Grace

by Paul Lynch

  Gimme some plug, she says.

  He smacks his hands together. That’s it. Say it again.

  She fills the pipe and tamps it with her thumb and he leans in and lights it with a dirty smile.

  Where did you get them lucifers? she says.

  I stole them.

  She tokes on the pipe, fills her lungs, and blows the smoke clean out, does not cough once. He stares at her with a slack-jaw mouth, realizes he has been wound up. She drops her voice low and husky as if it has been worn out from excitement. You smoke like a wee girl, Colly.

  You sound like a man, he says.

  The rain comes yoked to a hooded sun, unfastens and falls like a cloak. This continuing warp of season and its slurs. You must ignore the rain. You cannot tense, otherwise the cold enters your bones. You must walk like it is not a bother to you—like this. You must think that you will be dry again, for you will. The way it has rained this October murders the memory of warm September. And tomorrow it is November the first, the quickening of winter, though hardly worse weather will come of it. The fairy pooka have come to pluck November from the calendar and corrupt another month.

  Colly has produced from his coat the broken umbrella. It is useless and raggy against the rain but still he persists with it. In the lowlands they pass lazy beds that lie in ridges along the pale hillsides, like the rotting ribs of some dropped-dead beast, she thinks. The ruined stubble fields are but a memory of green. Now they suck uselessly upon the rain. Everywhere there are great puddles like stoups, holy water for all the tin cans in the world if a priest had want to bless them.

  These roads are too quiet. Perhaps it is the rain, for it is not usually like this. Even children and beggars are keeping indoors under leaky roofs. The townlands beginning to thicken with cabins filled with peat smoke to burn the spying eyes that watch them pass and sometimes a curious face leans out. Not a turnip head on a stick to be seen among the poor this Samhain. By the bridge in Cockhill they are accosted by a woman who stands threadbare to the rain and drunk by the looks of it. She mutters some curse at them or perhaps what she asks is for a coin but Grace pulls Colly along by the wrist the moment he begins to chat with her.

  She says, don’t be telling people all our business.

  He says, I was only having fun with her. She stank like a dog.

  She says, you can tell a wild lot from the eyes of a person. The who of them and what they want and how mad they are.

  When they reach Buncrana town they are dark with wet. Colly cupping the lucifers to his chest, for they have gotten soaked in his pocket. She takes them off him and puts them in her satchel. Who would want to be a man? she says. The way breeches stick to your legs and make you cold, it is worse than being in a skirt. And a hat just sends drip into your eyes. You are better off with a shawl over your head. A man’s clothing is so ill-considered.

  Colly shakes his head at her. You canny run in a skirt.

  The sky is slate and sits so low upon the market town she thinks of the lid of a coffin, then tries to unthink the thought. Everything under these clouds is sodden. A horse trough is overwhelmed and sputters. A bill on a yellowing wall announcing some public meeting is folding over itself. She sees a man in a doorway with his eyes to the ground scratching at himself and there are others, people who look like they have stepped out of their bodies to become their own shadows tight to a doorway or wall. The town, it seems, is held in a kind of stupor. And such a shush. She hears some angry voice rise up, it seems, against the rain but the rain beats the voice down. It is a quiet she does not remember. You would expect to see more going on, the movement of booley cattle through the streets after being taken down from the hills for the Samhain. People taking to drunkenness. But the main street keeps a Sunday’s quiet. She tries to hear what hides behind the rain but it is a mask over everything. What is held within that sound are all things but it is the rain that decides what is and what isn’t.

  A scrawn of donkey tethered to a post turns its head with curiosity. Colly leans in as they walk past, swells up his teeth. Hee-haw! he says. Grace points to an awning that hangs over the street and pulls him by the elbow until they are under it. Colly takes off his cap and hammers it off his hand. She pushes him. Quit shaking your wet all over me.

  You can’t get any wetter.

  The church rings the quarter hour then twice upon the half hour. A dark hound steps onto the street with a lowered head as if it has taken a beating. It is then she sees a bone tied to its tail. She pinches Colly’s elbow. She says, do you think it is some kind of omen? Or perhaps it’s just a trick.

