by Paul Lynch
I suppose you think this a joke.
It’s a side of beef, Barnabas. Pat Glacken came around the other day and gave it to us. Can you explain to me now what’s wrong with it?
I won’t eat it.
Excuse me?
I can’t eat it.
Since when?
Any other animal but not that since after what’s happened.
But you ate beef last week.
Billy leaned over the table and spooned potatoes onto his plate. Don’t be stupid, Da, he said. Since when don’t you eat meat?
Barnabas gave the boy a long look that held no expression at all, turned to look at the bowl of spuds and reached into it and began to spoon them onto his plate and then he put the spoon back into the bowl with a clink and leaned back, looked again at the boy as if he did not know him, and what was building inside him coalesced and was conjured quick into a fury that took the boy unawares, the hand that swung out flatly towards him and whipped across his cheek. Billy bucking backwards, stood up in shock holding his hand to his face. In that same movement he threw a look to his father of pure hate. Eskra stood up speechless and Billy fled from the room and Barnabas looked at her mouth gasping wordless like a fish. He stared at her dead-eyed. I’ll break that boy’s bake if he talks to me like that again.
Eskra stared at him like she saw a different man before her, looked at his face so long his features altered and fell away into an exaggeration of its parts, his lips ballooning into a fattened sneer that became all of his face and she watched him fork spuds into that same swollen mouth indifferent. He ate with the kind of patience of a man who is feigning thought about his food and it was then that Eskra banged the table with her fist. She went around to Billy’s place and plated meat and potatoes and poured gravy over it and took it upstairs. When she came back down Barnabas was leaning back sucking on a cigarette holding in his hand his whiskey.
You’ve had enough of that, she said.
He gripped the glass and swirled it towards his lips. Eskra sat on the range chair defiant.
Barnabas.
He turned slowly towards her. I am the boy’s father and he will not talk like that to me not ever.
He was asking you a question, Barnabas. Since when don’t you eat beef?
A long sip of his whiskey for an answer.
Do you know what I think? he said.
I don’t care what you think any more. I’m just sick of it.
I’ve been thinking about the day it happened. How people round here responded. Everybody came to help us that day. Everybody.
She did not look at him.
Only that’s not true, he said.
He saw the damask of puzzlement on her face. What are you on about, Barnabas? she said. They all came.
He shook his head. They all came but one.
She could see when he stood that he wore a sly smile, like a man who had cracked the nut of a puzzle.
Everybody came who saw the fire and even Doctor Leonard who lives a good mile away, she said.
You’re right. Everyone within reach. Everyone within reach but one. You know who was here. Fran Glacken and those eejit sons of his. The McLaughlin clan–even that imperious fucking father of theirs dragging his beard all the way over here. Peter came cycling his bike in his fucking wellies. And the others came after when they heard. But there was one fucking bastard who didn’t show. And never came to offer his condolences neither.
She did not like what she saw in his eyes nor the way his hands fisted. The way he looked at her.
One fucking bastard, he said.
And who was that, Barnabas?
It was Pat the fucking Masher Doherty, he said.
Her face bunched up confused and Barnabas leaned back in the chair smiling to himself. He drained the glass of whiskey.
So what if he didn’t, she said. Pat the Masher is a quiet man who keeps to himself. He has enough of his own troubles, what with that son of his.
I reckon it didn’t suit him to help us.
That business before Christmas with his son. Sure he would have no reason to be upset with you about that. What happened with John the Masher wasn’t our fault. It wasn’t anybody’s fault.
Don’t be foolish, Eskra. Do you think that would not be remembered? From where that house is he could have done nothing but see that fucking fire, I’m sure of it. Watched us be burned out of the farm so he did. And I’ll tell you what, Eskra. I’ll tell you this. There might have been more to it than that. I can see the whole picture in my head so I can.
You need to stop this, Barnabas.
Stop what? he said. I’m not doing anything.
He stood and left the room without looking at her.
