by Tom O'Neill
‘Thank you. Though not everyone calls me that. You will find little pellets of it in a nest at the back of the hay bales in your own sheds.’
‘Rat shit is the only thing there, that I know of,’ said Dark.
‘You could call it that if you were very coarse. Those are not just any rats. Those fine fellows, I’ve been feeding up specially. I don’t have time to make the paste of it myself so I’ll leave it to you.’
He caught a glimpse of her scurrying up the wall and her stoat tail disappearing over it. He guessed that this was as much as he was ever likely to hear from her.
Back in the house he went to bed for a couple of hours. He was already starting to count on Joey to do his calves in the mornings. Sure enough Joey walked into the kitchen as Dark was coming out of the bedroom.
But Joey seemed out of balance and confused. At first he wouldn’t talk.
Dark just waited.
‘When I went to collect the eggs this morning they were all gone,’ Joey said after some time. ‘Robbers. And they didn’t even put respect on the eggs, the best in the world, the blackguards broke one on the way out. The rest are gone. No eggs this morning. Sorry, Arthur.’
‘Sorry about that,’ said Dark, who had never heard before of a robber who took only duck eggs.
Joey plonked a sandwich on the table. Two slices of stale white bread with afternoon tea biscuits crumbled between them.
‘Thanks Joey,’ Dark said. ‘Something tells me I know who took your eggs. And who they were fed to.’
‘Who?’ he asked excitedly.
‘I don’t want to say because I don’t know for sure,’ said Dark.
‘Fair enough,’ nodded Joey, wisely.
‘But if I’m right it is a one-off, no need to worry about it ever happening again,’ said Dark.
‘That’s alright then, Arthur,’ said Joey, his familiar smile breaking back onto his face. ‘The young man got hungry during the day then, did you?’ He was gone out to feed the calves before Dark could correct him.
Dark just couldn’t face into collecting the rat droppings. Not before school. And he needed to collect more of the canker too. He wasn’t getting down to the hospital again until tomorrow anyway.
As the school day wore on, he was planning how he would collect the canker on the way home and then gather the rat droppings before it got dark. He would take his time. Make sure he got plenty of each thing. Mix it up properly. He texted The Red. ‘Need a spin to hospital first thing tomorrow.’
The text came back instantly, as though he had been expecting the request. ‘Will be in Kill at 7 in the am good buddy.’
At break time Kevin came over to him, leaving Ciara standing alone for a while. Before he talked, Dark said to him, ‘Look Kevin, I know that wasn’t reasonable what I asked you to do. Don’t worry about it.’
‘No it wasn’t reasonable. Nor was it reasonable to ask me not to tell anyone about your situation. There are people who might like to know.’
Dark didn’t feel like guessing what Kevin was trying to say to him. He just shrugged.
‘All the same,’ continued Kevin, ‘I had a bit of luck.’
As he explained, talking really quickly and smiling to himself, Dark did not have the heart to tell him that his interest in the medical side of things had waned as fast as it had surged. Kevin talked about trawling academic medical sites for email addresses, running apps that hit the external access system with multiple combinations of email stem usernames and low grade password choices, abysmal database security, and more.
‘You are legend,’ said Dark flatly, ‘what did you find?’
‘What was it you hoped I’d find?’
‘I dunno, anything strange,’ said Dark, not expecting anything at all.
‘Well, there certainly was that,’ said Kevin.
He had a printout of the report in his back pocket. He gave it to Dark and sauntered away back across the grounds. Dark scanned through the pages of Connie’s notes. There were lists of all the tests done. He understood some of it because that snotty doctor had been right, he had been reading stuff on the medical websites. He went down to the bits Kevin had marked with an orange highlighter, all under the heading ‘Miscellaneous Observations’.
Troubling case. Idiopathic in extremis. Negative on all tests. Presented to several physicians. Discussed online with others. Still no insights forthcoming. Patient was discharged after first presentation on assumption that recovery would be facilitated in home environment but home-based follow-up neglected. Illness continued advancing aggressively and patient had deteriorated to a severe degree by the time he was readmitted. Now dangerously ill. Patient has extraordinarily high pain threshold and has already outlived expectations.
