The Walking People (19 page)

The first thing he noticed when he reached her grave was the thin green film that covered the light stone. He reached out and touched it, rubbing the slimy matter with his fingertips. It was one of the only headstones without a name stamped across the top, and after looking at it for a while, examining how well the mound of dirt that covered her had leveled out, he wondered what to do next. It crossed his mind that a prayer would be the thing, but he'd never prayed by himself without being told, without joining in with a dozen or more other voices. Then he noticed the fresh dirt just beside his mother and the yawning hole beyond. A new arrival expected. Tomorrow, from the looks of it. His thoughts leaped to the cottage by the river and how they were the only family that would still bury its dead in this place.

Up at the top of the slope was a wind-bent and knobby hawthorn tree that looked as if it were pointing back at Ireland. Michael walked up to it, again stepping over grave after grave, doing his best to stay at the edges and take broad strides. He broke a small, leaf-heavy branch from the tree and went back to scrub some of the green veil from Julia's headstone. He rubbed and scratched until he had warmed up again, eventually dropping the useless branch and using the rough tweed of his jacket sleeve. When he had done as much as he could, he walked in a wide circle, gathering wildflowers and then a long blade of grass to tie them together.

It was beginning to feel impossible to go a single step more without eating. Catching a fish might take hours, and he had no line and no net, and the thought of the water when he was already so cold made him shiver and feel sorry for himself. "Well what do you expect?" he demanded, casting the words hungry, tired, sore, and cold from his thoughts. Then, at the height of his frustration, he had a thought that stopped him. There was another option, one that didn't require getting wet. He half wished he hadn't thought of it, but now that he had, he couldn't turn away. Stomach turning in dread, he got back on the bicycle, which he'd begun to think of as his own, and coasted down the hill to the rocky beach at the bottom. There they were, the rocks he remembered, standing at high tide. And yes, there too were the spots of grayish white covering the rock, covering all the rocks at high tide, a feast of barnacles for the taking. He willed himself to do what he'd seen his father and his uncles do a thousand times. He got up close to the rock, leaned in to examine the little creatures, then pried off a middle-sized one and pulled it out of its shell. Dermot ate them alive, killing them with his teeth and swallowing them down just the same as if they'd been fried in a pan full of sweet butter. But at the moment Michael was about to put it in his mouth, he found he couldn't, and instead he squeezed it between his palms good and hard until he was sure it was dead. He put it in his mouth and thought he felt it move. He spit. If I could get hold of a pot or a pan, he thought. If I could build a fire.

As he called himself every harsh name he could think of and geared up to try it again, he heard a splash. He looked out at the water and
saw a person swimming, male or female he couldn't tell, just a pair of pale arms and a dark head. He looked around to see if anyone was watching him and noticed a heap of clothes lying just beyond the reach of the water. Women's shoes. He looked out again at the water, and the person had stopped swimming. Her head bobbed in place, and he couldn't tell if she was just resting or whether she was looking at him. He hurried away.

Back on the road, he could just make out the roof of the cottage where he'd first seen his mother dead. Cahill was their name. What could he do but ask? They would remember him, surely. How many dead travellers had they given shelter to in their day? He turned in on the narrow road, the weeds and bushes pushing in from both sides to a degree he hadn't remembered from before, and he went straight up to their door. He knocked and waited. Knocked again. Waited. Shouted "Hallo?" toward the side of the house before walking around to the back and knocking again. He gave up knocking and listened. A bolt of nervous energy shot from his stomach to his groin, then up again to the back of his neck. I'll just take something to hold me over, whatever's on the counter. They were decent sort of people and will understand, and I'll come back tomorrow and I'll tell them. He pushed open the door, called out one last time, and, after waiting for a moment, stepped inside.

