So sexual and easy, her ramblings in that little field.
Fergus relished the red mare. He used to creep into Carmichael’s stable, climb into Sally’s stall, and settle himself on her back. No one had ever caught him there. The stable — infused with scents of old hay, neat’s-foot oil, corn — felt safe. It was warmer, drier, than any cabin on the mountain. He’d sit aboard the mare an hour or two, legs splayed out, fingers combing out her stiff mane.
He was fifteen before he attempted to ride her. Until then he hadn’t felt the need of mastering anyone. Climbing aboard in secret — that had been enough. Then one afternoon, lying on the grass, head resting on one elbow, watching the lovely mare graze — her lips pulled back, blue gums and yellow teeth cropping grass blades — he suddenly felt that he must get aboard her and ride.
The feeling came on him suddenly, like a hunger pang.
He sat up and looked around, wary.
There was no one in sight. It was midsummer. A lull between hay cuts. The meadows were empty, silver sun rippling across.
He got up and approached the mare softly. At first she shied, but each time he renewed his steady discourse in Irish, speaking calmly, and at his fourth approach she let him catch hold, twisting his fingers in her mane, laying his cheek against her neck, smelling the sun’s heat there.
He led her to the stone wall, climbed the wall, and swung a leg across. When he kicked lightly with his heels the mare ambled on the grass, pausing to sniff at a butterfly twitching through the poppies.
They slowly perambulated the little pasture. When Fergus knotted his fingers tighter in her mane and bunched with his knees, Sally broke into gorgeous canter.
He found it difficult to stay firmly seated, and began springing higher with every stride. Catching a sideways glimpse of Farmer Carmichael standing at the gate, Fergus lost his concentration. Relaxing his grip, he was pitched off her back, landing hard on hands and knees, stunned.
The mare shook herself, stopped, bent to munch. Looking up, Fergus saw Carmichael striding across the field toward him. The farmer wore an old black swallowtail coat, muddy boots, and a straw hat tied under his chin with a scrap of purple ribbon. He carried a blackthorn stick.
Wary of a beating, Fergus stood up hastily, looking around for a rock to defend himself with.
The mare rubbed her feet on the grass.
“The knees!” the farmer shouted. “She’ll want a good strong grip! Comes from the knees!”
He had a brown, chiseled face. The inflexible lips of the English. Phoebe, his daughter, had the same lips. She liked to play-bite.
“Use your hands gentle, but keep your knees firmly. She will carry you like a cloud if you have the right hands and strong at the knees.” He peered at Fergus. “You’re Mike O’Brien’s boy, yes? Grandson of old Feeny?”
Fergus nodded.
There was silence troubled only by curlews sputtering over, winging sharply toward the byre. Carmichael reached out and caught his mare, grabbing a fistful of her mane. Sally sniffed at his pockets, and the farmer dropped his stick in the grass.
“Let’s see you aboard.”
Fergus hesitated, unsure. At the same time angry. It was impossible to be around a farmer for very long and not feel the ancestral glow of tedious, unilluminating anger.
“Come, boy!” The farmer interlaced his fingers, making a footstep, insisting. “Quickly now!”
Better to be up above the farmer, looking down. Fergus stepped into Carmichael’s hands and was instantly thrown up across Sally’s warm back.
“Hold her steady, boy.” Carmichael circled around, eyeing them keenly. “You’re sitting like a plowboy. Straight back! Don’t slump!”
Fergus let go of the mane and thrust his shoulders back.
“Don’t use hands at all,” the farmer instructed. “Only knees. Come now. At a walk. Step her along. There it is. There it is.”
For half an hour Fergus walked then jogged the mare around the little field while Farmer Carmichael criticized his seat and called out instructions. “Feel her muscles working. Feel them slide, feel them knit. You’ll never sit properly until you know your horse down to the bones. Loosen up and keep loose. Your knees are your voice with her. Your hands come later.”
