In a quiet wood beyond he saw pheasants and a few fleeing rabbits. His own footprints were sinister in the leaf litter and his breath spouted out before him. The valley reminded him of the dairy farm of his childhood with its standing puddles and makeshift gates and diesel murmurs somewhere on the air. The buildings were stone here and had outlived whole family lines, pre-dated nations and accents and understandings, while the sheds and houses of Scully’s childhood were all hewn from the forest around them, their flapping tin and sunsilvered wood ancient before their time. That was the life the banks had taken from his father. The suits came swooping and the farm slipped away. Scully only had the memory, the stirring now and then of that life before chest hair and girls and shopping malls. Maybe that’s why I’m here, he thought, surprised. Maybe I’m buying back the farm in a way, buying back childhood. He thought of his broken father living out an adaptation in the suburbs, his mother dazedly behind him. The quick decline. The strokes. The suits alighting once again. Buying the farm, what a good way to describe oblivion.
Looking back he saw his tiny faded white house up on the hill against the sky. Between him and it were the sodden fields rising up to the huge bald oak before the shell of the castle and its outbuildings with all their black staring windows. He imagined six hundred years of peasants looking up from their work to see the severe Norman outline of that sentry at the head of the valley. It had as many eyes as God, that shadow up there. Little wonder they burnt it.
Scully stumped across the miry fields feeling the wind bright on his cheeks.
As he approached a stone wall looking for a stile, Scully heard dogs. He stopped and cocked his head and almost went backwards into the slurry as two rangy hounds came silently across the wall and over his head.
‘Good day to ye!’ yelled a farmer with one leg over and the butt of his broken shotgun following.
‘G’day,’ said Scully with the dogs about his legs.
The farmer eased down the wall to land steady on his feet in the mud. He was dressed for hunting.
‘My name’s Scully. We’re neighbours now, I spose.’
‘Ah, you’re the Australian boy from Binchy’s Bothy, then.’
‘That’s me. Pleased to meet you.’
Scully shook his little spotted hand. He was gaunt and gingery with crazy fat sideburns and bad teeth, and Scully liked the look of him.
‘Jimmy Brereton, man of leisure. I don’t mind tellin ye the first time I saw them candles in the window up there last week I nearly shit meself. I thought, it was auld Binchy back again, the lazy booger.’
‘No, it’s just me.’
‘And the family comin, they tell me.’
‘You been talking to Pete-the-Post.’
‘Aw, Jaysus no,’ the man laughed. ‘Peter’s been talkin to me!’
‘He’s a good bloke.’
‘Ah, he’s great gas is Peter. Follow Pete, they say, for wherever Pete is the crack is mighty.’
Scully laughed. ‘Well they’re right.’
‘He says you’re doin a fine job of it up there, workin like a nigger.’
‘He’s been a great help,’ said Scully. ‘I’ll die when I get his bill, I spose.’
Jimmy Brereton kicked his dogs away apologetically and moved closer. ‘Just between us, you know, Peter’s the one keepin the show goin in there. He’s as good as feedin his brother’s family, God save him. Himself won’t get out of bed most days now.’
‘Conor?’
‘I’d buy a whole big box of candles if I was waitin on power from Conor Keneally.’
Scully must have looked stricken because the other man laughed good naturedly then and swung his twelve gauge about.
‘Ah, ye would’na been the first either, lad. Peter’s doin all but the stuff you need a ticket to do, and even some of that, but there should be laws for good men and laws for eejit bastards. That’s what I’d say if I was God.’
‘How can you tell em apart?’ said Scully with a smile. ‘Good men and eejit bastards.’
‘Well, if you were God and you couldn’t tell you’d be out of a job, no? Us poor mortal friggers have to find out by experience. We have to be on the receivin end of good and evil in order to figure it out.’
Scully looked up at the big two-storey place near the road where smoke tore from four great hewn chimneys.
‘That’s your place there?’
‘The auld coach house and stables. In the family, well God knows how long. By God, them horses had it good once.’
‘So the castle’s yours too?’
‘Aye, since the Troubles, friggin thing. It’ll fall on me one day, the bad-humoured heap of shite. The government won’t let me knock it over.’
