“I know no such man,” Tavish said again. “How was he dressed?”
“In a green coachman’s coat that would take the sight from your eyes. It hung to his ankles, and had golden buttons in the shape of tiny bells that tinkled when he moved. A high hat to match his coat, he wore, and boots that shone black as a blackbird’s wing during mating time. In his hand was a long coachwhip and two huge coach dogs crouched at his heels.”
“Och,” said Tavish, “I think I recognize the man.”
In the dream he had put his thumb behind his Tooth of Knowledge, as he had shown Kevin many times to do, and straightway the truth was made known to him. The coachman waiting round the bend in the road was an omen.
“’Tis sure now we be going to take our trip,” the old man said, confiding his dream to Kevin. “’Tis a great secret between us. No one else must know of it.”
The boy nodded eagerly. Between Tavish and the child had developed an understanding possible only between two such spirits, so unlike and yet so complementary to each other. Tavish had few thoughts that escaped utterance at one time or another. To think a thing was to say it. Thoughts without words went nowhere. They had no existence until molded into language and the warm breath of life breathed over them. The result of this rationalization was that the two were perfectly matched; Tavish loved to talk, Kevin to listen.
In the old man’s profuse outpourings, the child found a release from the ache of silence which walled him in. His wrapt attention to the Speaker’s words was balm to the old man’s pride. The boy’s great, expressive eyes laughed, danced, sighed, and wept, according to whatever mood Tavish created. The two were inseparable.
Maeve regarded the first attachment between Kevin and the old man with tolerant eyes. The child’s attempts to play with other children were complicated by his inability to express himself in the usual ear-shattering shouts and screams. He was active and as fleet of foot as any boy in the camp, but the terrible block of unnatural silence marked and set him apart from the others.
With the impulsive cruelty of the young, they sometimes teased Kevin because he couldn’t speak, and the wounds inflicted were worse than any sticks and stones might make. The gentle companionship of Owen Roe Tavish was a relief for child and woman alike.
“I do be teaching the lad the fancies of life,” the old man declared. “Sure any fool can learn the facts.”
It was a rich, wonderful, and altogether fanciful education the boy received. The history of Ireland according to Tavish, began with the Little People who had inhabited the land in the beginning. “They were that small, Kevin, were you to walk among them you’d be called a giant. They ruled Ireland in those days, with kings and queens and warriors and noble folk just like now. Horses and cows and sheep and pigs they had, of a size like to their own. Then came Amergin Glunmar, king-poet and king-judge. He divided Ireland into two parts: the part above the ground and the part below. The part below Amergin gave to the Tuatha De Danaan—that’s what the Little People were called—and the part above he reserved for mortals. ’Twas as good an arrangement as any, but from that day to this, those above the ground are constantly interfering in the affairs of those below, while the Little People themselves can’t leave off meddling in matters that should concern only mortals.”
After Amergin, Tavish explained, the land was divided by his two sons, Eremon and Eber. They cast lots to see with whom Cir, the poet, and Cennfinn, the harper, would go. By decision of the lot, Cir, the poet, went northward with Eremon and Cennfinn, the harper, to the south with Eber.
“And since that time,” Tavish assured Kevin, “music and harmony have dwelt in the south of Ireland, and poetry and learning in the north.”
Together Kevin and Tavish explored the wooded hills and back roads around every camp. As they walked the old man talked and dreamed aloud. The boy listened enthralled, more at home in a world of wishing wells and straying stones, of fairy mounds and the legends of the great Finn, than any he had known. Even the now-familiar nomadic existence of the horse traders seemed foreign by comparison.
Tavish was very secretive about the dream he had had. He shared it with no one but Kevin. “There’s no yer-a-no about it, the coachman waiting means I’m going home to Ireland, and you’re coming with me,” he told the boy. “Not to heed the warning of such a dream could bring seven years’ bad luck.”
The Travelers were encamped near Augusta, while Jamie and the men scouted the countryside on daily selling and trading expeditions. There had been light showers of rain, leaving a slight chill in the spring air. Here and there above the young green of the hills, hawks winged in sharp, predatory circles.
