The Law of Dreams (15 page)

Fingers dirty with dry blood.

“Fergus?” Somehow she articulated his name.

“Yes, miss?”

“You won't leave me lying in pain, will you?”

He barely heard the awful sounds, but understood what she wanted. She had
pulled open her dress, exposing her white breast, and was struggling to raise herself up
on her elbows. “Please, Fergus.”

Slowly he raised the musket, taking aim at her heart.

“Will you lift me up to the Lord?”

Everything stopped. The world stopped.

He squeezed the trigger. Smoke filled the air and the gun roared and she
flopped back on the bed, dead as any of them.

Summer! Summer! The milk of the heifers,
and ourselves brought
the summer with us.

He lay on his stomach, concealed, watching cattle drovers pushing a herd
of bullocks up toward the pass. He didn't recognize their song, but it was low and
plaintive, like all the cattle songs he knew.

A fat man followed the drovers on a pony. Dressed like a cattle dealer, in
a cloak and boots and straw hat, he was swaying from side to side as if he were asleep
in the saddle — and perhaps he was, a broad yellow hat shading his face.

Fergus had left the farm riding Carmichael's red mare, blood on her
saddle that he'd tried to wipe clean with handfuls of straw. He could ride her
well enough but, afraid people would recognize her, he'd dismounted after a few
miles and left her grazing along the road, where someone must claim her and feed
her.

He'd found his way up the road into the pass, where he had been
hiding for weeks, sleeping in a crevice padded with leaves, surviving on wild herbs,
rainwater, and eggs stolen from birds' nests below the cliff. Time had become an
astringency of cold nights, various kinds of sunlight, handfuls of gathered food. Three
or four times he'd painstakingly loaded, primed, and cocked Shamie's musket.
With a peeled stick on the trigger, he held the muzzle to his heart while curlews and
magpies cawed from the rocks and gnarled shrubs. Despite the
birds' taunting he had been unable to bring himself to fire, and would unload
slowly and carefully, then repeat the sequence a few hours later.

Ashamed of his weakness, he decided to avoid thinking any more than
necessary. Trying not to let words form, but feeling his way through the days by
sensation, texture, mood, the play of light on the rocks.

There was a string of fine-weather days, which he spent lying on his back
on the rough, warm granite, watching clouds float across the country. When it rained,
the pass was cut off from the world. He respected that, the precision of solitude, his
body in the clouds.

Solitude and constant wind gradually honed him, or numbed him, until he
was no longer bothering to reload.

One day a fine carriage had come through. Hiding the musket in the rocks,
he had stepped out into the road, begging, and the lady presented him a loaf of bread,
butter in a noggin, a hunk of mutton, and a fat little tract, which he used for a
pillow.

Pads of white, pulpy skin developed on his heels. The skin of his face
hardened. His lips cracked, healed, cracked again. Fissures had appeared in the balls of
his feet, frightening him — red cracks into himself, exposures, openings. The blue
workhouse jacket, leached of dye so it was almost silver, hung from his shoulders like a
husk. His trousers were greasy rags.

Another afternoon, concealed behind rocks, he observed a company of
dragoons working up the pass, walking heavy black horses, in perfect silence — all
noise being shoveled off the mountain by the wind. He'd kept out of sight,
flattened on granite, sighting the musket from man to man — but he hadn't
felt tempted to shoot.

He spent hours each day gathering herbs, chewing them soft. Stolen eggs he
broke in his fist, licking up raw egg-meat and splinters of shell. Hour after hour,
lying on his back, on warm rock, he watched hawks wreaking havoc on smaller birds.

The yellow summer and the white daisy,
And ourselves brought the
summer with us.

A strange song to be singing in winter, he thought. Perhaps it was the
only cattle song they knew. The bullocks were now almost at the mouth of the pass,
where the road narrowed between two boulders. Wary of the squeeze,
the animals were hesitating, and the drovers started pitching pebbles, trying to force
them ahead.

A mistake. Cattle couldn't be forced. You had to respect their
wariness. Driven stiffly, they would always rebel.

