by Paul Lynch
He took the knife and began to cut the fleece, scored it around the hoofs and rolled his knuckles between wool and flesh until he had the fleece tubed inverse to the neck. He took the front legs and broke them and then he cut them off and he twisted the head and cut at it until the tendons stretched like they were holding on to some kind of form of the life it once held and then it came free and he put the fleece on the ground and cut the head out of it. The carcass lay violet and still bore heat and he hacked at its midsection and cut the loin out of it and laid it on the grass. He bent to the remains, dragged it and he picked it up and slung it into sludge behind a bunch of heather and he bent and wiped his hands on the heather.
Sullen sky coming down to meet the land and he walked with the fleece around his neck and the meat in his hand and he found the makings of a cave, a rock inviolate against the wearing of the rains and a shelf leaning out to lid the place. He lit a fire that shook yellowing into the blue light and he fixed some sticks upon it. He cooked the meat and ate the charred flesh and finished the last egg and he took the fleece and climbed into the pelted tubing, lay against the shoulder of slanting stone and cursed the rain cunting down when it came.
THE CUTTER WAS CURLED dozing under a sack when the cart groaned to a halt. He heard a voice low in exchange with his brother and then the cart sagged and sprung with new weight and squealed slowly back to life. He heeled the boards with his feet and groaned and lifted the sack to peer at the stranger, pangs of spangled light on his eyes, and he saw a man backturned and then he lay back under the sack.
He awoke some time later and lifted the bag off his face and sat up. The man was sitting sideways with his head wrapped in a blanket, his knees under his chin. The Cutter reached across for a brown bottle by his side and uncorked it with his teeth and drank. He watched the man and then drank some more and he watched the stranger again. He stretched out his leg and tapped the man’s elbow with his foot. The man did not stir and he kicked him again and the man whipped off the blanket and glared. The Cutter gave him a big smile then proffered the bottle. The man looked at him darkly then reached out and took a hold of it and he took a slug and his chest seized up and he spat out the contents. The man wiped his mouth to The Cutter’s wheezing laugh and handed the bottle back. The Cutter looked at the man’s face all bruised and scuffed and his eyes bloodshot and he giggled. You from Ballymagan?
The man shrugged. I donny know where that is.
The Cutter wheezed giddily. You were just in it. Where ye got on. What’s yer name?
Coyle.
Call me The Cutter. And this here’s Mr. Whiskey.
You’re up early, the pair of yez.
The Cutter sucked a long slug and his mouth made a pop leaving the bottle. The dog that bit the hole off ye, he said.
Coyle watched the man curl fetal, black feet poking out from under the sack, a bag and boots by his head. He eyed the landscape in the wan sun, the land dimpled and degged with sprouting color, their passing met by blank bovine stares from huddled herds and he stared idly back. They trundled through townlands indifferent to their passing though still he watched wary and low, the blanket shawled about his head. These settlements seemed thrown into being, haphazard upon the land with their white walls clad in smokedirt and peopled with pigs and the deadstone stares of old women in shawls.
The Cutter was still asleep when it began to rain, a drizzle tentative at first as if it were feeling its way about and then with certainty it began to thicken. The Cutter sat up and pulled the sack over his head and he motioned for Coyle to join him and Coyle took the blanket off his head and balled it and sidled alongside him under the sack.
You for Derry too? The Cutter asked.
Might be.
Make up your mind sir.
They watched the wagging road fall away from them and saw out the rain and when Coyle began to cough violently into his hand The Cutter said nothing but patted the man on the back and told him to swig good from the bottle.
The rolling of the rig put The Cutter into a doze and when he awoke later he saw that Coyle was gone. His brother’s voice wroth behind him and the world covered in fog. Across the back of Inishowen they had traveled and now they were alongside the Foyle. The sound of water muted on the lough and he sat himself alongside his brother and peered his eyes onto the disappearing road.
