Chapter 4 #19
His mother, standing at the table, where she is spreading butter on the end of a loaf before cutting off the slice—one for him, one for Enda, one for Rose—follows his gaze.
Her eyes light upon her husband for a moment, then she waves the buttery knife at her son.
“You’re to go to school, and there’s an end to it. ”
Liam slowly takes the bread and stows it in his pocket.
He submits to a swift wet comb through his hair.
He ties the laces on his boots. He follows the familiar route, but on the threshold, his classmates barging past him into the schoolhouse, something tugs at him, insistently, inexorably, reeling him back.
He spins around, he dashes sideways down the street, back, all the way back to the Lanes.
He pushes at their door, he climbs the stairs, to the very top, where they have a room, at the rear.
In the doorway, he pauses, arrested by the tableau of two figures, lit from the side by a shaft of sunlight filtering in through the window.
A woman—Liam has to blink before he realises it is his mother—is sitting on a chair drawn up to the side of the bed.
His father is propped against a rolled-up blanket, and his mother is lathering his face with white soap.
It is an act of such care and attention, her hands moving carefully, expertly, rubbing and coaxing the foam about his chin and cheeks, and all the while she talks to him, in a quiet undertone, wiping the soap from his mouth, putting down the bowl of water and picking up a razor.
She lays a towel around him and applies the razor to his face with gentle, deft fingers.
Chhhruss, says the blade against the stubble, chhrrrruuus, as it carves its way through the soap, and then she wipes it on the towel, and turning him to face the other way, she shaves the other side, talking, talking all the while.
Liam cannot move, so struck is he by this sight—his parents, alone, without them, carrying on their lives, with no children by, apart from the one in his mother’s belly—and the way his mother cares for his father, her hands enacting this simple task.
It will be a moment that will return to him again and again, when he is a grown man and far away from them all, seeing his mother caring for his father like this, and the understanding that she is mending him, in much the same way as she turns a collar or darns the heels of socks.
His father will be made well again, his rents and holes stitched up by her.
“There now,” she is murmuring, and Liam can just about hear her, “just turn this way for me, like that, yes, my love, we’ll soon have you right, I know we will, and all this will pass, like everything else, and we’ll be set again, just you see if we won’t, but for now you stay there, right where you are, you’re not to worry about anything, we’ll manage, so we will.
I can always take in sewing again, and the girls can help me, so you must do nothing but rest and get better, do you hear me, get your strength back, but first give me your hand, yes, like this, here, not much to feel yet but this baby will be a fine one, I know it, a strong one, another boy, I believe, it knows you’re there, it can hear its daddy, and we can’t wait to meet it, can we? ”
The baby, who is the size of a pear, senses its parents’ movements as a concertina of space and a flickering alteration of its light.
It considers the saline taste on its tongue, and the shape of the handprint before it: the slices of light between the fingers, the breadth of the palm, its alternating intervals of light and shade.
The baby wriggles with a flicking motion, a fish in a stream, taking in a sip of fluid. Here I am, it says, I am here.
“That’s it now,” Liam’s mother says. “You can lie back down, sleep some more, rest now, my love, rest.”
Liam, unseen and silent, turns away. His mother is taking care of things, as she always does; his father looks more like himself, with all that beard growth gone. Liam goes back down the stairs, one boot after the other. At school, he will be whipped for his lateness, but no matter.
His mother, hearing her son depart once again, smiles, but doesn’t turn her head. She leans forward, over the bulge of the baby, and presses her lips to Tomás’s brow.
As a chainboy to the mapping team, Tomás’s job was to move the measuring chain in a series of straight lines so that the soldiers could get accurate measurements from their trig points. He was also expected to heft heavy instruments along paths and tracks, up mountains, along shores.
The most crucial part of his job, however, was translating for the surveyors and the sappers whenever they had to ask farmers or villagers where this boundary lay or who owned that field or what was the name of the river.
Tomás stood behind a seated soldier as the local people queued up, one by one, to answer questions, and Tomás spoke with them, then told the redcoat what the responses were.
More and more, he was handed the pen and told to write it all down himself because the redcoats had no sense of the spelling involved, of the many regional variants of cloch and droichead and gaoth and sliabh.
Whenever he sat at the table, the map sheets before him, he always surreptitiously pressed his hands to their inked marks, almost as if he would make a print of them across his palms, because it was clear to him that, with a map, a person could never get lost. With a map, a person could always know where they were.
He learned quickly and eagerly, always seeking an opportunity to ask a question or a chance to perform a new task.
By standing beside a redcoat surveyor and adopting an attitude of helpful deference, he was able to observe and memorise how the mysterious theodolite operated.
It must, he saw, be steadied and levelled on its tripod, with tiny water bubbles to position inside three different markers; it must then be centred, bringing the vertical axis to match a gravitational marker.
Angles were read and recorded, spoken aloud, and then the next bluff or outcrop could be recorded, as long as the instrument didn’t move an inch.
When instructed to take down the instrument and pack it away, Tomás always first sneaked a look through the lens, holding his breath so as not to steam up the glass.
Inside the theodolite was a world untroubled and hermetic, where mountains and trees, buildings and roads hung upside-down, where the sky was a pellucid sea that collected in the bottom of the lens, and the sun shone its beams upwards, like stalks of barley.
Tomás did not shy away from what he saw around him, never shirked in committing to the record what had occurred in these places in recent years.
He set it all down: the ghost towns, the weed-lush fields, the mass graves, the workhouses, the Famine roads that led nowhere.
He corrected the earlier surveyors’ inept manglings of the language, their cavalier erasure of history.
Maps can be read for many things—geography both natural and man-made—and Tomás made sure that the Great Hunger was inscribed on his drafts and in his name books, that it was recorded, in symbols and writing, that its effects and scars would be seen, its evidence and testimony unmissable, for all time.
He followed his division wherever they were ordered, from coast to coast, over river and bog and valley and mountain, and this journeying fed his restlessness.
He learned that there were days when the rain came down more heavily than usual, and the surveyors kept to their tents, wary of what they called “a wetting,” the sappers to their bottles of stout, so he was able to slip away, to wander at will.
The weather was of no consequence to him; he moved through the drizzle like a fox.
He learned that he must never contradict a soldier or a redcoat surveyor, even if he knew their calculations were erroneous, that seaweed should be consumed if a man wants to keep his teeth, that the cerulean ink intended for the sea may be mixed with gorse flowers to achieve the emerald hue needed for fields, that the land, his land, contained such astonishing variety—river valleys and coves and shallow waters and pounding waves and lime-cut wastelands and cragged peaks and lowland and towns and cities and streets and woods—and that he had never imagined such bounty.
He learned that everything he saw—quarry, hospital, weir, castle—had a minuscule corresponding symbol.
The blisters on his heels hardened into calluses; he rubbed pig fat into the seams of his boots each night.
He was tireless, his division said, sometimes ruefully, always ready to press on, to urge them all another mile or two down the road; he never rested, never allowed a mistake to filter into the books or the charts, and he was rigorous at winkling out every detail, every twist in a road or a stream.
After two years of this, he was no longer an apprentice chainboy, the commanding officer told him; he was still classified as a labourer but he had been promoted within that category to what was called a civilian assistant and would receive a salary.
The thought of this—the shillings and pennies that would be coming into his pocket each week—kept him awake that night.
Coins that would be his very own, to spend, to save, to purchase life’s needs.
Some men, he saw, from looking around himself, sent money to families back wherever it was they came from; others squandered it in shebeens or county fairs. What would he do?