Blackstrap Hawco (60 page)

The two boys, curious of her actions, stared toward the night sky yet saw no obvious attraction. Turning her head, Rose then knelt and, pressing her palms to the stone, set her ear flush to the door. She shut her eyes and listened intently for near to an hour. The boys, growing weary, thought to sit, yet remained on their feet, not wanting to slacken the grip of the proceedings. Just when they were growing sleepy, they heard their mother whisper, answering in words previously unknown, words that were tested on the tongues of the boys as they recited what had been heard. Rose nodded once. Then opened her eyes, leaned back and raised her fist to the door to knock soundly, three times.

The dull clatter of knuckle bones against stone.

Done with her undertaking, she gathered the skinned rabbit and broke the rosary beads, sprinkling some from the twine onto the earth surrounding the grave. She then took the remaining beads and, on her way back down the valley, with the boys trailing after her toward the darkness of her tilt, placed each bead in her mouth, one by one, and swallowed. Three beads were left to cook with the rabbit, which Rose ate late that night with the twin boys.

The next day, after a sound sleep, where not one person stirred in the tilt, making not one movement nor one sound, Rose gave the boys instruction: ‘Go ta da woods.'

Doing as they were told, they found the spot where they had first sighted the girl. There, they waited in hope. The scene was not so thrilling as the first sighting, for the sun's rays were not illuminating the space and so there was no such heavenly aura about the forest nor in their hearts. Regardless, in time, in the dimness of a clouded afternoon, a girl appeared. Although the figure seemed of the same size and shape, its hair was black rather than blonde.

The figure was in the exact position as before and turned without a word of beckoning from the twins. As she made her way to face them, there came a caw from overhead and the twins looked up to see four crows perched in the upper branches of a spruce tree.

The girl came toward them.

‘
Tháinig beaguchtach
,' she said, in a tongue the boys barely recognized. They knew only that she was speaking in Irish, a language that the children thought hopeless, for it was an old and difficult language, and that she had said something having to do with loss.

The girl walked up to Francis and stood by his side. ‘You have spoken of me,' she said in English.

‘No,' said Francis, denying involvement from the very start.

The black-haired girl followed them home, where Rose stood in the doorway to the tilt, and studied the child as she neared. She then took her by the shoulders and investigated the features of her face.

‘Were da sun shinin'?'

‘No,' said Ace, hoping that something might have gone wrong, for, again, he felt only second-best in this venture.

‘Wha's yer name chil'?' asked Rose.

‘Caitriona.'

‘Ah, 'n who tol' ye so?'

‘
Na daoine maithe
.'

Rose put a palm to the girl's cheek where it remained for a count of minutes. She then turned to step back into the tilt where she set her hand over the flame of the open fire and turned her palm to see the outline left in smoke. As expected, it was of a different face from the one stood in the doorway, yet of not so great a difference as to banish the child from their midst.

The mutely glistening void of ebony

On the night of what many assumed to be Catherine's return, a gale blew, battering the walls of the Cavanagh tilt and rousing Patrick from his blank sleep.

The pounding of the wind shook the walls and the rain slathered the windowpane, blurring everything beyond when Patrick sat up and blankly stared toward the glass. The hammering on the walls became more distinct and rhythmic until he assumed it might be a person rather than the wind knocking on wood. The voice he heard was indistinct yet sounded as though it might be calling his name. He shifted off his bunk and grabbed his sticks, leaning and leveraging himself up and toward the door, not wanting the noise to disrupt the sleep of Rose and the children.

Patrick set one hand to the wall for support and, with great care, pushed opened the door, clutching the edge just as the wind thrust hold of it, yanking him out. In a brisk moment, both the door and his body were caught by Ferrol who quickly reinstated Patrick to his previous position. Uprighted, Patrick squinted at the two faces drenched with rain. One smaller, the other bigger. Cian Shea and Ferrol in borrowed oil slickers. The world behind them petulant and storm black.

