Chapter 4 #5
It is hard for Liam to comprehend the scene below him, nor can he decide what is more shocking: his father’s outlandish appearance, the fact that he is expressing affection, or that he is addressing him thus in front of other people.
He always warns Liam and his sisters against speaking their native tongue anywhere outside their home because, he says, you never know when the redcoats might be listening and they would punish anyone, even a child, if they overheard.
“There you are,” the person who bears a disquieting resemblance to his father yells, wresting himself loose. “I have so much to tell you, so much, you will never believe—”
Gaping down at his father, Liam feels something brush his sleeve: the widow has come to stand next to him. He looks up into her face to see if she understands the gravity of the situation, but her expression is one of resignation. She sighs, then turns to climb down the ladder.
“Mister,” she says, as she steps down to the floor, “are you not ashamed to let your child see you in such a state? Where did you get the drink?”
She shakes a finger at each of the men holding Tomás back, and Liam recognises them as the two fishermen he’d seen the day before. “Which of you was it that gave it to him?”
The fishermen mumble, wasn’t me, missus, not me.
“It was one of you,” she insists. “I know it. I’ll get it out of you if I—”
“My father doesn’t take a drink,” Liam says quietly, as he descends the ladder.
The older of the fishermen lets out a guffaw; the other mutters an amused aside in a low tone. Quick as a flash, the widow lands a sharp slap, first on the shoulder of the older man, then on the arm of the younger.
“He doesn’t!” Liam protests. “Never.”
The widow leans towards Tomás, who gives her a wide, blissful smile.
She sniffs the air near his face and, for a wild moment, Liam thinks she is about to kiss him, to press her lips to his temple or his cheekbone, as his mother does sometimes when she thinks no one is watching.
But the widow draws back. “He doesn’t smell of the drink,” she says.
“That’s what I thought,” the younger fisherman says, rubbing at his arm.
“And his eyes are clear enough.”
“We found him up by…you know…” The older man drops his voice to a whisper, uttering some near-silent syllables. Liam’s keen ears catch the words “well” and “waters” and “singing to himself.”
The widow narrows her eyes. She reaches out, snatches the leaf-crown from Tomás’s head and tosses it into the smouldering grate. Tomás lets out a roar of protest and, throwing off the restraining hands of the men, lunges forward to retrieve it, trying to restore it, ashes and all, to his head.
Liam, the widow and the men all watch this solemnly, warily: each of them is wondering what to do next.
The widow, of course, takes charge.
“Help me now,” she says, beckoning to the men and to Liam. “We’ll need to get him out of those clothes if he’s not to catch his death.”
Tomás, realising what is happening and reluctant to lose his new costume of rushes and ferns, begins to run about the room, yelping.
He knocks over pots, he upturns buckets, he slides under and over the table, he bangs his head twice on the low rafters, all the while crying out incoherent words about layers of time and the illusion of ownership.
Eventually, the fishermen, strong from lifetimes of labour, tackle him to the floor by the half-door, and hold him down while the widow strips him of his sodden jacket with grim and determined fingers.
“Shame on you,” she scolds Tomás, as she might a child, “for being so bold. You lie there until I see to you.”
She removes his boots and socks, his shirt, and Liam has to turn his gaze from the appalling sight of his father’s bared limbs, the flash of dark hair at the centre of his chest. When the widow starts unbuttoning his trousers, the older man asks her if she would like him to take over the undressing.
The widow shakes her head. “It’s nothing I haven’t seen before.”
For the second time, the widow goes to her chest and brings out a nightshirt in thick flannel, old and well-worn, and pulls it over Tomás’s naked body.
Liam sees the long, pale flanks, the muscled and hairy calves, the knobbed elbows all disappear inside the flannel.
Then the three of them haul Tomás—more pliant and subdued now—to the chair before the fire, place a blanket about his knees, and then seem to consider their duty done.
The men nod at the widow; one of them ruffles Liam’s hair; they leave.
The widow flings a piece of sacking around her shoulders and goes out to see to her livestock.
And Liam is left alone with the man who looks like his father, but isn’t.
He takes a step towards him, then another. His father is sitting in the chair, his head bowed. A strange, thin noise is coming off him, drifting into the air like smoke: a kind of humming or crooning, the pitch of which slides up and down, like a rosined bow upon taut strings.
