“Who?” asked Anna as she stumbled and caught herself.
“Oh, here,” he said. “Let me go first and you place your hand on me back, right on the point of me shoulder blade, or we’ll be creeping along this coastal path when the sun comes up. We don’t want that.”
Anna stood still and Donal stepped past her.
“What now, who, you ask? Now why would I tell you that? Don’t ask me such things.”
And he began to walk with Anna’s anxious hand pressed against his back. Already their pace picked up. She wanted to grip his shoulder blade, hold it like a steering wheel. Sweat sluiced down the center of her back and between her breasts. Twice she ran smack into him when he paused. He turned to face her.
“I’ll not drive us off the cliff. You’ve no choice but to trust me. Try this again. Do you ride, Anna?” he asked.
Her twenty-first-century brain focused on her glorious bike, which she rode on weekends, training for the triathlon. A cross-trainer, good for trails or the road. But of course he wasn’t asking about her bike. He meant horses.
“No,” she said. “I don’t.”
“Strange. I took you for a horsewoman. Aye, I took you for that fancy group. Well, my story won’t help you as much, then. But consider if you and I are horse and rider. A good horse reads the slightest movement from your legs, your arse, your hands. If you moved your head to the left, a good horse would know it, and he’d know before you fully knew that left was the way to go. And I can’t quite say who is horse and who is rider here, but I want you to put your fine brain to rest and let your hand read my body so that we can get up this bloody trail.”
Anna could not help but notice that in his directions, he had mentioned her legs, ass, head, hands and even her fine brain. He had just articulated more parts of her body than her ex-husband had noticed in the last six months of their marriage.
He continued. “Put your hand on my back again, my shoulder blade, and I’m going to turn. What did you feel?”
“Your shoulder blade pointed back toward me.”
“Good. Now I’m stepping over a rock here, a good big one. What happened with my shoulder blade?”
“It moved up, and I think the other moved down a bit.”
“Right. You should be picking your foot up, searching for whatever I just stepped over.”
As he said this, Anna let her eyes sink down to the soles of her feet, and she lifted one foot and let it glide along a rock. She read his back all the way to the crest of the trail, where the horse and cart waited for them.
As they settled into the bench seat, and the horse began her steady pace back to the shelter of the cottage, Donal said, “Tomorrow is the last day for the other French ships destined to come to shore. You have just advanced in the smuggling trade. You’ll be handling one trade at a spot very much like this one while I take the last batch across the peninsula.”
“Am I moving up in the ranks?”
“Aye, lassie, you are moving up. To what rank is unclear, but you are moving up. And I must be losing my mind.”
The shore along Rockport could be wild with storms. But unlike now, she could always go home, take off the rain gear and jump into a hot shower.
Now, Anna tried to remember what dry felt like on her skin, what warm had been. The invention of Gortex, more than 100 years in the future, whispered a distant song to her. Her job was to wait on the dark coastline, squatting on the rocks until she spotted a flash of lantern from an otherwise darkened boat. She was determined to get her part of this right. She had to light her small lantern in response, using her cape as a tent to keep out the wind. Then, after two minutes, she was to douse the light again. She had reassured Donal that she could do this, and that she would not panic, not fail, not flub the whole flipping deal. She had not counted on the blistering severity of the cold, despite having been here in the increasingly icy days of fall for two months, despite knowing that cold and water and hypothermia could be fatal assailants.
She had grilled Donal earlier in the day, after she had convinced him that she could handle one of the clandestine meetings by herself while he managed the other rendezvous on the bay side of the peninsula.
“What if the boat that came ashore was English and not French? Where will you be? When will you return? Tell me again what to say if they offer less than the agreed-upon amount?”
He had answered all her questions, all that she had dared to ask, because if she had asked more (as she’d dearly wanted to do), he likely would have denied her this chance. She’d seen that he’d been on the edge of saying that she was too much of a risk, and more than anything, she wanted to prove her worth. He had shown her the spot on the beach, they had walked it out yesterday, and today he had helped her drag the cache to the protection of the rocky cove. Then he had driven off with the cart, heading straight for the other side of the peninsula to make a similar transaction.
She squatted to offer less of her body to the dense wind and mist that billowed ashore like an advancing army. She reminded herself that this sort of weather was hardly called rain by the Irish; just mist, or the strange word mizzle. Only her booted feet had contact with the rocks as she made the rest of her as small as possible, keeping her knees tucked tight, head low. But even so, the cold sank into her bones so that she was raw from her spine out to her skin. There was no hiding from this elemental tyrant.
She saw a light and lit her lantern, dousing it two minutes later. She waited for a response, three blinks of light in answer to hers that said French, that said we are rowing ashore, be there, be quick. There, there it was. Anna had squatted too long; her knees were frozen in place. She willed her once triathlon-trained body to obey her. “Stand up,” she commanded. She stood up, keeping a firm grip on the lantern. There was only one place for a boat to come ashore—there was no mistaking the spot. Anywhere else, a boat would shatter on the imposing rocks on either side of the cove. Her job was to show the men where it was and to accept the exchange, the bottles of the gracious items that the slim mercantile class would be willing to readily buy. How hard could the transaction be after working in a law firm?
