Wild Decembers (9 page)

“There’s an outside tap,” she said as he went towards the door, and as an afterthought she threw him a bit of torn towel.

After he’d washed, he looked up at the sky and tried to figure out what time it might be in western Australia.

“Well,” he said, coming back in, his shirt sticking to his wet back.

“Well,” she said in an unceasing blink.

“We’d better settle up,” he said.

“Settle what! Love,” she said, her voice oversmarmy.

“For the hay.”

“Ah, go on with you.”

“I had to buy that hay myself . . . I had none of my own. I paid dear for it.”

“You’ll have hay this year. Plenty of it. The fine fields you’ve re-claimed . . . Or stolen.”

“A deal is a deal,” he said, angry.

“After what we’ve done for you . . . Buttering your bread on both sides . . . We’re not whores, mister. We’re ladies.”

“Ladies pay their way.”

“We can give you an IOU if you want to frame it. . .” and she turned and lifted her rear end to him, muttering, “
Pog mo hón.
”

“Is that Dutch?”

“It’s the local Dutch . . . Kiss my arse.”

“Where’s your purse, missus?”

At that she began to shout, and Reena wakens, her sleepy green eyes like mashed gooseberries as she is told to sit up and witness Mr. Mick Bugler trying to ravish her sister.

“Rape . . . Rape.” She keeps repeating it as he opens the door and goes out.

Standing in the hayshed he whistles to control his temper. The bales were already cut and forked in amongst their existing little pile of hay. She had done it while he slept and had not even bothered to sweep away the scraps of coloured binding twine.

“Bitch . . . Bitches,” he shouts out, going back to find the door being closed in his face.

“Give me my trousers.” He hammers on the door, only to find that they have put music on to drown out his voice.

As he drove away, Rita stood in the yard, barefooted, a grey blanket over her, like some venging effigy carved out of a living clay.

“You’ll be back . . . You’ll be back,” she kept shouting.

The morning had a jubilance, the dew melting and lifting off the hedges like a torn gauze, small birds no bigger than thimbles daft and doughty, chirping their first uneven notes, and a fruit tree in flower, the soft pink tassels tapering back and forth, forth and back, and not a stitch on his lower quarters. He drove fast to avoid the Noonan twins, who would be going to prepare the altar for first Mass, and he was out of the town and up the mountain road congratulating himself when lo, he is ambushed by the Crock, rushing forward with a leaflet in his hand.

“I cut this out for you. It’s on how to make silage.”

“Creep . . . Creep.”

Laying the newspaper cutting on his lap, the Crock commiserated: “And the eyes of them were both opened and they knew they were naked and they sewed fig leaves to make themselves aprons.”

His cackling laugh reached a bed of hot young nettles and an oak tree, where a colony of brown birds had assembled, some grooming themselves, others piping their lusts out joyously.

T
HE ANIMALS SLIPPED
and slithered over the wet cobbles in the makeshift pen where Boscoe, the part-time helper, and Joseph had driven them. As each one was pushed forward for its injection, Joseph caught the face and wedged it between the rungs of the gate, then held it down for the vet to inject twice. Sinead, the assistant, wrote down the particulars of each animal, the tag number, the age, the breed, the sex, and the measurement of the injection. Some jumped at the prod, others took it differently, whisking their tails violently on their clotted rumps, and some relieved themselves repeatedly. Goldie tried in vain to climb over the pen, which had been constructed from old bits of wooden creel and cart ends.

“That’s a lovely dog,” the vet said.

“She’s a no-good dog,” Joseph said, and swiped at her.

As the Crock came up the road, his singing preceding him, Sinead said he had some bit of news to report. They had met him down in the village when they stopped to get petrol.

“He has something juicy.”

“What?”

“He’ll tell you.”

“The Shepherd spent the night with the sisters.” The Crock shouted it as he came around the corner of the entrance wall.

“How do you know?”

“I saw him . . . He rode up home after six . . . and the gas thing . . . he was in his birthday suit.”

“Holy smoke!”

“The sisters kept his trousers as proof.”

“They’re demons,” the vet said, and reminded Sinead of the night he was called for a sick yearling and the way they didn’t want to let him go.

“I’m disappointed in him,” Joseph said, looking from Breege to them and back to Breege again.

“I’m not . . . He’d go with anything in a skirt,” Sinead said.

“Ah yes . . . But he’s engaged to be married,” Joseph said.

“Go on.”

“To who?”

“A lady in Australia . . . a Rosemary.”

“And you never let on,” the Crock said, irked.

“He asked me not to . . . He asked me to keep it to myself.”

Breege hears it and gives a little involuntary jump like some of the animals after the prod. She went quite peculiar. She felt empty. What is empty. What is full. Full is when she couldn’t wait for night, when she lay down, piecing together moments, seconds, his wave from the tractor, the “Howya, Breege” and the can of mushrooms that he left on the step, small mushrooms, the pink insides, so evenly, so daintily, serrated as if a razor had slit each one, and that other time down at the pier when a lady politician in a maroon suit unveiled a plaque for the victims of the famine and Bugler had turned to her and said, “You’re better looking than she is.” Things. Things she had made too much of and would have to let go.

“We’ll see how they take,” the vet said, peeling off his plastic gloves, which Sinead refolded for him.

“We don’t want any sick ones. We don’t want any lumps . . . It would break me,” Joseph said.

“Sure you have piles of money,” the vet said, and jumped the wall, and then hoisted Sinead over to cries and giggles as to what would his wife say.

