The Law of Dreams

by Peter Behrens

  “You be careful of that wild creature, miss,” the sergeant warned.

  SHE CROSSED the farmyard, and he stumbled after her. She had nothing to say. Her clean clothes; her brown hair smelling of light. She knew she was going to live a long time, marry a farmer’s son, have sons of her own. Fergus was going to die soon, and that was the difference between them. When they came to the kitchen door she pushed it open then took his elbow, pulling him inside. The door boomed shut behind him. He was standing on warm flags in the farmhouse kitchen, a large room with low beams and a tin-plated range throwing heat that smashed into his chest painfully, as though the last thing he’d been keeping safe had been broken into.

  Your soul lived in your chest, did it not.

  The fish-faced officer looked up from the table, where he and Phoebe’s brothers had been eating ham and cheese on toast and drinking porter. Farmer Carmichael who had been scribbling on a scrap of paper looked up, surprise on his face, sour as cheese.

  “What do you suppose you are doing, Pheeb?” her brother Saul demanded.

  “He must be fed. Look at him!”

  “They were fever cases up there, Pheeb. He wants keeping outside, or we’ll catch it.”

  “I shall give him something to eat first.”

  The tin-plated range was throwing wild heat. Fergus, light-headed, could feel himself starting to sway. If he fell down now he knew he would die here on the kitchen floor, in front of them.

  Phoebe looked around and saw him stagger. “Fergus, sit down. Look at you, boy. Oh look at you.” She guided him to a three-legged stool and pushed him until he sat down.

  “It was their choice to stay, it was,” her brother Saul was saying.

  “Well, whatever it was, it’s done now,” said Phoebe. “Listen up, old Fergus, sweetheart. We must put some nourish in you. They are going to take you away, you see. Abner is taking you in the cart. You’ll need a little strength, won’t you?”

  He was powerless. All he could do to hurt them was die in their kitchen, and he wasn’t ready to die.

  There was a red ham in a pan on top of the range. Stropping a knife, Phoebe briskly cut off a slice, sawed two cuts of wheat bread, and gave him the food. He took it and could feel the salt swelling up his lips as he chewed.

  Carmichael at the table was back at writing, steel nib scratching the paper.

  “They’ll have to admit him to Scariff workhouse,” Carmichael said to the officer. “I pay the poor rates after all, and they’re a burden. He’ll be cared for, they’ll feed him.”

  Crouching on the stool, Fergus ate furtively from his hands, feeling heat exploding off the range and soaking into him like something dangerous.

  “There, you see, you’ll be all right,” Phoebe said. “I’ll come to visit you.”

  He watched her carry more bread and butter to the men at table and refill their noggins from the jug of porter. The room was quiet except for the click of the fire and the scrape of knives on plates and the slap of liquid pouring. He knew she was lying. It stung her to have to look at him; she wanted him away, perhaps more than any of them did.

  Fergus wolfed his food. She was feeding him up for the road.

  Abner Carmichael went out to harness the donkey to the cart while Fergus continued to eat his bread and ham like it was dream, like it was his old life he was consuming. He could hear Phoebe’s other brother, Saul, laughing hoarsely at some joke the officer made.

  Phoebe, making up a little parcel of food, kept her back to Fergus.

  The food had warmed him up inside, and his brain was moving. When Abner came into the house saying the cart was ready, Fergus understood this was ejection. They were ejecting him. The Carmichaels had won.

  Phoebe stood in front of a window, with light pouring through her hair. She was smiling as she made some remark to the officer then took a dainty sip of porter from a cup.

  You look at a girl, and see she isn’t your girl, and understand she never will be no matter how much you want her. You grasp that, finally. Awareness pierces the chest like a spike being driven in. The world doesn’t belong to you. Perhaps you belong to the world, but that’s another matter.

  Still, when it came time to go, he didn’t go easy — he felt he owed his father, Mícheál, that much. He grabbed an iron pan off the stovetop and pitched it at Saul’s head and grasped a hot stove handle and threw it at Abner and was trying to seize one of the kitchen knives when Saul and the officer knocked him down and held him on the floor writhing while Abner wrapped up his ankles and wrists with yellow twine.