‘There were a wreck,' said Cian, his head tilted in a manner of shielding, and his voice struggling to outdo the wind. ‘Down off da cove.' He pointed toward the void that pressed behind him and stretched for an eternity to the point of relentless indistinction.

‘T'were a Portugee vessel,' said Ferrol, raising his eyebrows in glee. ‘Get on yer slicker, Paddy. Facking ha.' He clapped his wet hands together and squeezed until his muscles bulged through the slicker sleeves. ‘Dere's port aboard.'

 

The sea was a blackened throb

made dark and malevolent

by nature's ire.

If not for the whitecaps,

those sizzling crests of black

beaten white by the punishing wind,

that signalled division between sky and water,

the entire scene would have amounted to

nothing more than a swelling,

mutely glistening void of ebony

in which all was held

with lamentable indifference.

 

Within that black gale, three men managed their descent over the cliff by holding a thick length of rope and giving careful attention to their footing on the sheening lips and crevices of each craggy rock. It was not a night for missteps as everything was sopping and slippery as though sealed in a viscous coating of primordial slime.

Patrick was first down on the shore, his hollow boots crunching into the beach rocks as his sticks dug in for steadiness, his socks wetly thick against the nubs of his legs, the phantom itch worsening by the moment. He glanced up at the two others, Cian and Ferrol, the former gradually descending the incline like a nanny goat, Cian's boots slipping and scrambling, certain to fall on Ferrol at any moment, who trod down the cliff facing as though across a field. It was a precarious situation unto itself.

Patrick turned to face the far-off thunder of waves striking cliffs. In the cup of the cove, there was greater protection from the wind, the waves not so treacherous where Patrick approached the punts, overturned on the beach, not caring which he might take a lend of for the excursion. Beyond the punts, the sea was a-swell, rising and tossing as though in fitful battle with itself.

 

Battered by all forms of nature's distress,

lashed by sheets of rain

and muscle-shoved by the wind

 

Patrick flung down one stick and went about uprighting a punt. Crouched as he was, he was quickly blown over.

‘Nar lazing about,' said Ferrol, yanking Patrick to his stubs. ‘Dere's port ta be salvaged.' He stared out as the sea rose before them, seemingly higher than the earth itself yet remaining strangely in place.

‘Fack,' said Ferrol, laughing in fellowship with the storm.

Patrick, squinting water from his brow and dragging the boat toward the water's edge, was soon aided by Cian and Ferrol. In the gale, she was barely launchable, for the swell of the sea hurled the punt back at every attempt, and near smothered the three men with five-foot-high surge.

In ignorance of the sea's true power, and the tumultuous bashing of the boat against all parts of their bodies, chests, legs, arms, groins, the
three men battled on, finally managing to get the craft fully afloat, the punt smoothly, unevenly rising high above them while they hung on with their bent fingers, until, again, the punt was flung back onto shore, the wooden weight of her nearly snapping Patrick's right leg at the knee, as he had been sucked beneath her in his efforts. The panging was nothing new to him yet was none the more agreeable due to its familiarity.

‘Get aboard 'er,' Ferrol shouted above the fizzling noise. ‘Up. Jaysus, yer as lazy as a cut mongrel.' Again, Ferrol pulled Patrick to his feet and left him supported by Cian while Ferrol turned and made a roar at the punt, leaning into her with both arms and shoving her – against the thrust of the sea – back into the rising waves.

‘Now,' shouted Ferrol, waving his arm to the others. Patrick hobbled ahead with an arm over Cian's shoulder, and Ferrol, seemingly having had enough of Patrick's lameness, snatched up his friend and tossed him into the rocking punt.

With the strict attention of the two lads now at work, they fully relaunched her, Ferrol and Cian wrestling with her, holding at either side while Patrick took up the oars and moved them around to no avail. One oar came up out of the water as she took a swell port side, Ferrol going fully underwater, laughing and shaking his bald head when the water dropped. Young Cian shouted something, but no words worked in the ramming crossfire of such weather's ferocity. He pointed back toward the cliff they had descended, perhaps wanting to return or warning them of the approach of others who might have in their minds a similar adventure, for there were glistening shadows spilling over the cliff and creeping toward them.

