Selected Stories

The Hill Bachelors

In the kitchen of the farmhouse she wondered what they’d do about her, what they’d suggest. It was up to them; she couldn’t ask. It wouldn’t be seemly to ask, it wouldn’t feel right.

She was a small woman, spare and wiry, her mourning clothes becoming her. At sixty-eight she had ailments: arthritis in her knuckles and her ankles, though only slightly a nuisance to her; a cataract she was not yet aware of. She had given birth without much difficulty to five children, and was a grandmother to nine. Born herself far from the hills that were her home now, she had come to this house forty-seven years ago, had shared its kitchen and the rearing of geese and hens with her husband’s mother, until the kitchen and the rearing became entirely her own. She hadn’t thought she would be left. She hadn’t wanted it. She didn’t now.

He walked into the hills from where the bus had dropped him on the main road, by Caslin’s petrol pumps and shop across the road from the Master McGrath Bar and Lounge, owned by the Caslins also. It was midday and it was fine. After four hours in two different buses he welcomed the walk and the fresh air. He had dressed himself for the funeral so that he wouldn’t have to bring the extra clothes in a suitcase he’d have had to borrow. Overnight necessities were in a ragged blue shopping bag which, every working day, accompanied him in the cab of the lorry he drove, delivering sacks of flour to the premises of bakers, and cartons of prepacked bags to retailers.

Everything was familiar to him: the narrow road, in need of repair for as long as he had known it, the slope rising gently at first, the hills in the far distance becoming mountains, fields and conifers giving way to marsh and a growth that couldn’t be identified from where he walked but which he knew was fern, then heather and bog cotton with here and there a patch of grass. Not far below the skyline were the corrie lakes he had never seen.

He was a dark-haired young man of twenty-nine, slightly made, pink cheeks and a certain chubbiness about his features giving him a genial, easygoing air. He was untroubled as he walked on, reflecting only that a drink and a packet of potato crisps at the Master McGrath might have been a good idea. He wondered how Maureen Caslin had turned out; when they were both fifteen he’d thought the world of her.

At a crossroads he turned to the left, on to an unmade-up boreen, scarcely more than a track. Around him there was a silence he remembered also, quite different from the kind of silence he had become used to in or around the midland towns for which, eleven years ago, he had left these hills. It was broken when he had walked another mile by no more than what seemed like a vibration in the air, a faint disturbance that might have been, at some great distance, the throb of an aeroplane. Five minutes later, rust-eaten and muddy, a front wing replaced but not yet painted, Hartigan’s old red Toyota clattered over the potholes and the tractor tracks. The two men waved to each other and then the ramshackle car stopped.

‘How’re you, Paulie?’ Hartigan said.

‘I’m all right, Mr Hartigan. How’re you doing yourself?’

Hartigan said he’d been better. He leaned across to open the passenger door. He said he was sorry, and Paulie knew what he meant. He had wondered if he’d be in luck, if Hartigan would be coming back from Drunbeg this midday. A small, florid man, Hartigan lived higher up in the hills with a sister who was more than a foot taller than he was, a lean, gangling woman who liked to be known only as Miss Hartigan. On the boreen there were no other houses.

‘They’ll be coming back?’ Hartigan enquired above the rasping noise of the Toyota’s engine, referring to Paulie’s two brothers and two sisters.

‘Ah, they will surely.’

‘He was out in the big field on the Tuesday.’

Paulie nodded. Hartigan drove slowly. It wasn’t a time for conversation, and that was observed.

‘Thanks, Mr Hartigan,’ Paulie said as they parted, and waved when the Toyota drove on. The sheepdogs barked at him and he patted their heads, recognizing the older one. The yard was tidy. Hartigan hadn’t said he’d been down lending a hand but Paulie could tell he had. The back door was open, his mother expecting him.

‘It’s good you came back,’ she said.

He shook his head, realizing as soon as he had made it that the gesture was too slight for her to have noticed. He couldn’t not have come back. ‘How’re you doing?’ he said.

