By the Lake (11 page)

“He’s straight and direct,” Patrick Ryan said. “Himself and the Bishop don’t pull. They’re like chalk and cheese.”

“He drank the tea black without sugar. He wouldn’t even take a biscuit,” Ruttledge said.

“I’m surprised he took the tea. He must have been upset. He generally takes nothing in houses. He lives on fruit and bread and milk and water. For a man with such an interest in cattle he never touches meat. I suppose that’s why there’s not a pick on him for such a big man.”

“As soon as we came out of the house he spotted you by the sheds and headed your way at once,” Ruttledge laughed. “Even before he got close, you started pulling money from your pocket. The day was wild. The wind took a fiver and stuck it on a whitethorn.”

“I should have kept out of sight. I mustn’t have expected him to leave the house so soon,” Patrick Ryan said. “I owed him washers. I hadn’t paid any dues for a couple of years.”

“After you paid him what you owed he saw the fiver stuck on the thorn and reached into the bush. ‘I think God meant that for me as well.’ ”

“He has an eye like a hawk, especially where there is money. You have a good memory, lad.”

“It was that same day I tried to give you money. You threw it back in my face and it all went on the wind. We had to search for it in the bushes.”

“I never cared about money,” Patrick Ryan said.

When the crossbeams were bolted to the four iron posts, they used scaffolding planks to walk between the ladders. The heavy roof beams were angled and cut and fixed into place. They started to cut the rafters. The work was clean and pleasant. High up on the planks there was a cooling breeze from the lake. The noise of distant traffic on the road became part of the insect hum and the sharper singing of the birds. A wren or a robin would alight on one of the roof beams and look down on them as if they were sheep or cattle and fly back into the bushes. They had become so used to working together spasmodically over the years that they were often silent. When they talked, it was generally Patrick Ryan who wanted to talk, and it was often mordant and funny, about people he had worked for or known. Now and again out of the silence would come without warning a seething, barely restrained urge to strike out and wound over a mislaid tool or a piece of wood. These violences would come and go and appeared both to fulfil and to exhaust themselves in their very expression.

“Johnny must be home by now,” Ruttledge remarked as they worked. “He should be over on his visit any of these days.”

“I know, lad. I should have gone over to see him but I hate the sight of going though we were great friends. His was the worst case this part of the country ever saw. He left when he had the whole world at his feet.”

Once they started nailing the rafters, the frame to hold the roof took shape. Each new rafter formed its own square or rectangle, and from the ground they all held their own measure of
sky; in the outer rectangles leaves from branches of overhanging ash and sycamore were mixed with the sky.

“What are you looking at, lad?”

“At how the rafters frame the sky. How the squares of light are more interesting than the open sky. They make it look more human by reducing the sky, and then the whole sky grows out from that small space.”

“As long as they hold the iron, lad, they’ll do,” Patrick Ryan laughed sympathetically. “There was a time when people were locked up for saying less than that. If you came out with a spake like that they’d think you had gone off like one of the old alarm clocks.”

A few mowers were starting up in the early meadows.

“I could mow for you this year, Patrick, when I get the mower out. I’m mowing for Jamesie,” Ruttledge offered as they worked.

“No, lad, no. I have plenty of clients who have asked. My meadows won’t be fit for weeks yet and it would make no great differ if they were never mowed.”

Wisps of cloud trailed across the blue. Whenever the hammering stopped, the steady motor hum of insects met the shrilling of the small birds and the harsher cries of gulls and crows closer to the shore.

An approaching car was heard. They paused on the ladders to watch it move through the breaks in the trees.

“God almighty, this place is getting like O’Connell Street,” Patrick Ryan said when the car turned uphill from the lake.

A green Vauxhall came to a stop beneath the alder tree at the gate. Two burly middle-aged men got out.

“Trouble,” Patrick Ryan said. He quickly descended the ladder and hurried towards the gate as if he didn’t want the men to come any closer. No handshakes or pleasantries were exchanged. The three men moved out into the lane until they were hidden by the high banks.

Ruttledge rearranged the planks and tidied the cut ends of the beams and rafters into a small heap for firewood. He was used to people looking for Patrick Ryan. Often he had seen him gather up his tools and leave with them in the middle of work. It had been galling once. Now he had come not to care. There was very little work that couldn’t just as easily be left undone.

