Lena has started rocking her chair again, slowly, thinking. “They’d do it,” she says. “Most of them, anyway. If they think there’s gold on their own land, or even that there might be, they can’t just turn away from it. If it was up on the mountain, they’d play safe and leave it, maybe. But not on their land.”
Cal finds himself strangely and deeply outraged for the men who were on the riverbank today. He has his own beef with these men, or some of them, but he remembers their faces in the pub when Rushborough brought out the ring: their stillness as their land transformed and ignited, blazing with fresh constellations and long-hidden messages from their own blood. Compared to what Rushborough and Johnny are doing, their salting the river seems like kid mischief: shoplifting beer, shaving the drunk guy’s eyebrows. Cal has lived in Ardnakelty long enough to be conscious that the tie between them and their land is something he can’t fathom, cell-deep and unvoiceable. Johnny, at least, should have known better than to fuck with that, and much better than to let some guy with an English accent fuck with it.
“If they find out,” he says, “there’s gonna be trouble.”
Lena watches him. She says, “You reckon they should find out?”
“Yeah,” Cal says. An immense tide of relief is rising inside him. At last, he can do something. “And I reckon the sooner the better. We’re all heading down to Seán’s, to celebrate. They can all find out at once.”
Lena’s eyebrows go up. She says, “That’ll get messy.”
“The longer I wait, the messier it’ll get.”
“You could say it to Johnny on his own. Walk home with him after the pub, tell him you’ll be saying it to the lads tomorrow, so he’s got till then to pack his bags. Keep things from getting outa hand.”
“Nah,” Cal says.
“Tell him there’s other people that know as well. In case that Rushborough gets any funny ideas.”
“People round here,” Cal says, “they think about the kid like she’s half mine.” It comes out with difficulty, because he’s never said it before and because he has no idea how much longer it will hold any kind of truth; he’s sorely aware that he hasn’t seen Trey in days. But for now, at least, it can still have some worth to her. “If I call out Johnny in front of God and everybody, so the whole place knows it was me that tanked his plan, then no one’s gonna go thinking she was in on his bullshit. So, once he’s gone, she can go on living here without anyone giving her hassle.”
There’s a small silence. Off by the vegetable patch, the dogs have triggered the zombie scarecrow and are losing their minds, threatening all manner of extravagant destruction from a safe distance. The tomato plants are burgeoning; even from here, Cal can see the bursts of red shining among the green.
“This Rushborough fella,” Lena says. “I met him, the other morning. I was out walking the dogs, and he stopped for a wee chat.”
“About what?”
“Nothing. Aren’t the mountains lovely, and this isn’t the weather he expected from Ireland. Whatever you do, watch that fella.”
“I’m not gonna say anything when Rushborough’s there,” Cal says. “He’s smarter’n Johnny; he might manage to talk his way out. But I bet you a hundred bucks Rushborough’s gonna leave after a couple of drinks, to give Johnny and the guys some space to gloat about how good they fooled him. That’s where I come in.”
“Still,” Lena says. “Watch him, after. I don’t like him.”
“Yeah,” Cal says. “Me neither.”
He wants to tell Lena that these days he feels like he can’t find Trey, that for three nights running he’s had nightmares where she disappeared somewhere on the mountainside, that he wishes he had bought her a phone and put a tracker app on it so he could spend his days just sitting still and watching her bright dot go about its business. Instead he says, “I gotta go shower and eat something. We’re heading down to Seán’s at six.”
Lena looks at him. Then she comes over to him, cups her hand around the back of his neck, and kisses him full and strong on the mouth. It feels like a baton-pass, or like she’s sending him into battle.
“Right,” she says, straightening up. “I’ll leave you to it, so.”
“Thanks,” Cal says. The smell of her is in his nose, clean and sunny as drying hay. “For talking to Mrs. Duggan.”
“That woman’s a feckin’ nightmare,” Lena says. “If I was Noreen I’da poisoned her tea years ago.” She puts a finger and thumb in her mouth and whistles for her dogs, who abandon their war with the scarecrow and head across the field in long, happy bounds. “Let me know how you get on,” she says.
“Will do,” Cal says. He doesn’t watch her to her car. He’s already picking up the glasses and heading into the house, thinking about the right words to use when the time comes.
Eleven
It’s early enough that Seán Óg’s is mostly empty, just a few old guys eating toasted sandwiches and bitching at the racing on the TV; most of the Friday crowd are still at home digesting their dinners, laying the proper groundwork for the serious drinking ahead. Daylight still slants in at the windows, in long rays turned solid by the lazy hang of dust motes. Only the alcove is full and raucous. The guys are scrubbed and combed, buttoned into good shirts; their faces and necks are reddened in odd spots, from the sun off the river. Rushborough is holding court in the middle of it all, spread wide on a banquette telling some story with sweeping arm gestures, and getting all the laughs he could want. On the table among the pints and the beer mats, mottled rich red and green and yellow by the drops of colored sunlight through the stained glass, is the little bottle of gold dust.
“Sorry I’m late,” Cal says to the alcove in general, pulling up a stool and finding space for his pint on the table. He took his time getting ready. He feels no urge to spend any longer with Rushborough and Johnny than he needs to.
“I was as well,” P.J. tells him. P.J., like Bobby, has a tendency to confide in Cal, possibly because Cal lacks the long familiarity to give them shit. “Listening to music, I was. I was all stirred up when I got in; couldn’t sit still. I tried to sit down to my tay, and wasn’t I up and down like a hoor’s knickers, forgetting the fork and then the milk and then the red sauce. When I do be like that, the only thing that’ll set me straight is a bitta music.”
Clearly the music only partly did its job. This is a very long speech for P.J. “What’d you listen to?” Cal asks. P.J. sings to his sheep sometimes, mostly folk songs.
“Mario Lanza,” P.J. says. “He’s great for settling the aul’ spirits. When I’m the other way, when I can’t get outa the bed, I’d listen to this English young one called Adele. She’d put enough heart in you for anything.”
“What the hell were you all stirred up for?” Mart inquires with interest, glancing across at Rushborough to make sure his voice is low enough. “Sure, you knew what was in there all along.”
“I know,” P.J. says humbly. “But ’twas some day, all the same.”
“We don’t get many like this,” Mart concedes.
Rushborough, taking a brief second to scan Cal as the rest of the men laugh at his punch line, has picked up on the tail end of this. “My God, you must lead more exciting lives than I do, I’ve never had a day like this,” he says, laughing, leaning forward over the table. “You do see what this means, don’t you? It means we’re on the right track. I knew the gold was out there, I always knew that. But what I was afraid of, what I was terrified of, was that my grandmother’s instructions weren’t good enough. It’s not as if she gave me a map, you know, X marks the spot. She was playing a game of Telephone that had been going on for centuries, describing a place she hadn’t seen in decades—all these directions like ‘And then follow the old streambed down to the west but if you reach Dolan’s back field you’ve gone too far,’ my God”—he throws himself back on the banquette, arms flying wide—“sometimes I wondered if I was stark raving bonkers to go chasing after something so vague. She could have been miles off target, literally miles. I was braced to find nothing but mud today, and go home with my tail between my legs—not that it would have been a waste of time, it’s been entirely worth it just to meet you and see this place at last, but I can’t deny it: I would have been heartbroken. Devastated.”