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  He reached the Owenduff River, which laboured to drain the two loughs of their water against the constant replenishment of the West of Ireland’s rains. He waded in, the water shallow in late August but the cold still biting through his britches. His balls and pócar (his ‘poker’, as Thomas called it) shrivelled to aching tightness as the leathery soles of his feet carried him across the stony riverbed. He clambered out on the bank and rested a moment, allowing himself to be soothed by the whispers of the lazy waters.

  He looked again along the valley where his home had once stood. The land hadn’t always been in the ownership of Lord Lucan. He’d acquired it from another of his peers, Lord Faulks, Earl of Somethingshire in England, he couldn’t recall exactly. A place of plenty, he imagined, where people dwelled in splendid homes of granite and glass, where the wood of the tables couldn’t be seen for the abundance of food. At least that was the picture his father and Thomas had painted for him in recent times, their visions inspired by burgeoning bitterness.

  Lord Faulks hadn’t been the worst, although word had it the nobleman had never set foot in Ireland, inheriting the estate of two thousand acres from his father. It was a small estate by the standards of many of his kind. Lord Lucan had sixty thousand acres, it was rumoured. Faulks, a young man of education, was said to have been more interested in botany or biology or one of the new fields of science that were now the subject of much study in England. Life as a tenant of his had been no fairytale, but his rents were fair and any improvements to a tenant’s lot brought about by his own efforts remained his own property. They had ten acres then, sufficient to exist beyond subsistence. After rent obligations had been fulfilled and mouths fed, the surplus lumpers could be sold for grain or even to buy a chicken or a pig. They’d had five or six chickens running about the house at one time, he remembered, although the taste of an egg was by now lost to his memory. Then Faulks decided to sell and Lord Lucan had emerged as the buyer. They were exchanging one preposterously moneyed lord for another. Unlikely ever to set eyes on him either. Their just-bearable lives would progress unperturbed, no better, no worse.

  Then Harris had arrived, Lucan’s land agent and the estate’s overseer. Most of Lucan’s vast holdings at that time were in the north of Mayo, around Castlebar. When the tenants met in the secret hollows of the mountain to sip their poteen, words were uttered of Lucan’s ruthlessness. Around Castlebar they called him ‘The Exterminator’. He’d put thousands on the roadside, left them to rot without batting an eyelid. Likely he would do the same here. The men shivered as they pulled their coats against the wind – and the fear that the whispers about Lucan spoke the truth.

  At that time over twenty homes stood in the valley. All gone now, no sign even of a single stone atop another to mark the fact that people had once lived here: farmers had toiled, children had run about, families had eaten, songs were occasionally sung. Then the eviction crews had come, constables accompanied by hired thugs, bringing their machines of destruction, descending on the people, burning the thatch from over their heads, levelling the walls to the sound of screaming women and crying children, impotent looks on the faces of the men, shamed before their womenfolk.

  They’d all been given a choice. They could each have plots on the mountainside, four acres apiece, rent the same as they currently paid for ten of fertile land. Or else they could have nothing. Some chose the latter, especially those with many mouths to feed. Four acres of soggy turf couldn’t grow food for ten people. They’d taken the boat to faraway places, America mostly. God alone knows what became of them. A handful of the farmers had elected to stay, too long a part of the place to imagine a life beyond. Since then their four acres had become three, then two, as Lucan sought to subdivide the holdings, increase his tenantry and still extort his rents. A single Scot, Buchanan by name, was leased the land where twenty families once lived. Then the land was given over to pasture; it was more profitable.

