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trousers and leaving his money by the door, he turned and
     stroked her hair.
    She was a woman who did not believe anymore in the existence of tenderness. She had been a girl on the streets since she was
     fourteen years old. And when Tomas did not leave, when he lay there in theroom that became cold as the night sky cleared, she asked him what he was doing.
    “I love you,” he said.
    She leaned up on her elbow. She drew the cover up across her breasts and shook stray hair from across her face to look more
     clearly at him.
    “There is no need to lie,” she said.
    “No. I am not.”
    “You are,” she said, her voice turning hard and cruel from hard and cruel experience. “You think saying that to me you won’t
     have to pay me. You think I am some stupid witch.”
    “I would give you everything I have in the world,” Tomas said.
    “Pay me, then.”
    “I have no money.”
    The woman shrieked and kicked out at him and kicked again until he came out the other side of the bed.
    “I knew it!” she screamed. “I knew it! A liar!”
    The fierceness of her was a measure not of the loss, but of her own anger in having however briefly believed in his innocence.
     She hated him then for having reminded her of a world she knew long ago.
    Tomas stood and told her that he had nothing, and she reached up and swung her right arm and caught him full in the face.
     His nose pumped a thick crimson.
    “I love you,” he said, and stood there bleeding.
    On this declaration, she let out a long wail and got up and beat him as if beating at the old lie of Love itself. Tomas did
     not move. He took her blows like proofs of something else and stood.
    When at last she had surrendered and stopped in a wheezing breathlessness on the side of the bed, she heard with astonishment
     the handsome Foley repeat his vow of love. He stood there naked by the window and told her.
    “Stop it!” she said. “Stop it!” And she held her hands over her ears and looked for a time like a young girl again. “Don’t
     even say that. Not you.” She turned away and looked at where the wall was flaked and cracked. “Do you know how many times
     I’ve heard men say that?” she said.
    “This is me,” said Tomas. “I love you.”
    She sighed and rolled back over on the bed so that she was near him. She looked at the beauty of his body and weakened. She
     looked at his softened sex and wanted to take it in her hands.
    ’’If you love me—”
    “I do,” he blurted.
    “If, I said”—she reached up a hand and touched his stomach and drew it away again—“if you love me, you will pay me,” she said,
     and watched him for the dodge she knew would be coming. A bell in the town rang two o’clock. She should have been out on the
     street again. She heard it and waited, then on the end of its second pealing heard Tomas Foley offer her his boots as payment.
    “Here, I have no money. I will get some and bring it to you tomorrow,” he said. “These are good boots.”
    She took them in her hands. “They are.”
    “They show you,” Tomas said.
    “I’d almost believe you,” she told him then, and with that he turned and walked to the door of that small room and picked
     up his clothes and put them on.
    “They show you I love you.” He stood in his ragged trousers and held his shirt in his hand. He looked at her a final time.
     “What is your name?”
    With his boots in her hands, the woman who through his eyes had seen herself again a girl in a time before the tarnishing
     of all such notions as truth and love said her name was
Blath,
meaning flower.

4
    With their eldest brother lost in the seas of love, Finbar and Finan woke in the dawn with hunger eating at their
     insides. They opened their mouths on the damp air to see if the pangs might escape. They did not. They sat up and wondered
     what to do. With Tomas sleeping they seemed grown in stature and got up and stood with legs apart and stern faces as if serious-minded
     captains. They