Immediately after breakfast, Tavish drew. Kevin aside. “We’re off to the deep woods … to cut two shillelahs; sticks to make a man walk with grandeur. We’ll be needing them when we get to Ireland,” he whispered mysteriously. “Not a word to anyone.”
Kevin looked eagerly toward Maeve, who was clearing away the breakfast dishes. Five years of marriage had erased the young girl look from her face, but rewarded her in turn with a quiet gentleness. Whatever anguish she had suffered because of Jamie, had left no mark except the faint suggestion of lines at the corners of her eyes.
“And what are you two planning now?” she said affectionately, when Tavish and the boy approached her.
“Sure yesterday I spied an eagle nesting. I thought it might interest the boy,” Tavish said slyly.
“Since when have eagles begun nesting in the low branches along the road?” Maeve retorted.
“That’s the very thing I’ll be asking the creature when we come face to face with it this day,” Tavish replied blandly. “There’s the mite of a chance it’s that rare bird called the ‘bush eagle.’ ’Tis an outcast, and does everything opposite, like nesting in the shrubs instead of the upper branches, and hatching ducks instead of eagles of the air.”
Maeve raised her hands in the gesture of defeat that mothers use. “Take him with you, but mind you bring him safely back. There may be more rain and I’ll have nought to do with pneumonia in either of you.”
“Your blessing is all we need to keep out the drop,” Tavish said airily. “But a bit of bread and meat might come in handy toward the middle of the day.”
Maeve wrapped great slices of bread and meat and shooed them on their way. She watched them trudging into the woods and an indulgent smile softened the shadows in her eyes. “Sure the naoidhean and the older are the same age in many ways,” she said aloud, turning back to her work.
As Tavish and Kevin strode through the thickening timber, kicking aside the leaves of yesteryear, the Speaker explained the necessity of finding a proper stick with which to return to Ireland. “The stick a man carries is as important as the clothes he wears. A stick makes the man, you might say. I’d sooner go home in a wooden box than show my face in Ireland without a proper stick.”
He continued his dissertation upon the importance of shillelahs throughout the morning. “They were called shillelahs after a place in Ireland famous for its oak trees, but when the English came the trees were cut down. Now the sticks are made from blackthorn and ash. I’m thinking the ones we’ll take back with us will be of hickory. There’s a good, tough wood, and not too heavy.”
“It’s more than something to help a man over the rough places,” Tavish rambled on. “A stick is a comfort when you’re by yourself. It’s company … like having a dog with you. I’ve known men who never exchanged a civil word with their neighbors, but carried on the politest sort of talk with their six-foot shillelahs.”
Toward the noon hour they stopped by a small spring and ate their meat and bread. Tavish had examined and rejected quite a few hickory trees. “A man should be as careful in choosing a stick as in choosing a wife,” he commented expansively. “They be the two things that will walk with him in life and lie beside him in death.”
The old man found a patch of leaves where a shaft of sunlight had warmed and left them dry after the rain. “If you
’ll stand watch, Kevin lad, I’ll stretch out here for a minute’s nap. Mind, you’re not to go wandering away.”
Kevin watched, attentive as a puppy, as the old man made himself comfortable, grunting and shifting from side to side on the pile of leaves. “Sure I need something to rest my head on now. Fetch me a smooth, flat stone, lad.”
The boy darted away like a dog bent on retrieving a stick. He scouted along the low bluff that overhung the spring beside which they had eaten, snapping his fingers to attract Tavish’s attention when he found a rock that seemed suitable to serve as a pillow.
“Bring that one along,” Tavish called, “I’ll see if it’s soft enough.”
Kevin lugged the stone to where the old man lay and watched curiously as Tavish turned it about, examining it with mock thoroughness. “A man must be careful about the kind of stone he lays his head on,” he warned. “I don’t know about over here, but in Ireland we have ‘straying stones.’ To fall asleep on one of them is as good as your life. They’ll whisk you away for a hundred years, and without so much as a ‘God save you’ when they bring you back. It happened to Mochae, when the good saint fell asleep listening to the singing of a bird, and three times fifty years passed between the closing of his eyes and the opening of them.”
