Chapter 8 #13
He hadn’t noticed that it was market day, hadn’t been aware of Rose preparing to come.
In truth, he has never had much of a sense of how women decide which days they will do the washing and peg it out to dry, which days the cleaning and the sweeping, how or when the clothes are mended or the socks knitted.
Such conversations have always woven like smoke through the air about his head, and he has never paid them any mind: leave the household to the women and he will get on with his work.
Except—Tomás has to shift to the other foot, pass his left hand across his brow at the thought—there are no women now. There is only Rose.
Ever since they received a reply from the mapping office, Tomás has taken to what he thinks of as walking out.
What else can a man like him, without a right hand, do?
He cannot work but he has now the ease of knowing he has money in his pocket, sent to him each month: at least he knows that the rent will be paid, the children provided for.
Whenever the mood takes him, he packs himself a small inventory of essentials—a rolled-up blanket, a pair of dry socks, a spare shirt, a cup, a compass—and off he goes, on foot, in whichever direction feels right.
He might be gone for two or three nights, perhaps a week.
He will not be deterred from this; he refuses to let the redcoats take this as well as his arm.
There are men around here who disappear, like him, for nights on end, who lose whole chunks of days to the drink.
They take up with a friend in a shebeen or an inn, and sink beneath the surface of alcohol—they might wake up in a town two counties over, with no idea how they got there, dishevelled, their pockets empty.
This is not Tomás’s way. He has never been one for the drink, never flushed away his wages or land like that; he has always been careful with money.
He has taken the precaution to hide enough to keep his children for several years, in the event that anything happens to him, and he’s shown Rose where to dig to find it.
And now, since they wrote asking about compensation—he will not think of it as Father Joseph’s letter, no, he will not—he receives a regular payment: the mapping office sent a reply, on headed and watermarked notepaper, signed by a commissioner, and it concurred that Tomás had been injured-and-disabled “while carrying out orders” and would be sent a surprisingly large amount each month for the rest of his life.
A “stipend” is the word they use. This letter Tomás had also given to Rose, for safe-keeping.
Never let it be said that he doesn’t know how to take care of his family.
Work, the making of maps, the measuring of land, the moving along with a division, is at an end for him.
He will never again follow the survey carts, never handle a theodolite, never point out to a chainboy where he must stand, never help to unravel the links of the measuring chain along undulating ground, never fill the columns of field books, never calculate triangulation or altitude; he will never again write that most beautiful of words, “azimuth.” He will not take up a pen and draw the meandering mark for a coastline, or a miniature tree for woodland, or the dotted lines of parish boundaries.
Most devastating of all, he will never finish the project he has been working on ever since they moved to the peninsula—his own map and record of the country—and the loss of this purpose feels to him like the forfeiture of another limb.
Old age seems to have caught up with him in a sudden swoop. His joints ache and twinge in the morning, his heart performs a peculiar fluttering at times, and even with his spectacles, his eyes don’t see words on the page or symbols on the maps so well.
He will attend to his land and his beasts; he will attend to his remaining children.
He has, however, been robbed of that most important task, the one he believes he was born for, or perhaps survived for, the one to which he had always intended to devote his twilight years: his version of the map, a true cartographic representation of his country, which would have erased and disregarded its conquerors.
Such a map will only ever now live inside his head, for his left hand has never had the agility for inscription and detail, and the only other person who might have done it, his first-born son, is gone.
Tomás has decided, in the wake of this loss, that he will walk out as much as he can: if he cannot draw this country, he will stride through it; they may have taken his hand but he will damn well trace it with his feet.
He finds himself ever conscious of his dwindling years, the narrowing down of his stretch of time here on earth, always aware that disaster can befall a man at any time, and he wishes very much, still, to find the valley with the road.
He craves this now, more than ever, more than anything.
If he cannot have his map of the land, he would like at least this map of himself.
It burns within him, the desire to find where he is from, to walk the soil where he began.
It cannot, he is certain, elude him for ever: he is following a simple process of elimination.
If anyone can find it, surely he can. He has a copy of the map of the entire country—a smudged one that was being discarded, where the engraver or the printer used too much ink—and he will walk along every lough and every path in the land, if he has to, but he will find it, he will.
A noisy clatter of women with shawls over their heads come down the lane behind him, carrying baskets in outstretched arms, chattering and laughing, and Tomás has to step aside to let them past.
In the days after he’d been told about Enda’s disappearance, when he’d risen from his bed and was staggering about the place, he had discovered, laid out on the little table in the back bedroom, the faulty map, as well as a selection of his old draft maps of the neighbouring townlands.
For a moment, he had been perplexed as to what they were doing there: who would have had the temerity to touch his work and leave precious papers like these in the open, vulnerable to dust and daylight?
He had been nursing his maimed arm against his chest, working himself up to confronting Rose and Eugene, and then it came to him why the maps were there, arranged like this.
Enda must have consulted them before she fled.
