by Paul Lynch
Nothing useful can be found in the empty outhouse or yard, not even a fire-striker. Just throwings of wood which she puts beside their unlit fire. The strange emptiness of an abandoned house as if people do leave something behind them, not a memory of themselves, she thinks, but a feeling for somebody else of who they might have been and that feeling meeting no answer.
Colly says, their wheel of luck turned all the way to bad, all right.
She stands at the door and stares at the everlow of cloud, can see houses in the far-off. Her voice brightens. She says, when we get rested I’ll go and ask at nearby houses for a match or an ember, then we’ll be laughing the three laughs of the leprechaun.
Bart stares unseeing at the empty hearth. Without the cloak he has become his bones. He is wheezing through a sucky mouth. She wraps her arms against the cold and sits beside him, wonders who it was tried to eat the bark, the people who owned the house or the wanderers who stayed here after, you’d want to be some kind of fool to eat a tree, let us hope things will not get as bad as that.
She says, I wonder what happened to them, if they became ditch-sleepers or maybe we passed them on the road or maybe—
Colly says, I’m freezing, maybe we can summon the devil and ask him to get this fire lighted.
Fuck up.
Bart looks at her.
Colly says, go out at midnight and you’ll meet him on the road, he’s bound to be waiting for you—can you imagine it?—hey, sir, Satan or whatever they call you, where are you—I’m here waiting, what do you want?—I want some wishes—right so, I’ll grant you three things, what are they?—right, Satan, I want you to get me a great big fire lit and some timber and some nails to go along with it for building and some pig iron and bags of straw and plenty of hens and a milk cow and a field of lumpers and a loom and eight pounds of wool and a sheep and another brown cow while I’m at it and you can throw in a lake full of salmon and as for my second wish—
They lie in a corner and Bart is instantly asleep despite the cold. She spoons into him, rests an uncertain arm on his shoulder. She notices now a second exhaustion that creeps beneath the usual tiredness, a feeling in her legs and arms and chest that frightens her. Bart begins to shake with great coughing and then he goes silent.
She whispers, are you awake?
Bart says, no.
She says, do you think they ate the tree bark or maybe they boiled it? Is there nourish in bark?
Bart moves his shoulder as if trying to get away from her. Then he whispers. Did you not notice?
She says, notice what?
The air.
What of it.
The change in it.
So.
I saw it last night. There was a halo around the moon. You know what that means. There will be a change for worse in the weather.
Inside the dream, Colly is roaring—stir up! stir up! She feels herself loosening from the dream’s entwine—Colly roaring, open your eyes! She awakes and can feel the dread thing before it is thought. Opens her eyes and meets the sudden knowledge of worse, the room heightened with white light, her breath riding before her into the room. A strange and deeper cold. Bart is awake and sitting with his knees to his chin clicking his teeth. His hair and shoulders are covered in bird cac and she wonders if it happened yesterday or during the night, looks to the rafter for sign of life. Bart points to the window and Colly says, you need to look. She says, stop telling me what to do. She gets up and goes to the door, opens it slowly to see what she already knows. Light upon light. The slack-fall of snow upon snow. The world deforming to white as if beauty can be done to the thing undone.
It is Colly who says, will you listen up?
She says, shut up, you.
Bart whispers, shut up yourself.
I’m not talking to you.
Look at the way he is.
He’s fine, so he is. He’s just freezing.
You must be seeing past him, or under him, or a ghost or something but you are not looking at him.
I’m looking at him right now.
He is getting the fever, so he is, same as the others on the roads.
No he’s not.
Yes he is, you silly bitch.
Bart says, I’m not getting the fever.
Yes you goddamn are.
The trees stand in luminous shock. The snow makes guesswork of the road. Colly says, it is an early snow but even still you should have been ready for it. Bart stooping after her like a corpse. He is growling at the snow and growling at her, calls her a heifer, something mindless, finally he goes silent.
She thinks, he is like an old man for sure.
Colly says, you should have left him back where he was, he’s nothing but a hindrance.
Colly sings every song he knows while she counts a marching beat. She knocks her blue knuckles on the door of every house and cabin, it does not matter now about pride or what kind of person you think you are, she thinks. She visits big farmhouses where the weather vanes keep the same frozen silence as the hinges of every door. She knows the hasty rasp of a bolt. The flutter of a curtain. She thinks, two people to your door like this looking the way Bart looks can bring only trouble. Every ear listening for the sound of coughing, for sickness tramps through the snow and leaves footprints and when it knocks at your door it wants to come in, lean over the fire, take a sup of your soup, lie down on the straw, spread itself out, and bring everybody else into its company.
Those who open their doors do so just-about and stand fright-faced and starving. They shake their heads when they see Bart round-shouldered with his razor cough, his face a funny color.
An eyeball in the crack of a door says, you can come in to the fire but that other fellow will have to stay out.
