When Deegan came home she told him what had happened.
‘You spent my money on roses?’
‘Your money?’
‘What kind of fool did I marry at all?’
‘Is it a fool I am?’
‘What else?’
‘I suppose I was fool enough to marry you.’
‘Is that so?’ Deegan grabbed the end of his beard as though he might tear it off. ‘The hard times aren’t over. It’s all very well for you sitting here day in, day out. You didn’t bring so much as a penny into this place. And a working man needs more than dried-out spuds for his dinner.’
‘You don’t look any the worst for it.’
And it was true: Deegan had put on weight, had the bloom on him that men have after they marry.
‘If that’s the case, it’s not your doing,’ Deegan said, and went out to milk the cows.
That summer her roses bloomed scarlet but long before the wind could blow their heads asunder, Martha realised she had made a mistake. All she had was a husband who hardly spoke now that he’d married her, an empty house and no income of her own. She had married a man she did not love. What had she expected? She had expected it would grow and deepen into love. And now she craved intimacy and the type of conversation that would surpass misunderstanding. She thought about finding a job but it was too late: a child was near ready for the cradle.
The children Martha bore, she reared casually, never threatening them with anything sharper than a wooden spoon. When her first-born was placed in her arms her laughter was like a pheasant rising out of the bushes. The boy, a shrill young fellow, grew tall but it soon became apparent that he had no grá for farming; when the boy sat in under a cow, the milk went back up to her horns. He looked up to his uncles whom he visited every now and then in Dublin and it was hardship to make him do a hand’s turn. He would get away just as soon as he saw the opportunity.
The second child was a simpleton: a beautiful, pale boy with a pair of green eyes staring from a shell of dark brown hair. He did not attend school but lived in a world of his own and had a frightening aptitude for speaking the truth.
It was the girl who had the brains, the girl who travelled through youth same as youth was a warm stretch of water she could easily cross. She finished her homework before the school bus reached the lane, refused to eat meat and had a way with animals. While others were afraid to enter the bull’s field, she could walk up and take the ring out of his nose. And she had taken a liking to her brother, the simple one. Always she was urging him on to do the things nobody else believed him capable. She’d taught him how to knot and cast the hook, how to strike a match and write his name.
Seldom did neighbours come into that house but whenever they did, Martha told stories. In fact, she was at her best with stories. On those rare nights they saw her pluck things out of the air and break them open before their eyes. They would leave remembering not the fine old house that always impressed them or the man with the worried look that owned it or the strange flock of teenagers but the woman with the dark brown hair which got looser as the night went on and her pale hands plucking unlikely stories like green plums that ripened with the telling at her hearth. After these stories they were sometimes too frightened to go back out into the night and Deegan had to walk them as far as the road. After such nights, he always took his woman to bed to make not only her but himself sure that she was nobody’s but his. Sometimes he believed that was why she told a story well.
But in that household as in any other, Mondays came. Whether the dawn was blood red or a damp, ash grey, Deegan got up and placed his bare feet on the cold floor and dressed himself. Often his limbs felt stiff but, without complaint, he milked, ate his breakfast and went to work. He worked all day and some days were long. If, in the evenings, his eyes of their own accord were closing while he’d yet again the cows to tend, it was a solace to drive over the hill and see the lighted windows, the tusk of chimney smoke, to know his work was not for nothing. Before he retired, the bank would give back the deed and Aghowle would, at last, belong to him.
The fact that it stood in a hollow, that the walls within it were no thicker than cardboard didn’t matter. Now that his parents were dead and his brothers had gone, Deegan was becoming sentimental. He remembered not how his mother had spent so much of his youth in bed with the curtains drawn or the nights when his father took down the strap saying he couldn’t have it all his own way, but simpler things, plain facts. The line of oaks on Aghowle’s lane were planted by his great-grandfather. No matter how hard or high his children swung, those limbs would never break. Secretly, he knew that the place gave him more satisfaction than his wife and children ever would.
