Blight

“There’ll be no reason for that, mutt,” Thomas said as the dog pressed against his knees. “You keep down.”

He took off his boots on the doorstep and shook the rain from his long coat and hung it on its peg. He had inherited the coat from an uncle and it had kept him warm more years than he could remember. Leaning his spade behind the kitchen door as he entered, he slopped water from a bucket into the dog’s dish. The dog limped over to drink. There was a smell to it, or so he supposed. He lived with the dog and none of that affected him. The smell was better than solitude.

Thomas had gone out hungry and come back the same. The house was sinking in disrepair. He had neither will nor strength to mend it, and no longer a family to mend it for. In three bare rooms, all the food that remained was bread furred with mould. He crossed himself at the kitchen table and reached for the family Bible. The book had passed down three generations and sat on the same shelf all that time. Now the year was eighteen hundred and forty-eight and it seemed that God had turned His face from the Brennans and from the provinces of Ireland entirely.

Walking sleepless through that morning’s mist, he had seen the dark splotches blighting the leaves. He had dug up potato plants in the east field to get to their budding tubers. Soft and brown to the core. Three years it had been the same. He had sunk to his knees, ready to pray or cry or both. It had taken his last once of strength to get back on his feet.

Thomas did not read well, yet he cherished the history on the Bible’s fly-leaf, births and deaths, those of his children scribbled askew. He stopped reading before the list ended. The children were gone and that was enough to know – two daughters, his son, and his wife the same. All were taken by failed harvests and scarlet fever and every disease else that preyed on weakness without mercy. Four faces, four smiles that lived in his heart, and everything else faded with the fingermarks he left every time he touched their names. He touched their names because he could not bear to speak them aloud. 

“Don’t a good smile beat everything,” his wife used to say. She was the last but one to go and by then all smiles were memory. 

What now for Thomas Brennan? He could lay himself down and invite his fate. That was how everyone seemed to do it. Weary and beaten as he was, he found he could not. He did not know why. He was still searching for something, though he no longer had sight of what it might be.

The rain outside eased after a while. He put on his boots again, drew on the long coat and set off south. He told the dog to stay. The dog did not listen. Maybe it was going deaf as well as blind. It followed, sniffing after the coat. Only three legs worked now when the dog tried to run, one at the rear paddled without touching the ground. 

The village was a mile down the valley – a half-dozen cottages and three dozen ghosts, faces he had known from birth. He descended a dirt path lined by small humps of fresh earth and sparse wooded crosses. Older graves in the background had headstones. He could name the newer burials he had helped with. Among them his wife. Among them his precious ones, their holes too small and too easy to dig.

He stopped at the village well, peering down to gauge the water. He wondered if it was safe to drink. 

He lifted his head and called out, “Molly!”

She was alive the last time. Young and also too old for her age. Wasn’t she born the same year as his eldest? Thirteen, maybe fourteen now. He had known her father, her mother too.

“Moll!”

Thomas shortened the name to shout it louder. He walked up the little dirt track to her family’s cottage and pushed the door. The dog did not follow him in. In the third room, he found a body, wrapped in a blanket on a mattress that had no bed frame beneath it. He stood in the doorway, staring. Death no longer surprised him, but the repetition was beyond understanding. 

“I wasn’ able to move him,” a voice said.

He jumped. The girl had crept up behind – matted hair and big eyes and arms of bone. Her eyes were red raw and bulged as if they were late additions, hot-wired into place by God or the Devil.

Thomas looked at her, then back to the blanket, confused by the relief he felt.

“Our Sean passed. Got sick. Three days then gone.”

“Molly,” he said. A soft word was all he had. Her cheek twitched as if remembering things it knew before, but finding no use for them now. 

“I didn’ wish to come for you, Mr Brennan, not in the night.”

“No, of course. You’re right, sure enough.”

He stepped into the room, put his hand to Sean’s forehead, checking it was properly cold, the boy properly dead.

“We’ve to bury him,” she said. And for records no one kept, she added, “I’d three brothers.”

