Solace (11 page)

From the window he could see his father in the yard below, working at the baler with a pair of pliers. He was tightening the pins below their metal shields, bent over the pick-up reel like a
quilter tweaking his threads. By now he had lost almost all of his hair. The gleaming tan of his crown, its spray of dark freckles, was somehow disorienting. He was not old, and certainly not
frail, but he carried about with him the indemnity clause of seeming an older man than he actually was; a cloud of anxiety that asked to be met with solicitude, attention, a kind of anticipatory
grief. The trace of warmth on his skin, the healthy brownness of him, complicated this picture, even for all the hours working in wind and rain to which it actually attested. On the baler he worked
deftly, moving between the parts without hindrance, without once seeming to linger, his tools neatly laid on the ground by his knee. Now he reached back into those tools for the thing he needed
– the ratchet wrench – without even having to look.

Mark envied it in him, this ability to lock his thought down. His own attention was always darting, sputtering, untied. Reading, he would be four or five lines into a paragraph before he would
think of something he wanted to see to, or listen to, or type into a search engine, and he would drift off on that thing, letting it tumble him into one new distraction after another until the
clock demanded that he be somewhere, do something – and through that thing, in turn, he would almost sleepwalk his way. But his father’s concentration was absolute. On a machine or on a
match, he could fix and settle like this. Until the job was done or the whistle blown, nothing could pull his gaze out of its walled path of awareness, out of its still, determined hub. The rhythm
of his father’s hands was something Mark knew as intuitively as he knew the rhythm, even the feeling, of his own; and from where he stood, he could see exactly what remained to be done with
the machine hitched to the back of the tractor, could see what way Tom would go about it, could tell where his glance fell, where his gaze fastened, where his mind pulled back for a moment,
charting its next move. And yet if he was out there with him now, they would be arguing, already, over the best way to deal with the pins. Mark would be trying to do it more quickly; he could see
the short cut from here. And his father would be telling him that he rushed everything, that he could stay with nothing, that he had no patience, no steadiness, no sense.

He lifted his phone and clicked his way back into the text Joanne had sent him while he was in the car with his mother. Was he feeling better, the message had asked. He had tried to text her
back, but his mother had been talking to him, asking him questions about Mossy, and he hadn’t been able to think of anything to write; he had wanted his reply to be something funny, something
wry, something that would cast him in a better light than the state she’d seen him in that morning. But his mother wasn’t talking in his ear now, and he still couldn’t think of
the right thing to say. What was funny? What was wry? Should he ask her out now, or would that look like the action of a desperate fool? Should he tell her he was down home, or would it be
presumptuous to think she was even interested in where he was? He stared at the message for another moment and then, snapping the phone shut, he left it on the dresser and went downstairs.

He was there now, and that was what mattered. Tom had waited for him all weekend, and Maura had given him stories about college work and scholarships and money that had to be
applied for, and he had accepted it all, and he had started the work by himself on Saturday morning, mowing the first few meadows, getting the grass into rows, going through them with the tractor
and the old Claas baler. It was a sight, too, to think of that baler as an old one: when Tom had bought it, only ten or twelve years ago, he had been the talk of the country, he knew he had, but
now it was a rusting, unreliable heap of a thing, and the last few hours had been spent fixing it up after another ordeal driving around an uneven field. Now, though, he had it ready to go, for
another while at least. The hardest fields, the fields that dipped too sharply and went too suddenly into bogland at the edges, he had left for Mark to do; he preferred Mark to do them. Tom himself
would go around the meadow with a pitchfork, making sure the rows were even, watching the bales as they came.

