Chapter Twenty-Two #3
She lets out a long breath and watches the smoke of it spread and dissolve in the cold air. “Looks like I live here as well,” she says. “I’ll have to work out how to do that.”
Cal nods. They sit in silence for a while, listening for each other, trying to find each other in this unfamiliar place. The wren is still at work, indefatigably combing the grass.
“I’da given a lot to see Tommy Moynihan’s face,” Lena says, “when some blow-in put him back in his box.”
“He said I had a small mind,” Cal says. “You figure my feelings should be hurt?”
Lena laughs. “God,” she says. “He’s some dose, isn’t he?”
“I guess Rachel thought big,” Cal says. “For better or for worse.”
Lena stands up and dusts off the seat of her jeans. Cal watches her. The frost has purified the light so that the pale landscape stretches out for miles, to a faint horizon of hills in some other townland.
“I’m freezing my arse off out here,” she says, and holds out a hand to him. “Come inside.”
After lunch Cal and P.J. get started on Mart’s farm.
The work goes clumsily. Mart’s sheep are accustomed to Kojak, but Kojak is curled in a corner of Cal’s living room, motionless except for the flicker of his eyes and the lip that lifts when anyone gets too close.
P.J. brings up his tractor—even once the oil drains back into place, Mart’s won’t be an easy thing to touch.
P.J., who yesterday was solid as rock right through everything, flinches like a spooked horse whenever he looks at it.
The earth in the bottom field, with no rain to blur it and the frost to preserve it, still shows the dents of the tractor’s weight and the lighter imprint of Mart’s body.
When the inspectors come with their notebooks and questions, it’ll tell the chosen story.
Senan brings Ruairi over. Ruairi is twenty, a big, open-faced kid with a broccoli haircut, his usual cheerfulness muted by the circumstances.
What with Mart not even in the ground, no one makes any mention of the land going to him; but Senan, with a delicacy Cal never expected, strolls casually through all that’ll need deciding over the next while—we could turn the sheep back out after the footbath or we could house them till the scald’s gone, when d’you reckon the ewes’ll need scanning, that one’s lost both ear-tags, some of those lambs oughta go to the mart.
Ruairi answers readily and solidly. A couple of times he glances at Senan like he’s expecting disagreement, but all he ever gets is a nod.
Eventually the four of them maneuver the whole flock through the footbath and let them mill around for a while till their hooves dry off.
Ruairi finds the ear-tagger and the pack of tags in Mart’s shed and puts new ones on the ewe who’s lost hers, making a careful note of the number.
The squirrel watches them from the roof of the house, before whisking around and vanishing into some new hole in the eaves with an impertinent flick of its tail.
By that time Angela Maguire has arrived, chivvying a small flock of teenagers she’s collected to help get Mart’s house ready for the wake.
The sound of vigorous hoovering pours through the opened windows, and occasionally someone comes out to the yard to shake curtains or beat puffs of dust from cushions.
When Cal sticks his head inside for a drink of water, Angela shoos him and his mucky boots away and brings him a glass on the doorstep.
“Thanks,” he says. “I ran into Con McHugh, we were saying probably the wake could be tomorrow night. That sound about right?”
“Ah, yeah; that’s when I was thinking, all right. Leave us time to get everything sorted.” Angela, pushing hair off her forehead with the back of her wrist, shoots Cal a quick look. “D’you reckon Lena would give us a hand making the sandwiches?”
“Probably,” Cal says. Lena may kill him, but he gets what Angela is doing, and so will she. “Sure.”
“Great,” Angela says, taking the glass back.
“I’ll give her a ring.” Behind her, the floors are wet and shining, and her Finbarr and Noreen’s Cliona have cleared the breakfast things off the kitchen table and are giving it an energetic scrub.
In the living room, someone has turned the old mirror over the mantelpiece to face the wall.
Cal leaves Senan and Ruairi going through Mart’s books, looking for the date he put the rams in with the ewes, whether he’s dosed for fluke yet, what lick buckets he’s ordered.
Presumably Cousin Myles and a solicitor and various other people will show up at some point to put in their two cents’ worth, and the whole thing will take a while to shake out, but the land and the sheep are oblivious to all this; their requirements move on, unaffected, along their accustomed rounds.
When he gets home, the workshop radio is playing some cheesy pop song.
Trey has her wood burl out on the worktable, along with a big piece of paper covered in neat, indecipherable diagrams and notations, and is carefully drawing in guidelines for the hollows that will make cubbyholes.
Rip and Banjo are getting under her feet.
