Walk the Blue Fields

by Claire Keegan

  ‘Josephine is minded better nor any woman in Ireland,’ Stack was saying, nodding in the direction of the armchair.

  There, in the dark, was the nanny goat staring at her. Her eyes were frightening. Stack reached up and took a sprig of holly from behind a picture. Margaret thought he was going to give it to her but he gave it to Josephine, who ate it.

  ‘What part of the country did you come from?’ he said.

  ‘Wicklow.’

  ‘The goat-suckers,’ he said. ‘That explains it.’

  ‘Did you ask me in to insult me?’

  ‘That wouldn’t be hard, you’re proud,’ he said, prodding the eel with a fork. ‘This is ready. Pull up a chair.’

  She didn’t want to pull up a chair, didn’t want to sit in that awful place eating fried snake with all those dead people on the walls. Well, what did she expect? What happens when a woman follows a man into his house wearing little more than her nightdress on Christmas morning? But she was smelling burnt flesh and toast, watching the teapot steam. She hadn’t eaten yesterday. It is the stomach, not the heart, that drives us, she thought. She was grateful the room was dark so she couldn’t see the extent of the dirt and could eat in ignorance. Josephine sat under the table with her own buttered toast.

  ‘Most people have dogs,’ Margaret said.

  ‘Ah but the goat!’ Stack said, starting off on his favourite subject. ‘The goat is a great advantage. She’ll eat anything. She’ll go anywhere. She’s twice the size of any dog, she’s like a radiator going around heating the place and, to top it all, I’ve milk. Do you like goat’s milk?’

  ‘No. But they say it’s a noble child that’s baptised in it.’

  ‘Do they now?’ He was looking into the oven at the beef. It had begun to spit and he lowered the flame. ‘Are you one of these superstitious women?’

  Her mouth was so full she couldn’t answer. The eel was lovely. Once, her mother took her out to eat in the mart. Big dinners were cheap there. A neighbour came in and ordered his plate. He was white in the face. Her mother watched him getting his dinner and going off to a corner with his back to all his neighbours and said, ‘Do you see that man there? If you ever see a man like that, leave him alone till he’s had his fill. A man like that is dangerous.’ Margaret now felt like that man. She drank the tea, ate several cuts of toast and most of the eel.

  Stack looked at her big nose and her long hair and filled her cup again. He cut more eel and watched her. While she ate he could not help wondering what a child they’d have together would look like.

  ‘Do you not miss your own part of the country?’

  ‘I miss the trees,’ she said. ‘I miss the ash.’

  The quicken tree, the mountain ash, were all the one.

  ‘Well, you can’t be blamed for that,’ he said. ‘There’s no fire like an ash fire.’

  Margaret swallowed the last of what she had and looked at him. She looked at his grey eyes. He seemed decent and why should she mind that he was odd? All the finest people she’d known were odd.

  Stack bantered on. He criticised young people and turf, the Taoiseach, talked about New Year’s resolutions and sunburn. When he stopped to draw breath, Margaret went home.

  He’s a lonely man, she thought, and he’s desperate. But that goat! She’d have no time for that goat, sitting up like a witch in the dark.

  When Margaret reached her own house, the door was wide open and a litter of black mongrel pups was running across the floor. They’d chewed the corners off her library books, got up on every stick of furniture and left dirty paw marks all over her lovely white bedspread. One black pup trotted over, licked her hand and wagged its tail. She turned him up and saw, under his belly, a penis. She threw him out and thought about Stack. She couldn’t understand why she’d followed a total stranger into his house and eaten all that food when it could be poisoned. She could still see the big bald head and him reaching up for the sprig of holly.

  That night she saw children rounding up the pups, whistling, flashlights shining, green eyes racing like demons in all directions. There were dogs in the graveyard the night she walked all over the priest’s grave. So, they were back. The priest was jealous but the priest was dead. She felt an awful chill and pulled a cardigan over her nightdress. She had no way of boiling the kettle for a hot water bottle. She sat in the candlelight until the candle was burnt out. Then she groped her way into the bedroom and lay there in the darkness knowing now what was on the far side of the wall.

