Red Sky in Morning (8 page)

Gulls hee-hawed in the half-strangled sky and someone came towards him, pulled at his arm and began talking to him, and he saw it was a woman, a face wretched and toothless as she slurred her words whiskey reeking and held a hand out to him in begging. He walked across the quays towards the town rising above him, the cold crawling under his skin, and he stopped to cough and sat down on a wall. The countenance of a man sitting on a sided barrel and he watched him turn towards him, the flesh on his face hollowed to the bone and vicious-looking and Coyle met his stare and the man turned away.

He watched a boy scavenge in the gloom with slant-eyed dogs circling curious, their coats knotted and their tails alert. The boy struggled with a plank of old wood and another boy came a good head taller and he pushed the smaller boy away from the find taking the wood for himself. The small boy fought back with his head tucked into his shoulders and the dogs giddied around them. Coyle watched a man stride over, strike the taller boy on the back of the head and the boy crab away sideways. The man bent to the wood and lifted it to his shoulder and walked off with it.

The cold began to gnaw and his feet were numb in his boots. He blew into his hands and made towards a small fire. He walked past the shape of a man curled on the ground, a coat beneath his body and the man asleep or drunk or both, his hand tight around the neck of a bag with his belongings, and he found at the fire a man and a woman and a heap of children silent. He asked if he could borrow some heat and the woman said surely and they created a gap and let him sit in. The children nursed potatoes on sticks blackening over the flames and the man and the woman were eating quietly. The woman looked at him with dark eyes and smiled with long lips while the man beside her nodded to him, his face hidden beneath a low-pulled cap.

Coyle got down on his haunches and leaned into the heat, the fire scalding the palms of his hands and he rubbed them together. He started coughing and when he finished the woman reached over to one of the children and took the skewered potato from his hand and passed it to the stranger. The child grumbled and the man passed his own stick to the boy and Coyle looked at her and thanked her. When it was cooked he began to eat it, steam bursting the skin and the potato flesh dancing hot in his mouth. The fire began to go out and Coyle offered to help find wood and he left with the man and they walked towards the buildings. Coyle asked him if they were for sleeping outside and the man said they didn’t figure on the boat being kept by the fog and he said they’d have to make do like everybody else. They rummaged around the backs of the buildings and broke up some boxes and heaped the wood in their arms and took it back to the fire.

Some of the children began to sleep and Coyle coughed long and deep into his arm and the woman leaned into the man and spoke to him and when Coyle was finished the man asked him if he was alright.

He spoke quietly. I’ll do.

The woman spoke up. You be careful. You should find some way indoors tonight.

He looked up at her, tried to see her eyes. I’ll be alright. Tis just a cough. I’ve heard worse so I have.

Maybe so. But I mind my sister had a cough like that.

Coyle said nothing and the woman continued unbidden.

You remember the freeze. Ten year ago. It came in January and it didn’t lift till February and everything was buried beneath it. It went up to the knees in some places and you could hardly walk for all the snow and the cold about ye and we couldna harvest a thing.

The man beside her ayed in agreement.

We burned all the fuel we had in that month alone and we sat there indoors, with the father cursing the cold and the idle field outside and him sitting about inside, cursing the weans for there was a load of us. Then one day, it was about three weeks after it started, there was the hint of a thaw—everything started to melt a wee bit and I remember watching the ground begin to slush and the father sent us all out and we started rooting whatever we could get that wasn’t ruined in the hard ground.

The woman stopped talking and looked to a small girl who was tugging on her mother’s shawl. The mother took the girl in her arm and wiped the girl’s runny nose with the sleeve of her smock. Coyle looked around the fire at the children. Shadows darkening their small sleeping faces. One boy awake and he was listening to his mother’s story. Go on with your story, he said.

My sister was the biggest of us all, the woman said. Anne was near twenty and I was fourteen. We were freezing and I remember my hands were blue and John, my wee brother, he was a stubborn git. He said damn the work and went to go back inside and my father dropped him with his fist in the field.

