Grace

by Paul Lynch

Faster! Faster! Faster!

  She is sticky with sweat and panting. She thinks of the sanctuary of trees, how it would make sense to just run for it and hide but perhaps the dark of the woods is not dark enough. How every bird now is calling down the darkness. Crows are rioting an oak. She takes a turn for another road and knows she is lost, turns to see the two men following at a high walk.

  Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh!

  Faster! Faster! Faster! Faster!

  Close enough now to see the strength in their walk. Her ears alert to any change in their sound. Everywhere she sees places she might hide. The back of a stile. An old barn. The darkening hedgerow. Trees, trees, but none of them thick enough. She passes another farmhouse. She considers the sharpness of her knife. There is something ahead and it shapes into a stray dog and she thinks, if that is a black dog my luck is done for.

  It is a wandering collie blazing white at the neck.

  She hears a change in their movement, turns to see them coming at a slow run.

  Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh!

  She is wind over a gate, has no memory of touching it, skirts a hedgerow, turns to see the men climbing the gate. Now she is at a full run, meets another field, meets a dark road, knows she is lost.

  Colly says, those men are nothing but demons, that is what they are, demon men on the road, like—

  Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!

  The world has fallen away to just these two men. She thinks, I will run all the high roads of Ireland, run the night into morning, run until your ankles snap and yet still you would stump onwards.

  She stops to stifle her wheezing breath under a gauntlet of trees, hawthorns, she thinks, but it is too dark to tell and if you can’t tell the trees then perhaps they can’t see you. Watching the dark. Watching the laneway hold the dark. Then she sees their two shapes and she wonders now if Colly is right, that the two men are demons, for how else can they keep following you like this in the dark or perhaps they can hear your loud breathing. Running now into a field and then another, tearing her skin in a ditch, and she is terrified her legs will give in, terrified at the thought of these demon men and what they will do to her, and she notices now it is night and only night and what is mind-shadow is also world-shadow.

  Now here. The where of it she does not know. The knife in her hand. Her lungs a flailing old coat. She thinks again of poor Étaín, how good it would be to be turned into a fly or a puddle of water or a butterfly that could fly over the trees. How you would trade seven years and all for it. At a moment’s notice she will run, run, run. Then she bolds herself up. The dark is my friend as much as theirs. I will cut off their demon dicks and stick them in their ears. She watches the night, waiting.

  She haunts the late morning with her look. The way she steps onto the Harrow, slow and slightly bent as if sluggard thought could be made physical. Her eyes almost lidded. The foreman away up the site but the others are watching her, this slump-shouldered thing mouthing words to herself. Someone says, Darkey said aye for you at roll call. She sees Darkey stalling his pickax to look at her, wonders perhaps if there is concern in his stare. She is clagged with mud, shakes whatnot from her hair, picks at a briar hitched to her back. Thinks about what she must look like. Something half born. A little ditch sleeper.

  Some youngster all elbows has a firm grip of her barrow but she pulls him off it. The boy braves a hard eye at her but she tells him to go and fuck.

  Colly says, you dull-brained bitch, you are nothing but a dim ditchdigger—what is it you are trying to achieve by coming back here—don’t you get what just happened?

  To get through this day under the weight of such tiredness. She would sleep if she could standing in her boots. The cold breeze reminds her she is still damp from the ditch she slept in. She closes her eyes for a moment’s rest and still she can see them clearly, two forms like shadows lifted into life off the road. They could be any two men out of all the men working here and she is afraid to look at such faces for what she might meet, a recognition, the meeting of knowledge that is certain and what then? And how she would love to tell somebody what has happened, tell Darkey or the foreman or some other, but how can you say it? Because they didn’t catch you and even if they did who would care?

  She goes to the sitting rock out of sight of the foreman and puts the pipe in her hand and closes her eyes. She wakes from a drifting dark into rain-cold. Turns and meets the stare of John Bart. He is either looking at her or staring past her.

  Colly says, I’m telling you, it must be him.

  She thinks, do not look at his funny arm, but she does.