‘Mind if I have a poke around it sometime?’
‘Go by on your way home, but mind yourself. It’s at your own risk, now. Bastard of a place. Should have done the job proper, those lads back then. Save everybody a lot of pain. Stop by one evenin, Mr Scully, and we’ll have a pint.’
‘Thanks, I’ll do that.’
‘Bring your gals with you when they come, hear? You see any thin movin down in them woods?’
‘Coupla rabbits.’
‘Come on, boys!’
Scully watched him go bandylegged down the slope toward the stands of ash and larch at the foot of the hills with the dogs streaking ahead into hedges and deadwood.
He heaved himself over the wall and walked up into the field below the castle whose foundation seemed to be a great granite tor buried in the brow of the hill. The closer he came and the deeper into its shadow he walked, the clearer its size became. He saw it plainly now. Scully had long thought that architecture was what you had instead of landscape, a signal of loss, of imitation. Europe had it in spades because the land was long gone, the wildness was no longer even a memory. But this… this was where architecture became landscape. It took scale and time, something strangely beyond the human. This wasn’t in the textbooks.
It was not beautiful. The blunt Norman keep rose scarfaced between later gothic wings whose crenellations seemed afterthoughts and whose many tree-spouting windows ran on and on like a child’s drawing. Scully stood beneath the oak tree which grew at the foot of the entry stairs and spread its bare fingers into the air beneath the first windows. The stones of the steps were in-worn and puddled with rain, bristling with moss. Grass and ivy and bramble sucked against the walls to smother the single gothic door. Scully whistled through his teeth and heard the cattle complaining from Brereton’s sheds fifty yards away.
Scully pressed in through the vegetation and the half-open door into the rubble-strewn pit of the great hall whose floorboards lay in a charred and mossy pile in the cellar below. Everything had fallen through onto everything else. Great oak beams lay like fallen masts and rigging across cattle bones and tons of cellar bricks. Above it all, beyond the smoke-blackened gallery into whose powdery walls generations of local kids seemed to have cut their initials, loomed the vaulted ceiling, dark as a storm sky. He picked his way round a flagstone edge and heard the sickening burr of unseen wings high above. He came to the staircase built into the cavity of the keep wall. Walls twenty feet thick. A gust of wind angled through the place and stirred the scorched air. Scully got seven or eight steps up the spiral when he began to think of his warm kitchen and the iron kettle that would by now be hissing at its edge. Once around the first turn, the only light entering the staircase came from somewhere above. Grottos and torch niches became pits of shadow and his boots rang louder than he preferred. The light grew and a small chamber opened off to the side. Scully stepped up into its slot-like dimension and saw the huge bed of sticks and reeds left by the birds. The weapon slits let in planks of light and he looked down into the ash wood below his place. Birds wheeled down there, their cries rose plan-gently. He went on up the stairs, emboldened, and felt his way through the long damp curve until there was light again and a similar side chamber that he pushed on past to a long pillar of a door which yielded only slowly to his weight. Before him was a vaulted hall with long wide windows that let in blue light and illuminated the sea of twigs and marbled guano which stretched wall to wall. Rooks buffeted about, escaping as he came on, beating him to the glassless window where he stood looking out across the valley into the pass between castle and mountains where every puddle and window and flapping sheet of tin caught the light and rendered itself defenceless to the eye. The peaks of the Slieve Blooms ran with streaks of cloud and the ploughed fields fell away herringboned and naked. Scully crossed to the uphill window to look upon his little scab-roofed cottage beyond the wood. Its chimney ripped with smoke. Lanes and hedges and stands of timber and boggy boreens went out at all angles under his gaze as the wind tore his hair. From here it all seemed orderly enough, leading, as it did, to and from this very spot in every direction. It was a small, tooled, and crosshatched country, simple, so amazingly simple from above. Every field had a name, every path a stile. Everything imaginable had been done or tried out there. It wasn’t the feeling you had looking out on his own land. In Australia you looked out and saw the possible, the spaces, the maybes. Here the wildness was pressed into something else, into what had already been. And out there beneath the birds, in the gibberish of strokes and lines and connections of the valley was his new life.