Chapter 4 #14
He put out a hand and his palm met the wet, rippled trunk of a blackthorn tree, his fingertips finding clefts in the bark.
The very words were enough to sicken him; he thought he might retch, as if he’d ingested something rotten.
With a searing clarity, he saw himself as the lapdog of the redcoats, taking their money, helping them to tighten their hold on the land, touching his cap at them, yes, sir, no, sir, whatever you say, sir, here’s the name book, here’s the map, will I carry that for you, sir, will I do the readings, here are my calculations and my sketches and, oh, I see you’re signing your name to them there, thank you, sir, you’re very kind.
He was a betrayer, a traitor of the worst sort.
The redcoats had plucked him from poverty and early death, yes, but they had made him work like a beast for almost no pay.
Well, he would do their bidding no more, as from this moment.
This copse, it seemed blindingly clear to him, could be the one scrap of this whole country that hadn’t been taken by the redcoats or the landowners for their own purposes.
It might be the one place they had never set foot.
It could be the only remaining slice of the country still free of them.
He, Tomás, would not be the one to hand it to them on a platter. He would never work for them again.
Tomás groped his way forwards, filled with a loathing—for himself, for the soldier-men—so sharp and bitter that his mouth was stinging.
He was crawling on his hands and knees over the damp, leafy ground, and when he came to the smooth edge of the pool, he drank from it again and again, desperately, deeply, to ease the pain in his gullet, to slake a thirst he hadn’t known he had.
In its shadowed depths, he saw the flick of a fish but it was the face in the surface of the water that caught his attention, a haggard visage that resembled his own yet wasn’t.
It belonged to someone he had known long ago, someone who had since been obscured to him, someone who had loved him, had cared for him, right until the very end, and a great flare of shock and joy rose in Tomás, for the face was looking gravely at him and seemed to be on the verge of speaking, of asking him a question—
That accursed priest is at him again, tugging on his ear, pouring what feels like hot oil into it, and onto his hands, his throat.
Tomás hisses at him, like a cat, thrashes his head about, desperate to keep a hold on the reflection in the pool, the vision, whatever it was, the look of dismay on his father’s face.
Will this priest just leave him be so he can work out what it is he must do, what his father was trying to say to him?
It comes to Tomás, now that he has been dragged back to the room, that it has been a long time since he ate.
The sun has set twice since he was tied here, which means he hasn’t taken a bite for over thirty-six hours.
The notion takes up residence inside him.
He breathes around it, feels it swell and fill his body with dread.
Far worse than the tethers and the gag, the priest’s endless prayers, is the sudden awareness of a certain sour, aching hollow at his core, just under his ribs.
As the morning wears on, Tomás becomes distracted.
The copse, the waters, the face he saw all begin to slip from him because the emptiness in his belly is deepening.
It is stirring, it is stretching wide its fanged jaws.
Tomás knows this atrocious creature and he wants nothing more than to grab it by the neck and throttle it with his bare hands if it dares come any nearer.
It is, of course, hunger. Tómas is hungry.
The dark-robed figure who keeps him here, away from his boy and his work, receives whatever sustenance he needs.
Tomás watches as, at midday, the priest opens the top hatch of the door, just a little, just enough to allow a platter or a bowl to be passed through.
And then the man fills his mouth, daintily, a forkful at a time; he chews methodically, swallows the food, and licks his lips, while Tomás’s stomach groans with nothingness, feeding off itself.
Tomás shuts his eyes. He will not give in, he will not hand this person the satisfaction of knowing how the clean scent of milk, the tang of a mealcake drives nails through his innards.
Perhaps worse than that is the sense of something shifting, gathering itself, like a dark storm cloud out at sea, and Tomás fears it, fears what rains and storms it may drop when it reaches land.
At suppertime, on what is perhaps the third dusk of his confinement—he has lost his bearings in time by now—the plate that is handed through the half-door is something else.
When the priest bears it through the room towards him, Tomás turns his head away but it’s too late.
The first drops of rain from that ominous cloud have begun to fall, to wet his head, for he has caught the waft of it, the drifts of steam from it have entered his nostrils, have infiltrated his gullet, and he recognises it as the smell of colcannon.
Colcannon: made in a scalding pan, the fat at a sizzle, slices of onion softened to translucence, with kale and cabbage thrown on by the handful, a pinch or two of salt to make it good, and then the potatoes, and Tomás cannot think in this way, he cannot, he must not: he has to clamp down on thoughts such as these, must not permit them entry.
The storm cloud within him, though, is roiling and rumbling with thunder and he is at once here, in this cabin, inexplicably tied to a table, but just for a moment he is also standing at the side of a taller person.
There is a fire before them, its logs and turf throwing out a ferocious heat, and in the glowing crevices there are caverns and castles to be found, and the younger Tomás is seeking them with his eyes and dwells in them, and in the pan there is, of course, colcannon, which the person beside Tomás, who must be his mother, works at with a spoon, and as he lies there on the table he finds, with a kind of blunted incredulity, that he knows it was his father who carved the spoon for her, with his whittling knife, from a branch of birch.
Despite himself Tomás tries to seize this mote of memory; he snatches at it, to hold on to it.
He wants nothing more than to tell his wife about it: the colcannon, the woman beside him, the whittling knife.
He would like to say to her: Listen to this.
And: I will make you a spoon from birch myself, so I will, in the evenings when we sit together at the hearth, and you may use it to make colcannon for our children.
There is nothing—nothing—he wants more in this moment than to be sitting at a table, with his three children and his wife, about to eat such a meal.
The priest is shovelling the colcannon into his gob and Tomás is forced to listen, and his own stomach is howling, and the sudden recollection dissolves.
Hunger is all very well in itself: if you leave it be, it can be borne, but if you wake it, with a smell, with even a scrap of food, it comes back at you with double the strength.
Tomás grimaces, squeezes his eyes shut; he doesn’t want the storm to continue, for it to drop its entire load of rain, as clouds always will when they blow in off the sea and meet the immovable rockface of a mountain.
He gropes back along the rope thrown to him by his mind, tries to find his way back into that room, to that fireside, but instead of his mother and the pan and the spoon, he finds at the end of the rope those things he never wants to see or revisit, such things as would drive a person out of their mind.
He is in the eye of the storm now; he can hear the screaming of the gale, feel the dart of each icy raindrop.
He is forced to recall things he has expended much effort on trying to forget: for example, the sucking of stones, to slake the craving within, and the way the grit lodges in the pits of teeth, under the tongue.
For example: the crying, the endless crying, of the youngers who lie together on a sack filled with bracken.
And being sent out to stand at the gate to wait for someone, anyone, to rise up from the road so as to be able to hold out a hand to ask for a farthing, please, a morsel, all the while hearing the squealing noise of the earl’s pigs over the hill, which are hungry too, because it is your father’s job to feed and care for them but he is too weak or ill to do this task.
Also, for example: clothes that are worn to flitters so that the wind can find its way to your skin, and the scrabbling with freezing fingers in the mud to see if any of the lumpers survived, even one, maybe two, and then the awfulness of another kind of digging, the very worst kind, when the arms are so tired and the ground is so heavy and sodden.
How he and perhaps his sister have to fill in the hole, over three of the youngers, over their father, and they heft stones on top of it, as well as they are able.
They have to take them from the top of the walls their father built, a beautiful patchwork of stones in all sizes that surrounded their cabin, for their father had been an expert wall-builder, in his time, and they do it in the full knowledge that soon the eviction men will come and turn them out onto the road, for their father is dead and cannot work for the earl now so they cannot pay their rent, and the next day or the one after that they will have to walk to the next town in the hope of relief.