Walk the Blue Fields

by Claire Keegan

  Martha doesn’t cook a breakfast any more but Deegan doesn’t care. The girl goes back to school and although she gets on well, she isn’t the same. There’s no more talk of being the captain of a ship, of marrying the Taoiseach. The simpleton is the only one who’s happy. He has turned the whole parlour into a farm. His sheds are bedded, his combine parked against the skirting board. The fields have completely taken up the floor. At the edges of his land, the nylon curtains come down like sheets of rain.

  One night when he is herding his cattle, the boy hears something outside the window. It’s the wind nudging the rosebushes. Or maybe it is a mouse. The boy gets up and wonders if he would be able to kill it. He has twice seen his father break a rat’s back with a shovel. They are easy to kill. He stands holding the poker and goes quietly as he can towards the door and listens. He can hear the claws. When he opens the door, a dog is standing there, a stray. Something about him suggests something else. The boy strokes him, feels the bones under the dirty coat. The dog is shivering.

  ‘Come in to the fire,’ he says, with a sweep of his hand. That’s what his mother said to the stranger and the stranger followed her. Now the stray follows him, down the steps and on into his home. The boy is the man of the house now. He closes the door and tries to remember how to light a fire. It cannot be hard. Hasn’t he built a whole farm by himself? He takes newspapers out of the scuttle and twists them. His sister taught him how to do this. He places the papers on the hearth of his house, where the carpet meets the plywood. It takes a long time but finally he manages to strike one of the matches.

  ‘Damp,’ he says. ‘They’re damp.’

  The paper oaks catch fire and the boy piles high the hedges.

  ‘It’s all right,’ he says to the dog. ‘Come up to the fire and warm yourself.’

  Intrigued, the boy watches the flames. They turn the paper black and cross into the hay barn, set fire to his roof and spread on up through the nylon sheets of rain. This is the loveliest thing he has built. He opens the door to let the draught blow it up the chimney. Some small part of the boy is upset yet he stands back, and laughs.

  He looks around but the dog is gone up the stairs. When he jumps on the bed he lands on Martha.

  ‘Judge,’ the girl says. ‘Judge.’

  There is the smell of smoke coming up the stairs. Martha gets it too. Deegan is in the far room. He is such a heavy sleeper.

  ‘Daddy!’ the girl shouts.

  Smoke is crawling through the rooms, filling up the house. The boy is standing with the doors open watching the blue flames cross the ceiling boards, intrigued. Martha, in her nightdress, drags him out. Deegan doesn’t want to get up. Through sleep he looks at the dog. For some reason he is glad to see him back. He turns over and tries to sleep again. An age, it seems, passes before he will admit that the house is on fire and he summons the courage to get down the stairs.

  When they are all out they can do nothing more than stand staring at the house. Aghowle is in flames. Deegan breaks the parlour window to throw water on the fire but when the glass is broken, the flames leap out and lick the eaves. Deegan’s legs don’t work. He looks at the children. The boy is all right. The girl has her arms around the dog. There is a minute during which Deegan still believes he can save his home. The minute passes. The word insurance goes through his head. He sees himself standing out on the road but that, too, passes. Deegan, in his bare feet, goes over to his wife. There are no tears.

  ‘Are you sorry now?’ he says.

  ‘Sorry for what?’

  ‘Are you sorry now you strayed?’

  He looks at her and it dawns on him that she isn’t the slightest bit sorry. She shakes her head.

  ‘I’m sorry you took it out on the girl,’ she says. ‘That’s all.’

  ‘I didn’t know what I was doing.’ It’s the first admission he’s ever made. If he starts down that road there might be no end to it. Even in his surest moments Deegan never really believed there would be an end to anything. They stand there until the heat becomes too strong and they have to back away.

  They must now turn their backs on Aghowle. To some the lane has never seemed so short. To others it is otherwise. But never has the lane been so bright: sparks and ash are flying through the air. It looks as though the oaks, too, could catch fire. The cows have come down to the fence to watch, to warm themselves. They are ghastly figures and yet they seem half comic in the firelight.

