Walk the Blue Fields

by Claire Keegan

  ‘I think it’s nearly time that you were gone out of this!’ the sergeant cried.

  ‘I didn’t –’

  ‘You didn’t! You didn’t what?’

  ‘I didn’t –’

  ‘You didn’t! You didn’t! Get up off your arse and go home!’ the sergeant cried. He looked at the ledger. ‘Did you not even bother your arse to record the rain?’

  The guard stumbled out, half asleep, into the rain and read the gauge. All this was new to him. He came back and wrote a figure in the book and signed it.

  ‘I hope you’ll be in better form tomorrow,’ Doherty said, blotting the page.

  ‘I’ll be as I am,’ said the sergeant. ‘And don’t think just because you’re getting off early that you’ll not have to make up for it some other day.’

  ‘Amn’t I always here,’ sighed Doherty.

  ‘Do you think I haven’t noticed? Amn’t I tripping over you?’

  ‘I do whatever –’

  ‘But are you ever useful? That’s the question. If you’re of no use, then mightn’t you be as well off elsewhere?’

  Doherty looked at him and put his coat on. ‘Is there anything more?’

  ‘That’ll be all,’ the sergeant clipped. ‘It’s clearly as much if not more than you’re able for. God help us, but I can’t help but think sometimes that the force mightn’t be better off with a clatter of women.’

  The guard put on his coat, went out, and softly closed the door. The sergeant went to the window and watched him, how eagerly he pedalled on home. Doherty could ill afford to lose his post, the sergeant knew. He watched him until he had turned the corner then he went out for the coal.

  The coal was a turn from a Protestant for whom he’d done a favour. He pushed the poker deep into the fire and raked over all the old timber. He placed lumps of coal on the embers knowing, before long, that it would blaze. He wheeled the bike up close to the hearth and untied the parcel. Then he took off the clips and hung his cape on the back of the door and sat down. There was relief in sitting down, in being alone, finally.

  He looked at the marks of the tyres, of his feet, of the rain dripping off his cape onto the flagstones. He looked at these marks that he had made until the fire had warmed the room and the floor was dry. Then he took his tunic off and opened the letter. As soon as he opened the letter, the ring fell into his hand but his hand was expecting this. He looked at it briefly and went on to read:

  December 9th

  Dear Michael,

  I have decided it is impossible for us to go on. I have waited long enough and this ring, which I took as a token of your affection, is now an ornament. Nothing is as I had expected. I had thought that we would be married by now and getting on with our lives. I don’t know what it is you are doing up there or why you stay away. It must not be convenient for you to continue on with this engagement and it no longer suits me.

  The time has come for us to be together or remain apart. I see no cause for any further delay. I hear you are throwing your hat at other women. You were seen outside McGuire’s last week and the week before. If your heart has changed, it is your duty to let me know. I enclose your ring and pray God this finds you in good health as we are all down here.

  Yours,

  Susan

  It was as he suspected: she was calling him in. He felt solace in the knowledge that he was right and yet it struck him sore that he had hoped it might be otherwise. Hope always was the last thing to die; he had learned this as a child and seen it, first hand, as a soldier. He held the ring up to the fire and looked at it. The stone was smaller than he had realised and the thin gold band was battered as though she hadn’t bothered to take it off while labouring. He did not read over the letter again; the message was clear. He folded it back as it was, placed it in the heavy metal box and locked it. He placed the key and the ring on the desk and rolled up his sleeves.

  The room was warm and the chain, at this stage, would be dry. The firelight was striking the rims, the handlebars, the spokes. He turned the bicycle upside-down and, with one hand slowly turning the pedal, he placed the nozzle of the oil-can against the chain. Oiling it, watching the chain going round, it struck him how perfectly the links engaged the sprocket, how the cogs were made for the chain. Somewhere, a man believed he could propel himself using his own weight. He had seen it in his mind and went on to make it happen. Oiling the bike stoked up the old pleasure he had felt in cleaning the guns: forcing the cloth down the length of the barrel, dull gleam of the metal, how snugly the bullet slid into the chamber. Everything was made for something else in whose presence things ran smoothly.

