by Paul Lynch
He says, I am not stupid in the least. Don’t you see what is going on around you? The have-it-alls and well-to-doers who don’t give a fuck what is happening to the ordinary people. You saw that village yesterday and how prosperous it was, untouched by this curse. The arrogance of that driver. This is the way of things now. It could be the end of the world for the likes of us, but to the likes of them, they aren’t bothered. Do you know what I think? Those who are starving on the roads still believe deliverance is going to come. But who is going to deliver them? Not God and not the Crown and not anybody in this country. The people are living off hope. Hope is the lie they want you to believe in. It is hope that carries you along. Keeps you in your place. Keeps you down. Let me tell you something. I do not hope. I do not hope for anything in the least because to hope is to depend upon others. And so I will make my own luck. I believe there are no rules anymore. We are truly on our own in all this. If they have left us to fend for ourselves then we will do just that. We should meet it standing up. I believe that if I want that goddamn carriage to slow down or get off the road I can make it happen. I really believe this. Either I win or they win. There can be no other. I will make it happen, for how else am I supposed to live? What is happening now is no different from the end of the world, the only difference is that the rich can continue to live without affliction. The gods have abandoned us, that’s how I figure it. It is time to be your own god.
We must look like some pair of raggle-taggles, she thinks. Crows circling the field for the worm. Bart on the road with his sleeve rolled up, daring people to look. And the way she is growing out now, in every direction, she thinks. She has stopped tying her chest down with cloth. Keeps her boy’s cap in her pocket. Likes to run her hand through her hair.
Womaning, Colly calls it. You are womaning all over. You are turning into Mam. You are daring him to look.
She finds herself staring at Bart. Tells herself she is trying to understand him. How he has eyes that listen. Eyes that stare into the deepest part. She feels the loosening of things she has willed down and forgotten. Hears words that come unbidden from her own never, words that tell a tale of her life. When she says her name aloud to him, Bart smiles. He says, in my head I had taken to calling you Girly but Grace is better.
She whispers her name to herself. Grace. The sound of your own name is like stepping into some old-known river. Now you can be yourself again.
She asks him to tell her his story but he shrugs and doesn’t answer.
Later, he says, I came from a fishing family but I was quite useless to them. He laughs and then his face falls and he goes quiet. One time I awoke to see my brother burning to death in a blanket. He fell asleep drunk beside the fire. What could I do with one hand?
The roads are lit with wildflower and the world to bright. Cowslips wittering the ditches. The dandelions spoken in their best yellow lean over each other like brothers. An orchid one time, white as you like. Now and again, despite Bart’s hand, there are people who want to walk with them. An old drover half deaf, his hands wagging in the empty air as if to express the loss of his cattle. A woman in a man’s woolen cap who tells them she has walked nineteen miles since sunrise, walking with her arms folded, leaning into the thought of how she will ask a cousin for assistance. She thinks, it is easy to tell your story to strangers because no one on these roads judges another.
There is a certain look from Bart and they make their excuses and leave such walkers, find turnoffs they aren’t taking, return to some farmhouse they have their eye on and wait for night. They knife open padlocks, trick open latch doors, flat-foot through sculleries, whisper to awakening dogs. Bart says, you take just enough but no more unless you get into one of the far bigger houses, then you take what you like.
They walk the roads supping ketchup from a bottle and she can feel some sort of gathering power, the world widened for summer and how it throws open the evening sky. She wonders if they are part of this beauty, part now of nature’s natural return to power. She finds herself looking strangely at Bart. How often it seems he has tricked open the latch door of her mind. The way their minds seem to meet in the middle. The way he says the exact same thing she is thinking at the same time.
She says to him, when I was younger I used to lie awake thinking about time, the length of it, the idea of God, lie awake thinking of what it might mean to live forever and ever, of what that might be like, trying to live for all eternity in heaven but my mind would fall inwards at such thought and I would get into a panic.
Bart says, I thought I was the only one who did that. When I was nine or ten I used to lie awake all night trying to imagine the idea of endless time in heaven without day or night or the need or want for anything, no need for sleep or food or heat or another’s comfort and yet it seems to me that everything in life is related to these things otherwise there would be nothing to live for, and so I came to the conclusion that it was fucking pointless to live like that and decided I wouldn’t like to try.
They enter an abandoned cottier’s house and she is struck by the feeling she has been here before. How the world keeps making strange places feel familiar—the sight of hills at a certain angle of light or the shape of a tree she could never before have seen and yet it is like she knows the tree from memory or the memory of a dream. And now this room and how it echoes with the feeling of being known to her. She watches Bart touch the wall with his hand. He says, I feel like I was here once before. She startles him with her look.
She says, do you think someday when we were younger we just dreamed all this, forgot it until now?
Upon the morning road some black-dressed fellow is trying to catch up with them. Then she sees it is a priest, how he walks leaning into hurry. He calls out for them to stop. When he meets them he is sweating, wipes at his brow, pleads with them to follow. He says, the men who were hired did not show up. It is a sad matter.
