Lark's Eggs (32 page)

There was a Canadian redwing in the woods behind my flat who'd come because of the cold weather in North America. Never again I thought, as I was driven to Shannon, the attic room of beech or walnut, a boy half-naked, military smell—musk—off him, a montage on the wall. Choose your decade and change the postcards. Somebody or something dug into one here.

I have put bodies together again here I thought, put the blond or strawberry terracotta bricks together.

In San Diego next day I boarded a scarlet tram and a few days later I'd found a beach, the ice plant falling by the side, plovers flying over, where I swam and watched the Pacific go from gentian to
aquamarine
to lapis lazuli until one day, when the Santa Anas were blowing, a young man and a young woman came and swam naked way out in the combers, then came in, dried, and went away.

The Red Bridge, a railway bridge, always porous, became lethally porous, uncrossable by foot. Cut off was an epoch, gatherings for swims.

People would trek over clattery boards who knew it was safe because so many people went there.

In the fall of 1967 trains would go over in the evening, aureoles of light, against an Indian red sun. You'd hear the corncrake.

A little man who worked in the railway would stand in the sorrel and watch the boys undress.

Shortly before he died of cancer he approached me, in a
gaberdine
coat, when I was sitting in the hotel, back on a visit. He spoke in little stories.

Of Doctor Aveline who wore pinstriped suits, a handkerchief of French-flag red in his breast pocket, and always seemed tipsy, wobbling a little.

Of Carmelcita Aspell whose hair went white in her twenties, who wore tangerine lipstick and would stand in pub porches, waiting to be picked up by young men.

Of Miss Husaline, a Protestant lady who went out with my
father once, who didn't drink but loved chocolate liqueur sweets.

Of the bag of marzipan sweets my father always carried and scrummaged by the rugby pitch; squares of lime with lurid pink lines; yellow balls brushed with pink, dusted with sugar, with pink hearts; orbs of cocktail colours; sweets just flamingo.

And he spoke of the winter swim. ‘It was an article of faith,' he said.  

The September river was a forget-me-not blue and the bushes on the other side were gold brocade. The old man who stood beside me as I got out of the river had glasses tied by a black strap around his head. He lived in a cream ochre
ledge-top
Yorkshire wagon with green dado, near the river.

‘I've been here fourteen years but I'm moving tomorrow to a field near Horan's Cross,' he said, ‘The children torment me. I hit some sometimes and I was up with the guards over it. We were blackguards too. They used wash clothes on stones in streams. There was an old woman who used wash her clothes and we'd throw stones at her.'

Looking at the river he said: ‘A young butcher and a young guard used swim to the other pier, practising for the swim across the estuary in the summer. I used swim the breast stroke, the crawler. But then I'd put on swimming togs and go out and stand in the rain. It was as good as a swim.'

There'd been another caravan parked beside the old man when I first came to live in a caravan nearby and an Englishwoman lived in it sometimes dressed as a near punk—in an argyle mini skirt with a chain girdle—and sometimes as a traditional Gypsy with a
nasturtium
yellow shawl with sanguine dapples and a nasturtium yellow dress with sanguine dabs on it which had attennae.

In my first few weeks living in a caravan by a field there was the
blood translucence of blackberries, the mastery of intricate webs, the petrified crimson of ladybirds on nettles.

On one of my first mornings the guards arrived in plain clothes. A guard with jeans tight on his crotch banged on the door. ‘Mrs Monson has objected to you,' he said referring to a woman who lived in a cottage nearby.

In my first few weeks in a caravan I realized that living in a
caravan
there was always the laceration, the scalding of a nettle on you, the tear of a briar, the insult of a settled person. But you noticed the grafts in the weather, mild to cold in the night, fog to rain. You saw the pheasant rising from the grass. Close to the river you were close to the hunger of the heron, the twilight voyages of the swan, the traffic of water rats.

In the night there was a
vulnerability
, a caravan by a field near a main road, a few trees sheltering it from the road, the lights of cars flashing in the caravan, a sense of your caravan's frail walls protecting you.

Coming to live in a caravan by a field near a main road was part of a series of secessions.

A few weeks after I'd come to live in West Limerick I was
gathering
firewood in the wood behind my flat, yellow jelly algae on the logs, sycamore, maple, ash wings on the grass, when a little boy in a frisbee and a shirt with chickens wearing caps and flowers and suns on it, came up to me on a bicycle. His hair had the gold allotted to pictures of the Assumption of Mary in secretive places. The sky over the river was a brothel pink. ‘Pleased to meet you.' When I raised my axe a little he dashed away.

