She stopped her tune.
She was shocked at the sudden silence.
“You are daft,” she said.
“Imagine you’re me,” I said. “Going back to my hotel now. And on my way I’d like to hear anything, anything at all. Play. And when you play, walk off around the corner and listen.”
She put her hands to the strings and paused, working her mouth. I waited. At last she sighed, she moaned. Then suddenly she cried:
“Go on!”
“What …?”
“You’ve made me all thumbs! Look! You’ve spoilt it!”
“I just wanted to thank—”
“Me behind!” she cried. “What a clod, what a brute! Mind your business! Do your work! Let be, man! Ah, these poor fingers, ruint, ruint!”
She stared at them and at me with a terrible glaring fixity.
“Get!” she shouted.
I ran around the corner in despair.
There! I thought, you’ve done it! By thanks destroyed, that’s her story. Fool, why didn’t you keep your mouth shut?
I sank, I leaned, against a building. A minute must have ticked by.
Please, woman, I thought, come on. Play. Not for me. Play for yourself. Forget what I said! Please.
I heard a few faint, tentative harp whispers.
Another pause.
Then, when the wind blew again, it brought the sound of her very slow playing.
The song itself was an old one, and I knew the words. I said them to myself.
Tread lightly to the music,
Nor bruise the tender grass.
Life passes in the weather
As the sand storms down the glass.
Yes, I thought, go on.
Drift easy in the shadows,
Bask lazy in the sun,
Give thanks for thirsts and quenches,
For dines and wines and wenches.
Give thought to life soon over,
Tread softly on the clover,
So bruise not any lover.
So exit from the living,
Salute and make thanksgiving,
Then sleep when all is done,
That sleep so dearly won.
Why, I thought, how wise the old woman is,
Tread lightly to the music.
And I’d almost squashed her with praise.
So bruise not any lover.
And she was covered with bruises from my kind thoughtlessness.
But now, with a song that taught more than I could say, she was soothing herself.
I waited until she was well into the third chorus before I walked by again, tipping my hat.
But her eyes were shut and she was listening to what her hands were up to, moving in the strings like the fresh hands of a very young girl who has first known rain and washes her palms in its clear waterfalls.
She had gone through caring not at all, and then caring too much, and was now busy caring just the right way.
The corners of her mouth were pinned up, gently.
A close call, I thought. Very close.
I left them like two friends met in the street, the harp and herself.
I ran for the hotel to thank her the only way I knew how: to do my own work and do it well.
But on the way I stopped at The Four Provinces.
The music was still being treaded lightly and the clover was still being treaded softly, and no lover at all was being bruised as I let the pub door hush and looked all around for the man whose hand I most wanted to shake.
Chapter 22
And on and on it went as day after day I struck and flensed the Whale, and read Marcus Aurelius and admired his suicide, and had myself taxied out each night to discuss my eight pages of daily script with the man who arose from women to ride with hounds. Then, each midnight, when I was ready to turn back to the tidal rains and the Royal Hibernian Hotel, John would wake the operator in the Kilcock village exchange and have her put me through to the warmest, if totally unheated, spot in town.
“Heeber Finn’s pub?” I’d shout, once connected. “Is Mike there? Could you send him along, please?”
My mind’s eye saw them, the local boys, lined up, peering over the barricade at that freckled mirror-frozen winter pond and themselves all drowned and deep in that lovely ice. I heard Heeber Finn sing out from the phone and Mike’s quick shout:
“Just look! I’m headin’ for the door!”
Early on, I learned that “headin’ for the door” was no nerve-shattering process that might affront dignity or destroy the fine filigree of any argument being woven with great and breathless beauty at Finn’s. It was, rather, a gradual disengagement, a leaning of the bulk so one’s gravity was diplomatically shifted toward that far empty side of the public room where the door, shunned by all, stood neglected.
Timing it, I figured the long part of Mike’s midnight journey—the length of Finn’s—took half an hour. The short part—from Finn’s to the house where I waited—but five minutes.
So it was on a night late in February when I called and waited.
And at last, down through the night forest thrashed the 1928 Nash, peat-turf-colored on top, like Mike. Car and driver gasped, sighed, wheezed softly, easily, gently, as they nudged into the courtyard and I stepped down under a moonless and for a change rainless brightly starred sky.
