Collected Short Stories (8 page)

‘You have great courage, Tom, and God gives His grace to the courageous.'

The priest watched him go out, and from the window he watched him move among the mounds in the graveyard and kneel down, one hand resting on a headstone above the graves of his own people.

When he arrived home all fight had gone out of him as he sat at the table.

‘Were you away to see about the tractor, granda?' one of his grandsons asked him.

‘Tractor, son, what tractor?'

‘Give your granda peace to take his breakfast. Run out and play yourselves like good boys.'

‘Leave them alone, Mary, when the heart's cold the voice of a child can warm it,' and as he took his breakfast he told Jim to sell the sheep, then the cattle, but to leave the horses to the last.

A shower of rain fell, scoring the window pane with streaks of silver, and washing the dust from the potato leaves in the large flat field. There'd be a rich harvest there, but there'd be no one to harvest them, and in a short while no smoke would rise from the farmsteads and at night no comforting light shine out from Dan Mullan's across the wide fields. The larks would be free in the sky, but soon there wouldn't be the bark of a dog in the fields, and where children once played there would be nothing but huts peopled with strangers who had no wish to be there.

At night the old man went out alone with his dog, wandering the roads and calling in with Dan Mullan to shred his worries in useless talk. And then home again when the sky was a harvest of stars and the sea-waves bringing in unchanging sound upon the stones on the shore.

In June Dan Mullan went away. The O'Briens helped him to flit, his few sticks of furniture piled and roped on a cart, and Dan sitting on top of the old door. Easy for one man to leave and set up house again. Any old four walls that were still standing would do him. All he needed was to fling a few sheets of corrugated iron over them to keep out the rain. And that's what Dan did. He took possession of an old ruined house about two miles along the coast, patched the walls with cement, put down a new floor of concrete and had the two windows repaired. He placed his bed in a corner well away from the sparks of the fire and he often sat on it when Tom called to see him.

‘There's one blessing in it all,' he said to him one day, ‘that they didn't order me out in the winter time. By the time the days harden this old place will be warmed up. It's not much of a place with the smell of rotten seaweed at your door – still it'll do me my days. And I've enough money from the old place that'll keep me out of debt.'

‘The man who owns less is the best off.'

‘Wherever you go, Tom, you'll always have the comfort of a family. A man can't have everything in this life and he must be content. Jim will find a good farm for you all with the compensation money.'

‘Not with the war bringing high prices for sheep and cattle farmers are loth to sell their land. And I don't want to go far from here. You can't transplant an old bush. It'll wither in the richest soil.'

‘In a short while you'll be coming back here to tell me of your good luck. You'll see that I'm right.'

But the O'Briens hadn't the luck Dan expected. There were no farms for sale and Jim didn't try hard to find one. His mind was set in starting a shop in Downpatrick, a town where his children would have schools at their own doorstep. But his chief difficulty was to coax his father into his way of thinking. And one evening when his father came in from Dan's Jim told him that the only farms to be had were in the county of Antrim.

‘Antrim has cold, clabbery land – heavy land that'd kill them not used to it,' the father said. ‘It's not like the dry loose soil of our own county. You may drop all notion of going there, Jim. Wherever we go it mustn't be far away from our own people.'

‘What people, father?'

‘Your own people that's at peace in the graveyard beyond.'

Jim paused, paused until he was sure that his memory and its associations had sunk below the present moment.

‘What if we settled for a while in Downpatrick, father? It's only ten miles away.'

‘You can't farm the streets of a town.'

‘I was thinking we could start a shop there.'

‘A shop!' and his father stared at him and spat into the fire.

‘I mean we could start a shop and when the war's over we could sell it and come back here.'

‘Come back here! But, son, the house will not …'

‘I've heard tell of them opening roads in other places, making plans, and then calling a halt to them.'

‘I pray God they'll give this up. Maybe, Jim, they'll blot it all out. Maybe after all it was foolish to sell the sheep in haste.'

