On the windowsill stand a bunch of opened letters and a checkbook. Destiny has given her daughter two things — an agile mind, and a gift, or a curse, for giving away money. It has been that way for years: as a child on the Malone Road she would come home shoeless. Even now, there is always a check being dropped in an envelope. Red Cross. Oxfam. Shaftesbury Children’s Home.
— What in the world is Amnesty International?
— Just another bunch of Canadians, Mother.
— Does the postman not hate you?
— I’m on their watch list.
Lottie holds the bundle of letters in the air, flicks through them as if they were a moving cartoon: pound notes disappearing over the hill.
— Everything I know I learned from you, Mum.
Not a lie. She was, in her day, hardly a penny-pincher. Still, always a mother. Impossible to escape. She wraps an elastic band around the checkbook, tries to hide it behind the flowerpot.
They weave the hours away, moving fluidly around one another, swapping spoons, handing off bowls, borrowing dishtowels from one another’s shoulders. The state of the farm. The pulse of the village. The business Hannah has made with the purebred dogs.
Hannah’s hands have aged a little. Thirty-eight years old now, half her life a mother herself. A tilework to her skin. A braid of veins at the base of her wrist. Such a curious thing, to watch your daughter grow older. That odd inheritance.
— Tomas behaving himself up there, is he, then?
— Playing tennis every Wednesday.
— Good on him.
A wistful note in her daughter’s voice: Not driving you mad with that new stereo of his, is he?
— Sure the two of us are deaf anyway.
Hannah turns and takes the bread from the stove. With bare hands. A scorch at her fingertips. She steps to the kitchen sink, runs cold water on the burn.
— I was thinking, Mum. You know. Maybe you’d have a word with him? Maybe he’d go out, just this once? Lawrence has been talking about him all week long.
— You’re his mother.
— Aye. He listens to you but.
— He could maybe row out the decoys.
— He could, that.
Through the window, along the shore, she spies Ambrose wandering under the brown of his hat. He has always loved the lake. It stretches beyond him, a wide plash of gray. He will come in shortly, she knows, rubbing his hands together, looking for the warmth of a fire, a small brandy and a newspaper, the ordinary pleasures of an early September.
THE HUNTERS RETURN at lunchtime, trudging along the laneway, shotguns swinging. She doesn’t know many of them. Friends of Lawrence. A lawyer, a councilman, an artisan boatmaker.
— Where’s Tomas? says Lawrence.
— Beyond in his room.
Lawrence wears his shirt buttoned high. He is big-boned underneath it. He holds, by the neck, two goldeneyes. He drops the birds on the table, turns away, fills his pipe with tobacco, tamps it on the heel of his hand.
— He’ll be on then for tomorrow?
— Ach, leave him be, says Hannah.
— Do him the world of good.
— Lawrence. Please.
He shrugs off his cardigan and hangs it by the edge of the fire, mutters. A big man, a small voice. He livens when he joins his friends in the living room.
By late afternoon Lottie and Hannah have their hands in the warm guts of a cooked bird. Hannah pulls her fingers expertly along the bottom of the body and the flesh separates in her fingers. She spreads the meat out on a platter, with some slices of apple and a berry garnish. An extravagant gesture of color.
The men sit at the table, eating, all except Tomas. Jackets draped over the backs of their chairs. Hats perched on the windowsill. A loud laughter rolling amongst them. An ease to the day. A slow banter. A sliding away.
SHE IS GLAD to see Tomas emerge from his room, darkdown, when the guests have left. He wears an old fisherman’s sweater many sizes too big, belonging once to Ambrose. He wanders around, an air of sleep still about him. Nods to Lawrence across the room. A gulf between them, stepfather and son. Always a layer of cloud.
He rows out in the evening, after dinner, to check his star charts. In his long wading boots. Binoculars at his neck. They can see him operate on the lake, a small pinpoint of red flashlight drifting along the shore. There is a low moon, a small rip of wind across the lough.
When he hits the oar against the water, the light jumps and swerves and shifts, then settles down once more.
EARLY ON SATURDAY morning she wakes Ambrose for the hunt. The night is pitch-black outside. The cold stuns her cheekbones. She has prepared his clothes already. A warm undershirt and long johns. A heavy tweed jacket. Two pairs of socks. Folded on the small wooden chair. His toothbrush laid out, but no razor. It is the one day of the year when Ambrose does not shave early.
A sweep of headlights over the ceiling. The other guests coming down the laneway. Three, four, five of them this morning. The squelch of their tires in the mud. Lawrence’s voice already among them. A whisper and a shushing of the dogs. The drift of cigarette smoke from outside.
In the kitchen she and Hannah ready breakfast: just toast and tea, no time for a fry. The men are dark-eyed, gruff, weary. They glance out the window at the early dark. Fixing batteries in their torches. Checking cartridges. Tightening their laces.
His silhouette shows sudden in the hallway. She is quite sure, at first, that Tomas has been up all night. It has happened before. He has often spent the whole evening out on the water with his star charts. He slouches his way through the kitchen, nods to the men at the table, sits down next to Ambrose. The ritual acknowledgments. They eat breakfast together and then Tomas rises with Lawrence — not a word between them — and together they go to the pantry where the bolted silver safe is kept.
Lottie watches as the bare bulb throws a globe of light down upon them. Lawrence spins the dial on the safe, reaches in, turns to Tomas. She watches her grandson hold the unfamiliar weight in his hand. Bits and pieces of the language floating towards her: twelve-gauge, five-shot, 36-gram load.
— You’ll be going out then? says Hannah.
An astonishing calm in Hannah’s voice, but her body betrays her: the shoulders tight, her neck cords shining, her eyes a premonition of ill fate. She flicks a look at Lawrence. He shrugs, taps at the pipe in his breast pocket, as if that is the thing that will monitor everything.
— Thought I’d give it a go, says Tomas.
— Better have your woolies on.
The kitchen awhirl now. The rumor of dawn. The guests step outside. Tomas leans down to tighten his hiking boots. Hannah takes Lawrence by the collar, whispers something urgent in his ear. Lottie, too, takes Ambrose aside, beseeches him to look after the boy.
— We’ll be back by noon.
She is still in her dressing gown as she watches them go. A regiment. The marks of their bootprints in the mud. The dogs loping patiently behind them. They disappear around the red gatepost and the sky rises up as they grow small.
THE MORNING SOUNDS loud with the retort of the guns. Double blasts. Each one a sharp kick inside her. Lottie finds herself entirely on edge. Just to walk around the kitchen needs the utmost control. She would love to wipe her hands clean of flour and step out the half-door, hurry along the laneway, down to the lakeshore, check on them, watch them, bring them sandwiches, milk, a flask. Her eyes can find no resting place. With each shot she looks out the window. A blankness of gray.
Columns of rain pour distantly over the lake. The branches of the trees knit the wind. Surely, now, the storm will bring them home. She turns to the radio for the ease of noise. Bombs doing what bombs will. She searches the dial and settles on a classical station. On the hour mark even that, too, is interrupted. An incendiary device in Newry. Three dead, twelve wounded. No warning.