Oranges From Spain Read online

  Fair seed-time had my soul, and I grew up

  Fostered alike by beauty and by fear.

  Wordsworth, The Prelude

  For Alberta

  Contents

  The Trap

  Killing a Brit

  The Martyrs’ Memorial

  The Apprentice

  The Catch

  Angel

  Searching the Shadows

  The Red Kite

  On the Shore

  Louise

  The Fishing Trip

  The Silver Saloon

  The Pleasure Dome

  Oranges from Spain

  A Note on the Author

  By the Same Author

  The Trap

  His father sat with his legs stretched out into the hearth, his stockinged feet so close to the crackling furnace of a fire that steam rose in steady wisps. He was still wearing his working clothes, and the bottoms of his corduroy trousers were ringed with mud which would eventually harden and flake off about the house. He sat in his armchair at the side of the chimney where only a stranger, ignorant of its private ownership, would dare to sit. As he watched his father dozing, his head jerking at intervals on to his chest, he noticed how soiled and threadbare the headrest had become, worn almost shiny with use, and the white circles on its wooden arms where for twenty years his father had rested his mug. While all the meals were taken at the white-clothed table, his father always moved to the armchair for his tea. It did not matter whether there was company or not, he never broke his habit, and while select visitors might take their tea out of the best rose-patterned teaset, he would insist on his bucket of a mug.

  ‘Sure, those dainty wee cups are no use to a man at all. A couple of mouthfuls and you’re looking at its bottom,’ he would say, with a dismissive wave of his hand.

  As he dozed now, his head lolling to one side, the fire lit up the weathered tautness of his face and the tracery of tiredness circling his eyes, and even in this fitful drowse, it was as if his body was struggling to fight off some deeper sleep.

  In the kitchen he could hear his mother setting the washed dishes back in the cupboard and the tinkle of cutlery dropping into the drawer. When she had finished she too would come and sit by the fire. A little section of it caved in on itself, and his father’s breathing grew heavier. In a short while, however, he would wake up and say something like, ‘Boys-a-dear, I’m fair bushed the day,’ and then shuffle off to find some work to do, as if feeling guilty about the time he had wasted. He was a man whose whole life was founded on work; without it he was a floundering confusion. Take it away from him and he was like a little boy lost in a foreign and unfriendly city, where nothing was familiar and nothing had purpose. Away from the farm he wallowed in misery. There was, too, a deep vein of arrogance in him which produced an unshakable conviction that no one was able to do things as well as he could. Certainly not his son. He had also, just below the surface, a temper which could blow sudden and fierce, and which as a child he had often experienced, usually for the crime of ‘answering back’. His father grunted in his sleep and his mouth opened slightly.

  He got up and drew back a curtain from the window, but it was dark outside and all he saw was his own reflection. Carefully, he pulled it closed again, making sure it overlapped with the other one, not leaving a gap, which would irritate his mother. She was a patient, quiet woman who rarely complained about anything – perhaps she felt as if the outside world would be able to see into the room through any chink and observe them secretly. The thought gave him a little shiver and he ran his hand down the curtains’ join, making sure the folds fitted neatly over each other. He sat again and stared into the fire. Great glowing caverns of red were opening up under the thinning layer of slack. A puff of soot fell into it. The clock chimed. His mother came in with her sewing box under her arm and sat down. Without speaking, she handed him the needle to thread and then began to mend a ripped knee in a pair of blue overalls.

  ‘Did you put in much new fencing today?’ she asked, without looking up from her work.

  ‘Aye, a good bit – mostly up round the top fields. I’m sorry about the overalls. I never work with the wire but I tear something on it.’

  She smiled and smoothed the overalls with her hand.

  ‘At least you didn’t cut your hands. It’s terrible stuff to work with, all right.’

  He looked at her with some surprise.

  ‘Have you worked with it, then?’

  ‘I was working with it before you were born. Who do you think helped your father fence along the front road?’

  In his imagination he struggled to picture this slight woman grappling with fence poles and wire, but he could not focus on a clear image. She looked up and caught the quizzical look on his face.

  ‘We couldn’t afford any outside help in those days. Anything that had to be done we did ourselves. At harvest time your Uncle Tommy would lend a hand but that was all.’

  His father grunted again. They both glanced at him, then smiled at each other, momentarily linked in a little conspiracy of friendship which excluded the sleeping man. She returned to her sewing, forming close, delicate stitches which cut no corners or hurried anywhere. Doing a job well was a matter of honour – in that, his parents were well-matched. The slipshod, the lazy – all were despised as sins against God.

  ‘A job done half-right is a job done half-wrong,’ she would say to him when he was a child, applying her measuring rule to some task he had botched or executed half-heartedly. He hadn’t heard her say those words for some time. He watched her as she sat with her head bent over the sewing. It unsettled him to see how old she was beginning to look. It had hit him first on his return from his second year at university. Like most sons who loved their mother, he had assumed that she would go on for ever, unchanging and untouched by time or illness. It was only when he had returned and looked at her with fresh eyes that he realised he had been carrying an image of his mother which was unaltered since childhood. It was an image of someone strong, both inside and out; the woman who for twenty years was the first to rise, who lit the fire and had breakfast cooking on the stove each morning; the woman who was never ill and who never seemed to have any desires or needs beyond providing for the welfare of her family. It was the warm comforting memory of the mother who nursed him when he was ill, and salved the wounds his father’s sharp-edged tongue had inflicted. As he looked at her now, he saw a woman whose hair was whitening like a frosted hedgerow, and whose hand shook when she tried to thread a needle. There was still an inner wick of strength, but it no longer burned so brightly or seemed so invincible.

