Arc of the Comet Read online

  Arc of the Comet

  by Greg Fields

  ©Copyright 2017 Greg Fields

  ISBN 978-1-63393-481-8

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior written permission of the author.

  This is a work of fiction. The characters may be both actual and fictitious. With the exception of verified historical events and persons, all incidents, descriptions, dialogue, and opinions expressed are the products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real.

  Published by

  210 60th Street

  Virginia Beach, VA 23451

  800-435-4811

  www.koehlerbooks.com

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  DEDICATION

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER I

  CHAPTER II

  CHAPTER III

  CHAPTER IV

  CHAPTER V

  CHAPTER VI

  CHAPTER VII

  CHAPTER VIII

  CHAPTER IX

  CHAPTER X

  CHAPTER XI

  CHAPTER XII

  CHAPTER XIII

  CHAPTER XIV

  CHAPTER XV

  CHAPTER XVI

  CHAPTER XVII

  CHAPTER XVIII

  CHAPTER XIX

  CHAPTER XX

  CHAPTER XXI

  CHAPTER XXII

  CHAPTER XXIII

  CHAPTER XXIV

  CHAPTER XXV

  CHAPTER XXVI

  CHAPTER XXVII

  CHAPTER XXVIII

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS AND PERMISSIONS

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  This is a work of fiction. But in truth there is no such thing as pure fiction. We absorb in some way everything we do, everyone we meet, every breath, every experience, every heartbreak, disappointment, exultation and joy. We absorb these things, and we process them, either consciously or subconsciously, and in the process we manufacture our own stories, each drawn from what we know, and who we know.

  What follows is one of those stories, or, more precisely, an unfolding of the forces and strains that help define our shared human condition. The particular events, and the particular characters pursuing those events, are creations.

  But they are creations built in pieces from the people encountered in a constantly evolving life, all of whom have their own stories, and all of whom have their own distinctive, remarkable character. What follows is fiction, created by the interpretation and elaboration of things known, things felt, things imagined, and the complexities of those who sparked these reflections.

  DEDICATION

  To Leonard G. Fields (1920-2009)

  The brightest of comets

  Come to us Father, in the watches of the night. Come to us as you always came, bringing to us the invincible sustenance of your strength, the limitless treasure of your bounty, the tremendous structure of your life that will shape all lost and broken things on earth again into a golden pattern of exultancy and joy.

  —Thomas Wolfe

  PROLOGUE

  Liam Finnegan had never been a gentle man, but neither was he brutish.

  Where his mates would squeeze every hour out of a day and leave a crushed, pulpy husk at the end of it, Finnegan measured his time. He moved more slowly, spoke more deliberately than his neighbors. To be sure, he thought no great thoughts, nor tried to. Finnegan merely felt no compulsion to plunge headlong into a way of living draped in monotony, consigned to failure and bereft of hope. Rather, he did what he had to do to keep his humble existence moving along, took his pleasures in small doses, and found nothing in his part of southern Ireland to excite him. He felt assured of his survival at the least and knew that no amount of work would make it any easier. His countrymen, lacking Finnegan’s conclusions, took him to be a bit peculiar.

  Liam Finnegan was a farmer, as were his father, his grandfather, and presumably every previous male progenitor since his ancestors crossed the Irish Sea from Britain. The Finnegans had survived Cromwell, had survived the Penal Laws, had survived the great famines. Their lands had been seized and rented back to them in the seventeenth century, and so it had remained for more than two hundred years. Fortunately, Finnegan women had never been overly prolific so the family holdings were seldom split between more than two sons each generation, one of whom usually ran off early to another part of the island, to Europe, or to Hell. Rebellions, famines and disease periodically pared down the Finnegan males as well, with tenancy reverting to the eldest son. As a result, Liam Finnegan, the older of the two issues of his father’s loins, would always have enough work to pay the rent and to keep himself reasonably well fed.

