By the time she gets home, Alanna and Liam are out in the yard, trying to teach Banjo to walk on his hind legs, which Banjo has no intention of doing. Trey goes in through the front door, so she can hide the camera before anyone sees it. Then she goes looking for breakfast.
Sheila is in the kitchen, ironing Johnny’s shirts. “There’s no bread left,” she says, without looking up, when Trey comes in.
The room is already hot; the sun comes full through the window, singling out Sheila’s rough hands moving across the blue of the shirt. Steam from the iron rises up through its beam.
Trey finds cornflakes and a bowl. “Where’s my dad?” she asks.
“Out. I thought you were with him.”
“Nah. Just out.”
“Emer rang,” Sheila says. “I told her.”
Emer is the oldest. She went off to Dublin a few years ago, to work in a shop. She comes home for Christmas. Trey doesn’t think about her much in between. “Told her what?” she asks.
“That your daddy came back. And about the English fella.”
“Is she gonna come home?”
“Why would she?”
Trey shrugs one shoulder, acknowledging the justice of this.
“I thought you were going to stay awhile at Lena Dunne’s,” Sheila says.
“Changed my mind,” Trey says. She leans against the counter to eat her cornflakes.
“Go to Lena’s,” Sheila says. “I’ll give you a lift down in the car, the way you won’t have to carry your clothes.”
Trey says, “Why?”
Sheila says, “I don’t like this English fella.”
“He’s not staying here.”
“I know that.”
Trey says, “I’m not scared of him.”
“Then you oughta be.”
“If he tried to do anything to me,” Trey says, “I’d kill him.”
Sheila shakes her head, one brief twitch. Trey stays silent. What she said sounds stupid, now it’s out of her mouth. The iron hisses.
Trey says, “What’s my dad doing today?”
“Something with the English fella. Seeing the sights.”
“How about tonight?”
“Francie Gannon has a card game.”
Trey refills her bowl and thinks about this. She considers it unlikely that Rushborough will be invited to Francie’s game. Unless he goes down to Seán Óg’s for a pint, he’ll be home, on his own.
Sheila arranges the shirt on a hanger and hooks it onto the back of a chair. She says, “I shoulda picked ye a better father.”
“Then we wouldn’t exist,” Trey points out.
Sheila’s mouth twists in amusement. “No woman believes that,” she says. “No mother, anyhow. We don’t say it to the men, so as not to hurt their feelings—they’re awful sensitive. But you’d be the same no matter who I got to sire you. Different hair, maybe, or different eyes, if I’da went with a dark fella. Wee little things like that. But you’d be the same.”
She shakes out another shirt and examines it, tugging creases straight. “There was other lads that wanted me,” she says. “I shoulda got ye any one of them.”
Trey thinks this over and rejects it. Most of the men in the townland appear to an outside eye to be better bargains than her father, but she wants nothing to do with any of them. “Why’d you pick him, so?” she asks.
“I can’t remember that far back. I thought I’d reasons. Maybe I just wanted him.”
Trey says, “You coulda told him to fuck off. When he came home.”
Sheila presses the tip of the iron along the shirt collar. She says, “He said you’re giving him a hand.”
“Yeah.”
“What way?”
Trey shrugs.
“Whatever he’s promised you, you won’t get it.”
“I know. I don’t want anything offa him.”
“You know nothing. D’you know where he is? He’s out hiding gold in the river for that English fella to find. Did you know that?”
“Yeah,” Trey says. “I was there when he said it to the others.”
For the first time since Trey came in, Sheila lifts her head to look full at her. The sunbeam shrinks her pupils so that her eyes look one hot, clean blue.
“Go to Lena’s,” she says. “Pretend Cal Hooper’s your daddy. Forget this fella was ever here. I’ll come down and get you when you can come back.”
Trey says, “I wanta stay here.”
“Pack your things. I’ll bring you now.”
“I’ve to go,” Trey says. “Me and Cal have that chair to do.” She goes to the sink and rinses her bowl under the tap.
Sheila watches her. “Go on, so,” she says. She bends over the iron again. “Learn your carpentering. And remember, your daddy has nothing to give you that’s worth half as much. Nothing.”
Trey takes it for granted that there are unseen things on the mountain. The assumption has been with her from as far back as she can remember, so that the edge of fear that comes with it is a stable, accepted presence. The men who live deeper in the mountain’s territory have told her about some of the things: white lights luring from the heather at night, savage creatures like great dripping otters snaking out of the bogs, weeping women who once you get close aren’t women at all. Trey asked Cal once if he believed in any of these. “Nope,” he said, between delicate hammer-taps on a dovetail. “But I’d be a fool to rule them out. It’s not my mountain.”
