by Paul Lynch
Later she learns she is near Rathmullan, a townland she has never heard of. How Charlie laughs when he hears this. How could you never have heard of it and it here all this long? Twas here the old Gaelic order was put to a stop. It was from here the earls took flight. Anyhow, I will row you back across the water when you’ve got your color back.
Later, he asks, who are your people? Where are you from? Will they be worried for you?
She shakes her head. Says, my mam died, so she did.
The old man shakes his head. The old woman leans forward and asks, do you not have anybody else? A sister? Or a brother?
She has not given them her name. They call her wee fella. The old woman comes to her with clothing that will fit better but she will not wear anything else. The old woman left standing in the room with her lips pursed holding on to the clothes, the old man taking the clothes out of her hands, putting them into a trunk, a strange noise out of her like sorrow.
Days pass like drift-clouds unseen in some unwatchable night. She spoons seaweed soup, the occasional fish, spits bones into the fire. The old man and woman try not to watch the dead-staring eyes, eyes in the hell of herself that see the private animals of darkness, animals that roam in grotesque shape as if watched in shadow light. Her mind echoing soundings from an older life. The voices of Blackmountain that ring and dull. She hears the voice of her mother strange to her, Sarah’s voice without words just the sound of it, hears it without feeling any tenderness. And then comes a night when she wakes sweating from a dream so lifelike it haunts her for days. A baying crowd of hundreds of people carrying torches and slash-hooks shouting for her. Sarah among them. What it is they shout. Murderer. At the head of them is Boggs, his eyes lit, the man’s image morphing into the shape of a wolf that moves in its own anger-light like a mill wheel at full violence if she could even explain it. When she wakes from the dream she walks in a daze and cowers in a corner until daylight. Charlie finds her and lifts her back to bed. She sees that ghost image of Boggs-as-wolf as if she has witnessed it in daylight’s fullest expression, wonders if such dream power is prophecy.
She thinks, I could stay and live with these people and eat their seaweed soup. Charlie has said as much. He has pawned all but one of his fishing nets, he tells her, because he no longer has the strength to fish the channel on his own. But she knows they have pawned the nets for food. And so the wintering has reached even here, she thinks.
Charlie wants to teach her his tricks with the net. In the boat he tells her that all three of their sons died at sea in a single evening some years ago, a storm of great violence, he says. One day they were here with us and the next they were gone. She repeats the names of his boys in her head. She thinks, the old man’s voice is kindly, not done in by bitterness like his wife. He gives her plug, talks to her as if she were a son while the pair of them sit smoking. When they are outside together she secrets her pee into a tin cup standing up, her back turned to him. The old man tells her, your piss makes a wild lot of clatter. The old woman always watching her, giving her strange looks. She dreams of Boggs-as-wolf and she dreams of the old woman until night-long she is wrought by their faces that together snake and loom from that mind-dark, as if what glimmers there portends her own end, and she begins to think of the woman as evil. And then one evening as she sits smoking on the step, the old woman steps past her and stops, leans down, and pulls her by the lobe, puts a question into her ear.
Who is it, girl, you are always talking to?
It is December when she leaves, a morning sleeved with blue-cold and the stars a silvery dust. She takes nothing for her satchel but a smoked herring wrapped in brown paper. From his bed the old man has risen silent on his elbow to watch.
She will drift southwards for days, expectant of the gnaw-tooth of winter that has not yet come, the weather mild for December. She thinks, you can try this place or that and then you will find something to do with yourself, some type of work, and then everything will be better. The flatlands by the sea are seasonally numb and scrubbed of their color, the roads thickened with bare footers. She thinks, they are the kind of folk you would see passing through Blackmountain—wretched souls, Sarah would call them, the kind without even a hut. There seem to be more of them now, some looking so troubled even the pooka would not bother them. They slouch about the byway as if waiting for someone, roam the roads with eyes that poke and yearn. They look at her as if they can smell the fish in her satchel. She thinks, there is no winter yet because the wintering has entered inside them. Their eyes drink in her strength.