Deegan is now middle-aged. If it is a stage when some believe that much of life is over, and assume that what’s left is a downhill slope to be lived within the restraints of choices made, for Deegan, it is otherwise. For him, retirement will be the reward for all the risks he’s ever taken. By the time his pension comes, his children will be reared. He envisages himself in Aghowle with one Shorthorn for the house. He will get up when it suits him, sort through stones and repair the orchard walls. He will take out the spade, plant more oaks on the land. He can already feel the dry stone, the oaks’ blue shade. The eldest boy will marry, have children, and carry on the name. But in the meantime, before he can take his early retirement and retreat into this easy life he craves, there are children to finish rearing, bills to pay and years of work yet to be done.
*
One wet day while he is working beyond Coolattin pruning a line of Douglas fir, Deegan stumbles across a gun dog. The retriever has sheltered for the night under the trees and the forester has, in fact, roused him from a dream of ponies chasing him through a bog. Puzzled at first by the presence of a stranger, the retriever looks around and then remembers yesterday. O’Donnell tried to shoot him but then O’Donnell’s rage was always sharper than his aim. It was, quite simply, a case of the bad hunter blaming his dog. Now this bearded stranger whose scent is all resin and cow’s milk is standing over him, offering buttered bread. The dog eats it and lets the stranger stroke him.
Deegan does this knowing he will some day – if no owner comes looking – get a nice turn, for the dog is handsome. Waves of white gold run down the retriever’s back. His snout is cold, his eyes brown and ready. Come evening, Deegan doesn’t have to coax him into the car. The dog jumps in and puts his paws up on the dash. With the sunlight striking his coat and the wind in his ears, they travel down hills towards Shillelagh and the open road.
When they reach Aghowle, Deegan is glad, as usual, to see his house with its chimney sending smoke up to the heavens – not that he believes in heaven. Deegan is not a religious man. He knows that beyond this world there is nothing. God is an invention created by one man to keep another at a safe distance from his wife and land. But always he goes to Mass. He knows the power of a neighbour’s opinion and will not have it said that he’s ever missed a Sunday. It is autumn. Brown oak leaves are twisting in dry spasms around the yard. Exhausted, Deegan gives the dog to the first child he sees. It happens to be his youngest and it happens to be the girl’s birthday.
And so the girl, whose father has never given her so much as a tender word, embraces the retriever and with it the possibility that Deegan loves her, after all. A wily girl who is half innocence and half intuition, she stands there in a yellow dress and thanks Deegan for her birthday present. For some reason it almost breaks the forester’s heart to hear her say the words. She is human, after all.
‘There now,’ he says. ‘Aren’t you getting hardy?’
‘I’m twelve,’ she says. ‘I can reach the top of the dresser without the stool.’
‘Is that so?’
‘Mammy says I’ll be taller than you.’
‘No doubt you will.’
Martha, throwing out barley to the hens, overhears this conversation, and knows better. Victor Deegan would never put his hand in his pocket for the
child’s birthday. He’s picked the retriever up some place – as winnings in one of his card games or maybe it’s a stray he’s found along the road. But because her favourite child seems happy, she says nothing.
Martha is still young enough to remember happiness. The day the child was conceived comes back to her. It started out as a day of little promise with clouds suspended on a stiff, February sky. She remembers that morning’s sun in the milking parlour, the wind throwing showers into the barn, how strange and soft the salesman’s hands felt, compared to Deegan’s. He had taken his time, lain back in the straw and told her her eyes were the colour of wet sand.
She has often wondered since then, where the boy was, for her thoughts, that day, were fixed on the prospect of Deegan coming home. When he did come home, he sat in to his dinner and ate as always, asking was there more. Martha waited for the blood but on the ninth day after it was due she gave up and asked the neighbours in and told a story, knowing how the night would end. That part wasn’t easy.
But that’s all in the past. Now her daughter is sitting on the autumn ground, looking into the retriever’s mouth.
‘There’s a black patch on his tongue, Mammy.’