“Yes, three,” he agreed. Anyone could count that far, but the number felt very big.

He gazed at her ragged dress, its loose cotton baring her shoulders, one of her shoes only half a shoe. She offered no defence and he worried how his stare might appear. He owned a coat and that felt like riches. The girl looked cold and there was nothing he could do that seemed decent. He had worn through his entitlement to mourn and now he found himself stealing into hers. He knew she would not survive without him. Maybe not with him, either.

“You… I mean, we… I mean, yes, we’ll be needing a grave,” he said and his words held the promise that he would dig it.

She nodded and he smiled.

He walked back to his house alongside his dog, collected the spade and the Bible. He gazed around for other things that might be of use. After some thought, he picked up the red shawl the dog had taken to sleeping on and stuffed it in his coat’s inside pocket. The shawl had belonged to his wife and afterwards, for a short while, to the last of his daughters.

The journey and its return took most of an hour. Molly’s parents were buried at the side of the path a hundred yards before the village. Next to them were two more recent graves, the earth still fresh and unsettled. Putting down his Bible on a fallen headstone behind him, Thomas began his work. The mist and cloud had burnt off and that was all part of the farmers’ tragedy. When they still had use for sun, the farms got rain. Starvation and disease had come like the Reaper, the disease of the crop bringing disease to the people, and now sunshine came when there was nothing left for it to grow.

Thomas’s digging soon produced a square-sided hole to his waist. His back hurt and he was almost spent. Molly appeared carrying a wooden tray with two halves of a dry biscuit and two clay cups.

The dog hobbled towards her, tail wagging, expectant. She jerked back in alarm, her squeal becoming a scream. The dog looked confused.

“Ah, come on, girl. There’s no harm in that one. No fight either, not anymore.”

“Sure, I near spilt the lot,” she said. She laughed, but it was a half-laugh that soured into regret and she flushed hard red. They both knew how laughter had become rationed, and why.

She handed him the closer of the cups as she bent to his level. “That’s the last of Da’s poitín. And take some biscuit, Mr Brennan. I made ‘em for Easter, but I’ve been saving this one… for when Sean got well.”

The dog came back, sniffing towards the plate. He smacked it away before the girl could take flight. She thanked him and he wondered why her thanks felt so important. 

“I can’t take your food. Wouldn’t be right,” he said, looking at the cracked biscuit.

“‘Food for the hungry. Shelter to the homeless.’ From Isaiah, that is,” she reminded him.

She had been a Bible scholar and read on Sundays when there was a church. He remembered seeing her father’s pride. The three strong boys and the clever girl. Molly, my bright angel. Thomas had felt the same about his own.

He levered himself up. He and Molly sat perched between piles of earth, dangling their legs into the hole. He took a piece of biscuit to go with the poitín. It was brittle and uneven, but the first food in several days. It stuck in his mouth like dry dirt and he needed the burning drink to help him swallow.

“What’ll you do now?”

“Put my faith in the Lord.”

“What age are you?” he asked, though he was sure he knew well enough.

“What’s it matter?”

“Too young to rely on Faith,” he said. “How will you eat?”

“I’m eating now. We’re eating my biscuit, Mr Brennan.”

He examined the crumbs that had stuck to his finger and tipped down the dregs of the poitín. She hadn’t even sipped at her own cup.

“You said this is the last of it?”

“That it is. I’ll be giving up the drink now, I suppose.” 

He was slow to see her joke until she cracked a smile. As before, her brightness burnt out in a moment. He wished he had a way to fuel her spirit. Her spirit was wonderful, but far too brief.

“I’ve a mind to walk to Dublin,” she said.

“You don’t know Dublin.”

“I don’t know any place but here. I’ve a cousin went to Dublin.”

“I don’t remember,” he said. He had never known a niece or nephew in her family. Everyone knew everybody in that village.

“Before I was born,” she explained.

“How will you be finding them now then? Dublin’s a mighty city and three days’ walk.”

“You could take me,” she said. “Sean and I, we was going. They say there’s ships to the New World.”

