Dark Rosaleen (18 page)

He had not been on the ground for more than a few minutes when it began to rain, gently at first so that he welcomed it, washing away the sweat on his brow and cooling his aching muscles. But then the sky broke open and, through the middle of it, the rain came down in spiteful, painful bolts. He bent lower, feeling for his crop, pushing the earth aside. He knew every inch and ounce of it. He had spent a lifetime nurturing, feeding, turning, hoeing, weeding, every grain sifted through his loving fingers, earth so familiar it was part of him. Now suddenly it was a bog, alien and hostile, and he was frightened. He tried to stand but the cold knocked him to his knees again. He fell sideways and there was mud in his mouth. He spat it out and, cursing the sky and every living thing, he crawled back to the cottage door and lay exhausted on the floor by the hearth.

It was an hour or more before he felt strong enough to kneel. He reached up, took the rosary from its peg on the chimney breast and, resting his elbows on the stool, began to pray. When he had finished, he waited and listened. He heard only the storm, so he whispered another prayer and waited again. But the thunder was even nearer and louder and the white flashes of lightning only grew brighter and more terrifying.

He ended his prayers, pulled himself up and rested against the chimney breast. He nodded. It was as he had always feared, something he had secretly suspected ever since he was a child. No one was listening.

At that moment Tom Keegan realised he had spent his long life paying homage to someone who was not there. Painfully, slowly, he straightened himself and unhooked the tiny locket of Mary's hair from its peg, kissed it, wrapped it in his handkerchief and put it into his waistcoat pocket. Then, without bothering to put on his coat or cap, he went out into the storm and to the mountain path. He needed only his memory to guide him.

He climbed slowly, edging himself forward, until at last he came to a hollow where the mountain spring fed into a clear shallow pond. Here the wind seemed to him barely a whisper and the rain no more than a soft, warm and gentle drizzle. At the pond's edge was an old twisted hawthorn covered in a mass of mistletoe and to its right a rock so smooth and straight it might have been hewn by a mason. By its side was the Cairn Beag, a small mound of stones he had built many years before as atonement to his Fairy King. He pulled the locket from his pocket and placed it on top of the mound. Then he turned slowly in a circle and then half a circle again so that when he stopped he was facing the pond.

He saw a mist, a delicate shimmering gauze caught in soft white light spread across its centre, changing its contours as the breeze caught it. With his hand on the rock to steady himself, the old man went down on one knee and spoke to the Fairy King.

‘
Sláinte leat
and forgive me, Rí na Sideog. My bones are crippled with the cold and the pain of old age, as if you didn't already know. I have a gift for you here, the most precious thing I have left, taken from the most precious person I ever knew. It is yours to take, or for her if she is with you.

‘You will have seen what is happening down there, so you'll know why I have come. There is no one else I can turn to for help. Maybe it is too late. I think it is. Do you think it is?'

Still kneeling, he waited for an answer. The breeze dipped into the hollow, rippling the pond. The mist stretched out a finger beyond the edge of it, curled itself around the hawthorn tree and enveloped the nests of mistletoe.

The old man knew what the Fairy King was telling him.

‘It will cover everything then? Not a field spared? Not one of us saved? No one? Tell me, Rí na Sideog. No one?'

There was a sound, like the puff of distant bellows. The mist flowed out and spread itself, completely enveloping the water beneath it. The old man nodded again, understanding. He waited until he was sure his audience was over, cupped his face in his hands and began to weep. When the tears stopped he rested his shoulder against the rock and stood again. He kissed the locket for the last time, bowed to the mist and the Fairy King that sat forever within it and began his journey back down the mountainside.

Not a mile away, on a lane that led to the sea, a hundred people stood silently by the church of St Patrick. For two hours they had waited in the rain for the priest but what else were they to do? He arrived, without apology, just as the storm was directly overhead, so close there was no counting between the lightning and the claps of thunder. They thought it an omen.

The village was famous for a well that had been visited by St Patrick when he had stopped and refreshed himself, one of the many wells he made holy on his long walk through Ireland. The young priest led the villagers in a wide circle around it, stopping every few yards or so to recant each of the Stations of the Cross. They bowed their heads and bent their knees and walked on, reciting out loud the ten decades of their rosary, along with the five sorrows of Christ's death.

The cold numbed their fingers so that they barely felt the beads and the wind chilled their lips so the sacred words tumbled incoherently from their mouths. Their feet bled. They were barefoot and the stones cut, them but the more it hurt, the more their blood mixed with the rain, the more certain they were that God was witness to their penance and would hear their pleas and cover their fields in some holy cloak.