THE CUTTER SAW the black door of the Derry quays tavern and pushed in. Skeletal hands on a mantel clock pointed to half past two and the place full to near-riot. The tavern was dank, a stretch of light weak from a window and one man working the bar to myriad calls for his attention. Tobacco smoke hung shiftless in the air as if it had nowhere to move, the air already laden with the sweat of bodies fresh and the odor of others long past still reeking and in the far corner a door fanned open and shut wafting stale piss. Drinkers were squeezed in lines down benches and their belongings and barrels were piled by the door.
The Cutter got himself a drink and pushed his way through the room with a cup of beer over his head till he came to the back. He saw the edge of a bench and a young man on the end and he saw there was room and he asked the man to push up. The man no more than a boy, wisp of beard and a face that was stingy and narrow as a horse, and he acted as if he did not hear him. The Cutter nudged him and smiled and asked him again to push up but the man supped from his cup and turned his head away from him. A draining smile on The Cutter’s lips and he asked the youngster again to move and when he got no response he turned and walked away and then he stopped. He turned and walked back and elbowed his weight onto the seat. Plenty of room, he said and the youngster tipped sideways first and then leaped up from the bench and pulled a knife. The Cutter leaned backwards with his arms out wide and the drinkers around them stood up. Hold on there horsey, he said. The kid cut the air in warning with the blade and was interrupted fast by another who took him by the collar and heaved him back onto the seat putting apologetic words in his ear. The man then turned and offered a hand to The Cutter who stood glowering at the youngster and who turned his attention to his beer pooled and dripping off the table. The man before him with the same face as the knifeman but thicker with age and bearded. Sam Tea’s the name and you’ve just met me brother. Apologies for the way he’s acting.
All he had to do was push up.
The man waved his hand as if to dismiss the incident and he put it to The Cutter to shake. The Cutter looked at the hand before him and took it reluctantly and nodded towards his empty cup. Sam prodded his brother and pointed to the empty drinks. In the palm of his hand he danced a few coins. Go on, he said. The youngster went scowling to the bar.
Sam turned to The Cutter and nodded towards his brother. He’s half soused so he is and he donny speak so I do the talking for the both of us.
The Cutter sat down. Looks to me like The Mute hears fine rightly.
He hears what he wants to hear.
The Mute arrived back and slapped three beers on the table and sat with his shoulder turned.
Are you for sailing? Sam asked.
The Cutter smiled. Was. Some fog out there.
Across the table a gray-bearded man groused dead-eyed about the weather and the delays it had caused and the cost of a night’s lodgings to another who sat half listening, his eyes watery, smiling dumbly over fat glistening lips.
THE FURL AND GRASP of fog and then the road shortened before him. He followed till it met the Foyle and the road along the shore to Derry. Took him a while to realize he knew it. That one trip before with Jim. His brother’s laughter. That time they took a cart to Derry to flog a heap of spuds. A battered old horse they borrowed without asking. Must have been just fourteen. My poor brother. And he saw before him the rock of his jaw and the fierce living in his eyes.
The air damp and the sea sullen behind mist. A silence unearthly but for his own footsteps and when he heard the cart coming behind him it was nearly on top of him and he watched the driver well-dressed trundle past his greeting hand. The next one he stopped,
heard it coming sooner—an old horse driven by an old man with no words to say but for a tilt of his sandstone head to get on up and Coyle did so and sat behind grateful. He wrapped himself in the blanket and when they neared the walled city the old man stopped and motioned with his head towards his turning and Coyle squeezed the man’s shoulder in thanks. He hopped over the side and watched the old man and the horse disappear into the mist like an apparition from his mind that ceased to be.
The start of the city marked by slack-shouldered buildings dim in the fog and he found the streets veiled and lifeless. Evening thickened and he buttoned his coat and adjusted his eyes to the gloom. He followed the road till he was on the quays and he saw the vague shape of the walls rising behind it, the fog lingering upon packet ships fixed lifeless to the docks, the water unheard and the ships silent but for the soughing of their beams. He neared a vessel and saw the figures of sailors smoking on deck, the strangled echoes of one of them laughing while beneath them shone candlelight from a lone berth window.
