“Take that into the house like a good man,” she said, handing him her bulging shopping bag.
“Any sign of you making a move?” she asked as they crossed the yard.
It was her standard question, her way of asking if he were any closer to getting married, and he disliked her for it. He disliked the look of smug superiority that came into her eye as she asked it, almost belying the secret delight he knew her to take in his bachelorhood. He was aware that she thought of Breffny as his heir, the future owner of Clonglass and all the acres that Kevin would acquire for him before he snuffed it. Breffny would not earn his living as a farmer, of course. He would be a landed banker, knowing like his father that land was an asset that neither moth nor fire could destroy.
“What would I be doing with a woman? Amn’t I busy enough as it is?”
“You should put yourself in the way of women. You should start going to the dances again. All you do is drink with that good-for-nothing vet from Galway.”
“Dance halls are the last place that God created. I’d sooner look for a woman in a cattle mart.”
“I have an idea. You should get rid of that evil-smelling weed Snoddy and take on a girl student in his place. Monty knows a farmer this side of Roscrea who’s got himself a girl student for a year. You’re still in good shape if only you washed and shaved. Get yourself a girl student and you’ll be spliced before Christmas.”
With ill-concealed relief he left Concepta to Maureen and went out to the workshop to mend the mouldboard of the plough. It was a dark, forbidding afternoon with a threat of rain from the west, and he switched on the light and got out his electric welder. Billy Snoddy came slow-footedly across the yard, and Kevin told him to sharpen the chisels, that he would be needing them tomorrow. After a while the three children came running out of the house in their farm gear. Jocasta and Jacinth told Breffny to stay with Uncle Kevin, and they themselves went off down the lane.
Breffny was a fetching child. He was short, barrel-bodied, and bowlegged, with sandy-red locks that curled cutely about his ears. His plump cheeks were rosy, and when he laughed the gap between his front teeth gave him a look of clownish innocence.
“Come over here, Breff,” said Snoddy. “Come over here till I show you the oilstone.”
Breffny cared nothing for oilstones, but he was entranced by a box of old bolts that lay unregarded in a corner.
“What’s your age?” Snoddy asked.
“Four last birthday. Mammy gave me a black-and-white panda.”
“And what will you be when you grow up? A policeman or an engine driver?”
“A bank manager,” said Breffny
“Who told you that?”
“Mammy told me in my bedtime story. But she said I was going to be a farmer too.”
“How can you be a farmer and a bank manager at the same time?” Snoddy squinted at Kevin.
“Mammy told me that too. She said I’d be a bank manager on weekdays and a farmer on Saturday and Sunday.”
“You’re a very bright boy and your Mammy is a very bright woman.”
“She’s not as clever as Daddy. Daddy is better at sums.”
“You’ll need money to buy a farm, but if you’re a bank manager you can lend yourself some,” said Snoddy.
“No, I won’t. Uncle Kevin is going to leave me his farm when he dies.”
“Uncle Kevin is a very healthy man,” said Snoddy.
“Mammy says he’ll die when he’s seventy.”
Kevin could listen no longer. He switched on the welder to drown Snoddy’s attempt to get at him through Breffny. Snoddy was a coward. He worked indirectly, by hints and darts that found the softest target. Living with him, day in day out, was like standing under the eaves with the cold drip running down your neck. You were constantly aware of him, you could not escape from him, and you had to watch your every word, conceal your thoughts so as not to give the impression that he had a hold on you. As he watched the glare of the arc through the face mask, Kevin regretted not having dropped the sheet of corrugated iron on his neck, and he regretted it all the more because another such opportunity might never arise again.
It was possible, however, to have an accident on the moor with a shotgun on a Sunday afternoon; but the thought of pulling the trigger made him realize that he was not a murderer, at least in the common meaning of the word. No, he would have to devise something more circuitous, something that would not involve him in direct action. He would adapt O’Flaherty’s idea of adultery by circumbendibus. Murder by circumbendibus was what was called for, a murder in which he would be an accident manager, the arranger of an act that had been ordained by a higher authority.
