Wild Decembers (31 page)

“What kept you?”

“I had to get the grub,” and with that he plonked down the sliced bread and the package of bacon and a bill with a red sticker.

“They’re not back rashers . . . They’re streaky,” Joseph said, nettled about the bill, the shame of it.

“You still have the flu,” the Crock said, walking to the stove to warm his mittened hands. Seeing the copybooks with their glazed orange covers in which Joseph had written his monthly pieces, he exclaimed, “Christ, man . . . You’re not burning these . . . Your pensées.”

“Pensées,” Joseph said, opening each little book at the centre page so as to be able to clutch a fistful and consign them. The sight of them being sucked in and the ensuing ribbons of hot flame which danced on his face made him almost jovial.

“No one can say that I don’t keep the home fires burning,” he said bitterly.

“You’re all dressed up.”

The jacket of his good suit hung on a chair, but he wore the waistcoat, and in the buttonhole was a sprig of withered shamrock from the previous March. There was, as the Crock would later tell it, an irrationality to the man and a craziness in his eyes. He said conflicting things, such as he had corresponded with county councillors, senators, and the local TD and had had assurances from them that justice would be done concerning the mountain. Seconds later he spoke of setting the land and Breege and himself going on a cruise.

“How is she?”

“How do I know . . . No phone . . . No post . . . Nothing. I’ll go see her later this evening. I’m thinking of staying in a hotel. To be close by.”

“Who’ll milk . . . Who’ll fodder?” the Crock asked.

“I’m hiring you to do it.”

“I’ve never worked a milking machine.”

“Come on out, then.”

As they crossed the yard the flakes of snow seemed thicker, more purposeful, and they scurried in out of it. The cows had been milked only a short time before, and Biddy, the first one, bridled, then kicked soon as she felt the nozzles being pulled up over her teats. The byre was suddenly a den of moaning and kicking, Biddy swinging her hindquarters as if it was a torture instrument that had been put over her. The others, taking their cue, set about struggling to come free of their rusted iron halters. Little dribbles of milk passing through the glass tube looked blue and watery. Outside, Goldie yelped to be let in.

“Jesus, ’tis a circus,” the Crock said.

“’Tis a bloody lunatic asylum,” Joseph said, belting them on their clotted rumps until the stick broke in half, something which frustrated him even more.

Inside, they sat close to the fire as Joseph lit one cigarette off the other and had a vast muttering cogitation with himself. To distract him, the Crock wondered aloud if Breege would make it, cited another young lady with the same complaint: Eily O’Grady, who never came back, died in there at the age of ninety, had grown a beard. When he got no answer he deferred to the ash pan that was overflowing.

“You could bake great spuds in that ash.”

“In Jesus’ name will you shut up and go home . . . You’re an eejit.”

“One minute you’re kowtowing to me, you’re begging me to come up here, and the next minute I’m barred . . . I’m not a human football . . . I’ve had it. Kick someone else’s arse,” and as he rose to go, Joseph blocked the way and asked him in the name of God to stay, to have pity. Then, taking the letter from his pocket, he said, “That’s why . . . That’s why I am the way I am.” The Crock read it slowly, first by the fire and then by the window, and shook his head solemnly.

“Oh . . . Helen of Troy. Blue seas . . . Blue seas and a romping woman,” he said.

“No way . . . She wouldn’t mix with a man that’s wronged her brother.”

“He went to see her in the place.”

“Who told you?”

“A nurse that works there . . . A cousin. Sat by her bedside, Bugler did.”

“Oh Jesus, My Father hath chastised you with whips but I will chastise you with scorpions.” Joseph shouted it to the picture of the Sacred Heart, whose votive lamp had quenched for want of oil.

“Go up to him . . . Have it out. Man to man.”

“I will not go up there.”

“Are you afraid of him?”

“I’m afraid of no one,” he said, grabbing the letter and hurrying up the stairs as if a brilliant strategy had occurred to him. Up there he could be heard opening and closing drawers and wardrobes, singing, stopping only to call down that he required a hot toddy.

“There is none. We drank it all.”

“Get some.”

“Where? There’s no money.”

“Anywhere.”

“I’ll tell you what . . . I could drive over to my godmother, she always has a drop.”

