Walk the Blue Fields (14 page)

‘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.

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

‘What’s all this?’ said Margaret.

‘I dunno,’ said the fellow on the lorry. ‘It’s from the man with the toothache. That’s all I know.’

Soon the whole parish started to come. There were men with boils and women who wanted no more children;
women who were desperate for children, and a child that was born on Christmas Day who saw ghosts and couldn’t eat. They had shingles and gout and stones in their throats, bad knees and haunted cow-houses. Margaret placed her hands on these strangers and felt their fears and their fears put her heart crossways. The people left in good faith and their ailments and their apparitions disappeared. She’d wake and find new spuds and rhubarb and pots of jam and bags of apples and sticks outside her back door. Her dreams grew black as the charred doors of Hell. She
started
to tell God she was sorry, started sleeping late and when she woke, neighbouring women would be there
frying
rashers, boiling eggs, talking. Strange men came and cleaned the moss off her roof, put new hinges on the gate, new putty in the windows.

Margaret grew frightened of her own death and passed water all around the house after dark. This still gave her satisfaction. One night, after a rich man asked if she could turn his old friend into a sow, she couldn’t help herself. She went in to tell Stack. When they stopped laughing, Stack thought of her slapping Josephine with the leather strap and the strange island men leading her away. The men in his dream outnumbered him. That was the hardest part of the dream. He suddenly knew she’d move away and couldn’t bear the thought of her being gone. She had taken off her boots and was there rubbing her feet in his kitchen. Her feet were bigger than shoe-boxes and
reminded
him of a song.

‘You’ve a fine pair of feet,’ he said, ‘God bless them.’

She didn’t answer; she just kept the silence and sat
looking
at him. He looked strong from the bogs. There were clocks, too many clocks ticking on his walls. She realised she hadn’t wound her clock in weeks, as though that could
stop time. She didn’t want time to stop but the strangers were always coming, their palms filled with hatred and bitterness and even though she didn’t know half their names, it was all contagious. She thought about the Nowlan woman and what she’d said about the child.

‘My eggs are right.’

‘Your eggs?’

‘Come to bed for an hour.’

When they went into the bedroom Josephine was under the quilt. Margaret laughed while Stack tried to lift her. When he unbuttoned himself and she saw his penis, she thought of the lizard in her dream. He hadn’t, at first, a notion what to do but nature took over. Josephine did her best to get between them. When Margaret woke, Stack was gone and the goat was staring at her. There was a terrible stink of goat and hair all over the bed.

Margaret went back to her own house and ate two tins of red salmon, skin, bones and all and washed it down with a pint of buttermilk. She looked in the mirror. The whites of her eyes were like snow and her skin had turned into the skin of a woman who lives in salt wind.

The next morning she went into Stack’s house. He hadn’t slept, had walked the bogs half the night with Josephine.

‘Do you have a sledgehammer?’ she said.

‘No,’ he said.

‘No?’

‘But I’ve a fair idea what you’re thinking.’

‘You have?’

‘I’ve been thinking meself.’

‘Do you mind?’

‘I don’t,’ he said. ‘Isn’t it the sensible thing to do? But I should be the one to do it.’

‘No,’ she said.

Margaret drove to Ennistymon and bought the sledge. As she drove along, she wondered what the priest would think. He would look at her mortal frame walking around his house, having conceived another illegitimate child. He would still be regretting the day he ever laid a hand on her but it was his weakness as much as his destiny that made him stretch out his hand. He was ten years older than her and it was him, not her, who had broken his vows to the Lord. And hadn’t she paid for her side with the death of the child? And that wasn’t her fault. Hadn’t the gypsy woman said it wasn’t her fault?

When she got to Ennistymon, the mad man on the bridge signalled her to stop.

‘There’s ostriches on the road!’ he cried. ‘Slow down!’

She was glad there were crazy people in the world. She watched him, wondering if she wasn’t herself a bit mad. When she rounded the corner, ostriches were walking down the main street. People were standing on the
footpaths
watching them go past and a young girl with plaited hair was driving them along with a stick. So, being mad was the same as having your wits about you, Margaret thought. Sometimes everybody was right. For most of the time people crazy or sober were stumbling in the dark, reaching with outstretched hands for something they didn’t even know they wanted.

She was expecting a child. She knew this the way she knew, after Christmas morning, that it was Stack, not the wind, on her doorstep; it was him shouted.