  Rested, Owen shook the memory away and moved on. He soon reached Derrintin Lough, two jagged-edged ponds of water joined in the middle by a narrow channel, near the centre of which sat a tiny elongated island, which was more a lump of rock with a dusting of earth and a canopy of stunted trees and shrubs. The tiredness in his legs gave him pause as he looked into the peaty brown water. His limbs had been feeding upon themselves for months now, their fat burned away, languid muscle over bone all that remained. A frog croaked, masquerading somewhere nearby as grass or moss. He looked about, seized a stick and studied the reedy grass. It sat immobile, barely visible against the lush growth, alert for predators. A hind leg moved almost imperceptibly, ready to spring. The rotting stick came down on its head even as it rose into the air towards the water and it fell twitching onto the ground. He sank to his knees, grabbed it by the hind legs and held it up before his eyes. A tiny nodule of blood clung to the creature’s shattered head. He shoved in into his mouth whole, bit, crunched, closed his eyes. No taste, just texture, liquid and solid, sinew and slime. It filled his mouth, spilled from his lips. He pawed at his jaw to shove the escaping tissue back in. A lump went down his throat, painfully, as his gullet had narrowed through lack of use, and he coughed, scrambling forward to the water on his knees. Cupped hands impulsively splashed the water towards his mouth, dousing the sudden awareness of his own revulsion. He hunkered back, panting and staring into space as his stomach got to work consuming the unfamiliar meat.

  It was only fifty feet, maybe less, to the island. As a boy he could have swum there and back ten times over. Not now. But to fish from the shore would prove worthless and dangerous as fishing and hunting on Lucan’s property was strictly forbidden. Nearby, a large lump of driftwood knocked gently against a boulder. He looked about for other people but the landscape was devoid of human life. He pulled the small pouch of rabbit hide from his pocket and tied it around his neck, stripped naked and threw his threadbare shirt, jacket and pants away towards drier ground. He pushed the log out with his toe and plunged into the water. He gasped and spluttered, clinging to the log with a stick-like arm, his nerves rebelling against the outrageous cold. He had to get moving, warm himself from the inside out. His free arm reached and pulled, reached and pulled, his legs kicking, propelling him sluggishly outward. It took him ten minutes. He scrambled up and beat his arms about him in the warm August sun, then hurried through the trees and the shrubs towards the eastern tip of the islet.

  Owen emerged and looked into the black depths of the water. For months in this spot he’d baited the fish, a trick his father had taught him: maggots were frequently cast into this dark pool at the isle’s tip, giving the fish a taste for them, drawing them to the spot. He retrieved the long straight wooden pole he’d secreted behind a rock. It was wrapped about with his mother’s strongest thread; a bent pin was his hook. From the pouch around his neck, he spilled a handful of maggots. As he busied himself with the line he imagined his family back in their tiny cottage, his father, brother, sister, the only ones left now, probably cursing that he hadn’t returned with food. In so many ways he felt he’d been a disappointment to his father. Couldn’t dig a potato pit for all his worth. Cut the turf too thickly. Thatching not tight enough. Too weak to lift a rock. Run home to your mother. Hide your face inside a book. It’s all you’re good for.

  His father had never said any of these things to him but Owen could hear him saying the words behind his furrowed brow. And then his father would turn to Thomas. Give your brother a hand, Thomas, he would say. Thomas wearing a crooked grin as he sauntered across the hillside. ‘Made an arse of it again, spalpeen?’ And he would ruffle his younger brother’s hair, Owen shrugging him off. Yet he loved Thomas deeply.

  He set aside the plumpest half-dozen maggots and cast the rest into the water, watching as they twirled and faded one after another into the darkness, then skewered one of the others on to the hook and exhaled some warm breath on the tiny doomed thing. It immediately began to wriggle furiously, as though brought to life again by his breath. He quickly cast
the line while the maggot convulsed; its death dance would hopefully prove irresistible to the prey. He sat and studied the water, his naked legs dangling over the edge of the rock, and prayed that God would look kindly on his endeavour.

  Until the moment when Owen’s mother, Honor, died early in ’46, he’d never seen his father weep. Weakened by childbirth and hunger, Honor faded before their eyes into a tattered rag. Patrick, the infant, had somehow survived, but only briefly. Barely nine weeks passed before they had laid him too in the earth, his father questioning God’s reasoning for bringing the child into being at all.

