Selected Stories

Hartigan continued to come down regularly and a couple of times his sister accompanied him, sitting in the kitchen while he saw to any heavy work in the yard. ‘Would Mena have room for you?’ she enquired on one of these occasions, appearing to forget that Paulie was due to return when he’d worked out his notice. Miss Hartigan always brought sultana bread when she came and they had it with butter on it. ‘I only mentioned Mena,’ she said, ‘in case Paulie wouldn’t be keen to come back. I was thinking he maybe wouldn’t.’

‘Why’s that, Miss Hartigan?’

‘It’s bachelors that’s in the hills now. Like himself,’ Miss Hartigan added, jerking her bony head in the direction of the yard, where her brother was up on a ladder, fixing a gutter support.

‘Paulie’s not married either, though.’

‘That’s what I’m saying to you. What I’m saying is would he want to stop that way?’

Miss Hartigan’s features were enriched by a keenness to say more, to inform and explain, to dispel the bewilderment she had caused. She did so after a pause, politely reaching for a slice of sultana bread. It might not have been noticed that these days the bachelors of the hills found it difficult to attract a wife to the modest farms they inherited.

‘Excuse me for mentioning it,’ Miss Hartigan apologized before she left.

It was true, and it had been noticed and often remarked upon. Hartigan himself, twenty years ago, was maybe the first of the hill bachelors: by now you could count them – lone men, some of them kept company by a mother or a sister – on the slopes of Coumpeebra, on Slievenacoush, on Knockrea, on Luirc, on Clydagh.

She didn’t remember putting all that from her mind when Paulie had said he would come back, but perhaps she had. She tried not to think about it, comforting herself that what had been said, and the tone of Miss Hartigan’s voice, had more to do with Miss Hartigan and her brother than with the future in a neighbouring farmhouse. Nor did it necessarily need to be that what had already happened would continue to happen. The Hartigans’ stretch of land was worse by a long way than the land lower down on the hill; no better than the side of Slievenacoush, or Clydagh or Coumpeebra. You did the best you could, you hoped for warm summers. Paulie was a good-looking, decent boy; there was no reason at all why he wouldn’t bring up a family here as his father had.

‘There’s two suitcases left down with the Caslins,’ he said when he walked in one Saturday afternoon. ‘When I get the car started I’ll go down for them.’

They didn’t embrace; there’d never been much of that in the family. He sat down and she made tea and put the pan on. He told her about the journey, how a woman had been singing on the first of the two buses, how he’d fallen asleep on the second. He was serious the way he told things, his expression intent, sometimes not smiling much. He’d always been like that.

‘Hartigan started the car a while back,’ she said, ‘to make sure it was in form.’

‘And it was? All right?’

‘Oh, it was, it was.’

‘I’ll take a look at it later.’

He settled in easily, and she realized as he did so that she had never known him well. He had been lost to her in the family, his shadowy place in it influenced by his father’s lack of interest in him. She had never protested about that, only occasionally whispering a surreptitious word or two of comfort. It was fitting in a way that a twist of fate had made him his father’s inheritor.

As if he had never been away, he went about his daily tasks knowledge-ably and efficiently. He had forgotten nothing – about the winter feed for the heifers, about the work around the yard or where the fences might give way on the hills or how often to go up there after the sheep, about keeping the tractor right. It seemed, which she had not suspected before, that while his presence was so often overlooked he had watched his father at work more conscientiously than his brothers had. ‘He’d be proud of you these days,’ she said once, but Paulie did not acknowledge that and she resisted making the remark again. The big field, which had been his father’s pride, became his. There was another strip to the south of it that could be cleared and reclaimed, he said, and he took her out to show her where he would run the new wall. They stood in the sunshine on a warm June morning while he pointed and talked about it, the two sheepdogs obedient by him. He was as good with them as his father ever had been.