The weather was promised good for another two days; then the rains would come from the north and stay heavy on their part of the map over the weekend at least. The summers were getting worse.
Tom knew he was not imagining those summers years ago. They had been long and hot and sometimes desert dry, but there was no point in talking about those summers now. They were gone. Mention of
them in Keogh’s of an evening drew only a silence that never seemed friendly. There were things nobody thanked you for reminding them of. There were years that had somehow slipped so far into
the past that it was better not to mention them. People had been around then who were gone now, children had been small then, neighbours had been neighbours. Nobody around the place had been
happier then, as far as Tom could remember it, but they acted now as though they had been happy in a way that they would never be happy again. It was best to leave it. People needed to have their
ideas about what was gone; they needed them to hold on to.

For the week they would work together on the remaining fields, and then there would be the work of gathering the bales and of stacking them in the hayshed. There was other work, too, that Tom
needed help with after the hay was saved; work he could do by himself, but that went more smoothly and more pleasurably with Mark at his side. He had been angry over the weekend, annoyed that Mark
had not come down sooner, but he looked back on that anger now as though it had belonged to someone else. He checked the pins again and listened for the sound of the back door.

There had come two children, no more. It was enough and it was not enough; it seemed at once a blessing and a snub. All around them were families of four and six and even ten children, families
crammed into cars and tearing around gardens; families too big, often, for the houses they were born into. But families that said what needed to be said about their fathers, that settled things
into place for the years too far away yet to see. Tom and Maura had first a daughter and then a son. There had been only the beginnings of others. Two before Nuala, and another – late on, so
late that it had been a shape, that Maura had taken to talking to it, even to naming it – around a year before Mark. And no more afterwards. Mark, the doctor had told Maura, was the last one
there could be.

Nuala, to Tom, had been the same person all her life. She had seemed on her guard with him in the hospital when she was one day old, and she was still that way. The whole time she was small, all
through her schooling years, then all her weekends home from college, she had been like that with him. Talking to him only in half-sentences. Giving him only half the story, and probably less than
half the truth. Maura saw it in her too, said Nuala was secretive with her as well; said it was her age, but she said that about her no matter what that age happened to be. And in no time at all
that age was almost the age Tom had been the year Nuala was born, and she was moving to London, coming home to see them only once or twice a year. She phoned often, and she and Maura had their
chats, and on the phone to him she always told him a few things he liked hearing about her life over there, and asked how things were with him, but when she visited, he seemed never to have a
conversation with her that lasted longer than their conversations on the phone. Always, she seemed only in the door with her suitcase – and now with her husband, a quiet English fellow called
Denis – before she was heading off with the cases again, off to the airport, back to London.

The longest she had been home was for her wedding in the local church a mile from Dorvaragh. In the car that had talem them there, Tom had told her not to be nervous, and she had shown him how
to fix the rose in his buttonhole. The air in the car had been struck with her perfume, and the skirt of her dress had spread out over almost the entire back seat, part of it resting, rustling, on
his knee. The makeup she had worn made her skin look different, gave it a different colour and a new smoothness; her lips looked wet and glistening, and her eyelids were painted silver as a coin.
All morning the house had been full of women bent down in front of mirrors, racing between the bedrooms and the sitting room with dresses and shoes and boxes in their arms. As the car pulled up to
the church porch, Nuala had squeezed his hand once, and then she had opened the door for herself, before the driver could come around to her, and stepped outside. Tom had felt her shaking as he
walked her up the aisle.

Mark was born three years after Nuala. His stare as Tom took him from Maura for the first time was steady and clear; Tom had carried him to the window and pointed down to the car park, down to
where he had left the car; it had been the blue Escort, that time, with the dog-bone grille. The child had a red face like a drinker and a head of dark spikes. A broken vein above his left eye
would, Tom thought, take years to fade away. From her bed, Maura called him back from the window. She was worried about draughts.

