The Reckoning 2

‘Jeez, would you look at those lazy-beds,’ Sullivan spoke in a humorous tone to distract Mary who’d been lagging behind. He’d offered to carry the baby, but she’d clutched it to her breast all the harder, and insisted wee Seamus would be all the better when their first-born was fed a little buttermilk.

Donnelly’s battered hat rode up, climbing the path in front of them, his red hair poking out like a lit match wind and rain could not dampen. He was in a hurry, but stopped off high above them on an outcrop of rock, sinking into his greatcoat, his eyes blazing to wave them on, and pointing over the hill. Always over the next hill. They hadn’t stopped. 

Not that there was anything worth stopping for. A few dwellings clinging to whatever shelter the mountain offered, but with their turf roofs caved in. They’d hurried past. Donnelly nudged the door open with the toe of his boot. Sullivan pulled his scarf up around his nose as the stench hit them and glimpsed the rats at work inside. At least some animals were feeding well. They hadn’t had a bite in three days. He held an arm out to push Mary away, but she was so locked inside her own misery, she didn’t seem to notice or care, just trudged on and on, following him blindly.

Sometimes she mouthed a prayer to the Virgin Mary, but she hadn’t spoken to him much in that time, either. He’d tried to reason with her, tell her to stop, so they could bury their son. But she wouldn’t listen

Donnelly was light-footed and chatty, about nothing much. In one of the shacks he’d come out chewing something. God knows what. Sullivan didn’t want to ask. His companion had convinced Mary that St. Columba would raise the child up and he’d fill their mouths with bread. All they had to do was have faith and put one foot in front of another. God’s judgement was on those that had died.   

Their feet followed the parallel lines through the turn, some three to four feet apart, weaving in and out of rock and around trees. The potato plants wilted and dead. Sullivan didn’t need to lift them. The stench was enough of a warning. They’d tried eating the edible potatoes with overly salt water to kill the taste. They’d been schooled in hunger.

Their first year of marriage, they’d ate the bark from the trees and grown thin as a blade of grass. They’d almost eaten their seed potatoes, but knew there would be no going back after that.

Mary’s father had a bigger plot of land and even a cow to milk. She talked incessantly of the time of her childhood when they’d ate cup potatoes or even the pinkeye potatoes the clergy and gentry had on their table, often with a cut of beef. But, in recent years, even Mary’s father had made do with lumpers. They were late maturing and kept to beyond May. They kept starvation at bay—until they didn’t.

They’d kept half a pig, sharing it with the O’Farrell’s, the cottier family of five next door to them, and butchering it together when the season ended and winter set in. Smacking their lips in anticipation. The smell of rich pig’s blood bringing out the bloom in the O’Farrell children’s cheeks.  

The soil here was better than he was used to. The turf piled up about a foot between the lines like a rising loaf into which the seed potatoes were covered and mixed with manure and lime, grass side down, a fertilised sandwich no man would harvest with his small sharp spud spade. Keeping a pit or clamp for storage with a thick layer of straw and earth with potatoes underneath it, until spring. Drainage was good, but already the weeds had begun to take hold around the rotting potatoes, choking them and calling them back to the earth, reclaiming the land.

He followed the ridge, keeping an eye out for Mary until it came to an abrupt stop. When everything depended on the success of the potato crop, life was easier. But he had to hire himself out to other farmers to make money to pay the rent. They got by. They even made enough to feed half their pig.

Mary had stopped at an outcrop of stone in the shape of a warped cross beside a stone dyke that had fallen in on itself. The wind whipped behind them, pushing them on. Crows cawed, circled overhead. They had found something to feast on.  She crooned a nursery rhyme in Gaelic as she bared the child’s head and pulled her shawl to the side and unbuttoned the top of her dress. Her breast was little more than an empty pouch, shocking in its whiteness as she tried to tease her nipple and feed their child.  

He hurried across and spoke harshly to her. ‘For God sake woman, put your titties away.’

A vacant glitter remained in her eyes and she held his stare, before replying, ‘What’s God got to do with it?’

He felt rather than saw Donnelly at his back. And it was his presence rather than anything he’d said that made her rearrange her blouse and dress and clench the baby to her neck, rocking it slowly back and forth.

