Grace

by Paul Lynch

  Later, Colly says, listen, muc, you must have been dreaming, I’ve never heard of a person being haunted on an individual basis, and anyhow I’ve decided now that what I am is a rationalist, so I don’t believe in ghosts anymore, this is what the schoolmaster used to call thinking people, the ones who figured out mathematics and time and all that lark, rationalists, I think the word comes from the Greeks when you would turn up for a feast only to be handed out small pieces of lotus food and you were skeptical about the size of it.

  She finds Bart and McNutt sitting to the side of the hut, their legs splayed out in an apron of sunlight. McNutt’s face long with a puss. All this sitting about does his head in, she knows, his hands agitating for something to do. McNutt sits picking the muck between his toes and rolling it in his fingers. He is talking to Bart about the clipping of dog ears and it is hard to tell if Bart is listening or not. He sits with his head hanging downwards, idling his knife at wood. She gathers them with her shadow and McNutt looks up, holds her with a long stare that is a new and different type of looking.

  He says, her holy grace has returned. Here, yank me up.

  She ignores his outstretched hand, sits down beside Bart.

  McNutt puts his boots on and steps into the hut.

  This new way McNutt has of looking at her. She thinks, for sure, there has been a softening in his look. How the eye alone can communicate longing. She pulls the shard of looking glass from her pocket and wipes it with her gown. She widens her right eye and stares at it in the mirror.

  Bart says, what’s wrong with you?

  Nothing’s wrong.

  You act like there’s something wrong with you.

  She looks to the door and whispers. We need to get rid of him. He’s nothing but trouble. You’ve seen what he is like—he is stupid, dangerous. He is not right in the skull. He did not do what was agreed upon. That man. That woman. He got those people killed.

  She catches sight of herself in the mirror. Her hair has summered, reaches past her ears curling into woman.

  Colly says, you are the spit of Mam.

  No I amn’t.

  Bart says, you are being hard on him. McNutt is the way he is. That is what makes him McNutt. He cannot be any other person.

  She cuts a look at him, says, your beard is getting too long for your face, it’s time you cut it.

  McNutt steps out of the hut with a hurt look on his face. He says, and what about my beard? Do you not think it is getting long also?

  She watches him root a stone from the ground with the tip of his boot and hurl it down the hillside. For a moment it is a bird flying for the sun and then it hurtles the fall of the damned.

  This morning she is a forager, roams the crags barefoot under a sun half hidden that could be the tip of a pale finger. Her stomach cramped and the hillside damp from last night’s rain and an hour’s roaming without luck. Anything at all, she thinks, to get out of that hut. Like twins with their brown eyes pretending not to look at you. There is nothing now in that hut but dead air. McNutt has sucked all the good air out. Even the sound of his breathing would madden you.

  Look! Colly says. Her shoulders become taut when she sees the starry white of pignut growing beneath a low blackthorn.

  She says, I hate them things, Colly. Do you think it is an ill omen? What was it Mam always called them? The increaser of dark secrets.

  Colly says, I heard the bitter berries of a blackthorn can make a woman pregnant.

  She crawls beneath the tree and with her knife roots out two pebbly tubers. Then she slides back out but slips on the wet grass, falls into the mouth of the tree. The bite comes quick into the fleshy heel of her hand.

  She shouts, fucking auld git!

  Colly says, you’ll be poisoned to death, them blackthorns are lethal.

  She would like to cudgel the tree with its own wood.

  Colly says, you’ll be dead before you know it.

  She can feel the thorn under the skin but cannot get it out. Finds Bart alone in the hut and presents to him her hand. He holds the palm aloft and squints, rests it like a saddler on his lap.

  He says, there are three ways we can go about this. I could make up a poultice to draw it out but that would take a day or two. If we had a bottle we could drop some matches into it and draw the thorn out. That would be the quickest for sure.

  Her shoulder jerks at the sight of his knife. Her elbow begins to wriggle.

