1892

by Paul Butler

  I halted just past the threshold, the door flapping closed behind me, numbing their laughter. Kathleen was standing not four feet from me. Cymbals clashed in my ears and sent all thought scurrying for the cover. Her stare pinioned me with such an improbable combination of emotion – shock, hope, disgust, horror, yearning – that I believed for an instant this must be some waking dream. I waited for her to melt into the wavering heat of the day, but she did not.

  “They told me I would find you here but I hoped they were lying.”

  The words had come out in a delicate stream, and I was put in mind of an illustration in a book of fairy tales I had once gazed at when I was a small boy. It was of a hideous, horned monster lapping at a fast-running river with its huge, spotted tongue. The following illustration, I remembered, had been torn from the book. Although I hadn’t believed her at the time, my mother had told me that on the missing page the monster had turned into a handsome young prince.

  “I was asking the landlord for water,” I said instantly, surprised at my inventiveness. “I need it for the horses.”

  She watched my face carefully, trying to discern whether there could be any truth in my words. Though I could feel my face burning, I was floating from myself, and I felt no remorse or embarrassment. As she had taken me by surprise, I reasoned, she had broken the rules and I could not be held to account for anything she might find out about me. Yet at the same time, I hovered above both of us, wondering vaguely how far this shabby creature would have to climb to be the man she seemed to want him to be, and how far he was falling from that standard with each further lie.

  She raised her hand to catch a wisp of her hair which had been snatched by the breeze. She laid it back over her ear. Suddenly an ache, more profound than any hangover, took hold of me and I was firmly rooted in myself again, feeling a punishment far worse than any a devil could conceive.

  “No!” I said, letting the fire in my heart breathe through my lips.

  “No?” she repeated, squinting from the sun.

  “It wasn’t the horses,” I said. “I was trying to get drunk.” Why was this woman torturing me? Couldn’t she see there was no hope for either of us? I turned away for a moment and watched the distant, parched landscape of O’Brien’s farm and the gawping figures of Norris and Ryan who had both stopped work entirely. Ryan leaned on a rake. Norris left the cow she had been milking and came to swing on the broken fence like a ten-year-old child. I turned back to Kathleen again, shoulders slumped. “You’ll have to leave me in peace, that’s all.”

  The words slid out and I knew there might soon follow a mountain of regret the like of which I had never known. But she didn’t move. Not right away. She just stared and frowned as mothers do at children.

  “What happened?” she asked.

  Kathleen

  At first I thought I was hurt by it. Here was the man who had stolen for me, followed me home in the day, and at night had tapped upon the dark, frosted glass of my dreams until something in me had yielded. He had made me love him, and it was a betrayal, as well as a broken contract, to tell me now to leave him in peace.

  But there was more to it than this, and I sensed I might be to blame. There was something in his dark eyes I had not seen before, something quite beyond the hunger and need I had already seen in them. There is a look that comes over dogs when they are close to starvation, a vacancy, an absence of want. This is what I saw in the crumpled clothes, the caked mud of his jacket, and the eyes flaring with frustration one moment then dying to indifference the next. Something really serious had gone wrong, and I knew I had to withhold judgment until I knew what it was.

  “It’s no use,” he said, turning from me again.

  Against my better instincts, as we were in the open and I could sense distant eyes appraising us already, I stepped toward him and even touched the sleeve of his mud-caked jacket.

  “What’s no use?” I asked, a note of pleading in my voice.

  “Me,” he replied, and I became aware that, despite the heat, he was shivering. “I’m no use.”

  My hand would not let go of his sleeve and a series of small tremors swept through me as though transferring themselves from the violent tumult within him. Warm tears kissed the rims of my eyes, and spilled over my cheek. He saw this and allowed me to draw close. My forehead came to rest in the sweat-moistened hollow of his neck. His arms came around me.

  _____

  “Why does it matter that they’ve seen us?” I asked. The leaves rustled so loudly in the gathering wind that, even though Tommy lay beside me, I had to raise my voice a little to be heard.

  “It just does,” he said still staring at whatever patch of sky he could see through the moving gauze of twigs. “They’re from a different world, and I don’t want that world to meet the one we’re in now.”

  “I think you’ll find it’s all the same world.” I smiled and took another blade of grass in my fingers, rolling it until the green rubbed off on my skin. It seemed appropriate somehow that I too should be dyed by the colours of nature. Tommy with his caked mud, or whatever it was – at close proximity it smelled foul enough to be something else – and I with my green-stained hands might pass for children of the wood. When we left this place, I thought, we would emerge for the first time from innocence and beauty.

  I knew what he meant about the two worlds. In the universe I inhabited, the priest would have taken him inside and explained all the steps of redemption. He would have recognized innate goodwill, no matter how wretched the man who appeared before him. The pain of anger rose in waves each time I let myself think of it and I knew that I would be capable of genuine fury if I were to come across the robed hypocrite. I was glad Tommy had at least damaged the Cathedral window, but I was alarmed at the depths to which he had fallen. “How did you get that stuff all over you anyway?” I asked, dropping the grass and rolling on top of him again, feeling his bony ribs, taut chest and shoulders.

