Grace

by Paul Lynch

  She says, then tell me, what is the point of all that money?

  Colly says, do you think we can get a room to ourselves?

  She watches the dawnlight creep the doorways and lanes and courtyards. It shows the rough sleepers for who they are, slumps of thought made physical. And yet the streets carry a better sort of person, early-rising men in fine capes and overcoats going to the day’s business and women in fine-cut cloaks just the right size. She watches the early risers for watchy eyes. A wide enough street with signage for everything. A man dragging onto the road a sign that announces the best in parasols.

  They walk to where the town seems to end and they meet a great bridge. Bart says, this is the Shannon and that is a notion of hell right there. He is pointing to a great army barracks on the bank of the river. Nearby women are tramping linen at the waterside, the water passing by bruised and silent. A man walks past them wearing a coat with a sleeve torn off.

  Colly says, perhaps this is what people are doing now, they are pawning one sleeve at a time—soon there will be people walking about naked but for one leg of their breeches or just a single sleeve—speaking of which, that cack-handed Bart, don’t you think a witness would remember how he looked?

  Shush up, she says.

  Bart looks at her. Are you starting up again with your complaining?

  I didn’t say anything.

  You were muttering at me just now.

  I was not. I was just talking about taking my boots off.

  She imagines her feet like bruised fruit, dipping them in warm water, washing gently until you bring out the skin’s bright pink—to have the feet of a girl again.

  Never before has she been on a staircase or entered a house such as this. Dawnlight like someone’s long foot on the first two steps, the landlady haunting upwards with a candle. She walks behind Bart, Colly gasping. This house is a ten-roomer at least, he says. The house and the staircase seem to lean sideways as they travel upwards and she hears a man hoarse behind a door whispering some conspiracy while the wood mutters agreement. Upwards, upwards with falling-off thoughts until she grabs hold of Bart’s coattail, Colly whispering, you’re his little limpet, stuck to the rocks of his arse, and she lets go and holds on to the crooked wall instead. A strange man stepping down past them hauls after him the vapors of drink and the staircase and walls begin to narrow and lean farther sidewards until she is convinced the entire house will topple over under the weight of their walking or the staircase will collapse under them and she will fall all the way down into damnation. And who is the landlady faintly candled but Mammon holding the keys to hell.

  Two beds crammed tight under a slanty ceiling. Bart says, Christ, is there a window at least? She catches the landlady staring at Bart’s arm. He says, send up a basin and hot water and hurry up with it. Bart then to sleep like a man dead and she lets her feet out of her boots and washes them in the candlelight, slowly at first, sadly, for she hasn’t washed her feet with soap in such a long time. The reality of her feet. How they have been unshaped by boot, corned and thickened, the heels like stumpy rocks. The flesh not pink or even white but blue and sometimes black and she climbs into bed saddened, finds the wrinkled coarse sheet still warm with the heat of somebody else, the same vapors off the blanket as that man they passed on the stairs. How the ceiling presses down upon you.

  She says to Colly, the house is going to topple over while we’re asleep and then we will be dead.

  Colly says, if it happens in your sleep you might not notice.

  She has worried herself awake despite the bed’s comfort. She thinks, Bart with his one arm, Bart picking up the purse. Colly is right. He will be easy to finger. She tries to think of sleep and pretends she is asleep in Blackmountain, realizes she can no longer be sure of her mother’s face.

  She whispers, Colly, are you awake?

  I’m fast asleep.

  Colly, I can’t remember anything of Blackmountain.

  Ugh.

  Tell me something to remember.

  Like what.

  Whatever.

  Do you remember the wiggly hole you could put your finger in?

  What?

  The peephole in the door.

  And now she can see it, kneeling to the hole with a squinting look, the world blurred outside. The faint smell of old resin. The echoing of a voice that is the voice-shape of Mam held but not seen and why can’t you think of her face clearly when you think of her?

  Do you mind the way we used to crow-squawk the door—hee!—opening and closing it over and over, driving Mam demented, leave that door closed, she’d shout, shut it, would you!