‘All right. All right.’

They were in the kitchen. His father was upstairs. The others would come and then the coffin would be closed and his father would be taken to the church. That was how she wanted it: the way it always was when death was taken from the house.

‘It was never good between you,’ she said.

‘I’d come all the same.’

Nothing was different in the kitchen: the same green paint, worn away to the timber at two corners of the dresser and around the latch of the doors that led to the yard and to the stairs; the same delft seeming no more chipped or cracked on the dresser shelves, the big scrubbed table, the clutter on the smoky mantel-shelf above the stove, the uncomfortable chairs, the flagged floor, the receipts on the spike in the window.

‘Sit with him a while, Paulie.’

His father had always called him Paul, and he was called Paul in his employment, among the people of the midland towns. Paul was what Patsy Finucane called him.

‘Go up to him, Paulie. God rest him,’ she said, a plea in her tone that bygones should be bygones, that the past should be misted away now that death had come, that prayer for the safe delivery of a soul was what mattered more.

‘Will they all come together?’ he asked, still sitting there. ‘Did they say that?’

‘They’ll be here by three. Kevin’s car and one Aidan’ll hire.’

He stood up, his chair scraping on the flagstones. He had asked the questions in order to delay going up to his father’s bedside. But it was what she wanted, and what she was saying without saying it was that it was what his father wanted also. There would be forgiveness in the bedroom, his own spoken in a mumble, his father’s taken for granted.

He took the rosary she held out to him, not wishing to cause offence.

Hearing his footsteps on the brief, steeply pitched stairs, hearing the bedroom door open and close, the footsteps again in the room above her, then silence, she saw now what her returned son saw: the bloodless pallor, the stubble that had come, eyelids drawn, lips set, the grey hair she had combed. Frances had been the favourite, then Mena; Kevin was approved of because he was reliable; Aidan was the first-born. Paulie hadn’t been often mentioned.

There was the sound of a car, far back on the boreen. A while it would take to arrive at the farmhouse. She set out cups and saucers on the table, not hurrying. The kettle had boiled earlier and she pushed it back on to the hot plate of the stove. Not since they were children had they all been back at the same time. There wouldn’t be room for them for the two nights they’d have to spend, but they’d have their own ideas about how to manage that. She opened the back door so that there’d be a welcome.

Paulie looked down at the stretched body, not trusting himself to address it in any way. Then he heard the cars arriving and crossed the room to the window. In the yard Frances was getting out of one and the other was being backed so that it wouldn’t be in the way, a white Ford he’d never seen before. The window was open at the top and he could hear the voices, Kevin saying it hadn’t been a bad drive at all and Aidan agreeing. The Ford was hired, Cahill of Limerick it said on a sticker; picked up at Shannon it would have been.

The husbands of Paulie’s sisters hadn’t come, maybe because of the shortage of sleeping space. They’d be looking after the Dublin children, and it seemed that Kevin’s Sharon had stayed behind with theirs in Carlow. Aidan had come on his own from Boston. Paulie had never met Aidan’s wife and Sharon only once; he’d never met any of the children. They could have managed in a single car, he calculated, watching his brothers and sisters lifting out their suitcases, but it might have been difficult to organize, Kevin having to drive round by Shannon.

His brothers wore black ties, his sisters were in mourning of a kind, not entirely, because that could wait till later. Mena looked pregnant again. Kevin had a bald patch now. Aidan took off the glasses he had worn to drive. Their suitcases weren’t heavy. You could tell there was no intention to stay longer than was necessary.

Looking down into the yard, Paulie knew that an assumption had already been made, as he had known it in the kitchen when he sat there with his mother. He was the bachelor of the family, the employment he had wasn’t much. His mother couldn’t manage on her own.

He had known it in Meagher’s back bar when he told Patsy Finucane he had a funeral to go to. The death had lost him Patsy Finucane: it was her, not his father, he thought about when he heard of it, and in Meagher’s the stout ran away with him and he spoke too soon. ‘Jeez,’ she said, ‘what would I do in a farmhouse!’

