By the Lake

  “What party? ”

  “Someone has to be giving the party with a cargo like that in the house. I never saw the man giving the party yet that lasted long.”

  “Visitors come. There are times for celebration. It will last for years,” Ruttledge said.

  “It’d be some party all on your own. I wouldn’t be surprised if it ended with Kate here throwing you out.”

  “She may well do that anyhow.”

  “And she mightn’t be too far out,” he started to shake gently, his good humour restored.

  They walked him to the car and trailer. Kate gave the sheepdog a biscuit, which he carried with importance to the front seat.

  “I’m sorry it was dumped on you. It should have been delivered here,” Ruttledge apologized.

  “Anyway it’s safe now. It’s hid,” the Shah said.

  As he turned the heavy trailer in the space between the house and the bare iron posts, he raised a slow hand in a version of an episcopal blessing to a grinning Patrick Ryan, who was all mock attention beneath the posts. Patrick answered with a blasphemous sign of the cross—on forehead, on both shoulders, on breast, in mock gratitude, and then raised his own hand in a smart military salute as the car and trailer swung around. The performance was superb, but its intended victim did not even glance in the mirror as the car and trailer crunched past the porch and out the gate to go slowly round the shore. Patrick had been acting for himself. There was no response or applause to drown out the empty echo, and he turned away in disgust.

  “A worse thing could not have been left at the sheds,” Ruttledge said to Kate as he prepared to rejoin Patrick Ryan. “I’m sure he’ll be counting now to see if we’ve sold any cattle.”

  “What was the Shah doing with the trailer?” Patrick Ryan asked when Ruttledge returned. “He’s unlikely to be heading into the cattle business at this stage.”

  “Some things for the house were delivered to the railway by mistake.”

  Jamesie would have been on fire to know what had been delivered, but Patrick Ryan was incurious about the things around him and asked no further.

  “He may be your uncle and he may have made his weight in money but let me tell you something for nothing, lad: he’s still as thick and as ignorant as several double ditches.”

  “I’m fond of him,” Ruttledge affirmed simply. “He was kind when I was young. That goodness is still there even if it sometimes doesn’t show too well.”

  Patrick looked hard at him for a moment, but Ruttledge stood unflinchingly, and after a long pause he turned away to mark the angle of a beam.

  They were able to raise the heavy beams and, using ladders, bolt them to the top of the iron posts. As they worked in the heat and silence, Bill Evans was the only visitor they had on his way to the lake for the buckets of water. He stayed chatting with them until Patrick Ryan threw him cigarettes, and then he went into the house for tea and food and more cigarettes.

  “He may well be happier than any of us, lad. He doesn’t know any differ,” Patrick Ryan said.

  “Who can tell?” Ruttledge asked lightly.

  “Who can tell, when all is said and done, and who can tell the man who wore the ragged jacket,” he sang softly. “It’s a conundrum, lad. That’s what it is.”

  “Would you swap with him?”

  “No, lad. I would not swap with a lord. We all want our own two shoes of life. If truth was told, none of us would swap with anybody. We want to go out the way we came in. It’s just as well we have no choice. If there was choice you’d have certain giddy outfits having operations to get themselves changed into other people like those sexchange outfits you see in the newspapers.”

  They never knew whether he would come from one day to the next until his dark figure appeared in the spaces between the trees in around the shore or at the alder at the gate or standing in the doorway of the room. They worked often till dark. Once the heavy crossbeams were bolted into place, they started to cut the frame to hold the roof. When they had finished work for the day and eaten, he always sat on in the house, reluctant to go home.

  “I’ll be glad to run you to Carrick to see Edmund,” Ruttledge offered several times as a way out of the long, closed evening.

