by Paul Lynch
I felt wild let down so I did and left, the dog barkin at me but keeping his distance, and I was down the road out past the gates when I heard her call out and next thing there she was behind me. She was runnin towards me bunchin her skirt and she said she was sorry but she didn’t want any trouble out of it and she said she knew who I was and why I needed to know.
She told me she always had ears to what was going on and she knew almost everything that happened in the house and I asked her why the trouble happened and she looked at me and then she just shook her head.
She said that Hamilton was nothing but bother drinkin all the time and gamblin away his father’s money and he wasna right in the head either. Then she said that there was no good reason for it, no good reason at all. And I remember I began to cry again I couldna help it and I said to her what did she mean. And she looked at me and her eyes began to get wet too and she took a hold of my wrist and I remember her hand had a chill in it that I could feel right to the bone and she said she was in the scullery one time and she overheard Hamilton talkin to Faller, telling him he wanted Coll out. And Faller was ignoring him because that was the kind of him and Hamilton was always trying to impress him and then Faller asked him finally what he had done and Hamilton said he had passed Coll on the road that same day and Coll did not doff his hat.
MAYBE THERE IS some plan for us we canny figure on but I’m worn out lookin. Coll’s mother told me before she died—ach the memory of her all weak like that now I donny want to be thinking about it. But before she passed she told me that all you can do in this life is to learn to accept loss. I always thought about that afterwards thinking she were wrong but I’m worn out now from hoping to see him again and I figure maybe she were right. You come into this world with nothin and you canny leave with anything. But I got to be strong for the children so I do and I got to keep hoping that he’s going to come back and that’s all there is to it. I mean would you just look at him Brigid, look at the wee rosy red cheeks on him, just the spit of him. And I named him after his father. Isn’t he a sight?
THEY SAT SEALED in the darkness, huddled as before in their separate groups and the air hot as hell. Their faces lit by trembling fires and the hollows of their eyes were pooled in shadow as if in their eyes it was the darkness of death that lay. Discord in their relations and turmoil in their hearts and they listened to the land silent and the crackle and spit of the fire and they heard the calls of those that had since begun to sicken. Men went crawling in the gloom for a place to void while the others around them heard their moans and tried not to listen. They drained the last jugs of whiskey into their cups and then drank the water and nobody was hungry.
Atop the valley he watched torch fires glimmer and move about slowly like fat fireflies. The sky vivid with stars and he could see the shapes of sickening men coiled about the place and to the east a bank of dark cloud slowly lidding.
He went to the tent and he lay down with the others to sleep. Closes his eyes. Lies in the lulling of memory and falls into the black hole of it and she turns and smiles and he is with her now and there is nothing to the night. He walks ageless up the stony path underneath the bending blackthorn blossom. Light now, an afternoon. The light golden and he smoothes her hair. Light on the nape of her neck and he holds her hand and warm is her flesh. Dog rose and elder and the bees dip drunk on the air scented sweet. The tinkling mirth of a small stream and they step over it, step past a house pale and unwatching, walk up the hill till halfway they sit. Glashedy island risen rocky out of the water, old man’s head of the sea watching whitely the winging birds. The earth, the air and the sea and she whispers into his ear breathily.
And he thinks. That this was it.
And he noticed he was awake and he sensed others were too. The air stagnant with heat and he saw some of the men sitting up and listening. He trained his ears to the low rumble coming from behind them and then someone stood up and shouted. Horses. And then it was upon them and it awoke to him what it was. The first report rolled off the valley in clattering shocks and another followed as the men surged out of the tent. All around them the stomping of hoofs and the blurring of torch fires wielded by horsemen encircling them, the maneuvers of some crazy war dance. He saw a man come down off a horse with a rifle in his hand and he sighted it walking into a tent that pulsed a moment later with a shock of white light, a momentary illusion as if it had been flared by sheet lightning before it was sucked into the darkness again. He heard the clatter of gunshot that followed and the tent illumined again and went dark and the air around him began to pulse with bitter light, thunder from firing guns and men began to scream. Everywhere he saw men with death grins wielding rifles from the neck and some of them by the side while others held torches so the shooters could see, the ground glowing red like coals beneath them. He ducked low and ran across the swale, guns snorting acrid fumes that curled invisible towards the sky and he heard them calling to each other, working the shanty in a circle, and he heard his own kind, men calling for mercy unheeded and then he snagged and stumbled over a body. He picked himself up and pitched atop another and the figure moaned under his weight. The wetness of the man’s blood warm against his hands and he crawled desperate and her face appears before him, more vivid than he has imagined and he is struck by the intensity of it, and he continues to crawl but he does not know where he is, everywhere it seems lie more bodies and the ground is biting at his hands and gnawing at his knees and he hears her voice softly, and he crawls harder, the night air a clamor of pounding anvil around him and he comes smack up against the standing legs of another. He turns and scrambles backwards and then he puts his arms over his head as if to shield him from what the man standing over him intends to do, sees the gun rising and he hears her voice over the sound of the shot and it is clear to him now what has become of him, a wallop like the kick of a horse to his side and his hands fall back useless. A fierce ringing in his ears and still he hears her voice softly, lie here my love, lie here against the warmth of my skin, and he lies into her then, the warmth wet at his side, lies back to sleep against the turning of the earth.
