Silence the Dead

by David Crossman

  They walked on for a minute or two in silence.

  “Sheep shite,” Katy giggled.

  Tiffin giggled.

  Thomas tried not to.

  A wall of fog was clawing its way up the hillside half an hour later, making the world chill and moist. Thomas had lost the trail some time ago, but the going was easy underfoot, mostly grass and a few rocks – and not so many of the obstructions of which Katy had complained. All they needed was a little cave or an overhang and somewhere to start a fire.

  The fog diffused the starlight enough to create a horizon of shadows, a cluster of which transmunessed into a ring of upright stones. “Look,” said Tiffin, “a stone circle. We can make a tent.”

  Thomas, being Irish was more than a little superstitious – though he’d have denied it with his dying breath – and the legends surrounding stone circles, created by unknown people for reasons unknown in the distant past, provided fertile soil for his active imagination. “Let’s go on a bit further,” he said, preparing to do so.

  “I’m tired,” said Katy.

  “I’ll carry you,” Thomas replied, giving wide berth to the seven squat stones comprising the circle that, through some trick of the eye, seemed somehow animated by their very indistinctness.

  Tiffin walked in amongst them. “I’m tired, too,” he said. “Are you going to carry me as well?” Unfolding a blanket, he began to drape it over two of the stones. “Don’t be afraid.”

  “I’m not afraid!”

  “Good, then come help me set things up. We can make a nice little camp.”

  Once again, Thomas felt the pang of taking orders from a twelve-year-old. Something he’d done more than a few times in the history they shared. A certain awe or intimidation on Thomas’s behalf was traceable to the fact that Tiffin had read proficiently at age three and expressed himself in writing when he was four. Thomas, for whom reading had always been a chore, lagged far behind. And now again, Tiffin, with his cold, condescending logic, was right. He was afraid, and it was a fear he’d simply have to conquer if he was to live with himself.

  He entered the circle, deafening himself to the whispers of the Ancients in their strange, unknowable tongue, dripping with portent and dread, that had fueled the fears of his ancestors for untold generations.

  “They’re called the Seven Sisters,” said Tiffin in his irritating, matter-of-fact, know-it-all way.

  Thomas was about to ask him how he knew, but the answer would be the all-too-familiar: ‘I read it.’ Tiffin was always reading, scrounging books wherever he could find them. And whatever he read somehow stuck in his brain like a burdock. Thomas couldn’t make it out. Whenever he read, it made his head hurt.

  He’d managed to keep the tinder in his box dry, and assembling a little pyramid of dried sheep and cow patties, soon had a fire smoldering just outside the open end of the tent Tiffin and Katy had made.

  They ate sparingly, and huddling together, covered themselves with the remaining of the blankets. For a long time after the younger ones had fallen asleep, Thomas lay with his arms behind his head, mindlessly watching the coals burn down, intent instead upon the solid-seeming wisps of fog that stalked the entrance to their tiny sanctuary on silent feet . . . the ghosts of the Seven Sisters, wandering the night in search of souls, kept at bay by nothing more than the residue of their mother’s prayers for her children. Eventually, the sheer exhaustion of the day overtook him, and he fell into a bone-deep sleep.

  Dawn, when it came, got all tangled up in his dreams. Someone was pulling at his sleeve, but in his stupor, it was impossible to tell from which world the incessant tugging was coming. There were words, too. A voice. Familiar. If only he could sort them out. “Huh?”

  “Tiffin’s gone,” said the voice.

  “Katy?”

  “Tiffin’s gone,” she said, letting go of his sleeve.

  Thomas rubbed his eyes, as if to massage some sense of order into his brain. “What are you talking about? Gone where?”

  “Gone away.”

  Thomas threw the roof blanket aside, and the dawn poured in. “Tiffin!” he called, pulling himself upright on one of the Seven Sisters. “Tiff!”

  They were on high ground, commanding a clear view of the barren hillside in all directions. On the extreme western horizon, the colorless ocean nudged at coves and inlets. Between it and them could be seen the distant cluster of buildings signifying Tinnahally. Crowning a hill toward the south and east, not two miles distant and tumbling down to the banks of a wide river, was Killgorlin. Behind them, the hill rose a hundred yards or more in windswept folds.