  Martha holds on to her daughter’s hand. She thinks of her money, the salesman and all those obsolete red roses. The girl has never known such happiness; Judge is back, that’s all she cares, for now. It hasn’t yet occurred to her that she’s the one who taught her brother how to light a fire. The guilt of that will surface later. Deegan is numb and yet he feels lighter than before. The drudgery of the past is gone and the new work has not yet started. In the lane, the puddles are reflecting fire, shining bright as silver. Deegan grasps at thoughts: of having work, that it’s just a house, that they are alive.

  It is hardest for the boy whose farm is gone. All his work, through his own fault, is wasted. Nonetheless he is intrigued. He looks back at his creation. It is the biggest fire anyone has ever built. At the foot of the lane the neighbours are gathering, coming on slowly towards them. Now they are closer, offering beds for the night.

  ‘Who cares?’ he keeps whispering as he goes along. ‘Who cares?’

  Close to the Water’s Edge

  Tonight he is out on the balcony, his dark tan stunning against the white of his dress shirt. Five days have passed since he left Cambridge to spend time with his mother on the Texas coast. Up here, the wind is strong. The plastic leaves of the tall, potted plants beat against the sliding glass. He does not care for the penthouse with its open-mouthed swordfish on the walls, the blue tiles and all the mirrors that make it impossible to do even the simplest thing without it being reflected.

  Early in the mornings, the porters erect wooden loungers and stake blue parasols on the private strip of sand. As the morning heats up, the residents come out to lie almost naked in the sun. They bring paperbacks, towels and reach into their coolers for Diet Coke and Coppertone. He lies in the shade and watches the procession of young men with washboard bellies walking the strand. They are college kids his own age who stay at the motels closer to the strip.

  Towards midday, when the heat becomes unbearable, he swims out to the sand bar, a good half-mile from the shore. He can see it now, the strip of angry waves breaking in the shallows. Now the tide is advancing, erasing the white, well-trodden sands. It’s ten years since the ban on DDT came into place and the brown pelicans are back. They look pre-historic gliding over the water, scooping their prey with their huge bills, their high, plummeting dives. A jogger stays on the hard sand close to the water’s edge, his shadow at his side.

  Inside, his mother is arguing with his stepfather, the Republican who owns this complex. He is a man of humble origins who made his money out of exports and real estate. After his parents divorced, his mother said people have no control over who they fall in love with, and a few months later she married the millionaire. Now he can hear them talking, their enraged whispers gathering speed on the slope of their argument. It is an old story.

  ‘I’m warning you, Richard, don’t bring it up!’

  ‘Who brought it up? Who?’

  ‘It’s his birthday, for Christ’s sake!’

  ‘Who said anything?’

  The young man looks down. At the hot tub, a mother braces herself and enters the bubbling water. Screams from racing children pierce the night. He feels the same trepidation he always feels at these family occasions, and wonders why he came back here when he could be in Cambridge in his T-shirt and jeans, playing chess on the computer, drinking Australian beer. He takes the cufflinks from his pocket, a gift his grandmother gave him shortly before she died. They are gold-plated cufflinks whose gold is slowly wearing off revealing the steel underneath.

  *

  When his g
randmother first married, she begged her husband to take her to the ocean. They were country people, pig farmers from Tennessee. His grandmother said she had never laid eyes on the Atlantic. She said if she saw the ocean, she could settle down. It wasn’t something she could explain but each time she asked her husband, his response was the same.

  ‘Who’ll take care of things round here?’

  ‘We could ask the neighbours –’

  ‘What neighbours? That’s our livelihood out there, Marcie. You know that.’

  Months passed, she grew heavy with child and finally gave up asking to see the ocean. Then, one Sunday, her husband shook her awake.

  ‘Pack a bag, Marcie,’ he said. ‘We’re going to the coast.’

  It wasn’t yet light when they got into the car. They drove all that day, across the hills of Tennessee towards the coast. The landscape changed from green, hilly farmland to dry plains with tall palms and pampas grass. The sun was going down when they arrived. She got out and gasped at the bald sun sinking down into the ocean. The Atlantic looked green. The coast seemed a lonely place with the stink of seaweed and the gulls fighting for leftovers in the sand.

