Up at the top of the slope was a wind-bent and knobby hawthorn tree that looked as if it were pointing back at Ireland. Michael walked up to it, again stepping over grave after grave, doing his best to stay at the edges and take broad strides. He broke a small, leaf-heavy branch from the tree and went back to scrub some of the green veil from Julia's headstone. He rubbed and scratched until he had warmed up again, eventually dropping the useless branch and using the rough tweed of his jacket sleeve. When he had done as much as he could, he walked in a wide circle, gathering wildflowers and then a long blade of grass to tie them together.
It was beginning to feel impossible to go a single step more without eating. Catching a fish might take hours, and he had no line and no net, and the thought of the water when he was already so cold made him shiver and feel sorry for himself. "Well what do you expect?" he demanded, casting the words hungry, tired, sore, and cold from his thoughts. Then, at the height of his frustration, he had a thought that stopped him. There was another option, one that didn't require getting wet. He half wished he hadn't thought of it, but now that he had, he couldn't turn away. Stomach turning in dread, he got back on the bicycle, which he'd begun to think of as his own, and coasted down the hill to the rocky beach at the bottom. There they were, the rocks he remembered, standing at high tide. And yes, there too were the spots of grayish white covering the rock, covering all the rocks at high tide, a feast of barnacles for the taking. He willed himself to do what he'd seen his father and his uncles do a thousand times. He got up close to the rock, leaned in to examine the little creatures, then pried off a middle-sized one and pulled it out of its shell. Dermot ate them alive, killing them with his teeth and swallowing them down just the same as if they'd been fried in a pan full of sweet butter. But at the moment Michael was about to put it in his mouth, he found he couldn't, and instead he squeezed it between his palms good and hard until he was sure it was dead. He put it in his mouth and thought he felt it move. He spit. If I could get hold of a pot or a pan, he thought. If I could build a fire.
As he called himself every harsh name he could think of and geared up to try it again, he heard a splash. He looked out at the water and saw a person swimming, male or female he couldn't tell, just a pair of pale arms and a dark head. He looked around to see if anyone was watching him and noticed a heap of clothes lying just beyond the reach of the water. Women's shoes. He looked out again at the water, and the person had stopped swimming. Her head bobbed in place, and he couldn't tell if she was just resting or whether she was looking at him. He hurried away.
Back on the road, he could just make out the roof of the cottage where he'd first seen his mother dead. Cahill was their name. What could he do but ask? They would remember him, surely. How many dead travellers had they given shelter to in their day? He turned in on the narrow road, the weeds and bushes pushing in from both sides to a degree he hadn't remembered from before, and he went straight up to their door. He knocked and waited. Knocked again. Waited. Shouted "Hallo?" toward the side of the house before walking around to the back and knocking again. He gave up knocking and listened. A bolt of nervous energy shot from his stomach to his groin, then up again to the back of his neck. I'll just take something to hold me over, whatever's on the counter. They were decent sort of people and will understand, and I'll come back tomorrow and I'll tell them. He pushed open the door, called out one last time, and, after waiting for a moment, stepped inside.
The door led to a back room kitchen, small, just a counter and a few flimsy cabinets. There was an electric cooker sitting out, an electric teakettle, and a small refrigerator that hummed softly and was so pristinely white it seemed out of place. There was a full loaf of bread sitting out, and when he laid his hand on it, it was still warm. He cut four thick slices from the loaf and smeared butter onto each. He looked for some kind of meat—more pork like he'd had that morning, or cured beef, or salmon. Surely a cottage this close to the river had salmon to bring them through the season, but no matter where he looked, he couldn't find anything. He thought of the hens he'd heard clucking on his way around the house, but he pushed the thought out of his mind. He took four eggs instead, filled a jar with milk. He pushed the swinging door open just a crack and looked into a room with a table, four chairs, a fireplace, and a larger cushioned chair pulled up close to the fireplace, which was now cold. He listened for a moment, then tiptoed across the room. He swiped a book of matches off the mantel and a few pieces of turf from the pile. Once in the back room again, he thought he heard a creak—like a footstep or a door being pushed open slowly, carefully. He froze, his arms full of the things he'd gathered, and he waited, breathing as quietly as his pounding heart would allow. It would be better to call out, he told himself. It would be better to announce myself and say I called out once before. More than once, in fact. His thigh muscle began to twitch. It would be better to put these things back, go round front, and try again.
