The Law of Dreams (5 page)

Saul and his father stood holding the iron-tipped ram, ready to tumble the
walls.

Fergus watched the roof crumbling as it burned. In a few moments it
collapsed entirely, and the cabin was a white cup holding nothing but flame.

HE STUMBLED DOWN
the path after the men, clutching the
horse blanket, unsure if he was their prisoner. They ignored him; perhaps they were
ashamed. They had biscuit, so he followed.

As they came into the farmyard he looked about for Phoebe but saw no sign
of her. Carmichael, his two sons, and the officer disappeared inside the house. The
soldiers headed for the stable. Clutching his blanket, ignored, Fergus finally stumbled
after them.

Where was Phoebe while her men were tumbling? What kept her busy? Where
did she hide?

In the stable, the soldiers stacked muskets, unbuckled their white
crossstraps, and shrugged off their knapsacks and ammunition boxes. The sergeant handed
him a biscuit, then allowed him a swallow of fiery
poitin
from a clay jar.

The old mare, disturbed by the presence of strangers, was fussing in her
stall. The soldiers settled down to filling and lighting their clay pipes. They
continued to ignore him as if he were a ghost and they could not see him. Perhaps he
was
in a dream. Or perhaps he was a ghost; perhaps he was dead already. How
would you know if you were dead? He finished the biscuit quickly and licked the crumbs
from his hands. The old mare would know.

Approaching her stall, he started whispering to her, then stroking her
nose. It seemed to settle her, so he must be alive still. Her warm, sweet breath clouded
his face. He felt tears dribbling down his cheeks. Climbing one
side of the stall, he settled himself aboard her, legs astride. Leaning forward, letting
his arms fall down either side, he lay on her neck, absorbing her heat.

“Fergus? Is Fergus here?”

Startled, he looked up and saw Phoebe at the stable door.

“Miss, if that is the name,” the sergeant said, pointing at
Fergus. “The creature found in the paddywhack.”

He gripped the mare with his knees, knotting fingers in her mane as Phoebe
approached.

“Come with me, Fergus.”

“I'm sick, I'm dazzled.”

“I'll give you something to eat.”

“They are all dead, the cabin is tumbled, no one is buried, they are
burned.”

Phoebe was looking at him blankly.

This is the way it is in dreams. You speak and cannot be heard.

Then he realized he was speaking Irish, which the Carmichaels did not
have, not even Phoebe. He sat on the mare, dumb, staring at her.

“Come inside, it's all right,” she said. “I
promise.”

Something inside him gave way and he started weeping.

Reaching up, Phoebe touched his leg. “Oh don't you, Fergus!
Can you eat, do you think? Come inside, I'll give you a cup of broth and some of
our bread.” She touched his hand.

“You be careful of that wild creature, miss,” the sergeant
warned.

SHE CROSSED
the farmyard, and he stumbled after her. She
had nothing to say. Her clean clothes; her brown hair smelling of light. She knew she
was going to live a long time, marry a farmer's son, have sons of her own. Fergus
was going to die soon, and that was the difference between them. When they came to the
kitchen door she pushed it open then took his elbow, pulling him inside. The door boomed
shut behind him. He was standing on warm flags in the farmhouse kitchen, a large room
with low beams and a tin-plated range throwing heat that smashed into his chest
painfully, as though the last thing he'd been keeping safe had been broken
into.

Your soul lived in your chest, did it not.

The fish-faced officer looked up from the table, where he and
Phoebe's brothers had been eating ham and cheese on toast and drinking porter.
Farmer Carmichael who had been scribbling on a scrap of paper looked up, surprise on his
face, sour as cheese.

“What do you suppose you are doing, Pheeb?” her brother Saul
demanded.

“He must be fed. Look at him!”

“They were fever cases up there, Pheeb. He wants keeping outside, or
we'll catch it.”

“I shall give him something to eat first.”

The tin-plated range was throwing wild heat. Fergus, light-headed, could
feel himself starting to sway. If he fell down now he knew he would die here on the
kitchen floor, in front of them.

