Red Sky in Morning

by Paul Lynch

  THERE CAME A POUNDING at the door and then the juddered sound of kicking and like a great suck of wind the door came off its hinges. The men darkened the house and the women were shrieking, the children burying their heads into the custody of their mothers, but Jim said not a word. The men grabbed him and dragged him threshing out of the house. Outside he was stood in front of the dark figure of Faller, whose face flared to light when Macken stepped with spitting torch towards him, holding in the other hand a shearing hook, denticles shining like razored teeth. Faller took the torch and shone it in Jim’s face.

  Show me the cunt, he said.

  Jim squirmed but the grasp about him tightened and he glowered at Faller who flashed a smile in return. He leaned in towards the man.

  No? We have here a man who doesn’t want to talk.

  He put a hand to Jim’s collar and dragged him to the side of the house and threw him face down to the ground and he came behind him and drove a knee into his back.

  Rope.

  From the house two men began to drag outside the women. Faller roared out to them. Put them back and shut the door.

  He grabbed hold of Jim’s arms till they were awkward behind him, forced each fighting hand open till the fingers were splayed. Fluidly he knotted with one hand the rope about each of the man’s thumbs and then he wrenched his handiwork together. He stood up and yanked Jim to standing by his shirt. He walked him towards a tree and then he rubbed the dust off his shirt. Macken stood by his side and watched Faller throw the rope. It slithered and fell over the bough of a tree and he made it taut and he handed it to Macken who summoned another of his men. They took hold of the rope and he told them to pull. Jim’s arms swung up behind him unnatural, a howl from his lips and the ligature tearing till the ground no longer met his toes.

  Faller stood in front of him, then leaned in and spoke.

  Where is the cunt?

  His voice low and familiar and they waited in silence for the man to talk and when he didn’t Macken stepped past Faller and threw a fist at the hanging man’s face. Jim howled as his body contorted and Faller turned and gave Macken a look that made the other men step away. Faller stood still then reached into his jacket and produced his pipe. He looked at the man suspended before him, his rictus face flickering in the light, and he took the tin from his jacket and began to pinch tobacco. He tamped it down into the pipe’s chamber and put the bit to his lip and he lit it and sucked on it slowly, the smoke curling into the nothing light.

  Now, he said. Let me tell you a story.

  HE RAN HEART-JAGGED and bone-cold kicking wildly through the fields, brush and briar pricking at his clothes and deeper into his flesh and he did not notice the rain hissing on the leaves. The cold gnawed toothless but slowly wearing and he thought of warm things, a fire to lean on, the pure gleam of hot food.

  He was upon the place of his brother’s house when he heard the breathing of tethered horses and he advanced further till he heard low voices. Rough moonlight and he watched. Amidst the fanning of torches a gathering of men and the height of Faller among them and he crept closer till he saw a figure under the bough of a tree, two feet off the ground and suspended on a rope. The arms twisted backwards towards the shoulders, the joints wrenched seemingly from their sockets and the head hung low and then he saw the man was hanging by his thumbs. Two men were leaning into him talking and he saw in Faller’s hand the shape of a shearing hook and only when one of the others stepped back did he see the face of the hanging man and realize it was his brother.

  MINDSCREAM AND THE NIGHT pitched on top of him, his hurtling body a clamber of limbs trying to beat off the mauling darkness. From out of the abyss skeletal fingers of trees made snatches for his face as he ran from the horrors of what he had seen, briars like witches’ claws tearing at his flesh and he fought them with blind fury. His breath jagged at his chest for each breath was a shard of glass and onwards he tore, through scrub and sheugh and down a sharp decline till something took hold of his boot and held it firm and the ground reached up for him and his mouth bit hard upon the earth. Pain like a searing flash of lightning white hot and thunder crashed in his ears and he rolled down the ground weak and useless until stunned he lay, his breathing fevered, the earth wet against his face and he was arrested with the image of his brother hanging from the tree like some kind of Christ, broken and illumined among shadows and he saw the image of Faller, the man stepping forward with shearing hook in hand, the implement rolling easily between fingers and thumb, stepping forward towards the broken man, and nausea defeated him and he shook deep with coughing. It held him for a time till he could shake no more and he lay there sodden in the moist arms of grief, the moon watching through gray veil, and then he was upwards again, climbing into the mouth of darkness.

