Away (10 page)

Alone, Mary knew there was something hidden inside her, a lost thing she could find again when she had need of it, for she
had fragments of the old beliefs. They were gone from her husband but they had not been completely stolen from her … had become dormant, instead, in a kind of winter sleep. Any kind of return would be accepted by her, unquestioningly. A stone, a song, a green eye, the interrupted gesture. Something in her wanted finishing.

There was a story about a woman who had danced across a moor and over the cliffs at Rathlin to her death, and a belief that when her body washed up at Fair Head this was how the place received its name; from the look of her beautiful blonde hair moving in the water near the rocks where her skull had broken. Mary couldn’t recall who had been the girl’s partner in the dance but she could imagine the paleness of him, his torn shirt and liquid eye. She could imagine the blood of the young woman aflame in his embrace, every colour of rock, turf, and sea swirling, and the belief in him strong in the bones of her slender ankles – one wrist clasped by his beckoning hand. It was in herself, in her own beliefs, to dance like that, though she kept the idea hidden. And it was in her also to twist a sentence into a song if she chose to sing at all.

Brian ate his supper in silence, dipping the potato in the milk and looking past his wife to the fire. He peeled away the shells and pushed the eggs whole into his mouth savagely. When he spoke, at last, it was to no one but himself, as if he wanted to deliver his thoughts out into the room in order to rid his mind of them.

“To think that the little schools were started in the time of the Penal Laws, in response to oppression, when they wanted none of us educated. It’s as if our people have always been hungry,” he said, “for knowledge. And when they had nothing at all they still produced the few miserable pennies it cost to keep
a schoolmaster alive. They’ve always had this hunger, you see, for the day that words can be spun into meaning. Nothing could keep them from it. Two hundred years of hiding the hunger, and then hiding the nourishment of the learning in the small makeshift schools.” He placed his hands flat on the table in front of him. Their largeness was manifested in their length rather than in their width. They were the hands of neither labourer nor farmer. “There’s a rare beauty,” he said, looking at his hands, “in something hidden and secret, and it’s a rare kind of education to be got in hidden places.”

He was not speaking to her but Mary answered him anyway. “Yes,” she said, “there’s a rare beauty in something that is hidden.”

As they ate their supper of bacon, eggs, potatoes, and milk, the clouds parted and the low sun broke through, sending a beam in the window and lighting the tops of the folds on Brian’s sleeve, enriching the various soft browns of the scattered eggshells. It came to rest on a pile of books that occupied a three-legged table in the corner. Moving through this harsh light to the child or to the fire, Mary seemed to appear and reappear to her husband, who remained with all but his sleeve in shadow.

Outside, the moist earth steamed in the sudden blaze and, in a valley two miles from the uplands on which O’Malley’s cottage stood, a mild breeze awakened, stirring marsh grasses and making thorn bushes lurch in odd ways. One by one the leaves of the planted fields there turned over. Had anyone been watching they would have seen the beginnings of a black stain speckling otherwise healthy foliage. As it was, one small boy, playing with stones and sticks and a puddle of rainwater, lifted his head and sniffed the air, unable to identify the new perfume, a portent carried on the wind.

These are the beginnings of despair. The clouds part and the
last rays of sun blanket a landscape of unspeakable beauty. The blue sea is covered with a carpet of stars, cormorants sail near cliffs where their young flourish, and smoke drifts from cottages where meals have been taken in peace. The sweet, dark smell of the change is confused with that of hidden roses. Not one bird pauses in song, anticipates the hunger.

The breeze crept under the cottage door. Brian, reading Latin near the window, lit his pipe at the exact moment that he might have inhaled the terrible sweetness. Mary, however, recognized something in the air that made her think, for a moment, of cool white skin stretched over the muscle on an arm. The air smelled of loss – of a beautiful absence. It caught in her throat and she brought her hand briefly to her lips as if to silence herself.

Then the wind changed direction, the sun set. Soon it was time for sleep.

