Mizzle had been their word for prick in those days, when they were small; his had been the frequent object of curiosity. And language too, in those days, had been most thrilling — exercising, strenuous; a net you threw to capture what you didn’t know.
Tenants spoke English in Carmichael’s neat fields along the river and anywhere there ran a good road. The same men and women would speak Irish on the mountain, on the rough, or when handling cattle.
“You’ve no right to stay.” Carmichael sat neatly on the mare — back straight, heels forward — his face a brown map of impatience. “Don’t put me in a position, Mick. I’ve been more than fair.”
Mícheál leaned deeper on his stick. “Here we are, and here we’ll stay.”
“There are the dragoons, you know, at Portumna — I suppose I could have you taken up and sentenced for trespass. How should your wife and children manage then? Don’t make me come up here again, I warn you, Mick. Two pounds — that is the last offer you’ll have, and it makes my hair turn to pay you so much.”
Mícheál gave a slight shake of his head. Carmichael grunted impatiently and wheeled his mare. Fergus watched as horse and rider began deftly picking their way down the mountain.
Mícheál said, “What do you say, Fergus? Is your father in the right?”
“There’ll be nothing left to eat soon.”
“It’s the same everywhere, though. Your mother and the girls wouldn’t survive the roads.”
“So you want us to stay. What for?”
“I can’t give in to that fellow,” Mícheál said. “I just can’t. Perhaps I ought to but I cannot. It isn’t in me, somehow. After I’m dead, you must do what you must.”
Biting at the Grave
A WEEK AFTER CARMICHAEL’S VISIT, Fergus awakened one morning with a bitter taste of iron and salts on his tongue. He shared the sleeping loft with his two younger sisters who had started losing the hair on their heads while a black fur — hunger fur — sprouted on their foreheads and cheeks and the backs of their hands.
It was difficult to fall asleep, and more difficult to awaken. He felt thick and dull. Raising arms to pull on a shirt was an effort. When he went outside, his piss was mustard yellow, fizzing and foaming before sinking slowly in the ground. He hadn’t noticed any hair falling out, perhaps on account of the bites he’d earned tumbling with the Carmichael boys, but he hadn’t strength for tumbling now. Anyway the farmer had discovered what his sons were doing and forbidden them passing along any food.
None of the others was awake when he started down the mountain with his dog. Coursing for badger. Past the wrecks of cabins in little hamlets. Humps of rubble, the stink of moldy thatch. Where were those people now?
Badger was good meat, fried up and salty. It had been a wet night, but now the sun was driving light into the sky. Nosing the old holes and burrows, the dog found no trace, nothing that interested her. They worked the slope and finally came down along the river, coursing the bank for a while looking for the otter burrows, finding none. He had never heard of anyone eating otter. Finally he slipped the rope on her and crossed Carmichael’s meadow, moving closer to the farm.
In the old days, the farm dogs — weezers, Phoebe called them — used to come running at strangers or tenants approaching the yard. Pink tongues out, paws slashing the stones, barking and howling at intruders.
Carmichael had gotten rid of the mastiffs the year before, after one of them had attacked Phoebe and bit her on the heel.
She had shot the dogs herself, after her father placed his gun in her hands.
Approaching the farm slowly, peering through the gate, he saw no sign of her though the kitchen chimney was smoking. He coursed the dog up along the road for a while then turned and walked by the farm again. This time as he passed the gate she was hurrying across the farmyard, steel pail in her hand.
He didn’t call out, didn’t step into the yard, but she saw him and came over. Her feet in slippers now that it was winter. Thick cowhide pampoots. Fresh linen apron.
“You’ll try a taste of milk, Fergus?”
“Yes.”
“You couldn’t get it any fresher.”
“No, miss.”
Their ritual played out. Setting the steel pail down on the cobblestones, she took a cup from her apron and handed it to him.
“Try a taste yourself, miss?”
“I will not. But you go ahead.”
The sweet fat taste of cow’s milk.
“Thank you, miss.”