Team entirely nonplussed. Senior Registrar Reilly pointed out only modern comparable ailment is Chronic Wasting Disease – only found in elk! Likelihood of contact, let alone inter-species prion transmission, considered very remote. (Nevertheless, suggest checks for brain lesions post m.)
As a curious aside: SHD Leah Cannon has found only one similar human situation in the literature. The source relates to papers written in a hospital in the Congo in 1902 by a doctor Faith Trant. She described strikingly similar cases of patients presenting with chronic pain, rapidly deteriorating physically with no signs of any known ailments or agents. As in our case, Trant reported relatives claiming that the patient had been bitten by rodents, but with no bite marks visible. Patients invariably died. SHD Cannon submits that Trant, without the benefit of modern knowledge, began to put store in the relatives’ suspicions of witchcraft.
Regrettably, even with the benefit of all of our 21st century knowledge and technology, we find ourselves unable to make any more progress than did Dr Trant.
Dark re-read the report, his eyes arrested by certain phrases. Outlived expectations. Checks for brain lesions post m. Suspicions of witchcraft.
There was no part of the report that didn’t make Dark feel sick. He tried to look straight ahead. He had a job to do. It was what Connie wanted and therefore he would do it. He was going to get through the day and get through the night and then his job would be done. After that, he was staying in Cork at the bedside from tomorrow morning regardless of who told him to leave. He was staying with his mother and Connie from then to the end.
The bell went but he couldn’t go in yet. He had never felt such weakness as came over him. He folded himself down on his hunkers with his back to the gable wall, transfixed with the image of someone taking a scalpel to Connie’s brain post mortem. After a while of sitting in the drizzle with his head on his knees, he was aware of two people standing next to him. He looked up. Ciara was departing without looking at him. How had she known he was here? She had brought Mammy Úna. He wished she would take Úna away with her again. He understood that the old woman was kind, but he had no use for that.
Úna put a surprisingly hard hand on Dark’s head. He stood up and blew his nose into his jacket sleeve and said, ‘Sorry, Miss Moriarity, I’ll go back to class in a minute.’
‘Stay strong for the people who need you.’
‘Don’t get weak now, young man. This is no time to feel sorry for yourself,’ she said in a voice that startled Dark. She looked up into his eyes. There was no hint of the usual kindness. Dark found himself wondering, as often, what his dad would think of him now. Waiting for advice from a woman who everyone knew was bats. His dad was a rational sensible man. What would he make of his ‘wise old Arty’ losing his grip on anything that made sense. As if reading his mind, Mammy Úna spoke to him, fast and firm, ‘That’s no good to anyone. Dead or alive. Stay strong for the people in this world who need you.’
Dark nodded.
‘Now, I don’t want you to come back in to class,’ she continued. ‘I want you to go and see to whatever it is you think you have to see to. There’ll be time enough for sadness later.’
Dark left his bag in class and headed out the road on his bike. He had his mind back on the thi
ngs that needed doing. He remembered something Connie always said. 11
He could manage by taking hold of just one thought at a time. First he needed to get some more of the canker. The little piece he’d taken previously had crumbled and got mixed with lint and bits of straw in his pocket.
It was just as well he had left school early because it turned out that the heron’s instructions had become harder to follow this time. The section of river bank where the old crab trees had been surviving had been cleared and graded with a track machine. The valley of the Brown River was designated a special conservation area. But this stretch belonged to Saltee, who didn’t enjoy living things that weren’t making him money. The bank had been freshly seeded with grass for his cattle.
