Black Harvest (11 page)

I
T WAS THE
wildest day Oliver had ever known. In a different mood he would have felt exhilarated, bowling along the empty road with the rain lashing down, and the huge wind flattening everything in sight as it sent huge branches skittering across his path, and all the time the distant thud of thunder, like gunfire. But after what had just happened the great gale unnerved him. As he battled with the wind he had one picture in his mind, the pattern of white on black that the water had picked out as it poured into the pit. The terror of that moment was in this storm, it was wrapped round his mind like a black cloth, and he couldn’t get free of it.

He must tell Father Hagan. Who else was there? The phone was still dead and the O’Malleys had gone away. There was no smoke coming from Donal Morrissey’s chimney, and the boy sensed anyway that the old man was weary and
wanted to be on his own.

He pedalled hard through the village, lights were on here but there was nobody in the street, it was too wild now. The priest lived at the end, he remembered, near the shop.

It was a great relief to see Father Hagan’s old bicycle propped against the kerb outside his house, but nobody came to the door. He banged three times and waited, then he peered through the letter box. There was no light on inside though the next door house was all lit up, as if it was winter.

He walked round to the back and saw an empty garage with its door wide open. So the priest couldn’t be in Ballimagliesh at all. Oliver rattled the door handle but it was locked, so he sat down on the kitchen step and stared at the little garden. It was still pouring with rain, a gale was blowing and he was soaked to the skin. But he didn’t even notice.

After a few minutes he took a notebook and pencil out of his anorak pocket and began to write something. The letter took a long time. It was hard to know just how much to tell Father Hagan and Oliver still hoped he might come back. But nobody disturbed him as he sat writing laboriously on the cold step.

He folded the piece of paper in two and half pushed it under the door, then he found a stone to put on top of it so nothing could blow it away. Finally he took the package from his bicycle basket. He had wrapped the skull in newspaper then put it in a plastic carrier bag. He looped the handles round the door knob and left it there, gently swinging.

It was easier going back because the wind was behind him,
but he was starting to panic. He’d not forgotten Jessie but if he stopped now, to look for the vet, he might find himself pushing the bike back down that lonely road. If the sky got much darker he’d need lights, and the bicycle didn’t have any.

The tin of soup he’d bought at the shop rolled about the wicker basket. It was only when he’d come to pay for his trolley of groceries that he realized he had left all his money at the bungalow. He had found two coins in his pocket to pay for the soup. And he was so hungry. Perhaps Colin would bring a lot of food back.

He was glad when he’d gone over the hill and was on the flat again, past those trees. The two huge elms stood like lonely giants in a landscape where everything else was wizened and twisted by the prevailing wind from the sea. One tree was very rotten and a large branch had been torn off and flung into the road. The other leaned horribly, wheezing and groaning like an old man.

Oliver did not hear it fall. The wind was pounding in his ears as he pedalled towards the bungalow, conscious only of his own heart thumping and the ache in his legs. But if he had looked round he would have seen that the trunk blocked the entire road and that a farm gate in a hedge had been turned to matchwood by the great branches. Ten minutes later and he could have been underneath them.

Father Hagan didn’t get back to Ballimagliesh till eight that night. He took the note and the plastic bag inside and didn’t look at them till he had made himself some tea and listened
to a news bulletin on the radio. His housekeeper, Mrs O’Rourke, was away in Killarney, visiting her sister. She went at the same time each year. Neighbours were very good when the priest was on his own. They brought meals in to him and left food on his doorstep when he was out. This was probably a loaf from Mrs Moffatt next door. He took everything into his tiny sitting-room, and sat down.

“Dear Father Hagan,” he read. “Please could you come? The baby is so ill that my aunt decided to go to a hospital with her. Young Danny (from the bar) has driven her to Sligo. We are on our own at the bungalow. Colin and I have been digging a den where they are going to build a garage. I think I may have come across something important, but I’m not sure. Could you come and have a look? One thing I found was the skeleton of a big dog, but I’m not certain about
this.
(Here he had drawn an arrow pointing up to the kitchen door handle.) My cousin Prill is ill too; she keeps having nightmares and feeling sick. I don’t feel very well either. Please could you come? Yours sincerely, Oliver Stanley Wright. P.S. If you
could
come we would all be pleased. P.P.S. We think the dog’s got a bug. It keeps vomiting.”

