Solace (34 page)

Keogh already had the Christmas decorations up in the shop. The bollocks, he imagined himself saying to his father. It would be a way in. It was the way in he had been looking for, he realized,
all the drive down. None of the items on the radio programmes would have given them anything to talk about; none of them was useful enough in that dull, pragmatic way. Besides, he would not be
stupid enough to try to have a conversation with his father about anything that had happened outside his father’s world. Paddy Keogh having a Christmas tree in the window and blue icicle
lights hanging down from the eaves at the beginning of November was good enough. A mean-looking little runt of a tree too, he imagined himself saying, crooked as a whin, and don’t you know
well it was the cheapest he could get? The cheapest? Tom would ask, in mock disbelief. Surely you don’t think he paid for it? And the back and forth would be under way, and somehow they would
keep going from there. Mark felt his language sit into the groove he had made for it, somewhere along the line; the mould he had taken from his father. The conspiratorial mutter, the accent thick
again on the tongue, the head nodding or shaking along with every second sentence. The vocabulary of half-phrases, of words that meant nothing and meant everything. He passed the last houses before
the lane and looked up ahead to the farm.

Light. The hayshed door was a square of yellow light against the darkness. The surprise of it almost caused Mark to miss the turn for the lane. The lights were never on in the hayshed. Even if
an animal was sick, or a calf being born, everything happened in the low houses to its rear. Mark had not thought that there was even a light to switch on in the hayshed. What would it shine on?
From where? The shed should have been packed from wall to wall, and right to the roof, with the summer’s round bales. There should have been no room for light.

He resisted the temptation to drive right around to the farmyard; his father would expect Mark to come straight into the hayshed and help him with whatever the problem was. The last thing he
wanted to do was to spend the night standing and kneeling in straw and shit and in the dust of the hay, watching an animal kicking and dying and staring at him out of one frightened yellow eye. He
would have to face it in a couple of minutes, but not yet. Not now. He parked outside the house.

Aoife whimpered as he heaved her out of the seat. He tugged her dress down over her nappy and tried to get her to take her blanket, but she was too cranky. He draped it over his shoulder,
smelling its beautiful tang of sleep and powder and piss. It needed a wash.

The front door opened, and his father was there. ‘Well, button,’ he said to Aoife, taking a step forward with his arms outstretched towards her. He nodded to Mark. ‘Well. You
got down.’

‘She’s not awake yet,’ said Mark, nodding a greeting in reply. The dog was sitting alert in front of his father’s chair, her tail thumping the ground, a question in her
eyes.

The place looked different, but not in a way that he could place immediately. All the furniture seemed to be exactly as it had been, and even the small things – teapot, sugar bowl, bread
bin – were in the same places they had always been, yet the place seemed somehow stripped back. There was something spare about it that made it seem not neat or tidy but instead held in some
kind of quietness, some kind of shock. The smell was different: frying-pan grease and cooked meat and something else, too, something artificial and high on the air.

As his father shut the door to the hall Mark turned to him. ‘Why are the lights on in the shed ’ithout?’

His father came over to the couch and reached a hand out to Aoife, laying it flat on the crown of her head. ‘She’s tired from her journey,’ he said.

‘She’s not tired, she’s still half asleep,’ said Mark. ‘She slept the whole way down. It’ll be a nightmare to get her down now again.’

‘What do you think of this lassie, Scruff ?’ his father said to the dog, kneading its ears. It panted with pleasure. On its breath, Mark caught the smell that was hanging in the air:
dogfood from a can.

‘What’s going on in the hayshed?’ he said to his father.

‘Ah . . .’ His father shook his head as though whatever it was did not matter. But when he looked at Mark, his eyes were shining. In his chest, in his arms, Mark felt wariness
thicken and deepen.

‘I’ll show you in a while,’ his father said.

‘Show me what?’

‘Just . . .’ his father shook his head again. ‘Something I want you to look at.’

He seemed pent up with something, seemed almost high, as though one nudge or one question would tip him into giddy laughter. When Aoife whined, Mark was glad of the chance to look towards her
and lift her. ‘I might as well bring her upstairs,’ he said. ‘It’s late.’

His father reached a hand out to Aoife again. This time she stared at him. ‘I don’t think she knows me at all,’ he said.

