Wild Decembers (18 page)

Now, Mr. Brennan has no intention whatever of tolerating an invasion of his rights in this fashion.

If your client enters into this part of my client’s bog again, my client will at once issue proceedings in the Circuit Court for damages and an injunction.

Yours faithfully,

Bugler thought first to tear it up, then decided to make a scrapbook for Rosemary to let her see why he had to keep postponing to save her from this mess.

Dear Sir:

Our client Mr. Bugler insists that he is entitled to cut turf on Yellow Dick’s Bog, and he objects strongly to your client trying to cut off his mode of ingress and egress thereto. He cannot understand why your client should place barbed wire across the gate by which Mr. Bugler was endeavouring to enter.

We have bespoken Mr. Bugler’s land registry map to see if it can be of assistance in solving this difficulty. In the meantime, you might kindly let us know if your client denies that Mr. Bugler and his predecessors have been cutting turf on this bog for many years as claimed.

Yours faithfully,

Dear Sir:

We are not able to go ahead with our enquiries, and you will see from the enclosed file the difficulties with which we have had to contend. Mrs. Cleary of Messrs. Dowling & Co., architects, has visited the bog on a number of occasions but has met with great difficulty in drawing a map and instructing us as to whether or not Mr. Bugler is cutting turf in the area occupied by your client.

Your client has on occasion used improper if not to say foul language and once tried to frighten Mrs. Cleary, This is totally inappropriate and unacceptable. You must instruct your client to give Mrs. Cleary proper access with regard to the boundary under dispute, as otherwise your client runs the risk of losing his tenancy altogether if a map cannot be prepared and presented to both parties.

Yours faithfully,

Dear Sir:

I acknowledge receipt of your letter dated 10th instant, the contents of which I have discussed with my client. My client has confirmed that he did attend his bog on the 6th instant accompanied by Guard Cosgrave, as they wished to request Mr. Bugler once again to leave his property, on which he was cutting turf and furthermore interfering with the drain which our client created at great expense. When Mr. Brennan, accompanied by his sister and Guard Cosgrave, arrived at the area in dispute, they were very much amazed to discover that Mr. Bugler and two persons unknown to them were walking on Mr. Brennan’s property at a place not referred to in the proceedings. Mr. Brennan, in the presence of his sister and Guard Cosgrave, asked them to remove themselves from his property. You are wrongly instructed that the people concerned, i.e., Mr. Bugler and helpmates, proceeded onto the public road, because in fact they were in clear view the entire time it took them to cross from those lands to the dwelling house of Mr. Bugler. After Mr. Bugler had gone, Mr. Brennan and his sister discussed the situation with Guard Cosgrave, who then left the scene, as he said the Bugler crowd would probably not return to the bog. However, shortly after this time, Mr. Brennan and his sister saw Mr. Bugler returning to their property accompanied by one of the strangers, and Mr. Brennan requested Mr. Bugler not to go on his property. For the first time during the evening the person accompanying Mr. Bugler, now known to be Mrs. Cleary, the architect, approached Mr. Brennan to tell him he was not the registered owner of the lands in question, and when requested by Mr. Brennan to identify herself and the purpose for which she was standing on these lands Mrs. Cleary said nothing and did not engage in any further conversation. Mr. Brennan denies completely that he shouted at her or behaved in a most unreasonable manner. In fact, to be quite clear about the matter, it was Michael Bugler who removed his coat and used words to the effect that he would fight Mr. Brennan, something which caused such distress to Mr. Brennan’s sister that he was obliged to take her home. Later in the day he had again gone for Guard Cosgrave, who returned to the scene and who spoke to Mr. Bugler, who in due course left the bog with Mrs. Cleary and went home.

Yours faithfully

V
IOLET HILL
, fluid, flowing, a brindled phantom upon the mountain in the early morning, a vision that streaked back and forth like a painted picture and then again in the dusk, becoming one with the dusk, except for her eyes, which glowed wildly. “You flyer,” Joseph would say each time she broke out of her kennel. What he did not know was that she was digging the soft clay under the surround of the wire meshing. It was in wet and dusk that she ran to her delirious destination.

Bugler had been going slow on account of the poor light, and when he heard the cries and turned off the ignition, he knew that it was a wounded animal and hoped that it would not be Violet Hill. He found her at the side of the road, and kneeling, he picked her up and listened to her small strangled cries. Then he carried her, willing her not to be dead, carried her into their yard and down the three steep steps to the back door, which he knocked on with his foot, holding her with both hands lest she unmesh. Her hind leg was broken and bent backwards, and the long sleek trunk of her body was damp with blood, but she was still alive. The blood dripped harmlessly onto the outdoor mat as he waited for the door to be answered. Opening it, he saw Breege first with a smile and then drawing back shocked, unable to look at the crumpled heap in his arms.

“Oh no,” she said.

“I found her out on the road.”

“Oh my
God,
” she said in a whisper, and looked in towards the kitchen.

“Where’s Joseph?”

“He’s sick . . . He’s in bed.”

“Can I go up to him?”

“I’ll tell him . . . It’s better that I tell him.”

