Solace (35 page)

It had been years since Mark had gone with his father to the mart in Edgeworthstown, years since he had stood, stick in hand, beside the closed gate of a cattle trailer while a buyer handed his
father a cheque. A pound a pound, the price had been then, and the men would joke as they shook hands; the buyer would say that the trailer was only half full with the cattle, that he had thought
they would pack it out, and his father would retort that the cattle were only half price; the buyer would tell his father not to go too far away on holiday with the money he was giving him, and his
father would promise to send him a postcard. Often, when Mark was young, the buyer would pat him on the head and tell him that he’d know how to spend the money for his father, or something
like that, and his father would say that he would know well. And the men would laugh, and Mark, not even fully understanding, would laugh too.

And the child that Mark had been would have been able to see, now, that this price was too low. It seemed three grand, maybe even four grand short of what it should have been. The cows were all
young and strong, the calves well fed: he had seen them coming on all summer. And the bullocks were heavy bastards, and the bull – the bull was built like the truck he had arrived in. Mark
closed his eyes. He saw the empty fields, the empty sheds, the empty stalls. He saw the empty mornings, and the stretch of the days, and the dog racing around looking for the last of the scent,
looking for something to worry, something to watch. When he heard the door from the yard, when he heard the tread of his father’s boots in the back kitchen, his first instinct was to stuff
the receipt back into the biscuit tin and throw it back into the press. But he stopped himself. He stopped his own arm as it twitched and as it climbed. He turned.

*

There were things that seemed unsayable; things that seemed impossible to push over the surface of thought. There were truths, or what seemed like truths, lodged in the walls of
the mind; there were summations, pronouncements, accusations, formed and moulded and added to over months and over years, curling and stretching and nestling in the spaces they had made for
themselves.

The extraordinary thing was how they turned out, all of these things, not to be hiding after all; not, after all, to be anywhere out of reach. They turned out to have been waiting, to have been
poised. They came to each man’s lips like lines that had been long ago learned for a play never staged; they came into the room like over-praised children, sure of themselves, proud of their
presence, never for an instant imagining that they ought not to be there. Never for an instant intuiting that they might have burst in too soon or too loudly, in too large a number.

Mark went first, because Mark had the evidence; the pink slip of paper that seemed, in the moment that he held it up to his father, sharpened to a switchblade’s edge. In that moment, in a
rush of self-certainty that was almost like joy, Mark thought that there was nothing his father could say, nothing his father could send at him that he could not swipe aside and send shattering
against the wall.

But he had forgotten. How had he forgotten? His father was so good at this. He glinted at the scent of it. He was an athlete, opening with light shots, weighing the return. His father saw where
his opponent was willing to go; he saw, with a sliding thrill, the terrain they thought they could handle. Then he went deep, went fast, moved as though on ice through convolutions of his own
invention, through spirals that could not be anticipated and could not be stopped; he was fluent, exhilarated, alight. When he shouted, when he sneered, when he spat out his verdicts and his
vehemence, he was like a man thirty years younger; like a man younger than his son. Mark stared at him. It was almost wonder that he felt for him, watching how he soared. It was a kind of pride, a
kind of awe.

In the grip of what felt so much like hatred, it was a kind of love.

When there was silence, and when it settled in the room among the rubble of their words, Mark stood and took his car keys from the counter. At the stairs, he listened to another type of silence,
and then he made his way to the door.

‘Watch her,’ he said, without looking at his father. ‘I’ll be an hour.’

His father did not ask him where he was going. His father knew that he could not be seen to care.

Tom’s heart hammered in his chest as he listened to Mark drive away. He had said everything he had wanted, for so long, to say, yet his mind still whirled through new
ways of saying it, through other ways of telling Mark how it was. He took the whiskey from the bottom cupboard, uncapped it, then screwed the cap on again. He had a headache, he realized. Whiskey
was not what he needed. He filled a glass of water and looked for the painkillers.

Mark understood nothing. He understood nothing about the farm, and he understood nothing about what Tom had been through with it, and he understood least of all that Frankie Lynch had done them
a favour by stepping in and buying the cattle. This was no longer a country to try to run a herd of animals in. Any fool could see that. The best thing to do was to get out now at the best price
you could, and keep the head down for a while, and then, when the air calmed and the place settled into whatever it was going to settle into, to get back in at your own pace. It was what people
were wishing they could do with their houses and their sites now, what Frankie Lynch’s brother, the builder, must have been wishing he could do with the field of houses he had built up at
Glen. But those other people had not got in quickly enough, they had not heeded the signs, and heeding the signs was what you had to do.

