The farmer yawns to see a stranger on his doorstep. You can go through the back field, the ruins are there.
I walk out back and dip under the electric fence, make my way through thick green grass.
The way he said ruins roils me.
It is a two-storey, cut-stone farmhouse with a walled courtyard. Overgrown. The roof is gone; through the window cavities, stark rectangles of blue sky. An alder tree plunges through the centre, puffing green branches over the crumbling wall plates.
I enter by the space where the front door was. Nettles, rubble, dust. I try to imagine colours, a table and chairs. Ivy vines as thick as my arm lap the architrave and, looking up, I see scorch marks on the wooden lintel above the door. They catch me by surprise, these singes of blackened silver on the wood, and there is, when I draw close, the faintest catch of smoke, as the flames of a hundred-year-old fire lick through a tear in the fabric of time and burn down the walls of my heart.
I hear the roof purloins crack like gunshots. Exploding glass. I hear the squirming moans of Richard and Abie, who lay twisting outside the courtyard wall after a botched execution, and took a whole day to die. I hear their sisters soothe them. I hear the voices of the men who torched this house on a beautiful day in June 1921.
When I leave, I leave the house behind, but fire comes with me, snaking through the runnels and chambers of my heart. It burns. It burns.
*
Author’s note: This story refers to an infamous incident at the end of the Irish War of Independence in June 1921, where two young men Richard and Abraham Pearson of Coolacrease, County Offaly, were shot and left to die by a local IRA squad, and their family home was burned to the ground. My late grandmother was a Pearson from Kilcooley, a cousin of Richard and Abraham.