Chapter 10 #11
At peace, my arse, she thinks, as she bends to gather the next armful.
Tomás was never and will never be at peace: he was the most unknowable, dissatisfied, edgy, turbulent person she’d ever met.
Never was he still, never was he content, but always fidgeting, always up out of his chair, saying he was away to mend something or straighten something, or bolting out of the door to see to a task or walk off somewhere.
When she was little, she used to run after him sometimes, try to hang on to him, saying, Da, will I come too?
His was a hand impossible to hold, always stiff and unyielding, the fingers refusing to curl around hers, so that she couldn’t keep her grip on it.
He would stride along, her hand sliding off his, and if he noticed she was there, which was never a given, might look down at her in surprise and say, Is it you, away back to the house, off to your mother now.
It bothers her, she realises, as she upends the stook so that it leans against the other; it nags at her, in a visceral and prickling way, that he should have died in the open air, at the side of a road, so far away from them.
He should have been in his bed, with his family around him.
It strikes Rose as a lonely, miserable way to die: alone, outdoors, with people walking past you, not knowing you, not seeing that you’d gone.
It is like the passing of a wild animal, or—
At this half-formed thought, Rose’s mind pulls aside, like someone veering away from a cliff-edge.
She knows that people—thousands of them—died at roadsides, in ditches, in the rubble of their homes, outside churches, wherever they fell, not long before she had been born.
Neither of her parents had ever spoken of those times, but she, Liam and Enda were aware that they had no grandparents, no cousins, nobody, and Phina had once told them that Tomás had rescued her from a terrible fate, that he’d come for her and taken her away with him, but she wouldn’t elaborate.
Rose has always been aware of a darkness, a roiling cloud, in her parents, a sense of rupture, a lack of rootedness.
She has for ever carried, like a heavy bag strapped to her back, the sense that she wasn’t able to assuage their losses: she was too small, too ignorant, to aid them, to make up for what they lacked.
She didn’t know how to ask them about it, how to form those questions, where to begin, what to say.
And now it was too late. They were both gone.
Rose straightens, pressing a fist to her back.
She is filled with sudden and baseless fear, a chill water welling inside her.
She is lacking too much; she is unprotected; there aren’t enough of them to be safe.
She wants people, her people, around her; she wants walls, high ones, to keep out the ravening night, the baying enemies.
She wants—what? Her sister, her older brother.
She wants her mother. She wants her father not to be dead; she wants him to have said to her, as a child, Yes, you can come along with me, let me show you where I’m going and let me tell you where I’ve been, and for him to have gripped her hand, firmly, as if he would never let it go, would never leave her, would never just walk out the door and not come back.
She and Eugene are not enough, but there is nothing to be done.
She puts that same hand, dusty and filthy, into her mouth, and she whistles for her dog, and instantly, he leaps from slumber to action, and over the half-mown field he comes, bounding towards her, ears flying back, mouth open in a canine grin.
Placing his sandals with care, Liam edges along the cultivated rows of neatly spaced sprouting leaves—they are some kind of layered vegetable resembling a scallion but with a sourer tang.
The local people have a word for it that sounds like “ulli” and they fry it in hot, spiced oil, with nuts and lentils, sometimes with freshly caught fish: Liam often cannot resist buying food from market stalls as he walks between the school and the mission-house, because the brother who cooks here on the edge of town tends to boil everything to a colourless and flavourless pulp.
Liam didn’t know it was possible to make meals taste so awful.
The market-stall food, however, has begun to tempt him almost every day, because of the way it makes his mouth and tongue tingle with turmeric, cardamom, tamarind, cinnamon and galangal—the very words themselves are delicious.
Liam straightens to stretch the muscles in his back.
Even though it is not long since dawn, the people of Cochin are already up and about: the track that winds past the mission-house and along the canal is filled with those clattering out to the fields or making their way into the markets or fishing nets of town.
The canal itself is thick with kettuvallam piled high with sacks and goods, and long, slender boats, paddled from the rear.