“Don’t be long. I’ll need the van to go to Breege.”

Coming down the stairs he seemed to the Crock to be revived, his hair plastered back with oil and his features sharper and more assertive because of it.

“Go up and tell Bugler to meet me here.”

“Suppose he says no.”

“Tell him. . .”

“It’ll be some summit,” the Crock said. Suddenly they both jumped as the door creaked and swung open. In the gust of cold air a robin flew in, its rust-brown feathers jewelled in ice so that it seemed not a real bird but an omen. It made three circuits around the kitchen as they leapt at it to kill it, then it flew towards their faces, then bashed itself repeatedly against the windowpane.

“Jesus, ’tis a weirdo,” the Crock said, chasing it now with the parted legs of the tongs.

“Don’t let it upstairs,” Joseph shouted. Too late. The bird had already curled itself on the bottom step. The Crock hauled himself onto a chair and waited so as to be level with it when it got to where the stairs turned and there was a pocket of dark. It moved jerkily, dropping onto each successive step with a soundless thud, and in time his waiting hand came around it, soft, covert, murderous. There were two sounds then, a screech of pure delirium, almost joyous as his fingers squeezed its neck, then a stifled cry as he throttled it, the sound ending in a splutter. Bringing the hand back he displayed it proudly, the neck swerved to one side as if it had just been unscrewed, the beady eyes wide open.

“How much will you give me for it?”

“Get rid of it,” Joseph said wildly. “Get rid of it now.”

“Easy man. . . easy. It’s only a feathered friend,” and with that he consigned it to his pocket so that he could show it in the hotel that night, scare the ladies with it. There was a five-course dinner and with a stunt like this he might eat for free.

Joseph could hear him coming on foot. They met by the gate as he tried to put it back on its hinges.

“You haven’t fixed it yet,” Bugler said.

“Aren’t you frozen?” Joseph said. Bugler was bareheaded, with snow on his hair and on his thick eyelashes.

“Warm heart,” he said, and wished a neighbourly Happy New Year. They were at a loss, not knowing exactly how to begin and looking vacantly at the tumbling, thralling snowflakes.

“Do you want to come in?”

“I can’t . . . I have a date,” and there was something smug and insinuating about the way he said it.

“Good Christmas?” Joseph said then.

“I got drunk . . . I even think I felt sorry for myself.”

Their laughter, if it had been laughter, ceased as Joseph waited, his eyes smarting from no sleep.

“You got the letter?” Bugler said.

“I did. You shouldn’t have visited Breege in the hospital . . . Upsetting her.”

“It didn’t upset her.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I like her . . . A lot.”

“She’s sick . . . She doesn’t need you.”

“I’ve asked her to come up to the house.”

“She won’t.”

“She said she will . . . She has something important to tell me.”

“And what would that be?”

“I leave it to you as a man to guess.”

“Don’t touch her . . . Don’t tamper with her . . . Don’t go near her.”

“I have touched her,” Bugler answered back, the voice calm, unhurried, but pitched with the certainty of a man who has found what he has been seeking. There was no more time and no more explaining; he turned and walked quickly away.

Joseph held on to the gate because he had to, his world was flushing out of him, if what he heard was true. With a cry then of intent and infantile need, he called out to the Crock to come, Jesus, at once so that they could drive there. The thought that she might have given herself, that Bugler’s blood might be mixed in with theirs, drove him berserk, and he burst his hot heart’s delirium and his hot heart’s despair on the rungs of the gate.

He turned to go back into the house, but he couldn’t.

For one minute he thought the shotgun was stolen so well had he disguised it. The muzzle felt like a poker of ice and his fingers stuck to it. He put the cartridges in different pockets so as not to look too bulky. He needed to walk, to walk and talk. He was talking all the time as he went up the back field and under fences to the next field and the next. Bugler’s cattle were around a feeder; a bawling drove of them turned towards him, their moaning half supplication, half threat, the dark descending on them and on him.

