‘Another drop of gravy, Father?’
‘Do you think there’s such a place as Limbo, Father?’
‘Did my father say where he was going, Father?’
Even though he came back every summer to make the hay, he never again sat on the ditches combing knots out of her hair, talking about the children they would have. Summers passed and the whole family, instead of putting on the record player and opening the stout when the hay was safe on the loft, would kneel and answer his rosary.
Margaret tried not to think of the priest. After her walks, she sat with her feet in a basin of soapy water listening to Raidió na Gaeltachta, or got into his bed with the hot-water bottle, trapping lamplight in the right angle of his books. Sometimes she came across a passage he’d underlined but the words held no great meaning. Nothing in the house she’d come across meant anything. Sometimes she saw his shadow at the bedside, felt his cold presence shadowing hers and saw again his open collar, the hayseed trapped in his cuffs, but that was only his ghost.
If she wondered, before she slept, what her neighbour was doing in his bed at the far side of the wall, she didn’t dwell on it. She tried not to dwell on anything. Putting the past into words seemed idle when the past had already happened. The past was treacherous, moving slowly along. It would catch up in its own time. And in any case, what could be done? Remorse altered nothing and grief just brought it back.
No doubt she was the subject of curiosity. Some said her people were all dead and that the priest was her uncle, that he’d taken pity on her and left her the house. Others swore she was a wealthy woman whose husband had run off with a teenager and that her heart was broken. When it got late down in the pub it was common knowledge that the priest had been in love with her, that she’d had his child and lost it, that he wasn’t gone off to the mission at all that time he’d gone off to the mission.
On All Soul’s night, the middle-aged man who’d given her the embers banged on her door but Margaret just stood there staring him down through the glass. Eventually, he went away. And women said she must be going through the change of life:
‘The new moon takes a terrible toll on women like her,’ one woman down in Lisdoonvarna said, feeling the wilted heart of a cabbage.
‘Oh, it would,’ said another. ‘The moon’ll pull at her like the tide.’
Stack, like every man who has never known a woman, believed he knew a great deal about women. He thought about Margaret Flusk as he drove home from Lisdoonvarna with Josephine sitting up in the passenger seat.
‘Wouldn’t it be terrible,’ he said, ‘if that woman took a liking to me? She’d have nothing to do only break down the wall between the two houses and destroy our peace for ever more.’
All she’d need was reason to knock on his door. If she had reason to knock, he felt sure he’d let her in. If he let her in once she’d be in again and then he’d be in to her and there the trouble would start. One would need a candle and the other would want the lend of a spade. A woman would be a terrible disadvantage: she’d make him match his clothes and take baths. She’d make him drive her to the seaside every fine day with a picnic basket full of bananas and tuna fish sandwiches and ask him where he had gone when he had gone nowhere but into Doolin or down to Ennis for a drop of oil.
December came in wet. Margaret had never known such rain. It didn’t come down out of the sky but all skewed, on the wind. There was salt on the windows and a tang of seaweed in the air. People down the town took to drink while the birds went hungry. They played darts for turkeys and hampers, fell out and in again. The women took dead fir trees and holly into their houses, strung multicoloured electric lights under the eaves. Children put pen to paper, sent letters to the North Pole. The postman was run off his feet but Margaret didn’t even get a card.
The night before Christmas Eve she walked to the cliffs and back. She had written a few lines to her mother without reply. Her mother could be dead and she wouldn’t know. The sea was going mad, eating away the land. By the time she got home, she was soaked. The salt rain made her feel cold and hot at the same time. It was getting dark but there wasn’t a light in the parish. The electricity was gone. Margaret threw sods on the fire. The turf hadn’t really dried; it smouldered unhappily in the grate, burned away without turning into flame. She longed for wood, big ash sticks she could split with an axe. She imagined herself outside on a fine, frosty morning splitting sticks, stacking them against the wall, and the smell and the heat that would come off them. But sticks were rare in Dunagore. Her mother, who said little, sang Irish:
Cad a dhéanfamid feasta gan adhmad?
