Chapter 6 #10
Everyone is asleep, apart from the baby.
It inhabits its briny, warm world with its eyes open, thumb inserted into its mouth, listening to the silence, to the peristaltic pops and gurgles of its mother’s body, its soothing cardiac tempo, the creaks of the rafters, the susurrations of its father’s breathing.
Not impossible, of course, that there are remnants of others here in this place, stray elements or traces of the people who walked this land before, come to inspect the new arrivals.
Who is to say that such overlaps never occur, that the woman who wished for a child, the man with the ash stick, the meaty-fisted holy man, Brith herself, the little starvelings haven’t tiptoed in or slid under the door or eased themselves through the caulking or filtered in through the thatch to look down on these people in their beds?
Why wouldn’t they, if they could, peer at Rose as nightmarish images of pursuit and threat flit through her mind, as Liam wrestles nocturnally with caverns and streams?
What would stop them leaning over the living to feel the warmth of their sleeping breath, the longed-for tick-tick of blood along their veins, to observe the enviable flush of life in the redness of their lips, in the tint of their cheeks?
Perhaps this is why the unborn child is awake, because it senses the presence of these ghosts; perhaps it is the only one attuned to their hesitant shuffling, their phantasmic sighing, their wistful longing, their grief at their inexplicable and eternal incorporeality.
The baby sucks on its thumb, meditatively, musingly, eyes flicking back and forth in the darkness, ruminating, cogitating.
It pedals one foot, reflexively, then the other, ankles knocking together, as if readying itself for motion.
It is in no hurry, however, to leave its aqueous seclusion. It is biding its time.
As summer takes hold of the peninsula, drawing delicate white flowers from the wet bog and miniature blue arrows of swifts from the eaves, it becomes apparent to Phina that her family are taking the move here in very different ways.
Tomás is invigorated, full of fire and plans, unrecognisable from the man who lay in bed for weeks.
If Phina looks out of the window, she might see him digging the little field, or instructing Liam in the correct way to harness the donkey, or constructing a henhouse, or pulling weeds, or spreading kelp on the drills.
It hangs in the air between Tomás and Phina, like an invisible skein of spider silk, that this is a life familiar to them both, from back then, from before, that its rituals and routines are inscribed in their bodies and minds, that they know how to do it, what comes next in their list of tasks.
It is their original map: the rising at dawn, the baking of bread, the milking of beasts, the tilling of soil, the gathering of eggs, one eye on the weather at all times, the other on the land or the youngers or the fire.
As for the children, Enda is besieged by restlessness, an inability to remain in a chair for long or settle to any task: she must explore, she must find out everything, right now, this very moment.
She is out after breakfast, often until dinnertime, when she returns filthy and barefoot, her boots tied around her neck, her pockets filled with purple berries or pine cones or shells from the strand.
Liam, Phina has been surprised to observe, does not share his sister’s curiosity about the place; he doesn’t, for the first time in his life, want to fall in with whatever Enda proposes, preferring to sit inside, reading a book the priest has lent him, his face lily-pale.
Enda asks him to come with her, she entreats him, she stamps her foot and says, What’s wrong with you?
, but he will not oblige her with his company.
And Rose? Rose will not leave Phina’s side.
If Phina is placing the washed pots on the mantel, there Rose will be.
If she is riddling the grate, Rose will be crouched next to her.
When she is using the small axe to cut firewood, Rose is at her side, her first two fingers inserted into her mouth, her doll clamped into her armpit.
Trying to sweep the cobwebs from the walls with a broom, Phina sees there is nothing else for it, and she makes Rose her own miniature broom from a stick tied with birch twigs, so that the child can do it too.
Phina has to learn not to step sideways too quickly, or backwards without looking, because Rose is always there, beside her, behind her, half a pace away, eyes fixed on her, as if wanting to read her mother’s thoughts, as if needing to study how to be, how to navigate this new life.
