“Oh, yes, right,” said all five, in a sweet chirruping.
“We have followed summer around the world for six or seven years. We have lived in Jamaica and Nassau and Port-au-Prince and Calcutta, and Madagascar and Bali and Taormina but finally just today we said we must go north, we must have cold again. We didn’t quite know what we were looking for, but we found it in St. Stephen’s Green.”
“The mysterious thing?” Nolan burst out. “I mean—”
“Your friend here will tell you,” said the tall man.
“Our friend? You mean—Garrity?”
Everyone looked at Garrity.
“As I was going to say,” said Garrity, “when I came in the door. They was in the park standing there . . . watching the leaves turn colors.”
“Is that all?” said Nolan, dismayed.
“It seemed sufficient unto the moment,” said Snell-Orkney.
“Are the leaves changing color up at St. Stephen’s?” asked Kilpatrick.
“Do you know,” said Timulty numbly, “it’s been twenty years since I looked.”
“The most beautiful sight in all the world,” said David Snell-Orkney, “lies up in the midst of St. Stephen’s this very hour.”
“He speaks deep,” murmured Nolan.
“The drinks are on me,” said David Snell-Orkney.
“He’s touched bottom,” said MaGuire.
“Champagne all around!”
“Don’t mind if I do!” said everyone.
And not ten minutes later they were all up at the park, together.
And well now, as Timulty said years after, did you ever see as many damned leaves on a tree as there was on the first tree just inside the gate at St. Stephen’s Green? No! cried all. And what, though, about the second tree? Well, that had a billion leaves on it.
And the more they looked the more they saw it was a wonder. And Nolan went around craning his neck so hard he fell over on his back and had to be helped up by two or three others, and there were general exhalations of awe and proclamations of devout inspiration as to the fact that as far as they could remember there had never been any goddamn leaves on the trees to begin with, but now they were there!
Or if they had been there they had never had any color, or if they had had color, well, it was so long ago . . . Ah, what the hell, shut up, said everyone, and look!
Which is exactly what Nolan and Timulty and Kelly and Kilpatrick and Garrity and Snell-Orkney and his friends did for the rest of the declining afternoon. For a fact, autumn had taken the country, and the bright flags were out by the millions through the park.
Which is exactly where Father Leary found them.
But before he could say anything, three out of the six summer invaders asked him if he would hear their confessions.
And next thing you know with a look of great pain and alarm the father was taking Snell-Orkney & Co. back to see the stained glass at the church and the way the apse was put together by a master architect, and they liked his church so much and said so out loud again and again that he cut way down on their Hail Marys and the rigamaroles that went with.
But the top of the entire day was when one of the young-old boy-men back at the pub asked what would it be? Should he sing “Mother Machree” or “My Buddy”?
Arguments followed, and with polls taken and results announced, he sang both.
He had a dear voice, all said, eyes melting bright. A sweet high clear voice.
And as Nolan put it, “He wouldn’t make much of a son. But there’s a great daughter there somewhere!”
And all said “aye” to that.
And suddenly it was time to leave.
“But great God!” said Finn, “you just arrived!”
“We found what we came for, there’s no need to stay,” announced the tall sad happy old young man. “It’s back to the hothouse with the flowers . . . or they wilt overnight. We never stay. We are always flying and jumping and running. We are always on the move.”
The airport being fogged-in, there was nothing for it but the birds cage themselves on the Dun Laoghaire boat bound for England, and there was nothing for it but the inhabitants of Finn’s should be down at the dock to watch them pull away in the middle of the evening. There they stood, all six, on the top deck, waving their thin hands down, and there stood Timulty and Nolan and Garrity and the rest waving their thick hands up.
And as the boat hooted and pulled away the keeper-of-the-birds nodded once, and winged his right hand on the air and all sang forth: “As I was walking through Dublin City, about the hour of twelve at night, I saw a maid, so fair was she… combing her hair by candlelight.”
“Jesus,” said Timulty, “do you hear?”
“Sopranos, every one of them!” cried Nolan.
“Not Irish sopranos, but real real sopranos,” said Kelly.
“Damn, why didn’t they say? If we’d known, we’d have had a good hour of that out of them before the boat.”
Timulty nodded and added, listening to the music float over the waters. “Strange. Strange. I hate to see them go. Think. Think. For a hundred years or more people have said we had none. But now they have returned, if but for a little time.”
“We had none of what?” asked Garrity. “And what returned?”
“Why,” said Timulty, “the fairies, of course, the fairies that once lived in Ireland, and live here no more, but who came this day and changed our weather, and there they go again, who once stayed all the while.”
“Ah, shut up!” cried Kilpatrick. “And listen!”
And listen they did, nine men on the end of a dock as the boat sailed out and the voices sang and the fog came in and they did not move for a long time until the boat was far gone and the voices faded like a scent of papaya on the mist.
By the time they walked back to Finn’s it had begun to rain.
The End
