Chapter 6 #25
His family ask him about the ring—how did he come to have it, where did he find it?
—but the questions don’t interest him, so he merely shrugs and makes a gesture towards the bog.
Enda slides it from his thumb, which Eugene isn’t entirely happy about, and they pass it among them, holding it up to the light, Tomás fetching his spectacles to examine it more closely.
They talk about it for a while, saying it must be old, very old, and perhaps they should show it to the widow, or the sisters from down below, or the priest, but Eugene shakes his head, rapping the table with his curled knuckles.
Rose is the last one to hold it: she slides it onto her finger and regards it there for a long moment thoughtfully, turning her hand one way, then the other.
Then she says, I think we should give it back to Euge.
He found it. He should keep it. And she takes it off and puts it into his hand, closing his fingers over it, one by one, making him its protector and custodian.
Eugene partly gauges the passage of years by observing his siblings and his parents; another part of him measures it in terms of storms. A gale blows in from the sea and it lifts part of the thatch; Liam and their father climb up together onto the slippery roof, with the wind snatching at their clothes, and they toss twine to each other, over the hump of the house, their voices trying to find the other, and Eugene doesn’t like this, he doesn’t like it at all: not the sky, which is angry and low, not the yellowish light, not the way the gale whips his hair around, and certainly not the way his brother is up there, standing on the gable end, gesticulating, coils of twine over his shoulder.
Later, another storm comes and this one is wet and wild: the thatch stays on but the rain leaks through and his mother puts pots and buckets about the place to catch it.
The streams and rivers burst their banks; their hillside becomes a flood.
Eugene removes his boots and goes splashing through the currents and the puddles.
Everything is new, everything is different: the field, the donkey’s place, the haggard are flowing with water, swallowed by the river.
The yellow irises are up to their necks, valiantly keeping their heads above water.
Eugene worries about the bog-girl and how she’ll be faring, so he wades up to the boreen, which is rushing and bubbling with noisy silver currents, but he finds that the bog is still a bog, the same as always.
It is after another storm, one from the south, with low and venting winds, the sea heaving up great banks of black weed and broken shells, that he and his mother walk out to check on the neighbours, and on the way back, his mother tells him she has a strange feeling, terrible strange it is, just here, and she puts the heel of her hand against her clavicle.
Then she says, Oh, Eugene, and clutches at his arm, the front of his jacket, and he doesn’t like this, she should know he wouldn’t, so steps sideways, and when he looks again, his mother is lying on her side, her face turned to the ground.
The basket is upturned and all the things in it are scattered around her: a cloth, the straw that held the eggs, some kale from the widow, a handkerchief.
Eugene spends some time putting these things back.
Then he sits on the hillside, waiting for his mother to wake up and walk to the house.
She doesn’t. She lies where she is and doesn’t answer when he makes an enquiring noise, doesn’t respond when he taps her hand.
Eventually, Eugene wanders away. He goes to the place where there is a row of smooth rocks emerging from the sod, like the backs of whales coming up from the sea, and it’s possible to walk along them, and he does this, back and forth, for a while, looking out beyond the cliffs, where sea-witches are whisking white froth off the top of the waves with their brooms. When he returns, he finds his mother is gone, as if she hadn’t been lying there at all.
The basket, which he has repacked, is still there, so he takes it in his hand, intuiting that this is what she would want him to do, and walks up to the house.
Inside, everything is different. Rose’s face is streaming with tears, like the ground after the wet storm; Enda is sitting at the window, her fists rammed into her forehead, and those tongues of fury are writhing around her.
His mother is lying on the bed, which is a more usual place for a sleep, her feet making a V, her face turned up to the rafters, and someone has placed coins on her eyelids.
Most disturbingly, his father is bent over her, his face pressed to her middle, his hand gripping hers, and he is crying, not tearful crying, like Rose, but a kind of roaring, and out of the storm of it come words but they are not in any particular order and Eugene cannot make sense of them.
Eugene puts his hands over his ears, surveying the scene.
Rose’s leaking eyes; Enda’s rage; his father making the horrible sound.
He cannot parse this situation; he cannot fathom these various behaviours, what it all means, what might be expected of him.
The only possible course of action is to make himself disappear, to occupy the smallest space imaginable.
He climbs the ladder to the loft, lifts the lid to a chest and wedges himself in next to the blankets kept there.
Here is a place to think, a place to preserve some of the necessary space and silence around himself.
He props open the lid with a twig from his pocket, so he can watch what happens next.
It turns out to be this: Liam bangs in through the door, his face flushed and distraught, and the priest is with him.
Eugene’s father leaps up and shouts, Get out of here, don’t you dare, and Liam says, Stand aside now, and Tomás says, He’ll not have her, I’ll bury her myself, here, on this land, and Liam says, No, you won’t, she’ll have a proper service, with a mass said, it’s what she would have wanted.
Eugene wonders why they are shouting about burying, why they wish to place Phina in the earth; he thinks his mother would not want this because doesn’t she always brush at the clothes when they have mud on them; she tuts if he comes home with soil on him, dirt she calls it.
Then he thinks of the bog-girl and he wonders if his father means to put his mother with her, down in the wet and mulch of the marsh.
Why, though? Why are they so set on putting Phina into the land?
It is confusing indeed. Eugene presses himself lower into the chest and the blankets as the house fills with people, neighbours, who bring food, who embrace the girls, who shake Tomás and Liam by the hand, and say, Sorry for your troubles, and She was a good woman, and She was taken too soon.
The lid of the chest is lifted, after a time, he doesn’t know how long, and Enda offers him her hand and helps him step out.
Then he is taken with them down the hill, to the chapel, and there is a gash in the soil and into it goes a long wooden box.
The priest is saying words and Rose and Enda and Liam are crying, and Tomás is trembling, his legs making the fabric of his trousers ripple, and this distracts Eugene because he is trying to copy his father, to make his own legs tremble like that, but then Rose whispers something to him.
Mammy’s in there, Euge. And she points at the box, which is now resting at the bottom of the pit.
Eugene looks at it. Mammy’s gone, Rose says, and Eugene waits to be told where she’s gone, and when she’s coming back.
And he must look as if he doesn’t understand, because Rose says again: Mammy’s gone.
Say goodbye now. Eugene doesn’t like this idea, not one bit.
There will be no goodbye; he will not say it, he will not think it, he refuses.
So he shakes his head, to Rose, to the grave, to the priest, to the air, to the box they say his mother is in, he shakes it back and forth, emphatically, desperately, sealing up his mouth, like a mussel-shell.