  Then her husband took out his pocket-watch.

  ‘One hour, Marcie. I’ll give you one hour,’ he said. ‘If you’re not back by then, you can find your own way home.’

  She walked for half an hour with her bare feet in the frothy edge of the sea, then turned back along the cliff path and watched her husband, at five minutes past the appointed hour, slam the car door and turn the ignition. Just as he was taking off, she jumped into the road and stopped the car. Then she climbed in and spent the rest of her life with a man who would have gone home without her.

  *

  His twenty-first birthday is marked by a dinner at Leonardo’s, the fancy seafood restaurant overlooking the water. His mother, dressed in a white pants suit with a rhinestone belt, joins him on the balcony.

  ‘I’m so proud of you, honey.’

  ‘Mom,’ he says and lets her embrace him.

  His mother, a small woman with a hot temper, likes to go marketing. She drinks a glass of fresh grapefruit juice with vodka before she goes and makes out a list on the counter. Olive oil, artichoke hearts, balsamic vinegar, veal. All the things she could never afford. She avoids the aisle of toilet paper and dog food, goes straight to the deli and points to the monkfish, the prosciutto, the organic cheese. Once, she bought a ten-ounce jar of beluga caviar and ate it with her fingers in the parking lot.

  ‘I’m so proud of you,’ she says now, staring at his throat. She puts her glass down and reaches out to knot his tie. ‘There,’ she says, standing back to look at him again. ‘How many mothers can look at their sons and say, “My boy’s going to Harvard University?” I’m a pig-farmer’s daughter from Tennessee and my boy is going to Harvard. When I’m low, I always remember that, and it cheers me up no end.’

  She takes a sip from her glass. Her nails are painted a hard and shiny red.

  ‘It’s no big deal, Mom.’

  She looks out at the water and down at the strand. He never really knows what’s going through her mind.

  ‘You play your cards right and this could all be yours some day.’ She gestures to the complex. The gesture is reflected, from different angles, in the mirrored room behind her. ‘You wonder why I married him but I was thinking of you, all along.’

  ‘Mom, I don’t –’ her son begins but just then the millionaire comes out with a lighted cigar and blows a mouthful of smoke into the night. He’s a plain man with an Italian suit and the whitest teeth money can buy.

  ‘You all ready? I could eat a small child,’ he says.

  They take the elevator to the ground floor where a porter opens the front door. Another man, in a gold-braided uniform, brings round the car. The millionaire tips him and gets in behind the driver’s seat even though the restaurant is less than a ten-minute walk along the strand.

  When they reach Leonardo’s, the owner greets them, shakes his stepfather’s hand. There’s a palm tree growing in the middle of the restaurant with a parrot chained to one of its branches. They are escorted to a table under the chandelier. Yellow light spills over the white cloth and cello music is coming out of the walls. A basket of bread is laid out, butter, a selection of shellfish on a wooden board. His stepfather reaches for an oyster, loosens it with his knife and swallows it. His mother picks up a fat shrimp as the maître d’, a thin man with dark brown skin, appears.

  ‘How may I help you this evening?’

  His stepfather orders the wine and tells him to bring out the champagne.

  ‘Did you hear about this guy Clinton? Says if he’s elected President he’s gonna let queers into the military,’ he says. ‘What do you think of that, Harvard?’

  ‘Richard!’ his mother says.

  ‘It’s OK, Mom. Well, I don’t think the tradition of –’

  ‘What’s next? Lesbians coaching the swim team, running for the Senate?’

  ‘Richard!’

  ‘What kind of defence would that be? A bunch of queers! We didn’t win two World Wars that way. I don’t know what this country is turning into.’

  Smells of horseradish and dill spill out from the kitchen. Alobster has got loose in the tank but the waiter dips a net into the water and snaps a thick elastic band around his claws.

  ‘No more politics,’ his mother says. ‘It’s my boy’s night. He got a 3.75 grade point average last semester. Now what do you think of that, Richard?’

