Chapter 6 #7
The man and his sons dig foundations into the flat ground, in a shape as circular as the ring that resides in the sealed purse of Brith’s stomach.
They hew stones from the mountainside and carry them down, one by one, and place them carefully, incorporating the strong standing stone into their structure (Brith and her hound feel each thud, the packed peat around them shifting, the slow currents of soil moving them sideways).
The walls rise around the men, and then they bring the marram thatch and lay it in a dense covering that will keep away the rain and the wind, and there they set themselves up, the chimney blowing smoke into the sky, the men working the landlord’s fields and tilling their own meagre crops and paying the tithe each month, the women birthing the babies and knotting the nets and gutting the fish and keeping the children from the well and fetching the water, and so it goes for many generations, and battles are fought across the country, again and again, and crops are burned and people go hungry.
Some rise up against their oppressors, and the invaders try to banish their language, and men are killed and babies slaughtered and women hung from trees by their hair and others thrown into the sea with their hands tied, but the peninsula is quiet, mostly, as long as the people pay their landlord and do his work.
Five generations of the people who dug the foundations live between the hillsides at the base of the mountain, each one adding new walls or beams to the house.
The last is a family with nine children.
The Great Hunger comes and their crops disintegrate before they can lift them from the soil.
They survive the first winter, by relying on shellfish and nettles.
When the blight takes the second year’s crop, the father goes to the viscount, their landlord, for help, but none is forthcoming and the viscount instead raises the rent.
Two children die, then three, then the grandmother succumbs; with each passing, the woman of the house makes a mark in the rafter above the fire.
Taking his four remaining children with him, the father goes again to the door of the viscount but his land steward tells the man he is behind with the rent, and if he wants relief he must leave, give up his house and his plot of land, and go into the county workhouse.
We will not do that, the father says, through gritted teeth, we will not leave, it is our land, we’ve lived on it for hundreds of years, but can you not help us, man, my children are starving to death?
The end comes, for all of them. By the time the next year of the Great Hunger comes around, the house on the hillside is empty, the windows boarded up, the thatch burned.
The following winter, gales remove the roof altogether, and the chimney stack tumbles down in the frost. The streams continue to flow, the irises bloom in the spring, the lichen softens the grey of the stones, birds flit in and out of the broken door of the house.
And one morning, in moist and misty weather, a man holding a knapsack and a compass climbs the mountain, his child trailing behind him, a surveying pole and chain in his cold-reddened hands.
First the child, then the man, goes into the little copse, which is all that remains of Brith’s dense and expansive forest. Not long after that, the same man returns with his wife, and all of his children, one of whom still resides in his wife’s belly.
They climb the hillside, the smallest daughter aloft on the man’s shoulders, the wife leaning heavily on his arm, and he shows them the tumbledown cottage with an air of hesitant pride; he gestures at the mountain, the stream and the copse, like a magician revealing a particularly spectacular trick.
Phina stands, canted forward, one hand on the windowsill of the ruined cottage, the other pressed to her lower back, catching her breath.
Her knuckles graze the rough grey stone, and she takes great gulps of the cool, fast-moving breeze, which carries the scent of both sea and earth, salt and vegetation.
She imagines, fleetingly, that the child podded up inside her is experiencing the same thing: a heaving of its little lungs, a racing of its tiny seed-heart.
She starts to take in what is before her, what her husband has squandered their money on, what he has pulled them from home and carted them across the country for.
They are standing, her family and herself, at a breach between two hills, with a large, steep, rocky mountain behind it.
All is green: the grassy turf, the moss, the cluster of trees some distance away, the tall stems of flowers edging a little stream.
They are on a level piece of ground, elevated above the wet bog, stretching from where she is standing to the lip of the hill, a surprising place, like a platform or perhaps a stage, dug into which is the shell of a house.
Grey stone walls, Phina tells herself—and the child, for she believes the unborn share not only the blood and food of the mother but also her every thought, so she tries to confine herself to good and pure conjectures alone—with two blank-eyed windows, the remains of a chimney stack, no roof.
She repeats this to herself, to the child: this place has no roof.
The doorway has rusted hinges, to which cling the splintered shards of a door.
Inside, Phina can see through the frameless window if she bends her knees, is a hearth, from which is growing an abundance of wet-petalled harebells and a bare-branched sapling, and the crumbling walls of what were once two separate rooms. The furthest wall is partly made up of an enormous, incongruous rock, the slope of which juts into the back room.
This place, she remarks to herself (and the child, don’t forget), in an unruffled voice, would need digging out.
A week or so for that task. All the fallen stones within require placing without, which would take her husband the best part of another week.
The walls and chimney would have to be repaired: a job for two perhaps three men.
The windows. The fireplace should be cleared.
They would need thatch. Fencing about the place, a byre, a henhouse, a place for the drying of turf, perhaps a loft.
To make it liveable, in its most basic sense, will take months.
And there is no money, as far as she knows, to do any of these things, no money at all: what little they had saved, Tomás has used to pay the viscount for the lease and the first month’s rent.
Breathing more evenly now, she straightens up, still keeping one knuckle on the house, as if trying to ascertain its character, or perhaps locate her feelings about it.
She looks one way, down the valley, towards the lough and the village where they have left the cart to which all their worldly possessions are lashed.
She turns back, and sees that Enda is climbing up the chimney breast, chattering about nests, about the journey, her fingers and her feet searching for footholds in the stone facing as she talks; Liam, further off, is hunched into himself, a bird beset by rain, looking down at his feet.
Phina turns, at last, to her husband. He is stepping in and out of the doorway, putting out a hand to tap the stonework, bending to peer up the flue, moving from one end of the tumbled cottage to the other, showing Enda some swirled markings on the rock in the wall.
Where is Rose? Phina shoots glances, one way, then the other.
She whirls around, looking down the path, then up towards the steep mountain, seeking a flash of gleaming dark hair, the red jersey the child is wearing.
Just as panic is seizing her by the throat, she feels her hand brush up against something soft, and she looks down.
Rose is right beside her, almost under her skirts; her face is tilted up, searchingly, her green-brown eyes—the colour of acorns, Phina always thinks—fixed on her mother.
She looks again at Tomás. He is smiling, for perhaps the first time in months, his cap pushed back on his head, leaning on the hearthstone, the harebells brushing against his trousers.
Phina is filled, instantly, with rage, head to foot, like a pitcher receiving milk.
She would do anything for Tomás: she will bear his children, she will cook his food, she will patch his worn-out clothing, she will rise when he does, she will sleep next to him, she will nurse him if he is sick, she will not mind his bouts of silence and withdrawal or even madness, she will soothe him if he is out of sorts, she will put her arm around him at night if he is besieged by monstrous dreams. There are things he has done for her that can never be repaid: they are bound together for eternity, and they both know this.
Even so, Phina lifts her chin and clutches Rose’s hand closer to her side. She says: “We will not be staying here.”
Tomás turns. He examines the set of her face, the line of her mouth. Liam, outside the house, shifts uneasily at her peremptory tone. Enda, sitting on top of the cottage wall now, looks down at her parents. Rose steps even closer to her mother’s skirts and slides her thumb into her mouth.
“We will not,” Phina states.
Tomás crushes his cap in his hands, he shifts from one foot to the other.
“Ah, now,” he says, “a little fixing is all that’s needed, I’ll get the—”