The Law of Dreams (3 page)

He could barely hear the taunts. They seemed as distant as the crying of
hawks on afternoons when he lay upon his back in the rough of some mountain pasture and
listened to their hunting remarks, watching them floating on cushions of pure heat.

Phoebe Carmichael, neat and clean.

He let out a sigh, and his cousin must have realized the hopelessness of
the situation, because he released the hostage arm and stood up quickly, kicking Fergus
hard on the hip then stumbling away up the mountain with his companions.

Three barefoot boys howling a rebel song.

You could eat pain and come out alive. It was a silent meal. You could eat
pain, even find a relish. You ate unhurried. You made certain to taste every bite. You
could eat pain; it wouldn't kill you.

LATE SUMMER BEFORE
the new potatoes were lifted was
mi an ocrais
, hungry month, when his father returned home to work on
Carmichael's harvest.

The only season of the year his parents were reunited. His mother was
redeyed and weary in those few blazing weeks, before her man left once more. Together
they drank
poitin
, which she would not touch the rest of the year. Everyone on
the mountain was famished then — teeth glaring, eyes bright in sunburned
faces.

His mother and father had gone off together just before Carmichael's
harvest began, leaving Fergus to feed his little sisters on Indian meal porridge. When
they returned, three days later, he knew from their sun-flayed appearance, from the
grass in their hair and the scratches on his father's face, that they had been
roaming, engaging, sleeping on grass, drinking
poitin
, living on butter and
birds' eggs.

His mother caught him looking at her and must have sensed his anger and
confusion. “Life burns hot, Fergus. Too hot.”

He resented such willfulness, their capacity to abandon every
responsibility, including their children.

“You think I'm a robber,” his father, Mícheál,
told him.

They had been standing in Carmichael's best field of wheat,
the
rosy field
, whetting their blades. People on the mountain had names for each
corner of Carmichael's farm. Their language knew that land like a bee knows a
flower.

Fergus's mother insisted that the rosy field had
been red once in flowers.

Mícheál said, “In blood.”

The rosy field
.
The black field
.
The field of the
altar
. Carmichaels did not use the names, perhaps were unaware they
existed.

Mícheál could whet a blade like no one else could. Whet to pure
sharpness, to an edge like a spoken word, barely there. And he cut and mowed faster and
cleaner than anyone else could on the farm.

“You are a grim fellow. You look at me like I've stolen
something,” Mícheál said, testing the hone by scaling his thumbnail and
peeling back the thinnest film of tissue.

They owned nothing, certainly not the harvest tools. The iron blades and
wooden handles belonged to the farmer, to Carmichael.

Little girls scampered like mice over the wheat stubble, gathering stalks
in armfuls and setting them down in stand-up sheaves. Women forked the standups into an
oxcart driven by Phoebe's brother Saul.

Mícheál was still the strongest hand for harvest, but Fergus
would surpass him eventually. Not this year. Next year, perhaps. Insects cackled as they
worked through the crop, feeling the sun's stare on the back of their necks.
Friction of grain dust made red the creases inside their elbows.

When Farmer Carmichael came out to see how the cut progressed, he spoke to
Mícheál in English, and Fergus felt the grit of that language washing over
him, scraping and stimulating; the language that poured out of Phoebe's mouth.
Wanting to feel closer to her, he kept fitting his thoughts in English as he worked up
and down the rows alongside Mícheál and the others, swinging and cutting,
swinging and cutting, though English words — or none he knew — didn't
suit such work. Not really.

After the harvest was made, Mícheál would leave them again.
Going for the north, traveling with a gang of barn builders, wall builders, going up
into Ulster, sometimes so far as Scotland, and not returning before the next August,
when he'd show up at harvest once more. Mícheál rarely spoke of his life
on the roads, but Fergus had imagined it anyway: new barns and fresh walls. Stone towns
and salmon rivers. Fat fields of horses grazing.

In another week or two Mícheál would be leaving.