  ‘3.75? Not bad.’

  ‘Not bad? Well, I should say not! He’s top of his class!’

  ‘Mom.’

  ‘No, I won’t be hushed up this time! He’s top of the class, and he’s twenty-one years old today! A grown man. Let’s have a toast.’

  ‘Now there’s an idea,’ says the millionaire.

  He pours champagne into the flutes. The glasses fizz up but he waits for the contents to settle.

  ‘Here’s to the brightest young man in the whole state of Texas,’ he says.

  They are smiling now, suddenly at ease. There is a chance that this dinner will not be like the others.

  ‘… and to not having queers in the military!’

  The mother’s smile capsizes. ‘Goddamn, Richard!’

  She raises her hands. As her hands move, her son realises how beautiful her diamonds are.

  ‘What’s the matter? It’s just a little joke,’ her husband says. ‘Doesn’t anybody round here know how to take a joke any more?’

  The waiter arrives with a steel tray, and the entrées. Turbot for the lady, salmon for the young man and a lobster.

  The millionaire ties the bib around his neck, takes the pincers and breaks open the lobster’s claw.

  ‘There must be some fine women up there at Harvard,’ he says, picking out the meat. ‘Some real knock-outs.’

  ‘They accept us on the basis of intelligence, not looks.’

  ‘Even so. The best and the brightest. How come you never bring a girl down?’

  At this point, he could say something. He composes a retort, decides to speak, then looks at his mother and hesitates. His mother’s eyes are pleading for his silence.

  ‘They must be all around you like flies,’ says the millionaire, ‘a young man like you. Why, when I was your age I had a different woman every weekend.’

  ‘These olives!’ the mother says. ‘Taste these olives!’

  The millionaire puts his head down and concentrates on his food. The young man flakes a piece of salmon off the bone. His mother stares at the parrot in the tree.

  ‘Is there anything else you need?’ She smiles the old, apologetic smile

  ‘No, Mom,’ he says, ‘I’m fine. This is good.’

  After their plates are taken away and the waiter has brushed the crumbs off the cloth, the maître d’ comes back and whispers into his stepfather’s ear. The chandelier is doused and a lighted cake is carried from the kitchen by a nervous, Mexican waiter singing ‘Happy
Birthday’. It is a pink cake, the pinkest cake he has ever seen, like a cake you’d have at the christening party for twin girls.

  The millionaire is grinning.

  ‘Make a wish, honey!’ his mother cries.

  The young man closes his eyes, and when his eyes are closed, he realises he does not know what to wish for. It is the unhappiest moment of the day so far but he blows hard, extinguishing the candles.

  The millionaire takes the knife and carves the cake into uneven pieces, like a pie-chart. The young man stuffs a piece in his mouth and licks the frosting. The millionaire reaches for his mother’s hand, clasps her jewelled fingers.

  ‘Happy birthday, Son,’ she says, and kisses her husband on the mouth.

  The young man stands up and hears himself thanking them for a pleasant birthday. The lights come back on and then he hears his mother calling his name, the waiter saying, ‘Good evening, Sir,’ at the door. He is crossing the highway now, finding a space between the speeding cars. The other college kids are out on the promenade. He stands for a moment and watches a bungee jumper throwing herself into mid-air, screaming. She dangles for a while above the ground until a man comes over and takes her harness off.

  Down at the deserted beach, the tide has reclaimed the strand. The water is black, the night wind streaking white frills across the surface. He loosens the knot at his throat and walks on, towards the pier. There, yachts with ropedin sails stand trembling on the water.

  His grandmother, with whom he lived while his parents broke up, is dead now. Not a day has passed when he has not felt her absence. She said if she’d had her life to live again, she would never have climbed back into that car. She’d have stayed behind and turned into a street-walker sooner than go home. Nine children, she bore him. When he asked what made her climb back in, she said, ‘Those were the times I lived in. That’s what I believed. I thought I didn’t have a choice.’ His grandmother is dead but he is twenty-one years old, inhabiting space on the earth, getting A’s at Harvard, walking on a beach without any time constriction in the moonlight.