by Paul Lynch
Tell me now what is realistic. Tell me.
All right I will. The costs of rebuilding the byre. The loan on the new barn. Having to pay for new animals. The cost of feed. Labour. How long we’d have to wait before there would be money again. Years and you know it. And how would we live in the meanwhile? Tell me. I always said not to keep putting all our money back into the farm but you would not listen to me one bit. You always did your own thing. You were foolish with your money in America, spending it like there was no tomorrow and you were foolish with it here, despite my saying it to you.
And what would I do now in America, me in the prime of my middle years, near enough to be growing old?
There’s many a man who went to work older than you. My father did it.
Aye and the work kilt him. He died younger than me because of it.
As he spoke he saw he had wounded her, enjoyed the look it gave her. And the boy? he said. What about him? This is what he knows. This is what we wanted for him. That this be the place for him and no place else.
This place is nothing but damnation.
He stood there eyeing her with malice and she said nothing more and he saw the fight was gone out of her. She turned away from him. Where is that Billy now? He didn’t come home from school.
Wait, Eskra, he said. I have a trick up my sleeve. Just you wait and see.
Part III
HE AWOKE IN A rose dawn and saw a vision of what could be again. What came to him brought its own light of revelation and he lay there in the grasp of it, saw how the byre could be again. Eskra in the still of sleep and in that soft light made porcelain, her arm ragged-thrown as if it were wood washed upon the shore of some dream. He dressed quietly and went downstairs, rested his hands upon the sink and leaned towards the shaving mirror. Took a long look at himself. Who he saw was a man with eyes clawed by age and that man now rust-bearded, as if some transfiguration had taken place–another man emerging beneath his dark-haired older self, held brightly by a renewed and burning spirit. He reached for the razor and held it over his hand and it was then that he pressed the blade’s edge into his palm, drew it. His blood opened to the world and he smiled at the pain and he made a blood handshake with himself. He reached to his beard and took between the fingers of both hands the rust-wire and pulled at his cheeks until it seemed the skin came elastic off his bones, could feel in his hands the beard’s wiry resilience. Who he was now and that was it. He saw how he was after the fire and looked upon that yielding man with disgust. In his mind a vision of the byre stood again on the earth and he saw what would be done and he would call upon all that old strength to move the heavens and the earth, could feel spring’s sap vital in his veins, that great power giving rise again to the trees and that which made green the trembling earth. He clasped his hands again into that bloody handshake. To be whole man again. A man who will not yield.
He stood staring out the kitchen window, saw the flagstones burning, how they seemed to hold within them their own light. When he stepped outside for water, to his bare feet the flagstones were cold. A supernal arc of reddening light expanding westwards over the mountains and he saw it as if it were warding off his own darker forces, that titanic of dark in his mind brought into veiling white light.
Later, he put on his boots, went to the stable and to a shelf that held a miscellany of old things and he nosed through them and put some items in an old and dusty satchel. The horse lying down watching him and he kept the silence between them till the horse nickered a soft hello and blinked. He reached out a smile towards her.
Embered fields held him as he walked. He heard his own breathing, the sound of the sea coned to his ear, watched a large bird wing and dive distantly, pump the air skywards again. The morning had reached its full brightness when he found the place and it was as he had remembered–a swathe of deadland dressed in rushes and stark trees that stood out of it lonely. The land here seemed more ancient, looked like swidden land that had been razed centuries ago and forgotten. It was held now in title by nature and sat upon the edge of the mountain bogland with a narrow fir forest at its westerly wing. That bogland came rolling down from the mountains all malign purpose, a creeping slower than time in its dun cloak that swept out all that was green. Travelling to claim the music box of the trees.