We stayed out for hours and then the rain began to freeze and then it started snowing again and the father he paid no attention but Anne told him to look at us and then he told us to go back in but the sister, he told her to stay, and she never said a word of complaining. Later she nearly sat on the fire for need of warmth and the next morning she wouldna get up outta bed with the coughing.

It was thawing a wee bit that day too and the father he made her get up again and she wasn’t fit for it and she told him so but he gave her a box on the side of the head and pulled her out of the bed. She went back out to the field with the rest of us and she was wheezing and coughing and the hands were dark blue again from the cold and it only got worse.

That night the father cursed her high and low, saying what kind of daughter had he brought her up to be and him having no money for a doctor, so we moved her by the fire and we tended to her. It was only when she got much worse, it were late one night, and she was keeping us all awake and we sat around her, she was in a wild fever and she was wheezing badly and she was coughing like it would never stop and the father, he began cursing and he went out and we heard him fixing up the horse and cursing at it and when he came back a few hours later he had the doctor with him.

It was the first time we’d laid eyes on a doctor. He seemed very small for we thought he’d be tall and he didn’t say a word but he tapped the sister’s chest and he listened to her heart and he put his head to her chest again and we searched his face but it wasn’t revealing anything so it wasn’t and he didn’t even look at any of us. John hiding behind me and then the doctor went by the door and he put on his coat and hat and he spoke to the father but we couldna hear what he said because they were talking in low voices but we saw him nodding his head and we didn’t know what he meant by that but later that morning when it got bright anyhow she were dead and the father he died too the year after.

The woman pulled the girl close to her and rubbed a hand through her hair. In his mind Coyle began figuring the best time to go south out of Derry and where to go after that and how long he’d be in hiding. And he saw in his mind images of how he’d get things sorted out. Get back and fix what’s left to be fixing. He took hold of the ribbon in his pocket and rubbed it between finger and thumb and the woman saw him with it and he closed his hand around it when she saw him.

So anyways, she said. That’s all I’m saying.

T
HE EVENING WAS MEASURED
in cups of beer. The Cutter stood soused to the bar and he saw two men push through, one of them towering above all others and the other man behind him with only one eye. He looked at them and then turned away, something about the manner in which the tall man carried himself, and his way of taking in the face of every man in the room.

He watched the pair go to the counter and the tall man take off his stovepipe hat and put it on the bar. The barman pulled down a bottle of brandy and a bottle of port and poured them into a glass and gave it to the tall man who took the mixture and went over to the fire with the contents swirling. He bent and lifted a poker black-nosed from a bucket and placed it in the burning turf. He waited and took it out glowing. He put it near his lips and blew the dust off it and the steel brightened at the attention of his breath and then he placed it in the drink. The glass began to smoke and the man put the poker back down and shook the mixture and drank.

S
O COLD HE WAS
and his guard dropped low and he braced to enter a tavern. He strolled sober-eyed till he had two unguarded mugs in each hand and he squatted by the fire and drank them. Warmth fired his belly and his head began to ease and he was joined by another man who stood squat-legged and stuffed into his trousers and was too drunk to talk. The man stood with his eyes closed while resting a hand onto the air in front of him as if to steady himself.

Coyle emptied the mugs and got up and went outside and found another tavern. He stood at the crowded counter casual among inebriates and he watched them drinking and he took his chances, a glass untended on a table and he curled his palm around it and when he turned around he knew he was exposed. Above the din rose a voice indignant and then a man quick-standing but Coyle was already gone.

He flitted the shadows that rested their backs upon the doorways and he skulked beneath the gaze of women who solicited him, come here to me you they said, their cheeks a brazen red and their bodies lolling in come-hither affection. Men tumbled from taverns and he sought refuge away from them cramped and bone-weary in a doorway blanketed dark, the smell of piss in the air hung with the voices clattering from the Cowbog, song or shouting they were up to it was hard to tell for singer and shouter approached all the same, and he listened to them barrack their way up the street and watched them kick past him and when a young couple came by and slipped giggling and groping in beside him, they did not see him get up and walk sullen to anyplace else, tired and terribly alone and the streets quietening down around him.

