Walk the Blue Fields

by Claire Keegan

  When she gets back she changes into her old clothes and goes out to check her hens. Jimmy Davis had three lambs taken, and lately she feels afraid.

  ‘Coohoooo! Cocohoooo!’ she cries, rattling the bucket.

  At her call they come, suspicious as always, through the fence. She counts them, goes through their names, and feels relieved. Then she is down on her knees plucking weeds out of the flowerbeds. All the flowers have by this time faded yet there is no frost in the mornings. The broom’s shadow is bending onto the second flowerbed. It is almost three. Soon the children will be home, hungry, asking what there is to eat.

  As she is bringing the fire back to life, Judge comes in and paws her leg. His tail is wagging. Several times he paws her before Martha realises there’s something in his mouth. She kneels down and opens her hand. He drops something onto her palm. Her hand knows what it is but she has to look twice. It is an egg without so much as a crack in the shell.

  Martha laughs. ‘Aren’t you some dog?’

  Martha gives him milk from the saucepan and says the girl will soon be home. They go down the lane to meet her. She climbs down from the school bus and tells them she solved a word problem in mathematics, that long ago Christina Columbus discovered the earth was round. She says she’ll let the Taoiseach marry her and then she changes her mind. She will not marry at all but become the captain of a ship. She sees herself standing on deck with a storm blowing the red lemonade out of her cup.

  Back home, the simpleton is getting on well. In the parlour he has planted late, brown paper oaks to shelter his dwelling house. The boy likes being alone and doesn’t mind the fact that people sometimes forget he’s there.

  The eldest returns from the Vocational School stinking of cigarettes. Martha tells him to brush his teeth, and puts the dinner on the table. Then she goes upstairs. She has things to think about. What she is thinking isn’t new. She takes her wedding coat out of the wardrobe, opens the seam and looks at her money. She doesn’t have to count it. She knows how much is there. Five hundred and seven pounds so far, she has saved, mostly housekeeping money she did not put on the table. No longer is it a question of if or why. She must now decide when, exactly, she will leave.

  Deegan comes home later than usual. ‘You couldn’t watch that new man. He’d be gone by three if you didn’t watch him.’ He eats all that’s placed before him, rises, and heads out for the milking. The cows are already at the field gate, roaring.

  That night he goes to bed early. His legs are sore from walking the steep lines and his feet are cold but before he can turn over he is asleep. In sleep he dreams he is standing under the oaks. In the dream it isn’t autumn but a fine, summer’s day. Agust of wind blows up out of the valley. It is so hard and sudden – whatever way this gust is, it frightens Deegan and the oaks flinch. Leaves begin to fall. It all seems wrong but when Deegan looks down there, all around his feet are twenty-pound notes. Towards the end of the dream he is like a child trying, without much success, to catch them all. Finally he has to get a wheelbarrow. He fills it to the brim and pushes it all the way to Carnew. As he wheels it along the roads, neighbours come out and stare. The envy in their eyes is unmistakable. A few notes flutter from the barrow but it doesn’t matter: he has more than enough.

  When he wakes he gets up, goes to the window and looks out at the oaks. They are standing there, as always, in the dark. Deegan scratches his beard and goes over his dream. Dreaming has become the closest thing to having someone to talk to. He looks at Martha. His wife is fast asleep, the pale breast pressed against the thin cotton of her nightdress. He would like to wake her and tell her now of his dream. He would like sometimes to carry her away from this place and tell her what is on his mind and start all over again.

  *

  During this mild winter, Christmas comes. The frost is brittle, the birds confused. By this time Judge’s coat is immaculate, his shadow never too far from the girl’s. Deegan’s humour improves for he’s worked overtime and caught thieves stealing Christmas trees. The Forestry Department give him a bonus cheque which he spends on new ceiling boards for the house. All through the holidays he measures and saws, hammers and paints. When he’s finished with the last coat of varnish, he takes Martha to the hardware and makes her choose wallpaper for the kitchen. She picks out rolls depicting woodbine whose pattern is wasteful and hard to match.

  Neighbours come to the house that Christmas and remark on how, each time they visit, the house has improved.

  ‘Oh, an auld house is impossible to keep,’ Deegan protests. ‘You could spend your whole life on it and see no difference.’ But he is pleased, and hands round the stout.

