Grace

by Paul Lynch

  McNutt answers with a broken whisper. I am— all right. The bastards— seen us— coming.

  Bart says, where is your gun?

  McNutt says, I cannot—

  She stares into the hole but cannot see anything, Bart curls his body to hide the strike of three matches, drops a butterfly of light into the hole. In the moment of its fall she can see the hole is a dug trap, can see the roof of grass and sticks made to cover it, can see McNutt lying at the bottom in a funny twist. And then she turns and sees them, shapes at first and two lanterns being lit that pull shadows into what they always were, men who were waiting, and now she understands what has happened, that the earth has reached for McNutt because these gaters have dug a nice trap.

  Bart is quickly pulling the pistol and he is trying to shoot it, fuck, he shouts, shakes the gun as if trying to shake some sense into it, the weapon dumb in his hand and he drops it to McNutt, here, you shoot it. He grabs her wrist, yanks the wiring loose in her arm. She becomes her legs, becomes the trees they are fleeing for, sees herself as if from the trees running towards them, as if her mind has gone there in one leap, Bart horsing a knackered wheeze beside her. They reach the trees and she sees the trees are not safe at all but better than being out in the open and she looks again to see the men have not followed. What has followed instead is the spirit of McNutt’s fear, the shouting of a man abandoned directly to his fate, the shouting of the last man on earth. The tracery of the moon shapes men standing weaponed around the pit, bludgeons, slash-hooks, two men climbing down into it.

  They wait until no more McNutt’s awful shouts. No more the men upon him. No more the moon. Just the dawn gray and bloodless. She thinks, the men are gone to their beds and why not? Like happy hunters with their job done and who would return to look? They creep towards McNutt and can see clearly the hole, a great pit dug deep enough to capture a man and not climb back out, the ground of the pit planted with stakes, the figure of McNutt lying broken, half his clothes beaten off him, his boots at a funny angle and his head turned as if to stare into some final thought. A sudden sorrowing noise from Bart and then his face slips and he drops onto his knees and grabs a fistful of earth and drops it over McNutt’s body. She watches the soil fall like rain like black tears like soil simply for a dead man and it is then that she wants to kill them, wants to go to the big house and bring death upon them, set fire to the house—that would please her the most. Or shoot them in their bellies as they lie in their beds, Colly says, make fly their bed feathers with blood, we’ve still got one gun left, we could take back the two guns those gaters took out of the hole.

  Her ears still ring with the roaring of McNutt, his voice like the peals from the blacksmith’s hammer, blow after blow until the iron dulled and lost its voice. She can see it like a picture, Mr. Big Farmer Man nightgowned, kneeling under his cross, his wobbling jowls as he blesses himself while his gaters lie in wait like wolves for McNutt to return with his key.

  She says, let us avenge him, but Bart does not answer.

  She hears him swallow a sob. She keeps watch over her shoulder almost wishing the men to come.

  They quit the mountain—this place is cursed, she thinks. The blackthorn with its true poison has done its work. Bart says, they’d be bound to find us up there sooner or later.

  Her eyes plead for sleep as they secret themselves out of these lowlands. They rest in a copse of stunted oak where the light is ribbed and the trees smother the world to quiet but for the eversound of a stream. She sits slumberous against a tree and is followed to dream by shadow-men swinging billhooks and clubs, not six of them but endless men who hold the dark to their faces and she sees wolves that step from the shadows of trees and wolves that come pawing out of the earth and they are the shadows that make the violence complete.

  In the dawnlight that is dreamlight she awakes and there is Bart in the curl of sleep. She rises and walks downstream, takes her comfort behind a whin bush, washes her face in the water. Looks up to see Mary Bresher stepping away through the underwood.

  Grace shouts, wait!

  Mary Bresher stops and turns with an uncertain look that widens into relief. She says, oh, it is you, I was wondering who was calling.

  Where were you going?

  I was just out for a bit of fresh air. The air is so clean here.

  I expected I would see you again.