He walked bent through the rushes, looked till he found them, pellet-like between the sedge grass and the mud. Discovered their tracks. He followed the markings and figured out the run of a trail and he walked over to a lone ash tree and pulled a bowie knife from a scabbard in his satchel. He cut off a young branch and sheared it clean of its buds and he walked back to the beat and followed the path to a narrowing where the earth rose about a foot high on each side. He drove the rod perpendicular into the earth, took a wire noose from the satchel and rested it on his lap, removed some string, tied a slipknot twice around the rod to secure it. He tied the snare to the string and hung it over the track the distance of his fist beneath it. Took some twigs and stuck them through the hoop in the grass to hold the noose. His breathing came slow and concentrated and he thought about the smell of his hands on the wire, looked down at them red and thick-skinned with eclipses of dirt in his nails. Saw what little he had been doing with those hands all this time since the fire. He laid three other traps and it seemed to him the bright morning could not last and it did not. Through the haze came the distant sound of an airplane. He listened to it, a lone and angry insect buzzing against the sky’s window, watched the sunless noon pass over him before he began tracking up the bog hills, shaping in his mind what it was he would have to get done to make real his vision.
He came into the house all storm energy, threw his coat on a chair and sought her out by the table. He stood over her with a smile on his face that reached up to his ears near lunatic, held a rabbit aloft like some kind of carnival prize. The gleam of a killer’s eyes and the eyes of the rabbit glassed blind to her. She drew away from him in mock disgust. A drop of blood dripped in slow fashion towards the floor and she stood quickly, pointed.
Would you look at that, he said.
Get that thing into the sink.
He put the rabbit in the sink and began to rub his hands in satisfaction, looked at her again smiling fulsome, a long time since she’d seen him like that and she found herself returning the grin.
And do you know something else? he said.
You are going to tell me, I suppose, that you’ve cleaned the county of rabbits.
Naw, he said. I’ll rebuild the fucker so I will.
Rebuild what?
The bloody byre. I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before. That it’s possible. And I can do it without it costing hardly anything. I dreamed last night of a fellow who was about when I was a wee lad, a memory I’d long forgotten. They used say he’d pay for nothin not even the stone for his house from the quarry. I heard that he built his own house himself from the rocks out of his own field. One of them thran lunatics.
You are hardly going to do that, Barnabas.
No, will you listen to me. I’ll get stone and wood. Ask about. There was once a time when people built what they could with what they could get. There’s always ways and means. There’s a heap of blocks lying unused at Fran Glacken’s and maybe he’ll give them to me. And we won’t spend a penny. And we’ll use the leftover savings to buy the cattle when I’ve done with it. We’ll be as right as rain again.
As he spoke her face rose into a smile of appeasement and then it fell again. I don’t know if this is a good idea, Barnabas. You’ll get no help from those around here. You never did unless you were paying for it.
What did you think I thought would happen, Eskra? That they would all roll up here in their horses and carts in a big line of solidarity, with manpower and supplies and rebuild it for us? Give us animals to set us going again? Like something out of a film? The folk round here live with the fear of God in them but are Christian only in name. They can see only their blood’s own shade.
Just
think about what I’m saying, that’s all. About our other options.
I woke this morning with a vision of it. I know in my heart if Matthew Peoples was here now he’d be saying this is the right thing to do.
The way she looked at him. It was as if he had prized open the rawest part of her, placed his finger into the quick.
She sat a long time in the range chair after he left the room, her thoughts adrift until a feeling came she had alighted upon something. She stood and went to the console table in the hall, pulled at the brass handle of the drawer, rummaged until she found it–a photo, the skin of it yellowing with a small cat’s ear and she put it to her nose. Time smelled of dust and potpourri and other things she could not name and perhaps what she smelled too were things that came reaching for her from that day in the photo. What she saw was the yard ten years ago, men standing in their welly boots and waistcoats with their arms across their chests after stacking hay. She could see their shapes as they stood that evening in the kitchen, sniffing at the pot over the stove, heaving into each other for a seat. Ghost smells of sweat and hay and earth knit the air around her. She could see dirt from their hands ringing the sink.
