The Misremembered Man by Christina McKenna Page A

again. The prospect of meeting someone gave him a fresh focus; he could see a light shining on a far hill, urging him on.
    He didn’t have much of an idea of the kind of woman he wished to meet. All his life he’d felt exiled from the game of courtship and marriage. He had never felt himself worthy of that union, which somehow seemed the natural preserve of all other men but him. Marriage was for men who were not afraid. Men who could walk life’s tightrope and not allow each wobble and tremor to hold them back from their goal.
    But, perhaps now was the right time. Uncle Mick’s passing had left a gap that needed filling. Rose and Paddy thought so, and even Dr. Brewster.
    But what kind of woman would want me? Jamie tried to unpick the snarls to the knotty question as he cycled home from town, bumping over the hills and dales of the road he knew so well. He sat slouched over the handlebars of Uncle Mick’s ancient bicycle, chewing a Bassets fruit bonbon, staring down at the road flying beneath the shrieking wheels.
    Maybe she’d like a bit of cawntry-and-western music, he mused—the Clancy Brothers and Jim Reeves were his heroes—and enjoy and encourage his “accordjin” playing. He sometimes took it along to Slope’s of a Saturday night, to relieve Declan Colt & The Silver Bullets when they needed a rest and the toilet. Up there on Declan’s vacated stool, Jamie would squeeze out “The Fields of Athenry” or “The Boston Burglar”. And if there wasn’t a stranger on the premises—someone whose unfamiliarity might mark him out as a Protestant—he’d risk a bar or two of “Roddy McCorley” or “Sean South of Garryowen”, both Republican songs having the same melody anyway.
    Hopefully she wouldn’t mind the farm and the noise of the animals, and smell, and so forth. But she wouldn’t have to help outside if she didn’t want to, Jamie reflected. Rose McFadden didn’t do much outside except the bit of gardening, cooking being her major interest. So, above all, this imagined woman would be a good cook. Someone who’d have his fry-up ready and on the table when he returned from doing his chores. And wouldn’t it be great if she would wash his shirts and underwear now and again, without always having to take them down to Rose and the embarrassment of it?
    Jamie sped down the hill toward his home, smiling to himself. He felt content that he had more of an idea now of what he was looking for.
    In the yard he dismounted from his creaky conveyance and wheeled it over the raddled ground, scattering the brown-speckled hens, rousing the dog from its doze by the barn door and causing the two Ayrshires in the near field to lurch toward the gate and gaze hopefully at the customary source of their sustenance.
    A so-far rainless June had baked the ground into a crazy cross-hatching of bicycle and tractor tires. Here and there, an assortment of deceased machinery—the innards of a cultivator, the limbs of a hay shaker, the body of a grain spreader—lay bogged down in the earth, trapped for ever.
    The yard lay to the left of the house, sheltered by a ragged ring of sheds and barns. Those timeworn structures sagged forlornly in their ancient foundations; they had been erected many decades earlier with the meager profits from the ten-acre farm and by the callused hands of Uncle Mick’s great-great-grandfather. Mick had wisely kept quiet about his colorful ancestor, but Jamie had heard the stories.
    It was said that Turlough McCloone was a lunatic with a passion for grog and loose women. He had begotten a string of children through a vigorous, lust-crazed violence, scattering his seed and deserting his women, before finally settling down. The Duntybutt farm was tangible evidence that he might have finally gathered sense. But unfortunately he did not live to find out. One day an enemy in a silk hat unseated him from his dappled cob with a five-shot Paterson-Colt, a gun that had proved notoriously inaccurate, until that