When they reappeared from behind the high banks of the lane, the two burly men got straight into the green Vauxhall and Patrick Ryan came slowly back to the shed. He was not in a good mood and stood staring up at the pattern of beams and rafters in sour abstraction.

“The longer you live the more you eat,” he said.

“What’s wrong?”

“We should have put on the creosote.”

“We can still put it on from the ladders.”

“It’d be a sight easier if we’d had the wit to put it on before the timber left the ground.”

As they nailed the last of the rafters into place, Patrick Ryan appeared troubled or absentminded and made a number of small unusual errors.

“Who were those men?”

“A couple of certified thicks from the arsehole of Drumreilly. When they want anything done they think the only work in the world is their work.”

“Did they threaten you?”

“Put it this way, lad, they didn’t offer me oranges,” he said.

The cans of creosote were taken from the shed and the dark liquid poured into two smaller paint cans. Ruttledge brought out two pairs of rubber gloves and offered them to Patrick Ryan.

“No, lad. You put on the gloves. My hide is too hard.”

“That stuff is dangerous. You can smell the fumes.”

“I’ve been plastering and painting all my life and never wore nothing. I’m not doing anything different now.”

They were high on the ladders, brushing the creosote into
the raw timber, when Kate came from the house in a white beekeeper’s suit and hat and veil. In her gloved hands she carried a brass smoker and a yellow hive tool. The smoker had been lit and breathed a pale smoke when she pressed the fan-like bellows.

“What’s she up to now?”

“With that gear on you hardly need two guesses.”

“What can she be doing with the bees?” he asked aggressively.

“I don’t know. We can ask her on the way back.”

He poured out creosote roughly, and as it ran across the beam it sprayed out in all directions from the violent brush strokes. One cheek bulged while his jaw worked slowly up and down as if he was eating his tongue. He was in foul humour again.

Kate was a long time in the orchard. When she reappeared she looked dishevelled and her long fair hair was flying about her face, smoke blowing from the brass nose of the smoker she carried awkwardly. She would have passed by quickly but Patrick Ryan called, “How is the bees?”

“They’re angry.”

“Were you afeard?”

“No.” She was taken aback by the mocking aggressiveness of the tone, and stopped. “I could have gone through the hives but there was no point. They were boiling up. I
was
afraid.” Small beads of sweat glistened on her forehead when she looked up. One side of her neck was red and chaffed where she had been stung beneath the veil.

“What cause has the bees to be riz on a fine day the like of this in Ireland?”

“They didn’t want me around. It wasn’t a good idea.”

“What wasn’t?”

“To go near the hives.”

She waited but Patrick Ryan went back to pouring the creosote out on the timber, spreading it roughly around with the brush. When a spray of the dark liquid fell dangerously close to
where she stood, she moved quickly on without glance or word. The two men worked in silence, pouring the creosote, spreading it with the brush, moving the ladders.

“This creosoting from the ladders is one slow feck of a job,” Patrick complained as he moved the heavy ladder along the beam one more time. “I’m away with myself out to the orchard here to cut a button.”

“I’d be careful of the hives,” Ruttledge warned.

“The bees won’t bother me. My hide is too hard.”

“I’d still be careful.”

“No, lad, no. The bees won’t bother me.”

He disappeared into the orchard, his cap worn jauntily back to front. His shoulders and back beneath the dirty white shirt were large and powerful but so perfectly proportioned that their strength was concealed.

Ruttledge continued creosoting. There was a mindless pleasure in brushing the dark liquid into the wood in the heat and the light breeze from the lake. In the far distance, the bucket of a mechanical digger clanged and pushed and clanged again.

