by Paul Lynch
She wakes and thinks she might be dying. This pointing pain in her gut. It is not work pain, she knows, the kind that haunts your muscles, nor is it hunger. She thinks she might be poisoned. Thinks of some evil chomping her insides. She stands at the cabin window watching the dawn unravel, today’s light like light echoed from some inferno, the last of all light and not the first of this day.
Colly, she says, I think I’m dying.
You silly bitch, didn’t I tell you last night not to eat in one go all the bread.
Later, the barrow has become an extension of the pain that begins in her back and carries through her hips, shocks through her arms to become one with the load. She imagines her body falling to rot like this mush of bog earth all colors of brown. She thinks of what Darkey said once, that this ground used to be ancient forest, rotted down into peat. She stares at the earth and wonders how long it takes for a tree to die and then rot to become stringy brown turf, how many thousands of trees over how many thousands of years and of a sudden she can see the crooked trees at Blackmountain and what it might be like in thousands of years.
She says to Colly, I need to sit down. My hips are going to sunder.
She finds herself watching John Bart, has yet to see how he gets under a rock, such a curious thing, she thinks. Watches with a secret wish for someone else to trouble him just so she can see the quick of his knife. She watches him swinging a stone off his back, hinging upright to light a pipe, leaning back in laughter with another. Twice she has seen him go up to the foreman giving out about some problem.
Colly says, looks like he was born the wrong way out.
Who?
That horselicker John Bart, that one-armed—
I don’t like that kind of talk.
I know why it is yer looking at him.
I’m not looking at him.
Yes you are but it’s all right, there’s no arm in it.
Shush or he’ll cut you up. You saw what he can do with a knife.
I will admit he’s very handy.
Stop.
Now you have me thinking, what’s the definition of agony?
Listening to you all day.
John Bart hanging off a tree with an itch in his—
She thinks, John Bart. What is it about him? She knows she has been taking sneaky looks. Trying to puzzle him out. How it is that he carries himself like any other man, a man with two arms or almost, smoking all the time while carrying rocks. How he has been marked out as different by the bad birth of an arm and yet he drives pity out. The answer lies, she thinks, not in what you see but in what you feel. Perhaps what is known is the man’s loneliness.
She is barrowing smash-rock through the slipslide of mud when she is seized with sudden pain. It comes from her hips, shoots through her with burning zest. She thinks, this is it, my body is done in. She drops the barrow, takes a look at the sky and sucks in a long breath. What she wants is to hang off such clouds and mix with the sky and be no more of it. To be carried by wind and fall like rain into unfeeling. She turns upon the roaring voice of Darkey. Hey, laughling! Wee boy! She sees him by the sitting rocks waving his pouch of tobacco.
Colly says, my lungs are starving for a smoke.
Darkey says, look at you, all frowned up.
Two others beside Darkey lean their pipes into flame. She does not know them, watches their eyes become blank as they take the first toke. Darkey eyes her, sups from a tin cup, puts it down, drips his fingers with tobacco. His fingers are oiled and dark-stained as if he has pulled himself to life from the bog having molded each stubby finger out of the morass. He sucks a string of tobacco off a finger.
She lights up, takes a seat upon the rock.
One of the men says, there’s others now swelling the numbers that aren’t from about here, some women also. Tom Peter says some of them walked from as far as Collon to get here. That’s twenty miles. Thinning out the work for the rest of us. Them women should fuck right—
She tokes her mind into quiet, the same and simple abeyance of toke and exhale as the others. The sounds of the site—the general thud-clutter, the hammering rock-men, the voices rising in echo and coming loose in the sky, the agitations of a tethered dog—all lose their stridency, soften out, unbecome on the air like smoke. When she is finished her smoke she stands and taps the pipe empty off the rock. It is then one of the men issues some strange curse. He stands up. Hey! he says. Hey! She turns and sees his puzzled look is upon her, how he goes to speak but his tongue hovers dumb in his mouth as if what he has begun to say cannot be said. She follows the man’s pointed finger to the rock she has been sitting on. The rock seat is covered in blood.
She is aware of herself putting her hand to the seat of her breeches, watches the hand return red.
Their looks now upon her, Darkey beginning to stand up flap-mouthed and then his face packs down in confusion.
The horror now of what is. She can feel blood to her cheeks, blood to her ears, blood to the tips of her hair. Can feel blood in the down-below gushing out of her body, this blood that has been silently secreting itself. She knows she is going to die right now in front of these men. She stares at the rock and then dares the men with a savage look, shouts, what are you lot gorping at?
She watches herself walk as if watching from someplace in the sky. Watches the men watching her. What lies in their eyes, their mouths, their hearts. She steps out of sight behind the toolshed, dips her hand in the horse trough. Blood water skeins her fingers and even Colly has gone quiet. She thinks, for sure now I am dying. My insides are melting blood.
She strips horse flannel and dips it in water, puts it down her breeches. Picks up the barrow where she left it. She wants now to fold into herself, disappear completely from all eyes, to lie down in the trench and be covered in gravel. She is aware of Darkey staring at her, something in his look that frightens her. Can imagine their whispers gathering into laughter or anger or worse and that worse is something you do not want to think of. She looks to the sky and thinks, this will be the sky I’m to die under. She dares a look again but nobody is watching.