After a few seconds passed and he did not hear another sound, Michael let himself out the door he'd come in and, crouching low as he passed the windows, ran off into the closest field, careful not to drop anything.
That night, he decided to sleep indoors in one of the derelict cottages. If he hadn't been so bone cold, the heavy iron padlock on the door would have been comical against the rotted wood that flopped open with one kick of his travel-weary legs. Inside was a scene halfway between two worlds. To the right of the door the roof had caved in, letting a generation's worth of weather and bird shit in upon the single bare mattress and single wooden chair. To the left was a table, a mirror spotted with mold but still hanging, an iron pot sitting where a fire would have roared, a broom leaning in the corner. After taking an inventory of the house, everything precisely where the occupants had left it except for the half the weather had claimed, he went out once more to gather more turf from one of the neat stacks at the side of the road, and to see if the old well still had water.
He tested the old well rope and retied the knot that held the bucket. He leaned as far as he could into the dark hole and sniffed. He stood and lowered the bucket, hoping there was enough rope, giving it just a few inches at a time. As he waited and hoped, he spoke to himself out loud for the second time that afternoon. "Tomorrow I'll go straight over and tell them what I done."
He heard a gentle slap and felt the rope resist his grip as the bucket filled with water. Fighting his own greed, he forced himself to pull it up early, hand over hand, careful to keep the bucket from banging against the sides.
As he lifted the bucket to his mouth, tilting it too high so that the water sloshed out and ran into his nose, he thought of the girl's name. He hadn't been trying to remember it, but there it was. She must have been the one swimming, head bobbing in the waves, squinting and craning her neck toward shore as she'd squinted and craned that night on the road and again when he'd gone to help collect Julia's body. Yes, in Galway too. Her stained face, her arms stretched out like a child acting the bird, ready to take flight. Greta.
6
WITHIN HOURS OF Shannon O'Clery's departure from Ballyroan with her single suitcase and her passport zipped into the inner pocket of her purse, it began to rain. It was the kind of heavy, beating rain that usually kept up for only a quarter of an hour before tapering, but that night, and right up until daybreak the next morning, it poured and poured, flattening the brambles and the high grass around the cottage so that it looked like Little Tom had been out there all night dragging the old curragh back and forth. The hedges, too, looked like they'd born a great weight, and the way they'd split down the middle reminded Greta of a man's hairstyle—parted in the center, each half combed away toward the ears. The river, which had already been close to overflowing its banks, rose up over the stones that marked its edges and slid halfway into the Cahills' back field, swelling the ground, causing Little Tom to stand at the back door of the cottage with the lines in his forehead as knit and twisted as his mouth. Twice during the night he'd been out in the storm to check
on the cows, the single bull, the mule, the two ponies, the chickens, and the three small leaks that had sprung from the roof of the hay shed. Twice he'd come back, muddied to the knees, more worried and heartsick than he'd looked before.
"It won't come any closer," Lily assured them. "To the eye that field looks flat, but there's a slope there where it's stopped. You wouldn't notice except to feel it under your feet when you're walking."
But after only a few hours respite in the morning, it began to pour again in the early afternoon of the next day, and all day was as dark as midnight except when lightning flashed and the world turned greenish yellow like the water that sometimes pooled in the lanes and the fields. They'd shut off the electricity as a precaution, and the kitchen, lit only by lanterns and candles, seemed to Greta like a photograph from a long time ago. They waited—Little Tom in Big Tom's chair, Lily and Johanna at the table, Greta in the straight-backed chair by the fire, all wondering if what Lily said about the slope was true, if it had ever been tested like this before, if they should prepare themselves for water to come sliding under the door of the cottage and set the furniture sailing.