  “I know that well,” he answered. “I know that well but Edmund’s days are done. Our lad was easygoing like my father. My mother spent years in America and was hard. She lost an eye when she got hit in the byre with a horn while tying a cow and nearly all the money she brought back with her was lost trying to save the sight of the other eye. She was very hard. In my turn I was probably too hard on Edmund. In the end what does it matter? I could see Edmund was finished the minute he woke. He’s hanging by a thread in Carrick. We’ll not see him again.”

  “Would you like to take a run into town?” Ruttledge offered on other evenings.

  “No, lad, no. We’d take to the drink if we went to town.”

  “We could have one or two and leave it at that. We don’t have to go wild.”

  “You should know by now that your Irishman can do nothing by halves. He has to go the whole hog.”

  “There’s a few things that have to be got for the house.”

  “You go to town, lad, if you have to run for messages,” he said. Kate looked up from her ironing with alarm. “Why don’t you put that away so that we can have a proper chat, girl?”

  “We can talk away while I’m ironing. It’s more pleasant.”

  “It’s hard to whistle and chew meal. Do you think will you ever make that drawing you do pay?”

  “I don’t think so, Patrick.”

  “Why do you keep at it, then, girl?”

  “It brings what I see closer.”

  “Does it mean that nobody would want those drawings if you tried to sell?”

  “That’s possible. An aunt of mine painted and drew all her life. She was good but never sold a drawing or a picture.”

  “She must have plenty of washers, then.”

  “Her husband was a lawyer.”

  “He kept the show on the road. I suppose they had no children either.”

  “They had two girls.”

  He would become more and more frustrated but could not attack openly and they could not get on. What he wanted was complete attention and his moods were unpredictable, always changing. “Don’t tell me about the people of this part of the country. I’ve ploughed their fields, built their houses, laid them out, slept in their beds, sat at their tables. They’re as ignorant as dogshite. All they want is to get as much for themselves and to give as little back as they can ever manage. And the older they get—when you’d think they’d have some sense—the greedier the cunts become.”

  “That’s too hard. There are many decent people round here.”

  “There’s a few,” he admitted reluctantly. “They are far from the normal.”

  “What about Mary and Jamesie?”

  “Mary’s the best in the world,” his face brightened. “There’s none better than Mary. Jamesie would give you the shirt off his back. Once I was coming to borrow their mule. He had the mule tackled and was putting out topdressing. As soon as he saw me come he had the mule untackled in seconds. He declared before God that he was doing nothing with the mule. The mule was there for me to take.”

  “What about yourself? You aren’t too bad either,” Kate said firmly.

  “You should know me well enough by now,” he laughed and grew light. “I don’t count. I’m just a sort of comedian to the crowd. Do you think when you made those drawings of me, Kate, do you think you got any nearer to the beast?”

  “You have an interesting face but you know that yourself. I don’t think I ever got it right.”

  “Maybe it’s just as well that it wasn’t laid out for all to see,” he said defensively, but his pleasure was obvious.

  “You gave us a great deal of help when we came first,” Ruttledge said when they were alone laying out the timbers for the roof.

  “It was nothing, lad,” Patrick
Ryan said. “What else would I have done?”

  “The first time I gave you money you threw it to the wind. We had to search for the notes in the bushes.”

  “I disremember, lad. I’ve done many things in my time that are best forgot but I’ve never taken money from neighbours.”

  “You were here the first day the priest came to the house,” Ruttledge said.

  “I disremember that as well.”

  “You went into hiding. When the car pulled up at the gate you told me to go and invite him into the house and be in no hurry out.”

  “It’s beginning to come back. Go on, lad.”

  “I brought him in and made him tea. Kate was in the town. He wasn’t looking for you at all. We talked about the weather and cattle and the land. After a long time he asked, ‘I suppose you are wondering what brought me here?’ ‘It did cross my mind but that doesn’t matter. It’s nice that you are here,’ I said. ‘Whatever about that,’ Father Conroy said, ‘I’m not here on my own account. I believe in living and letting live. The man up in Longford is very interested in you and why you left the Church and has me persecuted about you every time he comes. He’s coming on Thursday to give Confirmation and one of the first things he’ll ask me is, Have you been up to see that man yet? And this coming Thursday I’ll tell him in no uncertain terms I have, and that’s the whole of my business here.’ ”

  “He’s straight and direct,” Patrick Ryan said. “Himself and the Bishop don’t pull. They’re like chalk and cheese.”