  And now, in April, Liam Finnegan sat on the headlands overlooking the Atlantic near the Finnegan lands in Dungarvan, County Waterford. The spring wind blew a heavy ocean mist into his face. Although springtime, Finnegan’s Ireland shivered as cold and as barren as the earliest weeks of winter.

  His father had taken him as a boy to visit an uncle in County Sligo, well to the north. They made the trip by cart, and it had taken them several days. Young Liam had seen ruins along the way—the Drombeg stone circle, and, later, the great monastery at Inishmurray. How strong the stones had been to a young boy, how thick against the wind that assailed them so fatalistically. It would take centuries to wear them away. Yet, he thought, in the end they would vanish, casualties of a relentless assault, and the resolute stones would come to dust and powder, blowing against the faces of future generations ignorant of the haunted silt that settled over them. At Inishmurray he walked through the old graveyard, imagining the rotted corpses that lay beneath the soil. And of the monks buried there he had thought, ’What, brothers, has your holiness won you?’

  A young man now, in April, during unsettled times, going neither upward nor downward and not possessing the luxury of either alternative, Liam Finnegan felt his blood move within him. Instead of spending this Saturday evening at Mick Ryan’s Pub as was the custom of the young Waterford farmers, Finnegan walked. He walked through the village, what there was of it, from north to south, passing Ryan’s and hearing the familiar voices within. On other such nights he might have shared their company, and been glad of it. But on this particular evening what welled up within him, inarticulate but intrinsically lyrical, could not be resisted. He had felt it before, and always it had perplexed him. It plagued him as a virus for which the simple ways of his homeland knew no cure. They were an unsophisticated people, and he was part of them. He knew no more than anyone else. And so, for reasons he knew himself to be incapable of understanding, he bypassed Mick Ryan’s and headed southward toward the coast. The sea in this part of Ireland he knew to be as restless as his own soul. Perhaps he could find an empathy on the headlands.

  On a highland two miles outside the village Finnegan stopped walking, gazed below him to purple-blue water, and, satisfied that he had found the view he sought, sat down on the soggy ground. The sea washed in like old wool, its edges frayed. It drew him outward to the horizon where distinction between sky and water disappeared. The sun, hidden all day behind thick clouds, had fallen off to his right over the western ocean. A cold wind blew toward him, meeting the melancholy chill that rose from his breast so that, as with the sea and the distant horizon, distinctions blurred. Finnegan sat, oblivious of the murky ooze of the ground around him.

  We are a dying land that will yet live for centuries. We are a people just slightly deformed—lame enough to be scorned and abused but still holding enough strength to survive on our own, and, on occasion, to fight back a bit aga
inst those who sneer at us. As a country we shall limp along, surviving, growing older, growing more lame.

  (Sea beat upon shore. A gull cried. Wind and mist were cold, even for April, an April in Ireland.)

  I am a young man. I am nineteen. I am a farmer, and shall be so until I die. In Ireland I shall sire sons who will grow as tall as I am. They will marry Waterford girls, and they will farm Finnegan lands when I grow too old to do so. And then I shall die. Perhaps I will not die in loneliness, but surrounded by a family I have brought into being, and the sons they have brought forth as well.

  The sons and grandsons I have condemned to a slow demise.

  And after my death I shall go down into the ground. Dirt will cover me in my box. And I shall join the holy monks at Inishmurray; we shall be together in our holiness.

  (The April wind rose; the April mist thickened. It was growing dark, and darker by the minute . . .)

  Ireland is a dying land, and though I am but nineteen I am dying with it, as are we all, as are my unborn sons. We all know it. The boys up the hill at Ryan’s know it, and they cannot drink it away. Maire Coghlin knows it, knows that even behind her gentle beauty is a waft of the grave no lemon scent can conceal. Fr. McCurragh knows it, too, although he would never admit it, either to his flock or to himself.

  Liam Finnegan knows it, he feels it to his core, and he resents it. I shall not be stillborn here, living what little there is of my life without so much as a fuss. I am not a greedy man, and by God I am no hero. But Ireland is a dying land, and my fate here is set. I am granted not so much as a whimper against it all.