As Liam makes his way along the rows of vegetables, bending to remove weeds, he greets these passers-by with a nod or a word: some reply and others ignore him.
The day is already hot, the humidity so intense it’s as if he’s wading through water, as if the wide, slow-moving canal has lifted itself up and permeated the air.
It mists his spectacles; it turns his robe to sopped lianas that cling to his back and legs.
Scratching in the earth to winkle out a particularly sinuous root, he cannot help but reflect that his father would be amused to see him thus.
Liam can almost picture Tomás here in south India, leaning on the wall behind him, his black cap pushed back on his head, watching as Liam pulls the weeds.
How he would laugh, the wheezing cackle that always makes him pound his chest with a fist. All that learning, he would say, and they have you scratching about in the dirt, tending scallions.
This is where all that Latin and scripture got you?
You’d have been better following in my footsteps after all.
Swiping at his brow with the back of his hand, Liam glares at the wall.
My days are very varied—he is addressing the imagined Tomás now—some mornings, I might be teaching mathematics to schoolboys, or working on a translation of an ancient astrological text, and on other days, yes, I may be working in the Order’s garden, but it doesn’t mean that—
A flicker of movement to his left alerts him to the presence of a face, perhaps two, of his brethren, behind a window in the mission-house, looking down on him, standing and arguing with his invisible father.
He bends quickly to a weed. When he straightens again, the window is as before: an impenetrable surface reflecting the cluttered buildings at the edge of town, the canal that moves itself through the dropped green handkerchiefs of rice fields.
In the distance, along the flat valley, through the shimmer of heat-haze, Liam can see people bent, like him, over their crops. There are two figures pulling a plough through a shallow stretch of water, its reflection of clouds and sky rippling and splintering, re-forming as the people move on.
Liam crouches beside his basket, as if he is looking inside it but he is in fact taking a moment’s pause.
The heat is vicious today and how he wishes for a hat like the people here wear, large and woven into a bowl shape, giving merciful shade.
When he spoke of this to the spiritual adviser of the mission-house, the man had frowned at him and said they were required to keep themselves apart, differentiated, so that they may be looked up to as the leaders and saviours they are.
Leaders and saviours, Liam is muttering, as he stands and lifts the basket of weeds to his shoulder, leaders and saviours, and then he realises he is being irreverent, ungodly, and he stills the tongue in the burning cage of his mouth.
He may yet be being watched, he thinks, as he walks, suddenly self-conscious, too aware of how his legs move, to the place outside the high perimeter wall to tip unwanted greenery.
Shaking the basket only a little too vigorously, and watching the weeds tumble out, Liam’s train of thought is interrupted by a slight but distant sound, like a shout, or a call.
Perhaps a bird, perhaps a child? Liam glances up but sees only the splintering light on the waterway’s surface, the bobbing shapes of boats.
He is turning back to the mission-house gate when he hears the noise again.
This time, Liam shades his eyes, straining to see.
There, on the track, shoving his way through the crowds, is a figure, dressed in a yellow mundu.
The man moves with urgency and purpose; people step aside to let him pass; something about the way he holds his arms bent at the elbows, with the hands cupped together, strikes Liam as odd. What does he carry?
Without knowing why, Liam lets the basket slip from his fingers.
He moves towards the man, away from the mission-house, which is not permitted for him at this hour—he will only be able to leave later, to teach his mathematics classes—but he cannot ignore this person.
The man is shouting something: he is heading for the mission-house, Liam is certain, he has seen him.
He has been sent by the Lord, and he, Liam, will aid him, will assist him with whatever trouble has beset him.
Liam hurries towards him, along the canal path, his heart hammering.
The man is closer now, still yelling—inarticulate, grief-stricken syllables, perhaps not words in any language.
Although Liam knows he could still improve, he is just about able to converse in Malayalam, more fluently than his other brethren, though it would be committing the sin of pride to acknowledge it.
So Liam raises his voice and calls to him: “What is it? How may I help you?”