“Sleepy fox,” he cried.
“We didn’t think he could be coming for us when he stopped the car out on the road. In those days unless you were somebody as forward as John Quinn you were afeard to go near a priest or a teacher and didn’t expect them to come near.”
“Master Hunt was as decent, as straight a man as ever wore shoe leather. He wasn’t like the savages we had for masters.”
“We were finishing the tea. After chatting for a while he said he wanted a word with us on our own. When we walked a bit out towards the car he told us that he had come on only one or two others as good as Jim in all his years of teaching. He felt sure he’d win a county scholarship the next year but not if he was kept from school.”
“We were only delighted. The only reason we kept him from school is that we never thought it mattered,” Jamesie said.
“Master Hunt brought the results himself. He had never been to the house before. His hands were shaking when he handed us the letter. You’d think he was the child that had won the scholarship.”
“Well, in a way he had,” Ruttledge said.
“Nothing would do this omadhaun but make the Master sit down. Though it was morning he opened a fresh bottle of whiskey. I declare to God the pair finished the bottle.”
“What did Jim say? He must have been in heaven.”
“He got to say nothing with this fella ravelling on with Master Hunt. I was afraid the Master would drive into a ditch with that much whiskey. Master Hunt wasn’t used to whiskey.”
“He was very apt,” Jamesie said defensively. “He was a big strong man.”
“When the Master left, Jamesie got on his bicycle and cycled all over the country full to the gills as he was with whiskey.” Mary laughed maliciously, but her eyes were full of deep affection. “They called him First-in-the-County for a long time afterwards.”
“They were jealous,” he said.
“You should have known enough about people by then not to blow. You were long enough in the world to know.”
“What was it but the truth?” he said. “There were a few who were glad.”
“A rare few,” she responded.
“To hell with them,” he said. “Nobody counted but Jim and Master Hunt.”
“You’d have been better to let them find it out for themselves. Jamesie here can keep nothing in,” Mary said wistfully.
“Mary was never the same again after Jim went away to college that September,” Jamesie had said many times before. “Her heart was broken. She was never to be the same again. The life left the place.”
“What does Margaret here think hearing about her father when he was young?” Ruttledge asked.
“Father never talks about when he was young. Only Mother does,” the child said matter-of-factly.
“They’ll all come down for Margaret as soon as they get back from abroad,” Mary said, and the child drew closer to Mary.
Outside on the street Jamesie looked anxiously down at the fallen meadows and then at the sky where a jet was chalking a path on the cloudless blue of evening. He felt anxious and exposed: the whole country would laugh at his greed if the heavens opened.
“I’ll be over early in the morning,” Ruttledge said. “There’ll be no rain.”
“Please God. Whenever suits,” he said almost absently as Mary and Margaret waved from the doorway. The casualness was studied; he would not know ease again until his meadows were safe.
Along the shore a boy was fishing out on the stones, casting a glittering spoon out over the water and then reeling it slowly in. The heron rose out of the reeds and flapped ahead before swinging away towards the farther shore. A glaring red sun was sinking below the rim of the sky.
“We were expecting you over,” Ruttledge said to Kate.
“I couldn’t get away. The Shah arrived. He wanted to talk to you about something. Then I had Bill Evans and it was too late.”
“Had Bill any news?” Ruttledge asked idly, tiredly: Bill Evans never had news.
“Big news,” Kate said. “One day every week from now on he is going to town on the bus. He’ll get a meal and be generally tended to.”
“He must be in heaven.”
“In pure heaven.”
The next morning a white mist obscured even the big trees along the shore. Gossamer hung over the pear and plum and apple trees in the orchard and a pale spiderwebbing lay across the grass in the fields. A robin was trapped in the glasshouse and set free before it became prey for the black cat. The heavy mower was uncoupled from the tractor and replaced by the tedder. The very quiet and coolness of the morning was delicious with every hour promising later heat. When the sun had burned away the mist and dried the dew on the swards, the tedding began. The tedder was new and working perfectly, turning the flat neat swards into a green stream of grass, and when it was done the spread grass lay like a raised green floor to the sun. Then the tractor and tedder went slowly round the lake to Jamesie.
The dogs met the tractor as it came down to the house. They were all in the meadows. Jamesie and Mary were shaking out the heavy swards with pitchforks while Margaret played with the dogs.
