His eyes snapped open as if waking from a nightmare. Astonishment fought with drowsiness for dominance.
The heavy bell sounded as if it were in his room. It almost was.
Koesler looked at his watch. 6:30. The bell kept ringing. Although he had no hangover, he knew he was about to get a headache. He caught up with the clangs at five, and then continued to count. The bell tolled an incredible twenty-four times, his head reverberating at each ding and dong. He was willing to bet the parish mission would have a grand attendance for morning Mass. If nothing else, the entire village of Gurteen was either wide awake or deaf.
Gradually, he tried to organize his thoughts.
Thursday.
Three days till his return to Dublin and the ecumenical service and the subsequent return to Detroit.
Three days of relaxation.
Last night, he had planned not to rise before nine. However, St. Patrick’s bell had proven to be modified rapture. The rapture was that he now had more of the day to enjoy. The modification was provided by that infernal noise. His ears were still ringing from the din.
As he began to shiver his way out of bed—what made Gurteen so
It was Holy Saturday, the day before Easter. The pastor had excused him from the vigil service scheduled to begin at 11:00 p.m. He was grateful. He was tired from hearing all the confessions, and wanted to turn in early. He read till nearly eleven.
The ushers at this parish had been instructed to ring the church bell at the moment Mass began on Sundays and Holy days. No one had ever informed them that if Mass began at midnight—as it would in the Easter Vigil—they should not ring the bell. One would have assumed that to be common sense.
However, one would have been wrong. At midnight that Saturday night, or Sunday morning, the vigil service ended and the first Mass of Easter began. And some usher laid on the bell.
Koesler had awakened in much the same emotionally shattered state as he had this morning. And then the phone had begun to ring. The first caller had given Koesler the unexpected opportunity of using a minstrel joke he had almost forgotten.
“Why is the bell ringing?”
“Because someone is pulling on the rope.”
“Oh.”
She had seemed satisfied.
Perhaps Gurteen lay in some geological fault. There must be
By this time, Koesler had shaved and was looking with misgivings at the bathtub. No shower. And this had to be the coldest bathroom in Western civilization. He filled the tub with the hottest water he could tolerate, shed his two pairs of pajamas, and hopped into and under the water.
The problem was that he had to lift parts of himself out of the water in order to wash. The hot water evaporating from his body simply made him colder. Now he understood why the bathroom was painted blue: It matched the color of any naked body trapped within its confines.
Coffee and toast and aspirin in the pub’s ample kitchen got things off on a more equable footing. Tom Murray was not yet up and about. So Koesler leisurely and quietly pondered the day. He was getting an earlier start than he had originally intended. Why not, then, take a slightly longer trip?
He consulted his map and traced the route that led south of Galway Bay to the Burren, to where, as well as to barren Connemara, the English had herded huge clusters of the Irish to survive if they could, but more likely to die.
Koesler had long wished to see for himself this starcrossed region. And, since St. Patrick’s bell had gifted him with an unexpectedly elongated day, and since the sun was warming this into a more conventional spring morning, he decided to do it. Figuring the distance between Gurteen and the Burren, he concluded the trip would require no more than two-and-a-half hours. Which should bring him to the Burren before noon.
Driving was simpler today. There was very little traffic, especially on these back roads. There was little need to shift gears except between third and fourth on the hills, and Koesler was beginning to get accustomed to driving on the left. He thought he might even have some initial difficulty making the switch back to the right when he returned to the States. Nevertheless, he hoped he would not get caught in any heavy or problematic traffic today. After only a couple of days of Irish-style driving, he did not feel all that comfortable with it.
Still slightly ill-at-ease with his turned-about Escort, his mind wandered back to auto problems he had experienced in the distant past.
He winced as he recalled the time he had hit a parked car—the stupidest thing, he thought, a driver could do. That he could remember it so clearly made it the more painful. There had been nothing wrong with the weather; it had been a bright, clear summer day. The culprit, he defensively rationalized, had been his breviary, which he had that morning placed on the passenger side of the front seat. The breviary was, as usual, packed with notes, phone messages, and clippings—his office away from home. As he made a left turn, the prayer book began to slide off the seat. Horrified to think of the mess of papers that would litter the floor if the breviary fell, he reached for it.
When he was able to look up, the parked car was only a few feet away, too close to stop in time.
Nobody had been injured, but the front of his car looked like a pug dog, while the rear of the other car resembled an accordion. And he had spent the next several weeks getting the mess straightened out.
Ballyhaunis. A jog to Highway N83, a trunk road, better than the one that had led here from Gurteen.
Then there was the time he had attended an evening movie, leaving his car parked on Michigan Avenue in Dearborn. When he came out of the movie house, his car was nowhere in sight. The Dearborn police, however, knew where it was. They took him to visit his car as it lay dormant in the fenced-in lot of a service station.
This time it was his fate to be the victim of a driver who had run into a parked car. And this time it was the rear of his car that was accordion-pleated.
The irony was that the lady who had driven her car into his had done so deliberately—in an attempt to commit suicide. She had done a very good job of wrecking both cars, but a very poor job of suicide. A few bandages had repaired her. His car had been laid up for months.
Claregalway. He had to be careful now to leave N17 and move to N18.
Koesler, by long-established habit, kept his head in constant if imperceptible movement. Years ago, he had read that such motion, in addition to providing a more panoramic view of the terrain, helped the driver’s concentration.
He was reminded of Johnny Cash’s song about Ireland, “The Forty Shades of Green.” Koesler had not been keeping count, but there surely were more than a few verdant nuances to this land. And yet, considering the incredible number of violent deaths in Ireland’s history, and the amount of blood this ground had absorbed from the wars among the ancient kings to the battles with the Viking invaders to the seemingly endless British occupation, it was somehow odd that the land had not turned red.
Kilcolgan. It was time to turn down a secondary road that would lead along the circle of Galway Bay to the Burren.
He was now approaching an area of Ireland about which he had heard a great deal, but had never seen, not even on a picture postcard.
He had found it difficult to believe some of the descriptions he had heard. The Burren, after all, was a part of this lush, fertile island. And, of course, the Irish were known to exaggerate now and again.
He came to the crest of the hill he’d been climbing for the past several miles. And there it was. There had been no exaggeration in its description. It was awesome.
Layer after layer of limestone, stacked like shelves, going down one hill and rising in the next. He had never seen, much less imagined, anything like this. This, then, was the Burren.
He would not describe the scene as desolate. No; a moonscape would be his idea of desolation. At least in the Burren there were tufts of grass growing between the limestone slabs. And he had heard that cattle could and did feed on this grass and, indeed, that they gave good milk.
