Boycott

by Colin Murphy

  The river and road parted company at a place called Coolloughra. He stood on the bridge across the road, staring down into the water, and wondered should he take the tiny muddy track that accompanied the course of the river or remain on the road. He could see no life in the river beyond that of the weeds which danced to the river’s tune, and he decided that whatever fate lay ahead of him was more likely found round a bend of this road. There was little logic to his thinking, he was aware, but also he realised that he was beginning to care less and less. At least on the road from Tawnyard the company of his brother had offset his misery.

  Coolloughra was a village of about twenty cottages spread out along a hundred-yard stretch of the road, most of them abandoned. Mindful of his earlier encounter with starving villagers, he proceeded as quickly and silently as his energies would allow. Near the end of the street he passed a cottage, outside which a small boy with vacant eyes sat on a mound of freshly dug earth, which looked distressingly like a grave. The pitiful child didn’t shift his gaze as he passed, as though Owen was some invisible spirit floating by.

  As the evening drew in and the cold increased with the receding light, he had to draw his jacket tighter around him and turn up its collars. He saw few on the road now, though just before dark two mounted English infantrymen rode past at speed, bound no doubt for the Westport barracks. He found the ancient ruins of a castle and decided it would serve as his accommodation for the night. It was of simple design: square at its base, with three complete walls but no roof, which had long since collapsed. Ultimately all castles come tumbling down on the heads of those in power, he reflected, more in hope than certainty as he gathered twigs for a fire. He managed to get a flame going and huddled in his blanket under a projecting stone, hoping that the rains wouldn’t come, and wondering if Thomas was thinking of him as he gazed at the dark vastness of the ocean. He prayed the ship would sail his brother safely to the New World, and then slept.

  It remained dry, but the night sent a chilling frost and he awoke shivering and ravenous. Given his paucity of food, he bore the hunger and continued on his way. At a place called the Triangle, so named as roads on three sides enclosed its lands, he encountered an eviction party at its business. There were some uniformed constables and a number of hired thugs to carry out the deed. A man on horseback was reading loudly from a piece of paper, detailing the notice of eviction. Owen hid in a ditch and watched as a battering ram splintered the door of the cottage and the burly men forced their way inside. A woman and child screamed from within. Then came the sounds of a scuffle and a young man was hauled struggling outside and felled with fists and cracks on the head from the constables’ truncheons. Owen could bear no more and crept along behind some shrubbery, re-emerging on the road about fifty yards beyond.

  At the Triangle the road had forked, and he now found himself walking more in a southerly direction. It mattered little, he thought; one road was as hopeless as the other. But, in a pitiful concession to good fortune, he found a metal cup by the side of the road, probably the former possession of unfortunate evictees. And at midday, the find enabled him to stop by a tiny lough, fill the cup and soak a biscuit to some level of edibility. He scooped up the mashed oaten mush with his fingers, then refilled the cup with water and drank the remainder down, making sure not to miss a speck. He sat there a moment looking out over the small body of water, idly recalling his days of fishing and swimming in the loughs near his home. He looked at the cup, an infinitesimally small piece of luck that had come his way; perhaps it was the beginning of better things, he thought.

  He heard first the sharp snapping of a twig and a moment later felt the crack of something striking the back of his head, and his world turned as black as the inky depths of the lough beside which he sat.

  Owen was first conscious of the pain, intense and concentrated on the top of his skull, and his hand instinctively reached up to soothe it. He could feel his hair matted with dried blood, the strands clumped together, and touching his scalp antagonised the injury.

  He attempted to sit up, had a sense of the world swirling about him, and had to lie back down against the long grass. He groaned in protest at the nausea and pain and after a few seconds the grey sky above paused in its dance. He became conscious of the light drizzle on his face and the cold that had penetrated his body. Using his arm to slowly prop himself up, he looked about. All was as serene as one might expect in such a place. The surface of the lough lay as untroubled as a sheet of glass, the scattering of trees about the water’s edge rested motionless, a few leaves clinging to the skeleton of branches. Slowly he gathered his wits, the nightmare of what had occurred gradually dawning. His food was gone, as was his blanket and the matches, even the metal mug. The only comfort he could take was that they’d left him his clothing, but even that was by now soaked through. He managed to get unsteadily to his feet. The only evidence of the attacker’s presence was a branch, its end stained by the blood from his wound. He looked towards the road, but the thief was long gone.

  Tears falling from his eyes, he began to stagger back towards the road, despair overwhelming him. The food, the blanket and the matches had been a small crumb of hope, at least for the few days ahead while he sought some end to his journey. Now the pointlessness of his choices seemed greater with every step and he felt a clamouring urge to simply fall to the ground and lie there until death relieved him of his misery. He fell against the low wall that marked the roadside and rested until his sobbing subsided. He looked up and down the road, now muddied with pools of water, and massaged gently at his scalp. How he wished Thomas was here now to suggest a course of action, to make the hard decisions he’d always dodged or dithered upon. It occurred to him that Thomas would never have sat with his back to the road, openly eating the food that was as tempting to a thief as a bag of gold, and he once again cursed his stupidity.

