Walk the Blue Fields (6 page)

And so the girl, whose father has never given her so much as a tender word, embraces the retriever and with it the possibility that Deegan loves her, after all. A wily girl who is half innocence and half intuition, she stands there in a yellow dress and thanks Deegan for her birthday
present
. For some reason it almost breaks the forester's heart to hear her say the words. She is human, after all.

‘There now,' he says. ‘Aren't you getting hardy?'

‘I'm twelve,' she says. ‘I can reach the top of the dresser without the stool.'

‘Is that so?'

‘Mammy says I'll be taller than you.'

‘No doubt you will.'

Martha, throwing out barley to the hens, overhears this conversation, and knows better. Victor Deegan would never put his hand in his pocket for the child's birthday. He's picked the retriever up some place – as winnings in one of his card games or maybe it's a stray he's found along the road. But because her favourite child seems happy, she says nothing.

Martha is still young enough to remember happiness. The day the child was conceived comes back to her. It
started
out as a day of little promise with clouds suspended on a stiff, February sky. She remembers that morning's sun in the milking parlour, the wind throwing showers into the barn, how strange and soft the salesman's hands felt,
compared
to Deegan's. He had taken his time, lain back in the
straw and told her her eyes were the colour of wet sand.

She has often wondered since then, where the boy was, for her thoughts, that day, were fixed on the prospect of Deegan coming home. When he did come home, he sat in to his dinner and ate as always, asking was there more. Martha waited for the blood but on the ninth day after it was due she gave up and asked the neighbours in and told a story, knowing how the night would end. That part wasn't easy.

But that's all in the past. Now her daughter is sitting on the autumn ground, looking into the retriever's mouth.

‘There's a black patch on his tongue, Mammy.'

That she is a strange child can't be doubted. Martha's youngest holds funerals for dead butterflies, eats the roses and collects tadpoles from the cattle tracks, sets them free to grow legs in the pond.

‘Is it a boy or a girl?'

Martha turns the retriever over. ‘It's a boy.'

‘I'll call him Judge.'

‘Don't get too fond of him.'

‘What?'

‘Well, what if somebody wants him back?'

‘What are you talking about, Mammy?'

‘I don't know,' Martha says.

She throws what's left of the barley on the ground and goes inside to strain the potatoes.

While the Deegans eat, Judge explores the yard. No doubt the place is fine. There's a milking parlour whose steel throws back his reflection, an empty henhouse with one late egg, and a barn full of hay. He walks down the lane, urinates high on the trunks of the oak trees, shits, and kicks up the fallen leaves. His urge to roll in the cow-dung is almost irresistible but this is the type of house where they might let a dog sleep inside. He stands a long time
watching the smoke, considering his circumstances. O'Donnell will be out looking for him. Judge picks up a sod of turf and carries it into the house. The Deegans, who are eating in silence, watch him. He drops the sod in the basket at the hearth and, before they can say a word, goes out for more. He does not stop until the basket is full. The Deegans laugh.

‘You'd have to see it to believe it,' says Deegan.

‘Where did you find him anyhow?' says Martha.

Deegan looks at her and shakes his head. ‘Find him? I bought him off one of the forestry lads.'

The girl gives Judge a slice of birthday cake and mashes butter into the leftover potatoes, feeds him on the doorstep.

While they are down the yard, milking, Martha comes out. The evening is fine. In the sky a few early stars are shining of their own accord. She watches the dog licking the bowl clean. This dog will break her daughter's heart, she's sure of it. Her desire to chase him off is stronger than any emotion she has felt of late. Tomorrow, while the girl is in school, she'll get rid of him. She will take him up the wood, throw stones, and tell him to get home. The
retriever
licks his lips and stares at Martha, grateful. He puts his paw up on her knee. Martha looks at him and fills his bowl with milk. That night, before she goes to bed, she finds an old eiderdown and makes a bed under the table so nobody can walk on his tail.

