Chapter 4 #8
Of the frosty road, he knows this: that it cut through a V-shaped valley, with high peaks on either side, a deep and slate-grey lough filling its base, that he had been compelled to walk its length, very slowly, the dark shapes of the hillsides on either side of him biting into the sky, and that the weather had been bitter and chill, and dusk had been upon them, and the air was thick with the choking, sweetish scent of rot.
It invaded his nose, filtered right down to the bottom of his lungs: ever after he would recognise the smell instantly, if he came across it.
If he allows himself to delve into his mind, if he probes the memory at all, which he tries never to do, he senses that he had not been alone on that road.
There were others with him, and they are hazy to him now, with indistinct voices.
There was at least one taller than him, and some smaller, whose hands Tomás had held, and some of these figures had hair that shone bright copper in the flinty dawn light.
Whenever Tomás finds himself ambushed by these thoughts, which isn’t often, for he is assiduous in keeping them at bay, he recalls that he had no wish to walk this road, and very little strength for it, but that he had to, and that was that.
And then there exists a yawning gap in his recollections.
His mind holds nothing more of the road, its geography, the cold dusk and the damp dawn, and the others who walked it with him, their little hands in his.
The next he knows, unaccountably, is that he was found alone, on the outskirts of a village, begging for food, by two men with a cart.
Tomás knew enough to fear these men, with their smiles and their soft voices and their strange clothes, buttoned black suits with white collars, their promises of help, the curious way they addressed each other as “Friend.” He knew in the core of himself, he could not say why, that when they said “orphanage” they in fact meant “workhouse,” which was a word that carried dread and shame; such a place would lock you away and you might never come out again, so he tried to run, tried to pull himself from the grasp of the men with starched collars, who had him by the wrist. He had been warned of the dangers of the workhouse, he knew, by someone who loved him.
So he kicked out, wrested himself free, slipped through an alleyway between two dwellings, his bare feet skidding on rounded pebbles, but one of the men came after him and there was such a weakness in Tomás’s limbs, and here now was the other man, waiting at the far end of the alleyway, and between them they caught him up, loaded him into their cart and took him with them.
Of the cart Tomás possesses a clearer sense.
The sway and creak of the axle, the tittuping hoofs of the two donkeys pulling it, the filthy and stricken faces of the other children who were collected, as he had been, from villages and verges.
The countryside reeling past, empty and denuded; patches of land mere churned mud pierced with drooping and blackened stalks, and the fenced and guarded fields of the landlords filled with waving, golden corn.
A gulley outside a town with a curious humpy shape that he thought might be a haystack but when they got closer, it began to resemble a heap of human bodies, left there under the sky, and he tried to look away, because it had to be a trick his eyes were playing on him and he had no desire to see those entangled limbs, all bone and joint, the teeth stained green.
A row of cabins with their thatch burned to cinders, doors split in two by the axes of the eviction gangs, furniture and crockery fanned out on the ground.
The figures that rose from the roadside and hobbled towards the cart, so many of them, mile after mile of their brittle arms, their cries and entreaties.
A bent-over creature standing at the end of a long path, half man, half dog, with the hair gone from its head and yellowish fur growing on its cheeks and neck, and how it stared to see them pass, and Tomás saw it was a young man, his face quite distorted by madness, and he was chewing, chewing on a mouthful of leaves.
A tattered woman who ran with surprising strength alongside them, saying, Would you buy a cup, sir, would you buy a pair of spectacles, or a bawneen?
and snatched with her bleeding fingernails at the arm of a child by the backboard of the cart, and Tomás had to prise apart her grip and slap her away, and he turned to see her crumple into a puddle of rags in the middle of the road.
When they arrived, after a day and a night of riding the back roads, they numbered eight in all.
The workhouse was at the edge of an unfamiliar town with a river cutting through it; grey stone bridges arched over it, looking to Tomás like the lithe forms of sleeping sea monsters.
It was a large, imposing stone building with high walls around it; he wondered what the place had been before these times, why it was here, and when he asked the men on the cart, they said it used to be a barracks for the redcoat soldiers, that the children would be looked after here and, no, they themselves would not be coming in with them—they would be leaving them here and returning to the roads to seek out more orphans.
Outside the workhouse iron gates were huddled groups of people, sheltering in the lee of the walls, and Tomás looked at them carefully, asking himself, did he recognise that woman with the dark plait, was there anything of note in that old man’s scarred cheek?
But the person opening the gate was brandishing a stick and slashing it towards these figures, shouting at them to get back, so the people melted away and Tomás was carried forward, through the gates, which clanged shut behind him.
He would ask himself later, when he had become a maker of maps, in an ever-simmering attempt to unpick the question of his origins, how long had he travelled on that cart?
For how many miles, and in what direction?
Had they taken a circuitous route through different villages or parishes?
How far was the workhouse from his place of birth, from the road through the river-cut valley?
But he had been only a child; he hadn’t yet learned the ways of assessing distance or navigation, of recording and remembering names of villages and townlands.
There was no chance he could ever retrace the cart’s journey.
The workhouse was all he had now, was what he was: he was confined within its walls, its rules, its systems, its hierarchies.
He rose at the sound of one bell; he ate at the toll of another; he set to work at the ringing of a third; he put away his tasks when told; he lay down to sleep at the final bell of the day.
He was watchful, mostly silent. He kept to the edges of rooms, observing which boys to avoid, which he might safely bed down beside, which were most likely to steal food from his serving.
He learned to keep a fist raised and ready to defend his plate, as others did, and to sleep in his clothes if he wanted to keep them; he learned that the best way to keep warm at night was to curl up with your knees pressed to your chest. For Tomás, it seemed, had decided he was going to live; he had discovered, to his faint surprise, that within him was an inexplicable but strong urge to survive.
It gushed through his veins, lit up the branched tangles of his brain.
It seized him by the scruff each morning and hauled him to his feet.
He would not be going under, it told him, he would get out of here and live his life.
There were perhaps thirty children at the workhouse when Tomás arrived, housed in a long cabin at the back of the yard, girls in one dormitory and boys in the other.
The wardens clothed these children in whatever was to hand, gave them a bed of straw and sacking, a slice of bread and one serving of thin meal porridge a day; they put them to work; they buried those who failed to wake in the mornings, with scant ceremony, in a pit just outside the walls.
There was a school, of sorts, paid for by the same Christian society to which the men with the cart belonged; for a brief hour the young inmates might receive instruction from a visiting priest, or a listless schoolmaster would drill them in the basics of letters and numbers.
It was soon discovered that when a slate was put in front of him, Tomás could write in a fluent script and perform sums; he could recite poetry in three languages.
When the priest stood before them, Tomás found he could flawlessly produce the words of the catechism.
The schoolmaster demanded to know who had put this learning into his head, but he could find no answer.
Soon, the schoolmaster got Tomás to instruct the younger ones while he rested his feet on a windowsill and his head on a wall and fell into a doze.
It was always Tomás the wardens displayed before the governors or visiting landowners who might be moved to donate to the cause of relief, as an example of their methods, and the fine people in their beautiful clothes nodded and smiled when Tomás spoke out his multiplication tables.
Otherwise, he worked, alongside fellow inmates, breaking up stones so that the redcoats could make roads with them, or cutting up hides in the shoe-mending workshop.