He awoke again from a malignant dream that spread its corruption within him. From what dark place in his mind it came he could not know. In his waking day these things lay hid and unimagined but at night they ripened like malign fruit and he awoke with relief into the dark certainty of the room, the assurance of Eskra’s breathing, the quiet mesh of the house. His tongue slapped his mouth and his mouth was dust and he rose up before the morning, walked downstairs amidst the tangle of dream. What lingered there was like dawn shadow from a ragged tree snaking a suggestive and ghastly thing upon the ground unreal but shrinking now in the light of the sun. He reached into what was left of the dream and saw the face of a woman he met on a road. Nightfall, her skin moon’s milk and her dark hair was curled and he asked her where he was going and she smiled and said nothing, walked alongside him, their hands touching and he asked her again and she turned around and said, all those who have died follow the same road, and when he looked at her again he could see she wasn’t young at all but an old woman with her hair gone grey and her skin sored and then that face became the face of Matthew Peoples and he saw the awful things that insected out of his mouth.
He lit a lamp for comfort and fixed the fire awake. Sawed bread for breakfast and ate it dry watching the dawn, a blue skate wing that left a wake of blood on the horizon. When it was light he went out, a rawing cold speckled by spit-rain that promised greater rainfall and he looked towards a huddling of dark cloud shaped like an anvil. He went to the byre and began to clear out the remains, his hands reddening in the cold. He pulled at the charred wood, lifted fire-cracked stones, kicked cattle bones that lay concealed in the ashes. Caught amidst the byre the linger of the fire’s stench. The metalwork shaped now like the letters of some occult alphabet signing for him sounds that led to a dark and final truth about the nature of man and beast. He removed pieces of the ruined remains to a site behind the new barn that he had begun to use as a dumping ground. He did not want to return yet to that taper field. Back and forth with the wheelbarrow all day to make with char a small dark hill. Nature had taken to the barrow as if it were a coat, gnawing the front of it until it was holed above the wheel. He could see the ground as he walked while the barrow leaked its load, left a trail of black dust upon the grass. The tangled ruins of the byre began to take shape with other ruined things behind the new barn, a cutting bar rusted to reddened bones as if it had laid down weary and died there. An old stove laughing at its predicament with hysteric grill teeth. Machine tools worked and put down by hands long gone.
He thought often about Matthew Peoples. Remembered the first time he saw him. Watched him lumbering up the yard, a white moustache on his face at the time that could have hoofed a horse. Jesus, if a whole tree could walk, he thought. Figured him for useless but Matthew soon learned him. That man could turn a hand to anything, could hedge and harrow, ditch and reap and sow. Could cure croup even. Told Eskra to sluice the young boy’s chest and throat with a sponge in coldest water and sure it worked. Knew how to cure fistula on a horse too. Told Barnabas he needed a toad and Barnabas laughed at him but Matthew turned up the next day with a sack and produced a toad from it, a warted and bloated thing with eyes slow-blinking, a strange duplicate of Matthew Peoples himself. He held it in the air towards Barnabas. Hold it to the horse’s
hole, he said. Goan fuck yerself, said Barnabas. Matthew leaning back laughing. He began to rub the back of the toad off the sore. Keep yer head back, he said, for there’s a wild smell off it. Barnabas half-turning his head in disgust. I’d say there is. You can stick your head up its hole for all I care, I won’t be going anywhere near it. He called Matthew a juju man but Matthew stopped laughing and looked at him puzzled. There’s no magic in it. It’s the milk from the toad’s warts will ease it so it will. He threw the dead toad into a ditch like a useless flap of skin. Said it would take about two weeks and sure as he said it, it did.
Eskra watching him at the window. Saw a shift inside him as if a mass of great weather were moving on to slub over distant hills not his own, took with it wind and pressure. Said to herself, finally, he’s back to himself again. He’s moving on from what’s happened. She saw him bending to lift what was left of the purlin beam, oak a century old made light as pumice from the fire, and then he was bending down again, came up with a white rock in his hands shaped like a skull.
That same evening he stood in the light of the hall laid out in its shaded evening tapestries. He took his coat off the hook and sleeved it, stood a moment searching his pockets. He went into the kitchen and she watched him take the car keys from a hook on the dresser.
