Small Things Like These

by Claire Keegan

In October there were yellow trees. Then the clocks went back the hour and the long November winds came in and blew, and stripped the trees bare. In the town of New Ross, chimneys threw out smoke which fell away and drifted off in hairy, drawn-out strings before dispersing along the quays, and soon the River Barrow, dark as stout, swelled up with rain. The people, for the most part, unhappily endured the weather: shop-keepers and tradesmen, men and women in the post office and the dole queue, the mart, the coffee shop and supermarket, the bingo hall, the pubs and the chipper all commented, in their own ways, on the cold and what rain had fallen, asking what was in it – and could there be something in it – for who could believe that there, again, was another raw-cold day? Children pulled their hoods up before facing out to school, while their mothers, so used now to ducking their heads and running to the clothesline, or hardly daring to hang anything out at all, had little faith in getting so much as a shirt dry before evening. And then the nights came on and the frosts took hold again, and blades of cold slid under doors and cut the knees off those who still knelt to say the rosary.

His earliest memories were of serving plates, a black range – hot! hot! – and a shining floor of square tiles made of two colours, on which he crawled and later walked and later still learned resembled a draughts board whose pieces either jumped over others or were taken.

Other times, Furlong would hear a sharp, hot whistle and laughter, which made him tense. He imagined his girls getting big and growing up, going out into that world of men. Already he’d seen men’s eyes following his girls. But some part of his mind was often tense; he could not say why.

It was 1985, and the young people were emigrating, leaving for London and Boston, New York.

The auctioneer said business was stone cold, that he might as well be trying to sell ice to the Eskimos. And Miss Kenny, the florist, whose shop was near the coal yard, had boarded up her window; had asked one of Furlong’s men to hold the plywood steady for her one evening while she drove the nails.

It was easy to understand why women feared men with their physical strength and lust and social powers, but women, with their canny intuitions, were so much deeper: they could predict what was to come long before it came, dream it overnight, and read your mind.

‘Santy came, surely,’ Furlong said. ‘He brought me a jigsaw of a farm one year.’

Before long, he caught a hold of himself and concluded that nothing ever did happen again; to each was given days and chances which wouldn’t come back around. And wasn’t it sweet to be where you were and let it remind you of the past for once, despite the upset, instead of always looking on into the mechanics of the days and the trouble ahead, which might never come.

‘They’re getting hardy, Eileen.’ ‘You know we’ll blink a few times and they’ll be married and gone.’ ‘Isn’t that the way.’ ‘The years don’t slow down any as they pass.’

‘Is there something on your mind, Bill?’ Her finger slid over the top of the glass, circling it. ‘You were miles away this night.’

What was it all for? Furlong wondered. The work and the constant worry. Getting up in the dark and going to the yard, making the deliveries, one after another, the whole day long, then coming home in the dark and trying to wash the black off himself and sitting into a dinner at the table and falling asleep before waking in the dark to meet a version of the same thing, yet again. Might things never change or develop into something else, or new? Lately,

When the talk dried up, Eileen reached out for the Sunday Independent and gave it a shake. Not for the first time, Furlong felt that he was poor company for her, that he seldom made a long night shorter. Did she ever imagine how her life would be if she had married another? He sat on, not unhappily, listening to the clock ticking on the mantel and the wind piping eerily in the flue. The rain had come on again, was blowing hard against the windowpane and making the curtain move. From inside the cooker, he heard a lump of anthracite collapsing against another, and put a little more on. At some stage, the need for sleep came over him but he made himself sit on, dozing and waking in the chair, until the hour hand of the clock hit three and a knitting needle, pushed down deep into the heart of the Christmas cake, came out clean. ‘Well, the fruit’s not fallen anyhow,’ Eileen said, pleased, and baptised it with a Baby Power.

‘Where does thinking get us?’ she said. ‘All thinking does is bring you down.’ She was touching the little pearly buttons on her nightdress, agitated. ‘If you want to get on in life, there’s things you have to ignore, so you can keep on.’

So many things had a way of looking finer, when they were not so close. He could not say which he rathered: the sight of town or its reflection on the water.

When he let down the tail board and went to open the coal house door, the bolt was stiff with frost, and he had to ask himself if he had not turned into a man consigned to doorways, for did he not spend the best part of his life standing outside of one or another, waiting for them to be opened.

‘Ah, I’ll not,’ Furlong stepped back – as though the step could take him back into the time before this.

‘Sure, didn’t I take my own mother’s name, Mother. And never any harm did it do me.’

A part of him wished it was a Monday morning, that he could just put his head down and drive on out the roads and lose himself in the mechanics of the ordinary, working week. Sundays could feel very threadbare, and raw. Why could he not relax and enjoy them like other men who took a pint or two after Mass before falling asleep at the fire with the newspaper, having eaten a plate of dinner?