by Paul Lynch
She stares at the twilight trickery and knows she needs sleep. The road leaning down to a bally of five or six stone cottages. A sudden crooked feeling when she sees elms with their bark stripped. A smokeless sky.
The evening shadows loiter as she passes among the cottages. She would like to call out, for you cannot be sure who is ever about and isn’t it better to meet a stranger, a squatter, or even a thief or a drunkard than to be alone in an empty bally like this. She sees the wind has carried wet into some of the houses. The odd sight of fodder beet growing unpicked in a dead garden.
Walk onwards, she thinks, out of this townland, there will be someplace to sleep a few mile beyond. But the dark has come on so quick and her feet are complaining and she would like to sit. And look, that last house is still hung with a door.
She knocks just in case and then steps into the house, lies down on the empty floor by the wall and blankets her cape.
Morning will wash away the dark.
It is only this, an empty house.
It is only sleep and then it isn’t. Who’s there? she thinks. She has heard voices. There was a man calling out—footsteps at the door that could be wind or an animal or worse. Somebody trying to get in. She is trying to stir up, to sit on her fear like hands to be sat on. She does not know if she needs to wake or if she has already woken. Her tongue a drunkard that will not test the silence. She thinks, damn you, stir up! And then she does or perhaps she is awake, for it is so dark it is hard to tell this space from dreaming, lies waiting for them to reveal themselves, a feeling that there are people hiding in the walls, her ear a reluctant listener, and then she sees them, shadows finding form in rough circle around the fire, all of them with their backs to her, sees the shape of a woman rubbing mud into her hair and she is rubbing mud into the hair of her children, rubbing mud into their faces, another two men rubbing their heads with mud and then one of the men leans across and puts his head into the fire— the empty dark of the room as she wakes, the room freshened with icy air coming in through an unlatched door, the wind bringing inwards the smell of mud and drizzle.
Quickly onto the road wishing for the sun. The sparrows unseen chitter the world awake and then brightness touches her body. She takes a lift as far as Belleek from some journeyman who has a way of looking at her without looking at her. He whistles at his own thoughts and quietly slides in his seat until he is touching her. She asks to be let off on the edge of the town. He says, I’ll be going back this way in three or four days if you should be on the road. She takes another lift as far as Ballybofey with an old cart man who mutters unheard-ofs at his mule. She cannot stop looking at the way his veins run like black spiders. They stop at a well to water his horse and in the bare field beside it there are seven rough crosses. The man watching the way she washes her hair, the way she washes her feet, his eyes resting questions upon her she cannot answer. She would like to say, I am returning home. I am from Blackmountain. It is in the far-off farther north, the very top of Donegal. She would like to say, you think you make your own choices in life but we are nothing but blind wanderers, moving from moment to moment, our blindness forever new to us. And to fully understand what this means is to accept something that is an outrage to most people. There are only the facts of where you are right now and when you try to look back the facts become dream. The rest is just talk for the horses.
She follows until a line of sky becomes lough and she knows it as the Swilly. Meets an echo of her younger self passing by. The sea in the distance opening a doorway. Familiar faces turning in half-light and sounds of speech and the way that each body moves uniquely in memory, each memory rising in its own kinked light that is seen briefly but not held, each memory breaking like surf one wave over the other leaving a wash of emptiness.
The reached sky lies past Buncrana. And how they rise round-shouldered from the earth to greet her, like old brothers waiting one behind the other, these hills called home. She sees how they sit under the always-is of sky as if watchers to a time in which three hundred years might pass in a moment. She thinks, this is how long you have been walking. An ancient woman gathering dust on her feet and if someone were to touch you now you would crumble like the ashy coal that holds its old shape. She sends her mind in flight over the hills and bogland, watches it alight upon the mountain road. Is arrested from thought by a gent riding a horse so black it gleams an undercolor of silver. The man touches his cap and wishes her a good morning. She is surprised when he smiles at her. That man was gentry for sure, she thinks.
How the road winds through bogland she has always known. A slab of lake and a lonely tree. This place unchanged and as old as it ever was, almost treeless and only the clouds that drift their shadows have changed. She meets the mountain road and walks until she reaches the pass and then she sees it, Blackmountain, the far-off shapes of two houses, and her feet grow light and her spirit is light as she walks onwards. This feeling now of what it would be like to be met by them, to watch them come out of the house, this feeling that she is no longer herself and yet you are yourself, for you cannot be another. Another feeling that grows with each step, how it tries to speak but she will not let it, how it wants to shout but she gags it at the mouth for you must, you must, you must.
A little voice comes to meet her and says, but where is the smoke? But where is the door? The voice is her own and it is the voice of who she once was. Closer and then she cannot walk farther. She sees there is no door only a doorway of stone that stands mute to an empty house. What rides through her body robs it of breath, gives the heart sudden weight. She steps into the house, sees how the damp and the moss have made their home, that animals have lived here, a few wandering ewes, no doubt. She looks to the hearth and sees it is a long time without fire. Stands very still as if awaiting some answer or clue as to what happened, if Mam made them depart in a hurry, or something worse than that, but the walls speak only of emptiness and the house seems so very small, much smaller than she has remembered it. She thinks, you must go outside and look for their graves. She circles the house over and over but the land has nothing to say. The hillside asleep under its barren brown coat. The trickle-water ditch that cuts through it. The sound of the wind calling its children.