  More of the fire caved in. Soon, it would be time to build it up again. He hoped the coal scuttle didn’t need filling, or it would mean a trip out to the wintry yard. His father started to wake up, and rubbed his mouth with the back of his hand. The chair creaked as he pushed his back into it. His mother paused from her sewing. Suddenly, the dog started to bark loudly in the kitchen, then followed a high-pitched, nervous whine. His father jumped up and grabbed his boots, and without opening them, forced his feet down into them, stamping on the floor to get them on, as if crushing some poisonous insect.

  ‘He’s here! Samuel, get the gun, quick. Quiet, boy, quiet!’

  The dog stopped barking, but continued to let out a faint, tremulous whimper. As his father rushed into the kitchen, he fumbled with the catch of the gun cupboard, trying to open what was firmly locked. His mother threw down her sewing and got the key from its hiding place inside the fruit bowl. With it, he opened the door and pulled out his father’s shotgun. As he hurried out with it, his mother called him back.

  ‘The cartridges, Samuel, the cartridges!’

  He ran back and grabbed the box, almost drop
ping it in his haste. His father was standing in the kitchen with the light out, peering into the yard. The dog stood alert and ready, but completely silent. He loaded two cartridges and handed the gun over. His father checked it with a glance, then ordered the dog to stay. Opening the door only wide enough to allow both of them to edge through, they slipped into the yard. The cold night air stung their faces and a cutting wind stabbed at their clothes. A bright, whole moon cast a milky light over the yard and sharpiced stars trembled nervously. They walked slowly towards the barn, their eyes scanning every shadow for any flicker of movement, and their ears straining for the slightest rustle, but a silent stillness held everywhere, calm and undisturbed. His father carried the shotgun loaded and ready to fire, holding it out in front of him but pointed at the ground. His breathing was heavy and there was a stiffness in his stealthy movements which made them seem awkward and exaggerated. As a cloud scudded across the moon, they paused and stared into the pools of darkness which formed at the base of the barn and round the sheds and outhouses beyond it. Glancing at each other, they shook their heads to say they saw nothing, then his father nodded in the direction of the hen-run. Suddenly, there was movement close to the furthest shed, and the shotgun sprang up into the shooting position.

  ‘It’s only one of the cats, Da,’ he cautioned.

  But it was too late, the barrel had already spurted red, and with a loud crack sent a volley of shot that splintered the stillness which had settled on the surface of the night. The cat scuttled off unharmed into deeper darkness.

  ‘Damnation!’ spat his father, the closest he ever came to a public curse. ‘Thon cats are a damned nuisance – always getting in the road of something. They’re not worth their keep. If it’d got itself killed, it would’ve been good value for it.’

  They walked openly and quickly, both knowing that if the fox had been there, it was now long gone. They checked the hen-run and looked around but could find no trace of an attempted incursion.

  ‘Come on – there’s no point freezing to death out here. It’ll not come back the night, but we’ll let the dog out to run round for a hour or so just to be sure.’

  ‘Are you certain it was here?’

  His father looked at him as if he had just asked a foolish question.

  ‘It was here, all right. The dog knew and as soon as I set foot in the yard I knew too. It was here all right – as sure as I’m talking to you now.’

  They turned back to the farmhouse, walking in silence and occasionally passing a little shiver from one to the other. When they got into the living room, the fire had been built up and the hearth brushed. His father returned to his armchair but sat on its edge and held his open palms towards the heat.

  ‘He’s a fly one, all right – I’ll give him that. But I’ll get him in the end. Sooner or later, he’ll make a mistake, then I’ll burn his tail.’

  ‘The radio forecast snow,’ his mother said. ‘If it does, it’ll make finding food harder than it is already. When he’s desperate he’ll be driven down here and ready to take risks.’

  His father nodded in agreement, then leaned forward and spat into the fire. It sizzled for a second then vanished. Silence settled on the room. His mother finished sewing the overalls and began to darn the thick woollen socks his father always wore, summer or winter. His father began to study seed catalogues, pausing from time to time to complain about price increases from the previous year. While his parents did this, he sat at the table and began to read some of his lecture notes. Finals were only six months away, and he was already a little nervous. Although he pretended not to see it, he caught his father winking at his mother, as he always did when he saw his son studying, as if somehow he was engaged in a slightly humorous activity. Once, he had caught his father flicking through one of his textbooks and, when he realised he had been discovered, he dropped it red-faced, saying, ‘A powerful lot of words, a powerful lot. And is anybody the wiser for them?’ Despite his father’s outward indifference, he suspected that he harboured some well-hidden pride in it. Once, at market, he had overheard him giving William McBurney a list of the subjects he was studying, pronouncing each one slowly as if it was a foreign word he had to get exactly right.

