He flexed the muscles of his back. He remembered a time when he thought they would never move again. But now they were pliable and strong, and as he sat there on his roof and looked around him he realized that he felt happy. He hadn’t had time to think at all, just to do. Now, for the first time for many years, he owned something, something he had built himself with his own strength and ingenuity. Of course even though he had built it it didn’t belong to him. He was a holder of it, but, he thought grimly, it would take a good man to put him off it. He was in agreement with Murdoc. He was his tenant. Each year he would pay five pounds or in lieu its value in wheat or rye, grain or meat to be decided by the parties concerned. You could say that for the first time in his life he owned a bit of Ireland, a wild bit to be sure; and one that would take years to put heart into, so that it could be won back from the wilds and made to smile, but that was for the future, because it would smile, and when it did it would surely smile in a fair land.
He waved an arm. Man saw him wave and answered him, and then he set to work again with a sigh.
‘I wish,’ said Mary Ann as they trudged up the slope after the slowly ambling black cow, that there were more people around here that we could talk to. I’m getting tired of talking to just you and Daddy.’
Pedro ran forward on his bare feet, jumped on his hands, sprang from them and landed again on his feet. He beamed at her for approval.
‘Anyone can do that,’ she said, ‘but what good is it? I wish Father Sebastian would come to us. I wonder if he is all right, Pedro.’
Pedro nodded his head vigorously, and then did a cartwheel with arms and legs.
‘There is one of the O’Duane boys down with his father today,’ she said, looking where the figure of a boy beside the lake was sitting on the rock working on a brown net. ‘They’re so stupid,’ she said. ‘They just look at you with their mouths open.’ But she closed a bit on the cow and started edging her a little towards the lake.
The boy working at the net watched them approaching from under his eyebrows. He was a gangling boy with tumbling brown hair and bony limbs which when they filled out would make him a physical copy of his father. He had very clear eyes, red lips, and the down on his upper lip and chin was becoming noticeable. He glanced where his father, down at the lake shore, was hammering at a board at the stern of the boat, and then he concentrated on repairing the rents in the net with the brown line. He didn’t look up when he felt they were near him.
‘God bless the work,’ he heard the girl’s voice say in Irish, ‘ and what are you doing?’ Such silly questions women always ask, he thought. He didn’t answer her. He didn’t look up.
‘What’s your name?’ he heard her asking. Let her find out.
‘Oh,’ said Mary Ann to her brother in English. ‘What a stupid boy! He must be the half-wit of the family.’
The boy looked up then, at Peter.
‘It must be a terrible affliction for you,’ he said, ‘ to have a one like that around. She doesn’t even appear to be a one with any wit.’ He said this in Irish. He saw Peter’s eyes opening wide with delight. He liked the look of this fair boy. Peter clapped his hands and hopped from foot to foot. He was pleased.
Mary Ann was furious. The blood mounted into her sunburned cheeks.
‘Ignorant boys make ignorant men,’ she said in Latin.
‘Can a woman milk a cow with the Latin tongue?’ the boy asked Peter in Latin. This charmed Peter. He sat on the heather and kicked his legs in the air, trying to clap his bare feet.
‘Well, you are no gentleman,’ said Mary Ann in English. ‘A gentleman would stand in the presence of a lady and bow his head.’
‘Do you see any ladies around?’ the boy asked Peter. Peter shook his head vigorously. The boy was vastly amused at Peter. His eyes almost disappeared as he smiled. ‘What’s your name?’ he asked Peter.
On this Peter rose to his feet, thought a moment, then joined his hands piously and looked up to the sky acting like a saint. He made a ring motion around his head then with his hand, and looked inquiringly at the boy. The boy was puzzled. ‘Have you no tongue?’ he asked. Peter showed him a ripe red tongue. They both laughed.
‘He can’t talk,’ said Mary Ann. ‘You could see that if you weren’t so stupid. He’s telling you his name is Peter.’
‘Oh,’ the boy said. ‘ I heard of you. You are the dumb one. I saw you when you came the evening of the big feast. My name is Dualta.’