  There are things you can do to keep secret the course home. This long toe-cutting walk with the breeze at your back. She routes through pastureland she has never walked through before and keeps tight to the ditches, jinks through sudden gaps and unpicks the bramble. She thinks of the violence held in the greenery of a ditch, how you swallow the dog to catch the cat and swallow the cat to catch the bird and swallow the bird to catch the spider and swallow the spider to catch the fly and everything eats everything else and the man wants to swallow the woman and the world calls it nature. Her hand of its own accord keeps touching her knife.

  In woodland she moves in zags like some animal of strange bearing and instinct, waits and watches to see if she is being followed. She has avoided the town and can see it in the distance, thinks of yesterday’s watching window, the assembly of faces passing in the glass and how you are blind to the who and the what of them, and that is the trouble, how you may see in a window’s reflection what appears to be true and yet it is just shadow.

  Twilight is touching the woods when she meets the bridle path near the cabin. She is spent and sore, wants to take off her boots and burn them. It is Colly who senses it—quick! he says. A tap soft to the cheek. A wet mark to the forehead. Hee! Running then towards the cabin, arms flung out, blinking against the downpour. She stands at the door when it happens, the awareness that blooms out of its own dark in the second before, the soft sucking sound of a foot rising from mud. It is an iron arm that nooses her neck, lifts her off her feet, a great weight pressed to the back of her and then she is dragged backwards and useless and kicking amid grunt and drink-smell and in her ears she can hear her own strangle—how the sky twists and heaves sidewards suddenly and out of it the evil sun that is the face of another. She is shout-trying, shout-trying, tastes her own blood, and there comes a second hand that cups her mouth and she wants to spit the filth-taste out. She is trying to breathe, squirming useless now against this physical power. In the midst of all this it occurs to her that she does not know the who of these men, these men dragging her towards the shade of the woodland. She finds herself pinned utterly, a rough hand at her mouth half covering her eyes, a face all teeth above her, another hand rough at her breeches. A button pops off and she knows now she is done for, that last night she used up all her life’s luck. That everything now is folding into the one kind of dark, the light in her mind closing down to a nothing, thought burrowing deeper past thought, past any sense of herself, until it finds a gleam of something that could be called light or could be called strength and it might be Colly who does it—knees the man in the groin and a great wind comes out the man’s mouth. He buckles and her legs come free enough to roll herself out from under him—Colly grasping to pluck the other man’s eyes out and it is then—she does not know what happens. The hand gone from her mouth and she screams—Colly!—finds herself free, finds herself wriggling backwards from the sound of a fight, grunt sounds, the sound of someone hitting the ground—Colly!—and she is trying to crawl to the safety-dark of the wood—Colly! Colly!—crawling and crawling until she hears the sound of another behind her and she quickly turns to see a man coming upon her, sees an arm held shriveled to a chest, sees the other arm loose with a knife, sees the tough eyes of John Bart coming upon her—Colly! Colly! Colly!—sees behind John Bart where a man dark with his own blood is slowly moving away down the path. The shape of another lying on his back.

&
nbsp; The hand of John Bart putting the knife into a scabbard.

  The good hand of John Bart lifting her up.

  Her ears are full of thunder-blood. Blood of the dead man not ten paces away, one leg funnied beneath the other and his arm spun out as if waving farewell. She watches the trickle-red from a knife-cut to the throat. John Bart walking silently in circles, his head lowered as if trying to see past a puzzle and she watches and a thought occurs he cannot hide his youth even with that mustache. This moment and how it seems to hold suspended and then it falls out of time altogether, as if time has to gain something back, some equilibrium from the sudden of what happened—John Bart, worrisome, walking in circles and her own breath stunned in the throat and how time can be like this forever.

  Colly is breathless. He says, I had him kneed in the balls, that one on the ground—hee!—that’s all was needed, and that other, I had his eye near pulled out, we could have run off, we didn’t need the help of that Bart fellow, who does he think he is, some kind of hero?—now we are in all kinds of trouble with a dead man and whatnot.