Judge lies in his new bed, rolls onto his back and stares at the drawers under the table. This is a different sort of house but Deegan will sell him just as soon as he finds the opportunity. The woman he understands: she is just the protective bitch minding her pup. The eldest fellow keeps to himself. The middle boy's scent is unlike any he has
ever encountered. It is something close to ragweed, closer to plant than animal like the roots you'd bury something under. Judge, being wary in this strange place, fights sleep for as long as he is able but the kitchen's darkness and the fire's heat are unlike any comforts he has ever known and his will to stay awake soon fades. In sleep he dreams again of finding milk on the second teat. His mother was
champion
retriever at the Tinahely Show. She used to lick him clean, carry him through streams, proud that he was hers.

The next morning the simpleton, who sleeps odd hours, is the first to rise. Judge wakes, stretches himself and
follows
the boy out to the shed. They carry withered sticks in and the boy, knowing Judge expects it, does his best to light the fire. He arranges the sticks on yesterday's ashes and blows on them. He blows until the ash turns their faces grey. When the girl comes down she does not laugh at her brother; she simply kneels and, in her teacher's voice, shows him how it's done. She twists what's left of Sunday's newspaper, cocks the withered timber, and strikes a match. The boy watches and is intrigued. The strange blue flame grows bigger, changes and, at a certain point, turns into fire. Something about it makes him happy, makes him wonder. He has a capacity for wonder, sees great significance in common things others dismiss simply because they happen every day.

When Martha comes down, the door is wide open and there is no sign of the dog. She had hoped, the night before, that he would somehow run away. A cold wind is coming in. She shuts the door and walks into the scullery to fill the kettle. There on her sink is the retriever and with Deegan's good china cups, her two youngest stand rinsing the suds off his back. She doesn't really care but the girl sees her and Martha feels compelled to scold.

‘Did I say you could wash that dog in here?'

‘You said nothing about Judge.'

‘Judge. Is that his name?'

‘I called him that yesterday.'

‘You'll not bathe him in that sink again. Do you hear?'

‘He's my birthday present. At least Daddy bought me a dog. You bought me nothing.'

‘Are you jealous?' asks the boy.

‘What did you say?' asks Martha.

‘Who cares?' he says. It's a phrase he's heard a
neighbour
use which he thinks is worth repeating.

‘I care,' says the girl, reaching again for water.

Martha takes her tea out to the yard where things always seem a fraction easier. She looks down the lane. The oaks are losing their leaves so quickly now. She drinks her tea, takes the stake off the henhouse door and opens it wide. Her fowl rush past in a sweep of red feathers and dust, racing for the feed and the open air. She stoops and reaches into their nests for eggs.

She strides back in to make the breakfast, feeling
treacherous
. She often feels treacherous in the mornings. She wishes her husband and her children were gone for the day. Always a part of her craves the solitude that will let her mind calm down and her memory surface.

On a hot pan she watches the eggs grow white and
harden
. Never has she been able to eat them. This morning she longs again for sheep's liver or a kidney. She's always had a taste for such things but Deegan won't have it. What would the neighbours think? The Deegans never ate but the best and he'll not see his wife standing at the butcher's stall, ordering liver. She stands there in her apron on a Tuesday wishing she'd married another man, a Dubliner, perhaps, who would stroll down to a butcher's shop and
buy whatever she craved, a man who couldn't care less what neighbours think.

With the pan spitting, she walks outside and at her
loudest
, shouts. The desperation in her voice travels all the way down into Aghowle's valley, and the valley sends back her words.

‘My God,' says Deegan when he comes in from the
milking
, ‘we'll be lucky if we don't have the whole parish here.'

The Deegans eat and, with full stomachs, go their
separate
ways. The eldest cycles off to the Vocational School. He has just the one year left and will then become
apprentice
to his uncle, the plasterer who lives at Harold's Cross. The simpleton heads off to the parlour, gets down on his knees and sets to work on his farm. So far he's built a boundary with dead fir cones and marked out the fields. Today he will start on his dwelling house. Before the week comes to an end, he'll have it thatched. Judge walks with the girl down the lane to the school bus. When he gets back, Martha places the frying pan on the kitchen floor and watches while he licks it clean. Without so much as a wipe she hangs it back up on its hook. Let them all get sick, she thinks. She doesn't care. Something has to happen.