Afterwards – when the journey through the hills had become a funeral procession at the edge of the town, when the coffin had been delivered to its night’s resting place, and later when the burial was complete and the family had returned to the farmhouse and had dispersed the next morning - Paulie remained.

He had not intended to. He had hoped to get a lift in one of the two cars, and then to take a bus, and another bus, as he had on his journey over.

‘Where is it they’ll separate?’ his mother asked in the quietness that followed the departure.

He didn’t know. Somewhere that was convenient; in some town they would pull in and have a drink, different now that they weren’t in a house of mourning. They would exchange news it hadn’t seemed right to exchange before. Aidan would talk about Boston, offering his sisters and his brother hospitality there.

‘Warm yourself at the fire, Paulie.’

‘Wait till I see to the heifers first.’

‘His boots are there.’

‘I know.’

His brothers had borrowed the gum boots, too; wherever you went, you needed them. Kevin had fixed a fence, Aidan had got the water going again in the pipe up to the sheep. Between them, they’d taken the slack out of the barbed wire beyond the turf bog.

‘Put on a waterproof, Paulie.’

It wasn’t going to rain, but the waterproof kept the wind out. Whenever he remembered the farmhouse from his childhood it was windy – the fertilizer bags blowing about in the yard, blustery on the track up to the sheep hills, in the big field that had been the family’s mainstay ever since his father had cleared the rocks from it, in the potato field. Wind, more than rain or frost, characterized the place, not that there wasn’t a lot of rain too. But who’d mind the rain? his father used to say.

The heifers didn’t need seeing to, as he had known they wouldn’t. They stood, miserably crouched in against the wall of a fallen barn, mud that the wind had dried hanging from them. His father had taken off the roof when one of the other walls had collapsed, needing the corrugated iron for somewhere else. He’d left the standing wall for the purpose the heifers put it to now.

Paulie, too, stood in the shelter of the wall, the puddles at his feet not yet blown dry, as the mud had on the animals. He remembered the red roof lifted down, piece by piece, Kevin waiting below to receive it, Aidan wrenching out the bolts. He had backed the tractor, easing the trailer close to where they were. ‘What’s he want it for?’ he’d asked Kevin, and Kevin said the corrugated iron would be used for filling the gaps in the hedges.

Slowly, Paulie walked back the way he had come. ‘D’you think of coming back?’ Aidan had said, saying it in the yard when they were alone. Paulie had known it would be said and had guessed it would be Aidan who’d say it, Aidan being the oldest. ‘I’m only mentioning it,’ Aidan had said. ‘I’m only touching on it.’

Blowing at the turf with the wheel-bellows, she watched the glow spread, sparks rising and falling away. It hadn’t been the time to make arrangements or even to talk about them. Nothing could have been more out of place, and she was glad they realized that. Kevin had had a word with Hartigan after the funeral, something temporary fixed up, she could tell from the gestures.

They’d write. Frances had said she would, and Aidan had. Sharon would write for Kevin, as she always did. Mena would. Wherever it was they stopped to say good-bye to one another they’d talk about it and later on they’d write.

‘Sit down, Paulie, sit down,’ she said when her son came in, bringing the cold with him.

She said again that Father Kinally had done it beautifully. She’d said so yesterday to her daughters in the car, she’d said it to Kevin and to Aidan this morning. Paulie would have heard, yet you’d want to repeat it. You felt the better for it.

‘Ah, he did,’ Paulie said. ‘He did of course.’

He’d taken over. She could feel he’d taken over, the way he’d gone out to see were the heifers all right, the way it was he who remembered, last evening and this morning, that there was the bit of milking to do, that he’d done it without a word. She watched him ease off the gum boots and set them down by the door. He hung the waterproof on the door hook that was there for it and came to the fire in his socks, with his shoes in one hand. She turned away so that he wouldn’t notice she’d been reminded of his father coming into the kitchen also.

‘Aren’t the heifers looking good?’ she said.

