The Radiant Road (5 page)

And the room fell silent, as if it, too, were waiting to see. And her arm inside the tree felt cool and prickly, the hair rising up.

And Clare's mind filled with—not pictures, exactly, but feelings, and near-pictures, near-memories, of what was inside that tree.

Her heart started beating fast. She pulled her arm out.

I will see if I fit some other time.

Four for a Boy

The next morning, half asleep, Clare heard voices drifting up from below. Wrapping herself in the sky-blue comforter, Clare walked to the edge of the platform and peered down.

She could just see her father's hands gesturing as he talked to a woman. The woman was shorter than he was, quite short, with dark, thick, gray-spattered hair, just curling in at her jaw. When she talked, her hands moved, too, thick and square and strong. Her voice was warm and husky as a clarinet, but not so sad as a clarinet: friendlier. When she laughed, it was like a clarinet blowing bubbles.

The woman said, “I'll be so glad to see Clare again, if she comes down soon.” As she spoke, she looked straight up at Clare and winked. Her smile made her face round as a friendly bowl, and her eyes were bright and black. Clare's father said, “Is she up, then? Clare?” and was leaning in to look as blushing Clare drew back into her room. But she didn't feel bad; she felt like laughing, too.

A minute later she climbed down, dressed and uncombed. Her father said, “Oatmeal warming in the pot for you, sleepy. And this is Mrs. Dunn.”

“Mary Joseph Dunn,” said the smiling, black-eyed woman.
Although she was no taller than Clare, she looked solid and strong as the yew trunk. “But please call me Jo,” she added.

“Oh, now—” began Clare's father, who preferred Clare to call adults by Mr. or Ms.

But Jo interrupted him. “Or Aunt Jo, if your father prefers, though I am not your true aunt, of course. But we can't have formalities between two who have known each other as long as we.”

Clare glanced at her father for help.

“I'm teasing you, my little red leaf,” said Jo. “I delivered you into this mad world; I was your mother's midwife. I was your grandmother's midwife in her time, too, and delivered your mother's red head into this house just as I did yours. And I am so sorry that you lost her, Clare,” she added, “so sorry indeed.”

And the way she said it didn't make Clare feel embarrassed and sad, as it usually did. It made her feel warm.

Jo was persuaded to stay for breakfast, where Clare learned that she was also the house's caretaker. All the years that they had been gone, it was Jo who kept the house repaired, stoked fires every winter to warm the pipes, chased birds out of the fireplace. It was Jo who had stacked their boxes and lit the fire to welcome them home.

“It's the modern things here, the wiring and pipes and such, that need the babying,” she said. “It's not the old stones. They're strong.” Jo put an admiring hand on the wall. In the morning quartz-light,
the stones were many colors, not just gray—pinkish-violet and purple-gray and a kind of clayey blue.

Conscious that she would own the house someday, Clare said, “Thank you.”

“It was my pleasure,” Jo replied. “I was a nurse and midwife all my life, and when they pensioned me off I didn't know what to do with myself. It wasn't the money, only I'm up and about at four a.m. and have my own house and garden seen to by ten. That leaves a lot of empty day.”

She asked Clare how she liked her room—whether she wanted a rug on the floor or hangings to cover the bare stone. Clare said she liked it as it was, and Jo seemed to find that the right answer.

“And are you still a maker?” she asked, buttering a piece of toast. When Clare didn't answer right away, Jo glanced up at her, her dark eyes crinkling like a smile. “I remember you well for a making child, songs and stories and little forts you would make, all the time. A writer, by now, are you?”

Clare tightened. “Not really,” she said. To write hidden, upside-down poems—notes for poems—was one thing. To talk about it was unthinkable. With her spoon, she pushed a lump of cold oatmeal from one side of the bowl to another. “No. I guess I grew out of it.”

Jo laughed. “You never grow out of making. At the least, what
about in your dreams? Don't you make every night, in your dreams?”

“That's not me, though,” Clare said. “I'm not, like,
making
my dreams.”

“Ah,” said Jo, with a friendly smile. “Who is, though, if not you?” She stood up to clear her plate. “Tell me this: have you been up to visit the top of the tree yet? Let's go and greet it, then. I always pay my respects to the tree when I come.”

“Breakfast dishes waiting for you when you come back in,” said her father as they left.

The sea that morning was dusty blue and calm. Clare and Jo scrambled up the green hill, still slippery from yesterday's rain, on rough steps made by rocky ground. Up at the top, they stepped carefully around the chunks of quartz that salted the grass, drinking the sunlight. What Clare had taken for a pile of stones the day before turned out to be her own chimney.

They stood with their backs to the yew and the ocean, looking over fields of green pasture that ran up to those stony ruins of a castle or church, and on beyond to the edge of a distant forest.

Feeling the damp on her shoes, Clare thought of a question. “Why doesn't the rain come in the window?” she asked. “It rained yesterday, and the hill is wet, but the house stayed dry, even though there's no glass in that window.”

“The window was made that way,” said Jo. “Look and you'll see that the stones slant outward. The wind could still blow it in, if the wind so chose, but I've never seen it happen.”

“When I was little, Mam used to say it was left open so the fairies could fly through,” Clare said. “What's the real reason?”

Jo gave her a sideways look. “What makes you think that's not the real reason?” she said.

Clare looked down. She wanted to be polite, but she wasn't going to pretend to believe in fairies. Also, she'd been starting to like Jo. “Um, okay,” she said, her voice tight.

