Free Red Sky in Morning by Paul Lynch Page B

talking and looked to a small girl who was tugging on her mother’s shawl. The mother took the girl in her arm and wiped the girl’s runny nose with the sleeve of her smock. Coyle looked around the fire at the children. Shadows darkening their small sleeping faces. One boy awake and he was listening to his mother’s story. Go on with your story, he said.
    My sister was the biggest of us all, the woman said. Anne was near twenty and I was fourteen. We were freezing and I remember my hands were blue and John, my wee brother, he was a stubborn git. He said damn the work and went to go back inside and my father dropped him with his fist in the field.
    We stayed out for hours and then the rain began to freeze and then it started snowing again and the father he paid no attention but Anne told him to look at us and then he told us to go back in but the sister, he told her to stay, and she never said a word of complaining. Later she nearly sat on the fire for need of warmth and the next morning she wouldna get up outta bed with the coughing.
    It was thawing a wee bit that day too and the father he made her get up again and she wasn’t fit for it and she told him so but he gave her a box on the side of the head and pulled her out of the bed. She went back out to the field with the rest of us and she was wheezing and coughing and the hands were dark blue again from the cold and it only got worse.
    That night the father cursed her high and low, saying what kind of daughter had he brought her up to be and him having no money for a doctor, so we moved her by the fire and we tended to her. It was only when she got much worse, it were late one night, and she was keeping us all awake and we sat around her, she was in a wild fever and she was wheezing badly and she was coughing like it would never stop and the father, he began cursing and he went out and we heard him fixing up the horse and cursing at it and when he came back a few hours later he had the doctor with him.
    It was the first time we’d laid eyes on a doctor. He seemed very small for we thought he’d be tall and he didn’t say a word but he tapped the sister’s chest and he listened to her heart and he put his head to her chest again and we searched his face but it wasn’t revealing anything so it wasn’t and he didn’t even look at any of us. John hiding behind me and then the doctor went by the door and he put on his coat and hat and he spoke to the father but we couldna hear what he said because they were talking in low voices but we saw him nodding his head and we didn’t know what he meant by that but later that morning when it got bright anyhow she were dead and the father he died too the year after.
    The woman pulled the girl close to her and rubbed a hand through her hair. In his mind Coyle began figuring the best time to go south out of Derry and where to go after that and how long he’d be in hiding. And he saw in his mind images of how he’d get things sorted out. Get back and fix what’s left to be fixing. He took hold of the ribbon in his pocket and rubbed it between finger and thumb and the woman saw him with it and he closed his hand around it when she saw him.
    So anyways, she said. That’s all I’m saying.
      
    T HE EVENING WAS MEASURED in cups of beer. The Cutter stood soused to the bar and he saw two men push through, one of them towering above all others and the other man behind him with only one eye. He looked at them and then turned away, something about the manner in which the tall man carried himself, and his way of taking in the face of every man in the room.
    He watched the pair go to the counter and the tall man take off his stovepipe hat and put it on the bar. The barman pulled down a bottle of brandy and a bottle of port and poured them into a glass and gave it to the tall man who took the mixture and went over to the fire with the contents swirling. He bent and lifted a poker black-nosed from a bucket and placed it in the burning