“A boy.”
“What?”
“A boy,” the nurse repeats, and she looks over to the doctor, who is holding a wailing baby between Deirdre’s knees, his clenched fists swinging. Deirdre can just see them, arcing up in the air.
“What?” Deirdre says again. She can taste the salt of the sweat coming off her upper lip, trickling into her mouth.
The nurse, pulling her mask down to her chin, says slowly and clearly, “You’ve … had … a … baby. A boy.”
And Deirdre understands at last. Smiles up at the nurse. Says in a thick fuzzy voice, “Oh. Good. A baby. For a minute there I thought I was dying.”
Maam Bog
THERE comes a point when the men find the exact rhythm and things take care of themselves. The machines work and the bog co-operates. The Bord na Móna administrators come out to walk the fields and keep going for lack of any complaint. Tuesday and Wednesday morning had been like that. Tomás and Peter were getting on again because the tractor, the spoon harrow, and the ridger were in working order. There were no more stumps or surprises. The weather was taking a turn for the better and the crumb was drying. Tomás milling the eighth field in their second set, while Liam and Peter were ridging the fifth. Yesterday was a peak day and the lads had gone home at the end of it worn down but happy that the work was coming along at last. Everyone doing their part.
Angus stands at the far trench having a smoke. He and Egg have been moving the ridged crumb from field three over to four. The conveyor belt stuttering along. Angus enjoys the fourth field; its main feature is a rabbit warren, the only rise in the flat expanse of the bog, twenty
feet long and five feet wide. The Bord had decided to leave it—there have been a slew of feel-good initiatives coming in over the past ten years to appease the conservationists. Angus eyes the warren for any sign of life. There must be a whole city of rabbits inside, though they stayed in when the machines were close. Yesterday Angus had seen a few venture out as far as the grass and sedge that grew along the trench. The crew sometimes tosses carrots around the burrow holes.
Angus’ uncle in Roscommon had kept rabbits in a row of wire pens at the back of the farm. Before holidays the old man would walk out with the nephews, pull one of the bigger rabbits from its hutch, and with it wiggling under hand he’d take it to the barn and twist its neck. He moved quickly, holding on while the rabbit twitched. Then he’d set the body down on a wood table. A row of hooks above. Skinning a rabbit, you always start at the head. His uncle going slow. The boys watching. Tufts of downy fur let loose as he cut, wind coming in the cracked window. Angus has always thought that bog scraw was like that, like animal fur. With skill it can be taken away from the body like a cloak. Cotton grass carried away in the breeze, just like animal down. He’d worked at Maam Bog when Bord na Móna first took it over in 1982, helped dig the first trenches. Went back a few years later to take the scraw and heath off it. The sedge and deergrass lifting like a blanket, the brown muscle of peat below.
Sound comes in fits and starts over the bog. Over by the ridger Tomás and Peter are shouting. Angus can’t make it out. When the wind off the lough changes direction the slightest bit, the voices are gone. He puts out his cigarette and heads
over to the next field. Tomás is resting the balls of his fists on his hips and Peter is backing off. By the time Angus gets over to Tomás, Peter’s standing thirty feet away with Liam.
“What’s wrong?”
“This.” Tomás hands Angus a thin leather strap. There’s wet peat still on it.
“Where’d he get it?”
“Just over there. Came up in the ridging. He was heading down for lunch when he saw it.”
Peter, in his muddy boots and grubby jeans, starts walking towards Angus. The kid is tall and wiry with a soft complexion. Tomás swears under his breath as if he knows what’s about to happen.
“It was over there,” Peter says, and points.
Angus turns the strap over in his hand. It’s eight inches long, narrow, with rough edges. Could be anything. “Call them,” he nods at Tomás. “Did you mark it, Peter?”
“Aye.”
Angus knows Tomás would normally ignore protocol. He’s seen him do it in the past. But word traveled in the lunch room, and if the Irish Archeological Wetland Unit found out that you’d come across something and didn’t report it they’d be out on their biweekly survey to miraculously find “a location of archeological sensitivity” on each of your eleven fields. And there’d be no easy way to work around them.