  She thinks, that is a man dead on the ground, for sure. Stares at this Bart fellow, for he is a man is he not and what thoughts are in his head also? She sits on a rock and tastes blood where cheek flesh was gouged out. She eyes the dead man, straightens when she sees the still hand rising to the throat. The dead man is trying to sit up. What she sees in his eyes when he meets her look is not the look of an attacker but the terror of a man staring into his own end. The stumbling mouth of the man. Otter. Otter.

  Colly says, he wants water but tell him to go and fuck.

  She does not know why but feels hatred for John Bart. She goes into the cabin and twines her breeches safe to her waist with a knot. Can see in the glen below the windowed amber of the farmhouse and how good it would be to have a life like theirs and not her own where such things continue to happen. She brings water to the lips of the injured man. John Bart watching her from the tree stump he sits on, the woodland darkening now like great wings about his shoulders. Then he goes to the man and drags him by the collar, sits him to the stump.

  Colly says, we will have to kill him now, we have no choice but to be murderers.

  Bart says, you must come with me now. I know this man and I know the other I cut. They’re rough dogs, travel with a rough crowd. They will come back here or seek me out.

  She eyes the cabin and thinks of the fire gone out and thinks of the bed and thinks of the wildflowers she’s picked to make the place look brighter, the mouse-ear that is a single green orchid, thinks of the dead woman she had to drag out. Thinks about Bart, for he is a man and men are nothing but trouble and how are you to know what is in his head, he could be planning something also. She scowls at him. Says, I didn’t ask for you to kill anybody on my account.

  He looks at her with astonishment. Of a sudden she knows what he is and what he is not. He turns without word and starts for the path without her. She stares at the path and stares at the dying man, another body left lying about and you’ll be the one who has to take care of it and maybe you’d be safer with this knife fighter.

  Wait! she shouts. She goes into the cabin and bundles her blanket and belongings. When she steps out of the house the dead man has gone.

  She says, what did you do with him?

  He says, I did nothing with him.

  So where is he gone?

  He got up and ran off.

  I thought he was dying.

  Obviously not.

  Colly says, I’m not going nowhere without some tobacco.

  Bart walks down the bridle path and grunts for her to follow. After a minute, she suddens to a stop. Stands eyeing an alder freshly axed and lying off the path, its wood the color of blood.

  John Bart turns with a snappy look. He says, what now?

  She says, we’ll not go down this path. We’ll go through the wood. That alder there is a bad omen.

  He turns without word and continues down the path.

  Colly says, I’m in a right mind to burst him.

  IV

  Ride the Wolf’s Mouth

  It is like the worst of black weather, she thinks. Having to follow behind this citóg. This ridiculous rush of a walk. I’m just some cat’s paw to him, being made to tramp through this wood having your eyes twigged out, he’d ask you to put your own hand in the fire.

  Colly says, I’m still in a right mind to burst him.

  The tangle of a ditch and they emerge to find a road quit of starlight. The night thrown open into its full dark.

  She thinks, John Bart, you have killed all the stars tonight. She stares at Bart but he has coalesced into the dark like a trick. Hedgerows huddle along the road and mutter the breeze like watchers. Bart announced by the shrill clack of his hobs on the road’s rough stone, his breathing heavy as utterance. She wants for him to stop. She would like not to follow. She would like to be able to go back to where she has been suddened out of, the cabin she called home. Colly whispering, he is some customer, all right, I’m sick of this marching—tell me, why would they be coming after us, they would be coming after him, that kittery cunt—hee!—he is the one who cut them with the knife.

  She mouths soundless abuse at Bart, would love to sneak up and box him where it hurts. The way he steps unrelenting through the dark, a power different now from any power she can muster. How he seems to be made only of will and of necessity like some force that will take no account.

  Rain suddens heavy and tuneful, makes all the earth sing a blind song of itself. Soon she is sodden but still Bart walks on. Bull of a brain! A john mule’s bollocks! His shoes sound off the stones their infernal click-click. She shouts for him to stop but only his boots answer, click-click, click-click.

  She comes alongside him and tugs his sleeve, says, we’re getting soaked.

  He says, fuck the rain.

  She says, what is the point in getting so wet?

