The devil has dallied these westward roads, doffed his cap in every townland. She watches the always-is of the clouds, tries to fashion from their shapes animals but cannot. Sees instead the shapes of children coat-tailing ragged elders wandering weary and in want of light.

Colly says, do you think Bart is getting sad with himself?

She thinks this might be true. There is a lengthening now to Bart’s look. It is as if he does not see the road but can see ahead to the days that will soon unlearn for winter. Before you know, it will be the Samhain, the world to dark and what then? How the word winter makes you think of Blackmountain, its blue-cold colors, the sleet call of the wind. Those nights when storm would harry the house as if some great force had come to shake them off the hill. This feeling now as if some great wind is coming, something shapeless and unimaginable, something greater than the world that travels hidden between light.

In one small town they are met by two well-dressed women who shake a can before them asking for money for the building of a new church. The beggary come forward to wheedle and cajole when they see the quality of their cloaks.

Better to fox the dark than become one of them, she thinks. They shadow the greater farmhouses, test the ground with sticks for traps, watch for gaters, hush at well-fed dogs. They tap the downspouts of the better farmhouses for the sound of hidden money, search for potato pits and smash open larder locks. The most you’ll find is a bag of flour lonely on a shelf. A wrinkled carrot left for a horse. A heel of bread. An admonitory clock ticks her off as she scoops into her palm bread crumbs from a table. One time they find hidden treasure—a box of seed potatoes growing arms and legs and stashed underground for the growing season. They roast the seedlings over a fire and Colly says, when you think of it, that is an entire field of future potatoes we’ve just eaten.

They pass through Nenagh town in the dusk and watch a field lit in circling torch-fire. A traveling show of some kind setting itself up amidst caravans and horses. She is astonished to see the silhouette of a man on stilts like some strange and slow insect wading the dark.

She thinks, these last few days on the road have been full of odd sights. What about that rich man’s bullock standing on a rock as if he were afraid of the very field he stood in? And that horse standing with its face to a tree as if renouncing sight of the world? And what about that idiot of a man who walked past with a smile on his face and blood sicked on his shirt? These are auguries, all right. Every flour cart on the road has been accompanied by soldiers. And in these great vales of Tipperary, the farming estates are sometimes as big as a town. They meet villages where the gardens are tended, the houses fashioned and slated. The great fields of corn giving to the world their color. How they crane their necks towards the flashing scythes. And yet there are the townlands you must go through with shut eyes, where grass grows over the doorways, where the fields learn color only from the sun. The have-it-alls and the have-nothings, Bart says. I give it a year before the country splits apart.

She thinks, it is the sight of the children in such townlands that cause the most grief. She has seen children with fever, children thin from long illness, but never has she seen children such as this. Some of these children are losing their voices. Little boys without their shouts. Little boys with hairy faces. Little girls becoming crones. Children being rushed through life to wear the death masks of the Samhain.

Bart says, I don’t think the country will celebrate the turning of the season this year except in them big farmsteads. Think of the feasts they will be preparing. The fieldwork done. The larder full of riches. The baking of cakes and biscuits and the jellies and ham and tongue. We used to be told in whispers to stay close to the bonfire, for there are demons in the dark coming to get you. But the demons do not have to ride the dark anymore. This year they do not even wait for the Samhain.

Everything in life has a secret signal, she thinks. Like color, for instance. What is color but some sort of expression as to the nature of a thing? She thinks about this, wonders if she is right. What is the green of a tree but some kind of announcement? It doesn’t speak and yet it shouts—I am a tree, here I am. Or the jimsonweed in the ditches white-sounding to the bees with trumpets of silence. There are other things too that secretly speak. She thinks about Bart. How he is trying to express what cannot be said, or if it can be said, he doesn’t want to say it. This new thing he does as he walks, stepping a little too close to her, his left hand touching off her right hand. It is only a brush, made to seem like an accident, yet she feels it strong as a thump. She does not know what to do with herself, agitates a sudden hand through her hair or pulls at an eyelash, begins to prattlebox like some old biddy. And sometimes she wakes warm in the solitary cold of dawn and there is Bart in sleep—or perhaps not in sleep—with his body spooned into her and his good arm around her shoulder giving her his warmth. How she tenses, lies holding her breath, and then Bart turns away in sleep or perhaps not in sleep.

Colly says, riddle me this—what’s got two legs by day and three legs by night?

The way Bart wakes and jumps into his body shortly after, his face as if nothing has happened.

They shelter by the damp abutment of a bridge a day’s walk from Limerick city. Bart says, it’s rare enough you’ll find the underside of a bridge empty like this. They build a fire and she watches Bart produce a newspaper he has found and laughs at the sight of him. She thinks she might be giddy from hunger. This trick he has for holding and folding, resting the paper on his knee and turning it with his hand. She leans across and pokes at the paper to annoy him. Bart pretends to ignore her. Then he says, says here the costs of provisions have tripled—

She leans forward and pokes the paper again.

Bart says, will you listen. An article here says they are flying a balloon over parts of Dublin with people in it, the entire thing full of gas.

Colly says, I doubt that’s possible, let me have a look.

Bart stands up in fury when the paper is grabbed off him.

Give it back, he says.

Hold off a minute.

Give it here, I said.

Colly says, you know, I always knew people would figure out a way to fly in the future but I always assumed they would do it with birds, lash people to the backs of condors or some other giant bird with rope, something secure anyhow—now, that would be something, being lashed to a bird, being able to fly over people you hate and shit on their houses.

Bart stamps off towards the river and she watches him go to where the grass has run wild. The way he steps easy out of his clothes. His white and shiverless back as he sits down in the low water and begins to douse himself.

Colly says, take your eyes off him, you dirty wee bitch.

She looks up and sees some woman stepping along the river path, sighs, for she knows who it is from the wringing of her hands. Mary Bresher gives off a surprised look. She says, I was just thinking about you and here you are. Do you mind if I sit down?

She watches Mary Bresher gather the pleats of her cloak as she sits down beside her. Her lovely blue feet are filthy from walking. Through the long grass she can see the shape of Bart stepping out of the water, bold as brass and she pretends not to look but Mary Bresher is looking also.

She says, ah, the sight of a man. It makes me miss my husband something terrible. By any chance have you seen my child?

They have lucked themselves a lift towards Limerick. A cooper’s cart with a canvas covering and the man black-faced as hell looking for a chat. Colly says, this fellow has the look of the devil, all right—he’ll have our souls shut in a barrel. She whispers, shush up, and Bart casts her a vexed look. The cooper lifts her up by the wrist and it is then she sees his right hand has just two fingers and she thinks of Bart and she thinks how in some strange way this man could be his father.

Rock-away, rock-away, the cooper shouts, and the horses nod and whinny and she folds her arms and tries not to listen to Bart and the cooper’s chatter. Her eyes close and Colly is muttering, pair of cripples, hardly a good hand between them, and then the world is borne by dark and it is not the cooper but McNutt who says, do you know how to drive this, and Bart says, I was hoping you would ask, and he takes hold of the reins and the horses strain and pull the cart into gallop until they take no heed of Bart’s shouts and then she sees the road edging towards a great precipice and she screams at Bart and she screams as they go over it, wakes into the comfort of slowness, rainfall and its curtaining shush, the eaves of the canvas dripping their wet. Colly says, this cooper fellow’s a right barrel of laughs—do you think he will float if we pour water into that hole of his mouth?