  In all that vastness, there was no sign of Tiffin.

  Chapter Four

  “Tiffin!” Thomas yelled at the top of his voice, his heart rising on a sudden wave of worry.

  “Tiffin!” Katy cried. “Tiffin!”

  Their calls echoed and re-echoed through the wilderness until it seemed that the Seven Sisters themselves had taken up the refrain. But there was no reply.

  “Katy,” said Thomas breathlessly, scarcely concealing his alarm. “You stay here with the things. Don’t move, do you understand?”

  “Where are you going?”

  “I’m going to get Tiffin,” he forced a smile. “He’s hiding on us, isn’t he?”

  “I want to go with you.”

  “Not this time, Kate. I need to move as fast as I can so we can get him and get back on the road, okay?”

  It wasn’t okay, but she sniffed back a tear, straightened her shoulders a bit, and made an effort to reel in her trembling lower lip. “Okay.”

  “Good girl. Now don’t move, hear? I need you to be right here when I get back. I don’t have time to go looking for you as well. Understand?”

  Katy nodded, sat down on the saddlebag, and twined her fingers around her straw doll.

  A little further up the hill, in the shelter of a stunted cliff, Thomas came upon a little pile of human feces. Some time during the night, Tiffin had been there. So had someone else. There were two sets of hobnailed boot prints. It was clear to see there had been a struggle of some kind, and twin heel marks in the rain-softened turf testified that the intruders had dragged Tiffin down a cleft off to the right.

  Bile rose in Thomas’s throat as an impromptu sequence of gruesome images leapt, unbidden, to his brain. As he raced down the rock-strewn ravine, he was brought up short by the glint of something in the grass. He bent and picked it up: a George and Dragon gold sovereign. An expensive trail of breadcrumbs!

  Shadows closed quickly about him as he ran, and it took a few seconds for his eyes to grow accustomed to the change, but he kept a sharp lookout and, within seconds, found what he was expecting. The other sovereign. Almost without stopping, he scooped it up and dropped it in his pocket. At the same moment, he heard voices just beyond a ridge ahead.

  “You’ve got the count of ten to tell us where they are!” The voice was guttural and heavily accented.

  “Then I’ve got plenty of time,” said Tiffin. “You’ll need help to count past three.”

  Thomas crested the rise just in time to see the young man strike Tiffin across the cheek with the back of his hand. Tiffin simply glared at him. “I told you, I’ve given you all the money I have.”

  “Them men give you two sovereigns back at the pub,” said the other boy, obviously a farm laborer out for some quick money.

  “Nobody gave me any sovereigns.”

  “They did. We know they did.”

  “Says who?”

  “Never you mind, says who,” said the first man, spitting in emphasis. “You shake ‘em out, or we will.”

  “You can shake me ‘til Sunday,” said Tiffin defiantly. “All you’ll get is teeth.” He stood up and shook the layers of loose-fitting rags that enveloped him. “Do you see anything? Hear anything?”

  “Maybe she got it wrong,” said the tall man.

  “The day Hetty don’t know a sovereign when she sees it is the day the Devil repents,” barked his compa
nion. “They’re either on him, somewhere, or back with the others, and I mean to have ‘em. I didn’t come all this way fer seven shillin’s!” He threw Tiffin’s little bag of coins angrily on the ground.

  “Seven shillin’s is seven shillin’s,” said the other philosophically, retrieving the bag and secreting it among his clothing.

  Thomas quickly studied the area. Directly over Tiffin and the two strangers was a stubby overhang, some thirty feet high. Taking the hill in long strides and staying as far from the cliff’s edge as possible to keep from casting a shadow, he clambered to the top and crawled to the edge on his belly. Poking his head over, he looked down on the heads of Tiffin’s assailants, who were back to him. Tiffin saw him, but was wise enough not to react.

  Stones were not hard to find. Thomas seized several close at hand and returning to the edge, caught Tiffin’s eye and indicated what he was about to do.

  “So,” said Tiffin, drawing himself to a kneeling position on shaky legs, “I guess you’ve given up on counting, aye? Too much for you, was it?”

