Chapter 6 #18
The well appears much more swiftly than he’d anticipated.
He’d imagined a long trek through the wet trees, or having to search for it among the trunks, but he sees that he’s been tracing its path all this time and here it is: the holy well, the sacred spring, the very thing that altered the course of all their lives.
Without it, he knows, they would still be living in the Lanes, his father would never have become garrulous and then silent, and he would still be sitting at the back of the classroom, watching as Enda put up her hand to answer every question the master asked.
Liam pauses, stock still, in a stance of polite obedience, feet together, fingers laced, before recognising it as the pose he adopts when serving at mass, and he drops his hands to his sides.
What he feels is a faint sense of disappointment.
He’d expected it to be much larger, with statues, perhaps, or offerings tied to the trees, signs of pleas and heathen devotions: Father Joseph had described such practices at school.
He had told them, as he stood at the front of the class, that in ancient times people had worshipped things they could see, the seasons and the land; they believed in hydromancy—and wasn’t that a beautiful word, boys, derived, of course, from the Greek?
—and they made offerings of their most precious possessions in return for wishes fulfilled or curses made.
But instead of a watery dell of druidical promises, this is just a pool, roughly circular, deeper than he might have guessed, and somewhat unremarkable, with a great deal of greenery growing around it, ferns and lichen, a blanket of moss, complex webs of ivy.
He shuffles forward, wanting and yet not wanting to look down into the waters.
The surface is dark and implacable. He can see in it only fragments of the inky sky above, striated by black branches, a hovering image of his own chalky face.
There is a faint stirring from the far side and he can picture his father rumbling something about subterranean water tables, then tries to banish the thought, because he doesn’t want to think about Tomás and this well, about what happened or might have happened, he doesn’t want to drink the waters or get them on his skin or his clothes, not at all—he doesn’t want to catch the madness or the distemper or whatever it was—he wants to make his plea and get away.
So he squeezes his eyes shut, he grips his medallion and he says the words he rehearsed last night, as he lay awake under the thatch: “Please let me not go to the island tomorrow with my da. I don’t want to go.
I want to stay here. I…” He swallows, passes his tongue across suddenly dry lips, wondering what, if anything, to say next, and then he hears the following words, in what sounds like his own voice, “I don’t want to be a mapper, I want to be a priest.”
Liam’s eyes spring open. He is all astonishment.
He hadn’t meant to say that last part: it seemed to spill out of him without his will.
He hasn’t even thought it or articulated it, but now he has heard it, in his own voice, he knows it to be true.
He wants to be a priest; he wants to wear long black robes, to take mass, to hear people’s confessions; he wants to lay his hands on the crowns of heads and say, Bless you, my child; he wants to be a man of God, to have a face as serene and unlined as Father Joseph, a life of regularity and rules and duties all laid out for him.
He wants the soothing chime of the bell to punctuate his days, to be wrapped in trails of incense smoke; he wants to stand before a row of kneeling people, saying the stirring words, Behold the Lamb of God.
Liam can hardly breathe for excitement. It is as if his whole life, the years ahead, have been unrolled before him, like a beautiful woven carpet.
He gazes at the dark waters, confounded, amazed.
He watches as an arm—which must be his because there is his jersey sleeve, his shirt cuff—extends over the pool, as the fingers uncurl.
The medallion drops, turning and turning, flashing gold in the remaining light, the face of the saint with the halo of stars appearing and disappearing.
There is a discreet, gulping sound as the well receives it, and Liam watches it tumble into obscurity, swallowed by the dark depths, never to be seen again.
Immediately, from just behind him, comes a noise: a horrible, hair-raising, tortured squeal that razors the air, that shrinks the skin on his body. Liam jack-knifes into himself, simultaneously cringing and spinning round, a shriek of fear leaving his mouth.
“Who’s that?” he cries, stumbling to the side, splashing clumsily into the lip of the pool, his boots soaked, water instantly invading his socks.
The sound comes again and he flails blindly in a circle, as if to ward off an enemy, arms windmilling, but there is nothing behind him, to the side, in front of him except trees, trees, trees and leaves, leaves, leaves, the gurgling of the spring, which he mustn’t fall into for he feels very strongly that he might never get out.
