Free By the Lake by John McGahern Page B

him.”
    “Who will I say …?” the girl enquired politely.
    “Tell him the man who wore the ragged jacket called. Once he hears that he’ll know. ‘For none can tell the man who wore the ragged jacket.’ ”
    “The man who wore the ragged jacket,” she repeated, puzzled and amused at his confidence and theatricality.
    “ ‘And when all is said and done, who can tell the man who wore the ragged jacket?’ ” he repeated. The men who had been to the football match shouted out to them. Ruttledge waved. Patrick Ryan stood at the door and shouted, “Up us all! Up Ceannabo!”
    “ ‘May we never die and down with the begrudgers,’ ” they chorused back and pounded their glasses on the table. One man cheered.
    “God, you could have a great evening with that crowd,” Patrick Ryan said as they got into the car. “I can tell you something for nothing, lad. Only for football and the Mass on Sunday and the
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on Wednesday, people would never get out of their frigging houses. They’d be marooned.”
    They drove out of town and were soon back in the maze of small roads. Except for the narrow strip of sky above the bending whitethorns they could have been travelling through a green wilderness.
    “I’ll be round tomorrow. We’ll finish that shed,” Patrick Ryan said as they drove slowly, Ruttledge blowing the horn loudly at every blind turn of the road.
    “There’s no hurry.”
    “You were anxious enough to get building done once,” Patrick Ryan said.
    “That was a long time ago.”
    “You’ve got on a sight since you first came round the place, lad.”
    “We managed. Most people get by in one way or another.”
    “Some get on a sight better than others. What do you put that down to—luck? Or having something behind you?”
    “They all help,” Ruttledge said.
    “Do you miss not having children?” Patrick Ryan asked aggressively as if sensing the evasion.
    “No. You can’t miss what you never had. It’s not as if there aren’t enough people in the world.”
    “Was she too old when you started?”
    “No, Patrick. She wasn’t too old,” Ruttledge said quietly but with an edge of steel. “Where do you want to be left? Or do you want to come back to the house?”
    “Drop me in the village,” Patrick Ryan said.
    There was nothing stirring in the small village. A few cars stood outside the two bars. A boy was leaning over the little bridge, looking down into the shallow river, and he lifted his head as the car drew up beside the green telephone box. The priest’s cows were grazing with their calves in the rich fields around the roofless abbey.
    “You’ll see me in the morning,” Patrick Ryan said as he closed the car door, and went jauntily towards the Abbey Bar.
    At the house Ruttledge called to Kate that he was back, changed quickly into old clothes, remembering that he had completely forgotten to look at the Shorthorn.
    The cattle had left the ridged fields by the shore, their shapes still visible on the short grass. Two fields away he found them grazing greedily. At a glance he saw the old red Shorthorn was missing. Anxiously, he went in among the cattle. She wasn’t there; neither was she in any of the adjacent fields. She was their last surviving animal of the stock they had first bought. It would be hard to lose her now through carelessness.
    He searched the obvious places quickly. He said to himself as he grew anxious that it was useless to panic or rush. Nothing could be done now but to search the land methodically, field by field. Having searched every field, he found her finally in a corner of the young spruce plantation that had been set as a shelterbelt above the lake. At her back was a ditch covered with ferns and briars and tall foxgloves. She was lying on her side when he parted the branches. She tried to struggle to her feet but recognizing him fell back with a low, plaintive moan for help. “My poor old girl,” he spoke his relief at finding her. She repeated the