by Paul Lynch
She held him and brushed her hand through his wire-dark hair and saw in him the little boy she was holding, saw full and clear the measure of his distress. When his breathing had calmed she led him upstairs and sat him on the bed and watched him curl childly, went to the curtains and closed them. His voice small in the room. I’m just so tired, he said. She sat on the chair and watched him fall asleep, daylight pressing through a gap in the curtains to light a daguerreotype jellyfish upon the wall, while the rest of the room became an ocean of unlit depths, like the inscape of his mind she was fearful for. How he had aged this past while she saw, the dark of his hair beginning to whiten at the sides and it seemed to her that life had worried more lines into his eyes. Before she left the room she leaned over him and saw in that dim light those lines now smoothed as if only in sleep he could find repose.
Later, the sun hid while a marble-grey sky let loose rain with insistence. She saw the rain speckle and leap from the flagstones, saw through the cataract of rain towards the mountains where a wash of light had brazened itself and made everything that was dim and dun under it brilliant. She brought him vegetable soup and tea and he sat up with the pillow to the small of his back. She drew open the curtains and settled on the bed, saw a rare look in his eye. He leaned towards her and coughed. I didn’t mean to, he said.
We should take you to the doctor.
I could still smell it, Eskra.
Smell what, Barnabas?
The fire.
Barnabas, the smell is all gone. There’s nothing left of it. I’ve been cleaning like a char woman. The wind took the smell all away.
I could smell it in my clothes. Buried in the fibres. I want all them clothes tossed out, Eskra.
Those clothes have been washed pure clean. You didn’t smell it yesterday in the same clothes when you were wearing them. Where do we have the money now to get new ones?
He sipped on his tea and grimaced.
What’s wrong with you now? she said.
This tea is only lukewarm.
She shook her head at him as she spoke. It might help if you got yourself busy, Barnabas. Get yourself ready for when the insurance comes in. Get you out of your funk. It’s natural so it is for a man to feel down on himself after what’s happened. But there’s so many things that need doing around the place. You need to get going again.
He said nothing and shifted and gathered a heap of blanket in his fist. Then he looked at her, those blue eyes that had their vice-hold on him. Eskra, he said, but she began to talk over him and what he heard sounded like bone in her voice, as if she had grown new strength having to bear up the extra weight of what was for all of them. You need to start fixing up outside, she said. That byre needs to be cleared out and made ready for the rebuilding. There are broken walls that need fixing. The farm is going to waste. The fields are a disgrace. The land needs to be maintained till we get it to rights again. It is time now for you to put your mind to it. And don’t worry about the vegetables. The early cabbages are near ready and I’ve already planted the rest.
Eskra.
Do you hear me now, Barnabas?
He sighed. Aye. All right.
And, Barnabas.
What?
I can’t look any more at those dead animals.
He had come to her, he used to say, like an angel from the clouds. Saw you first from five-hundred feet in the air. Through the noise of riveting steel that could bend the sky out of shape. I watched you above that bellyache of traffic. Heard on the concrete the press of your footsteps. From that height you develop eyes for seeing. You stood out from the crowd. Your eyes glittering up at me. The swan sheen of your neck. I was only waitin for you.
It was impossible, of course, but Eskra liked the story. You latch onto small details and from them write the book of your life. Before she had met him she had been watching the skyscraper go up between Nassau and William Street, would walk around the block from the typists’ shop where she worked to spend part of her lunch at the barricade. She would squint her eyes and imagine the men on top and could not grasp in her mind such daring. One evening she stood behind Barnabas in line at a cobbler’s shop, saw him peering into a book while eating a sandwich, and she just knew he was a steelworker. She followed him up the street. Excuse me, she said. I’m sorry, but you are one of them steelworkers, aren’t you? He turned around and eyed her sly-smiling. Aye, he said. He held aloft a pair of ragged resoled boots. The one thing you need the most working high steel is good shoes. A pair that fit you just right and the soles all properly on them. You want those shoes to feel like your own feet. I never spend money on hardly anything but drink and good boots. A gleam of mania in the way he laughed and his face stained with grease and the ivory of those eyes in the look that held her. She had to ask what it was like up there, if there was a danger he could fall, and he met her question with a hurt look as if he had never considered it. He pointed towards the sky. We’re up so high I swear to you now I could reach the clouds, but I never look down. And it was then she bade him a smile. My parents are Irish too, she said. What county are you from?
