Seamus O’Kelly, “The Weaver’s Grave”

Part V
The widow walked along the streets, outwardly calm, inwardly confused. Her first thought was ‘the day is going on me!’ There were many things still to be done at home; she remembered the weaver lying there, quiet at last, the candles lighting about him, the brown habit over him, a crucifix in his hands - everything as it should be. It seemed ages to the widow since he had really fallen ill. He was very exacting and peevish all that time. His death agony had been protracted, almost melodramatically violent. A few times the widow had nearly run out of the house, leaving the weaver to fight the death battle alone. But her common sense, her good nerves, and her religious convictions had stood to her, and when she put the pennies on the weaver’s eyes she was glad she had done her duty to the last. She was glad now that she had taken the search for the grave out of the hands of Meehaul Lynskey and Cahir Bowes; Malachi Roohan had been a sight, and she would never forget him, but he had known what nobody else knew. The widow, as she ascended a little upward sweep of the road to Cloon na Morav, noted that the sky beyond it was more vivid, a red band of light having struck across the grey-blue, just on the horizon. Up against this red background was the dark outline of landscape, and especially Cloon na Morav. She kept her eyes upon it as she drew nearer. Objects that were vague on the landscape began to bulk up with more distinction.
  She noted the back wall of Cloon na Morav, its green lichen more vivid under the red patch of the skyline. And presently, above the green wall, black against the vivid sky, she saw elevated the bulk of one of the black cockroaches. On it were perched two drab figures, SO grotesque, so still, that they seemed part of the thing itself. One figure was sloping out from the end of the tombstone so curiously that for a moment the widow thought it was a man who had reached down from the table to see what was under it. At the other end of the table was a slender warped figure, and as the widow gazed upon it she saw a sign of animation. The head and face, bleak in their outlines, were raised up in a gesture of despair. [213]
  The face was turned flush against the sky, so much so that the widow’s eyes instinctively sought the sky too. Above the slash of red, in the west, was a single star, flashing so briskly and so freshly that it might have never shone before. For all the widow knew, it might have been a young star frolicking in the heavens with all the joy of youth. Was that, she wondered, at what the old man, Meehaul Lynskey, was gazing. He was very, very old, and the star as very, very young! Was there some protest in the gesture of the head he raised to that thing in the sky; was there some mockery in the sparkle of the thing of the sky for the face of the man? Why should a star be always young, a man aged so soon? Should not a man be greater than a star? Was it this Meehaul Lynskey was thinking? The widow could not say, but something in the thing awed her. She had the sensation of one who surprises a man in some act that lifts him above the commonplaces of existence. It was as if Meehaul Lynskey were discovered prostrate before some altar, in the throes of a religious agony. Old men were, the widow felt, cry, very strange, and she did not know that she would ever understand them. As she looked at the bleak head of Meehaul Lynskey up against the vivid patch of the sky, she wondered if there could really be something in that head which would make him as great as a star, immortal as a star? Suddenly Meehaul Lynskey made a movement. The widow saw it quite distinctly. She saw the arm raised, the hand go out, with its crooked fingers, in one, two, three quick, short taps in the direction of the star. The widow stood to watch, and the gesture was so familiar, so homely, so personal, that it was quite understandable to her. She knew then that Meehaul Lynskey was not thinking of any great things at all. He was only a nailer! And seeing the Evening Star sparkle in the sky he had only thought of his workshop, of the bellows, the irons, the re, the sparks, and the glowing iron which might be made into a ail while it was hot! He had in imagination seized a hammer and made a blow across interstellar space at Venus! All the beauty and youth of the star frolicking on the pale sky above the slash of vivid redness had only suggested to him the making of yet another nail! If Meehaul Lynskey could push up his scarred yellow face among the stars of the sky he would only see in them the sparks of his little smithy.
  Cahir Bowes was, the widow thought, looking down at the earth, from the other end of the tombstone, to see if there were any hard [214] things there which he could smash up. The old men had their backs turned upon each other. Very likely they had had another discussion since, which ended in this attitude of mutual contempt. The widow was conscious again of the unreasonableness of old men, but not much resentful of it. She was too long accustomed to them to have any great sense of revolt. Her emotion, if it could be called an emotion, was a settled, dull toleration of all their little bigotries.