  (Waves crashed upon the shoreline. The April mist congealed into a light rain. . .)

  Liam Finnegan sat on a highland, spat upon the ground, and felt no cold. He was not a greedy man, nor was he a hero. Liam Finnegan had read few books. He did not know Ralph Waldo Emerson; the names of Whitman and Thoreau would have drawn no response. He was no Romantic.

  Finnegan felt the same disquiet hat spurred his countryman Columbanus to the European continent, that sent Sir John Cabot westward. And in the simple ways of his Irish youth, he could never have understood it except for these restless Saturdays spent gazing over an ocean he had not yet sailed, feeling man’s most basic longing—the frantic urge to stay alive.

  The light April rain continued its bored persistence. It had grown completely dark. Finnegan rose from the wet furrow, pulled his damp coat around him and wandered along the Colligan River back toward Dungarvan. Even in the dark he knew his way. He passed Ryan’s again, but did not go in. There was no point. As he reached the northern end of the village and started across an open land to his farm, he began to shiver. With the cold, he told himself.

  He had never been a gentleman, but neither was he brutish. Liam Finnegan saw a dying land, and knew, as all men know, that it was time to leave.

  CHAPTER I

  My mind was a mirror;

  It saw what it saw, it knew what it knew;

  In youth my mind was just a mirror

  In a rapidly flying car,

  Which catches and loses bits of the landscape.

  —Edgar Lee Masters, “Ernest Hyde” in

  Spoon River Anthology

  In the deep Virginia night, the narrow two-lane highway overhung by the heavy branches of unidentifiable trees, Tom McIlweath struggled against the wheel of the car, against the cracked and rutted pavement, and against his own instinctive craving to pull to the side of the road and sleep. His eyelids drooped with ten times their weight, his eyeballs flickered and darted from side to side. The day had been interminably long, hopelessly dull, the electric charge of anticipation and the heady intoxicant of unfettered discovery having drained out of him long ago. Now the road belied no mystery. No breathless adventure awaited him along the way. The only excitement his tired mind could derive lay in the process of passage itself. He was blood jetting through a vein, colorless and silent except for his own movement, which gave it whatever dimension it would ever possess.

  Virginia. The word itself harkened Romantic images of dogwoods bordering rich green fields, of the wet lowlands of the Tidewater, flush with birds and foxes. Virginia had been a lonely boat sniffing up the James. It had been slavery and the Civil War, redeemed now by its own bloodshed. Virginia had been Jefferson, Washington, the Lees and the endless line of Byrds.

  But here tonight, Virginia proved itself to be only a road, like all the other roads. Like New Mexico and Texas and the steamy, sticky roads of Alabama. Hell, he had not even seen Virginia. When they crossed the state line from North Carolina, it had been dark. All Virginia meant now was more of the same, a bit shadowy and somewhat foreign, but just as tedious as any place else. Days of mindless monotony had numbed Tom McIlweath’s erstwhile nimble imagination.

  McIlweath wanted desperately to sleep, but there was nowhere practical. On nights past they had stopped at highway rest areas and spent a few fitful hours trying to construct some comfortable posture in their cramped car. Even that seemed like deliverance now to McIlweath’s exhausted body. Only one more day of this. It did not matter where they stopped. They didn’t need a motel. Yet in this remote, empty swath of wooded bleakness, off the interstate and on a county road, they were unlikely to encounter even a wide spot in the road. Miles would pass, and still nothing. Only the blunt sword of headlights cutting against the darkness and the pinpoint swirls of the night bugs ambushed by the light.

  To keep himself from complete vacancy he tried to scan the scenery behind the darkness. It was no use. Nothing penetrated the dead hanging weight of the trees, blocking both light and shape. McIlweath jerked his head sharply in all directions to shake some life into it. He took several deep breaths and stretched his arms against the wheel. He arched his back and yawned viciously. The road droned on, the clanking whirr of the old car deepening the sedation. McIlweath did not let his head stop moving. So many trees around, and deer peeking from behind them. Drifting off meant serious injury, maybe even journey’s end. Too early for that. Just drive, he told himself. Drive through old Virginia, and watch for signs of life.

