Chapter 4 #2
“It’s not on the map we have, so we’ll need to locate the source of that stream before we do our surveying. Go on inside,” he calls to his son’s retreating back, “and tell me what you find.”
Was it a mistake, he wonders, to bring the child along?
But the boy must have a trade, must learn to work a job: Tomás will not have him cast out into the world without any prospects, so why not train him as his apprentice?
The boy excels at mathematics and draughtsmanship, but Tomás senses resistance in the child, a part of him that yearns for something other.
It is pure ingratitude, he has said to the boy’s mother.
He doesn’t care for the work, doesn’t put his back into it.
Ah, now, Tomás, she replied, he’s young.
Ten isn’t young, Tomás retorted, sure when I was ten—
Tomás had fallen silent, the words choked to a halt. He does not like to go down that vertiginous path, into those particular dark woods. It is Tomás’s belief that it is always better to say too little than too much: many things are best left unsaid.
He slides his pencil back into his pocket.
If his wife were here with him, on this drumlin (which is formed from eroded soil and loose shale gathered during the long journey of a once-mighty glacier, its power waning as it reached this exact spot, causing it to drop its gritty treasures, what a miracle, what a revelation), if she were standing here at his side, her shawl pulled over her hair to keep off the rain, he knows exactly what she would say.
Be kinder to him, speak more gently, and he will listen to you. And she would be right, of course.
Tomás scuffs with a curled hand at his bristling chin.
The problem is there is so much work to be done, so many field notes to take, so many mistakes to correct, so much history to preserve.
He sees himself as that cursed man in the story—read to them once by a visitor—who was forced to push a boulder up a hill every day, only for it to roll back down each night.
He can still recall the tale, the book with a red-leather binding, held in gloved fingers, as they all sat huddled together on their benches; he has been both intrigued and repelled by it ever since.
He can imagine the grain of the boulder against his palms—it would be granite, he thinks, and he can feel the glistening flecks of mica pricking his palms as he struggles to find a shoulder-hold on the rock.
He can imagine the exact tilt of the gradient, how much pressure he would have to exert against his back foot, pushing down with his calf muscles, straining, straining—
His thoughts are snipped short by the recollection that his son should have reached the copse by now. Tomás gives himself an almost visible shake: why has he allowed his thoughts to run along such fanciful pathways? He shades his eyes with his hand and peers into the mist.
Liam trudges the distance towards the cluster of trees tucked into a hollow between two hills.
He glances back to find out if his father is watching him, but sees only a gaunt outline etched against a shifting, liquid sky.
In an unaccustomed act of rebellion, Liam tosses the surveying pole to the ground.
He’s sick of carrying it, sick to his back teeth.
He moves towards the copse, talking in his mind to his sister, Enda, who is not quite a year older than him: Sick to my back teeth, he tells her. You should see the way he orders me about, like I’m a donkey or a dog, and you wouldn’t believe the weather he has me out in.
Enda had been acutely disappointed that she hadn’t been taken on this mapping expedition, but their father had said it was no work for a girl.
Liam will tell her, when they get back, that she was the lucky one, getting to stay at home.
He is exploring his own emerging back teeth, as he steps between the first tree trunks, feeling the hard, pearly nubs erupting from his tender pink gums.
Then he pauses. Later that night, he will wonder why. Was it that he stopped or did something stop him? Which way round was it?
The quality of light in the copse is immediately different, verdant and lustrous, glimmering with the trembling of the leaf canopy.
The wind vanishes, as does the relentless rain.
He is enclosed and enfolded, as if he has stepped inside the secret green house of a giant.
Liam looks up: the tops of the trees separate and collide in the breeze, revealing and concealing the opaline sky.
He sees the arrowhead leaves of an aspen entangling with the ripple-edge foliage of an oak, bending together like conspirators.
Underfoot, the ground is spongy with damp.
It oozes from the soil, the leaf-rot; it sucks and grips at his boot soles.