  She put her hand on the stile for the second time that day, and again raised her palely sad face over the graveyard of Cloon na Morav. As she did so she had the most extraordinary experience of the whole day’s sensations. It was such a sensation as gave her at once a wonderful sense of the reality and the unreality of life. She paused on the stile, and had a clear insight into something that had up to this moment been obscure. And no sooner had the thing become definite and clear than a sense of the wonder of life came to her. It was all very like the dream Malachi Roohan had talked about.
  In the pale grass, under the vivid colours of the sky, the two grave-diggers were lying on their backs, staring silently up at the heavens. The widow looked at them as she paused on the stile. Her thoughts of these men had been indifferent, subconscious, up to this instant. They were handsome young men. Perhaps if there had been only one of them the widow would have been more attentive. The dark handsomeness did not seem the same thing when repeated. Their beauty, if one could call it beauty, had been collective, the beauty of flowers, of dark, velvety pansies, the distinctive marks of one faithfully duplicated on the other. The good looks of one had, to the mind of the widow, somehow nullified the good looks of the other. There was too much borrowing of Peter to pay Paul in their well-favoured features. The first grave-digger spoiled the illusion of individuality in the second grave-digger. The widow had not thought so, but she would have agreed if anybody whispered to her that a good-looking man who wanted to win favour with a woman should never have so complete a twin brother. It would be possible for a woman to part tenderly with a man, and, if she met his image and likeness around the corner, knock him down. There is nothing more powerful, but nothing more delicate in life than the valves of individuality. To create the impression that humanity was a thing which could be turned out like a coinage would be to ruin the whole illusion of life. The twin grave-diggers had created some sort of such impression, vague, and not very insistent, in the mind of the [215] widow, and it had made her lose any special interest in them. Now, however, as she hesitated on the stile, all this was swept from her mind at a stroke. The most subtle and powerful of all things, personality, sprang silently from the twins and made them, to the mind of the widow, things as far apart as the poles. The two men lay at length, and exactly the same length and bulk, in the long, grey grass. But, as the widow looked upon them, one twin seemed conscious of her presence, while the other continued his absorption in the heavens above. The supreme twin turned his head, and his soft, velvety brown eyes met the eyes of the widow. There was welcome in the man’s eyes. The widow read that welcome as plainly as if he had spoken his thoughts. The next moment he had sprung to his feet, smiling. He took a few steps forward, then, selfconscious, pulled up. If he had only jumped up and smiled the widow would have understood. But those few eager steps forward and then that stock stillness! The other twin rose reluctantly, and as he did so the widow was conscious of even physical differences in the brothers. The eyes were not the same. No such velvety soft lights were in the eyes of the second one. He was more sheepish. He was more phlegmatic. He was only a plagiarism of the original man! The widow wondered how she had not seen all this before. The resemblance between the twins was only skin deep. The two old men, at the moment the second twin rose, detached themselves slowly, almost painfully, from their tombstone, and all moved forward to meet the widow. The widow, collecting her thoughts, piloted her skirts modestly about her legs as she got down from the narrow stonework of the stile and stumbled into the contrariness of Cloon na Morav. A wild sense of satisfaction swept her that she had come back the bearer of useful information.
  ‘Well’, said Meehaul Lynskey, ‘did you see Malachi Roohan?’ The widow looked at his scorched, sceptical, yellow face, and said: ‘I did.’
  ‘Had he any word for us?’
  ‘He had. He remembers the place of the weaver’s grave.’ The widow looked a little vaguely about Cloon na Morav.
  ‘What does he say?’
  ‘He says it’s under the elm tree.’
  There was silence. The stonebreaker swung about on his legs, his head making a semi-circular movement over the ground, and his sharp eyes were turned upward, as if he were searching the heavens for an elm tree. The nailer dropped his underjaw and stared tensely [216] across the ground, blankly, patiently, like a fisherman on the edge of the shore gazing over an empty sea. The grave-digger turned his head away shyly, like a boy, as if he did not want to see the confusion of the widow; the man was full of the most delicate mannerisms. The other grave-digger settled into a stolid attitude, then the skin bunched up about his brown eyes in puckers of humour. A miserable feeling swept the widow. She had the feeling that she stood on the verge of some collapse.
  ‘Under the elm tree’, mumbled the stonebreaker.
