The gift

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I know what it was I wanted to tell you about, it was Christmas. I call myself a traveller who never did, but my mother and father were both brought up on the road. It was my mother who wanted to settle, long before I was born. She’d lost my older brother to pneumonia. They’d been out in the west with the horse and cart one October, in a storm that lasted for days. Everything was drenched and frozen, and in the end, my brother died before they could get help for him. I think that was why they came to Dublin. I think that was it.

Well, I remember one year I was at school – I would have been six at the time. And the teacher was a Miss Munro, she was a spiteful woman. She was no taller than a pencil and the boys trembled in front of her. She should have been out breaking horses, not in a classroom breaking the spirits of children. She knew fine the names they called me and she was deaf to all of them. If she could find a way to punish me she would. I was forever going off into my own world. I’d sit there with my head on my elbow looking out into the school playground. There was one tree there, a cherry, and I loved just looking at its blossom in the spring and listening to the leaves. One morning Miss Munro must have caught me staring away at that tree and she came charging up the row, twisting my ear in her fingers until she’d hauled me onto my feet, shouting over and over –

‘Are you away with the fairies, Mary Riley? Are you away with the fairies?’

It was coming near Christmas and I’d seen my father pacing again at home.

‘The wolf in him wants out,’ my mother whispered to me as she put a button onto a shirt. But there was the ghost of a smile on her mouth as she spoke the words, and I saw her glance at him as she spoke, though he never turned, only kept pacing.

This particular day Miss Munro had shouted at me for my shoes, the state of my shoes. I felt so small and embarrassed there in the class, and I could hear the sniggers around me, I could tell the rest of them relished my suffering. By break-time my face was smudged with crying and I felt broken in bits. And suddenly my father was there, in the corridor, and I remember he just picked me up in his arms as if I’d been a bale of hay or a young calf. It wasn’t the end of the school day and Miss Munro came charging out of her classroom.

‘Do you people not know what time is?’ she screamed shrilly, and her red mouth seemed the only thing in her small, white face. ‘Do you people have no idea what time is?’

My father laughed; I could feel his laugh as he held me, but it wasn’t a bitter or an angry laugh; it was soft and just edged with a lace of mockery, no more than that.

‘Ah, you know what clocks are, but we know what time is.’

And with that he turned and went, carrying me still in his arms, as though he was bearing me from a burning building. And all the shrieking of Miss Munro at his back was as grass blowing in the wind to him.

And out there was my father’s old van, and I was puzzled, for he never came to collect me from school. I always made the journey myself, even though it was a long walk on a winter morning.

‘Where are we going, dad?’ I asked him as he put me into the car, and it was warm and I caught the smell of him, from his hair perhaps.

‘We’re going on a journey, Moorie,’ he said softly, and I know then he was in a really good mood. If he was sad he drank, and then sometimes he wouldn’t speak to my mother or me for days, but just stare from the second floor window, away towards the hills, as though he wasn’t there at all. But when he was happy he ruffled my hair and his brown eyes shone like river stones and he called me Moorie.

We’re going on a journey.

And everything was in the back of his van, and my whole heart filled with excitement. I’d been off with him and my mother in the summer time, to camp by rivers and in glens, to listen to traveller stories at night by the fire. But I’d never been away in winter, when we were stuck in the city, in the fog and the freezing rain. Now we were going on a journey.

What I remember is that night. He was looking for somewhere, my father. We were nearly there, wherever there was. And I was in the back, lying among blankets and coats because he was afraid I’d get cold. And I remember looking out and seeing all those stars. There was a jeweller’s in Dublin that had diamonds in the window set on a black velvet cloth. And that was what I thought of now as we bumped and rattled along back roads in search of the place my father wanted to find.

And some of me wanted to be there, to know what the place was, and some of me never wanted to be there at all. I wanted to stay where I was for ever, looking up at the stars as the van lurched and hummed on an on into the dark.

But at last we juddered to a halt and the silence flooded back. I had no idea what time it was and my father set up the simple tent between two trees. There was no sound in all the world and there was a frost; it was as though a giant in one of the stories of Old Ireland had breathed over everything – the trees, the fields, the hills – and turned them to a silver mist.

