by Paul Lynch
A crow wings down and scratches the air with its caw. She has heard that after Samhain the dead travel in the likeness of such birds. She thinks about what Colly said last night. Where do the spirits come from? There is so much you can’t know. Like where the rain really comes from. Sarah says the rain is God’s sadness at the world but she heard once it is something to do with the sea air reaching the mountains. Perhaps that is so. And what is the weather anyway and why has it been so fierce this year over all others? Storms in the middle of summer and whatnot. And why does she hear about all these different sorts of animals in different countries but there are no dangerous beasts in Ireland but for the pooka, who you cannot see anyway and which nobody has ever seen except in stories that involve people you have never met and aren’t likely to? And what is taking Colly so long?
She scatters the remains of the fire pit with her foot. Puts her hand to the ashes and there is not even a breath of heat. She stands waiting for Colly. Another minute and she goes around the building, walks out towards the road.
It is then that she sees the long back of Boggs. The shock red of his hair. It is him, all right, dragging Colly by the scruff, the boy wriggling with his pants around his ankles and his heels trying to get purchase on the ground. Then Boggs turns and drops Colly with his fist, hauls him up over his shoulder like a sack. Says, I’m taking you back to your mother. That jut of red beard and the backward-leaning walk like some hunter happy with his kill. Colly’s fists hanging useless. She does not think about any of it. What she does. It is something later she realizes that just happened, as if she turned mechanical or became possessed by some spirit. Or even that there was another person hiding inside her all along. The way she plucked from the wall a tooth-shaped rock and came up behind Boggs, put it to his head. The way she felled him, the big man turning around like some slow animal to the blow, hinging down onto one knee and then the other, and how their eyes met as he turned to fathom what struck him, the unexpected composure in his eyes, the poison boiled to those darkly stars and behind that dark the light she saw of an understanding, a communication between the two of them that terrified her to the place of her innermost—and then Boggs is just sitting there on the road with a hand to his head, muted, stupid, bloody, and Colly is on his feet trying to hitch up his trousers that are inside out, the flesh of his right eye sprung red, and she is shouting at him—run! Colly, run, for fuck’s sake! But he is fumbling to get his trousers up and buttoned—cannot—and then what he does. He steps out of them, slings them under his arm and runs bare-bottomed into the fields, chased to his heels by one of Boggs’s hounds.
They run until their hearts no longer beat but shatter into jags that swim the blood to stop every muscle. They drop to the ground, floppy useless shapes, lie gasping under poplar trees that stand aloof whispering to themselves a different story of the world. Colly lying holding his pants over his modesty, an indigo bruise flowering uneven on his face. She sees that Boggs’s fist struck the cheekbone. Colly is crying from shock, exertion, and pain, no doubt. Keeps pressing at his face as if he is in wonder at the novelty of hurt. Leave it be, she says.
They did not think where to run. Ran blind through a field of winter wheat that met a flooding bourn, then flatland, a planted forest, a puddling dirt road. They sent up the birds, ran swift like swallows last of season, all breast of white neck and their coats flung behind them like tails. Behind a settlement of limed-white houses came towards them a shooting blur, something demon-black that barked itself into dog and ran alongside them, party to the fun. And now they are here, this quadrangle field with two piebalds and a bay that group together to watch these wheezing visitors and snicker at the intrusion.
Colly turns his trousers the right way around and steps into them. He doesn’t care that she sees his pizzle.
She thinks, what is it I have done?
She says, lie down. Listen.
Colly whispers. That bastard. He didn’t say a word. Came up behind while I was having a piss. I could hear him. His breathing. As he was coming behind me. And then I could smell him. But I was halfway through the piss and couldn’t stop. And then when I got it stopped and I got it back in and I was trying to get the buttons done but the breeches were inside out and I couldn’t button them. It was like I knew something bad was going to happen. But also I didn’t. I don’t think he knew you were there. He lumped me with his fist and threw me over his shoulder like a straw man. Like a bag of sticks. Like a—
Would you ever shush a minute, she says. Just for once? Do you think he is kilt? Do you think that I kilt him?
