Paradise Alley (14 page)

•
16
•

That first night they had sat behind the wall of the old
bawn
near Ballykinvarga, and watched the storm move across the plain toward them. He had made a peat fire there, and roasted the cut-up parts of dog over it, flipping pieces to her now and then. Smirking, gloating across the fire at her as she ate up every bit of it—the still-sizzling, greasy meat, with its thick yellow bile and fat. She had eaten everything he gave her, even down to its liver and its heart, though she had known even then that he was testing her.

“Better than the flint corn, ain't it?”

She just kept eating, watching him, not sure of what she should say or even if she should nod.

“Flesh always is.”

She kept watching him, still silent.

“Better'n the Cork city poorhouse, too,” he went on, grinning at her with the blackened, goblin stumps of his teeth.

“No meat there. Just cabbage an' turnips, if ya got that.”

“They took you in,” she said at last, wondering at the luck of that.

They had no poorhouses in Ballyvaughan, or Kilfenora, or any of the little villages way out at the end of the Burren. The very idea, of some public place where they might feed you and shelter you. She felt again the envy she had known, looking at the doors of the orphanage
in Limerick, even though they were latched against the orphans.
Just the idea of it—

But Dolan only gave a short, sharp laugh that sounded like a bark.

“That's what they did, all right,” he said. “That's what they was about
—the takin'-in business.
They took us in one end, and shat us right out t'other.”

“But they did take you in. That was somethin'—”

“Oh, they took us in, all right. When we give ourselves up an' admitted we was starvin', they took us right in. First they took us in the boardroom an' stripped off our clothes. Then they had the medical officer look in our mouths, an' the sanitary officer douse us in cold water, an' pour lice powder all over us, an' put us in uniforms like we was common prisoners.

“They took me sisters an' me Ma to the women's yard. An' they took the brother, Patrick, to the idiot ward, an' they took me father an' me out in the back, to break stones an' walk the capstan. And in return they give us a bowl of cabbage soup and a handful of turnips every day, and the bloody flux.”

His knuckles squeezed white around the bone of dog haunch he held, his face suddenly filled with rage.

“He was no fuckin' idiot. Just because he was too chary to answer their questions! He should've been with us, he should've been with the Da an' me, it'd been a comfort for him before they carried him up there with the rest of us!”

Ruth leaning back in sudden terror, unsure of what he might do. But the fit subsided, as quickly as it had come over him. Settling into his previous merely implacable anger.

“Not that it mattered. They took us all up there anyway. Took us up to the black gable, one by one.”

“But not you.”

She knew the black gable from the talk on the road. Every poorhouse had one. It was the room they took them up to when any hope was gone. The dying room—

“Oh, no, you don't come back from the black room,” Dolan confirmed, nodding his head vigorously up and down.

Looking very young, almost boyish when he was serious, despite the boils along his scalp, the teeth missing from his head.
But he was
young, he must've been very young, little more than a boy,
she would think, whenever she thought about it in the years to come.

“They took us all up. First me sisters. Then me Da an' Ma, then the brother, who was no idiot. Took us all right up to the black gable, when the time come, an' there they laid us on a big wood slide out the window, so they could shit us right into the ground.”

“But not you,” she said again.

“Oh, yes,” he insisted. “Oh, yes. Me, too.”

Behind him, far off to the east, she could see the storm moving upon the old cattle fort like an advancing army. Solid sheets of rain battered the empty fields, methodically blocking out the light.

“When all I could do was lie on the ground an' soak me britches in blood, they come for me, too. With a priest to gimme absolution, and a board to carry me on, and a piece a yellow linen for me shroud.”

“But you didn't die.”

“Sure I did. I told ya, nobody came back from the black room.”

The rain audible now, the storm almost upon them. He jumped to his feet, still clutching the grey, half-eaten dog's haunch in one hand, staring out over the mossy, broken-toothed wall of the
bodhun.

“Shite!” he swore to himself, watching it in disbelief. “What kind of storm is it, blows from the east?”

And in that instant, watching him there along the walls of the ancient fort, the dog haunch in his hand, she didn't know where she was anymore. She didn't know who she was, or if she was dead or alive herself or in some old goblin story of her father's.

