جميع فصول : الفصل -الفصل 70

It ended the way these things end, which is to say it ended badly and nobody won.Ahern got between them with his case in his hand and his voice raised in a thing I had not heard before, a command that came out of him like a crack of ice, and the wolves on the headland stopped. Eileen's grey wolf stood on the track with her shoulder bleeding where Declan had taken her and her head down and her eyes on me, and the three men from the salvage crew were on the grass with their hands behind their heads because Ahern had told them what would happen to them if they moved.Eileen shifted back. She stood on the track in her coat with her grey hair down and her hand pressed to her shoulder and she looked at Ahern and said, "You have my claim. I made it in front of you with a witness and I am going to make it again in that hall at nine o'clock and there is not a wolf in this village who can stop me.""You are a banished wolf," Ahern said. "You cannot make a claim until the ban is lifted.""Then

The hall did not quiet down. It went the other way. Forty wolves were on their feet and the shouting came from every part of the room at once and Ahern was standing at the table with his hand up and his voice going out over the top of it.“Sit down,” he said. “Sit down and be quiet or I will clear this hall and hear the whole of it in the church with the door shut.”The hall sat down. It took a while.Ahern put his hand flat on the table.“The boy has read the charter and the boy is right,” he said. “A wolf who is not of this pack may be named a challenger by the Alpha only if there is no claimant of the blood in the territory. There is a claimant of the blood in the territory. There is the boy. There is the woman from Athlone. There is the woman from the north. There is the man Korkut, who is not in this room.” He looked at Mairéad. “The naming of the challenger is void. Take the weight off the table.”Mairéad did not move for a long moment. Then she picked the weight up and put it i

The cottage went so quiet that I could hear the fire and the sea and the breathing of forty wolves packed along the walls.Ronan stood at the head of the table with his old hands flat on the red ledger and his face the colour of the ash in the grate."I wrote the false charter," he said. "Not all of it. The first part of it is the true charter copied out by a clerk in 1901 and I did not write that. But the middle of it I wrote, and the clause about the land in the form that a co-op cannot use I wrote, and the strike through it I drew, and the note in the margin in the hand that looks like the enforcer's I wrote with a pen I had practised with for a week." He looked up. "I was twenty nine years old. Eileen came to this cottage in the summer of 1961 and she put the true charter on this table and she said, Ronan, the village needs a book that the co-op can read and that the Council will accept, and I said, the true book is the book, and she said, the true book has a clause in it that wil

Tom did not come out from behind the wolves.He stood where he was at the back of the hall with his red face and his grey moustache and his hands at his sides, and he looked at Mairéad and then at the co-op and then at the door.“I have been in this hall the whole time,” he said. “The whole co-op has been in this hall and I have been standing at the back with my wife and my boy and I have not been in the back room.”“You were not in the back room tonight,” Mairéad said. “You were in the back room this morning. At eight o’clock, before the hall was opened, when I came down and found the lock off the green door and the frame moved and the press open and the tin box on the floor. And you were the one who told me the woman from Dublin had been in the hall in the night and that the true ring was in the press and that the whole village was going to hear about it.” She put her hand flat on the table. “You have been my hand in this village for fourteen years, Tom. You were the one who put the

The hall emptied slowly. Ahern took Mairéad up to the room above the hall and put a wolf on the door, and two of the salvage men took Tom down to the net store and sat him on a bench with his hands on his knees and his wife crying in the doorway. The co-op went out into the lane in twos and threes and did not go home. They stood in the road in the dark and talked in low voices and did not go home.I went out to the rope walk at the end of the pier because I could not stand in the hall any longer, and Declan came after me and stood at the far end of it with his hands in his pockets and did not say anything for a while."She wrote to a Bridget in Dublin," I said. "There was a Bridget in this village in March who died in the hall of her heart. And there was a Bridget in Dublin who was banished in 1988 and who came back in the spring because my sister wrote to her. And the woman in the harbor tonight had red hair and a mark on her throat and she is dead. And there is not a wolf in that ha