  With little other choice, he clambered over the wall and began to walk again, the movement at least generating some little heat within his body. Judging by the hardness of the blood in his hair, he’d lain by the lough for hours, but the grey, drizzling sky denied any attempt to identify the hour. So he walked on, resting on a rock or a wall every so often, not encountering a soul, the near-flat landscape abandoned and desolate.

  Ahead to his right he could see the gentle rise of some hills, their tops shrouded in mist, and realised he had little true idea where he was at all, if even he still walked the roads of Mayo. His mind felt as numb as his hands and he could frame no coherent thought, no notion of where he might be going, no scheme to find shelter or food. He simply pressed one foot ahead of the next until darkness began to enfold the world.

  He woke beneath a bridge to the sound of a stream, having no memory of how he’d come to be there, then shivered and hugged himself tightly. He cupped his hands into the icy stream to satiate his thirst, but lost all feeling in his fingers, the skin turning white and wrinkling. As he massaged the wound on his head he was conscious of a prominent swelling that felt like a stone pushing through his skull. Clambering back up to the road, he saw a stone marker that told him he’d passed the village of Killavally one mile back. If he had, he could recall no detail of it; not a cottage nor a person nor a single stone within the place.

  He walked on in dawn’s early light, the day free of yesterday’s unrelenting drizzle, and his body heat worked to dry his clothes, albeit with tortuous slowness. An hour into the day a family approached pulling a handcart – a man, a youth and two younger girls. They eyed him with suspicion and veered towards the far side of the track as he neared them. He had no choice now, he thought.

  ‘Please can you help me? I was robbed. I’m starving and freezing.’

  They hastened their step, the youth lifting his small sister into his arms protectively. The man looked over his shoulder at him. ‘Keep clear of us! Sure isn’t everyone starving? And the state of ye.’ This last was uttered with disgust.

  As they receded on the road Owen looked down at himself
. His clothes were spattered with mud and his shirt was torn at the chest, although he had no recollection of this having occurred. He held a hand to his face and felt its muddy grittiness. But was his appearance so different from the countless other wretches who wandered the roads?

  He continued through the silent countryside, the hills to his right rising higher, a multitude of loughs, large and small, to his left. Where one almost touched the road he knelt and drank, then leaned over to observe his reflection. He was horrified to look at himself, for blood from his wound had coursed down as freely as a stream across his face, where it had dried hard. Little wonder he had repulsed the family earlier, the streaks of blood giving him the appearance of some kind of savage beast. He splashed water in his face and found he had to rub hard to shift it. When the ripples in the water began to subside he stared into his own eyes for some minutes, realising that he barely recognised the youth who stared back at him. Besides the obvious gauntness, something about his eyes had hardened, or perhaps it was hopelessness that he saw there, and he knew that the water would never settle enough to allow him see the reflection of the person he’d once been.

  The hunger continued to wail at him as he stumbled along. The food he’d had in recent days had merely masked his starvation. No nourishment had been stored within him and the energies of that food had long since been burnt away with the effort of walking. He was now near the point of death again, as bad as during those last days on Tawnyard Hill.

  He heard the approach of horses at his rear and turned to see four English infantrymen approaching at a gentle trot. Was it possible they were still looking for him and Thomas for stealing the pig? It didn’t matter. Better arrested and transported to Van Diemen’s Land than to die here. At least they had food on prison ships.

  He stood in the centre of the track and watched their approach, their red jackets and peaked hats clearly identifiable some way off. They slowed and split as they neared him, two moving either side.

  ‘Please help me. Please can you give me some food? Anything.’

  They looked down on him as though he was some form of diseased animal, repulsive and potentially dangerous. A couple of them exchanged uncertain looks, and an officer who sported a wide, curling moustache briefly met his eyes before calling out: ‘Be off! We’ve nothing for you.’

  The horses stepped again into a trot. The officer turned and looked at him over his shoulder and Owen, feeling now also starved of his dignity, mustered the energy to hurl a mouthful of spit in their wake. The officer turned away and continued on his journey. Owen closed his eyes and exhaled a drawn, mournful sob, then finally looked again at the road ahead. He could see no point. He would take not a single step more. He had reached the end of his road and found no salvation. All he had done, all the effort and trauma of survival thus far, had been in vain. He moved to the edge of the track and allowed himself to collapse on the long grass that bordered it, and there he lay, the life slowly ebbing out of him, his spirit finally crushed.

  He opened his eyes to voices and looked up to see the faces of a man and woman above him. The woman, a black shawl pulled tightly over her head, blessed herself at his stirring, and the man lifted him a little from under his shoulder and held a flask to his mouth, dampening his lips.

  ‘Thought ye were dead.’

  They were in their thirties, country people like himself, poor but better fed than most he’d seen. She wore all black, her face barely visible beneath the shawl. He was dressed in a knee-length coat that had seen better days, and had huge, bushy eyebrows the like of which Owen had never seen before.

  ‘Have you any food?’ In his desperation, he hadn’t bothered with the niceties.

