Chapter 6 #17
He hurls the poker away from him and sits down, his head in his hands, his eyes shut tight. He waits, now, for Phina to say something reassuring. That he is imagining things. That Liam is looking forward to the trip out to the island.
But she doesn’t.
“My love,” Phina smooths the hair on the back of his neck, “are you…” even with his eyes closed Tomás can sense her selecting her words, trying to erase the concern in her voice “…quite well? You don’t…think that your…your melancholy from last year might be returning?”
Tomás opens his eyes in astonishment. He looks at the floor, at his socked feet. “Not at all,” he snaps, “why would you say that? Aren’t you the one insisting I take this work?”
Phina rises, lifting the baby to her shoulder and rubbing his spine. She walks to the door and back in the slow way women have when they are carrying an infant. “Have you talked to Liam?”
“Talked?” Tomás repeats, shocked. “Whatever do you mean?”
“About the island. About being your apprentice. About missing school.”
Tomás fidgets with the cushion on his chair, crushing it between his hands. “What is there to say?”
“It may be…” Phina says, and Tomás feels she is once again selecting her words “…that he needs to be persuaded, that he may not wish to come or—”
“Not wish to come?” Tomás stands up so abruptly he knocks a plate to the floor. “What have the boy’s wishes to do with anything? He has no notion of how lucky he is, to be given a chance like this.”
The next day, however, he leaves off halfway through his scything. He finds Liam sitting at the table, bare feet resting on the dog, a book propped up against a bowl; the boy is copying something, his tongue pressed into his inner cheek, his fingertips blackened by ink.
“There you are now,” Tomás says.
His son looks up from his copybook and his eyes are like two birds’ eggs, implacable and still.
“We’ll be off next week,” Tomás begins gruffly, “you and I.”
Liam blinks slowly, as if having trouble understanding the meaning of this sentence, or as if his thoughts are still with his lesson.
Tomás glances down at the page beneath his son’s hand, expecting to see mathematics or algebra, but he sees instead that it is some kind of psalm or prayer that Liam is writing out.
Why would you be copying that, he is about to ask him, but, fleetingly, he has a peculiar and uncomfortable sensation of a crevasse zigzagging through the ground between the two of them, as if they are in the grip of a seismic event and the floor of the cottage is splitting open.
He has to shake his head to rid himself of it.
“Off where?” Liam asks.
“To the island, of course.” Tomás shuffles his feet, puzzled.
Again, the sensation that the ground is shifting and that he is standing on one side of a huge fissure, with Liam on the other.
He tries to remember what Phina says to him about Liam: try to talk to him with kindness, don’t be too brusque.
“We’ll have ourselves a grand time, won’t we,” he raps the table in what he hopes is a jocular fashion, “out there in the ocean? You and me together, like before. We’ll be rowed out there on a boat, I’m told, like…like seafarers or…or explorers.”
Liam glances down at his hands then back up at his father. “But I’m not wanting to miss school,” he says, in a distant, almost formal voice.
“Ah, now,” Tomás blusters, “what boy wouldn’t like a few months away from the desk? Sure, your friends will be eaten up with jealousy. There’ll be Norse ruins…seabirds…some interesting rock formations…We’ll be the first surveyors on the island, did you know that?”
“Father Joseph says I need to be preparing for my examination in—”
“I wrote him a note,” Tomás cries. “I gave it to him, after mass, it must have been a month ago now, so the man knows full well that—”
“He says I shouldn’t be going if I want to pass—”
“You’re my son!” The words, emphatic and furious, appear from nowhere. “And I say you’re going.”
Liam is silent, staring down at his psalm or whatever it is. Tomás presses a fist to his mouth, trying to bring his fury to heel. Why does the boy look so shifty, so reluctant? What is it that has come between them?
He tries again: “The redcoats have some fancy new tools, I hear. I’ll be needing all the help I can get. It’ll be just the two of us. With a couple of dundarlán sappers in tow, of course, but it will be a real adventure, won’t it?”
Liam still says nothing.
Tomás stares at him, floored. He is filled with an urge to grab him by the shoulders, to give him a shake, to say, Whatever is it, whatever is wrong, why won’t you look me in the eye, I’m your father.