Patrick Ryan’s re-emergence into this slow mindlessness was like the eruptions of air that occur in the wheaten light of mown meadows in a heatwave. Dried grass and leaves, and even bits of sticks, are sent whirling high in a noisy spinning cylinder of dust and violent air, which then as quickly dies, to reappear like a mirage in another part of the meadow. With one hand he held up his trousers as he tried to run. His free hand swung his cap in a wild and furious arc as he attempted to beat away his tormentors. Whirling round to face the attacking bees, he beat out to left and right, but it was to no avail: he swung the cap round his head in a smaller despairing arc as he turned again and ran. The barely manageable trousers were bunched awkwardly around his ankles and with every fighting step he threatened to fall over. At the foot of the ladders he turned and stood. With his cap he beat away the single bees that zoomed in like dive-bombers. There
was nothing Ruttledge could do. He had to beat away stray bees that came at him high on the ladder. A bee became entangled in his hair. Only very gradually did the attacks cease. At the foot of the ladders Patrick Ryan was slumped low but his breathing was growing easier. “Double fuck those for fucken cunts of bees,” he cried out.

A buzzing came from his hair. With his cap he pummelled and crushed his head until the buzzing stopped. Ruttledge helped him search his shirt and trousers. There were even bees in his shoes. When Ruttledge shook free a number of bees trapped beneath the collar of his shirt, he called out angrily, “Why didn’t you kill the fuckers?”

“There was no need.”

“They should be all killed. They shouldn’t be let around any house. I was sitting there with my trousers down thinking about the world to come when they came down on me like a fucken cloud.”

“Are you in much pain?”

“I tell you, lad, I wouldn’t swap the pain for a place in heaven,” he grinned savagely. “It’ll pass. Everything does if you can wait long enough.”

“There’s Blue in the house.”

“It’ll do no good. We’ll give them no heed. They’ll go in their own time.”

“We’ll dodge into the house for a break. They’ll be more settled when we come back. I could do with a drink of water,” Ruttledge said.

It was cool within the house. The dark light was restful. No matter how Kate pressed Patrick Ryan, he would not allow her to examine or treat the stings.

“Not a blessed thing will do any good. Pay them no heed. Treat yer man if he wants,” he brushed all offers aside.

“My few stings are nothing,” Ruttledge said.

“Give me a good glass of whiskey instead,” Patrick Ryan said.
A large glass was poured. He wanted neither water nor lemonade. “Yer Irishman’s morphine. May we all meet up in heaven. Am I having no company?” He raised his glass in salutation.

“It’s too hot and I’m not in pain.” Ruttledge poured himself a small measure as a gesture and added much water. Kate had tea.

The pain forced Patrick Ryan to move and shift as he drank but his humour was improving by the minute. “They came down on me like a cloud,” he said. “The noise was worse than the darkness. No matter where you ran or turned they were around your head and you couldn’t beat them away.”

“I’m sorry. I should have warned you,” Kate said. “I never saw them so angry. I couldn’t handle them, even with all the gear.”

“It wasn’t your fault, Kate. Yer man here warned me but I paid no heed.”

He constantly moved and shifted on the chair as he spoke. He talked as if talk itself could ease the pain. He drank quickly and appeared not to notice when Kate refilled his glass.

He talked of a mowing accident that happened when he was a child. A man had been mowing a meadow with a young horse when the blade cut through a nest of wild red bees. The young horse was nervous. They say the bees can smell fear. They lighted on the poor horse. The man was luckily flung clear when the horse bolted. In no time the horse made bits of the shafts and traces before dropping down stone dead. Patrick Ryan had never laid eyes on the man or set foot in the meadow but he could see the man sitting on the single-bar mowing machine and the young horse and the big trees of an enclosed meadow as real, as real as if he had been there.

“The past and present are all the same in the mind,” Kate said. “They are just pictures.”

“Are you sure you haven’t been drinking, Kate?” Ruttledge asked.

“It must be the aspirins and the Blue,” she said and winked.

Patrick Ryan was so concentrated that the little exchange passed unnoticed.

“There were red bees and black bees. We used to raid the nests in the meadows and suck the honey. The red bees were the wickedest. The rotary mowers and the bag stuff took all the nests out of the meadows,” Patrick Ryan said as he rose gingerly. “If we have any more of that painkiller we’ll be falling from ladders. We’ll go back to work in the name of God and his Blessed Mother.”

Outside, the bees were still flying around but they were no longer attacking. Patrick Ryan kept changing his weight from foot to foot on the rungs of the ladder but he never complained, all the time keeping up a flow of jokes and stories as if speech alleviated pain. In the silences, he whistled and recited nonsensical refrains and blasphemies. Solicitous enquiry was brushed aside.