Pecked by stones, the lead bullock lurched off the road, kicking his
heels. He watched the others start to mill and turn. The dealer awoke and bellowed at
his men, who were haplessly cracking their little whips. Two drovers went stumbling down
the bracken slope after the strays. Braying and frisking, more animals quit the road and
wandered uphill, biting at the rough grass.

Watching the disarray, he decided the drovers didn't know their
business. Perhaps they were sheep men.

He'd expected to die on the pass but hadn't been able to kill
himself, and had let the dragoons pass through without engaging. Weather had flayed him,
but not killed him. Perhaps it wasn't the time to die after all. His feet were
hardening again.

It was time to go down into the world.

Shamie's musket lay in a crevice, protected from the weather. He
decided to leave it there. It was too dangerous to carry — any cattle dealer in
the mountains would be carrying a bell gun or a pistol and would be quick to open fire
on an armed stranger.

He stood up. Facing the wind, he started picking his way down the slope,
and a flash of Luke lit up his brain. The tune of her little voice. The scent of her
cunt, like straw burned from a field.

BULLOCKS WERE
an awkward set of creatures, difficult to
handle, insolent, infinitely nervous. Six were wandering in the rough above the road as
he came at them obliquely and started pushing them together, speaking softly, taking
advantage of their instinct to herd.

When he had them in a group, he knew he could turn them without getting
too close.

He could feel the dealer watching from under the brim of his straw hat.
Slowly, steadily he worked the bullocks back to the road, where most of the herd was
grazing on the grassy crown.

Once they were back on the road, he snapped off a hazel wand. Cracking it
against his leg and clicking his tongue, he started pushing the herd through the narrows
of the crest. The bullocks foraging in the rough slope below the road trotted uphill to
rejoin the moving herd, the inexperienced drovers floundering after them.

No one spoke to him, but after a mile or so he was included in their
pattern of position and calls. The dealer went back to sleep in his saddle.

THEY CAME
out of the mountains into country smelling of
grass, damp wind in their faces. The dealer awoke. Kicking his pony's sides, he
pushed ahead through the herd and cantered off into the dusk.

It was dark when Fergus next saw the dealer, standing in the road ahead
holding a lantern on a stick, turning the herd into a field he must have hired for the
night. As soon as the gate was shut, the dealer climbed back aboard his pony and rode
off to find his supper, and the drovers started a fire of sticks. Wooden noggins were
pulled from a sack. Fergus took one, and a wooden spoon. No one stopped him. He helped
himself to their porridge of Indian meal, licked his bowl clean, refilled it, and ate
more slowly. He had always disliked the Indian meal, each summer he'd grown sick
of the taste long before the new potatoes came in, but now it tasted luxurious —
rich, greasy, sweet. He felt it softening his tongue, restocking his brain, language
returning.

It was dark when the cattle dealer came back, smelling of whiskey.
Throwing his reins at Fergus, he pulled a pistol from his saddle and walked off to
inspect the herd while Fergus unsaddled the pony and turned it out to graze. A few
minutes later the dealer returned to the fire and glared at Fergus as though seeing him
for the first time. “Who are you? What's your business?”

Fergus looked down into the fire. He felt the weight of English words on
his tongue but couldn't say them.

“I don't need no scamps. Got a tongue? Are you a
rebel?”

He felt strained and anxious but he couldn't spring the language.
The dealer was looking at him with hard eyes. “Are you one of the reivers? A
cattle thief, are you?”

Fergus shook his head.

“I'm driving for Dublin, for Eden's Quay. I could use
another fellow that can trail a herd of wild woollies and no fuss. Pay, five shillings,
coin of the realm, once they are safe aboard.”

Fergus nodded.

“Give me your hand, so.” The dealer spat in his palm and
slapped Fergus's hand. “You are a vicious-looking scoundrel, have you been
living in a hole? Now you're Billy Butler's man — Butler of Slieve
Gullion. What name is yours,
buachaill
?”

“Fergus.”