It is the longest walk home. She walks in terror that the bleeding will not stop. This bleeding that comes from her private self. She washes the rag and the butt of her trousers and a memory comes from the summer a year ago. Sarah with a rag of blood. Sarah asking if she has bled yet. Is this what she meant? And what if it isn’t? What if it is some disease? What if it is the old witch’s curse?
Colly has nothing to say on the matter, has started humming loudly to himself as if he doesn’t want to listen. She hears herself shouting at him, what if I were to die here like that old woman and nobody finds me but for the dog? What then?
She moves through her mind all night long, searching down darkest paths for knowledge. The waking moment from sleep into dark and the relief she is not dead yet. She is aware of the night passing under her as if she were in deep water, its travel soundless like some tidal pull. In the early morning she hears rain burst upon the roof and drip inwards over everything, drenching her thoughts with blood. When she examines herself she finds the rag has more blood but is no worse than before. She washes the rag and takes a drink of water. Eyes her gray face in the shard of looking glass and thinks, don’t you just hate the sight of yourself?
The days pass and she gathers her quiet. Is aware now of different kinds of looks. Not all the men, just some of them. She thinks, if the looking of a man could be measured, you would measure it in weight. The look that glances is light as a feather. But the look that sizes you up and down weighs a full pound. One long look she gets from a man adds up to three pounds’ weight or more, she thinks.
She stands trying to heave the barrow up a hill of mud and then a man appears and takes the wheelbarrow and drives it on without word, leaves it down for her.
She stands unsure of herself, mutters something about the man being ridiculous. Wonders if the rules are changing but nobody has said. Catches Darkey watching her from the smoking rock
but his face has no expression and she will not go over to him.
Colly says, who gives a box of fucks about that Darkey anyhow? You’ve got your own tobacco now.
Colly wants a go at the barrow. Go on, girl, gimme! She is thirsty and sore. The pain that pricked her hips all week has passed, become now the usual dull pain of work. She scratches her mouth with a dry tongue, watches a man dip a cup into the drinking barrel.
Gimme a go. Gimme a go. Gimme a go.
Fuck up.
Go on, girl, let me.
Colly harrumphs as he takes over, springs the wooden wheel of the empty barrow into the air off a rock. To mud again, rolling forward, the barrow veering around one fellow who stands folded into a hacking cough. They are not seen stepping out of the bustle. How they bring the day to quick when they block her. She sees that two of them are from the smoking rock that day with Darkey. The other is the man with the weight of looking in his eyes. She eyes the bit-rock and dust in the empty barrow, eyes the scrim of mud on her boots, a black toenail peering out. One of them snorts or perhaps it is the horse tethered to a post and half crazy the way it stares into the far-off. She gruffs her voice low. Get out of my way.
The man who speaks is the watcher. So, barrow boy. What do we call you now?
His mouth smirks but his eyes are dead looking at her.
The third man says, Anvil here has something to say to you.
Colly starts singing and she wishes he’d shut up. Three blind mice—hee!—three blind mice—
She says, Anvil? Did somebody bang you on the head that much?
Nothing moves in the eyes of this Anvil and then he purses his lips and wolf-whistles at her. She thinks of her cheeks, how the nature of a blush is that it sneaks up on you before you can do anything about it and you have never stopped one yet. She eyes the men with venom. Everybody at the Hollow is filthy, but these three disgust her with their loose teeth and mashy faces. They are hardly even men yet. She gruffs her voice again, says, get the fuck out of my way, tries to shunt the barrow, though the two hands of Anvil hold it firm. He nods his empty eyes towards the fir trees. Says, we were thinking, perhaps you might fancy a smoke with us. We’ve got plenty of tobacco. Come with us over to those trees after work—
Of a sudden some rock carrier bulls right through them and then she sees it is John Bart under a stone. Get off the fucking path, he says. The men move quick to allow him through, though Bart knocks into the shoulder of one of them and continues on. Anvil steps forward and takes hold of her shirt, brings his face towards her, goes to speak but what is formed by tongue and teeth does not pass his lips, his face to white as the sharp of her blade is pressed between his legs.
There is pleasure in the way he backs away from her all sneer and teeth. The two others staring mutely at the knife.
Colly is singing for the rest of the day.
See how they run—hee!
See how they run,
They all ran after the farmer’s wife,
Who cut off their cocks with a carving knife—
Foot by foot this going-nowhere road deepens through the bog, gathering new workers into its expression of noise and mud and tree bones. The weather that comes to dress it, sun one moment and rain the next, though the morning wind is the worst, she thinks. How it strips you cold for the rest of the day and you can never get warm after it. There are more women now doing the same work as the men. They all come in disturbances of dress and body, many thin-skinned, their countenances whittled to rock. They take their children and leave them by the side of the site, though most of them do not play as children but sit white and silent. So many people now are hungered and bone-sore and half dressed. She wonders which ones have walked here since the middle of the night, twenty miles for a day’s work and nine pence.