She does not know how long she has been standing here ill to the wind, trying to summon their voices. A strange thought nagging her. That it is you who are dead. That it is your spirit that has returned hundreds of years later, that they went on living to the ends of their lives, that Mam lived to a great old age and the boys became men and had wives and many children. She takes a long inhale of cold breath and sees the ghost of her mother bundling her skirt and setting off up the hill. She knows now that this house cannot be slept in. The things you might hear.
She knows when she stands at his door that the old man’s eyes disbelieve sight of her. But then his hands rise huge to take hold of her wrists and he shakes them like hammers. She watches him mouth for words but no words come out. Finally, he says, I thought you were— heavens. I thought you were—
He puts a fir chair near the fire and asks her to sit. She tries to hide the knowledge that came upon her the moment she saw him. The answer that fell from his eyes. She can see now how the Banger’s thickness has gone, how his hands are too great for him. His hair gone to metal. And his eyes that watered when he saw her have continued like so, for they are the eyes of a man grown old. Her sight travels the meager room and she wonders how long the forge fire next door has gone out, what kind of day it was. What he said when it happened, if he sat down and stared at his hands. He looks at her now as if he does not know what to ask her, this man who was once a friend of her mother, a far-off cousin.
Finally he says, so you’ve been up Blackmountain?
He holds her with a strange look when she does not answer.
He says, where have your words gone?
She cannot answer.
He says, you had quite the tongue on you always.
His look has not left her but t
hen something that looks like fear alights the surface of his eyes and before she can name it he is upon her, grabs her with the same old strength, pulls open her mouth with his fingers. When he lets her go, he says, sorry for that but I needed to make sure your tongue was not cut or that you weren’t the pooka come to get me. God knows I’ve been waiting. I heard there is a woman out in Glen who lost her words also. She’d seen enough.
He cannot look at her eyes because her eyes are full of questions. Then he rises from his chair and rubs his great hands. He says, I do not know— I do not know what happened to them. It went very bad in some places. Went very bad around here, all right. Though mostly it never touched this house, thank God. The things I seen you cannot ask me. All I can tell you is that house was empty when the worst of it were over. That was the worst winter I can ever remember. I never saw the sight of it in my life. It brought distress like no other. A good many departed from around here. They took to the roads or went for the boat and many entered the churchyard down below and the fields are full up with them. I never went up that hill during it, though maybe I should have but there was such misery and you had to mind what you had because in a wink it would be gone. I never saw them come down this way, that’s God’s truth. Thank God it never touched this house.
A shaky hand runs through his hair. He spits at the fire.
He says, you’ll see one or two big houses gone up around here as if nothing happened. There was a few got their makings out of it. There is always a few who bide their time until things get to their worst and then they buy up what is going for cheap. A lot of fine stock was bought by the grabbers for gutter prices. People cleaned out for almost nothing in return. That Columbo McLaughlin. I don’t know if you remember him. Spent his time with the purse in one hand licking the tips of his counting fingers. Fattened his household rightly, so he did. And a good lot of houses lying empty now. This forge hasn’t seen smoke in two year. As the cat’s still got your tongue I will inquire after your people but I doubt much will come of it because I would have heard word by now. And I should have asked as there is blood between us. She was a good woman, your mother. It was— it was a time of terrible disorder.
He turns to look at her and his eyes brighten. You are very different from what I remember of you. God took you off a wee girl and sent you back a beautiful woman.
She wakes to a voice that is her own whisper. Rises to see the shape of the Banger breathing the sea’s breath in his chair. She wraps the cape about her shoulders, opens the latch door, sees how the throw-light falls in peace upon the lapped hands of the Banger, his legs sprawled and his feet turned inwards, his mouth open as if agog to some dream. The animal rush of cold air and she puts behind her the road that twists uphill to Blackmountain, walks towards a sea of ashes that sends upwards a rusted knife of wind. A sudden pair of watching red eyes in a field that belong to a bull.
Too many places now hold memory against her. It is, she thinks, as if memory were hidden not in thought but deep within the physical arrangement of things. How the cornering road gives up sudden movement that is the dancing of ghosts she tries to outwit by staring somewhere else. She passes her own ghost walking with her mother. Some unremembered conversation and a feeling of long and endless summer, a future of infinite space. And in the breakwater she sees some lost day under a forgotten sun. She closes her eyes and is her own ghost diving into the water down to where the worldsound holds still and there is only heartbeat and the shape of her brother lissome in the water and perhaps you can now accept what is.
