By the Lake (33 page)

From there the talk turned surprisingly to the priest’s own faith. He spoke with warmth of his mother and his father, who had been a farmer and small cattle dealer. “They believed and
brought me into life. What was good enough for them will do for me. That is all the reason I need. When my father was dying he said that if he were given an opportunity to start life all over again he’d take it without a thought. I doubt if I could go that far. Once is more than enough.”

“It would be wrong to say I envy you,” Ruttledge said.

“Live and let live is what I say,” the old priest said. “The man above in Longford will never see it that way. Those Northerners want to bulldoze everybody into their own view.”

“We are not short of people like that down here, either,” Ruttledge said.

The evening had flown.

“I’ll drive up your way tomorrow to see what I can do but I’ll not call. It would look a bit obvious. I’ll drop in with whatever news I have later.”

“Would you like to come and eat something with us then?”

“No,” he said firmly. “I’ll call to let you know what happened.”

The next day they saw his car climb past the gate to the house. He was a poor driver and drove slowly, his eyes fixed resolutely on the road. They thought he must have spent a long time at the house because they did not hear the car go back down towards the lake. The next day Bill Evans was as distraught as ever. He had seen the priest call but couldn’t imagine that the call had anything to do with him. A couple of days later the priest came to tell them the matter had been settled but he would not delay as he had a sick call to make, and on the next Thursday morning Bill Evans was back on the bus sitting beside Michael Pat in the front seat. When he called on his way to the lake the next day, he told of all the help he gave Michael Pat and spoke as if they had never missed a day.

Monaghan Day was the biggest mart of the year and was held on the last Thursday in February. By now it had grown so large that it extended to the Friday and Saturday, and there were years like this year when it entered March. All the big buyers and dealers came to Monaghan Day. Because of the number of dealers, the prices to be had were generally higher than at any other time of the year. In talk in the bars around Monaghan Day some argued that the name derived from the time Monaghan buyers came to the fairs at the end of winter to buy young cattle for shipping to Scotland. More asserted that the name went much further back to the time of the faction fights, when a famous family of fighters called the Monaghans were kings of the early spring fair, with their lead-filled ash plants. Great crowds gathered to watch these fights. On one Monaghan Day the fighters had to be smuggled out of the town, hidden in cartloads of oat sheaves, after a local man had been killed in a fight. A few others declared it had nothing to do with either Monaghan, other than in the heads of ravellers and romancers who had neither knowledge nor religion: it was not Monaghan Day but Manachan Day, after Saint Manachan, who founded the old abbey and whose feast day falls on the 25th February. A great many more swore that they couldn’t care less if it was the fair of Timbuktu as long as plenty of buyers came and the prices were high.

Jamesie took an inordinate pride in his few young cattle, and bucket-fed and currycombed and groomed them for Monaghan Day. Patrick Ryan had two young cattle still running with their mothers and he came with Jamesie to the house one morning.
The three men separated Patrick’s calves—they were at least yearlings—and took them over to Jamesie’s in Ruttledge’s trailer. They were wild, unused to any handling, and were housed with great difficulty.

“Racehorses,” Jamesie laughed. Patrick Ryan was unperturbed throughout and made jokes and was in great good humour. He planned to be in town on Monaghan Day. He was living with a rich family in Carrick, putting in bathrooms in houses bought to rent, and they would drive him to the mart on the day.

Mary was delighted to see Patrick again and he grew more handsome in the warmth of her affection. They all had a whiskey together, to the ticking and the irregular strikings of the clocks, while arranging to meet up with Patrick outside the main ring before the bidding began at noon. Then Ruttledge left. They had much to talk about together and the talk would flow more freely in his absence.

On the evening before Monaghan Day, Jamesie and Ruttledge loaded the cattle into the trailer and ran them into the mart. The grounds around the mart were relatively empty and it was easy to back the trailer in between the gates. They made three runs. Because of their wildness, they had to make an extra run to bring Patrick’s cattle in.

“A most hopeless man,” Jamesie sang as he gloated over the sleekness of his own cattle set beside Patrick’s rough beasts. “As clever, as clever a man as ever walked these parts but no care, no care in the world.”

“Do you think he’ll turn up tomorrow?”

“Don’t you worry. He’ll turn up. With all that excitement and show and a world of strangers, our Patrick will not be found missing.”

The great wastegrounds around the mart were deserted except for the cars and tractors bringing in cattle early. Plastic bags shone gaudily along where they were caught in the ragged
line of whitethorns that marked the boundary on a high mound. The powerful arc lamps were on and men were testing and oiling gates and spreading bales of straw. In the low-ceilinged office lit by naked bulbs, a woman wrote down their names and addresses and handed them the white paper discs with their numbers. They then drove the cattle from the holding pen into the narrow chutes. On a concrete walk above the chutes an attendant in a blue cloth coat checked each ear-tag against the cattle cards, and with a dab from a big pot of glue fixed the pale numbered discs to their backs.

“Good luck tomorrow,” he said as he bound their green cards with a rubber band and placed them with other cards in a big cardboard box. They separated the bulls and heifers and closed them in pens beside the sale rings and left them hay and water for the night.

“They’ll never see the fields around the lake again,” Jamesie repeated.

In the near-empty mart the small early herds looked forlorn under the glare of the arc lamps in the rows of tubular steel, all of them lowing plaintively, their breaths showing in the cold air.

Jamesie didn’t want to go for a drink to Luke’s or any other bar. He was too tense but would never admit to such feelings. Tomorrow all the pride and care for his animals would be tested against the prices they would fetch. When they reached the lake he insisted on getting out of the car at his gate and walking all the way on his own to the house in the darkness. “Haven’t I done it thousands and thousands of times?”