“You're no good,” Fergus said when they stopped at the
end of another row and were sharpening again. “You're never here. I
can't call you my father. You're no good for us.”

Mícheál shook his head. “You're such a farmer.
You're too stuck to that ground of yours.”

“Someone has to be.”

HIS GROUND
.

Carmichael dispensed potato ground in patches, annual arrangements, and no
one ever had the same patch twice; but Fergus always felt his ground was his. Once he
had his crop in, the patch belonged to him, and he'd kill or die for it.

He could raise enough potatoes on a quarter acre of well-dug beds to keep
his mother and sisters through the year — nearly. In those last, blazing weeks of
late summer, just before the new crop was lifted, they had to survive on yellow meal
— but his potatoes yielded at least ten months of perfect nourishment. The only
tool needed to cultivate them was a spade to open the lazy-beds and turn and chop the
soil a little. No plow, no horse. To his regret he could not keep a horse on mountain
grass. A horse would not stand it, and any plow would burst between the rocks.

Each spring he spaded his beds and laid the sets. Summer they came up in
green stems and beautiful, viney flowers. The pig was kept on potato scraps and sold to
pay the annual rent — they never tasted the meat. He himself consumed five pounds
of potatoes every day, steamed, boiled, or mashed. Over the winter, his mother might
make a
kitchen
, using salt and a few herrings, but usually it was potatoes
plain, and he never tired of that food.

Potatoes were not
made
or
cut
, like the farmer's
hay or corn; they were
lifted
, joyfully, the surprise of the world.

THE LAST NIGHT OF CARMICHAEL'S
harvest they burned off the straw and the farmer fed his cabin people a supper — ham and butter, wheat bread and apples — on the side of his best meadow, under oaks, wind ringing through their branches. It was dark before the tenants started back up the mountain. Fergus walked ahead of his parents, who were carrying the little girls, asleep. The night was warm.

They had passed the first cluster of cabins when he first caught the stink of putrefaction, physical and wild, rolling down the mountain path with all the violence of a loose cartwheel or a drunk with a club. “What is that terrible stink, my God?” his mother cried. “They've been tearing the graves!”

Unbaptized infants were buried under stones so dogs could not get at them. The piles of stones were sometimes shifted from one grave to another too early, and the dead left unprotected — but this wasn't that smell. It was too large.

Men and women galloped past him on the path, snorting like ponies, but Fergus made himself keep to a steady pace.

There had been blight in the district the year before, but restricted to lands along the river. They had not suffered blight on the mountain. And his plot, this year, was good sharp limestone ground, well drained, the safest. Farmer Carmichael did not like his cabin people planting any plot of ground more than one season, fearing they would grow too attached to it and forget that it was his land, not their own.

Through the darkness, Fergus could see people reaching their plots, falling on their knees, and scrabbling at the soil with their fingertips. Unable to restrain himself any longer, he broke into a run with Mícheál galloping after him, carrying in his arms one of the little girls, howling with delight.

Reaching his plot, Fergus immediately saw that his plants, healthy and green that morning, were withered and black. Falling on his knees, he pulled one up, then another and another. The potatoes clinging to the roots were shriveled and wet. He dug up every plant in the row and the potatoes were nothing, purple balls of poison, and he heard neighbors' screams floating in the dark.

TEN WEEKS LATER
his people were the only ones left upon the mountain.

All the other cabin tenants had accepted the quit fee Farmer Carmichael offered and had gone to the workhouse to submit themselves. Or had gone on the roads, begging. Or were trying the public works: breaking rocks at sixpence a day, living under hedges and in scalps and burrows dug in along the edges of public roads. Narrow and grassy, those road verges —
Ireland's long meadow
— were the only lands in the country, apparently, that didn't quite belong to one farmer or another.

Anyway, the neighbors and relations had disappeared. Weakened by hunger and black fever, they'd been easily removed, like shavings swept off a table.