It is then she sees it, takes hold of Bart’s hand and squeezes. Bart tries to slide his hand back into her hand but she has pulled it loose. She is pointing off-road. Look. The cooper blinks and begins to slow the horses.

Christ wept, he says.

The tree is a great spread oak and leaning against it is a cart wheel and tied to its spokes is the body of a youth. The arms and legs thin as sticks but loose in the rope that tied them. She cannot speak, can only think of the awfulness of such an act, who would tie a dead boy to a cart wheel like that?

Bart says, what’s that sign say around his neck?

The cooper stalls the horses and they lean forward to read the words and she turns away, watches the wind scuttle across the road a fallen leaf that is a sparrow or perhaps the soul of a dead person while the sign speaks its solitary word.

Thief.

Into the city by night’s silent hours, when the streets give no account of themselves. They are footsore and hungry and she aches for sleep and yet there is wonder—the shape of a city, Colly says, some of the buildings as tall as giants, everything so grand and quiet. Bart says, the fox will find his feast in the city. Even at night when everybody sleeps, she thinks, a great town gives off a feeling of possibility, it is not unreasonable to think things will be better.

They come through the old city into Newtown, Bart calls it, and Colly says look, they have brought the moon down to the streets. Gaslight upon the endless shuttered shops. Gaslight stretching down an endless street wide as Paris, one would think. Gaslight throwing bright upon the great high houses. Bart says the constables here are rough and we’d best be careful. Echoing steps that could be a policeman or just some ragman’s shadow but certainly not a ghost, she thinks, because ghosts don’t live in the cities and even if they did, ghosts don’t hide anymore but walk about in the open.

Bart knows his way over a short bridge that leads into Englishtown. Everything becomes untold in dark but for a church’s tolling that tells the hour of two. Colly says, Christ, this place smells of shit-rot. The buildings here are as high almost as Newtown but they are run-down and slanting. The narrow streets grip the dark. Even the spirit shops are shut for the night. And yet there are children. They web nakedly out of the shadows as if they have been waiting for these strangers, hoping to escort them to a room. Such children are the rats of the city, she thinks. They pull at their hands and their sleeves, plead and cajole—mister, mister—cailín gleoite—and Colly shouts at one of them to fuck off when a hand threatens to pull Grace’s cape loose. Bart stops and puts his hand up, says hold on a minute, and she is startled by a boy who stands apart from the others blue-skinned and pimpled, naked from the waist up. A simple pleading look that eats at her heart. She nods at him and they begin to follow, the other children catcalling. They are whispered at. A drunkard shouts his face to a wall. Some groaning she can hear through a glassless window might well be the sound of dying.

The streets seem to labyrinth and then the boy turns into an alley so blind she is seized with the fear that they have been led into a trap where they will be murdered for their cloaks. She halts and grabs hold of Bart’s sleeve but Bart is already shouting whoa to the boy as if he were a horse, the boy continuing to walk on as if he has not heard. They stand at the edge of the alley’s dark until the boy reappears. Bart says, we go no farther. He waves his hand and points another direction and the boy signals that everything is all right, his hand gesturing to come along, come along, and then he leads them along another route, Colly saying, keep a watch out, I don’t like this one bit. They go down slippy steps and one hand goes to a wall and the other hand to her knife, watching this boy light a guttering candle and then he puts his hand out for a coin. In the flicker-light she can see the sunken pallor of his face and yet there is an unmistakable boy-light in his eyes and it seems to her as if this moment were not happening now but is a moment that has happened in the long-ago. Bart says, I am here for work so can pay you coin tomorrow. How the boy wavers with his eyes and then leads them into the house which smells of wet-cold and mildew and worse and try not to think of it, she thinks, downwards into a cellar cramped with sleeping people and perhaps the dead and that is what you smelled, and she sees their sprawling figures in the candlelight and the walls are wet and she thinks she can smell sickness, can hear it in someone’s cough, and they find a space and Bart rests against her and too soon he is asleep.

Colly whispering, what new hell is this?

She knows when she wakes she has been trying to wake all night. Colly says, I have been sleeping inside out and backwards. A creeping numb-cold from hands to feet and Bart is looking shivery. A look on his face suggests he has not slept one bit. He is nicking at his boot with his knife. Colly reckons there might be three or four families living in this single room, twenty-four people is my count, and there must be six or seven rooms in this house, go figure. The walls shake with coughing. Tears stream down the peeling plaster. Grace stands quickly and goes to the door. We need to go, she shouts. Up the soot-dark steps shining from rainfall that eats through her cloak as it falls. How the buildings that stoop upon the narrow passage make her think of old men steadfast in illness against dying. And here is the boy stepping out of a doorway as if he has been waiting, his hand out for money.

She says, we’ll have coin for you tomorrow.

The boy steps boldly in front of her and waves his hand again. Bart slaps the hand away and the boy stares at him with a look of willed courage.

Bart says, did you not hear what we said?

Of a sudden, another boy appears alongside him. He says, Deaf Tom don’t hear you.

Colly says, then why didn’t he say so?

She tries to see into his eyes as if to see into his unhearing, to see her own lips moving as if talk were to his eyes the simple fact of chewing, sees instead his eyes wrought with fear and hate. She pulls Bart by the sleeve and they turn and go up the street, can still feel upon her back the eyes of the boy.

Bart speaks aloud. We’ll not return there tonight.

Every gobdaw in Ireland, she thinks, has come to Limerick. The streets are full of sleeve pullers, rogues and ruffians, tinkers, beggars, and peddlers. By the bridge into Newtown they huddle and shout, hold up ragged garments and bedding and what have you. She thinks, they’d sell their own limbs if they could find a buyer. You do not look at their faces. You do not search for what you do not want to see, the people who wear bluing skin instead of clothing, each bone that pokes in accusation.

Bart says, there’s nothing worth stealing in Englishtown that isn’t being sold here.

Colly whispers, I’ll bet there’s secret trade in mice and rats.

Straggling behind Bart street after street as he makes inquiries after friends he says he knew a year or two ago. The doors and gateways shutting before him and everybody he knows is gone. Jim Slaw, he says. And Mick the Hammer. Where in the fuck? They were always here.

The sky and the streets and the faces they meet have become the same washy color. She follows behind Bart listening to the city, darning through sound her ear’s stitching needle, the yelling and chatter and clatter and catcalls while some distant metal heart clamors near the docks. Matching the sounds to what she sees. The sluggish rattle of a passing cart. A hoarse man trying to find more voice as he pleads with two sailors at his stall. A group of children on kindling legs cajoling some official. The silence of the beggary. There are rumors of fever on certain streets near the river. There are rumors of a gang of vicious children robbing people in the backstreets of Irishtown and for a moment she can see their faces, starving boys forced to become violent men.

