Irishmen
It was the sixth sunny day of their eight month trip, as William’s wife pointed out; there was no need to add that it was going badly.
“You were right,” he said, kneeling beside Alexandra’s bicycle. “The tube’s been punctured.” He caught the little droplet of water on the tip of his finger, scowling at the miniscule hole that had ruined this beautiful day. He removed the pump from the air valve and stood, fingering his scraggly beard in consternation.
His wife sighed. “I don’t understand. If they want us gone so badly, why would they prevent us from leaving?”
William shook his head. “I think we’re just someone to toy with.”
Worry creased the corners of Alexandra’s eyes. “Do you think we can find someone willing to sell us another tube?”
“I’m not sure,” he said, running a hand through his hair. “But we’ve walked a long way already. We’ve got legs; we can use them.”
†
It was with childish delight that William had left his home, his family, and his friends for this exultant pilgrimage. The States, having just borne the youth of the land through an era of fantastically exotic spiritualism and swollen with the acid dreams of wild-minded young revolutionists, had exploded back into realism. There was no place for the dancing nudes or crazed concerts anymore in his homeland, and even in his heart he was no longer stirred by these things that once gave him purpose. Still, there smoldered in his chest the desire to find a cause worth reveling in, equal to his passion, which he could risk everything for. He had no doubt he was capable of self-sacrifice—now he sought an object for his protest and his worship. This search, he felt, was not to be completed in America, where already his generation was forgetting itself. Elsewhere, over, beyond—that was why he left so abruptly with his wife as a priestess, his guitar as his dogma, a pair of bicycles for freedom and a tent to serve as their temple. It wasn’t quite God they were after—it was His plan, His pregnant dreams, themselves as His hands, their songs His work in the lives of the suffering.
They began in Greece and moved northward, hesitating here and soaring past that, driven by an image Alexandra found in a magazine from Italy that neither of them could read. The boy who formed the focus stared past the camera toward the sky, which was partially hidden by a looming iron wall. Using his pocket dictionary, William translated the heading: “Peace Walls in Belfast.”
“Well, that’s it,” Alexandra had said, eyes glowing with fervor. “We’re going to Northern Ireland.”
They dallied only slightly as they pedaled closer to the island, and managed the boat fare with sparse left over. William had caught his breath at the sight of it: a glowing country, lit just below its surface with emerald fire.
Ireland reverberated in their hearts like a motherland. The dying mountains, their harsh woodlands veiled by misty time, were intoxicating in their wildness. The verdure of the land seared the sky, which was nearly always iron. On kinder nights, William and Alexandra slept out in the mystical moonlight to witness the majesty of the hills and valleys that somehow remained just as brilliantly green. The lakes shone a blinding blue in icy rebellion against the starkly metallic sky. It was a place steeped in an ancient dream, so fit for legend as to make them wonder if perhaps Avalon was here, beneath the world and shimmering through like billowing silk half hidden by smoke. The two, however, wondered always in silence—there was in this place an aversion to exclamation, and in fact any kind of speech. They had seen other countries during the journey north, each with their own splendor—some greater than anything in Ireland—and yet nowhere else had they encountered this heavy kind of magic, which enveloped the island in a magnificent melancholy that stilled the tongue before it waggled some useless utterance that fell so short of the mountain-rent sky.
The people, at first, did not seem at all similar to their rugged and glorious land. Laughing at the couple’s stories of exotic places, they bought poor William more whiskey than he’d ever had in his life. Alexandra, who refused alcohol at any occasion, was conned into enjoying considerable Irish cider before her new drinking mates enlightened her to its true main ingredient. Each little town they visited insisted on bringing them to the town’s pub—The Red Fox, or Mrs. O’Brian’s Kitchen—and gave them drinks on the house, taught them Irish drinking songs, and asked, with a wink and an elbow for his neighbor, “So—what’s your favorite country?”
It took a little longer for William to notice how few pounds the man who insisted on paying for their drinks had in his wallet, and for Alexandra to catch the words of the tunes the old women sang—sad, all of them, with sickness and bleak-eyed young widows and death. The Irish did not have the same spell as the land; at night, the two could wonder aloud about the contradiction of their sorrow and their laughter.