  When the pubs opened after Christmas, there was talk. The Flusk woman was seen coming out of Stack’s in nothing only a nightdress. He must have sheared her, they said, because there was no sign of the sheepskin. Stack carried her across his own yard and into her own house. Some said it stopped there.

  ‘He must be drinking his Bovril, so,’ said the grocer.

  ‘Sure wouldn’t he need a stepladder just to reach her knickers?’

  ‘Ah, we’re all the same height lying down,’ said an old man.

  ‘Imagine the two of ‘em wudout a stitch,’ said the draper’s wife. ‘They’d frighten one another.’

  ‘Not half as big a fright as she’d get,’ said the auctioneer who was doing his best to join in but was in a terrible way with a toothache.

  ‘You mean a small fright,’ said the barmaid who was single and getting older and pretending not to care. ‘Two hailstones and a mouse’s tail.’

  ‘You should know,’ they all said because they knew the barmaid thought that would be a nice cosy little number up there in the cottage with Stack, looking down on all the tourists in the summertime and him with plenty of money and nobody to spend it on only herself and Josephine.

  In Dunagore the smoke kept rising. Margaret bought two boxes of sanitary towels in the supermarket and set the women talking.

  ‘There could be a babby in Dunagore yet!’

  ‘Wouldn’t Stack be the proud father?’

  ‘Sure isn’t the spring coming?’

  Margaret walked between the showers, kept track of her eggs and the changing moon. Daylight lasted longer but towards evening the red sun always sank into the sea. Dirty suds floated up on the edge of the strand. The heather was thick, took on new growth like hair all over the boglands. Tourists wandered into Doolin looking for Irish music and mussels, directions to holy wells. Men came down from Dublin to test themselves on the golf course at Lehinch, lost balls and found others. Ahitchhiker knocked on Margaret’s door and asked in a german accent which way was east. Margaret pointed towards home and the young woman took off over the fields.

  On Valentine’s Day, she went outside and there, at the front door, was a load of ash sticks. Stack had left them during the night. He’d made a phone call while he was drunk, gone up to Limerick and traded two lorry-loads of turf for the load of sticks.

  Margaret got in the car and took off down the road to Ennistymon. She met but could not avoid another car on the narrow road. They both lost their side mirrors, stopped, shrugged and went on again. When she got to the town the man on the bridge signalled her to stop:

  ‘Seven cabbages for a pound!’

  People were buying cards, red roses. Margaret bought an axe, came back and spent the morning splitting the ash. That night she built an almighty fire. She sat at the hearth with her feet in the basin, sweating. She drank the sherry she’d bought for a trifle she never made and thought about her son. He would be nine years old, if he was alive. She’d heard the banshee the evening before he died but mistook her for a stray cat. The child was fast asleep in the cot that night. He was such a deep sleeper, it made her nervous. Sometimes she put her hand near his mouth to make sure he was still breathing. She had placed her hand near his mouth several times that night and the next morning he was cold, the tinge of blue on his lips. She stopped the clock and ran up the wood with him in her arms. She stayed there all night but in the end came home to face it all.

  ‘Cot death,’ the doctor said. ‘It happens.’

  She wo
uld never forgive him for that. In any case, she wasn’t the type to forgive; forgiving might mean forgetting and she preferred to hold onto her bitterness, and her memory. But always she blamed herself.

  Shortly after his birth, a fisherman from Rosslare came to see her.

  ‘I hear you’ve a caul,’ he said. ‘I’ll give you me last penny for it. Me father and the one brother I had on this earth drowned.’

  ‘I couldn’t sell it.’

  ‘If you let me buy that caul, I’ll be safe at sea.’

  ‘Not for love nor money will I sell it.’

  ‘Well, money is all I can offer,’ he’d said, and went away.