  He had once, as a child, knocked the sugar bowl off the table. The sugar had spilled and was wasted, for it could not be sieved out from the glass. He could see it still, the bright shock of it on the flagstones. His mother had taken him out to the bicycle and spun the wheel, holding his fingers at an angle, tight to the spokes. It went on for an age and the pain he felt could not have been worse had she actually dismembered him. It was one of the first lessons he had learned and he would carry it all through life.

  Now, he felt a childish pride in owning the bike. He turned it right side up and pumped the tyres until he felt hot and satisfied. When he was sure the tyres could take his weight for the distance, he propped the bike against the desk. Then he took the crate from the sack and positioned himself at the hearth.

  In reaching out, he hesitated but the fruit he chose felt heavy. The rind did not come away easily and his thumbnail left an oily track over the flesh. When he tasted it, it tasted sweet and bitter all at once. There were a great many seeds. He took each seed from his mouth and threw it on the fire. Juice was staining his uniform but he would leave a note for Doherty to take it down to the Duignan woman and have it pressed. Before he had swallowed the last segment of the first orange his hand was reaching out for the next. This time he kept his thumbnail tight to the skin so as not to break to the flesh. The peelings singed for while on the open coals but shrank and in time became part of the fire.

  His knowledge of women swept across his mind. He tried to think of each one separately – of what she said or how, exactly, she was dressed – but they were not so much mixed up in his mind as all the one: the same bulge at the top of the stocking, the shallow gasp, the smell of malt vinegar in their hair. How quickly all of that was over. He ate the oranges and thought about these women, concluding that there was little difference between them. By the time the last seed was on the coals, he was glutted.

  ‘Another casualty,’ he said aloud in the empty room.

  The clock on the wall ticked on and the rain was beating strong and hard against the barracks door. He burned the crate and threw the coal dust on the embers. When he was sure no evidence of how he had spent the night remained, he lit the candle and climbed the stairs, feeling a shake in himself that made the light tremble. He did not take off his clothes. He got into the bed as he was and reached out for the clock. As he wound it and felt the spring tighten, the old desire to wind it until it seized came over him but he fought against it, as always, and blew the candle out. Then he rolled over into the middle of the cold bed. When he closed his eyes, the same old anxiety was there shining like dark water at the back of his mind but he soon fell asleep.

  Before first light, he groped his way blindly to the outhouse and felt the oranges passing through his body. There was a satisfaction in this that renewed and deepened the extravagance, all at once. When he came inside, he lit the lamp, made tea and buttered some of the white bread. He took the razor off the shelf, sharpened it on the leather strap, and shaved. There were unaccountable shadows in the mirror but they did not distract him. He washed, changed into his good brown suit, gathered up the ring and key and went outside to look at the day. No rain was falling but there were clouds stacked up on one side of the sky.

  He wrote the note for Doherty, put on the clips and threw the cape over his shoulders. When he got up on the saddle, he felt the springs give unde
r his weight. He reassured himself that he had the ring, the key, and stood on the pedals, to get started. Soon he was labouring over the hills, knowing full well that the days of idling and making women blush were coming to a close. A cold feeling surged through him. It was new to him and like all new feelings it made him anxious, but he rode on, composing the speech. By the time he was pushing on for her part of the country, he grew conscious of the rain and the noise it made, the rattle of it like beads on the handlebars.

  When he entered her townsland he saw the rushes and knew the clay beneath them was shallow clay. With a bitter taste in his mouth, he faced up the mountain but before he was halfway up, his breath gave out and he had to dismount. Marching on, he could feel his future: the woman’s bony hand striking a hollow sound in the loaf and the boy with the hungry gaze asking for bread.