  The world is small like that, isn’t it? I’m always running into people I know and in the strangest of places too.

  Mary Bresher lowers her hood and seems to wonder at the sky. She points towards a rock and says, do you mind if I sit down? She gathers her cloak and sits and Grace studies the woman, wonders how it can be so that the woman’s feet are sticky with mud and that the forest floor makes noise under her weight. And those wrinkles worrying the corner of her mouth cannot belong to a dead person.

  She says, are you in some kind of limbo?

  Mary Bresher laughs a little girl’s laugh. There you go again with your odd questions. I’ll admit I haven’t met anybody in a long while now. You are the first person I’ve talked to. I miss my husband. I cannot find him. Shall I tell you how I met him?

  Grace reaches and frees a burr stuck to the pleat of Mary Bresher’s cloak.

  Mary Bresher says, what is wrong with you? Such a long face.

  She says, I don’t know what’s what anymore.

  Whatever do you mean?

  I used to think I knew everything about the world but now I feel like some blind person stumbling through it. Tell me this, do you think that everybody in the world is born fixed into their position?

  I don’t know about that. It is certainly the case that everybody takes the same position in death.

  It seems to me that a fish cannot become a bird and that the bird will attack the fish if it tries to fly. Perhaps that is the natural order of things. But why must that be so? I just saw men belonging to a rich farmer beat to death a poor man with clubs. They dug a trap to catch him like an animal, or like a fish if you think about it—pulled him like a fish from a pool. Poked his eyes out with their beaks. Things have gotten worse now. I think it would take some kind of magical effort for the fish to leave the water—

  Snap-foot and movement and here is Bart stepping towards her and when she looks Mary Bresher is gone. Bart hunkers beside her, his face a mixture of mud and rough beard.

  He says, I thought I heard voices. Are you chatting again to yourself?

  She stands wishing at a field of horses. Knows where Bart’s thoughts lie. They are back in that hole with McNutt, the same thought trying to undo what has been fixed in time’s forever and still the mind wishes it. Her own thoughts trying to hold on to some moment of McNutt. His wagging mouth and you trying to get shut of it and look at you now. Later they sit in the corner of a field under high shrub watching a fire burn out, not a word spoken between them.

  Finally she says, do you think he was just unlucky? Do you think he made his own luck?

  Bart disturbs the cooling ashes with a stick. He says, do you remember when we first stayed on the mountain, that night when one of the rocks cracked like pistol shot and you and me nearly shat ourselves while McNutt sat there shaking with laughter. He put the rock on the fire to give us a fright but the noise when it exploded told anybody that could have been listening where we were that night. He couldn’t do anything without a show. That was McNutt. But you’ve got to admire him. He refused to live off hope.

  V

  Winter

  The devil has dallied these westward roads, doffed his cap in every townland. She watches the always-is of the clouds, tries to fashion from their shapes animals but cannot. Sees instead the shapes of children coat-tailing ragged elders wandering weary and in want of light.

  Colly says, do you think Bart is getting sad with himself?

  She thinks this might be true. There is a lengthening now to Bart’s look. It is as if he does not see the road but can see ahead to the days that will soon unlearn for winter. Before y
ou know, it will be the Samhain, the world to dark and what then? How the word winter makes you think of Blackmountain, its blue-cold colors, the sleet call of the wind. Those nights when storm would harry the house as if some great force had come to shake them off the hill. This feeling now as if some great wind is coming, something shapeless and unimaginable, something greater than the world that travels hidden between light.

  In one small town they are met by two well-dressed women who shake a can before them asking for money for the building of a new church. The beggary come forward to wheedle and cajole when they see the quality of their cloaks.

  Better to fox the dark than become one of them, she thinks. They shadow the greater farmhouses, test the ground with sticks for traps, watch for gaters, hush at well-fed dogs. They tap the downspouts of the better farmhouses for the sound of hidden money, search for potato pits and smash open larder locks. The most you’ll find is a bag of flour lonely on a shelf. A wrinkled carrot left for a horse. A heel of bread. An admonitory clock ticks her off as she scoops into her palm bread crumbs from a table. One time they find hidden treasure—a box of seed potatoes growing arms and legs and stashed underground for the growing season. They roast the seedlings over a fire and Colly says, when you think of it, that is an entire field of future potatoes we’ve just eaten.

