Grace

by Paul Lynch

  McNutt keeps complaining about the dark, about the want of candles and brown paper. He says, I want to kill somebody but this is nothing but treacherous.

  Bart says, you’ll get used to it.

  Colly is deepening into sulk, for he can hardly get a word in.

  Sometimes she thinks she can hear laughter in the curling tongue of the wind. They walk until the sun knifes open the horizon and wait for evening again.

  By day these boreens and townlands are busy enough. They watch from their hiding places the passing beggars, the people carting belongings, the children tailing elders along the road. But by night when you walk these roads the villages are sudden silences, stacks of huts that rise soundless against the dark and even their dogs are quiet. Having to tell McNutt to shut up as they foot through them. If he is not complaining then it is a hundred songs a night and always with the stories. Did you hear the one about the man who sold tin to the devil? Did you hear the one about the evil eye on the washerwoman? Did you hear the one about the king and the crow? Did you know that if you can hear a crow talking you will be both a king and a wise fellow? Do you know how the wheel of luck turns?

  Colly wants to know all sorts of impossible things. The place of the soul—where it is kept. Do you think it resides in the organs or could it be inside the body but not of the body, or could there be some kind of box for it in the brain, like the place where humor is kept, it makes sense that it would take the shape of the body because it would be easier to travel with, but if that is the case, what happens when you lose an arm, like John Bart, for instance, does his soul have a bandy arm also?

  She thinks about her own soul, all that has been put in it, wonders how a soul can be of the same essence when you are changing a little bit every day, when you are no longer the same person, because you are not the same person at the end of the year as you were at the start of it, and sometimes you change during the day, depending on certain events. And if that is the case, and you die at one age rather than another, would your soul not be completely different? That is a mystery for the sages.

  She picks fuchsia flowers from bushes spidery in the dawn, sucks the faint taste of honey. The Slieve Bloom Mountains rising before them. How they hold to the sky like some great wave from the sea.

  The mountains greet them with mist. It seeps and clings, hangs mystery over everything. The rising track humped with sedge disappears up the hillside. A crow shouts some message about the loss of its body and the trees wait like marauders. The world-sound so still but for the boom and echo of McNutt. Did you hear the one about the old crow that slept in the eagle’s nest? Twas the coldest of nights and the crow was fed up with the constant chill. So he takes to a nest that is not his own, finds a fledgling in it, and what does he do but take the fledgling off and murder it, buries it under a rock. Then he goes back to the nest and waits for the eagle to arrive, and when it does, it thinks the crow is its fledgling, sits on it, and keeps it warm all night. That’s the type of cleverness I like.

  It is Colly who sees the figure first. He says, there’s a man sleeping in that ditch. Legs and boots prop out of a bush as if man could root with a tree. And yet how the eyes know before they can take full measure that the man is dead. The feet at the unusual angle of dying. An odd stillness while everything else in the ditch trembles in the life of the wind. Don’t look, she warns Colly, but how can you help it? The strange fact that is a dead body. What it is and what it isn’t. She sees the dead man’s hand open as if to express in death the full measure of his want, the hand reaching for something to eat, or perhaps it was because he was dying alone in this ditch that he was reaching into memory, reaching for the hand of a woman he loved or for the hand of his mother, for they say all men call for their mothers upon death.

  Colly says, do you think that when the birds ate his eyes, his soul escaped out his eye sockets?

  They stand over the body and McNutt gives it a kick and she shouts, stop that, you brute pig.

  McNutt says, I’m just making sure he’s dead.

  Bart says, toss him a coin instead.

  McNutt says, I have no coins to give him.

  She takes out the purse and counts what’s left, puts a penny into the dead man’s hand. Watches McNutt lag behind as they walk onwards, sees him bend to the dead man, take the coin back off him.

  He says, I’ll give it back to him in hell.

