Chapter 8 #10
What does it mean to lose a hand? A person can no longer button his own jacket or tie his bootlaces.
He must school himself and his remaining hand to raise a spoon to his mouth.
It takes him twice as long to milk a cow or dig a drill.
He might try to write something with his left hand, but what comes out is the scratched scrawl of a child.
He will spill water over his exquisitely inked cross-sections of a mountain range, the paper ruined, the geological symbols blurring to abstract cloud trails.
He will discover that the lack of half an arm somehow sets his feet off course, unbalances him, and that when he stumbles he hasn’t two hands to catch himself.
He gains bruises down his thighs, along his flanks.
He collides with doorways, shelves, table corners, rafters.
When he is told that his eldest child, his daughter, the headstrong one, has taken herself and her fiddle across the water, never to return, that she deceived them all, that she didn’t even say goodbye, he will discover that one hand isn’t enough to wipe the tears from his face.
He will wish to smash something in the wake of this discovery—a bowl, maybe, a cup—but he will find that his left arm hasn’t the strength in it, even for this.
He will rise in the morning with the phantasmagoric sensation of a hand—and how miraculous it had been, how nimble and wise, how had he not marvelled at this every minute of every day when he still had it?
—resting at the end of his shirt sleeve, its fingers curled, its nails bedded into their half-moons, its palm ready to hold whatever he wishes it to.
But the hand is gone, it is no more. The incompetent redcoats took it from him, and he will never see it again.
Tomás has been back at home for almost a month when he raises his head at the table, like a man waking from sleep.
He seems not to see his daughter, sitting opposite him, sawing a knife down through a loaf of bread; he doesn’t look at his son, the youngest, who is spreading butter on each slice that drops from Rose’s knife, one by one, making sure the butter reaches right to the edges, the way he likes it.
Both his children, however, jump when Tomás suddenly speaks, for the first time in days: “What are we to do?”
Rose pauses, midway through cutting. She looks at Eugene, she looks at Tomás. “About what, Da?”
Tomás pushes away his bowl of soup, wipes his mouth. He lifts the shoulder of his injured side. “The state of me,” he says. “I’m good for nothing. I’ll never work again. I can’t hold a pencil, can’t write a word. I can’t even till my own land. You and Eugene can’t work those fields on your own.”
Rose clears her throat, sits straighter.
She casts a glance towards Eugene before she speaks.
“After mass last week,” she says, and if the words have a rehearsed quality to them, it is because she has been speaking of nothing else, to the widow, and to Eugene, for days, whenever she’s out of Tomás’s earshot; she has been expecting this conversation and she is ready with her reply but she must tread carefully because, as the widow pointed out, her father is not an easy man, and for this to work she must make it seem like his idea, “I was talking to…” here she is horribly conscious that she must avoid mentioning Father Joseph, and the fact that this scheme is all his “…some people, and it was suggested that we might write to the mapping office in the city about…com-pen-sa-tion.”
Rose has had to practise saying this word, taught to her by Father Joseph as she stood with the widow outside the chapel, its odd emphasis on the third syllable.
She likes the word: it has a safe, reassuring ring to it.
Father Joseph had, of course, heard of Tomás’s accident—he was kept informed of most goings-on in the peninsula and people were always keen to talk of the troubles of others—and he had come up to Rose to find out more.
You can’t let those redcoats get away with it, he had said to her. It’s not right.
“Compensation?” Tomás repeats slowly.
Rose nods and tries to remember what else Father Joseph had said, and she remembered being surprised by his vehemence, his insistence, because it was well known that no love was lost between him and Tomás.
Father Joseph had said that Tomás had been injured in the line of work: the army or the mapping office surely owed him for that; they must pay for what they had done to him.
Compensation. Hadn’t Rose’s family suffered enough?
“Father J—” She stops herself just in time. “It was said that because the accident happened while you were following orders, that you were injured in the line of—”
“Exactly!” Tomás shouts, banging the table with his fist, setting the spoons and bowls leaping and clattering. “It’s exactly that! Those feckers did this to me. They took my hand.”
Tomás, agitated, stands up, and begins to pace around the table, muttering about obeying orders, about blackguards and beatings and inebriated doctors, and the irony of him not being able to write the letter, and who on earth hereabouts can they find to write such a thing?
The girl hasn’t the learning, and neither does the widow or the fishermen.
Rose must keep her face still, her expression perplexed, throughout this rant. She must sit with her hands in her lap, apparently deep in thought. Who, she must appear to be wondering, should we ask to write the letter?
All of a sudden, Tomás subsides, falling silent.
Rose waits, her mouth pursed, not daring to glance up at him.
Has he arrived at the one and only solution to this problem?
She thinks perhaps he has. He is staring at the table, his face twisted into a grimace, as if in pain.
He seems about to speak, then stops himself, then changes his mind.
“That fella,” Tomás gets out, in a gruff and strangled voice. “Whatshisname. That priest of yours. I wonder would he do it?”
Rose allows herself to gasp with surprise. “He might. He has the learning after all. Will I walk over there and ask him? Tomorrow. Or the day after.”
She watches as Eugene goes to the pegs by the door and takes down his jacket, which he puts on, and her shawl. Tomás takes it from him and passes it in a bundle to Rose.
“Now?” Rose stands, reaching for it. “Will I go now?”
Tomás nods, once, furious yet relieved, then waves her off with a curt gesture.
Enda stands at the stern, looking out at the water as yet uncut by the boat.
The sun beams down on the hold passengers having their time up on deck; a fresh but unthreatening wind fills the sails, and the boat is skimming along nicely over a tranquil sea.
Around her, she hears accents from the north, from the east, from cities, from farms and fields.
There are young men and women, awkward and shy in their newly tall bodies, tiny babies wrapped in blankets, ancient and toothless old ladies with bonnets tied firm, children who charge about in herds, from one side of the tilting deck to the other.
No one else, not a single other person, is travelling alone.
She feels a sickening wave of something gathering behind her eyes, which sting and smart, and she turns to face the direction they came from.
Their vessel leaves a smooth, filigree-edged road on the ocean that vanishes and erases itself so that they can never find their way back, even if they want to.
Then she hears that a man next to her at the rail is speaking to her.
“What was that?” she says, forgetting momentarily to put on the low voice of a man.
He gestures at the fiddle case, as always strapped to her back. “Will you not give us a tune, son?”
Enda stares at him for a moment, the word for “son” resounding in her head, and for a moment she sees, with a lacerating clarity, her mother carrying baby Eugene on her shoulders, her father and Liam standing facing each other on the hearthrug, the older man imploring the younger to stay, not to go into the Church, to be his apprentice.
Liam is the son, the mhac, she wants to say, and Eugene: They are the sons. But I am the one who has gone.
The man is still regarding her, his snaggle-toothed mouth held in a hopeful grin. Enda makes herself nod. A tune. Of course.