  “Hold steady, boy, we don’t wish to harm you now. Hold steady.”

  Such lies, he thought.

  Phoebe was nowhere in his field of vision as he was hung over Abner’s shoulder like a trussed boar. Perhaps she had left the room. Perhaps she ran upstairs, threw herself on her bed, and covered her ears with pillows so she wouldn’t hear his protests as Abner was lugging him from the house. Perhaps she lay very still the way her mother, trying to avoid another rack of coughing, had kept perfectly still on her deathbed, like an animal hopelessly caught in the jaws of another, larger, animal.

  He was weeping, shouting You’re not my girl! You’re not my girl! as he was carried out, and it was Irish anyway, and none of them would understand.

  Abner laid him in the cart very gently then climbed in over him. Taking up the reins, Abner clicked his tongue and the donkey started off, iron shoes clicking across the cobbles then out through the iron gate. And that was the end of the old life, dream life, Phoebe life, life of the mountain.

  PART II

  Bog Boy

  IRELAND, NOVEMBER 1846

  Workhouse

  AFTER A WHILE ABNER STOPPED the cart and unbound him, and he sat with his legs dangling from the back as they continued along the road. He could smell the lard that greased the wheel hubs.

  The company of soldiers following on foot.

  With every jolt from the road, his legs flew up, kicking. He considered jumping down, scrambling over the nearest wall, fleeing across the field. Finding his way back up the mountain. Perhaps the soldiers would shoot, but he doubted it. Perhaps they would chase him. But probably soldiers would not like leaving the dry road to muddy their boots. Which they must clean and rub constantly, he’d heard, or be constantly beaten.

  What did soldiers care for a tenant on the loose? It wouldn’t mean any more to them than a hare. Probably less. Not worth a scramble. Not worth a bullet. Abner had untied him, after all, and might stand to let him go. He had strength to get himself over the nearest wall, but probably not much farther. He knew that if he lay down in a field he’d stop breathing. And he didn’t wish to die there, with magpies pecking at his eyes.

  So he stayed on the cart.

  Abner passed him his fuming pipe. Fergus held the warm clay bowl in his paws and puffed and watched the company of soldiers veering off at the crossroads.

  A dab of wild scarlet moving into the glen, disappearing.

  Sunlight beckoned, then rain swept in.

  The pipe went out as they were crossing a bog that was split with precisely cut trenches where the turf had been excised, and Abner had nothing to light it with. The donkey trotted on, passing isolated cabins and potato plots where leaves and stalks lay smashed on the ground.

  Mother and father, dead. Sisters, dead. You feel very light: floating. Not much attaching you to the world it seems.

  Cramps, in the belly, stiff with gas.

  Entering Scariff, the road became a street lined with ruined cabins. He had visited the town every year, come to the fair to sell the pig, and it had always seemed exciting — threatening, hurrying — but now it was dead.

  Roofs burned out, one after another. Abandoned cabins stared at one another across the road.

  Scariff stank of the moldy thatch that was left, too wet to burn.

  Beggars standing outside the iron gate of the workhouse were cawing like crows as Abner drew up the cart.

  “Now, Fergus, it
’s the Poor Law Union, you know. The workhouse.”

  Fergus unwilling to open his mouth.

  You guard what you have when it’s nothing.

  Emptiness, silence.

  “Very good establishment they say it is, and you must do as they tell you.” Abner was pulling him off the back of the cart. “They’ll feed you and take care of you, never fear.”

  The other son, Saul, had always had a jeering tendency, but Abner was usually kind, and good at working cattle. Cattle could not be worked by anyone who hated them or feared them or did not comprehend their sensitivity.

  You could have been cattle, or a horse. Or a rabbit. Fox, badger. Anything that lived on the mountain. A stone, a piece of turf, white root of a mustard plant.

  The beggars outside, some clutching children, were hoping to be admitted to the workhouse, but they cleared the way respectfully for the farmer’s son to approach the iron gate.

  There was a porter’s lodge just inside. The workhouse itself was a handsome stone building with a courtyard. Fergus felt Abner’s grip on his arm holding him down; otherwise he might flutter into the sky, like a moth.