‘Oh, they are, they are.’

‘He was pleased with them this year.’

‘They’re not bad, all right.’

‘Nothing’s fetching at the minute, all the same.’

He nodded. He naturally would know times were bad, neither sheep nor cattle fetching what they were a year ago, everything gone quiet, the way you’d never have believed it.

‘We’re in for the night so,’ she said.

‘We are.’

She washed the eggs Mena had collected earlier, brushing off the marks on them, then wiped the shells clean before she piled them in the bowl. The eggs would keep them going, with the rashers left over and half a saucepan of stew in the fridge. ‘You’ve enough for an army!’ Kevin had said, looking into the deep-freeze, and she reminded him you had to have enough in case the weather came in bad.

‘What’d we do without it?’ she said now, mentioning the deep-freeze. They’d had half a pig from the Caslins, only a portion of the belly used up so far. ‘And mutton till Doomsday,’ she said.

‘How’re they these days, the Caslins? I didn’t notice Maureen at the funeral.’

‘Maureen married a man in Tralee. She’s there since.’

‘Who’s the man?’

‘He’s in a shoe shop.’

They could have gone to the wedding only it had been a period of the year when you wouldn’t want to spare the time. The Hartigans had gone. They’d have taken her but she’d said no.

‘Hartigan came back drunk, you should have seen the cut of him! And herself with a frost on her that would have quenched the fire!’

‘He’s driving down in the morning. He’ll pick me up.’

Rashers and black pudding and fried bread were ready on the pan. She cracked two eggs into the fat, turned them when they were ready because he liked them turned. When she placed the plate in front of him he took a mouthful of tea before he ate anything. He said:

‘You couldn’t manage. No way.’

‘It wasn’t a time to talk about it, Paulie.’

‘I’ll come back.’

He began to eat, the yolk of the eggs spreading yellow on the plate. He left the black pudding and the crisp fat of the bacon until last. He’d always done that.

‘Hartigan’d still come down. I’m all right on the bit of milking. I’m all right on most things. The Caslins would come up.’

‘You couldn’t live like that.’

‘They’re neighbours, Paulie. They got help from himself if they wanted it. I looked over and saw Kevin having a word with Hartigan in the graveyard. It won’t be something for nothing, not with Hartigan. Kevin’ll tell me later.’

‘You’d be dependent.’

‘You have your own life, Paulie.’

‘You have what there is.’

He ate for several minutes in silence, then he finished the tea that had been poured for him.

‘I’d have to give in notice. I’d have to work the notice out. A month.’

‘Think it over before you’ll do anything, Paulie.’

Paulie harboured no resentment, not being a person who easily did: going back to the farmhouse was not the end of the world. The end of the world had been to hear, in Meagher’s back bar, that life on a farm did not attract Patsy Finucane.

As soon as he’d mentioned marriage that day he knew he shouldn’t have. Patsy Finucane had taken fright like a little young greyhound would. She’d hardly heard him when he said, not knowing what else to say, ‘Ah well, no matter.’ It was a nervousness mixed in with the stout that had caused him to make the suggestion, and as soon as he had there was no regaining her: before she looked away that was there in her soft grey eyes. ‘I won’t go back so,’ he’d said, making matters worse. ‘I won’t go back without you.’

When they sat again in Meagher’s back bar after the funeral Paulie tried to put things right; he tried to begin again, but it wasn’t any good. During the third week of his working out his notice Patsy Finucane began to go out with a clerk from the post office.

In the yard she threw down grains for the hens and remembered doing it for the first time, apprehensive then about what she’d married into. Nor had her apprehension been misplaced: more than she’d imagined, her position in the household was one of obedience and humility, and sometimes what was said, or incidents that occurred, left a sting that in private drew tears from her. Yet time, simply in passing, transformed what seemed to be immutable. Old age enfeebled on the one hand; on the other, motherhood nurtured confidence. In the farmhouse, roles were reversed.