Tá deireadh na gcoillte ar lár.
That night, Margaret lit a candle, placed her feet in a basin of soapy water and watched the smouldering turf. She wondered if the priest had gone to Hell. The priest believed in the afterlife, in God and Heaven and Purgatory, in all of that. He said there wasn’t any point believing in Heaven if you didn’t believe in Hell. Margaret wondered if she would join him there but it seemed more likely that she’d be turned into a pucán or a dock leaf.
She drank two bottles of stout and felt the past rearing up, all those summers of childish commitment, them saying they’d marry and then him going off and the whole family witnessing his ordination. Him coming back to make hay without so much as a handshake, eating her ribs and parsley sauce and walking alone through the wood beyond the fields. She’d meet him on the stairs, in the cow-house, on the back lane where the foxgloves turned the ditches pink but he’d pass her with a bare nod same as she was a shadow of what she had been.
And then, one evening, a heavy shower fell out of the blue. The house was sullen; the hay was down.
‘That’s the end of us,’ said her father, standing at the window.
‘’Tis only a shower.’ Her mother, always trying to pacify him.
‘We may buy it in. I said we shouldn’t have mowed today. Didn’t I say we shouldn’t have mowed?’ Her father willing the rain to fall harder to prove him right.
‘Tomorrow will be fine, surely.’
‘What are you saying woman? We’re finished.’
Margaret went out in the rain to the wood. She always felt marginally safer when she was outside. The wet Douglas fir looked almost blue. There was the scent of damp fern. Wild anenomes shivered in the damp breeze. She stopped in the clearing where the quickens grew. Their silver boughs shook pleasantly, their leaves trembling. Out in the lane the priest passed, smoking a cigarette, his open-necked shirt wet on the shoulders. The only reason she made her presence known was to ask the simple question of why he never looked her in the eye or asked how she was? Could the man who’d promised her marriage not even ask her how she was? And then she caught up on him and he showed her why. They lay down without a word on the wet grass and she knew while he was planting his seed in her that she would pay for it. Afterwards, he got up and paced between the trees and smoked a cigarette. Then he turned his back and went off without a word.
It was night when Margaret rose. She walked home watching the tops of the trees and, beyond their boughs, the yellow wisp of moon. The experience was like almost everything; it wasn’t a patch on what it could have been.
Now she sometimes imagined where she’d be, what she might be doing if she had not made her presence known. She was constantly afraid to take the smallest step in any direction. The greatest lesson the priest had taught her was the lesson of where one step can lead. She stared at the clock above the fire’s mantel and came to her senses. The feetwater had grown cold. She dried her feet, cursed a little so she would not cry, and fell asleep in the chair.
When she woke, the fire was almost out and the candle was burnt away to nothing. Outside, no lights flickered in the houses around the coast. The villages of Doolin and Lehinch were still in darkness but the last quarter of that winter moon shone down into her garden. Her neighbour’s nanny goat was standing on her hind legs, eating all that was within reach. Margaret hadn’t the energy to chase he
r off. The moon and the clouds looked so still. It was almost Christmas. She dried her feet, went to the priest’s bed, and dreamt she was a man.
There was a loft in her dream whose floor sprouted grass. The grass grew higher than a house, its stalks leaning west then east then west again although there was no wind. Margaret lay supine, wearing nothing only a man’s trousers and when she put her hand down there, instead of a penis, was a fat lizard which was part of her, the muscular tail swinging back and forth. Awoman who looked like herself came in from another century wearing some type of knotted cloth. When she saw the lizard she didn’t flinch but took it inside her anyhow and when Margaret woke she felt herself to make sure she wasn’t turning into a man. When she saw her hand she got a lovely shock, for she saw blood. She’d thought all that was over. She got up, went into the bathroom and washed herself.
It was almost morning. Grey light framed the trembling curtains. The house was a trap full of draughts. Outside, a gale was blowing. Margaret was used to the wind flattening the long grass in front of her house but it was strange not hearing its power in the trees. She’d never get used to Dunagore, knowing no seed would take root and grow into a sycamore anywhere near that house. She could now smell her own blood. So she was still a child-bearing woman. While she was thinking this she saw the basin of feetwater. She opened the back door and threw it out on the wind. The wind was so loud it shouted like a man.
