“I’m hurrying,” Ruttledge said as he had tea and a sandwich in the house. “I know Jamesie will be on edge once he hears the mower.”
“What time do you think you’ll be finished?”
“His meadows are smalclass="underline" by teatime.”
“I’ll be over around six.”
He travelled round the shore. All the gates from the road to the house were open. The pair of dogs met the tractor at the last gate, escorting it down to the house. The brown hens lay sprawled in the dust and shade behind the netting wire. A pair of boots was drying in front of the open door. The green gate to the meadows had been pushed wide from the whitewashed wall of the outhouse. Ruttledge left the tractor running on the street, the mower raised.
“Are yous ready?”
A sound of laughter came from within.
“Good soldiers never die,” Jamesie shouted out but did not appear.
It was dark and cool within the cave of the house after the hot sunlight. Jamesie sat at the table by the window in his stocking feet with a copy of the Observer. Mary and Margaret sat quietly together at the unlit stove. After the greetings and welcomes, Jamesie said, “Why don’t you turn the bloody thing off out on the street and we’ll have tea or a drink or something?”
“No. We’ll start. How much do you want cut?”
Jamesie and Mary looked to one another quickly before turning to Ruttledge. “What do you think?”
Ruttledge refused to be drawn. “It’s up to you. I can mow it all if you want.”
“Mary?” Jamesie turned.
“There’s no use asking me. You know yourself what you want.”
He was in crisis, having always had the meadows cut in three parts: it was against his instinct to risk it all in the one throw. In bad summers he would spend weeks struggling with hay, but cut in three portions all of it would never be lost. While he knew that the machines had taken most of the hardship from haymaking, he couldn’t quite believe that they had taken most of the risk and excitement and drama as well.
“What did you do?” he asked anxiously.
“I knocked all mine.”
“Cut it all to hell,” Mary said suddenly. “Otherwise we’ll be sick looking at it for the whole summer.”
“What if it pours?” Jamesie demanded.
“The forecast is good,” Ruttledge said gently.
“Fuck it,” Jamesie said suddenly. “Cut it to hell. We’ll live or die.”
“Good!” Mary said vigorously. “I wouldn’t like to count the summers I was sick of the colour of hay.”
The meadows must have once been tiny, not much more than gardens. Hedges or ditches had been removed and now ran as shallow drains through the small meadows. Wherever they dipped sharply Jamesie had marked them with old nylons tied to the top of poles like flags. In places the meadows ran along the river and the edges of the bog. On these stretches he kept watch. Ruttledge was uneasy to have him so close because he knew the danger of a blade flying loose or catching a small stone to whirl it from the thick grass like a bullet, but Jamesie could not be persuaded away.
“Here you can’t see the river from the grass. Lord bless us, if the tractor went in we’d be the talk of the country for weeks.”
No stone or blade flew and by evening all the small meadows were mowed. A huge flock of crows descended on the swards, and some pigeons but no gulls. The meadows were hidden from the lake. Away to the west the sky was turning red.
Ruttledge was surprised not to find Kate in the house. “She said she was coming over.”
“Something must have held her up,” Mary said.
“I couldn’t look at whiskey. I’ll have water or a beer,” Ruttledge protested when Jamesie pounded a bottle of Powers down on the table like a challenge and unscrewed the cap, the three swallows on the gold label poised for flight.
“You’re no good. Useless,” he said as he poured a large whiskey and raised his glass with a challenging flourish.
The cold beer was delicious in the tiredness. The tiredness itself was deeply pleasurable after the jolting and heat and dust and concentration on the disappearing ground. Mary put a large platter heaped with sandwiches on a chair.
“These are wonderful, Mary. Did any word come from Italy?”
“Yesterday,” she smiled the sweet smile that was all her own and took a postcard from the windowsill. “There’s nothing in it. Read away.”
Ruttledge was expecting to see a crowded beach or a café with tables under awnings or an old church on the card, but it was a reproduction of Giotto’s Flight into Egypt. Joseph with a bundle on his shoulder was leading the donkey carrying Mary and the Child. Against the deep blue of the sky and the pale hills hovered two angels with outspread wings and haloes of pale gold. The blue of Mary’s robe was lighter than the lightest blue of the sky. The robes of Joseph, the child and the angels were as brown as earth. The trees on the pale hills were flowers. The whole had an extraordinary and deeply affecting serenity: it was as if they had complete trust in the blessed light as they travelled to a place or state where nothing cast a shadow.
By the time he handed it back, Jamesie and Mary were laughing at Ruttledge’s absorption in the postcard.
“What’s so funny?”
“I’d say the mother picked it. Jim just wrote. It’s more like what you’d get for Christmas,” Mary said when the laughter died.
“The card is beautiful. It must have been a long journey for Jim,” Ruttledge said.
“Before he went to school, he had me and the Granda tormented with questions. We had no idea at first how good he was,” Mary said. “Once he went to school he turned quiet. He used sit here at the corner of this table doing his exercises. We knew he was good but what is good? This fella here couldn’t wait to quit school. I was just middling.”
“Don’t heed her,” Jamesie said. “She was by far the best in her class. I was never any good.”
“That doesn’t mean anything. It doesn’t mean a single thing. I was far from what Jim turned out to be. We didn’t know he’d turn out to be Margaret’s father then, either.” Mary smiled at her grandchild. “We knew nothing.
“Jamesie here always took a week from the roads to cut the turf and set the potatoes. We had the bank we still have on Gloria though it’s never used now. There was no hardship with the wheelbarrows then like when I was young. We had the mule and the cart with rubber tyres. All Jim had to do was catch the sods his father pegged out of the boghole and put them on the cart. The mule took them out on the spread where they were heeled up. I think Jim would far sooner be at school than on the bog but he never complained. Most people kept their children from school then when they were needed. No heed was passed.”
“It was always cold on Gloria,” Jamesie said. “You wouldn’t be cold down in the boghole but on the bank you’d be blue. The only shelter on Gloria is those poor little lone birch trees. People used to cut out little houses in the banks to shelter or get away from the showers. We used to be weak watching for Mary. There was always a fear gorta on Gloria. We’d be middling until we’d spot her bicycle coming in the lane and then we’d nearly die. We’d go pure weak.”
“One day we saw Master Hunt’s car come in the bog road. Of course this hawk here was the first to spot it and was watching and wondering what the Master could be doing on the bog.”