By midnight, all that’s left in the pub is a dense fug of sweat and beer breath, Barty wiping down tables with a rag, and the men in the alcove. The ashtrays have come out. Rushborough smokes Gitanes, which lowers him further in Cal’s esteem: Cal feels that, while people are entitled to their vices, anyone who isn’t a dick finds a way to pursue those vices without giving everyone in the room a sore throat.
“I’m proud,” Rushborough informs them all, throwing an arm around Bobby’s shoulders, “I’m proud to claim this man as my cousin. And all of you, of course all of you, I’m sure we’re all cousins of some degree. Aren’t we?” He looks about half drunk. His hair is ruffled out of its sleek sweep, and he’s tilting a little bit, not drastically, off center. Cal can’t get a good enough look at his eyes to decide whether it’s real.
“ ’Twould be a miracle if we weren’t,” Dessie agrees. “All this townland’s related, one way or another.”
“I’m this fella’s uncle,” Sonny informs Rushborough, pointing his cigarette at Senan. “A few times removed. Not far enough for me.”
“You owe me fifty years’ worth of birthday presents, so,” Senan tells him. “And a few quid in communion money. I don’t take checks.”
“And you owe me a bitta respect. Go on up there and get your uncle Sonny a pint.”
“I will in me arse.”
“Look,” Rushborough says, with sudden decision. “Look. I want to show you all something.”
He lays his right hand, palm down, in the middle of the table, among the pint glasses and the beer mats and the flecks of ash. On the ring finger is a silver band. Rushborough turns it around, so that the bezel is visible. Set into it is a pitted fragment of something gold.
“My grandmother gave me this,” Rushborough says, with a wondering reverence in his voice. “She and a friend found it, when they were children digging in the friend’s garden. About nine years old, she says they were. Michael Duggan was the friend’s name. They found two of these, and kept one each.”
“My great-uncle was Michael Duggan,” Dessie says, awed enough to talk quietly for once. “He musta lost his.”
The men lean in, bending low over Rushborough’s hand. Cal leans with them. The nugget is about the size of a shirt button, polished by time on the high surfaces, ragged in the crevices, studded with small chunks of white. In the yellowish light of the wall lamps, it shines with a worn, serene glow.
“Here,” Rushborough says. “Take it. Have a look at it.” He pulls the ring off his finger, with a reckless little laugh like he’s doing something wild, and passes it to Dessie. “I don’t really take it off, but…God knows, it could have been any of yours as easily as mine. I’m sure your grandparents were digging away in the same gardens. Side by side with mine.”
Dessie holds up the ring and peers at it, tilting it this way and that. “Holy God,” he breathes. He lays one fingertip on the nugget. “Wouldja look at that.”
“ ’Tis beautiful,” Con says. Nobody makes fun of him.
Dessie passes the ring, held over a cupped hand, to Francie. Francie, giving it a long stare, nods slowly and unconsciously.
“That’ll be quartz,” Mart informs them all. “The white stuff.”
“Exactly,” Rushborough says, turning eagerly towards him. “Somewhere in that mountain, there’s a vein of quartz, shot through with gold. And over thousands of years, much of it was washed down out of the mountain. Onto Michael Duggan’s land, and all of yours.”
The ring passes from hand to hand. Cal takes his turn, but he barely sees it. He’s feeling the change in the alcove. The air is drawing in, magnetized, around the shining fragment and the men who surround it. Till this moment, the gold was a cloud of words and daydreams. Now it’s a solid thing between their fingers.
“The thing is,” Rushborough says, “the important thing is, you see, my grandmother didn’t just discover this by chance. The one thing that frightens me, the one thing that’s been giving me pause about this whole project, is the possibility that her directions are no good. That they’ve been passed down over so many generations, they got warped along the way, to the point where they’re not accurate enough to lead us to the right spots. But you see, when she and her friend Michael found this”—he points to the ring, cupped like a butterfly in Con’s big rough hand—“they weren’t digging at random. They picked the spot because her grandfather had told her his father said there was gold there.”
“And he was right,” Bobby says, starry-eyed.
“He was right,” Rushborough says, “and he didn’t even know it. That’s one of the marvelous aspects: her grandfather didn’t actually believe in the gold. As far as he was concerned, the whole thing was a tall tale—something invented by some ancestor to impress a girl, or to distract a sick child. Even when my grandmother found this, he thought it was just a pretty pebble. But he passed the story on, all the same. Because, true or false, it belonged to our family, and he couldn’t let it disappear.”
Cal takes a glance at Johnny Reddy. Johnny hasn’t said a word to him all evening. Even his eyes have stayed carefully occupied, far from Cal. Now, he and Cal are the only people who aren’t gazing at the scrap of gold. While Cal is watching Johnny, Johnny is watching the other men. His face is as intent and consumed as theirs. If this ring is what Johnny was keeping up his sleeve, it’s having all the impact he could have hoped for.
“The gold is out there,” Rushborough says, gesturing at the dark window and the hot night outside, thrumming with insects and their hunters. “Our ancestors, yours and mine, they were digging it up thousands of years before we were born. Our grandparents were playing with it in those fields, just as they’d play with pretty pebbles. I want us to find it together.”
The men are still. Their land is changing from a thing they know inside out to a mystery, a message to them in a code that’s gone unsuspected all their lives. Out in the darkness, the paths they walk every day are humming and shimmering with signals.
Cal feels like he’s not in the room with them, or like he shouldn’t be. Whatever’s on his land, it’s not the same thing.
“I feel incredibly lucky,” Rushborough says quietly. “To be the one who, after all these generations, is in a position to salvage this story and turn it into a reality. It’s an honor. And I mean to live up to it.”
“And no one but this load of gobshites to give you a hand,” Senan says, after a moment of silence. “God help you.”
The alcove explodes with a roar of laughter, huge and uncontrolled. It goes on and on. There are tears rolling down Sonny’s face; Dessie is rocking back and forth, barely able to breathe. Johnny, laughing too, reaches over to clap Senan on the shoulder, and Senan doesn’t shrug him off.
“Oh, come on,” Rushborough protests, slipping his ring back onto his finger, but he’s laughing too. “I can’t imagine better company.”
“I can,” Sonny says. “Your woman Jennifer Aniston—”
“She’d be no good with a shovel,” Francie tells him.
“She wouldn’t need to be. She could just stand at the other end of the field, and I’d dig my way over to her like the fuckin’ clappers.”
“Here, you,” Bobby says, digging a finger into Senan’s solid arm, “you’re forever giving me shite about why aliens would want to come to the back-arse of Ireland. Does this answer that for you, does it?”