He saw the way she hid her hands, fingers curled like a bird’s beak hid up cardigan sleeves that were pulled out of shape. Saw how her hands were rashed red and scabbed in places and that she hid them because she might be ashamed of them. She saw when he talked how he liked to use his hands, a gesticulator, moving the air with knowledgeable movements like he was working metal, pushing and pounding at the air, heaving huge girders or hammering rivets. She had learned to speak with her fingers hid and relied more on her eyes to do her bidding, but when she forgot her embarrassment and used her hands to speak, she drew the air before him with gossamer, gestures soft and diaphanous like spiderwebs.
Barnabas put on his coat and slapped on his cap and stepped out into the yard. From the haggart, Cyclop spied on him like a sniper, his nose barrelled between his forepaws. A single squinting eye that watched Barnabas walk out the gate and then the dog stood and yawned, a great silent saurian roar all fanged pearls so that it seemed the animal’s entire nature in that moment changed, took the spirit of some kind of ferocious bawling beast, and then the shape-shifter’s mouth returned the animal to its tamer form. The dog followed the man out the gate, giddied after a bird with a wag of his tail and made zags in the hedgegrass following his nose. Barnabas heard the rustle of the dog and he stood and called for Cyclop to come along but the dog paid him no heed, followed a trail that took him into a ditch and disappeared. Barnabas shook his head and shouted after him and heard emptiness after his own voice. Stupid fuckdog.
Peter McDaid’s house was a five-minute walk beyond the curve of the road and the air here was different to him, unsullied, met his nose a sharp, clean thing that held what he remembered to be pure. The route sided with hedgerow trees of willow and oak and between them sat hawthorn and holly. He saw a robin trail the air, a brisk and flitting red that shot into the trees. McDaid had built a flat-roofed brick shed across the road from his house so that his yard was the narrow lane itself. His dog, Queenie, made the middle of that lane her kingdom and sat now upon a throne of high shadow, a mongrel with a regal, long face and in her look was a register of suffering that could be read almost as human. Come here to me you, Barnabas said. She rose up and came a distance towards Barnabas and sat and waited for him to ruffle her ears and then with a red-stubbled tongue she licked the hand of her subject. McDaid appeared on the front step bare-chested, his short legs in his welly boots. He hawked up phlegm and spat it into the yard and watched the way it bubbled.
Yes, Barney.
Yes, Peter.
McDaid put his hands on his hips. Did ye hear about Ruddy up in Birdhill? Buck eejit. A heap of his cattle escaped onto the road and roamed their way into the grounds of Glebe house. Trampled the living shite out of the lawns. Went at it like they were squashing grapes, making holy wine for the priest. Devaney must have thought it was Hitler invading if the Jerry weren’t already on their way back to Berlin. R
uddy had to spend the next two days filling in all the holes in the grass, a terrible mess they made. Going around the place with a bucket and shovel. As McDaid spoke, the claws around his eyes tightened and the lines around his mouth made a puppet of his lips, and then he leaned back and laughed a whoop skywards. When he saw Barnabas was not even smiling he stopped and shook his head. Since when did you become such a dryballs?
Fuck knows.
That’s wild funny so it is.
Aye.
Going around the place, a bucket and shovel. Like he was at the fucking seaside. McDaid slapped his belly and began to whoop again.
Barnabas rubbed his cheek with his knuckles. Peter, I need a wee bit of help.
Let me guess. You want help clearing up that field?
Are you a mindreader or what?
Eskra might have come to see me yesterday so she did. Mentioned it to me.
Did she now.
Aye. Sure she can’t be waiting for you to yank yer socks up.
Go in then and put on your flitterjigs.
McDaid stepped into the house and began to curse and knock things about and he came back out with a dirty vest in his fist. He stood looking at the dog and then he necked through the vest and nodded up the road scratching an armpit. What tools have we got? Let me bring my hooring shovel just in case.