She looked at the men as they were lined in the photo and saw the smiles they wore for the camera, smiles hitched up under hard eyes like trousers that would fall back down. What they could not hide was what was solid in their eyes, a knowledge of true difficulty, of lives lived in rare promise. Sun on their white shirts. Sun on the flagstones. Barnabas standing tense in the middle and staring into the void towards her with a wild man’s gaze. The man was bright and burning and she saw then how it was and what could be again and she saw too what she did not know she was seeing. In the far side of the photo, one of the labourers holding onto another man’s arm, trying to pull him back into the frame. Just the back of the man’s head was visible, hair and shoulder matched in white and a hand hung loose. Her breath stalled. It was Matthew Peoples. Too shy to take part in it that day or so they thought for who knew the real answer to a man’s shyness. That he did not want to be pictured perhaps, for to be pictured is to want to be remembered and who wants to think of their own death? Different strands of time began to fold on top of one another. Did an animal break free inside and knock him? Or was it the smoke that snaked around him and took him down? That same day of the photo he had given her a pot of cream he had made himself. For your hands, he’d said, and it had worked.
Billy came loping through the pasture field with the butt of a smoked-out rolly held backwards between finger and thumb. Tongues of grass licking at his boots made sodden his ankles. He threw the butt into the grass and looked up to see the swift shape of Cyclop appear upwards out of a ditch, the grass bending as the animal roamed through the field. Billy shouting at the dog to come to him and the dog stopped in the grass and singled out Billy with the still of his orange eye-beam. Come here to me you. Billy at a run then moving towards the dog and he caught the animal by the collar, bent down to him. What are ye up to, eh? The undercarriage of the dog was cotted from the wet fields and the dog eyed the clouds as Billy talked to him as if something of more interest were to be found there. Billy roaming a hand through the dog’s dark hide and he stopped when he saw fresh blood on the white fur of his mouth. His voice dropped. Are you hurt are ye, Cyclop? He took the dog by the muzzle and ran his hand through the fur and he searched over the dog and knew by the way the dog looked at him that Cyclop was not injured at all, that the dog wore the blood of another. He stood up and Cyclop went off at a run and he shouted after him. What kind of stupid dog are ye?
She watched him soap his hands in the sink, the water sluicing clean his soiled fingers. Saw how he stood up straight like he used to. A certain command he had, the broadness of his back flat against the weakening light, the way he pointed a thick finger towards the window. The sky, he said. See its colour. She came forward and saw the sky was an unnatural jaundice that laid a strange pallor over the world. He said it was unusual, perhaps to do with the lengthening of the days into spring, but what she saw produced a sensation she could not explain, produced in her a deep sadness. She stood by him and put her hand on his back and rubbed at his shoulder, said to him, I saw the bees today carrying pellets of pollen to the hive. The queen has begun to lay. And he turned and took her hand and said, see, I said everything would be right again. She saw then the slice in his palm. What happened your hand? she said. She took it and rubbed it gently, brought it to her mouth and kissed it. What did you do?
Nothing, he said. I came into contact with myself again.
She looked at him confused and smiled. They stood a moment in the quiet mesh of their breathing until Billy came trudging downstairs. She broke from Barnabas as the boy came into the room and Billy went straight to the stove and leaned over the bubbling rabbit stew, took a sniff at it. Jesus, I’m starving.
Eskra took from a drawer the good linen tablecloth and smoothed it over the table and Barnabas noticed the use of it. Billy spoke. We saw a German bomber today at school. The strange shape of it. It couldn’t have been American.
Eskra looked at him and smiled. That’s a long way for it to be from the war.
Maybe it was looking for ships to bomb, said Billy.
Maybe it was lost, said Eskra. Looking to get back home.
Barnabas came towards the table knuckling his cheek. Tis rare you’d see the Luftwaffe all the way out here. Twas likely the RAF. Them airfields in Derry are kept busy.
The stew was scalding and Barnabas watched Billy wolf at it like he had not a tongue to be burned in him and said so. Billy looked at his father and began to blow at his food and he ate with a dramatic slowness and when he had cleared the bowl he excused himself from the table. They sat together eating and listened to the boy clumping around upstairs. Barnabas leaned back and smiled.
Don’t think I still don’t believe this is a foolish idea, she said.
Will you remind me to get the battery charged for the radio?
Barnabas stood to make the tea and he leaned to look outside. How quick the night has come, he said. It was only minutes ago the sky was that funny colour and now look at it. The day has gone completely.
Eskra went into the living room to play the piano. Notes and chords sounded with slowness as if her fingers were learning new shapes, or it could have been she had to teach herself to forget her sore fingers. Billy sat to the table with his schoolbooks. Barnabas sat in the range chair reading the paper and then he got up and began to prod at the fire. He saw Billy writing in a notebook.
Is that homework you’re doing?
Naw.
Well do your homework then.
Billy watched his father and closed over the notebook and Barnabas went back to his chair. He shut his eyes and after a while his eyelids began to flutter and his mouth hung loose as if he was agape to some inner vision. Suddenly he sat up, looked over at Billy’s empty chair red-eyed, saw the boy had got up from the table and was cutting at the bread.
Did you hear a knocking at the front door, Billy?
Billy shook his head. Naw. You were dreaming.
Barnabas tilted his head. I wasn’t. I was only resting. He stood up out of the chair and looked towards the clock. Who would be calling to our front door at this time?
He went into the hall and opened the door and was met by the sullen dark, the hall’s lamplight uncertain on the steps against it. He called out hello, heard no answer. He stepped outside and walked around the side of the house and called out hello again and he stood and listened. Swabs of covert clouds dimmed the moonlight and the night air met his lungs cold. Piano music softly through the walls. He rubbed his hands and went to the front door and stood. The webbing of night sounds hid to the eye. The nattering breeze-shift of the hedgerows and trees. Two dogs calling to each other in short sharp barks. Something else too. He listened and heard a distant drone, like insects, looked towards the North Star. Could guess what it was. He went back inside and Billy was looking at him funny.
<
br /> There was nothing, he said. Nobody at all.
That’s what I said.
I heard just the sound of your airplanes. From the war. Far off in the north. Americans I reckon. A huge formation heading over to England probably. Couldna see nothing through the clouds. If it wasn’t for hearin them planes and the rationing sometimes I often think what’s going on in Europe is made up. The Emergency some big yarn we’re being spun to explain why nothin gets done in this country. Bunch of useless bastards in Dublin. The newspaper says the entire world is being reshaped but here in this place you wouldn’t know nothing of it.
He went towards the tea pot and poured it, put the cup to his lips. Damn tea’s gone cold again. What does a man have to do to get a hot cup?
She went outside to see to the horse and found the day uncertain. In the sky, dark and light like wary forces circled one another and a conciliatory grey hung in between. She found the top half of the stable door a quarter open and saw that wood and wall were newly met by spider web. The gossamer shined at her with its own light as if it could trap the uncertain sun, work it brightly within its own fibres and shine it. She saw no sign of the spider. She took a twig and twirled the web free of the door and in that moment a spider scurried sudden and as fat as her finger. She did not flinch, took the flossed stick and its occupant and tossed them.
The horse had not risen nor eaten. It seemed to her from the way the horse was sitting that the animal was not sick but protesting, as if the poor creature was angry about something. Animals make it hard to tell but listen hard enough and they speak it to you in their own way. She shovelled out the horse’s manure and went to the pump for fresh water and pretended to the horse to change the feed. She bent down to the animal and spoke soft to her, produced a lump of sugar in her hand and held it flat under the horse’s nose. From the rafters there came a large ticking sound and she imagined for a moment some kind of bat sharpening its teeth and she smiled at the notion, remembered when she first came here how wind and silence and that pure dark of a winter evening could let loose all sorts of nonsense into her head. The horse’s eyes glossed and she wrinkled her nose at the sugar and Eskra drew her hand away from her. She put words soft into the horse’s ear, knuckled gently the withers, skied her hand down the horse’s nose. What’s wrong with you, sweetness? Since when don’t you like the sugar I could be putting in my tea? When she stepped outside she saw the previous sky was being torn up and a sheeting blue being hung in its place.