  ‘That’s what he said’, added the widow. ‘Under the elm tree of Cloon na Morav.’
  ‘Well’, said Cahir Bowes, ‘when you find the elm tree you’ll find the grave.’
  The widow did not know what an elm tree was. Nothing had ever happened in life as she knew it to render any special knowledge of trees profitable, and therefore desirable. Trees were good; they made nice firing when chopped up; timber, and all that was fashioned out of timber, came from trees. This knowledge the widow had accepted as she had accepted all the other remote phenomena of the world into which she had been born. But that trees should have distinctive names, that they should have family relationships, seemed to the mind of the widow only an unnecessary complication of the affairs of the universe. What good was it? She could understand calling fruit trees fruit trees and all other kinds simply trees. But that one should be an elm and another an ash, that there should be name after name, species after species, giving them peculiarities and personalities, was one of the things that the widow did not like. And at this moment, when the elm tree of Malachi Roohan had raised a fresh problem in Cloon na Morav, the likeness of old men to old trees - their crankiness, their complexity, their angles, their very barks, bulges, gnarled twistiness, and kinks - was very close, and brought a sense of oppression to the sorely-tried brain of the widow.
  ‘Under the elm tree’, repeated Meehaul Lynskey. ‘The elm tree of Cloon na Morav.’ He broke into an aged cackle of a laugh. ‘If I was any good at all at making a rhyme I’d make one about that elm tree, devil a other but I would.’
  The widow looked around Cloon na Morav, and her eyes, for the first time in her life, were consciously searching for trees. If there were numerous trees there she could understand how easy it might [217] be for Malachi Roohan to make a mistake. He might have mistaken some other sort of tree for an elm - the widow felt that there must be plenty of other trees very like an elm. In fact, she reasoned that other trees, do their best, could not help looking like an elm. There must be thousands and millions of people like herself in the world who pass through life in the belief that a certain kind of tree was an elm when, in reality, it may be an ash or an oak or a chestnut or a beech, or even a poplar, a birch, or a yew. Malachi Roohan was never likely to allow anybody to amend his knowledge of an elm tree. He would let go his rope in the belief that there was an elm tree in Cloon na Morav, and that under it was the weaver’s grave - that is, if Malachi Roohan had not, in some ghastly aged kink, invented the thing. The widow, not sharply, but still with an appreciation of the thing, grasped that a dispute about trees would be the very sort of dispute in which Meehaul Lynskey and Cahir Bowes would, like the very old men that they were, have revelled. Under the impulse of the message she had brought from the cooper they would have, launched out into another powerful struggle from tree to tree in Cloon na Morav; they would again have strewn the place with the corpses of slain arguments, and in the net result they would not, have been able to establish anything either about elm trees or about the weaver’s grave. The slow, sad gaze of the widow for trees in, Cloon na Morav brought to her, in these circumstances, both pain and relief. It was a relief that Meehaul Lynskey and Cahir Bowes could not challenge each other to a battle of trees; it was a pain that the tree of Malachi Roohan was nowhere in sight. The widow could see for herself that there was not any sort of a tree in Cloon na Morav. The ground was enclosed upon three sides by walls, on the fourth by a hedge of quicks. Not even old men could transform a hedge into an elm tree. Neither could they make the few struggling briars clinging about the railings of the sepulchres into, anything except briars. The elm tree of Malachi Roohan was now non-existent. Nobody would ever know whether it had or had not ever existed. The widow would as soon give the soul of the weaver, to the howling winds of the world as go back and interview the cooper again on the subject.
  ‘Old Malachi Roohan’, said Cahir Bowes with tolerant decision, ‘is doting.’
  ‘The nearest elm tree I know’, said Meehaul Lynskey , ‘is half a mile away.’ [218]
  ‘The one above at Carragh?’ questioned Cahir Bowes.
  ‘Ay, beside the mill.’
  No more was to be said. The riddle of the weaver’s grave was still the riddle of the weaver’s grave. Cloon na Morav kept its secret. But, nevertheless, the weaver would have to be buried. He could not be housed indefinitely. Taking courage from all the harrowing aspects of the deadlock, Meehaul Lynskey went back, plump and courageously to his original allegiance.