Besides, he had wanted a change. It was not that he found the work of the farm demanding; he could manage it alone. He always had. That was part of what he had been able to make clear to Mark
tonight, that he had always had to do everything alone, that even on the rare occasions when Mark was around, he was no real help, doing only the bare minimum and getting away again as soon as he
could. Mark had disputed this, but it was indisputable: it was fact. He had no interest in the place. He looked down his nose at it all. And yet he thought of himself as having some claim to it,
some right to tell Tom what he should and should not do with his own money, his own herd, his own land. He was a grabber, pure and simple, and it had been time for that truth to be told. It was not
fully true what Tom had said about being happier to see the herd going to Frankie Lynch than to think of it falling to Mark, but it made little difference, Mark having so little interest, and he
was glad that he had said what needed to be said about the laughing stock Mark was making of himself, and of Tom, with what he called work, with his excuse for a job; sitting all day in front of
books and papers like a boy getting ready for his school exams. He had been in college now nearly longer than he had been in school, and with nothing to show for it; he spent his time thinking and
reading and writing about the one part of the place’s history that nobody around the place gave a damn for. He was living, like a squatter, in a house that Frank Lynch had paid for, a house
that belonged, now, not even to Mark, but to the child. And he was smothering the child, stopping her growing up the way she should. She could barely even talk, could barely mumble anything other
than a few baby’s words. There had been more, and some of it had gone on to ground, maybe, that would have been better avoided, but still Tom was glad to have it said. It was better out. He
was tired of carrying it around.

He had not found the work of the place too much; that was not what had happened. It was more that he had found that it had begun to matter to him less and less after the summer, as the months
began to slide in towards winter. To take hay to the manger every evening seemed a nuisance; instead, he piled it with bigger loads twice or three times a week. If he did not change the straw
bedding in the calf house, there were no consequences: the animals did not complain. He noticed damage to the fences he had put up over the summer in the lower fields, but he put off the work of
fixing them, letting the bullocks and the cows mix freely, which was something he had never before allowed.

Late in September, he realized that one of the Friesian cows was missing. He was not sure how long she had been away from the rest of the herd; he had not checked on them in a couple of days.
When he found her, she was lying in the shelter of a tree, and when he hunted her up, he saw that she was badly lame. He cursed at the sight of her, limping and straining; he should have spotted it
in her earlier, should not have left her to suffer like that by herself. He saw, too, that she was run down: she looked thin and weary; her eyes were dull. He brought her up from the fields to the
yard, talking to her as she made her slow way, telling her, more than once, that he was sorry not to have looked after her sooner. When Farrell came to inject her, Tom saw the way he looked around
the place, at the tools left on the ground, at the gate fallen off its hinges, at the troughs more full of leaves and twigs than they were of water.

‘Where have you the rest of the cattle?’ he asked Tom, after he had finished with the Friesian.

‘The lower fields below,’ Tom said, as casually as he could.

‘I might as well have a look at them while I’m here,’ Farrell said, and he walked on to the gate before Tom could say anything to stop him.

‘They’re awful lean, Tom,’ he said, when he had looked at the herd.

‘That’s the breed of them, Mick.’

‘It can’t be the breed of all of them,’ Farrell said. ‘And there’s scour in them. They need dosing for fluke.’

‘Right enough,’ Tom said. ‘I’ll take care of that.’

Farrell looked to the road. He sighed. ‘Look, Tom,’ he said. ‘I’m coming to this place a long time, and I know you well and I knew poor Maura well, may God have mercy on
her. You know well I’d never do anything to cause you trouble. But there’s people passing on that road every day mightn’t go so easy on you. These cattle are scrawny.
There’s men getting reported for cruelty for far less. Do you know what I’m saying to you?’

‘Say no more,’ said Tom, and he pulled at the twine on the gate so that it fell open.

‘If you need any help with them, Tom,’ said Farrell, ‘anything at all . . .’

‘I’m going to book them in for a test with you next week, Mick,’ Tom said. ‘I’ll be needing that done.’

‘Anything, Tom,’ Farrell said, and he walked up the lane to his van.

