been dropped down from the sky over them. The swamp looked gray and endless as pictures in the Bible; wherever Dewey turned, the world held perfectly still for moments at a time—then a heron would pump through.
"Papa, what's that lady doing?"
"Why, I believe that's Miss Hattie Purcell on foot ahead."
"Is she supposed to be way out here?"
"Miss Hattie calls herself a rainmaker, son. She could be at it. We sure can use the rain. She's most generally on hand at the post office."
"I know now." He opened his mouth.
"Don't be so apt to holler," said his father. "We may can keep to the rear of her, if we try good."
The back of Miss Hattie rose up a little steep place, her black hat sharp above the trees. She was ahead of them by a distance no longer than the street of Royals. Her black coat was a roomy winter one and hung down in the back to her ankles, when it didn't catch on things. She was carrying, like a rolling pin, a long furled umbrella, and moved straight forward in some kind of personal zigzag of a walk—it would be hard to pass her.
Now Miss Hattie dipped out of sight into a gully.
"Miss Hattie's making a beeline, ain't she," said Dewey's father. "Look at her go. Let's you and me take us a plain path."
But as they came near the river in a little while, Dewey pointed his finger. Fairly close, through the trees, they saw a big strong purse with a handle on it like a suitcase, set down on the winter leaves. Another quiet step and they could see Miss Hattie. There on the ground, with her knees drawn up the least bit, skirt to her ankles, coat spread around her like a rug, hat over her brow, steel glasses in her hand, sat Miss Hattie Purcell, bringing rain. She did not even see them.
Miss Hattie brought rain by sitting a vigil of the necessary duration beside the nearest body of water, as everybody knew. She made no more sound at it than a man fishing. But something about the way Miss Hattie's comfort shoes showed their tips below her skirt and carried a dust of the dry woods on them made her look as though she'd be there forever: longer than they would.
His father made a sign to Dewey, and they got around Miss Hattie there and went on.
"This is where I had in mind the whole time," he said.
It was where there was an old, unrailed, concrete bridge across the Little Muscadine. A good jump—an impossible jump—separated the bridge from land, for the Old Road—overgrown, but still coming through the trees this far—fell away into a sandy ravine when it got to the river. The bridge stood out there high on its single foot, like a table in the water.
There was a sign, "Cross at Own Risk," and a plank limber as a hammock laid across to the bridge floor. Dewey ran the plank, ran the bridge's length, and gave a cry—it was an island.
The bearded trees hung in a ring around it all, the Little Muscadine without a sound threaded through the sand among fallen trees, and the two fishermen sat on the bridge, halfway across, baited their hooks from the can of worms taken out of a pocket, and hung their poles over the side.
They didn't catch anything, sure enough.
About noon, Dewey and his father stopped fishing and went into a lunch of biscuits and jelly the father took out of another pocket.
"This bridge don't belong to nobody," his father said, then. "It's just going begging. It's a wonder somebody don't stretch a tent over this good floor and live here, high and dry. You could have it clean to yourself. Know you could?"
"Me?" asked Dewey.
His father faintly smiled and ate a biscuit before he said, "You'd have to ask your ma about it first."
"There's another one!" said Dewey.
Another lady had dared to invade this place. Over the water and through the trees, on the same side of the river they'd come from, her face shone clear as a lantern light in nighttime. She'd found them.
"Blackie?" she called, and a white arm was lifted too. The sound was like the dove-call of April or May, and it carried as unsurely as something she had tried to throw them across the airy distance.
Blackie was his father's name, but he didn't answer. He sat just as he was, out in the open of the bridge, both knees pointed up blue, a biscuit with a bite gone out of it in his hand.
Then the lady turned around and disappeared into the trees.
Dewey could easily think she had gone off to die. Or if she hadn't, she would have had to die there. It was such a complaint she sent over, it was so sorrowful. And about what but death would ladies, anywhere, ever speak with such soft voices—then turn and run? Before she'd gone, the lady's face had been white and still as magic behind the trembling willow boughs that were the only bright-touched thing.
"I think she's gone," said Dewey, getting to his feet.
Turtles now lay on logs sticking up out of the low water, with their small heads raised. An old log was papped with baby turtles. Dewey counted fourteen, seven up one side and seven down the other. Just waiting for rain, said his father. On a giant log was a giant turtle, gray-tailed, the size of a dishpan, set at a laughable angle there, safe from everybody and everything.
With lunch over, they still didn't catch anything. And then the lady looked through the willow boughs again, in nearly the same place. She was giving them another chance.
She cupped her hands to her silent lips. She meant "Blackie!"
"Blackie!" There it w
as.
"You hold still," said his father. "She ain't calling you."
Nobody could hold so still as a man named Blackie.
That mysterious lady never breathed anything but the one word, and so softly then that it was all the word could do to travel over the water; still his father never said anything back, until she disappeared. Then he said, "Blackie yourself."
He didn't even bait his hook or say any longer what he would do to the fish if they didn't hurry up and change their minds. Yet when nothing came up on the hook, he looked down at his own son like a stranger cast away on this bridge from the long ago, before it got cut off from land.
Dewey baited his hook, and the first thing he knew he'd caught a fish.