  Where was his mind? If he were a plant growing on the mountain, or a stone too large to be shifted —

  “Keeper!” Abner shouted through the bars. “Keeper!”

  A bonfire was crackling in the courtyard, inmates herding around it, attempting to warm their hands.

  A uniformed keeper stuck his head out a window in the little gate lodge, and the beggars standing in the street began screaming “Soup! Soup!” while holding up howling children.

  “Go away!” the keeper shouted.

  “Open up, you!” Abner’s voice was firm. “My father’s a ratepayer, and this poor fellow is ours.”

  Abner thrust a scrap of paper between the bars. “Here is the ticket all made out. Now come, you, and let him in.”

  The keeper’s head withdrew and the little window banged shut. A moment later the lodge door opened and the keeper came out, buttoning up his blue coat. “You don’t expect me to greet every pauper in the country, do you?”

  “I don’t expect nothing but your duty. Now let us in.”

  “You must hold off these ragged pigs.”

  “Hold them off yourself, it’s not my concern.”

  “Let me see your ticket.” The keeper glanced at it, then shoved it in his pocket and started unlocking the gate. The beggars were wailing and pressing, trying to get inside. The keeper opened the gate just enough for Abner to push Fergus through, then banged it shut, catching the wrist of a beggar, who began screeching like a cat.

  “Do as they tell you now, an mhic,” Abner was saying between the iron bars. “Good luck to you. God bless you, dear.”

  He was on the point of opening his mouth and pleading with Abner to take him back, to take him home, but something stopped him, and he remembered his father’s silence. He watched the farmer’s son climb aboard the donkey cart, crack his whip lightly, and start driving away.

  Go, you hasty fucker. I’ll get you.

  “Look smart, boy.” The keeper gave him a shove, pushing him toward the bonfire. “Here is the warden coming — Mr. Conachree. Strip off your clothes now, they go in the fire.”

  A small official was beetling across the yard, followed by an orange youth lugging a pail in each hand. Ignoring them, Fergus turned to stare at the fire.

  Everything red, warping, and changing.

  Water cascaded over his head. While he was still gasping and sputtering the keeper and the orange boy seized and pinioned him, peeled off his rags, and threw them in the fire. Then they held him while the official began clipping his hair with sheep shears.

  Looking down at the flagstones, Fergus watched snips of his hair twitching with lice.

  “Hold still or Warden might slip and snip off your ear,” the orange boy warned.

  He could feel the tears but fought them back. Humiliated, trying to hold on to some string of himself, he attempted to withdraw inside himself.

  Are you just that voice inside?

  Frightened, cagey. A rabbit dashing for a hole. Heart beating fast and hard.

  Shearing done, the warden dropped the clippers into the pail of strongsmelling fluid and left without a word, walking across the yard and disappearing inside the building.

  Fergus stood naked, shorn, gasping and shivering. The orange boy was pulling on a pair of leather gloves. “Close your eyes, man. This goo stings very wicked.” Dipping his gloved hands into the pail, he began vigorously rubbing Fergus’s scalp. The acrid solvent stung at cuts and welts, made his eyes tear.

  He felt like a badger, trapped, killed, peeled.

  The orange boy gave one last violent knead then pulled off the gloves. “There, that’ll do you I reckon.”

  He would remember his shearing as the end of everything, therefore a beginning as well. A kind of birth, in sheep dip. He knew himself then — skin and soul and nothing else. He would not forget.

  Digging into a sack, the orange boy dropped some clothes at his feet. “Put on your jacket, fresh fish. We dress like gentlemen here.”

  Schoolroom

  Fresh fish was what you were called until they had gotten used to you.

  Paupers were fed in the yard, where the steam of soup was stunning, and he lingered over the kettle until the warden screamed at him to take his noggin right fast and move along, move along.

  A hundred men and boys slept on straw pallets in the male paupers’ sleeping hall. He fell asleep instantly but awoke in blackness in the middle of the night, with strangers lying flat as the dead, and the fire too far off to give any light or heat. He had wet himself, and the sour stink of piss on straw reminded him of Carmichael’s stable and the red mare in her stall. Carmichael calling out instructions as Fergus trotted her around and around the little pasture.

