The Law of Dreams

The Law of Dreams

by Peter Behrens
The Law of Dreams

The Law of Dreams

by Peter Behrens

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Overview

Driven from the only home he has known during Ireland’s Great Hunger of 1847, Fergus O’Brien makes the harrowing journey from County Clare to America, traveling with bold girls, pearl boys, navvies, and highwaymen. Along the way, Fergus meets his three passionate loves–Phoebe, Luke, and Molly–vivid, unforgettable characters, fresh and willful.

Based on Peter Behrens’s own family history, The Law of Dreams is lyrical, emotional, and thoroughly extraordinary–a searing tale of ardent struggle and ultimate perseverance.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780812978001
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Publication date: 08/28/2007
Edition description: Reprint
Pages: 416
Product dimensions: 5.50(w) x 8.10(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Peter Behrens's first novel, The Law of Dreams, won the Governor General’s Award, Canada’s most prestigious book prize, and has been published in nine languages. The New York Times Book Review called his second novel, The O’Briens, “a major accomplishment.” He is also the author of the novel Carry Me and two collections of short stories, Night Driving and Travelling Light. His stories and essays have appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Times, and many anthologies. Awards he has received include a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Creative Writing at Stanford University. A native of Montreal, he is currently a fellow at Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.

Read an Excerpt

The Law of Dreams

A Novel


By Peter Behrens

Steerforth Press

Copyright © 2006 Peter Behrens
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-58642-170-0



CHAPTER 1

Eating Pain


HE WOULD SLIP FROM THE CABIN before the rest of them were awake and come down the mountain, hoping to catch a glimpse of her. With his dog, he'd course the slick, foggy slope, then down along the river and across Carmichael's meadows. Feet brushing cold wet silver grass. Slipping the straw rope off the fanatic dog, freeing her to nose under hedges, at dry burrows, her tail swinging.

Approaching the farm, they'd pass Carmichael's rich black mountain of manure and the stone haggard, crowded with hay.

The Carmichael farmyard was flanked by stone walls six feet high, built to withstand — built for war. The only entrance an iron gate.

The yard was paved with blue stone. He had always distrusted the alien firmness of the stone on his heels. And the gaunt, whitewashed farmhouse eyeing him so bitterly: the whitewashed face of disregard.

He had always felt deficient here. He had tried convincing himself he did not but why else the constant self-argument, the tingle of thoughts inside his head rising up like doves off a perch, fluttering and billing, all confusion?

He would come hoping to catch a glimpse of Phoebe Carmichael in the steel light of morning, milk pail in her hand.

His old playmate. He had known her all his life, as he knew everyone.

Seeing him waiting at the gate, she'd offer him a drink.

You wouldn't get it any fresher.

No, miss.

He loved Phoebe's narrow pink feet on the blue stones. Her bare forearms, and the clean fabric of her gown and apron.

She was the only female of the Carmichaels. Her mother a consumptive, dead at twenty-nine and buried in the yard of the Presbyterian church at Mountshannon.

Setting the pail down on the cobbles, Phoebe took a blue china cup from a pocket of her apron and handed to him.

Dipping the cup then raising it to his lips, he'd pause before tasting the milk.

Try some yourself, miss?

No I will not, Fergus. But you go ahead.

The milk scent sweet and cloudy. He'd drink in two swallows, warm and thick with fat, coating his teeth.

Thank you, miss.

You're welcome.

And every night he'd lie awake, in the cabin on the mountain, listening to his parents breathe. Phoebe became an ember in his mind, burning down through his thoughts, glowing. Could she feel what he felt? Did she lie awake in her father's house, thrilled with trouble, wishing for a tug on the warm red line connecting them?


HE HAD always lived on the mountain, his people tenants of Carmichael.

Farmer Carmichael who kept a red mare. Name of Sally. He'd purchased her for a hunter in a time when the strong farmers of the district had a fad for hunting and shared the expense of a pack of hounds.

Red, with a black mane. Not tall, but deep-chested, strong. Plenty of heart.