Phoebe looked around and saw him stagger. “Fergus, sit down. Look at
you, boy. Oh look at you.” She guided him to a three-legged stool and pushed him
until he sat down.

“It was their choice to stay, it was,” her brother Saul was
saying.

“Well, whatever it was, it's done now,” said Phoebe.
“Listen up, old Fergus, sweetheart. We must put some nourish in you. They are
going to take you away, you see. Abner is taking you in the cart. You'll need a
little strength, won't you?”

He was powerless. All he could do to hurt them was die in their kitchen,
and he wasn't ready to die.

There was a red ham in a pan on top of the range. Stropping a knife,
Phoebe briskly cut off a slice, sawed two cuts of wheat bread, and gave him the food. He
took it and could feel the salt swelling up his lips as he chewed.

Carmichael at the table was back at writing, steel nib scratching the
paper.

“They'll have to admit him to Scariff workhouse,”
Carmichael said to the officer. “I pay the poor rates after all, and they're
a burden. He'll be cared for, they'll feed him.”

Crouching on the stool, Fergus ate furtively from his hands, feeling heat
exploding off the range and soaking into him like something dangerous.

“There, you see, you'll be all right,” Phoebe said.
“I'll come to visit you.”

He watched her carry more bread and butter to the men at table and refill
their noggins from the jug of porter. The room was quiet except for the click of
the fire and the scrape of knives on plates and the slap of liquid
pouring. He knew she was lying. It stung her to have to look at him; she wanted him
away, perhaps more than any of them did.

Fergus wolfed his food. She was feeding him up for the road.

Abner Carmichael went out to harness the donkey to the cart while Fergus
continued to eat his bread and ham like it was dream, like it was his old life he was
consuming. He could hear Phoebe's other brother, Saul, laughing hoarsely at some
joke the officer made.

Phoebe, making up a little parcel of food, kept her back to Fergus.

The food had warmed him up inside, and his brain was moving. When Abner
came into the house saying the cart was ready, Fergus understood this was ejection. They
were ejecting him. The Carmichaels had won.

Phoebe stood in front of a window, with light pouring through her hair.
She was smiling as she made some remark to the officer then took a dainty sip of porter
from a cup.

You look at a girl, and see she isn't your girl, and understand she
never will be no matter how much you want her. You grasp that, finally. Awareness
pierces the chest like a spike being driven in. The world doesn't belong to you.
Perhaps you belong to the world, but that's another matter.

Still, when it came time to go, he didn't go easy — he felt he
owed his father, Mícheál, that much. He grabbed an iron pan off the stovetop
and pitched it at Saul's head and grasped a hot stove handle and threw it at Abner
and was trying to seize one of the kitchen knives when Saul and the officer knocked him
down and held him on the floor writhing while Abner wrapped up his ankles and wrists
with yellow twine.

“Hold steady, boy, we don't wish to harm you now. Hold
steady.”

Such lies
, he thought.

Phoebe was nowhere in his field of vision as he was hung over
Abner's shoulder like a trussed boar. Perhaps she had left the room. Perhaps she
ran upstairs, threw herself on her bed, and covered her ears with pillows so she
wouldn't hear his protests as Abner was lugging him from the house. Perhaps she
lay very still the way her mother, trying to avoid another rack of coughing, had kept
perfectly still on her deathbed, like an animal hopelessly caught in the jaws of
another, larger, animal.

He was weeping, shouting
You're not my girl! You're not my
girl!
as he was carried out, and it was Irish anyway, and none of them would
understand.

Abner laid him in the cart very gently then climbed in over him. Taking up
the reins, Abner clicked his tongue and the donkey started off, iron shoes clicking
across the cobbles then out through the iron gate. And that was the end of the old life,
dream life, Phoebe life, life of the mountain.

IRELAND, NOVEMBER
1846

AFTER A WHILE ABNER STOPPED
the cart and unbound him,
and he sat with his legs dangling from the back as they continued along the road. He
could smell the lard that greased the wheel hubs.

The company of soldiers following on foot.