‘She’s just sleepy.’

‘It’s all set up for you anyway,’ his father said, nodding towards the ceiling. ‘I put the electric blanket on the cot and all.’

‘Thanks.’

‘Sure I might as well go out to the shed and you can come out to me when you’re ready,’ his father said. The dog was at his feet, tongue out, tail dancing. They looked one with
the same excitement. They looked like two friends who had discovered what it was that wagged the whole world.

*

The sight knocked the breath out of Mark. He steadied himself against the wall of the shed.

‘What the fuck is this?’ he started to say, but his father was already walking over to one of the tractors, a red beast of a thing with a curved bonnet and a front weight block like
a fist.

‘What do you think of this lassie?’ his father said, clamping a hand to a front tyre that was almost as tall as him.

Mark stared. His mind would not work. ‘Are you going to fucking live in it?’

Tom laughed and moved on to the second machine. It was also colossal. It was of a green so bright and lurid it could have belonged to a float in a Paddy’s Day parade.

‘Where the fuck did you get these from?’ Mark tried again. ‘What the fuck are they for?’

‘Gerry Brady’d be able to tell you all about them,’ his father said. ‘I can’t remember the half of it. But you’d want to hear Brady, the way he goes on about
them. Hydraulic this and telescope that, and some new type of transmission, and wait till you see the way the cab ’ithin is laid out.’ He gestured up to the door. He was lit up like a
bride. ‘Go on there, get up into her. She’s like an airplane in there, I’m telling you.’

The step up into the tractor cab was spotless. The interior was so luxurious that Mark almost laughed. The seat on the old Massey had been like a small metal stool; this one looked like a
recliner, with a cushioned cover and a headrest and armrests, and beside it, a jumpseat that folded neatly down. The gears and the controls were laid out like a buffet, presided over by what looked
like a computer screen. The steering-wheel extended from the floor on a muscular base; the dash itself was a sleek black panel of glass. As Mark sat, his mind hurtled through attempts at
calculation. A figure came and he stared at it. It was disgusting. But it was probably close to the truth.

‘What do you think of that, now?’ his father said, stepping up and looking into the cab. He touched the jumpseat. ‘There’s room enough in it for the two of us.’

Mark said nothing. He stared at the sleeping darkness of the dash.

His father gestured towards it impatiently. ‘Turn her on, can’t ya?’

It was quieter than Mark expected it to be: a low, confident thrum. On the dash, the needles of two dials blinked into life; a monitor between them told him the time was close to ten. He looked
to the other screen: it was a GPS, showing the road and the lane in storybook colours, an eager red ring marking their spot.

His father leaned in closer. ‘That’s the command centre there, now,’ he said, pointing to a cluster of gears. ‘And this is a panorama cab you’re in. And you see
that plug there?’ He pointed somewhere under the steering-wheel. ‘Do you know what you can put into that?’

‘No,’ Mark said warily.

‘Your laptop,’ his father said, in a tone of absolute triumph. ‘You plug your laptop into that, or your phone, and you can do whatever you have to do.’

Mark killed the engine. Every little dancing and flashing piece of red and yellow circuitry vanished back to where it had come from.

‘And all those controls, the most of them is electronic,’ his father said. He shrugged with the same glad air. ‘Ah, it’s beyond me, I’m afraid, though.’

Mark looked at him. ‘Then what are you doing with it?’

His father seemed ready for the question; he seemed amused by it. He shrugged again; a dance of the shoulders.

‘The horsepower on this thing must be ridiculous,’ Mark said.

‘I couldn’t tell you, to be honest. Brady would tell you.’

‘It must be near three hundred,’ Mark said.

‘Chancy but it is.’

‘And what – you buy two of the fucking things in case you need one to pull the other out of a bog hole?’

His father grinned as though he were being teased about a new girlfriend. ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘In the long run, I’m telling you, they’re worth it. Sure, the farming is
hardship enough.’

Mark got out of the cab, jumping from the first step to land heavily on the floor of the shed. It was a habit he’d had since he was tall enough to get out of a tractor cab without being
lifted; he’d imagined himself to be MacGyver, or Magnum PI, or one of the guys from the A-Team. And he’d imagined this while he was jumping out of a scrawny Massey Ferguson from the
arse of the seventies, all the time wishing his father would buy a new tractor, a modern tractor, so that he could really pretend he was an American detective on a souped-up set of wheels. Now the
souped-up wheels were everywhere he looked in the hayshed, huge, obnoxious in their streamlined sheen, and all he could feel was a plummeting dread.