This island will be the making of us, as a mapping team, can’t you see that?
Then we will always work together, you and I, like a pair of hands.
He shoves his own hands into his pockets, then takes them out.
“We’ll make a deal, will we?” Tomás says, trying again for a jovial tone. “You help me out there, and when we get back, I’ll help you study for the examination. Every night, if need be. How about that?”
Liam lays down the pen he is holding and turns a page in his book.
“So,” Tomás says, after a moment, “that’s it, then. We’re all set. We’ll leave in a week.”
Days later, in the early dawn, Liam hurries away from the house, pushing his arms into the sleeves of his jacket.
It is that time of day when the clouds are a darker blue than the sky behind them.
He has timed it perfectly, he thinks, before anyone else is awake, even the baby: no one will wonder at his absence for a good while.
The dog is still asleep by the hearth, so Liam needn’t worry about being followed or given away by barking.
His father, who is a devilishly light sleeper, is away with the redcoats already, finalising the arrangements at their base camp.
Liam passes through the yard, past the pump, through the field, the donkey’s soft nose rising into the air to sniff at his scent. Liam puts out a hand and strokes the damp nap of its face.
He moves quickly onto untended ground, his boots finding footholds between the gulleys and streams. He is trying not to think too much, not to dwell, is keeping his thoughts practical.
The rim of metal presses into the skin of his palm: whatever happens, if he falls, if he stumbles, he mustn’t drop it.
It has to be his most precious possession, an item that means everything to him.
Liam has spent sleepless hours pondering this; he has thought about it as he made the long hike down the hillside in the mornings, as he walked the long road to school, as he returned in the evening.
He has considered all his treasures, one by one: a penny he found on the road, a piece of coral from the beach, the whitened jawbone of a fox, complete with teeth, a hawk’s feather.
And then, in bed one night, his mind offered up to him the saint’s medallion, given to him by Father Joseph the first time Liam had performed his duties as altar boy at mass.
He slid his hand beneath his pillow and felt it there, its smooth edges, the raised effigy of the saint, the tiny stars adorning the halo, the loop of metal at its top, and he had been filled with a bright, sharp pain because of course this was his thing-most-precious, his treasure, because it would hurt him to give it away, but wasn’t that what Father Joseph would call the essence of sacrifice?
Liam casts a look over his shoulder. The cottage is further away now: a long box with a covering of thatch, a cursive slant of smoke rising from one end.
Inside it is his family, minus his father: his mother, his sisters, his baby brother.
None of them know what he’s up to; none of them know what is in his head.
The copse reveals itself suddenly, from behind an incline, just as it did that first day; it is almost possible to miss, if you don’t know what you’re looking for. Liam stops again, his heart punching at his ribs, from either the climb or fear.
He doesn’t want to do it but he must. He doesn’t want to do it but he can’t not.
He shifts from one foot to the other; he puts the medallion into his left hand, then back to his right; without intending to, he lets out a whimper of distress and the sound scares him, so he clamps his lips shut.
He looks up and around. The two hillocks, the high mountain ahead. The darkness has faded even more, draining from the sky. It won’t be long until daylight and then his mother will wake up and they might come looking for him. It must be now. Now or never.
He incants these words to himself as he moves forward, towards the copse, and steps inside. Now or never, now or never, now—
It is the same yet different. There are the tussocks, and he is careful to tread between them, and there the twisting stream, but the sense of a green house is gone.
The oppressive and frightening atmosphere is absent.
It was, of course, spring when he was here before and now the leaves are almost off the trees and the ground is thick with rust and yellow and brown, with layer upon layer of discarded wet foliage.
It’s possible to see out through the trees now, to catch a glimpse of the mountain and the valley below.
Liam hears his laboured breathing and the thudding of his heart as he picks his way along the stream, moving upwards, and he hums to himself, just for the comfort of the sound, just so his thoughts won’t run along the tracks he fears—the little graves, the laughter he heard here, his father’s madness, the loss of his boot—and he realises it’s a song Enda has been playing, over and over again, but he doesn’t care because anything that distracts his mind is welcome.