As they waited—Johanna with her hand to her throat, fingering the scarf Shannon had given her, Greta thinking of hers wrapped in tissue and safe in her dresser drawer—the girls, in their separate silences, also recalled that fresh bundle of wildflowers on Julia Ward's grave and the loaf of bread that had been torn into in the back room. Lily had made the loaf to have the day of Mrs. O'Clery's funeral, and she was livid when she saw it half eaten. The girls, who didn't want Lily to know the possibilities stirring in their minds and, at least in Greta's case, didn't know why she wanted to keep Lily from knowing, took the blame. For her part, Lily couldn't get over their greed or their carelessness. It wasn't like them. One half gone, the remaining half was left uncovered on the counter to go stale in the damp air.
Leaving the topic of the bread behind was the one good thing brought on by the rain—a new subject, a new worry, the incident forgotten until, in the late afternoon on the second day of rain, there came into the quiet, darkened kitchen the sound of pounding on the front door.
"Who in the world?" Lily said, getting up and taking a lantern with her. It wasn't only the weather that made a visitor so surprising, it was also the use of the front door knocker. Anyone with any sense would go around back and not be dragging mud all through the house. Little Tom followed, then Johanna, then Greta, all pressed against one another in the short and narrow hall that was colder and damper than the kitchen. Lily opened the door and, without exchanging a single word, ushered the visitor inside.
"God bless all here," Michael Ward said, his voice just a notch above a whisper as he took in the group crammed before him. He brought the smell of wet earth and smoke into the cottage with him. He cleared his throat. "Nasty day," he added, this time at a volume they could all hear.
"You're wet to the bone," Lily said, taking hold of the sleeve of his jacket and squeezing. "Have you had a breakdown?"
"A breakdown, Missus?"
Little Tom mimed the steering of a driving wheel.
"He might be on foot," Lily pointed out. Then asked, "Is the road washed out?"
"Mammy," Johanna said, sticking her head into the discussion, "why not let him in the door so he can sit by the fire?" Greta could tell by the sudden music in Johanna's voice that this person who dripped rain on their floor was the Peeping Tom.
In the kitchen, sitting on the straight-backed chair Greta had just vacated, Michael Ward was instructed by Lily to peel off his jacket and pull up as close to the fire as possible without catching fire himself.
"Do you know me, Missus?" Michael Ward asked once everyone had settled themselves in positions around the room. So far, he'd directed all of his questions and statements only to Lily, but he felt the others looking on, especially the two girls. He couldn't for the life of him remember the older girl's name. There should be more of them, if he remembered correctly. More boys, plus the father. Back then, it had seemed like a family of boys, with the girls sprinkled in for good measure. Now the Cahill cottage was overwhelmingly female—not just because there were three women inspecting him from various corners of the room and the one male presence had retreated to the darkest corner, where he sat and said nothing. There was also a female quality in the fire-warmed air. All that waiting and watching, and the sense that they knew things without being told.
"I do. Not until you took off your jacket, but then, yes. Michael, isn't it? You've gotten very tall. Are ye up the road again? Have ye been here long?"
At that moment Lily remembered the bundle of flowers on Julia Ward's grave. Next to that memory she put the vision of her lovely bread, the nearly full pound of butter it contained, a cup and a half of sugar left abandoned and half stolen on the counter, crumbs all around. It was a puzzle she now realized her daughters had solved days ago. The boy had nice ways when he was younger, not so like the tinkers that you'd recognize him as one of them right away. It seemed the years had brought him up to their speed.
"It's only myself, and no, not long, just a few nights." No one spoke. It was unusual to see a tinker so weather-beaten, so desperate for shelter. Tinkers, more than anyone, knew how to handle the elements. But Michael looked exhausted, his skin ash gray, with bruiselike circles under his eyes and a short beard covering his cheeks. He looked hungry too. The hollows in his cheeks reminded Lily of the boy's father, those high cheekbones, eyes drawn just a touch too close together like you'd see on a dog turned mean. But the boy had turned out to be better-looking than his father. To start with, he was taller. Not quite so tall as Little Tom, but still. And he was broader through the shoulders than his father had been. And though his face showed more of his father's features than it had as a child, they were more attractive on Michael. He was, all in all, very nice-looking—aside from his present state of sodden clothes and bloodshot eyes.