  They hesitated a moment, then the woman turned towards a handcart and rummaged out a loaf of bread. She broke this in four pieces and handed Owen a section. He looked at it a moment as though it might not be real, then bit deeply. It was coarse and grainy, but wonderful. The man proffered the flask again and he managed a barely audible ‘thank you.’ Presently the man helped him up and they sat on some rocks by the roadside, each eating a portion of bread.

  ‘We’re going to Australia,’ the man offered to Owen’s near silence.

  He looked up at them. ‘Thank you for the bread.’

  ‘Where were you headed?’

  ‘Don’t know. Wherever I ended up.’

  The couple considered this but decided not to pursue it.

  ‘We buried the last of our children two months past. We had food enough, but the fever took them one by one, God bless their souls.’ They both blessed themselves. ‘After that, we decided this place had no more use for us.’

  ‘I’m sorry for your loss.’

  They rose as one. ‘Well, better make tracks before it gets too late,’ the man said.

  Owen offered his hand. ‘Thank you…eh…where am I, by the way?’

  The man smiled incredulously. ‘Up ahead is the village of Cloonee, where we lived, and then the road meets another going south between Lough Carra and Lough Mask. That leads to Ballinrobe.’

  Owen had heard of Lough Mask and Ballinrobe, but they were places whose names meant as much to him as the likes of Dublin or Rome. As the man lifted the cart handles and readied to leave, his wife handed Owen the final quarter of bread. ‘Take it, we’ve enough for our journey,’ she said and smiled.

  ‘The tragedy is,’ the man offered in parting, ‘there’s a ton of food not a mile down the road.’

  ‘What food?’

  ‘Oats. Four cartloads. Guarded by ten of Her Majesty’s bastards. Moving it te Ballinrobe tomorrow. They were waiting for more men te guard it.’

  The soldiers he’d asked for food, he thought.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘I ought te be,’ the man called back, ‘I helped te harvest it.’

  Half an hour later a stone marker told him that Cloonee lay ahead. To his right was a small rise speckled with trees. Up ahead he saw a soldier leading a horse across the track and decided to leave the road and walk up the gentle slope, although the effort nearly finished him. As he reached the top and emerged from a copse of trees, he was met by the sight of a large body of water a couple of miles to the south, which he guessed to be Lough Mask, and in which he could identify a scattering of islands and a coast lined by woodland. To the west, the hills cast their shadow across the lough as the evening drew in. On another day he might have savoured the beauty of the scene, but he had only a small piece of bread to sustain him and he was beginning to formulate a notion in his head.

  He moved towards a point overlooking Cloonee across an open field. He could identify a large cluster of cottages, several of them abandoned or destroyed. On the roadside near to these sat four large carts piled high with what he assumed to be sacks of oats bound down with ropes. The soldiers were using the abandoned houses, a couple of which were without front walls, as temporary pens for the horses. Three tents had been erected on open ground in full view of the carts and a couple of fires blazed in metal braziers. Two soldiers stood guard by the carts and a few villagers looked on, their hunger probably heightened by the knowledge that so much food was so close yet out of reach.

  He lay on the ground until night began to descend. When he judged it dark enough, he began to crawl on hands and knees across the fields until he reached the cottages. Owen’s heart was pounding, his nerves on fire, fear burning in his gut, yet somehow he knew he would not turn away. The imminence of death was a powerful motivator and if he didn’t get a supply of food that very night, he was as good as dead anyway. He skulked silently along until he reached one of the ruins that corralled the animals. A couple of the horses whinnied, perhaps sensing his presence, but didn’t draw the attention of any of the men who were about thirty yards away. He breathed hard, glanced along the narrow road towards the guards, then quickly untied one end of the rope and crept around behind the ruin. The horses stayed put, much to his good fortune. He felt about him on the ground for a heavy stick, found just that an
d weighed it in his hand for a moment before hurling it into the air. It sailed down into the roofless building and a moment later he heard one of the horses howl in fright, rear up and take to its hooves through the unroped entrance, its companions hurriedly accompanying it in sympathy.

  There was immediate pandemonium as the men guarding the oats cried out to comrades gathered nearby around the blazing braziers. Peering round the building, he watched as four soldiers set off on foot after the animals. A number of others ran to a second derelict cottage and began to saddle the other horses.

  ‘Come on, come on…’ Owen urged through clenched teeth.

  At last the men guarding the carts abandoned their posts to assist the others and, bent low, Owen scurried along the side of the cottage. He went towards one of the middle carts, which offered him the most cover, and began to yank fiercely at a sack of oats from under the ropes, and after some seconds of wrenching it from side to side, it came free and fell to the ground. He could see the commotion still ensuing through the wheels of the cart, the guards watching as their comrades set off in chase of the runaways. Any moment, he knew, they would turn back towards their posts.

  He hefted the sack over his shoulder and was shocked at its weight – or perhaps it was his frailty – and then took to his heels, moving towards the rear of the cottages, his intention to make his way into the withered fields beyond, hoping they might not notice their loss until the morning. He stared out into the blackness of the moonless night. In ten seconds he would be gone from sight. He hurried forward and stepped directly into the swinging fist of an English soldier.