Paradise Alley (8 page)

“You must. Help him. Get away.”

She turned her head slowly to look where her mother was pointing, thinking she must surely be mad now. But she was pointing to her brother Brian, the favorite. The boy sitting on the floor, staring dully ahead as he always did, but with something dribbling down his chin and chest.

Something he had
eaten—
eaten, when there was nothing to eat,
nothing to eat in the world. And coughed it right back up, too. At least two turnips, and a potato as well, judging by the remnants on his shirt, and in a small pool in his lap. In his hand, Ruth saw, lay the old red handkerchief of her mother's. Covered in dirt now, from where she had wrapped the hidden turnips and the lumper in it, and buried them all away under the hearthstone. Until something had broken, something had ruptured in her and she had felt herself giving out, and realized there was nothing more she could do. That was when she had dug up the stone, dug out the last, few bits of food in the world—and handed them all over to Brian.

Ma made no secret of it now. Looking over at her, propped up on one elbow, Ruth could see her still gesturing—her face shining and victorious, even in her death agony.

“Help him. He must get out—” she was still whispering.

Ruth looked back at her brother where he stared, straight ahead through bleary, lifeless eyes. Her sacrifice too late, the food useless to him now. Still her mother gestured with her broken, bloodied finger for Ruth to do something, to help him, Brian.

Instead she crawled over to the others, huddled together under their blankets. Agnes and Liam with their eyes closed, dead or sleeping she wasn't sure. The rest staring glassily up into the thatch, their chests barely moving, if they were really still moving at all. She bent down close to see—

The old woman glared up from the hearthstones.

“Save him!”

Brian sitting, staring straight ahead, feet out before him. Bits of potato dribbled down his chest.

Don't die here.

“Get him out!” Her mother's dying words.

Don't die here, in this place.

Ruth heard the words in her own head supplanting them, and she began to crawl. Mad and shamed despite herself, despite the fact that it didn't matter, they were all going to die. She would not die there, with them.

She came out of the
scalpeen,
and the cool air outside braced her for the moment. She felt light-headed, but strong enough to struggle to her feet and walk. She knew she would not get far, but at least it was
better to get out, and die like this, out in the raw, cool wind along the Burren than inside with them.

Her family—

I thought to go, so I went. I started to crawl, an' I did not stop until I was out of the
scalpeen.
I thought just to go an' curl up in the lazy beds. But then I was out, an' I felt the air, and I said, All right, just keep goin' as far as you can.

She kept going, lurching on out, away from the remnants of their cabin, out past the bare white rock and the bright riot of flowers.

•
10
•

She walked out of the
scalp,
expecting to fall down at any moment. She walked on out across the Burren, past the lazy beds, and out of the last sight of their tumbled cabin. Walking just to see how far she could get, thinking,
Well, better to die out in the field, at least. Better to die out under the sky.

She found herself at a road and she walked along it, though she did not remember where it was, or what way she was going. After many hours, though, she came to another cabin, one much like their own, and she went up to knock on the door. Not knowing what she could even ask for; after all, nobody in the whole county had any more to eat than what they did.

But when she went to knock on the door, she found it pushed open. What little there was inside turned upside down. The cabin plainly deserted, its people no doubt out on the road already.

The way we should've gone. Before it got too late.

She picked through the meager, leftover belongings of the deserted family—not surprised, in her near delirium, to find herself among someone else's things, someone else's home. She found a used shift she picked up—thin as an onionskin, but a shift nonetheless—then a shirt, and a pair of pants. They were too big for her, but she was able to roll them up and put them on.

She kept searching through the cabin after that, looking for food.
She could not find any, but she felt warmer in the found clothes, and the cabin itself, and after a time she lay down and fell asleep on the floor.

The next morning she woke up and walked back out on the road again, because she could not think of anything else to do. After a while she came to other cabins, and in nearly every one of them, she found
something
she could use. Most often scraps of clothes, or a few old things she might trade for food. Sometimes, if she looked hard enough, she could even find food itself—a few last bits of potato or turnip the departed had squirreled away under the thatch or the flagstones, forgetting even such scraps in their desperation to be away, off the starving land.

