The Walking People (11 page)

"Where's your father?"

"Him and the boys went to the crossroads to meet Mr. Devine's bull." They'd filed off that morning with two young cows that had never calved. Greta knew that they would wait by one of the abandoned cottages until Mr. Devine arrived and Big Tom gave him money for his bull to hop up on the cows' backs. Greta also knew that sometimes they had to wait a long time for the bull to be ready to hop up a second time. Lily had sent her and Johanna to give him a message once, and they arrived as the bull was beginning to twitch and pace. Just as the bull leaped and the cow staggered forward, Big Tom had roared at them to go away. "You know what they were doing, don't you?" Johanna had crowed as they raced home.

"And your mother is inside?" Mr. Grady asked.

"Yes."

"And Johanna?"

"Inside as well. Well, now that I think of it, they might have gone around front. My mother wanted to have a look at the whitewash. There's mud up to the eaves. Will we walk around front and I'll get her for you?"

Greta took a few steps toward the front of the cottage, but Mr. Grady stayed put.

"Is it chores they're doing inside?"

"It is, of course. Pop and the boys will be back soon."

"And what kind of work could they be doing that they'd need to pull the curtains?"

Greta glanced over and saw that the curtains in the kitchen and the back room had been pulled since Mr. Grady had come into the yard. Greta smiled. "Now, Mr. Grady, why don't we go around front and I'll get Mother."

"No, Greta. I think we'll walk to the back door and you'll tell her I'm here to see her about something." His pale face had become flushed. His voice lost its cheerful, gloating tones and sounded like a chord pulled too tight.

"Will you wait here while I get her?" Greta lowered her voice and in a volume barely above a whisper said, "She might not be dressed."

As Mr. Grady looked at her, Greta fought the urge to push her glasses higher on her nose. She realized that she was chewing her lower lip, and she stopped. She smoothed her skirt. She concentrated on staying perfectly still. "She wasn't feeling well yesterday, and she'd be very cross if I—"

"Go, then," said Mr. Grady. "I'll wait here."

Greta walked across the yard as if someone else were in charge of her limbs. She glanced around, as if observing different things in the yard, a casual task, off to fetch her mother. When she reached the back door, she pushed it open halfway, then slipped inside.

"What does he want?" Lily asked. She was standing behind the door. Johanna was sitting on the stool.

"To talk to you."

"How does he seem?"

"Different," Greta said. "Something..."

"Christ," Lily said. She took off her apron, smoothed back her hair. "Stay here," she said to the girls.

"Why didn't ye hide everything?" Greta asked once Lily had left. She waved her hand over the rows of salmon, mounds of rock salt, piles of bones, scales, heads, and tails covering every surface.

"I don't know," Johanna said, throwing up her hands. "I told her. 'Into the drawers,' I said, and made off with a tray, but she was just like a statue watching out the window. I asked her what will we do, and she didn't answer. I pulled the curtains myself. I don't think she would have done it."

"The drawers are full up already. That might be why she got funny. Under the beds would be better—just until he went."

Observing through the slice of space between the curtains, the girls watched their mother walk across the yard and give Mr. Grady a big smile. She patted his arm. She pointed out something in the henhouse behind him. He didn't turn to look, and at one point, as he was speaking, he looked so cross that Johanna wondered aloud whether he was going to spit, and if he did, what their mother would do. Greta heard her mother's soft, calming tones ride gently over his angry ones. It was her shushing voice, the one she used whenever she held a baby. Mr.
Grady wasn't having it, and after a few minutes he pointed at Lily, his finger so close to her face that if she nodded, he would have touched her nose. Even after she turned away and walked back to the house, he stood there staring at the back door, as if deciding whether to push his way inside.

Johanna gave up her stool when Lily came back in, and the three of them were silent as they waited for Mr. Grady to leave. Johanna watched at the window while Greta sidled up closer to Lily and threaded her fingers in her mother's thick hair.

"He's gone," Johanna announced finally. "He just turned up the coast road."

Upon hearing the word, Lily dropped her shoulders and let out a long breath, as if she'd been holding it the whole time she'd been talking to Mr. Grady. She inhaled deeply, then let it go again.

