Stay

by Aislinn Hunter

  Sound comes in fits and starts over the bog. Over by the ridger Tomás and Peter are shouting. Angus can’t make it out. When the wind off the lough changes direction the slightest bit, the voices are gone. He puts out his cigarette and heads over to the next field. Tomás is resting the balls of his fists on his hips and Peter is backing off. By the time Angus gets over to Tomás, Peter’s standing thirty feet away with Liam.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “This.” Tomás hands Angus a thin leather strap. There’s wet peat still on it.

  “Where’d he get it?”

  “Just over there. Came up in the ridging. He was heading down for lunch when he saw it.”

  Peter, in his muddy boots and grubby jeans, starts walking towards Angus. The kid is tall and wiry with a soft complexion. Tomás swears under his breath as if he knows what’s about to happen.

  “It was over there,” Peter says, and points.

  Angus turns the strap over in his hand. It’s eight inches long, narrow, with rough edges. Could be anything. “Call them,” he nods at Tomás. “Did you mark it, Peter?”

  “Aye.”

  Angus knows Tomás would normally ignore protocol. He’s seen him do it in the past. But word traveled in the lunch room, and if the Irish Archeological Wetland Unit found out that you’d come across something and didn’t report it they’d be out on their biweekly survey to miraculously find “a location of archeological sensitivity” on each of your eleven fields. And there’d be no easy way to work around them.

  When the light-rail car circles by the far end of the fifth field, Tomás hops on it. One of the Bord na Móna workers from the next section sits on the opposite bench, a tool box on the floor in front of him. He’s holding his cap in his hands, staring down at it, his work boots worn down on the outsides. Tomás holds the leather strap in his hand. They were always supposed to be on the lookout for anything out of the ordinary: bogwood, tracks or walkways, stone fences. The closer your fields were to Maam Lough the more likely it was you’d find something. Every tree stump, every sight of wood made Tomás’ heart race. The inconvenience of it should they find so much as a plank. The archeologists had been surveying Maam for three years and hadn’t found a single object worth noting, save for a few cooking stones that came up last summer in Flynn’s field on the other side of the lough.

  Angus pulls the IAWU kit out from under the seat of the tractor Tomás was driving. Inside there’s a survey map of the bog, a pencil, a few orange flags, a list of contacts. He reads over the instructions they’ve included; there are no surprises. Walking over to where Peter is standing he wonders, briefly, if he’s doing the right thing. They’ll be able to get on with work around the archeologists but who knows what kind of attention the strap will draw to the other fields; maybe all the sections will warrant a further survey. The Bord is superficially in favour of working with the Department of Arts and Heritage, superficially in support of the archeologists and the Museum folks who wet their pants every time they pull a quarter pound of butter out of some corner of the bog; but in actual fact the Bord just wants the peat processed and sent off to the power station with as little fuss as possible.

  Peter had pushed a wrench into the ground to mark where he’d found the strap. Angus walks up to him and tosses an orange flag in his direction. The wind catches it. Peter tries to grab it, can tell it’s going to fall short. It does, sails down onto the moist peat. Both men look down at the orange marker on the ground between them.

  “It’s out of our hands, anyway,” Angus says, picking the flag up and aiming the marker in the general direction of the wrench. Like a dart he lets the flag go. It falls sideways about half a foot from the right spot but Angus shrugs, figures it won’t make much of a difference. They’ll cordon off the whole area anyway. The light-rail car goes by again on the far side of their section. For a split second there’s the sound of the engine as the tractor pulling the passenger car moves along the track, then the wind shifts and there’s a second of silence. Angus feels a cool breeze on the back of his neck. Then the wind shifts again, carries the sound of curlew and kestrel calls. Peter pulls the wrench out of the peat and wipes it off with the corner of his shirt. Then the two of them turn, walk up the incline to where Liam and Egg are waiting.

