Chapter Four #4
“You’re the one that bloody rang me,” Lena says, but Noreen has already hung up.
“Get fucked,” Lena says to the phone, loud enough that the dogs come over to help. Nellie has brought her favorite toy, a well-chewed old runner, which she drops at Lena’s feet to make things better.
“Good girls,” Lena says, looking down at their worried faces and calming her voice. “Noreen can go and shite, amn’t I right?”
The dogs, reassured by her tone, wag and press against her, agreeing from the heart with whatever she thinks. The sausages have burned on one side. Lena blows on them till they’re cool; then she sits down on the kitchen floor and shares them out between Nellie and Daisy. She’s lost her appetite.
When Cal took early retirement, he expected it to be lazier than this.
That was the one thing that gave him doubts: he’s not the kind of guy who’s at ease sitting on his ass doing nothing, and he figured all that leisure would itch at him pretty fast. He put off the problem by buying a fixer-upper house, and he had some vague ideas about traveling around Europe once that ran out of work for him to do, but it turned out he’d just forgotten how country life works.
If his house or his land doesn’t come up with something that needs doing, his neighbors will.
No farmer is going to let an able-bodied man go to waste.
Cal has learned, among other things, how to drive a tractor, how to fill a clamp for silage, and how to shear a sheep, although Mart claims that if Cal did his whole herd, the first one would be ready for shearing again by the time he got done with the last.
This afternoon he’s chopping firewood. Everyone for miles around has a lavish supply of this, gleaned after the fire that swept the mountains the summer before last—Cal had his doubts about the legality of this, but no one showed up to object, so he rolled with it.
A few old oaks came down here and there, and Cal and Trey saved what they could for furniture and those countertops, but most of the casualties were spruce.
Cal considers spruce to be no good for anything except firewood, and not much good for that, but it’s been seasoning long enough that at least it shouldn’t coat his chimney in creosote and start a fire of its own.
He and Mart worked out a deal: Mart, who has more shed space, stores Cal’s wood till he needs it, and Cal, who has better joints, chops for both of them.
The weather is right: not raining, although it’s considering it, and not too chilly, only the first hint of frost to tell Cal he’s getting this job done just in time.
He hasn’t lost the boyhood knack; the axe-blows ring clear and satisfying, and the wood splits cleanly into fireplace-sized pieces, spreading the tang of spruce through the air.
On an upturned bucket, Mart’s boombox is playing Linda Ronstadt to help things along.
When Cal has worked up a sweat, he pulls off his fleece and wipes his face on it.
He takes a minute to let the air cool him, and to look out across the fields to the mountains.
The dark smudges of spruce groves are fewer and farther between than they used to be, but heather and gorse have run riot over the ragged black scars the fire left behind.
The mountains, with millennia of experience in regeneration, let the ash settle and went to work without missing a beat.
After just one summer’s worth of growth, no one would guess anything ever happened.
Mart, who’s trundling alternate wheelbarrow-loads of split wood to his back door and to Cal’s red Pajero, wolf-whistles at him.
“Wouldja look at them muscles,” he says admiringly.
“D’you remember the state of you, when you first got here?
A belly on you like Santy, you had, and I could tell by your face you were riddled with the cholesterol.
That’s what the food in America does to a man.
Over here you wouldn’t even be allowed sell it as food, most of it; you’d have to label it ‘industrial by-product, not for human consumption.’ And now look at you.
Giving Jean-Claude Van Damme a run for his money. ”
“I still got a belly,” Cal says, slapping it.
“That’s only a bitta curve, sure. Curves are in, boyo; d’you not keep up with your fashion magazines? You’re a credit to this place. We oughta put you on the tourist websites, as an advertisement. Before and after Ardnakelty.”
“You’re just buttering me up so I’ll keep going,” Cal says.
Mart grins. “You’re doing a great job there, Jean-Claude. Keep at it. Although,” he adds, struck by an inspiration, “who I did oughta get down here to help me is wee Bobby. I need a way to get that fella talking when he’s working too hard to be on his guard.”
“He’s still keeping quiet about Róisín, huh?” Cal says, picking up the axe again.
“The little fecker’s turned cunning,” Mart says, outraged. “ ’Tis true what they say, that love changes a man. Bobby Feeney never had a cunning bone in his body, and now will I tell you what he done?”
“Uh-oh,” Cal says.
