Michael had broken away and moved towards the caravan, which stood silhouetted against the moonlight. He shouted up to Maughan, ‘Times move on, Maughan. There’s no need to be taking it to heart – there’s plenty of villages along the coast that will still need to buy from you. And Jesus, nothing reaches Belmullet, no one delivers there, they will be glad to see more of you.’
He reached his free hand to his cap and pushed it back in order to take a good look at Shona, on the driving board of the caravan. ‘People are moving into the villages and hereabouts every week to work up at the new quarry. They say ’tis going to be huge and they will move the whole mountain in a generation. The men will be coming from all over Eire to work here. They’re labourers, not farmers, and they need food every day. They have to know when they can get it, ’tis long hours up at the quarry. You don’t always come when you’re expected. And when you do, people don’t know what you’ll have for them. The women will have money in their purses, and they will need to buy the food.’
Maughan didn’t answer at first, just leant over and whispered something in Shona’s ear.
Sarah had moved to her husband’s side. She placed one restraining hand on his arm and with the other she held on to Mary Kate. She was unaware that the eyes of the women of the village were all trained on her. The first person at her side was Bee. ‘Don’t go too close, Sarah,’ she said as she tugged on her sleeve. Captain Bob had moved around to Michael’s side, followed by Seamus and Pete and Brendan, who, a full head taller than Michael, fixed Jay Maughan with his stare as he puffed on his pipe.
Gradually the rest of the villagers moved up to stand alongside and support them, in number if not in voice. Sarah sensed movement behind her and, looking over her shoulder, saw Rosie and Keeva walking fearlessly towards her. The crowd parted and they came forward to stand one on each side of her.
Keeva wound her fingers into Mary Kate’s shawl and stood so close to Sarah, she could feel the warmth from her body. Bee smiled down at her. ‘Welcome, brave lady,’ she whispered. Keeva, despite the tension of the moment, flushed with pleasure.
Rosie moved around the side of them both and stood next to Michael and Captain Bob.
The crowd began to murmur; they were shamed, two fearless young women had led the way, and they were feeling bold. Shona was losing her power as Bridget worked hers. Shona’s eyes met Bridget’s and they locked on, the two women in their own battle for dominance. Beads of perspiration stood out on Bridget’s brow. Josie, who had hung back with her, slipped her hand into hers and squeezed it tight.
Shona never spoke. No one had ever heard her voice, except for Bridget. When she read palms, she wrote down her words and Jay translated. Her lips moved, but her words went unheard. Each time that happened, people feared it was a curse falling from her mouth. Rumour had it that in every village she bestowed upon one woman the ability to heed her warning. Some said that Bridget McAndrew not only heard her but knew where Shona’s curses fell.
Shona was staring down at Sarah and Mary Kate. Leaning across the driving board, she again whispered into Jay’s ear. There was a sharp intake of breath from the mothers in the crowd, followed by an instinctive sweeping up of sleeping children into arms, as though they feared that Shona had instructed Jay to jump down and steal them. A breeze ran down the road and cut through the warm night air. The women tightened their shawls about them as a cloud floated across the moon and darkness fell.
Jay, having appraised Sarah, turned his gaze back to Michael. He was not going to shift and his mood was now as black as night. ‘We came often enough for you all before. How would Tarabeg have managed until now without the Maughans? I told you, you be taking our trade, Malone.’
Michael had fought in battles and held men in his arms as they died in agony; he was not afraid of Jay or Shona and he was determined to stand his ground. He pulled himself up to his full height, stepped right up to the running board and met Maughan’s gaze. ‘You have a horse and caravan, you can trade anywhere you like, just not here any more.’ He had been waiting for this showdown since the day he decided to make his own way and he had his answers ready.
‘You won’t be lasting long,’ Maughan hissed in his face.
Maughan was losing his temper, and his presumption that the village Michael was born and raised in should trade only with the tinkers and not one of their own was making Michael lose his own. ‘Off ye go, little man, and take your old witch of a mother and yer stolen children with ye,’ he said, taking a length of the reins in his hand and making to slap the horse on the rear. ‘Or maybe the Garda should come and ask ye a few questions?’