  The Traps

  THE afternoon Sean appears, Dermot is waiting. He’s been standing for close to an hour with his arms crossed, eyes to the field, thinking, The boy will come today, from a fixed point in the distance, between the back field and the road to the O’Riordan’s. It will be Sean O’Riordan come to dig the fence post holes, it will not be any other. Though Dermot wishes it were. He doesn’t want to talk to Abbey, doesn’t want to reason it through, he just wants her to come back. Give her the week, he’d said to himself five days ago; and in two days’ time she should be home. He pictures her walking in the door of the cottage, then he imagines it another way, that she might call him from Galway for a lift. He sees the drive out to pick her up, sees her stepping out the bus-station doors and getting into the Mini. This morning he turned the phone ringer back on. If it rings now, he’ll answer it.

  She’s been gone five days but it feels like weeks. Time is slowing and Dermot is all too aware of it. There were years between Clifden and the lobster traps, and Abbey’s arrival. A decade that swung past him without so much as ruffling his hair. He’d gone off side, tucked away in the cottage, sleeping in his clothes the whole time, as if it’d been one long night, a surreal dream. These last few months have been different. He has a sense of purpose now; a part of him has announced itself after years of travel, of hiding away. He can’t stay here now. Perhaps Abbey won’t come back, and even if she does he imagines it won’t be for long. Even Spiddal, untouched for twenty years, is changing; every second house is a bed and breakfast, a craft shop opened last year and now there are rumours of a second hotel. Tele Gael turning the town into a set for some Irish soap opera Dermot will never watch. In three months carloads of tourists will fill up the driveway next door. A satellite dish will be set up on the roof. German and Italian children will scream from the swing sets that will surely go up in the yard. He can see himself standing in this exact spot, witness to it all. How, he wonders, have I passed the time? And the answer refuses to come to him. So he turns to the back field, waits for the boy, just as he’s always done.

  The sound of hammers in the next lot takes on a rhythm and just as Dermot is about to put his finger on what song they’re playing, they slow and the music becomes something else. Flagon stands at the property line barking at the workmen. The smell of cut wood is in the air. Dermot takes a bucket into the house and fills it with water from the sink, comes back out and waters the garden. Carrots and parsnips are beginning to come up and the leaf lettuce rustles in the breeze. Turning to go in for more water Dermot sees the shape of a gangly boy crossing the field. The sun high overhead, the sky clear; the fence posts and wire stacked by the back wall of the house. Dermot watches the boy’s progress. Decides Sean can start with the border to Fitch’s, along the old stone wall, and he’ll mark the rest out later. He could help but he doesn’t want to interfere. The boy won’t want him there either. Better to let him start at his own pace. If Sean wants a late lunch Dermot will have to drive to the Spar for groceries. He’s been eating at Hughes the past few days, mostly going for the walk. Niall had nodded at Dermot as he set the roast pie down on the table. “I guess Abbey’s still away.”

  “Mr. Fay.” The boy is out of breath.

  “It’s Dermot.”

  Sean sticks out his hand and Mary, in a red gingham dress with a torn pocket, comes to stand in front of him. Dermot ruffles her hair and she gives him a sharp glance, takes her headband off. Dark curls fall towards her face.

  “Where’s—?” The girl looks around the yard.

  “The Border collie,” Sean says.

  “Flagon.”

  “Flagon.” Mary says it quietly, starts walking around Dermot in circles, the fingers of her
right hand lightly touching his knees.

  “She’s around.” Dermot gives a whistle but the dog doesn’t appear. “Probably in the field.”

  Dermot shows Sean the fence posts and wire bales and then waits while the boy stares the material down. Next door, a power saw starts up, there’s the loud whirr of the blade and then the sound of it hitting wood. Behind Sean the laundry on the clothesline flaps in the breeze, billows in the direction of the back field.

  “Start at the northwest corner and follow the line of the old stone fence. We need a post every twelve feet.”

  He tosses a yellow tape measure Sean’s way.

  “Here’s the digger,” he motions to the ground where the hole digger is lying on its side. “It’s a lend, so mind it.” Dermot thinks over what else to say. “Start with the holes for now and tomorrow I’ll have the posts dropped off a truck so you don’t have to haul them. Come early and you can help with that.”