  A door opens beside them and the bristles of a broom sweep outwards and stop. A whistling male voice roars across the street. Would yez quit tormenting that dog. The head of the shouter leans over the broom and takes in the sight of Grace and Colly bit down on their pipes. He shakes his head. Yez look like a pair of wet weasels. Are yez here for the traveling holy man?

  Colly says, what holy man?

  She thinks, it is the gap in his teeth that makes his words whistle.

  The man nods down the street. In the town last night, he says. A man came through here with the hat of a bishop dead two hundred year and said to cure everything from the pains to the hunger for the wearer. They made a long line for him.

  Colly eyes the man up and down. We’re looking for Dinny Doherty. The pony man. Do you know where to find him?

  The man leans thoughtfully on the broom. His cheeks look freshly razored but he has missed a salty streak of stubble under each eye. He looks like he is growing a set of eyebrows on his cheeks, she thinks. Auld Fourbrows, so he is.

  The man says, yer looking for Dinny Doherty?

  Colly says, we’re after walking from Urris Hills.

  In this weather? And yer looking for Dinny Doherty?

  That’s what I said. Are you not listening, sir?

  And who are your people?

  We’re the Coyles.

  The Coyles? You must know my cousin, then. Tommy Thomas?

  Colly looks at Grace and she shrugs.

  How can yez not know him? Everybody knows Tommy.

  The man pauses as if chasing a thought. Wait, now, Tommy’s dead this two year. It’s hard to keep track of everyone, so it is. You pair aren’t here scouting for trouble?

  A horse and carriage pull up farther along the street and Colly stares at it. A man is stepping down and helping a woman alight and both are immaculate, she sees, the man with his black-bright top hat and the woman with her cuffs of white lace. There is no rain where she walks under the man’s umbrella. She seems to glide on her toes.

  Auld Fourbrows juts his jaw in derision. You’d think he owns the place, the way he goes about. Then he turns towards them. Get yerselves back home to Urris. More and more are coming to the town same reason as you are and all they’re doing is hanging about. There’ll be nothing here but trouble and you’ll get yerselves sucked into it, mind my words.

  She turns as if to go but Colly says, our mam is dying.

  The man gives the boy a soft look. He says, sorry to hear that, wee man. What is it that ails her?

  Colly eyes the man with great seriousness. He says, she’s got the ass cancer. She canny sit right or lie down or stand up or do nothin with it. She’s dying slowly whilst lying sideways. The doctor says she must have caught it sitting down someplace.

  An arrow of laughter shoots from her gut to her mouth and she cannot pinch it quiet. Auld Fourbrows shakes the broom at Colly and they turn and run as one into the rain, its immensity, its ability to gather all things into its expression, and she thinks she can hear Auld Fourbrows’s laughter huge and hoarse behind them.

  She shakes Colly by the arm. Where did you get such talk? I never heard nothin like it. Could you not come up with something simple?

  What’s wrong with it? Auld Benny died of the ass cancer, so he did.

  That was just banter, Colly. Auld Benny died from the bad lungs. Did you not hear his coughing? People said it as a joke
because in all the years nobody ever saw him leave the bed.

  Colly is silent. Then he speaks. How was I to know if nobody told me?

  The dog with the tail-tied bone appears again, its face bent against the slap-rain.

  Colly says, that is the saddest looking creature I’ve ever seen.

  She sees in the dog’s eyes a look of both sorrow and regret and wonders if a dog can reach an understanding of such things.

  This night is different from all others, Samhain, the night of the dead. Before it grows dark they must find refuge, for the spirits are allowed to roam the sky tonight. She believes if they leave the town it will be easier to find some unused shelter. It is one thing to face another night in the open but another to be out under a sky filled with demons. They leave the town and in the far-off the hills are hunched against a bullyragging sky. Over a bridge they lean and watch the waters writhe with the spirit of the rain. In the creeping dark they walk past large farmhouses that send out the feeling of being watched with the burning eyes and burning mouths of sentinel turnip lanterns lit to fend off the dead.