T
HAT
winter Osbert and Granville tramped around the countryside with campstools as usual – weather permitting. At Murlough Bay, Osbert sketched the view of Rathlin Island and Granville composed a lament for the hundreds of women and children who had been slaughtered there in 1576 by the Earl of Essex in his attempt to tame “Wild Ulster.” Although he could not, from this distance, see
Crooknascreidhlin
(the hill of the screaming) or
Langraviste
(the hollow of the great defeat), where he assumed the massacre had taken place, just looking at the cliffs of the unfortunate island moved Granville to poetry. In fact, he had confused his disasters: both locations were the sites of equally brutal attacks on the part of Scottish soldiers a hundred years later.

The brothers also visited the now-abandoned hedge school. Osbert made several drawings, inside and out, so that it would be recorded for posterity, and Granville wrote two long narrative poems, one entitled “A Lament for an Abandoned Hedge School” and the other, a dramatic monologue, called “The Hedge Schoolmaster’s Lament.” They had seen this gentleman once or twice during excursions to the cliffs at Fair Head. As was the case with all the tenant farmers and cottiers in Antrim, the schoolmaster’s potato crop had failed. But he was managing the winter well, he said, had eggs from the chickens and milk from the cow and a bit of money set aside so that he could last until next year’s harvest.

“And your wife, sir?” they asked, anxious for a glimpse.

“Quite well,” he had replied. “Thinking of spinning now that the child is weaned.”

“And your friend, Quinn? Is he still developing his intellect … with your help, of course, and that of the Supplement to the fifth, sixth, and seventh editions?”

“He visits once a month or so,” Brian was unconsciously stabbing the ground with the pitchfork he carried in one hand, “and we talk some about the Supplement, for which we’re very grateful,” he added, touching his hat nervously.

“His people are well?”

“They have lost their potatoes.” The schoolmaster examined the sky. “They have some corn but there is hardship among them.”

Osbert said that this year’s harvest would set things to rights, and Granville maintained that crop failures never occurred two years in a row. Neither mentioned the new National School or the empty hedge school where the unattended wattle had begun to sag, and the thatch was full of mice and birds. They complimented the schoolmaster on his improvements to the farm and continued on their way. By the time they reached Lough Crannog the light was absolutely perfect.

Mary was beginning to leave the house behind. It had sheltered and protected her early in her marriage, throughout her pregnancy and childbirth, and while she was nursing the baby. It had kept its stone arms around her while she learned to read and while the first awkward nouns were scratched by her on the slate. The new world of books was kept dry and safe by it. Its fire had bloomed daily as a result of the plentiful supply of thatch provided by her husband. She had come to love its two
lamps and four napkins, its stone flags and simple table. The sheets, the pillows, the small panes of glass in its few windows. The six rush-seated chairs and the one flat stone at its threshold. She loved the iron pots she used for cooking and even the troublesome hens that ruined the thatch by nesting in it. She loved the corners and the broom with which she removed the dust that collected where the walls met the floor. The drowsy sameness of each day. The comfort of binding oneself to the maintenance of life.

But as the first winter following the crop failure progressed, the change began to nudge her towards other activities, the way small animals nose their young in the direction of the wider world. Brian was a torn man. His crops had failed, his school had weakened and eventually died. He spent his days guiltily building and tearing apart his few drystone walls – improving the farm – or sometimes he worked on into the night angrily cutting turf, though his modest barn was filled to capacity. Mary saw him in the distance, hunched over his own father’s turf spade, obsessed, as if this one tool from the past, alive in his hands, could make the present disappear. He did not speak to her about his discontent.

Liam thumped the door with his small fists and clambered up onto the stool to slap his palms against the window glass when his father left for the field until, at last, his mother dressed him warmly and allowed him out into the physical world where he watched, mesmerized, Brian’s love-dance with labour. Eventually the child, himself, began to dig in the earth, caking the undersides of his delicate new nails with mud. He is no longer all mine now, thought Mary. The field has claimed him as it claims all the men … those who are not chosen by the sea. She looked at the curve of his miniature back as he crouched over a pile of dirt and said to herself, “This is the way his life will be, bent, under a darkening sky.”