Instead of taking the cup back, she looked him up and down, hands on her hips. “Does he treat you fair, do you think?”
“Who?”
“My father, who else?”
“He’s a stiff old goner. Likes his way.”
“That’s what he says of your father, more or less.”
“It’s not true.” Though perhaps it was. But his father’s stubbornness wasn’t driving people to their deaths. Or perhaps it was.
“What will happen to you?” she asked.
He shook his head.
“Listen to me. Two pounds, Fergus, that’s more than fair. You’d better take it and take your mother and the little girls. You’ve never had near so much before. What do you see from selling a pig? — very little I expect. Take the fee, and go for Ennis or Limerick, you can surely find something there. Your father is biting at the grave to shame us, but it’s himself that’s shamed. Think of your poor mother and the girls. You know this is the truth.”
“Can’t leave.”
“Don’t say so. Of course you can. You must. Your father left every year, didn’t he?”
“He always came back. If we leave now, we’ll never come back.”
“I believe,” she said slowly, “you had better take the going-away shee” — using their old private word for money. “Tell your old fellow he must. He won’t squeeze any more from Father, and if he don’t quit —”
“Dagger the money. It isn’t money, it never was.”
Taking the blue china cup from his hands, Phoebe reached down to pick up the milk pail.
Phoebe Carmichael had always been perfect as far as he was concerned. Distinct mind like a polished ax. The two of them, babies in baskets left under swaying trees, alongside a meadow. Wind sweeping through high grass with a sound like bedsheets tearing.
It’s funny when you’re dying and never have been with a girl.
He watched her backing away, then turning, fleeing from him across the paved farmyard. Fleeing slowly, lugging the steel pail with both hands.
He watched her disappear into the farmhouse with its glass windows and slate roof gleaming in the fresh wet of the morning.
He turned, started back up the mountain. There seemed nowhere else to go. He felt extremely lonely. It seemed as if Phoebe had been his last hold on life. Later that morning on the upper slopes his hungry dog caught a scent and ran off howling, and he never did see her again.
THEY ATE sparrows, songbirds. His mother pleaded with his father to quit, but he would not. He had been leaving all his life and now he wouldn’t.
Exactly why, Fergus could not say. A feeling in the blood. Perhaps he shared it. Perhaps they had something in common after all.
They finished what was left of the yellow meal and lasted another two weeks on stirabout, mostly water, with wild herbs and nettles boiled soft. They gradually lost the strength needed to snare and trap small game and spent more of each day in bed.
Carmichael kept away. Fergus did not go down to the farm again or see Phoebe. He was just strong enough to tend the fire, feeding it little parcels of turf. His father had stopped speaking. Then his mother. They lay glassy-eyed in their bed.
They saw no dragoons. The little girls lay in the loft mewing like cats. Their bed straw grew filthy, and Fergus hadn’t strength to change it. One afternoon he spent hours — or maybe it was just a few moments — watching a spider scuttle in and out of the fire.
WITH A little water, dying will last a long time.
The first sign a raging headache. He understood what it meant. While it was still possible to think more or less clearly he made himself smoor the fire, carefully, so it would burn as long as possible. If it went out, there was no possibility of lighting it again. Then he climbed into the sleeping loft, lay down on the straw, slept and dreamed. He could always stir up Phoebe in his dreams. In his dreams that girl came up out of herself with enthusiasm deep and furious. It was her gift.
Ejection
HE AWOKE TO THE SCENT of a soldier.
Grease, gunpowder. The polish applied to brass.
Pungent and complex, the scent filtered into his brain and startled his stomach, which drenched itself with acid that rose, scorching his throat, and made him cough. The cough blew him awake.
His eyelids were glued with crust, and it hurt tearing them open. He lay on a pallet in the sleeping loft of the cabin, his two sisters beside him. His skin felt stiff, but the sores on his arms and legs appeared to be healing. The air was hazy with smoke from the fire he had smoored hours, or days, earlier, just before giving himself up to the fever.
Peering down from the loft, he could see the soldier standing just inside the door.