The first Carmichael in the country had been a bloody soldier. Protestants, English speakers, the Carmichaels held the farm as lease-holding tenants of the earl of Liskerry the great landlord, tiarna mór. No one had ever seen tiarna mór himself, said to hold ground all over the country and live in Rome. Carmichaels subtenants lived in cabins on the mountain, each family with their cabin, their pig, their allotment of potato ground. In exchange the cabin people owed the farmer a certain measure of labor. Working in Carmichael's fields at harvest-time, they often would catch themselves staring at red Sally in the little pasture where she grazed. Some of them hated the big mare, and others felt a pride of connection. Telling themselves that Carmichael's Sally surely was the finest bounder in the country.

So sexual and easy, her ramblings in that little field.

Fergus relished the red mare. He used to creep into Carmichael's stable, climb into Sally's stall, and settle himself on her back. No one had ever caught him there. The stable — infused with scents of old hay neat's-foot oil, corn — felt safe. It was warmer, drier, than any cabin on the mountain. He'd sit aboard the mare an hour or two, legs splayed out, fingers combing out her stiff mane.

He was fifteen before he attempted to ride her. Until then he hadn't felt the need of mastering anyone. Climbing aboard in secret — that had been enough. Then one afternoon, lying on the grass, head resting on one elbow, watching the lovely mare graze — her lips pulled back, blue gums and yellow teeth cropping grass blades — he suddenly felt that he must get aboard her and ride.

The feeling came on him suddenly, like a hunger pang.

He sat up and looked around, wary.

There was no one in sight. It was midsummer. A lull between hay cuts. The meadows were empty, silver sun rippling across.

He got up and approached the mare softly. At first she shied, but each time he renewed his steady discourse in Irish, speaking calmly, and at his fourth approach she let him catch hold, twisting his fingers in her mane, laying his cheek against her neck, smelling the sun's heat there.

He led her to the stone wall, climbed the wall, and swung a leg across. When he kicked lightly with his heels the mare ambled on the grass, pausing to sniff at a butterfly twitching through the poppies.

They slowly perambulated the little pasture. When Fergus knotted his fingers tighter in her mane and bunched with his knees, Sally broke into gorgeous canter.

He found it difficult to stay firmly seated, and began springing higher with every stride. Catching a sideways glimpse of Farmer Carmichael standing at the gate, Fergus lost his concentration. Relaxing his grip, he was pitched off her back, landing hard on hands and knees, stunned.

The mare shook herself, stopped, bent to munch. Looking up, Fergus saw Carmichael striding across the field toward him. The farmer wore an old black swallowtail coat, muddy boots, and a straw hat tied under his chin with a scrap of purple ribbon. He carried a blackthorn stick.

Wary of a beating, Fergus stood up hastily, looking around for a rock to defend himself with.

The mare rubbed her feet on the grass.

"The knees!" the farmer shouted. "She'll want a good strong grip! Comes from the knees!"

He had a brown, chiseled face. The inflexible lips of the English. Phoebe, his daughter, had the same lips. She liked to play-bite.

"Use your hands gentle, but keep your knees firmly. She will carry you like a cloud if you have the right hands and strong at the knees." He peered at Fergus. "You're Mike O'Brien's boy yes? Grandson of old Feeny?"

Fergus nodded.

There was silence troubled only by curlews sputtering over, winging sharply toward the byre. Carmichael reached out and caught his mare, grabbing a fistful of her mane. Sally sniffed at his pockets, and the farmer dropped his stick in the grass.

"Let's see you aboard."

Fergus hesitated, unsure. At the same time angry. It was impossible to be around a farmer for very long and not feel the ancestral glow of tedious, unilluminating anger.

"Come, boy!" The farmer interlaced his fingers, making a footstep, insisting. "Quickly now!"

Better to be up above the farmer, looking down. Fergus stepped into Carmichael's hands and was instantly thrown up across Sally's warm back.

"Hold her steady, boy." Carmichael circled around, eyeing them keenly. "You're sitting like a plowboy Straight back! Don't slump!"

Fergus let go of the mane and thrust his shoulders back.

"Don't use hands at all," the farmer instructed. "Only knees. Come now. At a walk. Step her along. There it is. There it is."

For half an hour Fergus walked then jogged the mare around the little field while Farmer Carmichael criticized his seat and called out instructions. "Feel her muscles working. Feel them slide, feel them knit. You'll never sit properly until you know your horse down to the bones. Loosen up and keep loose. Your knees are your voice with her. Your hands come later."