Colly shakes his head with vigor. Then he rubs at his face as if he has shaken new pain into it. You winged him is all. He was breathing fine when we left him.
I hit him hard with that rock. If he is not dead he might be mortally wounded.
She can see the shape of Boggs growing pale on the road, sitting there with his knuckle hair turning gray. Having to lie down with great slowness and his hands grown weak and his face whitening as the blood leaks out—
I have to go back, she says. I have to see if he’s dead.
She is already on her feet. I’ll be back, I promise.
You can’t go, he says. What if he gets you? His eyes reach as if to seize her by the heart. Don’t you leave me here on my own.
She studies him, the way he sits folded over himself, unmanned into the boy that he is. One side of his face popping out.
I must.
She will pass through the air like the wind itself, secretive and invisible. Like light as it passes over all things without noise or touch. As delicate as the butterflies that flit her stomach. If only it would rain again to quieten this noise in her head.
She has to think her way back, for the path is unfamiliar. It is as if it wasn’t she who had passed by here earlier but somebody else. A shadow. That secret other who hurls rocks from walls. She sees Boggs’s face everywhere she walks, hears the silence of his death and the gathering of a hunt. She walks past the woodland and stares at the spangle of wet prints they stamped fresh into the track but has no memory of making them. Then she sees it, the boundary wall along the road. Creeping towards the wall on hands and knees, like some cud chewer, she thinks. Afraid to look over, to witness the unalterable fact that sits in this moment of which there cannot be any other. She crouches and waits a long moment counting each breath. You will rise at ten breaths and not a breath before. On her sixth breath she suddenly rises.
There is no body. There is no sign of Boggs at all, not even a drop of blood.
The rock has been put back in the wall.
The cabin stands an abandoned hump, the roof caved in or destroyed. Its mud walls slowly returning to earth but it will do for tonight. There is a dead vegetable plot that looks like fire was set to it and they kick through it in search of an old tuber. She gets a match to spark tinder alight and they make a small fire and lie in an alcove where the bed used to be. She huddles with Colly, above them the mouth of the world wide open and the stars tongued out, a sky magically quit of rain. Nearby they can hear a river roaring. She rolls dock leaves and puts them to his face. Here, she says. There is a loose look in Colly’s eyes, a tremor in his voice. His body looks wrung out of shape.
She is almost asleep when he whispers to her. I have a plan, he says.
What?
I will become a poisoner of horses. You will travel town to town behind me and fix the horses right again.
But I don’t know the first thing about horses let alone unguents. Has that blow made you gone silly?
His sleep comes quick like a candle quit smokeless to dark. His head resting upon her. She sleeps under a skim of dreams that scatter like birds and she wakes to the vast night, the fullness of cold, the long tooth of hunger. The dread weight feeling she has not slept one bit. We are like dead bodies, she thinks, with a past but no future. I have died and climbed into the earth of my grave. When she was alive there was heat and food and laughter and all the old familiar thi
ngs, the faces of the youngers and Mam who still wanted her. But now Mam is done with her. To be so unwanted but yet Colly is wanted and isn’t that why she sent Boggs to take him back home? It strikes her now, how in the morning she must say to him, you are going back home because you must, because this was all a mistake. A great adventure to remember. She will take him back as far as the bogland and send him on alone. She will send him home to save herself from Boggs.
They are cold-stiff when they leave the hut, numb to the tips of their fingers. The truth of the world, she thinks, is that cold is the truest state of all things and heat is a temporary nature. The cold does not burn itself out in rush like fire but waits with unlimited patience. She stamps her feet awake, claps her hands as she walks, Colly trailing sullen behind her. She keeps asking what he dreamt. She tells him she dreamt about a man with missing fingers following her, but Colly isn’t listening. Come here, she says. She puts her arms around him and he is so small against her. The way he goes on, she thinks, you would think he is almost a man, but his shoulders are like angel wings that could snap in your fingers.