"Now," she said after she'd collected herself. "No sense getting your father with all the work he has to do. You two finish up here."

"Are we still going to town, myself and Greta, with the ones that are ready?" Johanna asked. "Every house along the north road is expecting us."

"No. Today I'll bring them myself."

The boys and Big Tom did not return for their midday meal, and if Lily had not predicted that this might happen, Greta would have worried that Mr. Grady had taken his angry face and his pointing finger down to the crossroads. Unlike Lily, Big Tom would not have used his soothing voice. The boys would have taken places beside Big Tom, arms folded, as Mr. Grady's red face went scarlet.

"How much are the salmon worth?" Greta asked Johanna some time after Lily left. Johanna was fixing the hem on one of Lily's skirts. After stowing the new fish in the places left vacant by the ones Lily had brought to town, they'd parted the curtains and opened the windows, letting in the flies and the gnats along with the fresh air. They never handled money when they delivered the fish in town; Lily took care of all of that separately.

"Enough," Johanna said, rooting through Lily's box of thread to find the closest match.

"What do you mean?"

"Enough is what I mean. Enough to have to take them from the river in secret and sell them in secret, so what do you think? Enough to make Mr. Grady look like he was going to blow steam out of his ears."

"But maybe he just doesn't like Pop."

"Well, he doesn't like Pop, but don't you know the bailiff keeps a shotgun that Mr. Grady gave him? And on the nights when he doesn't come, Mr. Grady walks up and down the river himself with it?"

"To shoot someone?"

"Greta, it's time you copped on, don't you think?"

"That's what I'm trying to do, Johanna. And Jack takes a shotgun too, doesn't he? And we know he's not going to shoot anyone."

Johanna rolled her eyes.

"You don't know either. Why don't you just say you don't know, instead of pretending all the time that you know everything."

"I know that this is the way it is. Always has been. Always will be."

"So, is going with the net the same as if Pop and the boys went over to Mr. Grady's house and busted in the door and took his money and whatever they could put their hands to and then went and sold his things in town?"

Johanna pulled the needle through the fabric, pulled it up, up, up over her head as far as she could reach. Then she leaned forward as if she were giving it a kiss and snapped the thread with her teeth. She tied off the stitch, smoothed the edge of the skirt across her lap.

"Well?" Greta asked.

"I'm not talking to you," Johanna said.

 

Since walking away from Mr. Grady in the yard, Lily had felt a tremor in her body that she couldn't manage to still. Her hands shook, her knees shook, her heart felt out of rhythm. Twice on the way to town she'd had to stop pedaling the bicycle so she could get a better grip on the handlebars. One of those times she'd been tempted to walk down to the ocean, unwrap the dead fish from their brown paper packaging, and throw them all into the Atlantic. She pedaled fast through the crossroads without even lifting her hand to her sons when they shouted hello. She'd been pleasant to the man, but in return he'd
pointed his finger in her face and raised his voice. A man who does that to a woman, to a neighbor, to a person he knows full well he'll have to pass in the road for the rest of his life, doesn't care anymore, and this thought made Lily breathless. When she looked at him, she'd seen hate, and she also saw that his hate had been handed down to him alongside the river. His father had hated Big Tom's father, and his grandfather had hated Big Tom's grandfather, and while she was seeing all of this, she also pictured Johanna and Greta looking out the window at her to watch what she would do.

That night, Lily waited until the house was asleep to tell Big Tom that Mr. Grady had been to visit and that he'd been more angry than she'd ever seen him. The girls had been buzzing around Big Tom all evening, looking at him, looking at Lily, asking with their expressions whether he knew. Lily ignored them. It was better to wait and get him alone, in private, in their bedroom. It was an off night, and when Big Tom said he planned on getting a big sleep, he meant it. He refused to open his eyes.

"And?" he said.

This, Lily thought, is the man I married. Ten pregnancies, five children mostly grown.

"And he got Greta."

At this Tom opened his eyes and turned toward Lily. "And?" he said.