AS HE walked home that afternoon, up the mountain, four young men — one a cousin — stopped him on the path. Before a blow had been struck, while the cousin was still boiling up insults, calling Carmichael's mare a sorry lump of leather; a bag of goat bones; a mustard fuck, Fergus lowered his head and ran at him, butting him in the chest and knocking him down. Seizing a stick, he held off the others until his cousin stood up, grunting like a bull. Fergus threw away the stick and ran. They gave chase, screaming like a pack of hounds, and one of them finally brought him down with a brute shove that sent him sprawling.

He lay with nose pushed into the decaying leaves, his cousin's knee pressing in the small of his back.

"That girl's a goat-boned whore," the cousin whispered in his ear, giving his arm a twist. "Say it, Fergus. The little cunt Phoebe, your sweetheart, is nothing but a goat-boned whore."

But he would not. He never could bring himself to give in. He would eat his pain.

His cousin wrenched the arm back another inch so the joint was grinding on the rim of its socket.

Eating pain. It was a kind of food. Made you dizzy.

He was aware of the young men's raucous laughter. Sunlight splitting though the oaks. Moldy leaves scratching his eyebrow. Scent of turf.

Phoebe would smell like cold water or honey, or the black turf. When a turf bank was sliced open, the strongest, purest fragrance was available only if you got down on your knees, put your nose very close, and breathed it in. He always felt compelled to do so and the scent always spun him — clobbered his chest, strove at his heart so he felt his heart as a muscle working. Other turf cutters — men and boys kicking at their spades, constantly relighting their pipes — laughed at him kneeling on the ground, inhaling, losing himself. No one else felt such a need — or if they did, they stifled it.

He could barely hear the taunts. They seemed as distant as the crying of hawks on afternoons when he lay upon his back in the rough of some mountain pasture and listened to their hunting remarks, watching them floating on cushions of pure heat.

Phoebe Carmichael, neat and clean.

He let out a sigh, and his cousin must have realized the hopelessness of the situation, because he released the hostage arm and stood up quickly, kicking Fergus hard on the hip then stumbling away up the mountain with his companions.

Three barefoot boys howling a rebel song.

You could eat pain and come out alive. It was a silent meal. You could eat pain, even find a relish. You ate unhurried. You made certain to taste every bite. You could eat pain; it wouldn't kill you.

CHAPTER 2

Mi an Ocrais


LATE SUMMER BEFORE the new potatoes were lifted was mi an ocrais, hungry month, when his father returned home to work on Carmichael's harvest.

The only season of the year his parents were reunited. His mother was red-eyed and weary in those few blazing weeks, before her man left once more. Together they drank poitin, which she would not touch the rest of the year. Everyone on the mountain was famished then — teeth glaring, eyes bright in sunburned faces.

His mother and father had gone off together just before Carmichael's harvest began, leaving Fergus to feed his little sisters on Indian meal porridge. When they returned, three days later, he knew from their sun-flayed appearance, from the grass in their hair and the scratches on his fathers face, that they had been roaming, engaging, sleeping on grass, drinking poitin, living on butter and birds' eggs.

His mother caught him looking at her and must have sensed his anger and confusion. "Life burns hot, Fergus. Too hot."

He resented such willfulness, their capacity to abandon every responsibility, including their children.

"You think I'm a robber," his father, Míchéal, told him.

They had been standing in Carmichael's best field of wheat, the rosy field, whetting their blades. People on the mountain had names for each corner of Carmichael's farm. Their language knew that land like a bee knows a flower.

Fergus's mother insisted that the rosy field had been red once in flowers.

Míchéal said, "In blood."

The rosy field. The black field. The field of the altar. Carmichaels did not use the names, perhaps were unaware they existed.

Míchéal could whet a blade like no one else could. Whet to pure sharpness, to an edge like a spoken word, barely there. And he cut and mowed faster and cleaner than anyone else could on the farm.

"You are a grim fellow. You look at me like I've stolen something," Míchéal said, testing the hone by scaling his thumbnail and peeling back the thinnest film of tissue.

They owned nothing, certainly not the harvest tools. The iron blades and wooden handles belonged to the farmer, to Carmichael.

Little girls scampered like mice over the wheat stubble, gathering stalks in armfuls and setting them down in stand-up sheaves. Women forked the stand-ups into an oxcart driven by Phoebe's brother Saul.

