Holy Ground
written by: David O’Mahony
@davidomahony
Liam was digging a hole.
Not a very wide hole, or a very elegant one. It was a brutish, irregularly round thing a geometry teacher would be ashamed of, but it was certainly getting deeper.
All holes get deeper the more you dig, but Liam was digging with the grim-faced obstinacy of a man possessed or a man trying to deliver himself from a guilty conscience. One of those was true. And the hole was getting very deep indeed.
“C’mere to me,” said Tim from the gate to the field Liam was digging in. “What is it you’re doing at all?” Tim was Liam’s neighbour. Liam tried to ignore him. He owned the field, after all. It had been passed down from his grandfather and farmed by his father, though Liam, born in the village, had grown up in the city with his mother and only moved back six months earlier. Tim had made no secret of his desire for the land, even if he had never made an offer to Liam.
“Busy,” Liam called back eventually, spiced dusty powder catching in his nostrils. He sliced into the ash-dry sod with pockmarked steel, then levered up the crumbling ground with a soft grunt. It was a bitter hot summer. Normally the irrigation pipes provided enough water for the village to muddle through even the hottest months. But they weren’t working anymore. Somebody had crashed a truck into the little dam they’d built a hundred years ago to create their own reservoir, and the whole store of water had flowed down to the sea.
They had never found who did the damage. As he paused to grimace, the knot in his back howling, Liam looked over his shoulder toward the barn that sheltered his now crippled truck. He knew that if he owned up to it, the neighbours would kill him. They were a hard sort of people, and this was a hard country; holy ground filled with rocks and sorrows and smothered dreams of change. Liam was from the village but not of it, a blow-in usurping what they deemed the rightful order. They wouldn’t listen to how he had just swerved to avoid the O’Rahilly’s feckless German shepherd. They would just want their pound of flesh, and the blood along with it.
So he was digging a hole.
He was hip-deep in it when he heard the rattle of rusting metal that told him Tim was jumping the gate. “Christ’s sake,” he thought. “Hello Tim,” he said.
“Is it China you think you’re digging to,” said Tim, his brow crumpled in confusion. “Your father’d never do something like this. Ruining a perfectly good field and catching sunstroke along with it.”
“Yeah. Could do with a drink alright.”
“Ah sure I know. When I catch whoever broke the water,” said Tim, his hands tightening an invisible noose. And there was something in the set of Tim’s jaw, the relish in his eyes, the wistful half smile, that told Liam this was a dangerous man who had killed before and was as changeable as an afternoon in autumn.
“I hear ya,” said Liam, driving especially hard into the ground, hating having somebody standing over his shoulder even if the shadow gave a whisper of relief.
By nightfall, he was alone again, and he had dug to about elbow level. He was not a tall man, but it was still the deepest thing he had ever carved out with his own two hands. Hands which, as it happened, were screeching in protest. Staring up at the cloudless black, he lay in the dirt and fell asleep.
He jerked awake as a stone bounced off his nose. Tim was back, staring at him wordlessly along with three children. They threw another stone. “Go on,” said a feral-faced lad of sixteen. Liam hauled himself up. “I think the lads’re a bit bored,” said Tim tonelessly, eyes riddled with contempt. Looking from him to them Liam saw a family resemblance. Outnumbered and outgunned, Liam went back to digging.
By noon the quartet had swollen to a dozen, a quarter circle prodding each other in the ribs and tutting disapproval. They would, Liam realised, have suffered through the drought rather than asked for help from outsiders. Death held no great fear for them.
He made it to eye level before somebody dropped a pail into the hole next to him, along with a malformed wooden ladder so he could continue for their amusement. Nobody offered to help. The evening came and the watchers were now more than 20, ringing him in acrid sweat and pregnant silence. They shifted only to allow him to dump out soil at the top of the ladder, then flowed back into place like a shoal of fish. Their faces were as immovable as ancient stone.
Then, in the gathering twilight, a change in the soil. A thickness, a solidity that had not been there previously. The shovel went in hard and came out again only with resistance. Once, twice, a third time he thrusted until the blade went fully under the hunk of earth. Muscles and palms howling he pried it up with a growl, a wrench and a startled gasp as the water sprayed out. Out and up, long-repressed and singing of liberty, pumping and thumping into the hole faster than he could have hoped.
Attempting to scale the ladder to escape the pool, shoes now slick with mud, he slipped and fell back into the gathering brown life’s blood. Looking up at the circle of gloomy faces in the gathering night, the water sloshing over his chest and onto his face, he wondered if his sins would be forgiven.
- Holy Ground - September 16, 2024
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