She didn’t want distress like that for any wife Paulie would eventually bring to the kitchen and the house. She would make it easier, taking a back seat from the start and be glad to do so. It was only a pity that Maureen Caslin had married the shoe-shop man, for Maureen Caslin would have suited him well. There were the sisters, of course.

During the weeks that followed Paulie’s departure, the anticipated letters came from Mena and Frances and from her daughter-in-law Sharon on behalf of Kevin, and from Aidan. The accumulated content was simple, the unstated expectation stated at last, four times over in different handwriting. Aidan said he and Paulie had had a talk about it. You are good to think of me, she wrote back, four times also.

Hartigan continued to come down regularly and a couple of times his sister accompanied him, sitting in the kitchen while he saw to any heavy work in the yard. ‘Would Mena have room for you?’ she enquired on one of these occasions, appearing to forget that Paulie was due to return when he’d worked out his notice. Miss Hartigan always brought sultana bread when she came and they had it with butter on it. ‘I only mentioned Mena,’ she said, ‘in case Paulie wouldn’t be keen to come back. I was thinking he maybe wouldn’t.’

‘Why’s that, Miss Hartigan?’

‘It’s bachelors that’s in the hills now. Like himself,’ Miss Hartigan added, jerking her bony head in the direction of the yard, where her brother was up on a ladder, fixing a gutter support.

‘Paulie’s not married either, though.’

‘That’s what I’m saying to you. What I’m saying is would he want to stop that way?’

Miss Hartigan’s features were enriched by a keenness to say more, to inform and explain, to dispel the bewilderment she had caused. She did so after a pause, politely reaching for a slice of sultana bread. It might not have been noticed that these days the bachelors of the hills found it difficult to attract a wife to the modest farms they inherited.

‘Excuse me for mentioning it,’ Miss Hartigan apologized before she left.

It was true, and it had been noticed and often remarked upon. Hartigan himself, twenty years ago, was maybe the first of the hill bachelors: by now you could count them – lone men, some of them kept company by a mother or a sister – on the slopes of Coumpeebra, on Slievenacoush, on Knockrea, on Luirc, on Clydagh.

She didn’t remember putting all that from her mind when Paulie had said he would come back, but perhaps she had. She tried not to think about it, comforting herself that what had been said, and the tone of Miss Hartigan’s voice, had more to do with Miss Hartigan and her brother than with the future in a neighbouring farmhouse. Nor did it necessarily need to be that what had already happened would continue to happen. The Hartigans’ stretch of land was worse by a long way than the land lower down on the hill; no better than the side of Slievenacoush, or Clydagh or Coumpeebra. You did the best you could, you hoped for warm summers. Paulie was a good-looking, decent boy; there was no reason at all why he wouldn’t bring up a family here as his father had.

‘There’s two suitcases left down with the Caslins,’ he said when he walked in one Saturday afternoon. ‘When I get the car started I’ll go down for them.’

They didn’t embrace; there’d never been much of that in the family. He sat down and she made tea and put the pan on. He told her about the journey, how a woman had been singing on the first of the two buses, how he’d fallen asleep on the second. He was serious the way he told things, his expression intent, sometimes not smiling much. He’d always been like that.

‘Hartigan started the car a while back,’ she said, ‘to make sure it was in form.’

‘And it was? All right?’

‘Oh, it was, it was.’

‘I’ll take a look at it later.’

He settled in easily, and she realized as he did so that she had never known him well. He had been lost to her in the family, his shadowy place in it influenced by his father’s lack of interest in him. She had never protested about that, only occasionally whispering a surreptitious word or two of comfort. It was fitting in a way that a twist of fate had made him his father’s inheritor.

As if he had never been away, he went about his daily tasks knowledge-ably and efficiently. He had forgotten nothing – about the winter feed for the heifers, about the work around the yard or where the fences might give way on the hills or how often to go up there after the sheep, about keeping the tractor right. It seemed, which she had not suspected before, that while his presence was so often overlooked he had watched his father at work more conscientiously than his brothers had. ‘He’d be proud of you these days,’ she said once, but Paulie did not acknowledge that and she resisted making the remark again. The big field, which had been his father’s pride, became his. There was another strip to the south of it that could be cleared and reclaimed, he said, and he took her out to show her where he would run the new wall. They stood in the sunshine on a warm June morning while he pointed and talked about it, the two sheepdogs obedient by him. He was as good with them as his father ever had been.