Tavish scrutinized the child’s face for the effect of his words and found there a worshipful wonder that tugged at his heart. “Kevin lad,” he said gently, “remember the things I tell you. They’re the great truths and there’s a mystery surrounds them, as there is mystery surrounding life and beauty. Any omadhaun can figure out a fact—and facts change from time to time; but the deeper truths, like the deepest water, never change … no matter what storms rage above on the surface.”
With that observation, not a word of which the boy understood, Tavish closed his eyes, murmuring a little prayer from his childhood.
Jesus, Father, Lamb, I pray
Drive each evil thought away;
Be with me till break of day;
In my sleep or on my way;
When the hour of hours shall sound,
Jesus be within me found. Amen.
Kevin watched wraptly as the old man closed his eyes and appeared to fall asleep immediately. His lips relaxed and slight, easy snores vibrated within his throat. To the child’s overstimulated imagination, sleep settled about his companion with a presence that was almost physical. It seemed on the verge of spiriting the old man away bodily. A terrible thought flashed in Kevin’s mind: Maybe the stone under Tavish’s head was in truth a “straying stone”! He edged closer, seeking to retain some contact with the sleeping man; but the bond between them was broken. He felt alone, cut off, imprisoned in a tomb, the walls of which were silence and the door to which was speech—and he was dumb. A heavy stillness settled over the woods and the sinister shadows crept closer. The small, friendly agitation of insects and the light rustling of leaves became sounds fraught with menace.
Kevin sat without moving, feeling the pinpricks of fear that began at the pit of his stomach and grew and spread like so many faceless monsters, until every fibre of his being was contaminated. Seconds spawned and became minutes. He wanted to cry out and deep, silent shrieks formed in his throat, only to die there unborn. His chest became a great, convulsive ache.
Without being aware of it, he had crept closer until he was crouched trembling above the sleeping Tavish. A lone, hot tear fell from his cheek and splashed on the back of the old man’s hand. The Speaker opened his bright blue eyes and found two pools of misery staring down at him.
“Wirra, wirra,” he said gently. “Sure now I dreamt a tear big enough to drown a man fell on the back of my hand. And it woke me just in time, too. The coachman with the green coat that was in my dream before was back, and this time driving a black coach and four black horses. Their manes and tails fanned out in the wind until they filled the sky like clouds. I was about to step into the coach when that tear woke me.”
With that the old man scrambled to his feet. “Now we’ll be off to find the proper stick for Owen Roe Tavish and his young friend, Kevin McRuin, to walk the lanes of the world with.”
He said not a word of the look of stark and lonely terror that had greeted him in the boy’s eyes. Kevin, ashamed of the panic that had overwhelmed him, now dashed belligerently among the trees and shrubs, seeking to demonstrate his doughtiness.
It was late afternoon before Tavish found the hickory limb that suited him: a thick, low-hanging branch, gnarled but straight, stretched out above a seam of limestone rock that formed a shallow bluff. He boosted Kevin into the tree, and passed up his heavy-bladed pocket knife to the boy.
“Press the end of the limb down to me, Kevin lad,” he instructed. “I’ll be pulling on it while you whittle away. Mind you don’t cut yourself … and chop as close to the trunk as possible. The knobbier the handle the better.”
Kevin sawed valiantly at the tough wood, while below, Tavish strained the long limb downward. Suddenly, with a sharp splintering sound, the branch ripped away, trailing a long strip of hickory bark stripped downward from the trunk of the tree. Kevin had been concentrating furiously upon cutting the limb, so he did not see what happened. The first realization that something was wrong came when Tavish groaned. The abrupt giving way of the limb had caused the old man to stagger heavily and fall backward over the outcropping of limestone—a drop of some six or eight feet.