  But their father had eschewed bitterness, remained stoical. He refused to entertain any rebellious inclination towards their British rulers or resentment at their landlord or his minions. It was the early days of the famine then and many persevered in the hope that the next potato crop would bring an end to their misery. Battling with his pride, he reluctantly accepted so-called ‘outdoor relief’, nourishment provided mostly by the Quakers in the form of soup kitchens. Then the Poor Law known as the ‘Gregory Clause’ (the ‘Gregory Curse’ to the peasantry) had dictated that this relief would be denied to any cottier holding more than a quarter of an acre of land. The Government had effectively given them a choice: give up your land or starve. It was believed far and wide that this clause was simply a means of facilitating the eviction of tenants so landlords could grow more profitable cash crops or turn land to pasture. Michael Joyce refused to surrender his land, clinging to the hope that they would turn a corner. And despite their misery he had resisted recourse to hatred. The British hadn’t brought the potato blight. Some malevolent twist of nature had thrust it upon their heads. And their treatment at the hands of the landlords was simply the lot of their kind the world over. Thomas became increasingly deaf to his father’s pronouncements. And the truth was that Owen couldn’t suppress his own resentment at their predicament.

  Then his sister Bridget had taken ill the previous September, in the third year of the blight. The fever. Typhus, they called it. Too weak to do battle with the sickness, she had lain on the straw, by turns wailing in a tortured screech, shivering, sweating, shielding her eyes from the dim light. Each of them had cried at her side as they had listened and clasped her hand. Thomas had become enraged and dared to charge his father with finding some help. But his father hadn’t rebuked him or struck him, he’d simply stared back across the smoky space for some minutes before departing into the fading evening light.

  He returned some hours later and, with unmasked impertinence, Thomas asked where the hell he’d been. His father struck him with the back of his hand and then immediately sought to comfort his eldest born, a gesture shunned by Thomas.

  Owen knelt over Bridget’s prone form and spoke through tears. ‘She’s weak, Father. The pox has spread everywhere. Look at her legs. And she can’t breathe.’

  Michael Joyce stared at them and spoke with rage bitten down in his words. ‘I went to see Harris, to plead for help. When he learned that Bridget had the fever he drew a pistol and threatened me. Geraghty escorted me beyond the gates. He told me not to return. And he said to make sure “I burned the bitch’s body.”’

  A snarl forming on Thomas’s face withered before it could rise, as Owen, conscious of a stirring in his sister’s body, uttered her name aloud. Bridget whimpered and turned her head. She opened her eyes and smiled at Owen, then drew another tortured breath, the last of her twelve years of life.

  The two boys sensed a shift within their father, deprived now of his wife, his infant son and his eldest daughter, a re-ordering of the rules that defined his world. He would mumble to himself that God had tested his faith beyond endurance. In those lightless days after they laid Bridget into the earth, it seemed that in his father’s mind a more basic law superseded even those of God, that of survival.

  It was October and winter was approaching. Once again the blight had turned their crop of potatoes to a fetid mush and the unfamiliar turnips had been ignorantly sown, their yield a fraction of that expected. Their meagre rations would hold out a month if they were lucky. Owen had been fishing from that same favourite spot in Derrintin Lough when his father had appeared from nowhere, a hundred yards away on the northern shore. He’d been on the point of calling out, but something checked him. Owen recognised that, like a timorous animal, his father was skulking. Crouching and watching, he saw Michael Joyce pull an object from beneath his jacket, grip it with both hands, pivot and swing, sending whatever it was twirling skyward, defining an arc towards the lough’s glassy surface, the crisp hiss of the splashing water reaching his ears a moment after the event, the object lost to man’s knowledge in the inky blackness of the lough.

  His father fell to his knees as he pulled off his coarse woollen jacket and plunged it into the water, then his shirt, every action punctuated by a glance over his shoulder. He washed his face and splashed water on his bony chest. Owen puzzled most at the washing of his hands. If he did it once he did it six times, each time studying his palms as though for some unyielding stain. His father finally wrapped his face in his palms and across the stillness of the water, Owen shivered as the sound of sobbing reached him. He knew then that whatever malign stain troubled his father, it was not to be found on his hands.

