The Walking People (20 page)

"It's only myself, and no, not long, just a few nights." No one spoke. It was unusual to see a tinker so weather-beaten, so desperate for shelter. Tinkers, more than anyone, knew how to handle the elements. But Michael looked exhausted, his skin ash gray, with bruiselike circles under his eyes and a short beard covering his cheeks. He looked hungry too. The hollows in his cheeks reminded Lily of the boy's father, those high cheekbones, eyes drawn just a touch too close together like you'd see on a dog turned mean. But the boy had turned out to be better-looking than his father. To start with, he was taller. Not quite so tall as Little Tom, but still. And he was broader through the shoulders than his father had been. And though his face showed more of his father's features than it had as a child, they were more attractive on Michael. He was, all in all, very nice-looking—aside from his present state of sodden clothes and bloodshot eyes.

The half-collapsed cottage Michael had found that first day had proved impossible to heat. He got a fire going easily, was generous with the turf, pulled in as close to it as he could, but it was no use. It was as though the collapsed half of the cottage sucked the warmth away and whipped it out toward the ocean. While he lost heart over it, he also found himself amazed. A campfire built in the middle of an open field threw off more heat than this neat square in the wall that had been built specially. He found an old piece of cloth folded on a shelf and had the idea of hanging it between the two halves of the broken house to help keep the heat in, but when he went to unfold it—a curtain or a sheet, he couldn't tell—it fell to the ground in tatters. Then he tried building a wall of furniture at the dividing point, but there was only an old table and a dresser, and two chairs that came apart in his hands when he went to lift them. Eventually he had given up and tried to sleep, but sleep turned out to be almost as difficult as trapping the heat of the fire. All night long, and for the next two nights
as well, anytime he closed his eyes he imagined the remaining half of the roof crashing down on him. The rotted beams creaked in the wind that barreled up from the Atlantic, and the thatched roof of the intact side sagged lower and lower with each hour of rain. The mirror still hanging on the standing wall and the precise shape of the fireplace now seemed to have lasted through years of neglect only to mock him. All his daydreams about living as a settled person had featured cows at pasture, fields healthy and productive. He'd never thought about how settled people begin—the seeds, the lumber, bringing each cow to the bull to make a herd.

Just as Lily was about to ask what in the world brought him out in this weather, Michael Ward drew a long breath and made his confession.

"I done something I want to tell ye," he began, and the Cahills leaned away from the sound of the rain to listen.

 

Each time lightning flashed, Greta noticed, Michael Ward was the only one who did not look to the window. The rest of them turned their heads, stared at the stretch of mud between the cottage and the stable, braced themselves for the clap of thunder that always followed. His presence in their kitchen was not as worthy of their attention as it might have been if the day were clear, or if it had been a regular kind of rain. After the burden of his conscience was lifted, Michael appeared most concerned with finding a new position in his chair, turning himself around in increments, like a pig on a spit. As his damp clothes warmed and slowly dried, the smells buried deep in their wool and cotton fibers were set free and filled the kitchen with more of the outdoor smells Greta had sniffed earlier. In addition to the strong whiff of turf smoke, there also came the scent of something human, more flesh than elements, a body unwashed for more than a week, the underarms of Michael's once-white shirt yellowed with wear. It was different from the cow manure and chicken shite smell the Cahills carried around in their clothes and on the bottoms of their shoes, and although she knew it was a scent that should be scrubbed off him as soon as possible, there was something not entirely unpleasant about it. Every time she looked away, out the window, toward the lightning in the distance
or the mewling of the cows inside the stable, the odor drew her back as decisively as if he'd walked over to her and cupped her cheek in the palm of his hand.

