Is cuma liom. Tá ocras orm.
You’re useless, is what you are, she said, but she smiled.
The day was almost done, the sun sank to the far treetops and poised there. Everything lasted longer now that spring was almost over. The sun shone through the window and bathed the room in a sudden umber light. The kettle was quietly steaming the wall with condensation.
Blinking, I looked toward the window, at the old dust-grimed milk bottle. Together, without a word, we watched the sunlight spill through the marred surface, turning its sullied contents gold, and we were caught, transfixed by it; I imagined the same color curdling in Mag Delacey’s blood before her heart burst.
Would you not break it? I said aloud, not to Cait really but to the silence, to anyone who might consider the bottle at all and the cruelty of it placed there, with its suggestion of death and murder and fear that hung in all the silent, estranged places of the Delacey house. Would you not break it?
I lied, Cait said without looking at me. I am scared, I’ve always been scared. But neither of us could look away from the bottle; it was as if having two witnesses to confirm its existence also confirmed the unthinkable: that Cait’s father had killed her mother and that Cait, knowing this, had done nothing.
As we stared, the last of the day, that aching measure before dusk, dipped low behind the trees. Everything darkened around us. I was conscious of both our breaths, and then Cait pushed back her chair and strode across the room. To hell with you, you bastard, she said and took up the bottle and smashed it on the floor, and I shuddered with the sound it made. I thought I would feel glad but instead I only felt scared for her and guilty that I had had no part in what she had done.
Cait stood looking at the broken glass and what was left of the milk that the poison had strangely preserved all these years. She sniffed the air and I did the same but there was nothing, no smell of rot or decay, no odor of corruption as there had been years before when she had first smelled its sweet and curdled poison—nothing that might have satisfied the need to destroy John’s trophy, that might have made sense of any of this. The milk bottle was smashed and once it was swept up there would not even be the proof that it had existed at all, and no evidence, other than the knowledge of his children, that John had killed his wife.
Are you all right? I asked. I wanted to stand next to her and hold her but felt like an interloper spying on her grief. The room lengthened with darkness.
I shouldn’t have done this, she said.
She knelt and I knelt with her and began scooping the larger glass fragments up with my hands. The bones of her kneecaps shone white. Her eyes were moist with tears. I shouldn’t have done this. She shook her head. You shouldn’t have made me do this.
Cait, I said, you were right to do this. It should have been done a long time ago.
A long time ago, she mimicked, and a long time ago my mother would still be alive if it wasn’t for your father.
I stared at her, willing her to be reasonable, willing her to see that she couldn’t mean what she was saying. Cait, come on now, let’s clean this up, sure it’s all right.
It’s not all right. I think you should go.
But Cait, sure —.
Leave me alone, Michael. Sure you’ve done enough.
Go, Michael, just feckin go, would you.
I tipped my palm, and the glass shards fell back to the floor, glittering now in the fading light. When I stood she would not look at me; her shoulders moved up and down as she picked at the glass. For a moment I stared at the crown of her head, at the tender spiral of hair there, but still she did not look up. I thought of my father leaving us and my mother dying and the few small things I had to remember them by. In the end, no matter how much you loved another, they always betrayed you and left you wishing you had never loved in the first place.
The hell with you, too, I said and stalked out the door, leaving it wide to the country, to the night and the sky and the fields smelling of sulfur, and a hundred unknown sounds and imaginings in the dark, and a drizzle that had just begun that would turn to a hard rain within minutes and leave me soaked before I was halfway home, and that I was glad for because these were all things I could understand and truly believe in.
The sky looked wounded and raw and the back of Flaherty’s gutted shed stood out darkly against it. His hounds were baying from somewhere beyond the farmhouse and courtyard, as they did at this time every evening when the light shifted. The farmyard was mounds of muck and silage weeping slowly across the cobblestone and sluices. Crows sat thick and silent on the shingle roof.