Míchéal was still the strongest hand for harvest, but Fergus would surpass him eventually. Not this year. Next year, perhaps. Insects cackled as they worked through the crop, feeling the sun's stare on the back of their necks. Friction of grain dust made red the creases inside their elbows.

When Farmer Carmichael came out to see how the cut progressed, he spoke to Míchéal in English, and Fergus felt the grit of that language washing over him, scraping and stimulating; the language that poured out of Phoebe's mouth. Wanting to feel closer to her, he kept fitting his thoughts in English as he worked up and down the rows alongside Míchéal and the others, swinging and cutting, swinging and cutting, though English words — or none he knew — didn't suit such work. Not really.

After the harvest was made, Míchéal would leave them again. Going for the north, traveling with a gang of barn builders, wall builders, going up into Ulster, sometimes so far as Scotland, and not returning before the next August, when he'd show up at harvest once more. Míchéal rarely spoke of his life on the roads, but Fergus had imagined it anyway: new barns and fresh walls. Stone towns and salmon rivers. Fat fields of horses grazing.

In another week or two Míchéal would be leaving.

"You're no good," Fergus said when they stopped at the end of another row and were sharpening again. "You're never here. I can't call you my father. You're no good for us."

Míchéal shook his head. "You're such a farmer. You're too stuck to that ground of yours."

"Someone has to be."


HIS GROUND.

Carmichael dispensed potato ground in patches, annual arrangements, and no one ever had the same patch twice; but Fergus always felt his ground was his. Once he had his crop in, the patch belonged to him, and he'd kill or die for it.

He could raise enough potatoes on a quarter acre of well-dug beds to keep his mother and sisters through the year — nearly. In those last, blazing weeks of late summer, just before the new crop was lifted, they had to survive on yellow meal — but his potatoes yielded at least ten months of perfect nourishment. The only tool needed to cultivate them was a spade to open the lazy-beds and turn and chop the soil a little. No plow, no horse. To his regret he could not keep a horse on mountain grass. A horse would not stand it, and any plow would burst between the rocks.

Each spring he spaded his beds and laid the sets. Summer they came up in green stems and beautiful, viney flowers. The pig was kept on potato scraps and sold to pay the annual rent — they never tasted the meat. He himself consumed five pounds of potatoes every day, steamed, boiled, or mashed. Over the winter, his mother might make a kitchen, using salt and a few herrings, but usually it was potatoes plain, and he never tired of that food.

Potatoes were not made or cut, like the farmer's hay or corn; they were lifted

CHAPTER 3

Phytophthora infestans


THE LAST NIGHT OF CARMICHAEL'S harvest they burned off the straw and the farmer fed his cabin people a supper — ham and butter, wheat bread and apples — on the side of his best meadow, under oaks, wind ringing through their branches. It was dark before the tenants started back up the mountain. Fergus walked ahead of his parents, who were carrying the little girls, asleep. The night was warm.

They had passed the first cluster of cabins when he first caught the stink of putrefaction, physical and wild, rolling down the mountain path with all the violence of a loose cartwheel or a drunk with a club. "What is that terrible stink, my God?" his mother cried. "They've been tearing the graves!"

Unbaptized infants were buried under stones so dogs could not get at them. The piles of stones were sometimes shifted from one grave to another too early, and the dead left unprotected — but this wasn't that smell. It was too large.


(Continues...)

Excerpted from The Law of Dreams by Peter Behrens. Copyright © 2006 Peter Behrens. Excerpted by permission of Steerforth Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Table of Contents