  The silence thickened and deepened in the room. He looked up from his notes and thought about the fox. He wondered where it was at that exact moment – perhaps slinking through some sheltering hedgerow, or looking down at the yellow-eyed farmhouse from the dark safety of the woods. He had seen it only once. It was during the summer, when, sitting on the back of the baler, he had glanced down to the bottom meadow, and to his amazement had spotted the fox trotting across the field, pausing only to sniff a little circle of itself. Even allowing for the distance, it was smaller than he had imagined, but there was something almost arrogant about its strut through the sharp-spiked stubble. But he harboured no romantic fancies about it and would kill it too if he got the chance. It was vermin and had to be destroyed. Anyone who had seen the hen-coop that morning couldn’t help but feel the same way. Last August, the fox had broken in and butchered a dozen hens, killing with a savagery that was fired by a need beyond hunger. When he discovered it, it had been all he could do to stop himself being sick. For his father, this was the beginning of something which started as a desire to protect his property and livelihood, but gradually turned into an intensely personal battle where wits were pitted against each other, until it became almost a struggle for supremacy over the land itself. There were mornings when his father rose at dawn and stalked the hillsides, hoping for some chance sighting. He would stand in the shadows, for an hour or more, close to any spot where he had found some trace of it, his patient determination stronger than any discomfort.

  When his father finished studying the seed catalogues, he raised himself slightly off the chair, slipped them under the cushion he was sitting on, and in the same movement brought out a copy of the local newspaper. He got a full week out of it, confining his nightly reading to a separate section. This evening, he read the council news and scrutinised the planning applications, commenting from time to time to no one in particular, on their relative merits.

  ‘Jim McCammon has put in again for a bungalow on the Ballymore Road.’

  ‘They’ll never let him build there,’ replied his mother.

  ‘I don’t know about that. He was telling me last week he’s got Hugh Downey pulling for him in the council, and somebody in the planning office told him he’d a fair chance.’

  ‘Wheels within wheels,’ said his mother, enigmatically.

  ‘Aye, it’s all about who you know these days,’ his father asserted. Then, lifting the poker from the side of the hearth, he raked it backwards and forwards between the lowest bars of the grate. ‘I was thinking of putting in myself,’ he said quietly, sitting back casually, but alert to register what reaction his words had evoked. Looking up from his lecture notes, he saw that his mother had stopped darning and had a look of surprise on her face.

  ‘For a building site?’ she asked.

  ‘Aye, a building site for a house or a bungalow.’

  ‘And where would the site be?’

  ‘Well now, I’ve always thought down by Miller’s Lane would be a quare good site for a house. You’ve a brave view and you’re close to water and electricity. It’s a quiet road, but it’s not as if you’re out of the way or anything.’

  No one spoke.

  ‘I’m only thinking about it, now. I haven’t decided on anything yet. But you never know when a site could come in useful.’

  His mother returned to her darning with a thoughtful concentration and his father turned another page of the paper. The fire glowed deeply red and the only sound which broke the silence was the chime of the clock.

  The radio forecast was right. In the morning there was a light skim of snow brushing the ground and icicles hanging from the guttering of the house. In her habitual response to snow, his mother had made porridge for breakfast, and they took it with warm milk and a lacing of su
gar, while steaming logs crackled and hissed in the fire. He had offered his father a morning’s work – he needed the rest of the day to work on an essay due at the start of the new term. As he finished his last piece of toast, his father was lacing his boots and warming his palms at the fire, then rubbing them together as if to store up heat for the rest of the day.

  ‘Well, let’s get at it, then. If you’re on a half-day, I’d better get the most out of you.’

  ‘Studying’s hard work too,’ he said defensively.

  ‘What was it old Dan McCoubrey used to say about scholars?’

  He pretended to search in his memory before answering his own question, a smile fingering the sides of his mouth.

  ‘ “The pen’s lighter than the spade, for learning’s easy carried” – aye, that was it. I mind it now.’

  He put on his overcoat, placed his flat cap squarely on his head, then pulled it down until the peak shadowed his eyes.

  ‘Aye, those were his very words. I mind it well, now,’ he said, as he opened the kitchen door and strode off across the yard, his sturdy footprints crisply cemented in his wake.

  His good mood did not last long. The tractor engine refused to start, its blackened innards groaning and whirring at each attempt to force it into life. It had given good service over many years, but it was obvious it would not survive the strain of many more winters. Finally, however, it stuttered into half-hearted life and they loaded bales of hay on to the trailer and set off down the long lane to the fields. As always, snow seemed to make the world quieter, stiller, a unified one-ness through which their noisy journey seemed clumsy and intrusive. The passage of the tractor between the hedgerows dislodged little flurries of snow and, long after they had passed, the snow continued to fall like a fading echo. In a white-humped field, two rabbits traced intricate patterns, then scampered over the brow of the hill, kicking up tiny spumes of snow as they ran. The sky was full of the promise of more snow.