Catherine
The mud sucked at my skirts and knees, cold and black as sin, and the more I tried to kneel with any grace, the more it gripped me, dragging me closer to the rot and dark beneath. I would’ve laughed if I’d had a tongue for anything but prayer or weeping. The cemetery on the hill above Lismore was no grand cathedral ground, only a scatter of stones and crosses the color of bone, half of them tilting, a few devoured by brambles that even the goats refused. But Sully O’Toole deserved better than the pit they’d given him, the dirt barely shoveled back, a cross so plain you’d think it marked a turnip row, not a man’s whole life.
I tried to keep my hands clean as I brushed the wet earth from his name, but the soil got everywhere, slicking my fingers and ringing the letters in under my nails. “Sully,” it read—no saint’s name, no grand title. Below that, in a second, rougher hand, someone (the gravedigger, most likely, who’d claimed a mumbled kinship to my dead man for the price of a pint) hadscratched “O’Toole.” There was nothing else. No dates, no lines of holy writ. Just Sully O’Toole, newly dead, gone from the world like a stone tossed in the river.
I pressed my brow to the cross and let the tears come, hot and embarrassing, the sort of crying I’d have mocked in a younger version of myself. Wind off the water stung my cheeks, cut through my dress and shawl, but only made me hold tighter to the marker, fingers splintering against the grain. I tried to picture him as he’d been—not laid out in his Sunday best in the borrowed parlor, not waxy and silent on the cart they’d trundled up the lane—but alive and grinning, mud-spattered boots on the hearth, shouting for another loaf, another cup, another night with me.
I had no words for what I wanted to say. I’d never been clever with speech, even before all this loss. So I traced his name, one letter at a time, working the dirt into every groove, as if by smearing myself over those five little letters I could keep him anchored in the world a little longer. Each S, U, L, L, and Y. Then the long O, the proud T, the double O like two open wounds, and the L and E that finished the name like a promise unfulfilled.
They’d taken everything from us, but this patch of ground was mine for as long as I could defend it. And defend it I would, even if the world turned to ash.
A movement on the road below caught my eye. The gravedigger, a crooked stick of a man, was shifting stones with a spade, eyes flicking up toward me every minute or so. Waiting, probably, to see if I’d pay for a better marker, or if I was simple enough to start digging with my own hands. I glared at him, and he looked away, the coward.
The sun was low in the west, making the grass seem brittle and sharp, shadows long as tales and twice as lonely. Somewhere below, cattle bawled, and a dog barked, and in the far distance, the deep bell of St. Patrick’s tolled for another round of souls.I hated that bell. Hated it for reminding me that time kept moving, kept dragging us away from our dead.
I bent forward and pressed my lips to the wood, tasting salt and pitch and a sweetness I hadn’t known in years. “They took you from me too soon, my love,” I whispered, the words sticking in my throat. “I swear by all that’s holy, I’ll love no other.” I said it again, quieter, each word a nail, each nail hammered down by the wind and the ache in my chest. “I’ll love no other. Never, never, never.”
I fished in my apron pocket for the wildflowers I’d picked on the walk up. Most were battered, stems snapped, but the bluebells held their heads high, and I wove them into the twine that tied the cross, a silly, girlish thing he’d have teased me for. Then I wiped my cheeks and sat back, knees screaming from the cold and damp, and let the silence settle.
That’s when I heard them: the English, coming up the road, boots slapping mud and voices carrying above the wind. There were three at least, maybe more, their uniforms the same sickly gray as the sky above. I ducked low, drawing the shawl over my head. No use being seen here, not when every Catholic in Munster was a suspect, every widow a possible traitor. I watched the gravedigger, saw the way he kept to his work, never glancing at the soldiers. Good man. Maybe he’d forget the coppers I still owed him.
They paused at the gates, murmured something I couldn’t catch, then moved on, one of them spitting into the ditch for good measure. I waited until their voices vanished, the clang of their weapons melting into the sound of the crows.
I should have left then. Should have gotten up and gone, left the mourning to the crows and worms and whatever God still watched over the likes of us. But my body wouldn’t move. I could no more leave that grave than I could dig one for myself.
In the end, it was the cold that did it. My teeth chattered so hard I thought they’d crack, and my fingers had gone stiff and blue. I stood, wiped the worst of the mud from my dress, and leaned once more over Sully’s cross. “I’ll come back tomorrow,” I said, not sure if it was a promise or a threat. “I’ll bring better flowers. Maybe I’ll even sing for you.”
I turned and walked down the hill, shoes squelching, heart heavy as lead. I didn’t look back until I reached the stone wall at the road’s edge. There he was: my Sully, reduced to a name on a plank, bluebells bright as blood against the gray. I blinked hard, then squared my shoulders and started for home.
He was dead, but I was not. Not yet.
The mud was the only constant now. It swallowed the lanes, overflowed ditches, and painted every face and hand the same sick color. As I walked, the sky grew heavy and low, pushing the world flat, pinning it under a lid of sooty gray. Ahead, the road narrowed between hedgerows, mostly burnt or hacked down for firewood, the rest clawed by wind into shapes that looked more animal than plant. Behind me, the sound of boots and English voices faded, replaced by the wet hush of a country still trying to die quietly.
I passed three women huddled under a ruined fence, two with children clinging to them, one with a babe so starved it didn’t even cry. Their eyes followed me like dogs, and one called after me in a voice that was more cough than words. I kept walking. There was nothing I could offer but my own empty hands.
Closer to the marsh, the road widened, and I saw the first true crowd. Not a mob, not yet, but enough bodies moving together to look like a slow river of rags and hollow faces. Men with torn coats and bleeding feet; girls so thin you could see every rib through their shift; a blind old fellow singing to himself in a language no one else remembered. They parted as I movedthrough them, most not even glancing up. We all learned, quick or dead, to mind our own ghosts.
A sudden sharpness clamped my arm, and I turned to see a woman even older than the gravedigger—her face a tangle of wrinkles and mud, hair pulled back so tight it might have been growing straight from her skull. Her grip was all bone and stubbornness. “Girl,” she hissed, “you’ve no place here. They’re coming. Turn yourself around before the Red Men do it for you.” Her accent was Connacht, but the vowels had been sanded down by too many bad winters and not enough bread.
I didn’t answer. She shook my arm once, hard, then let go, as if disgusted by my weightlessness. I kept walking, feeling her gaze burn holes in my back. After a while, I forgot she’d even been real. Maybe she wasn’t. I didn’t feel real myself.
Everywhere, there was smoke. Some of it from the cottages and barns set alight by the English, more from families burning anything they could—dung, driftwood, their own old clothes—to keep children alive one more night. I could see, across the low fields, the remains of Kilvarra: a line of blackened stones, and above it, the column of smoke so thick it made the sun look as weak as a guttering candle.
Somewhere, someone screamed. A man, or a boy, or a fox caught in a trap. I never looked, just adjusted my shawl and kept my eyes on the mud. My shoes had holes in both soles. My toes were numb, but I’d learned to like it. Numb meant you didn’t feel the cuts, or the cold, or anything at all.
Halfway up the rise to our hut, I stopped and looked back. The river of people was still there, a tide of faces drifting east, away from the fighting, away from the bodies. They all looked so determined, even the smallest ones. I wondered what they thought awaited them, if anything. I wondered if I envied them.
A sudden wind picked up, tearing at my dress and shoving me forward. I staggered, then kept on, boots squelching, skirt heavy with mud and some other weight I couldn’t name.
By the time I reached our door, my arms and feet were shaking, but I’d managed not to weep. That was something. I was the only thing still upright in a world of toppled fences and broken people. I pulled my shawl close, pushed the door open, and went inside.
There was nothing left outside worth seeing.
The hut felt smaller with Sully gone. Not for any lack of space; it had never been more than a single room, walls stacked in stone the color of old teeth, thatch roof slouching toward the ground like a drunk in the last watch of night. But with only me to fill it, the air shrank, pressing close, shoving dust and memory into every corner. I could’ve crossed from door to hearth in three steps if my feet were less heavy.
His boots were still by the door, streaked in the same red-ochre mud I’d cleaned from them a hundred times, never once to his satisfaction. He’d left them there the morning he died, right foot canted inward like a man mid-stride. His coat hung over the back of our one chair, stiff with weeks of sweat and rain and old tobacco. On the table sat his hunting knife, the one he’d bragged had belonged to his father’s father. It was the only thing in the house sharper than my grief.
I touched the knife and felt the old ache pulse in my palm, a memory of last winter when he’d sliced potatoes for our supper and, careless as ever, laid open the soft pad of his thumb. The blood had pooled in a perfect, dark dot on the bread, and I’d wiped it away before he even noticed. “It’s naught,” he’d said, grinning like a boy. “Taste of iron never hurt a hungry soul.” I blinked, and the vision faded, replaced by the present dullness—the taste of ash, the sourness of alone.