Patrick is away on a hack now, you say. He’ll soon best Nell with her eight hundred pounds so. That judge hadn’t a clue from Adam. But if my daughter-in-law goes on the way she’s flying now, and when Maureen becomes a schoolteacher …
You’re right about that, youngfella! Patrick was robbed … What did he say? What’s that Blotchy Brian said? That Patrick would be better off, as he couldn’t pay his rent, he’d be better off giving a mortgage to someone else on a handful of land, on his handful of a wife, and take off to England to get some work … To call a fine holding like that a handful of land, the scum bucket! … “But it’s just as well that that old bat of a mother of his isn’t around to give him bad advice,” he said. The scum bag! The scum bag! The scum …
Where have you gone, youngfella? Where are you? … They’ve taken you away from me …
3.
You don’t know, my good man, why the land in Connemara is so rough and barren …
— Patience, Coley! Patience. The time of the Ice Age …
— Ara, put a sock in it! The time of the Ice Age, for God’s sake! Nothing to do with it, it was the Curse of Cromwell. That time God banished the Devil down to hell, he nearly didn’t succeed. He tumbled from heaven down here. Himself and Michael the Archangel spent a whole summer wrestling it out. They tore the guts out of the land from the bottom up …
— You’re right there Coley. Caitriona showed me the mark of his hoof up there on Nell’s land …
— Shut your trap, you nasty grabber! …
— You’re insulting the faith. You’re a heretic …
— I’ve no idea how things would have ended up after their brawl, only the Devil’s shoes started to give way. Cromwell had made them. He was a cobbler over in London. His shoes fell off along the shoreline. One shoe broke into two pieces. They’re the three Aran islands out there since. But as the Fallen Angel was up the creek without his shoes, he forced Michael to retreat all the way to Skellig Michael. That’s an island there facing Carna. He roared and screamed at Cromwell to come and mend his shoes. I’ve no idea how things would have ended up after the struggle if his shoes had been mended …
Cromwell hightailed it to Connacht. The Irish hightailed it after him — not surprisingly — as they were always fighting against the Devil …
Michael confronted them, still running away from the Devil, five miles from Oughterard in a place they call Lawbawn’s Hole … “Stand, you knave,” he said, “and we’ll give it to you straight in the balls.” That’s the spot where he was banished to hell, at Sulpher Lake. That’s where the Sulpher River rises to flow through Oughterard. Sulpher is the correct name for the Devil in Old Irish, and Sulphera is his wife’s name …
With all the messing, didn’t Cromwell escape their clutches and took off to Aran, and he’s been there ever since. It was a holy place until then …
— But Coley, Coley, let me speak. I’m a writer …
— … Go and get stuffed, yourself and your Yellow Stars! …
— The way it is, as you say yourself, the very best sods were stolen from us …
— Who are you to talk about stealing, Tim Top of the Road, when you’d rob the egg from the stork, and the stork after that? I was cursed that my bog was right next to yours and I didn’t have a patch of land to dry my turf on except that bit right next to yours. You’d cosy your own cart or donkey up against your own rick, but you’d fill your own load from mine. Do you remember the morning I caught you at it. It was just at daybreak. I told you the night before that I was going to the market with some pigs. You said you were going to the market also …
And the day I caught your wife. I saw her heading off to the bog in the cold light of day. I knew there’d be nobody up there. They’d all be down at the shore at full tide. I was going to go there too, but I knew by the look of your one that she was up to no good, off for a bit of stealing …
I crawled up on my belly down around the back of Drum, then I shot up and saw her tightening the rope over the top of the load …
“However much the fox escapes, he’ll be caught in the end,” I said …
“I’ll get the law after you,” she said. “You have no business sneaking up on a woman on her own in a lonely place like this. I’ll swear it black and blue. You’ll be deported …”
— And you talking about stealing, Tim Top of the Road, you’d steal the honey from the hive. Selling every clump of your own turf. Not a bit of yours taken in since Hallowe’en, and yet a blazing fire in the kitchen, in the parlour, upstairs …
I was in visiting you one night. I recognised the turf I had cut in the bog myself the day before that.
“The way it is, as you say, there’s neither heart nor heat in any of that turf,” you said. “It should be a lot better … The very best sods were stolen from us …”
— And you talking about stealing, and you’d whip the sheet from a corpse. You stole the wrack that I had slaved for over from the Island.
“If we can’t pile this stuff on the bank either on our backs or with the horse,” I said to the wife, “I’d better put some string around the end of it, so we’ll know it’s ours. It’d be no bother for that shower at the top of the road to swipe it from the shore in the morning.”
“You’re not saying that they’d go as far as to rob the wrack,” the wife said.
“God grant you sense, woman,” I said. “If it was spread out there on your own ground, they’d swipe it, not to mention anything else.”
… The following morning I was coming down from the houses, and I bumped into your daughter at Glen Dyne, with a load of seaweed astride the donkey.
— Oh, that fast one my eldest is hanging around with.
— I recognised some of my own wrack immediately, even though some of the string had been removed from the end.
“You got that in Cala Colum,” I said.
“In Cala Lawr,” she said.
“No way,” I said, “you got it in Cala Colum. Seaweed never comes in to Cala Lawr from the Island with a south wind and a full tide. That’s my wrack. If you have any decency at all you’ll unload it and leave it to me …”
“I’ll get the law after you,” she said, “assaulting me on my own in a lonely place like this. I’ll swear it black and blue. You’ll be deported …”
— You stole my hammer. I spotted it when you were working on the back of the house …
— You stole my sickle …
— You stole the rope I left outside …
— You stole the thatching stick that I left stuck out in the barn after two rough days in Kill Unurba. I recognised my own two notches on every stick …
— If the truth be told, a fistful of my periwinkles were stolen too. I left them in a bag up at the top of the road.
“Come here ’til I tell you,” I said to the youngfella, “if we collect as much as this every week from now ’til next November, we’ll nearly have enough for a colt.”
There were seven big lumps of bags there. The next morning I went down to the periwinkle man. He looked at them. “This bag here is a couple of stone short,” he said.