Contents

Cover,
Title Page,
Dedication,
Epigraph,
Prologue,
Part I - The Mountain and the Farm,
Chapter 1 - Eating Pain,
Chapter 2 - Mi an Ocrais,
Chapter 3 - Phytophthora infestans,
Chapter 4 - Tumbling,
Chapter 5 - Biting at the Grave,
Chapter 6 - Ejection,
Chapter 7 - Soldiers,
Chapter 8 - Succor?,
Part II - Bog Boy,
Chapter 9 - Workhouse,
Chapter 10 - Schoolroom,
Chapter 11 - Murty Larry,
Chapter 12 - Dragoons,
Chapter 13 - Lost,
Chapter 14 - The Bog Boys,
Chapter 15 - Meat,
Chapter 16 - Luke,
Chapter 17 - Vengeance,
Chapter 18 - The Oath,
Chapter 19 - Lighting the River,
Chapter 20 - Hunger (I),
Chapter 21 - Mary Cooley,
Chapter 22 - Hunger (II),
Chapter 23 - Cattle,
Chapter 24 - Dublin Town,
Part III - City of Stone,
Chapter 25 - Crossing the Water,
Chapter 26 - Night Asylum,
Chapter 27 - City of Stone,
Chapter 28 - Stab the Drum,
Chapter 29 - Shea's Dragon,
Chapter 30 - Pearl Boy,
Part IV - Red Molly,
Chapter 31 - The Cutting,
Chapter 32 - Red Molly,
Chapter 33 - The Tip,
Chapter 34 - Names,
Chapter 35 - Muck Muldoon,
Chapter 36 - Ashes,
Chapter 37 - Tired Horses,
Chapter 38 - Her Sorrow,
Chapter 39 - The Cliff,
Chapter 40 - The Pay,
Chapter 41 - The Bout,
Chapter 42 - The Road,
Chapter 43 - City of Stone,
Chapter 44 - Tim the Jew,
Chapter 45 - Germans,
Chapter 46 - The Goree,
Part V - A Ship I Am,
Chapter 47 - A Ship I Am,
Chapter 48 - The Poison Cook,
Chapter 49 - The Constant Sky,
Chapter 50 - Cailleach Feasa,
Chapter 51 - Fianna,
Chapter 52 - Many Gray Horses,
Chapter 53 - The High,
Chapter 54 - A Seat in a Canoe,
Chapter 55 - Bonaparte's Retreat,
Chapter 56 - Letters,
Chapter 57 - Chance,
Chapter 58 - A Vision,
Chapter 59 - The Labrador Current,
Chapter 60 - Crossing the Mountains,
Chapter 61 - Tenderness and Violence,
Chapter 62 - Kissing the Peak,
Chapter 63 - The Coffin Ship,
Chapter 64 - The Wager,
Part VI - The Law of Dreams,
Chapter 65 - Grosse Île,
Chapter 66 - Upriver,
Chapter 67 - Montreal,
About the Author,
Copyright,

Reading Group Guide

1. What do you think the title of the book means?

2. The book is told from Fergus’s point of view, except for the prologue, which is told from Farmer Carmichael’s. Why do you think the author made that choice?

3. Is Farmer Carmichael a sympathetic character? Does your opinion of him shift depending on the scene you read?

4. Fergus’s father, Micheal (pronounced Mee-haul), tends to be a rolling stone, except when his family’s life depends on them moving, in which case he stays put. What is the significance of this, and what does Fergus learn from it?

5. Would you describe Fergus’s feelings for Phoebe Carmichael as a “crush” or as something more complicated? What are the symbolic undertones in their repeated ritual of her offering him milk?

6. Why do you think Luke dresses as a boy? Does Fergus think more or less of Luke’s powers as a leader after he discovers Luke is female?

7. Fergus has a strong affinity for horses, do you agree? How does he identify with horses? What, if anything, does he learn from them?

8. Different horses appear at meaningful points in the novel–Farmer Carmichael’s red horse, the blue horse that Fergus chooses at the railway site (and which kills Muck Muldoon), and the black horses that Fergus buys in Canada at the end. Is it significant that each stage of the book has in it a horse of a different color, so to speak?

9. Molly betrays Fergus in some manner three different times. What are these betrayals, and how does Fergus react to each? Do his reactions make emo­tional sense to you?

10. Fergus’s thoughts are often described in short, one- or two-sentence para­graphs. Is this an effective technique? Does it help shape your impression of the character?

11. The epigraph at the beginning of the book from Thomas McGrath con­cludes, “May you fare well, compa—ero; let us journey together joyfully,/ Living on catastrophe, eating pure light.” How does this quote capture the book’s themes?

12. Fergus often implores himself in the book to keep moving forward. What is the broader significance of his moving forward? What happens to the peo­ple in the book who stay put?

13. Fergus would likely be diagnosed with what we now call post-traumatic stress disorder. How would you imagine the events in the book shaping his personality down the line?

14. What impressions of the Famine did you have before reading this novel? How has this book affected those impressions?

15. This novel is based on Peter Behrens’s own family history. How and when did your family come to the United States? What do you think the journey was like?

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