Later she thinks, if only Colly hadn’t spat at him and got it good in the door, he might have given us matches.
They meet a townland where sickness has been tramping about, all right, gone into three different cabins and brought down the fist of God. Each cabin with its walls and roof stoved in as if God finally had enough of their coughing. She knows what this is, that you do not go into a fevered house and tend to the sick or bring out the bodies, but you must close in the walls and the roof on top of them when you think they are dead.
Colly is watching all the time for birds, anything to throw a stone at. The sky silent as grief. Her feet numb and she has to listen to her stomach with its shouty mouth, stops where a fox has tracked ghostly across the road and imagines her hand burrowing into the warmth of its den, pulling it out and strangling it.
We have come too far, she says. It is time to get back to the cottage.
Colly says, the pair of you moping like sad mules.
He starts singing the same line of a song over and over and she starts to sing along, thinks, the more you sing the less frightened you are and isn’t that always the case, perhaps we should be singing every moment of our lives and singing into our graves.
My arse has crossed an ocean,
And still no breezes blow,
And I would it had the motion,
Of but an ebb and flow.
Shut your eyes, she tells Colly. They walk past a young woman delirious in a ditch, the woman smiling as the snow gives last drink to her lips. The snow gowning her white for the slowest of country burials. The woman becoming part of the all, she thinks, that is the sky and the earth locked together in white and forgetting. You do not look but keep walking onwards. This feeling she has. It is not that she tells herself she is different. She knows she is different from all these others on the road, that what she sees around her will not happen to her also. That she will make better choices. So why would you look at them, they have made their choices and you made yours, they aren’t even people, just sitters and starers with their cramp-hands held out like the grabby hands of the dead. They want what you want and would take it out of your hand or even kill you for it so why would you even give them a sympathetic look?
She does not know why they sit ar
ound the unlit fire. She thinks it might be the echo of a habit that is as old as people-kind but never have people been without fire so what is going on? She wants to laugh but there is nothing to laugh at. You do not think about the cold and you try to sleep but how can you sleep when your bones shout as loud as this? How you feel every minute of the dragging dark, cannot decide which is worse, the way hunger gnaws your body or the way cold gnaws on what’s left.
She says over and over, the snow will lift, it will lift, so it will. Perhaps in the morning or the morning after. Then we can get you on to Galway.
No more does Bart answer.
Colly says, I told you we should have left him here, we would have got on far better without him.
Walking the however-long of another morning. The trees that drape their icy beggar-hands. A screaming oak on the slump of a hill and beneath it in a field she sees five digging men. They have turned a mound of snow and earth. The slow and heavy sway of a dead-cart moving towards them. The men spade at the ground and they gale their breaths into the frozen air, the ground like pitted teeth to their effort. And no wonder, she thinks. For why would the earth want to become a dead-house? You’d be stuck having to listen to the chatter of the dead complaining all the time about being lumped in together.
Colly says, is that what I think it is over there?
I told you not to look.
You do not look but keep walking onwards.
The beauty of snow is that it allows no smell.
The white road becomes a slippy hill that judges in silence two men struggling like drunkards. They are trying to get their donkey and tumbrel over the hillock. An old man shouting and then he stops and bends as if into thought. She falls like snowfall into the work, puts her back into the push, not an ounce of strength and the look they give her tells her they know it. A son with the same frowning look as his father. The cart unheeding their gruntwork but then it groans deep and moves with a squawk like some old bird shown free of its cage.
The old man stops the mule on the top of the hill. She holds out her hand but the son stares and shakes his head. She sees how these men are not well fed but they are not wintered like most others. She pulls her knife and waves it.
Would you look at that, the son says. Are you an idiot or what?
Colly whispers, don’t back down one inch.
She stands facing them, watches the father step with heavy feet around the back of the cart. He puts a hand up, says, Patrick, leave it. I said leave it, now. He reaches into the corner of the cart and pulls towards him a sack, lifts out five pieces of turf, holds them out to her. He says, the Lord is thy keeper.
She wants to shout at the old man, fuck God’s luck when you can make your own.
Colly says, fuck them hoors only giving us five pieces of turf.
She puts the knife between her teeth and takes the turf, grunts her voice down.
Gimme matches.
The cornered cold is creeping back into the room. She studies the shrunken fire and throws upon it damp wood.
Colly says, people say God is everywhere at once, but so is the devil and everybody knows the devil is fire and so God is the devil and that’s the case proven.
She stares at the fire and remembers how it rushed to life and perhaps Colly is right, perhaps fire doesn’t die because fire is both God and the devil, always waiting behind the air in some other chamber of existence, waiting to rush in and turn everything black with its hunger.
She thinks Bart’s mind has grown slippy in fever. How he refused to lie beside the fire and she had to drag him over. The bitter things he has said. His little whispers. I dreamt you were dead and I liked it. I dreamt we were all dead. I dreamt the world died and everything was better for it.
