A Different Kingdom(17)

Agnes Fay, Michael Fay's grandmother, lay as still and straight as a felled tree in the conjugal bed, breathing softly to Pat's low snore. She was dreaming of boots. Boots kicking the door of her home and men in two-tone uniforms shouldering in, police tunics with soldiers' khaki underneath. Her mother in an agony of terror, her brothers white, whirling for the revolvers gleaming on the chair. And she had plopped her rump down on them as calm as you please, sat on their metal hardness and refused to move as the Black and Tans skeltered through the house and her father stood with his hands on his head. A girl, merely, she had almost wet herself with fear, but had sat on, her skirts hiding treason and saving her brothers from a bullet in the back yard.

Sean dreamed of shiny tractors ploughing ruler straight furrows and belching smoke into the blue sky. Behind them the settling seagulls were pushed aside by the rising corn, and a man came scything, his blade like a horned moon brought into the sunlight.

Pat dreamed of horses, and smiled as he slumbered. Michael did not dream, because he was in Rose's arms.

His younger aunt was awake, feeling for a bulge that would not be there for weeks yet. Her knuckles skimmed over her boy-narrow hips, and she wondered if it were possible that a new life should burst out of them without killing her.

She remembered. He had stopped her up so that the slick clockwork of her monthly trickle had been dammed. As she was damned. A dark man, a faceless man, he had filled her with heat and pressed her into the cool leaf mould whilst the river had churned on like the rage of her swimming blood and the night rose dark and thick with trees around her. And now there was another heart beating in there.

Poor Thomas McCandless. Clumsy and eager, she had blamed him for it, let him have what he had been wanting this long time and then she had named him the father. Poor, gulled Thomas, fumbling and red-faced, afraid to look and yet as greedy as a child. A Protestant father of a bastard child, or so they thought. The real father had been a hooded horseman passing by, and as his mount pulled out of the river bottom in the next morning's dawn its hoofs had sent the crumbling bank tumbling into the water. She did not want to see him again, but thought she would if the baby split her apart in its journey toward the light.

'Souls are cheap,' he had said as he rode away, and she thought he had laughed.

IN THE RAINFLENSED back yard the stone was dimly glinting, the gutters pouring night-dark liquid into the rainwater barrels. The wolves padded the stone like ghosts, peopling Demon's dreams with fear and fellowship, Sniffing at the animal smells. The horses laid back their ears in the stables and in the fields the sheep were crowded and alert, but nothing molested them. The farm cats watched luminous-eyed from dry corners. The pack milled about in the starless gloom, silent and searching. Once one pawed at the back door. Then they poured away towards the woods like feather-footed phantoms afraid of the dawn.





FIVE

FIVE YEARS PASSED.



Rose never came back, because she was dead.

The news filtered down to Michael some seven months after her hasty departure. She had been stolen in the night by the priest and a pair of stern nuns, and Michael had cried his heart out at her white face in the back of the big car, looking not much older than himself. For him she died the moment the door closed on her and the car was out of the front yard. She had left his world and was in another one. Death did not enter into it, and he was unsure as to what exactly it was anyway. Death to him was like a letter lost in the post. Someone had gone somewhere he could not visualize. For him death started ten miles from home.

No one would tell him how or why she had died; it was under-carpet material, a skeleton to find a closet for. He prayed for her, and for the child she had said she was going to get, but he was not entirely sure if she had been joking with him, even now. Rose had always been a great one for stories.

After a while, an immense while—three years at least—she receded from the forefront of his mind. Rachel took over with the chickens and made a hash of it, for they distrusted her and she could not find half their nests. So there were eggs for breakfast less often. And Grandfather had thrown one of the hired hands out of the house, Thomas McCandless, a youth who was almost a boy. Michael never learnt why. He spent as much time as possible alone or with Mullan. It was safer that way. He had a vague idea, however, that Rose would come back some day, that he would go down to their pool by the bridge one morning and see her sitting there with her toes in the water waiting for him.

The five years saw him grow furiously so that his clothes crept up his limbs overnight and alarming wisps of hair began to appear where there had been none before. Where Rose had had some. That thought was absurdly comforting.