"Stop saying
and.
Greta was brilliant, no worries there, but he told me he knows all about the hotel and the B and B's. Private houses are bad enough, but he said the other business went over the line. And he said that when the county official came to pay him for what they take upstream, he was told the stock was low. He said it was like stealing money from his pocket."

Big Tom grunted.

"He's serious, Tom. He's had it."

"Well, I've had it as well. Did he ever think of that?"

Lily kicked off the covers and sat up. Tom saw things in black or white, always had, but there had to be a way to explain to him that feeling she had when Grady's face was in front of her. She'd grown up in Ballyroan just as Tom had. She knew it was no sin to take food from
the river God gave them. Even before she and Tom married, her family took the fish the Cahills gave to them and were grateful to have it. But there was a difference between her and Tom; Lily was scared, and Tom didn't know what it meant to be afraid of anything. And the situation in Ballyroan wasn't the same as it had been when Lily and Tom were children and there were enough people around to protect and defend the Cahills. Lily had never missed having neighbors as much as she had that afternoon when Johanna first spotted Grady in the yard.

"He's in the right, Tom," Lily said. "It's time to stop now, before this gets any worse. He'll do like the man in Clifden who started getting water bailiffs from the north or from some other part, paying their whole wage himself and giving rewards for what they can discover at night, and then where will you be? The system he has now is a fool's system, and he knows it. Someone from Conch will turn in Tom Cahill? After shaking your hand in town for the past forty years? It's a laugh, actually. And he's through."

"I'm through as well."

"Jesus, Tom—" Lily stopped, reversed, began again more calmly. "We could make up the loss somehow, couldn't we? What if we sold a piece of land? We hardly use that back-road field Gibbons sold you before they left, and it's hard to get to."

Big Tom was quiet for so long that Lily began to feel a nugget of relief crack open in her chest and spread along her limbs.

"Sell it to who?" Big Tom said finally.

"Well, I don't know. We'd have to figure that out."

"Lily, sometimes I wonder about you. Gibbons gave me that field for less than we make selling eggs in one month. Who would take it except for me? Useless, rocky land—it's a wonder the cows haven't starved. We need that river, do you understand? We need what that river brings in."

"Well then," Lily said, "look at those Dennehy boys who went off to Germany to work in a pottery and how well they're doing. Or the boys could do half years in Manchester, back and forth. It's not the same as going to America, where we'd never see them again. You don't need all three of them here. They could take turns coming and going." Lily paused, let her eyes follow the slight crack in their
bedroom ceiling where it ran from the top of the window to the door. She took a breath. "You're forgetting that it's his right. It's his river, his fish."

"No, Lily. You're the one who's forgetting."

 

The next afternoon, the loose gear on John Hogan's bicycle clanged like an alarm as he sped along the coast road, then turned down the Cahills' lane. Lily and Big Tom had headed off together earlier in the afternoon to settle up accounts, Lily hoping to mark an early end to the season, Tom seeing it only as a routine collection of payment and orders. John Hogan hopped off the bicycle before it came to a complete stop and took a few fast skips alongside before abandoning it to the dirt. Looking left and right, he rushed to the Cahills' door and pounded.

Inside, sitting with legs crossed and facing each other on their bed, Greta and Johanna froze their game of
fidchell.
They pushed the small board under one pillow and swept the empty spools they used for players under the other pillow.

He waited, pounded again. "It's John Hogan."

"Will we answer?" Greta whispered. This was unexpected. Before leaving, Lily had told them to stay inside and if Mr. Grady came back, to ignore him and keep the doors locked tight. No one said anything about the bailiff.

Johanna put her finger over her lips and shook her head. Like the night months before, when they went spying on the tinker camp, Greta fought the urge to pee.

Outside, the bailiff gave up and circled around to the back of the house. He pounded on the back door, and the sound, that much closer than the front door, made Greta jump and clap her hand over her mouth.

"Will he bust through the door?" Greta asked. Johanna shook her head more vehemently than the first time and scowled, as if commanding Greta to stop asking questions.

The pounding stopped. The girls heard footsteps crunching the gravel at the side of the house. John Hogan poked his head into the stable. He whistled into the hay shed, squinting in the shadowy darkness. There, he spotted the three boys, fast asleep and half buried in hay.