Chapter 6 #19
“Li,” he hears her cry, “Li, don’t, I’ll fall—I’ll—I’m sorry—please stop.
” But the terror in her voice only spurs him on.
For once, for perhaps the first time, he has her.
It’s as if he’s wearing blinkers: all he can think is that he’s suddenly stronger than her, bigger than her; he is top dog.
He’s about to destroy that fiddle, her most precious possession, and then he’ll deal with her.
Enda, however, is not one to give in. She tightens her hold on the tree, she squeezes her eyes shut, and she kicks out with her other foot, trying to free herself from his clutches.
One of her heels connects with a part of him—afterwards she’ll wonder if it was his shoulder or his chest, something soft and cloth-covered—and his grip on her foot is gone, she is free, and her brother is still there with her in the tree, but then there is a long moment of silence as he is pulled away from her, down to the ground below, his face a pale mask of surprise, his body dropping through the branches, cracking against them as he falls, flipped like a puppet, down, down, until he hits the earth with a thud.
And then Enda is alone in the tree once more.
Phina is deep in sleep, dreaming about ladders, salt-saturated and tilting with the motion of waves, when she hears the noise.
Her body reacts before her mind. There is a certain type of cry that sets a mother in motion before she’s even aware of what she’s doing: it’s something in the pitch or the timbre that alerts the animal part of her brain to some manner of disaster.
One moment Phina is sleeping, deep in a maritime nightmare, the next she is out of bed, out of the house, the baby tucked into her shawl, hurrying awkwardly towards the sound.
“What?” she finds herself yelling, at the air, at which child she doesn’t know. “What is it? Where are you?”
Her eyes catch sight of a figure streaking out of the trees up the slope: a blaze of auburn hair, white nightshirt, legs working like pistons. Enda.
Phina sets her course straight for her, a stone catapulted towards a target, and child and mother meet in the middle of the meadow where the donkey is tethered to a stake.
Phina seizes Enda around the arm and looks her over.
The girl’s face is stricken, her hands green and grazed, but there are no obvious injuries.
“Mammy—Mammy,” she gasps, “I’m so—so—sorry—I—”
“Whatever’s happened?”
Enda points towards the mountain and the copse at its base with a shaking finger and utters the terrible words: “It’s Liam.”
Phina hands the baby to Enda, and for the first time in years, she runs: away from her daughter, up the slope, between the hills, along the stream, towards the trees.
Her body is still sore and soft from the birth, her chest engorged, her innards not yet settled back into place, but still she runs like a startled hare, into the trees, through the briars and the leaves.
“Liam!” she screams, to the dark trunks, to the mossy stones. “Liam!”
The branches catch at her hair, the streams mumble and gabble.
Phina turns, her bare soles skidding on pebbles and leaf-fall, and turns again, peering into the greenish shade.
She has never set foot in these trees: Tomás has told the children, and her, that it isn’t a safe place to be, and she had obeyed him but, nevertheless, here she is.
“Li!” she calls again. “Where are you?”
Behind her, outside the copse, she can hear the voices of Enda and Rose, the latter asking questions, and the former telling her to hush.
Phina stands still. She reaches for the frond of fern and grips it in her hand, and as she does so, a drift of sound reaches her ear: it is lower than the noise of the water, softer than the susurrations of the leaves. It is something like a sigh or an exhalation.
Her head snaps around. There, through the greenery, she catches a glimpse of something white, then the trees move over it and it vanishes, but Phina is off, dodging one trunk, then the next, and she is thinking, Dear God, is the child dead?
and she forms the word, please, under her breath: please. Let him live and take my life instead.
Suddenly there he is, her son, stretched out and on the ground, between some small tussocks, at the base of a tree, his chest moving up and down in soundless gasps.
He is dazed but coming round, blinking up at the light.
She kneels, eyes darting about, taking in his injuries.
His shin is clearly broken, bent at an odd and unnatural angle, a snapped bone pushing at tautened skin, and his face is ashen, with a duck-egg lump on the forehead.
She lets out the breath she didn’t know she’d been holding. Nothing here that won’t mend.