The storm swept over them, dousing the fire and wiping out the last, grey light of evening. They huddled back down against the wall. She couldn't see him in the total blackness though she knew his face was just in front of her, could feel his rancid breath along her cheek as he leaned in, telling her the rest of the story.

“When I couldn't open me mouth to say me own name anymore, they come to get me. They got the priest, an' six men to wrap me up in linen an' carry me to the window, an' there they slid me on down into the hole with the rest of 'em.”

Her mother's mad, red eyes at the end, shining in triumph.
She saved a potato for her son.

“But you didn't die.”

“But I did. I was dead, an' buried, but it didn't take me any three goddamned days to rise me up. No, I got up that night, before they could put a new layer of lime down, an' I walked 'round to the front door an' banged on it to be let back in.

“'
By the grace of God, who is that?
' they cried. ‘
Go away, anyhow, whoever you are. We're full up!
'

“An' I said, ‘It's me, Johnny Dolan, an' I'm already in!'

“An' they said, ‘
Go ‘way, you're an imposter! Johnny Dolan is dead!
'

“'But it's me!' I told 'em. ‘I know who I am, for God's sakes!'

“An' then the officers come to peek out the door, an' they could see the blood an' the shite all over me trousers, an' the lime from the grave pit in me hair, an' the shroud wrapped around my shoulders. Just like Lazarus himself, raised from the dead through no fault of his own.

“They took all that in, an' then they shut the peephole again, an' I could hear them whisperin' inside to each other an' wonderin' what to do. Then they come back, but all they said was,
‘Go away! There'll be a terrible discrepancy if you're alive again!'
“

She could feel him beside her, shaking with hard laughter at his little joke.

“
'Go away, or there'll be a terrible discrepancy!'
And so I did, and so I went, an' lived by me own wits, an' been dead ever since.”

The storm swept on past, soaking them to the bone. And when it had passed, the stars came out, and a thin crescent moon, and the silence returned, along the empty and abandoned land.

He made her take off her clothes then, and ran his hands all over her in the dim moonlight. She had been expecting something like this, though she had no real knowledge of it. Later she understood that he did not, either, but still he made her get down on her hands and knees by the old fort wall. Down in the puddles of water and dog grease, and the bones, and he did it to her right there, rutting in the mud like two dogs themselves.

And she felt nothing, only tired and dizzy, as she had for so long now, and went along with everything he told her to do, for fear that he might hit her or snap her neck. All she had been aware of was the smell of the earth under her, the grass cold and slippery beneath her hands and arms. The grey blur of the rock wall beside her, and the smell of the wet peat from the fire, his defecation behind the wall.

Even so, even though she did everything he told her, he slapped her sharply when he had trouble pushing in, fumbling and grunting behind her. He slapped her face, and punched and dug his elbows into her side, below her ribs, and
that
was the first time, too. That was the first time he had laid hands on her, out in the empty blackness of the hill fort.

•
17
•

“What good are ye? What good are ye to me, then?”

He told her every night, pushing in at her in the hay, or the abandoned
scalpeen
or the moss bed. Wherever they lay, pushing himself into her—

“You're
useless
to me otherwise. Ye know that—”

After that night, after that first night in the fort, she had walked with him all through the country. Not that she had to. That was the damned thing, the damning thing, that she regretted most of all. She could always have slipped away with the other wraithlike souls treading along the road. Down some alleyway in the blue-slate towns, or even off into some abandoned cabin or tumbledown, while he was still sleeping.

And maybe he would have broken her head like a dog's. Maybe he would have sniffed her out and made her pay for it, but she didn't think so. More likely he would only have laughed and cursed at her:
Go to the devil then. Useless bint!

Instead he'd said that he would feed her, and he did. He'd said that he had another sister named Deirdre, the only one of his whole family not dead but living away in New York. She did not know if she should believe this—if she should believe anything from him less immediate than the bits of bread or cabbage he flung to her each night as if she were a dog. He told her they would walk to Dublin, and look
for some way to get passage money. But mostly she saw that they went where the roads took them, or where he had heard there was food.

She did not even know if he really believed they were all dead—as much as he insisted on it for himself. That hard, crackling laugh—the only time he ever laughed.

“Sure I'm dead. Otherwise there would be a discrepancy—”

Sometimes he would almost seem to slip into a trance, studying every face along the road as they passed. All the caved-in, yellow cheeks and the fearful eyes. Staring back at him, too exhausted now even to look away with the proper modesty. Taking him for only one more driven mad by the hunger.