“They are too proud,” said Alexandra, shaking her head. “It’s almost shameful that they would buy us meals, when they’re having trouble affording their children’s.”
“I’m not sure that it’s such a bad thing,” William offered, scratching his chin in thought. “They’re a sad people, I’ll grant you that. But think of the children as we rode in—did it look like they were thinking of food?”
“They looked hungry enough to me.”
Yet, as Alexandra thought about it, the hunger was only a thinness; it wasn’t the pitiful portrait of scars that etched the faces of other children they had seen as the pair hurried past, eyes averted. She remembered their shouts of delight as they chased after the pair, chortling at the ridiculous sight of their bicycles laden with bags and tent and guitar. They had stopped, as they always did for the children, prepared to hand out what little two pilgrims carrying their lives on their backs could afford. These children, though, demanded not food, but songs; William took out his guitar and strummed a Spanish children’s ditty, and then a Greek drinking song. In return, they taught him “Four Green Fields,” “The Foggy Dew,” and “Molly Mallone,” songs that wrenched the heart and numbed the mind, that children should know them so well.
William squinted in concentration as he tuned his guitar, his fingers delicate as they twiddled the pegs. “They—and their parents—weren’t looking for food; they’re looking for laughter.”
The land didn’t change as they crossed the border into Northern Ireland; it held the same aged mountains, the same aquamarine lakes, the same sky. It was the people that declared it different, hostile—insane.
†
William approached the little shop on the Protestant side of the wall. He tried hard to walk with confidence, so he kept his head upright and his step slow. The people stared at him from doorways and windows and street corners, and he could smell the sour reek of their scorn. Once he met a man’s gaze as he passed by him, leaving the same store he was so determined to enter. The stranger carried a grocery bag that bulged at the bottom with cylindrical shapes—canned fruit, perhaps, or soup. William’s hands twitched with nerves; he looked up with a brave smile and was buried beneath the stones lodged in the man’s eye sockets, too cold to pass as eyes.
Shuddering, he abandoned his false poise and darted through the shop door. Inside and momentarily shielded from the curling lips and muttered threats, he leaned a moment against the wall, cursing his cowardice. A slow inhalation, and he turned to see the lyrics of “Loyal Protestant” framed before him on the back of the door.
“I am a loyal Protestant; from Belfast town I come,
A story I will tell to you about these rebel scum…”
“What the devil are ye doing in here?”
The sharpness of the voice grated across William’s ears. He cringed.
The shopkeeper loomed before him, a broom clutched in her wrinkled hand. She seemed so old that her face was entirely concealed by the furrows and gouges left by age; only her eyes were visible through the creases of her skin, bright and dark. Shorter than William by at least a foot, she nonetheless reduced him to stammering like a child.
“I’m s-sorry, ma’am…I came in looking for a tube—a bicycle tube. Someone seems to have poked it—I mean it must have been an accident.”
“Ye’d best get out of here, now,” she hissed, her mouth contorting into a snarl. “Lord knows I don’t need folks saying I deal with people as may have crawled over the wall!”
“But ma’am, we need to fix that tire, or we can’t leave at all,” William retorted, desperation strengthening his resolve. He took a step toward her threatening figure, hands held out in supplication. “Please, what harm would it do?”
Her eyes narrowed to slits that nearly disappeared into the crumpled folds of flesh, so only the gleam of anger showed they were still there. “I won’t have naught to do with the likes of ye,” she snarled. She raised a gnarled fist and shook the broom at him. “Go on, get out!”
Defeated, William turned back toward the door. There was a creak of hinges, a heavy fall of a booted foot, and a tap-snick of a cane striking the floor and sliding.
“Hold on, now, Eileen,” rasped a second voice from the depths of the shop. “I’d rather like to give this fellow his bicycle tube.”
An old man stumped into view from the door behind the counter. He looked slightly younger than his wife, or rather better preserved; his features were not blurred enough by time to have quite vanished. Silver hair curled in wisps from his head, but his venerable black beard was only streaked with gray.
