Chapter Sixteen #4
“The hell are you on about?” Francie demands. “He’s not going to show up at your door looking for a fuckin’ gunfight.”
“I know that, sure,” P.J. explains, with a harassed look at Senan, who’s started singing the theme tune from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. “I only meant—”
“In a cowboy hat and chaps, is it? He’ll be lovely.”
Senan is doing a spraddle-legged cowboy walk, unholstering double finger-pistols. Mrs. Geraghty’s grandkids are giggling in the window. He tips an imaginary Stetson to them. Cal and Mart have started laughing.
“I only said if he—”
“On a fuckin’ mustang, yeah?”
Mrs. Geraghty has joined her grandkids and is staring, open-mouthed.
Senan tries to trot a mustang for her, but he’s laughing too hard.
Francie cracks up too, and then even P.J.
joins in at his own expense, and the five of them stand there in the middle of the street laughing their asses off.
Mrs. Geraghty gives them a tentative polite wave, but that only makes them laugh harder.
Cal is in Mart’s car, heading home, before it occurs to him to check out his injuries.
The main ones are a tender lump above his ear, where he got elbowed, and a sore neck from him and Mouth hauling each other around.
He has a few random bruises and scrapes thrown in, but nothing feels serious enough to need attention, and none of it detracts from his mood, which is better than it’s been in a long time.
He knows any kind of victory is a long way off and by no means certain, but the rules of engagement are no longer Tommy’s rules, which in itself counts as a win.
“I do love a good roola-boola,” Mart says happily, shifting up a gear as they leave the village behind.
“I haven’t had one a them in years. I was worried that I’d got too old, but wouldja look at that, Jean-Claude: I’ve still got it.
Bernard McHugh’s eye can vouch for that.
He won’t look very managerial in work on Monday. ”
He glances sideways at Cal. “Did I take you by surprise back there, starting shite?”
“Little bit,” Cal says, twisting his neck to test it out. “I figured we’d at least wait till the guys had made up their minds.”
“If I’da waited,” Mart says, “them lads woulda gone on dithering till Christmas. Sometimes a decision looks awful complicated till you’re dropped into the middle of it, and then ’tis all crystal-clear.
I was just providing a bitta clarity.” He slants Cal a wicked look.
“And anyhow, don’t you be lecturing me about patience, and you the one that resorted to violence. ”
“Sorry I got you guys barred,” Cal says.
“That won’t last,” Mart says, waving the idea away magnificently. “If that fella bars the lot of us, he’ll be outa business. We’ll be back in by Thursday.”
“You reckon that was a bad call?” Cal asks. “Hitting Mouth?”
“Ah, God, no,” Mart assures him, taking a hand off the wheel to dig out his tobacco pouch and rummage in it for a rollie.
“You saw the lads: they’re only over the moon with themselves.
They needed that. And no one’ll hold it against you for giving Mouth a few skelps; sure, we’ve all had the urge. He’s some gowl, that fella.”
He waits for a pothole-free stretch of road and flicks his lighter. “And it stopped Bernard talking,” he says, through his rollie. “I appreciated that.”
“Bernard’s an OK guy,” Cal says. “He wasn’t trying to start anything.”
“Exactly,” Mart says, aiming his cigarette at Cal like Cal just said something profound.
“That’s the problem with Bernard, bucko: the man isn’t just some lickarse that thinks anything Tommy does is holy.
He’s a dacent lad, he’s thought this over, and he has a point.
I don’t agree with it—as far as I’m concerned, he can shove it up his hole—but ’tis a point. That’s what I don’t like.”
“He was talking quiet,” Cal says. “Nobody much heard him.”
Mart shakes his head impatiently, like Cal missed his meaning. His glee over the fight has dropped away; his profile, against the hedges speeding by, has an intent, inward focus that Cal can’t read.
“I’m getting old, Sunny Jim,” he says. “Regardless of Bernard’s eye, and although I hate to admit it. I’ve always had a terror of getting old.”
Cal has never heard Mart confess to any fear of anything except cauliflower. He wonders if Mart is about to reveal something terminal. The thought hits him harder than he would have expected.
“You look like you’re in pretty good shape to me,” he says. “No worse’n you were when I got here, anyway.”
