How different from my capless friend.
My friend?
I blinked with surprise, then stepped forward and nodded.
“Beg pardon. The man with the concertina …”
The woman stopped cranking and glared at me.
“Ah?”
“The man with no cap in the rain.”
“Ah, him!” snapped the woman.
“He’s not here today?”
“Do you see him?” cried the woman.
She started cranking the infernal device.
I put a penny in the tin cup.
She peered at me as if I’d spit in the cup.
I put in another penny. She stopped.
“Do you know where he is?” I asked.
“Sick. In bed. The damn cold! We heard him go off, coughing.”
“Do you know where he lives?”
“No!”
“Do you know his name?”
“Now, who would know that!”
I stood there, feeling directionless, thinking of the man somewhere off in the town, alone. I looked at the new cap foolishly.
The two old people were watching me uneasily.
I put a last shilling in the cup.
“He’ll be all right,” I said, not to them, but to someone, hopefully, myself.
The woman heaved the crank. The bucketing machine let loose a fall of glass and junk in its hideous interior.
“The tune,” I said, numbly. “What is it?”
“You’re deaf!” snapped the woman. “It’s the national anthem! Do you mind removing your cap?”
I showed her the new cap in my hand.
She glared up. “Your cap, man, your cap!”
“Oh!” Flushing, I seized the old cap from my head.
Now I had a cap in each hand.
The woman cranked. The “music” played. The rain hit my brow, my eyelids, my mouth.
On the far side of the bridge I stopped for the hard, the slow decision: which cap to try on my drenched skull?
During the next week I passed the bridge often, but there was always just the old couple there with their pandemonium device, or no one there at all.
On the last day of our visit, my wife started to pack the new tweed cap away with my others, in the suitcase.
“Thanks, no.” I took it from her. “Let’s keep it out, on the mantel, please. There.”
That night the hotel manager brought a farewell bottle to our room. The talk was long and good, the hour grew late, there was a fire like an orange lion on the hearth, big and lively, and brandy in the glasses, and silence for a moment in the room, perhaps because quite suddenly we found silence falling in great soft flakes past our high windows.
The manager, glass in hand, watched the continual lace, then looked down at the midnight stones and at last said, under his breath, “ ‘There’s only a few of us left.’ ”
I glanced at my wife, and she at me.
The manager caught us.
“Do you know him, then? Has he said it to you?”
“Yes. But what does the phrase mean?”
The manager watched all those figures down there standing in the shadows and sipped his drink.
“Once I thought he meant he fought in the Troubles and there’s just a few of the I.R.A. left. But no. Or maybe he means in a richer world the begging population is melting away. But no to that also. So maybe, perhaps, he means there aren’t many ‘human beings’ left who look, see what they look at, and understand well enough for one to ask and one to give. Everyone busy, running here, jumping there, there’s no time to study one another. But I guess that’s bilge and hogwash, slop and sentiment.”
He half turned from the window.
“So you know There’s Only a Few of Us Left, do you?”
My wife and I nodded.
“Then do you know the woman with the baby?”
“Yes,” I said.
“And the one with the cancer?”
“Yes,” said my wife.
“And the man who needs train fare to Cork?”
“Belfast,” said I.
“Galway,” said my wife.
The manager smiled sadly and turned back to the window.
“What about the couple with the piano that plays no tune?”
“Has it ever?” I asked.
“Not since I was a boy.”
The manager’s face was shadowed now.
“Do you know the beggar on O’Connell Bridge?”
“Which one?” I said.
But I knew which one, for I was looking at the cap there on the mantel.
“Did you see the paper today?” asked the manager.
“No.”
“There’s just the item, bottom half of page five, Irish Times. It seems he just got tired. And he threw his concertina over into the River Liffey. And he jumped after it.”
He was back, then, yesterday! I thought. And I didn’t pass by!
