Chapter 6 #24
And Rose? Rose is his magnetic north, the sun around which he orbits.
He will go to bed only on the pallet next to hers; he will sleep only once she herself is asleep, and even then the rest he has is a quivering, shallow thing, from which he can be pulled by a passing breeze, the creak of a door hinge, the turning over of the dog, a dream in which a hooded stranger throws seedpods into the embers of a fire.
Eugene’s waking hours are measured by no clock but by Rose’s activities and location.
Where she goes, he goes. When she milks the cow, he will sit with his back to hers, leaning against her: she always gives him the task of dipping a finger in the froth and drawing a cross on the cow’s hide, as their mother taught them.
They have a ritual that when he has the froth on his finger—and it isn’t a sensation Eugene likes, and Rose knows this, of course, because she knows everything—he will look at her, eyebrows raised, and she will answer the question she knows he is asking: We draw a cross on the cow, she will say, her lips curled in a smile, as a charm to keep her safe.
The word “safe” is his cue to make the cross, so he does, every time, and he lets out a guttural chuckle, because he likes the idea of a charm, and he likes the smooth side of the cow, and the milk releasing into the bucket, and he knows that Rose will give him a spoonful of the cream, and that later they will take some along to the elderly neighbour who lives over the hill.
Some days, if his mother and Rose are busy with long and repetitive tasks, he gets a desperate restlessness in his legs, and the only way to relieve it is to pace from wall to wall, letting short moans out of his mouth.
At these times, Enda might take him with her to the lough to collect the eggs, and they will spend some hours there: she will tie a length of rope to a branch of the hens’ tree and fasten the other end to his waist so that he can splash in the shallows, learning to work his arms in time with his legs so the water supports him, so he can fly on the surface, the birds doing the same above him, and Enda will practise scales and melodies on her fiddle, every now and again breaking off to tell him he’s doing well, he’s almost afloat, he’s doing three strokes, now four, now five.
His mother has sewn Enda a special blouse in a smooth fabric to wear when she goes out to play at weddings or a wake or sometimes a dance.
The blouse is looser around the armpits and tighter at the wrists, she’s told him, to allow for the action of the bow.
When she goes out playing, she takes Bran with her, and he, Eugene, often accompanies them.
He likes the walk there, along the road that he can see from their house.
Enda doesn’t like her hand to be held—she says she needs to keep it supple for the fiddle strings—so he keeps one hand on the fur of Bran’s neck and in the other he holds a fistful of her skirt tight against his chest. This is not, as Enda believes, because Eugene worries about getting lost or left behind: he possesses, just behind his eyes, a natural sense of where he is and how one direction relates to another, how a road links up to a second, then a third.
He keeps himself firmly between Enda and Bran on these walks because the walls and fields and trees away from the house whisper to him in unfamiliar voices, and he fears they might lure him to places unknown.
While Enda is playing, it is his job to mind Bran; Eugene will sit to the side, watching his sister, his back pressed to the wall, the dog stretched out over his feet.
Enda will let him carry any pennies she has been given for her playing because he likes the slithery feel of coins as they clink together in his palms.
Time is not a concept of which Eugene has a grasp.
His siblings grow. The voice that comes out of Liam’s mouth is suddenly the growling and rumbling of a large man’s, but they all get used to it, although Eugene finds he misses the light, fluting tones of his brother and sometimes goes to him and puts his fingers into his mouth to see if he can prise it out again (Liam puts up with this for a moment or two, then eases away Eugene’s hand, saying, That’s enough, Euge).
His sisters acquire forms and stature that resemble their mother’s.
Strands of silver appear in their father’s hair, and these spark intriguingly in the light, and soon his temples are completely white.
Bran’s muzzle does the same. Growing seems strange to Eugene: that he can step out of the door a slightly taller boy than the previous day is peculiar, unsettling. He doesn’t like it.
The day he sees that his hand is no longer smaller than Rose’s is when he runs through the bushes of the boreen and doesn’t come back for a long time, even though they are all calling for him.
He stumbles through the solace of the bog, its brownish ooze lapping over his bare feet, and when he reaches the higher ground, he kicks and thumps at the soil, hurls handfuls of it into the air, grips its dampness in his fists and squeezes and squeezes until he notices that it has turned to dry clods between the slits of his fingers.
He sits down on a stone, distracted, his rage forgotten, examining these wedges of peat, the way they have taken on the lines and contours of his fingers and palms, the way they fit back so perfectly into his hands.
He feels something hard inside one, and for a moment he is loath to break the clod apart, so lovely is it, but he is curious to see what it might be—a pebble, perhaps a cowrie, and Rose would be pleased for him if he had found another shell to add to his collection—so he rubs away the crumbs and smears of turf and sees a gleam, a smooth curve, and then he has it in his blackened palm: a ring, made of gold, an interlocking pattern with curves and circles, two tiny scaled animals swallowing the legs of each other, caught in eternal and complicated twinship, the symmetry of it pleasing, the way his eye can follow one of the lines and meet it back where he started, the way one animal’s mouth holds the feet of the other.
Eugene stares at it for a long time, tilting his head one way, then the next, following each animal three times around with the beams of his eyes.
Then his gaze drops to the marshy ground at his feet.
He pushes his feet deeper into the wet, toes pointing downwards.
What else might be in there? What other treasures could he find?
He flexes his feet back and forth, the ground shifting, sucking, and he feels something—hard, unyielding—and Eugene is interested.
He slips the ring onto his thumb for safekeeping and digs down with his hands, the bog water instantly invading the fabric of his trousers, claiming him, as if it wishes to draw him in, to make him part of itself.
He digs, tossing handfuls behind him, and before long, he finds what looks to him like a human arm, crooked at the elbow.
He feels no surprise, just a flicker of curiosity.
What would a person be doing here, down in the earth?
He clears more soil, working upwards, and here is the whorl of an ear, a cheek, a mouth, lips partly closed, a neck and, round it, a string of plaited leather woven with cowrie shells and a knotted rope.
Eugene sits back on his heels, considering her.
The person, a girl, he thinks, seems to be asleep, eyes shut tight against the world, as if she finds it too harsh, too jarring.
He pulls away more of the soil and there is her shoulder, around which is wrapped the long swirl of her hair.
He pats her with a solicitous palm. She ought to wake up.
He sees, for the first time, that her arms are around something and, digging further, he finds the ear and muzzle of a dog.
It is so like Bran that for a moment Eugene is thrown: why is Bran here with this girl and wouldn’t he be terribly cold?
But then he remembers that Bran has gone to market today with Rose.
It is indeed a puzzle. Eugene sits there, with the bog-girl, for a while.
He sucks the peat off the circles of the ring, feeling its ridges and scales against his tongue.
He puts a finger to her face. He thinks that she, too, doesn’t like to speak.
He likes her stillness, her silence, her closed-up face, her grip on her hound.
He feels that she, like him, loves her dog.
She seems more like him than anyone else he has ever met.
He thinks that she needs him, Eugene, to take care of her, the way everyone takes care of him.
He spends a while holding her hand, his fingers curled around hers, then realises he is hungry because he didn’t eat his breakfast. So he uses his feet to push the wet earth back over the girl and her dog—gently, gently, ever so gently, because he doesn’t want to wake them up—replacing their blanket of marsh and bog earth, and he slops his way back to the house.