Mart blows that away with a scornful snort.
“I’m not talking about the aul’ aches and pains, man.
I’m fulla those ever since I was a lad of thirty; I don’t pay any notice to them.
But I never wanted to be one of them aul’ fellas whinging and whining about how things were back in their day.
What’s the point of them? They’re not in the world at all; they’re getting no sense outa it, nor it outa them.
To all intents and purposes, Sunny Jim, they’re dead men walking.
” He rolls down his window to flick ash.
“I’ve always made an effort on that,” he says.
“I read the internet, when the aul’ connection doesn’t give up on me.
I take an interest in what the young people do be saying, seeing as I’ve none of my own to keep me up to date. I’ve a favorite Taylor Swift song.”
“Which one?” Cal asks. He’s not clear on where this is going.
“ ‘Shake It Off,’ ” Mart informs him. “That’s beside the point.
What I’m saying is, even if I listen to Tay-Tay all day long and read the whole of Reddit, I’m still getting old.
Maybe Bernard’s right: this place needs progress, and I’m just another aul’ fella throwing a wobbler ’cause the world’s moving on. ”
“No,” Cal says.
Mart cocks an eyebrow at him. “No?”
Cal doesn’t know how to find words for what he means.
The things he’s come to prize in this place are not, mostly, the ones he moved here in search of.
The beauty is all there and more, but he was also picturing simplicity and peace, maybe even innocence, none of which showed up in any noticeable quantity.
Instead he’s found the intricate webs, constructed over centuries, that bind people to one another, to their land, and to their past. He’s under no illusion that these bindings are simple or innocent, either.
They’ve sliced people to the bone, scourged them out of town, choked them to death.
But alongside all that, they’ve held the place together, steadfast in the face of time, dark happenings, rifts, attacks, and sieges.
The things under threat from Tommy wouldn’t hold any weight in a corporation’s profit-and-loss projection, or meet government criteria on innovation and sustainability; by any standard that has power, they’re worthless.
Their currency has value only to its holders.
But it seems to Cal that dismissing them as disposable because of this would be some grievous kind of sin.
“Bernard’s got a point,” he says. “Not one that’s good enough.”
Mart nods, accepting that. “I’m not against this place changing,” he says.
“ ’Tis no fuckin’ paradise, whatever the tourist board likes to say; there’s plenty of things that could do with a bitta change.
But we oughta be the ones doing it. Not a buncha suits ripping the guts outa the place and building it back whatever way’ll fill up their bank accounts. ”
They’ve reached Cal’s gate. Trey won’t be there—Aidan’s parents are out of town for the weekend, so everyone is heading over to his place to do unspecified stuff that Cal assumes will include the kind of party that would give him nightmares.
For once, he’s glad of her absence. He’s not in the right frame of mind for explaining why he gets to kick ass and she doesn’t.
Mart pulls in at the side of the road, but he doesn’t turn to Cal; he’s still looking out the windshield, one hand on the wheel, a thread of smoke curling from the rollie between his fingers. The car is cold and has a comforting smell of tobacco, rain, and dog.
“Will I tell you something, Jean-Claude?” Mart asks. “Something I haven’t said to anyone else?”
“Go for it,” Cal says.
“All this that we’re doing,” Mart says. “Gathering at Tommy’s place the other night, and shouting from the rooftops, and getting ourselves barred from Seán’s. ’Twon’t make a blind bitta difference.”
Cal is startled. “Hey,” he says. “We got this.”
“Quit being American, for fuck’s sake,” Mart says. “You’ll give me the sick. You’re in Ireland now; follow the local customs. We don’t give fuckin’ pep talks.”
“I’m just saying,” Cal says. “We’ve got plenty more left in the tank.”
“Ah, we do,” Mart agrees. “I’m not saying we’ll get nowhere.
We’ll get Tommy off your missus’s back, one way or another.
We might beat him back off the land, this time; I wouldn’t put a bet on it either way, but we might.
But Tommy’s a long-sighted man. He’ll give people a coupla years to simmer down.
He’ll do some good deeds for the townland meanwhile—pull a few strings and get the aul’ post office reopened, maybe, or bring in more school buses. And then he’ll start over.”