They went to the field with their tools slung like rifles over their shoulders and they stood wary at the perimeter taking in what they saw. Carrion birds circling and making terrible noises in the sky like warnings. The men swung their shovels down and leaned against them and McDaid spat venomously. He looked at Barnabas. Would ye not heap them up and burn them proper instead?
Maybe I don’t want to smell again the stink of their dying.
Arrah fuck.
Barnabas began to walk forward into the field and he stopped and kicked the half-burnt corpse of a cow. Fuckdog, he said.
They walked to the bottom of the field and stood in the shadow limbs of the trees and started. The pitch and slice of spade into sod and they turned the grass, put it face down on the field, bared the raw earth to them. They began to dig their way down and the ground was soft and then two feet deeper they began to meet stones that screeched in protest when the shovels struck. They dug around them and pulled them free with their hands and Peter McDaid rubbed the muck off some and said these’ll do surely for a wall when yer stuck. Every once in a while Barnabas fell to coughing and McDaid watched him suck on his fag as if the cigarette and his lungs were unrelated things and he shook his head in wonder. Jesus, Barney, do you want us to stop for another day?
In the field the sun spun shadow clocks around the bones. The men began to disappear down into the earth and the smoke from Barnabas’s fags clung to the interior. McDaid took off his vest and threw it out of the hole, stood bare-chested to the work like some misshapen vision of a warrior red-faced, swarded upon the shoulders with black matted hair that he would use to wipe the sweat of his forehead. They dug the hole down to the height of their chests and stood in it ten feet long and then Barnabas climbed up out of it, put a hand down to pull McDaid up. They sat for a few minutes smoking on the old stone wall and when they were finished they began to walk through the field.
Nothing left of some of the burnt animals but heads and hooves that looked as if they had been discarded by itinerant folk who just picked up after a huge feed and left. Darkened rib cages pointed at them like petrified fingers. Flies fed upon the corpses and the sound of their buzzing thickened the air and McDaid carried his vest hitched to his nose. The corvids pitched upon the trees and the perimeter walls to watch with their mechanical heads or they circled beady-eyed and raucous. The men walked about the field surveying the mess, over by the stone wall where one of the cows had collided with it, sent the top rim of stones sprawling, and they travelled around by the old oak that stood sentry over the fields some two hundred years but had never been witness to anything like this.
Barnabas went back to the yard and fetched some rope and looped it around the shanks of the lesser-sized animals and they began to drag them towards the pit. Some of the cattle were too big to move by themselves and they left them as they were to be dragged by the horse. One cow had the throat burned out of it but for the muscle of tongue that lay exposed and cooked as if ready to be eaten. They stood over another that lay near intact in the middle of the field, its front legs curled delicate as if it had been sleeping. The way its head rested belied the violence of its death, the skin flayed into a charred leather that lay pleated like finger folds at its rear and the sheen off it like new shoes. McDaid rested his foot upon it and put on his vest. Get me a knife and I’ll cut you a pair of brogues, he said.
Barnabas was silent.
Arrah, Barney, the big serious head on ye.
The birds had been to work on the carcass, took the sweet eye jelly from the sockets while the ridges of the animal’s back were burned black as if the fire had only licked up its spine and left the rest to brown in the heat. They walked up the low rise of the field and at the crest they saw one cow lying on its back as if it had been stunned by a blow. Barnabas stared at it. God damn, he said. The legs of the cow were starred to the skies in a salted biblical manner, its head stretched back and its body stiff as stone. They looped rope around the shanks and tried to pull the animal but the dead beast was stubborn to them, as if it had enough of what already was and it flashed fire-browned teeth at them in defiance. Barnabas went for the bay horse.
A lemon sun swung pale arcs of light that shined the horse’s flanks and made her fawn. She flicked her dark tail as she sauntered. Barnabas rubbed the dark poll hair and began to talk to her. Rotten business here old one. Hope you don’t mind looking at it. Just do like me and hold your nose. He ambled the horse through the gate and saw McDaid standing bent at the edge of the pit. Barnabas looked at the corpse and wondered if the horse had any sense of it. Aren’t these your brethren? he said. The horse breathed easy and stared superior into the distance, the darkening fuzz of head hair to match the colour of the hills watching down on them. Barnabas lined up the horse and tied the rope to the harness and got her to pull and the slack rope stretched taut until the carcass was dragged into the hole. McDaid kicked dirt after it and shook his head. Jesus Christ, sir, he said. That’s some lot of beef.
