Walk the Blue Fields by Claire Keegan Read Free Book Online Page A

Shortly afterwards, he drove to Courtown Harbour to find a wife.
    He found Martha Dunne on a Sunday afternoon in the Tara Ballroom. Deegan, sitting there in a blue pinstriped suit with his beard trimmed, watched this broad-hipped woman making bold figures of eight within a stranger’s arms. Her skin was smooth as a plate and her scent, when they waltzed, reminded him of the gorse when it is on fire.
    While the band was playing the last tune, Deegan asked if she would meet him again.
    â€˜Ah, no,’ she said.
    â€˜No?’ Deegan said. ‘Why not?’
    â€˜I don’t think so.’
    â€˜I see,’ Deegan said.
    But Deegan didn’t see and for this simple reason, he persisted . The following Sunday he went back to Courtown and found Martha in the hotel, eating alone. Without asking , he sat down and kept her company. While she ate, he steered the conversation from the fine weather through the headlines and wound up talking about Aghowle. As he described his home he began to imagine her there buttering swede, patching his trousers, hanging his shirts to dry out on a line.
    Months passed and through nothing stronger than habit, they kept meeting. Deegan always took her out to supper and to dances, making sure to pay for anything that passed her lips. Sometimes, they walked down to the sea. On the strand, gulls’ footprints went on for a while then disappeared . Deegan hated the feel of sand under his feet but Martha’s stride was loose, her brown gaze even. She strolled along, stooping every now and then to pick up shells. Martha was the type of woman who is content in her body but slow to speak. Deegan mistook her silence for modesty and, before a year of courtship ended, he proposed.
    â€˜Would you think of marrying me?’
    While the question was in mid-air, Martha hesitated. Deegan was standing with his back to the amusement arcade. With all the lights behind him she could hardly make him out; all she could see were slot machines and shelves of coppers that every now and then pushed a little excess into a shoot to let somebody win. At a van a child was reaching up for candy floss. The crowd was getting smaller; summer was coming to an end.
    Martha’s instinct told her to refuse but she was thirty years of age and if she said no this question might never be asked of her again. She wasn’t sure of Deegan but none of the others had ever mentioned marriage, so Martha, with her own logic, concluded that Victor Deegan must love her, and accepted. In all the years that followed, Deegan never thought but he did love her, never thought but he showed his love.
    The following spring, while birds searched for the perfect bough and the crocus laboured through the grass, they married. Martha moved into the house Deegan had described at length but found Aghowle to be a warren of dim, unlived-in rooms and unsteady furniture. Dirty nylon curtains clung to the panes. The wooden floors were bare of rugs, the ceilings full of woodworm but Martha, being no housekeeper, didn’t really care. She rose late, drank her tea on the doorstep and threw meals together same as she was packing a suitcase. Often Deegan came home from work expecting her to be there with a hot dinner but more often than not his house was empty. He’d stoop and find the big enamel plate with fried potatoes and a pair of eggs dried out in the oven.
    Martha preferred to be out in wellingtons lifting a drill for onions or slashing the nettles along the lane. The forester brought her seedlings he’d found in the wood, sycamores and horse chestnuts which she staked about the land in places where the hedges had been broken. For company she bought two dozen Rhode Island Red pullets and a cock. She sometimes found herself standing in the barn watching her fowl pecking the seed, feeling happy until she realised she wasn’t.
    Before a year had passed the futility of married life struck her sore: the futility of making a bed,