He could see she took comfort from the idea. He let it linger and shook his head only when his honesty was long overdue. “I belong here, Molly, that’s all I know. You could come and live with me, now you’re alone. My house is empty.”

He pulled the red shawl from his coat, stretched it between his hands, held it towards her. He remembered it used to be more colourful.

“Think of it as exchange… for the feeding and watering,” he said. 

“I can’t.”

“Can’t?”

“My da told me…”

“Aw, feck to that,” he snapped.

“I’m sorry,” he said after. “Really sorry. We’ve a better chance together, that’s all.”

Her face had retreated, staring far away towards some other place. She seemed to take an age to forgive him. 

“I know he’s dead… my Sean, you know. I’m not stupid, Mr Brennan.”

“They’re all dead.” He offered the shawl again. “This was my wife’s.”

Molly stared at the shawl. “I can’t be her,” she said.

He could read what she was thinking. He had lost so much the nervous emotions in his head seemed to be ripped loose, flailing about and searching for new things to which they might attach themselves. He wanted to see Molly as he had seen his daughters, but there was considerable uncertainty he could not admit to, even to himself. 

“It’s not that, Moll, I promise. You’ll be needing the help. And I’ll need yours. That’ll be all of it. And the shawl… well, it’s just something to ease the cold.”

“Alright, then. For the very warming of it,” she said. 

He watched for a change in her expression but it did not come. He felt uncertain what was best to do, but this was all he had, so he handed it over.

She wrapped the red fabric around herself, the bare shoulder bones disappearing. “It don’t mean nothing, me taking it. I’m not decided on the rest, Dublin and so on.”

“Of course not. You’re safe with me.”

“I don’t like dogs,” she said.

“I know,” he replied.

He collected Sean’s body from the cottage and carried it out. It felt very light. Sean had shrunk. They had all shrunk. Thomas lowered himself into the hole first, then pulled in the body, then had to get his feet from under without stepping on its bones. He did not succeed entirely, but he did not think she noticed.

After he climbed out, they stood above the grave looking down, Sean’s face looking up. From the other side, the dog sniffed over the edge.

“D’you have words to say?”

She shook her head, so he took on the task himself. Opening the Bible, he read a passage he had marked and used before: 

“… Eat your food until you return to the ground…”

She did not cry. He thought maybe she had cried herself out before he came. He leaked a tear for both of them. He let her cover the face with the first two spadefuls of earth. That was enough.

“I’m done now,” she told him.

He nodded towards the cottages. “Go get your things.”

She didn’t move. 

“There must be things you want,” he said.

And maybe there were, but maybe all she wanted was to get away. She started down the slope. The dog limped after her and she began to hurry, eyes on the dog until the dog gave up. He realised she had not said yes and he had made no real concession to her.

“Molly!” he shouted. “About Dublin… we can decide later, for both of us.”

She turned and gave him a look and the dog a suspicious glance. Then her face lit up with a smile that seemed to beat the day and beat the Devil and beat everything in his heart. He felt the clutch of despair loosen for a moment. And it was good. 

He watched her all the way to the cottage. She reminded him of smiles he had once lived for and which he remembered now only by a finger that passed over ink names he had scrawled in his Bible, the names of his daughters. His son. His wife.

He finished covering the body, counting cycles of dirt as he tossed them in. For some reason, the dog was missing. He found he did not miss its company as much as Molly’s.

When he spotted the dog again, it was lying half submerged in tall grass. A rabbit squatted under a tree nearby, listless and slow. The rabbit ignored the dog. The dog ignored the rabbit, or maybe didn’t see it. He knew the dog was in pain. 

Thomas remembered the biscuit and the poitín, his lost family in the Bible, the dead brothers from her cottage, the red shawl. Was Molly really the age of his eldest? Would his daughter have looked like this by now? Molly was the last thing here still new. 

Thomas Brennan called his dog.

“You sit now,” he said.

The dog wagged its tail and sat lopsided before him. He raised the spade.