“Tommy kill Mart Lavin?” she asks, by way of greeting.
“Yeah,” Cal says. The dogs have bounced over to investigate his smell of sheep and sweat; he bends to rub their heads. “Not Rachel, though.”
Trey stares, her pencil in midair. “You serious?” she says. “For definite?”
“Yeah. She did that herself. Aiming to turn people against Tommy, sink his big plan.”
“Huh,” Trey says, after a moment, the same way Cal says it. She snaps her fingers for Banjo and lifts his hock to disentangle a wood shaving from his fur. Cal can’t tell what she’s making of this, whether she thinks Rachel was an idiot or whether she sees logic in her choice.
“You’d’ve thought of something better’n that,” he says. “To stop him. Right?”
“I did,” Trey points out. “We did.”
A couple of years back she would have stated it as plain fact, no different from I sanded that table. Now Cal can tell, from her straight glance at him, that this is reassurance.
“Right,” he says. Trey frees the wood shaving and gives Banjo a pat, dismissing him to go back to sniffing Cal’s socks.
“Keep that about Rachel to yourself,” Cal says. “Miss Lena knows. No one else needs to.”
“ ’S Tommy’s fault anyhow,” Trey says. “You gonna get him now?”
“That’s done,” Cal says. “Tommy won’t be giving us any more trouble.”
“He going to jail?”
“No,” Cal says. “Not unless he gets feisty. We need him, to pull the plug on his buddies’ plans. He so much as looks sideways at anyone, then yeah, we’re going to the Guards. But he won’t.”
“So he’s not gonna pay for any of it,” Trey says flatly. “What he done on you, or Lena. Or Mart.”
“Kid,” Cal says. “You remember what I said to you a few days ago? What I wanted was Tommy Moynihan tarred and feathered and run out of town.”
“He hasn’t been.”
“Closer than you think. Tommy’s not gonna be giving orders and getting his ass kissed around here any more.
He’s not even gonna be able to walk into Noreen’s or Seán’s.
He shows his face in the village, someone’s gonna spit on his shoe.
He tries to drive down the street, people are gonna block his way.
” Cal knows enough, now, to feel the immensity of that shift. “Tommy’s nothing,” he says.
Trey winds the wood shaving around her finger. In the end she gives that a reluctant nod. “He might haveta leave town,” she says.
“He might,” Cal says. That would probably be a good call.
Once Tommy’s fulfilled his function, there are people who might feel he’s surplus to requirements.
In any case, the landscape Tommy sees out his window is redrawing itself, not in the ways he envisioned, and Cal can’t picture him reshaping himself to fit its new form. “Either way,” he says, “he’s gone.”
After a moment Trey says gruffly, “Sorry ’bout your man Mart.” She’s gone back to her pencil and ruler; Trey abhors being on the receiving end of sympathy, so she’s unskilled at offering it. “Ye were mates.”
“Sort of,” Cal says. “I guess. Thanks.” His feelings about Mart were complicated, and are getting more so.
He can’t tell how much is personal grief, and how much is the broader loss that comes from an old oak wantonly chopped down or a standing stone vandalized.
The distinction hasn’t seemed important, since the work that needs doing is the same either way.
“Miss Lena’s coming for dinner,” he says, and enjoys Trey’s fast spin towards him. “I want to make her something good. What do you figure?”
The kid stares at him like she suspects some trick. “You talked to her?”
“Yeah,” Cal says. “Everything’s fine.” Which, while it may not be exactly true, feels close enough to hold up.
Trey keeps up the stare for another minute, but whatever she sees satisfies her. “Fuck’s sake,” she says in the end. “About fuckin’ time.”
“You know what?” Cal says. He feels like he’s going to crack open on something, maybe tears or laughter, he can’t tell which. “Your language sucks. That’s no way for a proper young lady to talk. I’m gonna send you to charm school.”
Trey, turning back to her burl, snorts derisively. “Charm schools’d run a mile if they saw this place.”
“I’m gonna start one. Noreen can help me out. We’ll have you lifting up your little finger and curtseying in no time.”
The kid gives him a look like he’s lost his mind, which Cal agrees is a possibility. “Make tacos,” she says. “Lena likes them. We’ve got the shell yokes, and mince.”
“OK,” Cal says. “We’ll do that.” He wants to give both her and Lena something extravagant and elaborate, something magnificent enough to blow away every particle of the last few weeks, but tacos will have to do. Probably Tommy was right and he has a mind for small things, but he’s OK with it.
Trey is bent close over her burl, taking complicated measurements. She says, “C’n Kate come for dinner as well?”