The half-collapsed cottage Michael had found that first day had proved impossible to heat. He got a fire going easily, was generous with the turf, pulled in as close to it as he could, but it was no use. It was as though the collapsed half of the cottage sucked the warmth away and whipped it out toward the ocean. While he lost heart over it, he also found himself amazed. A campfire built in the middle of an open field threw off more heat than this neat square in the wall that had been built specially. He found an old piece of cloth folded on a shelf and had the idea of hanging it between the two halves of the broken house to help keep the heat in, but when he went to unfold it—a curtain or a sheet, he couldn't tell—it fell to the ground in tatters. Then he tried building a wall of furniture at the dividing point, but there was only an old table and a dresser, and two chairs that came apart in his hands when he went to lift them. Eventually he had given up and tried to sleep, but sleep turned out to be almost as difficult as trapping the heat of the fire. All night long, and for the next two nights as well, anytime he closed his eyes he imagined the remaining half of the roof crashing down on him. The rotted beams creaked in the wind that barreled up from the Atlantic, and the thatched roof of the intact side sagged lower and lower with each hour of rain. The mirror still hanging on the standing wall and the precise shape of the fireplace now seemed to have lasted through years of neglect only to mock him. All his daydreams about living as a settled person had featured cows at pasture, fields healthy and productive. He'd never thought about how settled people begin—the seeds, the lumber, bringing each cow to the bull to make a herd.
Just as Lily was about to ask what in the world brought him out in this weather, Michael Ward drew a long breath and made his confession.
"I done something I want to tell ye," he began, and the Cahills leaned away from the sound of the rain to listen.
Each time lightning flashed, Greta noticed, Michael Ward was the only one who did not look to the window. The rest of them turned their heads, stared at the stretch of mud between the cottage and the stable, braced themselves for the clap of thunder th
at always followed. His presence in their kitchen was not as worthy of their attention as it might have been if the day were clear, or if it had been a regular kind of rain. After the burden of his conscience was lifted, Michael appeared most concerned with finding a new position in his chair, turning himself around in increments, like a pig on a spit. As his damp clothes warmed and slowly dried, the smells buried deep in their wool and cotton fibers were set free and filled the kitchen with more of the outdoor smells Greta had sniffed earlier. In addition to the strong whiff of turf smoke, there also came the scent of something human, more flesh than elements, a body unwashed for more than a week, the underarms of Michael's once-white shirt yellowed with wear. It was different from the cow manure and chicken shite smell the Cahills carried around in their clothes and on the bottoms of their shoes, and although she knew it was a scent that should be scrubbed off him as soon as possible, there was something not entirely unpleasant about it. Every time she looked away, out the window, toward the lightning in the distance or the mewling of the cows inside the stable, the odor drew her back as decisively as if he'd walked over to her and cupped her cheek in the palm of his hand.
Michael's confession was not brief, and it included a description of how he'd cycled close to one hundred miles. Not tarmacked, easy miles, but country lane miles, roots and rocks cropping up out of the ground, the lane sometimes stretching straight up the side of a mountain before shooting around the side. It also included a description of seeing his mother's headstone, catching it just before it became grown over with moss, and how when he got to the Cahills' cottage, he'd knocked and knocked, shouted his presence, walked around the side of the cottage and shouted again, knocked on the back door as insistently as he'd knocked on the front. He remembered them as good people, he said, and when he entered and took something to eat, stole it, yes, to be fair, though he hoped they wouldn't see it that way, it was the only thing he could think to do. He didn't mention trying the barnacles down at the high-tide mark or seeing a girl's dark head among the waves.
The Walking People Page 15