I peered through the car window at unstirred dark; the dashboard lights had been dead these many years.
“Mike …?”
“None other,” he whispered secretly. “And ain’t it a fine warm evenin’?”
The temperature was forty. But Mike’d been no nearer Rome than the Tipperary shoreline; so weather was relative.
“A fine warm evening.” I climbed up front and gave the squealing door its absolutely compulsory, rust-splintering slam. “Mike, how’ve you been since?”
“Ah.” He let the car bulk and grind itself down the forest path. “I got me health. Ain’t that all-and-everything with Lent comin’ on tomorra?”
“Lent,” I mused. “What will you give up for Lent, Mike?”
“I been turnin’ it over.” Mike sucked his cigarette suddenly; the pink, lined mask of his face blinked off the smoke. “And why not these terrible things ya see in me mouth? Dear as gold fillin’s, and a dread congestor of the lungs they be. Put it all down, add ’em up, and ya got a sick loss by the year’s turnin’, ya know. So ya’ll not find these filthy creatures in me face again the whole time of Lent, and, who knows, after!”
“Bravo!” said I, a nonsmoker.
“Bravo, says I to meself,” wheezed Mike, one eye flinched with smoke.
“Good luck.”
“I’ll need it,” whispered Mike, “with the sin’s own habit to be broke.”
And we moved with firm control and thoughtful shift of weight, down and around a turfy hollow and through a mist and into Dublin at thirty-one easy miles an hour.
Bear with me while I stress it: Mike was the most careful driver in all God’s world, including any sane, small, quiet, butter-and-milk producing country you name.
Above all, Mike stood innocent and sainted when compared to those motorists who key that small switch marked paranoia each time they fuse themselves to their bucket seats in Los Angeles, Mexico City, or Paris.
Also, to those blind men who, forsaking tin cups and canes but still wearing their Hollywood dark glasses, laugh insanely through the Via Veneto, shaking brake-drum linings like carnival serpentine out their race-car windows. Consider the Roman ruins; surely they are the wreckage strewn by motorbiking otters who, all night beneath your hotel shriek down dark Roman alleys, Christians hell-bent for the Colosseum lion pits.
Mike, now. See his easy hands loving the wheel in a slow clocklike turning as soft and silent as winter constellations snow down the sky. Listen to his mist-breathing voice all night-quiet as he charms the road, his foot a tenderly benevolent pat on the whispering accelerator, never a mile under thirty, never two miles over.
Mike, Mike, and his steady boat gentling a mild sweet lake where all Time slumbers. Look, compare. And bind such a man to you with summer grasses, gift him with silver, shake his hand warmly at each journey’s end.
“Good night, Mike,” I said at the hotel. “See you tomorrow.”
“God willing,” he murmured.
And he drove softly away.
Let twenty-three hours of sleep, breakfast, lunch, supper, late night-cap pass. Let hours of writing bad script into fair script fade to peat mist and rain, and here this young writer comes again, another midnight, out of that Georgian mansion, its door throwing a warm hearth of color before me as I tread down the steps to feel Braille-wise in fog for the car I knew hulked there. I heard its enlarged and asthmatic heart gasping in the blind air, and Mike coughing his “gold by the ounce is not more precious” cough.
“Ah, there you are, sir!” said Mike.
And I climbed in the sociable front seat and gave the door its slam. “Mike,” I said, smiling.
And then the impossible! The car jerked as if shot from the blazing mouth of a furnace, roared, bounced, skidded, then cast itself in full, stoning ricochet down the path among shattered bushes and writhing shadows. I snatched my knees as my head hit the roof in staccato.
Mike! I almost shouted. Mike!
Visions of Los Angeles, Mexico City, Paris, jumped through my mind. I gazed in frank dismay at the speedometer. Eighty, ninety, one hundred miles; we shot out a great blast of gravel to hit the main road, rocked over a bridge, and slid down in the midnight streets of Kilcock. No sooner in than out of town at one hundred ten miles, I felt all Ireland’s grass put down its ears when we, with a yell, soared over a rise.
Mike! I thought, and turned.
There he sat, only one thing the same. On his lips a cigarette burned, smoking first one eye, then