  Now she is standing by the door looking out upon what she always saw, the forever of those hills and that ancient traveler of light walking upon them making different each day.

  From blackest sleep she is poked awake by Bart, can hardly open her eyelids.

  Colly says, if he does that again I’ll put my fist through his head.

  Bart says, some person, a drunkard, I think, came into the room while we slept. He didn’t take anything. It’s a good thing I sleep with the money.

  She thinks she can remember half waking to somebody coming into the room, some silent figure that stood by the door as if awaiting permission to step into her dream, the door being closed again, moving through sleep to see who it was and then too tired to care. She wonders now if Bart had not said anything would she have even remembered, moves to the side of the bed and wiggles a finger through a finger-hole in the blanket that might also be the wiggly hole in the fir door of home. Tries to match this Bart beside her with the Bart from her dream, another Bart who stood with two fine hands and how he turned before the wolf and put his hand into its mouth.

  The real Bart turns around and whispers, put on your boots. What kind of person barefoots when they can afford lodging?

  She says, and you with your robbery-arm hanging out.

  They are shape-shifters that step out of the store and into the parade of the town. The afternoon sweet with light and her feet light in these new booties fit for a lady and everything so pleasing and how could you stop looking at them, a pair of calfskin side-laced boots so strange she is unsure how to walk in them, their leathery-upwards smell, the glide and press of the cut.

  She thinks, a fish cannot become a bird, or can it? Maybe it can.

  Colly says, perhaps if you’d stop looking for yourself in the windows you wouldn’t walk like a hen.

  She thinks, you should be watching for watchers, and yet she knows that no one is looking, that Bart was wrong, first saying no to the buying of new clothing, then saying we will only attract attention. Now he looks so pleased with himself wrapped in a thick-knit charcoal cape that hides his hand so well. He seems to walk straighter but then he turns as if nettled by some thought and snaps a comment about the way she is walking, drawing attention, he says, and she answers with a flutter of her new ivy-green cloak.

  She watches the well-dressed ladies and wants to be noticed, for you too are now a woman among them. That cloak is nothing compared to my cloak, my cloak is newer than yours. She thinks, the carriage of these people. If the world is ending most of these fancy Nancys don’t seem too bothered about it. And yet the streets are haunted by faces made long to the bone, sunken eyes that reach for you. They pass by the coach stop and it is crowded with beggars waiting to harry passengers from the next coach.

  She cannot decide which is better, to be hungry in the countryside or to be hungry in a town. Who would want to live in a town? she thinks. When she was young she imagined the strangeness of big towns but she sees now each town is the same as any other. The same high buildings and how the spaces between buildings echo the same sounds, always the same bridge with the same layabouts and louts watching everything that passes, eyeing you over and under. Streets that brattle with beggars and boot-boys and criminals and always someone shouting at a mule or a horse and how animals stare silently back at you. The gentry wear perfume and no wonder, she thin
ks, for people dump their toilet under their noses and though the river blows freshening air it is nothing like the air that comes down off Blackmountain, heaven-scented and devout in its duty to clear out the house.

  She stares into the face of a meaty man leaning over a stall of gizzards and chicken heads and is astonished by his prices.

  Bart says, we will eat at the lodgings tonight and not on the street, where children will be hanging off you.

  She says, oh will we, now?

  Bart wants to play billiards and is halfway up the stairwell but she stands at the door and will not go in.

  Colly says, would you look at that scrab-arm, who wants to play billiards against the likes of him?

  She turns and Bart comes back down after her, his face deepening with rage, his eyes with their popped-out look.

  He says, what’s wrong with you now?

  She does not want to tell of this new fear of going up staircases, that in the dream she had the staircase collapsed and then the building fell on top of her and she was awake in her own dream even though she was dead. She wraps her cloak about herself and puts her back to him, begins to dance from one foot to the other, jumps in the air and spins around, opens out the cloak in some final dramatic flourish.

  Bart’s stare is long and cold and his eyes do not blink.

  Then he says, you’re some woman.