A warm hand pressed her arm.

“I'm not teasing you,” said Jo. “Sit down beside me—this sunny patch looks dry, or dry enough—and let an old woman rattle on for a bit.”

They sat on the ground looking out over the green. “Well,” Jo began. Clare felt, from how she said that one word, that Jo would talk for a while, and she was glad. She lay back on the wet grass to listen and watch the changing sky.

“Here in Ireland, we believe, or we used to believe,” Jo began (and Clare wondered which it was), “that when the Good People travel together, they travel on certain paths, and always straight ones. It's hard to see anything but sky from that stone hole when you're inside the house, but—”

“From my room you can,” Clare said. “I saw the pasture, and some woods, and those ruins or whatever, over there. It's like the window's a telescope pointed straight at those ruins.”

“So it is,” said Jo, “that's exactly what it is. You understood that on your first day. Well, well.” She was silent for a moment, then continued. “That twelve-hundred-year-old castle is one landmark of the fairy road. Your yew tree here is one landmark, and the ruins is another. And can you almost see,” Jo asked, “a good ways beyond the castle, that dolmen?”

“What's a—” Clare began, but Jo interrupted.

“Of course you wouldn't know, my apologies. A dolmen is—well, no one really knows for sure. They say they might be tombs, because at some point people were buried under some of 'em, but it's only a guess. A dolmen is most often two great rocks standing on end, and a third one laid across them, like you made your forts, when you were a child. Only this child would have to be the size of this hill, because the stones are that big, and that heavy—heavy enough to have stayed in place for thousands of years. Can you see it?”

Clare sat up. She thought she might see something, something white in the grass out far past the castle, but she wasn't sure.

“Well, it's hard, at this distance, if you don't know what you're looking for,” said Jo. “But that dolmen is called Finn's Cap. They're
all over this country, I can tell you, dolmens and standing stones and—oh, much more. And beyond Finn's Cap, which you can't see, is a hawthorn tree—a fairy thorn, as we used to call them here.”

“Why
fairy
thorn?” Without meaning to, Clare sounded peevish.

Jo laughed. “You don't care for that word, I see. They are also called the Good People, you know, and other words as well. Fairy thorn because hawthorns are favorites of the fairies, I suppose. I was walking near there yesterday. That tree is fully dressed in flowers still, even though we're past May. It's the fourth landmark, all in a straight line with the others. Inside the forest is the fifth landmark, but you can't see that from here. The point is, when the landmarks go in a straight line, it makes a road for the . . . for the Good People to travel as a host, leaping from one to the next, and through your window to the yew tree—and behind the tree, of course, the sea itself. The sea is the beginning and end of all roads, if you travel long enough, even fairy roads. There are paths like that all over this country.”

“Only Ireland, supposedly?”

“Oh no. In every country, everywhere. But most places, people have forgotten the roads, or how to tend them. Here we remember better than most.”

Clare squinted into the distance. She wondered why they called it Finn's Cap. Maybe she would walk there later.

“I will tell you something else about that window, though,” said Jo. “One day a year, at Midsummer only, the sunrise shines straight through that window.”

“Midsummer?” Clare asked. “Like the middle of summer, you mean?”

“Well, it is called Midsummer because it's the longest day, when the sun is in its greatest glory, before the long decline into autumn. But scientifically, my scientific girl, it's the first day of summer, the summer solstice. That's usually June twentieth or twenty-first—twenty-first this year, at the new moon.”

“My birthdays,” Clare said.

Jo smiled. “That I know,” she said, “for I remember that long day and short night well.” She brushed her hands again, decisively. “It's time we pay our respects to the yew.”

They turned around to face the yew, where the deep green of its leaves flourished against the two blues of sky and sea. But Clare stopped, put her hand out to Jo's arm.

In the branches of the yew were four identical birds, large and thick-beaked, black and white in big patches. The four birds sat straight and still, staring at Jo and Clare.

The hair on Clare's arms rose electrically. The birds were Strange. A fairy-making? But they were just sitting there.

“Well, well,” said Jo softly. “Four for a boy.”

Clare thought she hadn't understood Jo's accent, because “four for a boy” made no sense. “
What
now?” she said, and immediately blushed at the phrase:
You're in Ireland, not Midland, Texas.

“One for sorrow, two for joy,” said Jo. “Do you not know about counting magpies?”

“Is that bird a magpie?”

“It is,” said Jo. “And there's an old belief that magpies are an omen—an omen of what, it depends how many you see. The rhyme for it goes, ‘One for sorrow / two for joy / three for a girl / and four for a boy.' There's more, too—I think, ‘Five for silver, six for gold—' Ah, I don't remember the rest. But let's both look out sharp for a boy today, and see which of us the omen was meant for.”

Clare wasn't sure if she was serious or not. They stood for a long moment, watching the magpies watch them. Then all four birds at once, with no visible signal, no preliminary shifting, launched from their four branches and flapped away.

“Then in we go,” said Jo.

The yew's branches spread wide and free here aboveground, and Jo and Clare ducked beneath their green umbrella. Within the shade, the hard boughs twisted and bent to make a little bench, and after Jo refused it, Clare sat. She felt safe; the tree held her in its arms. She felt that she could tell the tree her troubles. She rested her head on the hard wood, the rough brown and the smooth, peeling
pink, and stroked a green frond with flat, pointed leaves, like a fir tree.