  ‘The grave of the weaver is there’, he said, and he struck out his hooked fingers in the direction of the disturbance of the sod which the grave-diggers had made under pressure of his earlier enthusiasm.
  Cahir Bowes turned on him with a withering, quavering glance.
  ‘Aren’t you afraid that God would strike you where you stand?’ he demanded.
  ‘I’m not-not a bit afraid’, said Meehaul Lynskey. ‘It’s the weaver’s grave.’
  ‘You say that’, cried Cahir Bowes, ‘after what we all saw and what we all heard?’
  ‘I do’, said Meehaul Lynskey , stoutly. He wiped his lips with the palm of his hand, and launched out into one of his arguments, arguments, as usual, packed with particulars.
  ‘I saw the weaver’s father lowered in that place. And I’ll tell you, what’s more, it was Father Owen MacCarthy that read over him, lie a young red-haired curate in this place at the time, long before ever he became parish priest of Benclog. There was I, standing in this exact spot, a young man, too, with a light moustache, holding me hat in me hand, and there one side of me - maybe five yards from the marble stone of the Keernahans - was Patsy Curtin that drank himself to death after, and on the other side of me was Honor Costello, that fell on the grave and married the cattle drover, a big, loose-shouldered Dane.’
  Patiently, half absent-mindedly, listening to the renewal of the dispute, the widow remembered the words of Malachi Roohan, and his story of Honor Costello, who fell on the grave over fifty years Ago. What memories these old men had! How unreliable they were, And yet flashing out astounding corroborations of each other. Maybe there was something in what Meehaul Lynskey was saying. Maybe - but the widow checked her thoughts. What was the use of it all? This grave could not be the weaver’s grave; it had been [219] grimly demonstrated to them all that it was full of stout coffins. The widow, with a gesture of agitation, smoothed her hair down the gentle slope of her head under the shawl. As she did so her eyes caught the eyes of the grave-digger; he was looking at her! He withdrew his eyes at once, and began to twitch the ends of his dark moustache with his fingers.
  ‘If’, said Cahir Bowes, ‘this be the grave of the weaver, what’s Julia Rafferty doing in it? Answer me that, Meehaul Lynskey.’
  ‘I don’t know what she’s doing in it, and what’s more, I don’t care. And believe you my word, many a queer thing happened in Cloon na Morav that had no right to happen in it. Julia Rafferty, maybe, isn’t the only one that is where she had no right to be.’
 ‘Maybe she isn’t’, said Cahir Bowes, ‘but it’s there she is, anyhow, and I’m thinking it’s there she’s likely to stay.’
  ‘If she’s in the weaver’s grave’, cried Meehaul Lynskey , ‘what I say is, out with her!’
  ‘Very well, then, Meehaul Lynskey. Let you yourself be the powerful man to deal with Julia Rafferty. But remember this, and remember it’s my word, that touch one bone in this place and you touch all.’
  ‘No fear at all have I to right a wrong. I’m no backslider when it comes to justice, and justice I’ll see done among the living and the dead.’
  ‘Go ahead, then, me hearty fellow. If Julia herself is in the wrong, place somebody else must be in her own place, and you’ll be following one rightment with another wrongment until in the end you’ll go mad with the tangle of dead men’s wrongs. That’s the end that’s in store for you, Meehaul Lynskey.’
  Meehaul Lynskey spat on his fist and struck out with the hooked fingers. His blood was up.
  ‘That I may be as dead as my father!’ he began in a traditional oath, and at that Cahir Bowes gave a little cry and raised his stick with a battle flourish. They went up and down the dips of the ground, rising and falling on the waves of their anger, and the, widow stood where she was, miserable and downhearted, her feet, growing stone cold from the chilly dampness of the ground. The twin who did not now count took out his pipe and lit it, looking at the old men with a stolid gaze. The twin who now counted walked uneasily away, bit an end off a chunk of tobacco, and came to stand in the ground in a line with the widow, looking on with her several [220] feet away; but again the widow was conscious of the man’s growing sympathy.
  ‘They’re a nice pair of boyos, them two old lads’, he remarked to the widow. He turned his head to her. He was very handsome.
  ‘Do you think they will find it?’ she asked. Her voice was a little nervous, and the man shifted on his feet, nervously responsive.
  ‘It’s hard to say’, he said. ‘You’d never know what to think. Two old lads, the like of them, do be very tricky.’