  Amid his gyrations McIlweath turned his head to the passenger seat and gazed down at its contents, contorted awkwardly in the too small space, but sleeping soundly nonetheless. Conor Finnegan, as vulnerable now as a newly hatched robin. It was Conor Finnegan who had led hem both this far, Conor Finnegan who had caused them to be here, wherever this “here” really was. And, McIlweath mused, it was the most peculiar set of accidents that had allowed him to do it.

  Finnegan relied on the accidental, the serendipitous and the unplanned. Conor Finnegan’s accidents almost always seemed to turn into blessings. He was easily the most blessed figure McIlweath had ever known, causing the other to admit to himself that he was—there was no other word for it—jealous. He would have welcomed some portion of Finnegan’s magnificent good fortune for his own. This entire expedition, in which their fates were temporarily joined, was for McIlweath an effort to conjure some of that mysterious quality that had so teasingly eluded him. His confinement with Conor Finnegan these past several days might have allowed some of that peculiar luck to rub off. He hoped so.

  The road swerved in gentle turns around land that seemed to rise higher. Perhaps they were re-entering the Blue Ridge. McIlweath noted that it had been nearly half an hour since they had passed another car. Finnegan had speculated that the back roads would be more scenic, so they had abandoned the interstate in South Carolina. No other travelers here; only sleeping natives. God, it was lonely. And warm. The late summer night had fallen thick and humid, the temperature dipping only slightly after sunset. McIlweath’s shirt clung to the seat. He felt his legs clammy with dried perspiration. The heavy Southern air drew reluctantly down his throat.

  McIlweath looked at Finnegan, asleep on his side, legs tucked up under the dash, hair askew and mouth ajar. A thin band of spittle rolled out of one corner. Not very dignified, thought McIlweath, and so very unlike him. If he could see himself he�
��d be embarrassed.

  Two weeks on the road had robbed them of all mysteries. They had no secrets now, at least no superficial ones. Yet, McIlweath still regarded Finnegan somewhat mystically, an emissary from realms he himself could scarcely hope to know. Finnegan might appear human now, or even subhuman, in these exaggerated and contorted poses, but once his eyes opened and his mind started to work, once that distinctive spirit became animated, Conor Finnegan would again assume outsized proportions.

  What a horrible burden that must be, thought McIlweath. If he truly strives beyond what the rest of us conceive, who can be there to save him?

  Finnegan shifted in his seat with an unconscious grimace. This sleep in its twisted discomfort was no sleep at all. He would wake as tired as when he drifted off, and sore in the neck and back from the awkward angles, ready to find something amusing or puzzling or moving in the day ahead, in the scenes around him. Irrepressible, sometimes insufferable. By contrast, McIlweath often felt his spirits repressed after long nights and ragged mornings. This very night was doing that to him.

  And so, on an empty road in an empty land, hours before daybreak, hours since the last web of light tangled across the warm earth, Tom McIlweath did the only thing his circumstances allowed. He drove on, wrestling a Protean fatigue. Next to him slept the favored Conor Finnegan, “St. Conor” to some of their more cynical friends. How strange to see him there, and how ungraceful for both of them.

  ***

  This trip had begun in its way several months earlier. Although January, great rings of perspiration spread outward from underneath Tom McIlweath’s arms. He sat jammed together, shoulder to shoulder, with a group of students he only vaguely recognized. His mistake. He had come too late to get the seat he really wanted, down there and to the left, near the attractive girl he had met during his first weeks here, the girl who shared two of his classes, the girl who haunted many of his waking minutes and most of his sleeping ones. McIlweath had wanted to sit near her so that he could see her, and perhaps catch her eye. He had watched her from a distance for many months, always from a distance. During that time, he had spoken no more than ten sentences to her, yet she remained a Romantic pursuit, an idealized version of youthful curiosity.