Afterwards – when the journey through the hills had become a funeral procession at the edge of the town, when the coffin had been delivered to its night’s resting place, and later when the burial was complete and the family had returned to the farmhouse and had dispersed the next morning - Paulie remained.
He had not intended to. He had hoped to get a lift in one of the two cars, and then to take a bus, and another bus, as he had on his journey over.
‘Where is it they’ll separate?’ his mother asked in the quietness that followed the departure.
He didn’t know. Somewhere that was convenient; in some town they would pull in and have a drink, different now that they weren’t in a house of mourning. They would exchange news it hadn’t seemed right to exchange before. Aidan would talk about Boston, offering his sisters and his brother hospitality there.
‘Warm yourself at the fire, Paulie.’
‘Wait till I see to the heifers first.’
‘His boots are there.’
‘I know.’
His brothers had borrowed the gum boots, too; wherever you went, you needed them. Kevin had fixed a fence, Aidan had got the water going again in the pipe up to the sheep. Between them, they’d taken the slack out of the barbed wire beyond the turf bog.
‘Put on a waterproof, Paulie.’
It wasn’t going to rain, but the waterproof kept the wind out. Whenever he remembered the farmhouse from his childhood it was windy – the fertilizer bags blowing about in the yard, blustery on the track up to the sheep hills, in the big field that had been the family’s mainstay ever since his father had cleared the rocks from it, in the potato field. Wind, more than rain or frost, characterized the place, not that there wasn’t a lot of rain too. But who’d mind the rain? his father used to say.
The heifers didn’t need seeing to, as he had known they wouldn’t. They stood, miserably crouched in against the wall of a fallen barn, mud that the wind had dried hanging from them. His father had taken off the roof when one of the other walls had collapsed, needing the corrugated iron for somewhere else. He’d left the standing wall for the purpose the heifers put it to now.
Paulie, too, stood in the shelter of the wall, the puddles at his feet not yet blown dry, as the mud had on the animals. He remembered the red roof lifted down, piece by piece, Kevin waiting below to receive it, Aidan wrenching out the bolts. He had backed the tractor, easing the trailer close to where they were. ‘What’s he want it for?’ he’d asked Kevin, and Kevin said the corrugated iron would be used for filling the gaps in the hedges.
Slowly, Paulie walked back the way he had come. ‘D’you think of coming back?’ Aidan had said, saying it in the yard when they were alone. Paulie had known it would be said and had guessed it would be Aidan who’d say it, Aidan being the oldest. ‘I’m only mentioning it,’ Aidan had said. ‘I’m only touching on it.’
Blowing at the turf with the wheel-bellows, she watched the glow spread, sparks rising and falling away. It hadn’t been the time to make arrangements or even to talk about them. Nothing could have been more out of place, and she was glad they realized that. Kevin had had a word with Hartigan after the funeral, something temporary fixed up, she could tell from the gestures.
They’d write. Frances had said she would, and Aidan had. Sharon would write for Kevin, as she always did. Mena would. Wherever it was they stopped to say good-bye to one another they’d talk about it and later on they’d write.
‘Sit down, Paulie, sit down,’ she said when her son came in, bringing the cold with him.
She said again that Father Kinally had done it beautifully. She’d said so yesterday to her daughters in the car, she’d said it to Kevin and to Aidan this morning. Paulie would have heard, yet you’d want to repeat it. You felt the better for it.
‘Ah, he did,’ Paulie said. ‘He did of course.’
He’d taken over. She could feel he’d taken over, the way he’d gone out to see were the heifers all right, the way it was he who remembered, last evening and this morning, that there was the bit of milking to do, that he’d done it without a word. She watched him ease off the gum boots and set them down by the door. He hung the waterproof on the door hook that was there for it and came to the fire in his socks, with his shoes in one hand. She turned away so that he wouldn’t notice she’d been reminded of his father coming into the kitchen also.
‘Aren’t the heifers looking good?’ she said.
‘Oh, they are, they are.’
‘He was pleased with them this year.’
‘They’re not bad, all right.’
‘Nothing’s fetching at the minute, all the same.’
He nodded. He naturally would know times were bad, neither sheep nor cattle fetching what they were a year ago, everything gone quiet, the way you’d never have believed it.
‘We’re in for the night so,’ she said.
‘We are.’
