The Hunter

Trey, with Banjo at her knee, appears in the hallway behind him. Lena knows from one look at her face that this won’t be easy.

“Come out for a walk with me,” she says to Trey. “Leave Banjo.”

“Now there’s a great idea,” Johnny says. “Get yourself a bitta sunshine, have a nice chat. Not for too long, now, your mammy’ll need help with the dinner, but sure Maeve can—”

Trey gives Lena a quick wary look, but she doesn’t argue. She steps out and closes the door on Banjo and Johnny both.

They head up the road, higher onto the mountain, moving themselves well away from the house. Trey doesn’t talk, and Lena takes her time, getting her bearings. Like Cal, she’s become adept at reading Trey’s moods, but today Trey has a feel to her that Lena can’t interpret, something unyielding and almost inimical. She’s walking at a hard, fast lope, keeping the full width of the road between herself and Lena.

Gimpy Duignan, shirtless in his front yard washing the layers of dust off his car, turns at the crunch of their feet and lifts a hand to them; they nod back without slowing. The heat has shifted, turned denser and heavier. Between the tall spruces, the blue of the sky is thick and smeared like paint.

“I was gonna come see you anyway,” Trey says. She’s not looking at Lena. “Need to ask you something.”

Lena says, “Go on.”

“Brendan,” Trey says. “You said you had a guess who done that on him.”

Lena is rocked by the strength of her urge to give Trey everything she has. For generations, this townland has been begging for someone to come along and defy it wholesale, blow all its endless, unbreakable, unspoken rules to smithereens and let everyone choke on the dust. If Trey has the spine and the will to do it, she deserves the chance. Lena only wishes she had got there herself, back when she was young enough and wild enough to throw everything else away.

She’s got too old. The risks she takes now are middle-aged risks, carefully gauged to gain the best results with the least damage. Cal and Trey, as well as her changed self, keep her in check. She might still be willing to risk herself; she won’t risk them.

“I did,” she says. “And I told you it’s only a guess.”

“Don’t care. You know themens around here. Whatever you guess, you’re probably right. I need to know.”

Lena understands exactly what Trey is doing. In theory, she even approves. Trey could have decided to keep blasting away scattergun at a place that’s never treated her anything but poorly; instead, she’s taking deliberate, accurate aim, and Lena agrees with her that a matter this serious deserves accuracy. She has no idea how to communicate to Trey the chasm between theory and reality.

“I get what you’re at,” she says. “Just so you know.”

Trey glances swiftly across at her, but then she nods, unsurprised. “I only wanta get the ones that done that on Brendan,” she says. “Just them. I wanta leave the rest outa it.”

They pass the abandoned Murtagh house, slates coming off the roof and yellow-flowered ragweed growing waist-high up to the door. A bird, startled by something unseen, bursts up from the trees on the slope above them. Lena doesn’t look around. If someone is watching, the fact that she’s talking to Trey will do nothing but good. Mart will have spread the word, by now, that Lena’s been brought to heel.

“That’s why I need to know now,” Trey says. “Before your man Nealon ends up getting set on the wrong people.”

“Right,” Lena says. “Let’s say I give you my guesses, that I pulled straight outa my arse, going on nothing except I don’t like the cut of this fella, and that fella had a funny look to him around then. Are you going to stand up and say in court that you heard those lads dumping Rushborough?”

“Yeah. If I haveta.”

“What if I’m wrong?”

Trey shrugs. “Best I can do.”

“What if some of ’em can prove they weren’t there?”

“Then I’ll only get the ones that can’t. Better’n none. I already thought about all this.”

“And then what? You’ll come back here and go back to mending furniture with Cal, is it? Like nothing ever happened?”

The mention of Cal makes Trey’s jaw set. “Work that out when I get to it. All I’m asking you for is names. Not advice.”

Lena spent the whole drive looking for the right way to go about this, but all she found was the looming, intractable sense that she’s out of her depth. Someone else should be doing this, Noreen or Cal or someone who has a bull’s notion of how to deal with teenagers; anyone but her. Trey’s feet bite at the dirt and gravel with quick sharp crunches; the urgency thrums off her, barely kept in check.

“Listen to me,” Lena says. The sun comes at her like a physical force, pressing her down. She’s doing what she swore she’d never do: bending a child to this townland’s will. “You’re not going to like it, but hear me out all the same. I’m not going to give you any names, ’cause they’d do you no good. You’d have to be pure thick to send men to jail on nothing but someone else’s half-made-up guesses, and you’re no thick.”