‘Hartigan started the car a while back,’ she said, ‘to make sure it was in form.’
‘And it was? All right?’
‘Oh, it was, it was.’
‘I’ll take a look at it later.’
He settled in easily, and she realized as he did so that she had never known him well. He had been lost to her in the family, his shadowy place in it influenced by his father’s lack of interest in him. She had never protested about that, only occasionally whispering a surreptitious word or two of comfort. It was fitting in a way that a twist of fate had made him his father’s inheritor.
As if he had never been away, he went about his daily tasks knowledgeably and efficiently. He had forgotten nothing — about the winter feed for the heifers, about the work around the yard or where the fences might give way on the hills or how often to go up there after the sheep, about keeping the tractor right. It seemed, which she had not suspected before, that while his presence was so often overlooked he had watched his father at work more conscientiously than his brothers had. ‘He’d be proud of you these days,’ she said once, but Paulie did not acknowledge that and she resisted making the remark again. The big field, which had been his father’s pride, became his. There was another strip to the south of it that could be cleared and reclaimed, he said, and he took her out to show her where he would run the new wall. They stood in the sunshine on a warm June morning while he pointed and talked about it, the two sheepdogs obedient by him. He was as good with them as his father ever had been.
He drove her, as his father had, every three weeks down to Drunbeg, since she had never learned to drive herself. His father used to wait in the car park of Conlon’s Supermarket while she shopped, but Paulie always went in with her. He pushed the trolley and sometimes she gave him a list and he added items from the shelves. ‘Would we go and see that?’ he suggested one time when they were passing the Two-Screen Rialto, which used to be just the Picture House before it was given a face-lift. She wouldn’t be bothered, she said. She’d never been inside the cinema, either in the old days or since it had become a two-screen; the television was enough for her. ‘Wouldn’t you take one of the Caslin girls?’ she said.
He took the older of them, Aileen, and often after that he drove down in the evenings to sit with her in the Master McGrath. The relationship came to an end when Aileen announced that her sister in Tralee had heard of a vacancy in a newsagent and confectioner’s, that she’d been to Tralee herself to be looked over and in fact had been offered the position.
‘And did you know she had intentions that way?’ Paulie’s mother asked him when she heard, and he said he had, in a way. He didn’t seem put about, although she had assumed herself that by the look of things Aileen Caslin — stolid and on the slow side — would be the wife who’d come to the farmhouse, since her sister Maureen was no longer available. Paulie didn’t talk about it, but quite soon after Aileen’s departure he began to take an interest in a girl at one of the pay-outs in Conlon’s.
‘Wouldn’t you bring Maeve out one Sunday?’ his mother suggested when the friendship had advanced, when there’d been visits to the two-screen and evenings spent together drinking, as there’d been with Aileen Caslin. Maeve was a fair bit livelier than Aileen; he could do worse.
But Maeve never came to the farmhouse. In Conlon’s Paulie took to steering the trolley to one of the other pay-outs even when the queue at hers was shorter. His mother didn’t ask why. He had his own life, she kept reminding herself; he had his privacy, and why shouldn’t he? ‘Isn’t he the good boy to you?’ Father Kinally remarked one Sunday after Mass when Paulie was turning the car. ‘Isn’t it grand the way it’s turned out for you?’
She knew it was and gratefully gave thanks for it. Being more energetic than his father had been at the end, Paulie worked a longer day, far into the evening when it was light enough.
‘I don’t know did I ever speak a word to her,’ she said when he began to go out with the remaining Caslin daughter. Sensible, she looked.
*
‘Ah, sure, anything,’ the youngest of the three Caslin girls always said when Paulie told her what films were on and asked which she’d like to see. When the lights went down he waited a bit before he put an arm around her, as he always had with her sisters and with Maeve. He hadn’t been able to wait with Patsy Finucane.
The sensible look that Paulie’s mother had noted in Annie Caslin was expressed in a matter-of-fact manner. Sentiment played little part in her stalwart, steady nature. She was the tallest and in a general way the biggest of the three Caslin girls, with black hair that she curled and distinctive features that challenged one another for dominance — the slightly large nose, the wide mouth, the unblinking gaze. Paulie took her out half a dozen times before she confessed that what she wanted to do was to live in a town. She’d had the roadside Master McGrath, she said; she’d had serving petrol at the pumps. ‘God, I don’t know how you’d stand it up in the bogs,’ she said before Paulie had a chance to ask her if she’d be interested in coming up to the farmhouse. Even Drunbeg would do her, she said, and got work six months later in the fertilizer factory.