With fear drumming a charge inside his breast, Kevin slid to the ground and scrambled to where Tavish lay. The Speaker’s face was gray with pain and his lips had turned the color of old blood. He held his eyes shut, but with his right hand he fumbled to touch the frightened boy.
“Listen closely, child, and hear me with both ears. I’m hurt that badly I can’t move. You’ll have to go for help. You know the way!”
The words seemed to cost Tavish great effort. He lay silent for a few moments, then opened his eyes and looked at Kevin. The boy saw that his eyes, once so blue-bright, were now blurred with pain. “You must hurry, lad; and remember this spot, so as not to lose it when you come again. I … I may be asleep and not hear the calling.”
He rested, breathing painfully. Kevin made no move to leave, but stood transfixed by the horror of what had happened. About him gloom spread like a mantle through the woods. Here and there a patch of sunlight disappeared, swallowed by the lengthening shadows. “In the forests where night is born,” Tavish had said once, when telling Kevin a story. Now the child felt he was witness to the birth. Darkness, newborn but menacing, was slowly wedging him in, driving him closer to the only comfort and protection he knew. It was physically impossible for him to stir from Tavish’s side.
Something of what was going on inside the boy seemed to communicate itself to the injured man. “I wouldn’t be sending you into the darkness alone without a special prayer,” he whispered. “Come closer and stand in the sign of the cross.”
Kevin obeyed and Tavish continued without opening his eyes. “’Tis the mighty ‘Cry of the Deer,’ invoked by St. Patrick when he was on his way to Tara, bringing Christianity to the pagans. During his journey the pagan king planned to kill him from an ambush. But, with this prayer, St. Patrick changed himself and all his followers into deer, going safely through the forests to Tara. Repeat it after me, and should danger threaten you, sure you’ll change in a twinkling into a great stag, with antlers flashing, and hoofs as sharp as sabers.”
Laboring over each sentence, and with Kevin mentally repeating the words after him, Tavish spoke St. Patrick’s mighty invocation:
I place all Heaven with its power,
And the sun with its brightness
And the snow with its whiteness
And fire with all the strength it hath
And the winds with their swiftness along their path
And the sea with its deepness
And the rocks with their steepness
And the earth with its starkness—
All these I place, by God’s almighty help
and grace,
Between Kevin McRuin and the Powers of Darkness.…
Amen!
The effort left Tavish exhausted. “Go now, lad,” he whispered. Drifting into unconsciousness, he heard as from a great distance the sharp crackle of twigs and leaves that diminished as Kevin sped away.
XXI
Jamie drove campward in the moonlight. It was late and he was sleepy. He had been on the road since early morning, and for his day’s work had sold a span of young mules and two mares in foal at ridiculously low prices. There had been small choice in the deals. The market was bad and either you sold your animals for what they would bring, or continued to feed them until they had devoured any profits they might eventually fetch. With a sigh of weariness, Jamie leaned back against the seat cushions. The tired sorrels slowed to an ambling walk and the muffled thrumming of their hoofs upon the dust-padded surface of the road lulled him into a fitful doze.
He must have fallen asleep, for abruptly he started wide awake, his muscles tensed and ready. On the surface all seemed serene. The road ahead glowed placid and empty in the moonlight; a strip of dull rust upon the bright blue steel of night. Nor did a closer scrutiny of the shadows lurking beneath the trees along the way give an answer to Jamie’s sudden alarm.
A premonition that something was wrong seized him. It began to grow with every revolution of the buggy wheels. He urged the sorrels to a brisk trot, but the increased speed served only to increase his apprehension. By the time he reached the camp, Jamie was certain something terrible had happened. One look was enough to confirm his fears.
The entire camp was awake and dressed—even the children. Great fires were lit, illuminating the grove in which the camp was set. Men, women, and children stood silent in a deep semicircle outside Maeve and Jamie’s tent.
A fear as dry as cotton lined Jamie’s mouth. He leapt from the buggy, leaving the team to wander to the corral untended. “What’s happened, man? Is it Maeve?” he demanded of Me-Dennis, standing on the outskirts of the group.
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