She had to be careful. Sometimes she came upon a cabin with bodies in it, already black and bloated from the famine dropsy, or the scurvy. It took her some time before she could steady her nerves enough to go in and search such cabins, trying to touch as little as possible, lest she come down with the
tamh
herself.

And sometimes there were still people living inside, or in the tumbled-down
scalpeens.
Skittish and wild, and fierce as wolves. Hovering under the thatch, liable to come at her with a knife or a stick if she surprised them. And sometimes she came across cabins that had already been picked clean, with bodies inside that didn't look as if they had died at all from the
tamh,
or the hunger.

She kept walking. She walked the whole length of the Burren, from Ballyvaughan to Kilshanny, from Lisdoonvarna to St. Mary's of the Fertile Rock. Through the little towns with their blue-slate squares, the markets empty and shut up against the country people. The empty pastures, and the fields lying fallow, and untended—

The town moved slowly through the field. All of them, men and women and children, bent over at the waist. Searching for any last turnip roots, the only sound the quiet sway of their clothing and the shuffle of their feet along the ground. She watched them, thinking about the town walking out by moonlight to dance at the crossroads, the ribbons tied in her mother's hair.

Her mother, walking along the road. The silent sower, holding her skirts out—

The roads were full of people now, walking out of the West.
Headed down to Cork, and east to Dublin, anywhere there might be food. The men and women moving slowly, steadily, as fast as the hunger would allow. Shawls thrown up over their heads, the loose, slouching plug hats pulled down over their heads. Unfired pipes shoved between their teeth in the rain, hands in their pockets. Walking out of the West—

In Limerick she saw the cartload of orphans, left in front of the poorhouse door. The house full, the door shut against them. People hurried past on the street, looking away. The orphans sitting up in their shirts, large-eyed and bald, like baby birds in their nest, too bewildered even to cry.

And near Tipperary she met a band of men carrying a black flag with the words “Flag of Distress” written on it. They looked as fierce and wild as wolves, armed with makeshift pikes and hoes, as if they were ready for anything. They asked if she wanted to join them, taking her for a boy. But then a man came down from the local works and gave them some bread and they melted away, as meek as lambs and glad to get it.

They huddled just inside the cave, waiting out the rain that fell in steady sheets. All of them, men and women alike, covered with makeshift shawls of one sort or another—blankets, tablecloths, skirts. Anything to cover them. Faces flushed with fever, talking together quietly as they waited, repeating the same hopes and rumors of the road.

“I heared there was flint corn at St. Brendan's Well.”

“Ah, no, we just come from there,” a grey-haired, stoop-shouldered man answered apologetically.

“Wait till the Liberator gets back from London, he'll see to us—”

“Did you hear what he told the Commons?”

The stoop-shouldered man recited as if it were a lesson he had learned by rote in the hedge schools.

“ ‘Ireland is in your hands, in your power. If you do not save her—' ”

“God bless him, Swaggerin' Dan!”

“ ‘I solemnly call on you to recollect—' ”

“Aye. They needs to recollect us soon.”

“Takin' boats full a corn out of the country ever day, while they leave us Peel's brimstone—”

“ ‘—a quarter of her population—' ”

She leaned against the rock of the cave's mouth, listening dully to the others speak of the Liberator, Daniel O'Connell. Trying to look as inconspicuous as possible. Trying to look like a half-starved boy, in her scavenged pants and shirt, she figured that was safest on the road.

Not that she had seen one man in ten left with the strength or the inclination to interfere with her. Not that there was anything left to fear from these, jammed together in their cave. For all the angry words, they remained calm and placid, ready to accept whatever their fate might be. “It is the will of God,” she had heard them say, then curl up and die on the spot.

The worst way to die ever discovered.
Ruth feeling the same, feeling as if, in the end, life would just flow out of her like water draining out of the limestone after a storm.

And why, oh why, should anyone extend it so long?

“Look in here!”

Behind them, they hadn't quite noticed it, the opening into the rock stretched far back into the hillside. The walls straight and even, obviously the entrance to a dolmen—perhaps the tomb of some important, ancient king, like ones the farmers still found after a heavy rain.

“Back there?”

They peered down into the black passageway of the tomb.

“Are ye daft?”