They spend their last few pence on stale bread rolls. They are told where to find soup given out by some religious society or relief committee, nobody knows or cares. They join the queue and idle the hours listening to the chatter, it’s as if they are trying to kill you with waiting, did you notice how every day they are handing out one drop less, dinner missed the belly and went elsewhere. Then the door to the kitchen closes and they turn away with the others and grumble.

Colly says, that fellow over there.

She takes a good look at this man he is talking about, he must be Bart’s age and yet he moves with the ague of an oldster. He looks like a stick dressed by the wind, won’t even last the night.

When they get back to their lodgings, Deaf Tom holds up four fingers to remind them how many days’ payment is due.

She watches winter taking the city. It has come early this year. How it scavenges the light, sends despair to walk the streets. Or lie alongside the strung-out shapes that occupy each laneway, court, and stairwell. Each day the city seems to deepen its beggary, deepen the numbers who come from the country to gather on the quayside awaiting passage. They depart on the ships that Bart says are taking all the food out of Ireland and if this is true, she thinks, she wonders how anybody can allow it.

She wonders how a city can hold so many and yet how it can also hold so much wet. The rain hangs from the eaves and pools every corner, creeps into your feet, gnaws through your cloak, eats into your brain until you can think of nothing else. They stand under shop awnings until they are shouted at and she sees that a good many shops have their shutters down and Bart says a lot of the ordinary tradesmen now are done out of business.

Yet Newtown is another city. She has never seen people who look so continually pleased with themselves. Cockerel men in fine cloth standing outside great stone buildings talking about serious matters. Women fashioned in exotic hats and ribbons and colors walking under parasols. How the rain with its wanty fingers cannot touch them though the filthy streets dirty their booties.

She stands with Bart outside a coffeehouse reaching her eyes through the signed window, has never smelled anything like it. The men inside reading newspapers, supping and chatting. Quidnuncs, Bart says. Nothing worse than men acting like women. She doesn’t know what he means but does not ask him, must be some word he’s read in the newspaper. Watching such men in the coffeehouse and watching such men on the street and she thinks that these people have been born clean, born into a higher position, while all the rest of us on earth were born into a lower position and such a thing is all down to who you are and where you come from and the luck of the draw and there is nothing you can do about it but take it back off them, because a fish cannot become a bird but there is nothing to stop a fish from wearing the bird’s feathers.

They return to the kitchen each day and sometimes you don’t get in and sometimes you do. She watches the splashy ladle dumping its watery soup, feeling both glad and hateful. A heel of bread. A room full of vile smells and sucking noises and a man who growls while collecting the bowls. Better to be out, she thinks, where you can creep the quays, watch the backyards of the high houses, the backyards of shops and stores. They walk the streets and send out their eyes but the city has too many eyes to meet them, the length of each street that swallows your strength and gives nothing in return for it. Everything is bolted and never has she seen so many watchmen and policemen and you do their thinking for them and step about in guilt for the thoughts of what you want to steal from them. Bart whispering that they must be careful, twice today they have been watched and followed by youths who belong to the Ryan gang, he says, you know them by the way they tie their neckerchiefs, they take only horses and money but perhaps that has all changed now. Them two fellows were figuring us out. And she begins to see them everywhere, each neckerchief a signal or perhaps not, who is to know who is what in the tumult of the city.

Today Deaf Tom came with some darkening man who stood stoat-eyed and said, you owe this boy payment for seven days. The warning he gave them. Now it is two o’clock. She stands under an archway with Bart watching the not-sky and how it has come down to meet this not-river and churn it into sea. It is as if the Shannon has been swelling all night into something eyeless and calmly malignant and now it lies in waiting. But for what? she thinks. For all the things you do not want to think of. This wind reaching into every mouth.

Colly says, you would wonder why God didn’t make us something else, of all the options available to Him—wouldn’t it be so much better to be a lion licking your hot balls in Africa or an elephant in India, or even an eagle winging over Wicklow would be better than this—who wants to be an Irishman born into wet—and do you know something else, I haven’t seen a single rat in days and you know what that means.

Ugh.

Grace.

What?

Do you know something?

What?

This is no way to live.

Fuck off, then.

Bart says, what was that?

She turns and stares at Bart pitting the knife into the heel of his useless hand. The flesh full of red marks. Her rage flies into shout and she feels like another person listening to herself. We have run out of luck. We should have had our pick of the riches of this city but instead we are penniless and getting worse with it. Why did we come here at all? This is your fault. It was you who said it. We would have been better off in the country.

Bart backwards against the wall as if her words were fists and then his eyes go strange, fuse into a look wrought by the cold and rain and what stirs in a soul hungry for nourish and what stirs in all souls in such a city and she sees what is held in his eye and knows it is fear.

He says, it might be time to put my cloak in hock.

She roars, hock your cloak and the cold will finish you off in a week.

Colly says, fucking spud-hander.

She has dreamt of a sudden laneway walled high and dark and a gang of children coming upon them not children at all but wolves set to devour their hearts. Just when it seems the deaf boy is going to run out of fingers, Bart finds them new lodgings. She eyes the tumbledown building and follows Bart through a crawl space into a near-pitch room. The wet from a broken window flies through the dark upon bodies asleep or bodies in agony or perhaps they are dead, she thinks, and really, does it matter, at least we won’t have to pay for it.

A long night of cold and Colly prattling on about souls. She thinks it must be something to do with this morbid city, all this winter-wet. Listening to the city’s dead-cart going by earlier on with a gloomy voice calling for bodies. Colly wanting to know if the soul has a memory box—like, when you die, where do your memories go—if the soul doesn’t have a memory box, how can you remember your life when you die—and tell me this, that time when Roger Doherty got his head smashed by the horse’s hoof and he went stupid as a mule, where did his mind go then—hee!—you see, that is the proof—I think there has to be a memory box of some kind in the head that stores all your life and his memory box got broken from the kick—but the thing is, if that is so, does that mean his soul will change as well and that he’ll go off to heaven stupid as a mule?

She realizes Bart is not beside her because here he is stepping into the room. In the half-light she sees his cheeks freshly razored and that horseshoe freshly shod to his face. His eyes have new poke in them. He pulls her by the wrist. There’s a commotion in the town, he says. Get up.

How Bart powers up the street like some groomed horse agleam and full of himself. She has not the energy for this march-walking. Colly says, let that horselicker go his own way. She folds her arms and scowls at his back, smiles when some fathead coachman lets out a deforming roar when Bart steps in front of him. Now they are standing before a crowd gathered by the gates of some grain house. Bart grabs her elbow. Over here, he says. The gates are warded by some twenty soldiers who stand impassive to the women and children sent to the front of the crowd, the women heckling and shouting at the soldiers, their men behind them laughing. She feels herself pulled forwards, inwards, inwards, holding on to the sleeve of Bart, and now she has forgotten her hunger and is woven with the crowd. A ringleader on a box is waving his arms and shouting and somebody roars out, let there be vengeance, and Colly shouts, cut the throats of those horselickers! A solemn man turns around and nods to her. She sees these are not the destitute of the city, not the ravenous scarecrows, the ragmen withered to sticks, the sick and crippled. They are dressed instead in the clothes of the city’s working people, the tradesmen, the craft workers, the shop workers. Glory be to the poor man! End the distress! Let the grain out! Cut the throats of those horselickers! Bart pulls at her sleeve and nods her towards the sight of a man with a different look from the others, a detective, no doubt. Bart shouts in her ear, let’s step back a bit. And anyway, she thinks, this is not the plan, standing here, shouting out for who knows what.