It wasn't the answer the son anticipated and he added quickly: ‘McKeever, I hear, is ready to leave by tomorrow. We'll be the last.'

‘McKeever!' and the old man took the pipe from his lips. ‘If McKeever goes we may go. I never knew that man to make a mistake.'

‘He's going to live in the city from what I hear.'

‘That'll be the first mistake he ever made in his life.'

‘We'll never go there, father. Downpatrick's bad enough,' he hedged. ‘Still it's a friendly wee town and the fields and the hills wash up close to it.'

‘I couldn't end my days in it.'

‘Nor could me and Mary. But there's nothing else for us in the meantime but to buy a shop. That's the best proposition I can think of,' and he told his father how they'd need his advice on their buying and selling. ‘Whatever we do we must stick together and help one another. We must agree about this while there is still time to do something – no matter how poor it is.'

The old man nodded his head: ‘Whatever you do may the good God guide you in it. You have your life to live, and what you think will be good for Mary and the children will be good enough for me.' It was no use at his age, he thought, struggling against his son when there was a coarser authority struggling against all of them.

Within two weeks the son had bought a place in Downpatrick and after removing most of the furniture from the farmhouse he brought in his wife and children. The old man spoke little to anyone.

One day remained to him and he tramped the fields for the last time. The silence of the grave lay over them. Scaffoldings of new huts were being erected on the sea-road, heaps of shavings like the shearings of sheep were blown against the hedges, and the strokes of the men's hammers sounded to the old man like the pulse of his own blood. He reached Dan Mullan's deserted house and as he crossed the threshold, that had no door, a swallow flew out past him. Strange he never noticed them arriving this year, and he now gazed at them skimming swift and sure over the sunny fields. Inside in the house ashes lay on the hearth, and stones and glass littered the floor where schoolboys had broken the windows when taking a short cut across the fields. Up in a corner clung a grey nest of the swallows. They, too, would be cleared out, nothing was safe, nothing left undisturbed. Foolish birds, he said to himself, why didn't you go to the hills, anywhere but here. They'll not let you rest.

On his way back two lorries were pulled up on the sea-road and men were unloading warm-smelling timber. He greeted nobody and nobody greeted him. He looked out to the sea, to black jagged rocks where he often fished years ago. There was no change in them. The rising sea could do nothing to them except wear them smooth. Someday, please God, he'd be here again, indeed he would. The accursed war would be over, the strange huts and the strangers in them would be gone, and tractors would move quickly over the barren fields and crops rise again.

When they were settled in Downpatrick, the shop closed in the evenings and the father gone to bed, the son used to talk to his wife of the last journey they had made from the house, how his father had padlocked the gate, had his last look at the dark windows of the house, the trees in leaf in the garden and how he had spotted the clothesline and nothing would do him but open up the gate again and go back for that old bit of rope. They worried about him for he didn't go out much except to leave the two boys at the school in the morning and call into the church beside it. The sheep-dog, too, was listless, its coat lost its shine, and its nose was dry and cracked like a piece of black rubber.

At night the streets were dark and few lamps lighted, and before going to bed the old man listened to the news on the radio, news that might tell him of the war's end. And the mornings were cold and silent. Few lorries or cars were on the roads because of the scarcity of petrol, and it was only on fair days that the old man would rise early on hearing the knocking of farm carts descending to the town and see from his window the sheep on the road with their breaths hanging above them like a sudden fall of sea-mist. And he would hurry on with his breakfast to get out among the lots of sheep that were being sold, the dog barking madly and the old man searching for a familiar face among the groups of farmers. And the seldom time he did spot a friend it was to inquire about the changes that had taken place beyond. Dan Mullan's old house was levelled, he was told, for they were making a road that way. And there were as many new huts about the place as would house an army.

The old man would tell his son about these changes, and tell him that the house must still be standing for nobody had said a word about it. And God would keep her standing, he would say, to reinforce his faith.