She climbs down off the road to eat her fish in private, for who knows who’d be looking at you. Stands in the underside of a stone bridge, unwraps the fish and gobbles it, chewing to the steady plink of drip-water from the span above. She turns to the river, hears the whispering water’s shallows and grows dizzy with it, begins to feel sick in the gut, maybe it is the fish, maybe it isn’t, balls the paper and throws it behind her.
Of a sudden she hears Colly’s voice.
Watch out, muc, behind you!
There is movement in the shadows and she sees what she thought was a rock shape-shifting now into some form rising darkly upon legs and advancing towards her. A person. The rustle of the paper being picked up. Backwards now in slow steps and then she turns and runs for the bank, crabs sideways up it, loses her footing and finds it. Her head turning to see a stooped man footing stupid into daylight, naked but for a cloak, his limbs a filthy white and the man all eyes, searching her as she climbs. When she reaches the sedge at the top of the bank the knife is held ready but hidden behind the wrist. She is a single shape on that road, a single shadow that moves away at a run and then slows to a breathless walk. Can see in her mind a clear picture, the white of the man’s cock and his long tongue licking at the fishy paper. His eyes fucking at her with hunger. She checks over her shoulder but nobody has followed.
There is just the sound of her breathing, her feet on the road, her body parting the breeze.
She says aloud, that man near frightened the heart out of me.
Colly says, I caught you, Grace, looking at that man’s dong.
I did not.
You did, you dirty wee bitch. Now get that pipe lit and give me a toke.
She has taken to the soothe of the pipe. The way it settles a racing mind, for the roads are making her anxious. It is not the long-faced beggars that worry you, the men trying to sell you their ravelly frieze coats, their pokey-holed shirts, one fellow giving a great talk trying to sell a pair of men’s boots, their soles undone like wagging mouths. Or that half-blind woman who she helped drag a peeling dresser onto the verge of the high road, how it threw a shadow like some man stooped beside her, the woman asking if there were any carts coming in the direction of town.
It’s the others that are the trouble—the youngers you don’t see rising from the road. Raggedy little shapes that follow you, walk alongside you, say a prayer for you, ask you your name, hold a cupped palm out. One boy walks silently alongside her for an hour or more, his eyes on her like a dog. Colly says, tell that boy to fuck right off. By eventide the boy continues alongside her until she turns and screams at him to stop, to leave off from haunting her, for she has nothing to give, has nothing for herself. And she can still see him many miles later, his body like a ghost.
She sees the youngers in every child’s turnip face. Sees tiny Finbar sentry on a wall, watching her come, stepping out and dragging behind him a bed tick full of straw onto the middle of the road. The child no more than four, flame-haired, bulldog-nosed, the little hand held out, the voice so tiny it is like the sound that escapes from a hug. For the price of some meal, the boy says. She eyes along the wall for a watching adult, for she knows there is one. And then she thinks, perhaps there isn’t, perhaps this child has dragged for miles this tick on his own. She holds the knife ready, just in case—will run it through flesh if she is so much as troubled.
She thinks, I will run the knife through Boggs if I so much
as see him again. The idea of him, even. That brute idiot of a man. A bully and no better. I am no longer one bit afraid of him. And yet the next morning when she wakes wrapped in dawn-cold, she is haunted again by that dream image of Boggs-as-wolf. That mind picture of inexplicable and circling violence.
She walks into south Donegal because here things might be better. Sees men on the bigger farms keeping guard over their animals. How they have a way of stopping what they are doing to watch you. A good many with rifles slung on their shoulders or resting on a rock. She thinks, if one of them were to shoot me now I wouldn’t mind so much. For what would be the difference?