Dark did not like his next thought very much. He guessed that Saltee would not have burnt the removed timber and scrub yet. He would be waiting to burn them with his plastic wraps and empty spray drums which he usually fired on Sunday mornings when environmental inspectors were not scouting. For that, Dark guessed that he would have gathered the timber up near the house somewhere. Dark didn’t ever wish to be near that house, but he had no choice. He knew he had only one chance at this. He was going to do it precisely as instructed. He did not dare assume that canker from any other crab trees would do. He had a job to do. One step at a time. He was on autopilot now. He walked around under the shadow of the ditches to reduce the chances of being seen approaching.
He crept through an overgrown lavender hedge into the paddock at the back of the darkly decaying gothic mansion. Sure enough right in the middle there was a heap of stuff ready for firing and on top of the clump of chemical fertiliser bags sat the little uprooted trees. A bay window looked out directly onto the paddock and Dark hesitated. Grey light reflecting from the clouds made it impossible to make out whether anyone might be in there. He had to just hope Saltee wasn’t home as he made a dash from the cover of the hedge.
With his fishing knife he peeled cankered bark from several branches. Soon he had his pockets stuffed. He was running back to the hedge when he heard an enraged shout. He turned to see Saltee leaning out of a dormer window in the roof, looking through the telescopic sights of a rifle. His head was crimson. He screamed, ‘I’ve seen more of you than I ever want to see again.’
‘Daddy don’t shoot, don’t shoot,’ came the cry of a small girl from another window. ‘You’ll scare Milly.’
Milly was unaware of the danger and came trotting over to Dark as he ducked behind the pile of timber. He didn’t really believe that Saltee would pull the trigger. He was too shrewd to expose himself like that. But just to be on the safe side, Dark held the friendly grey pony’s halter and walked down the field crouching under her neck. When he was out of range of a .22 – or so he thought – he gave Milly a pat and thanked her. She started to canter off. He heard the bullet whizz past him and heard its impact before the sound of the shot reached him. Milly crumpled to the ground with a bullet gone through her eye. Three yards wide of its mark. Saltee had to be using a Hornet with deer hunting rounds. That meant that Dark was still well within range. He needed to get to the next field very quickly. As he threw himself over the gate another bullet zinged off the top bar. For some reason, Saltee was losing it.
Back at home, collecting the rat droppings no longer seemed the worst part of his mission. There was a fine deposit of them, some with fragments of duck egg shell still visible. He used his mam’s spatula to collect a pile of it into a Spar bag. After he had fed the calves and walked the dogs, he sat down at the kitchen table to make the poultice. He used the rolling pin to squish all the droppings into a paste and then mixed the crumbly brown bark with spots of red and white on it, through the paste. He put his blend into an After Eights tin and stuffed that in the inside pocket of his parka.
He phoned Joey and asked him if he could come over. Joey was there in a few minutes; pants wet to the thighs again from the direct route across the river.
‘I’m going to stay in Cork from early tomorrow. Until when, I don’t know. Can I leave you in charge of the place here? You know, to keep feeding the calves and come over a couple of extra times during the day just to check up on everything and to look in on the dogs?’
Joey got a very serious look on his face and nodded slowly as if there was some secret message in what Dark was asking. ‘Banner will surely take care of McLean’s business,’ he said, ‘rest easy.’ Dark had no doubt that the calves and dogs would be royally cared for so he dispelled the slight anxiety that had just registered. There could be nothing to worry about. Joey gave Psycho a pat and backed out the door, still nodding at Dark.
As he sat down to look at his laptop he became agitated. He started wondering: What if Connie didn’t even make it till the morning? He phoned his mam to see how things were. She was still sitting at the bed. She said that one of the doctors was spending almost as much time at the bedside as she was. The doctor was very attentive to the pain medication and was watching for any changes.
‘Leah Cannon,’ said Dark absentmindedly.
‘What? How did you know that Arthur?’ said his mother, suddenly awake.
Dark was stumped for an excuse, forgetting that he could just have known her name from that first meeting. After a minute he said, ‘I am thinking of coming down tomorrow morning, Mam.’
He expected her to say no, that there was no point and that he should go to school. But she said, ‘That’s probably a good idea. I’m sure you’ve organised for the animals to be taken care of?’