  “O’Brien threw me onto the ground.” He said it so casually I almost believed the intelligence to be as unremarkable as his tone suggested.

  “He did what?” I asked.

  He sighed wearily in reply as though tiring of the endless stream of confessions that being in my company demanded from him.

  “When he found me on the ground in the morning, he picked me up and threw me back into some . . . muck.”

  A burning sensation crept up my neck, reaching my cheeks. Whether it was the horror of the injustice, or the quiet acceptance with which he spoke about it, I couldn’t tell, but inside I was a bristling animal about to take on his fight.

  “You can’t mean to carry on working in that place,” I said quietly, willing him toward some show of indignation. But he merely blew out his cheeks and touched the hair over my ear with his warm fingers.

  “If I’m to be paid anything, I must go back to work before he returns,” he said vaguely. “Even then it’s far from certain.”

  I pushed myself off his chest, curled one leg under the other, and sitting, watched him from above.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked, tilting his head and squinting from the sun.

  “I’ve fallen for a man who is assaulted by his employer and daubed all over in filth, but doesn’t feel the need to find himself a more respectable situation.”

  He gave a bitter laugh and rose surprisingly swiftly to a sitting position to face me.

  “It’s not that simple,” he said, eyes darkening. His Adam’s apple rolled up and down inside his bristly neck. “You think there are people lining up to hire the likes of me in this place? Have you not seen the signs: ‘Catholics need not apply’?”

  “So you claim to be a Catholic now when it’s just the thing that would hold you back?”

  “That’s just a word,” he said brow deeply furrowed, eyes searching the dusty earth for an explanation. “It’s more than t
hat. Everyone is connected here. You need references for work. Do you think O’Brien would give me that?”

  The wind curled around us, catching the leaves, rippling them with laughter. “You’re working for a man who won’t give you a reference? Tommy, you’ve got the whole thing on its head. He won’t treat you decently if you don’t expect decent treatment.” He rocked one way then the other on his knees as though trying to escape the question. “Tommy,” I said sharply, trying to recapture his attention. “Your standards are too low.”

  The same look of blank defeat I had seen before passed over his face. “Well,” he said, knees scraping from the dust. “For now, I have to get back to work.” He glanced at me nervously as he rose. The deep sting that had come to my heart when he told me about the priest returned. Suddenly I could see he was trapped, and that whatever name he gave it – the English, O’Brien, prejudice, Catholics, Protestants – these were his chains, forged to such detailed specifications, such cunning knowledge of his weaknesses, that he would never break free of them without help.

  We embraced once more, sadly this time, and I took in the scent of his liquor-enriched breath, a nursery fragrance for me, then we walked together through the woods to the place where he was no longer comfortable for me to follow. I smiled after him, managing a half-wave as he clambered over O’Brien’s fence and looked back, searching for me amidst the brush. I watched him then trudge heavily through the cow pats, careless, apparently, about where he trod. I knew I could not leave him there; something had to be done.

  Twelve

  Kathleen

  I knew this was where he slept as soon as I crept in; I could sense his presence in the air. Then I saw a small pile of dog-eared books under the straw mattress. Bending closer, I read the faded title, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and reached out to touch the line-illustration of two boys on a raft.

  A sentiment warmer than the Mississippi River flooded through me, a rush of affection for the child who had grown to a man in the midst of utter squalor, holding onto his boyhood while his life crumbled and rotted around him. The beams of sunlight coming through the gaps in the planking brightened. Stripes ringed the dim barn, catching the little lamp of iron and glass that hung from the rope, the rim of a broken cartwheel in the corner, and a box of matches beside the books. Like an undertow a second revelation followed the first: Tommy was good. He was a decent, kind, honest person. He lied sometimes, but only when the weight of a merciless addiction was full upon him. He stole, but not for personal gain. Tommy was what happened to a fragile soul in a world of endless self-importance and cruelty. Those white hands that pinioned him outside the Cathedral would never allow him to prosper if they could prevent it. The priest would always presume to judge, guarding the road to salvation for the favoured few. The pig of a man he toiled for worked just as hard to keep him in the dirt. Everybody wanted to feel superior to someone, and the weight of all these people held him down. Only a strong man could break free of it, and Tommy was not a strong man. I knew I had to intervene.

  A bestial snort made me start and look around. Through a gap in the fence a furry snout poked, its huge nostrils quivering. There was no sunlight coming through this part of the wall, and I realized that this human habitation – if it could be so called – was part of two chambers and that the other part was for animals. This horse, like the one outside my employer’s home, sensed something. What? I wondered. Why had I come here? I could feel the roll of a battle drum in my chest and the blood began rushing around my head, but I had no idea what I planned. My eyes glanced around the barn once more as though to find an answer; they settled on the matchbox.

  Tommy

  The mare in the barn whinnied loud enough to unsettle the cow. She let out a low, warning moan and flicked her heavy tail. My hands dropped from the warm teats and I listened. Another noise seemed to carry on the wind – a woman’s urgent whisper beckoning me by name. Had I conjured Kathleen from the heat and dust of the farm? I remained motionless.