One small town and then another, they are all the same, she thinks. There is always a bridge and people with long eyes idling on the stonework. Always the day hanging heavy on half-empty streets. Eyes whispering behind windows watching for trouble. On a clothesline outside Convoy some fool has hung a wet wool blanket. She steals upon it like dusk, finds it crisp with cold. When it is dry she begins to sleep better. In another town she is drawn to the window of a dress shop, sees Colly dim and wild-haired staring back from the glass. She takes out the knife and cuts at her hair. Sees the reflection darken and take the shape of a woman inside the shop. Cut your hair someplace else, she shouts. What must this woman see? she thinks. Some wild creature in men’s clothing too big for him. The woman raps her knuckles on the window and calls out until a man appears hunched and reluctant. He shouts at the glass. Go on, would you. Cut your hair someplace else, you little caffler. She leaves at the crown of her head a crest of hen hair. Brings the knife up to the angle of violence.
It is Colly who shouts at them. Riddle me this, what’s frightened as a sheep but fattened as a lamb? Will run away soon as look at you but would eat out of your hand?
The days are shortening to a distant sun that sits sister to the moon. She walks southwards or some days she just sits, the world without size, sun and moon clocking timeless around her. In an early dawn she awakes to see a bolide shower light the northern sky. Each star blinking out of an illimitable dark and falling in silence for a blazing brief moment. Her mind startles at the imprint of such beauty. Racing to count—six or was it seven? Quick as a wink and such good fortune, she thinks. In the whole of the world, I am the only witness, am alone to all this. To the tip of her tongue come seven wishes. I wish I was in my bed. I wish I was by the fire all warm. I wish I had a bowl of lumpers. I wish I had my long hair. I wish I had never left Blackmountain. She meets a thought, sees Boggs-as-wolf torchlit and circling towards her. I wish Boggs was dead.
She counts them up. One more wish, what is it? She thinks a moment, chews on some berries, then says it aloud.
I wish I was home with Mam.
She closes her eyes and Colly whispers.
Sure, what would you want to be doing back with that auld bitch, she is the cause of all your trouble—listen, muc, I say keep walking because farther ahead you’ll find something better.
Colly warns she is becoming reckless but she prefers not to listen. It seems to her now there are more people following the roads. There is nothing but cadgers and bother. The things you come across. In the declivity of a field she is startled to see the head part of a horse lying as if to sleep it went and its body ran off like some headless specter. The horse not even stripped of its meat but taken whole, swiped perhaps by some huge and ravenous animal. And yet she knows it was butchered by thieves, neck-to-tail to be eaten. Better off away from the roads, passing through fields and homesteads. People are watchful but they are also careless. They might keep an eye on their livestock but there is chattel to be had if you are quick about it. She develops an expert ear for dogs. She fills her pockets with nuggets from a coal bunker though she has no matches to light them. In one farmyard some fool has left out the butter churn. She scoops her hands with gold, leaves a black-smudged signature, licks catly at the slow melt. She is becoming reckless, all right. There are times when she looks at her behavior and asks who she is or what she is becoming. The best part of you, she thinks, the part you have known all your life, has gone missing.
She is chased by men from the backyard of a farmhouse into a dark that knows no moon and falls away like a precipice. Shouts noose the air for her neck. Gunshot travels unseen and soundless but for the report behind her announcing what has already passed. Grunt noise and the thunder-plod of footfall and a flaming lamp like some demon eye fixed in the dark upon her breathless singularity, and the way she runs into that cavernous night with nothing but her blanket and bobbing satchel, the accompanying report of a second shot, and how as she runs she tells herself to stop. And she does. Feels herself overcome, realizes in this moment she doesn’t care anymore, about any of this, whatever you would like to call it—life, if you will—and so she stops running, stands awaiting the first fist to strike her head or for the shot to strike the kill. She closes her eyes but what happens is this—the two men chasing her like dogs to the perfume of violence run past her sightless into the dark.
Days like sleep drift past her. She hears the New Year has passed from a newspaper reader days later in some Bally-o village. A fellow on a wooden crate announcing aloud and in mechanical fashion the days-past news while dabbing at his reading glasses with a digit. He reads about the celebrations in London and Dublin to a motley gathering. Some dailc standing beside her unshoulders a sack of turf to listen, wipes at his filthy face and red eyes with a cap. He turns to her and says, he has that newspaper read every week in that drone and I never know what he’s on about. She watches the people around her, the same clatty children and some woman who is beyond old and talking spittle, a hand on her shawl, the other pulling at the reader’s sleeve, trying to pull him towards her cocked ear. Speak up, man, speak up.