Then he’s off, sloshing, lurching, desperate to get away from this place, crashing through branches and twigs, just like before, and he hears that shiver of laughter, again, and he is crying now, letting out incoherent words, please, God, help me, please, and he senses, even in his panic, the glow of light that means the edge of the copse and he hurls himself towards it, blindly, and then he sees something that makes him stop so suddenly he has to reach out and grab a tree trunk to stop himself falling over.
An airborne shadowy figure, arms wide, floating in the sky, beyond the black bronchial spread of a leafless tree. It’s a vision—an angel—come to save him, to guide him! Or is it the Devil, appearing to him in celestial form, to trick him?
Liam’s jaw falls open to let out a scream or a prayer, he doesn’t know which.
“You’d better shut your mouth,” says the angel, “or you’ll be swallowing flies.”
His fists tighten, his pulse leaps. It is no angel after all—how can he have thought it was?
It is none other than his sister, Enda, there in the copse, in her nightgown, perched in the lower branches of a tree, filthy feet dangling.
She must have followed him here to see what he was up to.
She is grinning down at him, her fiddle at the ready, bow in hand.
“Enda?” he gasps, almost fearful of the answer—what if it’s not her but some spirit who has taken on her form, the better to lead him into danger?
By way of reply, she smiles and brings down her bow on the strings: a cluster of notes leaps out into the damp air, and Liam realises, with both relief and fury, that was the sound he’d heard, the noise that had frightened him out of his wits.
“Enda,” he hisses, and he’s almost sure it’s really her and not some malevolent vision, because there is the raw edge of her thumbnail where she’s chewed it, and there is the smut on her cheek.
“So,” she calls, over the sawing music of her fiddle, “you want to be a priest.”
He flushes scarlet, the heat rising to his neck, his cheeks. He is invaded, colonised by instant fury. How dare she come here and listen in on him?
“I—never—you shouldn’t be eavesdropping like that—spying on me.”
“I’m not.”
“You are so. You can’t just—you can’t be—” He kicks the ground, so incensed is he. “I’m going to tell Mammy and—”
She fits her fiddle under her chin, and steadying herself with just one foot hooked daringly around a branch, she plays a group of notes and sings in a loud voice: “There was a young boy called Liam and he didn’t want to be a mapper…
He wanted to train as a priest…to wear a long dress and look… dapper.”
With a bellow, Liam launches himself into the tree, grabbing at branch after branch, hauling himself up at surprising speed, fuelled by ire and loathing. He will stop her song, he will stop her mocking, if it’s the last thing he does.
“I’ll kill you,” he hears himself scream, “so I will.”
Enda lets out a peal of mocking laughter and scrambles higher, fiddle and bow tucked under one arm, and Liam, climbing after her, fixes his murderous gaze on the gleaming wood of her instrument.
He will seize it and dash it to the ground, and good riddance to it.
She is three branches above him, now two, and he is gaining on her and he sees a spark of alarm in her eyes now because she hadn’t known he was this agile, this fearless, she hadn’t noticed until now how much he’s grown, and she’s running out of tree: he has her, she’s trapped.
He sets his teeth, and gripping the trunk with one arm, he lunges at her.
“Get off,” she spits, her teeth bared, like a cat. “I didn’t mean it. I was only messing. Stop now. You’ll break my—”
“I’m going to smash it up, you see if I don’t!”
“Liam, stop,” she says, and her pleading tone is so unfamiliar to him, so thrilling, “please. I’m sorry. I won’t tell, of course I won’t.”
But a kind of savagery has descended upon Liam.
Fuelled by her fear, blind to the consequences, he makes a grab for her foot, as if he means to unseat her entirely from the tree, and seizes her toe in his hand.
He has it right there, in his palm. At this point, had Liam been in his right mind, he might have paused: he and Enda have reached brinks like this before, where rivalrous bickering turns serious, where harmless fights tip over into danger.
Liam, however, is not in his right mind.
He yanks at her foot as she sits there, clinging to the top of a tall tree.
He shakes it, a dog with a rat, with every ounce of his strength.