  He remembers he’s yet to ask Niall for a lend of the truck. He’ll ring him when he goes in. Sean is still standing with the tape measure in hand.

  “You’ll need to go down two feet.” Dermot bends over, picks up the digger, holds the handle out to Sean. The wood is split by the base. Dermot wonders if it’ll last. Suddenly he wants to call the whole thing off.

  Mary goes to the back of the cottage. On tiptoe she tries to reach Abbey’s underwear, the only bright colours in the yard. Dermot has left Abbey’s clothes out, has watched them dry, soak up the rain, then dry again. He knows that if he’d brought Abbey’s clothes in to the house, he’d happen upon them, that if he’d wanted to put them in her drawer he’d have to open it, would see that it was empty.

  Mary spins like a pinwheel, trying to reach a pink pair of underwear, jumping at them, almost making it. Sean watches Dermot go over and pull the clothes down, the underwear first then the two shirts, stiff and puckered from the wind.

  “Abbey’s,” Dermot says, by way of an explanation.

  “Your wife?” Sean hasn’t heard of a Mrs. Fay.

  “No.”

  Dermot ducks under the door frame, the laundry bundled up in his arms, his face inclined towards the clothes, the door closing behind him.

  Sean finds Dermot’s wheelbarrow and with Mary in tow he pushes it, filled with the digger, a shovel, and one post so that he has its measure, to the start of the field. He hits a rock at one point and loses the half of it; Mary gets a sliver trying to lift the end of the wood beam. Sean has worked it out with his father, he knows he has to dig straight down, that he has to fit the post in and then fill the hole back up with packed earth. The wire will come later. Sean puts the two tips of the hole digger down on the corner of the field, on the near side of what must have been a decent stone fence. Then he looks over to Fitch’s house to see if anyone’s watching. Two cars go by along the bay road. A third car honks and Sean looks up too late to see if he knows them. Behind him Mary sits in the grass, her dress fanned out around her, her blue leggings getting darker in the places where the dew’s soaked through.

  “Stand up, Mary.”

  Sean jams the blades of the digger into the ground, and they thud into the grass. He pulls the handle apart. Looks over his shoulder at his sister.

  “Mary, stand up.”

  This time she does and walks over to a rock, pretends to write on it with a blade of grass.

  Lifting up on the handle Sean grits his teeth, uses his arm muscles, can feel them strain. A chunk of earth lifts up, a core of dirt between the spades of the digger. Thin white roots throughout, a worm turning over just under the surface. Sean closes the handle, flips the clump over onto the ground and starts in again. Tips down, jam in, pull the handle apart, lift out. He turns to see if Mary is watching but she’s busy with her rock. Sean starts again, further down the post hole, the earth coming up in one swift move.

  One by one, Dermot sets Abbey’s clothes over the shower curtain rod. They’re still damp to the touch. Putting his face close to them, Dermot can smell Galway Bay in the fibres, and the hand soap Abbey used to wash them. If they’d been dry the morning she left she would have taken them too, and he’d have nothing but her empty drawer and a fear of filling it.

  In the kitchen Dermot opens the cupboard to the right of the sink. On the lower shelf: four plates, four bowls, an assortment of glasses, all of them mismatched, muted patterns. They’re clean and stacked, as Abbey had left them. On the middle shelf, teacups and saucers, and on the top shelf the bag of vitamin capsules given him two years back by Faherty. Reaching right of the vitamins Dermot pulls down a sheaf of papers—Abbey’s Irish notes. Verbs written out neatly in his hand on the top sheet; she’d copied them on the sheet below. There are also a few phrases, “She lives in Ireland, Tá sí ina cónaí in Éirinn,” “I am Irish, Is Éireannach mé.” Even though Abbey had no idea what part of Donegal her grandparents came from.

