His grip on the trigger tightened and he shuffled slightly on the hay where he had sat since midnight. Sure enough, the noise he had heard didn’t end with the hedge crossing. It was now making its way through the wet part of the bottom field and boots could be clearly heard slugging through the mud, phut, phut, phut.
“Sure didn’t Red Pat lose all his electric fences and two good drills, not to mention his old Turnip Mangle was carried clean out of the yard,” Myles O’Reilly said, hands folded tight under his arms, thumbs sticking up and a rolled-up copy of the Sunday Independent in his jacket pocket.
“Pat Malone below at the forge lost three ewes. And them in lamb,” Larkin the Postman added.
“Sure didn’t Sean O’Meara say he seen lads driving round in a white van and reckons its them travellers from within in town that’s at it,” Old Naughton said, lighting his pipe through a leathery cupped hand.
He thought about using the phone. No. No snotty-nosed Guards were going to get politically correct with this solution. This is the way it’s going to end. He remembered how three years earlier he had had the young local guard around and explained the situation to him.
“Garda John Duffy,” he said, hand out, having knocked at the unused front door of the house.
“Call me John,” he added over a cup of tea.
I’ll tell ya what,” James told the guard, “the last person to use that front door was me Father. An he was within in a pine box!”
James remembered how he had never met a man with such clean nails and soft handshake. How he dipped his biscuit into his cup and sat cross legged. How he spoke with some sort of accent that wasn’t from anywhere.
“At least he can kick a ball,” Red Pat had said after the charity match below at the cross.
“He can that,” the regulars sang back.
James remembered how the guard had said that he was to call them to deal with any situation where he thought he had trespassers and that he mustn’t take the law into his own hands. He remembered thinking how little this young fella knew about the ways of the world and how he was probably from a town family, reared in some warm semi-detached estate with a soccer pitch, swimming club and the dinner in the evening.
“And sure what would a towny fecker like him know about the ways of the country,” they laughed up at the bar in Mulligan’s. “Sure he probably never spent a day stackin turf or savin hay.”
His mind raced. All the horror stories that he heard outside mass came flying through him like arrows, each one sharper than the last, cutting as they passed. Whoosh, whoosh, whoosh.
The engraved lock plate and walnut stock caressed his palms as the moon came out from behind a night cloud. The spidery shadows along the lane moved on the ground and a timid breeze camouflaged small sounds. Then a loud clack, as rust barbed wire broke free from a knotted fence post. It was getting nearer alright.
He looked slowly around the darkness where he sat and could just make out the shape of the red Raleigh Twenty that his sister Brenda had fallen from and broken her wrist that summer before their Father died. He spied the old kitchen table with the leg cracked and mended by a piece of old pine just nailed to the inside of it. The same table where his Mother had sewn together the belly of their little brown mongrel, Susie, after the milk lorry hit her one morning. He could still see the check table cloth with the red stain on it and his Father’s best razor lying full of thick brown dog hair. An old basin that once stood proud in his Grandmother’s kitchen had stagnant water in it from the twins filling it with tadpoles during the summer months when Davy was home from London.
The moon disappeared.
Then a movement across the yard. Definite. Strong and sure, with little care for gentleness. He stepped up from the hay and followed the double barrels out through the shed door. Across the yard stood a hulking mass of shadow against the concrete.
“I thought I got rid of ye Bastards last night,” James called, in the blueness of the night light.
“I thought a cartridge in the back would be enough to keep ye off me land,” he added.
The mass of flesh was loping toward him, bubbling from its mouth. The moon jumped out and lit the scene and he could see that it was in fact the traveller that he had shot the previous night and dumped in the ditch at the bottom field. He was badly damaged and dirty and he had trouble moving.
“What in the name of Jesus?” James uttered.
The broken jaw of the fleshy mass moved and James felt the blood leaving his head while his heart pounded to get out of his chest.
“I’ll not harm you Boss,” the thing gurgled.
“I’ll not take only a few minutes of yer time.”
The moon retreated again and James thought the darkness would end him.
“At least I tried, Daddy, at least I tried,” he said to himself breathlessly.
“Bring me into yer home, Sir, and I’ll say me piece and lave ya to yerself,” the thing said, a foot dragging.