The crowd pulses to its own strange rhythm, pulls them leftwards until somebody shouts whoa and the surge settles down. They push to the rear of the crowd and she looks up and sees faces leaning from the windows of the factory buildings above them, thinks about how time has fallen away from the city, everything in the world stopped to just this, the silence between shouts, the whispered rumors being spread that they’re going to open the gates, that they’re saying come back tomorrow. Then some commotion behind them and she turns and sees some fool of a deliveryman is shouting and waving for his wagon to be let through and then some fellow with a grin is climbing the back of the wagon and he becomes a solemn Christ aloft with his arms held out, roars to the crowd, glory be to the poor man! He is met with a cheer and in the same moment there is a gunshot and the crowd unthinks into panic. She runs with Bart towards the wagon and there are others pulling at its contents and they take hold of a crate and she can see men unhitching the horses as if to steal them and there are men rocking the wagon and then Bart says, give it here, Bart the great rock carrier who gets the crate up on his back and moves away under it.

The sky behind them a shawl of whistles and roaring and then further gunshot. The sudden emptiness of a lane where Bart slides the crate off his back. That might be someone slumped in a corner or it might not, she thinks. She looks over her shoulder as Bart knifes at the box.

Colly says, I hope to fuck it’s tobacco.

She says, we can hawk whatever it is. She is trying to work out how many warm dinners a guinea would buy.

Bart pulling loose straw from the box and his hand emerges gripping a dark bottle. It’s some kind of spirit, he says. It is then the air changes around them and she knows them as wolves that peel from the shadows and of a sudden they are swarmed, somebody taking rough hold of her arms from behind her and she spits and kicks, tries to shout to Bart, can see Bart reaching for his knife but somebody has hold of him. In silence the wolves grab at the bottles and then they are gone and she finds herself staring at the ground bereft and there is Bart holding a hurt head and at least you are not hurt also, she thinks. It is then that she sees it, a single bottle that has rolled free and she runs for it, puts it under her cloak.

We can sell it, she says.

See? Bart says. We have made our own luck.

They walk through the city pulling at the sleeves of men outside the spirit shops offering sale of the bottle. She cannot understand why nobody will buy it. Colly says, they think you want to sell them piss in a bottle. One stringy fellow uncorks the bottle and takes a suspicious sniff. I don’t know what that is, he says, but I’ll give you this much for it. Bart stares at the open hand and says, fuck off with yourself. Two boys begin following and she thinks they might be something to do with the Ryan gang though Bart says they have not the look for it. Colly says, they’ve been sent by that Deaf Tom, I know it. In Englishtown a drunkard with red cheeks makes a grab for the bottle and Bart cowers him with the knife. Come on, Bart says, let’s try Newtown again.

Their ghost-selves in the window have stopped to watch the occupants of an eating shop, the certain angle of shoulders hunched over tables, hands forking and cutting, wiping, fisting for a cough, curling to bring mugs to mouths, talking through half-chewed food, a huge fire roaring at the room. The shape of a woman leaning back laughing. Their blood is red with nourishment, she thinks, while my own blood is trickling over the rocks of my bones, and though you can learn to ignore hunger, not to give it a single thought, hunger is always thinking of you.

Of a sudden she is inside the eating shop and stands before a table near the door, her hand held out, the air sauced with smell and heat and she hears herself saying, just a morsel, your honor, just a little piece. An aproned man hurries towards her and roughs her out the door. Get your hands off me, mister. There is nothing in Bart’s look and yet how she hates the sight of him when he helps her up off the street. She grabs the bottle out of his armpit and uncorks it and puts it to her mouth and drinks. Bart grabs the bottle off her and his mouth opens to shout but by now the drink is sliding its blade down her throat.

Bart shouts, what kind of fool are you? We can’t sell it if you drink it. And anyhow, what fool drinks on an empty stomach?

Colly says, fuck him telling us what to do.

This coughing-hot strangeness and her stomach is shouting. Everything tingles and burns.

Bart holds her with a maddened look. Then he puts the bottle to his lips and drinks. What in the fuck? he says. I think this might be rum.

Colly says, go on, give me a drink.

She thinks, this is way better than baccy.

Bart grabs the bottle off her and takes a longer sup.

She feels the rush of some great and sudden giddiness, wants to laugh at the world, wants to laugh at Bart’s face, this sad way he has of looking at her. She says, aren’t we some trio of filthy magpies. She pokes out her elbows and lets roll a magpie’s rattle that dilates into cackling laughter. Bart narrows her with a look and then takes another sup from the bottle. What trio? he says. There’s only the two of us.

She watches some man dawdle a moment to watch their commotion and shouts at him to fuck off, mister nosy-face. She says to Bart, did you ever consider card tricks? Her laugh is riotous. Colly has started to sing and she hasn’t a notion where he has gotten his strange rhyme from.

Diddley-aye-de-don,

Wee John went to bed with his breeches on.

Diddley-aye-de-doff,

Wasn’t it big Mary in the bed took ’em off.

What in the hell is up with you? Bart says. He makes a grab for the bottle and wrestles it off her. She watches him eyeing her without blinking as he takes another long drink. She leans against the wall and studies Bart and thinks, I am sick of all this, sick of the rain and sick of the city and I am sick of his stupid face.

She shouts out, I want to go home.

Bart’s face reddens and he roars out, what is wrong with you? You are always in a strop.

I mean what I say. I am sick of all this. I am going to go home tomorrow and there’s nothing you can do about it.

How are you going to go home tomorrow, the condition you are in?

I don’t care what you think. I am done with all this.

She is aware of the shapes of men and women gathering with laughing mouths to watch.

Bart says, keep your voice down. Listen, I will take you home.

It’s no longer any of your business.

Yes it is.

No it’s not.

Listen. I want to go north anyhow, go back to Galway. There’s more luck to be had there. I know some people. He leans forward and whispers. Why don’t we try and get some money here first. Then take a car northwards.

Would you listen to yourself. We are here since forever and have nothing to show for it except wet-cold and hunger and today you nearly got us dead. I am sick of it. I am sick of the sight of you. Get away from me with your stupid arm. Get away from me, I said.

She turns towards some stranger and points at Bart. Tell him to leave me alone.

Calm down, Grace.

The man steps forward and says to Bart, this young woman says to leave off, maybe you should leave her.

Bart pulls his knife and waves it. How about I chat with you instead?

She steps between the man and the knife and shouts into Bart’s face.

I don’t love you.

The way of Bart now and how she will never forget, so very still and something awful happening to his eyes as if a soul in a body could collapse, the way his mouth puckers a wordless hole and then behind him some stranger laughs. Of a sudden Bart pulls her forward into a kiss and she meets the strange taste of his mouth and a voice from her innermost shouts until she pushes Bart and strikes his jaw with her fist.

She shouts, I told you to fuck off.

She tries to shake the hurt out of her hand.

Encircling laughter fills up her ears and Bart useless before her.