  Bart says, hold still, will you. If it is a blackthorn, you’ll want it out now.

  His eyes narrow as he brings up the knife and she snaps back her hand when the blade touches her skin.

  Ach! she shouts. You are going to slice my hand off.

  Hold still, will you.

  She bites her lip, watches him score the flesh until the tip of the blackthorn peeps out. She likes how he has gentled the knife. Then he takes her hand to his mouth and kisses it—no, he is sucking the flesh to suck the blackthorn out, but still her face reddens.

  Colly says, I hope he doesn’t expect you to suck him back.

  Bart spits the thorn on the ground and he is still holding her hand when both look up to see McNutt watching from the doorway. He spits at the ground between his feet. Says, you should have said so, cunty.

  She snaps back her hand from Bart, says, I got stabbed by a blackthorn. Look.

  The way McNutt looks at Bart but does not look at her. He pulls at the strings that make a smile on his mouth. Says, so you had a little prick in you?

  He has stepped a foot farther in the door and she cannot see his eyes. Then he roars, Jesusfuck, and she can see the true dark of his mouth. He stamps out of the hut, begins to roar at the hillside. They watch him grab a rock and hurl it off another. He is not McNutt now but some other, a great rock smasher, an angry god, his arms pitchforking in different directions of violence. Christ, Colly says, the top of his head is going to blow off. And then he is breathless, comes to a stop, does not look at them. He turns and begins downhill.

  Bart opens his mouth to shout but no words come out.

  Finally, she says, what’s got into him?

  She watches the dusk draw dead souls from trees and rocks. A soul being loosened from a whin is shaped like a shout. Or some wild woman’s hair, Colly says, it’s like the hair of your dead woman—hee!—that’ll be the look of her, all right. A hand touches her shoulder and it is not Mary Bresher but Bart handing her the last of the pipe. She sends a ring-fort of smoke towards the lowlands. Thinks, such a lovely quiet without McNutt. Who cares if he doesn’t come back.

  She would like to tell Bart she is haunted, but how can you explain such a thing? He would not believe a word. He would say, show me this ghost you are talking about.

  She says, do you believe in ghosts?

  He says, I think that some people see ghosts because they need for ghosts to exist. We do not like to believe that things must end. That’s what I think anyhow.

  Colly says, fuck this ghost business going around stalking people—hee!—when I die I want my soul to become part of a machine like a big cog or rivet.

  The air becomes humid, burrs the skin and sticks to sleep. She finds Bart outside watching the dawn with the same frowning attention he uses to read a newspaper. He says, this close weather is troubling. She thinks, perhaps McNutt will return or perhaps he won’t, who cares about him anyhow.

  Another humid day and night and in first light she awakes to see McNutt standing over them. He stands greaved with mud and clung with thorns like a man who has crawled through the worst of a ditch. There is hurry in his voice. He says, you’ve got to get up, the pair of you. Come now.

  His eyes are blood and he looks like his more dangerous self. And yet, she thinks, he seems to stare past them into some faraway thought.

  It is then she sees he is wearing brand-new boots.

  She says, where did you get them things?

  He says, you must come down off the mountain. It happened in a single night. It happened again. It happened.

>   They brazen onto the hill road like locals. You could be anyone at all, she thinks, people wandering the county in search of work or food and certainly not some band of murderers. She studies McNutt’s new boots as he walks, wonders if his feet have shrunk to fit them. It is then the smell meets them on the road. She wants to think it is the smell of some dead animal lying in a ditch or the smell of bilgewater. But then they see the smell made visible. They should be green. They should be lush and tall. But what should be no longer is. In every field and lazybed the lumper stalks have become slippy with rot, the crops become scrawny old legs withering to their last moment. The same thing she saw last year.