The priest read the letter again very slowly, noting that the boy had made four separate requests for him to go to them. He stood up and put his car keys in his pocket, glancing over the note again. He didn’t take the bit about the digging very seriously, small boys were often very self-important about their treasures.

Then he unwrapped the newspaper and placed the skull
in front of him, turning it over and over in his hands. He peered into the black eye-sockets, his fingers trembling. When the telephone rang in the hall he jumped violently and almost dropped it.

The line sounded as if a blizzard was blowing down it. The person at the other end was yelling, but Father Hagan could only make out the odd word and asked the caller to repeat everything. It was David Blakeman phoning from Dublin. He had been asked to go to some hospital, it was an emergency; his baby daughter was ill and he was going to his wife. He wanted Father Hagan to look in on the three children, if he was round that way. They would both feel happier if someone could check up on them. He was very sorry to cause trouble and he would phone again tomorrow.

“How is the baby?” Father Hagan shouted back. He thought he heard, “Rather ill, I’m afraid. They want us both to be there.”

“Don’t worry about the children, I’ll make sure—” he began, more quietly, but the line had gone completely dead. He waited in case the phone rang again, but nothing happened, so after ten minutes he set off in his car for the Moynihan bungalow.

Half an hour later he was back at the house. A road block had been set up with cones and flashing lights and nobody was allowed through. A farmer, John Ryan, was arguing with the Garda about the tree. Everyone knew that it should have been felled months ago. It was a mercy no one had been killed.

Father Hagan had turned his car round and driven away quickly. He didn’t want to be drawn into any arguments tonight. They all knew about John Ryan’s penny-pinching ways. Why foot a bill for tree-felling, if the council would pay?

Nothing would be done about moving the tree till daylight came, and there was no other road to the bungalow. He picked up his telephone and dialled Dr Moynihan’s number. The shrill, unbroken, blaring noise told him the line was out of order. He slammed the receiver down in frustration, went into his sitting-room and relit the fire.

When he read Oliver’s note again Father Hagan was frightened. He stared down at the neat handwriting and his finger traced the words, “Could you come?… If you
could
come…” The baby must be really sick if the father had been summoned from his painting commission in Dublin and the mother had gone away to Sligo, leaving the three children alone. They were ill themselves, sickly, unable to eat. Oliver complained vaguely of not feeling “very well”, but the girl had told him much more.

They had all felt peculiar since setting foot in the bungalow and they had been throwing food away because it had gone bad in the heat. The warm, muggy weather had affected nobody else as it had the frightened family in that luxurious house, making them bilious, giving them sweaty, sleepless nights, causing the very fields round them to reek of decay. Even the dog was suffering. Father Hagan remembered it – Jessie, the big red setter he’d seen tied to the concrete
mixer. She was a bit noisy and uncontrolled, but those children obviously loved her dearly. It would be terrible if the poor creature died for want of a few pills. He wondered if he ought to tell the vet.

And there had been dreams too, figures that haunted them; the silent, distracted woman at the girl’s window and at the stores; the two beggars at the roadside who had torn at her clothes, like monkeys she’d told him, with hair all over their faces.

For a long time Father Hagan just sat and stared into the fire, thinking about all that had happened to them. Then he got up, took a thick box-file down from the bookcase, opened it and spread out papers on the table. Years ago at university he’d neatly lettered the peeling yellow label, “THE BALLIMAGLIESH EVICTIONS, 1848.” It was a piece of local research he’d had to do for his degree. Some of these old newspaper cuttings belonged to Donal Morrissey. He should have given them back.

The priest read far into the night and very slowly the puzzle began to make sense. Bits were locking together like pieces of a jigsaw. Tomorrow there would be phone calls to make, he must speak to his bishop, and visit the Garda, but only after he had been to those three children.