  Night of the Quicken Trees

  In every house in the country long ago the people of the house would wash their feet, the same as they do now, and when you had your feet washed you should always throw out the water, because dirty water should never be kept inside the house during the night. The old people always said that a bad thing might come into the house if the feet water was kept inside and not thrown out, and they always said, too, that when you were throwing the water out you should say ‘Seachain!’ for fear that any poor soul or spirit might be in the way. But that is neither here nor there, and I must be getting on with my story …

  From ‘Feet Water’, an Irish fairy tale

  Shortly after the priest died, a woman moved into his house on the Hill of Dunagore. She was a bold spear of a woman who clearly wasn’t used to living on the coast: not five minutes after she’d hung the wash out on the line, her clothes were blown halfway up the bog. Margaret Flusk had neither hat nor rubber boots nor a man. Her brown hair was long, flowing in loose strands like seaweed down her back. She wore a big sheepskin coat that fitted her to perfection and when she looked out at the mortal world it was with the severity of a woman who has endured much and survived. When she moved to Dunagore she was not yet forty but it was past the time when she could bear a child. That power had left her years ago and always she blamed it on that night of the quicken trees.

  The priest’s house stood on the highest point of the hill beside the mast whose evening shadow fell into her rooms. It was joined to another cottage of equal size and they both looked down like two still hares across the Cliffs of Moher. It was autumn when she came. The swallows were long gone and any blackberry still clinging to its briar had begun to rot. The house smelled of the priest. Margaret dragged anything she didn’t want down to the bottom of the haggard and set fire to it. Being superstitious, she kept his clothes. If she gave his clothes away he’d not have to go naked in the next world. She painted all the walls and ceilings with a bucket of white emulsion, disinfected the floors, the doorstep and rubbed the window panes until they squealed under the cloth, for, although she did not come from Clare, she knew nothing good ever happens in a dirty house.

  When she got the chimney swept she tore across the fields towards a farmhouse where smoke was rising. Soon after, she was running back with a shovel full of embers, her long legs stretching uneasily over the bog. After that, smoke was always rising. Neither was she gone nor did she sleep long enough to let fire die. In fact, she liked getting up while the stars were still in the sky. It gave her satisfaction to see a star falling. If she believed in the forces of nature she was yet determined to avoid bad luck. She’d had her share of bad luck so now she never threw out ashes of a Monday or passed a labourer without blessing his work. She shook salt on the hearth, hung a Saint Bridget’s cross on the bedroom wall and kept track of changes in the moon.

  When she got the house clean, she drove down the hill and around the coast to Ennistymon. These roads were narrow and steep. She could hear bog water rushing through the ditches. Beyond stone walls, bony cattle and small flocks of long-woolled sheep grazed the sod. Ponies stood with their backsides to the wind as though the wind would fertilise them. Every creature seemed capable or on the verge of flight.

  Once, when Margaret was a child, her mother had gone on a pilgrimage to Knock and came back with a stick of rock and an umbrella. Margaret waited for a windy day, opened the umbrella and jumped off the boiler-house wall, believing she would fly, and landed with a broken ankle on the car-road. If only, in her adult life, her unfounded beliefs could be so abruptly disproved. To be an adult was, for the greatest part, to be in darkness.

  Down in the village a crazy, white-haired man was standing on the bridge, directing traffic:

  ‘Quick! Quick! Winter is round the corner!’

  She bought flour and sugar, oatmeal, buttermilk and tea, peas and beans, spuds and salt fish, brought it home and baked a loaf. When it got dark at five o’clock, she went outside and lifted her skirt and squatted in the grass. She wanted to pass water on every blade of grass around her house, she could not say why. The grass was long and sour up there. Dunagore was a strange place without so much as a tree, not a withered leaf to be seen in autumn, just the shivering bogland and all the gulls wheeling around, screeching under restless clouds. The landscape looked metal, all sturdy and everlasting but to Margaret, coming from a place of oak and ash, it was without substance. There would be no shade in summer, no fields of barley turning yellow in the month of August. The skies in the east would now be obscured by falling leaves, their heifers would be in the barn, dairy cows chained to the stalls.