And my father taught me how to make a fire. He taught me that kindling is everything, that it’s the little pieces that matter. The big bits of wood are all very well, they count later on, but there’s no fire to begin with if there’s no kindling. And he said it was just like that with the travellers, that the big people – the doctors and the teachers and the judges – they were all very well, but they would be nowhere without the little people, the ones who pulled the carts and cleared the fields and mended the roads.

My hands were so cold as I found pieces of wood and kindling and brought them to my father. But when I came back the second time he had lit the fire and was blowing on it, blowing so the flames roared, and I thought to myself that he was a kind of dragon, a magical creature that could do anything in the world he wanted.

And I crouched beside that fire and stretched out my hands to it. I felt the orange glow warm on my cheeks. And my father told me about how the travellers came to be, all that time ago in Jerusalem when Jesus was alive. For they had come looking for someone who would make the nails for Jesus’ cross, and no-one would do such a thing, for he had been full of only goodness and kindness all his days. But the traveller said he would, and he lit his fire and flapped it into life with his apron. And ever since the traveller has been on the move, restless, journeying from place to place, the ghost of the nails he made shadows in every fire he makes. And I looked for the ghosts of the nails but I couldn’t see them.

And I went to bed with the words still circling my head like stars, and I wondered what we were, we travellers, were we good or were we bad? Was I ashamed to be one for the sin of that first traveller, or was I glad that we were different, that we had learned to find our way in the world by different paths, by secret roads? And I dreamed that night that I was lost, and went knocking and knocking on door after door. But no-one would tell me and no-one would help me, and everyone just sent me on my way once more.

He woke me first thing next morning.

‘Come on, Moorie,’ he said, and I knew this was it, that now at last I was going to find out why he had brought me here.

We walked into the forest, and it was what he always called a foxy wood. It was dark; the trunks were close and branches snapped underfoot. It smelled of owls and moss and green things. But there was a path, a ribbon of a thing that wound its way between stumps and vanished in a pale thread.

‘The travellers have been coming here for a thousand years, Moorie,’ he whispered, and I didn’t know why he whispered, but my heart fluttered like a bird in my chest and I drank in the place with all of my senses.

And at last we came to a glade, a round clearing in the woods, and I looked up at the branches and in them were the strangest globes. I thought at first they were hives – that was what came to me to begin with, that they were wild hives of bees. Some of them were only small and others were big as the globe of the world the headmaster had in his room back in Dublin.

‘Mistletoe!’ my father hissed. ‘Mistletoe, Moorie! And it’s been grown here by the travellers, because it has to be grafted!’ And he explained to me about grafting, and about what mistletoe was. And it seemed to me it was magical, this strange thing growing in globes above my head, with its white berry that was like a river pearl, a cloudy white.

All day we picked mistletoe there in the glade. My father climbed the trees and cut little pieces and dropped them. It was my job to run here and there, collecting them from where they fell, and gather them into bundle after bundle after bundle.

And when we left in the end and drove to a nearby town we sold mistletoe at all the houses, pieces for a few pence. It was frosty and our breath fluttered about us like scarves, and my father told me stories and taught me songs. He was so different from the way I knew him at home in the council estate among the dogs and the rubbish and the drink. Here he was different: he was himself.

And that night the rain came and a kind farmer offered us his barn to sleep in. My father wouldn’t have me getting soaked; he had a horror of that after my brother’s death. The barn was warm with a thick smell; we made our beds and listened to the rain on the roof above us. And the rain was like songs too. And in the night I dreamed that this was the place where Jesus had been born. I had come too in order to see this newborn king. But everyone had presents with them, the shepherds and the kings – I was just a traveller and I had nothing. But then I looked at my hand and I saw there was a sprig of mistletoe – the last one that hadn’t been sold – and I went to the manger and held it above the baby’s head and I kissed him.

That’s what I wanted to tell you. The story of the best Christmas I’ve ever known.

Read more: Short Story: The Gift | Shortbread