by Paul Lynch
Eskra’s hand went to her mouth and she stepped forward and put her hand on Barnabas. Are you all right, love?
Aye. I’m all right. It was the goddamn horse’s fault. Got spooked so she did.
He turned back to unloading the stones and she stood a minute watching till her voice became high with concern. What happened? she said. What happened to the horse? Where is she?
Barnabas did not answer and she pulled him by the back of his shirt and he turned to her dead-eyed holding against his chest a long flat stone.
Take it easy now, Eskra, said McDaid. The horse is up at my place. I put her in the barn to recover.
Eskra’s eyes widened in the dark and she bunched her skirt and abruptly made off, set off up the road calling for Billy to follow behind her.
The boy a fleet form running past her half-seen in the darkness. He merged with the moonless sky and the trees and the fields so that all became single dark matter. When she got to the shape of McDaid’s house Billy was almost whole again, stood with the horse in the middle of the road, the pair of them faintly visible against the sky’s obsidian.
She was in the barn, he said. I took her out.
In all the commotion I didn’t think to bring a lamp, she said.
Haul on. I’ll go into Peter’s and get one.
He came back out with a faltering lamp that would not burn any brighter. He held it close to the horse. She went towards the animal and began to feel all over, smoothed her flanks with long and slow and kneading gestures and the horse quaked when a hand came upon her hind leg. Eskra held still, the sound of the horse snuffling and breathing against her own breath nasal in concentration. She could see nothing else wrong with her, just pain flagged in a limp when they began to walk her forward.
She’s limping so she is, Billy said.
She’s bruised and spooked but she’s whole and that’s good.
She began to walk the horse slowly towards their house, whispered into the animal’s ear voice kisses.
Barnabas returned two days later to the old houses in the mountains with Peter McDaid and his mule. The animal squat and still under a sparkling diamond sun that strung out shadows of the men in hinging shapes. Stone by stone they revoked the claim of those two famine houses to the land, land that had let the hand of nature go to work in its wearing relentlessness. What was left of the walls came down and they loaded the cart, the pair working in unison, their hands and faces whitening from the dust. They stopped to drink water and chew on old apples and Barnabas threw into the bog an apple core, watched with amusement as McDaid chewed the core and ate its pits and stalk. In the afternoon he saw McDaid leap into an odd shape and then the man lying down on the moss.
What’s wrong with you, Peter? Barnabas said.
Me back is having spasms. Tis a hoor of a thing.
That’s the cyanide in them apples. That’s what it is.
McDaid lay tense with his hands by his side, lay staring at the cloud shapes, read into their natural forms things that he knew, dogs and cats and men’s faces and even items of furniture, saw the shape of his mother’s old dresser in the tall stretch of a cloud.
The last time my back spasmed like this I was at the far end of my fields. Raining like a total bastard. I had to lie down on me back and pull the coat over me head from the rain. Lie there like a dying animal.
He began to laugh at himself and stopped from the hurt. Ah fuck, he said.
When Barnabas had removed the last stone that would be needed he took a long slug of water from a bottle. He stood still for a moment staring at the ruined houses as if he could not believe what he saw. He proffered a hand to lift McDaid and the man rose like a corpse. McDaid slowly began to arch his back. Do you reckon you have enough? he said.
I’ve been keeping rough count.
McDaid walked slowly over to the cart holding onto the small of his back and he began to push at some stones to test they were piled firm. He stood again on a mound of moss looking down at the loss of the two houses. Do you reckon we took from this place its history? he said.
Barnabas held in his mouth two unlit cigarettes and he sucked them to life with a match. Blue smoke ghosting about his face and he handed one to McDaid, knuckled at his cheek. I’ll bet there isn’t a single person in Carnarvan who could tell you a thing about the people who left this place. Just look at it. The people here are so long gone none of them at all are remembered. What’s left is just an idea of people. A folk memory. It is nothing real.
His eyes travelled the silent land around them, the barren slopes of the mountains that leaned up to the sky. They no longer have stories whoever these particular people were, he said. They might as well have never existed. All signs and sins erased.
If you could sit down and talk with stones. The stories you’d hear out of them.
I’d say there was nothing here but suffering. I’d say there was hunger and they died or left and went someplace else. That was the way of it.
C’mon, let’s get to fuck away from here. I think I’m starting to mistake the sound of the breeze for ghosts.
The mule held himself sure-footed and stoical down that hill and in reward the afternoon sun went to work on his shape. It took the animal’s long grey ears and made on the moss a rabbit’s head for him and it took the mule’s stout body and stretched him out upon the bog until he walked grand and noble, a horse pulling behind him a mountain.
The first days of April brought showers teasing and temperamental that made it too wet to start building. Each time the rain fell he would escape to the stable, stand in the doorway, his eyes adrip with loathing. The stones in their tidy piles graded into different sizes and in the new barn sat a mound of sand and bags of cement piled like loaves that McDaid had brought to him. That cousin of mine has fuck all use for them, he said, has them sitting there for years so I told him I needed em. Owed me a favour.