  The tall farm boy drew back his hand to strike again, but at that instant, Tiffin dodged back out of the way. “Now, Thomas!”

  The rocks were already on their way, pummeling the would-be robbers about the head and shoulders. Both men crumpled to the ground in heaps.

  “Back up the ravine, Tiff! Quick!” said Thomas, and without waiting to see what damage his missiles had done, he was off down the cliff. He met his brother at the mouth of the ravine, but they didn’t stop running.

  “Did you find the sovereigns?” Tiffin asked, out of breath.

  Thomas tapped the pocket of his coat as it flew behind him in the breeze, producing a musical jingle. “Got ‘em.”

  Arriving at the top of a ridge, Thomas threw himself over and lay down. Tiffin followed. “What are we doing?”

  “Seein’ if they follow.”

  “They’re not going to follow,” said Tiffin.

  “How do you know?”

  “Because one of those rocks bashed the tall man’s head in good,” said Tiff. “He ain’t going anywhere.”

  Thomas felt suddenly sick. “He’s dead?”

  Tiff shrugged. “Either that or wishin’ he was.”

  “What about the other one?”

  “Got him good, too, but on the shoulder and the arm, I think. Last I saw he was movin’, but that’s about all.”

  Thomas’s eyes searched the horizon blindly as he struggled to accommodate his thoughts. “We’ve got to get out of here.”

  “What about the shillings?” said Tiffin.

  “They can keep ‘em.” Thomas scrambled to his feet, “to pay the devil their board.”

  The boys ran sprawling down the hill, their legs barely able to keep up with their forward momentum, and tumbled into camp where they found Katy sitting where Thomas had left her.

  “Good girl!” said Thomas, heaving to get a lungful of air. “Quick, help us get things tied up!”

  “Where were you?”

  Tiffin replied. “Just usin’ the privy.”

  Katy stooped to her labor, casting a sidelong glance at Tiffin. “What happened to your face?”

  “Just banged it on some rocks.”

  “Goin’ to the privy!?”

  “Nevermind,” said Thomas. “Get this stuff together and let’s be off.”

  When they had bundled their belongings, he took the sovereigns from his pocket and stuffed them into one of the rolled blankets, then stood and cast a weary eye over the mountains, unfolding into the distance, that stood between them and Queenstown. Chances are they’d be wanted soon for murder as well as thievery. They’d have to steer clear of towns and villages . . . even farmhouses, which meant following sheep trails over the hills during the day and the roads only at night.

  “I hope the sheep know the way to Queenstown,” he whispered to himself, striking off down the hill with his brother and sister falling in behind.

  The morning of the fifth day, exhausted and filthy, they arrived on the outer fringes of Cork where, benumbed by the hubbub of the city, they encountered others equally exhausted, equally filthy, in many cases diseased and starving . . . caricatures of humanity drawn with pale chalk. Homeless, hopeless. Like them. There was no need to hide any more. They were soon absorbed by the shoeless, shuffling, faceless mass filtering along the numerous arteries that drained through the city toward the harbor . . . to the coffin ships. They needed no directions: Just follow, and in time they’d end up where they were meant to be.

  Oddly enough, there was now and then an accompaniment to the emigrant parade. As the little island of Conlans drifted along the human river, waves of music broke upon them – rowdy drinking songs belted out of numerous throats with no particular regard for pitch or melody; ancient hymns sung softly, reverently; snippets of impromptu jigs magically seizing upon some rhythmic facility within the human spirit to set feet tapping, whether or not they would; the plaintive wail of a penny whistle; the asthmatic whine of a squeezebox, sounding like a welcome home. And a swirl of voices and accents, calling to one another, cajoling, wheedling, crying, laughing, complaining. This was not a congealed lump of humankind, but a living organism pressing, surging, singing toward its damn-all destiny beyond the far horizon.

  One individual distinguished itself from the rest by virtue of the fact that she had her hand in Thomas’s pocket, which struck Tiffin as unusual.

  “What are you doing?” he said.

  In an instant the girl withdrew her hand, and without a glance at either Tiffin or Thomas, disappeared into the crowd.