  They have waited and watched this lordly house and the steepened valley behind it. The comings and goings of a fashionable carriage. Watching evening take the house to dark. She catches Bart’s eye and they share a look that is strength. They are creep-foot towards the house. Music reaching from a bright-lit room and then McNutt’s fierce knocking brings the tune of the fox hunters’ jig to a stop. Voices tangle then untangle and she can hear a man and then a woman and it must be a servant-woman’s voice worrying through the great door. Who goes there? McNutt’s physique seems to change and he holds his hand oddly aloft in the air as if finding the true pitch of a song. Then he speaks in the voice of a gentleman. She cannot believe it, it is like a voice you would hear in a town.

  He says, I am sorry to trouble you but I am a member of the gentry. My carriage took an accident farther up the hill. I require some assistance urgently, if you please. My coachman needs a doctor. If needs be I have letters of introduction. I am Philip Fulton of the Fultons of Ballinasloe. The grain exporters, you know.

  She watches Bart snicker into his fist, looks at McNutt in wonder, cannot understand how a brute can magic such words out. They hear whispers and a woman’s voice saying, let him in, let him in, and a servant-man’s voice she guesses arguing back and she smiles at the dark when she hears the bolt being pulled and then the great wind of McNutt gales through the door, brings the man down with his fist, marches into the house with a shout.

  Cock-a-doodle-doo.

  She sees through her teeth, feels it surge as she enters, this anger that has risen fanged and fearless, wide as a wolf’s mouth. McNutt now is widened, a warrior who marshals the housekeeper and the fallen man, who might be a butler, into a room down the hall. Bart like wind passing beside her and she sees them both in the hallway’s great mirror, how their eyes shine whitely out of mud-painted faces, her hair braided with twigs, you look like some creature that crawled from a ditch.

  Bart takes a lamp out of the hand of the servant-woman and steps quietly up the staircase. She follows McNutt into a parlor room full of screams and shouts, two women standing guard over a young boy and there is the homeowner, Mr. Moneybags or whatever you want to call him, his bursting red face, and McNutt drops him to the floor with his fist, the man getting onto his hands and knees and crawling to his family the way a baby would and McNutt chasing after him, kicking him in the seat of his pants. The man trailing piss along the carpet. In the commotion of knocking they must have laid their musical instruments upon the floor and with a splintering kick McNutt sends a fiddle to the wall.

  He shouts, now, cunty, where is your gold hid?

  He leans into the face of Mr. Moneybags, who sits to the wall reddened and cowered and squeezing impotent fists. McNutt waves his knife alive in front of the man’s face, says, did you just fucking piss yourself? In front of your own family? I would not be sorry to kill you.

  She leaves the room and finds the pantry deep with food-smell. She inhales it for a moment, takes a sack and bags a five-pound weight of meal, bags a loaf of bread, slides a slimy tongue off a plate into her bag, takes it back out and wraps it in a cloth and bags it again. She grabs a side of wrapped meat. Caterwauling and havoc reach then from the parlor and she runs with the knife, enters to see McNutt has lifted the boy by the ruck of the shirt with his teeth.

  Bart then into the room with two fowling pieces hung off his shoulder and a horse pistol stuffed into the band of his breeches. He nestles with his bad arm a powder horn and shot bag. One of the women begins to shout. Why are you doing this? Do you not know who we are? I am on the committee that has been trying
to bring relief to the area. I have been writing to Dublin and London. We have been collecting subscriptions. We have been doing what we can. Why would you endeavor to rob us?

  McNutt says, shush with your gob music.

  He kicks a chair to a wall and climbs up and begins to wrestle with a plaque of stag antlers, frees them with a backwards fall. He comes to standing holding them to his chest, bends and puts them to his head and begins to circle the room and howl. No part of her now belongs to thinking. Her hands are upon the brass candlesticks and they are upon some books and they are upon crystal glasses and she denudes a table of its linen and then they are running for the exit and their bodies are a high song and she sees McNutt fighting the antlers through the door. The same wind that brought them into the house carries them out and they go glittering into that dark riding the wolf’s mouth.

