Spring Days,

There were evenings, back when he was a young man and still working up at Rooney’s farm,

that Fergus would stop at the back gate before turning in for the day and take a moment to

look down past the ash trees that grew by Donohue’s Hill, to where the sun sank into the

bogland beyond.

His favourites were spring evenings after rain had come and gone, and the clouds

stood solidly with their edges rendered in the colours of the sunset. On those evenings, he

would breathe in deeply the clean, wet air, the smell of meal and new life and he would feel a

lump of something that might have been hope rise like a stone in his throat. On those

evenings, he would understand what people meant when they talked about happiness.

On one such spring evening, Fergus took his breath and headed for home. The day

had been long. He’d been up in the dark to check the ewes that had dropped during the night,

finding one standing over a slick purple lamb whose fragile chest lay still. A bullock had

knocked a fence down in the back field and Fergus had slit his hand on the barbs putting it

back up. In one of the pens, the smallest of a set of triplet lambs had to be separated from the

mother that kicked at it, and placed with the other pets. There were two so far that year and

Fergus was glad the rejected lamb would have company. It was unlikely that sheep dwelled

on the confused hurt of a mother turning on them, but just in case they did, Fergus was glad

that lamb wouldn’t be alone to do it. There was brutality on the farm this time of year, but

Fergus didn’t mind it. The worst of the cold was over and soon the evenings would be long

and that was all, really, you could ask for.

Jack Rooney stood at the back door of the farmhouse, and he waved to him as he

passed.

‘Good luck now.’ Jack called and Fergus nodded back.

As he rounded the house, out of sight of the man who hired him, he glanced up at the

upstairs windows, hoping to catch a glimpse of Grace Rooney, silhouetted in butter-coloured

light. But no luck. The windows were empty.

Fergus stepped out onto the road and began the walk home. As he did, he thought of

the upcoming weekend and the dance that his brother-in-law had offered to take him to, the

one that Grace might also attend. The dusk settled around him, and he allowed himself to

imagine being the kind of man to cross the floor during ‘Good Looking Woman’ and ask her

for a dance. Be the kind of man she might say yes to. The kind of man who could laugh easily

with the other men, smoking by the tuck shop, and have them clap him on the shoulder as

they left with promises to see him soon.

Fergus was not this kind of man. The time-swollen boards of the dance floor always

seemed too great a distance to cross. The jokes he wanted to tell always stuck in his throat.

But, swaddled in the almost-darkness he could pretend. Back then, this pretending was

important to him.

He hadn’t known that this evening was different from the others until he saw his

mother standing, waiting for him in the middle of the road, where it curved by their pebble-

dash bungalow. She stood still, arms unburdened, hanging down by her sides. She was

dressed in her house clothes: skirt, blouse, cardigan, no coat to protect against the dew fall

that she always feared would settle in her lungs. At the sight of her, his heart grew sluggish

and his breath grew quick.

‘Come into the kitchen, Fergus,’ she told him, when he was close enough to make out

her features in the navy dark. And he knew, by the downward set of her mouth and the look

in her eyes. Without hearing, without seeing, he knew.

***

Many times, throughout his life, Fergus has looked back on the three days that made

up the funeral and tried to recall it in a linear way. Something so significant, he thinks, should

be clear and preserved, but his memories didn’t work like that. What comes back to him are

instances that he can’t quite place in time. Moments that arise from the blur of those days

with a startling clarity, like the pad of his thumb against a fresh bruise.

He recalls an image of his sisters sitting together in the Good Room, and the smear of

butter his eldest niece had left on his middle sister's sleeve. Recalls too how he realised in

that moment that his sisters, no more than six years his seniors, had become unknowable to

him. He can still, sometimes, conjure the shameful thrill it gave him to feel Grace Rooney’s

soft palm against his as she shook his hand, though he can’t be sure if this was at the house or

later, at the church. He can picture the white glob of what he presumed was hair product that

the priest had neglected to smooth into the few remaining strands of his comb-over, and how

Fergus had spent the mass expecting it to slide down the old man's face and slop onto the

lectern.

He remembers the pale falseness of his fathers clasped hands when he touched them,

the minute grains of powder dusted over the fingers to even out the colour. He cannot, no

matter how hard he tries, remember his father’s face.

He remembers most of all, though, the hum of the new fridge. The one his father had

bought the week before and had been so proud to buy. When they got home from the funeral

meal and his sisters packed up their husbands and children and left; when Fergus sat with his

mother by the hearth, the discomfort of his suit like an itch beneath his skin, that hum sat

between them. Fergus listened to it and realised that it was a cheap fridge, really, and his

father had overpaid for it, and that thought pierced him deeper than anything ever had before.

He’d looked at the bubbled lino to the left of his mother’s feet and she’d watched the

wall above his right shoulder, and neither of them had looked at the others raw, wet eyes.

And that hum, loud and metallic, had gone on and on and on.

Eventually, his mother had spoken.

‘That’s it now Fergus’ she said, ‘that’s it now.’

***

Going back to work after the funeral was not an option for Fergus.

His mother cited their own farm and its handful of dag-arsed sheep, the turf to be cut,

turned, and footed, the rushes to be gathered for weaving, and the lifts she would need to

town on Fridays for her pension and the groceries. Fergus agreed, even though he knew that

his mother was not really afraid that the groceries would not be bought, or the turf not

brought home, or the Brigid’s Crosses left unwoven, but that she would collapse, as her

husband had done, and die alone on the mottled kitchen lino while her youngest son worked

long hours away on someone else’s land.

She needed him close, and he needed not to disappoint her.

In the thirty years since his father died, Fergus watched the world move on around

him. Grace Rooney married the man they hired in his place. The boom came and went

leaving a row of unfinished houses like a step-by-step on the road into the village. His sisters’

visits had grown rarer as their children stepped into adulthood. As if, without the excuse of

raising a family, they feared being held to a redistribution of the responsibility they’d left

behind so long ago.

But of all the things that have happened, Fergus’s mother has not yet died, and he has

not yet left her.

They still live together in that pebble-dash house. Fergus farms and shops and sees

each day a little more of his father looking back at him in the bathroom mirror. His mother

stays at home, not even venturing out for mass anymore. Her legs have swollen, and her hair

has thinned and though she’d never give to say, he knows she doesn’t want to be seen like

that in public. In that self-consciousness, he sees himself reflected too. In the evenings they

sit together in familiar silence by the hearth. Their fridge is in the back kitchen now. This one

doesn’t hum.

On the worst days, as he sits with the cheap clock ticking down the hours to the

Angelus and the rosary beads sifting softly through his mother’s weathered fingers, Fergus

wonders at his life and what has not become of it. He pictures himself as he must appear from

the outside, a middle-aged man in a room of dusty idols and wax tablecloths, and the

wastefulness of it all rises up like a fog to swallow him.

But there are other days, better days. Spring days. When the rain clouds part and the

light of the sunset falls across the mass cards on the windowsill. On these days he remembers

the evenings he had stopped at Rooney’s back gate and feels that surge of something good

rise behind his ribcage. And he remembers, most importantly, that as long as he can still feel

this thing that might be happiness, his life is not one wasted.