‘My name is Mary Ann,’ she said, although he hadn’t addressed her at all. ‘ My friends call me Man.’
He looked at her for the first time. She was a dark beauty. She was growing up. Her eyes were still smouldering a little.
‘They named you well,’ said Dualta. ‘You look more like a man than a girl. You are a very rude little girl in fact.’
‘If one meets rude people,’ said Man, ‘one behaves rudely towards them.’
‘One does not,’ said Dualta. ‘One, if one is a Christian, and a lady, is supposed to be kind and forbearing with rude people.’
‘It’s something of an ordeal,’ said Man, ‘ to be lectured by savages.’
‘And are we savages?’ he asked.
‘What else?’ she asked. ‘Living like primitive people in these wild places. You have no graces. You won’t talk to people. You just glower at people as if you hated people. You don’t want to be friends with people.’
‘You are strangers,’ he said. ‘Strangers must win friendship. Will you win it with your rude talk? In the last few minutes Peter has made me his friend because he didn’t talk at all. Not you. When you are married, if you ever succeed in winning a husband, which I doubt, then your husband would have to beat you.’
‘I’d split his skull,’ said Mary Ann, ‘if he laid a finger on me!’
She said it very ferociously.
Dualta looked at the determined mouth and the chin and the clenched hands and he laughed. So did Peter.
‘May God help the poor devil,’ he said ‘You’d be like the woman that went to hell.’
‘Who was she?’ Mary Ann asked.
‘She was so terrible a shrew,’ said Dualta, ‘that her husband prayed the devil would take her, so he did and brought her to hell, and in three days she had all the devils in hell screaming for mercy, so the devil had to take her back again.’
Mary Ann smiled. She felt more friendly with this Dualta. She might have even sat with him and questioned him kindly about his work, but the figure of his father loomed behind them, like a shadow coming over the sun. She saw the face of Dualta closing down as his father spoke.
‘Are you ready with the net?’ he asked. There’s no time for idling, if some people can be feckless, you won’t be.’
‘The net is ready,’ said Dualta, rising to his feet.
‘Let me look at it,’ Odo said, taking it in his hands. Then he looked at the two. ‘Has your father no work for you to do?’ he asked. ‘Is he bringing you up idle, that you can be sauntering in the middle of the day?’ They were looking up at him. He was a very tall man. He seemed to be touching the sky with his head.
‘My father is pleased with us,’ said Mary Ann.
‘He is easily pleased,’ said Odo. ‘ Be off with you. The cow will be over the hill. And tell your father to watch his mearing. That I said that. Let his animals graze his own ground and not that of his neighbour. Tell him I said that.’
‘Come on, Peter,’ said Mary Ann. She turned away. She didn’t want to be rude again, and besides she was a bit afraid of this big fellow. When they had walked a little, they looked back. They saw Dualta carrying the net on his shoulder down to the boat.
‘I bet that man beats his children,’ said Mary Ann. Then she turned away from them and walked on behind the cow. Ahead of her she saw the figure of her father on the roof of the house. The straw of the roof looked fresh and golden in the sunlight. Somehow it seemed to her that their house looked solid, that it seemed part of the earth, as if it had always been there with the
dark mountain behind it. She waved and he saw her and waved back at her.
‘We have a nice father all the same,’ said Mary Ann.
Dominick was thinking the same thing about his children when, looking over the top of the thatch, he saw two people on horses coming galloping over the shoulder of the mountain. He raised himself. They obviously saw his head over the building and they checked their racing horses for a moment to wave at him and then came cantering down towards him. They were both good riders. The little horses flew very sure-footedly over the heather. As they came nearer he could hear the laughter of the woman. He could see her white teeth, so he came down the rough ladder to the ground in front of the house and started to wipe the wet and congealing mortar from his hands on a tuft of heather.
He had hardly done so when they rounded the house and brought the horses rearing to a stop.
‘You are welcome,’ said Dominick, looking at Murdoc who was dismounting. He didn’t help the woman off the horse. She jumped lightly to the ground herself.
‘You didn’t come near us, Dominick,’ said Murdoc, ‘ so we had to come near you.’
‘I was busy,’ said Dominick grimly.
