Chapter 6 #9
At the corner of its gable wall is the standing stone, partially occluded by the rocks packed in around it, and the mix of caulk and lime that holds the structure together; the outermost plane of it, decorated with interlocking swirls, faces the breeze coming off the inlet; its solid curve forms part of the chimney breast. No one who has lived in the house, the first being the man with the ash stick, has known that this stone was conveyed here from northern regions in the last ice age, and deposited on this mountainside, where it rested for thousands of years, later to be canted upright and made into a sacred menhir on the instructions of druids, who perhaps recognised that the stone was unusual, different from those around it, but had no idea why.
On a blustery morning, Tomás appears, stepping through the doorway, and to the house’s astonishment stoops and sets to, clearing its innards of rubble and stray vegetation.
He lifts each tumbled stone from the earth floor and carries it outside the walls, stacking them in the sunlight.
He spends a while examining them, then selecting them, one by one, to rebuild and repair the walls.
Each stone is fitted, snug, in and around the planes of the menhir, which holds up the gable.
The older fisherman, who comes ostensibly to help, but mostly to talk, conjectures as to how this great beast of a rock got here at all, upright like this, handy or what when you’re putting together a cabin.
Tomás runs his hand over the carved markings, the stippled and glittering granite surface, looks to the north, but says nothing.
With the use of long sticks, the chimney flue is poked free of leaf-fall and nests, and the hearth can once more exhale. Then the wait for the thatcher begins. He comes when he comes, the house hears the fisherman say to Tomás. It’ll be any day now.
A month goes by. Winter gives way to a bright, warm spring.
Tomás watches the patches of damp—maps of the house’s history—vanish from the walls.
The children continue to sleep in the widow’s loft; the widow by the fire; Phina in the back room, where Tomás joins her, late at night, letting himself in through the door, sliding into the blankets beside his wife, bringing the scent of the hillside, of the house with him, lime-wash, fern, soil, tree sap.
The thatcher appears one morning in April, leaning his ladder to the wall, instructing Tomás to hand him up rods of willow and hazel, bundles of sedge and heather.
The man works his way from one end of the house to the other, talking of the yield from his fields, a lad from over the way who fell foul of the law and ended up in gaol but escaped by shimmying through a drain.
“So you want to mind how you go,” the thatcher says, whipping a hazel switch back and forth in the air, testing its pliability, “or you’ll end up crawling your way through a drain.
” He ties a rod into place, fingers quick and deft, and reaches for another.
“A man of few words,” he remarks to the rod, or perhaps the house itself.
Tomás, his face set, hands him up another armful of sedge.
The part of him which turned garrulous that day, the vision he had of his father’s face in the surface of the pool, feels distant, unreachable, like mountains seen through mist. He doesn’t think about it.
It didn’t happen. Or if it did, perhaps he just dreamed it.
The ordeal with the priest he has buried so deep within himself that the only signs—observed by sharp-eyed Phina—are a flinching at the sound of the angelus bell, and a curious new aversion to bacon.
He will go to mass, once a week, in the company of his wife and children, because it isn’t possible to live in a place like this and not attend; he will even kneel and take the host upon his tongue, but he will not shake the hand of Father Joseph at the end; he waits, instead, at the churchyard gate until Phina is ready to leave.
He turns away from the thatcher abruptly, without a word, and takes up a spade, carrying it on his shoulder to a patch of bog.
There, he nicks and portions and lifts the peat into neat sods.
These he arranges into the shape of a hive, for the wind to dry them.
He is a man, he is a husband, he can provide warmth and shelter for his wife and children, for the baby to come.
Let the thatcher do his work, and Tomás will do his.
By the end of the following day, the cottage has acquired a thick lid of thatch, the straw-ends trimmed and shaped to a massed curve, the gables snugly covered.
The rain slicks off it and the wind skims over it, as if the elements are surprised by this development and wish to test its properties.
Inside, the space is unrecognisable: it is dim, contained, suddenly warm and, above all, Tomás feels, as he stands there, looking up at the new wooden rafters, safe.