  ‘God grant they’ll get it’, said the widow.
  ‘God grant’, said the grave-digger.
  But they didn’t. They only got exhausted as before, wheezing and coughing, and glaring at each other as they sat down on two mounds.
  The grave-digger turned to the widow. She was aware of the nice warmth of his brown eyes.
  ‘Are you waking the weaver again tonight?’ he asked.
  ‘I am’, said the widow.
  ‘Well, maybe some person-some old man or woman from the country-may turn up and be able to tell where the grave is. You could make enquiries.’
  ‘Yes’, said the widow, but without any enthusiasm, ‘I could make enquiries.’
  The grave-digger hesitated for a moment, and said more sympathetically, ‘We could all, maybe, make enquiries.’ There was a softer personal note, a note of adventure, in the voice.
  The widow turned her head to the man and smiled at him quite frankly.
  ‘I’m beholding to you’, she said and then added with a little wounded sigh, ‘Everyone is very good to me.’
  The grave-digger twirled the ends of his moustache.
  Cahir Bowes, who had heard, rose from his mound and said briskly, ‘I’ll agree to leave it at that.’ His air was that of one who had made an extraordinary personal sacrifice. What was he really thinking was that he would have another great day of it with Meehaul Lynskey in Cloon na Morav tomorrow. He’d show that oul’ fellow, Lynskey, what stuff Boweses were made of.
  ‘And I’m not against it’, said Meehaul Lynskey. He took the tone of one who was never to be outdone in magnanimity. He was also thinking of another day of effort tomorrow, a day that would, please God, show the Boweses what the Lynskeys were like. [221]
  With that the party came straggling out of Cloon na Morav, he two old men first, the widow next, the grave-diggers waiting to put on their coats and light their pipes.
  There was a little upward slope on the road to the town, and as the two old men took it the widow thought they looked very spent after their day. She wondered if Cahir Bowes would ever be able for that hill. She would give him a glass of whiskey at home, if there was any left in the bottle. Of the two, and as limp and slack as his body looked, Meehaul Lynskey appeared the better able for the hill. They walked together, that is to say, abreast, but they kept almost the width of the road between each other, as if this gulf expressed’! the breach of friendship between them on the head of the dispute about the weaver’s grave. They had been making liars of each other all day, and they would, please God, make liars of each other all day tomorrow. The widow, understanding the meaning of this hostility, had a faint sense of amusement at the contrariness of old men. How could she tell what was passing in the head which Cahir Bowes hung, like a fuschia drop, over the road? How could she know of the strange rise and fall of the thoughts, the little frets, the tempers, the faint humours, which chased each other there?, Nobody - not even Cahir Bowes himself - could account for them. All the widow knew was that Cahir Bowes stood suddenly on the road. Something had happened in his brain, some old memory cell long dormant had become nascent, had a stir, a pulse, a flicker of warmth, of activity, and swiftly as a flash of lightning in the sky, glow of lucidity lit up his memory. It was as if a searchlight had suddenly flooded the dark corners of his brain.
  The immediate physical effect on Cahir Bowes was to cause his to stand stark still on the road, Meehaul Lynskey going ahead, without him. The widow saw Cahir Bowes pivot on his heels, his head, at the end of the horizontal body, swinging round like the movement of a hand on a runaway clock. Instead of pointing up the hill homeward the head pointed down the hill and back to Cloon Morav. There followed the most extraordinary movement shufflings, gyrations - that the widow had ever seen. Cahir Bowes wanted to run like mad away down the road. That was plain. And Cahir Bowes believed that he was running like mad away down the road. That was also evident. But what he actually did was to make little jumps on his feet, his stick rattling the ground in front, and each jump did not bring him an inch of ground. He would have [222] gone more rapidly in his normal shuffle. His efforts were like a terrible parody on the springs of a kangaroo. And Cahir Bowes, in a voice that was now more a scream than a cackle, was calling out unintelligible things. The widow, looking at him, paused in wonder, then over her face there came a relaxation, a colour, her eyes warmed, her expression lost its settled pensiveness, and all her body was shaken with uncontrollable laughter. Cahir Bowes passed her on the road in his fantastic leaps, his abortive buck-jumps, screaming and cracking his stick on the ground, his left hand still gripped tightly on the small of his back behind, a powerful brake on the small of his back.