She says, you cannot be dead and also dream the world at the same time.
He whispers, I can dream what I like. Every man is alone in his own mind. All this is an illusion. I close my eyes and it is gone. None of it exists.
She asks him what he means but he does not answer.
Later, he whispers, even a dog gets a noble death, takes itself quietly to a field.
She rests wet sticks upon the fire, anything to keep it lit but the embers test a weak tongue and haven’t the hunger.
What days pass and it is a dream the last time she has eaten. The snow carried silent upon a howling wind that cuts downwards in blizzard. Everything to nothing, she thinks. Nothing to be had, nothing upon nothing.
You must try to eat some snow, Colly says, imagine it as otherness.
She thinks, how hunger slow-crawls then leaps like a cat. It claws at your thoughts, curls its shape into your sleep, and stirs restless. After a while hunger and cold become the same dullness, you cannot tell them apart. They slow the mind and soften the worry about the changes taking place inside her. The slump of her thoughts. This tingling weakness all over her body.
She realizes now the secret of this place. Why the others left. That there is some power here contained in the earth that rises up and has an effect on the brain, makes you sleepy, the trees whispering their madness to you and it is not you who will eat the trees but the trees who will feed on the dust of your bones.
Stir up! Stir up! Colly says.
She rests her hand over Bart’s mouth a little too long. His breathing as weak as thought. She wanders heavy-footed in the snow. The empty sky and the empty fields and Colly wants to know where all the airdogs have gotten to. He says, if there’s one thing in this country you can rely on, it’s the crows. He has stones ready for throwing but the sky is shut of them. She uses all her strength to climb to a tree’s rookery, shakes snow off the branches, peers for eggs in every abandoned nest.
Colly wants to know if Bart is going to die soon. Brittle light in the room but enough to see how his limbs have swollen. He has been lying in a curling shape for such a long while.
There are times now when she looks at Bart and does not care what happens to him.
The downwards sky into moon-dark and still she keeps walking. Everything floats in this snow-blue light. She knows now she has been here before, how the road winds around a slumpy hill with a screaming oak and the dead in a field beside it. In the dark she can hear the diggers still at work. They never stop, she thinks. They work night and day and still the bodies keep coming. She finds herself walking towards them, you just never know, one of them might help you. It is then it occurs to her these diggers are doing their spadework at night, no sound of carts or people talking. She coughs and the digging stops. She hears whispers, sees something ghost towards her, how a man’s face comes to be out of that moon-dark, a man made only of bones as if he has borrowed his body from what hides in the earth, clothed it with huge eyes, an animal noise coming from his throat as he scares her off with a threatening gesture of his shovel.
She hobbles away as fast as she can.
Colly says, whatever a man finds to eat is his own business, a man has got to live at all costs—who are we to judge?
She tests her hand over Bart’s mouth for breathing. Thinks he is trying to whisper something. Just his voice, a whisper without a body. Whatever he is saying, she cannot hear it.
Then Colly says, what is it you are eating, give me some.
She tries to hide it.
Tree-eating bitch, Colly says.
She wonders when the world fell away from her thoughts. If there is a sky now it is as wide as a whisker, weatherless, unwatched. Her thoughts slump before her in silence. Her sight has narrowed down to stillness. Sometimes she wonders what has happened to the cold, when it left her bones. She thinks Bart might be dead now and even if he’s not he can only be a hindrance. She no longer tests for his breath, though sometimes she thinks she can still hear him.
She dreams she stands under a tree in snow and at the foot of it are dead crows, the birds fallen in hunger, no meat on their bones and horror at the dead in their eyes. She cannot understand why she does not collect them in her satchel. Then she knows it is not a dream or p
erhaps it is, and anyhow who can tell this dreaming from real, there is no such thing as real anymore. Bart beside her and he is trying to say something so she tries to listen. When I was young my grandfather used to tell us that old people always knew the exact hour of their death. Can you tell me what time it is? She knows that Bart in the truth of the dream is beautiful. She tries to see him but he has gone somewhere else and a voice says, a bird in the hand is worth fuck-all, and it might be Colly but who knows. She dreams of strength, knows there is still hope because hope does not leave until you are dead. Hope is the dog waiting at your door. She hears some mysterious woman knocking and she knows it is Mary Bresher come to tell her to get out on the road. Get out on the road! Get out on the road! Colly roaring at her. Stir up! Stir up! Stir up! Stir up! You stupid bitch.
She digs for strength and finds it in the hiding place. Tells herself, truly, everything is all right. You are only tired, tired so. You are not as bad yet as the others. Daylight to blind the eyes and the world to slush. Her mind quietening to the path of her footsteps. She decides she wants to sit down just for a little while and does so and then the day passes by and she becomes aware of horse noise then shadow and a man’s voice says, why are you lying in the middle of the road?