The road takes her around headland that winds the sea around its many fingers, the sea taking the headland in its breath, an endless coarse breathing, this sea-wind that blows from the gulf of who-knows-where and what it whispers, that I have been here since the beginning of time and will whisper these rocks to dust. Children appear from a bally of houses and begin to shout and walk alongside her. A man stands at a door with two pails and shouts some comment at the children. A brazen girl no more than seven pulling at her gown. Who are you supposed to be? What are you doing? The girl follows alongside Grace in exaggerated march-step then falls behind with a hurt face when Grace does not answer.
She finds the house she seeks under a gathering rain-sky that stoops to pale the tone of the hills. The freestone cottage is low off the road and kept guard by high holly and blackthorn and hounds that loll and woof. She can see streaking through hedgerow the russet hair of some younger. A trio of hounds snapping towards her and she puts out her hand and commands them to shush.
She faces the door. The wrong woman answers. They eye each other up and down and the woman says, who are you?
She thinks, for goodness’ sake, speak, would you.
But she cannot speak and then a grunting voice from inside says, who is that? And then it is him, Boggs, filling the doorway, blinking at her, looking without knowing. And how small he is, she thinks. In her memory he is a haystack, had arms that gathered everything about him. Now she meets him eye to eye and takes the measure of a fool. Sees the way his dull eyes read her full body. How his scant horseshoe of hair and beard have lost their red color. She reaches her eyes into the house, reaches her ears for sound of them, tells herself, but you already know the answer.
His stupiding eyes say, I don’t know who you are.
Then he steps out and pulls the door closed, wheels her gently by the elbow and begins walking. Come along, he says.
He bends and puts his fist into a sack and rains feed for the hens.
He says, is he ill or something? Tell your father I am wild sorry about the trouble and that I will soon get it fixed. That villain from Inch did not deliver as promised and has left me to look like a fool. It is sore toil to maintain oneself in living these days and my eyes are at me as you can see and most things now are becoming dull to my sight. But listen, I don’t want to be troublesome. You have your own trouble to attend to and let us all go merrily to heaven.
The way he smiles at her then and she looks at him strangely and when he turns she studies the back of his head for the mark of the wound she put there. She turns and sees a redheaded girl following them like one of Boggs’s dogs. Of a sudden Boggs turns and says, get inside, you. She watches the girl retreat to the back step, where she continues to watch, and she thinks, some part of you will forever be this girl watching Boggs walk about his backyard unless you ask him, and she looks at Boggs without rage, can feel the words rise within her, these words she must speak, for if you do not speak them they can never be said and she wants to say, what did you do with them? Tell me where they are, for she was beholden to you. She would have done nothing without you.
She tries to will the words but the words collapse under their weight.
The rain stippling her face and Boggs is watching the sky and he blinks slowly and says, is your gig at the top of the road? That rain. I could lend you a jute sack for your head.
This hammer rock where she sits summoning her grief. The ghost wind that whispers guilt but does not answer. Watching memories leave the rocks. Watching what moves amid the shadows of the empty house. How the ash trees in the wind twist sudden images. She wants to shout at the trees, at the silent rocks, at this road that does not speak, but what can you say that will ever be answered? She meets a strange calm that says perhaps they are and perhaps they are not, and if they are not you might still find them. She remembers a story told by Sarah when she was young about this very rock, that a devil wings down and takes seat on it every night while you sleep, writes down every detail of your life. The book of fate, she called it. The things you would read in there, she thinks, if you could read the rocks.
She reads again the script the Banger gave her with his address. You will write and see if I hear anything and that there is the priest’s address. Just in case I don’t answer, for it will mean the pooka have come for me.
His laughter and a look as heavy as his hands stay with her.
His voice that says, once you get the wandering into yo
ur blood it is hard to shake it out. So and anyhow. We are a funny country, are we not? In all this time we never yet learned to look after ourselves. To think on our own two feet. The heroes are all gone long ago to the hills. The great warriors do not fight for us. And God gave up on us a long time ago. In his absence the pooka make trouble and only the rain cares for us and what kind of comfort is that? Best just to get along with things as they are. Wherever you go you are. Isn’t that what they always say? What I’m saying is, mind yourself.
A blackbird alights upon an ash tree and she watches it carefully, for in its flight path will lie an augury. She watches the bird take sudden flight for the south. Laughs to herself. Sure I knew that already.
How quickly a year goes out and now almost another. Already it is the autumn of 1849. So soon, she thinks, you will be nineteen. She has been a wanderer and has come to see this earth many-voiced and multitudinous and among its throng has come to believe there is not one earth but as many earths as there are people, and as many earths again to meet our changing lives. We are here under a hundred million suns and each sun dies out under the same limitless sun that burns in lasting mystery.
She has spent much of the year in south Donegal. Has seen swaths of countryside abandoned, has seen madness in the eyes of those whose fate it is to remember. And yet the lazybeds serried on every hill keep coming to green and men and women and children walk free of their shadows. They idle the corners and fill the air with pipe smoke, banter and intrigue.
In a place called Drumrat she watched an elderly horse kneel to its death and not one person rush with a knife.