“You snap him, Fergus!” Johnny urged. “Get your hands red. Be our chief.”
Looking over their heads, Fergus saw Luke’s slight figure roaming the distance.
He slipped the bayonet under his belt. “Get the kettle on. Chop the grub. We’ll bury her after.”
They were so thin and faint, so malleable, they couldn’t resist his orders; Johnny Grace falling in with the rest. Weak as moths, they moved to obey.
HOWLING THE uilecan, the funeral cry, the Bog Boys carried Mary Cooley out across the bog plain, then formed a hollow square and watched in silence while Fergus and Johnny Grace dug the grave, using spades left by turf cutters, chopping through bracken, through turf with gauze roots.
“Gently now,” Luke said.
Fergus took Mary Cooley’s wrists. Luke and Johnny took her ankles. It was still early, but the light had stalled. They swung her out over the hole. Water had seeped in already. The bottom was shining black. They set her down without making a splash.
No one spoke.
He picked up the spade and was about to start filling in, but Luke touched his arm.
“Time for you all to think.” She stared into the hole for a few moments, then looked around at the Bog Boys, studying their faces. Luke wore Shamie’s soldier jacket, her hands plunged in the pockets. “There is dead and there is life and there is something in between,” she said quietly. “I have been living in a strange country and somehow I want to go home again. I suppose us all wants so. Boys, the only way is bravery.”
When she paused, he heard wind moving through the bracken. He knew the storm was coming.
“We must take the thing in our hands,” she said. “Call it a raid, call it a venture, and make war of it. Make a beautiful battle if they try to stop us.”
The cold aroma of fresh turf.
Once, cutting fuel with his cousins and uncles, they had unearthed a strange, white thing. He’d thought it was a fish, but they insisted it was the pure body of a young girl. Later he heard them say she was a queen, with rings on her fingers and a blue stone held tight in her fist. He did not recall seeing any such things himself.
“This girl here,” Luke said, “it wasn’t Shamie’s fucking that killed her. He is a stupid, guff fellow, but I myself have been with fellows worse, much rougher — had them over me, using me; maybe you have too — they were gentlemen, some of them. It hurts, but it don’t kill you. No, Mary died because she was too small to live, because she hadn’t rations, just like you. And where is the food? Where is it?”
“Where is it, Luke?” asked the Little Priest, one of the smallest Bog Boys.
“The farmer has it. The farmer has hugged all the food of the country. If you are looking for a murderer, why, there he is.”
“There he is,” Johnny Grace said. “You’re right, Luke.”
Fergus realized what she was doing. She had put something in the air, a charge, he could taste it. Gunpowder.
But her plans were vapor. She had no plans, only wishes.
She had courage but no patience. Hers wasn’t the temper of a hunter.
“So, Mary Cooley,” Luke said, “here you are, girl, into the ground.”
The Bog Boys were standing almost soldierly, their feyness and weakness disguised behind solemn faces.
“Let your soul keep us. Keep us strong and brave, guide us as we go for war. Make them old farmers answer —”
“Answer in blood,” whispered Johnny Grace.
“Answer in blood, for what they’ve done.”
“Answer in blood,” the Bog Boys murmured.
“Strength and courage,” Luke intoned. “Watch over us. We’re your soldiers now.”
Luke nodded at Fergus, and he threw the first spadeful of soil down upon the dead girl, trying not to look at her face.
EVERY NIGHT, as the old moon was dying, Luke would wrap herself in the teamster’s greatcoat and lie on Mary Cooley’s grave until Fergus came out and led her to bed.
They could not get enough of each other in those nights before war.
After their convulsions, he lay warmed by the heat flowing from her body. The little scalpeen was suffused with her sexual smell.
“I am full when you’re in me, Fergus,” she said one night, idly playing with his hair as he lay across her. “Don’t feel the empties. No sadness at all. I wish we might stay connected all the time.”
In such interludes, between bouts of craving, he too was content.
“Know why I didn’t kill Shamie?” she asked him one night.
He shook his head.