“Why not? It's a king's barrow. Why else would they dig it so deep?”

“We were all kings in this land once, you know—”

“No sayin' what there might be.”

“Sure, but it's a fool's errand. How would we even find our way?”

“I have matches!”

A mad-looking young woman, blue eyes spinning like cartwheels, held up a little wooden box. They simply stared at her, too polite or exhausted to ask why she hadn't traded something so valuable as a box of self-starting matches for a potato, or a lump of bread.

“Do you really got some in there? Do they work?”

“Sure!”

The mad young woman took one out, scraped it along the cave floor, and held the light up, grinning. Once-lustrous red hair matted
down in loose clumps under her shawl, her stomach swollen—with hunger or a child, Ruth couldn't tell.

“Who knows? Who knows what gold they buried with their kings?”

“Our kings.”

“All right, then. Anyt'ing we find, we split it all ways even.”

“Agreed!”

She looked around at the twenty or so half-starved men and women and thought that if they found a gold crown and scepter, the first
gombeen
man they met could have it from them for a bucket of soup.

Dividing the spoils of their wishes—but that was all they had, after all.

She followed them down into the tomb, walking in a crouch under the vast stone slabs that stretched into the hill. The madwoman casually lighting one match from another. The air getting closer, damper, the sound of rushing water somewhere ahead in the darkness—

“Jesus God, what was that?”

An old man's voice pricked with hope as he stumbled over something in the pitch-black darkness, imagining it to be a king in his armor. Another match flared up, hovering over the ground.

“Jay-sus!”

They hovered around the rotting corpse, the cheeks collapsed, bones poking out through gnawed fingers that still grasped a blanket clutched up to the chin. No ancient, shriven king—just a woman dead some few days. They sidled slowly past her, moving still farther into the tomb. Tripping and bumping now into more bodies, some still breathing, laid down to die where they were along the cool, dark sides of the dolmen.

“Anything here's been plucked long ago—”

“Ya can't know,” the stoop-shouldered man insisted mildly. “I heared there was a child found a gold collar, not two leagues from here—”

The match blew out, and they stopped where they were in the darkness, waiting while the mad girl fiddled around for another one. She was getting low now, they could hear her fingers scraping along the bottom of the wood box. They had moved past the bodies, too far
down the winding passage for anyone more to drag themselves even for the privilege of dying alone. But still they were reluctant to go back without seeing the end of it.

The girl lit up another match, grinning triumphantly, and they shuffled slowly onward. The water sounded louder here, the air was a little clearer, and it gave them hope. There was a sudden curve in the passageway, one so well disguised they almost walked straight into the rock—and then they rounded the bend and came face-to-face with an immense skeleton, seated on a rock.

“Jay-sus, here it is!”

“Oh, we'll eat now!”

“Pig every night!”

The very sound of such words sent a pang through their shriveled stomachs, and Ruth considered again that they were mad. Undeniably, though, there was a skeleton. A formidable one at that, seated on its rock throne as serenely as if it had been expecting them. The bones indeed ancient, stripped of all flesh and colored a waxy yellow-brown—

“It must be Brian his own self. Eight feet tall, if he's a hand!”

“It's a king for certain. Who else could it be?”

But there was nothing else to the kingly skeleton—no royal raiments, or armor, or clothes at all. No gold crown or collar for them. And they understood, presently, that there was something else the matter, something altogether unnatural about the thing.

“Here, he ain't a king at all!”

“How d'ya know?
How d'ya know?
” the mad girl demanded, furious. Lighting up another match even though the first one already illuminated the small niche they were standing in, chasing away every possible shadow.

No one answered her, for they could see now the elongated jaw of the skeleton before them. The pointed teeth and long, extended claws of what was once a bear, or some other prehistoric monster, curled up to die in the tomb many ages ago. No king, no king at all—though nevertheless they stood staring at it for a few minutes more, compelled by its sheer size and mysteriousness. Before the stoop-shouldered man asked timidly:

“Well then, do ye suppose he et our king?”

• • •

The old women sat by the road, waiting for the burial cart to come out. She sat with them for want of anything better. They saw through her disguise, such as it was. Telling her she should get to a man while she still could, telling her she should get herself married, if that was what it took.