Her body and her shadow coming apart as she takes flight down the street.

She sidles into the reeking chat-laughter of men outside the taverns, Colly letting loose one of his bawdy songs or a good yarn learned from McNutt, watches them laugh with her. Lets the smiling men buy her drink. Watching all the while for Bart, who follows like some stray dog, his face grown long and silent watching from the shadows. She points him out to other men, watches their mouths wag with laughter. She thinks, it is good this power you can have over another, like a hand closing over a fist. Later, when she turns to laugh at him, he is gone.

Into the night and how the world becomes strangeness, everything inwarding to thought. She is sad-happy. She thinks she is the best-ever of herself. Colly roaring his head off, then singing a song along with two strange men and she does not know where they have come from. She is amazed at her own voice. Men whisper and walk with her and ask where are you from, who are you now, would you like me to walk with you? She humors some of them and waves the knife at others and then she is walking the docks and who is that but Mary Bresher warming her hands over a barrel fire.

Grace says, I thought you had given up following me.

Mary Bresher says, I am not following you—who would follow you, the show you are making of yourself.

You sound like my mother.

Your mother would not know you.

I’ll tell you what. Go away and fuck yourself. I am sick of your little hauntings.

Colly roaring for some tobacco and here is that fellow from earlier offering her a light and she walks with him, hears her own words as if another were speaking them, finds herself in a doorway with this same fellow and he offers her a bottle and she takes it and he is trying to kiss at her neck and she finds his hand between her legs and does not mind it. Time folding light into dark and of a sudden she is staring at her vomit all over the man’s feet and he is roaring at her and she is coming at him with the knife and he is gone, what is the city and what is the night, and you must lie down here, lie down in this corner, so colding, so colding.

This murmuring city and then her eyelids open. Oh! Oh! She sees two low slum buildings and the sky between them blowing cold upon cold. Her mouth is turf and her head spaded. This everything-hurts-all-over. Oh! Oh! Oh! She is shocked to see blue fingers, pulls her fingers into fists and tightens her shivering arms about herself. Colly says, hey, muc, are you awake? She cannot listen, this dry-brains head and this pain beyond terrible. Are you listening, muc, I’m trying to tell you. It is then she realizes she has no cloak. She comes upright with a sudden alertness, leans crookedly against the doorway and tries to see about her feet. Colly!

Two street cleaners with a swaying pushcart go past her heaving a smell of human waste. The eyes of one ask if she is all right and her eyes study him as if he were the taker of her cloak but he is just some street cleaner, some old simpleton washed in dirt. She turns and stares at this doorway she slept in, this doorway that put her out of her own feeling, this doorway that stole her cloak. The city is cold and the sky is a barren country. She wants to punch the screaming gulls. Thinks, what have you done to yourself, your feet covered in vomity drink and everything stinks of piss.

She does not see the city as she walks but stares into the puzzle of herself, searches her mind for a story of the night but there is nothing but dark. How hunger has come ravenous and this eating cold and she begins to see the night as if in fragments from a dream.

Bart!

He has not returned to their room. She bends to a woman slumped by the edge of an unlit fireplace and asks if he has been seen. The woman lets out a long breath as if it were the last of her ghost. Outside and she washes her face with icy water from a tap and a boy tries to charge her until Colly runs him off.

Listen, muc, he says, forget that citty-armed cunt altogether, we are better off without his bad luck.

And yet she walks the city until footsore. This strange feeling that has come upon her. Seeing his boxy shoulders and march-step in every man who is another. And so what if you have become a sleeve puller like everybody else, things are different now and that’s the way of it but things can also get better and so they will. She cadges tobacco from an old sailor with tarry fingers and fishy women tattooed on his arms. His watery wrinkled eyes surmise her head to toe. He asks if he can walk with her but Colly tells him to fuck off. She dulls the hunger with smoke, watches some fellow falling under the kicks of two constables and being dragged to standing and she wishes he were Bart because at least then you would have found him.

Day into night and night into day and she thinks she has walked every road in the city, the factory smoke becoming one with the morning’s mist that creeps in over the river and how can you see who is Bart now and who isn’t? She thinks, this is what life is, a great unseeing, the people who took your cloak gone into mist and the people you care about gone into mist and yet you go about living as if you could see everything.

She is struck by a feeling that Bart has taken the north road to Galway without her. This hunger worse now and she pulls at the sleeves of fine-looking men asking for a coin and Colly is rattling her ear with strange talk—bada bada, he says, let’s go into that bread shop and rob it, bada bada, let’s rob that young fella selling rats on a string.

How hunger wolfs through the body after so much walking. You must do what you can and who cares if they hang you. She climbs through the back window of a house in Newtown brazen as the day, comes face-to-face with a child in a high chair, Colly making faces at the baby as she whispers the milky bread out of his hand, hears footfall in the hall, climbs back out again. A breathless dash towards the high wall. Colly shouting, you stupid bitch, you should have grabbed something to sell.

She thinks, you should have grabbed a cloak.

She offers to hold horses for money. Does not count the hours in the room but lies turning through cold and the sound of coughing, listens to the heavy steps of some old man fumbling through the crawl space and along the wall, looks up and sees it is Bart. Even in this half-light she can see he has been undone, his face bloodied, his feet barefoot, and his body without cloak or waistcoat, his knife and scabbard missing. A knife-fight cut into his arm, cut into his shirt stained with blood. He does not look at her but drops like a rag at the wall opposite, curls himself in silence. She goes to him—Oh! Oh!—and he is shivering and she puts her arms around his shoulders.

Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh!

So out of this cursed city. The rain and the outlands whispering together some old talk that is the story of the world, both everything and nothing. Now they are road walkers the same as every other. Walking with a wanty hand held out. She watches how the winter light traps upon all things a film of wet that gives the earth a barren luster. All that is greenworld passing to its dying color.

They stand in a ditch to let a mudded mail coach come shuddering past them, Bart holding on to her elbow.

She knows this business of walking northwards is a gamble. Every rood of countryside is picked clean. The pipe in her pocket a gawping mouth and yet Colly keeps going on about a smoke.

Tappy-tap-tap, tappy-tap-tap, listen up, muc, we should at least put smoke in our bellies to tamp down the hunger.

There are others on the road but why would you look at them, she thinks. They hardly look at you and anyhow haven’t you enough to keep you busy. There is Bart, for instance. He walks with rags tied to his feet and hardly speaks and when he does his voice is a scratch above whisper. He walks like a man who has given up, she thinks, like a man fondling some downwarding thought. His eyes have become like Sarah’s, like that of the unseeing ox. Or perhaps he is just thinking himself forward step by step, his teeth set, his eyes staring into the far-off as if to unthink himself into will. Yet he cannot keep up.

Colly says, I think he is starting to tremble—that is what the cold will do, it eats into you until it has you all over and then you get the sickness.

Every so often she must stop and wait while Colly shoos at Bart as if he were cattle—hup! hup!

Bart will not meet her eye.

She whispers to Colly, it is as if he has left some part of himself in the city.

Colly says, he might have forgotten his shadow—look at the road, the shadow he throws is that of a small dog.