He turned towards him and tried to keep the bitterness from his voice. ‘You go on,’ he said. ‘We’re done here…We’ll bury the little one.’

Donnelly cocked his head. His eyes dark and shining, blind to them or what he’d said. ‘Can’t you hear?’  

‘What?’  

‘The angels from heaven singin’ Hosanna! Hosanna! St Columba must be close.’

Mary cleared her throat and tried to get up, before slumping back against the wet rock. ‘I can hear them.’ She smiled, weakly. ‘They’ve come for us.’ She rubbed her forehead through her wet hair and began coughing. Seamus falling from her arms falling face down on the muddy ground.  

‘She’s got the plague,’ Donnelly cried. ‘Keep—from her.’ He flung a hand and grabbed at the back of Sullivan’s coat to hold him back, but only knocked his worn grey hat off.

He took a step back and his smile was a form of weakness he hid behind. He picked up Sullivan’s hat and put it on his head. Then he put his hat on top of his own. He made the sign of the cross in the air over them, before striding away whistling as the darkness came down.  

Sullivan picked the child up from the much and put his son to the side as he took Mary’s hand. It was very cold and her coughing continued on and on and punctuated the night. He tried to warm her with his coat and then lying beside her skin to skin on the frozen earth. I’ll make her a drink of tea, he thought with a touch of whisky in it. Hot and harsh on the throat. That would surely cure her. Strong as I can make it.

He held her in his arms as body convulsed and shuddered, with a creeping coldness on the skin. He kissed her head and lips and cried out, as the wind stilled and the rain stilled enough to show the sharp outlines of the hills below the birch woods and the winding valleys they’d tramped up. The streams they’d traversed. All of which took them home to the little shack they’d shared. And her smooth, childish face, herding a cow from a strip of grain, appeared before him.  He wanted to cry out to her, but he couldn’t move his parched lips.

A fire consumed his chest and burnt through his body.  The sweetness of the green grass and her slender flanks and the smooth ridge of her back, the wonder of her swelling breasts against his and the way she gasped when they became one. Honeyed music distilled out of memory. The thick warmth of togetherness. The way them made a den of their bodies as if playing a children’s game that only they knew the entrance to. Leg over leg, limb over limb, never to part. For death do us part.

‘So you’re awake then?’

A small woman spoke in the old language of Gaelic, with all its hidden pathways. A shawl over her head, deep chested and round, she peered at him with small, mischievous eyes. A turf fire was burning in the grate and under the heather ropes hung a pot that simmered with a foul smelling substance that filled the room with a fog. He made an attempt  to sit up and cough.

Her wrinkled hand on his shoulder pushed him back down easily. She massaged his jaw as you would a cow and when he opened his mouth, she popped something onto his tongue. And he tasted salt.

‘Chew,’ she told him, with a curious, yet querulous expression. Her nest of grey hair drawn back from her high forehead. The skin of her temples taut, with cheekbones that suggested she’d once been beautiful. Perhaps even as beautiful as Mary. And his eyes filled with tears.

‘We’ve smoked it out…’ ‘It’ll make you strong.’ Dulse,’ she offered in explanation for the thing in his mouth.

‘’m’ weak as a fly.’

‘I’ll prepare a drink.’

‘No.’

He could only see the back of the healing woman’s head. Then he was gone back to the place where there were no paths or roads or cottages lying open like wounded beasts, or eyes upon him, only the crooning lullaby.  

When he awoke, he could sit up in the straw and knew that he’d fouled himself. The old woman helped him stand, and he sat looking into the fire, with his coat over his shoulder, crouching as she raked out his bed. He could hear a trickle of water from a stream.

‘I need to wash.’

‘You’re too weak,’ she said.

But the coat dropped from his shoulders and he crawled naked towards the door. He had to raise his hand to the latch and rest. No other cottages, but out front the potato and thick cabbage patch. He sniffed the air. No smell of blight. Lighter coloured ground with golden oats beside the water trough.

‘I must surely baptise myself in the clear water,’ he said. ‘Because I’m in heaven or hell.’