Selected Stories

Eoghan drove carelessly to the hayfield. There never was other traffic on these byroads, never a lost cyclist or someone who had walked out from Mountmoy. A wandering sheep was always one of their own. But there wasn’t a sheep today, only now and again a rabbit scuttling to safety.

You could sleep driving here, Eoghan used to say and once, in the heat of an afternoon, had dropped off at the turn to Ana Woods. He’d woken up before the old Austin he had then hit a tree. Not that it would have mattered much if he hadn’t, he always added when he told the story: all the cars he had ever owned were past their best, purchased from Chappie Keogh, who had the wrecking yard at Maire. Easygoing, good-hearted, seeming to be slow but actually rather clever, Eoghan had grown from being a sensitive child into a big, red-haired man, different in appearance from the others of his family, all of whom were noticeably thin. He was content to take second place to Tom. They had all their lives been friends, their friendship knitted closer in each succeeding span of years.

He drove in to where earlier he’d been turning the hay. He finished it within an hour, not hurrying because he never did. Then he went on, to Brea Maguire’s at the cross, where he drank and talked to the men who came there every evening. It would be a bad mistake, disastrous even, to go on doing nothing about Olivehill. They had wanted her to understand that, and hoped she did.

Nine days later James woke up one morning feeling different, and had difficulty on the stairs. His left leg was dragging a bit, a most uncomfortable business, and at breakfast he discovered that his left arm was shaky too. Reaching out was limited; and he couldn’t lift things as easily as he used to. ‘A little stroke,’ Dr Gorevan said when he came.

‘Should he be in his bed?’ Mollie asked, and James said he’d no intention of taking to his bed so Dr Gorevan prescribed instead a walking-stick. When she heard, Loretta came over with a sponge cake.

James died. Not then, but in the winter and of pneumonia. There had not been another stroke and he was less incapacitated than he had been at first from the one he’d had. A fire was kept going in his bedroom, and the family came often, one by one, to talk to him. But he was tired and, two days after his eightieth birthday, when the moment came he was glad to go. It was a good death: he called it that himself.

In the house to which Mollie had come when she was a girl of nineteen, where there’d been servants and where later her children were born, there was only Kitty Broderick now, and Kealy was the last of the outside men. In the bleak dining-room Mollie and Eoghan sat at either end of the long mahogany table and Kitty Broderick brought them the meals she cooked. Everywhere there was the quiet that comes after death, seeming to Mollie to keep at bay what had been withheld from James. But one evening after supper, when the days had already lengthened and there was an empty hour or so, Eoghan said: ‘Come and I’ll show you.’

She went, not immediately knowing what for; had she known she would have demurred. Well, anyone would, she thought, passing from field to field.

‘You can’t do this, Eoghan,’ she protested, having been silent, only listening.

‘We wouldn’t if there was another way.’

‘But Ana Woods, Eoghan!’

They could go on selling timber piecemeal, as had been done in the past, another half-acre gone and replanted every so often, but that hadn’t ever been a solution, and wasn’t a way now in which the family could recover itself. It would tide the family over, but tiding-over wasn’t what was needed. The woods were part of the whole and the whole had to be put right. Doing so on the scale that was necessary meant that the machinery for such an undertaking could be hired at more favourable rates. With more timber to offer it would fetch what it should, not dribs and drabs that added up to nothing much. And the well-cleared land could be put to profitable use. Eoghan explained all that.

‘The Bluebell Walk, though, Eoghan! The beeches, the maples!’

‘I know. I know.’

They went back through the yards and sat down in the kitchen. The setters, who had accompanied them in the fields and were not allowed in the kitchen regions, ambled off into another part of the house.

‘For a long time,’ Eoghan said, ‘there’s been waste. Papa knew that too.’

‘He did his best.’

‘He did.’