  They have bought enough tobacco to smoke hurt into their lungs. Two nights in a bed and she can feel her bones thickening in gluttonous sleep. Tries not to think of the dirt on her lady booties, because nothing lasts forever, not even new shoes. They are walking through Market Place when Bart takes hold of her wrist and points. He says, I know that fellow.

  He hurries her along, his face with a questioning look. Then he lets her go and marches onwards, his nose become that of a pointer hound to the breeze. She follows as he pushes through people, watches him rise on his toes to see better, turning down a narrow street and then another and she sees the man they are following turn into a lane that takes the world to quiet, sees him climb into some temporary erection of wood that is a shelter thrown together. Her hand has gone to her knife. There are rough sorts slumped here under this wood and a gnawed dog has lost its growl. She hears Bart shouting, is that you, McNutt? Sees a pair of large boots stirring and then a big man climbing slowly out. He stands to his full height and the man is all boots and he is a head taller than Bart. His mouth falls open and then he puts his hands into fists and steps towards Bart, grabs him by the lapels, and goes for a head-butt, and she is running now with the knife and it is then she sees Bart smiling, the tall man pushing Bart away in mock fight. He holds out a right handshake and leans back and laughs, offers his left hand instead. Bart takes it, pulls him into a hug.

  The man called McNutt says, John Bart. How in the fuck?

  Bart says, I saw you just now on the street, knew the head on you a mile off.

  McNutt says, you clop-armed cunt, you.

  She knows McNutt is in winter, watches his face as the three of them sit at the landlady’s table. He has the look of one who sucks on his tongue, she thinks. His cheekbones held high at the angle of want and not beauty. His eyes are too close together. His boots too big under the table. His hair is falling out from all that chatter. She watches his eyes lick at a piggin as it is filled with goat’s milk, his eyes grabbing at the landlady’s backside, as if to eat her haughty flesh. When he reaches for the milk she sees the arm of a man in slow perish. He is a man rescued from hell, she thinks. And yet, the on and on and on of his talking as if he has endless strength. The constant hoopla and performance. The little jinks he makes with his elbows. Since he has arrived she has not gotten a word in.

  McNutt says, I was in Galway for a while killing stray dogs, a nuisance to the streets, let me tell you. They told me I was only to use one bullet per dog but how is a man supposed to take a clean shot every time one of those hounds sees you coming and smells its own death? I’m sure it’s true that dogs are more noble when they decide to die by themselves, take themselves off to a field or whatever. But they are noisy as fuck when shot in the leg and trying to make a run for it. Did you know that dogs scream just the same as humans when they know they are going to die? Most times you’d have to finish them off with the club—

  Colly says, will the man ever shut up?

  She catches herself looking at McNutt’s hands.

  —that job ended when I threatened to put a bullet through the forehead of a certain fellow so I came down here to the belly button of Ireland. That’s what I call it. Did you ever hear that one before? Got here on the side of a car chatting to this crooked fellow who says he was going all the way to Cork but spent the entire time eyeing my pockets and I told him there was good reason why Cork was at the arse of Ireland and then I got the watch from his pocket because I figured if he was going to make an attempt to rob me he might as well rob his own watch. Got work as a packer at a warehouse out the road from here and then that ended and got work as a gater—

  Colly says, shut the fuck up, McNutt!

  —figured a way to let some boys in now and again, if you know what I mean, but then that ended when— well, I’ll tell you later. I had work lined up for next week when you found me but I won’t bother with that now, seeing as we’re all laughing the three laughs of the leprechaun.

  She watches McNutt drain the cup. He moves his huge boots under the table, taking up all the room. He says, this is some party, do you know what I read in the newspaper, that it takes six goats to make the milk of one cow, but all things being equal, the milk of the goat is as good as the other, in other words goat’s milk goes underrated in certain parts of—

  She can hear two women—whores! McNutt says—talking about money on the staircase and she wonders at the who of them, hears the door open and some coachman enters without word. The way he looks at them without looking. McNutt goes quiet as the man takes a chair by the fireside and she watches him light a pipe, watches him unfold a newspaper without taking his eyes off them. McNutt begins chatting in a low voice with Bart. It is the talk of old brothers, each buckling into laughter. She stares at McNutt but he pays her no attention, knifes Bart with a look. A pair of low dogs, she thinks.