The house is lime-washed, the floor is smoothed, the bed is brought up the hill and put together in the back room, straw pallets for the children are laid down in the loft, the lean-to is stacked with kindling, legs are hammered to a board to make a table, pegs fitted to dovetail joints for a bench, a drying line tied from sapling to hook, a patch of soil turned over, weeded and sown, an enclosure constructed for the beasts, which Tomás is determined will soon arrive.
He will pay for them, he has decided, out of his next wages from the redcoats because, yes, he has agreed to go back to survey for them; he will calculate and draw up their map sheets; he will accept their money; and if this decision was hard to make, he tells himself he is doing it for Phina, it is all for her, because without her he would be nothing; he would crumble into dry leaves, to be carried away by a breeze.
The house waits for them, the interlapped birch planks of the door expanding and settling into themselves in the sun, the joists of the roof creaking with the unaccustomed weight of the thatch, its twin windows eyes that watch the boreen for the arrival of these new inhabitants.
The stones of the walls absorb the lick of lime, taste the sluice of stream water that is scrubbed over them by the bucketful.
They listen to the whistle of the thatcher, the chat and chaffing of the fishermen, the laboured breath of the map-maker as he hefts wood or mud or sticks of furniture or kindling.
They hear the crackle and hiss of a fire in the hearth, and they feel its warmth gradually spread itself over their innermost sides.
(Brith, in her hidey-hole, is not unaffected by the change: the footfalls ease her and her dog slightly closer to the surface, to the air, and the sound of voices calling back and forth to each other reaches the tawny shell-whorls of her water-filled ear.)
The family come, eventually, on a windless day, when the sun is at its apex, flooding through the trees, illuminating the dew held in the fold of each blade of grass.
They carry bundles and pots and spoons and buckets, the older girl sprinting ahead and her course takes her right over the heads of Brith and her dog, but all she feels is the pleasant oozing suck of the bog between her bare toes.
The boy-child seems wary, looking one way, then the other, shifting the bundle strapped to his back.
The smaller girl has a hen tucked under each arm: haughty creatures with feathered pantaloons and onyx-bead eyes that they keep imperiously trained on their captor, who murmurs to them as they walk, Not far now, soon be there, wait until you see where you’re to live.
The father unlatches the door, holds it open, and one by one they shuffle inside.
The house holds its breath; the people hold their breath. House and people assess each other.
Liam smells dried rushes and the sharp resinous pinch of newly cut wood.
Rose feels the orbit of heat from the fire and she puts down her hens, with care, one after the other, and watches them start to peck and scratch at the dirt floor.
Enda spies eight curious notches cut into the beam above her head and wonders who made them and what they might signify.
Phina sees the table, the bed, the hearth, the thick and sheltering roof.
Enda spies the ladder to the loft and, within seconds, she has shed her various loads to the floor and has darted up it, calling to the others to come. Rose leaves her hens to follow her; Liam begins to unstrap the pack on his back.
The house observes how each of them settles themselves into their new home.
Tomás walks around the outside of the walls, three times, then leans on the haggard wall and contemplates the hillside, the clouds, the stack of turf; his heart is inflating until it feels as light as a balloon.
He has them all here, safe; he has pulled it off; he has found them a home, some land they can call their own.
He fixes his eyes on the wavering shape of the copse, its trees jostling in the breeze, and he feels an uncharacteristic urge to give it a nod, to say to it, Here I am, here we all are, we will take care of you.
Later, when darkness has wrapped itself around the peninsula like a cat settling into sleep, when they have eaten the soup Phina has made, when they have all taken themselves to bed, there is a thick, febrile silence throughout the house.
The rinsed-out bowls lie inverted on a cloth; the fire has collapsed into a soft mountain of cinders; the door creaks against its new bolt; Phina lies on her side, breath washing softly in and out of her parted lips; Tomás sleeps hunched into himself, his hand clenched around a fistful of his wife’s hair; Rose is curled up as near to Enda as her sister will permit, Liam on the other side of the loft.