“The poor bastard.” The manager laughed with a hollow exhalation. “What a funny, horrid way to die. That damn silly concertina—I hate them, don’t you?—wheezing on its way down, like a sick cat, and the man falling after. I laugh and I’m ashamed of laughing. Well. They didn’t find the body. They’re still looking.”
“Oh, God!” I cried, getting up. “Oh, damn!”
The manager watched me carefully now, surprised at my concern. “You couldn’t help it.”
“I could! I never gave him a penny, not one, ever! Did you?”
“Come to think of it, no.”
“But you’re worse than I am!” I protested. “I’ve seen you around town, shoveling out pennies hand over fist. Why, why not to him?”
“I guess I thought he was overdoing it.”
“Hell, yes!” I was at the window now, too, staring down through the falling snow. “I thought his bare head was a trick to make me feel sorry. Damn, after a while you think everything’s a trick! I used to pass there winter nights with the rain thick and him there singing and he made me feel so cold I hated his guts. I wonder how many other people felt cold and hated him because he did that to them? So instead of getting money, he got nothing in his cup. I lumped him with the rest. But maybe he was one of the legitimate ones, the new poor just starting out this winter, not a beggar ever before, so you hock your clothes to feed a stomach and wind up a man in the rain without a hat.”
The snow was falling fast now, erasing the lamps and the statues in the shadows of the lamps below.
“How do you tell the difference between them?” I asked. “How can you judge which is honest, which isn’t?”
“The fact is,” said the manager quietly, “you can’t. There’s no difference between them. Some have been at it longer than others, and have gone shrewd, forgotten how it all started a long time ago. On a Saturday they had food. On a Sunday they didn’t. On a Monday they asked for credit. On a Tuesday they borrowed their first match. Thursday a cigarette. And a few Fridays later they found themselves, God knows how, in front of a place called the Royal Hibernian Hotel. They couldn’t tell you what happened or why. One thing’s sure though: they’re hanging to the cliff by their fingernails. Poor bastard, someone must’ve stomped on that man’s hands on O’Connell Bridge and he just gave up the ghost and went over. So what does it prove? You cannot stare them down or look away from them. You cannot run and hide from them. You can only give to them all. If you start drawing lines, someone gets hurt. I’m sorry now I didn’t give that blind singer a shilling each time I passed. Well. Well. Let us console ourselves, hope it wasn’t money but something at home or in his past did him in. There’s no way to find out. The paper lists no name.”
Snow fell silently across our sight. Below, the dark shapes waited. It was hard to tell whether snow was making sheep of the wolves or sheep of the sheep, gently manteling their shoulders, their backs, their hats and shawls.
A moment later, going down in the haunted night elevator, I found the new tweed cap in my hand.
Coatles
s, in my shirtsleeves, I stepped out into the night.
I gave the cap to the first man who came. I never knew if it fit. What money I had in my pockets was soon gone.
Then, left alone, shivering, I happened to glance up. I stood, I froze, blinking up through the drift, the drift, the silent drift of blinding snow. I saw the high hotel windows, the lights, the shadows.
What’s it like up there? I thought. Are fires lit? Is it warm as breath? Who are all those people? Are they drinking? Are they happy?
Do they even know I’m HERE?
Death and the Maiden
Far out in the country beyond the woods, beyond the world, really, lived Old Mam, and she had lived there for ninety years with the door locked tight, not opening for anyone, be it wind, rain, sparrow tapping or little boy with a pailful of crayfish rapping. If you scratched at her shutters, she called through:
“Go away, Death!”
“I’m not Death!” you might say.
But she’d cry back, “Death, I know you, you come today in the shape of a girl. But I see the bones behind the freckles!”
Or someone else might knock.
“I see you, Death!” would cry Old Mam. “In the shape of a scissors-grinder! But the door is triple-locked and double-barred. I got flypaper on the cracks, tape on the keyholes, dust mops up the chimney, cobwebs in the shutters, and the electricity cut off so you can’t slide in with the juice! No telephones so you can call me to my doom at three in the dark morning. And I got my ears stuffed with cotton so I can’t hear your reply to what I say now. So, Death, get away!”
