Chapter 4 #7
When he at last has the satchel on his back and the maps under one arm, he hovers at the top of the ladder, heart hammering.
Tomás, still below, seems to be engaged by a homily about patterns of precipitation.
How will Liam get himself through the room and out of the door without Tomás seeing?
He cannot let his father destroy these papers, hurl weeks and weeks of work into the fire, to erase all they have achieved out here on the peninsula to fit some new crazed design of his disordered mind.
Liam will do whatever he has to in order to prevent it.
Tomás is over by the window, examining a spray of seaweed, holding it up to the light.
It must be now. Liam bites his lip, looking down the length of the ladder, the stretch of floor to the door.
He shuts his eyes briefly, summoning courage, picturing his mother, and Enda, and little Rose, because he knows that if his father is allowed to fling this work onto a bonfire, the redcoats will not pay him, and won’t employ him again, and then where would they be?
Turned out of their home to starve at the side of the road.
Liam launches himself, rattlingly, down the rungs, trying not to weep with the worry of it all, through the room, and out of the door, into a mild dawn with everything in his arms.
As he bolts across the yard, pursued by his father’s angry cries, it comes to him that he hadn’t formed a plan of where to go or what to do next.
He had only thought as far as getting all the papers down from the loft and out of the house.
So he runs in zigzags, his head clanging with alarm, his arms piled high, feet skidding in the dirt, desperate to save the work but having no idea what he might do, where he could stash all this to keep it safe.
Luck is on his side because the widow, a quick-witted woman, spots him from her milking stool in the little byre attached to the house, and hisses at him to come to her. And together, the widow and Liam hastily hide it all in the rafters above the cow’s stall, where Tomás will never think to look.
Moments later, Tomás comes roaring out of the cottage after his son and his work, still in his nightgown and his wilting crown of leaves. He finds only an empty yard and the widow innocently milking her cow.
“Where is he?” the maddened Tomás demands.
“Who?” the widow says, her hands working away.
“Mo mhac.”
“I haven’t seen hair nor hide of him all morning, mister. Now get inside and put on some clothes—you’re making a terrible show of yourself.”
Tomás grunts, stamps about the yard a few times, peers around the sides of the house, then goes back into the cottage. The widow, who is thinking that she hadn’t accounted for this kind of trouble when she agreed to take in these lodgers, waits a moment, then says: “He’s gone. You can come out.”
Liam, concealed behind the cow, presses his forehead against its broad, silken side.
He could stay here for ever, in this sweet-smelling place of straw and grass.
Wedged between the lime-washed wall and the contented beast, he could live out his whole span of years here.
Except, of course, for the matter of his mother and his sisters, far away in the Lanes.
How he longs for them in this moment, with the cow and the straw and the pfft-pfft sound of the milk hitting the empty pail.
For Rose’s trusting hand in his, for Enda’s boldness, for his mother’s good sense.
He recalls his mother, suddenly, bent over her work—she often takes in sewing for the people who live in fine houses in the big squares—and the slanting stitches she was using to fix a hole in a lace collar, stitches so tiny as to be invisible, as if done by the hand of a faery.
She had murmured, to herself perhaps, or to him, that she didn’t like the thought of Liam going so far away; she didn’t like the family being parted down the middle like this.
And she was right, as she always is: no good has come of it at all.
When Liam finally extricates himself from his hiding place and ventures back inside, he discovers his father at the table, busy with the drawing of his new map.
He is also, inevitably, talking: “Now would you not agree…” Tomás is mumbling, either to himself or perhaps to the old dog curled up at his feet, as he dips his pen into the ink “…that myth is the close relative of fact? We’re talking here about the earliest people of this country and…
” he makes a long, sure stroke across the uppermost left-hand corner of his page “…the way they chose to go to ground. This in turn, of course, goes back to how land is history, and history is land, how everything you might see, rocks or trees or fields, is—”
“Da.” Liam cuts across the flood of words—it is, he’s discovered, the only way.
His father pauses in his speech but his hand keeps moving: Liam watches it add the miniature crosshatchings of rocks on one side of the line—which he now recognises to be the clifftop not far from here—and the sprouted marshland symbols on the other.