James sat at the kitchen table and downed the Jameson in one shot. At the other end sat a large man with red hair and alabaster skin, a flock a freckles around his nose. His hair was matted and had twigs and grass entwined in it and his clothes were covered in a mud blood mix. He had a huge wound to his left side and parts of him hung from it like rotting fruit in a good year, wasp food.
“Now Sir. Last night I came here from inside in the town with the intention of looking around to see if there was anything that I could carry off with me. I was looking for small stuff, drills and sanders and the like. I know that men like yourself have this sort of stuff hanging around in sheds and that it’s easy pickins.”
James frowned and wondered if this was some sort of breakdown he was having. How could this flesh be talking to him? He had seen with his own eyes that he had fatally wounded the giant and had dumped him over the wall into the drain. His back was still sore from the work he had put in trying to lift and push the mass over that wall while trying to keep his shotgun close. He had checked the corpse to make sure it was without life. Not a breath came out of the thing he had left in the field.
“So,” the thing continued, “when I came in here last night you merely saw me as someone who was after your stuff. The stuff that you gained through hard work and caution. Stuff that was rightfully yours and that you had the right to defend. I was on your land and you felt that you had the right to protect it to the point of taking my life. We both knew the facts and both took our chances last night.”
The thing at the other end of the kitchen table reached down and slowly picked up the small glass of whiskey. It placed it to its lips and started to try to drink. A terrible noise filled the quiet kitchen as it drank.
Both men went silent.
James remembered his Father’s last words inside in St. Vincent’s that day so long ago, when adulthood was thrust upon him, a mere schoolboy on the Friday but head of the house by Sunday. When his sisters and Mother wept strong tears and he sat silent and pale. When his old Church learning left him and made a void. A void to be filled with work and football and dinner and whatever chat was going around the mart. When the privileges of being the eldest boy came home to roost.
“Anyway, you found me and blew a hole in my chest with that lovely old shotgun of yours and I fell in your laneway. You dumped what remained of me over the small wall and went off to bed. I suppose that my part in all this should have ended there. It didn’t though, and I found meself sort of awake lying in the ditch. I lay there not really feeling alive, dead but awake. After a while I discovered that I could move a bit and slowly I got the power to lift meself out of the drain and up here.”
“But. But why? Why me?” James blurted, avoiding the dead eyes.
“Now Boss. You know the answer to that. If you really try you can work that one out.”
“So after I got out of the drain, I said to mesel, I’ll go up there and chat yer man and see if we can’t work something out before I head off. Maybe have some sort of talk about what happened to see if we would do something different the next time.”
James’ mind struggled to engage with the sounds and visual information he was receiving. He recalled his cousin Martin acting odd and saying stuff about “the others” when he was in his teens. No one paid much heed until poor old Martin started standing up in Mass and blurting out stuff about living a lie, and, all the phoney’s that were sat there in the church with their Sunday suits and big hats and shiny cars. Poor Uncle Andy had to do something then, much to Aunt Maggie’s scorn.
The mass at the end of the table took in a deep and horrendous gurgling breath before continuing.
“Now I have five childer below on the site and they have no Daddy no more.”
“You still have your drills and all, and they have nothing.”
“That’s not really a fair deal now is it?” the traveller said.
“No. I suppose it’s not,” James replied, pouring more whiskey.
“I don’t have any kids meself but me brother has three that he brings over here every summer for a couple of weeks and Lord knows I do look forward to that bit o life around the place. The only thing that does be breathing around here the rest of the time is them twelve bullocks up there in that byre.”
“What can I do about this?” James asked of his guest, now whiskey calm.
“Well, Sir, I want you to let people know the stupid way you think about things. The stupid way of protecting something that is really worthless, by taking something that is, well, priceless. I want you to tell your story to as many people as possible. Let them all know about me and what a poor price you placed on my life and the happiness and future of my children. Tell them that you lay awake at night thinking, and that if you were born into the world that I was born into, then you’d probably be doing exactly the same thing as me. Therefore you and me are the same really, bar the chance of birth. Tell them that.”
“And if the Law says you did no wrong, then you look at your heart and tell the real truth of the matter. Tell them that.”
“Then, and only then, will we be evens.”