  Meehaul Lynskey turned back and his face was shaken with an aged emotion as he looked after the stonebreaker. Then he removed his hat and blessed himself.
  ‘The cross of Christ between us and harm’, he exclaimed. ‘Old Cahir Bowes has gone off his head at last. I thought there was something up with him all day. It was easily known there was something ugly working in his mind.’
  The widow controlled her laughter and checked herself, making the signs of the cross on her forehead, too. She said:
  ‘God forgive me for laughing and the weaver with the habit but fresh upon him.’
  The grave-digger who counted was coming out somewhat eagerly over the stile, but Cahir Bowes, flourishing his stick, beat him back again and then himself re-entered Cloon na Morav. He stumbled over the grass, now rising on a mound, now disappearing altogether in a dip of the ground, travelling in a giddy course like a hooker in a storm; again, for a long time, he remained submerged, showing, however, the external stick, his periscope, his indication to the world that he was about his business. In a level piece of ground, marked by stones with large mottled white marks upon them, he settled and cried out to all, and calling God to witness, that this surely was the weaver’s grave. There was scepticism, hesitation, on the part of the grave-diggers, but after some parley, and because Cahir Bowes was so passionate, vehement, crying and shouting, dribbling water from the mouth, showing his yellow teeth, pouring sweat on his forehead, quivering on his legs, they began to dig carefully in the spot. The widow, at this rearranged the shawl on her head and entered Cloon na Morav, conscious, as she shuffled over the stile, that a pair of warm brown eyes were, for [223] a moment, upon her movements and then withdrawn. She stood a little way back from the digging and waited the result with a slightly more accelerated beating of the heart. The twins looked as if they were ready to strike something unexpected at any moment, digging carefully, and Cahir Bowes hung over the place, cackling and crowing, urging the men to swifter work. The earth sang up out of the ground, dark and rich in colour, gleaming like gold, in the deepening twilight in the place. Two feet, three feet, four feet of earth came up, the spades pushing through the earth in regular and powerful pushes, and still the coast was clear. Cahir Bowes trembled with excitement on his big stick. Five feet of a pit yawned in the ancient ground. The spade work ceased. One of the gravediggers looked up at Cahir Bowes and said:
  ‘You hit the weaver’s grave this time right enough. Not another grave in the place could be as free as this.’
  The widow sighed a quick little sigh and looked at the face of the other grave-digger, hesitated, then allowed a remote smile of thankfulness to flit across her palely sad face. The eyes of the man wandered away over the darkening spaces of Cloon na Morav.
  ‘I got the weaver’s grave surely’, cried Cahir Bowes, his old face full of a weird animation. If he had found the Philosopher’s Stone he would only have broken it. But to find the weaver’s grave was an accomplishment that would help him into a wisdom before which, all his world would bow. He looked around triumphantly and said:
  ‘Where is Meehaul Lynskey now; what will the people be sayin’ at all about his attack on Julia Rafferty’s grave? Julia will haunt him, and I’d sooner have any one at all haunting me than the ghost of Julia Rafferty. Where is Meehaul Lynskey now? Is it ashamed to show his liary face he is? And what talk had Malachi Roohan about an elm tree? Elm tree, indeed! If it’s trees that is troubling him no let him climb up on one of them and hang himself from it with his rope! Where is that old fellow, Meehaul Lynskey , and his rotten head? Where is he, I say? Let him come in here now to Cloon na Morav until I be showing him the weaver’s grave, five feet down and not a rib or a knuckle in it, as clean and beautiful as the weave ever wished it. Come in here, Meehaul Lynskey, until I hear the lie, panting again in your yellow throat.’
  He went in his extraordinary movement over the ground, making for the stile all the while talking.
  Meehaul Lynskey had crouched behind the wall outside when [224] Cahir Bowes led the diggers to the new site, his old face twisted in an attentive, almost agonising emotion. He stood peeping over the wall, saying to himself:
  ‘Whisht, will you! Don’t mind that old madman. He hasn’t it at all. I’m telling you he hasn’t it. Whisht, will you! Let him dig away. They’ll hit something in a minute. They’ll level him when they find out. His brain has turned. Whisht, now, will you, and I’ll have that rambling old lunatic, Cahir Bowes, in a minute. I’ll leap in on him. I’ll charge him before the world. I’ll show him up. I’ll take the gab out of him. I’ll lacerate him. I’ll lambaste him. Whisht, will you!’
