Walk the Blue Fields: 'Pure magic.' Colm Tóibín

by Claire Keegan

teeth

millionaire.

‘These olives!’ the mother says. ‘Taste these olives!’ The millionaire puts his head down and concentrates on his food. The young man flakes a piece of salmon off the bone. His mother stares

Disengagement

never have climbed back into that car.

I thought I didn’t have a choice.’ His grandmother is dead but he is twenty-one

had

He’d stood there for close to an hour, on watch, but the quality of the smoke hadn’t changed;

The young man turned his bicycle in the opposite direction.

gave

same as he was far away.

lifted it

.???

The talk that had seized up when his presence was made known had risen back

Showing not telling.

oranges

mind as he pushed his bicycle back to the barracks in the rain.

. ??

coal

For what had he hoped? A total break?

holding

Before

knowledge

I feel that che characters inhabiting her stories have lived there forever and I have just been allowed into their lives for a short time. This hard, bitter but sad policeman is having a difficult life, scorned by the people of the village and rejected by his fiancé ford the sort of man he is.

The swallows were long gone and any blackberry still clinging to its briar

Wonderfull poetic way mqrking of seasons.

window panes until they squealed under the cloth,

Beyond stone walls, bony cattle and small flocks of long-woolled

If only, in her adult life, her unfounded beliefs could be so abruptly disproved.

To be an adult was, for the greatest part, to be in darkness.

‘Quick! Quick! Winter is round the corner!’

she decided she would stay in that house for as long as she could without harming anybody or letting anybody harm her. If either one of these things happened, she would move

He had courted a small farmer’s daughter outside Lehinch for twelve years, bought her six hundred and twenty-four Sunday dinners but she wouldn’t even let him touch

have. Summers passed and the whole family, instead of putting on the record player and opening the stout when the hay was safe on the loft, would kneel and answer his rosary.

‘No, thank God. And by the looks of you, your legs aren’t wooden either.’ He was putting the two of them together, adding them up in his mind.

The people left in good faith and their ailments and their apparitions disappeared.

And hadn’t she paid for her side with the death of the child?

goats: it is said that goats can see the wind. Margaret

For a moment the men waited and it seemed that all he had to do to make his future happy was to climb into that boat and be carried away on a tide cut by the strength

Why?