by Paul Lynch
SHE TOLD HIM SHE was still sick and would not tell him what was wrong, sat in the range chair where she walled herself in and did not rise from it. Sat there mute to him. He puzzled at her behaviour and told Billy his mother was still ill from the wasps. The next day the boy came home from school red and agitated, skulked in the shadows of the kitchen scowling at his mother, watched his father as he fixed the fire, followed him outside until Bernabas turned and cocked his head towards him, would you go get the oil for the lamps, some of them need refilling. Billy just standing there and when he spoke his words poured out. He told his father he was being taunted at school, that they were saying his mother had beaten up the old woman Baba Peoples, that she had cut off the woman’s hair to mark her. Barnabas looked at the boy in confusion and he began to shake his head, started cursing at him, told him to go away and fuck with such nonsense, but Billy shook his head and said it was true, that he had seen the old crone himself at a distance that day on the road and her hair was all gone off her. Looked like a fuckin bird so she did.
Barnabas stood before Eskra with a lamp. Asked her about what happened. Met the shut door of her face. He stood there looking at her speechless. Finally he said, what is it have you done, Eskra? What is it? What did you do to her? She did not speak and turned from him and blind then he became to his temper. He dropped the lamp, shook her near to standing out of the chair, pincered her cheek with his fingers. Met an eyeball that bore blue chill to him. He spat when he spoke. What in the hell is going on, Eskra? Did she do something to you? What?
The face before him then of a different woman altogether. The swelling had gone down and her face took its old form but in the eyes now he saw a total change. Leave me alone, she whispered.
In the aftermath of what was they scarcely spoke and he watched her continuing retreat from him, a shadow in the range chair passing hours listless, seemingly listening to the radio, or he saw her ghosting wordless through the rooms. The way she began to go out on long walks in all weather, as if to get away from him, and he would watch her, walking their fields but never those of another as if she were trapped on the farm, hemmed in by something other than boundary. It seemed to him she eyed the world now from someplace remote, a place where she could control what it was of the world she let into her and he saw too a difference in her bearing. It was as if she had lost her love for him but would say nothing of it. Barnabas watching on with a dread feeling. He tried to get her to eat and every day made some kind of dinner, usually of eggs and potatoes and meat, and he would make her breakfast in the morning but she would sit before her plate or bowl and pick at it. Will I get you the doctor? he said. She did not pass beyond the gates of the house and she spoke only a few words to Billy when he spoke to her and the boy began to look at her askew as if she were some malevolent twin of his mother, began to come late from school.
Barnabas did not know what to do with her so he began to spend more time on the byre, worked himself each day into a total exhaustion. He went with the axe to the stand of trees between the pasture and taper field and felled first the ancient oak. Palms burning from the swing and bite of the axe. The oak yielded to him and in that moment it seemed to him all of nature adjourned to watch, the weather holding itself mute, for in the few seconds of its falling the great tree let out a sorrowful groan. It smacked the earth and it seemed not just the leaves on the tree but the very air was trembling. He felled a mature evergreen and he chopped both trees free of their branches and used the horse to drag the harvest into the yard and he piled up the useless branches into firewood. He went again to see John-Joe, dug into their savings which was to pay for the new cattle. John-Joe the next day appearing with a horse and cart and strapped on the back was a large motor-powered band saw. They ripped the air with the noise of its cutting and over the course of a day cut the trees into slices of timber. Carried the lumber to the new shed and stacked it in piles and sheeted it up and Barnabas asked him how long he would need to leave it dry for. John-Joe began scratching his dark head. That depends, he said. The least, I imagine, is a month.
The early days of May brought a cold and mean sort of weather. He drove into town for supplies in the spit-rain and he saw how people had changed to him. People whom he might have expected to stop and say hello no longer paid him heed. He went into the hardware shop and was made to wait until last to be served, and when he was, it was by the store-owner’s son, for the store-owner, John Doherty, looked through him as if he were a ghost and went out back into his house. He drove home that day clamped down on his teeth with his hands white on the steering wheel. That same afternoon he saw the priest appear in the drizzle on his bicycle, cycle through their gate under a wide black hat and leave his bicycle gently against the wall. Barnabas hid behind the new shed, watched with disdain the way the priest walked so light on his feet, went around to knock on the back door and put his hand to the glass to look in. Calling out Eskra’s name. Barnabas staying where he was until he saw the cleric cycle back out onto the road. Knew she had gone out on another long walk again.
He stood before the roofless byre and listened to the emptiness of the farm, this time of spring and all that should come with it, the song of the animals as they would have been taking to the fields in their chorale. The way the cattle knew his voice. Their aliveness. Their stubborn cowness. He stepped up the ladder and climbed the front wall and looked to where he would fit the rafters and then he looked down into the waiting byre, saw how he would place into it a beating heart. The bellow of cattle and their goading, the old knit smells of feed and shit. He thought of the way Eskra was behaving before him, that goddamn woman, and he could not understand her any more and did not know what to do. No longer even a mammy to the boy. Seemed as if she no longer had the ability to hear them. A few more weeks to wait for the timber and then he would roof it and slate it and the byre would be done and when it was, surely she would right herself again. Everything could start all over. The way he was treated now in the town. He leaned over the stonework and banged it with the base of his fist. A taste of salt air faintly from the bay and from his height on the wall he saw the land as it was encircled around him, McDaid’s back fields, the lands of Fran Glacken, that white house of Pat the Masher’s with its mess and stink. He leaned over the wall and spat onto the flagstones.