That same night, at the far side of the wall, Stack couldn’t sleep. This often happened. He wondered if other men really slept through the night and woke rested. Some nights he liked being up knowing others were asleep. He would sit at the fire, eating cream buns, watching television with Josephine. Other nights he craved the company of another human being, someone who would be able to change the stations and boil the kettle. He covered Josephine with his coat. Her hooves were trembling. She dreamt a lot and ate things in her dreams. On fine nights, he sometimes put on his hat and coat and walked the bogs.
That night the electricity failed, he drank five hot whiskeys and thought about the past. Nothing would ever compare to the past: his mother laughing when she noticed him using his left hand; his father teaching him to shave; that summer they all got sunburnt in the bog and took turns with the calamine lotion. How strange it was to hear his father sing and how the song made his mother blush. But his mother and father were dead. He was thinking about death and how he himself would go, when he went, stumbling a little, to Margaret’s house. He believed he would die alone and not be found until Josephine ate the door down and somebody recognised her on the road, but death, at least, was certain. Every man needed to be certain of something. It helped to make sense of the day.
He went to Margaret’s back door and stood listening. There wasn’t a stir. It was getting bright and the sun’s light without the sun itself was visible beyond the cliffs. Not a soul knew he was there. He liked being at her door knowing the woman was inside, asleep and safe. He stood for a long time imagining she was his. Then the door opened and Margaret came out, half asleep, with a basin of water, and threw it in his face.
He went home and took his clothes off. Josephine had gone to bed. Beside her, he felt light in the head, was hot in himself then cold. He started to sweat and passed wind. He felt the stone that was always in his throat growing bigger, going down into his stomach. He sat on the toilet for a long time before it passed and when it did it was the size of a stout bottle. When he looked in the mirror, a stranger looked back at him. The stranger was older than he had realised and his lips were parted.
He fell asleep and dreamt of Margaret wearing a bearskin, riding Josephine across the bogs of Clare. Her legs and arms were muscular. He followed Josephine’s tracks until she came to the edge of the sea. The woman slapped Josephine hard with a wet leather strap, urging her on into the sea and the pair took off. The waves were high. Stack stood on the edge of the strand, calling out to Josephine to come back: ‘Aw, Josie! Come back to me! Josie!’ but she got smaller and smaller and in the end he saw Margaret getting down on the coast of Inis Mór and men with red hands surrounding her, leading Josephine by the bridle, taking her away, bribing her with chocolate.
When he woke he felt like a new man. It was eleven o’clock in the night. He had slept through Christmas Eve. It hardly seemed possible but Josephine was standing over him, nipping the soft flesh of his arms. He opened the door and let her out. Margaret Flusk is wild, he thought. Hadn’t he seen her bare breast under the fur? Sure didn’t she piss outside? Hadn’t she got up in her sleep knowing he was there and not so much as blinked when he cried out?
On Christmas morning, he took a bath. He hadn’t taken a bath since Halloween. The electricity was still gone. He boiled water on the gas and nearly scalded himself. He polished his shoes, milked Josephine in front of the fire and put a lump of beef into the oven. He didn’t know why he was looking at himself or washing himself except it was Christmas and he felt young and strong. If only he hadn’t lost his hair. His father, down to the day he was laid in his coffin, had a full head of hair. The undertaker had combed it as he laid him out in the parlour but Stack hadn’t cried until the burial was over.
Now he took an eel out of the fridge and put it on the pan to fry. It was a Christmas box from the fishmonger down in Ennistymon who knew Stack had a taste for eel. He was certain it was still good. He looked at the black eel writhing on the pan. It looked alive and, for a moment, he wasn’t sure. He bucked himself up, came to his senses and walked up the path to the priest’s house.