  RANTY’S HOUSE STOOD GOLDEN in the dawn, a lone beacon on the pass near the top of the hill. Drumtahalla this place is. No place at all and if it is a place tis not fit for a goat. The Meeshivin forest spread wide below, steeped still in night where Coyle had returned walking stiff till he had reached the old man’s door. He banged on it with a fist and heard the scuffle of bare feet and then the door opened a crack. An eyeball glaring and then the door opened wide and Ranty stood before him, small and square with a face cut from stone like he did it blind to himself and he rubbed his eyes with sleep to take in the sight of the man.

  Get in will ye.

  Ranty stabbed the rakings and forced upon them some kindling and Coyle went kneeling towards the reluctant flame with his hands. Ranty watched him shivering and told him to slough off the wet clothes and when he did so he threw him a blanket.

  RANTY WATCHED HIM SLEEP. A stillness in the face that allowed him to see Coyle as a boy the way he was that time, the quiet intensity of him, grew into the same face as his father surely. The dark caves of their eyes hollowed by the tongue of the wind. And the pair of them when their minds were fixed as stubborn as the pounding rain. Dragging that body of Coyle’s father out of the Glebe River. The wrinkled white of it and the life long gone out of him. Having to get that rope looped about the body. Glad the boy didn’t have to see any of that. What he saw was bad enough.

  He looked towards the window. Low light and the fall of rain like murmur. Rain that knows nothing but the pull of the earth. And the earth receiving it quietly.

  COYLE AWOKE TO SEE RANTY on a chair by the wall watching him. The hard slabs of the man’s cheeks.

  Ranty nodded. Hungry?

  His voice quiet and familiar.

  Aye.

  Coyle dressed in his damp clothes and followed Ranty outside. Rocks fisted out of peatlands that rolled downwards to the forest glistening in the catching dawn. Behind the house a steep slope and they walked up to where a heifer and a calf were grazing. Ranty went to the calf and wished her well the morning and tied a rope about her neck and tightened as if he were for strangling it. The animal stood legs outstretched and the veins on its neck thickened to the size of a finger and Ranty moved fast and with an expert hand produced a blade and he put it to the vein at the base of the animal’s neck and made an incision. The beast gave its blood, the fluid draining into a piggin he held in the other hand, and when he had enough he handed the jar to Coyle. He took the open wound between finger and thumb and squeezed it together and then he took a pin from his belt and pushed it through all the while talking softly to the animal and made good the wound with thread.

  He boiled the blood with oaten meal and they ate the blackened stew from cracked bowls and not a sound from the bare stone room but for the working of their jaws. They were finished when the old man began to talk.

  The look in your eye I’d say you must have done some kind of wrong. I’m hoping you ain’t gone and kilt nobody.

  He looked at the face before him black-eyed with tiredness.

  I only meant to hit him.

  Ranty sighed. I know you well but I fear I’m better off for not knowing. I donny know where you’re for but for a man running from the law I’d ge
t myself to Derry where it’s easier to be hiding.

  I ain’t running from the law.

  Then why are you running?

  Tis something else.

  Ranty kept staring at him and Coyle turned his head. Faller and his men, he said. They got Jim bad too.

  The old man straightened and put down his bowl and fixed his eyes unblinking on the younger man before him.

  I know the kind of man that John Faller is and I know some of the things he’s supposed to have done and if that be the case there be no running from him. So I’d be suggesting to you that you be done with this place for now and get to hiding in Derry and further abouts as far south as you can go or get yourself over to Glasgow for a bit for he’s no man to be messing with. No man at all.

