Chapter 4 #6
“My point is, my point is, my point is…that there needs to be a map of how this land really is, of how it has always been, of what lies beneath whatever order or disorder others might impose upon it. There must be a way to create such a document. And to do so would be an act of honour. Honour and resistance. The whole matter rests in our hands, do you see?”
Liam nods, then shakes his head because he has no idea what his father is talking about, but Tomás seems not to notice, reeling about the room, addressing his words to the air, to the rafters above them, still sifting through his pockets.
“I can begin the work, of course, but you—you—you must be the one who continues it, after I’m gone.
What’s important is that we begin right away so that when the soldiers come, we will be ready, won’t we, and we will tell them, in no uncertain terms—” He pauses again, for he seems to have located whatever it was he had been searching for.
He comes towards Liam on dancing feet, something gripped in his fingers.
“Look, now, what I have for you. This will explain everything. You will see as I do. Here. Open your hands.”
Liam puts down the boot and obediently holds out his cupped palms. His father places into them, as reverent as a priest bestowing holy communion, a single pebble.
The boy looks down at it. It is about the circumference of a halfpenny, and smooth. Grey in colour, with a curious divot at one end. Four striations in white quartz run around its length. It feels cool in his palm, and curiously heavy for so small a stone.
He looks up at his father. Tomás is gazing down at him with suppressed delight and expectation.
“Now do you see?” his father whispers. “Do you understand?”
“So…” Liam looks from pebble to parent and back again, willing himself to comprehend what is happening, groping for an explanation.
“This is older than any of us, older than humans, older than the soil itself. It was here before us and it will be here after us. This hole here, do you see, you can place into it a desire or the name of your greatest enemy or that of the one you love best, and you will know, or can guess, without me telling you, where I found it.”
“Where?”
“The well, of course.”
“The well?”
“The spring. The tobar. In the copse. You saw it too, didn’t you? I drank from it, deeply, and I believe you did too.”
“I…”
“The well? You saw it—I know you did. The place where…” Tomás flaps his hands about his head, frenzied, his thoughts seemingly outrunning his words “…where everything meets. Where…where…You saw it, didn’t you?”
“I saw a stream and—”
“Yes!” His father grips his shoulders in ecstasy. “Exactly! So, you understand. You don’t have to say anything now. Just nod.”
Liam hesitates. He curls his fingers around the pebble.
Its underside, where it is in contact with his palm, has drawn into itself the heat of his body; its upper side is still cool.
The tip of his index finger fits neatly into the divot.
And because he is miles from home, from his mother and sisters, and because there is no one here to help him, and because the wild and deranged man before him seems to have replaced the only father he’s ever known, and because he doesn’t know what else to do, he nods.
Tomás lunges towards him, grasping him in an enormous hug, lifting him off his feet. “My boy, my boy,” his father mutters, as he clasps a bewildered and terrified Liam to his chest. “We’ll begin straight away.”
“Begin?” Liam says, as he is put back on his feet.
His father rakes his fingers through his unruly hair, darting looks about him. “Yes! It was no coincidence that we happened upon that copse, that we were drawn inside. We were chosen for this task, you and I. So we won’t delay. We’ll start now, today.”
“Start what?”
Tomás laughs, as if what Liam is saying makes no sense at all. “To redraw the maps, of course.”
Liam, in his thirty-first year, in the humid room of his interrogation, rises from the bench and walks to the wall, where he presses his forehead into the cool distemper and runs a finger around the inside of his damp collar.
The chamber is airless, with only one high window.
In the restless Calcutta dusk, the strange, probing aerial roots of a banyan tree rattle against the pane.
Behind him, the men at the table murmur in surprise; one of them barks at Liam to sit down again at once. He ignores this injunction, keeping his interrogators out of sight. He grips with all ten of his fingertips the powdery surface of the wall.
From here, it is just possible to glimpse a section of the outside world through the single window.
There is a parakeet feather resting in a fork of the banyan tree, its hooked filaments iridescent in the last rays of the sun, turning from blue to green to purple.
