The Boatman and Other Stories by Billy O'Callaghan
Author:Billy O'Callaghan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2020-03-04T16:00:00+00:00
Wildflowers
He came up the road a little after six, a big man with a soft, lumbering gait, worn out from a day that had begun with the dawn milking. A brief but violent late-morning downpour had caught him in the fields and soaked him through, and even after several hours spent behind the tractor’s wheel his shirt and jeans remained damp to the touch, and warm-smelling with the mineral tang of sweat. But because the sun had come out, hot enough for a while to scald, and settled the whole island with the burnished glow of a perfect August evening, his humour, having given way to torpor, was light and easy. Dragging at the air through a smile, he followed the road up between the head-high briar ditches bright on both sides with blooming fuchsia and honeysuckle and alive to the bother of wasps, bees and the occasional flitting greenfinch or babbler. He made the same traipse at roughly this time every day, even though his own home lay in entirely the opposite direction.
At home, if she’d already finished her day’s chores, his wife would be sitting at the table beside the open window, her broad head bent over the crossword puzzles that she never seemed to finish. She’d fill in the short words with fat capital letters, then spend several minutes glaring at the rest of the clues, tapping the butt of the pen against her upper front teeth. When it eventually became clear to her that she’d reached an impasse, her way was to seek a six-letter space, preferably Down, because that for some reason appealed to her, though Across would suffice at a pinch, and with her usual slow care she’d spell out her own name, M-A-R-T-H-A. Were he to enter at such a moment, he’d invariably meet a look that seemed equal parts wonder and confusion, as if his appearance, even after thirty-one years of marriage, still held for her a stranger’s surprise. She’d stare, eyes big behind the thick round lenses of her bifocals, then return her attention to the page, to set about colouring in the remaining blank squares so that, from a distance, if you happened to be colour-blind, you might assume the puzzle had been completed.
The evening had turned languid and the dead smut of earlier rain cloud lingered now only as a memory in the east. Weather for sitting out, he thought, pausing once just where the ditch on his right side broke for a four-rung gate, its iron rusted down to the maroon marrow of old blood. Weather for sipping a glass of cold beer and savouring the end part of another day well spent. He leaned on the gate’s top rung, stopping not because he was out of breath, though he was, but so that he could savour the spill of the land, the misshapen fields empty except for patches of the same measly yellow grass that grew everywhere on the island at this time of year, and the dappled blue-glass stretch of the ocean.
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