By the time the girls arrive, both snivelling, the baby held in Enda’s arms, Phina has already formed a plan.
“Enda,” Phina says, “give the baby to Rose.”
“But, Mammy,” Enda whispers, “you told us—”
“I know what I said. That Rosie’s too little to lift him. But she’s to take him now. I need you to help me get Liam into the house.”
Rose holds out both arms and takes the bundle that is Eugene, full of the solemnity of the task.
Enda shuffles towards Liam, and Phina indicates that she should take hold of his shoulders.
“He’s not dead?” Enda whispers, as they heft him between them, Liam moaning and wincing with each jolt.
“Course I’m not fecking dead,” he mutters.
“You mind your tongue,” Phina says. “He’s just concussed. And has a broken shin into the bargain.”
Between them, they carry Liam down the slope, past the donkey and the cow, through the haggard and into the cottage, where they lay him by the hearth and cover him with blankets.
“Run now,” Phina tells Enda, “for the sisters at the end of the village. They know how to set bones.”
The two elderly women arrive with a stook of willow sticks and a powder that the older sister mixes with water and heats on the fire as the younger touches the tips of her fingers to Liam’s snapped leg, the purpled and bruised lump on his head.
“Why do you do that?” Rose asks, squatting down next to them.
“Will it hurt him, can you make him better?”
“We can,” the older sister says, “but hope.”
The younger sister says nothing but mumbles and hums to herself as she presses her gnarled, wrinkled hands on different parts of Liam. Phina watches from the chair as she feeds Eugene; Enda sits at the table, plucking distractedly at her fiddle strings.
Without warning, without so much as a pause in her humming, the younger sister grips Liam’s mangled shin and there is a horrible crunching sound, followed by an outraged shriek from Liam, as she snaps it back into shape.
Then she wordlessly reaches for the heated pan.
She ties splints of willow to Liam’s calf and covers them with the greenish clay powder.
Taking torn strips of cloth, she binds it, round and round, until the broken leg resembles a chrysalis.
When they leave, Liam is quiet. He chews the herbs they left for him, then sleeps until dusk. When he wakes, he looks at Enda and says: “I’m so hungry.”
With meticulous and considered movements, Phina breaks first one egg then another onto a griddle. The shells she lays to one side: she will grind them up later for use on the vegetable path, for they are the best way to keep the slugs off her scallions and lettuces.
Watching her from the hearth are her two eldest children, Liam sitting in a chair, his leg bound and raised on a stool, Enda crouched beside him.
She seems not to want to leave his side, Phina has noticed.
Rose is asleep up in the loft; the baby is snug in his swaddling clothes in the cradle, violet lids twitching as he dreams his unfathomable dreams.
Phina scrapes the eggs onto two plates, adds a slice of bread, and hands them both to Enda. She observes that her daughter feeds Liam first, before herself, spooning the food into her brother’s mouth with care, bit by bit, without being asked.
Phina positions herself before them, hands on hips. “What happened at all?” she asks them.
Enda and Liam exchange a glance. Neither of them answers.
“Well?”
“It was my fault,” Enda mutters, “I—”
“We were just messing,” Liam interrupts. “That’s all. It was nobody’s fault.”
Phina looks from Enda to Liam and back again. Liam flushes under his waxy countenance, then Phina sees him tap his sister’s arm with a finger, and something like a pact passes between them. She will never get the truth from them. They are keeping a secret for the other and she isn’t to be told.
She sighs. She paces to the door and looks out at the darkening sky. She leans over the cradle to check on the child. As she straightens the bonnet on the baby’s head, she says, without looking at them both: “The question now, of course, is what we do about your father. And the redcoats.”
Again, Liam and Enda glance at each other, then away, as if the secrets between them are too potent, too dangerous.
“You, Liam, are supposed to meet him, and the division, tomorrow morning, at the clock tower in town. But you’ll not be going anywhere,” Phina continues, “so either we get him to delay his trip—”
“The redcoats will never agree to that,” Liam mutters. “We’ll lose the pay.”
“Or your father goes alone.”