“Those pitchforks aren’t a great sign of faith in the machines,” Ruttledge said as they gathered around the running tractor to watch him move the tedder into its working position and connect the drive shaft.
“We were just putting in time,” Jamesie said defensively.
“Which would you prefer — to be in Italy or in the meadow?” Ruttledge asked Margaret when the tedder was set for working and he was warning her not to come too close to the tines.
“In the meadows,” she answered and drew closer to Mary.
On the television forecast of the night before, the map of Ireland was shown covered with small suns, like laughing apples. Soon after midday all the small meadows were tedded. By evening the mown grass rustled like hay to the touch. The next morning they were swept into rows. The swept ground between the rows had already turned golden. Because of Jamesie’s anxiety Ruttledge went round the shore to bale his meadows first. Kate came with him to help stack the bales. Though the balers were a familiar sight in meadows for years, Jamesie watched in a kind of disbelief as the cumbersome red machine gathered in the loose rows and spat them out in neat tied bales. In a break in the baling, when Mary came with a can of sweetened tea, all his anxiety and lack of trust surfaced.
“If the thing was to break down now we’d be able to get up what’s left with the forks.”
“What about my poor meadows?”
“You wouldn’t care a frig.”
“I’d care but there’s not much I could do.”
“Please God, it’ll hold,” he said.
The bales were too heavy for the child but the two women and Jamesie were able to stack them almost as quickly as the baler spat them out. Two bales were placed sideways, sufficiently close to be crossed by two other bales but far enough apart to allow air to circulate. The stack was completed by a single bale on top, the uncut side turned upwards to cast the rain. When they were all stacked, they stood like abstract sculptures in swept empty space.
Then they all followed the tractor and baler round the shore to work in Ruttledge’s meadows, the two dogs trotting ahead. By evening, when the sun had gone round behind the house, all the meadows were baled and stacked under the long shadows of the trees stretching out into the lake. When the last bale was lifted to crown the last small stack, Jamesie gave a loud cheer. The sound was of triumph and heartfelt relief.
“All that work done in a few hours,” he repeated over and over. “Several men and horses would need days and not get it done.”
“It’s safe now,” Kate said gently.
“Not in the shed yet,” Jamesie warned.
“If there was rain we could take it in tomorrow. What could it do but heat in its own sap now?”
Inside the house a reading lamp with a green shade was lit on the big table. On the red-and-white squares of the tablecloth stood a blue bowl filled with salad and large white plates of tongue and ham, a cheeseboard with different cheeses, including the Galtee Jamesie liked wrapped in its silver paper, a cut loaf, white wine, a bottle of Powers, lemonade. There was a large glass jug of iced water in which slices of lemon floated.
“A great house. A pure feast. A lamp lit in the middle of the summer,” Jamesie said. “Wasteful. Wasteful. Children dying in Africa.”
“A lot he knows about Africa when he didn’t even know where Italy is! Men never quit about the lights and they’d drink as much whiskey in a day as would light a house for a year.” Drinks were poured. They were more tired than hungry after the work and heat. The soreness and tiredness became delicious in the drowsy glow of alcohol. Nobody wanted to sit at the table.
Margaret stood by Jamesie’s chair and he touched her hair and pulled at her ribbon. For the rest, they were content to sit and watch the light. The child stayed by his chair until the black cat came cautiously into the room. As the light faded, the sky beyond the dark shapes of the trees softened to a glow, and the room became enormous as it reached out to the fields and the trees in the long, velvety light of the sky.
“In weather like this but a little later Jamesie’s father died,” Mary said quietly. “They were building the hayrick in the yard where the hayshed is now. The father was sick in bed but couldn’t stay away from the window. ‘They are putting it up wrong,’ he’d cry out in a rage. Why worry yourself about them? It’ll be their lookout, I’d say, and try to coax him away from the window. But he’d not be five minutes back in bed in the lower room when he’d be back with his nose pressed to the glass like a bold child.”
“Were they putting up the rick wrong?”
“Not at all. They were putting it up different to the way he put it up. The string of curses was terrible: it’d fall, let in rain, rot, there wouldn’t be a mouthful for the cows. I’d coax him back to bed again but in no time he’d be back at the window with his nose pressed to the glass. This went on for the whole of the day. I was getting food for the men. Part of the time I had a job to keep a straight face. When they came into the house to eat he went down to the room and banged the door shut and never appeared again until they left.”