He kept looking. At first she thought he was after something—but what, from people who had nothing? She thought, too, it might be another one of his quirks. He had many strange habits and obsessions. For all the filth on his clothes and the terrible red boils on his head, he washed himself whenever he could. Making their camp near a stream or a lake. Pouring the water over and over himself, scratching and rubbing himself until he was raw.

She came to understand that he was looking for a particular face. She learned it when she lay beside him at night, those few nights when the hunger didn't cause her to fall asleep as soon as she stopped walking and put her head on the ground. He would gnash his teeth then, and twitch like a dog. Saying the one name over and over:
Patrick. Patrick.
She came to understand that he was looking for his brother, the one taken off to the ward for the simpleminded. Looking into every face he saw on the road for him, for Patrick to still be alive somewhere.

She had thrown it back at him, one night after he had been rougher than ever. Jabbing and throwing himself on her in the dirt, as if he would push her down and bury her there, under his weight. Staggering up afterward, covered in the dirt, all over her clothes, her face and hair. She had looked at him, already eating a haunch of rabbit he had cooked over the fire, and could not hold back.

“He's dead, you know. You know that. He's dead for sure, your brother—”

He had stood up, the yellow bile rising in his eyes the way she had first seen with the dogs. But she could not resist saying it, in her humiliation.

“Not like you, what only pretends to be dead. He is—”

Surprising her, he had even tried to argue it as he advanced on her.

“You don't know that. You don' know that, those fools. He could be as alive as me, which don' say much—”

“Ah, then ye are alive? But you know he's not.”

He had hit her then, as he did now whenever he wanted her to do something—move faster, get him something, shut up. He hit her, once on each side of her face, left-right, the fists thrown so fast they seemed to land at the same time. Knocking her back down to the earth, shutting her mouth. But unable to shake loose the triumph she still held, the secret knowledge, to be used against him on some future day.

He is looking for him, I was right—

In the morning, watching him wash himself, scratching and rubbing in the stream, she wondered what he was trying to rub off—the lice, or the lime and dirt from his poorhouse grave? She liked to watch him, in secret, seeing all of his naked, raw self out in the water. Reduced to just that. No banshee or devil but a
man,
with a man's ordinary hands and arms and penis, his red and boil-tortured skin. So ordinary and vulnerable, no different from her brothers. So different from the uncannily swift fists and bulk that attacked her out of the darkness.

Not long after she would take up the same habit. Lowering her lassitudinous, half-dead body into the water. Scrubbing her own skin raw, just as hard as he did his, trying to rub off what she could of him.

The cow pasture lay just off the road, along a hillside. Dolan moving through the thickets in the same quick, crouched, run he had—knife out in one hand. She followed dutifully, not sure if they should be there but driven on as always by the hunger, and by him.

“Just a taste, just a taste—”

Dolan murmuring to himself, over by the cattle. His eyes tracing the pasture for any sign of a herder.

“The red an' the true. Just a taste to keep us goin'.”

He scuttled toward a group of three milk cows lounging placidly along the hill. Kneeling down by the nearest one, looking back once more over his shoulder, then babbling something in a low, soothing voice—before he cut the animal, swift and sharp, across its right hind leg. The cow bolting up, kicking out violently. He eluded it easily and
kept running beside the creature, sticking a hardened lump of bread against the cut, letting the blood soak into it.

“Here, here, take this,” he commanded, handing it back to her.

She did—then held out her own bread and Dolan seized her wrist, and held it to the cow. Sticking it under the dripping incision. She held it there—Dolan's hand still enveloping her wrist, both of them running to keep up with the bolting animal. The deep, red blotches of blood seeping slowly into the bread.

The cow broke away, and Ruth brought the bread up to her face. It smelled almost sickeningly sour, meaty and raw—until suddenly she could resist it no longer and tore into it voraciously. The blood transporting her, the bread now as thick and rich as meat itself.

