Wild Decembers (24 page)

It was Boscoe who found him squatting in the heather, sunk into it, singing a song that was both sad and warlike.

“Hello, Joe.”

“What do you want?” The voice hoarse and strangled from all the use he had given it.

“Come on home . . . It’s no night to be out.”

“I’m staying put.”

“You are not.”

They fought then, up there in the grey solitude, like two figures in a windy tableau, cursing, shouting expletives at one another that could not be heard because of a sudden blinding rain; they stumbled and dragged one another down and got up again, and in the end they tired of it and linked one another for balance and came perilously down, as lavish now in their praise and solidarity with one another as earlier they had been in their denunciations.

“He’ll never own the mountain, ’cos,” Boscoe vowed.

“’Cos?” Joseph challenged.

“’Cos, he’s not able to talk to it.”

“Correct . . . And what’s more, it will never talk to him.”

When they arrived at the crater they stood and stared into it.

“How about deploying our personal artillery?” Boscoe said, and with telling vehemence their volleys drenched the slag stones and the debris.

Full of verve now, they asked and answered their own questions. Would they be beaten, would they be dispossessed; nay, nay, and never. The long campaign was on.

After that Joseph became a recluse. He was to be found in the parlour each night poring over law books that he had spread out on the table, a light bulb suspended above his head, the very first grey hairs above his ears piteously silver. He read and reread with immense concentration and underlined passages that applied, finding in them crumbs of hope, and he filled his notebook with citations of cases similar to theirs, of which there were thousands. She glanced at one of the books, at a section concerning quarrels between neighbours, but it applied only to city people, to arguments about ball games or garden refuse. He ate his supper alone.

“You get no fresh air,” she would say, standing there, waiting for him to talk, to at least tell her what he intended to do next.

With a cunning now akin to craziness, he never mentioned Bugler, and he stopped his surveillance of her, urging her to go down to the town and enjoy herself. He knew that he could trust her, knew that she would not deceive him. He told her of the fable from Aesop about the dog who grasped the shadow and lost the meat. That dog was meant to be Bugler.

On the way out from Mass, when asked how he was, he replied in the same quiet but convinced tone: “Oh, the finest . . . The finest.”

T
HE OLD MAN
has not had a visitor in years. The cottage shows all the signs of neglect, the path up to it choked with brambles. He jumps up as he hears the latch lift and his name shouted a few times, a voice saying, “Dan . . . Danno.”

“Almighty God but it’s you . . . My one and only friend,” he says to Joseph as he grips the hands, mashes them, then repeats Joseph’s name and his own shock at having a visitor. A nurse comes once a month, but never a visitor. Many’s the time he has wished for this, and now at last it has come true. He’s an old man, not wanted; his eyes bad, four operations in all, two for cataract and two for glaucoma, and another soon for the cornea if the drops don’t work. Joseph is a blur to him, but the voice is familiar, the voice of old when he took him up the mountain as a youngster to teach him target shooting. He recalls the man’s cap which Joseph wore, the makeshift rifle range that they set up, and his excitement when he fired his first shot and then the next and the next, and after an age shooting the bull. Years have passed, but the memory is bright, the broken post with the card taped to it, the scattering of the pellets a furore in the emptiness.

“I taught you first the rifle, then the shotgun.”

“You did.”

“You were mad for the shotgun because it made a bigger bang, and I used to say to you, ‘Take care, we think we’re alone up here, but there’s always eyes watching us, there’s spies everywhere.’”

“I hope I’m not bothering you,” Joseph says.

“Bother! You bring sunshine into my life . . . You’re the only visitor I would have wished for, and I’ll tell you something strange, I’ve dreamed lately of the two of us on that mountain and your wearing the man’s cap and your handing me the bullets to load the magazine . . . Yes, that tweed cap you wore, we left it behind . . . And now you’re here, and if it isn’t destiny I don’t know what name to call it by.”

“I should have come sooner. . .”

“Do you ever think of those times and the fun we had?”

“Often.”

“Old Danno trying to get you to zero in on the bull’s-eye, and you a kid . . . At first you pulled the trigger too fast. I had to learn you to squeeze it, just squeeze it, and eventually you did . . . Cripes, the day you got the cluster was the breakthrough . . . So you haven’t forgotten.”

Even before he asks, Joseph knows that he will not be refused. He knows the wardrobe upstairs where, they are kept, wrapped in rags and old newspapers; he can see them as he saw them as a youngster: the shotgun, the rifle, the old leather holster, and a revolver case that belonged to an ancestor, the hoard of bullets and cartridges, and as he asks to be let see them again, the old man’s clouded eyes light up as if the sun is beaming in or as if they are back on the mountain.

They are upstairs now, the wardrobe door creaking over and back, a smell of damp and must, old cartridges and a belt scummed with dust, all thrown onto the bed, as Danno laughs and cries by turn. He recalls the mountain carpeted with heather, the curlews, and the bullets that were able to put life and spark into an empty and desolate space. Then he remembers that strange dog that appeared one day out of nowhere and sprung on them and had to be hit with the butt of the rifle before it went away.

“I often think of it . . . And I’ll tell you something, I don’t think it was a dog at all.”

“What was it?”

“’Twas the supernatural . . . Some kind of a warning sign. After that I wasn’t welcome in your house anymore. They thought I was bad news.”

“Ah, they did not.”