She notices now he does not know what to do with his hands and that his voice, lush and deep, does not go with his figure.
Colly whispers, I’ll bet he’s one of them fake priests wandering the roads, men dressed in cassocks asking for alms, taking their cassocks off at night and climbing into bed with widows and daughters, praising God and all the saints while trying to pierce their insides, and how can you know this man is telling the truth, that this isn’t some scheme he’s up to?
Bart offers the priest his hand without discussion. She bends to pluck a dandelion and blows the seeds at his back.
Colly says, what did you wish for?
She says, I wished for that other hand to wither.
Throwing hate now at Bart, who chats to this priest as if he has always known him. They are talking about the trouble. She hears the priest say, the tree that is leaden with its own fruit breaks its bough come winter. It is greatness that leads to the ruin of itself. That is what they will find out.
She wonders who he is talking about, priests do nothing but spout easy wisdom.
They are taken to a house of three coffins. There are two men in white shirts and waistcoats, three women and a boy. A woman says in a low voice, she’s dead now, God be with her in heaven.
Grace tries not to look at these people with their woes, the boy casting her a malevolent look as she gets under a coffin, an ash box full with the body of some weightless child, the sound of a woman gasping as the coffin is lifted. She studies their house for something to steal.
There is a forever to this walk, she thinks. Colly going on and on, says, coffin work is other people’s bother, why did you say yes to it? She says, I didn’t say yes, I never even opened my mouth. Never has she felt so embarrassed, carrying the coffin of some child you have never known and everyone looking at you. Her eyes eat at the ground, eat at the trees, eat at the sky as if asking to be lifted away out of here. She thinks, how far away is this churchyard? Why didn’t Bart ask? And what are we doing carrying the coffins of strangers? Every time she looks she finds the boy staring. She tries to imagine the life
of the child she is carrying, to imagine the child doing different things but each picture in her mind is a version of herself, or it is Bran or Finbar running out the door to fall on the ground and sit crying or she can see them pulling the ginger cat’s tail before the ginger ran off because that is what cats do if you torment them like that and you were warned but you didn’t listen. She wonders if the boy who hates her with his looks will always remember this child she is carrying, but what will happen when the boy grows old and dies, who will remember the child then? Of a sudden she sees how memory works, that all memory eventually falls into a great forgetting that will include herself and everyone at Blackmountain and everyone on earth and the thought alone is enough to make your head burst.
Song-smoke. A room darkening to firelight. They have come back to the house and she stands silent by the wall watching the way they are gathered, hating the songs that seem to dream sadly out their mouths, hating the talk of their dead. A man saying, their road has ended, it is God’s will. The boy burning his eyes at her. She thinks, why is it Bart does not notice? Colly whispering, come on, let’s go. She tries giving Bart the full look of trouble but he seems to be enjoying himself. She slides along the wall towards the door, comes up against a pair of heavy black tongs, slips her coat over them, slips outside into the gloaming and away down the path, away from that bastard—
Bart shouts for her to wait up.
Colly says, grab him by the balls with those tongs, see how he likes it.
She turns and sees him produce a kettle out of his coat. He starts swinging it by the bool.
We’re some pair, he says. You’d almost think we’d planned it.
The leaves are trembling gently. The leaves are letting go their light. How the leaves release their light whispering grief to the dark and tomorrow the same of it. They pass over a bridge that echoes the life-rush of water. Water turning the stones. Water giving way to water in endless follow. Walking now a narrow road through a glen with old trees, larch and alders, she thinks. Such trees soon to be coffins. She tries not to see herself being laid in such a box but when you tell yourself not to look at something your mind does not listen and does what it wants.
Bart going on about that priest again but she doesn’t want to hear.
Colly is spitting. Why’s he always deciding things for us, that spuddy-hander—hee!—I would have said no to the priest, said, go and fuck off, holy father, we were grand before they both came along, we knew what we were at.
She thinks about what the look of that boy did to her, how his look wormed hate inside her, and now it sits wriggling under her skin and all she was doing was helping. And now she is carrying these stupid tongs as if anybody in the next town or some tinker on the road would even buy them.
Colly says, clatter him over the head with them, show him who’s boss.
Bart is still going on. He says, did you hear that priest, he was some sort of intellectual. Told me about the grief of Achilles. Said that he was overcome with grief for his friend Patry, Patro—whatever his name was, Pat, and that Pat’s mother, or was it Achilles’s mother, came along and gave him some elaborate gold buckle that had everything beautiful on the earth engraved on it and that made him happy for a while, made him forget his grief, imagine—
She wants for him to shut up with his talk of death and buckles. She wants for— she shouts, would you ever shut up with it? All this stupid talk. What would you know about Achilles and that Pat fellow? All that talk the other day and you got your answer for it—a kick in the head. It’s made you daft, so it has. It was you made us go and carry those coffins. You never asked me. I never felt so stupid in my whole life. And here I am crying and carrying these stupid tongs and I don’t know why I have them.
