So he called out to the young lad to stop acting the maggot and to stay away from the tractor, and not to do anything unless he was told to do it. The lad was standing on the bed of the trailer by now and was looking down at him, and Paddy felt sorry for his sharp shouted words because a look of hurt crossed the boy’s face, but that was soon supplanted by a dark shadow of anger. The lad jumped down off the tailgate and walked over to where Paddy stood, and came right up close to him, slowly, and said, Fuck off, Paddy, and Paddy’s mouth went dry with the shock of it, and the boy’s teeth were bared in anger and his eyes were flashing dark with temper, and the sound and the smell and the tongue-lolling, sharp-fanged mouth of a young collie pup occurred to Paddy, and he understood in that moment what it was to be a herded animal, to be barked at and rounded on, to be sheepish, to be cowed. The changeling boy was talking again, and his face was still up close to Paddy’s, and one of the men Paddy had gotten familiar with through their silent language of nods and waves and knowing looks that fine midsummer was standing straight in the distance, arching his back forward to stretch it out. Paddy envied that man his aloneness in that moment, his command of the emptiness around him, his small dominion, because the boy in front of him, the long-haired, pock-faced adolescent he’d known since babyhood, was saying, You’re a servant, Paddy, that’s all you are, you’re not much more than a beggar man, and my mother and father could fuck you off our land any time they wanted, and I’ll drive my tractor as far as I want whenever I want. And he spat on the ground beside Paddy’s foot, and he turned and he grabbed a filled bag and he hefted it and threw it so that it landed untidily on the trailer bed, and he stopped and half turned and said: No wonder Moll fucked off and left you. And Paddy stood silent and still until his heart quietened down and the silver dancing starbursts cleared from his vision, and he felt on his pained back the hint of a chill in the breeze that swept in from the distant ocean and down across the Mother Mountain to the bog.
The boy sat bold and proud on the inside wheel arch as they drove the slow roads home, gripping the grab handle lightly and singing some kind of a song, the same words over and over. He had no singing voice and the song wasn’t one Paddy knew the air of, and his reedy voice grated above the tractor’s oily roar, but Paddy kept his powder dry: he was shocked wordless at the boy’s sudden spite and he was afraid now; for the first time in his life he was afraid of another human being. He felt shrunken to tininess, and he saw in the future a day when the reins of the Jackmans’ sprawling stead were handed over to this growling pup and he was cast out, and Kit was cast out, and their cottage was levelled and the stones of its foundations pulled from the ground one by one, and the earth where it had stood rolled smooth and seeded to greenness, and grazed by careless beasts and walked upon by people who’d never know they’d ever lived. He saw Moll, standing at the top of the lane, returned to a home that was gone, wondering was she even in the right place, and he saw her walking back down to the main road, and leaving again, for all of eternity.
Paddy Gladney felt every day of his sixty-one years and he felt more than that: he felt ancient and ruined and spiritless and dead, as though there was no meaning to him or his life, as though he was a thin fleshy bag of old bones and gristle and muscles that worked from their own memory of working and not from any agency of his; that it mattered not one bit to the world or to any being in it if he lived or died; that there were dozens, hundreds, thousands, millions of creatures that could pedal a bicycle and hand envelopes to people or push them through letterboxes, and walk the land morning and evening, and count and fodder dry stock and mend a fence here and there, and what use was he if not as a father, and how could he call himself a father and his only begotten child gone from him, away from him, and not a sign of her anywhere, lost to him, lost, lost, lost?
Time is relentless, though, and heartless, and it insists on its own propagation, its own terrible replication of itself, moment after moment after moment. And just as relentless are the things that fill it, the bits and pieces that all put together add up to existence, to a life, all the big things that take up the greater part of the mind, and all the small things that sit waiting in the back of the mind, things that can’t be ignored or left undone: letters and parcels and lambs and calves and fences and posts and chickens and hedgerows and Mass and confession and missing daughters and angry little sons and heirs of landed people and what have you, and cold shadowed corners of the graveyard in Youghalarra and the mulch-rich soil there, blackening and thickening with the years and the fallen leaves, biding its time, waiting to be turned, to be opened, to receive.
In the years that followed their dear Moll’s departure on the Nenagh bus and the Dublin train, Paddy and Kit Gladney lived a solemn half-life of work and prayers and weakening hope, and the earth spun and the moon phased and the rain fell and the sun shone and their hearts grew heavier and heavier with grief. And a full five years went past, and more, and one Friday in spring when there was a cool breeze blowing uphill from the lake and the sun was high and white in the sky and Paddy Gladney was cleaning his boots on the scraper by the half-door, he heard the clang of the gate opening at the top of the lane, and he turned and looked, and he saw his daughter there across the yard, closing the gate behind her, like a good girl, the way she’d always been told to, and he closed his eyes and he opened them again on the greening hedgerow along the edge of the lane, and the briars and the bursting buds all along it, and the new lambs small and white in the haggard, and the strutting cockerel and the angry clucking hens, and the mucky path that ran from the half-door where he stood to the gate at the top of the lane where his daughter stood, looking back at him, smiling shyly at him like a child.
JUDGES
KIT WAS AFRAID at first that it was an apparition, not Moll in the flesh but her ghost. She extended her hand slowly towards the familiar face, and she felt heat in Moll’s cheeks and the wetness of her tears, and when she drew her hands back to her own face she could taste the sharp saltiness of her daughter’s tears from her fingers, and she saw that her daughter had lines now that extended from the sides of her eyes, and that her cheekbones pressed outwards against her skin. Like Thomas doubting the truth of the risen Christ, she took Moll’s hands again and looked at them, turning them over as though to inspect her stigmata, the marks of her suffering, and finding none she placed the precious living’s hands in her husband’s hands, and daughter and father held each other’s hands and none of them spoke a word in those first moments, and Paddy’s cry from moments before seemed still to echo from the gable of the barn and down the gentle slopes of the hillside to the village and back up the hill again, Kit, Kit, come out, come out here, she’s back, she’s back, she’s back. And what useful thing besides that could be said in that moment? She was back, and she was whole, it seemed, and the world was warm again and filled with life and light.
They were reverent in those first minutes and hours, filled with supernatural awe at this miracle, not quite believing yet that she was real. They laid food before her, and water and milk and brandy and tea, because what did girls drink who’d been missing for half a decade? Who could know? And they sat either side of her and looked at her as she ate, and they noticed the hardened angles of her jaw, the marks on her ears of piercings, the thickness and the length of her hair, the wave in it that hadn’t been there before, the muted shade of the dress she wore and the shortness of it, so that her lap as she sat was almost fully bared. And the ring on her left hand, not on her ring finger but on the one beside it, the middle finger, a gold ring with two small moulded hands cradling a golden heart as the centrepiece. They both were crying steadily and wiping their tears absent-mindedly away, and questions presented themselves to the front of their minds in ragged jostling queues and were turned one by one away before they could be voiced; no question was enough of a question, and no answer could change the truth of the moment, that this girl was at their table, and not drowned, or murdered, or kept prisoner somewhere, but sitting here eating, prettily and silently, and her story could be told or could be kept inside her: either way they’d live.