On a day when the weather is still, the sun a pale eye behind a veil of cloud, she raises her head from a mixing bowl to see that Rose has something in her hand, which she whisks back and forth as she narrates some story to herself, something that flashes blue and purple in the light stretching in through the door.
“What have you there, Rosie?” Phina asks absently, half a mind on her baking, the other half on where Enda might be.
The child is sitting cross-legged on the floor, at her feet, talking to whatever it is.
“A feather, is it?” Phina says, wondering will Enda be home for her tea or will Tomás have to go out searching and calling for her again.
Rose is murmuring, in her high and fluting voice; Phina catches something about a faery on a mountain, a lady with enchanting hair, and she is smiling to herself when she sees, pincered between Rose’s fingers, the tassel, the one from her mother’s shawl, the one that Tomás produced from his pocket in the workhouse.
Rose has it upturned on her hand, its silken trails forming long blue hair around one of her fingers.
Phina turns and bends in one swift movement, her knees cracking, and catches Rose’s wrist.
“Where did you get that?”
Rose, shocked from the orbit of her game by the sharp tone of her usually sweet-tempered mother, stares up at her, open-mouthed, her eyes starting to swim with tears.
Phina is filled, instantly, from head to foot, with scorching shame.
“Ah, don’t cry, a leanbh,” she says, and she clasps Rose to her chest with floury hands. “It’s only that…I…I…Wherever did you find it?”
“Sorry, Mammy, sorry. It was in a—” Rose begins but the rest of the sentence is swallowed by her sobs.
“Where?” Phina says, rocking her child but at the same time prising the tassel from her grip.
“In a box under the bed. I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”
Phina lifts her and settles herself in a chair, with Rose on her lap. She tells her over and over that it’s all right, she’s not vexed, it’s just that the tassel means a great deal to her.
“Why?” Rose asks, turning to regard her with large, wet eyes.
Phina looks back at her. She feels the astounding wholeness of her daughter’s body, its small spine, the wing-stubs of shoulder-blades, all folded inside her arms; she feels the shrugging twist of the unborn one between them.
Over in the corner, Liam raises his head, alert to some change in the room.
Phina feels a choking swarm of words in her throat.
Unlike her husband, she has perfect recall of the time before, the life she had, her people.
The strange thing, she would like to say to her daughter and her son, about this new house, their new life on the peninsula, is that she finds it returning to her here with such startling clarity, in vivid flashes, and how she greets them with a desperate grasp, gathering them to her.
She remembers: crouching with her sisters to crack nuts on a flagged floor in slanting sunlight.
She remembers: a yellow-washed wall, and her brothers when they returned from the fields, coming in through the door, shrugging themselves out of their jackets, pulling off their boots, and how they would shove each other, like bullocks in a pen, fighting to be first to wash themselves at the bowl of hot water their mother set on the table.
There were two neighbours, an elderly woman and her brother, living down the lane, who used to let them ride on their pony, she and her sisters clinging to the stiff little mane.
She recalls all the talk that surrounded her father leaving for America, whether they would all go or just him or if he might take one of the boys, the decision that he would go alone, initially, then send for them all, and there was the rush of preparation, the packing of a bag, the discussions about papers and tickets.
She can picture him with them, the way her mother would rub his scalp with her fingertips, how he would balance Phina on one of his shoulders—just as Tomás does with Rose, she could have said—and the trembling, eloquent sound of his pipe when the neighbours would come after dark and sit by the fire, and someone might sing, and another might accompany her father on a fiddle or a drum.
And she has a sense of her mother talking about her father, who was away across the sea, and how one day he sent a shawl, the like of which they had never seen before, and how happy it had made her mother; she kept it folded in linen, and only brought it out on Sundays.
Soon, her mother would tell them, whenever she tucked it about herself, its silk tassels shimmering and swaying, very soon, their father would send them enough money for their passage, sure it wouldn’t be long until they were all together again.