That’s how it had been through the town’s history. People in that world beyond the wood spoke of her and sometimes boys doubting the tale would heave chunks against the roof slates just to hear Old Mam wail, “Go on, goodbye, you in black with the white, white face!”
And the tale was that Old Mam, with such tactics, would live forever. After all, Death couldn’t get in, could he? All the old germs in her house must have long since given up and gone to sleep. All the new germs running through the land with new names every week or ten days, if you believed the papers, couldn’t get in past the bouquets of rock moss, rue, black tobacco and castor bean at every door.
“She’ll bury us all,” said the town ‘way off where the train ran by.
“I’ll bury them all,” said Old Mam, alone and playing solitaire with Braille-marked cards, in the dark.
And that’s how it was.
Years passed without another visitor, be it boy, girl, tramp or traveling man, knocking at her door. Twice a year a grocery clerk from the world beyond, seventy himself, left packages that might have been birdseed, could have been milk-bone biscuit, but were almost certainly stamped into bright steel cans with yellow lions and red devils inked on the bright wrappers, and trod off over the choppy sea of lumber on the front porch. The food might stay there for a week, baked by the sun, frozen by the moon; a proper time of antisepsis. Then, one morning, it was gone.
Old Mam’s career was waiting. She did it well, with her eyes closed and her hands clasped and the hairs inside her ears trembling, listening, always ready.
So she was not surprised when, on the seventh day of August in her ninety-first year, a young man with a sunburned face walked through the wood and stood before her house.
He wore a suit like that snow which slides whispering in white linen off a winter roof to lay itself in folds on the sleeping earth. He had no car; he had walked a long way, but looked fresh and clean. He carried no cane to lean on and wore no hat to keep off the stunning blows of the sun. He did not perspire. Most important of all, he carried only one thing with him, an eight-ounce bottle with a bright-green liquid inside. Gazing deeply into this green color, he sensed he was in front of Old Mam’s house, and looked up.
He didn’t touch her door. He walked slowly around her house and let her feel him making the circle.
Then, with his X-ray eyes, he let her feel his steady gaze.
“Oh!” cried Old Mam, waking with a crumb of graham cracker still in her mouth. “It’s you! I know who you came as this time!”
“Who?”
“A young man with a face like a pink summer melon. But you got no shadow! Why’s that? Why?”
“People are afraid of shadows. So I left mine back beyond the wood.”
“So I see, without looking.”
“Oh,” said the young man with admiration. “You have Powers.”
“Great Powers, to keep you out and me in!”
The young man’s lips barely moved. “I won’t even bother to wrestle you.”
But she heard. “You’d lose, you’d lose!”
“And I like to win. So—I’ll just leave this bottle on your front stoop.”
He heard her heart beating fast through the walls of the house.
“Wait! What’s in it? Anything left on my property, I got a right to know!”
“Well,” said the young man.
“Go on!”
“In this bottle,” he said, “is the first night and the first day you turned eighteen.”
“What, what, what!”
“You heard me.”
“The night I turned eighteen … the day?”
“That’s it.”
“In a bottle?”
He held it high and it was curved and shaped not unlike a young woman. It took the light of the world and flashed back warmth and green fire like the coals burning in a tiger’s eyes. It looked now serene, now suddenly shifted and turbulent in his hands.
“I don’t believe it!” cried Old Mam.
“I’ll leave it and go,” said the young man. “When I’m gone, try a teaspoon of the green thoughts in this bottle. Then you’ll know.”
“It’s poison!”
“No.”
“You promise, mother’s honor?”
“I have no mother.”
“What do you swear on?”
“Myself.”
“It’ll kill me, that’s what you want!”
“It will raise you from the dead.”