  The path is treacherous and their walk hushed, Bart leading the group with a papered candle. The moon has sucked the clouds into whirlpool and her feet are constant shouts, her arms near done in, for the weight of their haul is making them grow longer. What she sees in the lucent trees are the faces of men, can hear in the chattering leaves the planning of hounds and horses, riders with arrowed looks, forces being ranged against her ready to follow into the mountains. She thinks, we will have to be like the wind and then they won’t find us.

  Of a sudden McNutt begins to wheeze a low laugh. He is still carrying the antlers. Then his laugh explodes into a fierce dog’s holler. He tries to speak, did you see— I’d love to— just to hit that cunty a dinger again— just to see the piss on his pants.

  Colly says, it was a prize left hook, muc, a boxer’s best.

  She finds herself giggling along with him, for in laughter there is relief. Bart turning to shush them. In the glow of his papered candle he does not look like himself but some stranger, and perhaps that is so, she thinks, perhaps now we are all different. The path steepens and then Bart has them walking across some slippy sheep track. She tries to banish the thought of how one wrong step could send them falling into the downwards dark of the valleys that would surely lead to hell. Her eyes leaping about for something to hold on to and then she sees it—the ruins of a cottage roofless to the stars. She points it out to Bart and he says, it will surely do.

  McNutt says, you are a great seer of things in the dark, Bart. How did you find such a good view?

  They make a fire and roast the meat to scalding on a stick, wet their lips with fat. McNutt makes a show of drinking from an empty goblet, begins making toasts, to the high kings of Ireland, to the chieftains and their fighting men, to God in heaven and all the saints who were kind enough to present us with this feast and let us not forget Philip Fulton and all the Fultons of Ballinasloe, who were kind enough to lend us their name, the bunch of cunts.

  Even in this dim light she can see Bart staring at her, can feel the weight of his look that is admiration and perhaps also a look of longing but she does not want to think about it. When he has turned she sneaks a look, his face clear in the moonlight that beams through the roof and it is then she sees him different—his whiskers made brilliant and his skin a ghostly silver like some etching in a book, like some great fighter, she thinks, from the olden tales stepped onto this very hillside. She cannot explain this feeling that beats inside her, thinks it might be a feeling of power and freedom, wants to holler aloud to the mountaintops.

  She says, nothing in the world is right or not right, there is only this.

  McNutt turns upon her with a confused look. What was that?

  But now she is up and yelling at the dark. Burn it all, she shouts. Burn everything. Their eyes are moon-caught staring at her and then McNutt is all leap as if finally he has understood. He puts the antlers to his head, hunkers into a low-hipped dance, fashions some unearthly animal sound from his lips as he shuffles around the fire. She takes the linen she stole and billows it upon the blaze, begins to throw onto the fire everything she has taken—hears Bart shout, everything but the candlesticks—a picture frame with a painting of a tree and a child’s wooden toy with wheels and two books that sit for a moment resilient to the flames until they too catch fire.

  Theirs is a song sounded from the top of heaven and it rolls down the silent mountain to the fools asleep in their beds, and then Bart stands up as if in sudden anger and he leaps to life and they dance it all out, the moon watching behind the peep-hands of trees, dancing the dance that is the laughter of forgetting, the laughter that shakes the pain out, the laughter that makes you a god.

  Long days pass listening to McNutt yarning wool with his mouth. Stories of courage and war, slaughter in the four provinces, his dog days in Galway, some old mad nun who followed him about taking her clothes off. What finally brings him to a stop is an encounter that makes him whiten—two shapes sighted nearby in the mist. How they seem not to walk but hover, pass like bundled smoke. Then there are three of them and her heart warns with drums, for who knows what they are, constabulary or soldiers or perhaps they are just people out for a walk, but there is Bart readying the pistol and she is holding the fowling piece and wonders how she will aim it, McNutt not touching his weapon but sitting down like a man brought sick.

  When the figures have passed Bart turns upon McNutt. He says, why didn’t you ready your gun?

  McNutt whispers, this place has the haunting, I know it.

  She hears her words flung from her mouth. Who knew you were so superstitious? That is nothing but fool’s talk. Those men might be out looking for us.