Michael's confession was not brief, and it included a description of how he'd cycled close to one hundred miles. Not tarmacked, easy miles, but country lane miles, roots and rocks cropping up out of the ground, the lane sometimes stretching straight up the side of a mountain before shooting around the side. It also included a description of seeing his mother's headstone, catching it just before it became grown over with moss, and how when he got to the Cahills' cottage, he'd knocked and knocked, shouted his presence, walked around the side of the cottage and shouted again, knocked on the back door as insistently as he'd knocked on the front. He remembered them as good people, he said, and when he entered and took something to eat, stole it, yes, to be fair, though he hoped they wouldn't see it that way, it was the only thing he could think to do. He didn't mention trying the barnacles down at the high-tide mark or seeing a girl's dark head among the waves.

"Our father died," Johanna said sometime after he'd finished and turned a new side to the fire. Thunder clapped, rolled away. Greta could tell she'd been waiting to say it, had started to say it once or twice already but held back until she was sure Michael's story was over. It was a simple statement of fact, the most direct way of bringing their guest up to date. "And two of our brothers have gone to Australia." Her concise summary of the events since Michael was last in Ballyroan took a moment to sink in. Greta knew that in laying it out so bluntly, Johanna was also saying that sad things had happened to them as well. He wasn't the only one. And she'd covered for him, a circumstance that was now making Johanna feel deeply annoyed. Without being one hundred percent sure who the culprit was, without knowing if he'd be back, why he'd done it, if he'd do worse, she'd covered for him, taken the blame, and now here he was proving her a liar. Greta too, because as she always did, Greta had tagged along, nodding her support of Johanna's fib in her wide-eyed goosey way.

"Greta was home that day, at the time you said, and didn't hear a thing. Weren't you, Greta?" Johanna asked.

"Johanna!" Greta said.

"Johanna!" Michael repeated, tapping his forehead with his index finger.

"Well?" said Johanna. "Greta would know if you knocked and called or if you just waltzed in and helped yourself. Greta?"

So Greta hadn't been the one swimming after all. Michael turned to look at her as he felt his explanation fall from his lips to the flames of the fire. Dermot always said that no country person will ever side against another country person in support of a traveller, and Michael wondered if the rule applied to country people like Greta, who surely hadn't seen much or had much to do with travellers and who had a kind way about her. Johanna looked like a different girl from the one he remembered from his last time in Ballyroan, but this younger one, Greta, looked almost the same. She was much taller and looked a bit neater—as if she'd finally grown into the clothes she'd been wearing for years—but in the face she was the same. She looked hard at him before stretching a finger under her glasses to rub her eye, and Michael knew she would tell them the truth.

"Well, girl? Did you hear him calling?" Lily asked.

"I did," said Greta. "He knocked and shouted hallo and knocked some more, just like he said."

"Why in the world didn't you answer?" Lily asked. Johanna asked the same question in the way she uncrossed her legs, shifted, then crossed them again. This was not the story Greta told that afternoon when it was just the two of them in the cottage, part scared and part thrilled at the notion of a Peeping Tom, a full twenty-four hours before they'd notice the flowers on Julia Ward's grave and put the pieces together. Since the funeral, each girl had tucked away her suspicions, knowing the mystery would still be there long after Shannon disappeared. Even after Shannon's departure, after their false confession, after spotting the flowers on Julia's grave, the girls had not discussed the possibility of Michael Ward. Johanna's reason was simple: she didn't want to end up being wrong. And here was Greta saying she'd known for certain all along, had heard him calling, had seen him through the window and recognized him, and had kept the nugget of certainty all to herself.

"I was on my own," Greta said. "And it was a strange voice, a man's voice, and..." She trailed off, hoping she'd said enough.

"You're a goose, Greta Cahill," Lily said, but her tone said she approved. Her youngest daughter had some sense after all.

Grateful, Michael Ward turned back to the fire.

 

The boy made them an offer, and since he was alone, without money, without his entire extended family waiting in the wings to pounce on any sign of generosity, Lily decided, What harm? The western walls of four different fields had crumbled into heaps during the storm and had to be rebuilt. The leaks in the roof of the hay shed would only get worse. A number of trees that dotted the landscape had lost branches, and some had come down completely. Plus all the regular work. The calving season would begin soon, and Little Tom had to go to the fair to sell one of the heifers. Michael could sleep in the hay shed, in one of the dry sections. With blankets, he'd be as snug as could be. It had been quite a while since Lily made a family decision, since she'd stepped into the pantomime instead of just watching from the audience, and the rest of the family felt comforted when she told the boy where he would sleep and what time they ate their meals. It was as if they'd been seated in the wrong chairs for six years and had finally stood up and switched.