“It isn’t that I’m a girl and felt soft. I’d have killed him easier than slaughter a pig. But Shamie is the only one who can load and fire. He tried showing me the musket drill, but I couldn’t follow. He gets so red in the face — pinched, yelling — I had to laugh. But Shamie, he can put three or four bangs in the air fast as anything. There. Do you think I’m wrong, Fergus? Think I’m cold? Do you hate me?”
He turned on his side to look at her. It was strange how you connected with a girl, violence mixed with peculiar tenderness. And you thought you were deep inside, but you weren’t. No one was. Other people, machines of independent mystery.
“Fergus? What are you thinking, boy?”
“We are all cold inside, aren’t we?”
Luke seized his hand and kissed the pad of soft skin under his thumb and rubbed her cheek with it.
“We are an army,” she said.
Hunger (II)
“TONIGHT IS BATTLE,” Luke told them.
The old moon was finally dead. The loam sky glittered with stars. Clutching sticks sharpened at both ends, the Bog Boys stood about the fire.
“After a battle is always a song — always. Do well, behave strong, and we’ll be sung from one end of the country to another. They’ll be a song with our names stuck in like nails.”
Don’t need songs, Fergus thought. Need quiet. A plan. Directness.
But they all were ready to follow her, even Shamie. Even himself.
And perhaps that was enough of a plan.
LUKE ARRANGED the smallest and weakest Bog Boys directly behind her, at the front of the column, where they couldn’t straggle. Shamie carried the musket, Luke a pitchfork, Johnny Grace an iron spade. The others were armed with sharpened sticks.
Impressed with themselves, awed and solemn, the Bog Boys set out on the night march in better than their usual disarray. Shamie brought up the foot of the column, carrying the musket flat across his shoulder, fist around the muzzle. The Little Priest skipped up and down the column, plucking at their sleeves.
“Will I do something mighty?” the boy asked Fergus, touching his hand.
“I don’t know.”
They were calm and easy, traveling across the bog plain — soft ground, their ground, but he could feel the tension increasing as the column trailed through the abandoned village at the edge of the bog, past the cabin wrecks and the heaps of rubble marking graves.
A dove fluttered off a broken wall and the whole column froze.
“It’s all right, only a bird,” Luke reassured. “She’s wishing us well. Come along now, men. Easy now.”
Moving farther and farther from the safety of the bog, the column trailed across frosted pastures and meadows. He heard boys whimpering and pissing the ground. Like cattle, they were uneasy on the move in strange country.
Luke finally led them out on a hard road with stone walls flanking both sides and a grassy verge bearded with frost.
Shamie hustled from the rear of the column, breathless with protest. “Luke! You promised we shouldn’t travel on roads!”
“We can slip the walls easy enough, if we have to. We can get lost if we need, Shamie dear. Don’t worry.”
“Dragoons patrol the roads!”
“No dragoons tonight,” Fergus said, “only a few Frenchmen.”
Shamie jabbed the muzzle into Fergus’s belly. “You’d like to see me flogged, wouldn’t you? I know your kind — you’re a Fe
eny, ain’t you? You’re a Thin Boy, a rebel bastard —”
“Shamie! Get back in line!” Luke hissed.
Swinging the muzzle, Shamie pointed at Luke’s chest. Fergus heard a metallic-snap as the hammer cocked.
“What is this, Shamie?” said Luke quietly.
“What I please.” The soldier’s wrists were shaking.
Luke laid one finger against the barrel. “Will you blow my heart out?”
“No roads!” Shamie cried. “You promised we’d keep off the road!”
“Time of war, you tell me what holds, Shamie — what promises.” Luke spoke softly. “Rations or a fight — that’s all I promised the Bog Boys. That should be enough.”
Shamie held the gun level.
If Luke was shot, Fergus decided, he would seize a boulder from the wall and smash Shamie before he could reload. Break his legs, crack his head. But Luke still would be dead.
“Do it, then,” Luke said calmly. “Go, Shamie. Get it done, then. Fire away.”
The Bog Boys were watching, twittering anxiously, like sparrows on a branch.
“Are you going to or not?” she said impatiently.