  She knew it wasn’t right to refuse him but she could not bear to part with it. And then the child died and in the end she’d thrown the caul on the fire. What upset her most was the little things he’d never done; to think he’d never taken a step nor climbed a tree nor witnessed a wet summer. She had taken for granted a future of homework on the kitchen table, exercise books marked with gold and silver stars, a mucky hurl inside the front door, measuring his shoulders for a blazer. And then the future was blotted out, gone, like something that falls from sight without a sound.

  February turned into a March of many weathers. Margaret’s superstition deepened. When she stopped at the pub in Doolin for a bowl of soup and saw a cat sitting with her back to the fire she ran out and ordered more coal. Always the hills looked closer or black before it rained. One morning she woke and saw a crow sitting on top of the wardrobe. She drove to the chapel and lit a candle for the soul of her child. It was the first time she had gone to the chapel. An old woman was kneeling outside the confession box. Margaret lit a candle at the feet of Saint Anthony, knelt in the front pew and stared at the ambo. She imagined the priest standing there giving out sermons while her belly got bigger with his child. She had not intended to pray but when she looked up her knees were sore, the woman was gone, and children were rehearsing their First Communion. She watched each boy, looked for the face of a child she’d never see, filled her sherry bottle from the font in the porch and walked across the square.

  A caravan was parked beside the vegetable stand. Meet Madame Nowlan, Teller of the Future, the sign read. Margaret went on down to the hotel and ordered a fried herring. Outside, the crows seemed anxious. When she finished eating she wanted a drink but she did not really know what to ask for. They had kept whiskey at home for sick calves, and poteen to rub on greyhounds but nobody ever drank anything except stout at Christmas or for when the hay was saved. People seldom came to their house but when they did, they drank the calves’ whiskey and her father complained afterwards that he’d have to go out and buy more.

  She walked over to the bar and pointed at a bottle. Sambuca was written on the label. She asked for a large. The barman asked her if she wanted it straight and she said yes, thinking this might be some kind of glass. It tasted like liquorice and took away the aftertaste of the herring. People came in looking at her. She could read their minds. There’s the woman who had the priest’s child. There’s the woman who lives on her own. There’s that Flusk woman Stack’s after. When she couldn’t stand it any more, she got up and walked back to the caravan.

  Reluctantly she stepped up into the candlelight. Madame Nowlan was eating a rock bun, pulling raisins out of the dough with her fingernails. She had blonde hair and a fake tan. A pot of tea was left out on the table.

  ‘You want your fortune told, love?’

  ‘I’m not sure.’

  ‘Come on in. There’s no harm.’ On her radio, Willie Nelson was singing a song about loving someone in his own peculiar way. ‘I’ll read your leaves.’

  Margaret drank the tea and they talked for a while about the weather. The woman was an expert on rain. It felt strange to talk to another human being. She hadn’t held a conversation since Christmas and found it a terrible effort, trying to make sense of another’s words, then her own and all the possibilities for misunderstanding that went on in between. Madame Nowlan pulled out a mirror and drew lipstick across her mouth.

  ‘How do I look?’

  ‘You look fine.’

  Then she picked up Margaret’s cup and casually began to read the leaves.

  ‘I see a dead child by a local man. I see property, a house up on a hill, and terrible shame. There’s no need for this shame. It wasn’t your fault the child died. I see the number seven and a man with an S in his name. You already know this man. There’s trees in your memory. You’re mule stubborn. Don’t stay in the place you’re in. There’s a shadow on the back of that house. You must rear your next child in the Irish tongue. Who is this goat? There’s a jealousy here I can’t understand.’

  ‘My neighbour has a goat.’

  ‘It’s unhealthy, this goat. Well, you’ve lost and gained your fertility. That much is clear. Why are your people so hard? They turned their backs on you over this religious man. Have another child,’ she said. ‘The time is now. The next child will make your life worth living. After him, you’ll stop looking down over the cliffs. But give the next sea-man his caul. The last man you refused drowned.’

  ‘He did not.’

  The woman was silent now.

  ‘That’s terrible,’ said Margaret, looking at her feet.