The river sound comes to meet them like a roar of the world. It is the sound of rain and anger pleated into rush. They see it is in freshet, a turbid brown spate traveling eyeless and white-tongued and tasked with all the flood rain from the hills. It is a clamor that fills up their ears and damns the sounds of all else. Colly whistles in awe. He has to shout for her to hear him. It wasn’t this bad yesterday. Then his look becomes serious. Will we try for a fish?
She shouts, the trout are all fished out.
She thinks, this river would strip the very rocks it rests on.
The river travels through bogland and will guide them back to town. Her mind tangled with Boggs. What he will do with the sore head she gave him. Perhaps he will be done looking for them, will return to Blackmountain and roar at Mam instead. This angry river sound is the sound of Boggs roaring in her head.
They shadow the river’s edge, meet places where it has risen over its banks to swarm at trees and grab at thickets or reach for low-hung branches that fly back from the current as if stung.
It is when the river has returned to its banks that Colly sees it. He turns and points at the river behind them.
She has to shout to be heard. What?
Are you blind or what?
Where am I supposed to be looking?
He steps towards the bank and wags his finger. There.
I don’t see it, she says. And then she does. Drifting slowly towards them is a sodden white rump, the remains of a sheep that slopes headward in the water as if staring into some deep wherein lay an answer to the truth of its death. It seems to her the river is carrying the body at the noble pace of a funeral.
He shouts, how long, do you think?
It must be dead recently otherwise it would have been fished out.
We have to get it.
There is so much hope in his voice she doesn’t know how to answer. She thinks, the thing will be rotten, poisoned, or worse. And what trouble if they are found carrying it. And yet she can see in her mind the meat in the pot.
She follows him towards the bank. He nods towards her pocket.
Gimme the knife Mam gave you.
He leaps upon a young ash and hangs off a branch until it splinters. The secret soft of its flesh revealed and he begins to saw at the rupture. By the time it is cut free and carved with a point, the carcass has disappeared downriver. They run along the bank, Colly charging with the stick like a lance. She hears him shout. Hee! And then, there it is! An old hawthorn like twisted rope leans out over the river in a statement of bitterness. Colly begins to climb it and she shouts, be careful. He sidles out along the bough and begins making stabs at the animal. The carcass passes with its head blind in the water. She helps Colly climb down off the tree and they follow the sheep to a place where the riverbanks begin to hunch and narrow and she holds him as he steps down onto the leaf-rot by the water’s edge and reaches his arm out, tries again to catch the animal.
Don’t poke at it, she says.
I’m trying to catch the wool.
You’re going to send it to the other side.
They watch the sheep travel onwards as if to meet some grim appointment. It disappears behind rows of whin and high ground that fence the bank. Colly walks shaking his head. He says, we could have had it.
She says, we weren’t thinking straight. Anyhow, how in the hell were you to get it home with you?
I’d manage it on me back.
The weight of it and it might have been smelling. And people would think it was thieved. You wouldn’t be able to answer for it.
She tries to put the sheep out of her mind but her stomach continues to dwell on it. Colly stops to light his pipe.
She nods at it. Gimme a wee toke.
He smiles. I knew you’d like the taste of it.
In the sky she sees all things are considered. The northwest is bruised like Colly’s cheek but elsewhere the sky is like good cloth, clean and white, and the sunlight promises warmth. She thinks she can hear the sound of Colly’s mind coming up with a plan. The way his eyebrows gently knit when he is puzzling something. But all he comes out with is a riddle. What is always traveling but stays put, has a bed but canny be slept in, and a mouth that never eats nothin?
Ugh, Colly. That’s an old one.