Shona had cracked the whip before Michael slapped the horse, anticipating his action, and it reared up, sending clouds of dust swirling into the air. The dust settled in the eyes of those children who were still awake, making them cry and run for shelter behind their mothers’ skirts.
Swinging the caravan around on two wheels, they rode off, but not before Shona had turned her head, looked Sarah straight in the eye and said something. No one heard the words, but everyone felt the menace flying through the air. She had a reputation from the east coast to the west and all the way down to Limerick. Death, failed crops, disease and even a three-legged goat were all blamed on Shona Maughan and her curses. Ellen and Bridget exchanged knowing looks. The menace carried to them on the wind and settled about Bridget’s ears. Bridget kept her expression neutral, aware that all eyes had now fixed on her. The dust flew up from the back wheels and rendered the caravan invisible as it thundered down the road to Belmullet.
Sarah’s knees had gone weak. ‘Thank you,’ she said, turning to Keeva.
Bee put her arms around her. ‘Here, give me the babby. God in heaven, I wasn’t going to leave you stood there with that child. Maybe that will be the last we see of them now.’
‘Michael Malone, why did you have to go up to the horse, why couldn’t you just leave it, say nothing? That’s the way you deal with the Maughans – say nothing to them and they can say nothing back to you.’ Nola was walking towards them with Teresa by her side.
‘Rosie, come away,’ Teresa shouted, belatedly.
‘That was brave of you,’ said Michael to Rosie. And then, ‘Thank you, Captain Bob, I appreciate you doing that.’
‘Not at all,’ said Captain Bob.
Rosie, her heart beating so fast she could hear it, said, ‘You’re welcome,’ and joined Keeva and Bee.
Michael moved closer to Sarah and Mary Kate. As he placed his arms around his wife’s shoulders, he said, ‘Don’t be fretting now, she wasn’t looking at ye.’
Sarah looked down at the baby, now safe in Bee’s arms. ‘She was looking at both of us,’ she said to the wide open and knowing eyes of Mary Kate. ‘What did she say?’ she asked the crowd who had formed a protective circle around them both. She placed her hand protectively on her daughter’s head.
‘Nothing,’ said Michael. ‘She said nothing because she is nothing.’
Only Bridget had heard and she slipped her rosary from her pocket for the second time that day.
‘There is only one family that will be anyone or anything around here and that’s the Malones,’ he shouted after the disappearing caravan. ‘Oi, Paddy, more Guinness – are ye slacking or what? Am I not paying ye good money to give everyone a good time? Fiddler, your drink is on its way, play something for the children to dance to.’
Sarah knew there was no use asking her husband again, he would never tell her what he’d heard, if indeed he had heard anything, which she doubted.
Within minutes, the men were drinking and the mothers and children dancing. Tig sat on a bale and with drink in hand chatted to Keeva. Their heads moved closer and closer together and they remained that way, as the bright full moon, with its knowledge of all that had passed since the beginning of time and all that was to come, settled on the worn pebbled bottom of the Taramore river to watch.
Chapter 16
Six years later: 1952
With each year of Mary Kate’s life, the shop grew and thrived thanks to its local customers as well as the fishermen, quarry workers and passing tourists, who were becoming more numerous. Michael spent a week a month travelling, bringing all manner of exciting products back from Galway and Dublin in his new flatbed van. Often he took with him lists of errands villagers requested, and he was more than happy to drive the extra mile. Those same villagers were his friends as well as his customers and as he was one of only half a dozen people in Tarabeg to have made the change from horse to car, it was seen as his duty.
Sarah minded the shop, and Mary Kate joined her when she returned from school, perching on the three-legged stool that had been carved by Pete, under the barked instructions of Daedio, with her name engraved around the rim of the seat. Although she was only six, Mary Kate already had homework, set by Miss O’Hara. This she did in the shop while eating the delicious brack and butter and drinking the dish of tea Sarah set ready for her.
Michael spent his days either out buying and delivering, or tending the acres he’d turned over to crops. By night he was often busy poaching wild Atlantic salmon. The previous week he’d been out in a torrential downpour until dawn.
