Read Online Walk the Blue Fields by Claire Keegan - Free Book Online Page B

gust is, it frightens Deegan and the oaks flinch. Leaves begin to fall. It all seems wrong but when Deegan looks down there, all around his feet are twenty-pound notes. Towards the end of the dream he is like a child trying, without much success , to catch them all. Finally he has to get a wheelbarrow. He fills it to the brim and pushes it all the way to Carnew. As he wheels it along the roads, neighbours come out and stare. The envy in their eyes is unmistakable. A few notes flutter from the barrow but it doesn’t matter: he has more than enough.
    When he wakes he gets up, goes to the window and looks out at the oaks. They are standing there, as always, in the dark. Deegan scratches his beard and goes over his dream. Dreaming has become the closest thing to having someone to talk to. He looks at Martha. His wife is fast asleep, the pale breast pressed against the thin cotton of her nightdress. He would like to wake her and tell her now of his dream. He would like sometimes to carry her away from this place and tell her what is on his mind and start all over again.
    *
    During this mild winter, Christmas comes. The frost is brittle , the birds confused. By this time Judge’s coat is immaculate , his shadow never too far from the girl’s. Deegan’s humour improves for he’s worked overtime and caughtthieves stealing Christmas trees. The Forestry Department give him a bonus cheque which he spends on new ceiling boards for the house. All through the holidays he measures and saws, hammers and paints. When he’s finished with the last coat of varnish, he takes Martha to the hardware and makes her choose wallpaper for the kitchen. She picks out rolls depicting woodbine whose pattern is wasteful and hard to match.
    Neighbours come to the house that Christmas and remark on how, each time they visit, the house has improved.
    â€˜Oh, an auld house is impossible to keep,’ Deegan protests. ‘You could spend your whole life on it and see no difference.’ But he is pleased, and hands round the stout.
    â€˜Easy knowing you have a good woman behind you,’ they say. ‘Doesn’t a woman make a place.’
    â€˜That’s for sure.’
    Martha is quiet. She smiles and drinks two large hot whiskeys but, despite all coaxing, refuses to tell a story.
    For Christmas the girl gets an Abba record which she plays twice and commits to memory. ‘Waterloo’ is her favourite song. Santa slides down the chimney and leaves a second-hand bicycle for the middle child. He’d hoped for machinery for his farm – a harrow to put in the early wheat or a harvester, for his sugar beet’s near ready for the factory . Sometimes he wishes for rain. Their leaves, which he made out of bicycle tyres, seem dry and are not getting any taller.
    The eldest goes off to Dublin for the holidays. Deegan gives him a little money so he will be under no compliment to his uncles. It doesn’t matter that his eldest boy’s mind is on the city. Deegan has willed him the place and knows that Aghowle will some day draw him back. To hiswife he presents a sewing basket and, with egg money, Martha buys her husband a pair of Clark’s plaid slippers.
    On Saint Stephen’s night, a fox comes into the yard. Judge can smell him, detects his stink on the draught under the door before he reaches the henhouse. Judge gets up but the door is bolted. He goes upstairs and pulls the quilt off the girl’s bed. The girl gets up, takes one look at him, and wakes her mother. Martha hears the commotion in the henhouse and shakes Deegan who comes down in his pyjamas and loads the gun. The retriever’s excitement grows. He hadn’t known Deegan owned a gun. Together they run out to the yard. Awhite moon is spinning, shredding the light between the clouds. The taste on Judge’s tongue is hot like mustard but they are too late: the henhouse door stands ajar and the fox is gone. He has killed two hens and