He saw her at the table when he came into the room staring at a plate of picked-at food. The stove near gone out. He stirred the fire and fed it and poured himself cold tea. Turned the radio on. A song filled the room and stopped him on his feet. An old jazz song, a Duke Ellington number, and it brought him instantly to her arms in Vinegar Hill, dancing in her mother’s apartment. He leaned into the radio and turned up the volume and called across the room. Come here to me you. Her head slowly half-turning and then he was upon her, took her by the hand and pulled her out of the chair, began to lead her in a softly dance slow-circling as if dragging a scarecrow with stick feet. He whispered to her, you remember this, don’t you? Steered her into the swing of the music and then her feet found form on the ground and she began to relax into him, allowed him to hold her a little better, took a hold then of his hand more firmly. Her head fell to his cheek. The byre smell off him. The man become byre, become wood and nails and brick and timber and the dust of it all in his hair and the wire of his bearded cheek and she could smell off him too the grass and the trees, could smell off him all of Donegal.
He said to her, come back to me, Eskra, will you? Come back to me. Please. What’s done is done. I don’t care about it.
Her voice rose to him like the ghost of a voice from long ago. You will look after the boy, Barnabas? Won’t you? I don’t know who I am any more.
What are you on about, Eskra? You are his mammy.
She felt his arms tense as they moved slower now to the music.
Don’t you see, Barnabas. Everything is different now. Everything has changed. We cannot live here any more.
He stopped on his feet, let go her hand, bulled his eyes int
o her. What are you talking about, woman? he said. The fucking byre is nearly all built. I’ve gone and rebuilt it for you. For us. For our family. I’ve gone and paid to cut the wood while you were lying in your bed. I built the thing with my own bare hands. You must be gone in the head. His eyes blinded and he turned and stamped out the door, left her standing in the room on her own.
Dreams of disquiet held him like a vice and then his mind was loosed into the room. He opened his eyes and lay there grasping at a dream, like hands trying to hold water. The bedroom clotted with semi-dark and he shifted and listened to the quiet of the room. Turned and saw Eskra had got up. When he went downstairs the kitchen was dark and bore no sign of her, the bucket unfilled with water and when he opened the stove door he saw the fire was not lit. He cursed and went out into the morning and found the sky was low and luminously white as if something sacred was held just beyond its beckon. The pump let out a long, languorous screech like some strange bird calling and he filled the jug with water. A scruff grey cat appeared as if in answer to the pump’s call and it loped across the yard watching Barnabas. The cat stopped and braced itself to run, sphinx ears and streaks of rib bones beneath black-and-white tiger marks, and then the cat leapt quick into a field. He walked towards the gate with the jug in his hand and he leaned out to take a look at the road, looked as far as he could see towards the corner but saw no sign of Eskra.
He started the fire and laid it with turf and waited for the stove to heat, put on the radio and sat down. News of the war and football results and he stood up and turned it off again. The fire was warming when he saw the time and he called for Billy to come downstairs. A short while later Billy appeared in a rush. I’m late for school, he said. Nobody woke me.
Barnabas stood with his hands on the sink. How old are you now? Can you not wake yourself up?
Billy walked to the stove and saw no porridge had been made. Where’s me breakfast? he said.
You’ll have to go without. The stove’s just been lit. Barnabas looked about the kitchen. Here, he said. There’s a heel of bread.
Where’s Ma?
She’s upstairs in bed.
The boy took the bread and stuffed it into the pocket of his coat and he grabbed his schoolbag. I’m going up the town after school, he said. He went out the back door and slammed it. Barnabas knocked on the window and motioned for him to come back. Come here, son, he said. Billy stopped sullen and then he turned and came back to the door. What? he said.
Will we see about getting you a new dog this week?
Aye. Whatever.
What radiance was held in those white clouds faded to grey and the sun stole behind it a stealthy animal. He went into the stable and spoke hello to the horse and he mucked out the stall, put feed and water before the animal. When he stepped back in a while later he saw she had eaten her feed. He praised the horse and led her outside to the field and as he walked alongside the animal a strange feeling of loneliness came over him and he fought against its intrusion. When he turned from the horse he saw part of the wire fencing by the side of the house was sagging as if somebody had fallen over it. He went back to the stable and fetched the wire tightener. Walked the perimeter of the field and tested the wire for slack and tightened it until rain began to stipple his shirt. As he walked back to the house he saw there were sheets out on the washing line, walked over to take them in. They billowed softly as if forms of small children were shaping them into ghosts. Something about them bothered him and as he came close he saw they were the fire-ruined sheets he had found in the press upstairs. They were hung neatly pegged and taking rain grey as the day they were ruined. What the fuck is she doing? he said. He yanked the sheets off the line and pegs sprung into the air like small birds. He balled the dirt sheets and stormed with them in his arms towards the house, stood in front of the stove and looked at them again to make sure. Saw they still bore the smoke marks of that day and he stood there thinking of all that happened since the fire, opened the stove in a rush and stuffed the sheets in with the poker. He stood a moment shaking his head, saw in the wall’s scalloped mirror the distant shape of the horse under a tree.