AS HE walked home that afternoon, up the mountain, four young men — one a cousin — stopped him on the path. Before a blow had been struck, while the cousin was still boiling up insults, calling Carmichael’s mare a sorry lump of leather; a bag of goat bones; a mustard fuck, Fergus lowered his head and ran at him, butting him in the chest and knocking him down. Seizing a stick, he held off the others until his cousin stood up, grunting like a bull. Fergus threw away the stick and ran. They gave chase, screaming like a pack of hounds, and one of them finally brought him down with a brute shove that sent him sprawling.
He lay with nose pushed into the decaying leaves, his cousin’s knee pressing in the small of his back.
“That girl’s a goat-boned whore,” the cousin whispered in his ear, giving his arm a twist. “Say it, Fergus. The little cunt Phoebe, your sweetheart, is nothing but a goat-boned whore.”
But he would not. He never could bring himself to give in. He would eat his pain.
His cousin wrenched the arm back another inch so the joint was grinding on the rim of its socket.
Eating pain. It was a kind of food. Made you dizzy.
He was aware of the young men’s raucous laughter. Sunlight splitting though the oaks. Moldy leaves scratching his eyebrow. Scent of turf.
Phoebe would smell like cold water or honey, or the black turf. When a turf bank was sliced open, the strongest, purest fragrance was available only if you got down on your knees, put your nose very close, and breathed it in. He always felt compelled to do so and the scent always spun him — clobbered his chest, strove at his heart so he felt his heart as a muscle working. Other turf cutters — men and boys kicking at their spades, constantly relighting their pipes — laughed at him kneeling on the ground, inhaling, losing himself. No one else felt such a need — or if they did, they stifled it.
He could barely hear the taunts. They seemed as distant as the crying of hawks on afternoons when he lay upon his back in the rough of some mountain pasture and listened to their hunting remarks, watching them floating on cushions of pure heat.
Phoebe Carmichael, neat and clean.
He let out a sigh, and his cousin must have realized the hopelessness of the situation, because he released the hostage arm and stood up quickly, kicking Fergus hard on the hip then stumbling away up the mountain with his companions.
Three barefoot boys howling a rebel song.
You could eat pain and come out alive. It was a silent meal. You could eat pain, even find a relish. You ate unhurried. You made certain to taste every bite. You could eat pain; it wouldn’t kill you.
Mi an Ocrais
LATE SUMMER BEFORE the new potatoes were lifted was mi an ocrais, hungry month, when his father returned home to work on Carmichael’s harvest.
The only season of the year his parents were reunited. His mother was redeyed and weary in those few blazing weeks, before her man left once more. Together they drank poitin, which she would not touch the rest of the year. Everyone on the mountain was famished then — teeth glaring, eyes bright in sunburned faces.
His mother and father had gone off together just before Carmichael’s harvest began, leaving Fergus to feed his little sisters on Indian meal porridge. When they returned, three days later, he knew from their sun-flayed appearance, from the grass in their hair and the scratches on his father’s face, that they had been roaming, engaging, sleeping on grass, drinking poitin, living on butter and birds’ eggs.
His mother caught him looking at her and must have sensed his anger and confusion. “Life burns hot, Fergus. Too hot.”
He resented such willfulness, their capacity to abandon every responsibility, including their children.
“You think I’m a robber,” his father, Mícheál, told
him.
They had been standing in Carmichael’s best field of wheat, the rosy field, whetting their blades. People on the mountain had names for each corner of Carmichael’s farm. Their language knew that land like a bee knows a flower.
Fergus’s mother insisted that the rosy field had been red once in flowers.
Mícheál said, “In blood.”
The rosy field. The black field. The field of the altar. Carmichaels did not use the names, perhaps were unaware they existed.
Mícheál could whet a blade like no one else could. Whet to pure sharpness, to an edge like a spoken word, barely there. And he cut and mowed faster and cleaner than anyone else could on the farm.
“You are a grim fellow. You look at me like I’ve stolen something,” Mícheál said, testing the hone by scaling his thumbnail and peeling back the thinnest film of tissue.
