The Law of Dreams (23 page)

Tramping was strange and addictive, a kind of perfection, but there came a
time you had to stop, or you would walk right out of yourself. It would be easy.

* * *

“
I AM
needing tip boys. Ask
anyone — I treat my fellows square. Here, man, taste this.”

The contractor had been standing in the road, waiting with a cart and a
cask of beer, willing to hire any tramps that came along. Drawing a pot of beer, he
offered it to Fergus. “Wages paid once a month, regular. Three shillings per day.
Coin of the realm.”

Sipping the tawny beer, Fergus looked across fields lightly flavored with
snow to a cutting where hundreds of men with picks and shovels were gouging a
right-of-way.

Looking the other direction, he watched the sea smashing the coast. It
seemed yellow, so angry in its foam.

“Samuel Murdoch is my name.” The contractor wore a straw hat
tied under his chin with a ribbon and an old swallowtail coat, weathered purple.
Pantaloons were tucked into the tops of horse boots spattered with mud. He watched
Fergus sip the beer. “You're a good Irishman — where are you
from?”

The days of the Dragon fell away and he saw his sisters and parents, and
the white faces of dead girls — Phoebe and Luke — so strangely composed.

Feeling the contractor staring, Fergus looked up slowly.

Man, I'm from Hell. I am dosed in death.

But you had to shove all that down. Conceal it. It was poison to you,
possibly a hanging.

“Limerick,” he said.

Murdoch nodded briskly. “I'm Carrickfergus, myself. All my
fellows are Irishmen, pure and pure, excepting a few little black Welsh and one or two
Cornwall miners that don't cause any trouble. I pay coin of the realm, no scrip,
and I treat my fellows fair. Is that good beer?”

“It is.”

“You're my man, then.”

Fergus hesitated, clinging to the freedom of the road. So far his head had
been clear, but if he kept on any longer, alone, bad thoughts would return.

The dead unburied, pecking him.

Four days of solitude was enough.

“All right.”

“Good man. Finish that up and go see my timer,
he'll set you down in his book.”

THE CUTTING
was a notch in the hill. Hundreds of navvies
were digging it wider and deeper, filling horse carts with the excavation.

The camp sprawled over muddy ground adjacent to the right-of-way. He
crossed a field where dozens of spare axles, cartwheels, wooden wagon-tongues, and
barrels of grease were arranged in neat rows and stacks. In other fields there were
dumps of gravel and yellow sand; stacks of building lumber, and timber sleepers; black
mountains of coal. A park of wrecked horse carts neatly arrayed had been picked over for
salvage.

Heavy drays were squishing along the road in and out of the camp, loaded
with casks and crates, bundles of iron tools, burlap sacks of meal.

Despite the abundance, there was an air of meanness to the sprawl. Horses
standing bleakly in an icy field stared at him walking by. Looking up, he could see
shanties, tents, and shebangs where the men lived, terraced on the muddy slope just
below the cutting.

The heart of the camp was equipment sheds, repair shops, and barns, all
built with green lumber. Mud alleys between flimsy buildings were deserted except for
drays and teamsters unloading stores. He heard a blacksmith hammering and smelled the
sour tang of hot iron. Passing an unpainted wooden church, he saw every window was
hollow, framed with shards of broken glass.

Every structure in the camp looked temporary, ready to buckle in a hard
wind. The air smelled of iron, wheel grease, and pine lumber. He passed a
bootmaker's tent, with a pair of old boots dangling from a pole, and a
barber's, with a red-and-white sheet flapping in the wind. He met an old man
pushing a barrow of apples and asked for directions to the timer's hut.

It stood at the center of the camp, next to Mr. Murdoch's beer shop,
which had plate-glass windows and looked light and fragile, as though it might lift from
its footings and sail away. The timer's hut was a squat cabin, roofed with a sheet
of iron. A brass bell hung outside. He gave it a pull, and a voice yelled at him to
enter.

Inside was warm. The timer sat at a rolltop desk.
“Close the door, you devil.” He spoke without looking around.

A fire glowing in the nickel stove.

Fergus waited, absorbing the heat of the room.

The timer spun around in his chair. A crab-like youth in a dingy white
shirt, wearing steel spectacles. “Hiring on?”

