by Paul Lynch
SOON AS I GET PAID I’m gonna get some serious eating done, said The Cutter. His voice heard over the din of the rumbling cart. Drawn faces in front of him, some of them sitting with their arms wrapped around knee-tucked legs and others half standing. He looked at them and licked his lips and smiled. Yessiree. I’m gonna get me a chicken so I am. And I’m gonna get me the hindquarters of a pig and I’m gonna slap them down over a fire. He rubbed his hands.
Are you now, said Coyle.
I am Inishowen.
You must have a wee hunger on you then. I’m gonna get me the whole flank of a cow and I’m gonna eat the whole thing half raw and no one will be getting any of it but meself.
Is that so, said The Cutter.
Aye.
Well you must be eating with the hunger of a wee sparrow for I’m gonna get me a whole cow and a whole pig and a whole clutch of chickens and you can watch me eat em and I’ll have the eggs when I’m done. Just for afters.
He spat onto his hands and rubbed them. Across from them sat an old man called Chalky who leaned over and eyed the two men with grim gray eyes. Would yous ever shut your holes, he said.
Deep country for miles on end, fields of wheat and tobacco. They turned off the turnpike and traveled over a pitted dirt track that shook them on top of one another and they elbowed each other in the ribs and arms and laughed. The track opened onto a small valley with a far ravine and they saw the swale was felled of trees, the ancient silence of the place uprooted and a thickening of trees surrounding the valley mute at the spectacle. The ground was muddied thick despite a scattering of sawdust and they saw a shanty of canvas tents waiting to house them with firepits outside and black cooking pots hanging above them. A low triangle of stacked provisions. Further up the camp they saw horses and mules corralled and the makings of a blacksmith station, wooden huts, carts unhitched and idle, a few men moving about. An air of expectation about the place like the build-up of strange weather. The Cutter walked towards the barrels and squatted down and saw some of them were whiskey. He stood up and kicked a small dance into the air.
Jesus lads, it’s fucking Christmas.
IN THE DAYS TO FOLLOW they began to work not like men but beasts. First light of day and they would rise bleary from their tents, their bodies bent and their limbs stiffened and under heavy-lidded eyes their gaze was a distant unseeing. On their faces they wore the land, the earth and the dust embedding their skin and their pallor beneath was gray invisible as it was to the sun and they breakfasted with blackened hands and poured coffee upon tongues parched and whiskey-soured.
The valley surrounding was yellow within green and they would fan up the hill till they looked down upon the swale and they tightened their hands over the hafts of their tools and spat into the dust and they dug. His arms burned and his hands became numb, fingers bloodied and blistered, and every one of the men the same and no one with the intention of relenting. The men worked tireless and unremitting as they pitted the hillside with the points of their picks, the sluggish weight of their tools swung high, the weight stalling sluggish like a pendulum until it was returned hurtling towards the earth, a series of gray comets arcing the sky. The earth crumbled sluggish beneath them, the clod heavy and packed with rotten rock. They burrowed into the surface like animals taking flight from some sluggish danger or as if they were trying to escape the sun’s watch, and they worked till the sun drove down weary into the earth, the shadows of the men lengthening before them until each man fell into his own darkness. Upon evening they descended for camp, the earth left open like a raw wound, and they tramped down hungry and sore and they spooned their food onto tin plates by the fire and they drank their whiskey and they gambled and grumbled in the flickering light until like dead men they slept.
Each day anew the sun climbed over the hill and where the earth was rent birdsong died each day. Days of cottoned cloud trapped in the heat and then there were days of clear sky. The sun beat down hard and some men worked without straw hats and others without shirts and he watched the sun work their flesh, whipping skin till it cracked like the beds of rivers strangled.
The stubborn cut hardened its shoulder to the men and the work began to stall. Duffy issued orders and leveled some of them like threats, parading about in palls of blue smoke. The men carted rocks in their hands and Coyle watched Chalky, who some said was near seventy, deliver a stone silent from the earth and shoulder the weight fit for two men on his own with nothing but a suck on his teeth. They carried the stones onto carts alongside shovels of loosened earth and they drove the horse and carts with their timbers trembling down the rugged valley where men made good the fill.