“So we’re gonna have to get thorough,” Cal says. “He can’t get the post office reopened from Puerto Banús.”
Mart leans back in his seat to draw the last out of his rollie, and regards Cal steadily.
“You’re not taking my meaning, bucko,” he says gently.
“Tommy looks like the problem, but he’s not.
I’m going after him ’cause he gives us something solid to fight against, and we need that.
But if Tommy doesn’t get the job done, then sooner or later, someone else will.
’Tis happening here and there, all round the country.
There’s plenty of farming men getting old, Sunny Jim, and getting old alone, with no childer to take over the farm.
When they retire, or die, in come a buncha investors to snatch up the land, at prices the young men can’t match.
Next thing you know, there’s a megafarm, sucking up everything around it and getting more mega every year. ”
He nods dispassionately at his own knobbly knees, in their stained pants.
“ ’Tis only a matter of time before these joints of mine won’t get me through the day’s work.
P.J. and Bobby and Francie and plenty of others, they’re no chickens either; they won’t be able for this forever.
Whatever buyers Tommy’s lined up, if they’ve enough patience, they won’t even need fancy schemes and compulsory purchase orders. All they’ll haveta do is wait us out.”
He throws his rollie butt out the window, into a puddle. “You came here just in time, Jean-Claude,” he says. “Look at that.”
Cal follows his look. All around them, the stone walls spread out in a pattern as individual and intimate as a fingerprint.
The rain has faded; under the low-hanging cloud, the greens and tawny-golds of the fields have a strange rich glow, like they’ve been infiltrated by some other self from a memory or a dream.
“In ten or twenty or thirty years,” Mart says, “that’ll be gone.
Them walls’ll be cleared away, to let the big machinery through for the large-scale tillage.
Mosta the hedgerows’ll haveta go, as well—some a them are here since the Stone Age, didja know that?
but sure, you can’t let sentiment get in the way of business.
The houses’ll be bought up with the land, and people moved into nice new estates named after the developers.
Instead we’ll have livestock sheds the size of airport terminals.
There’ll be no cattle out to pasture; they’ll be housed year-round—you can fit more on the same land that way, d’you see.
Take a good look while you can, boyo. That’s the last of it. ”
The fields around here have names. Cal has learned them one by one, along the way: Garrybrock, Thady’s Acre, the Furze Field, the Five Rood, the Liss, the Stray Field, Tobardove, the Far Curragh, Gannon’s Kesh.
A kesh, according to Mart, was a causeway made of sticks across boggy land.
It vanished before living memory, along with Garrybrock’s badger and the Tobardove black well; no one remembers who Thady was, and no one gets led astray by fairies any more, but the footprints of all these things still run easily through every day’s pub talk, directions, anecdotes. None of them are gone.
Maybe Tommy will get one of the developers to name a row of identical cardboard houses Tobardove Terrace, to show how much he respects local heritage. His tenants can show their kids photos of dry-stone walls, and tell them how cows used to graze free where they park their cars.
Small with distance, Mary Ann Gannon and one of her sons tramp across their land, where the causeway used to run, with heavy sacks slung over their shoulders and her red wax jacket bright against the grass.
Richie Casey is moving sheep, swinging his crook and signaling to his dog with whistles sharp enough that flickers of them carry all the way to Cal’s ears.
These people and their way of life are turning into myth in front of his eyes.
“If you figure we won’t make any difference,” he says, “then what the hell are we doing?”
Mart turns to look at him. “What I just said to you,” he tells Cal, “I wouldn’t say to any of the lads.
And I expect you to keep it to yourself, as well.
You can handle it; ’tisn’t your home place on the line.
But it’d take the heart outa the lads. That’s all I’m doing, Jean-Claude: I’m keeping the heart in people.
So that when alla this is taken off us and changed, we’ll know we fought like fuck, and we’ll have a bitta heart left in us for whatever comes next. ”
He smiles at Cal and lifts his chin, dismissing him. “Go on,” he says. “You done a good day’s work. And you never got to eat your toastie. Go get some food into you; you’ll need your strength.”
Cal gets out of the car. Mart lifts a hand and drives off, spray flying up from his tires as he bumps through potholes.