Lugh was working in the pigpens. Moss fractured the low stone walls, the thatch bristled green with rot. I leant over the sty wall and watched him, my nose bunched against the smell. With a thick, stiff-brushed broom Lugh pushed the muck to the edges of the pen; brownish yellow water ran around his bright yellow boots and into the gutters. Over and over again he plowed channels through the waste, and over and over again the muck flowed back into the divide he’d created, yet somehow he still seemed to be moving the stuff.
His green jumper flashed through the late-afternoon shadows of the pen and I smiled. Green jumper and yellow Wellingtons—his pig attire. With horses he wore drab colors, with sheep he wore red, with cows he wore blue. He was convinced that certain animals liked certain colors and if you wore what they liked it made them easier to work with. In truth, all of the animals seemed to like Lugh, even those who wouldn’t come within a couple feet of anyone else. Pigs are easy, he said. They like yellow, Wexford color, the traitors, but sure it’s not their fault, sure they have no judgment at all.
He put down fresh straw, poured grain into the trough. The big sow ambled over and sniffed with her snout. The shoats stumbled about her feet, and when Lugh picked one up, it began to squeal. The mother looked up and Lugh held the shoat against her sloppy nose. Satisfied, she returned to eating, her great shanks shaking. Lugh held the pig against his chest, its small hooves scrabbling at his green jumper. What shall we name this one, Michael?
I looked at the small thing. It was black and white with large dark eyes, its snout puffed and snorted. It looked sweet and gentle and much too fragile; the other pigs were already beneath the mother, tugging at her teats. I shrugged.
Come now, man, you must be able to think of something. Haven’t you got a brain in that head of yours at all? Where’s your imagination? Your sense of adventure?
You could call him Lugh, I said. You two’d make a grand pair.
Lugh laughed. Oh ho, what’s eating you?
Nothing. Are you going into the pub later?
A’course I am.
Can I come?
You know where I’ll be. You don’t need permission.
Will you stop at the gate on your way?
Only if you give the young lad here a name. It’s an awful state altogether when you have no name.
I shook my head but grinned anyway.
I think he’s a Michael, don’t you? Looks like a Michael to me with the sour puss on him. Lugh placed the pig on the ground and went back to work. The shoat’s legs bowed for a moment before it stumbled over to its mother and struggled for purchase on her nipple.
After the Angelus I headed out to the wall but Lugh never did show. I waited until it grew dark and the moon rose high above the hills and still there was no sign of him. The light of my mother’s room shone down into the courtyard and I watched her silhouette moving back and forth behind the curtains. Then the light went out but I had the sense that she was standing there still, looking out at the dark fields. I knew better than to think she was looking for me. I stared up at her window, at the slim lappet of curtain and the ghost of her outline pressed against it, moving faintly in the breeze as if she were dancing.
the route of the tain
May 5,1981
It was dawn and I’d just come from running along the river. I stood upon the hill and looked over at the gray town and watched the light changing as it had the da
y Father left. Church bells were ringing throughout the narrow lanes and streets, and I saw people running through the slips. They were coming out of businesses and pubs and shops all along the quay. Cars sounded their horns and the old lighthouse boat blew its horn in response, a great moaning bellow that washed up and down the riverbanks.
A man stepped out of Quinlan’s and stood in the street, his head bowed, one hand pressed to his face, crying softly. I thought he must be drunk.
I walked up between the shop and the pub and recognized a lad from the Good Council running up the street. What’s happening? I asked.
Do you not know? he said breathlessly, and he seemed both shocked and filled with a strange nervous excitement.
What?
Bobby Sands is dead.
In the Bosheen young men were setting fire to whatever they could lay their hands on. Already you could see the black smoke reaching up into the sky. I heard a young woman crying: Wake up, Bobby! Wake up! Some had picked up rubbish-bin lids and were banging them on the cement as they did in the North, filling the streets with a painful clanging keen.