For sups of water they hardly stopped and the stock was better soused and when they did stop for something Duffy’s eyes were on them and he made warning to keep working or they would not be paid for the day, for time now was not their own and they learned to watch who was watching and when they stopped to eat they took no more time than was necessary.
Days wore on, time measured by the discordant chimes of the men at their work, seconds clocked by the thudding bluntly of the breaking earth, the clanging of pick on rock. In the valley below they saw the blacksmith hammer and shoe to his own silent beat and he watched them in turn up on the rim scuttling and slaving like ants.
HE BEGAN TO WAKE like he had not slept and all day he craved for sleep. He sat bent upon the fire with few words to go around, supped on his drink and watched the others weighed with the kind of tiredness that pulls a man into the ground. They would eat their fill of potatoes and bread and beans and beef, and the whiskey came easy to their lips. It burned their gullets and eased the pain in their hollowed bodies and made loose their tongues. They talked of the money they would make, farms they would build and the kind of women they would have and he always smiled and laughed with them but inside he saddled his loss. He wondered if the new child had been born, the absent weight of it phantoming into a sorrow that made him weak with frustration and he swore to himself he would get back. Drinking then for there was nothing else to do but salve the day’s pain and he listened to the others speak of home and some of them gave song like ghosts breaking free of a bodily burden, and The Cutter spent the time cursing to whoever would listen, that goddamn Duffy, the least he could do is bring us up some fucking hoors, and one by one they fell stiff-backed into sleep.
THEY WATCHED THE MAN slow to a dawdle over his pick. Watched for him too the hawk eyes of Duffy. Knew the man as a quiet one whose laugh was a gassy giggle. They saw his frame sagging and his shoulders shrunk and they knew he was not alright. The man let loose a lethargic swing then let the point of his bedded pick linger and he just stood there a while staring dead at the dirt. Chalky called out to the man and asked if he was alright but the man said nothing and when Chalky called again the man turned his head as if considering a question of great significance but instead he stared back empty.
A tall man with a face banded with dirt came over to him and spoke but the man said nothing to him and the man left and all around the earth shrugged off the men’s intrusions. Then the man let drop the tool from his hands and he fell from his feet, fell sullenly like dead meat and lay on his back, and the men watched and when they saw he was not getting up they stopped and bent over him, and they saw his eyes were open and heard him muttering to the sky. I’ll kill them all. I’ll kill them all so I will.
ANOTHER WEEK OF WORK relentless and the earth bared its teeth as if it was angered at the intrusion. The rock was sheared away in spalls of stone that split the air with no concern for a man’s face sending dust that silted their reddened eyes and none of the cutting deep enough despite the calls of Duffy to drive harder. His cigars burned to the butt as he paced in frustration and he cursed the goddamned cut and the useless cunts of Ulstermen and he said they were losing not just days now but weeks.
He disappeared the next morning leaving his deputy in charge, an Irishman called Doyle who carried a heavy foot and kept his face unwashed, the whites o
f his eyes pure and luminous despite the dust that darkened his face. He ordered the men quietly until a day later Duffy reappeared with men driving horses carting dozens of barrels of black blasting powder while sitting on the back with swinging legs were four face-painted whores.
The men whooped at the sight and that evening they formed brazen queues. Not enough women to go around and only half the men seemed interested anyway, and Coyle watched from the firepit some of the men standing in the queue holding dramatically on to their balls while The Cutter was seen going into the tent twice, and began to queue for a third time until the others protested and a fight ensued.