Jamesie sat in absolute silence while Mary spoke. When she finished he added, “My father was thick and ignorant but he adored Mary. He didn’t want her in the house at first but by the end he adored the ground she walked on.”
“He wouldn’t talk to me when I first came into the house but by the end he wouldn’t even take a drink of water from the hand of anybody else.”
“A week or so after the rick was built I was putting out topdressing with the little mule. Nothing would do my father but come out to help. It was weather like this, wonderful weather. He should have been in bed but you could tell him nothing. I passed no heed. Then he called me over. His graip, he said, was stuck. I could have laughed out loud. A child could have lifted the graip. It wasn’t stuck at all. He hadn’t the strength. It was then I saw there was something badly wrong. It was as much as I could do to get him back to the house. He only lasted three days.”
“I had to stay with him,” Mary said. “He’d get all worried if I tried to leave for even a few minutes. In the end he just faded. It was as peaceful as anybody could want.”
“He seems to have been more like Johnny than Jamesie,” Ruttledge said.
“Far more. That’s why the two were never able to get on. I don’t know where they got Jamesie. He wasn’t a bit like any of them.”
“The cuckoo!” he cried.
“Where do you think Johnny is at this minute?”
Jamesie drew back his sleeve but had difficulty telling the time in the muted light. “In the Prince. He’s bound to be in the Prince at this time. Unless the darts team are playing away.”
“People we know come and go in our minds whether they are here or in England or alive or dead,” Mary said with a darkness that was as much a part of her as the sweet inward-looking smile. “We’re no more than a puff of wind out on the lake.”
A loud knocking came from the porch with the sound of Bill Evans’s stick on the floor, the heavy brushing of his Wellingtons in the slow walk. “God bless all here,” his glance flitted from face to face until it fastened on the lighted table and stuck. His eyes wolfed the table.
“It’s not often we see you twice in the same day,” Kate said. Margaret left Jamesie to stand close to Mary. The black cat raced from the room.
“I hadn’t much to do above and I battered down to see how you were all getting along with the hay.”
“We have it all safe. You’re too late,” Jamesie said ironically.
“You’ll eat something?”
“Begod I will, Kate, quick,” he said, and when he was seated in the rocking chair with a large plate of sandwiches by his side, he said grandly, “You’re all very welcome to this side of the lake.”
“We are all very glad to be here,” they answered, suppressing their laughter.
“Did ye cut up there yet?” Jamesie teased.
“No.” Bill Evans felt at a disadvantage. “The meadows aren’t ready yet.”
“Anybody who hasn’t his meadows cut this evening is lost.”
“You were always a sight for blowing, Jamesie,” he said.
“That’s right, Bill. Give it to him,” Mary said.
“I’m well able to put him in order. I’ve been watching his capers for years,” he said, and Jamesie responded with a light cheer.
“Bill is going to the town soon,” Ruttledge said.
“Every Thursday. The bus will be coming to the gate,” he boasted.
“Good man, Bill,” Jamesie said agreeably.
“A whiskey, Joe, before I go,” he demanded.
“You’re not used to it, Bill,” Ruttledge said, but poured him a moderate whiskey, adding plenty of water.
He downed it in one swallow. “Another, Joe.”
“No, Bill. It would only get you into trouble,” he said, and walked him to the gate. He had no buckets and turned straight uphill, the stick reaching out in the crab-like, sideways walk.
The night air was sweet with cut grass and meadowsweet and the wild woodbine. A bird moved in some high branch and was still. The clear yellow outlines of the stacked bales were sharp in the ghostly meadow under the big moon and the towering shapes of the trees. Headlights of a passing car from across the lake were caught like little moons in the windows of the porch as it travelled towards Shruhaun. They had all risen to leave when he got back to the house.
“You must be tired. We’ll run you round the lake in the car.”
“No. We’ll walk. We had a powerful evening. Who wouldn’t want to walk on a night the like of that?” Jamesie said.
“The night is perfect but it’s been too long a day. Sit in the car.”
Ruttledge knew not to take the words at face value. They were glad to sit in the car and be driven, Mary and Margaret holding the two dogs in their arms. Jamesie’s head started to droop towards his chest as they drove.