I ran home along the overgrown railway cut. They had set fires alight in rubbish bins, and the flames, contained within the drums, were singular and bright. Smoke rose from a pyre of burning tractor tires and the wind bent it upon the Estate. I stared into the flames and my eyes watered; blinking, I ran on. The smoke swept back over the houses and into the country, and I pressed on through the choking black billows and emerged out into the lane with my eyes streaming and the smoke sweeping over the hills and through the valley and covering in burning ash all the long straths of blindingly bright yellow gorse.
June 1981
Mist still clung to the fields as I eased the boat out into the Flats. A sweep of black-and-cobalt sky ran across the surface of the water like shivers from a lash. Cows chuffed behind the hedgerow above the brae leading down to the cove. Creels rocked empty in brackish water at the bottom of the boat. A large bird lifted from the brake across the way and I listened to its sound magnified in the fog, reverberating down through the channel, off the stones of the breakwater and the point, and then ascending into silence.
Trying to ignore the dampness, I turned on my wireless and poured some tea from my flask as Radio Luxembourg came in, its signal splitting and then humming into life. I turned up the volume to dispel the quiet. I rowed slow against the current, then rested on the oars and listened to the country waking around me. The smell of river and furze bloom, of cow shit down near the banks where the herds came to drink of an evening. My father would have hated that I was fishing the way I was, using illegal eel pots and creating a famine of the freshwater for other fishermen, but I didn’t care. He was three thousand miles away in America now. How I was fishing the river was the last of his worries, I was sure.
I heaved the pots in, worried the eels from the trap into the creel, trying to avoid their teeth. On the wireless, a man was talking about the hunger strikers in Long Kesh. He said that Joe McDonnell was now blind. Fifty days. How long it seemed. Almost two months without food. When my belly growled I thought of the sandwiches that I had packed this morning and I felt guilty.
I steered close to a rock overhang near the bulrushes and fixed onto another trap with my gaff, brought it up, emptied it into my creels, baited the pot with perch and other fish bits, then sank it again. If I could spare I’d use the whole fish, but mostly I used the heads. Sometimes I used worms, giant lobworms, cut in half and hooked four per bait. They gave off a strong scent in the water, and to the eel the stench of death and decay was everything.
As I rowed I looked for my lines and markers. Shortly before dawn gray light shimmered off the fog banks and the river was one throbbing movement of glimmer and reflection; everything was suspended, filled with expectancy of the transformation that the light would bring.
On the wireless, doctors discussed how long a human could survive without food. There are factors, they said, and I nodded. I knew factors. It depends entirely upon how much fat content an individual has and their health from the outset, but with proper body fat and proper muscle mass, a healthy adult can survive for about sixty days.
When the body is deprived of food it starts to use its own tissues to produce energy. It will start to break down the protein in vital organs. Everything will slow down while trying to conserve protein, but there will come a point when slowing down is not enough and the situation will become serious. The heart, the respiratory organs, and the liver will start to fail, and lastly, the nervous system. Perhaps this is why you felt everything as it was happening to you; you were aware of your own decay, and I thought of the cruelty of that.
Muscles shrink and bones protrude. The eyes become large but blind. The skin becomes thin, dry, inelastic, and pale—as cold as something you’d throw in the ditch to rot. I wondered, How can Joe McDonnell’s family eat at all and not think of him? Does his youngest refuse her food? Would I fast if it would bring my mother back to health, bring my father back from America to stay? If by my sacrifice I could make my family whole again, would I starve myself to death?
I lowered my traps along the shore, toward hollows that caught moonlight, then moved farther out into the channel, thinking of old men that I shared this act with, and it was a soothing thought. I’d sell the eels to Quinn, the fishmonger on the quay who shipped them off to Britain and the continent. Some I heard even made their way to Asia, and I marveled at that, at the distance these eels had covered, from the Sargasso Sea to Ireland, and now all the way to Korea, China, and Japan.
