Free Walk the Blue Fields by Claire Keegan Page A

Five twelves are sixty. It will take almost five years but won’t the years pass anyhow? Deegan looks again at the numbers, sighs.
    The boy, who has all this time been lying inside his hayshed, looks out. ‘Is it money, Daddy?’
    â€˜What?’
    â€˜Mammy says you think of nothing else.’
    â€˜Does she now?’
    â€˜Aye. And she says you can sew your
own
arse into your trousers. Why would you sew your arse into your trousers?’
    â€˜You watch your tongue,’ Deegan says but he laughs all the same. The boy, like much else in life, has been a disappointment .He gets up and opens the curtains. The sky looks clear, the moon changeful. The holly this year was red with berries. He predicts a bad year and draws the curtains closed again. On the sideboard lie the girl’s new copybooks, her name written neatly on their covers. Victoria Deegan. The child’s name gives him pride; it is so much like his own. A cold feeling crawls up his back. He tries to think of nothing but instead he thinks of Martha saying, ‘I won’t leave you.’
    With bills, school uniforms and a wife’s unspoken desire to leave, another year begins. Martha’s desire to leave wanes when a flu clouds up her head and returns just as soon as she gets well again. Judge follows the girl everywhere . One night she runs a bath without bolting the door. The retriever gets up on his hind legs, looks over the edge of the tub and sniffs the water. It smells strange but it is warm. Before the girl knows what he’s doing, he’s in beside her.
    In January, Dublin shops advertise their sales. Martha takes the bus to O’Connell Street but she does not go near the shops. She walks past Clery’s, on down across the Liffey and winds up in a D’Olier Street cinema eating boiled sweets, crying while a tragedy concerning an Irish girl who left for America flashes across the screen. She comes back with her eldest boy and sticks of rock, disillusioned with her thoughts of leaving. Where would she go? How would she earn money? She remembers the phrase, ‘better the devil you know’, and becomes humoursome. Deegan puts it down to the fact that she is going through the change of life, and says nothing. He has become more than a little afraid of his wife and, to feel some kind of tenderness , often sits his daughter on his knee.
    â€˜Tutners,’ he calls her. ‘My little Tutners.’
    One Friday evening when he is low, feeling the pinch, Deegan drives down to the neighbour’s house to play forty-five. He thinks it might cheer him up to see the neighbours and play cards but when he gets there he cannot concentrate. After five games he’s lost what he normally doubles in the night, and so he gets up to leave. The neighbours do their best to make him stay but Deegan insists on going, and bids them all goodnight.
    When he is getting into his car, a stranger who holds his cards close to his chest approaches.
    â€˜I understand you have a dog you’d sell.’
    â€˜A dog?’ says Deegan.
    â€˜Aye,’ he says, ‘a gun dog. Do you still have him?’
    â€˜Well, I do.’ Deegan is set back on his heel but he recovers quickly. ‘I bought him last September but I’ve little time for hunting and it’s a shame to see him wasted.’
    Deegan goes on to describe a retriever. He begins to talk easily about pheasants and how his dog can rise them, how the soup off a pheasant tastes finer than anything you can find in a hotel. He talks about the turf basket and how it is never empty since the dog came to the house. As soon as he mentions turf, the man smiles but Deegan does not notice, for he is remembering the girl on her birthday and how she and the retriever now bathe in the same water. But it is too late to back down.
    â€˜How much would you be asking?
    â€˜Fifty pound,’ says Deegan. It is a crazy price – he will be lucky to get the half of it