He placed the mask on the floor and looked round. Little Breffny had carried the bolts outside and had made a neat pile of them in front of the door. In sudden irritation Kevin caught him by the arm and pulled him roughly away.
“Off with you now, Breffny, and play with Pup in the hay shed.”
With tears welling, the boy put a finger in his mouth and ran for the house and his mother.
“He’s a bloody nuisance. If he got half a chance, he wouldn’t leave a bolt or screw on the premises,” Kevin said as he gathered the bolts in both hands.
“Weren’t we all like that once? Sure he’s only a child,” said Billy Snoddy.
Half an hour later Concepta came out to call the children in to tea. Twilight was beginning to gather under the hedges, and Kevin could hear the voices of Jocasta and Jacinth as they came up the lane.
“Breffny, your tea is ready,” Concepta called from the gable. “Have you seen Breffny?” she asked the girls.
“He was with Uncle Kevin,” Jocasta said.
“Where’s Breffny?” she asked Kevin, coming into the workshop.
“He went round behind the hay shed a minute ago.”
“Breffny, Breffny,” Concepta called. “Don’t stand there, Kevin. Look for him,” she reproved. “He could have wandered off alone.”
Kevin went round behind the hay shed, Concepta ran down the lane, and Billy Snoddy went into Rowan’s Field, followed by Jocasta and Jacinth. Kevin was stopped in his tracks by a horrifying thought as Concepta’s voice faded behind the trees.
Led by an invisible hand which he half resisted, he went round behind the house and after a moment’s hesitation looked into the water tank. Breffny was lying on the bottom in three feet of water, his hair covering his bulbous forehead, his eyes closed and mouth open. He bent down to lift him out, but froze like a pointer in the act. He could not bear to be the finder of the body, to be associated so soon and so directly with another death on the farm. He picked up the broken chair that stood by the tank and put it back in its usual place, by the back door with a bucket on top of it. Then he went into the house and asked Maureen if she had seen Breffny. Concepta came up the lane and went round behind the house. Kevin, making for the cow houses, spun round as her horrified shriek gripped at his throat.
“What’s wrong?” he asked as he ran to her.
“Dead, dead. Drowned in your bloody tank,” she wailed as she hugged the dripping body to her breast.
Tears ran into her mouth, and the water from Breffny’s clothes ran down the front of her dress, so that she looked as if she had just risen from the river.
“There may be some life left in him,” Kevin said, thinking that Breffny in her arms looked bigger than he did alive.
“Go away, you clumsy stookaun. The water tank was always covered when we were children. Oh, no, my lovely boy.”
Concepta went into the house, and Kevin told Snoddy to fodder the cattle, that he was going to drive his sister home.
“You’re jinxed,” Snoddy said. “The black ox has trod on your foot, on your two feet. It’s the second death in this yard inside two months. The wages of sin is no longer death to the sinner but death to every innocent man and child he knows. I had better look out.”
Kevin walked off without answering. He felt beaten into dizziness and he walked as if
the power of movement was ebbing from his legs. He did not want to go into the house for fear of what Maureen might look or say, so he shuffled round the back and peered down into the tank through the gathering dusk.
“How did he climb up the side?” Snoddy asked from behind. “It’s at least three feet high without either hand- or foothold.”
“I have no idea,” Kevin said.
“Have you thought that the supernatural could have lent a hand?”
“What are you talking about?”
“You know what I’m talking about,” said Snoddy, turning on his heel to go.
Maureen led Concepta out of the house, Concepta carrying the body in a blanket, babbling hysterically about the boy and his father.
“I wouldn’t mind… oh, my lovely boy… but Monty always told me not to take the children here… my only boy.”
Kevin opened the boot of the Mercedes but she shouted witheringly, “No, no, no, you insensitive eejit, I’ll nurse him on my knee.”
He told the two girls to get in beside him. Concepta sat with Maureen in the back, hugging Breffny to her breast and crooning vacantly into his unhearing ear.