Dreams almost every night of his own agency and power and the byre rising up under a white sky and then those dreams turning to frustration where nothing got built at all, days running out in those dreams holding in his hands the useless stones, dreams that could have tired out even the interminable night’s patience.
The horse was still sickly and kept in the stable most days and he stood beneath the stone lintel with his back to her watching the rain, watching the sunken shape of the byre taking the full of another shower, watching the byre with a gluttony to get it built. An entire week of this kind of weather would drive a man mad so it would. He began then to stay indoors blowing smoke against the kitchen window, leaning his face against the glass, imagined it an invisible force holding him in.
My hands are itching to work, he said. I feel like I’m twenty-one again.
Eskra behind him in the room folding clothes. It’s an unfortunate time to start, Barnabas. It’s the same every year. Why don’t you wait another month?
I want to take Billy for a week out of school.
What for?
She paused in the middle of the room and saw the way he leaned his fists upon the counter as if his entire will were directed into those fists and he could at one push remove from the house the kitchen.
Just for one week, Eskra, to help me get started. Mixing that mortar and lifting them stones on me own will be slow and heavy work.
She shook her head to the unseeing back of him.
Listen to you. Always complaining about your lack of schooling and having to learn everything you know out of books. Always saying you could have done more with your intelligence. Is that what you want for your son? I’m not going to have him like those other children round here that treat school like it’s not important.
Just one week. It won’t hurt him.
No.
Look, the bastarding rain has stopped again.
He stepped out into a dry and matinal dark that concealed all signs of coming weather. A lamp placed on the flagstones that lit around him a pale corona and put everything else to dark. No rain during the night and he
sensed the morning might hold, churned at the mortar with impatience. Laid the byre’s first stones down. As the morning swung over him he turned and watched the bluish light push over the mountains and it seemed to him like the final movement of some old and weary creature that had travelled overnight the full circumference of the earth, while the daylight that came hesitant behind it could not hold all the creatures within its kingdom radiant.
Hours later he looked up over the low rise of a new wall, saw sunshine sparkle upon the pump. He washed his hands and went to the house for breakfast. Caught sight of Eskra through the window. She stood by the stove half lit in that bright morning light, motes of dust adrift and lit in their strange and softly orbits, and the light that held her as she rubbed at the webbing of her fingers made her look pained and beautiful. To kiss her with the reach of his eyes. He tapped at the glass and she came towards him and he pointed towards the byre. Would you look at that. She smiled.
When he went inside she poured him porridge and she rubbed at his shoulder and they ate their food together.
Later, after Barnabas went back out, Eskra stood to the stove and stirred again Billy’s porridge, poured it bubbling into a nut-brown bowl. The bang of the boy on the ceiling and she called out to him again. By the kitchen window she heard a rogue bee’s drone as it smacked itself off the glass and she walked over to let it out, saw the shape of Barnabas walking across the yard, his sleeves rolled and the skin to his wrists already caulked grey. What rose then to meet her was a wasp, came straight towards her face, and she took a step backwards and batted at it. The wasp dipped low towards the sill and turned and swung up towards her fast, all black-bunched thorax, its abdomen long and sickle curved, and she saw the sleek poise of its stinger. Her stomach tightened. She did not like to harm any creature under the light of the sun but in the countenance of the wasp she saw a sightless and dangerous aggression. She reached for a tea towel and swiped the insect towards the window, heard behind her the trudge of Billy down the stairs. She reached for a glass and cupped the insect against the window, watched it launch itself angry against the container as Billy came into the room. Get me the newspaper, she said. He went to the table and picked it up and came towards her rubbing his eyes with sleep and she took the paper and sealed the glass and told him to open the door. She let free the wasp, watched it take high into the air like a speck of soot, disappear over the stable roof. The head of Barnabas popping up from behind the low wall. If that boy is up send him out, he said.
She came towards him. I was going to ask him to come with me to the beach, she said.
Arrah, Eskra.
It’s Saturday, Barnabas. We’ve been cooped up here all week like animals.
Barnabas looked up at the sky and muttered a long curse.
Billy sitting at the table stirring honey into his porridge. She saw her own blue eyes in him as she spoke. Let’s go to the beach for a walk, she said. When they went outside to fetch the bicycles, Barnabas hunched up red-faced from the byre. That boy’s staying here, he said. Billy stood awkward with his hands in his shorts and looked towards his mother with an intense look of pleading until she nodded to him. Go and call the dog, she said. She turned to Barnabas. Can I not have some company on the beach? He can help you after lunch.
Before they left Billy had called for the dog and did a circle of the yard but the dog did not come. A busying breeze behind them on the road as they pedalled and Billy kept searching the road, expecting to see the dog as if he would appear at any moment from one of the fields, wet and wild and that eagerness brightly from his single eye. They came to the beach two miles up the road and it lay festooned with dark ribbons of seaweed. A slate sea that made it seem the world did not bend to meet itself but continued straight and true into the eternal.