  ‘Easy knowing you have a good woman behind you,’ they say. ‘Doesn’t a woman make a place.’

  ‘That’s for sure.’

  Martha is quiet. She smiles and drinks two large hot whiskeys but, despite all coaxing, refuses to tell a story.

  For Christmas the girl gets an Abba record which she plays twice and commits to memory. ‘Waterloo’ is her favourite song. Santa slides down the chimney and leaves a second-hand bicycle for the middle child. He’d hoped for machinery for his farm – a harrow to put in the early wheat or a harvester, for his sugar beet’s near ready for the factory. Sometimes he wishes for rain. Their leaves, which he made out of bicycle tyres, seem dry and are not getting any taller.

  The eldest goes off to Dublin for the holidays. Deegan gives him a little money so he will be under no compliment to his uncles. It doesn’t matter that his eldest boy’s mind is on the city. Deegan has willed him the place and knows that Aghowle will some day draw him back. To his wife he presents a sewing basket and, with egg money, Martha buys her husband a pair of Clark’s plaid slippers.

  On Saint Stephen’s night, a fox comes into the yard. Judge can smell him, detects his stink on the draught under the door before he reaches the henhouse. Judge gets up but the door is bolted. He goes upstairs and pulls the quilt off the girl’s bed. The girl gets up, takes one look at him, and wakes her mother. Martha hears the commotion in the henhouse and shakes Deegan who comes down in his pyjamas and loads the gun. The retriever’s excitement grows. He hadn’t known Deegan owned a gun. Together they run out to the yard. Awhite moon is spinning, shredding the light between the clouds. The taste on Judge’s tongue is hot like mustard but they are too late: the henhouse door stands ajar and the fox is gone. He has killed two hens and taken another. Their young look demented. In the chaos they keep searching but every wing they find is not their mother’s. Judge stares at Deegan but all Deegan does is fire a few shots off in the air – as though that would make any difference to a fox.

  The next morning the forester goes out to pluck the hens. He looks up at the beam where he hung them but there’s nothing there, just the bits of baling twine he strung them up with. Martha is already burying them in the garden. Her eyes are red.

  ‘Such waste,’ Deegan says, and shakes his head.

  ‘We’d be hard up if we had to eat Sally and Fern. You dig them up. You eat them. I’ll make the sauce.’

  ‘You never in your married life made sauce.’

  ‘Do you know, Victor Deegan, neither did you.’

  The nights between Christmas and the New Year are long. The simpleton, with bits of ceiling boards, builds haysheds for his farm, which he crawls through. The girl writes down her resolutions and with her brother’s sense of wonder reads the chapter entitled ‘Reproduction’ in the eldest’s new biology book. Aghowle stinks of varnish and there isn’t much money. Deegan is uneasy. He keeps having the same dream: every night he puts his hand in his pocket and there, his wallet, bulging with all the money he’s ever earned, is cut in two. All the notes are in halves and he can convince neither shopkeeper nor bank clerk that they are genuine. Towards the end, all the neighbours stand there laughing, saying there will be no improvements now.

  He dreams a strange dream also; of coming home through a blue evening feeling anxious because no smoke is rising, of walking ins
ide and his house being empty. There is a note that makes him sad for a while but the sadness doesn’t last and in the end he is a young man again on his knees, lighting the fire. After this dream he wakes and, in an attempt at intimacy, tells his wife.

  Martha, still half asleep, says, ‘Why would I leave you?’ and turns over.

  Deegan straightens himself. Such a strange thing to say. He never thought she’d leave him, never thought such a thing had crossed her mind. The house itself seems strange tonight. Martha’s roses have, through the years, crawled up along the walls and, in the wind, paw the windows. On the staircase, a green shadow like water trembles. He goes downstairs feeling brittle, to get a drink. Some day it will all be over. He will get back the deed, buy a steel box and bury it under the oaks. Without Aghowle to worry about, his future will be an open hand. Martha, the mother of his children, will be happy, for there will be nights in B&Bs and brand-new clothes. They will travel to the West of Ireland. She’ll eat liver and onions for her breakfast. They will walk again on a warm strand and Deegan won’t care about the sand under his feet.

