Wild Decembers

by Edna O'Brien

  “Who is it?” Joseph called twice.

  “You’d better go,” Breege said, and made a basket out of her apron as Bugler laid Violet Hill into it.

  “I’m sorry … I’m very sorry,” he said.

  “I know that,” she said, and pushed him back out.

  “It was Bugler,” Joseph said, seething. He was at the top of the stairs with a thin patchwork quilt around him.

  “It was,” she said, and turning to face him, she held up the apron. She did not know what he would do, what he would say. He did not roar, he did not speak, he closed his eyes for several seconds, then came down the stairs, took Violet Hill in his arms, and with his hand he gripped the stiffening face and held it and saw. He began then to help her to die, to allow her to die, telling her it was not dying at all, it was running faster and faster into the free and untrammelled emptiness, under the dew and the rain and the stars where none could wound or kill her because she had gone from flesh to spirit.

  “I’ll ring the vet,” Breege said.

  “No need,” he said, and went back to cradling her, moving back and forth, his voice getting lower now as the life expired in her, and then he bent down and said some farewell thing.

  They laid her on the towel on the table, and he bathed her and fixed her like the pieces of a jigsaw so that she was the perfect but unbreathing simulation of what she had been, forever consigned to memory, intact, the fawn delicacy that he had known, that the countryside had known, and with his thumb he closed the almond eyes that were trusting even in death.

  “Get me her rug,” he said.

  “It’s too dark to bury her now.”

  “She likes dark … She likes wild spaces … Don’t you?” he said, gathering the four corners of the towel to make a litter before laying her into her tartan rug.

  “Bugler didn’t do it … It was someone else,” she said gently.

  “Someone else! No other car went up the road. I would have heard it.”

  “You want it to be Bugler,” she cried mutely to herself, and then put a dab of holy water on the white oblong of Violet Hill’s forehead. He did not ask her to go with him, and he did not tell her where he intended the burying to be.

  JOSEPH WAS IN the shed when he saw the patrol car pull into the yard. He recognised it by the extra tall aerial. It was the fat guard, Garvey, whom he knew quite well.

  “Hello, Joe … How’s the form?” The voice apologising for itself as he got out and crossed the yard. A curtain of rain, a shibboleth hung over everything.

  “Down for the day,” Garvey said.

  “Down for the year.”

  “My wife can’t dry the baby’s nappies, but it’s worse for you farmers.”

  “What brings you to my mountain?”

  “You won’t believe this,” Garvey says, and trying to delay his mission, he launches into a story about going to the High Court in Dublin only three days before, and guess what, there were crocuses on the dual carriageway.

  “You’ve come about something other than crocuses.”

  “I have and I wish I hadn’t, because I know you won’t like it any more than I do.”

  “Then don’t bother.”

  “I have to … I have to take your shotgun off you.”

  “You can’t … It’s like my walking stick.”

  “Come on now, it’s a bit more serious than that.”

  “Who reported me?”

  “No one, Joe … No one.”

  “Mick Bugler did.”

  “He did not, though he had plenty of reason to. You lay in wait for him in the bog … You tried to ambush him. There’s nothing to be gained from that sort of behaviour.”

  “I went in to shoot snipe … I’ve done it all my life, so why can’t I do it now?”

  “We don’t want you shooting people.”

  “Look, it’s myself I do harm to and not that blackguard.”

  “All the more reason then why I should take the gun off you.”

  “He wants to retire me … Every day he’s up to some other stunt. He’s not satisfied just to cut turf. He covets Yellow Dick’s Bog.”

  “Oh, a crackpot … The best thing is to ignore him.”

  “I can’t and I won’t.”

  “Look, Joe, we’ll only keep the damn thing for a couple of months until the case is settled and the heat dies down …”

  “The heat won’t die down.”

  “Joe, for Christ’s sake, just give me the gun. Stop making it hard for me.”

  “I need it … Soon it will be lambing time. There will be lambs.”

  “You have no sheep.”

  “Sheep stray over onto the mountain from Galway.”

  “I was sent up here to do a job, so let me do it.”

  “You’re wasting your time, Garvey.”

