Ah, but you will be different, so different Dominick thought.
They heard the sound of the great rising sail as the blocks screamed.
‘I’ll have to go,’ said Peter. ‘I’ll pray for you, Dualta, that you won’t have too hard a time with Mary Ann.’
‘I’ll manage,’ said Dualta with a laugh.
‘Well,’ said Peter, and then he climbed up the side of the ship and Dualta shoved away.
‘I’ll be back in a month, Dominick,’ Rory was calling.
‘Good! Good!’ Dominick shouted, still looking at the face of his son who was leaning on the rail, trying not to look sad.
The anchor was weighed, and the sails filled, and the French ship moved away from them, leaving them looking very small on the great Atlantic.
Dualta set the sail on the boat and they headed in for the distant shore. There were no words between them. Dominick just sat on the seat there, staring before him, his hands dangling between his knees.
When they landed in the cove, Mary Ann was there waiting for them.
‘He’s gone all right?’ she asked.
‘He’s gone,’ said Dualta.
Dominick left them. He climbed out of the cove and up over the land until he came to a high spot where he could see the last rays of the sun shining on the white sails. It was well away. It was like a toy ship now. He sat on a stone and kept watching it.
That’s that, he thought. All the striving and all the fighting and the building, and the anchoring in the fair land, there it all is now sailing away. For what has a man to work for if he is not to work for his son? For in the middle of all the working you are dreaming dreams, of your son and your son’s son. You are dreaming stability. He had felt very calm when he was told. Indeed he had marvelled at his own calm all along, but now his eyelids were burning and there was a weight on his heart. There would never be a dynasty of the MacMahons in the fan-land.
‘Don’t be sad,’ said Mary Ann. She was standing beside him. She looked at him, the fair hair turning almost white at the temples, and the strongly lined face. ‘You knew he would go like that.’
He shook his head. He didn’t know.
‘Well, everyone else knew,’ said Mary Ann. ‘Didn’t he have Sebastian’s mark on him?’ I never knew, he thought. It was like a blow in the face when he told me.
‘And you have me,’ said Mary Ann. No, I haven’t you, he thought. You have left me too, as is right, but you have left me. ‘And you have Dualta,’ said Mary Ann. ‘He likes you very much, although I don’t see how he could like an old gloomy one like you.’
Dominick grunted.
‘Well, it’s true,’ said Mary Ann. ‘And now you are going to have a grandson as well. What more can you want?’
Even that failed to shake him out of it.
‘Aren’t you coming home?’ Mary Ann asked.
‘Home after you,’ he said, looking down, rubbing a fist in a palm.
Mary Ann looked helplessly at Dualta. He inclined his head and she went to him, and they walked slowly away.
He knew they were gone.
He dropped his head and rubbed his eyes fiercely with his knuckles. It shouldn’t be, he thought. I don’t deserve all this. I have been hit hard enough.
Strange, he thought, the places in yourself that you don’t know about, the deep places inside you that can be weeping all the time that your mouth is talking or laughing.
The inside of you is like a well, a deep well about which you know very little. That must be your soul, where all the real things take place. And if it is a right deep place, and has been tended by your head, then he supposed that God would be deep down in there whispering to you always about the realities. So that would be the real fair land, deep down in yourself.
He turned on the rock and looked.
Not that this physical one wasn’t fair too. The mountains were all purple-tinged and they ranged all around him protectingly, and below him was the white sand of the shore, and the heaving sea was stained with many colours.
Then he saw Mary Ann climbing the hill away from him, with Dualta walking beside her holding her hand. Mary Ann’s head was bent. It was not usual, he thought, for Mary Ann’s head to be bent. He grinned at the thought and rose to his feet.
He called out: ‘Hey, Man! Wait there a minute!’ and then as if he was a young goat, instead of an ageing (as they told him) forty-four-year-old man, he ran from his own rock down the hill into the valley and up to the top of the other hill where they waited and watched his running in surprise.
‘What are we going to call him?’ Dominick asked.
‘Call who?’ said Mary Ann, her mouth open.
‘The new son,’ said Dominick.
‘Oh,’ said Dualta, at once, ‘we will call him Dominick, of course.’
He was winking at Mary Ann.
‘Certainly we will,’ said Mary Ann. ‘Didn’t you know that?’
‘It’s a sound name,’ said Dominick judiciously, ‘ and let me tell you he is going to have a fine inheritance.’
They looked ahead of them. Around the corner of the hill in front of them they could see the long lake and behind it the deeply shadowed mountain, and on the slope of that they could see their house, which had been carved out of the hill, and they could see the pattern of the four wide fields that had been cleared; two of them were green and the other two were yellow with the stubble of the harvested corn.
‘And we have only begun,’ said Dominick. ‘ Eh, Dualta?’
‘Only begun,’ said Dualta.
‘Then let us go home in the name of God,’ said Dominick.
And they walked home.
Copyright
First published in 1959 by Macmillan
This edition published 2014 by Bello
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Copyright © Walter Macken, 1959
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Seek the Fair Land Page 35