“I am.”

The timer reached to a shelf and took down a ledger. Opening it on his
desk, he dipped his pen, made an entry, then offered the pen. “Step up and make
your mark, you heathen.”

While Fergus made his scratch, the timer started drawing a pot of beer
from a cask in the corner. The scent filled the warm hut, and Fergus suddenly felt
dizzy. Had been right after all to stop? Perhaps his fortune was to keep walking.

Walk until you come to the end of the country.

Walk into the green sea.

There is nothing holding you in the world.

“Look smart!”

Blinking, he looked up. The timer was holding out a pot of beer.
“Drink up! Mr. Murdoch's best.”

“I can't pay for it. Don't have the money.”

“Mr. Murdoch treats them signing on. Drink up.” The timer took
out a paper ticket from a drawer, marked it, and slid it across. “Your sub ticket
— subsistence, worth nine shillings, deducted from wages. Find a shanty taking
lodgers, and exchange your sub for a week's board. After one week, you may draw
another. Pay is made, last Saturday of the month, at Mr. Murdoch's beer shop in
the camp. If you are thirsty, you may always take a drink at Mr. Murdoch's —
the barmen will mark it against wages. Stay away from the shops in the village —
Welshmen are thieves.”

Fergus stared at the slip of paper in his hand, feeling overwhelmed by
warmth, beer, and an inchoate sense of everything lost.

The sense of spinning.

Like a dead leaf whirling from a tree.

“Try Muck Muldoon's shanty,” the timer suggested.
“He ought to have a crib to spare. His wife's the pretty red
doxie.”

* * *

THE SHANTY
camp on the Welsh hillside resembled the
baile
on the mountain, if the mountain were thoroughly peeled and stripped,
every stream caked over, every well forgotten, every cabin slathered into the
ground.

Muddy paths were lined with shanties that had no proper roofs or walls,
only scraps of whatever would stand.

The terrain was barren and brown, stripped of turf, trees, gorse, animals.
No potato plots. No patches of well-drained limestone ground. Nothing could be raised in
such a slickness of mud.

No mysteries. Everything had been scavenged from somewhere else. The whole
hillside could have been the ruins of one enormous, tumbled cabin, a giant hump of
greasy clay, marled with stones, scraps of canvas, and bits of lumber. Slowly losing its
shape, dissolving under the rain.

Overtaking a woman lugging a sack of coal, he asked her the way to
Muldoon's.

A RED-HAIRED YOUNG WOMAN
was boiling wash in a kettle in front of Muldoon's shanty. Fergus watched her stirring the clothes. Small nose, small hands, wearing an old blue gown.

“They said you take lodgers,” he called.

She looked up. Full lips, freckles. “Got your sub?”

He nodded.

“Let's see.”

He walked up and showed his ticket.

“Show us your tongue,” she demanded.

He stared at her freckled face.

“Come on, man,” she said impatiently. “Open up, or go away.”

He stuck out his tongue as rudely as he could.

She glanced at it, then nodded. “Come along, I'll show you what it is.”

He followed her inside the shanty, resenting her brusqueness.

“There is three rooms. Muldoon and me has the one. The other is lodgers. This here is the cozy, where we eat.”

A table and benches on an earth floor. A battered armchair and a couple of three-legged stools in front of the fire, where an iron kettle was seething on the hob.

The girl rapped her knuckles on the table and pointed to a stain in the wood. “Can you guess what that is?”

“I can't.”

“Blood. That's where they laid out Kelly.”

“Who is Kelly?”

“Kelly was killed Christmas week.” She touched the stain with her fingertips. “Broke like a bowl of eggs. The fellows brought him in here, laid him on that table. They used to say he was rough, but he wasn't, not really.” She rapped her knuckles on the wood. “Come, I'll show you your crib. You get a pot of beer with your supper. If you want more, it's sixpence.”

He followed her into a sleeping room where clothes hung from nails on the rafter. The crib she showed him contained a straw pallet and a blanket.

“Was it Kelly's?”

“It was.” She was small and quick in her movements, smoothing the blanket. She didn't bother looking at him. He sensed her impatience.