  They pass through Nenagh town in the dusk and watch a field lit in circling torch-fire. A traveling show of some kind setting itself up amidst caravans and horses. She is astonished to see the silhouette of a man on stilts like some strange and slow insect wading the dark.

  She thinks, these last few days on the road have been full of odd sights. What about that rich man’s bullock standing on a rock as if he were afraid of the very field he stood in? And that horse standing with its face to a tree as if renouncing sight of the world? And what about that idiot of a man who walked past with a smile on his face and blood sicked on his shirt? These are auguries, all right. Every flour cart on the road has been accompanied by soldiers. And in these great vales of Tipperary, the farming estates are sometimes as big as a town. They meet villages where the gardens are tended, the houses fashioned and slated. The great fields of corn giving to the world their color. How they crane their necks towards the flashing scythes. And yet there are the townlands you must go through with shut eyes, where grass grows over the doorways, where the fields learn color only from the sun. The have-it-alls and the have-nothings, Bart says. I give it a year before the country splits apart.

  She thinks, it is the sight of the children in such townlands that cause the most grief. She has seen children with fever, children thin from long illness, but never has she seen children such as this. Some of these children are losing their voices. Little boys without their shouts. Little boys with hairy faces. Little girls becoming crones. Children being rushed through life to wear the death masks of the Samhain.

  Bart says, I don’t think the country will celebrate the turning of the season this year except in them big farmsteads. Think of the feasts they will be preparing. The fieldwork done. The larder full of riches. The baking of cakes and biscuits and the jellies and ham and tongue. We used to be told in whispers to stay close to the bonfire, for there are demons in the dark coming to get you. But the demons do not have to ride the dark anymore. This year they do not even wait for the Samhain.

  Everything in life has a secret signal, she thinks. Like color, for instance. What is color but some sort of expression as to the nature of a thing? She thinks about this, wonders if she is right. What is the green of a tree but some kind of announcement? It doesn’t speak and yet it shouts—I am a tree, here I am. Or the jimsonweed in the ditches white-sounding to the bees with trumpets of silence. There are other things too that secretly speak. She thinks about Bart. How he is trying to express what cannot be said, or if it can be said, he doesn’t want to say it. This new thing he does as he walks, stepping a little too close to her, his left hand touching off her right hand. It is only a brush, made to seem like an accident, yet she feels it strong as a thump. She does not know what to do with herself, agitates a sudden hand through her hair or pulls at an eyelash, begins to prattlebox like some old biddy. And sometimes she wakes warm in the solitary cold of dawn and there is Bart in sleep—or perhaps not in sleep—with his body spooned into her and his good arm around her shoulder giving her his warmth. How she tenses, lies holding her breath, and then Bart turns away in sleep or perhaps not in sleep.

  Colly says, riddle me this—what’s got two legs by day and three legs by night?

  The way Bart wakes and jumps into his body shortly after, his face as if nothing has happened.

  They shelter by the damp abutment of a bridge a day’s walk from Limerick city. Bart says, it’s rare enough you’ll find the underside of a bridge empty like this. They build a fire and she watches Bart produce a newspaper he has found and laughs at the sight of him. She thinks she might be giddy from hunger. This trick he has for holding and folding, resting the paper on his knee and turning it with his hand. She leans across and pokes at the paper to annoy him. Bart pretends to ignore her. Then he says, says here the costs of provisions have tripled—

  She leans forward and pokes the paper again.

  Bart says, will you listen. An article here says they are flying a balloon over parts of Dublin with people in it, the entire thing full of gas.

  Colly says, I doubt that’s possible, let me have a look.

  Bart stands up in fury when the paper is grabbed off him.

