William Trevor - The Hill Bachelors

Paulie asked other girls to go out with him, but by then it had become known that what he was after was marriage. One after another, they made excuses, a fact that Hartigan was aware of when he pulled up the Toyota one morning beside a gateway where Paulie was driving in posts. He didn’t say anything, but often Hartigan didn’t.

‘Will it rain, Mr Hartigan?’ Paulie asked him.

‘The first time I saw your mammy,’ Hartigan said, rejecting a discussion about the weather, ‘she was stretching out sheets on the bushes. Six years of age I was, out after a hare.’

‘A while ago, all right.’

‘Amn’t I saying it to you?’

Not understanding the conversation, Paulie vaguely shook his head. He struck the post he was easing into the ground another blow. Hartigan said:

‘I’d take the big field off you.’

‘Ah no, no.’

That was why he had stopped. It might even have been that he’d driven down specially when he heard the thud of the sledgehammer on the posts, saying to himself that it was a good time for a conversation.

‘I wouldn’t want to sell the field, Mr Hartigan.’

‘But wouldn’t you do well all the same if you did? Is it a life at all for a young fellow?’

Paulie didn’t say anything. He felt the post to see if it was steady yet. He struck it again, three times before he was satisfied.

‘You need a bit of company, boy,’ Hartigan said before he backed into the gateway and drove up the hill again.

*

What she had succeeded in keeping at bay since Miss Hartigan had spoken of it was no longer possible to evade. When Paulie told her about Patsy Finucane she was pleased that he did, glad that he didn’t keep it to himself. She knew about everything else: it was all of a piece that Hartigan was trying to get the land cheap by taking advantage of the same circumstances that had left him a bachelor himself. Who could blame him? she said to herself, but even so she wondered if Paulie — so agreeable and good-hearted — would become like that in his time; if he’d become hard, as his father had been, and as grasping as Hartigan.

‘I’ll go to Mena,’ she said. ‘There’s room there.’

‘Ah, there isn’t.’

‘They’d fit me in.’

‘It’s here there’s room.’

‘You want to be married, Paulie. Any man does.’

‘He’d take a day shifting a boulder with the tractor. He’d put a ditch through the marsh to gain another half yard. He never minded how long a thing took.’

‘It’s now we’re talking about, Paulie.’

‘There’d be sheep in this house within a twelvemonth if Hartigan had it, the doors taken off and made use of, and the next thing is the wind’d be shifting the slates. There’d be grazing taken out of the big field until there wasn’t a blade of grass left standing. The marsh’d come in again. No one’d lift a finger.’

‘You didn’t know what you were coming back to.’

‘Ah, I did. I did.’

Obligingly, he lied. You’d say to yourself he was easygoing. When he’d told her about the Finucane girl he’d said it was the way things were. No matter, he’d said. Often you’d forget he wasn’t easygoing at all; often she did.

‘There’s no need, Paulie.’

‘There is.’

He said it quietly, the two words hanging there after he had spoken, and she realized that although it was her widowhood that had brought him back it wasn’t her widowhood that made him now insist he must remain. She could argue for ever and he would not go now.

‘You’re good, Paulie,’ she said, since there was nothing else left to say.

He shook his head, his dark hair flopping from side to side. ‘Arrah, no.’

‘You are. You are, Paulie.’

When her own death came, her other children would return, again all at the same time. The coffin would be carried down the steep stairs, out into the van in the yard, and the funeral would go through the streets of Drunbeg, and the next day there’d be the Mass. They’d go away then, leaving Paulie in the farmhouse.

‘Wait till I show you,’ he said, and he took her out to where he was draining another half yard. He showed her how he was doing it. He showed her the temporary wall he had put up, sheets of red corrugated that had come from the old shed years ago.

‘That’s great,’ she said. ‘Great, Paulie.’

A mist was coming in off the hills, soft and gentle, the clouds darkening above it. The high edge of Slievenacoush was lost. Somewhere over the boglands a curlew cried.

‘Go in out of the drizzle,’ he said, when they had stood there for a few minutes.

‘Don’t stay out long yourself, Paulie.’

Guilt was misplaced, goodness hardly came into it. Her widowing and the mood of a capricious time were not of consequence, no more than a flicker in a scheme of things that had always been there. Enduring, unchanging, the hills had waited for him, claiming one of their own.