‘By God, I can see that,’ said Murdoc, looking around him. Then he hit him on the shoulder. ‘You are here, Dominick, and it would take a lot of gunpowder to shift you.’
Dominick was looking at him. Murdoc was very well dressed. The stuff of his clothes was good and shaped. It was expensive stuff, he saw, and had been fashioned by a tailor. It hadn’t been woven by the local weaver nor put together by a handyman. ‘You have come a long way, Dominick.’
‘So have you, Murdoc,’ said Dominick, looking at the clean-shaven face and the clean hands and the tended hair. He wore a ring of gold too and a good chain around his neck. ‘ You are like a prince,’
Murdoc laughed.
‘You hear that, Columba?’ he asked. ‘Dominick saw me in harder days. Dominick, now I am a tiarna, I’m a chieftain, with lots of tenants like you to keep me in a style to which I am unaccustomed.’ He laughed.
‘Can I see your house, Dominick?’ Columba asked.
‘It’s humble,’ said Dominick, leading the way into it, ‘ and it is bare,’ He kicked the smouldering logs in the open fire-place.
They were looking around. It did look bare. He hadn’t yet mortared the inside of the stones. He had only had time to fashion one crude table and two stools. He thought how little either of them knew of the toil and the sweat and the contentment he had put into the almost bare place.
‘You did it all alone too, Dominick,’ said Murdoc.
‘I got no help,’ said Dominick.
‘Did you ever need help?’ Murdoc asked. ‘Now you will get time to know people. You’ll see. The winter will be with us. You must come to us again and not get drunk and tell people what’s wrong with them. They will love you, old friend, when they know you like I do, eh?’
Dominick laughed.
‘It’s well for man to manage on his own,’ he said, thinking how well Columba looked, as if a new bloom had come upon her. She wore imported clothes too. He was conscious of the feeling between them. It was a violent feeling. It was almost tangible in this small house. When their eyes met, they held and glowed for a second. He could almost feel their breathlessness, saw how they moved, instinctively to be close to one another. He felt a bit disturbed. He felt there was a new relationship between himself and Murdoc. Murdoc was his landlord. For them both now, the time they shared their last meals, and hunted and stalked and starved together, and crept around in bad clothes, wet clothes, all of them sharing their fevers and their hopes and their ambitions, all that was something in the past. Murdoc had procured something he wasn’t expecting.
‘I’m very afraid, Murdoc,’ he said, ‘that you will become respectable.’
‘No,’ said Murdoc. ‘Not me, Dominick. I’ll always be a cut-throat, but now I can afford to get somebody else to cut them for me. You are thinking that?’
‘No, not that,’ said Dominick. ‘It’s just that the bad days, in looking back at them, seemed to have been good, better than one thought, and impossible to recapture, even if one wanted to. I don’t know.’
Murdoc seemed to make an effort to bring his mind clear. He went close to Dominick, put his hand on his shoulder.
‘I haven’t changed, Dominick,’ he said. ‘I am always your friend. I owe you much. How could I forget, even if I wanted to? I don’t want to. I want you to know I am always there, if ever you need me. I am your friend. There is nothing I wouldn’t do for you. This is true.’
Ah, now, Murdoc, Dominick was thinking. Now a touch of patronage has entered into our relationship. Things between us can never be the same again.
‘Where’s Peter and Mary Ann?’ Columba asked.
Dominick went out into the sunlight again. ‘They should be coming with the cow now,’ he said. He watched his children approaching. He knew without looking back that they had come out of the door behind him, close to each other in the narrow opening. He felt out of the way. What did a stone-built house in the middle of nowhere mean to them? How could he try and explain his pride in it to them, when to them who had been used to better things it was merely the rude shelter of a peasant.
He watched his children. They were good-looking healthy children, not well dressed. I will have to contact a pedlar, he thought and buy some nice stuff so that they can look good on the Sunday.
‘We have visitors,’ he called, and stepped aside.