When the light-rail car circles by the far end of the fifth field, Tomás hops on it. One of the Bord na Móna workers from the next section sits on the opposite bench, a tool box on the floor in front of him. He’s holding his cap in his hands,
staring down at it, his work boots worn down on the outsides. Tomás holds the leather strap in his hand. They were always supposed to be on the lookout for anything out of the ordinary: bogwood, tracks or walkways, stone fences. The closer your fields were to Maam Lough the more likely it was you’d find something. Every tree stump, every sight of wood made Tomás’ heart race. The inconvenience of it should they find so much as a plank. The archeologists had been surveying Maam for three years and hadn’t found a single object worth noting, save for a few cooking stones that came up last summer in Flynn’s field on the other side of the lough.
Angus pulls the IAWU kit out from under the seat of the tractor Tomás was driving. Inside there’s a survey map of the bog, a pencil, a few orange flags, a list of contacts. He reads over the instructions they’ve included; there are no surprises. Walking over to where Peter is standing he wonders, briefly, if he’s doing the right thing. They’ll be able to get on with work around the archeologists but who knows what kind of attention the strap will draw to the other fields; maybe all the sections will warrant a further survey. The Bord is superficially in favour of working with the Department of Arts and Heritage, superficially in support of the archeologists and the Museum folks who wet their pants every time they pull a quarter pound of butter out of some corner of the bog; but in actual fact the Bord just wants the peat processed and sent off to the power station with as little fuss as possible.
Peter had pushed a wrench into the ground to mark where he’d found the strap. Angus walks up to him and tosses an orange flag in his direction. The wind catches it. Peter tries
to grab it, can tell it’s going to fall short. It does, sails down onto the moist peat. Both men look down at the orange marker on the ground between them.
“It’s out of our hands, anyway,” Angus says, picking the flag up and aiming the marker in the general direction of the wrench. Like a dart he lets the flag go. It falls sideways about half a foot from the right spot but Angus shrugs, figures it won’t make much of a difference. They’ll cordon off the whole area anyway. The light-rail car goes by again on the far side of their section. For a split second there’s the sound of the engine as the tractor pulling the passenger car moves along the track, then the wind shifts and there’s a second of silence. Angus feels a cool breeze on the back of his neck. Then the wind shifts again, carries the sound of curlew and kestrel calls. Peter pulls the wrench out of the peat and wipes it off with the corner of his shirt. Then the two of them turn, walk up the incline to where Liam and Egg are waiting.
The Traps
THE afternoon Sean appears, Dermot is waiting. He’s been standing for close to an hour with his arms crossed, eyes to the field, thinking,
The boy will come today, from a fixed point in the distance, between the back field and the road to the O’Riordan’s. It will be Sean O’Riordan come to dig the fence post holes, it will not be any other
. Though Dermot wishes it were. He doesn’t want to talk to Abbey, doesn’t want to reason it through, he just wants her to come back. Give her the week, he’d said to himself five days ago; and in two days’ time she should be home. He pictures her walking in the door of the cottage, then he imagines it another way, that she might call him from Galway for a lift. He sees the drive out to pick her up, sees her stepping out the bus-station doors and getting into the Mini. This morning he turned the phone ringer back on. If it rings now, he’ll answer it.
She’s been gone five days but it feels like weeks. Time is slowing and Dermot is all too aware of it. There were years between Clifden and the lobster traps, and Abbey’s
arrival. A decade that swung past him without so much as ruffling his hair. He’d gone off side, tucked away in the cottage, sleeping in his clothes the whole time, as if it’d been one long night, a surreal dream. These last few months have been different. He has a sense of purpose now; a part of him has announced itself after years of travel, of hiding away. He can’t stay here now. Perhaps Abbey won’t come back, and even if she does he imagines it won’t be for long. Even Spiddal, untouched for twenty years, is changing; every second house is a bed and breakfast, a craft shop opened last year and now there are rumours of a second hotel. Tele Gael turning the town into a set for some Irish soap opera Dermot will never watch. In three months carloads of tourists will fill up the driveway next door. A satellite dish will be set up on the roof. German and Italian children will scream from the swing sets that will surely go up in the yard. He can see himself standing in this exact spot, witness to it all. How, he wonders, have I passed the time? And the answer refuses to come to him. So he turns to the back field, waits for the boy, just as he’s always done.