Patrick searched that way, collecting images out of the blackness, yet everything was vague and shadowed and smeared, only the solidness of earth offering any hint of reassurance, all matter around it agleam with inky turbulence. There might have been movement, yet whatever it was could likely be creature or human, deformed shapes shifting in the wicked dimness to rob them of their very souls, or nothing at all, a mere trick of the eye-warping landscape. Patrick blinked the sting of the salt water away and rubbed at his eyes.

He then yelled, yet the words were even unknown to him and barely discernible in his own ears. His cry might have been a demand aimed
toward the other two, to get aboard the craft which was pulling loose from their grips, rising higher on one side and then on the other, Ferrol's greater weight about to capsize the craft which, again, was surging toward shore. The men floated and clung to the edge, at once in shallower water and then in deeper, their boots over underwater rock while their bodies strained to keep her from being heaved ashore.

Cian and Ferrol leaned ahead to gain control, stopping the punt's advance toward land, shoving her out until they were waist-high in water, then almost chest-high, waist-high, head-high, and spitting and wiping and blinking the sting of salt away. They clung until the sea came fully alive beneath her, then, in unison, the two pulled themselves free from the suck of the sea, up over the edge of the punt, the weight of each man distributed to either side, perhaps preventing the capsizing of the craft, yet allowing sloshes of water to pool in the hull.

Patrick rowed with vigour, pointlessly thrusting against the tide that demanded his return to land. His face strained with the effort while he was pelted with rain which he tucked his head against. Despite his constant labouring, the craft was heading nowhere except where the sea inclined.

He slaved to row in the direction Ferrol pointed. The scratchy waver of Ferrol's rough voice calling out, until he took hold of the oars and relieved Patrick of his station. At that point, with oars in hand and hunched in effort, a change came over Ferrol. Propelling the oars into the black water, his face strained to the point of wicked transformation, the tendons in his neck becoming pronounced, his teeth bared in fits of exertion, his eyes settling deeper into his skull, his muscles expanding beneath his open slicker and soaken shirt so that they tested the fabric. Rowing and growling, Ferrol laughed with the resonance of the deepening wind itself.

Cian – clamped about the bowels by a generous degree of fright – was seated beside Ferrol, wondering of his place in the venture. With his bare hands clasped tightly to the board beneath him, riding the vessel, he watched in one direction or the other as the sea swelled around the dory, the massiveness of it rising in disconnected peaked and rounded divisions, blackly bent and throbbing as though to its own intention, each patch churning out of rhythm with the other so that the sea would both rise and sink on all sides at once.

Words were called out to one another yet no one could make clarity of the utterances. There was only the flat pitch of a voice and Ferrol's rumbling laughter that broke like a nature sound in the sky.

Ferrol laboured harder, rowing, grinning enthusiastically, as though he were born for that likely sort of voyage, while Cian wore a worried expression and continued clutching the board, swiping the stinging spray of salt from his face, and checking back toward what might have once been land yet was now nothing actual. Blue lipped, he tucked his hands under his arms for warmth, but quickly put them back to the boards as he was violently tilted portside.

Patrick Hawco had learned from Ferrol that the Portugee ship had struck rock in the shallow of Critch Gut, yet when the punt was out so far, bobbing and thrusting from one end to the other, land became governed by illusion and direction was entirely vanquished.

Insofar as there was only one fitting action in the craft, Patrick and Cian keenly, hopefully watched Ferrol rowing, heaving his need into the effort while his swamped face grinned in the light of the whitecaps. Ferrol turned his head toward what might have been east and shouted in that direction. Nothing heard, as though the power of Patrick's ears had been stolen away. When Patrick searched that way, he saw the glisten in the air. No doubt wood of a ship's hull. The dark lines of slats that appeared vertical yet might have been at various horizontal angles depending upon their own position.

A roar in the sky that must have been Ferrol's cheer.