Sean trotted off to the kitchen to find whatever Deirdre had put out for the groundsmen. Madigan went with him. Joseph took a few moments to stretch after the practice, which he could not convince Sean to do. As he headed off to the comforts of the kitchen, he heard a familiar ching of hardened metal on stone. He followed the tap, tap to the construction site of the garden wall. He felt the pull, felt time tugging at him, dragging him by his ears.
When he had been a little boy and his father had just begun to build stone walls and fancy garden terraces, his father had taken him to work with him on weekends. Not often, because his grandmother had clamored for him to come with her, or Anna had said it was time for him to learn rollerblading, rock climbing, kayaking, swimming, or any of the things that Anna had thought were good. That was before Anna had gone all mental and gotten divorced and then gotten even more mental. But when Joseph had gone with his father, his father had given him firm instructions.
“Take your Tonka truck and stay over there, not close to me, because I’m splitting Goshen stone and you could get hurt. Got it?”
And Joseph had tried to be a good boy, had tried to do as his father had told him, but somehow he’d never been a good boy. One time, he had picked up his yellow truck in both arms because the dumping mechanism had broken, and he’d taken it to his father who’d been tap, tap, tapping on a giant rock, and it had all happened so quickly, so many things converging. Joseph had held up the Tonka to his father, his father had swung the hammer on the rock, the rock had split, and Joseph had fallen, the truck popping up into the air and making a yellow-and-black spiral. Joseph had landed on the sharp edge of the rock, his hand coming down on the newly exposed, surgically sharp edge of stone. A red river of blood had poured from the side of his hand. His father had dropped the hammer.
“Can’t you stay out of trouble for two minutes? For two lousy minutes? What good are you?”
Joseph wondered if everyone was dragged around by memories the way he was. He couldn’t shake the bad memories of his father, and at the same time he knew he was missing something important that should be remembered about his father. What was he missing?
He made his way to the stonemason, who held a stout pole under one large rock, ready to move it.
“Can you give me a hand here, lad? Can you put some of your fine wrestling arms to moving some stone?”
Oh, yes, he could do that. If only his father had asked him in the easy way of the stonemason. And if only his father had winked and smiled, and if only he had tousled his hair. If only.
Deirdre stirred a pot of sauce. Its aroma was enough to make Joseph pass out. He’d never really seen anyone pass out from pleasure, but he had never tasted anything like Deirdre’s cooking. She cooked a lot of things that were a cross between cakes and puddings mashed together. There were a few things that Deirdre made that he couldn’t eat, but only a few, and they all had to do with the organ meats; at those moments he did the best he could to beg off.
Joseph had hazy memories of his mother pouring ingredients while he stood on a chair, eager to mix with a spoon. But how much could he expect to remember, when he was just four when she died? From then on, it had been just the two of them, his father and him. His grandmother had provided a neutral zone, and she’d enjoyed cooking on the weekends, but for the rest of the time, his father would stop at Burger King for a soda, burgers, and fries and bring the whole thing home. Or pizza, or maybe they’d stop at Subway. None of that had prepared Joseph for Deirdre’s cooking. And Taleen, nothing in his entire life had prepared him for Taleen. If Taleen walked near his food, it tasted even better, her scent lingering like a spice.
The only history about Ireland that Joseph knew was something about a famine, but he didn’t know when it was. From all indicators, there wasn’t a famine happening in Tramore. The gardens at the estate were lush and crammed full, or they had been crammed full; it was late fall and the harvest had come and gone. The trees were bare.
“Here, sit down. I’ll give you a dish of this so that you don’t die on the spot from wishing,” said Deirdre. She spooned in some moist cake, then covered it with a ladle full of the creamy sauce.
Joseph dove into it and ended by running his finger around the bowl, wiping up every crumb, down to each rivulet of cream. Madigan lay at his feet, with his head resting on Joseph’s boots. The dog followed each movement of the spoon.