With every jolt from the road, his legs flew up, kicking. He considered
jumping down, scrambling over the nearest wall, fleeing across the field. Finding his
way back up the mountain. Perhaps the soldiers would shoot, but he doubted it. Perhaps
they would chase him. But probably soldiers would not like leaving the dry road to muddy
their boots. Which they must clean and rub constantly, he'd heard, or be
constantly beaten.

What did soldiers care for a tenant on the loose? It wouldn't mean
any more to them than a hare. Probably less. Not worth a scramble. Not worth a bullet.
Abner had untied him, after all, and might stand to let him go. He had strength to get
himself over the nearest wall, but probably not much farther. He knew that if he lay
down in a field he'd stop breathing. And he didn't wish to die there, with
magpies pecking at his eyes.

So he stayed on the cart.

Abner passed him his fuming pipe. Fergus held the warm clay bowl in his
paws and puffed and watched the company of soldiers veering off at the crossroads.

A dab of wild scarlet moving into the glen, disappearing.

Sunlight beckoned, then rain swept in.

The pipe went out as they were crossing a bog that was split with
precisely cut trenches where the turf had been excised, and Abner had nothing to light
it with. The donkey trotted on, passing isolated cabins and potato plots where leaves
and stalks lay smashed on the ground.

Mother and father, dead. Sisters, dead. You feel very light: floating. Not
much attaching you to the world it seems.

Cramps, in the belly, stiff with gas.

Entering Scariff, the road became a street lined with ruined cabins. He
had visited the town every year, come to the fair to sell the pig, and it had always
seemed exciting — threatening, hurrying — but now it was dead.

Roofs burned out, one after another. Abandoned cabins stared at one
another across the road.

Scariff stank of the moldy thatch that was left, too wet to burn.

Beggars standing outside the iron gate of the workhouse were cawing like
crows as Abner drew up the cart.

“Now, Fergus, it's the Poor Law Union, you know. The
workhouse.”

Fergus unwilling to open his mouth.

You guard what you have when it's nothing.

Emptiness, silence.

“Very good establishment they say it is, and you must do as they
tell you.” Abner was pulling him off the back of the cart. “They'll
feed you and take care of you, never fear.”

The other son, Saul, had always had a jeering tendency, but Abner was
usually kind, and good at working cattle. Cattle could not be worked by anyone who hated
them or feared them or did not comprehend their sensitivity.

You could have been cattle, or a horse. Or a rabbit. Fox, badger. Anything
that lived on the mountain. A stone, a piece of turf, white root of a mustard plant.

The beggars outside, some clutching children, were hoping to be admitted
to the workhouse, but they cleared the way respectfully for the farmer's son to
approach the iron gate.

There was a porter's lodge just inside. The workhouse itself was a
handsome stone building with a courtyard. Fergus felt Abner's grip on his arm
holding him down; otherwise he might flutter into the sky, like a moth.

Where was his mind? If he were a plant growing on the
mountain, or a stone too large to be shifted —

“Keeper!” Abner shouted through the bars.
“Keeper!”

A bonfire was crackling in the courtyard, inmates herding around it,
attempting to warm their hands.

A uniformed keeper stuck his head out a window in the little gate lodge,
and the beggars standing in the street began screaming “Soup! Soup!” while
holding up howling children.

“Go away!” the keeper shouted.

“Open up, you!” Abner's voice was firm. “My
father's a ratepayer, and this poor fellow is ours.”

Abner thrust a scrap of paper between the bars. “Here is the ticket
all made out. Now come, you, and let him in.”

The keeper's head withdrew and the little window banged shut. A
moment later the lodge door opened and the keeper came out, buttoning up his blue coat.
“You don't expect me to greet every pauper in the country, do
you?”

“I don't expect nothing but your duty. Now let us
in.”

“You must hold off these ragged pigs.”

“Hold them off yourself, it's not my concern.”

“Let me see your ticket.” The keeper glanced at it, then
shoved it in his pocket and started unlocking the gate. The beggars were wailing and
pressing, trying to get inside. The keeper opened the gate just enough for Abner to push
Fergus through, then banged it shut, catching the wrist of a beggar, who began
screeching like a cat.