Sometimes as I walked in the fields in the winter I'd see him, tatterdemalion against the trunk of a rainbow. Dogs were often
digging
for pigmy shrews in the fields.

 One day he was in the fields with two greyhounds of a friend on leashes, one white with marigold mottles, the other fleecy cream and tar black with a quiff on the back.

In the spring he knocked on my door. ‘I'm looking for haggard for my horse. I wonder can I put a horse behind your house?' He had a seed earring in his right ear now.

‘If I be bereaved of my children, I am bereaved.' Sometimes on summer nights when I swam in the artificially created pool in the fresh water part of the river behind my house he'd be there. On one side of the town bridge the river was fresh water. On the other side it was tidal water. He'd be leaping from the high cement bank with other Traveller children. Ordinarily he looked boxer-like but in swimming togs I saw that his legs were twig-like—almost as if he was the victim of malnutrition.

‘On your marks, ready, steady, go,' he'd command the other
children
. ‘Did you ever tread the water?' he'd ask me. Meaning being almost still in near-standing position in the water.

In the early autumn when I'd go to swim on the pier in the tidal part of the river he'd often be there with his horse, shampooing his horse's tail. The horse was a brown horse with one foot bejewelled with white and with a buttermilk tail. The boy's features were hard as a beech nut or an apple corn now. He'd look at me with his
blueberry
and aqua-blue mix eyes. ‘I can't swim her now. She's in foal.' The foal when it came was sanguine coloured. The boy left both of them in a meadow on the town side of the pier. The foal would sometimes go off on a little journey, a little adventure, and the mare, tied, would whinny until his return.

I went to the United States and after my return in the spring I found the flat I'd been living in had been given away. I moved into another flat in the same house. It was unsatisfactory. Cycling to the pier I'd watch and listen for the little boy. There was no sign of him. I wondered if his family had moved on, if he was in England. Then one day at the end of April he rode to the river on his horse. The time for swimming the horses had come again.

Up and down the Traveller men swam their horses. Steel greys—white horses with a hail of dark grey on them, Appaloosas—speckled Indian horses, skewbalds—batty horses, piebalds.

 Handsome horses with sashes of hair on their foreheads. A man with round face, owl eyes, stout-coloured irises, hard-bargained-for features, in an opaque green check shirt, spat into the water as he swam his horse. On his forearm he had tattoos of a camel, a harp, a crown.

The boy when he brought his horse to the water had a new bridle on her, viridian and shell pink patterned. He told me of the things that happened while I was away. In February the otters had mated by the pier.

I found a cottage in the hills outside the town and the boy's father who had kettle-black eyebrows, piped locks, roach hairstyle, wore a Claddagh ring—two hands holding a gold crown—on his finger, drove me there.

I put a reproduction of Botticelli's
Our Lady of the Sea
over the fireplace, her jerkin studded with stars.

‘Say a prayer to St Mary,' an English boy, the son of a painter, who cycled to a flat of mine in London in an apricot T-shirt, said to me.

The cottage was near a church but despite that fact I soon found that local people were knocking on the back windows at night, cars were driving up outside the house at night and hooting horns.

I'd cycle to the river everyday. There were roads like Roman roads off the road through the hills. ‘Finbarr Slowey bought a house there and brought his wife and children,' a Traveller man with
Indian-ink-black
hair and Buddha-boy features who was at the river with his strawberry roan, told me, ‘and they drove up outside his house at night and hooted horns. If they don't want someone to live in their village they hoot horns outside their houses at night.'

Many sumach trees grew in this area as in the Southern States and I kept thinking of the Southern States. The bunch of
antebellum
roses; the tartan dickie bow; the hanging tree beside a remote bungalow with a dogtrot. The brother of a friend of mine from a Civil Rights family was killed by the Ku Klux Klan on the Alabama–Georgia border. This area was very similar to the border country of Alabama and Georgia. Great sheaves of corn braided and left out for hurling victors; boys in green and white striped football jerseys dancing with girls at the Shannonside to the music of a
platform
band; the shadow of a man in a homburg hat at night.

The
IRA
's up there,' said the Traveller boy, ‘And vigilante groups. They tar and feather people.'

At night when I'd be trying to sleep people would stand behind the house and bang sticks. I didn't think there was any point going to the guards. A guard with black lambchop sidelocks and a small paste-looking moustache came by at about eleven o' clock one night and asked me if I was working.