Then the priest stopped and they followed him into the church to receive the holy Host. Cold and desolate, they watched as he put on the robes of Benediction and lit a single candle. Then, kneeling before the bare wooden table of an altar, he prayed for them and for himself, for he too had potatoes. None could see his anxious face and the rain drummed so loudly on the roof that few could hear his words. The icons of painted wood and plaster, the pious celebrities of prayer, heard nothing. Even Christ, limp in the lap of Mary, now seemed truly dead and she uncaring.

The priest ended his pleading, quickly de-robed and walked back down the aisle past his flock, careful not to look at any one of them. They followed, hurriedly pushing their way out, afraid to be there without him. As they crossed the churchyard, lightning lit up the gravestones and in one bright, single flash, the Celtic crosses and the names of the dead were suddenly magnified and leapt out at them. The women screamed and pulled their aprons over their heads. The men walked on, knowing it was just another of the Devil's tricks.

Tom Keegan had almost reached the bottom of the mountain slope when his son and Kate saw him. His clothes were sodden and heavy with mud, his face white with cold and splattered with dirt. The rain lashed unseeing, unblinking eyes, for he was now completely blind. Keegan ran to him, lifted him over his shoulders and carried him to the cottage, shouting.

‘Father, you fool. You stupid old fool. You will die. What are you doing on the mountain on a night like this? For God's sake, get inside and stay inside and get warm. Kate is with me to get your praties out.'

But the old man seemed not to hear and when he spoke he was talking only to himself. ‘I can hear water,' he said.

‘Of course you can, father, we all can and a lot of it is inside you, I shouldn't reckon. Great God! I've never seen a storm like this in all my life.'

But the old man could now see things that men with eyes could not.

‘There's water coming,' he whispered. ‘The river's rising, it's coming and flooding and it'll drown my praties. I have to get down to them.'

He struggled to free himself from his son's grip but Keegan held him tight and, once inside, they undressed and dried him, wrapped him in a blanket and sat him as close to the fire as they dared. Then he was silent.

The garden was now under water so that only the heaped potato mounds showed where they should dig.

‘Throw them up to the ledge, Kate!' Keegan shouted to her. ‘There on the rock. They'll be safe until morning.'

The water was like ice and Kate's hands and feet throbbed with the pain. The spade slipped from her fingers and she splashed around, searching for it beneath the muddied water. Soon she was crying with the cold.

They moved to the second row, Kate at one end, Keegan the other, where water was now gushing in like a frantic stream that had lost its course. Kate dug deeper but her spade felt nothing. She dug again but pulled up only mud.

‘There's nothing here,' she shouted, but already Keegan was on his knees, pushing his hands deep into the mire, his powerful arms breaking the mounds apart, as frenzied as the storm around him. Then he stopped and straightened his back and held out his cupped hands to her. She waded towards him but she knew even before she saw it. She knew the smell. A mass of pulp, brown and glue-like, oozed from between his fingers. They had come too late. The potatoes were lost.

Kate fell on her knees beside him, exhausted, and rested her head on his shoulders. There was no pain now. No throbbing. She was sitting in mud and water but she could not feel them. It was as if her body had been pulled apart and the stinking, corrupting, fetid odour belonged elsewhere. Then, as the sky was bright with lightning, she saw the old man.

He was behind them, white and naked in the rain, standing as straight as a ramrod in the wretched swamp that had been his life's garden. The smell had brought him out, the stench of miserable defeat. He was looking at the sky and talking, asking questions she could not hear above the storm, talking to the sky or something above it. He held up his arms, beckoning as if he was calling someone to him, the way a gentle shepherd does to a lamb. Then he dropped his arms to his side and walked slowly back to the open door. As his son ran after him, Kate sank back into the mud and was sick.

The old man lay on his mattress of straw, dirtying the sheets he had always been so careful to keep white and pressed. He held his ankles tightly together and his arms were crossed over his chest. His son pulled the blanket over him and knelt by him, knowing what he was about to do and knowing he could do nothing to stop him. He sat that way, watching his father's face for nearly an hour, not moving his gaze even when Kate came and sat behind him.

The old man stirred, opened his eyes to the son he could not see and whispered for him to come closer.

‘I cannot do more, my boy. All these long years I have fought and fought and finally I have lost. I think I've known that for a long time, but no matter now. We might have had better days together, you and me, a better life, but it was not to be. I had always believed that when things come to their worst they must mend but now I know that to be false. I will not struggle more. I cannot. It is time to leave.'

‘Yes, father, I understand. May God bless you.'

‘And you too, son of mine. And speed you to a better fortune, for it must be out here somewhere for someone. I'm away at last to meet my Mary. She has waited so long. Bless you, son, and bless you again and remember only what was good in me.'

He closed his eyes and lay still. Keegan whispered his prayers and crossed the old man's forehead.

Then he bent over and kissed his dead father's lips.