Selected Stories

He liked the child; he always had. The knowledge that a summer priest had fathered her caused him to like her no less, for the affection was rooted in him. And the child did not change in her attitude to him, but still ran to him at once when she returned from school, with tales of how the nuns had been that day, which one bad-tempered, which one sweet. He listened as he always had, always pausing in his work to throw in a word or two. He continued to tell brief stories of his past experiences on the road: he had traded in potatoes since he was hardly more than a child himself, fifteen when he first assisted his father.

But in the farmhouse Mulreavy became silent. In his morose mood he blamed not just the wife he’d married but her elders too. They had deceived him. And knowing more than he did about these things, they should have foreseen more than they had. The child bore his name. ‘Mrs Mulreavy’ they called his wife. He was a laughing-stock.

‘I don’t remember that man,’ he said when almost a year had passed, a September morning. He had crossed the furrows to where she was picking potatoes from the clay he’d turned, the plough drawn by the tractor. ‘I don’t know did I ever see him.’

Ellie looked up at the dark-jowelled features, above the rough, thick neck. She knew which man he meant. She knew, as well, that it had required an effort to step down from his tractor and cross to where she was, to stand unloved in front of her. She said at once:

‘He was here only a summer.’

‘That would be it so. I was always travelling then.’

She gave the curate’s name and he nodded slowly over it, then shook his head. He’d never heard that name, he said.

The sun was hot on her shoulders and her arms. She might have pointed across the ploughed clay to the field that was next to the one they were in. It was there, below the slope, that the conception had taken place. She wanted to say so, but she didn’t. She said:

‘I had to tell her.’

He turned to go away, then changed his mind, and again looked down at her.

‘Yes,’ he said.

She watched him slowly returning to where he’d left the tractor. His movements were always slow, his gait suggesting an economy of energy, his arms loose at his sides. She mended his clothes, she kept them clean. She assisted him in the fields, she made his bed. In all the time she’d known him she had never wondered about him.

The tractor started. He looked behind to see that the plough was as he wanted it. He lit another cigarette before he set off on his next brief journey.

Lost Ground

On the afternoon of September 14th 1989, a Thursday, Milton Leeson was addressed by a woman in his father’s upper orchard. He was surprised. If the woman had been stealing the apples she could easily have dodged out of sight around the slope of the hill when she heard his footfall. Instead, she came forward to greet him, a lean-faced woman with straight black hair that seemed too young for her wasted features. Milton had never seen her before.

Afterwards he remembered that her coat, which did not seem entirely clean, was a shade of dark blue, even black. At her throat there was a scarf of some kind. She wasn’t carrying anything. If she’d been stealing the apples she might have left whatever contained her takings behind the upper orchard’s single growth of brambles, only yards from where she stood.

The woman came close to Milton, smiling at him with her eyes and parted lips. He asked her what she wanted; he asked her what she was doing in the orchard, but she didn’t reply. In spite of her benign expression he thought for a moment she was mad and intended to attack him. Instead, the smile on her lips increased and she raised her arms as if inviting him to step into her embrace. When Milton did not do so the woman came closer still. Her hands were slender, her fingers as frail as twigs. She kissed him and then turned and walked away.

Afterwards Milton recalled very thin calves beneath the hem of her dark coat, and narrow shoulders, and the luxuriant black hair that seemed more than ever not to belong. When she’d kissed him her lips hadn’t been moist like his mother’s. They’d been dry as a bone, the touch of them so light he had scarcely felt it.

‘Well?’ Mr Leeson enquired that evening in the farmhouse kitchen.

Milton shook his head. In the upper orchard the Cox’s were always the first to ripen. Nobody expected them to be ready as soon as this, but just occasionally, after a sunny summer, the first of the crop could catch you out. Due to his encounter with the stranger, he had forgotten to see if an apple came off easily when he twisted it on the branch. But he had noticed that not many had fallen, and guessed he was safe in intimating that the crop was better left for a while yet. Shyness prevented him from reporting that there’d been a woman in the orchard; if she hadn’t come close to him, if she hadn’t touched his lips with hers, it would have been different.