Grace

by Paul Lynch

  Another rule. There aren’t any rules. Hup! Things are getting worse now. The country is starving. The world is going to fuck. The old times are done for, do you know what I mean? We’re going into the getting-worse part. That’s what I think. But whatever God almighty in heaven wants He can have it, so long as He looks after old Blister.

  At night she listens to him talking to himself, gibberish words, conversations with dead people. Then comes a night when some person—a man, she thinks—is heard trying to climb into the loft. She takes hold of the knife, wonders if Blister has invited some friend up to rob her. Blister creeping towards the loft door and then she hears a thump and a grunt and then shouts of abuse.

  Blister whispers, I just kicked some cunt off the ladder.

  She is certain she can hear in the far-off the crying of an infant. Or perhaps it was a cat, she thinks, you cannot sometimes tell the difference.

  She thinks of the old travelers’ tales she heard by the fire in Blackmountain, people passing the night in a stranger’s house, always the offer of accommodation and comfort. People inviting the pooka in the guise of strangers into their house, such was their hospitality. How those days are gone or maybe it was all made up, and wouldn’t it be nice to give shelter to everybody from the cold, but how can you be sure they aren’t night crawlers who will rob you even if they have with them a child?

  Blister sleeps by the door—just in case, he says, there might be more of them. Have you got a stick or something? You must guard where you sleep with your life. You let me in but you are a rare good one. If you let them in they will rob you and probably cut you. You must show them who’s boss.

  She wakes to the sound of Blister rustling through her satchel. Enough noise to wake the big house, never mind his cough. She waves the knife into his face and he backs away from her.

  He says, so you had a knife all along. I’m just keeping you on your toes, young fella.

  She watches him back away to the loft door, then he begins to move down the ladder. When he is just head and shoulders he stops with a smile and she thinks she might always remember his face, how his mouth is cut with furious teeth and yet how he cannot hide that look of loss in his eyes.

  He shouts, keep warm, young fella! I can smell trouble in the weather. Tell them all Blister says hup!

  Colly says, just wait and see, he’ll come back tonight with others. And so she walks until she finds an outhouse on a narrow farm where the floor is dry and that will do and there are shadows enough by day to hide her. She can feel a knife-point turning in the weather, for each night now is colder than the one before, and who was it said this was spring?

  She lies on an old rug mottled with mold, holds the blanket tight to her neck, pulls jute sacks on top of her. And still the cold walks in the door and climbs on top of her and reaches through the floor with its grabby hands. She lies awake thinking of the morning to come and ignores what creatures scurry over her.

  Quiet as a mouse during the day, for the farm belongs to some rough man. When he steps into the outhouse she stands in the corner holding her breath. Watches him send away stranger after stranger from his door, spalpeens or whatever, asking for work or a bite to eat. Watches him sitting on a stool in the corner of the yard tending a harness, his fingers steady and patient but quick and rough with the necks of his children, pushing and pulling at them, shouting at them like dogs. How she would love to go to his door but you cannot ask anything from such a bruiser so she pockets loose parts of a plow to sell later in a town, plans to leave in the morning. When she wakes in the dawn Colly begins at her. Hurry up, muc, he says, I need a leak. She steps sleepy from the outhouse and does not hear until too late the footsteps that come behind her, meets unseen a fist that drums sudden the world to darkness.

  When she comes to be again out of her own dark it is to the probing of a stick. She blinks into pain-light, closes her eyes, sees the burning of stars and the stars burning out and renewing like some fantastic vision if there wasn’t so much pain behind it. Some younger, a wee girl, her face a frozen blue, is standing over her. She sees the sun is high and hidden behind cloud, knows half the day has swung past. The girl is poking her in the thigh with a twig, keeps saying some unintelligible thing. You are going little please. You are going little please. It sounds to her like some childish rhyme. The girl is wearing a gown made of horse flannel.

