“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?”