Fergus sat up suddenly, and the soldier yelped in fear and started backing out. The tip of his bayonet caught the cowhide flap in the doorway and he cursed, jerked it free, and disappeared.
Fergus looked at his sisters lying beside him on the straw.
The dead were always powerfully still, a fixity that could never be mimed.
One summer, following cattle up on the booley, the mountain pasture, he had spent much of an afternoon staring at a dead fox, entranced by something he could not name. Dead shapes had a passion.
Living on milk, charlock, and yellow meal, a herd saw no one for weeks, and the solitude up there had been tangible and exciting; the world presented itself like a fresh thing. Wandering bracken slopes and shoulder bogs, he had observed the rippling mountain ranges the way a bird might view them, lumps of emptiness swallowed whole, July sunshine rifling patterns of light on the hills.
He heard a horse scuffling outside, and men’s voices.
The smoke inside the cabin was laced with the woody aroma of typhus. Peering from the loft, he could see his parents in their bed near the fire, but he could not tell if they were alive or dead. He shut his eyes.
He was alive himself. Certainly, he was.
Crawling to the ladder, he eased down the rungs and approached their bed, where they lay in filth. He studied his father’s face. Bone knobs glistening under waxy yellow skin. The eyes suddenly snapped open, violet and sensitive, like hungry birds, starlings.
“Soldiers outside,” Fergus whispered. “What shall I do?”
The eyes flapped shut.
“What shall I do?” he repeated. His mother raised her head and looked about the cabin wildly. “Water,” she whispered, then her head fell back upon the straw.
He stared at the doorway. Had he really seen a soldier? Was it just a fever dream? Perhaps the world was dead.
He should go outside, see for himself.
Walk outside. That is what you do in dreams. The law of dreams is, keep moving.
Soldiers
“THAT’S ONE!” Farmer Carmichael cried. “What of the others?”
The soldier who had been inside the cabin was bent over, vomiting on the snow. Straightening, he wiped his mouth on his sleeve. “All dead,” he gasped.
“Quite sure?” called an officer mounted on a beautiful limber horse.
“Dead as rabbits.”
“I warned O’Brien he must quit.” Carmichael spoke loudly. “I did warn him there’d be nothing for him if he stayed.”
“Better have a look yourself,” the officer said.
The farmer approached the cabin, the icy puddles crackling under his heels. Pushing Fergus aside, he slipped through the leather curtain and went inside. Smoke leaked out from the doorway, curdling in the bright air.
Stung by daylight, eyes aching, Fergus buried his face in his hands.
A few moments later Carmichael, coughing, emerged from the cabin. Seizing Fergus’s shoulders, the farmer shook him roughly. “Two pounds the fellow was offered!” Carmichael shouted to the officer. “Desperate, morose, wild fellow! All his life worthless! Always on the roads!”
“Well, he was a strong hand at harvest, though, he was,” Abner Carmichael said softly.
“Do you suppose I enjoy this work?” the farmer cried.
Fergus’s attention was concentrated on a biscuit that one of the soldiers was munching. Seeing him staring, the soldier broke it and held out half. Twisting free of Carmichael, Fergus stumbled toward the soldier and grabbed the chunk, but when he tried to bite into it, it was too hard, and his gums were too tender. He began licking to soften it, then broke off a small piece and put it in his mouth, sucking.
He turned around just in time to see Carmichael’s two sons touch the cabin roof with their torches. There was a thin layer of snow, but the scraws of turf underneath had a ferocious appetite to burn. The horse whickered at the flow of red sparks, and Fergus felt the officer staring at him. Something in the officer’s face — pity, disgust — pierced his stupor. He gave a howl and barged toward the cabin, but Saul and Abner intercepted him easily. “Let her burn now.” Abner’s kind, moony face closed on his. “It’s all for the best, Fergus. There’s no life in it.”