“After we get to town, you Fergus rascal, you'll have brass in
your pocket, the wee girls will rip you to shreds.” Billy Butler sat down heavily,
leaning back against his saddle, his thick legs stretched out toward the fire. He placed
the pistol on the ground, filled his pipe, and lit it with a wand from the fire. Puffing
away, he looked at Fergus.

“Get a feed?”

“Yes.”

“No blanket, though.”

Fergus shook his head.

“You can roll up with one of the other fellows. Get out there now,
buachaill
. We all stand night guard. Take a round of the fencing, see my
beauties is easy.”

BILLY BUTLER
slept aboard his pony all day, straw hat
and canvas cape protecting him from weather. He kept his pistol dry in a greased welt on
the saddle.

They began overtaking crowds of people moving east along the road for
Dublin. Men and women, with children on their backs, stepped out of the road as the
bullocks were driven through. At every halt the drovers cooked stirabout. Wary of
reivers, Billy Butler never slept at night, but sat by the fire smoking his pure
tobacco, getting up frequently and strolling among his bullocks, pistol in hand.

“
BY THE LIGHT OF BURNING
martyrs, I'll drop
any Dublin digger tries to turn my herd.”

Butler sat in his saddle. Swigging
poitin
from a clay jar, he
coughed, spat, and handed the jar around. The drovers were at the edge of Kildare plain.
Instead of grazing the herd one last night, they were going to drive straight through
the city, heading for the quays.

When the jar reached Fergus, he took a swallow, stamping his foot when the
liquor scorched his throat. The men laughed at him.

“The Dublin girls will eat you fellows alive,” Butler told
them.

As they ran the bullocks in along the black river, Dublin's sharp
forms and hardness impressed him. Granite blocks sheathed the water. The moon slapped
light on the city's endlessness of stone.

Just at dawn they began passing the quays, the light like gray wool. Ships
lay in packs along the river. The road thickened with traffic of drays and barrows and
people carrying children and baggage on their backs. The bullocks kicked their heels and
threw their heads back, bellowing from thirst. The river smelled of tar and herring.

They drove the bullocks into a wooden pen on Eden's Quay. Dublin was
packed with noise of dray wheels crackling on stone, men shouting, whips cracking.
Hundreds of people sat guarding their baggage as the winter sun
blared orange in the east. Children slept on mountains of baggage: trunks, cases,
sacks, grips, casks, bundles of tools, sets of harness, chairs, lamps, stools.

“Where are they all going?”

“Liverpool and America.”

He'd heard of them but had no sense of where these places were
— across the water, he supposed. Men went across the water to navvy the canals, or
harvest wheat in Scotland, but they always returned, as his father had returned.

Billy Butler handed each drover a little tobacco, then went off looking
for a buyer.

Intimidated by the noise, the crowds, and the piercing complex of Dublin
smells, the drovers retreated shyly to the cattle pen to stand among the warm animals,
puffing their pipes.

Fergus walked out on the quay. The caustic disorder was stimulating, the
noise a relief from his thoughts. A steamer lay along the quay breathing from a pair of
iron chimneys. The steam smelled of moss.

He peered down the black river, trying to catch a glimpse of the sea.

BILLY BUTLER
came back with a buyer and went wading
through the herd of bullocks, sorting animals with a stick. Fergus watched the two men
bargaining then slapping hands for the sale.

“Yes, yes, he's taken the whole bunch for Liverpool,”
Butler told them. “Come along now, lads, let us run 'em aboard old
Nimrod
, then I'll treat you to breakfast.”

The crowd of emigrants waiting on the quay began to stir when they saw a
gangway run out from the steamer. A few passengers tried to force their way aboard but
the deckhands beat them back with tarred rope-ends. A group of deckhands poured down the
gangway and ran across the quay to the cattle pens, shouting and swinging their
rope-ends, clearing a way through the crowd.

Billy Butler shouted at Fergus to run the gate open. They began driving
the braying, shitting bullocks across the quay and up the gangway onto the deck, where
they trampled neat coils of rope and overwhelmed every inch of deck space.

As soon as the last was run aboard, the gangway was hauled in. People on
the quay were waving tickets and begging to be let aboard but the men standing guard
along the rail ignored them.