“Ain’t so.”
By this time a number of the shepherds had gathered around, leaving the care of their flocks to their dogs and hired hands. “It’s a gamble,” said Grady Miller, “but Dom’s right, it’s the only way we’ll get to the canyon with most’ve the flocks intact.”
A number of the other men agreed.
Josh spoke up. “You all know better. Think, for a minute. Would any’ve you let your kids go play on a lake after only two night’s hard freeze – and warm days? ‘Course you wouldn’t!”
“The only thing warm ‘round here is your hot air!” said Domy. “We don’t need your team no more, Cox. Once we get across the lake, snow’s bound to be no more’n five or six inches deep the rest’ve the way to the canyon. You take my word . . . ”
Once again, Josh could see the mind’s of his fellow shepherds being turned. “You’re the one who said it wasn’t going to snow ‘til December,” Josh reminded bitterly. “Just yesterday!”
Domy snapped back. “That’s a lie, Conllan! I said no such thing. You just figure that, your sheep bein’ high-country bred, they’ll outlast the rest of ‘em. The more’ve ours die off, the better price you’ll get.”
Cox could barely contain himself. “I’ve heard a lot of foolishness come outta that mouth over the years. But that’s the most outright stupid thing you’ve ever said.”
“It ain’t!” Cox yelled. “It’s true.” He turned to the other shepherds. “Just think about it. They stand to gain by takin’ the long way. You stand to lose. Well, I’ll tell you somethin’, I’m gettin’ my bands down to Navajo the quickest way I can. And any idiot knows that shortest distance between two points is a straight line.” He pointed across Fable Lake. “If any of you’s too chicken, you can just follow them two an’ watch your sheep keep on dyin’ one-by-one, like they been doin’.”
Josh and Cox watched in disbelief as Andrews culled his herd and fully four-fifths of the shepherds drove theirs in behind. At the edge of the lake, the dogs stopped and just stood on the shore barking as the sheep followed the shepherds onto the ice. All but Fleet. Unable to hear his master’s commands over the din, he ran out ahead of Andrew’s herd and seemed to be attempting to turn them back.
This was something the rest of the dogs could understand. In less than half a minute they abandoned the safety of the shore and trotted out onto the ice, barking and nipping to turn the herds back toward shore. Andrew’s, meantime, was becoming apoplectic, cursing and firing his rifle in the air, at which Major, his horse, reared. When it came down, its mighty hooves cracked the ice. For a moment time seemed to stand still. Those still on shore watched as the crack turned into a fissure, and the fissure separated and the lake swallowed Andrew’s frantic horse, and Andrews, and two or three hundred sheep.
True to his name, Fleet had danced out of harm’s way.
Major, his eyes wide with terror, pounded at the ice in a vain attempt to get hold of something solid. Andrew’s was hanging from his saddle. While the rest of the shepherds scurried around on the edge of the lake yelling at one another, Fleet acted. He began lunging in between Major’s hooves, trying to snatch the flailing reins in his teeth while not getting crushed. At last, he succeeded and backpeddling for all he was worth – with the ice ground to flying chips by his digging claws – pulled the horse toward shore. Major, for his part, seemed to sense that a greater intellect was in control and, rather than lashing out aimlessly, began to paddle in the direction he was being pulled. Very soon, he felt mud beneath his feet and Fleet turned loose of the reins as the shivering, steaming animal pranced ashore amidst cheers and a shower of sun-touched droplets.
Andrews fell off his horse and, wreathed in steam and embarrassment, struggled to his feet. “That damn dog!” he bellowed. “That damn dog started it all!” In a flash he raised his rifle, aimed it at Fleet, and pulled the trigger.
The gun barrel dribbled a little stream of water, but nothing else happened.
Before anyone could react, Andrew’s cocked another bullet into the chamber, aimed and fired at the dog. Again, nothing. Fleet, sitting on his haunches, watched the proceedings with interest, his head tipped at an angle and his ears cocked straight up. Nor did he move when, in a fit of uncontrolled fury, Andrew’s took the rifle by the barrel, raised it over his head and began a mighty downward swing.