  Colly whispers, I don’t trust him one bit, he watches everything with his fingers—how can you trust a man whose eyes are so close together?

  She thinks, it is a kindness that we are doing to him. This hard man with his broken fists. A jester with a falling mouth. You’d think he would be grateful.

  Colly whispers. Riddle me this, what gives a good stab and has only one arm? I’ll give you a clue, you can use it on the fire.

  McNutt says, anyhow, I stopped me from going on.

  They watch the landlady saw bread and put it on the table, three hands reaching for it. She eats bread and wants to stroke her lace booties. The smell of meat cuttings cooking over the fire is the greatest of all smells until she turns and sees the coachman is watching her and what lies in his look, how the smell disappears and she lowers the new boot she has been admiring with her fingers. Something in the coachman’s physicality that suggests a comfort with violence, a man whose arms can take a full team of horses. The way he is twirling his knuckle hair as if he were Boggs, and this meat smell suddens her to the table at Blackmountain, the orbed white starving eyes of the youngers pleading at her and the landlady’s voice is Sarah’s and she dizzies to standing and closes her eyes, finds the door, finds her way up the staircase, Bart shouting some question after her but he does not follow.

  Wake up, the voice says. It is the voice of her father and she feels herself being gathered into his power, the smell of him uniquely, that ancient smell, old as the world is and brought to her from so long ago, and he is shadow and he is voice and he is the deepest hum—

  Wake up, I said. She opens her eyes to a kingdom of dark men. Bart is poking at her, leaning over her with his warm breath, McNutt is to the wall beside a guttering candle that throws him about the room
in frightening long shapes. He is picking at his nails, ignoring her.

  She sits up, punches Bart’s hand away from her. What?

  Bart says, we have to leave. Now, up with it.

  She cannot blink the dark from her eyes. She lies back down because it’s the middle of the night and that is what you do when you are in a warm bed, you sleep and let that be the end of it.

  Bart pulls her into sitting.

  Colly says, do that again and I will break that good hand.

  Bart says, that lodger in the dining room tonight. McNutt has seen him before. He’s a detective from the barracks. We are under suspicion.

  She looks to McNutt, who nods solemnly at Bart. I’ve seen him on the street before. He took an interest in her, all right.

  They are but shadows that slip the bolts of the door and close it with a click. Silently onto the street, their breaths bold before them and feathered in the moon-blue cold where the river sends up sound of itself. The streets are empty but for some hacksaw-coughing fool who might be asleep in a doorway and in another street there sounds the echoed roar of a drunk, his voice ringing like bad iron hammered by night, like a warning shout from someone else’s dream, she thinks, while the sound of the river is the sound of whatever you want it to be, the scolding whispers of the dead. She sees the drunkard begin to sit up and McNutt goes to him and swings a kick that flattens the man into his shadow. Bart pulling him by the coat. Enough’s enough, McNutt. McNutt stepping back with his hands in the air as if to say, I hardly touched him. Then he says, a paid scout for the barracks, no doubt. Something about McNutt’s carriage that tells her this danger he speaks of does not belong here but is carried and made by him, and what if this is all some tidy plan to get in on our scheme?

  Of a sudden McNutt turns upon her as if he has heard the very thought.

  He says, tell me, pirate queen, what are you taking those tongs for?

  Colly says, tell him to fuck off, these tongs are a holy relic.

  They walk two nights under the muffled stars making for the mountains. The dark as tight as a fist. She speaks to the moon like an old friend, watches it come and go in silence. In the black of nowhere they hide from the road and watch a passing procession of shadows, ten people, she thinks, perhaps more, and two pack animals. Not a sound between these walkers and how it seems as if their silence is holy and she thinks of Christ and his disciples walking some ancient road, watches these people pass by with their mystery hidden and at one with the colors of night.