“What’s wrong with you?” Joseph said scoldingly to Breege. “You’re miles away, you always give these people coffee and cake.”

“We’ll have it when we come back,” Sinead said.

“You always give them coffee and cake,” Joseph repeated, even more stern.

“Ah now . . . She’s probably thinking what prezzie to give Bugler . . . whether it should be an eiderdown or bed linen. Aren’t you, ducks?” from the Crock.

The day would have to be got through. Then the night. Emptying. Emptiness.

B
Y NOT ASKING HIM IN
, Lady Harkness showed her hand. Each year Joseph had sat in her little study with its red lacquered walls, two heaters, a rug over her knees, the opened ledger, and the pen and ink ready to mark the date of the renewal. She would even pour a glass of sherry. For well on ten years he had rented the grazing of her field down by the lake, he had kept half of his herd there. It was a good field, better than mountain grass, sweeter. He used to love going down there, he used to joke to Breege about having two kingdoms, one on the mountain and one in the valley. Sometimes of a summer’s evening he would sit and look out at the water, dotted with islands, reflecting and thinking that God had set him down in one of the loveliest places on earth. No more. She broke it to him snappily, said that sadly she had had a better offer for the field and had gone ahead with it.

“I’ll top it,” he said.

“I gave the other party my word.”

“May I ask who the other party might be?”

“Mr. Bugler,” she said, irked at being questioned so.

“You could at least have discussed it with me.”

“This Bugler chap was so insistent, called, telephoned, so friendly.”

“But you and I are friends for a long time . . . Breege comes to help you out.”

“I know. I know . . . I’m just a silly old woman. All I could think of was—the roof’s rotted, the greenhouse has fallen down, the tennis court is all nettles.”

“You could still cancel it.”

“Oh no . . . It wouldn’t look good,” she said, and she rose then and with a sharpness showed him out.

He was on the step when she mentioned that she would like his herd removed in the next seventy-two hours, as Mr. Bugler was anxious to take possession.

He stood in the dark grounds, made gloomier by the encircling maze of rhododendron bushes, feeling not yet the hot anger that he would feel, just a kind of wretchedness, like a child being shut out, and all of it done so skilfully, with such aplomb. He would lose on those cattle on which he had hoped to make a pile.

He passed Nelly’s Bar vowing not to go in, because if he went in he would blabber. At the end of the street he met the Crock coming up with two dead hares which he was hoping to flog to the Dutch couple who ran the hotel. Soon they were in the bar, him telling it, the Crock goading him on, interjections from one or another about Lady Harkness with jewellery hanging off her, man-mad, always was. There were those who had seen Bugler go there more than once, and always at night.

“He’s a thief . . . That’s what he is,” Joseph said.

“What will you do, Joe?”

“I’ll have to sell them.”

“You’ll be giving them away at this time of year.”

“I know. But I can’t get grass. There is no grass to let and there is no hay.”

“And you and he, weren’t ye friends?”

“Friends! He could park the tractor whenever he wanted. He could take timber for his fire. My sister leaving eggs and cakes for him. . .”

“Ah, she’s in with him . . . That’s why he gave her the ride.”

“What ride?.”

“She went on the tractor with him. Off up the mountain.”

He was still hearing them as he stood at the counter, on which two complimentary drinks awaited him; listening, feeling with a shocking calm the turbulence which had started up in him, digesting the enormity of it, her silence more telling, more significant than the venom with which they were trying to unsettle him.

He tasted one of the drinks, passed the second one back, and after a couple of mouthfuls he said, in an anxious voice, “I’ll be off.”

They watched him go.

“Hark, hark, the dogs do bark,” the Crock said, and added, “Poor Joe, poor cuckold.”

Finding her out-of-doors angered Joseph even more. She was in the disused dairy sorting out a pile of shallots, their pink skins in the light of the lamp giving off a pearled glow. She looked the picture of contentment, sitting on an upturned box, the wireless on, talking to Goldie. Everything that had been insinuated became true, became fact. Blind of him not to have noticed the change in her appearance, the glow, bits of her hair held up with a tortoise-shell comb and other bits straggling down, come-hitherish.

“What’s wrong?” she said, seeing his face so white, that shocked sere white of a burnt-out fuse, consternation over something and a rage with her.

“The bastard.”

“Who?”

“Who! Your Shepherd went down to Lady Harkness two nights ago and rented the lake field behind my back . . . the field I have rented for fourteen years.”

“Who told you?”

“She told me . . . She sent for me. I have three days to move my cattle so that his pedigree herd can be driven in . . . three days, seventy-two hours. You’ll never wash her linen again.”

“Calm down, Joseph.”

“Is it true that you drove up the mountain with him . . . to the wild?”

“So!”

“Sat in the creel on the back of his tractor . . . like Cleopatra on her barge . . . You forgot to tell me. It slipped your memory.”

“I don’t have to tell you everything,” she says overcalmly.

Then, as if it was to her stomach: “Was he a gentleman?”

“More of a gentleman than some.”

“I expect you pointed out to him the boundaries between his lands and ours.”

“I don’t even know them . . . no more than you do,” she said, and the sarcasm of it was too much for him.

He flew into a passion then, and he hit her once across the face, a hard, chastising stroke, like a schoolmaster’s stroke, but when he saw her bare arm go up helplessly to defend herself, he drew back and looked down at his palm, constrained. It was ruddy from the stroke, the colour in his hand and his face that of two Josephs, the infuriated one and the one who felt ashamed.