Half-way to its target, the weapon was seized in mid-air and ripped from Andrew’s hands.
“Nobody’s gonna want to save your life, if that’s your way of sayin’ thanks,” said Josh, tossing the rifle to Cox.
“This ain’t none of your business!” Andrew’s snarled through chattering teeth.
“You want help gettin’ them sheep out’ve the water?”
“I don’t need your help.”
“Whatever you say. If I was you,” said Josh, “I’d go home and get some dry clothes on, else you might freeze to death.”
Josh began to turn away. Several of the shepherds nearby began to snigger at Andrews. He tore a hefty branch from the ice at his feet and, before anyone could stop him, swung mightily at the back of Josh’s head. But he swung too hard, and his feet went out from under him, flailing wildly and propelling him back toward the lake where, with a resounding splash, he fell in.
This time there was nothing polite or subtle about the laughter that followed.
Andrews, angrily refusing aid, dragged himself out of the water and trudged back toward town.
“He’ll likely catch pneumonia,” said Cox, scratching Fleet’s head.
“I guess we’d best round up his herd,” said Josh.
Cox climbed up onto the sled and clicked his tongue at the horses that began laying down a trail around the lake. “He’d’ve killed you if he’d hit you with that thing.”
“He’s got a bad temper,” said Josh. “It’ll pass.”
The Conllan Homested
Canyon Ridge, New Mexico
March 12, 1957
“That same night, the house caught fire,” said Becky.
Maryellen was startled. “What house?”
Becky tilted her head at their surroundings. “You’re sittin’ in it.”
“This house!? How?”
“Nobody knows for sure. Josh seemed to think there was something sinister behind it – that somebody had set it deliberately.”
“Someone set the fire? With you in the house? And your baby?”
“I have a hard time believing anyone doing such a thing on purpose,” said Becky. “Why would they? Anyway, something woke me up, I’m not sure what.”
“Maybe a guardian angel,” Regan suggested.
Tiffin shot a sly look at Maryellen. “That’s the Catholic in ‘im.”
“Whatever it was, I was able to get outside, into the barn, and just watched it burn.”
“Did it burn to the ground?”
“No, fortunately,” said Becky. “There was about three feet of snow on the roof. As it melted, it just extinguished the fire. Smelled awful the next day.
“Anyway, when Josh came home a few days later, that’s what he found: a burned out house, and a burned out wife and a beautiful baby boy.”
“Tiffin?” Maryellen guessed.
Tiffin bowed. “Yours truly.”
“So, they were able to save the sheep?” asked Regan.
Becky shook her head. “Navajo Valley was covered in two to three feet of snow. All but a few of the sheep died. None of ours made it.”
Maryellen gaped in disbelief. “How did you ever make it? Obviously you rebuilt . . . how?”
“It was touch-and-go for a couple of years. Everyone else in the family told Josh to dip into the money he’d put aside for Grampa Tom’s trip; after all, Gramps would never know, since it was going to be a surprise. But Josh wouldn’t hear of it. Instead, he got work with the section crew on the railroad.”
“But, wouldn’t that mean he was gone most of the time?” asked Maryellen.
“Better part of two years,” said Becky. �
�I stayed with Josh’s sister, Katy, and her family, and would go up to see him every other weekend, weather permitting.”
“That must’ve been hard.”
“Mm.”
“I’ve often wondered,” said Maryellen, “how people survive things like that. I mean, you had the Depression; you lost your home, your livelihood. How do you keep on going?”
Becky smiled. “You grab hold of each other’s hand, real tight, and put one foot in front of the other.”
“It must’ve taken ages for you to earn the money to rebuild up here.”
“Well, it would’ve, if Granddad hadn’t stopped to satisfy his curiosity in Boston on the way back from Ireland. Everything we have today, this house, this land, our sheep and cattle, is all the result of a family fortune Gramps never knew he had.”
“He did go back, then?” said Regan.
“He did.”
Maryellen wondered aloud. “What must that have been like, after all that time?”