  “He drank the tea black without sugar. He wouldn’t even take a biscuit,” Ruttledge said.

  “I’m surprised he took the tea. He must have been upset. He generally takes nothing in houses. He lives on fruit and bread and milk and water. For a man with such an interest in cattle he never touches meat. I suppose that’s why there’s not a pick on him for such a big man.”

  “As soon as we came out of the house he spotted you by the sheds and headed your way at once,” Ruttledge laughed. “Even before he got close, you started pulling money from your pocket. The day was wild. The wind took a fiver and stuck it on a whitethorn.”

  “I should have kept out of sight. I mustn’t have expected him to leave the house so soon,” Patrick Ryan said. “I owed him washers. I hadn’t paid any dues for a couple of years.”

  “After you paid him what you owed he saw the fiver stuck on the thorn and reached into the bush. ‘I think God meant that for me as well.’ ”

  “He has an eye like a hawk, especially where there is money. You have a good memory, lad.”

  “It was that same day I tried to give you money. You threw it back in my face and it all went on the wind. We had to search for it in the bushes.”

  “I never cared about money,” Patrick Ryan said.

  When the crossbeams were bolted to the four iron posts, they used scaffolding planks to walk between the ladders. The heavy roof beams were angled and cut and fixed into place. They started to cut the rafters. The work was clean and pleasant. High up on the planks there was a cooling breeze from the lake. The noise of distant traffic on the road became part of the insect hum and the sharper singing of the birds. A wren or a robin would alight on one of the roof beams and look down on them as if they were sheep or cattle and fly back into the bushes. They had become so used to working together spasmodically over the years that they were often silent. When they talked, it was generally Patrick Ryan who wanted to talk, and it was often mordant and funny, about people he had worked for or known. Now and again out of the silence would come without warning a seething, barely restrained urge to strike out and wound over a mislaid tool or a piece of wood. These violences would come and go and appeared both to fulfil and to exhaust themselves in their very expression.

  “Johnny must be home by now,” Ruttledge remarked as they worked. “He should be over on his visit any of these days.”

  “I know, lad. I should have gone over to see him but I hate the sight of going though we were great friends. His was the worst case this part of the country ever saw. He left when he had the whole world at his feet.”

  Once they started nailing the rafters, the frame to hold the roof took shape. Each new rafter formed its own square or rectangle, and from the ground they all held their own measure of sky; in the outer rectangles leaves from branches of overhanging ash and sycamore were mixed with the sky.

  “What are you looking at, lad?”

  “At how the rafters frame the sky. How the squares of light are more interesting than the open sky. They make it look more human by reducing the sky, and then the whole sky grows out from that small space.”

  “As long as they hold the iron, lad, they’ll do,” Patrick Ryan laughed sympathetically. “There was a time when people were locked up for saying less than that. If you came out with a spake like that they’d think you had gone off like one of the old alarm clocks.”

  A few mowers were starting up in the early meadows.

  “I could mow for you this year, Patrick, when I get the mower out. I’m mowing for Jamesie,” Ruttledge offered as they worked.

  “No, lad, no. I have plenty of clients who have asked. My meadows won’t be fit for weeks yet and it would make no great differ if they were never mowed.”

  Wisps of cloud trailed across the blue. Whenever the hammering stopped, the steady motor hum of insects met the shrilling of the small birds and the harsher cries of gulls and crows closer to the shore.

  An approaching car was heard. They paused on the ladders to watch it move through the breaks in the trees.

  “God almighty, this place is getting like O’Connell Street,” Patrick Ryan said when the car turned uphill from the lake.