He was unable to resist another nibble at the biscuit. Thinking he had surrendered, Abner and Saul released him. He instantly broke from them, dashing for the cabin door. He heard the officer shout but got inside before anyone could catch him. Strings of fire drooped from the roof. Embers stung his neck. He tried to reach the ladder for the loft but couldn’t find it in the smoke. Burning scraws of turf were falling everywhere. His parents’ bed was ablaze — he saw their arms lifting up, flames shooting between his father’s legs. Fergus tried dragging him from the bed while the fire pecked his hands fiercely. His father’s clothes were alight, his eyes were open, wide and white; his mouth was open, a hole. A burning scraw of turf dropped onto Fergus’s neck. He let go of his father and wriggled and danced trying to shake the fire off himself. Now it was so hot he felt himself breathing fire. The smoke clawed at his eyes and he couldn’t see. Blind and wheezing and scratched by fire, his body stumbled for the doorway. The moment he was outside, someone knocked him down then threw a horse blanket over him to smother his burning clothes.
Shrouded under the rough wool he lay thinking this was death — this was how it felt. A weird remove. A sense of distance, and vivid pain stinging in the hands.
Death smelled strongly of horse.
Then Abner Carmichael snatched the blanket away, pulled him to his feet, and wrapped the blanket about his shoulders. “There you are, old man, there you are.”
The soldier who had offered the biscuit was facing the cabin, holding out his palms to feel the heat. The officer had dismounted and was standing with his back to the fire, adjusting girth straps on his horse.
Saul and his father stood holding the iron-tipped ram, ready to tumble the walls.
Fergus watched the roof crumbling as it burned. In a few moments it collapsed entirely, and the cabin was a white cup holding nothing but flame.
Succor?
HE STUMBLED DOWN the path after the men, clutching the horse blanket, unsure if he was their prisoner. They ignored him; perhaps they were ashamed. They had biscuit, so he followed.
As they came into the farmyard he looked about for Phoebe but saw no sign of her. Carmichael, his two sons, and the officer disappeared inside the house. The soldiers headed for the stable. Clutching his blanket, ignored, Fergus finally stumbled after them.
Where was Phoebe while her men were tumbling? What kept her busy? Where did she hide?
In the stable, the soldiers stacked muskets, unbuckled their white crossstraps, and shrugged off their knapsacks and ammunition boxes. The
sergeant handed him a biscuit, then allowed him a swallow of fiery poitin from a clay jar.
The old mare, disturbed by the presence of strangers, was fussing in her stall. The soldiers settled down to filling and lighting their clay pipes. They continued to ignore him as if he were a ghost and they could not see him. Perhaps he was in a dream. Or perhaps he was a ghost; perhaps he was dead already. How would you know if you were dead? He finished the biscuit quickly and licked the crumbs from his hands. The old mare would know.
Approaching her stall, he started whispering to her, then stroking her nose. It seemed to settle her, so he must be alive still. Her warm, sweet breath clouded his face. He felt tears dribbling down his cheeks. Climbing one side of the stall, he settled himself aboard her, legs astride. Leaning forward, letting his arms fall down either side, he lay on her neck, absorbing her heat.
“Fergus? Is Fergus here?”
Startled, he looked up and saw Phoebe at the stable door.
“Miss, if that is the name,” the sergeant said, pointing at Fergus. “The creature found in the paddywhack.”
He gripped the mare with his knees, knotting fingers in her mane as Phoebe approached.
“Come with me, Fergus.”
“I’m sick, I’m dazzled.”
“I’ll give you something to eat.”
“They are all dead, the cabin is tumbled, no one is buried, they are burned.”
Phoebe was looking at him blankly.
This is the way it is in dreams. You speak and cannot be heard.
Then he realized he was speaking Irish, which the Carmichaels did not have, not even Phoebe. He sat on the mare, dumb, staring at her.
“Come inside, it’s all right,” she said. “I promise.”
Something inside him gave way and he started weeping.
Reaching up, Phoebe touched his leg. “Oh don’t you, Fergus! Can you eat, do you think? Come inside, I’ll give you a cup of broth and some of our bread.” She touched his hand.
The Law of Dreams Page 3