  For days after, his father was withdrawn, residing in some dark recess of human existence. And unexpectedly there was meat on the table. Boiled in the pot, a thin, flavourless broth, but greeted with jubilance. The broth was produced first on the very evening that Owen had seen him by the lough. He’d been to Drummin, he’d said, three miles to the north, a fair hike on matchstick legs and a hollow stomach. He’d bartered some venison from a traveller in exchange for an old ring. Owen thought better of questioning the implausibility of this. It seemed inconsequential when set next to the feeling of food in one’s belly. Michael Joyce warned them that the subject of the meat was not to be discussed with their neighbours; desperate people, he’d muttered, were capable of anything, violence even. Owen remembered his father’s eyes seeking those of Thomas as he said this, the pair sharing a brief conspiracy of thought.

  A local found the gamekeeper Geraghty a week later, his body dumped beneath Tullynafola Bridge over the Glenlaur River, not a mile away. Word was about the hillside that Harris’s lackey had been beaten to death with his own musket.

  Four constables turned up the next day in their flat caps and dark green uniforms. The landowners harboured fears of a surge in agrarian attacks and the return of the scourge of the Ribbonmen. The Irish Constabulary had been charged with ferreting out any so-called secret agrarian societies and stringing them from on high as an example. The policemen dismounted as Michael Joyce met their eyes, then answered their questions. They searched their home, Sally looking up at them with vacant eyes as the men overturned the family’s meagre possessions and held lanterns into every crevice. Michael Joyce stood stock-still and watched. The boys waited outside. The constables had been looking for the musket, Owen learned later. Find it and they find their man. But their search proved fruitless and they moved on to the next dwelling along the hill.

  They subsequently learned from neighbours that the constabulary believed Geraghty had stumbled upon a poacher, had fired and missed, and the murderer had overcome him before he could reload. The attack had been frenzied. Some said Harris’s gamekeeper had been struck twenty times. An unhinged mind moved among their community. A lunatic. A savage.

  The subject of Geraghty was never spoken of again. To the land agent, Harris, his gamekeeper’s death had been an inconvenience, nothing more. An Englishman, Burrell, had taken Geraghty’s place. No one was arrested, although the constabulary did question a man by the name of Pádraig Walsh from up the valley, a suspected Ribbonmen sympathiser. But he had an alibi and no other evidence had revealed itself.

  It had been a bitterly cold winter, but somehow they’d all survived. It was during this baleful period, a week shy of Christmas, that a pair of kindly Quakers appeared at their door
on horseback. Owen had heard that the Quakers and others like them were often willing to provide food to the hungry for the price of their religious beliefs – to fill their bellies they must first empty their hearts of the Catholic faith and embrace Protestantism. The priest, Fr Lally, had recently warned them to resist all such temptation; it was better in the eyes of God to endure the pangs of hunger than to renounce one’s faith for a bowl of soup. When the priest departed, his father spat on the floor behind the clergyman, to Owen’s shock.

  Yet these two Quakers made no such demands. They urged Michael Joyce to hasten to Westport workhouse or his children would surely perish. He responded that he would rather see them perish than watch their last grain of dignity stolen in such a place, begging for scraps of mercy thrown on the ground by an institution of the British Crown. The two Quakers shook their heads and handed his father a small sack of oats, not charity of the British Crown they hastened to mention, but a gift from their society on the occasion of their mutual Saviour’s birth. Michael Joyce had looked at Thomas, Owen and Sally, standing shivering outside their dwelling in the crisp December air, then nodded and gratefully accepted the oats.

  As the months had passed his father became more and more withdrawn. Their financial debt to Harris had long since passed beyond their means ever to repay it. This year’s payment was almost due and there was no potato crop to meet it, let alone to feed them. Bridget’s death had finally broken his father. Whatever last sparks of forbearance and restraint he had within him had been stamped out. His bitterness smothered his grief. The English race were bastards all, rich and poor alike, commoner and king. The Irish, their subjects, were mere chaff in their realm. Each day tons of grain were transported from Ireland’s shores while her people starved or were driven onto emigrant ships. As Ireland’s people had known for centuries, Michael Joyce spouted, the English only understood one language when it came to Ireland, that of the pike and the sword and the pistol. And Thomas had listened with eager ears as each spit of venom had spewed from his father’s lips. Owen had felt only fear.