Quench the Moon by Walter Macken

Author:Walter Macken [Macken, Walter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pan Macmillan UK

Chapter Fifteen

It was late evening during the first week in July, and Stephen was eating his supper in Danny’s cottage.

It was a very tasty supper. All that day they had been mackerel-fishing with great success. They had returned when the boat was almost filled with mackerel. They had put the currach away, cleaned the gear, packed the fish-boxes and dispatched them to Clifden where they would be whisked by lorry to the Dublin agent. So now they were eating fresh mackerel and potatoes, to be followed by tea and home-made cake, as well as the butter which had been churned from the milk of Danny’s cow.

Mackerel is not a nice dish unless it is fresh, but when you have a mackerel that has just died and when you cook it in the pan, it curls up at the edges just like a trout, and it tastes very well indeed.

As he ate, Stephen marvelled again at Danny.

His cottage was very small but it was a model for any housewife in Connemara. The table at which they were eating was white from eternal scrubbing, and you could almost-imagine that the top of it was a clean tablecloth. Then the dresser over there with all its delf and they stalling and reflecting the lamplight from the polishing which they received. The cottage consisted of just two rooms, the kitchen and a bedroom above. The bedroom was severe in its simplicity, just a bed and a chair and a home-built cupboard for clothes. There was a little table too, with books on it, mostly magazines that told you about fishing and farming and the ailments of domestic animals and how to cure them. Apart from that, Danny did not seem to read much. He wouldn’t have much time for reading anyhow, if he was to look after his little piece of land and the cow, and fish as well.

But it was the cake that took Stephen for a walk.

He remarked on it as he sunk his strong teeth into a large hunk of it which was thickly coated in freshly-churned butter.

‘How in the name of God, Danny,’ he asked, ‘do you make a cake like this? Honest to God, there isn’t a house in the whole place I know that can make one as good as it.’

Danny smiled, and each side of his face creased into a million wrinkles.

‘Oh, I just picked it up,’ he said.

‘Well,’ said Stephen, ‘with cake like that, and the way you can make butter just right, and keep the house so that you could eat all your meals on the floor if you wanted to, if only you were a woman, Danny, I’d marry you in the morning meself, so I would.’

As he said that, he wondered why Danny had never married. There was nobody in the Three Parishes who didn’t have the good word for him. He was known as a very steady and good man, who took a few pints during the week but who was never known to have been seen drunk and disorderly.

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