She wants to know what happened to Bart in Limerick but every time she asks he waves his hand as if it were some small bother. She asks him again and again, was it the deaf boy and his friend? One of the street gangs?

Twice today he has said that nothing is the matter. He whispers about people in Galway who will help them. Some fellow who owes him a favor. Says, Galway is only a horse-leap away. We will go there and get fed and rested and then I will take you to your people in Donegal.

They have tunneled through dark into this town called Ennis. Scavengers on the streets like stunned crows. The town watched over by buildings that might be flour mills. She thinks she will always remember the look of the fever hospital, the fright-shapes in the dark by the gates waiting to get in. Bart stops and leans out of breath against a wall. They find a place to sleep on the edge of town, some old forge, she thinks, though it might have been a baker’s once. There are other rough sleepers who speak in coughs. It is the longest night she can remember. The wind now trying to fashion some tuneless song and Bart’s breathing is not wrong but it is not right either. She tries to hold him and keep him warm but he won’t let her, twists like a younger in her arms, his body inwarding towards sickness, she thinks. She lies listening for signs of fever. Bart turning away. She stirs from a dreamy thought, how she can see herself walking the road northwards without the leaning weight of Bart. Then she thinks, but you would hear in every lone step the sound of his coughing.

Today the wind smells of winter and raggy old women. Colly says, that crock-arm kept robbing my heat all night. She wanders the streets of Ennis town and sees how every space has a hand hanging out. There are people here who beg the beggars. Two beggars size upon her when she takes a corner and seeks charity. She finds a rusted tin on a rubbish heap and does a handstand against a shuttered shop, puts the tin out. The sky becomes the street’s filth and the ground becomes sky-puddle. Colly singing some song and she thinks of the strangeness of the world when seen from upside down, if only for a moment the world could be like this, perfectly reversed, how their money would fall from their pockets and their baskets would toss out their food and their jewelry would leap from their windows and you could walk the streets and pick what you like and you would be nobody’s fool.

Twice today Bart has stopped and refused to walk onwards. His head hangs with exhaustion. This road ever-long and every townland in shush. The ditches whispering for some morsel of food or for a swallow of water. She thinks, there is a gap widening between the luckless and the lucked. Heaven for sure is coming down to meet the earth.

It is the lucked who prize open the road’s silence. Carriages thunder the road as if nothing were the matter. People passing by on their way to the city or for ship’s passage, some of them dressed in their best clothes as if traveling to mass or a fair. Their belongings heaped and roped down. She wants to shout, the city is a trick—you think you can hide on its streets and escape this wintering but the city will eat you up. At least in the country the wintering sits on the road plain as daylight and you know where you are at. She stands with her hand held out watching such passing faces for some sign of witness but each is as blinkered as a horse.

Here and there in so casual a manner they come upon a body. Death harrows the silence and speaks as loudly as it wants. Every dead person wants to tell you the same thing, she thinks, that you think what has happened to me will not happen to you—

Bart is walking with his head down and does not seem to notice.

Colly says, the souls of the dead must be in great turmoil, for when you think about it, all a body wants is a shovel and some earth and some peace and quiet but they have been denied all that, have been left out for the birds and the badgers and whatever else as if they were wild animals, and when you think about it, the only thing that separates us from the animals is that we look after our dead and bury them, so it is understandable the dead would be annoyed—what is the world coming to when we let them parade about the place, it is the end of the world for sure.

They stand in the yard of an abandoned farmhouse that shapes its gloom over a barren garden, a feeling of emptiness like presence. She wonders why an elm has had its bark stripped to head height and sees another just like it. Colly says, this was a house of tree eaters, I told you this was going on. For a moment she can imagine them, strange creatures with long arms like that drawing one time passed around in school that showed a monkey-man wearing a stovepipe hat and a jacket and breeches that was supposed to be an Irishman talking to some Englishman, long teeth for nibbling.

She says to Bart, wait there a moment, points her knife and steps slowly into the house.

Wah! Colly says, that smell—this place stinks of bird cac.

Greasy daylight through the window and spatters of bird shit all over the walls and floor. The house two-roomed, emptied out but for the remnants of rough sleepers and some bird clicking by the rafter. There are splinters of smashed-up furniture and jags of broken delft in a corner as if somebody threw the crockery to the wall. Some fool has rolled into the house a log much too big to fit into the hearth and now it sits as a black-charred seat. Colly whispers, that’s a wood pigeon that’s got inside, I’ll bet you I can get it with a stone. The bird hurls itself off every wall and window before fleeing out the door into the wider world, where she watches it dissolve into the all as if it were only a thought of food and that is what you deserve for getting your hopes up. Bart stepping slowly into the house. He sits down on the log, an old man staring into the memory of fire.

Nothing useful can be found in the empty outhouse or yard, not even a fire-striker. Just throwings of wood which she puts beside their unlit fire. The strange emptiness of an abandoned house as if people do leave something behind them, not a memory of themselves, she thinks, but a feeling for somebody else of who they might have been and that feeling meeting no answer.

Colly says, their wheel of luck turned all the way to bad, all right.

She stands at the door and stares at the everlow of cloud, can see houses in the far-off. Her voice brightens. She says, when we get rested I’ll go and ask at nearby houses for a match or an ember, then we’ll be laughing the three laughs of the leprechaun.

Bart stares unseeing at the empty hearth. Without the cloak he has become his bones. He is wheezing through a sucky mouth. She wraps her arms against the cold and sits beside him, wonders who it was tried to eat the bark, the people who owned the house or the wanderers who stayed here after, you’d want to be some kind of fool to eat a tree, let us hope things will not get as bad as that.

She says, I wonder what happened to them, if they became ditch-sleepers or maybe we passed them on the road or maybe—

Colly says, I’m freezing, maybe we can summon the devil and ask him to get this fire lighted.

Fuck up.

Bart looks at her.

Colly says, go out at midnight and you’ll meet him on the road, he’s bound to be waiting for you—can you imagine it?—hey, sir, Satan or whatever they call you, where are you—I’m here waiting, what do you want?—I want some wishes—right so, I’ll grant you three things, what are they?—right, Satan, I want you to get me a great big fire lit and some timber and some nails to go along with it for building and some pig iron and bags of straw and plenty of hens and a milk cow and a field of lumpers and a loom and eight pounds of wool and a sheep and another brown cow while I’m at it and you can throw in a lake full of salmon and as for my second wish—

They lie in a corner and Bart is instantly asleep despite the cold. She spoons into him, rests an uncertain arm on his shoulder. She notices now a second exhaustion that creeps beneath the usual tiredness, a feeling in her legs and arms and chest that frightens her. Bart begins to shake with great coughing and then he goes silent.

She whispers, are you awake?

Bart says, no.

She says, do you think they ate the tree bark or maybe they boiled it? Is there nourish in bark?

Bart moves his shoulder as if trying to get away from her. Then he whispers. Did you not notice?

She says, notice what?

The air.

What of it.

The change in it.

So.

I saw it last night. There was a halo around the moon. You know what that means. There will be a change for worse in the weather.