When it came time for the spring sowing Mary rose in darkness with her husband and followed the light of his lantern to the field. Lights from neighbours’ lanterns speckled the hills, and the coming dawn was a red ribbon where the land rose up to meet the cliffs. As they silently shovelled the earth into small hills, or placed the seed-potatoes into the ground, an apprehension began to grow in her that some sudden calamity would take hold of them in the midst of this cold, dark calm. The gradually increasing red light that struggled across the soil, the broken earth at her feet did not dispel the fear and she continually looked over her shoulder to the cabin as if she expected the thatch to be ignited by the expanding crimson. Reflected in the panes of the window, the sun looked like fire and Mary clutched Brian’s sleeve instinctively, then moved her hand away again when she realized what it was. The face he turned to hers in that moment was dispassionate. He appeared to be anxious to return his attention to the soil as if his soul were being stitched, with each planting, into the earth.

Mary sensed that the soil was inert; asleep in a way that it never had been before. Pebbles were coated in an oily moisture that did not clear in the morning light and that caused the coldness of buried things to cling to them. On the island, Mary remembered, there had been places so barren that fields had to be created, over time, out of living materials: dung and sea-weed and the spines of recently eaten fish. It was the grass that grew in the sea that made the best soil, and as Mary stooped to make another planting, in her mind she saw the island men and women moving up from the strand with their dark, glistening burdens on their backs.

Liam, with his small face blurred by sleep, called her from the cabin door and she went to him to give him a cup of milk. Later, as she dressed him, fitting the trousers over his warm,
sturdy body, she began to want to think of ways to put some life back into her husband’s field.

It wanted a touch of the sea in it, Mary thought; a touch of the sea’s long hair.

She rose in the dark and moved across the room, searching for her shawl. The child whimpered and Brian unfolded into the warm spot she had left in the bed. Through the window glass she saw the moon hugging the horizon. The latch fell behind her like a penny dropping into a jar and she stood still in the wake of this sound with her hand extended as if to stop it.

As she walked to the sea with the wicker creel on her back, light began to touch the growth beside the path, and the lakes below her – one with its circular island – rose up silver and alive.

She felt that she had never walked here before.

There was only the field in her mind and the sea plants she must gather to feed it. It was a mile from the cabin to the cliffs.

Though she didn’t know this, the knife that she carried had lived indoors for two centuries after serving as a weapon in Cromwellian times. The creel was one woven in sorrow by Brian’s grandmother when she was mad with grief over the death of her first-born son.

All of that quieted now, by time. The passion and even the memory of the passion, forgotten.

The knife scrabbled against the floor of the basket as she descended the cliffs through the cut in the rocks named Grey Man’s Path, the long view opening before her. This coarse beauty – the ragged island offshore and the dark tumble of difficult coastal landscape – was implanted in her bones, making her sure-footed on its surfaces. The tide was out, as she knew
instinctively it would be, and large boulders clothed in ribbons of weeds stood awkwardly exposed.

The pale sky shone on the knife. She worked steadily, listening in the stillness to sea birds and the grating sound of metal on rock, her back to the waves whose skirts spread across the sand, her own skirt drenched by the dew through which she’d passed. Her discarded shawl lay like a corpse at her feet.

There was an air of sorrow about this work which involved a series of gestures that caused her to resemble a woman pleading for mercy then letting her arms drop in resignation and helplessness. But the basket filled quickly and soon she paused to press its contents towards the earth with her palms so that water drained through the weave and disappeared into the sand.

When she was finished she bent down to pick up her shawl. Then she straightened her spine, placed her hands on her lower back, and lifted her face to the sky. There had been a roof over her for so long, the complexity of the clouds startled her in ways the landscape hadn’t. She turned, then, tentatively towards the sea, squinting as if she expected it to strike her. But as it showed her nothing but water, and none of its sounds spoke to her, she squatted to fit the creel’s leather straps over her shoulders. Then, using the muscles in her back and legs, she slowly lifted her burden and, with her body bent at the waist, she began the long climb upwards. Twenty minutes later, by the small lake with the island – the water closest to her cottage – she saw him standing in the reeds near the shore.