  She sees people frantic and plunging spades and not a word said between them and by the side of a narrow plot she sees a white-bearded man pinching his face as if trying to awaken his eyes. A younger man stands over a shovel and weeps into his fist. She sees a young crippled woman propped on the back of a cart staring at a handful of black lumpers. She searches every face she meets, their asking eyes avid for signs from every other that this is not true, that this is not happening, because sometimes you wake and find you are still dreaming and you can go back to sleep and wake up properly later on and everything is all right again.

  Bart’s face is white. He says, I must sit down.

  She watches the sky and she watches the earth, sees that what is future-held is not held at all, that they have stepped through the world as dreamers. Her mind holding what isn’t and what is, the one supposed to be the other and now it is the other that is, begins to see that what carries over these fields has come as easy as breeze, drifting upon all things and through all things, this death wind haunting towards them.

  McNutt is pointing an accusatory finger at nobody in particular. He says, I’ll tell you what people are saying. That this is God’s scourge upon us. That God sent down this to punish the people for their sins. Because people do not pray enough. They do not praise the saints. They do not put their hand in their pocket for the priest’s collection. But I’ll tell you what this is. The people got it wrong, so they did. God sent this down because people are cunts, pure and simple. That’s all there is to it.

  Bart stares at the ground shaking his head. He says, that is utter nonsense. I have read plenty about this in the papers. It has to do with the warm air coming in from the Continent. There are men who say it is a scientific matter.

  McNutt leans back smiling. And who was it sent the warm air from over the Continent?

  The country is facing a second year without a crop, she thinks. It is as if some secret door has opened to let in all the forces of the otherworld. The year will drift to winter and what then?

  Bart says, let me tell you what is going to happen. Soon there won’t be a living animal left on this land. The cost of a hundredweight of oats is already at a pound and it will climb higher. The merchants will hold on to what they’ve got. It will be a pound and a half, two pound before the year’s out. The prices will go up and up so that the rich can protect themselves and that is always the way of it. The Crown will have to do something. They’ll have no other choice now.

  McNutt says, I don’t plan on hanging about watching all that happen. While you two were playing at Diarmuid and Gráinne, I went about my own business. Maybe I’ll let you in on it.

  He stands up and shakes his boots and taps his nose with knowledge.

  The moon tonight is mountainous, comes around the world to prize the dark. After the rain everything glistens for this night sun. The path has come loose with wet and her feet are glad when they meet the road. Southwards, downwards, the road winding towards the lowlands and the smell of field-rot rising to meet them. She thinks of what McNutt has said, imagines a divine hand dispersing vapors, such a mean way of thinking if that is so, and this is how they said the plague was spread all them years before. The fields no longer whisper their gossip but send instead their silent rot-smell to haunt alongside you. Smells like moldy eggs, Colly says. You must hold your nose like this and breathe through your mouth and then the smell won’t enter you.

  Another suddening of rain and they wait it out under tree-cover within sight of a village. In all lands across all time, she thinks, the dog is guardian of the night, but so far this night they have met not one dog bark. The dogs are no longer kings of this country.

  She watches McNutt lean his gun to the tree, his face reversed in mud. There will be no odd business this time, he has promised, hand on heart. And yet so far this night he has not shut up.