I couldn't sleep at night. I didn't see the Traveller boy by the river so I sought him out. I always thought his family were settled Travellers but when I enquired in the cottages near the river they said: ‘He lives in a caravan up by the waterpump.'

A long sleek caravan with gilt trimming, occasional vertical gilt lines, flamingo shadows in the cream. Behind it, on the other side of the road, was a flood-lit grotto. His mother was standing by the window—buttermilk blonde hair, mosaic face over a shirt with
leg-of-mutton
sleeves—above the layette, the celestial cleanliness of
aluminium
kettles and pots laid out for tasks. She wore a ring with a coin on it. There was a little blonde girl with yellow ducks on her dress and a little boy with cheeks the yellow and red of a cherry and eyes a turquoise that looked as if it had just escaped from a bottle. On the caravan wall was a framed colour photograph of a boxer with a gold girdle and on a cupboard a jar of Vaseline. I remembered an English girl whose father was a miner telling me that miners always put Vaseline in their hair before going down into the mines. The Traveller boy was wearing wellingtons the colour of sard.

‘You've no choice,' said his father, ‘but to buy a caravan and move into it.

The boy's father got a little caravan for me and I moved into it.

The hazelnuts were on the trees by the river the day I moved into the caravan. In being moved from house to caravan I found out the boy's name, his father referring to him. Finnian. A hawk had brought St Finnian the hand of an enemy who had tried to slay him the previous day.

A middle-aged single woman who had connections with the Travelling people moved into the cottage in which I'd been living and they started banging on her window at night. She couldn't sleep. A room was found for her on Maiden Street in Newcastle West. I'd
often see Traveller boys with piebald horses on Maiden Street in Newcastle West.

Shortly after I moved into the caravan a little boy with a Neopolitan black cowlick and onyx eyes knocked at the door. ‘I heard you like books. I have murder stories. Will you buy some?'

‘Do you want to buy a mint jacket?' asked Gobán, a Traveller boy with a sash of down growing on his lips who lived in a caravan near Finnian's. He was wearing a plenitudinous pair of army fatigue trousers. He went into his caravan and brought it out. It was
malachite-cream
, double-breasted, almost epaulette shouldered, with a wide lapel.

He and Finnian would often come to my caravan and I'd get them to read poems.

Both Finnian and Gobán were in identical Kelly-green fleece jerseys. ‘Will I tell you a joke?' said Gobán as Finnian read. ‘Stand up and be counted or lie down and be mounted.'

Finnian and Gobán and I would have tea, and half-moon cakes and coconut tarts I'd buy in Limerick.

Sometimes when Finnian would be out lamping for rabbits at night he'd knock at the caravan door and request Mikado biscuits.

The boys would come at night and tell stories; of the priest who used go on pilgrimage to Lough Derg and bring a bottle of Bushmills around with him on the days of pilgrimage; of the local woman who dressed in religious blue, spring gentian blue, and broke into the priest's house one night and put on his clothes; of the single Traveller man with the handlebar moustache who lived in a caravan and had a bottle of Fairy Liquid for ten years; of Traveller ancestors who met up with other Travellers they knew from Ireland on Ellis Island before entering the United States; of a relative of Finnian's who went to America, joined the American navy and was drowned while swimming in Lough Foyle during the Second World War when his fleet was stationed there.

‘Long ago in West Limerick,' said Finnian's father, ‘they had rambling houses—went from house to house telling stories.'

Every year settled Travellers in Ireland—buffers—make a long walk to commemorate the days of travelling. One year it was Dublin to Downpatrick, County Down. Despite the insults, the contumelies heaped against Travelling people, you keep on walking.

On December twenty-first, the winter solstice, Finnian and Gobán and Gobán's smaller brother Touser brought a candle each and put them in the menorah in my caravan and lit them against the winter emerald of West Limerick. Touser had a fresh honey blond turf cut, a pugilist's vow of a body.

A rowing boat with a red sail had gone down the river that day.

Patrick—Patricius—had once lit the paschal flame in this country.

When he couldn't sleep Caesar Augustus would call in the
story-tellers
and as we had tea and Christmas cake they told stories and jokes and in the middle of stories and jokes came out with lines from Traveller songs—‘I married a woman in Ballinasloe', ‘I have a lovely horse'—and, the lights of cars flashing in the caravan, it was as though all four of us were walking, were marching through the evening.