In the next field there was something that unnerved him, because he was not sure but that he was dreaming it. A foal was being born. It was more than halfway out, shaking its moist head, tilting from left to right. The front legs were out, the chestnut face swivelling above them, breathing, looking about, the white lining of the placenta draped around its shoulders like a shawl and the mare pushing, pushing for the rear and the back legs to come out. It was Bugler’s bay mare. Getting closer to it, he saw that at once she became agitated and tried to stand up, and even though he hated the man he did not hate the animal. She had gone in under those trees because like every mare she did not like to be watched when she foaled. In ten or fifteen minutes if he walked on, the foal would be out and up and suckling. So he walked on.

Rabbits were out in the farther field, a little apart from one another, nibbling at nothing, their underjaws a-quiver, fear in the eyes, as if they expected danger, and yet when they heard his step did nothing, only ran to one another and huddled. Safety in numbers, their tails like dirty off-white dusters and their rumps cleaved to one another in useless and abject camouflage.

Dark was coming fast and crows were convening in the cold sky. Tucking the cartridges in, he felt something of the old expertise, the way they snucked in, so nice, so neat. As he crooked his finger around the trigger, he heard them scattering, heard them tearing up into the sky, and then as he fired, the sound of the shots came strangely placid and unmenacing. One or two fell, but he did not cross to see if he had killed. How he had revered her. If she had spent one hour with Bugler, the best and sweetest and most trusting times between him and her would be ruined. He was still talking to himself when he ducked down into a drain, his shoes cracking on ice, like cracking a bread plate, and coming up he spotted O’Dea foddering from the open door of his van. The cattle were mounting it because he had never mastered how to keep animals back. They had not spoken since the day they quarrelled, but they each shouted now at the same moment and with the same high-pitched nervousness: “Happy New Year, Happy New Year.”

He hurried on, pretending to be looking for a stray beast. He went down to the river to see whether it was brown or blue or bottle-green, as if that mattered. The swans, Aziz’s mascots, glided by with a serenity as if it were a balmy summer’s evening. The mountain was coated white, ridges of the rocks showing through with a mineral blackness. Each of the trees was weighed with snow, but inside their black branches were shroud lines like the mad thoughts running amok in his mind.

“Jump in,” O’Dea said as he caught up with him.

“Ah no . . . I’ll walk.”

“I was going to call on you . . . We’re having a sort of a party tonight. Why don’t you come down?”

“Ah . . . You know me and the parties.”

“’Twill do you good . . . And Brunhilde would like it . . . You’re about the only one she tolerates.”

“I’ll see.”

They were level now, and spotting the rifle O’Dea said, “When did you get the rod back?”

“Weeks ago.” He said it as casually as he could. As he watched O’Dea drive off, it occurred to him that he should go back to the river and hide the weapon. But something prevented him. He put it down for a moment and flapped his arms to warm himself. Flapping and hawing, he felt that strange exhilaration, that burning warmth in the limbs which follows upon biting cold. His spirits had picked up on account of O’Dea asking him down.

When he returned to the glade of trees, mare and foal had gone. He saw them walking in the distance towards a shed that was up there, their dark shapes carved out of the night, in a supple and miraculous conjunction. When he saw them so close together, his heart froze with a kind of agony at how outside everyone and everything he felt, an outcast in the world save for Breege, and he knew that by telling her that single grain of truth she would not desert him, and then in a headlong absence of reason he saw their lives return to normal, the pattern of the steady days as they had once been. At his feet there was the afterbirth, a big bunch of jellied mush glistening in the light of a risen moon, the bits of red like mincemeat where the mother had snapped it off with her teeth. She had done it right.

He walked with an urgency now, trampling on his own shadow, annoyance at the amount of time he had already wasted, recalling that insolent and vainglorious boast of Bugler’s which would be null and void once he talked to her. The barn roof came into sight, a panel of sheer white, svelte as suede, with not a single bird track to mar it, and then a lurch in his breathing as he imagined that he had heard that detested sound, the rumble of the tractor breaking in on his newfound certainty.

Not knowing then that which he was about to do and yet with the repetition of that dreaded sound, knowing it, because it was always there, like a dream, waiting to be dreamed. It had thundered into the yard, music pouring out of it, the cabin decked with sprigs of holly to give a festive appearance. The bridal chariot come to carry her off. And then, the very worst thing. His own house lit up, illuminated, the upstairs and the downstairs windows, her way of saying “I have come home.”