  The next morning when Margaret went out to empty the ash bucket, the wind blew it back into her eyes, blinding her. When she came inside she decided she would stay in that house for as long as she could without harming anybody or letting anybody harm her. If either one of these things happened, she would move on. She would keep her course, get in a boat and cross over to the Aran Islands, go as far west as she could without leaving Ireland. But until then she would do her best to keep people at arm’s length for people were nothing but a nuisance.

  Not every man can sharpen a scythe or cut turf. Stack, the forty-nine-year-old bachelor who lived next door, had a bald head and seeds of grey in his eyes. He’d lived and worked the land with his father all his life until his father died. He was thirty-eight when his father passed away and now he was left with all the bogs and an income from the turf. He did not live alone but with Josephine, the sleek brown goat who had the run of the house. By day she stared into the fire and at night she took up more than half of the bed. Stack milked her every day, rubbed Palmolive on her teats and always remembered to bring her fig rolls from the town. He had courted a small farmer’s daughter outside Lehinch for twelve years, bought her six hundred and twenty-four Sunday dinners but she wouldn’t even let him touch the hem of her skirt or push the hair back out of her eyes so he could see her properly. Once she got a bit drunk and he placed his hand on her bare knee as they sat in the car outside her back door but that was all. In the end, she went off and married a man who sold stone and Stack found Josephine through an advertisement in the Farmer’s Journal.

  Stack couldn’t bear to part with anything. The spare room was packed to the ceiling with his father’s fishing rods, his mother’s sewing machine, weed killers, jam jars, the old solid-fuel cooker. He kept all the clothes he’d ever worn, from his matinée coats to the trousers he’d recently grown out of, and kept the door closed because Josephine liked to go in there and eat his mother’s slippers.

  Stack did not like to think he would ever become like the new generation. Young people couldn’t catch a fish or skim cream off milk. They went around in cars they couldn’t afford, with small children who’d never tasted their mother’s milk, committing adultery at the drop of a hat. In fact, hats didn’t drop fast enough for them. They drank beer straight from the bottle, came back from America and Prague looking for pizzas, and couldn’t tell a golden wonder from a Victoria plum. And now a woman was living next door, setting fire to the priest’s good furniture, walking the roads with her hair all tangled sa
me as she didn’t own a comb.

  Time passed and little happened in Dunagore. Wind off the Atlantic pushed the clouds one way and then the other, blew eerie notes through the mast, blew gates open. Cattle and sheep escaped, went roving and were captured. The postman hardly ever stopped at Margaret’s except to deliver a bill for the electricity. Once, a middle-aged man came up to her door and asked her to sign a petition to get the potholes filled on the road. While she signed her name his eyes crawled over her frame.

  ‘Would you be any relation to the priest?’ he asked.

  ‘Why, do I look like him?’

  He looked up at her nostrils, the gypsy eyes and the waiting mouth.

  ‘You don’t look like anybody,’ he said, and went next door to get the turfman’s signature.

  Margaret slept well, ate plain food and kept walking to the edge of the sea and back. Sometimes, she walked all the way to Moher and looked down over the cliffs and frightened herself. Sometimes, when she was down there with the rain drenching her hair and her sheepskin, she thought of the priest.

  The priest was her first cousin. He used to come to their house every summer to make the hay. He would come with the fine weather, sit on top of the hayrick at her side, dig new potatoes, sharpen his appetite, pull scallions and eat them raw. Margaret was a teenager. Skies were blue back then. As a young man, he said they would marry, that they would get the bishop’s permission, rear Shorthorns and have two children, a pigeon’s clutch. Margaret could see him coming in from the fields with a handful of clover, saying the meadow was without comparison. And then he went off to the seminary, became the pride of a family who no longer called him by his name: