“Yeah. She’s not gonna do anything.”
“You’re sure.”
“Yeah,” Cal says. “I’m sure.”
“Your call, Sunny Jim,” Mart says. “I hope you’re right.” He whistles for Kojak. Kojak comes bounding happily over to exchange pleasantries with Cal, but Mart motions him into the house. “We don’t want him along for this. Wait there a moment, now; I’ll be back to you.”
He shuts the door behind him. Cal watches a flock of starlings billow like a genie against the sky until Mart comes back, wearing his wax jacket and a thick knitted beanie in a startling shade of neon yellow. For an instant Cal has the urge to make some crack about it, call him DJ Cookie Crumble or some such, before he remembers they’re no longer on those terms. It catches him with a twist of loneliness. He liked Mart.
Mart is carrying his crook and a straight-edged spade. “That’s for you,” he says, holding out the spade to Cal. “Will you be able to use it, with that collarbone?”
“I’ll figure something out,” Cal says. He balances the spade over his good shoulder.
“How about that knee? It’s a long aul’ walk, and half of it’s not on roads. If that knee lets you down on the mountainside, there’s nothing I’ll be able to do for you.”
“Call in P.J. and Francie. They can carry me down.”
“I haven’t brought them up to speed on this wee expedition,” Mart says. “They wouldn’t approve. They don’t know you as well as I do, sure. You can’t hold it against them.”
“My knee’s fine,” Cal says. “Let’s go.”
The walk is a long one. They start up the same mountain road that Cal took to the Reddy place, but half a mile up Mart points his crook at a side trail, too narrow for them to walk abreast, its entrance almost hidden by scrubby trees and long grass. “You wouldn’t have spotted this, now,” he says, smiling at Cal. “This mountain’s fulla tricks, so it is.”
“You know ’em,” Cal says. “You go ahead.” He doesn’t want Mart at his back.
The trail runs over rises and between boulders, among thorny flares of yellow gorse and stretches of leggy heather whose purple bells are fading to brown paper. “All this here,” Mart says, stirring a clump of heather with his crook as he passes, “that’s ling heather. You’d get the finest honey in the world from that. A fella called Peadar Ruadh that lived up here, he usedta keep bees, when I was a child. My granny’d send us up for a jar of his honey. She did swear by it for the aul’ kidney troubles. A spoonful of that morning and evening, and you’d be right as rain in no time.”
Cal doesn’t answer. He’s been keeping an eye out for anyone following them—apart from anything else, he wouldn’t put it past Trey to have been watching him again—but nothing moves, anywhere around them. The wet earth of the trail gives under their feet. Mart whistles to himself, a low lonesome tune with a strange cadence to it. Sometimes he sings a line or two, in Irish. In that language his voice takes on a different tone, a husky, absent crooning.
“That’s a song about a man who goes to the fair and sells his cow,” he informs Cal, over his shoulder, “for five pounds in silver and a yellow guinea of gold. And he says, ‘If I drink all the silver and squander the gold, why should any man care, when it’s nothing to him?’”
He sings again. The trail slopes upwards. On the flat grassland below, the fields spread out shorn and pale in the sharp sunlight, divided by walls that lie along reasons that were forgotten centuries ago.
“He says, ‘If I go to the woods picking berries or nuts, taking apples off branches or herding the cows, and I lie under a tree to take my ease, why should any man care, when it’s nothing to him?’”
Cal takes out his phone, turns on the camera and holds it up to the view. “Turn that off,” Mart says, breaking off the song in mid-line.
“I told my daughter I was going walking up the mountains,” Cal says. “She asked for pictures. She likes the look of the scenery around here.”
Mart says, “Tell her you forgot your phone.”
He stands on the trail, leaning on his crook, looking at Cal and waiting. After a minute Cal turns the phone off and puts it back in his pocket. Mart nods and turns back to walking. In a little bit he starts his song again.
Ferny plants, like nothing Cal’s seen in the grasslands, reach from the verges to brush at his boots. Mart’s crook makes a small, rhythmic crunching on the path, underscoring the song. “The man says,” he tells Cal, “‘People say I’m a useless waster, with no goods or fine clothes, no cattle or wealth. If I’m happy enough to live in a shack, why should any man care, when it’s nothing to him?’”
He strikes off the trail and clambers through a gap in a crumbling, lichened stone wall. Cal follows. They cross a patch of land that looks like it was cleared, a long time ago, before being abandoned for tufts of tall fine grass to reclaim. In one corner are the tumbledown remains of a stone cottage, much older than Brendan’s. Mart doesn’t turn his head to look at it. A wisp of wind shivers the seed-heads on the grass.
As they climb higher the cold sharpens, slicing through Cal’s layers and pressing its edge into his skin. Cal knows their route is circling and meandering, doubling back on itself, but one gorse bush or patch of moor grass looks too much like the next for him to be sure exactly how. He glances regularly at the sun and the view, trying to keep his bearings, but he knows he could spend a year looking and never find his way here again. He catches Mart’s wry eye on him.
Without his phone, Cal can’t be sure how long they’ve been walking; more than an hour, maybe an hour and a half. The sun is high. He thinks of the four men trudging their slow steady way up these trails, the body in its sheet swaying between them.
Mart takes them through a thick stand of spruce, down into a dip, and out onto another single-file trail where the ridge spreads out into a plateau on either side. Glints of water show among the peat and heather.
“Stay on this path, now,” he advises Cal. “Every year there’s a sheep or two that steps into one of them bogs and can’t get out again. And twenty-five or thirty year back there was a fella that usedta come down from Galway city—mad as a bag of cats, so he was. He’d walk up and down the mountain barefoot every Good Friday, saying the rosary all the way. He said the Blessed Virgin had told him that some year or other, if he kept at it, she’d appear to him along the way. Maybe she did and she picked a bad spot for it, I couldn’t tell you, but one year he didn’t come back. The men went looking and found him dead in a bitta bog. Only eight foot from the path, with his arm still stretched out towards the dry ground.”
The spade is biting into Cal’s shoulder, and his knee throbs at every step. He wonders if Mart is planning to walk him in circles till it gives out, and then leave him to find his own way home. The sun has started to slide down the sky.
“There,” Mart says, stopping. He points his crook at a spot in the bog, about twenty feet off the path.
“You sure?” Cal asks.
“I am, of course. Would I bring you all the way up here if I wasn’t sure?”
All around them the plateau lies flat and wide. Long grass and heather bend, autumn-bleached. Small shadows drift across them, from wisps of cloud.
Cal says, “Looks a lot like about a dozen other places we’ve passed.”
“To you, maybe. If you want Brendan Reddy, that’s where you’ll find him.”
“And his watch is on him.”
“We took nothing off him. If he had his watch on that day, then it’s on him now.”
They stand side by side, looking at the bog. Patches of water shine here and there with reflected blue. “You told me not to go off the path,” Cal says. “If I go in there, what’s to stop me from ending up like the rosary guy?”