That she is a strange child can’t be doubted. Martha’s youngest holds funerals for dead butterflies, eats the roses and collects tadpoles from the cattle tracks, sets them free to grow legs in the pond.
‘Is it a boy or a girl?’
Martha turns the retriever over. ‘It’s a boy.’
‘I’ll call him Judge.’
‘Don’t get too fond of him.’
‘What?’
‘Well, what if somebody wants him back?’
‘What are you talking about, Mammy?’
‘I don’t know,’ Martha says.
She throws what’s left of the barley on the ground and goes inside to strain the potatoes.
While the Deegans eat, Judge explores the yard. No doubt the place is fine. There’s a milking parlour whose steel throws back his reflection, an empty henhouse with one late egg, and a barn full of hay. He walks down the lane, urinates high on the trunks of the oak trees, shits, and kicks up the fallen leaves. His urge to roll in the cow-dung is almost irresistible but this is the type of house where they might let a dog sleep inside. He stands a long time watching the smoke, considering his circumstances. O’Donnell will be out looking for him. Judge picks up a sod of turf and carries it into the house. The Deegans, who are eating in silence, watch him. He drops the sod in the basket at the hearth and, before they can say a word, goes out for more. He does not stop until the basket is full. The Deegans laugh.
‘You’d have to see it to believe it,’ says Deegan.
‘Where did you find him anyhow?’ says Martha.
Deegan looks at her and shakes his head. ‘Find him? I bought him off one of the forestry lads.’
The girl gives Judge a slice of birthday cake and mashes butter into the leftover potatoes, feeds him on the doorstep.
While they are down the yard, milking, Martha comes out. The evening is fine. In the sky a few early stars are shining of their own accord. She watches the dog licking the bowl clean. This dog will break her daughter’s heart, she’s sure of it. Her desire to chase him off is stronger than any emotion she has felt of late. Tomorrow, while the girl is in school, she’ll get rid of him. She will take him up the wood, throw stones, and tell him to get home. The retriever licks his lips and stares at Martha, grateful. He puts his paw up on her knee. Martha looks at him and fills his bowl with milk. That night, before she goes to bed, she finds an old eiderdown and makes a bed under the table so nobody can walk on his tail.
Judge lies in his new bed, rolls onto his back and stares at the drawers under the table. This is a different sort of house but Deegan will sell him just as soon as he finds the opportunity. The woman he understands: she is just the protective bitch minding her pup. The eldest fellow keeps to himself. The middle boy’s scent is unlike any he has ever encountered. It is something close to ragweed, closer to plant than animal like the roots you’d bury something under. Judge, being wary in this strange place, fights sleep for as long as he is able but the kitchen’s darkness and the fire’s heat are unlike any comforts he has ever known and his will to stay awake soon fades. In sleep he dreams again of finding milk on the second teat. His mother was champion retriever at the Tinahely Show. She used to lick him clean, carry him through streams, proud that he was hers.
The next morning the simpleton, who sleeps odd hours, is the first to rise. Judge wakes, stretches himself and follows the boy out to the shed. They carry withered sticks in and the boy, knowing Judge expects it, does his best to light the fire. He arranges the sticks on yesterday’s ashes and blows on them. He blows until the ash turns their faces grey. When the girl comes down she does not laugh at her brother; she simply kneels and, in her teacher’s voice, shows him how it’s done. She twists what’s left of Sunday’s newspaper, cocks the withered timber, and strikes a match. The boy watches and is intrigued. The strange blue flame grows bigger, changes and, at a certain point, turns into fire. Something about it makes him happy, makes him wonder. He has a capacity for wonder, sees great significance in common things others dismiss simply because they happen every day.
When Martha comes down, the door is wide open and there is no sign of the dog. She had hoped, the night before, that he would somehow run away. A cold wind is coming in. She shuts the door and walks into the scullery to fill the kettle. There on her sink is the retriever and with Deegan’s good china cups, her two youngest stand rinsing the suds off his back. She doesn’t really care but the girl sees her and Martha feels compelled to scold.