He would like perhaps to stand on a stool, unlatch the window, to reach out and take the feather, to make it his, to put it carefully into the pocket of his garment, which is so drab and monochrome, after all.
He would like to take it to his siblings, to give it to them, as if it might explain where he has been, what has happened to him or—
From the table comes a peremptory voice asking Liam if he can pinpoint the moment he went wrong or was led astray, and where God or his conscience might reside, where the Holy Father might have concealed himself, as if He is a lost handkerchief or wristwatch that Liam has carelessly misplaced.
“Did any of you ever see a tobar?” Liam interrupts.
The five other men look about in consternation and confusion.
It is the first utterance Liam has made all day.
He clears his throat and begins to speak to them of an ancient tradition in his country, where you make devotions to a well or spring, in the hope of a cure or the easing of a problem, dating from pre-Christian times, of course, but some were blessed by priests in an attempt to divert the people to the ways of God.
This is met with mutterings of disquiet, a single cry of outrage.
“My father set great store in—” Liam stops himself, again pulling at the tightness of his collar.
“I made an offering myself once,” he says instead, and turns his gaze back to the window, where the sky is just beginning to turn the deep indigo of early evening.
“I didn’t understand the power of it at the time—I was too young, you see—but now I wonder if it didn’t in fact change everything, if it wasn’t entirely instrumental in—”
“What has this to do with the matter at hand?”
“Hard to say,” Liam murmurs, his eye still on the parakeet feather, its purplish sheen, its green depths. “Maybe everything.”
Tomás doesn’t sleep for three days and nights.
Neither, much to Liam’s relief, does he touch their charts, drafts or field books.
Instead, he talks. On and on his voice goes, words and sentences pouring in torrents from his mouth.
He talks about landforms, ancient and historic; he talks about rivers and their courses, from spring to estuary; he gives over an afternoon to discussing with himself the question of pagan wells and sacred springs.
There is a whole evening during which he delivers a long disquisition on this world, parallel worlds, how to locate portals between them, and the ways and times each might be open to the other, until the widow yells at him to hush because there are some here who need to sleep.
Liam slips in and out of slumber, and whenever he opens his eyes, his father is pacing about, muttering, or has taken himself off to wander about the peninsula.
Tomás talks to the widow, he talks to Liam, he talks to the spinster sisters at the end of the lane, and to the old man who lives by the road; he follows the fishermen out to their currachs, and when they get tired of listening to him, he talks to their donkey.
Around dawn of the fourth day of his sleeplessness, he takes a breath in the middle of a soliloquy about soil to announce that they will be building a bonfire on the strand, as soon as there is enough light.
He will require help, so Liam should get himself dressed at once and start collecting dry kindling.
What is the bonfire for? Liam asks, from the safety of his bed, still half asleep.
Tomás lets out a huff of incredulous laughter, as if the answer is obvious, and says: To burn all the maps and the name books, of course.
Liam sits bolt upright. His hour has come.
He must act. There is no one else. He snatches up his britches, yanks them on, he pulls his jersey over his head, and all the while he keeps up some chatter, to throw his father off the scent.
Where will we find dry firewood, Da? he gabbles.
Has he a place in mind for the fire? What about up near the dunes, or would that be too much of a danger to the widow’s thatch?
Hands stiff with panic, Liam seizes the name books from beside his father’s pallet and crams them haphazardly into the leather satchel.
Down below, Tomás is talking about wind direction and how maps are acts of colonisation, enemy tools that must be destroyed, and Liam says, in a loud voice, Oh, right you are, Da.
All the while, he is grappling with the slippery drafts, the rolls of his father’s sketches, slotting one inside another and tying them tight.
So much work, so much labour: he would marvel at the extent and skill of it if he wasn’t making sure to gather it up, petrified that he might have missed a single book or page.
All those hours and days and weeks spent painstakingly at the widow’s table, Liam at his father’s elbow, ready to pass him ruler, ink, a new nib, a sharpened pencil, listening out for the curt test questions his father intermittently fires at him about elevations or the principle of triangulation.