To the girls she made one warning, and she waited until both Michael and Tom had left the room: "If he ever lays a hand where it doesn't belong, you come straight to me without stopping."

For Greta, Lily's warning opened up a world of possibilities as abruptly and dramatically as if someone had come into the cottage banging a drum. He might lay a hand on them? Or even if he didn't, he might want to? But which of them, and where would he lay it? And what would it feel like, that broad and weathered hand?

 

At supper on the second evening of Michael's stay, Little Tom tried to ask their guest a question. He pointed his finger in the general direction of Michael's chest and jabbed the air. Greta heard three syllables, understood a long
e
sound in the middle, but she couldn't quite get what he was trying to say. There were words and phrases Little Tom said so
often they didn't need repeating, but the guest at the table meant that Little Tom was trying for words the rest of them weren't used to hearing from him. He tried once more, and again all Greta could make out was the long vowel in the middle. Tom tapped Michael's chest, then pointed outside, then looked to Greta for help.

"Your people?" Greta guessed, and Tom sat back, satisfied. "Where are your people?" Greta asked Michael.

Michael had spent the day reconstructing part of a wall while Little Tom went to Conch to trade hay and turf for planks of wood to lay over the ground where the paths had been washed away. The girls had returned to the inn, where Johanna rubbed the same old rag over the counters in the kitchen and Greta flopped down on one of the guestroom beds and wondered what Little Tom and Michael were doing at home. That morning, as a solution to the mud that would be kicked up by their wheels while they cycled and would surely make them unpresentable for work, they'd decided to pedal with their shoes and socks in their baskets, their skirts folded up and tucked into the waistbands of their underwear for as long as there were no occupied houses along their route and no one would see them. They stopped a mile away from the inn and fixed themselves, but Greta missed a place in the back where her skirt was still caught up and didn't notice until Mr. Breen said "Oh!" at the sight of her cotton underwear and Johanna burst out laughing. Greta resolved on the spot not to speak to Johanna until she apologized, and so far had kept her promise. After the incident, Mr. Breen excused himself to go assess his own storm damage, and did not return all day.

"They're in around Kilkee," Michael said. "Could be headed for the Midlands by now."

"You'll catch them?" Little Tom asked, this a bit more clear than the last. Michael needed the question repeated, and Johanna took it upon herself to change it. "Why'd you leave them?" she asked instead.

"That's not your business," Lily said.

"Did they ask you to leave?" Johanna asked.

"Johanna, you're being very bold," Lily said. Now that she'd come back to life, she resolved to put a cork in Johanna's brazenness, her
cursing, her temper, her attitude—as if she alone ran the cottage, owned Ballyroan. She was so like her father—that notion of deserving things, of being entitled to say whatever they damn well pleased.

"I just left," said Michael, his story even more concise than Johanna's summary of Big Tom's death, the departure of the boys. It was so simple, saying it like that. His father, his sister, his aunts, cousins, brothers, and in-laws all went one way, and he went his own way. But looking at the Cahills, seeing himself stuck in with them at the small table, he was all at once desperate that they not think he disapproved of his family's life, that he thought it was somehow less than the life the Cahills were leading, or any other country family for that matter. It was only that it was lovely and warm inside in the kitchen, the fire roaring, the panes of glass a peephole to the world, where you could sit and appreciate but not necessarily pass through. His father, Michael wanted to explain, thought of all of Ireland as his own, but Michael saw every field, every roof, every turn and dip in the road as belonging to someone else. And they were both right.

Greta put her fork down and rested her chin on her fist to better hear what he'd say next. But there was no next he could think of. He left. Story told.