He drove her, as his father had, every three weeks down to Drunbeg, since she had never learned to drive herself. His father used to wait in the car park of Conlon’s Supermarket while she shopped, but Paulie always went in with her. He pushed the trolley and sometimes she gave him a list and he added items from the shelves. ‘Would we go and see that?’ he suggested one time when they were passing the Two-Screen Rialto, which used to be just the Picture House before it was given a face-lift. She wouldn’t be bothered, she said. She’d never been inside the cinema, either in the old days or since it had become a two-screen; the television was enough for her. ‘Wouldn’t you take one of the Caslin girls?’ she said.

He took the older of them, Aileen, and often after that he drove down in the evenings to sit with her in the Master McGrath. The relationship came to an end when Aileen announced that her sister in Tralee had heard of a vacancy in a newsagent and confectioner’s, that she’d been to Tralee herself to be looked over and in fact had been offered the position.

‘And did you know she had intentions that way?’ Paulie’s mother asked him when she heard, and he said he had, in a way. He didn’t seem put about, although she had assumed herself that by the look of things Aileen Caslin – stolid and on the slow side – would be the wife who’d come to the farmhouse, since her sister Maureen was no longer available. Paulie didn’t talk about it, but quite soon after Aileen’s departure he began to take an interest in a girl at one of the pay-outs in Conlon’s.

‘Wouldn’t you bring Maeve out one Sunday?’ his mother suggested when the friendship had advanced, when there’d been visits to the two-screen and evenings spent together drinking, as there’d been with Aileen Caslin. Maeve was a fair bit livelier than Aileen; he could do worse.

But Maeve never came to the farmhouse. In Conlon’s Paulie took to steering the trolley to one of the other pay-outs even when the queue at hers was shorter. His mother didn’t ask why. He had his own life, she kept reminding herself; he had his privacy, and why shouldn’t he? ‘Isn’t he the good boy to you?’ Father Kinally remarked one Sunday after Mass when Paulie was turning the car. ‘Isn’t it grand the way it’s turned out for you?’

She knew it was and gratefully gave thanks for it. Being more energetic than his father had been at the end, Paulie worked a longer day, far into the evening when it was light enough.

‘I don’t know did I ever speak a word to her,’ she said when he began to go out with the remaining Caslin daughter. Sensible, she looked.

‘Ah, sure, anything,’ the youngest of the three Caslin girls always said when Paulie told her what films were on and asked which she’d like to see. When the lights went down he waited a bit before he put an arm around her, as he always had with her sisters and with Maeve. He hadn’t been able to wait with Patsy Finucane.

The sensible look that Paulie’s mother had noted in Annie Caslin was expressed in a matter-of-fact manner. Sentiment played little part in her stalwart, steady nature. She was the tallest and in a general way the biggest of the three Caslin girls, with black hair that she curled and distinctive features that challenged one another for dominance – the slightly large nose, the wide mouth, the unblinking gaze. Paulie took her out half a dozen times before she confessed that what she wanted to do was to live in a town. She’d had the roadside Master McGrath, she said; she’d had serving petrol at the pumps. ‘God, I don’t know how you’d stand it up in the bogs,’ she said before Paulie had a chance to ask her if she’d be interested in coming up to the farmhouse. Even Drunbeg would do her, she said, and got work six months later in the fertilizer factory.

Paulie asked other girls to go out with him, but by then it had become known that what he was after was marriage. One after another, they made excuses, a fact that Hartigan was aware of when he pulled up the Toyota one morning beside a gateway where Paulie was driving in posts. He didn’t say anything, but often Hartigan didn’t.