They owned nothing, certainly not the harvest tools. The iron blades and wooden handles belonged to the farmer, to Carmichael.
Little girls scampered like mice over the wheat stubble, gathering stalks in armfuls and setting them down in stand-up sheaves. Women forked the standups into an oxcart driven by Phoebe’s brother Saul.
Mícheál was still the strongest hand for harvest, but Fergus would surpass him eventually. Not this year. Next year, perhaps. Insects cackled as they worked through the crop, feeling the sun’s stare on the back of their necks. Friction of grain dust made red the creases inside their elbows.
When Farmer Carmichael came out to see how the cut progressed, he spoke to Mícheál in English, and Fergus felt the grit of that language washing over him, scraping and stimulating; the language that poured out of Phoebe’s mouth. Wanting to feel closer to her, he kept fitting his thoughts in English as he worked up and down the rows alongside Mícheál and the others, swinging and cutting, swinging and cutting, though English words — or none he knew — didn’t suit such work. Not really.
After the harvest was made, Mícheál would leave them again. Going for the north, traveling with a gang of barn builders, wall builders, going up into Ulster, sometimes so far as Scotland, and not returning before the next August, when he’d show up at harvest once more. Mícheál rarely spoke of his life on the roads, but Fergus had imagined it anyway: new barns and fresh walls. Stone towns and salmon rivers. Fat fields of horses grazing.
In another week or two Mícheál would be leaving.
“You’re no good,” Fergus said when they stopped at the end of another row and were sharpening again. “You’re never here. I can’t call you my father. You’re no good for us.”
Mícheál shook his head. “You’re such a farmer. You’re too stuck to that ground of yours.”
“Someone has to be.”
HIS GROUND.
Carmichael dispensed potato ground in patches, annual arrangements, and no one ever had the same patch twice; but Fergus always felt his ground was his. Once he had his crop in, the patch belonged to him, and he’d kill or die for it.
He could raise enough potatoes on a quarter acre of well-dug beds to keep his mother and sisters through the year — nearly. In those last, blazing weeks of late summer, just before the new crop was lifted, they had to survive on yellow meal — but his potatoes yielded at least ten months of perfect nourishment. The only tool needed to cultivate them was a spade to open the lazy-beds and turn and chop the soil a little. No plow, no horse. To his regret he could not keep a horse on mountain grass. A horse would not stand it, and any plow would burst between the rocks.
Each spring he spaded his beds and laid the sets. Summer they came up in green stems and beautiful, viney flowers. The pig was kept on potato scraps and sold to pay the annual rent — they never tasted the meat. He himself consumed five pounds of potatoes every day, steamed, boiled, or mashed. Over the winter, his mother might make a kitchen, using salt and a few herrings, but usually it was potatoes plain, and he never tired of that food.
Potatoes were not made or cut, like the farmer’s hay or corn; they were lifted, joyfully, the surprise of the world.
Phytophthora infestans
THE LAST NIGHT OF CARMICHAEL’S harvest they burned off the straw and the farmer fed his cabin people a supper — ham and butter, wheat bread and apples — on the side of his best meadow, under oaks, wind ringing through their branches. It was dark before the tenants started back up the mountain. Fergus walked ahead of his parents, who were carrying the little girls, asleep. The night was warm.
They had passed the first cluster of cabins when he first caught the stink of putrefaction, physical and wild, rolling down the mountain path with all the violence of a loose cartwheel or a drunk with a club. “What is that terrible stink, my God?” his mother cried. “They’ve been tearing the graves!”
Unbaptized infants were buried under stones so dogs could not get at them. The piles of stones were sometimes shifted from one grave to another too early, and the dead left unprotected — but this wasn’t that smell. It was too large.
Men and women galloped past him on the path, snorting like ponies, but Fergus made himself keep to a steady pace.
There had been blight in the district the year before, but restricted to lands along the river. They had not suffered blight on the mountain. And his plot, this year, was good sharp limestone ground, well drained, the safest. Farmer Carmichael did not like his cabin people planting any plot of ground more than one season, fearing they would grow too attached to it and forget that it was his land, not their own.
