Chapter 6 #16
Enda runs, hitching up her skirts. She cannot help it, she must move her limbs, make her heart hammer in her chest, for she cannot abide the sitting that women must do: by the fire, at the table, at the pot, by the cow, by the tub.
She runs to the field, to the boreen, to the haggard, to the stream, but there is no sign of Liam anywhere.
There is only the dog, standing a short distance away, staring into the trees, ears pricked, as if waiting for a signal.
The new baby is a source of quiet and straightforward pleasure to Tomás.
It’s not always easy to get at the child, so surrounded as he is by visitors and women, so often is he either asleep or at suck or having his lower areas cleaned, but Tomás totes him outside sometimes, when he comes in from the field.
He likes to position the crib near his chair of an evening, while he makes plans for the mapping ahead, so that he can glance down on the infant’s face as he slumbers; the flicker of dreams animates his tiny eyebrows, his pout of a mouth.
All your cares seem to fall away when regarding this countenance.
Four children is a good number, it seems to Tomás, a solid and dependable one.
A table has four legs, as does a chair or a bed, and now his family has the same evenness and stability.
The child is watchful, quiet, rarely cries, and if left near a source of light—the window, the glimmer of the fire—will stare at it for hours.
He has black hair, like Rose, and blue eyes, like Liam and Phina, and Enda’s determined brow, and when he sleeps he clenches his fists, almost as if, it seems to Tomás, he holds a spear or a sword in them, as if he is ready for battle.
Eugene looks like all of them, yet none of them: he is entirely and singularly himself.
The rare noises he makes are questioning, quizzical, as if he is requesting an explanation of the world he has entered: Ah-blee?
he says, from his crib. Ai-ah? Bubbles of noise rise from him, float through the air of the cottage and out of the half-door, to hover around the flat platform of land.
Ga-nang, Eugene demands of the dust motes, the bowls on the shelf, the birch trees, the birds of the sky, the tiny yellow marsh-flowers. Yee-ur?
How much there is to do! Phina must feed the infant and cook and milk the cow and collect the eggs.
He, Tomás, must ready himself for when he leaves on his commission.
He must scythe the grass and feed the beasts and dig the drills; he must chop the wood and fix the loose window; he must mulch the fields early, ready for the next planting.
He must prepare all that he and Liam need for this trip to the island, get Phina to check over their clothing and boots.
So much to think about, so much to take care of.
His head, it seems to him, is split in two: this house and his family occupy one half, while the other is filled with thoughts of the island, said to be a remote and barren place where the people speak their own dialect.
He doesn’t wish to go, and yet he does. He would like to stay here, to see the winter in this cottage, yet the scale of the commission gives him darts of excitement: to map those cliffs and draw the corresponding sketch, his son at his side.
He cannot help but anticipate the pleasure of the work.
The thought, however, that he will be working once again for the redcoats crouches like a toad at the back of his mind.
He made a promise to Phina, or she dragged one out of him, and he sees that she is right: they cannot live here without the money he will make from the work; he cannot pay the rent and feed the children without those wages.
So he goes to call on the viscount’s land steward, pays him four months’ rent in advance, and checks, several times, that the man understands Tomás will be back, that the family are not to be turned out of the cottage, that he will be returning with money in his pocket to pay whatever arrears might be outstanding.
Then Tomás walks out, a few evenings in a row, to knock on the doors of the neighbours, to ask them to keep an eye on his wife and children while he is away.
Tomás is in the byre with Liam, forking hay and thinking about the islanders, the steep and craggy columns of rock they call home, which are possibly basalt or even granite, when he happens to glance out of the doorway and sees, to his amazement, an enormous dog.
There, in the yard, lying alongside Rose, stretched out on the ground, a patch of sunlight printed across its belly, looking for all the world as if it belongs here.
Tomás flings down the fork and comes out into the open air.
“Whatever is that?” he demands, his finger extended towards it.
“The dog, Da,” his daughter says, without looking up.
“I can see that,” he blusters, “but what is it doing here?”
Rose laughs. She rolls over, her legs in the air, then back, fitting herself ever closer to the beast. “He lives here!”
“Does he, by God? Since when?”
“Since ages.”