  Pain slices at her head as she tries to sit up. Ugh, she thinks. I’ve been axed in half! I’ve been decapitated! She squints at the girl and then shouts at her, get away with you. Sees farther down the road the watching eyes of another child, a little boy. What’s that you’re saying, wee girl?

  It is then she sees the farmhouse has disappeared. Gone as if it has fallen into the nothing she has just woken out of. This place different. Gone is the low hill that rose away from that narrow farm. Just flat tillage fields and not a single hill in the far-off and she cannot understand why she is covered in mud and leaves. There comes a lurching nausea as she tries to stand up, the world slantways to her vision.

  She thinks, I’ve been boxed in the head! That brute of a thing carried me here. Colly? Colly! Where are you?

  Colly says, my head is splintered.

  What did they do to me? Were we carried here on a cart, do you think?

  She touches her body as if afraid to find something broken. It is only her head that hurts.

  Colly says, I think we were dragged through the ditches, dragged like an auld sack.

  She can tell the little girl is afraid of her, watching this mud-boy trying to stand up on the road, leaning strangely, retching on an empty stomach. The child stepping quickly towards her and waving her stick like some occult wand, uttering the same unintelligible thing, the words sounding to Grace like some evil charm of strange undoing and surely that is what this is. The girl runs off but leaves her words hanging. As Grace wipes the twigs and leaves from her body she understands what the girl said.

  You are growing little trees. You are growing little trees.

  She stands and stares dazed and dumb at the road. When she begins to walk the thought strikes like a second fist. Where is my blanket, Colly? My satchel? Where have they gone to?

  She runs back to where she found herself, searches the road and ditches.

  He says, you must have left it in that outhouse.

  She eyes the sky and the nameless fields but the world has come undone of direction. There is only the sun to follow. She puts her hands to her head. Her voice a whisper. It’s gone, I don’t have it, it’s taken. She searches her mind for even a shadow of the man who struck her but there is only mystery, silence, darkness. She searches her pockets. She still has the knife but the plow parts she stole have been taken off her.

  Tell me, Colly, what is real and not real? What is natural and unnatural?

  Is that a new riddle?

  She wants to be angry with herself for being so stupid. She wants to feel angry for being fooled all the time. She wants to roar out for what the cold will bring in the absence of a blanket. But what comes instead is laughter rich and thick and easy as breathing and Colly can’t help but laugh with her. They walk along the road, roaring with laughter under a starling sky, the birds vibrating in their single shape with darkness and light.

  She thinks, laughter itself is a riddle. The way it hurts your chest yet brings such pleasure. It leaves you as hollow as a drum and yet feeling full.

  She watches the starlings take the form of a rain cloud and then scatter into giant raindrops, an augury of what soon comes—rain in downswings heavy enough to soak her. She hunches into her walk, moves like something sunken. Colly starts giggling again when she finds an evergreen to sit under.

  This giddiness has to stop, Colly.

  And then they are off again, giggles that soar into laughing whoops, fall to earth in a wheeze. She laughs because everything is so wrong. She laughs because she no longer knows what is real and what not real. If people are who they say they are. If anything that is
said has meaning. If everything is a trick, the whole world just some made-up story. Perhaps this is what growing up is like. This is what they don’t tell you. That the realness of the world is its lies and deceit. That the realness of the world is all you can’t see, all you can’t know. That the only good in life is your childhood, when everything is known for certain. She laughs so hard she no longer knows if she is laughing or crying, or if the two of them are really the same.

  She understands it remotely before it travels as thought. First to eyelash, then to chin. Feels it wetly on a knuckle. From out of the forever the sleet-fall comes. She watches with horror as it descends in lazy fashion. Spring is clocking backwards, she thinks. You must keep going. You must grin and bear it. Don’t grit your teeth or the cold will grip your muscles. Colly, sing me a song!

  But Colly has gone quiet. She walks with a hand nursing the hurt in her head, watching the sleet become snow.

  Finally, Colly says something but it is only a whisper.

  She says, what did you say?