The sound of hammers in the next lot takes on a rhythm and just as Dermot is about to put his finger on what song they’re playing, they slow and the music becomes something else. Flagon stands at the property line barking at the workmen. The smell of cut wood is in the air. Dermot takes a bucket into the house and fills it with water from the sink, comes back out and waters the garden. Carrots and parsnips are beginning to come up and the leaf lettuce rustles in the breeze. Turning to go in for more water Dermot sees the shape of a gangly boy crossing the field. The sun high overhead, the
sky clear; the fence posts and wire stacked by the back wall of the house. Dermot watches the boy’s progress. Decides Sean can start with the border to Fitch’s, along the old stone wall, and he’ll mark the rest out later. He could help but he doesn’t want to interfere. The boy won’t want him there either. Better to let him start at his own pace. If Sean wants a late lunch Dermot will have to drive to the Spar for groceries. He’s been eating at Hughes the past few days, mostly going for the walk. Niall had nodded at Dermot as he set the roast pie down on the table. “I guess Abbey’s still away.”
“Mr. Fay.” The boy is out of breath.
“It’s Dermot.”
Sean sticks out his hand and Mary, in a red gingham dress with a torn pocket, comes to stand in front of him. Dermot ruffles her hair and she gives him a sharp glance, takes her headband off. Dark curls fall towards her face.
“Where’s—?” The girl looks around the yard.
“The Border collie,” Sean says.
“Flagon.”
“Flagon.” Mary says it quietly, starts walking around Dermot in circles, the fingers of her right hand lightly touching his knees.
“She’s around.” Dermot gives a whistle but the dog doesn’t appear. “Probably in the field.”
Dermot shows Sean the fence posts and wire bales and then waits while the boy stares the material down. Next door, a power saw starts up, there’s the loud whirr of the blade and then the sound of it hitting wood. Behind Sean the laundry
on the clothesline flaps in the breeze, billows in the direction of the back field.
“Start at the northwest corner and follow the line of the old stone fence. We need a post every twelve feet.”
He tosses a yellow tape measure Sean’s way.
“Here’s the digger,” he motions to the ground where the hole digger is lying on its side. “It’s a lend, so mind it.” Dermot thinks over what else to say. “Start with the holes for now and tomorrow I’ll have the posts dropped off a truck so you don’t have to haul them. Come early and you can help with that.”
He remembers he’s yet to ask Niall for a lend of the truck. He’ll ring him when he goes in. Sean is still standing with the tape measure in hand.
“You’ll need to go down two feet.” Dermot bends over, picks up the digger, holds the handle out to Sean. The wood is split by the base. Dermot wonders if it’ll last. Suddenly he wants to call the whole thing off.
Mary goes to the back of the cottage. On tiptoe she tries to reach Abbey’s underwear, the only bright colours in the yard. Dermot has left Abbey’s clothes out, has watched them dry, soak up the rain, then dry again. He knows that if he’d brought Abbey’s clothes in to the house, he’d happen upon them, that if he’d wanted to put them in her drawer he’d have to open it, would see that it was empty.
Mary spins like a pinwheel, trying to reach a pink pair of underwear, jumping at them, almost making it. Sean watches Dermot go over and pull the clothes down, the underwear first then the two shirts, stiff and puckered from the wind.
“Abbey’s,” Dermot says, by way of an explanation.
“Your wife?” Sean hasn’t heard of a Mrs. Fay.
“No.”
Dermot ducks under the door frame, the laundry bundled up in his arms, his face inclined towards the clothes, the door closing behind him.
Sean finds Dermot’s wheelbarrow and with Mary in tow he pushes it, filled with the digger, a shovel, and one post so that he has its measure, to the start of the field. He hits a rock at one point and loses the half of it; Mary gets a sliver trying to lift the end of the wood beam. Sean has worked it out with his father, he knows he has to dig straight down, that he has to fit the post in and then fill the hole back up with packed earth. The wire will come later. Sean puts the two tips of the hole digger down on the corner of the field, on the near side of what must have been a decent stone fence. Then he looks over to Fitch’s house to see if anyone’s watching. Two cars go by along the bay road. A third car honks and Sean looks up too late to see if he knows them. Behind him Mary sits in the grass, her dress fanned out around her, her blue leggings getting darker in the places where the dew’s soaked through.