  “Tommy!” it came again.

  I raised my head. Norris was milking a few yards away. Ryan was some way behind her, hammering a fence post.

  My trousers clung to me as I lifted myself from the stool, and I wondered how not to draw attention to myself. If, for some reason unforeseen, Kathleen had followed me onto the farm, I could not bear the idea of their ignorant stares besmirching her with grins and insinuations. “I’ll come back to this one,” I said casually in their general direction. “I’ll milk the smaller cow, the one behind the barn.”

  Norris looked up from her work, shrugged, and continued inexpertly pumping at the poor animal’s teats. God, that woman was stupid! I had no recollection at all of talking to her in a tone that was not deliberately gruff or sarcastic. Why would I confer with her so politely after all this time – unless I was up to something? An animal with the brain the size of chicken would have known to be suspicious. But Norris was satisfied.

  I made my way around the barn. As though overhearing my excuse, the small cow had turned to watch my approach. There was another whinny from inside the barn, this one louder than the last. Then Kathleen came into view. Like an image from a painting of angels, it seemed as though she was trailing a cloak of white clouds from her shoulders. She was like one transfixed; standing close to the barn wall, her eyes were alive with some new emotion. Her arm was outstretched, her finger pointing inside. As I drew up to her I could see thick smoke was billowing from the open entrance to my own sleeping quarters. It rose and spiralled in the wind.

  I went to enter but Kathleen held me back by the arm. “No!” she said.

  The thick cloud passed between us, and I reconsidered. “I have to get the animals out,” I told her and wrenched open the second door.

  I rushed inside. The horse pen was already filling with smoke which seeped in through the partition between this and my sleeping chamber. I slipped my hands over the nearest mare’s reins, whispering gently, keeping my own breathing soft so as not to alarm her. Her companion was becoming raucous in fear, hooves pounding the earth, and I knew time was short. I turned and led her out slowly, one arm stretched around her head shielding her eyes from the smoke. As I released her outside, she ran in an arc and snorted away the panic which had grown inside her.

  I glared a mute entreaty at Kathleen, willing her to go. There were mountains of hay in the barn. The wood was brittle and splintered. The place was surely doomed to flare into a bonfire and draw the idle rich from miles around; I could almost hear the murmur of crowd and the excited shrieks of children; the noise carried like a genie on the crackle and spark behind me. The torchlight of spectacle and disaster would be shone upon us. But there was no time to persuade with words, so I re-entered the barn. Thicker, darker smoke seeped through the slats now and I could even see the orange eye of the flame peering through. Was that my bed? I wondered. My books, perhaps? The second mare reared and neighed as though I were the cause of its terror. It barged into the rickety wall, causing the whole structure to shake, then quite unexpectedly it bolted past me, for the light. Kathleen, who had followed me in, had to jump aside.

  I allowed myself an instant of relief; the animal’s instinct had saved her. But what of the barn and why had this woman followed me in? I took Kathleen by the arm and led her out as I had done the horses except, angry that she had endangered herself, I squeezed her forearm tight. When we came into the open air again she twisted away from my fingers and looked up at me, wounded.

  “Why did you follow me in?” I whispered angrily, still half believing I could keep the whole event quiet.

  “I had to,” she replied, her other hand rubbing the skin where I had grabbed her. “It was my fault. I started the fire.”

  “What?” I said, shaking my head. I took a closer look at what I had taken to be an accusing expression. She was leaning toward me, staring deeply into my eyes as though pleading for understanding. It
wasn’t hurt I saw in her face now; it was guilt.

  “I just couldn’t stand it, where you live. I couldn’t help myself.”

  I turned from her to the smoke which now rose in thick, black plumes from the barn’s twin entrances. I couldn’t see any fire through the accumulating layers of smoke, but there was a prickling, unwholesome heat in the breeze, and from the darkness inside, I could hear an ominous crackle like the noise of an army of cockroaches munching. What has this woman done to me? I wondered. Unseen flames were eating not only through my home but also through my livelihood. Any attempt I could make to divert blame from myself would be utterly futile, I knew. I was already on very shaky ground.

  “Tommy,” she said. She claimed my attention this time by holding onto my cuff with her fingers. “I just couldn’t stand the way they treated you.”

  I stared at her face for a moment, watched the deepening light of late afternoon on her pale, freckled skin. A rebel puff of smoke wafted between us, and the oddest of phrases suddenly darted around my thoughts like a mad, exotic swallow unexpectedly released from one of my stranger dreams: this is love, the chain of words repeated and echoed until I focused upon it. I watched Kathleen for a moment longer, and felt I was viewing an impossible thing – a lizard in a dinner jacket, a camel playing the piano. Smoke coiled and wafted around us, and the phrase still zigzagged through my mind, ribbons of explanation now falling like loose tail feathers: she hated my livelihood; she hated my home; she hated these things because they were dismal and she wanted better for me.