  Dermot finds what he’s been looking for: Abbey had jotted Angela’s number and the number at Connor’s on the first sheaf of paper. Tomorrow he’ll call her at work, to make sure she’s coming home. Walking from the kitchen to the front room he stares at the telephone number, knocks his leg against the arm of the couch. The place is a kip. Books are stacked on the big table, along with a number of dirty cups; the rug is covered in dog hair and there’s a water-stain along the trim. Tomorrow Dermot will get up on the roof, retie the thatch. He’ll borrow a ladder from the lads working next door. This place was a barn when he bought it. Two cows, a donkey and some sheep had all herded themselves in from the rain, slept on a straw bed in what is now the front room. Dermot remembers that it was months before the reek of shit and piss was finally out; the heavy must of wet fleece had stayed longer, as if it was worked into the stone. It was Fitch’s place at the time. Dermot took it and nine adjoining acres, used the money from his inheritance.

  When he thinks about his parents and about the house he grew up in, what he thinks of most often is going to the solicitor’s, getting the keys. He’d walked up Leinster Road in Dublin, knowing the sale would go through that afternoon. He’d even sold the furniture, remembers standing in the entry way, leaning against the door jamb, thinking that nothing had changed, that if he lifted the chair in the living room the leg marks would go down two inches into the carpet. His father had spent years in that chair, one ear to the radio, eyes closed, The Irish Times on the table beside him. He’d worked twenty-three years as a typesetter in the Times’ D’Olier Street offices and his son had never seen him crack open the paper at home. Dermot had gone into the kitchen and placed his hand on the handle to the cupboard door, thinking: toaster, butter plate and small plates above, two of the saucers with nicks along the side—one with a thin crack across the middle. And when he’d opened the cupboard, things were exactly the way he’d expected, although the butter plate was clean and empty and there weren’t any crumbs around the toaster. In his old bedroom the spread was pulled back, the brown wool one, as if his parents had been expecting company, as if they’d thought “Dermot is coming home and he may want to stay.” There was a way his mother’d had of putting him down at night. She would push her lips into the hollow of his cheek, then wipe the kiss away, laughing. In the end she’d outlived Dermot’s father by seven months, had spent that time in and out of hospital trying to find a complaint—“Sure, my heart’s going,” one week and then on the phone to Dermot about her arthritis the next. The doctor said she’d died of want—to be with her husband, to sit in a chair and know he was beside her. “We should all be so lucky,” he’d said as he pulled the X-ray down off the back light.

  Dermot didn’t want Dublin, not back then. He’d been shoring up in a rooming house in Clifden, working the lobster traps, and that was enough for him. Although the landlady’s clanging was driving him away; all afternoon she’d be in and out of the various apartments with a metal cleaning bucket, the clank of it hitting the floor. She’d sing under her breath, and the walls were thin as parchment. Missus McGuire was her name. She’d k
nock on Dermot’s door to tell him supper was ready, and stand there until he answered, craning her thin, lined neck up and over his shoulder to see what state the place was in. The sea had saved him. He was out on the boat at all hours checking traps, lifting them out of the water, both arms straining. The smell of the sea all around him, the glistening Mannin Bay waters draining off the catch.

  Fridays, Michael would come up from Galway after sitting in on meetings at the University. He had just started lecturing there after leaving Trinity, and though no one at the University in Galway wanted an Englishman on staff, there were only one or two conservancy experts in the country and Michael was one of them. And Michael was both a brilliant scholar and willing to teach. He’d picked up some Irish, sat on a number of boards, signed on with the Wetland Unit to show his commitment. Although there was no end to his complaining on the nights when he drove up to Clifden to see Dermot.

  Usually they met for drinks at Mahones. Dermot would come down in the Mini, right off the boat, smelling of diesel and algae. Michael would be in a suit or dress pants and a collared shirt, would roll up his sleeves as the night went on. It was Michael’s easy company that buoyed Dermot during those years. He remembers the nights at Mahones, their odd pairing and the looks of the locals, as if he and Michael were on show—the Englishman and the ex-professor who spoke Latin to the lobsters he hauled into his boat. Their regular waitress at the time was a woman called Janey, all of twenty, with wide hips and blue eyes. One night she turned and smiled at Michael when the two of them came in. She walked over to the table in long strides. “Those legs,” Dermot mumbled, watching her, and Michael shook his head.