“Rose and Enda found him,” murmurs Liam, who has come up behind them, “the day Eugene was born. Have you really not noticed him before?”
Tomás strides to the haggard; the morning is warm, bees cross-stitching the late-summer air.
Phina sits at the cow’s side, her hands working beneath, baby tied with a shawl to her back, saying something to Enda about putting down that fiddle and taking some eggs over to the elderly sisters, and Enda is saying she shan’t, she won’t, send Liam instead—
“Phina,” Tomás calls, “did you know there’s a dog here?”
“Mind what I say, Enda. Liam has studying to do,” Phina is saying, and she dips a finger in the froth of the milk and inscribes a hasty cross on the beast’s side. “You mean Bran?”
“He has a name?”
“Da,” Rose says, from her place on the grass, “he’s called Bran. You know that.”
“Since when,” he calls to Phina again, “do we have a dog?”
“Go now,” she murmurs to Enda, “and take the basket.” She turns to Tomás. “Since ages,” she says.
Tomás walks over to the dog, to get a look at it, or rather at the dog-and-girl combination, for the two lie entwined together on the ground, like one being, Liam standing above them.
As Tomás gets close, the dog jerks its head up, alert, awake in an instant at the sound of footsteps, giving a warning rumble from its throat.
“Growl at me, would you?” Tomás exclaims, but he stops in his tracks because a dog like that could break a man’s arm if it was minded to do so. “A good guard dog, is he?”
“Of course,” Rose says dreamily, pressing her nose into the fur of the animal’s neck. “He won’t let anyone come near when we go out walking.”
Tomás considers this. “And does he snarl at you like that? Does he bite you ever? Does he show his teeth?”
“Not to me. Only to anyone he thinks might harm me.”
He wants to object, because opposition is his first instinct, because no one asked him if a dog could come and live with them, because the animal is so huge and ferocious-looking, but his imminent departure presses upon his mind.
“He’ll take care of you, then, while Liam and I are gone?”
“He will. He always does.” Rose bends over the animal and whispers in his ear: “You don’t need to worry about Da. He won’t hurt you.”
It seems to Tomás, however, that there is something strange about the animal.
It seems to him that the dog’s gaze rests on him more often than not.
When Tomás is sitting at the table for his meal or putting on his boots by the door, he feels the press of the animal’s gaze, as if it knows too much, as if it sees everything.
He says this to Phina, late one night, as they sit by the fire together.
She is nursing the baby before they take to their bed, the bundled form held against her; he is also peculiarly aware of the hovering presence of his father in the room, perhaps near the doorway or over by the ladder, his face full of disappointment in him, for failing to give him a peaceful resting place.
Tomás will not look, however, will not seek him out.
Sure enough, the dog, which had been asleep by the fire, keeps raising its head with a low growl, the fur on its neck bristling, its eyes glowing like coals.
Phina looks at him, warily, searchingly, and Tomás thinks again, as he often does, of seeing her for the first time, beside the cart, her mother’s shawl around her.
“You’re saying,” she whispers carefully, “that you think the dog knows things about you?”
Tomás nods, his stubble rasping against his collar.
Over by the window, to the left of Phina, the form of his father presses on the darkness, making himself briefly visible, his arm missing from the shoulder, taken of course by the swine; Bran leaps to his feet and lets out a bark.
Phina shushes him, orders him to lie down.
Tomás blinks, hard, and then the apparition is gone.
Phina’s expression is careful. “What kind of things?”
He cannot look up, he won’t, and he cannot voice his shame for his wife. “Bad things,” is all he can say, willing Phina to understand the worst about him, his failure as a son, but how could she? The thing is unimaginable, after all.
Phina clicks her tongue, puts a hand to his cheek. “Sure, what bad things are there to know?”
Tomás springs up, shaking off her touch, scattering and shedding his thoughts: he will not dwell on such things, he will not. He starts rattling the fire-irons, tamping down the turf.
“Tomás?” she says.
Quick, he thinks, talk about something else—anything. He paces from one side of the fire to the other, keeping close to its light, avoiding the room’s dark corners.
“Do you ever wonder that Liam perhaps doesn’t want to be a mapper?” he blurts out, surprising himself. “Sometimes he seems—he seems— Well, as if he…I don’t know what that priest has been filling his head with but if I find out—”