  He takes his drink in the parlour. The retriever is lying on the hearth rug, soaking up what is left of the heat. Deegan never found anyone who’d buy him. The dog is wearing a jacket of red velvet which Martha, to please the girl, has sewn during the holidays. His wife has stitched a zip along the belly and trimmed the sleeves. Deegan shakes his head. In all their time together, never once has she sewn so much as a patch onto his trousers.

  He opens the ledger and looks over the bills. The price of schoolbooks is beyond reason. The thermostat in the cooler will have to be replaced. There is house insurance to renew but he can leave that for another while as he has the car to tax. He totals his income and the outgoings, sits back and sucks a breath in through his teeth. The spring will be lean but he’ll be careful and get through it as he always does. One thing the neighbours can’t say is that Victor Deegan is a bad provider. There isn’t so much as a lazy notion in that man’s head. Fifty-nine more payments. He does the arithmetic in his head. Five twelves are sixty. It will take almost five years but won’t the years pass anyhow? Deegan looks again at the numbers, sighs.

  The boy, who has all this time been lying inside his hayshed, looks out. ‘Is it money, Daddy?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Mammy says you think of nothing else.’

  ‘Does she now?’

  ‘Aye. And she says you can sew your own arse into your trousers. Why would you sew your arse into your trousers?’

  ‘You watch your tongue,’ Deegan says but he laughs all the same. The boy, like much else in life, has been a disappointment. He gets up and opens the curtains. The sky looks clear, the moon changeful. The holly this year was red with berries. He predicts a bad year and draws the curtains closed again. On the sideboard lie the girl’s new copybooks, her name written neatly on their covers. Victoria Deegan. The child’s name gives him pride; it is so much like his own. A cold feeling crawls up his back. He tries to think of nothing but instead he thinks of Martha saying, ‘I won’t leave you.’

  With bills, school uniforms and a wife’s unspoken desire to leave, another year begins. Martha’s desire to leave wanes when a flu clouds up her head and returns just as soon as she gets well again. Judge follows the girl everywhere. One night she runs a bath without bolting the door. The retriever gets up on his hind legs, looks over the edge of the tub and sniffs the water. It smells strange but it is warm. Before the girl knows what he’s doing, he’s in beside her.

  In January, Dublin shops advertise their sales. Martha takes the bus to O’Connell Street but she does not go near the shops. She walks past Clery’s, on down across the Liffey and winds up in a D’Olier Street cinema eating boiled sweets, crying while a tragedy concerning an Irish girl who left for America flashes across the screen. She comes back with her eldest boy and sticks of rock, disillusioned with her thoughts of leaving. Where would she go? How would she earn money? She remembers the phrase, ‘better the devil you know’, and becomes humoursome. Deegan puts it down to the fact that she is going through the change of life, and says nothing. He has become more than a little afraid of his wife and, to feel some kind of tenderness, often sits his daughter on his knee.

  ‘Tutners,’ he calls her. ‘My little Tutners.’

  One Friday evening when he is low, feeling the pinch, Deegan drives down to the neighbour’s house to play forty-five. He thinks it might cheer him up to see the neighbours and play cards but when he gets there he cannot concentrate. After five games he’s lost what he normally doubles in the night, and so he gets up to leave. The neighbours do their best to make him stay but Deegan insists on going, and bids them all goodnight.

  When he is getting into his car, a stranger who holds his cards close to his chest approaches.

  ‘I understand you have a dog you’d sell.’

  ‘A dog?’ says Deegan.

  ‘Aye,’ he says, ‘a gun dog. Do you still have him?’

  ‘Well, I do.’ Deegan is set back on his heel but he recovers quickly. ‘I bought him last September but I’ve little time for hunting and it’s a shame to see him wasted.’

  Deegan goes on to describe a retriever. He begins to talk easily about pheasants and how his dog can rise them, how the soup off a pheasant tastes finer than anything you can find in a hotel. He talks about the turf basket and how it is never empty since the dog came to the house. As soon as he mentions turf, the man smiles but Deegan does not notice, for he is remembering the girl on her birthday and how she and the retriever now bathe in the same water. But it is too late to back down.

  ‘How much would you be asking?