The door led to a back room kitchen, small, just a counter and a few flimsy cabinets. There was an electric cooker sitting out, an electric teakettle, and a small refrigerator that hummed softly and was so pristinely white it seemed out of place. There was a full loaf of bread sitting out, and when he laid his hand on it, it was still warm. He cut four thick slices from the loaf and smeared butter onto each. He looked for some kind of meat—more pork like he'd had that morning, or cured beef, or salmon. Surely a cottage this close to the river had salmon to bring them through the season, but no matter where he looked, he couldn't find anything. He thought of the hens he'd heard clucking on his way around the house, but he pushed the thought out of his mind. He took four eggs instead, filled a jar with milk. He pushed the swinging door open just a crack and looked into a room with a table, four chairs, a fireplace, and a larger cushioned chair pulled up close
to the fireplace, which was now cold. He listened for a moment, then tiptoed across the room. He swiped a book of matches off the mantel and a few pieces of turf from the pile. Once in the back room again, he thought he heard a creak—like a footstep or a door being pushed open slowly, carefully. He froze, his arms full of the things he'd gathered, and he waited, breathing as quietly as his pounding heart would allow. It would be better to call out, he told himself. It would be better to announce myself and say I called out once before. More than once, in fact. His thigh muscle began to twitch. It would be better to put these things back, go round front, and try again.

After a few seconds passed and he did not hear another sound, Michael let himself out the door he'd come in and, crouching low as he passed the windows, ran off into the closest field, careful not to drop anything.

That night, he decided to sleep indoors in one of the derelict cottages. If he hadn't been so bone cold, the heavy iron padlock on the door would have been comical against the rotted wood that flopped open with one kick of his travel-weary legs. Inside was a scene halfway between two worlds. To the right of the door the roof had caved in, letting a generation's worth of weather and bird shit in upon the single bare mattress and single wooden chair. To the left was a table, a mirror spotted with mold but still hanging, an iron pot sitting where a fire would have roared, a broom leaning in the corner. After taking an inventory of the house, everything precisely where the occupants had left it except for the half the weather had claimed, he went out once more to gather more turf from one of the neat stacks at the side of the road, and to see if the old well still had water.

He tested the old well rope and retied the knot that held the bucket. He leaned as far as he could into the dark hole and sniffed. He stood and lowered the bucket, hoping there was enough rope, giving it just a few inches at a time. As he waited and hoped, he spoke to himself out loud for the second time that afternoon. "Tomorrow I'll go straight over and tell them what I done."

He heard a gentle slap and felt the rope resist his grip as the bucket filled with water. Fighting his own greed, he forced himself to pull
it up early, hand over hand, careful to keep the bucket from banging against the sides.

As he lifted the bucket to his mouth, tilting it too high so that the water sloshed out and ran into his nose, he thought of the girl's name. He hadn't been trying to remember it, but there it was. She must have been the one swimming, head bobbing in the waves, squinting and craning her neck toward shore as she'd squinted and craned that night on the road and again when he'd gone to help collect Julia's body. Yes, in Galway too. Her stained face, her arms stretched out like a child acting the bird, ready to take flight. Greta.

W
ITHIN HOURS OF
Shannon O'Clery's departure from Ballyroan with her single suitcase and her passport zipped into the inner pocket of her purse, it began to rain. It was the kind of heavy, beating rain that usually kept up for only a quarter of an hour before tapering, but that night, and right up until daybreak the next morning, it poured and poured, flattening the brambles and the high grass around the cottage so that it looked like Little Tom had been out there all night dragging the old curragh back and forth. The hedges, too, looked like they'd born a great weight, and the way they'd split down the middle reminded Greta of a man's hairstyle—parted in the center, each half combed away toward the ears. The river, which had already been close to overflowing its banks, rose up over the stones that marked its edges and slid halfway into the Cahills' back field, swelling the ground, causing Little Tom to stand at the back door of the cottage with the lines in his forehead as knit and twisted as his mouth. Twice during the night he'd been out in the storm to check on the cows, the single bull, the mule, the two ponies, the chickens, and the three small leaks that had sprung from the roof of the hay shed. Twice he'd come back, muddied to the knees, more worried and heartsick than he'd looked before.

"It won't come any closer," Lily assured them. "To the eye that field looks flat, but there's a slope there where it's stopped. You wouldn't notice except to feel it under your feet when you're walking."