“Da?” Liam says.
His father doesn’t respond. Liam ventures closer.
Tomás is intent on something in his lap.
Liam peers over his father’s hunched shoulder and sees that he is mending the leaf-crown, his ashy fingers threading the stalks into pierced holes, deftly and expertly.
Where has his father learned to do such a thing?
How does he know to make a hole like that and to weave the stalk just so and to turn the crown in his hands so that one leaf follows the next and then the next?
Liam sees an oak leaf followed by an ash followed by an aspen.
He puts out a finger and touches his father lightly, ever so lightly, on the back, feeling the muscle through the unfamiliar nightgown. His father starts as if poked with a stick, and swings his head around. Upon seeing Liam, his face breaks into a delighted smile.
“A mhic,” he says. “Come here to me.” He reaches out and seizes him, and for a moment, Liam thinks he is about to be severely chastised, perhaps even beaten, which is not his father’s way, but instead, to his horror, he is swept up into his father’s embrace, onto his lap, the leaf-crown placed on his head, his father’s arms around him, tight as ships’ ropes.
“I have so much to tell you,” his father breathes into his ear, “so much to say, I hardly know where to begin, but because you and I are for ever bound together in this, aren’t we, and we must always work side by side, and there must be no secrets between us, so in that spirit—”
“Da,” Liam whispers, hot with discomfort, with this flood of words, with the peculiarity of sitting on his father’s lap, great boy of ten that he is, with the woven leaves that are slipping over his eyes, “where were you? We all thought—”
“Where wasn’t I?” his father cries, delighted. “My boy, I have been everywhere and yet nowhere. I have scaled the heights, I have run to the depths, I have been abroad and yet have stayed within the reach and shadow of—”
“What are you talking about?” interrupts Liam, in desperation. “You…you seem…different.”
“I am different. Everything is different. I have something for you, now, where is it?” His father leaps up, heedless, so that Liam tumbles to the floor, and begins to riffle through his pockets.
“Da, are you drunk?”
“I am not. Are you?”
“Me?” Liam is confused. “Of course not, but—”
“I found something, or something was revealed to me,” his father is emptying his pockets, with hasty hands, turning out stones and twigs and leaves and Liam’s lost boot, and discarding them to the floor, “and I took it as a sign that I was at last…” He becomes distracted by some ferns that fall out of one of the pockets and crouches to gather them carefully, as if they are nuggets of gold.
Liam reaches for the boot and clutches it to his chest, finding a modicum of comfort in its familiar leather contours—his mother might have cried if he’d lost it, for it would have to do for Rose when he’d grown out of it.
His father straightens up, one hand filled with ferns and moss.
“My point,” he says, with sudden urgency, “my point, Liam, child of my heart, is that everything we’ve thought until now—everything is…” He seems to lose focus, his fingers burrowing into the seams of his jacket.
“Everything is?” Liam prompts.
“…is wrong.”
“Wrong?”
His father beams at him, as if taking his repetition for agreement.
“I knew you’d understand—I knew it. What we thought we knew—or perhaps I mean what I thought I knew, because I do not blame you, my son, for how is one so young to know?
—is all wrong. About the land, about our history, and the intersection of both. ”
He seizes Liam’s face in his hands, and Liam finds that palmfuls of damp moss and twigs are being crushed to his cheeks.
“I see it all now. I see that maps cannot be made with theodolites and poles and compasses alone. These are but playthings.”
Liam gasps, dumbstruck at this heresy. He scans the features of his father’s face, the red-calligraphed eyes, so close to his. Could this be a trap? Should Liam agree or disagree?
“They are?” he mutters.
“Necessary playthings,” his father says, “but playthings all the same. How much more there is to the land! I have never before seen it thus. How layered, how nuanced is the geological form, especially when considered from the angle of human habitation and who…” Tomás holds aloft a finger for emphasis, and Liam takes the opportunity to discreetly wrest his head from his father’s grasp “…who is laying claim to it. Or should I say whose claim is in the ascendant?”
Tomás paces to the door in his socks, whereupon he swirls around and paces to the fireplace, then back to the door. Agitated and pale of face, he runs his fingers through his hair, over and over again.