Free In Too Deep by Billy O'Callaghan

tedium of rural village ways, of milking her father’s cows and feeding the hens, of helping her mother around the house with the endless chores of cooking and cleaning, of filling the little spare time she could find with sewing and some light reading before the hour grew too late and her eyes grew sore and weary from the stammering of the candle’s flame as it wrestled to hold its shape against the dozen whistling draughts.
    He had bounded into Ballinascarty as part of the Post & Telegraph Company crew, Paudie O’Reilly, ten years her senior, the flesh of his face burnt russet from exposure to a salt-riven sea breeze and the hottest summer anyone could ever recall. The small, close set of his eyes surveyed everything with a calm that veered in and out of scorn. At the céili that first Friday night in September he had been brazen in his approach, elbowing his way through the idling packs of local youths and with the beckoning gesture of an open hand luring her out onto the floor. Trembling with excitement and anticipation, she imagined grace in his lumbering swagger, and she fought against swooning as he danced her to a frenzy, his breath reeking of porter, his strong hands spinning her around until she was light-headed and swept off her feet. He leaned in close again and again so that there was nothing to breathe but his own stale air, and his voice rumbled through the drone of a fiddled reel, telling her she was the most beautiful creature that he had ever seen. Like a flower in bloom, he said, his life’s single attempt at poetry. She knew that she wasn’t beautiful, because the small rust-speckled square of her father’s shaving mirror had told a plain, uncompromisingly truthful story, but that night, dressed in her best skirt and her sister’s blue cardigan, and spun until she was dizzy with happiness, she held onto his words and savoured them.
    When the dancing was done, he stood to his fullest height and smiled in an open-mouthed way that revealed small grey teeth. His skin gleamed with sweat and even the heavy slathering of brilliantine had not been enough to control the wild flay of his jet-black hair. As soon as they had left the brightly lit hall behind, he wove his fingers into hers, and she felt as small and vulnerable as a bird. They kept a slow pace in the darkness, and he talked in a low grumble that seemed to rise up from the ground, a barely controlled roar that throbbed and ached to be let loose, about his own village, Douglas, and what a grand place it was. He told her about his job with the Post & Telegraph and how it had taken him all over Munster, but that in all his travels he had never yet seen a woman as fine as her. She, who had always been considered a girl, was glad of the night’s help in concealing her blushes. They walked slowly, leaning into the hill, and at the front gate there was an awkward moment when he suddenly plunged his face toward hers. A spout of panic threatened to overtake her and she was certain that she’d smother or that she’d scream out in discomfort from beneath the forceful crush of his chin and cheekbones, but she fought hard against the negatives, closed her eyes and told herself how lovely this was, her first kiss, her first romance, and with the strongest man that she had ever known.
    A week or so later, he was gone, taken off in some other direction by the demands of his job, but from time to time over the next six months or so he’d arrive unannounced, armed with a bag of boiled sweets or with a small bunch of posies or daffodils wilting in his clenched fist, and he’d say just the right things to feed her addiction. The time that spun between his visits helped their relationship, allowing her to endlessly reconstruct their moments together until they meshed perfectly with her fantasy. And then, early in the new year, he produced a ring, an old sliver of tarnished gold that had belonged, he said, to his grandmother.