A redbrick warehouse rose like standing shadow and he saw figures ghosting the mist, people huddling over the flames of barrel fires that danced dimly about the water’s edge. He walked among them and saw they were ship passengers not yet departed, their faces looming white and ragged out of the fog, countenances long and few were the words from their mouths. He saw a shawled woman sitting on her belongings and a child on a breast that hung limp and another child sitting nearby and he saw that they were alone. Men sat in circles, idle and heaped with drunken faces and he heard them talking in flat voices or there was no talk at all and he saw children sitting tired as if the fog had sapped them of their vitality.
Gulls hee-hawed in the half-strangled sky and someone came towards him, pulled at his arm and began talking to him, and he saw it was a woman, a face wretched and toothless as she slurred her words whiskey reeking and held a hand out to him in begging. He walked across the quays towards the town rising above him, the cold crawling under his skin, and he stopped to cough and sat down on a wall. The countenance of a man sitting on a sided barrel and he watched him turn towards him, the flesh on his face hollowed to the bone and vicious-looking and Coyle met his stare and the man turned away.
He watched a boy scavenge in the gloom with slant-eyed dogs circling curious, their coats knotted and their tails alert. The boy struggled with a plank of old wood and another boy came a good head taller and he pushed the smaller boy away from the find taking the wood for himself. The small boy fought back with his head tucked into his shoulders and the dogs giddied around them. Coyle watched a man stride over, strike the taller boy on the back of the head and the boy crab away sideways. The man bent to the wood and lifted it to his shoulder and walked off with it.
The cold began to gnaw and his feet were numb in his boots. He blew into his hands and made towards a small fire. He walked past the shape of a man curled on the ground, a coat beneath his body and the man asleep or drunk or both, his hand tight around the neck of a bag with his belongings, and he found at the fire a man and a woman and a heap of children silent. He asked if he could borrow some heat and the woman said surely and they created a gap and let him sit in. The children nursed potatoes on sticks blackening over the flames and the man and the woman were eating quietly. The woman looked at him with dark eyes and smiled with long lips while the man beside her nodded to him, his face hidden beneath a low-pulled cap.
Coyle got down on his haunches and leaned into the heat, the fire scalding the palms of his hands and he rubbed them together. He started coughing and when he finished the woman reached over to one of the children and took the skewered potato from his hand and passed it to the stranger. The child grumbled and the man passed his own stick to the boy and Coyle looked at her and thanked her. When it was cooked he began to eat it, steam bursting the skin and the potato flesh dancing hot in his mouth. The fire began to go out and Coyle offered to help find wood and he left with the man and they walked towards the buildings. Coyle asked him if they were for sleeping outside and the man said they didn’t figure on the boat being kept by the fog and he said they’d have to make do like everybody else. They rummaged around the backs of the buildings and broke up some boxes and heaped the wood in their arms and took it back to the fire.
Some of the children began to sleep and Coyle coughed long and deep into his arm and the woman leaned into the man and spoke to him and when Coyle was finished the man asked him if he was alright.
He spoke quietly. I’ll do.
The woman spoke up. You be careful. You should find some way indoors tonight.
He looked up at her, tried to see her eyes. I’ll be alright. Tis just a cough. I’ve heard worse so I have.
Maybe so. But I mind my sister had a cough like that.
Coyle said nothing and the woman continued unbidden.
You remember the freeze. Ten year ago. It came in January and it didn’t lift till February and everything was buried beneath it. It went up to the knees in some places and you could hardly walk for all the snow and the cold about ye and we couldna harvest a thing.
The man beside her ayed in agreement.