Strange, he thinks, that his father seems to have entirely lost his mind but not his extraordinary cartographic skill.
Tomás can draw geographical features freehand and with great rapidity, but can’t answer a simple question.
“Did you eat your breakfast?” Liam asks.
Tomás looks at him quizzically, with eyes wide and dark as sea anemones.
“It’s so clear to me,” he says to the dog, or perhaps his son, “that I don’t know why I never saw it before.
This is a country that has attracted wave upon wave of conquerors, those who seek to occupy and enslave, but now I alone see how we can resist. To map is to assume power.
We can redraw the very land we walk upon, record it how it is, how it was, how it will be.
We will not use their names, their estate lines, their plantation boundaries, their barracks: these shall be erased.
The very essence of the land, the soil is exactly—”
“Da?”
“I must tell you, child,” Tomás says urgently, placing his pen in his inkwell and taking up another, “that if any animal or bird crosses your path and asks for your aid, you must give it. Do you promise?”
“What about—”
“Promise!”
“I promise, but—”
“And if any bestows upon you such thing as a feather or a whisker or a part of its hide, you must keep it safe and return it, when asked, but only to its owner. You,” he pokes Liam in the chest, before applying himself to the map, this time with a pen from his cerulean inkpot, “will sail the wide oceans. You will ascend the blustery summit. You shall be tested and found wanting but you shall break the bonds that hold you. You will live among strangers and learn foreign tongues. And if you find the rays of the sun too hot, or not to your liking, do you know what you must do?”
Liam stares at his father, at his glittering eyes, at the hand from which pour rivulets of blue—rivers, pools, loughs, an estuary—and he has to swallow a sob to say: “I don’t.”
His father, adding a sign to his map with a flourish, laughs. “Liam! It’s obvious! You come back here!”
“Here?”
Tomás stabs the table with startling force. “Here.”
Liam looks down. His father’s middle finger, ink-stained, calloused on the first joint from the pressure of a pen, is pressed to his half-drawn map.
Liam sees the contour lines, close together, of two inclines, a dwelling place just below, a minuscule mark in blue ink, from which flow seven streams, and in his father’s crabbed calligraphy, the word: tobar.
“To…to the…well?”
His father grasps the cloth of Liam’s jacket, a blissful grin cracking open his face. “Exactly so.”
“Da.” Liam passes his tongue over chapped lips, summoning his courage.
He is telling himself he mustn’t cry. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, I don’t understand any of it.
Please can you stop this? Can we go back to the way everything was, with you and me measuring the peninsula?
I’ll help you, I promise, I’ll do everything you tell me.
I’ll hold the surveying pole straight every time—you won’t have to remind me, I won’t complain about the cold, I promise, Da.
Please. Please don’t be drawing this map.
It’ll only bring trouble for us. What happened to you…
at the well that day? What was it that—”
But his father speaks over him, as he takes up the green-ink pen. “Now, as I was saying, myth is fact and fact is myth, and both are embodied in the land itself and…”
On the afternoon of the fifth day, the priest arrives.
Tomás would never admit as much to anyone, but even in his right mind, he cannot remember anything about his childhood, his parentage, or where it was he came from.
All that information, all those days and years and nights of living under a roof, up until the age of perhaps twelve, all those facts and names that might skewer and pin his identity: gone.
All the conversations and meals, the work, the dressing and undressing, perhaps in the company of brothers and sisters, the animals they fed and cared for, the bedding, the cups and plates, the very soil they ploughed and sowed: gone from him.
The people who reared him, gave birth to him, washed his clothes, tidied his hair for mass, fed him, plucked him off the ground when he fell: not a trace remained.
The landscape of his home, its fields and pastures and trees and paths, the memory of his home’s hearth or doorstep or rafters or bedding: vanished without trace.
All he has is the recollection of a long, frost-shirred road rolling out before him, and his name.
The latter had been sewn, in a looping black script, into the breast pocket of a jacket he was wearing on the day he was brought to the workhouse.
Embroidered there by the hand of his mother, he supposed, in the time before.