Margaret wasn’t dressed. She was scratching herself and thinking. She liked to roam around in her nightdress having a think, drinking tea in the mornings. She went to the toilet and made sure she was still bleeding. It was strange to be producing eggs again. Wouldn’t it be lovely to lay out? she thought, like a hen. She had, as a child, followed a hen for days with a hat down over her eyes thinking the hen could not see her but Margaret never found the nest. The hen would lead her astray then disappear through the ferns. Then, out of the blue, she’d walked into the yard with a clutch of eleven chickens.
If only I could cut out the man, Margaret thought, I might have a child. A man was a nuisance and a necessity. If she’d a man she’d have to persuade him to take baths and use his knife and fork. She ripped a towel in two and made herself a sanitary towel, scalded the pot and waited for the tea to draw. Beyond the pane, standing there in his shirtsleeves staring at her, was the bachelor from next door. She wanted to stand there and stare him down but it was Christmas and, out of common decency, she opened the door. The bachelor looked clean but there was a strange smell off him.
‘Stack’s my name.’
‘Stack?’ What kind of a name was that?
‘I’m your neighbour,’ he said, gesturing to his own house.
‘Is that so?’
‘Some Christmas, and you with no electric to make a bit of dinner.’
‘What matter.’
‘Come in and have your breakfast. I’ve gas.’
‘You’ve gas!’ Margaret laughed.
‘Aye.’
‘I’m not hungry.’
‘You’re not hungry. Well, that’s a good one. Don’t you know the moon is changing?’
‘The moon?’ Margaret said. What did he know about the moon?
‘Put on your sheepskin, good woman,’ he said. ‘Hurry on. The fry will be in cinders.’
She didn’t think. She got the sheepskin and her boots and followed him down the path to her front gate which was opening and closing on its hinges. There were goat droppings all over his front yard. His porch was full of bicycle parts and the cab of a tractor and the kitchen darker than the sea. In the gas light she saw spades and shovels cocked up against the chimney wall and, hanging from the central beam, a scythe. A live snake was being fried in a pool of oil. On the table thick cuts of brown bread and a tub of fake butter. Margaret, in nothing only her nightdress and her coat, felt lovelier than the raven. I’m producing eggs, she thought.
I’m bleeding. I’m past nothing. Let this day bring what it will.
Stack held a bag of defrosted peas up to the candle to read the cooking directions.
‘I better cook these so they’ll not go to waste.’
Margaret could read the directions from where she sat. Maybe he was going blind. And the things he kept: seashells, a calendar from 1985, bottle tops, dead batteries, pictures of dead popes. There was a picture of Stack when he was about twenty with a full head of hair, three Sacred Heart pictures, barometers, and inside the window, behind the television, a fan to keep the window pane from fogging up. So, he likes to know who’s walking the roads, she thought. Through an open door, she saw a big, unmade bed. She could smell the goat. Maybe the goat slept with him. Just imagine.
‘Don’t mind the house,’ he said. ‘I’ve no woman.’
‘No?’
‘Well, I had a woman one time and now I’m not sorry I don’t have her. She was a fierce expense.’
‘Maybe you should find yourself a woman with money.’
‘If a woman had money, she wouldn’t want me.’
‘Why, have you a wooden leg?’
He laughed. It was a queer sort of laugh, closer to sadness than amusement. For a moment, she imagined his life and felt for him. Did anyone ever know what another was going through?
‘No, thank God. And by the looks of you, your legs aren’t wooden either.’ He was putting the two of them together, adding them up in his mind.
‘You must have left school early,’ Margaret said.
‘Why’s that?’
‘It gets more complicated after you learn to add.’
‘What?’ he said. ‘Oh, your tongue is quick.’
When he said the word she was back again under the quicken trees. Neither she nor the priest could help themselves. She felt him on top of her, panting, rolling over onto his stomach, zipping himself up, ashamed. And the thrill of it: the thrill after a decade of sitting on ricks of hay, eating scallions, him leaving the first primrose on the saddle of her bike. By breaking his vows of celibacy it felt possible that he might, somehow, make others. There was blood that night too. Beyond his head she could see the bright orange berries of the quicken trees.
Walk the Blue Fields Page 11