They left their bicycles by the machair dunes and Billy ran towards the water. He stood in the caul of a previous tide that lay spectral on the sand, leapt back from the advance of the water. He turned and took hold of a long cylinder of seaweed and began to flay the beach. Eskra walking slowly towards the water in bare feet, the lullaby sound of the sea and the salted air lush, and she bunched her skirt to her knees. The cold bit her toes as she entered the water to her ankles. Part of her dress fell from her hand and she watched it soak and darken, let the rest of it drop. She reached her hands into the water, a numbing cold and the sea’s salt stung the rawest part of her fingers, and then she felt the pain ease. She began to squeeze her hands into fists and released them, opened her palms in the water skywards as if making an expression of grace.
Behind her on the beach Billy began shouting to himself and threw a wrack of seaweed into the air, watched it flutter birdly and glisten. He turned and frowned when he saw his mother squatting strangely in the sea with her dress floating around her, the slow way she washed her hands.
The sea lay itself upon the beach without anger or rush, sighed as it made its retreat. They walked the length of the strand to a place of basalt rocks and they watched the tide recede and saw wobbled shapes of themselves on the sand’s shining surface and shrinking marks of their feet. Billy walking awkward behind his mother. Ma, he said.
She turned around to look at him.
Why is Da rebuilding the byre? The cattle are all dead.
She studied him where he stood, the boy all bony elbows and long and awkward feet, saw the way his gaze was both daring and avoidant.
It is in your father’s nature, Billy. To keep trying. What else do you want him to do?
The boy shrugged.
Your father is going to get us out of this mess. The bank did not want to help so what is he supposed to do? The alternative is to give up and move away. When I first met your father he was smarter than any of those men he worked with. He was filthy and greased all the time from the work and he drank a little too much but inside him he had intelligence. I saw it straight away. I saw that if your father had been born with better chances he could have been somebody great. That man had to build up a life from nothing in America and what he built for himself he built with no help. You know, when we came back here, I had it in my mind we were returning him to what should have been. That he had a right to be here in his own country. And that you could grow up in your home like I never did. And then what happened, Billy, with that fire.
She stopped and began to shake her head and stood staring at the sea. Billy walked past her.
In the back of his mind your father has never forgotten where he came from and what that was like and what that kind of life did to him. You know, he would rather die than go back to all of that again and lose everything he has. Do you see what I mean?
As she spoke she saw Billy frowning again. But why don’t you just sell up some of the fields? he said.
Eskra did not answer him.
The distant shape of a person on the beach walking in their direction and a small shape breaking away towards the water, a dog chasing a stick.
Goat McLaughlin marched breathless towards the Kane farm making sharp and short whistles at his dogs, the animals fanning out into an advance party of three that scuttled and sloped as if alert to some danger. They slid quick through the gate’s ribs, one of the dogs trailing blue rope from its neck and it made towards Cyclop’s water bowl and began to lap from it. Barnabas heard the old man’s whistles and looked up, saw the invasion of dogs, Goat moving quick-footed up the yard, his talon hands loose and jiggling. Barnabas muttered. Bring forth the prophet. Barnabas stretched his back and looked down at his hands and slapped the dust off them and he stepped out of the byre and stood in front of the pile of rocks in the yard, met the man’s advancing gaze. Yes, Goat, he said.
Yes, Barnabas.
The men did not shake hands but stood there eyeing each other, the old man clad in purple knee-patched dungarees and his eyes kept flitting to the stones behind Barnabas. A shine in his eyes that told he would speak and would be listened to. I didna want to disturb ye, Barney. Donny like to see a man taken from his work.
> Well, here you are.
I see yer rebuilding the byre.
That is so.
The old man paused a moment and looked at the staggered wall beside him and dropped down his chin. When it rose again his words came out lit by some internal fire of indignation and his hands began to jiggle intensely. Them stones, Barnabas. Those stones that ye took. Don’t ye know, Barnabas, there’s a desecration involved? Ye took from the land what is not yers to take. Ye cannot expect nobody to say nothing about it.
One of the dogs came towards Barnabas and began to nose at his feet, a tight and curling tail it sported and Barnabas gave the dog a menacing look, lifted his boot and pushed the dog away with the flat of his foot. The animal retreated sullenly and Barnabas eyed the old man, stood silent for a moment. What are you on about, Goat?
Beard to beard they stood and beneath the brushwire of the other’s chin Barnabas saw the old man bite down on his teeth. His eyes never leaving the stones. His mouth made a strange shape as he spoke and he began to wag a weazened finger. Ye know fine rightly what I’m on about. Ye took them stones from the famine houses up at Blackmountain. Yes, ye did. I heard fine rightly. Everybody round here knows. That accident ye had on the hill. Them stones do not belong to ye, Barnabas, and they must be put back even though the desecration is done. We will figure out a way.
Barnabas said nothing for a moment and then he let loose in the man’s face a great laugh, stood there with his mouth open and the black of his back teeth visible and then he snapped his mouth shut, leaned in towards Goat. The old man’s eyes had scorch in them enough to light tinder.
As Barnabas spoke his mouth tightened. I got them stones from me own land, Goat. And while you’re here let me tell you that you’ve some neck coming in here telling me what to do. When you wouldn’t help me out with nothin. He shook his head at him. You are a pious, superstitious old bastard who for all your Christian talk could not see fit to help another man when he was down. Now I’ve got to be getting back to my work.