Slowly, Shamie lowered the weapon. “You know I’m one with you, Luke — it’s only this fellow. Perhaps he is a spy.”
“Get back in line now, Shamie,” Luke said. “You must save any stragglers.”
“The Bog Boys we are,” Shamie groaned. “We don’t belong to no road.”
“Everyone must keep their place in line of march. I’m counting on you, Shamie.” She looked back at the Bog Boys. “No stragglers. No voice men. Quiet and carefully. Forward, boys.”
She led them down the road, carrying the pitchfork over her shoulder. The column shook itself and stumbled after her. Shamie stood aside and let them pass, and Fergus wondered if the soldier was going to desert the Bog Boys now, and slip away across the fields. He hoped this would happen, but a few minutes later when he looked back Shamie was there at the foot of the column, impatiently herding the smallest boys.
THEY ENTERED the wood where once he had hunted badger with his dog. At night the wood seemed unfamiliar, but the cold, weird smell of a small brook he remembered. The Bog Boys splashed across, ankle-deep, one after another, the water biting cold, the bottom grainy.
“Take the head now, Fergus,” Luke said after they had all crossed the brook. “It’s your country, after all.”
The Bog Boys were clumsy in the unfamiliar wood, stumbling over roots, slipping on greasy leaves. Finally Fergus had each one grab the shirt of the boy in front. The connection seemed to settle them. Holding on to each other, the column curled through the wood, quiet as smoke.
Looking up through networks of branches, Fergus saw yellow stars. They came out on a lane and he recognized gouges left by cartwheels. They were approaching the farm.
Suddenly he doubted if he could be an outlaw after all, if he had the heart for murderous intent. A familiar whiff of manure and chimney smoke left his throat as dry as bark. He wished he was alone and had never met Luke and could disappear.
They passed an oat field where Carmichael’s cattle usually grazed on the winter stubble, but there were no cattle out tonight.
He heard a sound and stopped abruptly. The column jammed up behind him.
Hooves scratching.
Leather noise.
A horse was coming up the road.
He gestured for the Bog Boys to skip over the nearest wall. They tumbled across and squatted in thick, cold grass along the base of the wall, their backs to the stones.
The land before them sloped from the road. Carmichael’s orchard of small, tough apple trees.
He listened.
“Only one alone,” Luke said.
Shamie was using his teeth to tear open a cartridge.
“No firing!” Luke whispered.
Fergus peered over the wall.
“Who is it?” Luke asked. “Travelers? Churchmen? Can we rob them?”
It was the farmer, Carmichael, sitting heavy as iron aboard his beauty mare.
Shamie banged the butt of his musket on the grass, tamping the charge, then brought it to his shoulder.
“Shamie — no!”
The shot was simple and abrupt, like a piece of wood splitting. Shamie was enveloped in dense white smoke.
The farmer slumped on the mare’s neck for a few paces before tumbling off. His foot caught in the stirrup and he was dragged along the road by the frightened mare like a fox dragged by hunters.
“Have we killed them?” Johnny Grace asked eagerly.
Boys were hopping up and down to see over the wall.
“Is it dragoons?”
“Where’s the rations?”
“Is it fighting?”
Shamie was tearing open another paper cartridge. Fergus felt sick. Luke touched his arm. “There it is, Fergus, there it is,” she said softly.
Shamie grinned, his long face stained with powder. “Took him in the brains. Now we may help ourselves.”
Luke stepped up to the soldier and Fergus thought she was going to strike him, but she stroked his arm instead. “You must keep up steady firing, Shamie, when we reach the farm, and hold the others off.”
“You can’t go now,” Fergus insisted. “They’ll be waiting, he has sons, they have a bell gun. We’ll never get away.”
“Come on! All of you!” Luke cried. “Over the wall! Boldly now! Up the road!”
Clutching their double-pointed sticks, yelping, the Bog Boys swarmed over the wall as Fergus watched, stunned. Even Shamie went over eagerly, climbing like a spider, his military equipment creaking. Smaller boys struggled to hoist themselves.