Margaret came home, pulled the priest’s bed out of the room, took it down the field, and doused it with paraffin. It was slow to burn at first, then blazed and turned into a bed of ash. She went inside and began to knock a hole in the wall between the two houses. Stack stood in his own
house at the dividing wall and felt afraid. When that wall came down nothing again would ever be the same. He could feel the grief of Margaret Flusk. Her grief was beyond comparison. And her strength; Margaret had the strength of two men. Weren’t her legs and arms the same as in his dream? He stood there and heard the plaster loosen, then the stones.

She was there half the day. When she saw light at the other side it reminded her of the time her mother woke her, as a child, on Easter morning so she could see the sun dancing, to witness the resurrection of Christ. When she got through the hole in the wall, Stack was singing.

‘They say Clare people are musical,’ she said.

‘They say Wicklow people suck goats’ milk from the teat.’

‘That’s why we’re so good-looking.’

‘You’re a quare woman.’

‘Do you think this child will live?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Do you know nothing?’ she said.

‘No.’

‘Neither do I.’

‘Aren’t we blessed?’

Josephine did not like the new arrangement. Stack did not seem to love her any more. He didn’t even warm his hands before he milked her and he forgot to rub Palmolive on her teats. The woman stole her milk, tied her to his bedpost, then told Stack she belonged in the shed. When Josephine gave birth, Margaret weaned her kid just as early as she could and took her off on a rope to an ugly-looking pucán 
over the hill.

Stack had never eaten as well. Margaret churned butter, baked bread, made cheese out of Josephine’s milk and spent the rest of her days eating chocolate. He couldn’t keep her in chocolate. It was like throwing biscuits to Josephine. He’d go down to the shop and come home with Mars bars and Maltesers and find she’d taken another one of his mother’s possessions down to the haggard and set fire to it. She was always lighting fires, going around with a big belly bumping into things and then running outside to throw up her food. And always she went to piss outside after dark.

Day and night, the whole parish came: every man, woman and child, looking to get rid of ghosts and
ringworm
. The kettle was always boiling, teapots going and poor Josephine tied up, imprisoned in the shed. Even the priest came, saying he had a bad leg and was there anything Margaret could do for him?

Margaret could tell what Stack was thinking, beat him at cards and split a load of sticks while he’d be thinking about it. She threw out the television, wouldn’t let him have holly in the house at Christmas, and watched him when he ate. And at night she kept herself well clear of him, was as bad as the small farmer’s daughter who, in fairness, never threw up her dinners.

They say something bad will happen if you don’t throw out the feetwater. They say man should not live alone. They say if you see a goat eating dock leaves, it will rain. Margaret gave birth in the priest’s house. There were
thirteen
women and nine children there that day running around with scissors and boiling water and telling Stack to get out of the way. He sat in his own side of the house with Josephine. Margaret’s screams shook the parish. Stack
imagined he heard a slap and the cry of a child for several hours before he heard them and then an old woman’s voice saying, ‘… easy knowing it isn’t her first.’

Now that Stack knew a woman, there grew the
knowledge
that he would never understand women. They could smell rain, read doctors’ handwriting, hear the grass growing.

Margaret christened her son Michael, baptised him with a jugful of Josephine’s milk. When a fisherman came over from Inis Mór to buy the caul she would not take a penny. She invited him in and treated him like royalty, made him sherry trifle and custard. They talked late into the night until Stack grew tired and went to bed. When he woke, Margaret was still in the chair and Michael was fast asleep in the fisherman’s arms.

By that time the two houses were clean as polished wood. The two chimneys that had poured out smoke onto the Hill of Dunagore were now one. Wood and turf leant against their gable walls. The opening the woman had torn down was framed in wood and had hinges which were attached to a door which opened, and sometimes closed. Stack looked younger. Somebody saw him in Ennis having a shave, sitting up in the barber’s chair with a towel around his shoulders, telling a dirty joke.

Margaret did her best to give up on superstition. She started to believe that nothing she didn’t believe in could harm her. But however she changed her behaviour, she could do nothing about her nature. In all the years she lived in Dunagore, she never lit her own fire, never failed to pull rushes in February and, hard as she tried, could never throw out ashes on a Monday or go out as far as the clothesline without placing the tongs across the pram.

If, on the occasional dark night, she thought about the
priest she did not dwell on it. The Lord’s work was indeed mysterious. If she hadn’t lost the priest’s child, she would not have inherited his house. If she hadn’t inherited his house, she could not have been washing her feet that night and she might have remembered to throw out the
feet-water
instead of throwing it like a spell over Stack and eaten his Christmas snake and had his child. As it stood, she had got into that bed beside the goat. And you know what they say about goats: it is said that goats can see the wind. Margaret too could see the wind; in her dreams she saw it shake the quicken trees, how the berries changed into beads of blood which fell on the greass all around that place where she had lain.