Jocasta and Jacinth held hands as if they could not grasp that they would never play with Breffny again. Maureen said nothing, and Kevin drove without noticing the traffic, reexperiencing the day the tree fell on Murt Quane. Now and again he shivered as if the cold water that had folded over Breffny had seeped through the marrow of his bones, and now and again he would think to himself, First men, then cattle.
He and Maureen stayed at the wake until after midnight, and the following day he went to the funeral and hung uneasily on the edge of the knot of mourners in the graveyard. Though neither Monty Kilgallon nor anyone except Concepta had breathed a hint of reproach, he felt as if his life had darkened beyond possibility of light, and he was surprised when an A.I. man whom he had not seen for over a year shook his hand in friendly recognition.
After taking Maureen home, he drove straight to Larch Lawn, not knowing why but vaguely suspecting that he must tell Elizabeth his version of events. He was pleased, therefore, when she took both his hands and held them for what seemed like a full minute.
“You poor fellow,” she whispered. “First Murt, now this. But don’t blame yourself. Bad luck, like good luck, comes in runs, my father used to say. I hope you’ve come to the end of yours.”
It was the first time she had talked to him about anything except her brother and the farm, and he was pleased, because in a small way it eased the dry grinding of his thoughts.
Chapter 7
In the days after the drowning, Kevin thought of himself as an outwardly sound apple whose core had been eaten by the grub of the codling moth. To a casual observer, he looked as he had always looked, but within him was a tearing and a gnawing, an unceasing awareness that he was the quarry and that he was being stalked by no less a hunter than the gentleman on the pale horse. He had once read in a schoolbook that Sleep is Death’s brother, but more terrifying was the knowledge that Sex is Death’s sister. It did not require much imagination to see that by losing himself in such a sister he was giving fortune an irrecoverable hostage. He asked himself why he believed in such fairy tales, but all he could reply was that he believed. The man on the pale horse had ridden off with Murt and then with Breffny. Who was next? From time to time he would tell himself that he was being fanciful, that both of them died in accidents that had nothing to do with his sin, but his thoughts always returned to the rider and the horse whose hooves do not ring on the road to warn of his approach.
One day, as he was returning from the mill with a load of sawdust for bedding, it occurred to him that God, not Death, was the problem, God who callously employed Death as his chela, as one of the many instruments of terror from his chamber of horrors. He knew nothing of God except what the priests and his own imagination told him, and for the first time in his life he asked himself what kind of god he believed in. He rejected one image after another until he thought of a solitary white cloud in a clear blue sky. He remembered seeing it on the moor on a summer day as he lay on his back eating frochans and listening to a lark filling the silence with such heart that the very air burgeoned with merriment and song. His eye followed the white cloud as an airplane overtook it. The airplane vanished, and after a minute or two reappeared on the other side. He realized now that what he had seen was God in one of his many manifestations. To one man he was a nightingale singing, to another a radiant sunrise, and to yet another a rising wave of the sea, but to Kevin Hurley he would now be a White Cloud in a Blue Sky. He could embrace you as the cloud embraced the airplane, but you could not embrace him. He could envelop you as a sea mist might envelop a lost ship, but you could never use your science to put him in a glass jar, hermetically sealed to impress your friends at a harvest supper.
He was not a provident god who had numbered the very hairs on your head and took a personal interest in the fall of a sparrow, but a remote and callous deity whose breath was cold as mountain mist in January, who made the earth as a clockmaker might make a clock and then withdrew into a remote corner of the universe to enjoy the ticking and at the end the final croak. Could such an impersonal and inhuman deity stoop to wreak vengeance on the wicked who were surely beneath his contempt? Would he not say, “I have made them wicked. I have wound up the clock, and now I shall listen to the ticking, however tiresome, until the spring runs down a billion or more years from now?” For a moment Kevin also listened, but he heard no answer in his heart. He knew, however, that it was not in his nature to be an atheist. If he did not believe in the White Cloud, he would have to believe in the Vacuum where it used to be—an even more terrifying option. He was stuck with himself as he was. He would have to accept the burden of his guilt and try to find the strength to cleanse himself, not merely because of White Cloud but to appease the ache of his own nature.