Inside the dream, Colly is roaring—stir up! stir up! She feels herself loosening from the dream’s entwine—Colly roaring, open your eyes! She awakes and can feel the dread thing before it is thought. Opens her eyes and meets the sudden knowledge of worse, the room heightened with white light, her breath riding before her into the room. A strange and deeper cold. Bart is awake and sitting with his knees to his chin clicking his teeth. His hair and shoulders are covered in bird cac and she wonders if it happened yesterday or during the night, looks to the rafter for sign of life. Bart points to the window and Colly says, you need to look. She says, stop telling me what to do. She gets up and goes to the door, opens it slowly to see what she already knows. Light upon light. The slack-fall of snow upon snow. The world deforming to white as if beauty can be done to the thing undone.

It is Colly who says, will you listen up?

She says, shut up, you.

Bart whispers, shut up yourself.

I’m not talking to you.

Look at the way he is.

He’s fine, so he is. He’s just freezing.

You must be seeing past him, or under him, or a ghost or something but you are not looking at him.

I’m looking at him right now.

He is getting the fever, so he is, same as the others on the roads.

No he’s not.

Yes he is, you silly bitch.

Bart says, I’m not getting the fever.

Yes you goddamn are.

The trees stand in luminous shock. The snow makes guesswork of the road. Colly says, it is an early snow but even still you should have been ready for it. Bart stooping after her like a corpse. He is growling at the snow and growling at her, calls her a heifer, something mindless, finally he goes silent.

She thinks, he is like an old man for sure.

Colly says, you should have left him back where he was, he’s nothing but a hindrance.

Colly sings every song he knows while she counts a marching beat. She knocks her blue knuckles on the door of every house and cabin, it does not matter now about pride or what kind of person you think you are, she thinks. She visits big farmhouses where the weather vanes keep the same frozen silence as the hinges of every door. She knows the hasty rasp of a bolt. The flutter of a curtain. She thinks, two people to your door like this looking the way Bart looks can bring only trouble. Every ear listening for the sound of coughing, for sickness tramps through the snow and leaves footprints and when it knocks at your door it wants to come in, lean over the fire, take a sup of your soup, lie down on the straw, spread itself out, and bring everybody else into its company.

Those who open their doors do so just-about and stand fright-faced and starving. They shake their heads when they see Bart round-shouldered with his razor cough, his face a funny color.

An eyeball in the crack of a door says, you can come in to the fire but that other fellow will have to stay out.

Later she thinks, if only Colly hadn’t spat at him and got it good in the door, he might have given us matches.

They meet a townland where sickness has been tramping about, all right, gone into three different cabins and brought down the fist of God. Each cabin with its walls and roof stoved in as if God finally had enough of their coughing. She knows what this is, that you do not go into a fevered house and tend to the sick or bring out the bodies, but you must close in the walls and the roof on top of them when you think they are dead.

Colly is watching all the time for birds, anything to throw a stone at. The sky silent as grief. Her feet numb and she has to listen to her stomach with its shouty mouth, stops where a fox has tracked ghostly across the road and imagines her hand burrowing into the warmth of its den, pulling it out and strangling it.

We have come too far, she says. It is time to get back to the cottage.

Colly says, the pair of you moping like sad mules.

He starts singing the same line of a song over and over and she starts to sing along, thinks, the more you sing the less frightened you are and isn’t that always the case, perhaps we should be singing every moment of our lives and singing into our graves.

My arse has crossed an ocean,

And still no breezes blow,

And I would it had the motion,

Of but an ebb and flow.

Shut your eyes, she tells Colly. They walk past a young woman delirious in a ditch, the woman smiling as the snow gives last drink to her lips. The snow gowning her white for the slowest of country burials. The woman becoming part of the all, she thinks, that is the sky and the earth locked together in white and forgetting. You do not look but keep walking onwards. This feeling she has. It is not that she tells herself she is different. She knows she is different from all these others on the road, that what she sees around her will not happen to her also. That she will make better choices. So why would you look at them, they have made their choices and you made yours, they aren’t even people, just sitters and starers with their cramp-hands held out like the grabby hands of the dead. They want what you want and would take it out of your hand or even kill you for it so why would you even give them a sympathetic look?

She does not know why they sit around the unlit fire. She thinks it might be the echo of a habit that is as old as people-kind but never have people been without fire so what is going on? She wants to laugh but there is nothing to laugh at. You do not think about the cold and you try to sleep but how can you sleep when your bones shout as loud as this? How you feel every minute of the dragging dark, cannot decide which is worse, the way hunger gnaws your body or the way cold gnaws on what’s left.

She says over and over, the snow will lift, it will lift, so it will. Perhaps in the morning or the morning after. Then we can get you on to Galway.

No more does Bart answer.

Colly says, I told you we should have left him here, we would have got on far better without him.

Walking the however-long of another morning. The trees that drape their icy beggar-hands. A screaming oak on the slump of a hill and beneath it in a field she sees five digging men. They have turned a mound of snow and earth. The slow and heavy sway of a dead-cart moving towards them. The men spade at the ground and they gale their breaths into the frozen air, the ground like pitted teeth to their effort. And no wonder, she thinks. For why would the earth want to become a dead-house? You’d be stuck having to listen to the chatter of the dead complaining all the time about being lumped in together.

Colly says, is that what I think it is over there?

I told you not to look.

You do not look but keep walking onwards.

The beauty of snow is that it allows no smell.

The white road becomes a slippy hill that judges in silence two men struggling like drunkards. They are trying to get their donkey and tumbrel over the hillock. An old man shouting and then he stops and bends as if into thought. She falls like snowfall into the work, puts her back into the push, not an ounce of strength and the look they give her tells her they know it. A son with the same frowning look as his father. The cart unheeding their gruntwork but then it groans deep and moves with a squawk like some old bird shown free of its cage.

The old man stops the mule on the top of the hill. She holds out her hand but the son stares and shakes his head. She sees how these men are not well fed but they are not wintered like most others. She pulls her knife and waves it.

Would you look at that, the son says. Are you an idiot or what?

Colly whispers, don’t back down one inch.

She stands facing them, watches the father step with heavy feet around the back of the cart. He puts a hand up, says, Patrick, leave it. I said leave it, now. He reaches into the corner of the cart and pulls towards him a sack, lifts out five pieces of turf, holds them out to her. He says, the Lord is thy keeper.

She wants to shout at the old man, fuck God’s luck when you can make your own.

Colly says, fuck them hoors only giving us five pieces of turf.

She puts the knife between her teeth and takes the turf, grunts her voice down.

Gimme matches.

The cornered cold is creeping back into the room. She studies the shrunken fire and throws upon it damp wood.

Colly says, people say God is everywhere at once, but so is the devil and everybody knows the devil is fire and so God is the devil and that’s the case proven.

She stares at the fire and remembers how it rushed to life and perhaps Colly is right, perhaps fire doesn’t die because fire is both God and the devil, always waiting behind the air in some other chamber of existence, waiting to rush in and turn everything black with its hunger.

She thinks Bart’s mind has grown slippy in fever. How he refused to lie beside the fire and she had to drag him over. The bitter things he has said. His little whispers. I dreamt you were dead and I liked it. I dreamt we were all dead. I dreamt the world died and everything was better for it.

She says, you cannot be dead and also dream the world at the same time.