“What sort of food does your family eat? I can’t tell if you devour this because it reminds you of home or because it is the thrill of eating a new and rare delight,” said Deirdre.
“My mother died when I was four. She had a riding accident; she was thrown by a horse.” They would understand a riding accident here.
“The death of a mum is a terrible thing,” said Deirdre. “Did your father marry again?”
Every time Deirdre mentioned his father, Joseph felt something big and powerful squeeze his skull, threatening to crush it.
“No, he didn’t remarry. There’s something about my father that I should remember, but I can’t,” he said and pushed his palms into the sides of his head.
“Sorry, lad. Let’s keep to food then. Here now, it grieves you to talk about your mum. Or is it your father that gives you the pain?”
“It’s my father. You’re right. Let’s keep to the food.”
She dug out a spoonful, tested the pudding, made a squeezed-up face, and looked skyward as she considered.
“The cows have gotten into the cabbage again. Turns the milk in a sharp way. I’ll send Con out to tell them that cows are not pigs. Pigs can turn the sharpness of cabbage to muscle. What has come over the lads looking after the herd? Nodding off, that’s what I think.”
Joseph couldn’t find one thing wrong with the pudding and thought Deirdre, despite all her strengths, might be a little too fussy. He reached across the table to a pie and tried to nudge a bit of crust that was perilously loose along the edge. Deirdre slapped his hand.
“Away with you,” she said.
Joseph smiled. Is this what it was like to have a mother—the firm swat on his knuckles, the persistent inquiry into his welfare? He stood up and looked down at the formidable woman, whose jarring green eyes always startled him. Madigan scurried to stand as well, as if he’d heard someone calling him.
“I don’t remember much of my mother, but you’re like a mum to me. Do you mind if I think that?” He had never said Mum before, and the way it sounded pleased him.
The late afternoon sunlight caught Deirdre’s face from an angle. “Think it if it gives you comfort, lad; we need all the comfort we can get.” Both of them looked toward the door, where Madigan stood impatiently.
“She’s not back from school yet,” said Deirdre, as if she could read his mind.
“I wasn’t thinking about Taleen,” he said, letting the lie fall off his tongue.
Deirdre took him by the hand and led him outside. “You’re a lad and lads are not very complicated, if you don’t mind me saying so. I know you find my cooking to your liking, but even my fine cooking is not reason enough for you to wander down to the kitchen as often as you do. You feel the pull of her.”
Deirdre let go of his hand as they emerged on the courtyard that overlooked the kitchen garden, the bare fruit trees trellising up the garden walls, and, further still, the stables.
“You’ll need to find one of your own, not from the servants. It would go badly for Taleen if the colonel knew that you fancied her.”
Joseph kicked at the remains of a dried pit from one of the trees.
“What would happen to Taleen?”
“He’d forbid it. He is very much against gentlemen taking up with Irish. He could send her away.”
Just then a gate squeaked, the sound carried by the moist air. From the upper pasture, Taleen came running, a book in her hand, the book that Joseph had taken from the colonel’s library. Nothing that Deirdre thought mattered nearly as much as Taleen gliding over the pasture, her hair spreading out like dark wings. Madig
an ran to meet her and danced circles around her.
This is my life now, thought Joseph, and this is how it was always meant to be. Living in the twenty-first century had been one big mix-up.
Chapter 26
Anna and Donal did not emerge from the whitewashed cottage for three more days, except to stumble out to pee, or to haul a bucket of water and pour it over their sweat-soaked bodies, gleaming in the November glare of midday light. Once Anna stepped outside naked, her hair damp and frizzing, rubbed into a tangled knot at the back of her head, just to breathe the cold air back into her lungs. Donal opened the door and pulled her back to him, wrapping his one arm across her chest, as a lifeguard might.
“Do you think we’ll catch on fire?” asked Anna, already dissolving into his chest, as if she’d been doing the backstroke and he’d been the ocean.
“Aye, we could go up in smoke. People have, you know. There are certain places where saints ignited and their ashes ascended to the heavens.”