Barnabas reached into his pocket and began to roll two fags and he lit them both in his mouth and proffered one to McDaid. The man took the fag and grimaced as he sucked on it.
You know what bothers me, Peter?
What, sir?
When you pulled me out. I have no memory of it.
Arrah, Barnabas.
I canny stop thinking about it. That I might as well have been dead. His voice trailed off. I’m wondering if that is what it was like for Matthew Peoples. Quick, like.
McDaid chugged on his cigarette and blew it out good and messy. He began to pull up his vest and revealed over his hip a scar with a star-shape. When I was fifteen I got gored by a dunty bull. Knocked me clean into another field. One minute I was awake hearing some vague shouting not wondering that all the blather was directed at me and then the next minute I wasn’t. Out like a lamp. When I came to I was in a kitchen. The great black in between, Barnabas, and I reckon that’s the way of it. One minute you’re here and the other you’re not and you won’t know nothing of it. That, at least, is what I hope.
Barnabas mussed the air with smoke. It’s strange all right. When they carried you to the kitchen you might as well have been dead for all you remember of it. The thing is, when you took me out of that fire, Peter, there was a minute there where I was a fucking ragdoll too. That’s what I canny stop thinking about. That I was half dead and now I am not but I did not know it. That I had no knowledge of it. I cannot decide if that should be a comfort. That I’ve had some experience of what dying might be like.
McDaid snorted smoke out his nose. Fuckin bog philosopher, he said. You weren’t a ragdoll. You were a heavy-arsed cunt that nearl
y broke me back and you were still breathing when I had ye. And you’re the same heavy-arsed cunt now, just look at ye. He winced on his fag and took a deep last drag and flicked it into the pit.
At the far side of the field the corpse of one cow remained and they let the horse wander as they walked towards it. The carcass lay as if dropped by the jaws of some darkling tide. McDaid looped the rope around the shanks and Barnabas went for the horse that stood hinged upon herself to nuzzle at her flanks. When they had dragged the last carcass into the pit each man took his shovel to the earth that sat in two high mounds either side of it. The dead animals all in a stinking limb sprawl that hurt the eyes to see it and Barnabas had to turn away, stare towards the trees, the swaying yellow of distant whin, a cloud shape over the hills a mutant triangular fish. He drove the shovel into the earth, sent the dark dust down on top of the animals. When the pit was filled and the ground heaped over, that lemon sun had swung low for the afternoon. McDaid stood over the pit smiling and began to make the sign of the cross. In nomine patris et filii et spiritus sancti.
Amen to that.
They began across the field to the horse and Barnabas spoke. Don’t you think it strange, Peter? That somebody someday will be lifting you about. In my case, Eskra. Washing my body. Dressing me for a funeral. Combing my hair. Putting me in a wooden box. Carting me about the place then on a carriage horse and me having no say in it. You know, he said, because of what you did, whenever it is my time to go, Eskra can hold me and wash me. That’s something I canny say for Matthew Peoples.
The men were silent. Barnabas looked up through the trees towards the tapered field and saw in his memory Matthew Peoples standing in it, the man’s big-boned shuffle. The slow blink of his eyelids. He began to roll another two cigarettes but McDaid put up his hand to say he’d had enough and Barnabas continued with just the one and smoked it. As he did so a blackbird swung down and hitched a ride on the horse. It paraded its amber beak as if it had dipped to drink in a Christmas orange and what it drank filled its eyes with rings of coloured juice. The watching carrion birds had scattered and Barnabas looked up and saw two rooks linger on the wall talking noisily till both of them agreed on some point of conversation and took off. The horse turned and the way the sun’s shadow fell upon her cast the blackbird like a pterodactyl. It stretched its wings on the horse’s flank hugely. The ground full of dark lesions as the men began to walk from the field and Peter McDaid spoke. Eskra says there’s insurance due in. How long have ye to wait?