Don’t tell me you are going to the pub, she said.
I’m not, he said.
We can’t even afford the rationed petrol.
His finger tapped his nose. Don’t worry about petrol. If we need any Peter McDaid can get his hands on some.
As he turned he stopped and stared out the window.
What is it?
He spoke as he was going out the door. Ah nothin. I thought somebody was coming in. Twas just somebody going past on the lane. A wee girl. Looked like one of Goat McLaughlin’s granddaughters. The one that always looks cold.
An acid evening in which the world wanted some kind of blessing or warmth and he stood in it and took a gill of air and released it from his lungs. Light in his mind beginning to press into the darker reaches as if he awoke to find some huge impediment had been freely rolled. The light of a future looming before him for his eyes to see it. He parked the car outside the cemetery and found the plot in the darkening light. The earth still raw and the brown earth night-shifting into shades of purple. He saw the plot bore a temporary wooden cross. He did not know how old Matthew Peoples was. Never even thought about it. He could picture the man running towards the fire and the living thing that was his body in movement and the mind housed within, all that was that made the man, and he stared into the heaped earth trying to imagine that man as bones. The light within him gone as if in that moment he was taken down the smoke made him instanter into dust. He stared at the earth sat loose and in clods and the grass beginning to grow unevenly, began to smooth out a large ribbed footprint on the graveside. Saw the shape of his hand on Matthew Peoples’ back, the flat of his hand that sent the man in. What rose inside him was great sorrow and he swallowed hard, felt wet on his cheek. To reach into the ground. To breathe life back into those bones. He wanted to speak, to say he was sorry, but the words sat dumb in his mouth. Finally he spoke under his breath. It was my own responsibility.
He turned and found the path towards the gate, took note as he went of the differing markers, headstones and crosses some of them standing as tall as a man, sized as if they were made to cast replacement shadows. The sky vast and darkening above. The gnawing ageless spit-rain. He saw how time made even stonework perish, the torque of the earth slowly twisting the stones so that eventually even the markers for the dead would be tossed out and the earth would make itself clean. What are these graves for anyhow, Matthew, but for the living and not for the dead, and when the living have left this life all remembering will pass with them, and you and me and everyone else will lie forgotten and stoneless and the sky goddamn the same over it. So what’s the point of my saying sorry to you anyhow? Tell me what good will it do? Tell me who am I even saying sorry to?
The hinges on the cemetery gate squawked like a hungry gull and the sound soared sharp and was lost in the bruising sky. He turned around to latch the gate and his eye travelled to the sudden shape of Baba Peoples standing over the grave, as if she had taken form from the matter of evening itself, its darkening air and what it held concealed, or it seemed to him she could have ghosted from the thick stand of trees that huddled behind the cemetery wall in their perpetual sorrow, had sat there watching him as he stood over the grave, and he knew in that dim light her eyes were upon him.
Two days later. She hummed along to the melody on the radio, violins that had become sweeping and urgent and reached upstairs to the bathroom in spate. She poured hot water into the great tin tub and put onto the floor the cast iron pot and ran her finger through the water. She stripped and stood naked and eased in her toes and then lowered herself into the heat that stung her all over softly as if she had laid herself down amongst nettles. The shut door dulling the sound of the music. It reached her now melancholy and distant like the rumour heard of a stranger whose life was cut short. Behind the music she could hear the dull pings of Barnabas beating metal free with a hammer. She closed her eyes and tried to dream but what coursed from her thoughts was bitterness. This goddamned place. She cursed the obstinate notions that brought them here and she cursed the poverty of the place that had not changed in one hundred years it seemed to her, people living with next to nothing and happy to live as if the world had not changed, a few cars and lorries now about the place but that was all, and the poverty that remained was like an unwillingness that shined out of them, a temperament more obstinate than rock. And that look they wore she saw was ingrained, the hard stare of suspicion, a look in the eye like some biblical judgement that summed you up as foreign and told that unless you were born there you were considered none. She dropped her head under the water and saw her family. When they first came to Carnarvan and how they spent Barnabas’s money easy and had within two years what it took others three generations to achieve. What was always in the air around here was something that would not be named by others but she would name it resentment. We do not deserve this after all that we have done. She hinged tighter her knees and slid deeper into the water until the echoes of the world began to lose their soundshape, the thud of her elbow on the tin, the staccato clattering of Barnabas, the start of rain. The noise it made on the roof amplified through the bath into something huge and susurrus, like the earth had found form to speak its secrets about the meaning of loss and other such things if only she could understand its revelations. And she thought then she heard the sound of knocking downstairs and she opened her eyes to the ceiling, through the water the ceiling plaster a white quavery thing she saw like a different plane of existence, and when she broke the surface of the water to listen, the world surged full-sounded and there was nothing at all to the day, no sound of knocking while the violins on the radio had ceased.