We burned all the fuel we had in that month alone and we sat there indoors, with the father cursing the cold and the idle field outside and him sitting about inside, cursing the weans for there was a load of us. Then one day, it was about three weeks after it started, there was the hint of a thaw—everything started to melt a wee bit and I remember watching the ground begin to slush and the father sent us all out and we started rooting whatever we could get that wasn’t ruined in the hard ground.
The woman stopped talking and looked to a small girl who was tugging on her mother’s shawl. The mother took the girl in her arm and wiped the girl’s runny nose with the sleeve of her smock. Coyle looked around the fire at the children. Shadows darkening their small sleeping faces. One boy awake and he was listening to his mother’s story. Go on with your story, he said.
My sister was the biggest of us all, the woman said. Anne was near twenty and I was fourteen. We were freezing and I remember my hands were blue and John, my wee brother, he was a stubborn git. He said damn the work and went to go back inside and my father dropped him with his fist in the field.
We stayed out for hours and then the rain began to freeze and then it started snowing again and the father he paid no attention but Anne told him to look at us and then he told us to go back in but the sister, he told her to stay, and she never said a word of complaining. Later she nearly sat on the fire for need of warmth and the next morning she wouldna get up outta bed with the coughing.
It was thawing a wee bit that day too and the father he made her get up again and she wasn’t fit for it and she told him so but he gave her a box on the side of the head and pulled her out of the bed. She went back out to the field with the rest of us and she was wheezing and coughing and the hands were dark blue again from the cold and it only got worse.
That night the father cursed her high and low, saying what kind of daughter had he brought her up to be and him having no money for a doctor, so we moved her by the fire and we tended to her. It was only when she got much worse, it were late one night, and she was keeping us all awake and we sat around her, she was in a wild fever and she was wheezing badly and she was coughing like it would never stop and the father, he began cursing and he went out and we heard him fixing up the horse and cursing at it and when he came back a few hours later he had the doctor with him.
It was the first time we’d laid eyes on a doctor. He seemed very small for we thought he’d be tall and he didn’t say a word but he tapped the sister’s chest and he listened to her heart and he put his head to her chest again and we searched his face but it wasn’t revealing anything so it wasn’t and he didn’t even look at any of us. John hiding behind me and then the doctor went by the door and he put on his coat and hat and he spoke to the father but we couldna hear what he said because they were talking in low voices but we saw him nodding his head and we
didn’t know what he meant by that but later that morning when it got bright anyhow she were dead and the father he died too the year after.
The woman pulled the girl close to her and rubbed a hand through her hair. In his mind Coyle began figuring the best time to go south out of Derry and where to go after that and how long he’d be in hiding. And he saw in his mind images of how he’d get things sorted out. Get back and fix what’s left to be fixing. He took hold of the ribbon in his pocket and rubbed it between finger and thumb and the woman saw him with it and he closed his hand around it when she saw him.
So anyways, she said. That’s all I’m saying.
THE EVENING WAS MEASURED in cups of beer. The Cutter stood soused to the bar and he saw two men push through, one of them towering above all others and the other man behind him with only one eye. He looked at them and then turned away, something about the manner in which the tall man carried himself, and his way of taking in the face of every man in the room.
He watched the pair go to the counter and the tall man take off his stovepipe hat and put it on the bar. The barman pulled down a bottle of brandy and a bottle of port and poured them into a glass and gave it to the tall man who took the mixture and went over to the fire with the contents swirling. He bent and lifted a poker black-nosed from a bucket and placed it in the burning turf. He waited and took it out glowing. He put it near his lips and blew the dust off it and the steel brightened at the attention of his breath and then he placed it in the drink. The glass began to smoke and the man put the poker back down and shook the mixture and drank.
SO COLD HE WAS and his guard dropped low and he braced to enter a tavern. He strolled sober-eyed till he had two unguarded mugs in each hand and he squatted by the fire and drank them. Warmth fired his belly and his head began to ease and he was joined by another man who stood squat-legged and stuffed into his trousers and was too drunk to talk. The man stood with his eyes closed while resting a hand onto the air in front of him as if to steady himself.