Walk, she told herself. She had practiced this walk several times, over the slippery, steep rocks and trail, and as her chilly brain insisted, she only had to go down to the cove, which was far easier than climbing up. She didn’t have to worry about climbing up just yet. Down, down to the slope of the beach, where she stood, waiting, as the dark shape approached, the men slicing through the water with their oars, looking all the while like a slinking pterodactyl, rising up to greet her.
The sailors delivered their crate a little ways up the beach, just far enough so that the high tide wouldn’t wash it away. Anna was helpless with the French language. She wanted to ask them to help her drag the crate up to the rocks so that it couldn’t be seen, but she was shivering too much by the time they arrived, and her teeth were chattering, and she only knew a few words of French. She tried to remember her high school Spanish because surely there would be similarities, but the more she shivered, the more her brain decelerated.
There were four sailors and they moved quickly, leaping out of the rowboat, slamming their crate on the sand, taking hers, saying something about her, laughing, one shaking his head and barking an order, all before Anna could do anything. The rain had become steady, rain that needed a special name, rain for which, she suspected, the Irish had a name. She’d have to ask Glenis. The winds had diminished, for which she was grateful, but the rain increased and was tinged with ice.
She had promised Donal that she’d stay with the cargo until he came back. He said he’d come and get her, and she wanted him to know that she could do this just as well as Glenis. And she wanted Glennie to know that her word was good. And now she felt like sleeping; she could close her eyes and the rain and the night would be gone. She sat down next to the crate and leaned her head against the rough wood, pulling her woolen hood closer, making a condensed version of herself, an elixir.
&nbs
p; From her huddled position, time was foreshortened. Her knees pulled into her chest, her left side pressed against the crate, and the ice came down in pinpricks of hot, hot, hot. Oh, that’s the hypothermia, she thought with a steady calm. Now, at last, she’d be warm again.
What did painters do before they learned about the techniques of foreshortening? How did they explain distance and the perception of tiny cows far away, of long hallways that disappeared into smaller and smaller spaces? This must have had something to do with time travel, she could feel it; if she could no longer feel her body, at least she could feel this certain connection with time, back where she started, back on the shore, freezing again. She deduced that this must be the case and looked for causality. She strained to stay awake, because foreshortening had something to do with time travel, and if she could keep thinking, she’d figure this out. As she sat freezing on the beach, Anna was fueled by the tenacity of lawyer-speak, opened by the rain, stroked by the rhythm of the waves, and pushed by the sand beneath her feet.
Foreshortening. She had walked through the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and had stood puzzled before the great flat artists of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Couldn’t they tell that something wasn’t as it should be? Or had they collectively agreed that the world of painting must be flat, that the way our eyes saw the distance was a trick, not to be spoken or replicated? That’s it, there was something about time that was right in front of her, and she had to stop seeing in the way that everyone had collectively agreed to. She was sitting—squatting, if she recalled correctly—on the coast of Ireland, having just concluded a black market business venture with French sailors, awaiting the rendezvous with Donal. Yes, all this—the rain, her thickening thoughts, the sodden wool cape, her head resting against the crate, the agreed-upon year of 1844, looping from the twenty-first century, her brother’s head bashed in with a Ford truck—all coming together as flat. If she could see it all foreshortened, the way the first great renegade artists who let their gaze run off the tiny horizon dared to show us a large hand, followed by a small body, then she could understand the whole thing. And there was nothing more important than understanding the foreshortening of time.
What was this painting? What overly large image was the foreground? There, it was Joseph, her nephew, in his absolute mathematical value, not the monosyllabic, sixteen-year-old version. The painting was all about him. All oversized and waiting for Anna to see him. And look, behind him, the road that had started wide grew more narrow as it flew off into the background, all streaming to the past. She thought she saw tiny bits of people: Glenis, Donal, other people standing on the spongy tundra of hope, waving. Keep going; this was making perfect sense.
She suddenly jetted back to her body. Something had sliced her back. A hand, an arm, a voice, someone urging her up. Donal. He was crying something like tears and she knew this without opening her eyes, yet she had to tell him about the painting before she forgot. His face came close to hers. She said, “Foreshortening.” But with the rain she wasn’t sure that he heard her.
She felt lifted, and he carried her the only way a one-armed man could carry her, over his shoulders, her upper torso bobbing along, hanging upside down. Ah, perfect. Foreshortening, she nodded to herself.
The rusty hinge of the door screamed open, audible over the rain and through the fog of her too-chilled brain. Donal kicked something out of the way; wood skidded across the room. Before she could wonder what had merited his urgent entry into the cottage, she was on the bed sitting up. Donal untied her hat and her waterlogged cape. While she sat, oddly immobile, he unfastened her boots. The top of his head fascinated her as he bent over her feet, working frantically to relieve her of her dripping shoes.
As soon as the shoes hit the floor, Donal flung a quilt and a wool blanket over her, wrapping her tightly. He struck the flint into action, lighting the peat fire. Her chest filled with a delicious gratitude for the fire, which surpassed anything that she could remember. Is this what it was like for all the Irish? Did the fire mean this much to everyone?