  The quip is tongued before it has been thought to belief. Bart turns to look at her and she cannot read what the look says. She thinks, sometimes the devil waits on the road and walks with you and other times the devil waits inside your head and gives you thoughts to speak.

  McNutt leaning back with his arms long on his lap and his big boots splayed out as if nothing were the matter. Then he smirks at her. Run along now, pirate queen, and take the good hand of your lover.

  Bart says, it might be time to leave.

  They summit the mountains watching the drab evening light for movement. Nothing but bogland and rocks and a wind that moans of ancient loneliness. A wagtail nearby with its whistling suck. Colly starts with a song.

  Wee Willie wagtail hopping on a rock,

  Mammy says your pretty tail is like a goblin’s—

  Colly!

  They follow a path downwards through bogland that rises then into woodland and meets a clear view of the lowlands. The south a patchwork of green as if all the great fields of Ireland were quilted together, she thinks.

  Bart says, that there is very different country. Those are the richest farmers in Ireland.

  McNutt says, I’ve seen a better class of farming among peasants in other districts but anyhow I see what you are saying.

  In a lonely ravine they meet a rough cabin. Its walls more mud than stone and it is roofed with tree cuttings that release the thin smoke of a low fire. They hide and watch the movements of a young hermit strung with a hungry look, how he sits on a rock for a long time just blessing himself. McNutt says, his sort will not be missed.

  They wait until night and creep upon the cabin. McNutt pricked red from wrestling with a holly bush, calls it a hoor, drags it as quiet as he can, which is not quiet at all, she thinks. Bart’s face stern with concentration. They take their different positions around the cabin and she stands holding her breath, wonders if the hermit is asleep or not, begins softly, makes the sound of a mad cat that could also be the sound of the pooka. Colly begins barking. McNutt joins in, rattling the bush with a donkey’s braying that would shake a house. Bart begins neighing like a horse. They haunt their strange rustling animal music into the hut until she sees the wooden door burst open and the hermit flee down the mountain dark.

  The hermit has lit a good fire and stacked the room with wood.

  McNutt has to lie down such is the cramping laughter.

  Bart says, he’ll think the pooka have come for him. We’ll be
able to stay here for a while.

  Colly begins to woof and they all laugh and McNutt puts a hand to his belly and begs for them to stop.

  Candlesticks bring light to eating faces, McNutt all fingers and teeth and she thinks, he is not a donkey at all but a mad dog. They drink bucket water in their goblets and McNutt gives toast to the hermit’s health, this fine hut, the wood he stacked for us, and let us hope the man tells the story for the rest of his life about how he was once haunted by the devil.

  Later that night, the mountain wind rises and sends the fire-smoke back into the cabin. It enters her eyes, her throat, seeps into her thoughts until she steps outside to breathe in the cold night air, eyes the dark with her arms wrapped to her chest. This wind that carries the same sound as Blackmountain.

  Dog days pass under summer’s mountainous skies. Such clouds, she thinks, weight the day on top of itself. There is no hurry to anything, neither the gentled heat, nor light, nor time, the days so slowly gathering.

  McNutt says, hungry July must be at an end.

  This is what Mam always called it, she thinks, that endless month after the old crop ran out and then the wait for August’s harvest. This year the wait is thirteen months long. Soon the crop will come and everything will be right again.

  She watches the way McNutt handles the meal, pulling his big fist out of the sack. Go easy, she says. He does not look at her. Instead he sits growing into strength. There is a restlessness now in this cramped hut. Bart digging into wood with his knife and Colly chattering about this and that and some other. She wonders if the occasional foragers she has heard nearby have heard McNutt, the way he talks night and day, sitting with his back to the wall, his boots hogging the fire. Shut the fuck up, McNutt, Colly says, but McNutt is a river without a low day. She throws private looks at Bart that say, how can you put up with him? Or perhaps the look says, how are we to get rid of him? But Bart does not answer, sits staring into his own thoughts, chipping at some piece of wood.