  “That girl had her hand in your pocket.”

  “What girl?”

  Tiffin pointed in the direction in which the girl had fled. “She went that way.”

  “Nobody had their hand in my pocket,” said Thomas. “I’d have felt it. Besides,” he continued, before Tiffin could protest, “unless she was putting something in, she’d have done neither of us any good.” He pulled his pocket inside-out.

  “Well, she did.”

  Thomas laughed. “What did she look like?”

  “A girl.”

  “Not all girls look the same, you know. Was she short or tall? Dark hair or light? Blue eyes or green.”

  “Her eyes were blue,” said Katy.

  “You saw her too?”

  Katy nodded.

  “And she had her hand in my pocket?”

  Katy nodded.

  Suddenly, Thomas was struck by the realization that he wasn’t in Farran anymore. The people here played by different rules. Or perhaps no rules at all. Immediately, he thought of the sovereigns, and he stuck his hand in the bedroll. They were still there.

  “ . . . and she had brown hair,” said Katy. “And green shoes.”

  “Is that so?” Thomas scanned the crowd. “Well, keep an eye out. If you see her again, let me know. As a matter of fact, if you see anyone put their hand in my pocket, or anywhere else in our stuff, you let me know, hear?”

  There were a number of conveyances across the channel to the port of Queenstown, mostly barges, skiffs, and rowboats, the owners of which were charging anywhere from a penny to a shilling a head. Tiffin began to climb down into one of these by a barnacle-encrusted ladder at the quayside. Thomas pulled him sharply back. “Where do you think you’re going?”

  Tiffin gestured at the island across the harbor. “Everyone’s going over there. I can see masts in the distance. That must be where the Crimea is. We must cross here.”

  “It costs a penny,” said Thomas.

  “So? We’ve got the sovereigns.”

  “Aye, and we’re not flashin’ ‘em around for this pack of thieves to see. We’d get our throats cut.”

  “I don’t want to get my throat cut,” Katy whimpered.

  Thomas squeezed her hand. “I didn’t mean . . . don’t you worry, Katy, nobody’s goin’ to hurt us.”

  A commotion was rising at the periphery of the crowd, too far away to concern the Conla
ns at the moment. “If we buy something in a store, they’ll give us change,” said Tiffin.

  “True.” Thomas studied the nearby shops, most of which, catering as they did to the poorest of the poor, dealt in items sold them by other emigrants who had parted with their most cherished possessions to obtain money for the voyage. Merchants at the bottom of the food chain, they bought cheap and sold dear. Interspersed among them were food vendors of various kinds.

  “I’m hungry,” said Katy, sniffing deeply at a Cornish pasty displayed at nose level.

  “Hungry are ye, lass!” said a large, pleasant-faced man behind the wagon. “Then here’s just the thing.” He held up the pasty and began to wrap it in paper.

  “Not now,” said Thomas. He looked at the man. “We haven’t got the money.”

  At once, the man’s convivial nature fell like scales from his face. “Then quit takin’ up space and clear off, the pack’ve ye.”

  “We have money,” said Tiffin, as they turned away and were jostled along by the pedestrian flood.

  “I told you,” Thomas whispered sharply. “We’re not puttin’ it on display in front of this lot. We’ve got to find a respectable place, somewhere we won’t be cheated.”

  “I know just the place,” said a voice close at hand.

  Tiffin turned. “It’s her!” He grabbed at the girl and came up with a handful of rags from which she slipped as easily as if she’d rehearsed the action a thousand times.

  “‘ere, leave off!” she said, punctuating the command with an epithet calling Tiffin’s parentage into question. Tiffin blinked as if struck. He’d never heard a girl swear before. With a sharp tug, she reclaimed her errant garment.

  Half a second later, Thomas had seized her by the arm. She turned on him like a dowsed cat, making to bite him. He spun her quickly around and twisted her arm behind her back.

  “Rape!” she screamed at the top of her voice. Several passersby chuckled since she obviously wasn’t being raped, and she swore at them violently, which didn’t endear her to those close enough to give a damn.

  “Ladies shouldn’t talk like that,” Tiffin admonished.