  I watched and I did nothing, Coyle said.

  When John Faller was a boy he was known one time to have twisted a whipcord round a horse’s tongue, tore it clean out by the root.

  Coyle looked at him straight. I only came up here for the night. Sarah’s expecting. There’s the other wean too. I’m going back so I am.

  There’ll be leaving whether you like it or not. If it’s the family you want you can always send for them from someplace but there won’t be much of you left to be having a wife if it’s John Faller on the warpath you be meeting.

  Coyle looked at him a long while. Alright, he said. I hear ye.

  SOMETHING ABOUT RANTY’S PLACE that reminded him of the home he grew up in. Mote light dusting the dresser at the far wall. The place where he put the chair. He thought of that time the bird flew into the house. Panic mindless in its fluttering wings. Told Ranty about it.

  I mind it was a sparrow though I couldna be sure. Me and Jim falling about the place laughing. The bird battering itself off everything in the room, bashed the crockery off the shelf and beat itself off the window and ma screaming at it and the old boy chasing after it, hold on now, we’ll catch it so we will, gently now, and ma screaming just kill it will you and get it out. He caught it with his hands so he did, his face blank and concentrating, his breathing steady, one step at a time and the bird surrendering to him as he cupped it, head and beak poking out of his blanketing hands. Took it out of the house and set it free.

  THE SUN ARCED DIMLY ACROSS the woolen sky. The raw umber stretched endless before him, the hobbled backs of the mountains silver-scaled and that high moraine thickening into angry heads of black. He marched past sightless rocks furred green and mottled by the rain, Ranty’s blanket over his shoulders and his boots damp and the blasted land sodden and holed and bunched with flowering heather useless to nobody. Donny even know now where I’m going. Somewhere past Drumtahalla. This place doesn’t even have a name.

  The wind blew dry the clothes on his back and his lungs filled with coughing, the air forced out like a bellows and it stopped him each time and left him sore and shaken on his feet. A low cloud rolled lazy from the west where he could see Dunaff, the seaboard a silver thread, and a drizzle came down and he took no shelter for trees were few and far on this damned part of the land. He stopped by a stream and bent to the brown water and he visited a spot where a sheep lay down to die, its fallen bones undisturbed and its skull grinning upwards, and he sat a while in meeting with this ashen eyeless vessel, a monument timeless to its once-housed fleeting life.

  Walking became the way of him and he ignored his hunger and watched the earth turn its back from the sun. Pure darkness some two hours away and he thought of nothing now but to eat. The hills rolled down and in the violet light he caught sight of a farmhouse, a faint dull white on the flank of a hill. He walked in that way till he came near and then he bent down low and pulled a reed to chew. He watched and saw no movement at all but heard the sound of children from the back of the house and he waited. Dusk stewed deeper and he stole up by the cottage and slipped open the latch on the outhouse door. The clotted smell of must and web and a high ridge of turf and the breathing of a horse. He felt about and found some oats. Straw bales piled to the height of his waist and he climbed upon them and lay down and covered his body. Sleep fell quick, dark and dreamless, and he awoke at intervals to the sound of steps outside and then he would drift again. He awoke and found that he was coughing and he buried his arm in his mouth. The door opened slowly before him. A child.

  The low light fell where he lay and he could not stop the coughing and she saw where he was and stood before him, her face all snot and filth and a fearless curiosity in her eyes. She turned and ran and he cursed his luck and made to move but the figure came back by the door with another. The first child walked over and he lifted his head and pulled a face and wrinkled his ears and the child giggled and he put his finger to his lips and shushed her and he smiled and she smiled back and put her finger to her lips too. The other child turned and was gone and he knew he had to leave now and before he had time to stir he heard footfall outside, and then the silhouette full-sized of a man at the door. The man saw the stranger and he let out a call that came half muted of fear and surprise, and when Coyle jumped up the man reached for a pitchfork by the door. The shape in front of the man sprang and took him to the floor, a threshing of limbs and then Coyle was upright with the fork in his hand. He went to the horse and felt about for a saddle and came upon the shape of one and pulled it. There was a clatter as it fell to the floor and there was a soft groan from the man and Coyle left the saddle where it was and took the animal which he saw to be a pony and guided it around the fallen man and out of the shed. Then he stopped and turned back and stooped to the man and took his hat which lay on the floor and put it on his head.