With the fire sending tendrils of heat to her face, her body began to relax and the shivering moved down a notch. Donal took two steps from the fire to stand in front of her. Anna felt obliged to try and sit up. She had so much to tell him about the French sailors, about the foreshortening, the painting, but what was all that?
“Listen to me,” Donal said, grabbing her chin, then letting go too quickly, as if the oval end of her jaw had jolted him. “You’ve nearly killed yourself. Don’t you know enough to seek shelter? There was nothing so precious in that crate worth dying for. Oh, Jaysus, if you had died….”
Donal stopped. Anna’s teeth had begun to chatter again as she warmed, reversing the process of hypothermia. She was so grateful that the rain was not running down her neck, and the wind off the Atlantic was not slamming into her. She wanted to tell Donal that she’d understood something about time while she had been huddled on the beach guarding the black market goods, but even now it made less sense to her. Wait, it had been so clear in the way that dreams are clear in the seconds of waking in the middle of the night, only to be left shardlike in the morning. But if it had been about time and Joseph, she’d have to save that for Glenis, who understood everything.
She wiggled an arm from the quilt and reached out, still shivering, for Donal, whom she had not touched in the way she was about to touch him. Both of them watched her arm as if it heralded a proclamation. She found his hand, still hot with rage and fear, and pulled as best she could, pulled until he understood that she wanted him to come down to her. He sank to his knees while she kept her eyes on his face, saw his brow soften, his eyes close. Still unable to keep her teeth from chattering, she moved her hand up to his shoulder, working her fingers along until they came to his moist neck. Ah, there it was, that’s what she was looking for, the vast epidermal covering of this man. Her fingers sank into the back of his neck, pulling his head to hers.
“Come here,” she said, with surprising clarity, not chattering at all.
Chapter 25
Joseph was shocked at how strong his body had become by practicing every day. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t practiced in high school. This was what he imagined it was like to take testosterone. His coach in high school had been so dramatic at the start of each season.
“If I catch any of you taking performance-enhancing drugs, I will immediately throw your ass off the team. So if you double in size between now and November, get acne the size of tomatoes, and growl like a rabid dog, that’s going to be my clue that you’re using and you’ll be busted. No negotiating. This is wrestling, not multimillion-dollar baseball.”
But Joseph was not in high school, not on the wrestling team. He was no longer the lowest life-form, a social throwaway, and he no longer had to tangle with his father every day and wonder what he’d done wrong. His father had had a list, which had started in the morning and grown to an exhausted heap by bedtime. It was better not to think about that part of his life.
Or maybe this is what sixteen was like, with his shoulders swelling up and his forearms hardening. The manservant who dressed him said that his shirts were now too small for him, and his neck was larger. His grandmother would call this a growth spurt. She’d told him once that his father had grown four inches one summer. She’d said it had been like watching a science experiment, or one of those tiny sponges that turned into Scooby Doo when you put it in water. He did wish his grandmother could see him—that much he missed.
He’d won four wrestling matches and was scheduled for another with the champion of Cork. The colonel had his new wrestling career mapped out; all the local parishes, and Dublin. Then he would have beaten every Irish man who called himself a wrestler. The colonel said that wrestling was a gentleman’s sport and the Irish had no business in it. He intended to prove it.
The matches that Joseph had observed here sometimes took as long as thirty minutes. All of his matches in high school had been over in less than five
minutes. Joseph’s coach had trained them in building sprinter-type muscles designed to give maximum power for up to ten minutes. Ten minutes was an extraordinary length of time for a match. By his second year, Joseph had been able to take down every opponent before he knew what was happening.
Only one tiny thought, niggling around in the back of his brain, troubled him. All of the men he wrestled were endurance athletes. They were farmers who plowed fields for ten hours, fishermen who hauled nets until their muscles popped up along their arms, and they could all just keep going. If Joseph couldn’t pin a man in his sprinter’s time, it might get difficult. So far, his speed and ferocity had beat out endurance. He had superior training, his reflexes were faster than those of any of the men he had challenged, his balance was fantastic, and, most of all, he had been trained to read an opponent’s body from the moment he first saw him. He looked at the walk, the flexibility, and, most telling of all, the initial handshake.
Joseph practiced wrestling all morning with Sean, who was gradually becoming a better opponent. Owen was mercifully given other duties by Deirdre and no longer had to return for practices. More often than not, Madigan liked to watch the wrestling practices. The huge dog seemed to think that his part in the whole production was to run into the melee when one of the boys was pinned and to pound his two front feet on the loser’s chest. Take that, the dog said.
Joseph had taught Sean the fundamentals, the rules, how to watch his opponent, how to place a hand on a shoulder, a thigh, the place between the shoulder blades. Even though Sean complained bitterly that he would never be as good as Joseph, he was clearly improving. Once he’d even surprised Joseph by flipping him to the ground. Sean had been so startled by his success that both of them had broken out in spasms of laughter. Since then, the practices had gone easier, as Sean had a ray of hope that his destiny was not just to be used as something for Joseph to fling about.
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