‘I’ll be growing the gills of the salmon out in the river any day now. I’m wet more than I am dry, so I am,’ he said as he slipped in through the back door at first light under a curtain of rain. Standing in front of the fire, bent over and with water dripping from the brim of his cap, the hessian sack with the night’s catch weighing heavy on his shoulder, he shook his oilskin over a bleary-eyed Mary Kate. She screamed and ran away, as she always did.
Sarah scolded him for putting water all over the kitchen floor, as she too always did. ‘Will you get the hell out of here with that thing,’ she hissed, pointing at the catch, ‘and take it over to Paddy’s right now if ye want to eat today.’
Michael, who always half expected to be greeted as a valiant returning hunter, pulled a dejected face. ‘Oh Jesus, woman, aren’t I wet enough? Paddy said he’ll be over here this morning to fetch it once I’ve put Mary Kate’s bike out to let him know.’ He gave his wife an exaggerated wink.
Sarah, the woman everyone described as having the patience of a saint to be putting up with the ever more fanciful notions of Michael Malone, was standing in her nightshirt, and Mary Kate was next to her, in her own night clothes, with her teddy hanging from one hand, a thumb in her mouth, her head tilted and a grin on her face. She almost giggled as her parents did mock battle yet again, standing in a puddle of river water that was slowly spreading across their kitchen floor.
On the nights her father was out fishing, Mary Kate slept next to her mother in her parents’ big bed. Both being light sleepers, they woke together the moment they heard boots crunching on the stony ground at the back of the house. Michael never knew that when he was out poaching, Sarah barely slept for fear of his being caught by the ghillie and put before the magistrate. Or, far worse, his curragh sinking in the wilder reaches of the Taramore river and taking him with it. The memory of her Uncle Rory and his untimely demise cast a long shadow. Michael Malone could do many things, but swimming wasn’t one of them.
Mary Kate was blissfully unaware of the significant role her bike played in the poaching activities of the village men. It was one of many tactics used to foil the ghillie and it had been devised by Michael on the Christmas Day Mary Kate had come down the stairs to find her first bike waiting for her. The way the bike faced, and which side of the door it was placed, sent a message to Paddy, Seamus, Pete, Father Jerry and anyone else who had the nerve and could be trusted to poach with them. ‘I’m taking the bike, don’t move it, Mary Kate,’ was an order Mary Kate had learnt never to question. To the village side of the door, front wheel facing the church, meant ‘poaching tonight’. Facing the coast was a message for Paddy, meaning ‘fish to be collected’. If Mary Kate ever parked her bike at the front herself, she would be scolded by Sarah as she furtively scanned the street. ‘What are you doing, child? Bring it round the back, now.’
In a village of just under a hundred people, every movement was seen and noted by someone, not least Mrs Doyle. Information was currency in Tarabeg. A nugget of gossip, however small, was reason to throw on a shawl and a headscarf and visit the post office or the shop. But it never appeared suspicious that even in the worst of weathers, after the heavens had opened and rinsed the dust off the village streets, the little bike still stood guard. Only occasionally would someone comment when in the post office, casting a distracted glance at the bike, ‘Does nothing keep that Mary Kate off her bike? Out in all weathers, she must be.’
A wild Atlantic salmon could weigh as much as an eight-year-old child and the spoils went far. Paddy and Josie were the only people for miles to own a fridge big enough to store whatever Michael and Tig brought home from their fishing expeditions. Paddy did not poach, but he gutted, filleted and divided the spoils, taking a share for himself. He ignored any guilt he felt about this in the same way he ignored the indigestion he got every time he put too many rashers on his bread in the morning.
The rules were that there could be not a whisper about Father Jerry joining them. ‘If Teresa knew the father poached, she would drop down dead on the spot,’ Josie always said when the subject came up.
‘She knows,’ Tig always replied. ‘His clothes and boots will be wet. Teresa Gallagher, she turns a blind eye to what suits her purpose, that being fresh salmon for tea.’
