Chapter 10 #28
When he comes to the pool, it is translucent, the sky above it dark enough for the water to be holding its own with the dusk, giving its own light, finding its own boundaries.
Eugene crouches. He reaches out and lays a palm on the water, perfectly flat, watching the ripples circle out from it.
And because he has been hiding most of the afternoon and hasn’t drunk from the pump, as is his habit, he does something he’s never done before: he turns his hand, dips it, and brings the water to his mouth.
It tastes, to Eugene, of peat, of leaf, of earth, of sky, both bitter and sweet.
It cuts its cool path through him and Eugene feels it entering him, merging with him.
And then a fish makes itself visible, stirring the depths, drifting up in half curves from wherever it has been hiding. Eugene watches without surprise the unhurried flick-flack of its tail, the calligraphy of its body.
The fish speaks. Its voice, to Eugene, is thrilling, unprecedented, at once tiny and loud.
It seems to rise up from the water; it wreathes itself through the gaps between trees; it shivers inside the leaf canopy; it vibrates along the water vessels in the roots and trunks; it locates the pool’s water in Eugene’s body where it has made itself into deltas and branches, and it causes them to quiver.
Give me the ring, it says.
Because it isn’t in Eugene to disregard an instruction given, because he takes whatever is said to him, examines it and acts upon it, if he wishes, he moves his hands towards each other.
He sees the answering reflection of their clasp in the surface of the pool.
The fingers on his right hand find the ring on his left.
They tug at it, drawing it from where it has resided for many years now, the flesh grooved around it.
Then he holds it out, away from him, and he drops the ring into the water.
It turns and turns, the gold of its interlocking creatures revealing then hiding themselves, over and over again.
It flickers and spirals, down and down, and then it is gone.
Eugene watches the fish circle the pool, swimming lower and lower, until it, too, disappears.
Without the ring, his hand feels queer, at once naked and burning.
Eugene shakes it to make it come right; he dips it into the water and swishes it there, disturbing the ripples, creating bubbles and splashes.
As he raises himself, shaking off the droplets, he catches sight—he is sure, he will ponder it later, it definitely seemed so—from the corner of his eye, in the half-light, the outline of a person.
It cannot be the gentleman from earlier, for it is not anyone he recognises or has seen before, and as it turns out, Eugene never sees him again.
This man is large, his outline tall and broad, and he appears to leap or coalesce from the water itself, bounding on strong, muscular legs.
He doesn’t pause to address Eugene, or even acknowledge him, or to look around himself.
Instead, he darts up and bounds away, through the trees, out of the copse and up the hill, as if he has enemies at his back, as if he has left something precious in that direction and he must get himself back there, as quickly as he can, to reclaim it.
Eugene stands watching the figure as it recedes up into the hills, over the crag, towards the rath, waiting to see what else might happen, if it will come back.
He will mull over the incident for the next few days.
Eugene tends not to dwell on the reasons or explanations for things; his way of thinking is one of curiosity paired with acceptance.
It happened; he had no understanding of what it was or why, and this does not bother him.
A fish spoke to him, he threw in the ring, as bidden, and then a man rose from the water, forming or freeing himself from it, and ran quickly away.
It is enough for Eugene to have seen this, to have been its witness, and he will fold it into his mind as one of the sights he has seen, one of the inexplicable events he has lived through.
He will think of it again, every once in a while, over the coming years.
There will be many years for Eugene, as it turns out: he will live beyond a hundred.
He will find, as he continues with his unusual existence on the mountainside, that he possesses knowledge both great and useful, that he contains everything he needs, has all he requires and no more.
He knows, for example, that his parents’ bones lie alongside each other in the churchyard, not far from a yew tree, the roots of which in time weave in and out of their whitened ribs.
He knows that Enda and Rose are together, that Enda is still restless and still plays her fiddle, still collecting tunes, a dog at her side.
That Rose earns money by making flowers out of wadded felt and that the blooms which come to life under her fingertips adorn the hats of fine ladies.
He knows, too, that there is a child with them, a boy with blue eyes and copper-coloured hair who bears his own name, and he knows when a husband comes for Rose, and that he is a good man, who on warm evenings will take the boy, Gene, out into the street where the two of them will throw a leather ball between them, and that more children will come to their household, many more.
He knows that Enda plays her fiddle until the end of her life, and that people come from all over to hear her.
He knows, too, that Liam is alive and not so far away from him: Eugene feels him sometimes, when the wind blows from the east, can sense him on the air.
He obtains two goats, churlish but charming creatures that are tethered on long ropes to a tree and come into the house on cold nights.
He acquires a dog, a mongrel pup with Bran’s long legs and fleetness of foot, but a smooth and striped coat.
It has an instinctive mistrust of the house and won’t come further than the haggard wall, and Eugene respects this and builds a shelter for it by Bran’s grave, and the dog is content enough, although it never takes to the goats.
Eugene lives long enough for the manor estate to be dissolved and redistributed, its house burned down, the landowning viscount (second cousin to the gentleman whose head Eugene once staved in) to face financial ruin.
A fraught and bloody war will rage throughout the country, in waves, like a fever.
He lives long enough for the children who live in the widow’s house to grow up and have children of their own, and those children will tell their children about the gruagach who is said to reside on the hill, beyond the tangle of trees and brambles, and how the children must be sure to be good, always, because he comes down at night and peers through their windows and sees all, and they must put offerings for him on their doorsteps or windowsills, and the gruagach will always leave something in return.
He will live long enough for some of the cottages on the peninsula to be bought up by city dwellers, who use them during the summer or to rent out to others.
And if these holidaymakers should find that shoes they leave outside have vanished overnight, or if they discover that some of their laundry is missing from the line, the peninsula people will give the same response, every time.
There’s one among us who needs such things and we must let him have them, for he is so old and wise that he could tell you all about the history of the land, should he wish to do so.