Joe McDonnell would die in a matter of days, perhaps a week, and my mother would be lying on her back, staring at the ceiling or looking through her window to fields facing the North, listening to the report on her own wireless.
From the bottom of the boat I took three large river-washed stones. They were wet and cold and heavy. Carefully, I stacked them above the rest, closed my eyes, and prayed: Mother, these stones are from your belly. With each stone, I take away your sickness. With each stone, I give you room to eat and breathe and sleep without pain. Please God, make you whole, make you well again.
Starvation, a voice from the wireless announced, is a very painful way to die. Then there was silence and I could not tell whether the speaker’s colleagues did not know how to respond or how to continue after such a statement, or if the broadcast had just ended entirely. The signal hissed and spat and water lapped softly against the gunwale. Mist breathed along the riverbank; my breath smoked the air. I heaved out on the oars and sloughed roughly toward the tide, my chest and stomach expanding with each lunging stroke but feeling only hollow in the space between rib and muscle and lung, where I knew every feeling of love and kindness should be.
In church, the heady aroma of incense rose with the chorus of chants and prayers toward the vast vaulted ceiling. Father O’Brien mumbled, swished his robes, and Peter Fallon, kneeling in his altar-boy whites and grinning at some friends in the front pews, jangled the ceremonial bell loud and riotously over the words. Even as Father O’Brien crossed the altar, Peter was still grinning and ringing the bell, and when Peter turned away and least expected it, Father gave him one sharp clout on the head that left my ears stinging far up the aisle.
In the dim light I saw her sitting in the front pews; it had been two months since we’d spoken. Light fell from the roseate and illuminated the vestibule of the altar, cast shadow along the side of her face, the edge of her jaw. Dust motes spiraled down around her, holding her frozen like one of the statues that encircled the clerestory.
The Mass ended, and as we departed our pews, I found myself straggling, waiting for her. I watched from the sacristy, where an old man was offering up a candle for someone’s soul. Cait’s hands slid into the font; her palms cut the dark water and she leant forward to anoint her forehead. The water, dewdrops on the tips of her fingers, held the light, and when she looked at me the marks of her fingertips glistened. That one, Delacey, is a hoor, an effin hoor I
tell you, just like her hoor mother. She came toward me then, but I passed her and trudged out to the chill air of the wet street littered with crisp packets rattling with the wind. I walked down to the quay and the river—the boarded-up barges, the still coal flats, the old rusted lighthouse boat, the black scudded water. And I continued walking, passing Matty Murphy in a bright alleyway beating a cat to death.
I walked the boreen to Greelish’s cottage with dusk coming on. The tops of the sedge shone silver with mist. At the farthest edges of the horizon the sky was tinged purple; night closed and with it came rain sweeping unbroken across the fields. The door squealed open at my touch, and I closed it fast behind me. The corrugate I’d placed across the tiles no longer stopped the rain. It collected in a pool on the bowed floor.
Cait had left her underthings in the cottage and I might never have found them in the darkness if I hadn’t stepped upon them. I ran them through my hands, stretched the material and brought it to my face; they were moist and dank with the smell of her and from lying in the cottage so long. It had been months since the two of us had been here and everything seemed to have been destroyed in that time. More plaster had fallen from the walls; sheep had wandered through and left their droppings on the floor. Tiles had been swept from the roof in the recent rains and lay shattered upon the cement. Our mattress was sodden and rank. I don’t know how I could have imagined this place looking better than it did now.
I rooted for kindling, broke the old settle into pieces with my boot, and soon had a small fire going. Leaning against the mantel and watching as the flames bent up the flue, I drew Cait’s clothes to me and shivered. For another moment I held her worn, faded underthings pushed to my face. Then I dropped them onto the fire and watched as their paleness blackened and shriveled. I stoked the grate and threw our blankets onto the coals. The room brightened with the flames but still I could not get warm.
In the Province of Saints Page 20