She hears talk that men are agitating against such strangers, against the women who are joining the work, against the gaffer watching over them, a rumor going about that he is going to drop their pay to afford the new workers. Each day she watches the pay clerk set up his payment table, the heavy way he walks as if his entire body complained of some disadvantage, about having to be here at all. He is only half here, she thinks. How he puts the money in your hand without looking at you.
Again and again she finds herself thinking about the contours of her body hidden under a man’s clothing. What she has done to herself—strapped her chest down and ragged herself shut, just in case. Sees herself as some character in a story, one of Colly’s great yarns, the one he told about Étaín—thrown about the world by others, turned first into water and then a worm and later a butterfly. She thinks, it’s better to be a butterfly than a worm but what’s the difference really when you can’t be yourself? And that great wind sent to blow the butterfly over the sea for seven years and all that fluttering and flying and never alighting and did she not grow tired with herself?
This day now and just to be done with it, she thinks. Watching the day slip from its shell into dusk. How the last light of each day is lengthening and yet such a walk to the cabin, firewood to be found. She drops the barrow and widens into a yawn.
It is Colly who suggests it, to take some of the bog wood back in a sack. We can take turns carrying it, he says. It will burn better than anything we can find in the wood. The twists of wood are quickly sacked and slung over her shoulder. Most of the others have left in small groups. She watches the wind blowing through the rags of the remaining walkers, wonders how far each must travel, their vision locked towards some inner-seeing of home many will not reach till dark.
She says, tell me a riddle, Colly.
He says, how about this one—what’s always the same weight yet keeps growing heavier?
She adjusts the sack on her shoulder. The road turns for another road and then another and Colly starts up.
A pat on Pat’s hat,
A pat on his cat,
It’s time hurrah for dinner.
The road is empty and her shoulder is smarting. She stops and rests the sack on the road, rubs at her fingers red and newly disfigured, rubs the pain out of her hand. She bends to lift the sack by the throat and it is then the men step out of her unnoticing. Two men far enough back to remain faceless, slow and silent and thick in the way they move, and yet one of them stops and then both step off the road. She thinks of the men who harassed her, watches the trees for hiding shapes. The empty road and how the trees bind the gray-soft and the coming night together as if to say nothing is the matter.
A pat on Pat’s cat,
Who has come for Pat’s rat,
It’s time hurrah for dinner.
Cabins begin to thicken the road as she approaches the town. They smoke the air but there are few faces and no animals, not even a dog. A finger of wood prods at her shoulder and she turns to adjust it, sees the two distant men behind her on the road and how they stop also. A sudden light feeling swims her legs.
She thinks, it is always the simplest thing and not the most complicated, isn’t that what Mam used to say? Those men are just walkers.
The west becomes a low sky-fire. The hedgerows are losing their color. Gloom spreads over the fields. She wills herself to slow her walk but the two men do not catch up. She hurries onwards, a vision of faceless men footing like phantasms behind her.
Colly says, maybe what they want is the bog wood.
She thinks, I will knife off their dicks if they come near me.
Colly says, you’ll lose them in the town, I bet.
She stops by the bakery shop and awaits their disquiet in the window, the world reflected into shadow like a dream of strange water, some shadow-man leaning drunk against a barrel and all such who walk past, a shadow-child who flits the street, shadow-horses dipping a trough, that shadow-gig that shakes the glass, her own shadow-face deeper and older and watching as the two men do not show themselves.
She counts a long minute and then another. The men have gone into a pub or a shop. She chides herself for being so stupid.
Pa
t’s rat chased by Pat’s cat,
Makes a run into Pat’s hat.
Pat’s cat has lost his dinner.
There are gleams of candlelight in a few of the cabin windows outside the town, though most are dark. She turns onto a low road, the sack as heavy as the falling darkness. She does not notice that Colly has stopped singing.
Grace.
What?
Them two are following us again.
She can feel them without looking, sees in her mind all the various turns from the road they did not take and now this one, this one road she happens to be on and still they are behind her. She turns and sees their two shapes clearer now. Oh! Oh! How everything in twilight seems cloaked in slowness but the men now are catching up.
She begins at a high walk, bending with the weight of the sack, hears herself panting.
Colly says, faster, faster.
She looks again and the men are closer. Oh! Oh!
Colly says, they want the firewood, that’s what they’re after.
She drops the sack like a bad thought upon the road, continues at her high pace. The men walk past the sack.
But oh! But oh!
Faster! Faster! Faster!
Now she knows it. That she cannot return home. That these men whoever they are want to know where she lives or worse. Her mind fighting the unwilled thought of what they might want. Soon it will be dark and that is the road splitting in two and one of them leads home, where you cannot go. She follows the unknown road. Wishes for all her life’s luck to come at once. She studies a wood and thinks how it might hold her and how it might not. Walks past a farmhouse set back off the road, lamplight in all three of its lower windows and how she would like to knock but what if they take ill at the sight of you or refuse to answer and them two behind you at the gate like patient dogs.