  McNutt says, let me tell you about a fellow I once knew called Salter. He was some fellow, all right. Used to stop in at Bracken’s place. Not right in the head at all. Always leaning on the right elbow with his hand circled around his drink staring quizzically at everything. He was famous for telling anyone who would listen that he was off to America. And then finally he went. With great fanfare. They held a wake for him and everything. He puts a sack of mucky spuds in a rowboat and sets off on his own one morning. His mother had knit him a pair of fingerless gloves for the rowing. So he rows out past the pier and rows and rows for three days until the tiredness overcomes him. Now, the thing is, he is not a natural westerner. Not a seaman at all. And his strength begins to sap. He discovers that while he can wash the spuds in the seawater and get them to a nice shine, he cannot eat them, for eating them raw give you the cramps. So he eats them anyway and soon his stomach is in bits. It is then that he curls up in the boat and begins to drift. The rain soaks into him. The wind hurls him about the place. The sun scalds him red all over, even the tips of his fingers. The cold turns him blue all the way down to his toes. Then he finds himself watching the sky on a night just like this, drifting, watching the same stars as ever there were thinking to himself that this will be the last night he’ll ever see them. He prays to God and gives thanks for giving him such a good life even though his life was mostly difficult. He lies there looking at the sky waiting for a long death. And then comes the dawn in all its glory and what does he see but a shoreline in the distance like a miracle. He cannot believe his luck. He begins rowing like a madman, for he realizes he has drifted all the way to America and all this on the strength of three raw potatoes and the stomach cramps. He rows himself with all the energy of the devil and his galley of dark lieutenants roaring at all the burning slaves of hell. Gets himself ashore and drags the boat up onto a little beach and hauls the sack of spuds over his shoulder and sets off to make his fortune. He goes up to the first person he sees, some old man staring at this wild sea-creature coming before him sunburnt and blue. He says, my name is Salter and I’ve just rowed here all the way from Ireland. And the old man looks him up and down with the sure look of one squinty eye and he says, arrah, would you ever fuck off with yerself.

  They break a noisy path through corn. Colly says, rich men plant corn while fools plant potatoes. Shush up, she says. Shush up yourself, he says. At the end of the field a stile unfolds shapely like a man with warning arms. Soon they can see the solid dark of the farmhouse. It is wide and two-storied with outhouses and cottages behind it. A field between them and a yard much too long and a plantation of trees to the right. In the old days, Bart whispers, you’d light a fire at the door of the house and watch them climb out the windows. That’s the way them Whiteboys did it. But they took delight in it.

  It will be a simple enough matter, she thinks. We will move like the dark, weightless like shadow. We will move certain through the house. She pictures herself in a parlor room, gutting a chair with her knife, scattering the room with horsehair. An image of people asleep on plumped pillows. She will take all their tea and sugar and a two-pound weight of whatever you’re having yourself, fat sir.

  Colly says, let the rats drink the cat’s milk. It is a war now, isn’t it?

  She watches Bart darkening his face with mud, rubbing mud through his hair until she does not know him.

  She whispers, which door is it?

  McNutt points.

  Which one.

  That
one.

  I can’t see it.

  McNutt spits. Bastarding stupids. Haven’t I been in and out already?

  He puts his hand in a pocket and produces a key. Let us go dine with them.

  McNutt will go first to the house and watch for any gaters. He is a dark bird that flits along the hedgerow and then he zags into the open field making towards the yard. She wonders again at the mind of McNutt, how he seems to become alive in fright, how everything in his life is edged with laughter. She tries to follow how he moves, can just about make him out, and then, as if the night has swallowed him, he is gone. They wait and watch the night’s stillness. How the night releases its bruised colors, the grass to blue, the slinking purple of chimney smoke.

  Colly says, something’s wrong, I know it.

  Bart whispers, hurry the fuck up, McNutt.

  They are waiting too long now and still McNutt does not come.

  Then Bart says, come on, let’s go.

  They creep along the field’s edges, their eyes wide to the dark. Closer now towards the field’s center, closer to the yard, closer to—it is then they can hear it, a strange sound like an animal sound only it isn’t. Bart reaching for her arm and he takes hold and squeezes. His voice is strangely flat. Wait.

  They hold still, send forth their ears to listen and she listens until she can hear past her heart, can hear the low moaning of a man. Slowly, slowly, pausing to listen, slowly onwards again. How it seems in this moment as if the hedgerow has closed in and the house has edged closer, as if the house itself were some hulking animal creeping towards them waiting to pounce. She knows it now—the moaning belongs to McNutt, wonders if he has fallen and twisted his ankle, banged his head off a rock, wonders why she can’t see him. And then they are upon the place of his moaning and still she can’t see it and then Bart grabs her arm and pulls her back. The ground has opened before them. They are standing at the edge of a great hole in the earth. Bart leaning down. McNutt! Where are you hiding? What happened?