She has not noticed she is crying until she has said it. Takes pleasure in watching his face crumple, the sinking of his brows and his mouth. How he falls into silence. For a moment he looks as if he wants to say something but cannot quite figure it, his mouth hanging open and then closing beneath that ridiculous horseshoe mustache. His walk seems to thicken. In the far-off there is something approaching, some slow horse and cart.
When Bart speaks, it sounds to her as if he doesn’t know whether to be soft with her or defiant. He says, what I said the other day is—what I said is that there’s no point sitting around hoping for things to get better. You must make them better yourself.
Like what? she says. Like what? Like this? She steps into the center of the road and sits down and folds her arms, puts the tongs across her lap. Stares at the oncoming cart. Bart stops and stares at her.
C’mon, he says. Get up off the road, will you.
He tries to pull her up by the elbow.
Colly says, stay where you are, show him who’s stronger.
She says, touch me again and I’ll tong the balls off you.
She eyes what comes and sees the cart is a gig. Wishes it would hurry. So slowly, slowly does it come she wonders if she should bother with this protest, wonders what she is really doing, this cart will come and clatter you on the head.
Bart humps against the hedgerow watching.
He says, that thing is so slow we’ll be here all night.
She can see the outline of a single horse and two people on the gig. A side lantern swinging uncertain against the dusk.
Bart says, quit your stupid game and get off the road.
She says, fuck up. I’m only doing what you tell me.
Slowly she stands up and eyes the coming gig so intently it is as if the world has narrowed to a tunneling dark and she sends into it her will, decides she will prove him wrong, or right, whatever, wishes the vehicle to a stop. The gig seems to slow and yet continues to bear upon her and she thinks it is not slowing down but speeding up, hears a warning shout that is not John Bart’s, the rattle and hoof-fall and the screaming in her head and there comes another shout but then the gig slows and comes to a shuddering stop. She cannot move her body, though her breath has already run for the ditch. Colly shouting, you did it, you mad bitch!
She finds herself staring into the faces of some elderly couple in the getup of townsfolk. They are sitting very still upon their fear. The leaden way the man moves his arm across the woman’s bosom as if to protect her and then he stands up and he is watching the trees both sides of the glen and he is watching John Bart’s shape in the ditch and then he shouts, please, whatever you do, don’t harm us, I’ll give you what you want.
It is then that she sees herself, a person half dark standing center of the road with these tongs in her arms like— they are the length of a firearm and I see one thing and you see another and what the man sees is a gun.
The man lobs a heavy stone with his arm and she watches it rise and strike the road with a chinking thud that is not the sound of a stone, the shadow of Bart fleet from the ditch to grab it.
Her breath is squashed. She is spiked all over with soreness. Running and running while still holding the tongs. They slow to a wheezing walk and watch the night close around them in strangeness. They do not know for sure where they are. She thinks, how luck like that can fall from the sky, or perhaps not, perhaps you made your own luck, perhaps Bart was right. They step through darkling trees and she can feel Bart watching her strangely as if trying to puzzle her out. Then he laughs hugely.
He says, you are some woman, do you know that? Some woman. He shakes his head as if he cannot understand her.
She looks at him strangely. Nobody has ever called her a woman before.
He says, the pirate queen of Connacht, that’s who you are. Grace O’Malley—ha! Now, isn’t that a coincidence. That’s what we’ll call you from now on. To have the nerve to do something like that with a pair of tongs. My God.
She doesn’t know where to look, so she sits on a rock and looks at the sky instead.
He says, hold out your hands. He pours the coins into her butterflied palms and then they count out their fortune—three pounds and ten shillings and twopence.
S
he says, do you think it’s enough?
He throws away the kettle, says, ha! Enough for what? The high life? You are some woman.
Then his voice quietens. He says, we need to be watchful. That was a big thing we did back there. They are going to come looking for us now. That will bring them out, all right.
Her breathing is ragged and there is weariness reaching for every limb. She wonders for how much longer she can run like this, can see herself running through the night and the tiredness eating in and the horsemen catching up because bodies get tired, that is what bodies do if you do not rest them and you are scuppered if you haven’t a horse for such matters. She looks up to see the dusk’s last light and the weight of night on top of it.
She says, what do you think will happen the day the world ends?
Bart’s brow puzzles. What kind of question is that? The world is not going to end. It will just keep on going. But if it was to end at some time in the future, it would look just like this. There will be clouds there marching westwards carrying rain and somewhere else it will be raining already and somebody will be getting wet and cursing about it. The same as it ever was.
She tells herself, the pirate queen of Connacht.
She knows now they are ancient and young and will never die.
The dreaming world is shaking free its shadows when they reach Athlone town. Her eyes tug with sleep. She thinks her feet are broken, has walked the night tense for the sound of their coming—a vision of grouped torchlight in the far-off. Just a bit farther, Bart kept saying. Yet here they are now, her heels scorched, into the town without bother. She tells Bart she wants a room and a bed, wonders what it would be like to stay in a boardinghouse.
Bart says, we would just make ourselves known to them.