‘If ye are caught, Tig, who will run the show here?’ Paddy protested every time Tig and Michael tried to persuade him to join them. Even though the path to the back of Paddy’s shop and the shed with the fridge was only twenty yards away, it could be a treacherous twenty yards for Michael and Tig to tread, with easily identifiable dripping sacks of salmon slung over their backs. It was unlikely the ghillie would be standing in the main street, but someone else would. John O’Donnell would happily earn a sixpence from the ghillie in exchange for a useful piece of information and then spend it in Paddy’s bar. For some, farmhands who lived on what they grew, bartered for extras with eggs, and whose wives made what they wore, a sixpence was a luxury that could be saved towards a boat fare and escape.
Josie had told Paddy she would kill him with his own cleaver if he poached. ‘I will not live with the shame,’ she had screeched at him the first time he’d told her he was thinking of joining in. ‘If the cold didn’t kill ye, ’twould be me meself doing it with me bare hands. Either that or you would find yourself in the barracks. Blacken my name and I won’t ever forgive you.’
Paddy knew his place. It was well and truly under the thumb of Josie.
*
A cold, clear night had arrived and the stars twinkled distantly as the poaching party approached their usual place. The only significant illumination came from the thinnest slice of orange moon. Away from the bridge, the rush of the river as it tripped over centuries-worn pebbles was tantalisingly close.
‘Another minute and we’ll be there,’ said Tig, who always spoke too much when he was nervous.
The ground became soft and the icy water lapped over the toes of their galoshes. They had arrived. As the chill crept through to their bones, they stood to catch their breath.
Only half an hour earlier, Paddy had been helping Tig prepare and load up his bag. ‘Make sure Michael puts the bike out as soon as ye are back,’ he said. ‘I’ll move Murphy’s pig over to make room in the fridge.’
Tig had been pulling up his waders and gathering up the tackle from where it had been laid out ready. His light would be a candle lantern attached to his head. It stood on the table, waiting, unlit and covered in a cloth to prevent anyone from the bar seeing it. The bar was now empty, the last customer long home, and the night was dark. ‘As soon as Sarah and Mary Kate are in bed, I’ll be off.’ He and Paddy moved to the window and gazed across the road, waiting for the light to come on upstairs above the shop.
‘I wish ye could come with us, for the craic, Da.’ Tig’
s eyes were alight with the excitement. Pete and Seamus were joining him and Michael tonight and would be hoping to take a fair catch back up the hill in the cart before the village awoke. Tig would have given anything for Paddy to have accompanied the four of them, but Josie was adamant and she’d been joined in her protest by Keeva, who was learning his mother’s ways.
‘Do you have to go, Tig?’ she’d asked. ‘Your mammy says breaking the law is the worst thing.’
‘Oh take no notice of Mammy, Keeva, she has never been any different, and when have we ever had any problem?’
‘Well, we have two sons to look after, so don’t go getting yourself caught.’
‘Never, not me. In a few years, those boys will be coming with me.’
Keeva had playfully slapped him on the back, knowing that no matter how much she attempted to emulate his mother, Tig wouldn’t listen to either of them.
Across the road, Michael was wrapping up the sandwiches Sarah had made. He tucked them into the wicker basket that he tied across his back with a leather strap.
‘It’s him himself,’ Paddy said, as Seamus and Pete came down the road, Pete leading the horse by the harness to make less noise, rags tied over its hooves to muffle the clip-clop. Pete led the horse and cart around the back of Michael’s shop. ‘It will be a good catch tonight,’ said Paddy. ‘He’s a lucky fisherman is Seamus. I’ll be watching for the bike.’
‘Will ye not come with us?’ asked Tig for the umpteenth time.
Paddy took off his cap and rubbed his head. ‘Ah, no. How many times have I told ye, Tig, I’m an unlucky fisherman. Since I married your mother, I swear the fish see me coming and they’re off. No, ’twould be a wasted night’s effort for ye all if I came along too and that’s for sure.’ Before Tig could ask him another question, Paddy put his head out of the window and looked both left and right. Then he slipped his head back in and took the arm of his son. ‘Go on, God be with ye. Don’t worry about the boys and Keeva, all is good here. Have a good night.’
Shadows in Heaven Page 23
