Walk the Blue Fields by Claire Keegan Page A

whose scent is all resin and cow’s milk is standing over him, offering buttered bread. The dog eats it and lets the stranger stroke him.
    Deegan does this knowing he will some day – if no owner comes looking – get a nice turn, for the dog is handsome . Waves of white gold run down the retriever’s back. His snout is cold, his eyes brown and ready. Come evening, Deegan doesn’t have to coax him into the car. The dog jumps in and puts his paws up on the dash. With the sunlight striking his coat and the wind in his ears, they travel down hills towards Shillelagh and the open road.
    When they reach Aghowle, Deegan is glad, as usual, to see his house with its chimney sending smoke up to the heavens – not that he believes in heaven. Deegan is not a religious man. He knows that beyond this world there is nothing. God is an invention created by one man to keep another at a safe distance from his wife and land. Butalways he goes to Mass. He knows the power of a neighbour ’s opinion and will not have it said that he’s ever missed a Sunday. It is autumn. Brown oak leaves are twisting in dry spasms around the yard. Exhausted, Deegan gives the dog to the first child he sees. It happens to be his youngest and it happens to be the girl’s birthday.
    And so the girl, whose father has never given her so much as a tender word, embraces the retriever and with it the possibility that Deegan loves her, after all. A wily girl who is half innocence and half intuition, she stands there in a yellow dress and thanks Deegan for her birthday present . For some reason it almost breaks the forester’s heart to hear her say the words. She is human, after all.
    â€˜There now,’ he says. ‘Aren’t you getting hardy?’
    â€˜I’m twelve,’ she says. ‘I can reach the top of the dresser without the stool.’
    â€˜Is that so?’
    â€˜Mammy says I’ll be taller than you.’
    â€˜No doubt you will.’
    Martha, throwing out barley to the hens, overhears this conversation, and knows better. Victor Deegan would never put his hand in his pocket for the child’s birthday. He’s picked the retriever up some place – as winnings in one of his card games or maybe it’s a stray he’s found along the road. But because her favourite child seems happy, she says nothing.
    Martha is still young enough to remember happiness. The day the child was conceived comes back to her. It started out as a day of little promise with clouds suspended on a stiff, February sky. She remembers that morning’s sun in the milking parlour, the wind throwing showers into the barn, how strange and soft the salesman’s hands felt, compared to Deegan’s. He had taken his time, lain back in thestraw and told her her eyes were the colour of wet sand.
    She has often wondered since then, where the boy was, for her thoughts, that day, were fixed on the prospect of Deegan coming home. When he did come home, he sat in to his dinner and ate as always, asking was there more. Martha waited for the blood but on the ninth day after it was due she gave up and asked the neighbours in and told a story, knowing how the night would end. That part wasn’t easy.
    But that’s all in the past. Now her daughter is sitting on the autumn ground, looking into the retriever’s mouth.
    â€˜There’s a black patch on his tongue, Mammy.’
    That she is a strange child can’t be doubted. Martha’s youngest holds funerals for dead butterflies, eats the roses and collects tadpoles from the cattle tracks, sets them free to grow legs in the pond.
    â€˜Is it a boy or a girl?’
    Martha turns the retriever over. ‘It’s a boy.’
    â€˜I’ll call him Judge.’
    â€˜Don’t get too fond of him.’
    â€˜What?’
    â€˜Well, what if somebody wants him back?’
    â€˜What are you talking about, Mammy?’
    â€˜I don’t know,’