She takes Judge up the wood. The sun is striking against the hazel. It is almost ten. Martha can, by now, tell what time it is without ever glancing at the clock. A blue sky is shedding rain. Some things she will never understand. Why is the winter sun whiter than July's? Why hadn't the girl's father ever written? She had waited for so long. She shakes her head at the absurd part of her that hasn't given up, and shelters for a while under the chestnut.

Judge is glad he cannot speak. He has never understood the human compulsion for conversation: people, when they speak, say useless things that seldom if ever improve
their lives. Their words make them sad. Why can't they stop talking and embrace each other? The woman is crying now. He licks her hand. There are traces of grease and
butter
on her fingers. Underneath it all her scent is not unlike her husband's. As he licks her hand clean, Martha's desire to chase him off evaporates. That desire belonged to
yesterday
, has become yet another thing she may never be able to do.

Back home, she lathers her underarms and shaves them, cuts her toenails, brushes her hair and fixes it into a wet knot at the back of her skull, same as she is going
somewhere
. Then she finds herself on her bicycle pushing
herself
all the way to Carnew in the rain. In Darcy's she buys a royal blue blouse off a rail, whose buttons look like pearls. Why she buys it she doesn't know. It will be
wasted
in Aghowle. She will wear it to Mass on Sunday and another farmer's wife will come up to her at the meat counter and tell her where she bought it.

When she gets back she changes into her old clothes and goes out to check her hens. Jimmy Davis had three lambs taken, and lately she feels afraid.

‘Coohoooo! Cocohoooo!' she cries, rattling the bucket.

At her call they come, suspicious as always, through the fence. She counts them, goes through their names, and feels relieved. Then she is down on her knees plucking weeds out of the flowerbeds. All the flowers have by this time faded yet there is no frost in the mornings. The broom's shadow is bending onto the second flowerbed. It is almost three. Soon the children will be home, hungry, asking what there is to eat.

As she is bringing the fire back to life, Judge comes in and paws her leg. His tail is wagging. Several times he paws her before Martha realises there's something in his
mouth. She kneels down and opens her hand. He drops something onto her palm. Her hand knows what it is but she has to look twice. It is an egg without so much as a crack in the shell.

Martha laughs. ‘Aren't you some dog?'

Martha gives him milk from the saucepan and says the girl will soon be home. They go down the lane to meet her. She climbs down from the school bus and tells them she solved a word problem in mathematics, that long ago Christina Columbus discovered the earth was round. She says she'll let the Taoiseach marry her and then she changes her mind. She will not marry at all but become the captain of a ship. She sees herself standing on deck with a storm blowing the red lemonade out of her cup.

Back home, the simpleton is getting on well. In the
parlour
he has planted late, brown paper oaks to shelter his dwelling house. The boy likes being alone and doesn't mind the fact that people sometimes forget he's there.

The eldest returns from the Vocational School stinking of cigarettes. Martha tells him to brush his teeth, and puts the dinner on the table. Then she goes upstairs. She has things to think about. What she is thinking isn't new. She takes her wedding coat out of the wardrobe, opens the seam and looks at her money. She doesn't have to count it. She knows how much is there. Five hundred and seven pounds so far, she has saved, mostly housekeeping money she did not put on the table. No longer is it a question of if or why. She must now decide when, exactly, she will leave.

Deegan comes home later than usual. ‘You couldn't watch that new man. He'd be gone by three if you didn't watch him.' He eats all that's placed before him, rises, and heads out for the milking. The cows are already at the field gate, roaring.

That night he goes to bed early. His legs are sore from walking the steep lines and his feet are cold but before he can turn over he is asleep. In sleep he dreams he is
standing
under the oaks. In the dream it isn't autumn but a fine, summer's day. Agust of wind blows up out of the valley. It is so hard and sudden – whatever way this gust is, it
frightens
Deegan and the oaks flinch. Leaves begin to fall. It all seems wrong but when Deegan looks down there, all around his feet are twenty-pound notes. Towards the end of the dream he is like a child trying, without much
success
, to catch them all. Finally he has to get a wheelbarrow. He fills it to the brim and pushes it all the way to Carnew. As he wheels it along the roads, neighbours come out and stare. The envy in their eyes is unmistakable. A few notes flutter from the barrow but it doesn't matter: he has more than enough.