The Village of Farran
County Kerry, Ireland
September 28th, 1933
The bus didn’t go all the way to Farran but one day a week, and this was not the day, so Thomas had to walk the last four miles from Cloghane. He didn’t mind. His legs, conditioned by countless thousand trips up and down Canyon Ridge, were more than equal to the task; whether his heart could take it remained to be seen.
The driver deposited Thomas’ suitcase on the cobblestones, bade him a good day, and bounced off across the peninsula toward Dingle in a cloud of smoke. Thomas picked up the case and began walking. Once beyond the penumbra of exhaust fumes, it hit him – the briny smell of the sea peculiar to Tralee Bay – in an instant, sweeping away fifty-three years as if they had never been.
Suddenly, he was twelve years old, running the heights up Connor Pass, trying to keep up with his dad. “Come on, Tommy boy! Ye cannae lag behind, or ye’ll never catch ‘em!”
Catching sight of a rabbit was easy. Laying hands on it was another matter. Joshua Conlan, however, was a master trapper. Rare was the day he didn’t return from the hills with a rabbit in his sack. Those days, they took the long road home, for the landlord – not as liberal in his views as Joshua – didn’t share the opinion that game was free for the taking.
“Comin’ Dad! Slow down!” Thomas said aloud, his seventy-year-old voice dispelling the illusion. He smiled at the memory of his father as it dissolved beyond the hillock, and walked on.
Nearing Farran as night came on, he was surprised at how little things had changed. In Chama, in New Mexico, in America, in the world, everything changed – that was the only constant. Here, even the trees scattered among the stone buildings seemed the same height they’d always been. There were no new houses. No new stores. In fact, the post office – the window of which once displayed a wonderland of boiled sweets – had long since closed, and the roof of the building that had housed it had fallen in.
The streets were silent. Where was everyone? Church? No. It was Thursday. Then it was dinner time. A sideways glance in one or two of the lighted windows verified the supposition. The faces that returned his gaze – for no ancient, one-armed stranger could pass through the streets of Farran unnoticed by all – were vaguely familiar, echoing the traits of their forebears among whom he had lived, but none was recognizable.
He walked on.
As the land rose and the sea fell away to the east, the smell of sheep, and grass, and mossy fresh-water streams began to predominate. Every footstep, like quicksand, mired him in memories whose doors he’d closed long ago. It seemed to be getting harder to walk. The air was thick and alive with feelings that, like Ezekiel’s bones, gathered sinew, blood, and flesh with every foot the path rose.
He stopped to catch his breath. Just around the corner was Sinner’s Bog, where his father lay buried over half a century now. Crossing the cruel Atlantic in the Crimea all those years gone by, he’d thought of this, the day of his return. How different it was in reality from what he had imagined. There were no ‘huzzahs’ of welcome. No one rushed out of their houses to greet him. No one would even know his name, or care. ‘Conlan? No, can’t say I ever heard of ‘em. No one by that name hereabouts these days, anyroad. Nor in my lifetime.’ With all the weighty passage of uncaring time, Tommy Conlan was not returning with evidence to exonerate his father’s soul of the unpardonable sin of suicide, as he had promised. He was just a one-armed old man who nobody knew, approaching a bog of outcasts to beg forgiveness.
And here it was. Someone had put up a low stone wall on the street side, to match that between the church yard and the bog, further separating the lost from the living. He seemed to remember there having been a tree on the opposite side. It wasn’t there now. He put down his suitcase, and reaching into the inside pocket of his overcoat, removed a fragile, yellowed sheet of paper, which he gently unfolded on the new stone wall. He read Tiffin’s words aloud. “Eighteen steps from the seaward end of the stone wall. Thirty-six steps from the cenotaph.” The natural finger of stone, nearly hidden in vines and moss, nevertheless still pointed skyward, directing the souls of the lost toward grace.
“May I help you?”
The voice pulled him from the recesses of his past and deposited him roughly in the present amidst the ruins of himself. In his surprise, Thomas had let go of the paper and a passing breeze picked it up as a plaything. Thomas grabbed for it, but the intruder was quicker. He snatched the page from the air and returned it.
“Father?” said Thomas, drawing the apparition into focus.