It was only later that he saw it. He made tea and sawed bread and took the paper and sat down to the deal table. Had moved it aside with a sweep of his arm before it registered. A letter. What caught his eye was the handwriting–an envelope addressed to him with Eskra’s handwriting on it. He felt then something tremor inside him, dull earth falling loose into the pit of his stomach, ran his thumb over the neat handwriting. The letter was a single white page of black script with no address on top. He read the letter twice, read it slowly, heard clearly her voice, circled over each sentence as if to test each line for solidity and meaning, and when he was finished reading he held the letter on his lap before him. He sat in the chair by the window and let the day die slowly around him, twilight casting buckled shapes of the world and a trapezoid of light on the deal table slowly retreating from him. A shadow forming at the table’s edge and it began to swell and make towards him, travelled tentative across the wood, a sprawling ivy shape until it took slowly in its grasp the hands of Barnabas, began to creep up his arms, and when he finally stood he was entangled, the dark of the room and the cold and the fire gone out and a shadow made of that darkness had entered inside him. He left the letter on the table and began slowly up the stairs, went into the bedroom and closed the door, drew the curtains. He sat on the bed and kicked off his shoes, swung his legs under the blankets and pulled them up to his neck. What broke inside him was what breaks in a man and he lay there stiller than the night that crept around him a hunter of dusk, stealthy and relentless as it beat its dark void wing upon the ceiling, devoured the entire room.
When Billy returned home after dark Barnabas did not hear him come into the room. The lamp he held put pale fire on the ceiling as the boy leaned over him. He whispered, what’s going on? Why are ye in bed? When Barnabas did not talk, he spoke again, a rising tremor in his voice. Are ye sick? Where’s Ma? Barnabas lying there silent with his back to the boy and Billy crossed the room and stood over the other side of the bed and saw his father’s eyes wide open to the dark but taking nothing in. He shook his father and Barnabas blinked.
The next morning Billy came into the room holding his mother’s letter. His eyes were red from crying. He stood before Barnabas and prodded him with his finger until the man stirred and heaved his eyes up like heavy stones. What does Mammy mean? Billy said. What does Mammy mean when she says she’s going home? That you are to look after me until she’s better?
Barnabas eyed the boy coldly and he spoke in a low monotone.
Your mammy’s left, he said. Gone back to where she came from. She says she couldna take any more of it, son. All this. That her nerves are shot. That she canny look after you like this. She won’t be back. She never liked this place anyway. Says she is gonna send for you when she is able but you’ll not be going nowhere. You’ll be staying here so you will. She can come back here, so she can, if she wants to be your mammy again.
Billy silent for a while, his face white. Is she not my mammy any more?
She is still your mammy. She hasn’t been herself this last while. That’s all there is to it. Now, please. Leave me alone.
The words of his father let flee something loose in the boy like storm-startled animals and he walked to the window and half opened the curtains and looked out. The view as he had always known it charged now with something different, as if the components of this world had come to hold an entirely different meaning. He turned around. Why didn’t you go after her? he said.
I didn’t know she’d gone only until later.
You coulda stopped her so you could.
Can’t you see the car’s gone? She went and took it.
His voice fell away for a moment and then he spoke. I don’t have any energy for this. I’m done in. Please leave me alone.
Billy stood there and his face bittered towards his father and his eyes became slits and he
reached towards the man and let loose his fists upon him, shouted all the while. Why didn’t you go for her? Why didn’t you go? You could have gone for her.
His father took the blows without moving, stared up at him a dumb beast.
He fell out of time, went to the deepest place. Days spent like nights and awake through nights like days. Where he lay was a stone room in his mind that shut out the dim day, the frowning night, the hours circling around him like prowling dogs unwanted and wary. He lay awake in that cold room cancelled from living things, nameless in his own void and when he slept it was a fitful sleep and he saw in that shapeless space leering faces of all those he loved and could not reach. She hovered like a wraith in his dreams with her spirit broken and he reached for her, saw her indifferent towards him, her eyes cold like she did not know him–like she had unlearned her love–left him with a feeling of pure hurt that carried through into his waking being. How he loved her. An ache of love. He dreamed he was walking along a road and he met a procession coming towards him and in that parade he saw every person he ever knew and as they walked past him weary in old clothes and sad faces he knew that every one of them was dead. He did not know if it meant anything. In his waking hours, the years of his life had taken on such weight he felt he could no longer lift himself from bed, lift himself into the world, felt like he had been tumbled out of his life. Images flickered and memories roamed unbidden, wild animals set loose to move about dangerously and each had their own distinct reek. It came to him how strange this place was to her when she first saw it, that it was no place she could call home. How she hated it but endured and he denied to himself that the vast and mythic place he held it to be in his mind was but a dream, that it was scant and cold and wild and it did not care for them. How he loved her. How he loved.