The Peace of Stale Air

The late afternoon light through the window that faced Addison Street captured the dirt motes that hung in the stale air inside Liam Finnegan’s apartment. There was no gold to this light. None of the soft and wafting colors that could carry a spent day into a quiet night. Instead this light shone through a window too long unwashed and fell onto tatty carpeting worn through in too many spots. The light itself came to Liam Finnegan’s eyes after bounding through the city’s concrete, steel and grime, untouched by greenery or peace, another manifestation of a place too congested, too cold, too common for a driven spirit.

Finnegan accepted it, though, and sat at his window, a small glass of whiskey in his hand. He looked out onto the street. Across the way was Wrigley Field, the ancient ballyard where the Cubs played baseball and where he had had his first taste of that quintessential American game so many years ago. On the hottest summer nights his sons would sneak out sometimes, and cross the empty street to steal into the ballpark and sleep on the grass along the outfield, the coolest spot they could find. They would wake with the sun and sneak back out before the security crew and custodians came to set up for that day’s game and before their father woke to face his own day.

One night Liam, hearing the scattering of his sons, followed them, and when he saw what they were about tailed them into the stadium. When the boys saw him they froze. Their father was a stern man, and they expected his wrath, and the belt that followed it.

“What are you boys doing out here?”

Edward, the oldest, twelve at the time, answered in a whisper. “We couldn’t sleep. It’s cooler out here. We were going to lie on the grass. Maybe sleep here.”

Liam Finnegan nodded at his sons. “A grand idea,” and then he led them through the last gates onto the field itself. There he squatted down and patted the grass. Cool, and slightly damp.

“Here, boys,” he said as he lay down in front of the ivy-covered walls in left field. “I’ll join you.” The boys laughed, clambered around him, and put their heads down on the cool grass.

Now, years on and the boys well scattered, Liam thought of that night, and the handful of nights like it. But they were too rare. They were not a close family. Mostly they went their separate ways – Liam to his job and the boys to school, and then to the streets. It had to be that way, he reasoned, especially since Molly had passed. The boys had no mother, no sun around which to orbit. They only had him, a father worried enough about keeping himself together. He kept them in line as best he could.

Finnegan thought this afternoon of other grass upon which he had laid his head, and as he did so, the scotch he sipped warmed those memories to a new depth. His family’s farmlands in Dungarvan, and the soft grass there at the end of a hard-working day. Time enough to pause before heading back, to gaze at the lowering sky and to sniff the ever-present sea air that wafted in from the coast.

He thought, too, of the fields nearby, those in the shadow of the Comeragh Mountains, where he had spent Sunday afternoons with Maire, the two of them entwined in each other’s arms and the birdsongs lending chorus to their burgeoning love.

He wondered now if those fields were gone, if they had been paved over and modernized by the relentless press of ambition and profit that paid no heed to place. He expected they were and that, if he were in Dungarvan now, his heartbreak would run even more deeply than it did in this grimy place in Chicago.

Finnegan sighed and sipped again. A journey it had been, a wrenching odyssey that placed him now at this window in the hollow croft of these days.

Some months ago he had written a long letter to his grandson Conor, Edward’s son. The young man’s restlessness mirrored his own, and in the questions for which Conor was seeking answers, Liam Finnegan saw himself. He had written then:

What I have done with my life, how I have lived, is my province alone, and I take responsibility for its glories, for its failures and brutality, and now for the peace that comes to me at the end of it.

I have felt the waters on my face and heard the wild cries of anguish, pain and sorrow. In flight, I came to a quiet place, and there I stay until all sorrow has passed and breath itself draws down to nothingness.

Liam Finnegan finished his scotch, then moved to the living room. He turned on the radio and lay himself down on the couch there, avoiding the loose spring that shot up from one of the cushions. Another night in a dwindling pool of time.

That was it, then. The peace of understanding.

He reclined on his couch, listened to the sounds of a Verdi opera, and closed his eyes.