She twisted her head around to catch a glimpse of the dark stubble on his face. “Are we being saintly? Do you think that people will remember us and that they’ll canonize us with sainthood?”
“I’ve no interest in saints, nor in what shreds of us will be remembered. Come back inside, Anna, and see if we can rise in our own smoke.”
What common language could they unravel? Anna had the language of technology, speed, the law, and sarcasm. And trickery, a thick layer of trickery that submerged her twenty-first-century world so that it did not peek out, embarrassed and naked in Ardgroom.
Donal had the language of the land, secret and submerged as well, used as a language that the English didn’t understand. The price for speaking it within earshot of the English was severe: loss of job, loss of the right to rent or worse. Anna continued to learn it, although her head threatened to burst from the effort.
She had learned that children had a saying for every day in school, when they were allowed to go to school. “Tell me again a saying for the day in Irish,” she asked him, running her finger along his collarbone. His shirt hung from a peg, trying to dry itself near the small peat fire.
“Molann an abair an fear,” he said. “The work praises the man.”
Anna was befuddled by the daily sayings, until she sat quietly, letting an ancient light shine in her brain. Then they became like Aesop’s fables or Celtic fortune cookies.
She wore a light linen shift, an underthing that months ago would have been too rough for her skin, but everything about her had grown firmer, as if even her skin cells had been lifting weights, tiny cells pumping iron. Anna knew she had lost weight, but for the first time in her life, she couldn’t run to a scale to determine how much weight. Instead she ran her hand along his chest, his shoulder, and the place where there should have been an arm. He did not flinch as she wrapped her palm around the thick stub just inches down from his shoulder.
“You’re drawn to it. How can that be? I could not bear to look at it when I was a boy, thinking that half my world was gone. A man builds a life, work, a family with two arms.”
Anna ran her fingers over the knotted scar tissue, the line of notches where thick stitches had once held his life together and saved him.
“Tell me how it happened,” she said, bringing her lips to his scar.
As she waited for him to speak, she loosened her hair, letting it fall around her shoulders.
“Thirty years ago, I was a lad of eight when the British troops ran through the streets of Cork to smash a suspected uprising. Me mum had sent me to a safe house outside town; she and all the others knew that the troops were coming. But I doubled back. I sensed something big was happening, huge like a storm and there was nowhere else where I wanted to be. I came around a corner and was trapped, surrounded by troops. I reckon the soldier was not fully grown himself, but proving himself, hardening his heart. With one buttery stroke of a sword, me arm had flew off, thudding in the street. I didn’t feel the pain of it for a long time, but I was shocked to see my very own arm laying so far from me, I’ll say that. I felt someone grab me up, and a woman took me into her arms and she ran down a little space between the houses and she took off her shawl and stuffed it around the stub of me arm. I can’t say why I lived or how they found a midwife to sew it tight enough to keep me from sending every ounce of my blood back into the earth. I remember her smell, crushed apples, and even as a boy, I took in her scent. It was the last thing I remembered for weeks.”
Anna got up to stir the hearth fire. She added more peat. She could now manage a peat fire flawlessly.
“Hurting children is a way to break the spirit of a people,” she said, as much to herself as to Donal. She settled back in next to him on their pile of clothes and blankets.
“But there is nothing broken about you,” she said, rubbing her palm in a circular motion on his belly.
Donal rolled to his side and pulled her close.
“You’re fixing everything there is to fix. If you don’t stop, I’ll sprout another arm.”
Later, when her leg escaped from the heat under the blankets, he ran his foot along her scar.
“So you’ve been marked by the sea,” he said, glancing over at her lower leg with the racing stripe of a scar running from knee to ankle. “Nearly all of us here are, in one way or another.”
No one else had seen the scar except for the midwife who had stitched her leg, and Glenis and Tom. Anna had never seen a scar as vivid or as large as this one. She rubbed her leg.