He rewrote some strange dark letter for the sky with the leaking wheelbarrow, through the yard and out onto the grass around the back of the new barn a twisting shape like the single arm of a swastika. Of its char and detritus the byre began to be cleared, and the floor stood open to the weather with its soot colour. Behind the hay barn was a dry-stone wall and he saw in passing a rock in the grass that had fallen over. The knit-stone was built by the hands of men that probably knew his forefathers, stood now like some demonstration against time. He bent to the loose rock and refitted it, and the stones kissed with a satisfactory smack as the wall took again its endurant appearance.
A turned tap of rain. Through shirt to flesh the rain-cold leeched and it took him a minute to notice. When he did he walked across the yard to the cover of the empty stable. He rolled a cigarette and watched the tobacco ash fall an aberrant spring snow, bellowed smoke into the rain that became one with the all-grey. The blackened heads of the mountains gauzy in the rain and watching down upon him like some convocation of elders huddling in judgement. Where
he stood he could see Cyclop in the pasture field marching with an enormous bone in his mouth. His free hand clenched into a fist. Stupid fuckdog’s as stupid as it fucking gets. He threw the fag to the flagstones and heeled it and became one with the rain, marched into the field where Cyclop was sitting. The grass had grown to an unruly green and bore in patches sprouting thistles like ornaments of fleur de lis. Cyclop watched him coming with his nose to the earth and his teeth clamped upon the bone, a long femur twice the length of his head and his orange eye lit with satisfaction. Barnabas called out to the dog from the edge of the field and began slowly towards him and Cyclop sat up as if he had taken a perfect read of the man’s intentions, began to make a wary retreat towards the trees. The dog bit down twice on the bone to get a better purchase on it and Barnabas soon caught up and they stood under the canopy of a sycamore tree beside the old beech that sat the way it did in silent pleading. Barnabas saw the end of the bone was shaped as big as a man’s heart. He grabbed hold of the bone and began to pull, his hand around the heart-piece, you stupid fuckdog you, and Cyclop dropped down and splayed his legs, held tight onto the bone, his lips drawing back to reveal a swell of sharp teeth and glistening pink gums. Tussling shadows on the hard-rooted ground they became, Cyclop wagging his tail and his eye shining humorous until he took a boot to his flank from Barnabas and he dropped the bone, walked off as if he had it within his nature to be insulted. The bone slimed with dog spit and Barnabas took it and carried it till he reached a ditch and threw it towards the brambles. Made a slug trail on his trousers when he wiped his hand on them.
He began through the pasture field towards the house and it was then that he saw the far shape of a woman leaving through the front gate. He marched upon the rain-speckled flagstones and went into the house, called out to Eskra, the room empty. He saw the teapot on the range and a single cup half full on the table and he poured the tea, stewed now into an approximation of bog water, drank it and wiped his lips. Why do I always get the cold tea? He called out for Eskra. The radio silent. Upstairs the floor creaked and there came the soft padding sound of his wife barefoot on the landing. He looked up the stairs and saw her looking down at him, her head and torso swaddled in towels, the blue and red of her agitated. What are you shouting for? she said.
