Mart shows up halfway through the morning, smiling up at Cal on the doorstep like he comes over every day. “Come on in,” Cal says. “Outa the heat.”
If Mart’s surprised, he doesn’t show it. “And why not, sure,” he says, knocking the dirt off his boots. His face and arms are burned a rough red-brown; under the sleeves of his green polo shirt, edges of white show where the sunburn stops. He rolls up his straw hat and stuffs it in a pocket.
“The mansion’s looking well,” he observes, glancing around. “That lamp adds a touch of style. Was that Lena?”
“Can I get you some coffee?” Cal asks. “Tea?” He’s been here long enough to know that tea is appropriate regardless of the weather.
“Ah, no. I’m grand.”
Cal has also been here long enough that he knows better than to take this as a refusal. “I was gonna make some anyway,” he says. “You might as well join me.”
“Go on, then; I can’t let a man drink alone. I’ll have a cuppa tea.”
Cal switches on the electric kettle and finds mugs. “Another hot one,” he says.
“If this keeps up,” Mart says, taking a chair and arranging himself around his worst joints, “I’ll have to start selling off my flock because I haven’t the grass to feed them. And come spring, the lamb crop’ll be fuckin’ atrocious. Meanwhile, what are them eejits on the telly showing? Pictures of childer ating ice creams.”
“The kids are a lot cuter than you are,” Cal points out.
“True enough,” Mart concedes, with a cackle. “But them telly lads give me the sick all the same. Going on about the climate change as if it’s news, big shocked faces on them. They coulda asked any farmer, any time these last twenty year: the summers aren’t the same as what they were. They turned tricky on us, and they’ve only got trickier. And meanwhile all them fools are lying on the beaches, burning the pasty arses off themselves, like it’s the greatest thing that ever happened to them.”
“What do the old guys reckon? It gonna break soon?”
“Mossie O’Halloran says it’ll be lashing rain by the end of the month, and Tom Pat Malone says it won’t break till September. Sure, how would they have any notion? This weather’s like a dog that’s turned rogue: you wouldn’t know what it’s capable of.”
Cal brings the tea stuff and a packet of chocolate chip cookies over to the table. Mart adds lavish amounts of milk and sugar and stretches out his legs with a luxurious sigh, putting the weather aside and settling in for the main business of the day.
“Will I tell you what never ceases to amaze me about this townland?” he asks. “The level of feckin’ eejitry.”
“This to do with Johnny Reddy?” Cal asks.
“That lad,” Mart informs him, “would bring out the eejit in Einstein. I don’t know how he does it, at all. ’Tis a gift.” He takes his time choosing a cookie, to build up the suspense. “Guess what he’s after picking up in London,” he says. “Go on, guess.”
“A social disease,” Cal says. Johnny doesn’t bring out his best side, either.
“More than likely, but as well as that. Johnny’s after finding himself a Sassenach. Not a bit on the side, now; a man. Some plastic Paddy with a loada cash and a loada rosemantic notions about his granny’s homeland. And Paddy Englishman’s got it in his head that there’s gold all through our fields, just waiting for him to come along and dig it up.”
Cal came up with a large number of possibilities for Johnny’s bright idea, but this wasn’t among them. “What the fuck?” he says.
“That was my first thought, all right,” Mart agrees. “He got the story offa his granny. She was a Feeney. The Feeneys are a terrible lot for getting ideas into their heads.”
“And she figured there was gold around here?”
“More like her granddaddy said his granddaddy said his granddaddy said there was. But Paddy Englishman took it as gospel, and now he wants to pay us for the chance to sniff it out. Or so Johnny says, anyhow.”
Cal’s instinct is to automatically disbelieve in anything that comes out of Johnny Reddy, but he’s aware that even a career bullshitter could accidentally stumble across something that has substance. “You’re the geology expert,” he says. “Any chance it’s true?”
Mart picks a cookie crumb out of a tooth. “That’s the mad part, now,” he says. “I wouldn’t rule it out altogether. There’s been gold found in the mountains up on the border, not too far from here. And the bottom of this mountain, where the two different kinds of rock rub up against each other, that’s the kind of spot where you’d get gold being melted by the friction and pushed up towards the surface, all right. And there’s an aul’ riverbed, sure enough, that coulda brought the gold down through all our land to the river beyond the village, once upon a time. It could be true.”
“Or it could be just the Feeneys and their ideas,” Cal says.
“More than likely,” Mart agrees. “We pointed that out to the bold Johnny, but it didn’t faze him one bit. He’s one step ahead of the likes of you and me, d’you see. He wants us to bunce in three hundred quid each and buy a bitta gold to sprinkle in the river, so Paddy Englishman’ll think it’s popping outa the fields like dandelions, and give us a grand or two each to let him take samples on our land.”
Even after only a few minutes’ acquaintance with Johnny, Cal can’t find it in himself to be surprised. “And then what?” he says. “If there’s no gold in the samples?”
“Francie Gannon inquired about the very same thing,” Mart says. “Great minds think alike, hah? According to Johnny, Paddy Englishman won’t see anything amiss about that at all, at all. He’ll prance off home with his pinch of gold, and we’ll all live happily ever after. I wouldn’t insult Sheila Reddy’s virtue, but I don’t know where that child got her brains from, because she got none from her daddy.”
“So you’re not gonna get involved,” Cal says.
Mart tilts his head noncommittally. “Ah, I didn’t say that, now. I’m having a great aul’ time, so I am. This is the best entertainment that’s come to town in years. It’d almost be worth throwing in the few bob, just to have a front-row seat.”
“Get Netflix,” Cal says. “Cheaper.”
“I’ve got the Netflix. There’s never anything on it, only Liam Neeson battering people with snowplows, and sure he’s only from up the road. What else am I going to spend my life savings on? Silk velvet boxers?”
“You’re gonna give Johnny three hundred bucks?”
“I am in my arse. That flimflam merchant’s not getting his hands on a penny of mine. But I might go in with the other lads to buy the bitta gold. For the crack, like.”
“They’re gonna do it?” Cal asks. This doesn’t jibe with what he knows of Ardnakelty people, or of their views on Reddys. “All of them?”
“I wouldn’t say all of them. Not for definite. They’re wary—specially Senan and Francie. But they haven’t said no. And the more of them that say yes, the more the rest won’t want to miss their chance.”
“Huh,” Cal says.
Mart watches him wryly, over his mug. “You thought they’d have better sense, hah?”
“I didn’t think those guys would put money on Johnny Reddy’s say-so.”
Mart leans back in his chair and takes a pleasurable slurp of his tea. “Like I’m after telling you,” he says, “Johnny’s got a great gift for bringing out the eejitry in people. Sheila was no eejit, sure, till he came sniffing around, and now look at her. But ’tis more than that. What you haveta keep in mind about every man jack in this townland, Sunny Jim, is that he’s the one that stayed put. Some of us wanted to and some didn’t, but once you’ve got the land, you’re going nowhere. ’Tis all you can do to find someone to mind the farm for a week while you head for Tenerife to admire a few bikinis.”