The next day the women were gone. Near midday the men put down their tools and they left the rock to go below where they watched a group of men begin drilling. They stood atop the rock with hand-held hammers and they beat the bits of the drills into the rock and it dulled their tools and the blacksmith set up station nearby, a man with sorrowful steel eyes and a sad horseshoe moustache, forging and heat-treating and resharpening. Eight blast holes were dug and the dusted rock was spooned out and from down below the workers watched the barrels being brought up, the powder poured in and then a group of men set to tamping. A young man called Stamp stood on the ledge with an iron bar in his hand and a pipe in his mouth and he worked the tamping bar downwards. The sun above a burning coin and the men below stood at the water station drinking. Coyle sluiced the brown water over his head and he wiped his eyes and water dribbled off his dusty beard. The Cutter sat down with his head between his legs. He looked up and took his sleeve and wiped snot from his nose and pointed. There’s a farm over there on the other side of the valley, he said. Coyle turned his head and wiped water out of his eyes.
Chickens?
Worth a looksee.
The next moment there came an explosion and their hands went to their ears and their bodies cringed instinctively as the sound clattered off the valley. They looked up to see but couldn’t see much and they listened incredulous to the rain of rubbled rock. Up on the ridge where Stamp had been standing was now a gout of dark smoke and all about they heard men shrieking. The tampers near him were blown off their feet and they picked themselves up dumbfounded, their hands to their ears as rock hailed all round them. Men below began to rush towards the site and they found Stamp supine, the iron bar three feet long he had been holding blasted clean through the lower flesh of his jaw, up and out through the front of his head, and the bar fell beside a man who stood bleeding, and he picked it up and held it, the item viscid with brain matter, and he looked at the injured man incredulous whose eyes were wide open and his mouth gasping.
There’s Duffy, a man said, and they turned to watch the contractor climbing up to the ledge with Doyle dragging behind. He walked towards the men with heated eyes and he stood over Stamp with his hands on his hips and looked down at him and sucked hard on his cigar. The injured man staring blankly at the sky clouding with cigar smoke, his face rock-dusted and unblinking. Another man was bent behind him examining with his hands the hole in the head and Duffy stuck his toe into the man and pointed down into the valley. Take him down to the tent. Jesus. Did I not tell yez no smoking.
When the smoke and dust had cleared a man began to shout and then they found another, a man called Ruddy pinned dead under a rock. He had been blown thirty feet to the other side of the ridge, his legs flattened and a boulder crushing his chest and an eye hanging loose outside his head. The men winced when they saw him and another got sick and two more got iron bars and tried to prise the rock and when that failed they got jacks and worked the boulder free.
In the camp Stamp was alive but by evening he was dead and they made a wooden box for each of the men. They dug a hole in the ground and Duffy looked at it and told them to widen it just in case and they put the coffins in, their feet pointed east and their heads pointing west, and they filled the earth leaving some room beside them. The men asked permission to mourn the dead men and Duffy sucked on his cigar and said you can do whatever you like after dark but it’s back to business tomorrow and they went to the shanty and they drank till they slept and in the morning they resumed work, the earth above the dead men unrested.
EACH DAY THE SUN a fury that worked the valley into a dim heat. The cut deepened and in the air the dust hung permanent and one by one the men began to weaken until shadows of men they became. Some of them took injury from falling rocks loosed above them but it was the tiredness that took its toll. He watched a man called Henry drop down beside him, his lips blue and his eyelids brown, and he put a hand over his mouth to see if he was still breathing. He yanked the man up as others gathered round and then Duffy was standing over him.
Coyle motioned towards Duffy. This fella here’s sick so he is, he said.
Get you back to work, said Duffy.
This fella needs water.
I won’t tell you again.
The Cutter came forward and they dragged the man away to take water and Duffy just stared and then he walked away. The man picked himself up like some elderly convalescent and he took a drink of water in a shaking hand and then he went back to work.
NO WORK ON A SUNDAY and the men lay about the shanty like bovines insensitive, heavy-footed and their eyes dark and their hats hung low. Those that bothered to get up from their beds had cups full of whiskey and they gambled and groused at one another while a man strangled a fiddle till he was told to shut up. A narrow stream ran through the valley and some of them washed their clothes standing naked by the side of it plashing water on their tired bodies.