  “If you don’t give it, I’ll get it from your sister. Out of the wardrobe where it’s kept.”

  “So she’s the informer.”

  “She isn’t.”

  “How would you know where it’s kept unless you were told. Holy Jesus, she actually went to the barracks and informed on me.”

  “It’s for your own good.”

  “She places Mick Bugler above her own brother.”

  “If I go back without it, the superintendent will come up.”

  “Go in and get it from her … Tell her that when Oedipus blinded himself with the hooks of his mother’s corset, her ladies in waiting split themselves laughing.”

  “For Christ’s sake … Why would I tell her a cracked thing like that?”

  “In case it hurts. In case it hurts, my good man.”

  * * *

  It was a divided house then. He took his meals out in the shed. He wrote notes to communicate the duties that were ascribed to her and those ascribed to himself. She wrote on the back of a brown envelope that had come from O’Dea; she said, “I am not on Bugler’s side … Please believe that.” He inked it out.

  The morning the decisive letter came he sat at the kitchen table and read it and broke down. She read it over his shoulder.

  Dear Sir:

  I refer to your letter dated 12 instant and I wish to inform you that the holding at issue in Yellow Dick’s Bog subject of receivable order no. 7/5/642 Folio 29596 was vested in D’Arby Bugler together with the right of turbary as formerly exercised on plot 6A, Yellow Dick’s Bog, containing 52 acres 2 roods 8 perches in the occupation of Michael Bugler and his antecedents.

  Furthermore, I have to inform you that your registration in relation to Yellow Dick’s Bog has a mistake. Contrary to your own assumption, you are not in fact the owner of 0.7 turf bank in question. As a result of inspection of the land registry maps our client is now assured of that portion and intends to make every use of his rights and to bring home the turf he has saved and which as you are aware is a back-breaking task. You will see from the enclosed map that it is blatantly clear, and should you object, our client has no compunction at all about going back to the courts to prove adverse possession of his rightful bank. He is sorry that there has been so much wrangling about this but wishes you to know that it was not of his own making.

  FOR TWO WEEKS there had been a heat wave, the ground baked and dusty, the dogs drowsy, leaves on the trees motionless and spent, a haze of pollen and dust that sifted through the days and at night gorse fires breaking out on the mountain three in a row. The men from the local fire brigade had had to go up there and Bugler was foremost among them. He had insinuated himself into everything, and no one thought any the worse of him because of his vendetta with Joe Brennan. “More power to your elbow,” the men said when they met him.

  Farm work had to be put off until nighttime, and people worked under the stars up to midnight, the air so still and permeable that voices could be heard across the lengths of several fields and the barking of dogs for miles around. The turnips that they had already dug had lost their greenish neck frills and lay along the drills withered and prone. There was about two tons to be brought home
and Joseph had calculated what he would get for them. He needed the money. Every solicitor’s letter and every barrister’s letter had a bill enclosed or a note that further costs were being drawn up.

  They worked almost in silence, Joseph digging, the Crock forking them to Breege, who threw armfuls of them onto an upturned cart. Sometimes the men stopped to wipe the sweat from their faces or under their arms with a towel that they shared, wondering why it was that Breege didn’t sweat.

  Whisht, whisht. It was the Crock who heard it, heard it because he was wise to it.

  A police siren like a high-pitched scream carried across into the field where two corncrakes had either been serenading or outwitting each other minutes before. It came from the direction of the mountain rather than the lake, and for a moment Joseph thought that it was another fire or else that weapons had been found up there, as there was a rumour about a cache of them. Hard upon it came the sound of the tractor, the two sounds, siren and tractor, in alternating and usurping peremptoriness, then a second of suspense and his absolute disbelief.

  “It’s Bugler bringing home the turf … with a guard escort,” the Crock said.

  “What? What?”

  “The guards are escorting the load in case of any trouble.”

  “Oh, Holy Jesus … He’s won, he’s won,” and thrusting the shovel into the dry ground, Joseph began rolling his sleeves down so as to go out and impede them.

  “Don’t,” Breege said. “Don’t go up there … it’s too late.”