  Give it back, he says.

  Hold off a minute.

  Give it here, I said.

  Colly says, you know, I always knew people would figure out a way to fly in the future but I always assumed they would do it with birds, lash people to the backs of condors or some other giant bird with rope, something secure anyhow—now, that would be something, being lashed to a bird, being able to fly over people you hate and shit on their houses.

  Bart stamps off towards the river and she watches him go to where the grass has run wild. The way he steps easy out of his clothes. His white and shiverless back as he sits down in the low water and begins to douse himself.

  Colly says, take your eyes off him, you dirty wee bitch.

  She looks up and sees some woman stepping along the river path, sighs, for she knows who it is from the wringing of her hands. Mary Bresher gives off a surprised look. She says, I was just thinking about you and here you are. Do you mind if I sit down?

  She watches Mary Bresher gather the pleats of her cloak as she sits down beside her. Her lovely blue feet are filthy from walking. Through the long grass she can see the shape of Bart stepping out of the water, bold as brass and she pretends not to look but Mary Bresher is looking also.

  She says, ah, the sight of a man. It makes me miss my husband something terrible. By any chance have you seen my child?

  They have lucked themselves a lift towards Limerick. A cooper’s cart with a canvas covering and the man black-faced as hell looking for a chat. Colly says, this fellow has the look of the devil, all right—he’ll have our souls shut in a barrel. She whispers, shush up, and Bart casts her a vexed look. The cooper lifts her up by the wrist and it is then she sees his right hand has just two fingers and she thinks of Bart and she thinks how in some strange way this man could be his father.

  Rock-away, rock-away, the cooper shouts, and the horses nod and whinny and she folds her arms and tries not to listen to Bart and the cooper’s chatter. Her eyes close and Colly is muttering, pair of cripples, hardly a good hand between them, and then the world is borne by dark and it is not the cooper but McNutt who says, do you know how to drive this, and Bart says, I was hoping you would ask, and he takes hold of the reins and the horses strain and pull the cart into gallop until they take no heed of Bart’s shouts and then she sees the road edging towards a great precipice and she screams at Bart and she screams as they go over it, wakes into the comfort of slowness, rainfall and its curtaining shush, the eaves of the canvas dripping the
ir wet. Colly says, this cooper fellow’s a right barrel of laughs—do you think he will float if we pour water into that hole of his mouth?

  It is then she sees it, takes hold of Bart’s hand and squeezes. Bart tries to slide his hand back into her hand but she has pulled it loose. She is pointing off-road. Look. The cooper blinks and begins to slow the horses.

  Christ wept, he says.

  The tree is a great spread oak and leaning against it is a cart wheel and tied to its spokes is the body of a youth. The arms and legs thin as sticks but loose in the rope that tied them. She cannot speak, can only think of the awfulness of such an act, who would tie a dead boy to a cart wheel like that?

  Bart says, what’s that sign say around his neck?

  The cooper stalls the horses and they lean forward to read the words and she turns away, watches the wind scuttle across the road a fallen leaf that is a sparrow or perhaps the soul of a dead person while the sign speaks its solitary word.

  Thief.

  Into the city by night’s silent hours, when the streets give no account of themselves. They are footsore and hungry and she aches for sleep and yet there is wonder—the shape of a city, Colly says, some of the buildings as tall as giants, everything so grand and quiet. Bart says, the fox will find his feast in the city. Even at night when everybody sleeps, she thinks, a great town gives off a feeling of possibility, it is not unreasonable to think things will be better.

  They come through the old city into Newtown, Bart calls it, and Colly says look, they have brought the moon down to the streets. Gaslight upon the endless shuttered shops. Gaslight stretching down an endless street wide as Paris, one would think. Gaslight throwing bright upon the great high houses. Bart says the constables here are rough and we’d best be careful. Echoing steps that could be a policeman or just some ragman’s shadow but certainly not a ghost, she thinks, because ghosts don’t live in the cities and even if they did, ghosts don’t hide anymore but walk about in the open.