Chapter 10 #10
Enda snatches it from her: a letter from home, with news of them all, with tidings, perhaps even love.
She carries it off to her room and pulls out the folded paper, opens it, hands trembling, and if she could drink this ink with her fingertips, draw it into her body, she would; if she could breathe in the peninsula air sealed into the envelope, she would, but in her agitation she can do no more than scan the lines, eyes darting from word to word, from top to bottom.
In her hands is a single, short paragraph, written by Father Joseph. There are no expressions of love or anger or, indeed, anything coming close to an emotion at all. It is dated four months ago, and it says that he seeks to inform her that her father, Tomás, has passed away.
When Rose and Eugene finish bringing in their hay, they take only a moment’s pause, shaking the stiffness from their arms and shoulders, wiping their brows, and drinking from the pump, before Rose turns and says to her brother: “I wonder will we go down and make a start on the widow’s field?”
Eugene, replacing the ladle carefully, makes no sound.
“The sky is clear,” Rose murmurs, looking up, “but rain might come in quickly. We’ll go now, will we? We will. I’m not too tired, are you? I don’t think you are.”
She has developed the habit of holding both sides of a conversation, Eugene has noticed.
For a while, he wasn’t sure if he liked it, but now he thinks he does.
Her words possess the motion of a saw moving back and forth through wood, or the swing of a pendulum: soothing and restful.
It requires nothing of him. He can listen, and nod, or not, and she will carry on regardless.
Rose reaches out her hand to take Eugene’s, and he lets her, and she toys, as she always does, with the gold ring around his finger, her fingertip following its circular patterns.
When they get as far as the end of their boreen, he extracts his hand from hers, and folds his arms around himself.
At fifteen, Eugene is tall, the tallest of them all, Rose often thinks, and has the strength of two or three men.
Which is fortunate, the widow remarked the other day, because all the other men have fecked off.
Eugene will apply himself to whatever task needs doing: feeding or milking, digging or scything, fencing or walling, fishing, trapping.
There’s a part of Rose that, when she watches her silent and mysterious brother bringing down an axe through wood or driving a plough through a field, wants to drag to his side all the people who called him “simple” or “useless” and say: Look.
Do you see? I dare you to tease him now, go on, I dare you.
She wants to yank them up the hillside by their collars and show them the loft full of tied stooks of hay, the walls and fences without a hole, their lean-to stacked with turf, their beasts placid and plump, and say: Guess who did all that? Not so useless after all.
The whole peninsula came to their house for Tomás’s wake and passed the night with her and Eugene, bringing bread and bottles, which people handed round, and the talk turned to that way Tomás had of ending conversations by simply walking away or cutting a person off.
He didn’t mean any rudeness by it, the widow said.
He was never one for goodbyes, the fisherman observed, never would he ever say that word.
He would just stop speaking and be on his way.
And then they began to talk of the time they had first met Tomás, when he appeared among them, and how suspicious they had been of this map-man and his boy, with their instruments, their questions, their inquisitive way of walking about the land.
Rose had turned her face to the embers in the grate. It seemed to her that their life in this house had been a slow process of subtraction: they had been six, and now it was just her and Eugene. Only two.
In the peculiar way she’d always had, the widow appeared at her elbow, sitting herself down in the seat next to Rose. She had her knitting in her hands, needles working against each other, winding up the wool—the colour of wet moss—into something that was possibly a sleeve.
“You’ll come and live down with me,” the widow said, out of the corner of her mouth. “You and the boy.”
Rose had shaken her head. “We can’t be—”
“Just for a while. Until you get back on your feet.”
“We’ll be grand here,” Rose had said, gesturing around the kitchen, where her father’s body was laid out on the table, pennies over his eyes.
The widow gave her a sharp look. “You can come back up during the days. You’ll need to mind the fields, the animals and the hens. But you’ll sleep down with me.”
“It’s good of you, but—”
“If you stay here,” the widow urged, in a whisper, “the loneliness will kill you.”
Rose had been struck dumb by this. She had glanced at Eugene, standing by the door, then back at the widow.
“Besides, I could do with the company,” the widow said, in her normal voice, her needles clicking, and then she played her trump card: “It’s what your mother would have wanted. God strike me dead if I left you and the boy up here to fend for yourselves.”
So Eugene and Rose brought their blankets and their clothes down the hill.
He slept in the widow’s loft and Rose by the fire, Bran stretched out next to her, the widow in her back room.
In the mornings, Rose and Eugene would help the widow see to her cow and crops, and then they would take to the lane, Bran trotting before them, nose to the ground, doubling back on himself if he found an interesting scent, and climb the hill up to their old home, returning to the widow’s at sunset.
Today, however, sunset is still far off, and they have work to do and hay to bring in.
Bran has gone ahead of them—he doesn’t like mowing days, as his people must spend hours in one field, and it makes him restless—and he is waiting for them when they reach the village, chewing on a stick he’s found somewhere.
Eugene lifts the scythe from his shoulder and begins on the widow’s furthest field.
Rose follows behind, mindful to keep her distance from the swinging of her brother’s arm, gathering up the hay in armfuls and tying it into stooks.
It is seven months now since Tomás passed, which feels to Rose like no time at all and yet an endless stretch of days.
Death baffles her, every time she brushes against it: the finality of it, how there is no bargaining to be done, no way of saying to it, If I give you this or do that you must give my mother or father back to me, release them from your clutches.
It is the inarguable force of their absence, and the conundrum of what to do with what they leave behind: the boots, the combs full of strands, the spoon worn smooth by their fingers, the shawl draped on a chair, the bonnet on the peg.
She would like to go to Eugene and ask him, How does it feel for you, what do you think of our father’s passing, tell me, how does it strike you?
She could have done this with Enda, or Liam.
Either of them—if they were ahead of her with the scythe, cutting away, felling the stalks—would have stopped the mowing, would have turned around, perhaps even hugged her hard, and told her how they felt, what their thoughts were on the matter.
They might have helped her tidy away the things, found a new use for them.
As it is, Rose has no one to talk to about it.
Tomás was found, Father Joseph told her when he’d climbed the path up to their house, a couple of days’ walk from here.
Lying on the ground, beneath the shelter of a tree, his blanket roll under his head, looking for all the world as if he was asleep.
Several people had walked by him, the priest had said, before it had dawned on one of them that the old man lying by the roadside wasn’t resting but had passed away.
All the signs, he said, suggested it was a peaceful death.
Tomás had lain down to sleep and not risen again.
May we all meet our end thus. And Father Joseph had looked as if he had concluded his duty in telling her, and that he might be off.
But Rose had been curious, unsatisfied by this story.
Where was he found? she wanted to know. Father Joseph was vague: a valley, he said, some distance away, a neighbouring county.
A valley? Rose had repeated. Yes, my child, the priest said, a valley surrounded by high hills, I’m told, with a lough running through it.
A beautiful place, by all accounts. But whatever was he doing there?
Rose had asked. And the priest had said: We may never know.
He was given to mysterious wanderings, was he not?
Your father was a man of strong character and there were unplumbed depths to his mind.
We must consider him now at peace, his worldly struggles at an end. He is in the arms of God.
Rose sneezes violently three times, and sets down her bundle to wipe her nose on her apron. Eugene, over in the far corner now, for she cannot keep up with the speed of his mowing, doesn’t look round.