Free Wild Decembers by Edna O’Brien Page A

blink.
    “We’d better settle up,” he said.
    “Settle what! Love,” she said, her voice oversmarmy.
    “For the hay.”
    “Ah, go on with you.”
    “I had to buy that hay myself . . . I had none of my own. I paid dear for it.”
    “You’ll have hay this year. Plenty of it. The fine fields you’ve re-claimed . . . Or stolen.”
    “A deal is a deal,” he said, angry.
    “After what we’ve done for you . . . Buttering your bread on both sides . . . We’re not whores, mister. We’re ladies.”
    “Ladies pay their way.”
    “We can give you an IOU if you want to frame it. . .” and she turned and lifted her rear end to him, muttering, “
Pog mo hón.
”
    “Is that Dutch?”
    “It’s the local Dutch . . . Kiss my arse.”
    “Where’s your purse, missus?”
    At that she began to shout, and Reena wakens, her sleepy green eyes like mashed gooseberries as she is told to sit up and witness Mr. Mick Bugler trying to ravish her sister.
    “Rape . . . Rape.” She keeps repeating it as he opens the door and goes out.
    Standing in the hayshed he whistles to control his temper. The bales were already cut and forked in amongst their existing little pile of hay. She had done it while he slept and had not even bothered to sweep away the scraps of coloured binding twine.
    “Bitch . . . Bitches,” he shouts out, going back to find the door being closed in his face.
    “Give me my trousers.” He hammers on the door, only to find that they have put music on to drown out his voice.
    As he drove away, Rita stood in the yard, barefooted, a grey blanket over her, like some venging effigy carved out of a living clay.
    “You’ll be back . . . You’ll be back,” she kept shouting.
    The morning had a jubilance, the dew melting and lifting off the hedges like a torn gauze, small birds no bigger than thimbles daft and doughty, chirping their first uneven notes, and a fruit tree in flower, the soft pink tassels tapering back and forth, forth and back, and not a stitch on his lower quarters. He drove fast to avoid the Noonan twins, who would be going to prepare the altar for first Mass, and he was out of the town and up the mountain road congratulating himself when lo, he is ambushed by the Crock, rushing forward with a leaflet in his hand.
    “I cut this out for you. It’s on how to make silage.”
    “Creep . . . Creep.”
    Laying the newspaper cutting on his lap, the Crock commiserated: “And the eyes of them were both opened and they knew they were naked and they sewed fig leaves to make themselves aprons.”
    His cackling laugh reached a bed of hot young nettles and an oak tree, where a colony of brown birds had assembled, some grooming themselves, others piping their lusts out joyously.

 
     
     
     
    T HE ANIMALS SLIPPED and slithered over the wet cobbles in the makeshift pen where Boscoe, the part-time helper, and Joseph had driven them. As each one was pushed forward for its injection, Joseph caught the face and wedged it between the rungs of the gate, then held it down for the vet to inject twice. Sinead, the assistant, wrote down the particulars of each animal, the tag number, the age, the breed, the sex, and the measurement of the injection. Some jumped at the prod, others took it differently, whisking their tails violently on their clotted rumps, and some relieved themselves repeatedly. Goldie tried in vain to climb over the pen, which had been constructed from old bits of wooden creel and cart ends.
    “That’s a lovely dog,” the vet said.
    “She’s a no-good dog,” Joseph said, and swiped at her.
    As the Crock came up the road, his singing preceding him, Sinead said he had some bit of news to report. They had met him down in the village when they stopped to get petrol.
    “He has something juicy.”
    “What?”
    “He’ll tell you.”
    “The Shepherd spent the night with the sisters.” The Crock shouted it as he came around the corner of the entrance wall.
    “How do you