“What happened with Kelly?”

“They say he must have slipped while his nag was pulling, and the truck cut off both his legs. Muck found him on the line. I was getting the dinner, nine bits of mutton on string, boiling away. Except they carried in old Kelly, and laid him out on the table. I've scrubbed but it don't go away. Do you want the lodgings or not?”

“Yes.”

“Give it over then.” She took his sub. “The fellows will be back soon. Mutton for supper, spoileen. You get porridge with milk in the morning, and your dinner to carry along. I will sell you some tobacco, if you want.”

“What is your name?” he asked

“Molly they call me.”

“Fergus I am.”

“The basin for washing is outside, and the jakes.”

She left abruptly, and he sat down on the bed, trying to remember what had brought him out here. Mostly the pure, sick desire to keep moving, which he had felt ever since that morning in the snow.

As he lay back on the bed he could hear the girl, outside, stirring the wash.

He stared up at the shabby sticks that were rafters, and the planks and scraps of canvas forming the roof, and knew it could all come down in a good knocking wind, burying him. He could feel the weight pressing his chest, but he made himself stay flat in the bed, though he wanted get up, run outside.

The only true thing is how alone you are now.

You can't run from it or you'll never stop.

IT WAS
dark when he awoke. The fragrant steam of boiling meat made him hungry, and he got up and went out into the cozy, where Molly had lit oil lamps and was kneeling by the fire, stirring the kettle.

She looked up and grinned. Her eyes were green — sea green. Water and light.

“Sit down, man. They'll be in soon enough.”

Sitting on one of the three-legged stools, he took out his pipe. Now that it was settled where he would live and eat and work, he should feel relieved, but did not. He felt the gloom closing around him and wished he were on the tramp again.

He searched his pockets for tobacco, then remembered he had nothing left.

“I can sell you backer,” she said quickly. “That's what you want, ain't it? Sixpence a good handful. Straight backer, too. No junk in it.”

“Don't have the money.”

“I might advance you enough for a smoke. Would that suit you?”

“It would.”

She disappeared into the other bedroom and came out with the tobacco. “You're hired for a tip boy, I reckon?”

“Yes.”

“The work ain't so bad if you don't lose your legs. Most of the fellows spill every penny of wages on drink, and jackets, and Liverpool girls.” She gave him enough tobacco to fill his pipe, then filled her own. “He may knock you around at first —”

“Who?”

“— but if you can stand it, why, the wages is good.”

“Who will knock me around?”

“Muldoon. Muldoon is ganger for the horse boys.”

“Does he knock them around?”

“I suppose he does.”

“Does he knock you around?”

“Sometimes he does. Ain't that fine backer?”

“It is.”

“If you are still here tomorrow, I shall advance you sixpenny worth.” She puffed her pipe. “This is fine smoke, ain't it? Don't buy backer at the tommy. They will skin you, give you three ounces for four, and it's rotten old meal besides. A fellow told me they mixes ground old bones with their backer. My stuff is quite pure. Do you like playing cards?”

He had seen the boothmen and horse dealers at fairs playing brightly colored cards, and gentlemen at Shea's with their cards, cigars, and brandies.

“I never have, myself. It's a con, isn't it?”

“It is, and it isn't. Myself, I deal a pretty straight game. Only for amusement really. And a penny here and there.” She grinned. “Won't you like to play sometimes? You can always play on tick. I trust my fellows.”

“Perhaps I shall.”

Drawing smoke, she held it, then let it sidle between her lips. She was looking at the table, where she had already set out supper plates. “I used to deal the fellows cards on that table — do you know the game Pharaoh?”

“I don't.”

“It's common. They deal it at the fairs. Me and my old mother, we've lived on the cards. All over Ireland. Working fairs, you must keep moving. You don't like 'em to know you. Poor old Kelly, he liked a hand or two. I ain't played since they brought him down. I scrubbed the table, but it don't go away. He wasn't rough, Kelly, not really.”

He heard noises outside.

“Oh, here we are,” she said, “I hear the mighty fellows!” She jumped to her feet and was lifting mutton from the seething kettle when the door opened and a small, wiry man wearing a leather coat stepped inside. He stopped and stared at Fergus.