  He says, I said, so this is what the end of the world looks like—I always wondered.

  The open country is hasped under hulking clouds that harry snow upon it. A company of cabins off-road and she knocks at every door but only one door opens to a closed face. Take a good look at yourself, Colly says. You’re covered in blood and muck. So quickly now has she been run through with cold. The road an immensity of quiet.

  Into view comes a work yard that sits in crumpled silence. She sees slag heaps beginning to whiten, work huts that could provide shelter, perhaps a fire. She looks for signs of smoke. Of a sudden two black dogs zip towards her all snapping teeth and she is barked away from the fence. She spits at them, sees an old jute sack caught in the mesh, pulls at it with colding fingers and cauls it over her head.

  She passes a whitening graveyard that slopes in solitude away from the road. She thinks, where there is death there must be people. She squints to read some of the tombstones as she passes. Fulton. Dykes. Platt. A man called Wilson Stringer. What kind of name is that? The year of his death 1762. Tries to travel her mind back such distance, a world so strange and old-fashioned, tries to imagine this Wilson Stringer, how he would have borne himself upon this road. Pictures a stranger in silly clothes that turns out to be Clackton. He doffs his cap and smiles with blood teeth. Get away, you, she says.

  For some time now, she has had peace from Clackton. She thinks, what would Clackton do now if he were leading their little group?

  She says to Colly, nobody walks the road in this weather but the dead, and even then, I haven’t seen or heard a single ghoul.

  He says, I wouldn’t be so sure about that—what makes you think you could tell the difference?

  Her teeth are beginning to click out a jig. She quickly pumps her fists.

  Grace.

  What?

  Do you know something?

  What?

  This is no way to live.

  There’ll be someplace just around that far corner.

  I just thought I’d tell you before we die of exposure, before we’re found under the snow—here lie the remains of two thick-as-fucks, may they rest in their own stupidity.

  Thanks for the reminder.

  And do you know something else?

  What?

  This is no way to live.

  She eyes a farmstead nestled into a whitening hill. Watches the snow laying quiet upon quiet, sees herself knocking at that door or sneaking into a hayloft until her thoughts are met with the report of a gun or the shadow of a fist and she finds herself walking onwards, for there is no room in such houses for the likes of you. This worry now that wriggles like a worm in your gut. Trust you to find the loneliest place in Ireland.

  Grace.

  What?

  This is no way to live.

  She comes upon the cabin and knows it is abandoned and even if it’s not you are going to go in. The way it stands smokeless in the snowy air, holds its own silence. She had taken a turn off the road, followed a track hoping for a townland. Dreamt of some four-square of whitewashed houses and the North Star glittering in the snow-bluing light and firelight winking in the windows, a voice calling out, come in and get yourself warmed. Instead she has found mazed country, everything taking the same erasure of white, the track and the hedgerow and the bramble thorning through it. Colly saying, you’re on the wrong path, so then she took another. And then out of the white it came, the sight of a mud cabin in front of a wood watching over distant plowland. The middle of nowhere, she thinks, and this is what bone-cold means and this cabin must do.

  Colly says, go up and knock just in case.

  Keep you quiet.

  She clears her throat as she approaches the door, knuckles seven times for good luck.

  In the wait for a sound the darkening trees issue silence. Something flits, she does not know what—dark, like what forms feeling before thought but not the thought thing.

  She says, there’s nobody in it.

  Of a sudden Colly’s voice tightens. Grace, I don’t like it, I said I don’t like it one bit, let’s—

  She thumbs the latch.

  I want to go home to Mam and the others.

  Would you ever quit with your fluster?