The abandoned cabins were being torched. The farmer and his two sons — black Abner and sandy Saul — were lighting the roofs of straw and turf using oily, smelly torches. Then they knocked down the walls one by one, swinging a thick timber ram with an iron head. The cabins were reduced to rubble left in ungainly humps. Some of it the Carmichael boys picked over, chipped, cleaned, and left aside to be built into the farm's future — fresh walls, footings, new chimneys.

Fergus watched Phoebe's brothers knock down a dozen cabins. Sometimes he worked with them in exchange for food. A wheat roll with butter slapped on. Piece of cold mutton. Cheese. An apple.

They called it
tumbling
.

* * *

ONLY HIS
father, Mícheál, who had been traveling all his life, refused to quit the mountain. Farmer Carmichael rode up to the cabin and offered more money and still he refused.

Fergus sat on a stool outside the cabin watching the farmer aboard his red mare confront Mícheál, leaning on a stick.

“Do you know, Mick, you are trying me very hard, indeed you are. Don't think I don't con what you are trying by starving yourselves. You hope to exploit a Christian conscience by having your own family suffer needlessly.”

“I only know what the roads are like, master.”

“You can't stay here.”

“We can't leave, master. You know yourself what will become of us if we quit.”

Mícheál said the word
master
like it was something you'd throw out with dirty water. Carmichael sat up straighter and Fergus noticed the old-fashioned bell gun, with its flared brass barrel, strapped awkwardly to his saddle.

There had been outrages on the other estates in the district. Landlords' agents had been attacked and beaten by whiteboy gangs.

All Carmichaels believed the land belonged to them. Fergus remembered Phoebe long ago, when they were eight or nine — playmates — insisting that her father held the farm after her grandfather who held it after his father who held it after his, who had defended it against the warrior tribes with painted faces, wild cattle, wicked paganry.

Not the story he knew, but it was a story.

“And what exactly is the wicked paganry, Pheeb?”

“Oh they muck about,” nine-year-old Phoebe had airily replied.

“Muck about how?”

Both of them fascinated by crime, cruelty, disaster, mishaps, freaks of nature, curses, evil eyes, poison cooks, and all aspects of evil and degeneracy.

“Terrible devices. Cut your mizzle off and pickle it. Make a soup of your ears. The priests sang like sheep. They'd roast a book in the fire, use the ashes for salt. Steal babies. There are still pagans alive in the hills.”

“Are there?”

“Oh yes.”

“Never have I seen them.”

“You must know how to look. Rebels and swingboys, whiteboys.
Goffers
” — her word for people they didn't know, though they knew almost everyone. “Boys with bloody hands.”

Mizzle
had been their word for prick in those days, when they were small; his had been the frequent object of curiosity. And language too, in those days, had been most thrilling — exercising, strenuous; a net you threw to capture what you didn't know.

Tenants spoke English in Carmichael's neat fields along the river and anywhere there ran a good road. The same men and women would speak Irish on the mountain, on the rough, or when handling cattle.

“You've no right to stay.” Carmichael sat neatly on the mare — back straight, heels forward — his face a brown map of impatience. “Don't put me in a position, Mick. I've been more than fair.”

Mícheál leaned deeper on his stick. “Here we are, and here we'll stay.”

“There are the dragoons, you know, at Portumna — I suppose I could have you taken up and sentenced for trespass. How should your wife and children manage then? Don't make me come up here again, I warn you, Mick. Two pounds — that is the last offer you'll have, and it makes my hair turn to pay you so much.”

Mícheál gave a slight shake of his head. Carmichael grunted impatiently and wheeled his mare. Fergus watched as horse and rider began deftly picking their way down the mountain.

Mícheál said, “What do you say, Fergus? Is your father in the right?”

“There'll be nothing left to eat soon.”

“It's the same everywhere, though. Your mother and the girls wouldn't survive the roads.”

“So you want us to stay. What for?”

“I can't give in to that fellow,” Mícheál said. “I just can't. Perhaps I ought to but I cannot. It isn't in me, somehow. After I'm dead, you must do what you must.”