He tried to stay away from Maureen, to talk to her only in the presence of Billy Snoddy, but she would come to his room in the middle of the night and lie against his belly, breathing on his eyelids until he was moved to caress her.
“We must stop this,” he said one night after he had assuaged the ache that long habit and her robust imagination provoked.
“Why?”
“Because it’s not right.”
“Don’t turn crawthumper on me now. I know how religious you are! You only go to confession and Communion once a year, just to do your Easter Duty, and then you’re afraid to go to Monsignor McGladdery. You go all the way to Roscrea to confess to the monks, God help us.”
“It’s got nothing to do with clergy. It’s against the current of my own nature.”
“If it is, you were a long time finding out. We’ve done it so often now that it’s second nature. If you were to stop, who knows if I could? Do you really want me to turn to Billy Snoddy?”
“You’ve played flame to his candle once before.”
“Only once, and it was no good. We were made for each other, you and me. We fit like hand and glove. When you move in me, it’s like an earthquake, but Billy Snoddy spent his handful of coppers at the first standin’—I came against dead mutton.”
“I prefer beef,” he said without thinking.
“Beef with the cut of mustard. That’s what it’s all about.” She laughed, and he could not help warming to the homeliness of her humour.
“Do you think of me during the day?” she asked.
“I’m a man, not a woman. I’m too busy to think about sex.”
“I think about you, and when I go out to the yard I sometimes stand and watch Henry. I think you’re better than Henry, even though you’re not as heavy.”
“What has weight got to do with it?”
“I like to move against the full brunt of a man. Billy Snoddy was too careful. He did it on his knees and elbows, but I couldn’t help laughing when it occurred to me that the cottager was more of a gentleman than the farmer who employed him.”
After that conv
ersation, it was difficult to deny her solace. He did not wish her to turn to Snoddy, and besides, the directness of her humour had fired his imagination. He realized that here was a woman whom only a gifted man could satisfy, that compared with her, other women were so lacking in vigour that a thundering twankydillo would turn them into nervous wrecks; and he realized too that because of her he led two lives, his own life on the farm and an idealized life in her lively imagination which conferred on him a kind of immortality. He was grateful to her for mentioning Henry, because now he often thought of Henry during the act, which added the force of fantasy to the grossness of sexual pleasure. At the back of his mind, however, was the thought that all pleasure was transient, that one day the blood would cool, that he might enjoy the peace of an evening sun.
In the meantime he ate his meals in silence while the Abominable Ruminant sat opposite, impassive as a buddha, counting the spoonfuls of mustard as they came out of the pot.
“Do you believe in a run of bad luck?” he asked Kevin as he topped up the battery of the heavy tractor.
“I believe in bad luck at cards and the races.”
“You can have bad luck with cattle too, and you can have bad luck with women—if you’re weak enough to love a woman. Thank your lucky stars that so far your farming luck has held.”
Kevin resented the obliquity of Snoddy’s probing, because it seemed to say that what Snoddy knew was too grievous to be expressed directly. He longed to take the galoot by the scruff of the neck and rub his nose in his own dung as he would have done to a dog that refused to respond to house training. But he always stayed his hand in tacit acknowledgement of the havoc that Snoddy could wreak on him.
The evenings were the most trying times. Maureen would sit knitting before the television while Snoddy reread the local newspaper and toasted the soles of his stockinged feet before the range and the grandfather clock hoarsely marked the slowness of the hours. At first he took to going outside and standing in one of the cow houses, drawing comfort from the innocence of animal breathing and the occasional cough from a cud-chewing bullock. Then he found that all rumination reminded him of the Abominable Ruminant, and he would jump into the car and drive recklessly to Killage for a drink. On these nights he avoided Phelan’s, because he never went there without a wash, a shave, and a change of socks and shoes. Instead he went from pub to pub, drinking a pint in each until it was time to head for home. He would gaze at the television in the corner of the bar, not caring about the picture but thinking about Maureen turning the heel of a sock for him, fighting the impulse to drive home at once and catch the Ruminant covering her on knees and elbows.
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