If this were another time, she thinks, you would be asked the who and what of you. You would be offered straw and put beside a fire. But there is so much movement on these roads nobody troubles to look at her. She thinks about the things she heard from the newspaper. Guns going off and fireworks and the grandest celebrations and the people in great numbers and the dignitaries gathered. She cannot imagine the look of such excitement. Can only conjure bright and strange colors, people as glittering effigies that move through some shapeless yet shining light, the brightest of hues like the purple-blues and the yellow-reds of flowers.
Later she thinks, where has all the time gone? She feels she has not been present for most of it. And yet this winter drags on like a leaden sack pulled by some dumb and sightless mule up an impossible hill. The pale sun hidden. The trees in their bones standing penitent. Everything, it seems, waiting for the earth gravid with spring but not yet. She is luck itself, she knows. The way she has evaded the worst of winter. The year previous, the frost came furtive into the house like a long hand under the door. Icicles on the jambs and Colly licking at them. And now the days are almost warm if you keep moving. Just the rain and the way the clouds swell with dark purpose, there seems no end to it. She walks down-headed and internal to the rain, her eyes turned to chatter.
So riddle me this. It weighs no weight and cannot be seen. But when you put it in your stomach it makes you grow lighter.
That’s the worst one yet, Colly, but I know what you’re getting at. Oh, boy, do I know it.
For two days Colly has been singing the same line of a song over and over.
Hó-bha-ín, hó-bha-ín, hó-bha-ín, mo ghrá.
Hó-bha-ín, hó-bha-ín, hó-bha-ín, mo ghrá.
Hó-bha-ín, hó-bha-ín, hó-bha-ín, mo ghrá.
Shut up. Shut up. Shut up. You are driving me demented, she tells him. I hate them old songs. Why won’t you stop?
But now in the bruising dusk upon this wet hill he goes silent. She has come to a crossroads and there is a commotion ahead. A carriage has parked on the side of the road and its lamp falls upon a gathering of people. She thinks, the coach is being raided, but Colly says, it is not, look! She sees scrags of people gathering around some woman standing on the coach
step. It is like a public meeting. There are shouts, prayers, and pleading and one young man is chanting the names of old saints and crossing himself over and over. Above the carriage woman she sees a scowling coachman in his box seat with a blunderbuss on his lap. She does not care for all this racket, continues on past them. She craves the company of herself and no other, for there are secret feelings that darkly gleam. It is not that she wishes to be dead in a direct manner. It is that she wants to disappear without consequence to herself. To break from the tree like the autumn leaf. To fall the way dusk falls into its deeper colors without thought of its falling self. To drift from the self like the moment of sleep.
But Colly starts up again and will not stop. Hee! Would you look what she’s handing out. Look! And then she is pushing through the clamor, sees the carriage woman is old, long-nosed and appointed in her dress, is putting something into their outstretched hands, the woman’s eyes seeing her and not seeing her, a piece of biscuit that meets her hand and then the taste of it—gingerbread, somebody says—oh, Lordy. Never has she put into her mouth anything like it, wants to cry with the taste.
Hee! Colly shouts. I told you so— leave me some, you greedy bitch.
It is like everything sweet on earth all at once and when it is gone she sucks from her teeth the memory-taste. For a long while she does not notice the wet road, cannot stop thinking about her gratitude. About that woman. The way she stood as if she owned the road, that look in her face that was a look that didn’t see you. And it is then she realizes the power of food this woman had over them and of a sudden she feels hateful. She would like to hurt that woman if she could. Take that fox stole from around her shoulders and wring her neck with it. Why are all these people standing in such wintering while she parades about in her fancy coach? It is only when she tastes salt on her lips does she realize she has been crying.