Before the Close

The almanac was printed in the town and was right about the moons, and it said nothing else, and the holding knew the rest.

It hung on the nail by the door where her mother had hung it, a season to a page, and the page for the autumn had the two moons drawn as two circles and a line of small print under them giving the minutes. Cliona across Donn. A span you could boil a kettle in, the print said, more or less, and the more or less was the town's, because the town's almanac had never quite agreed with itself about the night, and the holding had never written to tell it. Mairéad Ní Dhálaigh had read that page in the spring, when the year's almanac came, and had not needed to read it since. The ewes were brought down off the top field that afternoon. The lamp was out before the dark came, not after. The house was shut, and the shutter on the child's room left the width of a hand, because her own mother had left it so and had not said why, and Mairéad had worked out why at about the age Úna was now and had not said either.

"Bed, a stór," she said, and the child went, which was not every night.

Then she went out to the gate.

The gate stood at the top of the yard, where the yard became the top field, and the top field went up to the trees. Her mother had stood at the gate on these nights and Mairéad had taken it, as a child, for watching. It was not watching. It was standing where the house ended, so that nobody from the house went past it, and the only body in the house that might was her own. She put her hand on the top bar. The bar was cold and the wood was the wood of the gate, and she kept her hand on it.

The large moon was up over the trees, full and ordinary, the moon. She did not look for the small one. You did not see Cliona come; you saw Donn lose his edge, a little, on the one side, as if someone had breathed on him, and that was the start of the minutes.

He lost his edge.

The light began among the trees. Not at the top of them and not from behind them, where a moon or a fire would have put it, but low, between the trunks, where there was nothing to make light and nothing to carry it. The trees were bare already this year. It lay among them level, the way the first light lies along a field before the sun is up and before you can say where it comes from, and it was not much. A lamp's worth. A lamp left in a room you were not in.

She heard it before she had decided she was hearing anything. It was not the wind. There was no wind, and she knew every noise the trees made and this was not one of them: a long held note, very low, of the kind a person makes with the mouth shut, and far off, and not far off. When it rose the light rose. She did not make anything of that. Her mother had not.

At the tree line, something stood.

Tall. Standing as somebody stands who has been standing a while and is in no hurry to do anything else, and in the light that was its own and nobody's lamp. She did not look at it long. The custom said nothing about looking, and it was not the custom that turned her eye; it was that the thing was correct, every part of it where a part should be, and the correctness was what her eye kept going back to and could not settle on, and she had the gate under her hand and that was enough to be going on with. She looked at Donn instead, and at the edge of him going, and at her own hand on the bar.

Nothing came down the field. Nothing was called. Nothing was set down at the trees and nothing was lifted from them, and she had not heard, from her mother or from anyone, of a thing passed either way on one of these nights.

When she looked again it was among the trees and not at them, and then there was the light and not it, and then the light was less.

Donn's edge came back. The note went down under where she could hear it, if she had been hearing it, and the light went down with it, between the trunks, into the ground or into nothing, and the trees were the trees, bare, with the moon over them. The whole of it had been the minutes on the almanac's page, more or less.

She took her hand off the gate. She went in by the front, and said at the door what her mother had said, and did not look at the almanac on its nail. There was nothing to write on it, her mother had never written on it, and the margin for the autumn was clean.

The ceiling was dark and then it was not.

Úna had been told bed and had gone, and had been told the shutter would stay as it was, a hand's width, and it had, and the moon had come in the gap and put a white bar across the ceiling that did not move, which was the moon. She knew the moon. She had been looking at the white bar for long enough to be nearly asleep when the ceiling round it began to come up.

Warmer than the moon's white, and no bar to it: it lay over the whole ceiling at once, and it moved, slowly, the way the light off the river moves on the underside of the bridge in the afternoon, except that the river was below the house and this was coming from the top field, and the top field had no water in it. It breathed. Up, and down, and up.

Somebody was humming. A long way off, with the mouth closed, one note, and when the note went up the ceiling went up with it.

She thought about getting up. The window was right there and the shutter was a hand open and she could have put her eye to it. She had been asked not to, not in words, in the way the shutter had been left and the way her mother had said bed, and she lay and looked at the ceiling instead, and the ceiling was enough. It was the best thing she had seen on a ceiling. She was sorry when it started to go.

It went the way it came, slowly, down into the white bar, and the white bar was the moon, and the moon was ordinary.

Then the front door, and her mother's step, and words at the door said quietly to nobody, which was the words her mother said, and the step went to the bed and did not come to Úna's room, which meant Úna was supposed to be asleep.

She was, soon.

In the daylight the ceiling was the ceiling.

She looked at it for a while anyway.

"Were they there?" the child said, over the bowl, in the plain way she asked where the dog was.

Her mother had been asked that, and Mairéad gave the answer she had been given. "The moon was."

Úna considered it. "I saw the ceiling," she said.

"So did I, once."

That was the whole of it between them, and it would do for a year, and then it would do again.

The ewes went back up to the top field at the hour they went up any morning. Mairéad walked the top wall after them, counting, the way the wall was walked every day of the year, and did not go in among the trees, the way the trees were not gone into on any day of the year, and it was the same wall and the same trees. There was nothing on the ground at the tree line. She was not looking for anything on the ground. Nothing had been brought and nothing had been asked for, which was what her mother had said about the Good People on the one occasion she said anything, and Mairéad had taken it then for a small thing to say about anybody.

A Survey form had come round the holdings once, under the Union's arrangement with the Rangers, with a line for the dates. She had given it the almanac's page, which anyone in the town could have given it, and nothing of her own, and the man had thanked her and gone on to the next holding and nobody had come back to ask twice, which was the Union for you, and also the Rangers, and she had thought no worse of either.

The almanac said the next one was in a year and some days, and did not agree with itself about the days.

She had kept the gate. They had kept the minutes. In three hands' time the margin on the autumn page had nothing written in it, and she had understood that as a child for a thing nobody had got round to.