  He says, it’s only the wet, the wet never hurt no one.

  Her hands become fists and she fights the want to strike him, turns without word and steps off the road towards a grouping of trees wrapped in night shroud. John Bart’s click-click fading until it folds into an all-dark that widens vastly and without seam. She stares and feels the panic come quick in the pure blind of all this. Imagines them—who?—and yet she can see them—out there in the dark—marauders of some kind, air demons coming down from on high. She stares at the dark and wills loose the gripping thought, says aloud, only wee boys are afraid of the dark.

  Colly says, who are you calling wee?

  Then he says, tell me, what was the point of all that carry-on, that marching and getting soaked—even the birds are asleep.

  Hardly has Colly spoken when a quarter moon appears, spills slow milk on a figure stepping towards them—click-click, click-click, Bart then hunkering down beside her with his smell of rain-sweat and rain-tobacco and all that energy that is his decidedness and yet—she feels some class of victory over him. For a long while they each keep quiet and she wonders if he is asleep, if perhaps she should sneak off into the dark, thinks about the cabin and gasps the loss of four pennies she has left hidden in a matchbox.

  Bart sighs and says, what now?

  She does not answer, thinks, to hell with him and to hell with this.

  In silence they watch the rain speak itself out.

  Everything that is wet shines with ghost light and everything that is itself becomes also what it could be. She marshals hate to power her through this weariness until her hate becomes a memory dulled and dim beyond feeling. She becomes the cloudy moon winking into her own dark, stepping forward into a walking dream of those two men who attacked her—not the face of the man who was trying to climb up on her but the full fact of him, the man’s weight as his fullest expression, how he was not man in that moment but animal, bore the strength of a mad dog, and she thinks about his intent and how want can mix so cruelly with hurt, sees him stumbling down the bridle path with his left hand held to h
is throat, the blood smile John Bart gave him like a brand-new mouth, hears the mouth begin to chatter—didn’t we get what we deserved, dead man? Attacking that girl like that? Now give me a toke of that pipe in your pocket. Dead man reaching into his pocket and putting the pipe into his throat-mouth, the man wheezing as the throat tokes in satisfaction—

  John Bart is shaking her by the arm. He says, nearly there.

  She answers, nearly where?

  She wakes into cold and gloom and shawls her arms about herself. From a dream she carries the feeling that the last few years of her life were not lived—that in this moment of waking she is fully her younger self. Then dimly it comes—the knowledge she has awoken from a memory of the past that isn’t and she lies suspended in this slipway between dream and the new day that quickens its truth upon her. A barn of some kind. Daylight writing the rafters with letters of light. She does not remember having entered. She can only remember the road and this citóg now with his soft-snoring beside her, watching him sleep like some sort of cat creature curled in delight with himself. And then she sees how he nurses in sleep his bad arm to his chest.

  Colly whispers, go now, would you?

  She picks up her bundle and begins towards the double doors of the barn but Bart’s snoring stops as if somebody has put a hand to his mouth. She holds her breath, can hear him rustling upwards onto his wrist. She has stopped by the door and blithely picks straw off her jacket as if it were the most natural thing in the world to be standing here by this door and who would be thinking of running off at this hour when we have spent the full night trying to reach whatever this place is?

  Bart says, what you think you’re going back to is not the same as what you’ve got coming if you go back there.

  She looks at him and says, whatever does that mean?

  He has a weird sit, she thinks. It is just like Colly’s—the way he crosses his legs under him and leans back on his sit-bone. Her legs have always been too long for her body and so she prefers to sit down rather than squat. She sees the legs of an old milking stool poking out of the straw and grabs it, wipes the dust off the seat. The stool complains when she sits then breaks beneath her, throws her backwards knees over head. She stares at the rafters and thinks, my arsebone has been hit by a hammer. She is waiting for Bart to laugh at her but he does not. His dark eyes stare at her instead. She scours him with a look, opens her mouth as if to shout away his judgment but he motions a shushing finger to his lips—reddening, she is reddening all over. She feels— she wants— she picks up the stool and hurls it off the ground. Shouts, shush up yourself!