  Look! It is Colly who shouts and points to a rough-stone byre. Built onto its side is a rickety lean-to. They climb a gate and meet oozing mud-grass, step soft-foot towards the hut with their ears cocked. Colly points to the flash of a rat that vanishes into a ditch. Her hand goes up and she mouths silently for him to listen. Just the bellow and bump of cattle inside the byre and the rain scattershot upon the roof. And then the dogs come, four, then five, raggedy creatures of every size and hue. They are wild in the eye and fang the air with their barking. Colly bends down to one of them. Here, girl. The dog sidles skinny towards him and does not mind being patted.

  The byre is bolted. The lean-to is half rotten, its timber run with mildew. A corrugated roof so rusted you could drop a pebble through it, she thinks. Not even a spalpeen would sleep here. Not even the pooka. Moldy straw and old rags laid down by someone for the dogs and the stench of micturate so strong it is almost physical. They build a fire pit out of sight of the road and gather wet tinder.

  She watches Colly make a wriggling sit. What are you doing?

  I’m trying to warm the tinder.

  You cannot warm it with a wet arse.

  What do you suppose, then?

  We need to leave something out for the pooka. We don’t want to upset them on a night such as this.

  They search a wild field and find a bush stripped bare of its blackberries but for a few late bloomers almost unreachable. Hold on, muc, Colly says. He slides his small shape under the bush and reaches out his hand towards the center, plucks one and then another, gets all of them. Six unripe berries, the last fruit of the year. As he slides out a thorn catches him on the cheek. Ach! I’ve been got by a witch’s fingernail.

  She rubs his cheek with her thumb. How many did you get?

  A few. I dunno.

  It will have to do.

  That man never told us where to find Dinny, did he?

  We’ll try again tomorrow.

  Hee!

  What?

  Didn’t Dinny Doherty do a doo-doo? He did, did Dinny!

  The sides of the hills have begun to wink with the glow of Samhain bonfires. They can’t get their own fire lit. She rips some bedding from the dogs and lights it in the fire pit and finally there is small flame to build on. Later, they watch their hands color pink over the small fire.

  Colly says, I heard that some people turn hairy about the face when going hungry for months. That’ll be us yet, turning into monkeys.

  Stop that.

  When the fire burns out they warm together amid the dogs and the stench of piss. The dreeping outside and the rainwater that drips inside from the roof a steady torment and the worry that is building inside her. She whispers to Colly, give over the berries so I can leave the offering out.

  Colly is quiet. I’ll put them out myself in a wee while.

  You won’t know what way to put them.

  How is there a way to put them?

  It’s just that you don’t know it.

  She puts out her hand but he offers her nothing. She begins to rib him with her finger.

  Finally, he says, I don’t have them anymore.

  What do you mean you don’t have them?

  I couldn’t help myself.

  What did you do?

  I ate them and now I have a pain in my belly.

  She is silent a long moment. She wants to scream. The long night ahead and so unprotected. Lying here in the dark and what could come of it. This night in particular and its thousand sounds and soon its thousand eyes and she is afraid to look skywards, for in her mind she is afraid she might glimpse their specter light, the dead winging the dark, whistling by on fields of air, making their lamentations as they wander the world tonight. Plunging down on top of them like huge birds to carry them away into the place of the dead. This is what will become of us, she thinks.

  Then she remembers. She says, we must turn our clothes inside out. That will protect us. But it’s your fault if it doesn’t.

  She turns her back and she slips out of her clothes. He does the same. Afterwards, they share a laugh. This is wild uncomfortable, he says. He falls silent. Then he says, do you really believe in them? The pooka? The dead? Has anybody ever seen them?

  I think so. I dunno.