The wind blew at the curtains and spidery shadows danced on the walls, webbing the skull that Oliver had pulled out of the pit. Father Hagan got out of his chair and knelt down. In a way he did not understand these innocent children had unleashed some immense power out of the past; it had taken them back into years of terrible suffering, making them feel in their own bodies the pains and torments of those long dead. Some force was reaching out to them from the other side of death, touching them, threatening their very lives.

His brain was empty, as if the great storm had blown it clean and he fumbled helplessly for words, unable to put together the barest sentence, to commit them all into safe keeping. He was searching his mind for the simplest of prayers for Colin, Oliver, and Prill. He wanted to ask that this great evil might pass over them, that their father and mother would come home to them again, that the poor dog would recover, and that the baby would not die.

“Give them rest, O Lord,” he kept repeating. “Give them eternal rest,” and their white, terrified faces floated in front of him as, without knowing why, he uttered for living children words used for the burial of the dead.

“A
T LEAST WE’LL
sleep tonight,” Colin said. “That’s one way to look at it. At least Alison won’t be here, to keep us all awake with her yelling.”

“How d’you know we’ll sleep?” Prill’s voice was hard. “Nobody’s had a decent night’s sleep since we got here. It’s been too hot.”

“Well, it certainly isn’t hot now,” Oliver pointed out. “I’m cold. I had a bath before I went to the village and I could do with another.”

“You can’t,” Prill snapped. “You used up all the hot water and the immersion heater’s not working now.”

“Are you sure?” Colin said. “The electricity was supposed to be coming back on at five. It’s seven o’clock now.”

“Switch everything on, if you don’t believe me.”

He went round the house clicking switches. Prill was
right, the supply was still off. “The repairs must have taken longer than they thought,” he said. “It’ll be back on soon.”

But Oliver knew it wouldn’t be. There had been lights on in Ballimagliesh and the cottage at the top of the track had been lit up too, as he pedalled by. It was just this house.

They were all shivery. The thunder had petered out but a wind still howled round the bungalow, rattling everything that moved. The temperature seemed to have dropped quite sharply, and they pulled jeans and sweaters on over their summer clothes.

Jessie crept around after the children, whimpering. Now she was anxious to be with them, and whenever they sat down she flopped at their feet. When he stroked her, Colin could feel how bony she was. They’d simply lost count of how much food they’d had to throw away, how many times they’d gone out to the dustbin and emptied her bowl. There were always maggots. Colin saw them but said nothing to Prill. Prill saw them and said nothing either. They all knew they were there, and that it wasn’t the heat. Food didn’t go off so quickly.

The whole place was beginning to feel damp, even the thick carpets, unbearably warm before to their bare feet, seemed to have moisture in them. “You can’t get warm if you have cold feet,” Oliver announced firmly, pulling thick socks on. “That’s what my mother says, anyway.”

They tried to light a fire in the sitting-room with old newspapers and a torn-up carton, but it was hopeless. There was a five-minute blaze then the paper was finished, and the
damp cardboard smouldered, filling the room with smoke. Colin brought some twigs in from outside and threw them on half-heartedly, but they were sodden after the rain and wouldn’t even light.

“Gave up on the den, did you?” he asked Oliver. “I see you’ve thrown that piece of sheeting down it.”

“Oh well, you know. It started raining and I just thought it would be out of the way, till I could fix it properly.” Oliver had turned scarlet. He didn’t want the other two to know about the pit, not yet anyway. He wanted to show everything to Father Hagan first.

But Colin didn’t notice he was embarrassed. He had a secret of his own, the writing in the tunnel. He’d climbed out of there pretty quickly when the rain started. It wouldn’t be so funny getting trapped in a place like that. But he could remember the words quite clearly. “Lord Have Mercy”, and “Salvation”. What did it mean?

Prill was in a world of her own, too. The pink medicine had made her feel sick when she woke up, and after the long, drugged sleep she had a splitting headache. Nothing was different, nothing was better. She still felt hungry but the very act of eating seemed to turn her stomach. Nobody had been to the house, nobody could telephone, no letters had come. The only thing that had changed was the weather. All afternoon the sky had grown steadily darker and a thick rain had set in. The wind was now flinging it against the glass like gravel.