‘Will it rain, Mr Hartigan?’ Paulie asked him.

‘The first time I saw your mammy,’ Hartigan said, rejecting a discussion about the weather, ‘she was stretching out sheets on the bushes. Six years of age I was, out after a hare.’

‘A while ago, all right.’

‘Amn’t I saying it to you?’

Not understanding the conversation, Paulie vaguely shook his head. He struck the post he was easing into the ground another blow. Hartigan said:

‘I’d take the big field off you.’

‘Ah no, no.’

That was why he had stopped. It might even have been that he’d driven down specially when he heard the thud of the sledgehammer on the posts, saying to himself that it was a good time for a conversation.

‘I wouldn’t want to sell the field, Mr Hartigan.’

‘But wouldn’t you do well all the same if you did? Is it a life at all for a young fellow?’

Paulie didn’t say anything. He felt the post to see if it was steady yet. He struck it again, three times before he was satisfied.

‘You need a bit of company, boy,’ Hartigan said before he backed into the gateway and drove up the hill again.

What she had succeeded in keeping at bay since Miss Hartigan had spoken of it was no longer possible to evade. When Paulie told her about Patsy Finucane she was pleased that he did, glad that he didn’t keep it to himself. She knew about everything else: it was all of a piece that Hartigan was trying to get the land cheap by taking advantage of the same circumstances that had left him a bachelor himself. Who could blame him? she said to herself, but even so she wondered if Paulie – so agreeable and good-hearted – would become like that in his time; if he’d become hard, as his father had been, and as grasping as Hartigan.

‘I’ll go to Mena,’ she said. ‘There’s room there.’

‘Ah, there isn’t.’

‘They’d fit me in.’

‘It’s here there’s room.’

‘You want to be married, Paulie. Any man does.’

‘He’d take a day shifting a boulder with the tractor. He’d put a ditch through the marsh to gain another half yard. He never minded how long a thing took.’

‘It’s now we’re talking about, Paulie.’

‘There’d be sheep in this house within a twelvemonth if Hartigan had it, the doors taken off and made use of, and the next thing is the wind’d be shifting the slates. There’d be grazing taken out of the big field until there wasn’t a blade of grass left standing. The marsh’d come in again. No one’d lift a finger.’

‘You didn’t know what you were coming back to.’

‘Ah, I did. I did.’

Obligingly, he lied. You’d say to yourself he was easygoing. When he’d told her about the Finucane girl he’d said it was the way things were. No matter, he’d said. Often you’d forget he wasn’t easygoing at all; often she did.

‘There’s no need, Paulie.’

‘There is.’

He said it quietly, the two words hanging there after he had spoken, and she realized that although it was her widowhood that had brought him back it wasn’t her widowhood that made him now insist he must remain. She could argue for ever and he would not go now.

‘You’re good, Paulie,’ she said, since there was nothing else left to say. He shook his head, his dark hair flopping from side to side. ‘Arrah, no.’

‘You are. You are, Paulie.’

When her own death came, her other children would return, again all at the same time. The coffin would be carried down the steep stairs, out into the van in the yard, and the funeral would go through the streets of Drunbeg, and the next day there’d be the Mass. They’d go away then, leaving Paulie in the farmhouse.

‘Wait till I show you,’ he said, and he took her out to where he was draining another half yard. He showed her how he was doing it. He showed her the temporary wall he had put up, sheets of red corrugated that had come from the old shed years ago.

‘That’s great,’ she said. ‘Great, Paulie.’

A mist was coming in off the hills, soft and gentle, the clouds darkening above it. The high edge of Slievenacoush was lost. Somewhere over the boglands a curlew cried.

‘Go in out of the drizzle,’ he said, when they had stood there for a few minutes.

‘Don’t stay out long yourself, Paulie.’

Guilt was misplaced, goodness hardly came into it. Her widowing and the mood of a capricious time were not of consequence, no more than a flicker in a scheme of things that had always been there. Enduring, unchanging, the hills had waited for him, claiming one of their own.