“Come on,” Luke said, holding out her hand to Fergus. “Here is war, old man. Be sweet, Fergus. This is our night.”
Boys were running up the road and disappearing into the dark, screaming.
His throat was painfully dry, as if a fire inside had scorched everything.
“Live or die, don’t matter,” she said. “Not really. I’d be better with you, Fergus.”
He still did not move. She turned away. He watched her throw her spade over the wall. He imagined her torn to pieces, her blood entering the ground. She went over neatly.
He saw her pick up the spade, start down the road. She did not look back.
The aroma of apples filled his head.
He heard the crack of a shot from Shamie’s musket and a deep, answering boom from another gun.
His bones felt heavy. He would only have strength to travel a little way alone. He would be sick. He’d lie down in some ditch.
If you lay down alone, you’d never get up. You needed a reason. She was the reason.
Sharp screams, two gunshots, and an undertone of yelling floated down the road.
He climbed over the wall and started down the road toward the shouts and firing.
THE IRON gate at the entrance was swinging loose, squealing on its hinges. He stood by the pillar. The farmhouse was closed with iron shutters except one upstairs window where a light burned.
He could see Luke, Shamie, and a group of boys sheltering behind the storehouse. Boys were being boosted up and wriggling through a narrow window, dropping inside.
Two more boys were lying in the open between the buildings, and he could tell from their flat, uneasy shapes they were dead.
As he watched, Shamie stepped out briskly from behind the storehouse, took aim at the farmhouse, fired, then stepped back to shelter. Acrid smoke hung in the air.
He heard a horse whinnying. The red mare was pacing restlessly in front of the stable, dragging Carmichael on the stones.
As Fergus dashed for the storehouse, a gun fired from the farmhouse window, and he saw bits of iron shot sparkled on the paving. He made it to safety behind the storehouse wall, crashing into Luke, who threw her arms around him and kissed his mouth. Her lips tasted of salt and he felt her quick wet tongue; felt her bones through the clothes.
“They are killing my boys, the fuck
ing farmers.”
He was glad for coming after her, glad for courage, if that was what it was. Glad for being ready to die.
Shamie finished reloading and cautiously peered around the corner. “You take care,” Luke said, patting his hip. “Don’t let them clip you.”
“Takes a farmer a year to reload,” the soldier said disdainfully.
Stepping out from the wall, he brought the musket smartly to his shoulder, discharged, then stepped back and immediately began his drill of reloading.
“Beautiful firing, Shamie, beautiful!”
The Little Priest was tugging at Fergus’s sleeve. “They’re eating butter inside.”
“Fergus, if you please, go inside and stop the fellows gorging. Start passing out whatever we can carry way. We must get away before light. Shamie and I will hold the farmers off — never I seen such beautiful firing, Shamie! Fergus, you must get ’em started passing out the rations.”
“Farmers have pikes,” Shamie said. “Don’t you go inside, Luke! Stay with me, as cavalry supports the infantry.”
“I will, Shamie, I will, I’ll spike them and you can shoot off their heads.” She turned to Fergus. “Yellow meal, butter, bacon, ham — whatever you think we can carry off. See if there’s any axes, pikes, or blades we can use. Quickly, now. It’ll be light soon.”
Boosted on the shoulders of two boys, he wriggled through the deep little window and dropped into the storehouse. Sickles and scythes hung on the walls on pegs — the same ones he and his father had used, making Carmichael’s crop in the sun.
There were unopened crates of nails and sacks of sand, for mixing cement. A rack of fir planks, sorted by size. Sheet iron, intended for the roof of a new piggery, lay against one wall. Carmichael worshipped neatness, never trusting what he could not lay his hands upon. Insisting ground was his, even if others had named it and were buried in it. If Carmichael couldn’t see something, it didn’t exist, as far as he was concerned.
A trapdoor yawed open to a root cellar, once a place of concealment for saints and martyrs hiding from the bloody invaders. It was lit by a yellow lantern that greased the air with its fumes. Peering through the hole, he could see the Bog Boys feeding like maggots on a bone. He started down the ladder rungs.
The Law of Dreams Page 10