  But as the digging went on and the terrible cries of triumph arose inside Meehaul Lynskey’s knees knocked together. His head bent level to the wall, yellow and grimacing, nerves twitching across it, it little yellow froth gathering at the corners of the mouth. When Cahir Bowes came beating for the stile Meehaul Lynskey rubbed one leg with the other, a little below the calf, and cried brokenly to himself:
  ‘God in Heaven, he has it! He has the weaver’s grave.’
  He turned about and slunk along in the shadow of the wall up the hill, panting and broken. By the time Cahir Bowes had reached the stile Meehaul Lynskey’s figure was shadowily dipping down over the crest of the road. A sharp cry from Cahir Bowes caused him to shrink out of sight like a dog at whom a weapon had been thrown.
  The eyes of the grave-digger who did not now count followed the figure of Cahir Bowes as he moved to the stile. He laughed a little in amusement, then wiped his brow. He came up out of the grave. He turned to the widow and said:
  ‘We’re down five feet. Isn’t that enough in which to sink the weaver in? Are you satisfied?’
  The man spoke to her without any pretence at fine feeling. He addressed her as a fourth wife should be addressed. The widow was conscious but unresentful of the man’s manner. She regarded him calmly and without any resentment. On her part there was no resentment either, no hypocrisy, no make-believe. Her unemotional eyes followed his action as he stuck his spade into the loose mould on the ground. A cry from Cahir Bowes distracted the man, he laughed again, and before the widow could make a reply he said:
  ‘Old Cahir is great value. Come down until we hear him handling the nailer.’ [225]
  He walked away down over the ground.
  The widow was left alone with the other grave-digger. He drew himself up out of the pit with a sinuous movement of the body which the widow noted. He stood without a word beside the pile of heaving clay and looked across at the widow. She looked back at him and suddenly the silence became full of unspoken words, of flying, ringing emotions. The widow could see the dark green wall, above it the band of still deepening red, above that the still more pallid grey sky, and directly over the man’s head the gay frolicking of the fresh star in the sky. Cloon na Morav was flooded with a deep, vague light. The widow scented the fresh wind about her, the cool fragrance of the earth, and yet a warmth that was strangely beautiful. The light of the man’s dark eyes were visible in the shadow which hid his face. The pile of earth beside him was like a vague shape of miniature bronze mountains. He stood with a stillness which was tense and dramatic. The widow thought that the world was strange, the sky extraordinary, the man’s head against the red sky a wonder, a poem, above it the sparkle of the great young star. The widow knew that they would be left together like this for one minute, a minute which would be as a flash and as eternity. And she knew now that sooner or later this man would come to her and that she would welcome him. Below at the stile the voice of Cahir Bowes was cackling in its aged notes. Beyond this the stillness was the stillness of heaven and earth. Suddenly a sense of faintness came to the widow. The whole place swooned before her eyes. Never was this world so strange, so like the dream that Malachi Roohan had talked about. A movement in the figure of the man beside the heap of bronze had come to her as a warning, a fear, and a delight. She moved herself a little in response, made a step backward. The next instant she saw the figure of the man spring across the open black mouth of the weaver’s grave to her.
  A faint sound escaped her and then his breath was hot on her face, his mouth on her lips.
  Half a minute later Cahir Bowes came shuffling back, follow by the twin.
  ‘I’ll bone him yet’, said Cahir Bowes. ‘Never you fear I’ll make that old nailer face me. I’ll show him up at the weaver’s wake tonight!’
  The twin laughed behind him. He shook his head at his brother who was standing a pace away from the widow. He said:
  ‘Five feet.’
  He looked into the grave and then looked at the widow, saying:
  ‘Are you satisfied?’
  There was silence for a second or two, and when she spoke the widow’s voice was low but fresh, like the voice of a young girl. She said:
  ‘I’m satisfied.’

[END]

Notes
Pagination given here in square brackets is taken from William Trevor, ed., The Oxford Book of Irish Short Stories (OUP 1989). Note the editorial emendation at Part I [line 7, supra].