“They did so . . . They were afraid for you,” he says lament-ingly, and then, “You never married.”

“No. . . . Someone has to stay sensible.”

Danno laughs again and says what lovely girls there used to be all around, lovely girls with thick crops of hair.

“And little Breege, how is she?” he asked.

“She’s a big Breege now. I’ll bring you over one day.”

“Wait till I have the operation . . . Till we see how I get on. I’d want good eyes to look on the old scenes.”

Joseph braces himself to ask it. He takes the old man’s hand, and it is like holding a reed, its life gone.

“I was wondering,” he begins› but Danno guesses it and, with rapture in his voice says that there was no need to ask, that sure it is only an honour to give a good friend a weapon.

“Lock that door,” he says, and then reaches into the back of the wardrobe and takes out the shotgun and a box of ammunition.

“It’s yours,” he says, taking a bandage off the long muzzle.

“It’s only for a while.”

“It’s forever . . . You’ll bring this home and hide it, and when Danno is dust you’ll remember him.”

“Don’t talk like that.”

“I’ll be well butchered when they get me into hospital,” he says, and he is crying now, but joyful too at being able to pass on the only valuables he has ever had, his little armoury, and pass them to one who will revere them and not throw them in a ditch or hand them over to the authorities. To make things less melancholy Joseph picks up the wooden whistle made to lure foxes to their end. As he whistles into it, the squealing cry of a wounded rabbit is mimicked back, and they nod to one another, recalling how once or twice it worked and Mr. Reynard himself from upwind walked into the firing line. The whistle too is to be taken as a memento.

“Thanks a million,” Joseph says.

“Do your stuff . . . Do your stuff,” Danno says, and they pile them into a bolster case.

Downstairs they each drink a mug of tea and eat damp biscuits, talking of the escapades they had, the fires they made on the mountain, the eggs boiled in the same water as they used for tea, then a smoke, night coming on, the stars like pieces of diamond on the cloth of the heavens.

“Did you know that the Aborigines think that stars are holes in the sky?” he said then.

“They could be right,” Danno says, and talks of the evils of modern mankind with no longer any faith in God or the stars or Mother Nature.

“You could stay a few days with us,” Joseph says, rising to go.

“I have a friend in you . . . I always had,” Danno says. He is reluctant to let his visitor leave, repeats the goodbyes, utterly sorrowful, talks of the great things, the wild things, and the uncanny things that transpired on the mountain, like the crying they once heard and a gypsy woman saying afterwards that that crying could be traced to unborn children, the unborn children of sweethearts that were never allowed to marry. Something about it moves Joseph, moves him to thinking that he should kneel down and confess and say why he has wanted the gun at all. But then something stops him.

“You won’t get me into trouble?” the old man says, half throttled.

O
CTOBER, THE WINDS
. Like the song about Dromore he once gave her. The winds ripping all before them. The small trees, the alders, stooped from it, the tall ones skeletons, their leaves gone. Leaves in the air tumbling about, thick piles of them, gold and apricot on the sides of the road where the winds have whooshed them together, winds so very determined, ripping and tattering. A few roses clung to a bow of a briar and she was glad of it.

In bed at night she listened to the wind, thinking, was he thinking of her up there. She had sighted him only once and he seemed not to see her. It was in the chapel and he was wearing a green tweed coat that she had never seen before.

She wrote their two names with a bit of white flour on the top of the stove—Breege and Bugler, Bugler and Breege. She wiped it with her sleeve as she heard Joseph coming down the stairs.

Self knows before all else and self is useless to prevent it. Hopes starting up and dying down and starting up again, like different lenses, rose-tinted lenses slipped in between her dark thinking and her fancies. Then it was not fancy. Very early one morning, coming in from the yard with four eggs—one too many—in the palm of her hand, she dropped them, and bending to wipe them up she felt sick and went to the outside tap, retching.

The following Friday down in the town she made a mistake, quite a big mistake. The butcher’s had run out of sausages and Niall, the young assistant, told her that there were a few packets left in the freezer at Mac’s but to be fast about it. She walked her bicycle up the towpath, the ten-pound note in her hand.

In the shop waiting to pay for them she had one of those sudden longings, and already she pictured the sausages cooked, sizzling, ready to eat. Then her turn came to pay and the note was not in her hand. Where had it gone? She couldn’t remember who she met in the short journey up the street. Soon she was convinced that she must have given it to Mrs. Mac, unknownst to herself. They argued, with Mrs. Mac opening the till to prove it was not there and lifting out a little wad of notes with a paper clip around them.

“One of those must be mine,” she said.

“It is not . . . I clipped those notes myself a short while ago.”

Voices rising, tempers rising, other customers turning aside in dismay. She tried then to give back the sausages, but Mrs. Mac would not hear of it, she plonked them back in her hand and said, “Take them and take your business elsewhere.”

Out on the street, she wheeled the bicycle down the towpath, all the while hoping that she would find it, knowing that she would not, and thinking, I have made an enemy of a woman whom I have known for many years.

Early the following morning, she bicycled to the Glebe, where the Dutch woman lived. She had heard of her, how she cured people with different ailments, using herbs. She waited in the yard for the first stir of life, for a blind to be raised. In the shed across the way a huge hairy dog, the size of a calf, looked out at her sullenly but could not muster the energy to bark. In the greenhouse nearby the few remaining panes of glass held the tracings of a white frost as beautiful and as intricate as the lace of a mantilla.