Coyle gambled with the men and when he lost four dollars he put down his cards and got up. Boys I’m off for a walk. The lingering of a dream in his head and he nosed into the trees, their trunks skinny and snaking skywards and everywhere was green. A dark-eyed junco squatted on a branch near him and he stood and looked at it, never saw a bird like it, and the leaves all around dappled and dazzling in sunlight and he walked up the hill till the sky widened and he saw in the valley below the white spread of a farm. In the lap of a nearby field he could make out two duck-egg-colored carts and he sat and watched the sky broad and blue and he turned and walked back the way he came, inhaling the scent of the forest all the while before he got to the shanty.
He found The Cutter and sat down on a log beside him and took some whiskey in his cup and drank it.
Goddamn rat kept running over me while I was asleep last night, he said.
Some of the men nodded. Aye, said Chalky. Been noticing an increase in them hoors.
When I was a wean, The Cutter said, we used to smoke em out. We’d plug up all the holes but for one and then we’d light a wee fire and the rats would all come running out, hundreds of them, and we’d have the dogs there waiting. The dogs went wild so they did.
Some of the men laughed. A man staggered over from a circle of gamblers and he took out his cock and began to piss in front of them. The Cutter looked up. Are ye making me a proposition?
The man’s eyes slanted. What?
Would you ever fuck off with that skinny thing and go an piss someplace else.
I’m pissin here so I am.
Coyle stood up and went to the man and pushed him hard with the flat of his hand in the face. The man staggered till he fell over on his back and a dark stain began to spread on his leg and some of the men laughed and others let out a cheer. Coyle sat back down on the log and the man picked himself up and he stared at Coyle before stumbling away.
That’ll learn ye, The Cutter said.
Coyle took a stick and began to scratch with it odd shapes in the ground like he was trying to divine the runes of some obscure language housed within him.
TWO DAYS LATER CAME first rain. He watched the sky swell and roll darkly over the valleys and he whispered to himself, make it come. Cloud shadow darkened the swirling dust and the sky thundered above them. Then it came, rain thick and pounding, spilled as if burst from a belly, and the men stopped their work. Some of them took off their hats and arced the
ir faces and opened their mouths and some of them smiled and light returned to their eyes, narrow smiles of happiness but inside them a turmoil of sadness that bestowed on them again their humanity. Two young men began to wrestle with each other, a hand on each other’s collar and they went down to the ground laughing. Duffy watched the men from above on his horse and he looked up at the sky and he turned and rode away to the trees. The Cutter put down his pick and began to take off his clothes. He appointed his mouth like a stoup to receive the rain and he peeled his tattered garments, rumbles of laughter from his dirty black chest and naked in the puddling dust he lay. Coyle smiled and sat on a rock and he looked at an embankment of cloud. It reached down to meet the hills and he saw the ground beneath his boots soften, watched it receive the rain until it began to wear, drop by drop, and the ground was no longer what it was and began to wash away and he had the thought that all of life in the end was like this.
The Cutter stood up and his body began to shake and Coyle saw he was starting to dance, his knees furling and his elbows taking wing till he was caught up in the fury of some demented jig, the melody and cadence of which were known only to his inner self, and he was howling and the others began to watch and struck by it too they began to strip, peeling their clothes until they were revealed in their nakedness, soiled and sodden and they linked their arms and they kicked their feet into the air and they danced and they danced and they danced.
THAT DAY OF RAIN was singular and the days warmed again. The land returned to dust and in the valley below the fill became a minor hill, rising imperceptibly at first over the stone culvert, then reaching slowly towards the leafy shoulders of the valley. Heat from the sky and heat from the earth and one by one on the valley floor the horses and mules began to fall. They would sink to their knees and lie down still, eyes glossed and distant. The men would holler and boot them in the ribs but the animals looked back with eyes that spoke a singular language understood by the men. Each animal was shot and its corpse dragged away and its meat when it could be eaten was butchered and cut to shreds and jerked.