Paulie asked other girls to go out with him, but by then it had become known that what he was after was marriage. One after another, they made excuses, a fact that Hartigan was aware of when he pulled up the Toyota one morning beside a gateway where Paulie was driving in posts. He didn’t say anything, but often Hartigan didn’t.
‘Will it rain, Mr Hartigan?’ Paulie asked him.
‘The first time I saw your mammy,’ Hartigan said, rejecting a discussion about the weather, ‘she was stretching out sheets on the bushes. Six years of age I was, out after a hare.’
‘A while ago, all right.’
‘Amn’t I saying it to you?’
Not understanding the conversation, Paulie vaguely shook his head. He struck the post he was easing into the ground another blow. Hartigan said:
‘I’d take the big field off you.’
‘Ah no, no.’
That was why he had stopped. It might even have been that he’d driven down specially when he heard the thud of the sledgehammer on the posts, saying to himself that it was a good time for a conversation.
‘I wouldn’t want to sell the field, Mr Hartigan.’
‘But wouldn’t you do well all the same if you did? Is it a life at all for a young fellow?’
Paulie didn’t say anything. He felt the post to see if it was steady yet. He struck it again, three times before he was satisfied.
‘You need a bit of company, boy,’ Hartigan said before he backed into the gateway and drove up the hill again.
*
What she had succeeded in keeping at bay since Miss Hartigan had spoken of it was no longer possible to evade. When Paulie told her about Patsy Finucane she was pleased that he did, glad that he didn’t keep it to himself. She knew about everything else: it was all of a piece that Hartigan was trying to get the land cheap by taking advantage of the same circumstances that had left him a bachelor himself. Who could blame him? she said to herself, but even so she wondered if Paulie — so agreeable and good-hearted — would become like that in his time; if he’d become hard, as his father had been, and as grasping as Hartigan.
‘I’ll go to Mena,’ she said. ‘There’s room there.’
‘Ah, there isn’t.’
‘They’d fit me in.’
‘It’s here there’s room.’
‘You want to be married, Paulie. Any man does.’
‘He’d take a day shifting a boulder with the tractor. He’d put a ditch through the marsh to gain another half yard. He never minded how long a thing took.’
‘It’s now we’re talking about, Paulie.’
‘There’d be sheep in this house within a twelvemonth if Hartigan had it, the doors taken off and made use of, and the next thing is the wind’d be shifting the slates. There’d be grazing taken out of the big field until there wasn’t a blade of grass left standing. The
marsh’d come in again. No one’d lift a finger.’
‘You didn’t know what you were coming back to.’
‘Ah, I did. I did.’
Obligingly, he lied. You’d say to yourself he was easygoing. When he’d told her about the Finucane girl he’d said it was the way things were. No matter, he’d said. Often you’d forget he wasn’t easygoing at all; often she did.
‘There’s no need, Paulie.’
‘There is.’
He said it quietly, the two words hanging there after he had spoken, and she realized that although it was her widowhood that had brought him back it wasn’t her widowhood that made him now insist he must remain. She could argue for ever and he would not go now.
‘You’re good, Paulie,’ she said, since there was nothing else left to say.
He shook his head, his dark hair flopping from side to side. ‘Arrah, no.’
‘You are. You are, Paulie.’
When her own death came, her other children would return, again all at the same time. The coffin would be carried down the steep stairs, out into the van in the yard, and the funeral would go through the streets of Drunbeg, and the next day there’d be the Mass. They’d go away then, leaving Paulie in the farmhouse.
‘Wait till I show you,’ he said, and he took her out to where he was draining another half yard. He showed her how he was doing it. He showed her the temporary wall he had put up, sheets of red corrugated that had come from the old shed years ago.
‘That’s great,’ she said. ‘Great, Paulie.’
A mist was coming in off the hills, soft and gentle, the clouds darkening above it. The high edge of Slievenacoush was lost. Somewhere over the boglands a curlew cried.
‘Go in out of the drizzle,’ he said, when they had stood there for a few minutes.
‘Don’t stay out long yourself, Paulie.’
Guilt was misplaced, goodness hardly came into it. Her widowing and the mood of a capricious time were not of consequence, no more than a flicker in a scheme of things that had always been there. Enduring, unchanging, the hills had waited for him, claiming one of their own.
The Hill Bachelors Page 20