He whispers, I can dream what I like. Every man is alone in his own mind. All this is an illusion. I close my eyes and it is gone. None of it exists.

She asks him what he means but he does not answer.

Later, he whispers, even a dog gets a noble death, takes itself quietly to a field.

She rests wet sticks upon the fire, anything to keep it lit but the embers test a weak tongue and haven’t the hunger.

What days pass and it is a dream the last time she has eaten. The snow carried silent upon a howling wind that cuts downwards in blizzard. Everything to nothing, she thinks. Nothing to be had, nothing upon nothing.

You must try to eat some snow, Colly says, imagine it as otherness.

She thinks, how hunger slow-crawls then leaps like a cat. It claws at your thoughts, curls its shape into your sleep, and stirs restless. After a while hunger and cold become the same dullness, you cannot tell them apart. They slow the mind and soften the worry about the changes taking place inside her. The slump of her thoughts. This tingling weakness all over her body.

She realizes now the secret of this place. Why the others left. That there is some power here contained in the earth that rises up and has an effect on the brain, makes you sleepy, the trees whispering their madness to you and it is not you who will eat the trees but the trees who will feed on the dust of your bones.

Stir up! Stir up! Colly says.

She rests her hand over Bart’s mouth a little too long. His breathing as weak as thought. She wanders heavy-footed in the snow. The empty sky and the empty fields and Colly wants to know where all the airdogs have gotten to. He says, if there’s one thing in this country you can rely on, it’s the crows. He has stones ready for throwing but the sky is shut of them. She uses all her strength to climb to a tree’s rookery, shakes snow off the branches, peers for eggs in every abandoned nest.

Colly wants to know if Bart is going to die soon. Brittle light in the room but enough to see how his limbs have swollen. He has been lying in a curling shape for such a long while.

There are times now when she looks at Bart and does not care what happens to him.

The downwards sky into moon-dark and still she keeps walking. Everything floats in this snow-blue light. She knows now she has been here before, how the road winds around a slumpy hill with a screaming oak and the dead in a field beside it. In the dark she can hear the diggers still at work. They never stop, she thinks. They work night and day and still the bodies keep coming. She finds herself walking towards them, you just never know, one of them might help you. It is then it occurs to her these diggers are doing their spadework at night, no sound of carts or people talking. She coughs and the digging stops. She hears whispers, sees something ghost towards her, how a man’s face comes to be out of that moon-dark, a man made only of bones as if he has borrowed his body from what hides in the earth, clothed it with huge eyes, an animal noise coming from his throat as he scares her off with a threatening gesture of his shovel.

She hobbles away as fast as she can.

Colly says, whatever a man finds to eat is his own business, a man has got to live at all costs—who are we to judge?

She tests her hand over Bart’s mouth for breathing. Thinks he is trying to whisper something. Just his voice, a whisper without a body. Whatever he is saying, she cannot hear it.

Then Colly says, what is it you are eating, give me some.

She tries to hide it.

Tree-eating bitch, Colly says.

She wonders when the world fell away from her thoughts. If there is a sky now it is as wide as a whisker, weatherless, unwatched. Her thoughts slump before her in silence. Her sight has narrowed down to stillness. Sometimes she wonders what has happened to the cold, when it left her bones. She thinks Bart might be dead now and even if he’s not he can only be a hindrance. She no longer tests for his breath, though sometimes she thinks she can still hear him.

She dreams she stands under a tree in snow and at the foot of it are dead crows, the birds fallen in hunger, no meat on their bones and horror at the dead in their eyes. She cannot understand why she does not collect them in her satchel. Then she knows it is not a dream or perhaps it is, and anyhow who can tell this dreaming from real, there is no such thing as real anymore. Bart beside her and he is trying to say something so she tries to listen. When I was young my grandfather used to tell us that old people always knew the exact hour of their death. Can you tell me what time it is? She knows that Bart in the truth of the dream is beautiful. She tries to see him but he has gone somewhere else and a voice says, a bird in the hand is worth fuck-all, and it might be Colly but who knows. She dreams of strength, knows there is still hope because hope does not leave until you are dead. Hope is the dog waiting at your door. She hears some mysterious woman knocking and she knows it is Mary Bresher come to tell her to get out on the road. Get out on the road! Get out on the road! Colly roaring at her. Stir up! Stir up! Stir up! Stir up! You stupid bitch.

She digs for strength and finds it in the hiding place. Tells herself, truly, everything is all right. You are only tired, tired so. You are not as bad yet as the others. Daylight to blind the eyes and the world to slush. Her mind quietening to the path of her footsteps. She decides she wants to sit down just for a little while and does so and then the day passes by and she becomes aware of horse noise then shadow and a man’s voice says, why are you lying in the middle of the road?

Then the voice says, you aren’t fevered, are you?

She shakes her head.

Sit up, then.

She turns and sees a head without a body climbing down off a cart. Hands under her oxters hauling her up. The headless voice says, you’re just like an auld sack. Then he says, would this help you? She realizes now she is holding a piece of food. Old man hands filling her satchel with flitchings and some turf. It is old man Charlie, she thinks, rowed all this way in his boat on the snow across the fields of Ireland, and she wants to tell him it is time he rowed her back to Blackmountain, that a promise must be kept.

The old man says, that’s all I have to share with you now. I’m keeping some for the others. Some use having all the turf in the world when you cannot eat it, though some do I’m told. I’m holding out, holding out and you should hold out too because this spell of weather is nearly over and then we’ll all be laughing. I’ll have to eat poor donkey here but I’ll get five penny from the skin dealer and I’ll be ar mhuin na muice. If you know of anyone else who needs fuel, tell them to find me on the road. Keep the heart strong, for death is closing a lot of mouths. Here are some matches.

She nibbles the soft and it is apple and what taste, fights the sick feeling it gives her. Later she sees a woman tottering on the road. You must hide the apple from her, you must hide the apple also from that man lying in that ditch because if they see it they will take it off you. You must eat all this apple before Bart smells a look.

Colly’s endless chatter is getting louder and louder. She wonders where he gets his strength from. Listen up, muc, it’s time you let me be in charge for a while.

She takes the flitchings and turf out of her satchel and shows them to Bart. Look what I found, she says. There is no answer. She sparks the fire to life and watches it devour the flitchings and devour the turf and it is only when the fire has reached its brightest does she notice Bart is not lying where he was. That Bart has gotten himself up. She wonders how a man so sick could lift himself up like that. And then she knows. He has smelled the apple. He has gotten himself up to look for it. A sudden panic then at the thought of Bart finding her last bit of food until she remembers she has already eaten the apple. She calls Bart’s name but he does not answer. She stands up, studies each wall as if the very walls could pull such a trick, cannot figure it, for days he has been too sick to move and now suddenly he is better, he was probably hiding food the entire time, strong enough now to get up and walk. She goes to the door and calls for him but does not hear her own voice. She reaches for a greater shout but her voice is faint and is its own answer. Moving through dizziness and it is then that she finds what look like two tracks in the slush, two odd tracks like the stagger of a scarecrow that stepped into life and for sure they are his, and she follows and then she stops for she has not the energy to follow, how the footsteps disappear like dog tracks on the road.