  A green Vauxhall came to a stop beneath the alder tree at the gate. Two burly middle-aged men got out.

  “Trouble,” Patrick Ryan said. He quickly descended the ladder and hurried towards the gate as if he didn’t want the men to come any closer. No handshakes or pleasantries were exchanged. The three men moved out into the lane until they were hidden by the high banks.

  Ruttledge rearranged the planks and tidied the cut ends of the beams and rafters into a small heap for firewood. He was used to people looking for Patrick Ryan. Often he had seen him gather up his tools and leave with them in the middle of work. It had been galling once. Now he had come not to care. There was very little work that couldn’t just as easily be left undone.

  When they reappeared from behind the high banks of the lane, the two burly men got straight into the green Vauxhall and Patrick Ryan came slowly back to the shed. He was not in a good mood and stood staring up at the pattern of beams and rafters in sour abstraction.

  “The longer you live the more you eat,” he said.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “We should have put on the creosote.”

  “We can still put it on from the ladders.”

  “It’d be a sight easier if we’d had the wit to put it on before the timber left the ground.”

  As they nailed the last of the rafters into place, Patrick Ryan appeared troubled or absentminded and made a number of small unusual errors.

  “Who were those men?”

  “A couple of certified thicks from the arsehole of Drumreilly. When they want anything done they think the only work in the world is their work.”

  “Did they threaten you?”

  “Put it this way, lad, they didn’t offer me oranges,” he said.

  The cans of creosote were taken from the shed and the dark liquid poured into two smaller paint cans. Ruttledge brought out two pairs of rubber gloves and offered them to Patrick Ryan.

  “No, lad. You put on the gloves. My hide is too hard.”

  “That stuff is dangerous. You can smell the fumes.”

  “I’ve been plastering and painting all my life and never wore nothing. I’m not doing anything different now.”

  They were high on the ladders, brushing the creosote into the raw timber, when Kate came from the house in a white beekeeper’s su
it and hat and veil. In her gloved hands she carried a brass smoker and a yellow hive tool. The smoker had been lit and breathed a pale smoke when she pressed the fan-like bellows.

  “What’s she up to now?”

  “With that gear on you hardly need two guesses.”

  “What can she be doing with the bees?” he asked aggressively.

  “I don’t know. We can ask her on the way back.”

  He poured out creosote roughly, and as it ran across the beam it sprayed out in all directions from the violent brush strokes. One cheek bulged while his jaw worked slowly up and down as if he was eating his tongue. He was in foul humour again.

  Kate was a long time in the orchard. When she reappeared she looked dishevelled and her long fair hair was flying about her face, smoke blowing from the brass nose of the smoker she carried awkwardly. She would have passed by quickly but Patrick Ryan called, “How is the bees?”

  “They’re angry.”

  “Were you afeard?”

  “No.” She was taken aback by the mocking aggressiveness of the tone, and stopped. “I could have gone through the hives but there was no point. They were boiling up. I was afraid.” Small beads of sweat glistened on her forehead when she looked up. One side of her neck was red and chaffed where she had been stung beneath the veil.

  “What cause has the bees to be riz on a fine day the like of this in Ireland?”

  “They didn’t want me around. It wasn’t a good idea.”

  “What wasn’t?”

  “To go near the hives.”

  She waited but Patrick Ryan went back to pouring the creosote out on the timber, spreading it roughly around with the brush. When a spray of the dark liquid fell dangerously close to where she stood, she moved quickly on without glance or word. The two men worked in silence, pouring the creosote, spreading it with the brush, moving the ladders.

  “This creosoting from the ladders is one slow feck of a job,” Patrick complained as he moved the heavy ladder along the beam one more time. “I’m away with myself out to the orchard here to cut a button.”

  “I’d be careful of the hives,” Ruttledge warned.

  “The bees won’t bother me. My hide is too hard.”