‘He gave me the topper and the conditioner nearly for nothing,’ his father said, gesturing to the corner of the shed, where there stood two more new machines. ‘I haggled him
down till he was nearly crying. He couldn’t get over what I got him to agree to.’

Mark heard himself saying the words before he had given them permission to be sounded. They sprang forward of their own accord. ‘Which was?’ he said, an edge in his voice like a
warning.

His father had never been willing to talk to Mark about money. He might tell him the price a cow had got at a mart, or the price of a machine he was mulling over in the
Buy and Sell
, but
anything more than that, he would not share. Anything more than that, he kept private. He did not even tell Mark’s mother. Who was spinning into view for Mark now as he looked at what his
father had done. Or something belonging to her was spinning into view. Something she had left behind.

‘Where did you get enough money for this?’ he said, and even before he had finished the question he was certain of the answer.

His father’s face changed. In seconds it seemed to age all over again. ‘I made my money,’ he said, and he turned away.

‘You used Mam’s money,’ Mark said, and he grabbed his father’s arm. ‘Didn’t you?’

His father shook him off. ‘That’s none of your concern.’

‘Is it none of my concern either what you did with the bales?’ Mark stepped around to face him. ‘Where are they?’

His father said nothing.

‘You sold them?’ Mark demanded.

His father’s voice was whittled with scorn. ‘I hardly fucking gave them away.’

Mark stared. He stared at the back of his father’s head, a whorl of grey around a scalp of brown. He stared at his hands, the hands that had rested on his daughter’s head half an
hour before. Her tiny head. His heavy hand. He stared at the dirt on the shoulders of his father’s overalls, at the ridged nape of his neck. The skin was browner there still, weathered by
more years, more summers than Mark had known, than his mother had got to know, than Joanne had come anywhere close to knowing. Over his father stretched the parts of the shed that Mark had never
seen before. The high corrugated arches of the roof. The rafters, rusted and shadowed. The cobwebs hanging low, heavy and clumped as nests of bees. The mottled concrete of the corners, naked to the
air for the first time in years. His father had never let this space go empty; he had always filled it with hay again before the back walls ever had a chance to show. Now the tools that had always
been kept by the door were thrown in a heap on the ground: the graip and the pitchfork, the billhook, the sledge, the shovel with its reddened handle, the yard brush, the loy. Mark stared at
them.

‘The cattle,’ he said, and his father shook his head.

‘There’ll be other cattle,’ he said in a low voice.

*

Mark found what he was looking for without difficulty. Yet still it was not what he had expected to find. It was in the old biscuit tin where his mother had always kept bills
and other envelopes, lying over a pile of mass cards. A sad-faced Jesus tilted at him as he lifted the receipt from the box. It was thin, pink, folded once; it was covered with his father’s
writing. The name of his father was the first thing he saw. The name of Joanne’s father was the second.

He blinked. He squinted. He could not be seeing what he thought he had seen. But it was there. His name.
Frank Lynch
. And then, Mark saw, there was something else after it. Some squiggle,
some symbol, some mark. He stared at it, willing it towards meaning, and then he got it. He untangled it.
Jr. Frank Lynch, Jr.
It was Frankie’s name: it was what he would have been
christened. It was also a name he had never been called for as long as Mark had known him. But Mark’s father must have felt the need for some kind of correctness as he filled out the docket.
Some kind of formality.
Received from Frank Lynch, Jr
, the crinkled sheet was inscribed, and halfway down, the blue ink in which his father had written
Cows (18 Chr, 5 Her, 4 Fr) /
Heifers (9 Chr, 3 Her, 1 Fr) / Bullocks (9 Chr, 1 Her, 2 Fr)
had faded to nothing but pressure on the page, and
Calfs 24 (16 Chr, 4 Fr, 4 Her)
,
1 Chr Bull
and
Round Bales 342
(186 Hay / 156 Silage)
were in black ink, stronger and surer, as was his father’s signature, and the date, October 15th. And the price, underlined twice like a word on a placard.