  Hello? she calls. Doorlight maps the gloom into quiet, the mud walls and the thatch sooted and so turf-smoked that the reek of how many years’ burning is marked into this place—like the echo of all fires and that echoing made stark by fire’s absence—dampness, and how the room receives her with such astonishing loneliness, the door uneven on its hinges, and as one foot steps slowly inward she senses the emptiness of the hut, senses as if all the world were suddenly emptied of people and what that world would be like—the silence of nature, how greenery grows to take place-name back into itself, as if all knowing had never existed and the shadows cast were not the shadows of fire and lamplight but the dark of what the sun has abandoned—all this in a single moment of thought by the door, and much in that same instant her eyes alight upon half-forms in the dark—a single chair and a burnt-out fire, a Brigid’s cross on a bare crockery shelf, a picture upset on a nail and cast into its own dark—hello?—and then, over all things, through all things, through the dust and the damp and the dark—Oh!—a stench that now comes to her as inhuman and brutal, dominating the room—Oh! Oh!—her mind stepping back before her body is able to, footing backwards out the door and her shadow shrinks into the light as if she is meant only for this life and this light and not the other darkness within, backwards into the clean cold air, sucking and sucking it down deeper, her mind reaching for an answer—Oh, Colly! Oh! Oh! Oh!—the smell, and a strange sweetness mixed up in the smell, a smell like nothing she has ever smelled before, as if sweetness can be at one with evil, and she knows upon smelling it she will never forget it, that it is a message of death, and she knows that what Colly is saying to her is wrong, that it is not the smell of a rotting animal, that it is—Oh! Oh! Oh!—for she knows now this smell of death is a person.

  She stands squeezing her hands open and shut. Will not open her eyes.

  Yes you are.

  No I’m not, Colly.

  But you must.

  I can’t. I won’t. I will not.

  You will.

  Hmmph.

  It’s either that or sleep in the snow, I’m frozen, we’ll die out here, it was your idea all along.

  But you said you wanted to get away from this place.

  No I didn’t.

  Colly is quiet a moment. Then he says, it’s only a body.

  What do you mean it’s only a body?

  It’s a body under a blanket, there’s nobody about, if it were a dead dog or a dead hedgehog or whatever, would you have any bother dragging it out, would the smell of it bother you then?

  You’re not making a single bit of sense.

  Listen to me, now, they’re both the same thing, it’s logic, we learnt it at school.

  She sighs. It is not logic. It’s
a person.

  Colly is going on now about something else, but she doesn’t want to listen. She shakes her head and begins away from the cabin.

  The snow has saddened everything away, saddened away hope and goodness. Rags of snow thicken her lashes, burr cold to her face. She watches a lone farmhouse far in the glen that sits like something painted, can make out a window of light upon a room that is dry and warm and people eating but no welcome for me, no doubt. This creeping cold. My clothes growing damp to the skin. The fields without motion and how the bare trees could teach you resilience, holding still throughout, waiting for the season to right itself. But the trees don’t get cold, she thinks, and me here like some scarecrow getting snowed on. Of a sudden she is met by a vision of herself living as Sarah. Mam before Boggs ruined her. An image of herself as woman, full-chested. Clean and happy with herself. A crackling fire all warm. Making do. Finding forage in the wood.

  She does not know what it is but something moves as if to escape from inside her, some enormous frustration or sorrow.

  She turns around, begins back towards the cabin.

  It is Colly who sees it. That spade there beside that dunghill.

  Later, she does not remember how she spaded the corpse onto the jute sack. Her eyes shut and watering to the smell, her coat knotted to her mouth. Leaving it down for a while then going back to it. What she hears is the hiss of the dragging sack as if the corpse were hissing at her. How weightless it is. Light like dragging a sack of sticks, that’s all it is. Light like pulling one of the youngers along, the way you used to pull Bran along on the sack down the heather, racing down the hill. She enters the wood and her sight falls full upon the body and her stomach twists an empty retch. She casts her eyes in every other direction. Tries to tell herself that what is also isn’t. And yet her mind holds a perfect picture—that what lies on the sack is a very old woman, dead as dead is, her body shriveled to just a coating of skin, her rags falling away from jut-ribs. The face sideways and no hurt in it at all but enough of a face to haunt her. How the mouth and teeth are green as if she died eating forage, her chin weirdly bearded.