“Don’t tell me,” said the priest with a smile. “It’s the collar. Darn thing always gives me away.”
Thomas returned the smile, but with it came a look of profound sadness that made Father Murphy shudder. He nodded at the bog. “They used to bury people here, in the old days. It was for . . . ”
“Yes. I know.”
“You do?”
Thomas nodded.
“Are you . . . from around here?”
He nodded again. “Aye. Yonder,” he gestured up the hill.
“Really? Pardon me, but you don’t look familiar.”
“How old are you, Father?”
“Thirty-seven.”
“Let’s see – so you’d’ve been born in ’95? ’96?”
“ ‘96. That’s right.”
Thomas performed a quick mental calculation. “I’d been gone fifteen year by that time.” Curiously, as he spoke, Thomas could hear the ancient Farranese lilt creeping back into his voice, as if oozing into him through the soles of his feet.
“Why did you leave? Was it the famine? An Górta Mor?”
“What’s your name, padre?”
The priest was amused. “Murphy. Michael Murphy.”
“Murphy? Any relation to Doc Murphy?”
“My grandfather.”
Thomas laughed. “Well, ‘stap me vitals’ as an old friend used to say. Ol’ Doc had a priest in his loins! Must’ve been a shock for ‘im!”
Murphy was taken aback. “I . . . he . . . he died before I was born.”
Thomas acknowledged the loss with a tilt of the head. “Sorry to hear it. That I am. You’d’ve liked him . . . and he’d’ve liked you. Mind, your choice of vocation might have come as a bit of a surprise.”
“You knew him, then?”
“Aye.”
“I’ve heard he wasn’t overly religious.”
Thomas chose diplomacy. “You never know a man’s thoughts, do ye? Say what they might, you never know what’s goin’ on between him an’ his God.”
“That’s very true, Mister . . . ?”
“Thomas Conlan,” said Thomas, extending his hand.
The priest froze as if struck by lightning, his eyes wide as if to absorb every particle of the ghost that stood before him.
“What’s the matter?” said Thomas.
It took a moment for Murphy to get past the sputtering stage. “You can’t mean it!”
“Can, and do,” said Tho
mas. “Why? Not wanted fer anythin’, am I?” He chuckled.
“You certainly are!” said the priest, grabbing Thomas’s elbow and his suitcase at the same time and pulling him off toward the church.
“Here! Here! Slow down a bit. Me legs’ll get me there, but it has to be eventual, like.”
“I’m sorry,” said Murphy. “So sorry, but this is unbelievable. I’ve got to get you to the church!” He slackened his pace, but his grip persisted.
“Not in a hurry to pronounce last rites, are ye?” said Thomas. “I’ve been christened already!”
Murphy laughed perfunctorily. “Come along! Come along.”
Thomas’s imagination was not up to conjuring whatever surprise the young priest held in store, so he let himself be dragged along and turned off the speculative apparatus, leaving him sufficient presence of mind to slip Tiffin’s paper into his pocket.
When they arrived at the church, Father Murphy threw open the huge oaken door, allowing it to bang loudly against the wall. He didn’t seem to notice. Instead, amidst its thunderous echoes, he flew down the aisle having let go of Thomas’s elbow, apparently confident that the old man was sufficiently ensnared in his slip-steam to prevent escape.
Thomas, stranded at last in the door of the vestry, watched with curiosity as the young man strode to the old, much-used roll-top desk Thomas remembered from ancient times.
“Well, that’s familiar,” he said with a smile. “Ol’ Father O’Shields used to keep his tobacco in one of those little drawers up top there.”
“You can still smell it,” said Murphy, rifling through the contents of one drawer after the other. “Frightful stench.”
Thomas had always liked the smell of Father O’Shields’ tobacco, but before he could decide whether to comment, Murphy came up with what he was looking for. “Here it is! Here it is! Come, come. Sit. Sit!”
“You gonna say everything twice?” said Thomas, taking the seat indicated.
“Sorry. This is just so unexpected. Thomas Conlan, in the flesh. Imagine!”
“Imagine,” Thomas echoed doubtfully. “What’s all this about, then?”
Silence the Dead Page 31