  Where do you think they come from? Do the dead live in the middle of the earth? And how do they get out? Is there a mouth to hell? I’ve often tried to guess what lies at the center of the earth. If you dig a hole there’s nothing but rock and mud, so there is. So where would there be the room for them? Maybe they hide in the woods or in the waters. Or inside secret caves in the mountains. You wouldn’t see them there so you—

  A sudden creak drawls from the gate. The dogs sit up and one of them woofs a welcome or warning. Somebody—or something—is stepping towards them. Her voice sharpens into a shush. She feels Colly tense and grabs his wrist and squeezes. Now she sees they are damned anyway, that a dead soul will come because they have no protection, that a dead soul will swoop for them because they are fools. And then the stepping sound becomes the sound of a man coughing into a fist. The rattle of a key in a lock. A man opening and closing the byre door. They sit tense for a long moment and she can hear the man come out again. Then she is standing and Colly is pulling at her to sit still but she has to see who it is, wants to know what he is doing. She continues out, closes her eyes to the night sky and then allows herself to peep. There is only darkness, great and flat and fallen upon everything and she flat-foots to the corner and peers around, cannot see much but can hear the sound of piss-fall by the door. Then she sees the man’s outline move, sees him pick something up from against the wall, then return into the byre. She can hear him coughing, imagines him settling down into straw.

  She creeps back and says to Colly, it is only someone come to watch over the cattle. Protect them from the spirits. I think he had a gun.

  A dog yips as she steps on its tail. She stands very still a moment and then whispers to it an apology, slides into the heat of Colly.

  She wakes sudden into the dark like dream-fall. Awake to the echo of a man’s roar. The way terror trebles the size of your heart but keeps you stock-still. There is still the tangle of a dream and for a moment it seems she is both in the heat of that dream and the night that is cold and actual. She wonders if what she heard came from some blind cavern of dream, her ears reaching out as if they have power to travel beyond her physical self, reaching around the hut, expanding into the dark, seeing her hearing. What she hears is that the rain has stopped. That Colly has not woken. That the stranger in the shed is murmuring to himself and then a minute later he is snoring. The cattle man is having bad dreams, that is all. This long night and the stretch of it like the longest day turned to dark and anything for it to be over, anything at all, Mam and all this trouble she has caused, this place we have to be sleeping. She looks towards the hills and sees the Samhain fires have gone out and he
r eyes close and seek that same dark.

  A hot stubbled tongue wakes her and she blinks and sees the sticky eyes of a pup. He is all slather and stench. Eeooowwww! She pushes away the dog and sits up. The dogs have scattered but for this one, a flap-eared mongrel that leaps about or studies them from the vantage of its front paws. Two circles on its inky feet like daubs of lime. Everything is better this morning, she thinks. Everything in the world washed clean. The rain has gone. The spirits are shut back to wherever they come from. Even the watchman has left.

  She wakes Colly. Says, you can change your clothes back around now. We’re safe.

  Every part of her stinks of dog stench.

  Colly says, naw, I can’t be bothered.

  You’ll look ridiculous.

  I’m used to it now.

  Then turn you around while I change.

  She stands behind a whin bush and he talks to her as she strips.

  Usually when I dream I remember nothing of it. But last night I remember heaps. I dreamt about some strange city that looked like that picture of London I seen one time in the school. Big buildings set along roads that stretch forever and so many people. I remember all I wanted was to see the machinery they were making. So I asked and this man took me to them. Wild strange, so he was. Kept scratching his arms like a monkey. He was dressed head to toe in red, even his boots, and he said his name was Red Hugh. He took me along to this building and he opened the door and let me in and it rose to the ceiling with every machine and mechanic that has ever been thought of, contraptions and levers and swinging pendulums and giant screws like the noses off unicorns and wheels and planes and things accelerating and balls dropping and I knew if I thought about it I could puzzle everything apart and then put it back together again into something even better. It was the best dream I ever had.

  How did you dream all that in this place?

  I don’t know where it came from. I dreamt also that I knew how to make it so no umbrella would ever break again. All I needed were the right materials. Only I can’t remember now how to do it. It’s annoying my head. I’m going for a piss.