“I’m not dead!”
The young man smiled at the house.
“Aren’t you?” he said.
“Wait! Let me ask myself: Are you dead? Are you? Or nearly, all these years?”
“The day and the night you turned eighteen,” said the young man. “Think it over.”
“It’s so long ago!”
Something stirred like a mouse by a coffin-sized window.
“This will bring it back.”
He let the sun wash through the elixir that glowed like the crushed sap of a thousand green blades of summer grass. It looked hot and still as a green sun, it looked wild and blowing as the sea.
“This was a good day in a good year of your life.”
“A good year,” she murmured, hidden away.
“A vintage year. Then there was savor to your life. One swig and you’d know the taste! Why not try it, eh? Eh?”
He held the bottle higher and farther out and it was suddenly a telescope which, peered through from either end, brought to focus a time in a year long gone. A green-and-yellow time much like this noon in which the young man offered up the past like a burning glass between his serene fingers. He tilted the bright flask, and a butterfly of white-hot illumination winged up and down the window shutters, playing them like gray piano keys, soundlessly. With hypnotic ease the burning wings frittered through the shutter slots to catch a lip, a nose, an eye, poised there. The eye snatched itself away, then, curious, relit itself from the beam of light. Now, having caught what he wanted to catch, the young man held the butterfly reflection steady, save for the breathing of its fiery wings, so that the green fire of that far-distant day poured through the shutters of not only ancient house but ancient woman. He heard her breathe out her muffled startlement, her repressed delight.
“No, no, you can’t fool me!” She sounded like someone deep under water, trying not to drown in a lazy tide. “Coming back dressed in that f
lesh, you! Putting on that mask I can’t quite see! Talking with that voice I remember from some other year. Whose voice? I don’t care! My ouija board here on my lap spells who you really are and what you sell!”
“I sell just this twenty-four hours from young life.”
“You sell something else!”
“No, I can’t sell what I am.”
“If I come out you’d grab and shove me six feet under. I’ve had you fooled, put off, for years. Now you whine back with new plans, none of which will work!”
“If you came out the door, I’d only kiss your hand, young lady.”
“Don’t call me what I’m not!”
“I call you what you could be an hour from now.”
“An hour from now …” she whispered, to herself.
“How long since you been walked through this wood?”
“Some other war, or some peace,” she said. “I can’t see. The water’s muddy.”
“Young lady,” he said, “it’s a fine summer day. There’s a tapestry of golden bees, now this design, now that, in the green church aisle of trees here. There’s honey in a hollow oak flowing like a river of fire. Kick off your shoes, you can crush wild mint, wading deep. Wildflowers like clouds of yellow butterflies lie in the valley. The air under these trees is like deep well water cool and clear you drink with your nose. A summer day, young as young ever was.”
“But I’m old, old as ever was.”
“Not if you listen! Here’s my out-and-out bargain, deal, sale—a transaction betwixt you, me and the August weather.”
“What kind of deal, what do I get for my investment?”
“Twenty-four long sweet summer hours, starting now. When we’ve run through these woods and picked the berries and eaten the honey, we’ll go on to town and buy you the finest spider-web-thin white summer dress and lift you on the train.”
“The train!”
“The train to the city, an hour away, where we’ll have dinner and dance all night. I’ll buy you four shoes, you’ll need them, wearing out one pair.”
“My bones—I can’t move.”
“You’ll run rather than walk, dance rather than run. We’ll watch the stars wheel over the sky and bring the sun up, flaming. We’ll string footprints along the lake shore at dawn. We’ll eat the biggest breakfast in mankind’s history and lie on the sand like two chicken pies warming at noon. Then, late in the day, a five-pound box of bonbons on our laps, we’ll laugh back on the train, covered with the conductor’s ticket-punch confetti, blue, green, orange, like we were married, and walk through town seeing nobody, no one, and wander back through the sweet dusk-smelling wood into your house …”