ALONE THE BLACKSMITH WORKS, slowly and with care. Just a shovel and his two bare hands and he digs the earth deep till it lies open and receiving. The morning spent and the rubble around him red and he looks at the pit and thinks it has to do. He passes the day struggling under their weight, each one trouble enough for one man, and when he has enough for a cartload he nurses the horse forward up towards the valley fill, the animal slow upon its dusted hoofs. It stands patient with low-bowed head while the man unloads the cart, each one first he puts onto his back and then he lays them gently upon the ground. When he is finished he turns the horse around and begins the trip again. All day he works as the sun crests the sky and then begins to fall and though he is hungry he does not stop to eat and he stops only to give the horse some water. The horse struggles to cart forward the last load and then the blacksmith makes it stop and he empties the cart and he stands there alone before slowly with his shovel he begins to close over the earth.
He bends to the firepit and lights a wooden torch and puts it to the shanty. The canvas smokes and catches fast as he lights each tent and then the whole place is burning, chutes of black smoke sent bitter into the air, and he turns through the blackened pools that mirror the blaze and begins walking. And then he sees. Lying gray in the mud—a ribbon. And he bends to pick it up, wipes the smear of wet dirt off it, holds it for a moment in wondering and then he lets it go, taken off his hand by the breeze.
The day then is done under a soundless sky and he looks up and sees red sky of evening. The west festooned with coming night and rain clouds thick and waiting. The breeze sighs long, shakes the leaves that lie strong on the bough awaiting the return of autumn. The land steps into shadow and the birds tuck their heads. All then is still till the clouds burst open, rain that begins to fall great and unheeded. The land is old and tremulous and turns slowly away from the falling sun.
Epi
logue
IT WAS A MORNING BURSTING BRIGHT SO IT WAS AND he was in the forest, the axe in his hand and the wood all coined thickly about him. He sent the axe into the sky and sank it quarter into the stump and in the dream he began to walk for home. Dew on the fields and he glossed his boots, the day just hung, a white saturate that told nothing of what was to come, no rain nor wind just a great stillness about and the silence broken by the faint reach of a dog’s barking. And he followed the path, bright upon the lane, bright upon the beech tree, came to a bend and stood listening, the morning near hushed, scent of earth and sap, and onwards he went, upwards the hill, a pebble glanced and sent rolling, and when he got to the door he shook off his boots and placed his feet on the slate step, his hand on the latch, and he heard the sound of their voices warmly and went in.
Acknowledgments
Gerard Stembridge and Hugo Hamilton for being generous and wise early readers. Shaun McLaughlin and Sean Toland for subjecting the book to local scrutiny.
Peter Lahiff, Richard Oakley, Ian Devlin, Donal O’Sullivan, Gavin Corbett, Declan Burke, Birch Hamilton and Jim Kelly for their help and support.
All the staff of the late Sunday Tribune for giving me a starting point. Mary Rose Doorly for pointing me in the right way. Sinéad Gleeson and Charlotte Greig for lighting the path. Ivan Mulcahy for taking the leap, and for being the kind of agent authors dream about—dynamo and sage.
My editor at Quercus, Jon Riley, his assistant Richard Arcus, and at Little, Brown, William Boggess and Asya Muchnick, for their passion and insight.
My mother and father Mary and Pat, my brother Derek and sister Louise, for their love and encouragement.
Anna for her unstinting love and support.
Thank you.
About the Author
Paul Lynch is an Irish novelist and critic. He has written for Ireland’s Sunday Tribune, the London Sunday Times, the Irish Times, the Sunday Business Post, the Irish Daily Mail, and Film Ireland. He lives in Dublin.
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Table of Contents
Title Page
Welcome
Dedication
Epigraph
Part I
Chapter I
Part II
Chapter II
Part III
Chapter III
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Newsletters
Table of Contents
Copyright
The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Copyright © 2013 by Paul Lynch
Cover design by Matt Tanner
Cover photograph © Jamie A. MacDonald / Getty Images
Cover copyright © 2013 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.
All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitute unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at [email protected] you for your support of the author’s rights.
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ISBN 978-0-316-23024-7