Almost from the day he could walk, the boy wanted to be outside with Tom. He was a strong child, sturdy, and he was infatuated with the things of the farm. Hearing the splutter of a tractor
engine, he would rush to the window, demanding to see it, offended if it could not be seen. To be allowed in the cab of his father’s tractor, to grip the cold metal of the steering-wheel, to
press the black plastic dome of the horn; these things sent him into a chattering frenzy, or else into a spell of speechless delight. With the animals he was fearless. He would walk up to a cow and
swipe at its legs with a stick he had pulled from the ditch, or a length of piping he had picked up in the yard. He would grab at its udders, imitating what he had seen Tom do in the milking shed.
The cows were content in their routine, and used to handling; they tolerated the boy’s noisy proximity, his prodding and pulling, his lunges at their throats, their nostrils, their tails. But
it was not safe. It could not have been more dangerous. One kick from a cow lunging in to protect her calf could leave the child useless for the rest of his life.

Those first years, when he was small, there was pleasure just in watching him among the animals, the fields, the sheds that, before him, had only ever meant work or worry. To see this boy stride
around the farm, even if he was hardly taller than the sheepdog, even if he was in short trousers and red wellingtons, even if he had a head of curls like a girl; even for all this, the sight of
him there was like a prayer lodged in the mind and answered with every thought. Tom took Mark everywhere – to the mart and its chaos, to the creamery and its dirty white puddles, to the
slaughterhouse beside the army barracks, where the workers crossed the yard in butchers’ coats stained crimson, sucking on cigarettes and talking the ordinary talk of the day. He took him up
to visit Tommy Burke, who farmed at the other end of the lane and who Tom had known since he was a boy himself, and soon Mark was walking over the lane to Tommy alone, staying for hours around the
yard and the sheds, just as Tom had done at his age. Mark plunged into this world and asked few questions, showed little sign of being cautious or uncertain or afraid. It was as he had been that
first day in the hospital, the solid way of looking, the air of already knowing it all. Of being born to it, and for it. Tom did not say this to Maura, or to anyone, because it was not the sort of
thing that could be said aloud, that phrase, that set of words, but once it had rung in his mind, it continued to sound.

School was what changed Mark. It took a few years, but the change came, and then it worsened with each new year. The friends, the football matches, the long evenings at the kitchen table with
his books and his pencils and with Maura close by; he saw it as a chore to have to go out on the farm. Then he was in the secondary school in Longford and then he was in Trinity, gone altogether
except for the odd weekend.

The farm would be his, of course; Tom had long since sorted all of that out. He would have loved to know for sure that it would be farmed, but he could not insist on that, and he did not know
how to ask. He knew there was the matter of Mark’s college career, something he did not fully understand but had to pretend to understand unless he wanted to get the sharp end of
Maura’s tongue; she was always telling him that he was too selfish when it came to Mark and to what Mark was entitled to do with his life. He knew by now to keep quiet on it, and not to ask
too many questions, and not to point out – and he was only saying – that Mark seemed to have only a few hours a week when he really needed to be up in Dublin, and that he had his whole,
long summers free, and long breaks at Christmas and Easter as well, and it was just the case that there was a farm down here with his name on it, a farm that was coming to him, and Tom
couldn’t see how that farm could not be compatible with those few hours a week, those few months a year, that Mark had to spend up in Dublin. He could be saving himself a fortune on rent, for
a start, and if he would only do the training course for young farmers that they ran in the Teagasc place in the town, he would be in line for all sorts of grants and subsidies. There was a desk up
in his room, and he could work on his studies every evening if he wanted to – he could work on them any time he liked; Tom would not disturb him. And since he was so interested in the one
from Edgeworthstown who had written books, it seemed only natural that he would need to be around here anyway, instead of in Dublin. Mark kept talking about the library, how he needed to be near to
it and working in it and able to go into it any time he liked. But he was entitled to borrow some huge number of books from the library, hundreds of them; he had told Tom that a couple of years
ago, when they were talking about Trinity one time. And there were a couple of trains a day up to Dublin now, and back again, and of course he could buy himself a car. Tom would buy him a car. He
was always offering. But Mark always had some way of putting him off. He didn’t need it, he kept saying; he preferred the handiness of the train, preferred to be able to sit on the train and
catch up on work.