One by One in the Darkness by Deirdre Madden Page A

Judgement. It didn’t matter that the pictures weren’t perfectly clear, Helen thought: it was enough in itself that the cross was there; to think of it having stood there for all those hundreds of years amazed her almost as much as it amazed and delighted her father. He loved history, and he was always talking about it. Uncle Brian talked about history a lot too, but she would never have said that he loved it. There was a difference, although she wouldn’t have known how to explain or define it. For her daddy, it was the fascination of thinking about people who had lived hundreds, even thousands, of years ago, where he lived now; there was something about the odd combination of closeness and distance that caught his imagination like nothing else. He’d taken them once to see the elk’s head that had been found near Toome years earlier: a grey bony thing that frightened the life out of them, with it’s massive antlers and hollow eye sockets. ‘Can you imagine a yoke like that wandering around here? Doesn’t that beat all?’ Helen would always remember the sob of excitement in his voice. ‘Isn’t the world a wonderful place!’ Now and then in the newspaper there’d be a piece about a farmer somewhere who’d found something on his land: a Viking sword, or a pot of coins, or even a dug-out canoe from the Iron Age, and he’d always draw theirattention to it, read it out to them. ‘Would you like that to be you?’ their mammy would say. ‘I’d die happy, so I would,’ he always replied.
    They went through the gate into the graveyard which lay behind the cross. There was the ruin of a tiny church there, and the graveyard itself overlooked the wide expanse of the lough. It was a warm, sticky evening, and Granny Kate flapped her hand in front of her face to drive away the midges that hummed around her. ‘Hasn’t it got terrible heavy,’ she complained. ‘It wouldn’t surprise me if we had thunder out of this.’ The enormous sky was full of dark-blue clouds, and although it was late in the evening now, there was still a strong, odd light which lit up the trees and the black-and-white cattle that were grazing in a field below the graveyard. When they heard voices, the cattle slowly raised their heads, then plodded across the field to see what was happening.
    Charlie dug into his jacket pocket, and pulled out a handful of loose change. He gave the children a penny each, to hammer into the tree at the far side of the graveyard. From a distance it looked quite ordinary, perhaps a bit stunted, but when you got closer you could see that it’s trunk was almost more metal than wood, for people had hammered coins, pins and nails into it. Their daddy helped them each to find a place for them to hammer in their penny. It wasn’t difficult, for the wood of the tree was quite soft.
    ‘Don’t forget to make a wish,’ Granny said.
    ‘I’m going to wish that Sally’s nose doesn’t get better, so that we get plenty more nice outings like this,’ Kate said.
    ‘Why, you cheeky wee monkey,’ Granny said, but she was laughing, for all that she tried to hide it.
    When they were in the car on the way home, Kate bribed Sally with Rolos to try and coax her into telling what the cure had been, while Helen listened in to what the grown-ups were talking about.
    ‘Brian asked me to be sure and ask you if you want to go with him to the march on Saturday,’ Granny said.
    ‘What march is that?’
    ‘The civil rights march that’s to be in Coalisland. I thought he told you about it already.’
    ‘Aye, now you mention it, I think he did say something about it to me a while back. Is Peter going?’
    ‘Are you joking me?’
    Their daddy was quiet for a while, and then he said, ‘Ach, I don’t know. Do you think it’ll do any good?’
    ‘Well it won’t do any harm,’ Granny said. ‘I’d have thought you’d have had a bit more go in you, Charlie. I’d be there myself if I was younger than I am now. When you think of