Through the darkness, Fergus could see people reaching their plots, falling on their knees, and scrabbling at the soil with their fingertips. Unable to restrain himself any longer, he broke into a run with Mícheál galloping after him, carrying in his arms one of the little girls, howling with delight.
Reaching his plot, Fergus immediately saw that his plants, healthy and green that morning, were withered and black. Falling on his knees, he pulled one up, then another and another. The potatoes clinging to the roots were shriveled and wet. He dug up every plant in the row and the potatoes were nothing, purple balls of poison, and he heard neighbors’ screams floating in the dark.
Tumbling
TEN WEEKS LATER his people were the only ones left upon the mountain.
All the other cabin tenants had accepted the quit fee Farmer Carmichael offered and had gone to the workhouse to submit themselves. Or had gone on the roads, begging. Or were trying the public works: breaking rocks at sixpence a day, living under hedges and in scalps and burrows dug in along the edges of public roads. Narrow and grassy, those road verges — Ireland’s long meadow — were the only lands in the country, apparently, that didn’t quite belong to one farmer or another.
Anyway, the neighbors and relations had disappeared. Weakened by hunger and black fever, they’d been easily removed, like shavings swept off a table.
The abandoned cabins were being torched. The farmer and his two sons — black Abner and sandy Saul — were lighting the roofs of straw and turf using oily, smelly torches. Then they knocked down the walls one by one, swinging a thick timber ram with an iron head. The cabins were reduced to rubble left in ungainly humps. Some of it the Carmichael boys picked over, chipped, cleaned, and left aside to be built into the farm’s future — fresh walls, footings, new chimneys.
Fergus watched Phoebe’s brothers knock down a dozen cabins. Sometimes he worked with them in exchange for food. A wheat roll with butter slapped on. Piece of cold mutton. Cheese. An apple.
They called it tumbling.
* * *
ONLY HIS father, Mícheál, who had been traveling all his life, refused to quit the mountain. Farmer Carmichael rode up to the cabin and offered more money and still he refused.
Fergus sat on a stool outside the cabin watching the farmer aboard his red mare confront Mícheál, leaning on a stick.
“Do you know, Mick, you are trying me very hard, indeed you are. Don’t think I don’t con what you are trying by starving yourselves. You hope to exploit a Christian co
nscience by having your own family suffer needlessly.”
“I only know what the roads are like, master.”
“You can’t stay here.”
“We can’t leave, master. You know yourself what will become of us if we quit.”
Mícheál said the word master like it was something you’d throw out with dirty water. Carmichael sat up straighter and Fergus noticed the old-fashioned bell gun, with its flared brass barrel, strapped awkwardly to his saddle.
There had been outrages on the other estates in the district. Landlords’ agents had been attacked and beaten by whiteboy gangs.
All Carmichaels believed the land belonged to them. Fergus remembered Phoebe long ago, when they were eight or nine — playmates — insisting that her father held the farm after her grandfather who held it after his father who held it after his, who had defended it against the warrior tribes with painted faces, wild cattle, wicked paganry.
Not the story he knew, but it was a story.
“And what exactly is the wicked paganry, Pheeb?”
“Oh they muck about,” nine-year-old Phoebe had airily replied.
“Muck about how?”
Both of them fascinated by crime, cruelty, disaster, mishaps, freaks of nature, curses, evil eyes, poison cooks, and all aspects of evil and degeneracy.
“Terrible devices. Cut your mizzle off and pickle it. Make a soup of your ears. The priests sang like sheep. They’d roast a book in the fire, use the ashes for salt. Steal babies. There are still pagans alive in the hills.”
“Are there?”
“Oh yes.”
“Never have I seen them.”
“You must know how to look. Rebels and swingboys, whiteboys. Goffers” — her word for people they didn’t know, though they knew almost everyone. “Boys with bloody hands.”
The Law of Dreams Page 2