He glances down and sees that there is thick, luxuriant moss, glistening and emerald-bright, blanketing everything: the humps of stones, the long cylinders of fallen branches, the ridged splay of roots, unidentifiable mounds that suggest loaves of bread or animal lairs. Or tiny graves.
Liam’s mind reels, flailing desperately away from the thought.
Not graves, no, not here. Who would bury a child, or many children, here, in this desolate and soggy woodland?
He knows, of course, about the terrible times in this country, when the Great Hunger struck, which happened not much more than his short lifetime ago, knows about the countless starved people buried in ditches all over the land, and the rest driven away in coffin ships.
These mounds are too small, much too small, to be human children.
And no one, surely, would inter their tiny, starved younglings in this lonely place. Would they?
He tries to marshal his brain, tries to form the kind of thoughts his father—who feels suddenly very far away on that ridge—would want him to have.
Woodland, he forces himself to say aloud, although his mouth is now set so tight that he cannot push out the syllables.
Mixed. Some trees easily hundreds of years old, perhaps several feet around. Oak and ash and—
Could they be graves? Liam shuffles forward a step into the copse, then another, taking great care where he treads. Only on ground, please, solid ground. He feels something clingy and sodden brush against his calf, like a pleading wet hand, and he cries out.
It’s only the frond of a fern, curled into a little green fist, but the way his cry still rings in the trees does nothing to calm the fears that have beset him.
All around, he now sees, ferns are beckoning to him, their spears piercing upwards through the moss, undeterred by its heavy, suffocating swags.
Trees, he tries to think. Oaks, ash, saplings and full-grown.
He realises he can hear plashing and gurgling: water.
What is the word his father uses? Irrigation.
He will need to report this to his father in a moment, in half an hour, whenever he comes out of here: a number of streams, he will say, perhaps a spring or—
Behind him, without warning, there comes a sound so like human laughter that for a moment he is convinced his sister is there with him, that by some peculiar set of circumstances their mother has relented, sent Enda out after them, and she has managed to locate him here; she has crept up behind him, and she is mocking his fears, ridiculing his cowardice.
Liam whirls round. His sister will be there, she will.
She isn’t, of course. He sees only branches meshed together, a confusion of trunks, the glitter of a stream winnowing through rock, the black shape of a bird opening its wings.
Liam turns again, panicked, disoriented, and loses his footing.
His boot is wedged between two rocks, and he falls, into the moss, into a little green mound, which collapses under him, soaking through his clothing instantaneously.
He screams, thrashing on the ground, trying to free his boot, yanking himself away from the mossy hump, picturing the skeleton of a dead and hungry child beneath him, its little bones now crushed to senseless white spillikins, its spirit rising up, angry at being disturbed, and wreathing itself around him.
His socked foot bursts out of the boot and, in a heartbeat, Liam is up and away, crashing blindly through the trees, branches and twigs lashing his face, leaves swiping at the tears on his cheeks, brambles snagging on his britches.
He hears the gurgle of water, the ragged sound of breathing, the high-pitched keening of someone in distress, the pip-pip-a-pip of a bird’s cry, and suddenly he is out.
The copse has released him. The giant’s unstable, lichenous house is no more.
He is delivered back to the world. And it looks as he remembered it: soft parchment scrolls of mist, sloping hillocks, craggy rocks, the sea an indigo-grey line in the distance, and a forbidding figure striding towards him.
His father bears down on him and grips him by the shoulders. “Screaming, are you? Whatever is the matter?”
Liam cannot speak. His chest heaves up and down as he tries to draw in breath. A handkerchief is pushed roughly around his face.
“What happened? Where’s the pole? And your boot, for God’s sake?”
Liam points at the copse, unable to speak, resting his hands on his knees. His father, disgusted, lets go of him and tramps off to find the lost possessions without a word.
The day wears on, and Liam stands between copse and hillock, waiting for Tomás to return.
Towards the end of the morning, the rain slackens.
Grey, piled clouds congregate above the far-off mountain and then, as if they have reached some mutual agreement, disperse over the lower slopes and the sea.
A weak primrose tint casts itself over the hillocks, but the sun cannot quite break through.