After Farrell had tested the cattle, Tom called the
Leader
and placed the ad. It went in the following Wednesday, and the house phone rang that afternoon. There was a
moment of silence when Tom realized it was young Lynch who was calling about the herd, and when young Lynch realized it was Tom he was talking to, but it was money they were talking, and talk of
money could only keep going, could only pick up where it left off.

Lynch took them away in five loads, and it was only when he was rounding up the last dozen, the heifers, that Tom noticed a Charolais heifer standing apart from the rest. When he walked over to
tip her along he saw that her hips were down and her udder had filled. The heifer looked at him. He saw her sickness and her fear.

‘Ah, lassie,’ he said, and he patted her on the neck. Behind him, shouting, cracking his stick, Lynch was running the rest of the heifers into the trailer through the cattle pen.

‘Look at this one, what she’s at,’ Tom called to him, pointing to the Charolais.

Lynch squinted over at the heifer. ‘She’s calving?’ he said, in surprise. Tom nodded.

‘She has the right idea,’ Lynch laughed, and he started towards her. ‘More for her new master. Come on.’

Tom looked at him. ‘Sure you’ll leave her here for today itself ?’ he said, as Lynch swiped at the heifer’s hind legs.

‘I’ll have her up at my own place before she gets too much further into it,’ Lynch said. ‘Sure it’s only a couple of miles.’

‘You’ll leave her here for to calve, at least?’ Tom tried again, and when he heard the plea in his own voice, he took his stick and hit the heifer more sharply than Lynch
himself had. She staggered towards the trailer.

Lynch stilled her, moving her slowly and carefully on to the ridged ramp and into the trailer. ‘That’s it,’ he said, in a low voice. ‘Good girl now. That’s
it.’

The heifer stood uncertainly on the trailer’s edge, still trying to keep apart from the crush of animals jolting and mounting each other in the small space, each of them staring to the
side in the same frightened way. Knees buckled and necks lengthened, but there was barely room enough, even, for a tail to swish at a fly.

‘She’ll be all right,’ Lynch said, turning to Tom. ‘She has a couple of hours to go yet.’

‘That lane,’ Tom began, but he stopped himself.

Lynch needed a hand to raise the ramp and shut the trailer on the animals. ‘Good suspension on this yoke,’ Lynch said, gesturing to the trailer wheels. ‘She won’t feel a
thing.’ He dug in his pocket and took out an envelope thick with the burnished brown of fifties. ‘Now,’ he said as he handed Tom the wad, ‘nothing left to worry about, only
how to spend it.’

He climbed into the cab and was gone, the trailer jangling over the rocky surface, the yard ringing with the bellows of the heifers. Tom followed him down the lane as far as the house, watching
the dust risen by his wheels.

At first it had been strange not having the herd, but in truth the shape of Tom’s day changed very little. He walked the farm as much as he had before Lynch took the cattle; some weeks, he
walked it more. He still started out in the lower fields, testing the ground, checking the bog holes, examining the fences. Then he would walk back up the lane and past the house to the yard where
the calves had been housed until they were old enough to be let out to grass, and where the yearlings had pucked and chased one another through the long garden. He would look into each of the sheds
and then, setting the radio going in the old Massey, he would work for a few hours at something in the small shed he had years ago turned into a workshop for himself and Mark; he would hammer at
something, do something up, make something that would be useful in the yard. Before, there had always been a chainsaw or a hedge-trimmer to fix for someone, but nowadays hardly anyone left them in;
it might have been that they were buying new ones instead of getting them repaired, but Tom knew it was more likely that people still thought it was too soon to ask him to do a favour for them, to
do a job. And yet nothing could have been further from the truth. If he could have found fault with his own chainsaw or trimmer, he would have taken them apart just for the pleasure of dismantling
them and finding the problem, putting it right, piecing the whole lot neatly back together again, but they were running perfectly. The saw went through wood like water. The trimmer put a shape on
ditches that would nearly win you a prize. Only the old Massey was giving problems, the clutch worn down again, the gearbox sticking badly, the lift losing strength. It was on a wet morning,
wrestling in the tiny cab to open up the floor and get at the gears, banging his head and his elbows every time he budged, that Tom cursed and thrashed and twisted his way towards the decision that
landed him in Brady’s showroom two days later. In his coat pocket were Lynch’s envelope of cash and a cheque written on the savings account he had had with Maura.