All three of them had been to the phone in turn and lifted
it up secretly. All three had listened in vain for the reassuring purring sound. There may be a message for them at Danny’s Bar but they couldn’t go out in this wind. It must be the gale that had stopped Father Hagan getting to them, Oliver decided.

The only thing to do was to go to bed early and walk to Ballimagliesh in the morning. But before getting into bed Prill stuffed some things into a bag. The other two could do what they liked but once she had left this house she did not intend to come back.

The tin-opener was electric so they couldn’t open Oliver’s can of soup. All the milk had been thrown away so there was nothing to drink but cold water. Colin produced three biscuits and an apple from his rucksack and shared them with Oliver. Prill didn’t want anything to eat and went off to bed.

What they ate tasted of nothing, it was like eating thick paper. But the two boys chewed their way through it because it was food and their stomachs were empty. Ten minutes later Oliver went to the bathroom and was violently sick. He said nothing to his cousin but he knew now that it would have been the same with any kind of food. Their own bodies had started to play terrifying tricks on them.

“I’m going to bed,” he told Colin. “The sooner we go to sleep the sooner it’ll be morning.” He was under the covers in twenty seconds flat, kicking off his shoes and scattering clothes all over the floor. It was so unlike Oliver. Bedtime was usually quite a ritual with him.

Colin lay wide awake in the dark room, hunger squeezing his stomach like a fist getting the last juice out of an orange. The pain was agony. He’d never sleep unless he ate something else. There must be some food in one of those kitchen cupboards.

They’d found candles earlier on, and he’d stuck one in an egg cup and put it by his bed. He got up, lit it, and went down the passage to the kitchen. By its feeble, flickering light he searched through the cupboards and along the shelves but there were only tins that he couldn’t open, and packets of flour and rice.

He found some Bonios and a half-eaten tin of dog food and tried chewing a bit of biscuit, washing it down with gulps of cold water. But his throat was horribly dry, and the mealy lumps stuck halfway down his windpipe, hurting him. It was as though he’d tried to swallow a handful of gravel.

The stomach pains were getting steadily worse. He sat in a circle of candlelight at the kitchen table with the can of dog meat in his hand, fingering the old bent spoon Mum had found to dollop it out for Jessie. He sniffed. The meat smelled quite fresh and juicy, rather like stewing steak.

Suddenly his bare feet buried themselves in something warm and soft. He’d forgotten the dog for a minute, fast asleep by the sound of it, slumped under the table. He reached down and pushed the tin in her direction. “Jessie,” he whispered. “Come on, girl.” But the dog didn’t stir. Colin listened more carefully. When the wind dropped for a minute he could hear steady breathing, light and rather quick, like a
small child. At least she was still alive.

He sniffed at the tin again, and his stomach creased with pain. It was a punchball with a thousand knotted fists belting it from all sides. He would eat Jessie’s food.

He dug the bent spoon right down, and crammed a huge lump into his mouth. He wouldn’t breathe in or out while he was eating. That way he wouldn’t taste anything. It was food. His tongue pushed it to the back of his throat where it disintegrated into a kind of gritty pulp, but he was determined to swallow it. It would fill his belly and give him a few hours’ sleep.

But his throat muscles suddenly seized up completely, he was retching with the meat still in his throat. He got up, knocking the candle over, and groped his way to the sink, where he clawed the dog food out of his mouth, feeling blindly for the taps and turning them both on full.

Water, he must run water. He couldn’t see anything but he stood there shaking, listening to the rain as it poured down into the darkness, and the tap water drumming into the sink. He was sick repeatedly, he had never been so sick, and when it was over at last, and his stomach felt tiny and squeezed dry, like a rag, he went on standing by the window listening to the gushing of the tap. Water, he must use water, to clean his mouth and teeth and hands. He splashed it all over his face and let it run over his fingers. Somehow it made him calm again.