‘Did I say you could wash that dog in here?’
‘You said nothing about Judge.’
‘Judge. Is that his name?’
‘I called him that yesterday.’
‘You’ll not bathe him in that sink again. Do you hear?’
‘He’s my birthday present. At least Daddy bought me a dog. You bought me nothing.’
‘Are you jealous?’ asks the boy.
‘What did you say?’ asks Martha.
‘Who cares?’ he says. It’s a phrase he’s heard a neighbour use which he thinks is worth repeating.
‘I care,’ says the girl, reaching again for water.
Martha takes her tea out to the yard where things always seem a fraction easier. She looks down the lane. The oaks are losing their leaves so quickly now. She drinks her tea, takes the stake off the henhouse door and opens it wide. Her fowl rush past in a sweep of red feathers and dust, racing for the feed and the open air. She stoops and reaches into their nests for eggs.
She strides back in to make the breakfast, feeling treacherous. She often feels treacherous in the mornings. She wishes her husband and her children were gone for the day. Always a part of her craves the solitude that will let her mind calm down and her memory surface.
On a hot pan she watches the eggs grow white and harden. Never has she been able to eat them. This morning she longs again for sheep’s liver or a kidney. She’s always had a taste for such things but Deegan won’t have it. What would the neighbours think? The Deegans never ate but the best and he’ll not see his wife standing at the butcher’s stall, ordering liver. She stands there in her apron on a Tuesday wishing she’d married another man, a Dubliner, perhaps, who would stroll down to a butcher’s shop and buy whatever she craved, a man who couldn’t care less what neighbours think.
With the pan spitting, she walks outside and at her loudest, shouts. The desperation in her voice travels all the way down into Aghowle’s valley, and the valley sends back her words.
‘My God,’ says Deegan when he comes in from the milking, ‘we’ll be lucky if we don’t have the whole parish here.’
The Deegans eat and, with full stomachs, go their separate ways. The eldest cycles off to the Vocational School. He has just the one year left and will then become apprentice to his uncle, the plasterer who lives at Harol
d’s Cross. The simpleton heads off to the parlour, gets down on his knees and sets to work on his farm. So far he’s built a boundary with dead fir cones and marked out the fields. Today he will start on his dwelling house. Before the week comes to an end, he’ll have it thatched. Judge walks with the girl down the lane to the school bus. When he gets back, Martha places the frying pan on the kitchen floor and watches while he licks it clean. Without so much as a wipe she hangs it back up on its hook. Let them all get sick, she thinks. She doesn’t care. Something has to happen.
She takes Judge up the wood. The sun is striking against the hazel. It is almost ten. Martha can, by now, tell what time it is without ever glancing at the clock. A blue sky is shedding rain. Some things she will never understand. Why is the winter sun whiter than July’s? Why hadn’t the girl’s father ever written? She had waited for so long. She shakes her head at the absurd part of her that hasn’t given up, and shelters for a while under the chestnut.
Judge is glad he cannot speak. He has never understood the human compulsion for conversation: people, when they speak, say useless things that seldom if ever improve their lives. Their words make them sad. Why can’t they stop talking and embrace each other? The woman is crying now. He licks her hand. There are traces of grease and butter on her fingers. Underneath it all her scent is not unlike her husband’s. As he licks her hand clean, Martha’s desire to chase him off evaporates. That desire belonged to yesterday, has become yet another thing she may never be able to do.
Back home, she lathers her underarms and shaves them, cuts her toenails, brushes her hair and fixes it into a wet knot at the back of her skull, same as she is going somewhere. Then she finds herself on her bicycle pushing herself all the way to Carnew in the rain. In Darcy’s she buys a royal blue blouse off a rail, whose buttons look like pearls. Why she buys it she doesn’t know. It will be wasted in Aghowle. She will wear it to Mass on Sunday and another farmer’s wife will come up to her at the meat counter and tell her where she bought it.
Walk the Blue Fields Page 5
