Chapter 4 #4
The boy, put to bed in the loft, alone on the pallet, his belly full of her milk and bread, falls into an exhausted sleep.
She watches over him, monitoring him through the long night, keeping off the men who want to rouse him and question him.
She will let no one up the ladder and will pass the whole night there, in that chair, staying awake if she has to: she will protect this child because it is in her power to do so, and by God she will do it.
The map-maker had been with the widow for only a day or two when he had appeared next to her with books and papers under his arm.
She had been spinning, her foot on the treadle, her fingers feeding in the carded fleece.
He had fiddled with a string on one of his rolled charts for a while, clicked his tongue at the old mongrel by the hearth, cleared his throat and shifted from foot to foot, and she had wondered what it could be that he was building himself up to say.
With a final cough, he wished, he said, to ask her about the estate. Specifically, he said, scratching at his forehead, the changes that had occurred here since the last map had been made, over twenty years before.
She had raised her gaze from her work and she and the man had regarded each other for a long and complicated moment. She had allowed her foot to lift and the wheel to slow, its humming noise tailing off into silence.
Will we, she’d said, still holding his gaze, send your boy to fetch the eggs?
We will, the map-maker had agreed.
He had occupied himself in spreading out his papers on the table, and only when the boy, Liam, had left, closing the half-door behind him, had the widow gone to him and sat down at his side.
Looking down at his incomprehensible workings, she had told him what he had wanted to know.
That before the Great Hunger, there had been over forty houses or cabins on the estate, each the home for a large and extended family, most of them down here by the shore, others up in the hills or spread over the peninsula.
Now, she had said, plucking stray fibres of wool from her apron, there were only four dwellings left: herself, the fishermen, an elderly man living down by the cove, and two sisters at the end of the village.
The viscount had given orders for the land to be given over to grazing, with sheep replacing tenants.
The map-maker had remained silent, scratching down some words in one of his books, scoring lines through numbers.
Then he had tapped the table, drawing her attention to a large sheet of paper filled with lines and symbols, saying that here was the barony twenty years ago, and as she had looked, the scribbles and markings resolved before her eyes, into coves and hills and roads and paths and fields, all of which she knew, or rather had known.
It made her cry out in something like pleasure, to see the peninsula there upon the page, as it had been, to look down upon it, as if she were up in the air, a bird, or a heavenly angel, and it seemed to her a brand of sorcery, to be presented with this version of the place, as if the Great Hunger had never happened or it had been a terrible nightmare.
Her amazement must have loosened her tongue, because she could point at the picture of a little box of one house, then another, and she could recall and relate.
There, she heard herself say, lived a family of eleven, good people they were, they all died in the first wintering.
And these people in the second, and these, and these, and them, and also them, and here and here and here.
They are all buried together, where this road meets the other.
This cabin, they left after the rent was raised: nobody knows where they went.
These people went to the workhouse and we never heard more.
This family survived because the man was a good fisherman but the third wintering did for them.
Then this field was taken over by these people, and she pointed at another house, and of course there was trouble over that, but most of them left for America and only the old ones remained behind, and they sickened, and in the end we’d to tumble the stones of the house around them, for there were none strong enough to take them to the graveyard, so they were buried where they lay.
This cabin is gone, and this one, and this one, and this, and this, and this.
Her finger had paused over the viscount’s manor, rendered on the map in strokes of ink.
Although she hadn’t been near it for years now, she could envisage the double-fronted mansion with columns and windows, the long curve of the driveway, the gatehouse, the stable block, the creamery, the glasshouses, the storehouses, the walled kitchen garden, the ladies’ walk, the ha-ha, the boating lake.
She found she could still picture its interior: the gun room that smelt of leather and oil, the Chinese silk curtains in the drawing room, the winding marble staircase that split in two under a stained-glass window that she herself used to clean once a week, the ladies in their sparkling jewels and gowns that trailed along the floors, their lapdogs nesting in baskets by the fires, the little boy-child, the heir, running through the hallways, a wooden horse on castors clattering after him.
Her finger hovered over all these places, but it never landed; she did not touch the map here.
All she said was, many of us used to be employed in the manor house, then, before.
She didn’t say that every time she sees the tree at the crossroads, its branches shaped into plumes by the wind, she thinks of all the people who are buried in a pit beneath it.
That every time she passes the iron gates of the viscount, she hawks and spits on the ground.
That she will never work in that house again, never clean its windows or its parquet floors.
When she goes to the town, she sees not the market stalls, full again, the people clothed and fed, but drifts of the evicted, gathering by the clock tower, their hands out, their clothing rent and patched.
She doesn’t say that a dream comes to her sometimes in which she will be moving through the peninsula as it was, in the before time, with all the cabins full, turf smoke unravelling from the roofs, the paths filled with youngers playing, the neighbours gathering and talking, and she walks among these people, whom she had thought were dead or driven away, and she is smiling to herself, to them, and always in the dream she feels an urgency to get home, to reach her longhouse, to be among her children, to be at the side of her husband, so she walks faster, past house after house, cabin after cabin, and she makes it to the final corner, and she sees her home, and she knows her man will be in the byre, his hand upon the cow because he always had a rare way with beasts, and she hears the sound of her children’s voices coming from the open door, those three strong boys of hers and the baby girl, and she is hurrying forward, filled with eagerness to get to them, but always at that point she stumbles, she wakes, and the dream ends.
As they stood together in front of the out-of-date map, she said none of these things to the map-maker, but she thought perhaps he knew them anyway because he had rolled the thing into itself, he shuffled his papers, he shut his notebooks, and before he walked away, he reached out and patted her hand, only once, and roughly, which she didn’t mind.
She had returned to her spinning, and he to his mapping, and nothing more was said.
Liam wakes to find himself in a dusty, low-ceilinged space, pinned down by heavy blankets. Above his head is the packed density of thatch; below him is an unyielding bed. His head aches and his skin has the tight, boiled feeling of too much warmth. He pushes at the blankets and sits up.
The widow-woman is asleep in the chair on the other side of the room, letting out light, snuffling snores. Liam gives a polite cough because he doesn’t want to wake her. He is just wondering whether he could use the bucket without her noticing when his ears catch a noise outside.
As Liam will describe it to his sister, Enda, later: it is a flurry of words, a whooping, followed by a shout.
Liam frowns, turning his head first one way, then the other. Across the room, the widow slumbers on.
More shouts in a tone that sounds very close to gleeful.
Then a cackle of wild laughter. Part of Liam wonders who would be making such a noise at this time of day, so early in the morning; another part of him feels a sinking sense of dread.
The voice, the laughter had a familiar timbre to it, but it can’t be his father.
Tomás neither whoops nor cackles. Liam can’t recall ever hearing his father laugh. It can’t be him. Can it?
The door of the widow’s cottage bursts open, squealing on its hinges. And then a huge voice fills the narrow space, pushing at its clay walls, its wooden beams.
“Where is my boy? Where is my Liam? I must see him— I—”
There is a flurry of scuffling and mumbling.
Liam rises and tiptoes fearfully to the lip of the loft: two men are attempting to restrain a wild-haired man-creature, who is adorned with greenery.
Ferns are stuffed into each of his pockets; he wears a rough-hewn crown of leaves around his head; there are rushes woven crudely about his wrists and ankles.
“Mo mhac!” the creature cries, upon seeing Liam. “A bhuachaill!”