She had gone through his papers and found his sketches—the ones he had made for the redcoats, and kept, because he was fond of the look of them—and he cursed himself then, cursed his vanity, cursed the redcoats for their relentless acquisitiveness, their clamouring for ownership.
But, curse or no curse, the fact remained that his daughter had used his very own work to find her way.
Perhaps he should have known, should have seen it coming.
That time when, as a child, she had got herself onto that boat out to the island so remote that once she was there, once they’d arrived, and the trick she and Liam had played on him became apparent, it was too late to rectify it, to send her back.
That, Tomás thinks, as he stands against the wall in town, his eye trained on Rose and her egg stall, was the seed of these current troubles.
If Tomás had seen through the ruse before they left, if he’d thought to look at the child, maybe Liam could in time have been persuaded to become his apprentice, might never have fallen under the influence of that charlatan priest. If Enda hadn’t spent those months out on the island, with the people there, with the musicians who took her under their wings and taught her every day on the fiddle, the lot of them playing together until her eyes were dreamy and distant, maybe she would never have got such notions in her head.
Hadn’t Tomás said to Phina, again and again, that the girl spent too much time altogether playing that instrument?
Didn’t Phina think it was making the girl a little odd?
Always off to find a session where she might play.
Always asking people to give her a tune, to sing something to her—she collected music, she used to say.
No man might be tempted to court her if it was known roundabout that the girl was given not to cooking and mending but scraping out tunes all day and all night, sitting on a rock in the rath; no man would come near her, and then where would she be?
He had no idea, he’d railed, why the girl was so headstrong, so intransigent, so unswerving in her ideas, so bent on traipsing about the countryside when she should be at home.
It comes to him now, as he leans against the wall, pack on his back, that Phina had looked at him, eyebrows raised, and said: I wonder where she’d be getting that from?
Tomás brushes away this recollection. It is easier for him to keep himself filled with fury at Enda, at his maiming, than to dwell on Phina.
At the thought of his wife, loss engulfs him, as if he’s fallen into seawater, his head swallowed by the bitter waves.
He has to clench his remaining hand into a fist so as not to let out a sob that might attract the attention of passers-by.
It is unthinkable, senseless, that she is gone.
How can it have happened that he is the parent left and not her, when her daughters and her mostly silent son had such need of her?
Instead, Liam is away, Enda has vanished, and he is still here, bafflingly, with a broken Rose and a confused Eugene, and Tomás hasn’t the knack of helping them.
Over at the clock tower, Rose is handing something to a family with numerous children, and they are giving her money, and Tomás is pleased to see this.
Poor Rose, with so little to give her happiness, her sister gone, and only that brother for company.
It occurs to Tomás that he could go over there, stay beside her as she sells the last of her eggs and dulse, help her carry back the wares she will buy.
He pushes himself away from the wall, however, with his eye on the empty road before him, giving Rose a final glance over his shoulder.
She now has a young gentleman loitering near her stall, looking more at her than at her baskets.
Tomás pauses, frowning. There is something vaguely familiar about the young man and it comes to Tomás that it is the viscount’s son, back among them for the summer.
He considers again going over there: Rose is a beauty, always was, and he doesn’t want the likes of the future viscount paying her notice.
It won’t be long, Tomás thinks, until some gurrier will climb the hill to ask him for her hand, and what will he say?
Phina would have known what to do, would have been able to size up the suitor with a glance.
Tomás adjusts the straps across his shoulders.
The young gentleman has moved away, Tomás is relieved to observe; Rose has given him no welcome, then.
He pulls the compass from his pocket. As he looks down into its familiar, expressionless face, its quivering needle, a strange thought occurs to him: Enda, his daughter, had been a far better assistant than Liam.
Out on the island, when he had permitted her to help and when she wasn’t off with those musicians, she had set herself to her tasks with great enthusiasm and concentration.
What’s this for, Da? Why do you do that?
Is this granite or limestone? How do you know?
How do you measure the distance between here and there?
He hears these questions so clearly, in her high and piping voice, that it is as if he might turn around and find the young Enda beside him, her face tilted up to his, awaiting the wisdom of his answer.
Tomás is struck by the notion, as he turns his head to see that there is, indeed, no one with him, no small Enda, no one at all, that she would have made the perfect apprentice.
She would have carried on in his footsteps, had things been different, had the cards fallen another way.
Instead, she is gone, and he will never see her again.
Tomás lifts his shoulders, shrugging, as if trying to shift a weight from his back.
He pockets the compass and turns his face towards the road heading north-north-east. He brings himself back to facts: the here and the now and the why.
He believes he has spotted two possible valleys on the badly printed map.
He will go now, this minute, a journey of a day, perhaps more, on foot, but he can always find a place to sleep overnight—a dry overhang of rock, under the canopy of a sheltering tree, he is used to such hardship—and he will decide if either of them is the right place.
He is determined to find the valley. He must have this knowledge.
He will locate it if it is the last thing he does.