The last time I had meat in the cabin, when we ate the pig. A feast like nothing I had ever tasted, not ever. Kate and Agnes and Colleen, prattling happily on. The faces of me Da an' Ma, drawn and frightened across the fire. The pig no feast, I knew even then, but a last supper—

She choked down the bread and looked up for more. Dolan had already devoured his own and was still feeding off the wounded cow, nimbly dodging her kicks and the whipping, manure-soaked tail. Pulling directly at the wound with his lips, sucking up the slow drip of blood. She wiped her mouth and laughed out loud, running after him, not even caring about the herders or the sheriffs anymore.

The madness of it—drinking directly from the cow.

Dolan just ahead, holding one calming hand along the animal's flank, pulling his mouth away just along enough to speak, soothingly, as he skipped along backwards. His mouth bent over to its leg:

“Here now, here now, that's a good girl. Let me suckle at
this
tit—”

“Me now!”

They chased the cow up over the top of the hill, laughing and whooping, forgetting where they were in their blood giddiness.

That was when they heard it: a high, squeaking noise, very faint but still musical, and unlike anything she had ever quite heard before. It sobered them at once, dropping them to their haunches. Trying to hide themselves, up there on the hill. But there was no sign of anyone coming, no trace of any human activity at all but that distant, musical noise.

“A hand organ,” Dolan said at last, incredulous.

“A what?”

He gave her the back of his hand, rattling her head.

“A hand organ. One you crank. That's what it is.”

They looked down the hill across from the farmhouse, toward the ruins of an old abbey that had stood by the crossroads. Its roof was gone, and there was an enormous pine tree growing up over the wall where the choir had been. Just outside the portal, where the abbey steps had once risen, was a little white tent. The sound of the hand organ coming from there, a crowd of people around the tent pushing and edging forward.

Knowing why, now, there were no herdsmen, no farmer guarding the cattle. They watched for a while, then began to walk down the hillside themselves, wiping the blood from their faces.

“All the wonders! Just one penny! All the wonders of the world, for just one penny!”

A sawed-off little man in a grey, grizzled beard and an admiral's hat was pumping the crowd.

“The most stupendous collection of curiosioes ever assembled in the world!” he kept braying, a patch over one eye, hand stuck in his tunic like Napoleon.

“The original Kunstschrank of Philippe Hainhofer himself! Built expressly for His Imperial Majesty King Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden! Brought to you direct from the farthest reaches of Uppsala—”

The people pushed in though they didn't understand a word of what he was gibbering. Elbowing each other out of the way though most of them didn't have a penny to their names. She started to push in with the rest, just wanting to see, felt Dolan's rough hand hauling her back.

“Not now!” he told her, wrenching her shoulder.

That malicious grin splitting his lips again.

“You'll see it all, soon enough. So will he.”

The plan already well worked out in his mind, she realized later.
How early? When we came down the hill?

They waited the rest of the day, squatting in the briars and the wild rosebushes growing up through the floor of the ruined abbey. Only one window was left—the great, rose-glassed eye of God in the nave. Most of the panes put out, the rest glittering like cut and jagged teeth.
She spent the time crawling along the floor, uncovering the mysterious carvings and letters that were chiseled in the stone. The outlines of knights and prelates, the dates of bishops, carved into the smoothed, grey, granite crypts.

Running her hands over the newer letters, too, carved onto the wooden crosses that stuck up amid the briars.

These were the names of dead priests, from the newer wood church across the road—or so he told me, I did not yet know how to read. So helpless.

From what he said I should have known what was going to happen. I should have known, but I went along. That was my sin, the sin of going along.

They waited back in the abbey, listening to the little man's incessant, barking promotion. The sour hand organ grinding out the few circus notes he knew. Until the evening, when the raw wood church across the road from the ruined abbey began to ring its bell for vespers. The crowd moving reluctantly away at last. The enfevered, the starving, and the half dead dragging themselves over with the rest to hear their prayers. The little man in the admiral's hat rolled down his tent flap, moving about the ruins of the church, gathering up scraps of paper and wood to make his fire.

Dolan crawled out through the briars on his hands and knees. Leading her out, trembling, through the tumbled-down walls of the church. The knife in his hand again, cutting a long slit quickly and silently through the back of the little white tent. They slipped inside and rose cautiously to their feet, to uncover the mystery.

And there it was. A cabinet of wonders.

It was like nothing she had ever seen before. Not so much on the outside, no more than a carved wood box, slathered in gold paint. No more than the size and shape of a glassed-in kitchen cupboard, with shelves.