He was waiting at the corner of the lake the next morning. So many trucks and cars and tractors were drawn up along the sides of the road on the outskirts of town that they decided to abandon the car and walk. It was as if a great show or circus had come to town, except no flags were flying other than the lone tricolour outside Jimmy Joe McKiernan’s. At the mart gates, horns were hooting and men were getting out of lorries and
shouting and swearing as they waited to get out and in. Every square yard of the wasteground round the mart was filled.

The traders had already set out their stalls. Chain saws were displayed on a long trestle table beneath a canvas tent that bulged and flapped. From the open back of a van a man was selling animal medicines, sprays and drenches and large cans of disinfectant, sticks of caustic for removing horns, bone-handled knives with curved blades for dressing hooves. One whole side of a covered lorry was open. They had grease guns, tins of oil, top links for tractors, chains, pulleys, blue bales of rope. Close by was a van selling wellingtons, work boots, rainwear, overalls. Elsewhere, shovels, spades, forks, hedge knives, axes, picks were displayed leaning against the side of a van. All kinds of tool handles stood in barrels. Every stall was drawing its own small crowd.

Their cattle were safe in their pens but now other cattle were packed in among them so that they didn’t have space to move or lie. All the other pens were similarly filled and it was like a breathing sea of cattle under the steel girders and the lamps and the spluttering loudspeakers. A group of judges accompanied by a crowd moved along the pens reserved for the cattle competing for prizes in the different breeds. They paused and discussed and sometimes looked again before handing out the red and blue and yellow rosettes to a sudden sharp burst of clapping from the crowd. Then they moved on quickly to the next stall where the same process was repeated. The names of the winners in each section and the overall winner, the champion of Monaghan Day, were broadcast on the crackling, echoing loudspeakers to further applause, followed by a warning that the sale was commencing shortly. When the loudspeakers went dead, the lowing and bellowing and shouting, sliding of hooves, the clanging of gates resumed.

Jamesie entered both pens to quickly groom and freshen the appearance of his animals, but Ruttledge thought the grooming
would have little effect. In his mind the cattle were already gone. The buyers were moving among the pens. They were easy to pick out, as they wore hats and ties and suits protected by cloth overcoats with large square pockets, and they wore the red cattlemen’s boots laced high. Some carried bamboo canes like military batons. The signs were good if they paused outside the pens, and even better if they prodded or felt the cattle, and better still if they noted down their numbers.

Jamesie and Ruttledge didn’t have to meet Patrick Ryan until the commencement of the sale and went to the restaurant and had mugs of tea at the counter. Some men who had come distances were already eating dinners or big sandwiches at the Formica-topped tables on the rough concrete floor. In the kitchen behind the counter, women with their hair gathered up in pink plastic hats were busy rushing about as they prepared the hundreds of meals they would be serving till late into the night. While they were at the counter another announcement that the sale was about to begin spluttered over the loudspeakers but not until they heard the unmistakable sound of the actual bidding did they leave for the ring. Patrick was already there. In a dark suit and white shirt and tie he looked more like one of the dealers than any of the farmers gathered around the ring.

“Patrick. You’re shining,” Jamesie held out his great hand.

“The two of yous are a sight for sore eyes,” he said with perfect poise in the middle of the jostling and pushing in the crush around the ring. “If you didn’t leave your manners behind today you’d be walked on.”

“We never had much in the first place,” Jamesie responded, delighted.

“Did ye get my poor steers in or did they take to the hedges?”

“In no time they’ll be coming under the hammer. They look so good we were nearly putting them in for the prizes,” Jamesie said.

“Would you like to see them, Patrick?” Ruttledge enquired. “The pen is nearhand.”

“I’ll see them soon enough,” he laughed agreeably.

The initial bidding was slow. The cattle entered the ring through a weighing cage, the hands of the scale swinging wildly around the big white face before settling on the number of kilos the animal weighed. The assistant to the auctioneer then chalked up the animal’s number and weight on the back of a board and then swung it round to face the ring. None of the first six cattle to enter the ring was sold. There was much of the actor in the auctioneer; he bantered and traded insults with the tanglers, to the amusement of the crowd packing the barriers and sitting in the high stand above the ring.

“This is a fucken disaster,” he shouted down.

Then, to further laughter and cheering, he rolled his sleeves up as if getting ready to fight. “We might as well all go home and go to bed,” he shouted, and the shouts and the answering jeers and laughter crackled and spluttered out from the loudspeakers.

“You’ll have a great time riding Molly,” was shouted back and cheered to the roof, while the auctioneer pretended to be shocked, which increased the cheering. “Nobody ever does the like of that in this part of the country,” he shouted nonchalantly back, which was received with wild hooting and cheering and wolf-whistles.

Suddenly, a dramatic hush fell. The big dealers were taking their places around the ring and on the steps of the stand. The banter ended. There was a deadly silence as the bids rose quickly: “Who’ll give me four hundred?—420, 430, 440, 460, 70, 80. Who’ll give me five hundred? On my right—505, 510, 520, 510. All done,” the auctioneer leaned to the seller in the box below the auctioneer’s seat. They held a brief discussion. “Not enough. He wants a little more. Who’ll give me 520, 515, 510. I have to my left 510, any more, who’ll give me more?” The price didn’t advance, and he looked to the seller again, who nodded.
“On the mart—510, 515, 520, 540, 550, 555, 65, 70, 75, 80, 580 pounds. All done. All done.” He looked round at all the bidders moving slowly from face to face. “Sold! Five hundred and eighty pounds!” bringing the hammer down.

Once started, the selling went very quickly. The auctioneer’s voice took on the incantation of prayer; it was the rhythm and repetition that indicated its simple purpose more than any words or numbers. After the first dozen or so sales, a murmur of approval went round the ring. The prices were good, more than good, and all the indications were that it was going to be a great Monaghan Day.