“She’s still breathing,” he said, and together they listened for the little splutters of breath, faint as a faltering watch. Between them they held her then as if somehow holding her they would keep her alive but letting her go would bode the end of everything.

“Who is it?” Joseph called twice.

“You’d better go,” Breege said, and made a basket out of her apron as Bugler laid Violet Hill into it.

“I’m sorry . . . I’m very sorry,” he said.

“I know that,” she said, and pushed him back out.

“It was Bugler,” Joseph said, seething. He was at the top of the stairs with a thin patchwork quilt around him.

“It was,” she said, and turning to face him, she held up the apron. She did not know what he would do, what he would say. He did not roar, he did not speak, he closed his eyes for several seconds, then came down the stairs, took Violet Hill in his arms, and with his hand he gripped the stiffening face and held it and saw. He began then to help her to die, to allow her to die, telling her it was not dying at all, it was running faster and faster into the free and untrammelled emptiness, under the dew and the rain and the stars where none could wound or kill her because she had gone from flesh to spirit.

“I’ll ring the vet,” Breege said.

“No need,” he said, and went back to cradling her, moving back and forth, his voice getting lower now as the life expired in her, and then he bent down and said some farewell thing.

They laid her on the towel on the table, and he bathed her and fixed her like the pieces of a jigsaw so that she was the perfect but unbreathing simulation of what she had been, forever consigned to memory, intact, the fawn delicacy that he had known, that the countryside had known, and with his thumb he closed the almond eyes that were trusting even in death.

“Get roe her rug,” he said.

“It’s too dark to bury her now.”

“She likes dark . . . She likes wild spaces . . . Don’t you?” he said, gathering the four corners of the towel to make a litter before laying her into her tartan rug.

“Bugler didn’t do it . . . It was someone else,” she said gently.

“Someone else! No other car went up the road. I would have heard it.”

“You want it to be Bugler,” she cried mutely to herself, and then put a dab of holy water on the white oblong of Violet Hill’s forehead. He did not ask her to go with him, arid he did not tell her where he intended the burying to be.

J
OSEPH WAS IN
the shed when he saw the patrol car pull into the yard. He recognised it by the extra tall aerial. It was the fat guard, Garvey, whom he knew quite well.

“Hello, Joe . . . How’s the form?” The voice apologising for itself as he got out and crossed the yard. A curtain of rain, a shibboleth hung over everything.

“Down for the day,” Garvey said.

“Down for the year.”

“My wife can’t dry the baby’s nappies, but it’s worse for you farmers.”

“What brings you to my mountain?”

“You won’t believe this,” Garvey says, and trying to delay his mission, he launches into a story about going to the High Court in Dublin only three days before, and guess what, there were crocuses on the dual carriageway.

“You’ve come about something other than crocuses.”

“I have and I wish I hadn’t, because I know you won’t like it any more than I do.”

“Then don’t bother.”

“I have to . . . I have to take your shotgun off you.”

“You can’t . . . It’s like my walking stick.”

“Come on now, it’s a bit more serious than that.”

“Who reported me?”

“No one, Joe . . . No one.”

“Mick Bugler did.”

“He did not, though he had plenty of reason to. You lay in wait for him in the bog . . . You tried to ambush him. There’s nothing to be gained from that sort of behaviour.”

“I went in to shoot snipe . . . I’ve done it all my life, so why can’t I do it now?”

“We don’t want you shooting people.”

“Look, it’s myself I do harm to and not that blackguard.”

“All the more reason then why I should take the gun off you.”

“He wants to retire me . . . Every day he’s up to some other stunt. He’s not satisfied just to cut turf. He covets Yellow Dick’s Bog.”

“Oh, a crackpot . . . The best thing is to ignore him.”

“I can’t and I won’t.”

“Look, Joe, we’ll only keep the damn thing for a couple of months until the case is settled and the heat dies down. . .”

“The heat won’t die down.”

“Joe, for Christ’s sake, just give me the gun. Stop making it hard for me.”

“I need it . . . Soon it will be lambing time. There will be lambs.”

“You have no sheep.”

“Sheep stray over onto the mountain from Galway.”

“I was sent up here to do a job, so let me do it.”

“You’re wasting your time, Garvey.”

“If you don’t give it, I’ll get it from your sister. Out of the wardrobe where it’s kept.”

“So she’s the informer.”

“She isn’t.”

“How would you know where it’s kept unless you were told. Holy Jesus, she actually went to the barracks and informed on me.”

“It’s for your own good.”

“She places Mick Bugler above her own brother.”

“If I go back without it, the superintendent will come up.”

“Go in and get it from her . . . Tell her that when Oedipus blinded himself with the hooks of his mother’s corset, her ladies in waiting split themselves laughing.”

“For Christ’s sake . . . Why would I tell her a cracked thing like that?”

“In case it hurts. In case it hurts, my good man.”

It was a divided house then. He took his meals out in the shed. He wrote notes to communicate the duties that were ascribed to her and those ascribed to himself. She wrote on the back of a brown envelope that had come from O’Dea; she said, “I am not on Bugler’s side . . . Please believe that.” He inked it out.

The morning the decisive letter came he sat at the kitchen table and read it and broke down. She read it over his shoulder.