  “It’s not too late … He can’t do this … It’s not settled.”

  “It is settled … it’s settled now,” she said.

  “A ruthless man … a hobo … sans feeling … sans nature,” the Crock began.

  “Sans everything,” Breege said, and by her saying it Joseph knew that she was restored to him, they would be inseparable once again.

  They were one then, one in their commiseration and one in their humbledness. The months of letters, maps, drawings, folios, bills all made useless by Bugler’s power and Bugler’s effrontery; the two sounds now, siren and tractor receding but still scornful, defining their progress up the steep track to his house.

  “You see what he’s like,” the Crock said.

  “I see,” she said, weary.

  Many a time she had promised herself that she must put Bugler out of her thoughts completely, that she must go into the hidden house of herself like an orderly and rout him out. That time had come. She even saw the vulpine grimace that lurked behind his winning smile.

  There was an interval then, with only the sound of the tractor, steady, putting, reiterative, as Bugler went over and back, over and back, obviously unloading the bales of the turf and stacking them in a shed.

  “How would you describe that sound, Joe?” the Crock asked.

  Joseph thought for a while, but made no answer. He was far away, like someone in a bitter trance from which he did not want to be disturbed.

  “A wail … A banshee wail,” the Crock said, and to prove his ire he kicked out at the turnips that lay like lopped infants’ heads in a dreary and lumpen inertness.

  THE SOUND OF the tractor ran on from that night under a reign of timid stars to starless nights and brilliantly burning ones, the sky a muscled and pulsing swell of bright nebulae. It ran on through the summer, through ripeness and stubble, to come ultimately to the mountain, that coveted wilderness that was a test for each of them, beginning and end, a place where pride and stubbornness and perpetuity would be put to the test, then and in time to come.

  It was about a week later that a lorry with a digger attached was seen going up the road. The three workmen were all strangers. Soon as he heard it, Joseph ran with the binoculars, and when he climbed onto the barn roof, his worst fears were confirmed. Bugler was going to cut a road up to his own house. The lorry had a load of black slag that was tipped out, and soon the digger began to scoop up the stubborn earth. It took three days before he succeeded in stopping it. The periwinkle black slag and crushed stones lay to one side, and a quenched lamp attached to a pole said MEN WORKING.

  He would pursue his cause now with the energies of a madman, divination in his words and in his will; his stock, his farm, Breege, everything sacrificed to it. It was well known how a Bugler ancestor, a D’Arby Bugler, a rake, had lost his right to that part of the mountain, lost it to Joseph’s father’s father over a winter of cards. It was written down and witnessed, and his own father had even repeated it on his deathbed, how D’Arby Bugler ceded that corridor of mountain and had only a bona fide right to go up and down it. The folly of D’Arby Bugler was often talked of and how in the end he lost everything, even his shirt. It was written and sealed and deposited somewhere, in some safe, the humbled and hurried and slightly drunken scrawl that would be Bugler’s undoing. Finding it entailed more journeys, overnight stays in cheap rooms, overhearing doors banging and drunks coming in late. Even before he held it in his hand Joseph could picture it, a sheet of crude ruled paper and the ink, rusted almost to a powder and in whose dried traces lay the revelatory words.

  A colleague of O’Dea’s had hopes of finding it through his partner, but when various searches failed, he had to go to the city, to the Land Commission, where every moiety was registered. He parked his van a few miles out because he was nervous of traffic and walked through the streets until he came to the large leafy square where the doctors’ and dentists’ brass plates were now obsolete, as each building housed many offices. He stood in a massive hall with the clerk politely telling him that questions about land took months if not years, there being such a backlog of it, and that the English name of the mountain would have to be ascertained before the dispute could be settled.

  “Slieve Clochan,” he said accusatorily.

  * * *

  He became so racked and thin that one night Breege went to him in the front room and stood behind his chair and said, “Can we talk?” He was deep in the law books, believing now that O’Dea had deserted him.

  “What is it?” he said.

  “Don’t turn in on yourself … Please don’t turn in on yourself.”