“It will get lighter as time passes; it won’t look as angry and bright after a year,” she said. A wool blanket only partially covered them. Their bodies still warm from sex, neither wanted more heat. Anna rolled into the side of him and stretched with abandon, arching her spine, pressing her belly into him, forming a C with her body.
“Anna, I think you like sex as much as a man. And I’m not complaining even the smallest amount, but I didn’t know it was possible.”
She realigned her spine and rose up on her elbows, pushing long ropes of hair off her shoulders. She looked at him, this pre-AIDS, pre-genital herpes, pre-papilloma virus man who had only had sex with the one woman who had been his wife and given birth to their children. What could she tell him that would explain growing up in the culture of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries?
She folded her arms on his chest and laid her chin on her arms so that she could look straight at him. “Most of the time a woman worries about getting pregnant while having sex, especially if she doesn’t want to be. That takes away from the enjoyment and she feels alone, rather than with her husband, at the moment of greatest pleasure. Or if she wants to be with child, then she can only think of that, and not what’s happening, not the wonder of all the elements of two people fusing into one.”
He sat up, and Anna tumbled off him like a cat. “Is that what it’s like for you?” he asked. “Did you feel my elements fuse with yours? Because whatever happened for you was so very large and shocking.”
In law school, the word was all-important; each word had to carry an exact weight and meaning. Words meant everything. But she had never tried to put words to an orgasm before, so how would she do it now, using only nineteenth-century words? She wanted to use words about trains with happy cars rushing along the tracks at incredible speeds, exploding with crackling energy, then chugging happily into a warm station, sighing. No. She also wanted to use analogies of sky diving, hang gliding, all the over-the-top sports that she had tried on vacation in Cancun. No, these would not do.
“It’s like this, like you and I are riding down a river, floating at first, hand in hand or hand in foot, or any other body parts that we would perhaps least expect in contact with another body part, here there or anywhere, and the river’s current picks up speed, sends us careening around heart-stopping rapids, and you and I must hold onto each other and our insides turn molten. Not hot like a blacksmith’s fire but hot as if the smallest bits of ourselves have expanded and with each expansion we
see the most dazzling spectacle of colors inside our brains shouting directly from our sex parts (a term that Anna had settled on after considering all possibilities) and we hurtled down the rushing river with something both excruciating and near God-like, and when we don’t think we can bear it one more second without destroying ourselves in a celestial explosion of stars, we hear the roar of a massive waterfall ahead and there is no possible way for us to stop. The current grabs us and jerks us this way and that and suddenly we are over the top of the waterfall, and we are airborne, not knowing if we will live or die, entwined with each other. Gravity pulls at us and we spin, topple, head earthward and a pool of water catches us, dizzy and breathless as we are, struck dumb. We sink below the surface and finally come up for air and drag ourselves to a sandy shore, only able to stare at each other and gasp for breath. That’s what it’s like.”
Donal put his hand on the back of her head, pulling her toward him. “Well,” he said. “I thought so.”
Chapter 27
It had been more than a week since Anna had wondered if her family and friends had forgotten her or if her law school buddies had stopped calling. Had anyone filed a missing person’s report about her and Joseph? Had she been accused of kidnapping Joseph, irritating minor that he was?
These thoughts had pressed so hard on her in the first few months after barreling through a time chasm, a slippery slide that had dropped her off in 1844. Now they were softening and losing their urgency. She stopped trying to calculate quantum physics and the string theory of time. Cleary, time had its own validity, and just because she couldn’t explain it, there was no reason to deny it. Anna no longer had the desire to see the exact formula. It turned out she had plenty of desire, bubbling over, erupting, undulating spine desires. But not for formulas; instead, she had desire for this man seated next to her on the bench seat of the cart, giving the horse a lackadaisical snap of the reins, more of a leather nudge. They were way off schedule—not that the Irish would adhere to any schedule, but they had stayed days longer than planned at the cottage in Ardgroom. But smuggling did adhere to the shipping schedules, which were also given to the whimsy of ocean and wind. They were all ultimately guided by the sea. Still, here she was, a smuggler.
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