  ‘Fifty pound,’ says Deegan. It is a crazy price – he will be lucky to get the half of it – but the man doesn’t flinch.

  ‘If he is what you say, I might be interested. When can I see him?’

  Deegan hesitates. ‘Let me think –’

  ‘Would now suit you?’

  ‘Now?’

  ‘Aye. I suppose it would.’

  ‘Right. I’ll follow you, so.’

  That night Judge recognises O’Donnell before he comes through the door. He always leads with his bad foot and the foot always hesitates before crossing the door. If there is any speck of doubt in Judge’s mind, it vanishes when he gets the hunter’s scent. It is a mixture of silage and some kind of oil he uses to keep his hair in place. Deegan comes in first. Judge leaps up and rips his velvet jacket on the corner of the armchair.

  ‘Well, look at you in your finery,’ O’Donnell says, and begins to laugh.

  Deegan, feeling slightly embarrassed, joins in the laughter. ‘’Tis only a thing the child put on him.’

  Judge does his best to escape but every door off the kitchen is closed and it is only a matter of time before the two men catch him and place him, whimpering, in the boot of O’Donnell’s car.

  ‘There now,’ says Deegan. It is all he can do not to hold out his hand. ‘You won’t be sorry you bought him.’

  ‘Bought him?’ says O’Donnell. ‘When did you ever hear of a man buying his own dog?’

  As Deegan watches the tail-lights sailing down the lane he tries not to think of the girl in her yellow dress, thanking him. He tries not to think of her sitting on his lap. He tells himself it doesn’t matter, that there is nothing he could have done. When he turns to go inside, something above him moves. He looks up. Martha is standing at their bedroom window in her nightdress, watching. She raises her hand and Deegan, feeling surprised, raises his. Maybe some part of her is glad the dog is gone. While he stands there watching, his wife’s hand closes into a fist and her fist shakes. So, it is all out in the open.

  Needless to say, the girl wonders why Judge doesn’t wake her the next morning.

  ‘Where’s Judge?’ she says when she comes down. She looks at her parents. Deegan is sitting at the head of the table forcing hard butter into a slice of white bread. Her mother is holding a cup of black tea to her lips staring a
t her husband through the steam.

  ‘Ask your father,’ Martha says.

  ‘Daddy, where is he?’ Her voice is breaking.

  Deegan coughs. ‘A man came looking for him.’

  ‘What man?’

  ‘His owner. His owner came looking for him.’

  ‘What do you mean, his owner? I own him. You gave him to me.’

  ‘In truth,’ Deegan says, ‘I didn’t. I found him in the wood and brought him home, that was all.’

  ‘But Judge is mine! You gave him to me.’

  She runs outside and calls his name. She searches the land and all their hiding places: ‘The Spaw’ where he buries his bones, the tunnel in the hayshed, the grove beyond the hazels where the pheasants sleep. She searches until the knowledge that he is gone sinks in and changes her state of mind. Her father never loved her, after all. She decides she will run away but finds she isn’t even able to go to school. She eats little more than a sparrow. By the time a week has passed she has stopped talking. Every evening she goes out on the bicycle calling his name:

  ‘Judge! Judge!’ is heard all around that parish. ‘Judge!’

  Deegan knows the girl has gone a bit mad but the girl will get over it. It is only a matter of time. Everything else in Aghowle stays much the same: the cows come down to the gate to be milked, the milk is put in creamery cans and collected. Martha’s hens peck at the seed, roost for the night and lay their eggs. The pan is taken down early in the mornings, put back on its hook and taken down again. And the boys fight as always over what is and isn’t theirs.

  Sometimes, sitting in the wood with his flask and sandwiches, Deegan regrets what happened with the dog but most of the time it doesn’t cross his mind. The consequences, not their origin, strain him most for his wife no longer speaks to him, no longer sleeps at his side.

  Sometimes Martha sees herself back in that morning in the wood, throwing stones at Judge. His tail is between his legs and he is running away. He is looking back and she is feeling sorry but she knows she is doing the right thing. So much of her life has revolved around things that never happened. She grills cheese on toast but the girl won’t have it. Martha sits on her bed and tries to convince her that she should get another dog, a little pup who can be the girl’s own, a dog that she can love.