  ‘Is there anything you’d like to ask?’

  She couldn’t speak for a while. Eventually she said, ‘Do you see anything about my mother?’

  ‘Your mother? Your mother is gone to a better place.’

  Margaret thanked her and gave her whatever was in her pocket. Driving back, the roads looked steeper, the hedges taller. The ponies seemed enormous. It took her several minutes to get the key in the lock and when she did she stripped and sat in front of the fire. She lay down on the floor not realising, until she tasted salt, that she was crying. She began to wail. Stack heard her grief floating through the stone wall.

  A few hours later she was out again, naked but for the big sheepskin and her leather boots, walking the road to the cliffs. Stack followed her but his legs were not as long as hers, and he did not catch up until she stopped at Moher. She was down on her belly in the wet grass looking over the precipice. Ages passed. It was getting darker. Stack kept well away but stared at the back of her neck until she turned and faced him. She looked wild but her voice was calm.

  ‘I was in love with him,’ she said simply.

  ‘Don’t I know.’

  ‘I lost his child. Look.’ She opened two buttons and showed him her caesarean scar.

  ‘That must have been awful.’

  ‘It was,’ she said. ‘It was terrible.’

  Waves kept forming on the surface of the ocean. The wind wasn’t blowing hard but neither would it stop. Neither one of them wanted anything to stop. Stack wished he had a full head of hair. He wished he hadn’t wasted all those years on the farmer’s daughter.

  ‘I’ve never been in love,’ he said. ‘I’ve nobody only Josephine.’

  ‘That would break my heart.’

  He turned to look at her. ‘Your heart’s already broken.’

  As soon as he said this, her opinion of him rose. She looked back at the ocean. It wasn’t angry. Each wave seemed to brake before the cliffs, slowing before the end of its journey and yet the next waves kept on as though they had learned nothing from the ones that went before.

  ‘You must think it strange, me telling you these things.’

  ‘I suppose I do. But I doubt I’ll ever understand women. Tell me this: what sort of woman pisses outside?’

  Margaret laughed. She pushed her head and shoulders out over the Atlantic and let her laughter fall. She was not daunted by the ocean or the height of the cliffs. While her laughter fell, Stack realised he was more than half afraid of her.

  ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘It’s getting dark.’

  They headed for home. They had said so much that they were now at a loss for what next to say. A few council workers were finishing up for the day, spreading the last of the hot tar.


  ‘God bless the work,’ said Margaret.

  The labourer looked up at her and tipped his hat.

  From a distance the two houses on the Hill of Dunagore looked like one, with Margaret’s smoke whirling around the lighted windows. Stack, not wanting the walk to end, slowed down on the hill but Margaret did not alter her pace to suit him. She walked on, her bare legs mounting the hill, her hair blowing wild around her head. When she reached Dunagore she didn’t even bid him goodnight but walked into her own house and shut the door.

  *

  Summer came and the rain eased off. Swallows flew back and found their nests, woodbine climbed the ditches and the heather bloomed. A stranger knocked on Margaret’s door one Tuesday morning, a dark-haired man with a troubled look.

  ‘I hear,’ he said, ‘that you can cure a toothache.’

  Margaret wasn’t surprised. ‘Are you in a bad way?’

  ‘I’m demented.’ He sat down and covered his face with his hands and started to cry.

  Margaret went outside and caught a frog.

  ‘Put her back legs in your mouth without harming her and the pain will go,’ she said. ‘If you harm her the pain will double.’

  He held the frog. ‘Put her back legs in me mouth?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well,’ he said. ‘I’ll try anything.’

  ‘How did you find out about me?’

  ‘The Nowlan woman in the caravan told me. She says you’re a seventh child, that you have the cure.’

  He went out with the frog and four days later she got the first letter she ever got in Dunagore.

  Dear Miss Flusk,

  I don’t know myself. No pain since the morning after I saw you and the frog has taken up residence near the rain barrel. Many thanks,

  John McCarthy,

  auctioneer

  That evening a load of birch was delivered to her door.