His eyes were stone—not cold and hard, like the man outside, but entirely dead. His irises matched the Irish sky in their iron fog, and his pupils drifted like cirrus clouds, unbound and listless.
“Fair bold of ye, lad, to be coming into town in such a time as this,” he said, ignoring the grumbling of his wife, who had stepped back beside him, like a loyal squire to the side of his knight.
William nodded, disconcerted—and then realized such gestures were useless. “We didn’t know it was this bad, sir.”
The old man bobbed his head sagely. “Yes, it never seems as bad as from inside, does it? Even the walls—ye know they said the walls would be down in six months?” He tapped his cane against the floor, carelessly—tap-snick. “How long’s it been up, now, Eileen?”
“Four years, come September,” Eileen said. Her eyes remained on William, impatient for him to be gone.
“They tell me some of the younger folks are painting on them now—“murals,” I hear they’re calling them. Mighty pretty, they say, very patriotic.”
William saw again the murals on the wall—schoolgirls, politicians, and a great deal of guns.
“What religion are ye and yer lass, now?” the old man asked, as though something important had just occurred to him.
William felt a rush of terror at the question. “We were raised as Greek Orthodox.”
“Ah, well,” the blind man sighed, “that’s a wise answer, now. But ye know it really doesn’t matter, even here. It’s what it means, see?
“The folk here, we all saw ye coming from a league away—there was something different about yer necks, ye see. Not bent down, were they?” The old man craned his neck skyward, a secret curve marking his lips. His cane cracked against the floor in his vehemence. “No, yer lass and ye smiled at us angry people as bright as anything, and we knew right then ye didn’t know what that pilgrimage ye were preaching about so finely was about to get ye into.”
William recalling the swelling in his heart when he had strode into the town pub and announced to the people why he had come. He remembered elation akin to lovemaking or acid or coming home—and then a veil had been torn from his eyes as he saw the twisting faces that leered back at him.
“Ye’ll be a fine lad with good values—ye’d make a good Protestant,” continued the blind man, nodding again, his head listing slightly sideways, “but all the better if not. So get on going, and don’t ye fret about the paying. Folks ought to know better than to go about hassling pilgrims.” For some reason, he chuckled.
With a decisive shake of his stick, he turned to his wife. “I’m going out for my walk, now. Give this bold fellow his bicycle tube, and let him go back to Connemara, back to the good, poor places. I am going to walk the wall again, to listen to the young folks yell. Good luck to ye,” he said, swinging back to William, and staring a few inches to the left of his head. “Keep on the road, don’t look any folks in the eye, and the IRA won’t kill ye. Neither will the rest of us, if yer cautious. The Republic’s sad, but not so angry.”
He tottered past him, and—tap-snick—stepped out the door.
Eileen heaved a sigh that rushed out of her in wrinkles, clicks and wheezes folded over each other. Resigned, she muttered, “Hold on, now; I’ll fetch that tube for ye.” She bustled into the back of the store, and returned a moment later with the packaged bicycle tube. She handed it to him; her hands had the texture of bark, calloused high across her palms and fingertips.
“Thank you,” William said, tentatively.
“Ye and yer lass are welcome,” she returned, peering shrewdly into his face. The anger in her eyes had dissipated; her husband’s words seemed to have cooled her scorn. “Ye’d do best to leave here, as Liam said. Bring yer guitar and yer pilgrimage somewhere else. Ye won’t find much but bitterness and blood.” She blinked, once, heavily, and looked out the window. “It is Wednesday Mass tomorrow, after all.”
With that, she left, and William crept back down the street to the tent, where Alexandra waited for him.
†
From across the wall, they heard shouting.
The Catholics, on the other side of the wall, were at Mass. From the ground where they sat, William and Alexandra could see the spires of the church rising upward toward the sky. The piece of ground where they had pitched their tent was just outside the city, and they could hear the buzzing sounds of the people as they settled down for the evening. Nearby, a section of the concrete border had a strange pattern of notches chipped from it, forming a series of handholds.