  I’ll pay ye back.

  He stood in the yard and mounted the pony at a running jump. The animal more skeleton than flesh, bones gnawing into him and he drove his knees in tight. The child watched the stranger but she wasn’t smiling now and he felt the boring of her wide eyes into his back as he dug his heels into the horse and evanesced into the evening darkness.

  HE TRAVELED PONY-BACK throughout the night, his arms fastened around the dull heat of the beast, his mind slipping into slumber. No names had he for these places he was traveling for no track was he following, the man making but his own way through stretches barren where no man bothered to tread, the Donegal bog lying in swathes of indifference as far in the darkening as his eye could see. The moon fought the clouds and it was slow work in that haloed light, the animal unsteady on the hole-ridden moss and it showing no intention of doing what it was bidden. Bewitched it may have been as it veered rightwards instead of straight, or an intimation perhaps it was its own master intent on marking out some vast circle for cosmic purposes unknown.

  The moon slipped behind a wall of cloud. Around him the land concealed in swathes of endless black as if the world had been turned inside out and his eyes strained upon the mute void but there was nothing to fasten the eye, the hills cloaked invisible, the stars all fallen from the sky in this no-light of the devil. He proceeded in hope and determination and when it began to rain he hugged the beast tighter and prayed they were traveling in the right direction. The pony slowed and then stopped and he heeled it in its lungs and it started off again, stepping reluctantly, and then it stopped again and he fought at it some more with his feet. The world silent but for the breathing of the horse and the soughing of the wind and he cursed the damn darkness.

  And then the moon unfastened from the clouds and in the almost light he was able to measure from the line of the hills where they were and how far off course they’d strayed. The pony kept leaning rightwards and he’d fix it for straight but his mind began to drift and sleep would take him and then he would jolt awake to find the horse had resumed its strange rightwards path.

  He cursed the beast half mad so it was and tiredness began to weigh heavier upon him so that he drifted into sleep for longer each while. Fragments of faces puzzled together and whispered talking in tongues never heard but in the mind of the man and he managed to stay on the beast, arms clinging tight, but then he was off a wall a
nd he awoke with a start. He found himself upon the soaking heather and the pony a few steps away. He got up and went to the animal but it cantered off and he chased the stupid beast and nearly caught up with it but for a bog hole that caught his foot and when he was free he gave the pony chase but it displayed plans of its own that did not include this supposed new owner. The animal melted into the darkness and he widened his eyes but there was nothing to see. He was filled up with fury and he cursed again the beast and he listened for movement but heard nothing at all but for the flutter of a moth that winged near his face, the wind all skirling, and he turned and set off on foot, fighting the urge to sleep. He took off his boots and held them in his hands and took to running for heat.

  To the east a flame on the horizon and upon the morning air birdsong scattered. The land leaned downwards and he followed till he came to a turf cutter’s path. Sometime later the shape of a village hove into view and a thick spread of trees.

  RANTY SAT HIGH UPON THE SHELF of rock in the dawn light reading the terrain like some exotic bird wizened and unfeathered. He lit a pipe and sucked on it and rubbed his eyes. From the edge of the Meeshivin forest they came. Six dark shapes emerging from the trees and then the shapes merging into three as the men he figured upon mounted their horses. He watched them come in single file up the crest of the hill and he saw the procession stop awhile as the leader dismounted and bent to the ground. The wind sang softly through the pass and he saw the smoke from his pipe circle below and with his heel he put the tobacco out.