Through trees she sees the return of the river. Wonders what kind of animal it looks like, its restless hide sleek and brown. Of a sudden Colly is running and she sees the sheep alongside them as if it has traveled all along in quiet accompaniment, listening to their talk, waiting to be fished out. She sees it is caught on a thicket of bramble. She is running towards it before she can think. The river’s bank is low to the water and covered with sedge grass and leaf-rot. Colly reaches for the sheep with the stick, pokes until the stick catches the wool, begins to pull the animal towards him. He has become a fisherman, swollen-cheeked and puffing as he leans out over the water, shouting at the sheep—come on, would you!—and she starts to shout too, the pair of them hollering at the animal’s dead hearing. And then, as if they have willed it, the carcass comes free and stays stuck to the stick, ceases to travel downwater. Colly yells in satisfaction. He is puff-faced holding on, has not the strength to pull the carcass towards him. She gives him her strength but the stick bends as if to break and Colly roars out, go get another stick!
She sees that every ounce of him is holding on to the sheep, his body pulled into a sickle.
I can hold it, he says. But hurry the hell up.
Her mind crackles with panic and excitement as she runs. Anything at all she would use but along the bank there is nothing but whin. A stand of trees farther back and she runs towards them, hears Colly call out, the sheep’s head is rising up! She shouts over her shoulder, I’m coming. But she is not. Under the tall trees the ground is a puzzle of rot and she can figure nothing from it. She grabs at a stick but it is soft with decay, thinks of the trees as some huddle of old women watching scold-faced. She hears Colly’s roaring voice weak above the river. The sheep, he shouts. The sheep is lifting its head! The sheep is staring right at me!
Deeper into the trees. She runs with her eyes the flit-wings of bats in a hurry to see everything. The way the trees shut out the sound of the river so that she can only hear her thoughts. Just one stick. Just give me one stick. She thinks of the pooka, hiding everything from her, the way they are always playing tricks. She bargains with them but the ground yields nothing of use. Now she knows their haul will be lost. That Colly will be angry with her and sulk all the way to Blackmountain. She turns and runs back towards the river, the roar of it as she breaks free of the trees is the mouthblast of some huge animal. What comes to her then is sensed before she can grasp it, like the changing of air before great weather. A feeling heard like whisper. How the air has changed because something is wrong—towards the riverbank she runs but she is met by confusion, this part of the bank she cannot remember—she has
run to the wrong place, for there is no sign of Colly, and where is the sheep? She looks to the riverbank in both directions but Colly has gone, and then it hits her, the precise nature of what is, of what must have just happened, and she starts to scream out his name, screams it at the river, stands helpless by the bank where the leaf-rot sits disturbed, and it is then that she knows what has happened, sees the mud scar that has been made by Colly’s foot slipping into the brown water, the river that reflects nothing but itself. And it is then that she sees Colly’s stick floating deep amid brambles and beside the stick, the sheep, its eyeless black head grinning at her.
II
This Boy Called Tim
She is lifted off rocks. There is no will now to fight this old man, his smell when he carries her of brine and dogs, finds herself placed in damp wickerwork shivering under his coat. What she sees of the sky is a cowl pulled low as he rows her across the estuary. The old man with his flashing eyes and beard. Don’t you worry, wee man, he says to her. Aren’t you lucky that Charlie has found you? Sea-lap in her ears and plashing oars. When she looks up she sees those oaring hands huge and red-knuckled, fisting towards her like some languid play of drunken violence. The ferryman whistling to himself between grunts. There is nothing now to the will but that which craves the dark of a beneath and she sinks down into the down, finds herself lifted out, put to his shoulder, carried towards a house, a dog bounding beside them. She hears the bird-chatterings of an old woman. Charlie says to her, quick, Theresa, I found this boy near drowned on the lough, lying by the mouth of the river. Like a lump of seaweed there he was on the rocks. Would you look at the color of him. Go quickly get our blanket. He is light, light like a feather in my arms.
She is rested on a stool in front of the fire. Sits in the nothing of herself. What forms for thought a void wind without light. When the old woman goes to remove her wet clothing she is able to summon sudden strength to stop her. Smell of carrageen off the old woman’s hand that rests uncertain on her shoulder. The woman says, never mind your modesty, wee man. Didn’t I raise up three boys? And yet the old woman steps away from her.