‘Yes.’
They said goodnight and Dark went out to spend time in the rath. Somehow his fear of walking into a Saltee trap in the fields had evaporated. He had persuaded himself that having shown too much of his hand, Saltee was rattled now.
In the rath, the Old Man greeted him warmly. ‘And how are you doing now?’
‘I’ve been better. But I’m still standing,’ said Dark quietly. ‘What tomorrow will bring, I can’t tell.’
‘Aha,’ shouted Conán. ‘The young man has a tongue in his head as well as a heart in his chest. You’d better watch yourself there, Bal, or before you know it he’ll be cutting the legs from under you. Short and all as they are.’
The Old Man raised his hand and they all were silent. He stood in front of Dark and said, ‘You will travel with us tonight, son, but we won’t be seeing you again for a while, so I wanted to help you with your question. You are not the first young man to ever visit us here. We met another young man some years ago. He was tall and dark with honour in his eyes. When you are trying to remember your father, look into yourself. Stay true and be proud.’
Dark looked all around. They were all staring at him. Then the Old Man changed his tone and sat by the fire saying again, ‘But for now you can leave all those thoughts behind you and come with us.’
Chapter 9a
BLOOD SPILLED
Yet again, Matha was set to leave Tara. As he was going out of the central camp, he was called aside by Fionn Mac Cumhaill to where Cormac was standing in the company of a few others, next to a large cabin.
‘The High King wants to say something to you, Matha,’ said Mac Cumhaill.
‘What?’ said Cormac distractedly. ‘Oh yes, Matha. You have done well, son. Is there anything you want as your reward? Did you eat those sheep I gave you before?’
Once again Matha thought of asking whether there was not any symbol on the vellum that might help him with the task he was about. But he just said, ‘No sir, thank you.’
‘The boy never took your sheep Cormac,’ Conán grinned, catching Matha’s glance. ‘Do you not see that the only thing he wants is for you to tell him his future from that moth-eaten scrap of leather you carry around?’
Cormac hesitated. Then he took out the vellum and unfurled it with great tenderness. He turned to the side as he stared intently at it. Matha realised at that moment what Conán’s joke was. It was so dark in that part of the enclosure on that moonless night that Matha was barely able to ma
ke out his own fingers held in front of him. And Matha’s eyesight was better than that of any of these older men. Still Cormac stared at his parchment and spoke, ‘Scribing and deciphering promise the greatest advances to our kind, son. Your future is good, I see. Your generation must learn these skills and move our people forward.’
Nobody there said anything that might embarrass Cormac further as he continued to stare blankly at his precious script.
Mac Cumhaill then stirred Cormac who said, ‘Oh yes, and call Fleatharta here for me.’
When Fleatharta, the quiet man who was Cormac’s most trusted brehon, arrived, Cormac merely said to him, ‘Now Fla, you know what you are to do?’
Matha’s mood sank when he realised that Fleatharta was being sent with him. He did not even bother asking what kind of gift this was supposed to be. Matha was eager to go and would have preferred the company of ten sheep now, or just one. At least that would have been a welcome gift for his mother. What was he to do with a man like this? But he showed gratitude to Cormac and left with Fleatharta.
As they walked quietly, with Fleatharta regularly pleading with Matha to slow down, Matha listened to the man grumbling, apparently about what Cormac had said. ‘Squiggles on parchment? Great advances indeed,’ he spat. ‘Learning how to forget, is what it is. Trading an art of the brain for an art of the hand. Learning to make men lazy. Learning to unlearn the great skills of mind. Learning how to place all of our history and law onto the skin of a cow, where it could burn or wash off and leave us without any knowledge, without law, and without any recollection of those who have gone before us.’
Matha tired of this and stopped. ‘But great Fleatharta, is the good King not allowed a vanity the same as any one of us?’ he said. ‘He pretends he has great knowledge on a piece of skin. Who are you to mock him for not having spent half his life, like your kind do, learning cants and verses?’