And it was at one of these sheep-fairs that he unexpectedly met Dan Mullan. All day he had been moving around the fair and was returning despondently to the shop when he saw Dan leaning against the counter talking to Jim.

‘It's Dan!' the old man shouted, putting an arm on his shoulder and gripping his hand. ‘And how are you at all at all?'

‘Never better in my life, thank God. And Jim's after selling me as much tobacco as'd do me for a year of wet Sundays.'

‘When there's tobacco in the shop there's nobody we'd gladder give it to than yourself.'

‘There's not a grain of tobacco to be had in the old place. It was well worth the journey to get it.'

‘And how did you get here, Dan?'

‘I walked a bit and then got a lift in a cart, and the same man's giving me a lift back.'

‘And your old house is tumbled, I hear?'

‘She is. Right through her is a tarred road as shiny as the back of a herring. A runaway they call it.'

‘I suppose there's great changes everywhere?'

Jim knew what was coming but he had Dan well-primed.

‘Aye,' Dan said, staring across the counter at bottles of sweets. ‘Big changes everywhere.'

‘New huts and sheds?'

‘Aye, huts and sheds.'

‘I'd hardly know the place?'

Dan took the pipe from his lips, prodding the bowl with his finger and struck a match.

‘And our house, Dan? Is she – is she in bad shape?'

‘No,' Dan said, staring at the lighted match above the bowl of his pipe. ‘She's in fine health.'

‘Maybe the villains won't touch her. You'll see us back in her some day.'

‘It could all be,' Dan said, not looking at him, while Jim stooped below the counter pretending to rummage for something.

‘I must be on my way,' Dan said. ‘But I'll be back soon again.'

‘You're not going till you get something to eat.'

‘Eat! Mary gave me a feed that'd do a regiment.'

The old man saw the guilty look in his son's face and scarcely listened to him as he said: ‘When Dan called, father, we searched everywhere for you but couldn't find you.'

‘That's all right,' he said, with a limp wave of his hand.

The old man went out with Dan. They had a quick drink together in a pub, then he saw Dan climb into a farmer's cart and set off out of the town.

There was another month to the next fair for he had marked the date on a calendar that hung in the shop. But he didn't intend to wait that length of time till he'd see again, or maybe not see, someone from his part of the country. Maybe if he walked a mile or so out of the town he'd get a lift in a cart and see the changes that Dan talked about. It didn't matter how he'd get back – he'd get back somehow, he felt.

He said nothing to Jim or Mary, and about two weeks later when the children were in school and the sun shining frostily on the roofs of the houses he set off, the dog with him. He climbed the hilly road above the town and in front of him saw the uneven fields that merged into the hazy distance. He felt in fine form. A fresh breeze was blowing and the falling leaves hopped and flittered like mice, and his dog rubbed the itch off itself against the grassy banks that edged the road, ran back and sniffed his trousers and scampered ahead again.

He had gone nearly two miles when a cart overtook him and left him down a mile from the sea. The sun was setting and the long shadows of trees stretched across the road and bent up on the grassy banks at the other side. The air became colder. He could smell the salt in it and he could hear the dull roar of the sea.

In front of him over familiar fields were the outlines of many buildings he had never seen before. But he kept to the road and it brought him among low timbered-huts, huts that swarmed around him on all sides. Concrete paths branched off the road, and at each path was an arrow-shaped signpost with printed letters that made no sense. He was in a strange place, but the road led somewhere, and close to a bend in it that he should know so well there was a single-storey building with many windows and doors. Two of the doors were open and the rest were closed, and a man with an aluminium kettle passed by, and another man with shaving-cream on his chin shouted something and closed his door. And now all the doors were closed. But somewhere to the back of that building was his own house and the road to it, but the road that led to that road he could not find. He trudged on, past piles of drainpipes and heaps of sand, and past machines that were like tractors, silent machines tattered with clay and splashed with cement.