Mart puts the wheelbarrow down and settles himself on a stack of old tires to do the story justice.
A lifetime of farming has tattered Mart’s joints; he sits down when he can, which isn’t often.
He pulls off his hat, which today is a bright blue beanie with a pom-pom on top, and fans himself with it.
“Sunday afternoon,” he says, “I’m in the kitchen minding my own business, making myself a cuppa tay, and what do I see out the window only Bobby’s bockety aul’ Passat heading up to the main road.
Bobby’s got no reason to be out and about on a Sunday afternoon.
So didn’t I hop in the car and follow him—at a safe distance, like. Sure, I’d nothing better to do.”
Cal lifts an eyebrow at him, between blows: farmers never have nothing better to do.
“I’m as entitled to a break as any man,” Mart says with dignity.
“Ask the union fellas up in Dublin: they’d have your arse in court before you could spit, for denying me my break.
Anyhow I wasn’t planning on following him the whole way.
I’ve no interest in being a spectator to whatever that lad calls courting.
All I wanted was to see where Senorita Róisín is from, the way I can ask around and find out who her people are and whether she’s a dacent match for our Bobby. ”
“Awww,” Cal says. “Stalking him for his own good.”
“That’s exactly what I was doing. But did the little fecker appreciate it?”
Cal doesn’t have the breath to answer, but the question is rhetorical anyway.
“That fella,” Mart says, with mounting injury, “that shneaky specimen, drove the pair of us up and down every side road in the county for the guts of an hour. In the end I lost him. There’s me driving in circles like a feckin’ eejit, trying to work out how to get home, when I get a text.
I pull out my phone”—he mimes it—“and who is it only the man himself. And the text says, not a word of a lie, the text says, ‘Fuck off home and don’t be annoying me, Róisín doesn’t need the life frightened outa her by your ugly mug. ’ ”
Cal, tossing split wood into an old feed sack, is grinning. “Good for Bobby,” he says.
“Good for Bobby, me arse. I’m only looking out for him. He oughta be thanking me.”
“Maybe he doesn’t need looking after,” Cal points out. “If he’s smart enough to be one step ahead of you.”
Mart doesn’t bother answering that, beyond a snort. “What I’m only dying to know,” he says thoughtfully, pulling his tobacco pouch out of his pocket, “is whether he’s invited her for a night out to meet the aliens.”
“Mart,” Cal says, lowering the axe. “You can’t tell Róisín about the aliens.”
Bobby has been convinced, ever since he was a teenager, that the mountains are some kind of pit stop on an interplanetary back road.
He has decades’ worth of notebook entries—he wants to show them to Cal, but the ribbing he gets in the pub leaves him too shy—where he’s recorded lights moving on the mountainside, weird shapes in the sky, flattened patches of heather.
Sometimes, when his mammy is feeling well enough to be left alone, he spends the night up on the mountain with his phone camera and a pair of night-vision goggles.
Bobby has never been lucky enough to see a real live alien, but he holds out hope.
“I’ll tell the woman sweet shag-all,” Mart says, affronted. “Unless she turns out to be a right geebag that’d make his life a misery, and he’s too blinded by the hormone explosion to notice. Then I might haveta drop a hint or two, in his own best interests.”
“Come on, man,” Cal says. “The guy’s happier’n I’ve ever seen him.”
“I’m saying nothing. I’m wondering, is all.
” Mart examines the amount of tobacco in his rollie paper and sprinkles in a little extra.
Apparently this conversation has more substance to it than Cal recognized; it’s going to take a while.
He goes back to his wood-splitting. On the boombox, Linda is singing “Heart Like a Wheel,” rich and sweet enough to make heartbreak sound like something to wish for.
“Every relationship,” Mart informs Cal, “has its crossroadses. Not just the romances; alla them. Them moments where either ye’ll go your separate ways, or ye’ll come out in better shape than ever.
I don’t know about you, bucko, but if I was Róisín the Receptionist, I’d see the little green men as a bit of a crossroads. ”
“Maybe she’s into aliens too,” Cal points out. “They can hold hands in his hide, or whatever he’s got up there.”
Mart licks his rollie paper and considers that. “Maybe,” he acknowledges. “It’d be a great excuse for a bit of a cuddle while they wait. I’d say the odds are against it, but.”
“It’ll be fine,” Cal says. “If she really likes him, one weird hobby isn’t gonna be a dealbreaker.”