But after only a few hours respite in the morning, it began to pour again in the early afternoon of the next day, and all day was as dark as midnight except when lightning flashed and the world turned greenish yellow like the water that sometimes pooled in the lanes and the fields. They'd shut off the electricity as a precaution, and the kitchen, lit only by lanterns and candles, seemed to Greta like a photograph from a long time ago. They waited—Little Tom in Big Tom's chair, Lily and Johanna at the table, Greta in the straight-backed chair by the fire, all wondering if what Lily said about the slope was true, if it had ever been tested like this before, if they should prepare themselves for water to come sliding under the door of the cottage and set the furniture sailing.

As they waited—Johanna with her hand to her throat, fingering the scarf Shannon had given her, Greta thinking of hers wrapped in tissue and safe in her dresser drawer—the girls, in their separate silences, also recalled that fresh bundle of wildflowers on Julia Ward's grave and the loaf of bread that had been torn into in the back room. Lily had made the loaf to have the day of Mrs. O'Clery's funeral, and she was livid when she saw it half eaten. The girls, who didn't want Lily to know the possibilities stirring in their minds and, at least in Greta's case, didn't know why she wanted to keep Lily from knowing, took the blame. For her part, Lily couldn't get over their greed or their carelessness. It wasn't like them. One half gone, the remaining half was left uncovered on the counter to go stale in the damp air.

Leaving the topic of the bread behind was the one good thing brought on by the rain—a new subject, a new worry, the incident forgotten until, in the late afternoon on the second day of rain, there came into the quiet, darkened kitchen the sound of pounding on the front door.

"Who in the world?" Lily said, getting up and taking a lantern with her. It wasn't only the weather that made a visitor so surprising, it was also the use of the front door knocker. Anyone with any sense would go around back and not be dragging mud all through the house. Little Tom followed, then Johanna, then Greta, all pressed against one another in the short and narrow hall that was colder and damper than the kitchen. Lily opened the door and, without exchanging a single word, ushered the visitor inside.

"God bless all here," Michael Ward said, his voice just a notch above a whisper as he took in the group crammed before him. He brought the smell of wet earth and smoke into the cottage with him. He cleared his throat. "Nasty day," he added, this time at a volume they could all hear.

"You're wet to the bone," Lily said, taking hold of the sleeve of his jacket and squeezing. "Have you had a breakdown?"

"A breakdown, Missus?"

Little Tom mimed the steering of a driving wheel.

"He might be on foot," Lily pointed out. Then asked, "Is the road washed out?"

"Mammy," Johanna said, sticking her head into the discussion, "why not let him in the door so he can sit by the fire?" Greta could tell by the sudden music in Johanna's voice that this person who dripped rain on their floor was the Peeping Tom.

In the kitchen, sitting on the straight-backed chair Greta had just vacated, Michael Ward was instructed by Lily to peel off his jacket and pull up as close to the fire as possible without catching fire himself.

"Do you know me, Missus?" Michael Ward asked once everyone had settled themselves in positions around the room. So far, he'd directed all of his questions and statements only to Lily, but he felt the others looking on, especially the two girls. He couldn't for the life of him remember the older girl's name. There should be more of them, if he remembered correctly. More boys, plus the father. Back then, it had seemed like a family of boys, with the girls sprinkled in for good measure. Now the Cahill cottage was overwhelmingly female—not just because there were three women inspecting him from various corners of the room and the one male presence had retreated to the darkest corner, where he sat and said nothing. There was also a female quality in the fire-warmed air. All that waiting and watching, and the sense that they knew things without being told.

"I do. Not until you took off your jacket, but then, yes. Michael, isn't it? You've gotten very tall. Are ye up the road again? Have ye been here long?"

At that moment Lily remembered the bundle of flowers on Julia Ward's grave. Next to that memory she put the vision of her lovely
bread, the nearly full pound of butter it contained, a cup and a half of sugar left abandoned and half stolen on the counter, crumbs all around. It was a puzzle she now realized her daughters had solved days ago. The boy had nice ways when he was younger, not so like the tinkers that you'd recognize him as one of them right away. It seemed the years had brought him up to their speed.