Hello, Peter. Hello, Mary Ann. On the surface things were the same. But they weren’t really the same. He knew that from the look of Mary Ann. She was being very polite. She submitted to their caresses but she wasn’t carefree. Peter was polite. He could see his own nameless uneasiness in his children’s behaviour, and it made him feel a bit better. It made him grin. That is the hazard of life, he thought. They had gained a patron and lost a friend, because after all Murdoc was now an important man, and he was responsible to a lot of people.
‘We have to go,’ said Murdoc. ‘We have a lot of calling to do yet. O-ho, look below, there’s the only blot on the landscape.’
He was looking down below them, below the lake, at the gap in the wide valley where you could see the sea. Along the track there that wandered over the rough coast back to Rin Mhil they saw the column of soldiers on horseback. Periodically they patrolled the coastline all the way around, just to show that if you thought you were free you were free only because they said so. ‘The black beetles,’ said Murdoc. ‘Patience and we will have them out of it. One day they won’t be there.’
He mounted the little horse.
Dominick held a hand under Columba’s foot. She was wearing a high boot of soft flexible leather.
‘Well,’ said Murdoc. ‘There will be a big feast in four week’s time for the harvest. It will be a great day and night, Dominick. You will be there. Listen, something else. You remember that Sebastian?’
‘Yes,’ said Dominick cautiously, ‘I do.’
‘You are a sly one Dominick,’ said Murdoc. ‘You never told me he was a priest. He never told me he was a priest.’
‘We never told you he wasn’t.’ said Dominick.
‘Well, they have him now,’ said Murdoc.
‘What are you saying?’ asked Dominick, his heart almost stopping.
‘Coote got him,’ said Murdoc. ‘I saw him. I was there three weeks ago. He passed me on the street. They had his hands tied behind his back. But I knew him. He knew me too. His eyes met mine. He smiled.’
‘What did they do to him?’ asked Dominick. ‘ Where did they take him?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Murdoc. ‘What does it matter? He won’t mind. Won’t a fellow like him love to be sacrificed? You remember the arguments we had, eh, Dominick? I should have known.’
Dominick was close to him gripping his leg.
‘You must find out, Murdoc,’ he said. ‘Find out what happened to him. For the love of God.’
‘Is he important to you?’ Murdoc asked.
‘Yes, he is,’ said Dominick. ‘Do what you can, Murdoc. Somebody will know. Just so that you will find out.’
‘I’ll try, Dominick,’ said Murdoc. ‘But listen, friend, the man is a small loss, I tell you. He won’t mind what happens to him. Why should you? A soldier expects to die in battle if he is a soldier. In these times a priest expects to die if he is a priest.’
‘There’s more than that to it,’ said Dominick. ‘If you never do another thing for me, Murdoc, for the love of God find out.’
Murdoc was almost amused at his intentness.
‘All right, Dominick, if he means that much to you, I’ll try. Mary Ann, Peter, farewell, until the harvest feast.’
And then they were gone, galloping down towards the lake.
He felt Peter’s hand in his own then and Mary Ann was holding his other hand.
‘Daddy,’ said Mary Ann, ‘they couldn’t have killed Sebastian, sure they couldn’t?’
Peter’s hand tightened on his. Peter and Sebastian had been very close.
‘I don’t know, Mary Ann,’ he said. ‘I don’t know. I don’t feel anything in here,’ He was beating his chest with a mortar-stained clenched fist. ‘If they had done anything to him I would have felt it. They can’t have. We’ll know. We’ll know soon. Murdoc will find out for us.’
But Murdoc didn’t find out for them.
They found out another way.
Chapter Twenty-Two
IT WAS a month later that he found out.
He had burnt an acre near the house. He waited until the wind was east and then he set fire to a square of the land Driven by the wind the fire ate its way furiously and almost frighteningly through the tufts of withered heather and sedge. He himself was on the north side and Peter and Mary Ann on the south side of the square, beating at the fire with wet sacks so that they kept it in line as it flared. In half an hour it had eaten its way through until it was stopped dead at the west end by the rocky bed of the stream that ran down from the mountain.
They were blackened and breathless then, but triumphant, looking at the acre that lay burnt and smouldering and ready for the heart-breaking kiss of the spade.
Seek the Fair Land Page 23