  It had happened once before, long ago when he had done something terrible to himself, though she did not know what as she was too young. It was something to do with a girl, a Catherine whose name could not be mentioned ever again. He had gone away for a while and her mother said it was to the seaside, but she knew that it wasn’t. The thing he had done was a big secret, but she learned of it. He had taken some sheep dip to poison himself. When he turned round there were tears in his eyes, and she thought, He is listening to me at last. But he wasn’t. He asked her if he could ask a favour. If he could have her savings book. The bank was refusing to loan him any more.

  “It’s only temporary,” he said.

  “SLOW ON THE puck, Joe. Joe. Joe. Watch the sliotair. Jaysus, Joe.”

  Bugler and himself were playing a game of hurley in a big field with no fences and no goalposts. He could hear the clatter of the hurley sticks, each boss slashing the other, as if they were animated, as if they were animals, a fleeting sight of the ball with wire instead of cord around the leather sphere, the ball slipping off his spatula of wood and Bugler getting it, then a free flow bursting through and up and away into the air, his jumping to grasp it and feeling the heavy oar of the wood smack on the back of his hand, and a crowd of lads screaming and the referee in old togs, pointing a finger at him: “You will meet him again at a venue to be decided.”

  He woke panting, his body drenched with shame and wet, and he knew that they were about to come, either through the door or in the window, the lads in the dream, cheering and jeering. He had been playing hurley with Bugler in a big field with no fences and no goalposts and they were in their pelts, his skull still rang with the tough sound of the hurley sticks, the leathered ball, and someone either out of pity or jest shouting, “Justice for the little man.” Then the referee telling him that they were to meet again at a venue to be decided.

>   He opened the window to breathe. The air smelt of some oversweet rotting flower, not normal, nothing was normal in those moments, pre-dawn a bilious green and “Justice for the little man,” as the boys lifted him back for the replay; ten Josephs, nine Josephs, eight, seven, six, Mother of Jesus, down to the last little Joseph, little and belittled, alone in the strange field that was now sprouting great bunches of yellow ragwort and nowhere near home. It was only a nightmare and yet “We will meet again at the spot where hurlers bury their dead” struck him as being prophecy. His secret self laid bare, no longer safe and solitary in that crippled virginal baulk known only to himself and maybe to his sister, innocents both, pitted against a world that was too smart for them.

  Soon as he stopped panting he flung open the bedroom door to make sure that there was no one out there, kicked it twice, and then crossed to where Breege slept. She did not hear her door open, and for an instant he stood and looked at the peaceful, almost seraphic calm of her face in contrast with her arms, which were flung out, and the heavy head of brown hair, which looked libertine on the white pillow, her chest rising and falling under the pleated nightgown. She sat up startled and pushed her hair back out of her face, saying nothing, only listening.

  “This is what I’ve come to,” he said as he stood there, lean and abashed, tying the cord of his pyjamas childishly.

  “What is this is what you’ve come to?”

  He was about to describe it, but then suddenly he shook his head repeatedly, like someone freeing himself of water, and said it was nothing, it was a load of nothing, just a bad dream he had had. Hearing not just what he said but hearing his heart’s woe behind it, she knew that he was entering a zone in which dreaming and waking, wrongs and semi-wrongs, would be translated and magnified into an enormity to suit the dark mad mould of his thinking.

  BUGLER WAS ON a ladder with his back to her, in his shirtsleeves, the wind flapping the bright red patterns of his shirt, green and blue and yellow pouches breezing out. He was tapping various parts of the wall with a hammer, then listening intently. She watches, thinking, He does not realise I am here. It is the first time that she has ventured up there since she was a child and was sent up once with a letter. Though only half a mile from their house, it seems wilder and more mysterious, more native to the mountain, the sound of water everywhere and streams running down the sides of the house, rushing as if through a sluice gate, a different-coloured water to theirs, darker, blood-coloured. When she saw him there on the ladder, her heart went pit-a-pat and she realised that the feelings she had for him had not lessened, not lessened at all, if anything they were more. The yard itself was like a builder’s yard — heaps of gravel, huge buff-coloured stones, lesser stones, a cement mixer, and slats of wood of a delicate pink like tinned salmon. She coughs to make her presence known.