  Use your knees! Straight back! Don’t slump like a plowboy!

  He struggled to stay awake, afraid of the night, the breathing of strangers, afraid to sleep, afraid of death, but his eyelids were heavy, his face had no strength, and soon enough he was gone.

  AT DAWN the paupers arose obediently at the clanging of a bell. He followed the others outside, passing six fever cases writhing on the floor. They trooped out to the yard, where snow had fallen overnight, greasing the stones, and an iron kettle was seething over a fire.

  a>

  Breakfast was a thin porridge of yellow meal. Paupers ate in silence, standing about in the snow, using their fingers to scoop the gruel. After they had finished eating, boys began launching snowballs over the walls.

  The orange boy was packing a snowball in his hands when he suddenly wheeled, cocked his right arm, and took aim at Fergus.

  Feeling reckless, without any edges, Fergus said, “Throw it.”

  Yes, then I’ll murder you, so. Yes I will.

  The boy hesitated, then spun around and heaved the snowball over the wall.

  If you’d thrown it at me, I’d have taken off your head. I would have. Yes. Somehow.

  “Know what that is there, fresh fish?” The boy was pointing to scaffolding on the gable end of the building.

  “I don’t.”

  The scaffolding supported a wooden slide made from yellow planks. The slide sloped from the second-story gable window to a pit dug in the ground.

  “Up there is black room for fever cases. They push the dead ones out the window, and they tumble down into the pit. Have you had fever yourself?”

  “I have.”

  “Only once?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’ll get the relapse, then. I am Murty Larry O’Sullivan. I can sniff the ones to live and ones to die.”

  “Which am I?”

  But Warden Conachree came out on the steps, shaking a bell, the sound banging across the stone yard, and Fergus followed Murty into one of the ranks hastily forming.

  Paupers stood coughing and scratching while the little warden wandered up and down the ranks, peering into their faces.<
br />
  “Scouting for fever cases, the wee rogue,” Murty Larry said softly. “The overseers prefer paupers dead — it’s cheaper. They pay Warden sixpence for each one buried.”

  They filed into a long, gloomy hall with rows of benches facing each other down either side, and daylight filtering through broken windows high in the roof. Murty Larry pointed out a fat woman wearing a cloak, sitting on a stool near the fire. “Mam Shingle, our schoolmistress, the old whore. Her and Warden are robbing the Union blind. They say he’s bought a farm. Did you like that porridge they fed us?”

  “Trash, I thought it was.”

  “Cheap old dust! Workhouse has gone to Hell. In the old days I approved of the grub. Why, we used to have mutton every Saturday — it did me nicely.”

  He knew something of the ABCs, not enough to read or write easily. An old Waterloo hero gave lessons in one cabin or another on the mountain, costing a penny and a turf for the fire. He’d had the turf but rarely the penny.

  Mam Shingle lit her pipe and took a few puffs. The benches gradually filled with paupers of all ages, some carrying children in their arms. Instead of drilling them in ABCs, Mam Shingle began singing, in a high, quavering voice, a song about a white horse and a battle. She sang in Irish. Her accent was unfamiliar, and he could not make out half the words. Murty Larry was already dozing, chin on his chest, and many others appeared to be asleep. Fergus turned up the collar of his jacket. The fire was too small and far off to deliver any warmth. Smoke curdled through the room, until all he had in his head was its powerful gassy flavor.

  The old witch was still singing, but another song — he couldn’t make out a word. Perhaps it was the uilecan, a funeral cry.

  Perhaps it was.

  Slumped forward, or resting their heads on one another’s shoulders, most of the paupers seemed asleep. Knocked out by the lazy, heavy smoke clogging around the benches.

  Not knowing the words — were there words? — he began to sing with the old poison cook. Keening, an animal sound. Wind through trees. Rise and fall.

  Sensing a fluttering overhead, he looked up and saw a pigeon flapping around the beams. He stopped singing. More birds were fluttering in through broken windows, high in the ceiling.