At last he leaned forward and switched the tap off. The jets of water in the steel sink sounded quite loud. The others were
sleeping. He must go back to bed, warm up, and somehow get to sleep himself. He managed to relight the candle. The tin of dog meat was still on the table with the old spoon beside it, and maggots were wriggling on the rim and on the handle of the spoon where he had smeared it.

He was sure that his cousin wasn’t asleep.

“Oll?” he whispered. “Are you awake?”

Oliver grunted. He was trying to ignore the waves of sickness that kept sweeping over him, and doing cycling movements under the bedclothes to get himself warm.

“Don’t let’s stay here tomorrow. Let’s go to Ballimagliesh.”

“No, we won’t. We’ll set off early. But let’s try and get some sleep.”

“I can’t sleep. I’ll never sleep tonight.”

“Yes you will,” the voice in the darkness said, quite bossily. “Make your mind a complete blank, it helps you relax; you’ll drop off then. That’s what my father always advises anyway, when I can’t sleep.”

Colin was thinking, If I hear one more word about what your father says, I’ll
brain
you. But he just said, “Good night, Oll.” He was glad he was there.

Colin heard the noise first. He had been sleeping very lightly and was awake at once. He sat up in bed and listened; apart from the blasts of wind, the panes rattling, and a moan from Jessie in the kitchen, there was quietness.

Perhaps the cold had woken him. He was shivering as he
lay there and dampness was seeping into him. It was in the bedding, the curtains and the floor. The air that touched his face was heavy with it and when he brushed at his cheek in the darkness his hand came away wet. The same dank smell of mouldiness was back in the room, but much stronger than before, and there was a sharpness in it now that clutched at his throat.

As he sat in bed he heard the noise again, and this time he was certain. It was Alison. He recognized the familiar hoarse sobbing. His mother must have come back in the small hours, after they’d gone to bed. A wild hope sprang up inside him… Perhaps his father was here too.

Then the noise stopped abruptly. Colin strained his ears but the sodden darkness held nothing except the noise of the wind and rain, and his own breathing. He lay down again and closed his eyes firmly, willing it to be a dream, begging for sleep to come, bringing day nearer.

Oliver was a quiet sleeper and hardly disturbed the bedclothes once he was comfortable, but tonight his dreams were wild. He was at the bottom of a deep pit and his arms and legs were hopelessly entangled with the limbs of others who lay there quite patiently, staring up at the sky, while earth was thrown in on top of them. It was pouring with rain. Wet soil clung to his hair and stuck to his eyes, making them smart and run, and he was shouting, “Please let us get out, don’t bury us yet. Some of us are still alive.” But somebody went on shovelling earth over them mechanically, a man with a silly, fixed smile on his round moon face, the face of the priest, but
with all the compassion sucked out of it.

He cried again, “
Please
, let us get out, we are not dead,” but earth showered down, filling his mouth, and he fell back on to bodies that were already disappearing into the foaming mud. There were screams all round him, women, little children, old men, but as he lay there the sounds faded and the storm drowned the voices until all he could hear was a single cry breaking the darkness, the desolate sobbing of a child.

Oliver opened his eyes and pinched himself.
Alison
, it must be. They were back. But no, they were miles away, in Sligo, unless, unexpectedly… “Colin,” he whispered. “Are you awake?” he paused and listened again. “Can you hear it?”

“Yes. It woke me up, too. I thought it was Alison for a minute, then I thought it might be the dog, or that I’d dreamed it, but…
Listen!
”

The noise was much louder now, as if the baby was on the other side of the bedroom wall. The voice was more insistent, sharper. There was great pain in it. Oliver put his hands over his ears. “If they would only go to her,” he said. “If they would only comfort her. Why do they leave her alone?”

Colin heard springs squeak as Oliver got out of bed, then sniffling noises. He fumbled about in the darkness, found him, and sat down on his bed with his arm round his shoulders. “Come on, Oll. It’ll be all right in the morning. We won’t stay here, we’ll go to Ballimagliesh. We could stay in the pub till Mum gets back. Listen, it’s stopped now, anyway.”