Chapter 4 #3
Liam continues to stand. For a while, he keeps his shoeless foot off the ground, heron-like, but he becomes too exhausted and is forced to put his socked foot down on the damp earth.
A skein of marsh birds passes over his head, their cries a dissonant plucking on untuned instruments.
Liam tilts his head, tracking their progress as they veer and bank over the green inclines and fields, towards the cragged cliffs that fall off into the pounding sea: a sole geometric shape moving among grand and yielding irregularities.
How radiant, how lovely is the land—and yet how empty.
It is as if he has passed through a rent into another realm where humans are unknown, where he is the only one, and will have to make the best of it.
A thin thread of relief stitches through him then, an hour or two later, when in the distance he spies a woman driving a brown heifer along a road invisible to him from where he stands, the switch in her hand flicking back and forth; a dog sprints ahead, waits for her, then sprints ahead again.
From this distant signal of humanity, he draws small solace.
Still, Liam waits. His stomach begins to churn and knot with hunger.
He knows that in his father’s knapsack will be a slice of bread each for them, perhaps a waxy cube of cheese, but he dare not go in search of it.
Liam’s bladder has been uncomfortable for quite a time now, and he can stand it no longer.
He turns his back and, wincing at the icy touch of his frozen hands on his most vulnerable parts, relieves himself into the grass.
The woman comes back along the road without the heifer, the dog gambolling ahead. A gentleman rides by in a gig, flicking his whip to the horses’ backs.
Around mid-afternoon—Liam thinks, trying to discern from the blurred replica of the sun held fast by the clouds—he sees two fishermen returning home, their donkey laden with full creels on both flanks.
Liam experiences a deep and sudden longing to be their child, to be a fisherman’s boy, to be climbing up the hill back to a house where there will be a fire piled with fragrant sods and perhaps a dinner stewing above in a blackened pot.
He wants passionately not to be the son of a map-maker, abandoned for hours now on a wet hillside.
When he begins to think that the light is fading, he summons enough courage to call, softly at first: “Da? Da?”
The bowl created by the stony mountain and the hillocks at its base tosses his voice back to him. Da, Da, the land repeats, mockingly.
“Da!” Liam’s fear takes hold. “Where are you?”
Where are you, where are you, where are you? the hills demand.
Without noticing it, Liam has started to cry. His throat feels raw and flensed; he struggles to draw enough breath into his lungs. “Da, please,” he sobs, quietly so that there won’t be an echo. “Please.”
He eyes the copse. Could he step inside it again?
He thinks not. But has something happened to his father in there?
Liam considers the little green mounds, the clutching branches, the rushy streams. His father would never be cowed by such things, would never be bothered by fanciful notions.
He would stride through the ferns and the mounds, regardless, crushing all under his boots, his mind engaged only with the topography and the geology and the irrigation and the vegetation.
He has a scientific word for everything he sees.
Could it be that Tomás, distracted by the work, completed his survey of the copse, exited the other side and, forgetting entirely about the presence of his son on the hillside, merely tramped back to their lodgings?
Or even that he was so angered by Liam’s failure to report back on the copse that he is punishing him by leaving him here, out in the open?
Liam feels either to be a distinct possibility and so, with one boot, soaked to the skin, too cold even to shiver, he begins a limping, dispirited descent down the hill.
At the end of the mostly derelict village is a lime-washed longhouse, still thatched, still with smoke coming from its single chimney.
The widow living here has been the one to take in the map-maker and his son while they do their work: she has swept out the loft, putting down a pallet bed, with her second-best sheets and a woollen blanket each.
During the day, while the man and the child are out, she will sometimes climb the ladder and peruse what they have left there.
The man’s belongings are a disappointment: no fancy clothing or any such thing as a pocket-watch to be seen.
And the map-man has come all the way from the city, and is in the employ of the redcoats said to be making maps of the whole country, from top to bottom.
A jumped-up, mind-boggling idea, if ever she heard one, and no good will come of it: it will mean only more taxes and tithes.
So the widow-woman, all in all, has felt let down by her lodgers.
Instead of expensive cloth and linens, the man has clothes that are darned and patched by needlework that the widow, after inspecting it by holding it up to the light, has grudgingly to admit has been done by a skilled hand.
But the man has manners on him: he may not speak a word if it can be helped but he always wipes his feet at the door, and nods his thanks at table.
She is just setting about supper, scoring lines in a cross on the uncooked bread, riddling the fire to raise the heat, when the door creaks open and in steps a figure.
For a moment her heart clenches, like a hand snatching for something out of reach, but it is only the map-maker’s son.
A delicate-looking child, with a flare of auburn hair and skin like mother-of-pearl.
He sidles in sideways, wet to the bone. The widow presses a floury hand to her aproned chest, attempting to master her still-thudding heart.
“Child,” she says, “what is the matter?”
There follows a garbled account of some misfortune up on the hill—the widow can make out something about trees, a hill, the rain, a surveying pole, whatever that is—but the child wants to know, is his father here?
“Here?” she repeats, puzzled.
“In this dwelling.”
“But he was with you, up on the hill.”
The child’s head sinks and he sets up a terrible sniffling and sobbing.
The widow tuts and clucks, trying to quell the shudder that has passed through her. Hadn’t she told the man to be careful up there, not to wander from the path, wasn’t it said that people had vanished up on that mountainside, never to be found again, but he had looked away and told her not to fret.
She puts the bread into the crock and then the crock into the fire’s ashes, and she sets about the boy, stripping him of his sodden clothes—and what kind of a man sends his child out in such weather?
Children are a blessing, a fragile one, she would like to say to the man, have you no sense in that head of yours or is it only learning?
She sits the boy before the fire and chafes him with a blanket to get the blood back into his bones.
Never mind, she hears herself saying to him, don’t you worry now.
She sees her very own feet walk over to the cedar chest, which she has not opened for ten years or more, and then her hands removing the dried sea-kelp that keeps away the moths, and she sees her hands lifting out clothes: a shirt she had sewn so long ago it was almost hard to believe it had been her who’d laboured on that linen and not some other woman, that she had taken those buttons and stitched them there, and the grey trousers in warm wool.
She had spun the raw fleece herself, then given it to the weaver, and hadn’t the weaver said it was among the best he’d ever worked on?
And from that cloth she had cut and made trousers, measuring the legs and the waist of her eldest, so that they would fit so perfectly, with enough length to allow for growth, for the winter to come, and then in turn to be passed down to the younger ones.
Here they are, the trousers that were never worn, not once, not by any at all, and here she is, touching them with her palms and fingertips again, when she thought she never would: she could not bear even to look at them but neither could she open up the chest and give them away.
But here now are the trousers and the shirt, and one of the jerseys she knitted, and she is putting them onto the frozen, pale body of the map-maker’s son.
By this time, the bread is ready, so the widow cuts some for the boy, and he devours it like a dog would a stolen cut of meat, and she has to turn away, for a hungry child is a sight past bearing. Gruffly, she says she will go up the road and find someone to look for the boy’s father.
The peninsula men go out with lanterns and sticks and dogs; they know the land and the land knows them.
They follow the field boundaries and the courses of the streams, and navigate their way by paths and trees, bushes and rocks.
They search the hillside, they climb the mountain; they rove as far as the clifftops and the strand, calling the map-maker’s name.
By midnight, they have returned. There is, they tell the widow, no sign of the man anywhere.
They carry with them his curious instruments, found up on the mountainside—a straight stick with markings, a long and slippery length of chain, a metal tube of some sort with jointed legs—and these they lay, with care and reverence, on the widow’s table.
They stand there, all of them, for a moment, and they shake their heads.