H
E FOLLOWED THE MAN.
Watched him hang first on the jambs of a tavern door circling the cobbles with his feet. And then the man humped himself heavy into the night dragging an old suitcase behind him. Well-dressed so he was and his face was curlicued with two gray whiskers that rose up near to meet his eyes. He pushed up the street as if heaving weight invisible before him. Coyle heard him wheeze and giggle and listened to the slow plod of his feet.

Gas lamps licked long shadows on the street. The man staggered and stalled and Coyle stepped back to wait against a wall, watched the man fumbling for something in his pocket and saw it was a handkerchief. The man put it to his nose and horned it twice and he leaned forward and began to walk and drag his belongings. He launched loudly into song but the words fell dead from the air as if he could not support them on his own, needed the accompaniment but found none, and he halted again for breath and leaned a hand against a wall. Like this they traveled on the barren street, stopping and starting and Coyle waiting each time behind him, following now behind him in the middle of the street until he became more certain of the idea within himself.

A lane leaned off right and the man turned to take it and he stopped again and dropped his case and stood legs apart, a pool of piss beginning to form at his feet, the urine forking then weaving into a confluence as it trickled down the hill to where Coyle was running upwards towards him now, coming at him sideways with a shoulder that toppled the man off his feet. The man hit the ground heavy on his side and a rasp of air left his lungs and Coyle rolled him over. No word of protest from the man but a low groan, the fetor of booze and sour sweat, and Coyle could not look the man in the face. He reached into the pockets and found a wallet and he took the notes inside and poured out the coins and he paused and put a single note back in the wallet and put it back into the coat and he looked around and then he stood and stole down the street.

He turned a corner, no idea where he was going but to find someplace to sleep. He heard the echo of footsteps behind him and onwards he walked, heard the steps continue behind him and he stopped to wait by a door. The steps died off and he started out again and then he heard them continue. He put his hand into his jacket and tightened a hand around the small bundle of notes and then he stopped and stood in front of the closed front of a shop and he waited. The shape of a boy appeared on the street. Eyes like a cornered rat. Coyle looked at him as he went past and the boy then stopped and turned and stood peering. Coyle looked back at him.

I seen what you done, the boy said.

Coyle pulled his hands out of his pocket.

You didn’t see nothing. Get to fuck.

I did. That man on the ground.

I done nothing so I did.

Aye you did and I seen it.

Coyle watched the boy and let his words hang in the air and then he coughed into his arm.

Get away before you make yourself some trouble. I’ve a pain in me chest and a pain in me head. I’m not in the mood for your shite.

The boy rubbed his nose with the back of his hand and then he took a step closer, his rat eyes peering.

Gimme some.

I’ll give you a lug and that’ll be the height of it.

I’ll tell so I will.

Coyle laughed. Who are you going to tell at this hour of the night?

There’s people so there is.

Listen wee fella. I donny want to hurt you so I don’t.

The boy was silent and Coyle stepped out of the doorway and the boy took a step back. Coyle walked past him and proceeded up the street. He wandered aimless with nothing now in his mind but sleep, and then he heard the boy was still following and he turned slowly and sighed. Hungry as I am. He waited for him and looked the kid in the face, saw the hard stare of hunger, and he dipped a hand in his pocket and took hold of a coin and threw it back down the street.

Go on, he said.

T
HE SNUFFLE OF A HORSE
and the air kissed him cold and he tried to rub his body, stretched out his legs but found he could hardly move, his limbs dead to the world, and when he opened his eyes it seemed to be early morning, and he saw Jim beside him on a bale, his body robed in shadow but for the fierce gaze of his eyes and Coyle looked at him and he went to speak but he could not find the words and he fought against himself and when he found the power the words were strange in his mouth, sounded like the strangled words of some animal strange to him and they were not what he wanted to say and Jim looked at him sadly and lowered his head and when he spoke Coyle could not hear the words for they were not the words of his brother at all and by then they sounded far away.