Small Things Like These

by Claire Keegan

But some part of his mind was often tense; he could not say why.

The times were raw but Furlong felt all the more determined to carry on, to keep his head down and stay on the right side of people, and to keep providing for his girls and see them getting on and completing their education at St Margaret’s, the only good school for girls in the town.

But it cut him, all the same, to see one of his own so upset by the sight of what other children craved and he could not help but wonder if she’d be brave enough or able for what the world had in store.

Always it was the same, Furlong thought; always they carried mechanically on without pause, to the next job at hand. What would life be like, he wondered, if they were given time to think and reflect over things? Might their lives be different or much the same – or would they just lose the run of themselves?

it didn’t seem likely that someone hadn’t ever said a word about it in his company for people were bound, he knew, to reveal not only themselves but what they knew, in conversation.

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.

Always, she tackled the hardest things first.

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.

‘If you don’t slow down, you’ll meet yourself coming back, Eileen.’

‘The years don’t slow down any as they pass.’

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, he had begun to wonder what mattered, apart from Eileen and the girls. He was touching forty but didn’t feel himself to be getting anywhere or making any kind of headway and could not but sometimes wonder what the days were for.

Baby Power.

‘Would you mind telling me where this road will take me?’ ‘This road?’ The man put down the hook, leant on the handle, and stared in at him. ‘This road will take you wherever you want to go, son.’

‘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.’

Was she not one of the few women on this earth who could do as she pleased?’

When he reached the yard gate and found the padlock seized with frost, he felt the strain of being alive and wished he had stayed in bed, but he made himself carry on and crossed to a neighbour’s house, whose light was on.

It seemed both proper and at the same time deeply unfair that so much of life was left to chance.

‘Where’s there’s muck, there’s luck.’

She looked at the window and took a breath and began to cry, the way those unused to any type of kindness do when it’s at first or after a long time again encountered.

All Creatures Great and Small.

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?

I’ve nothing only a small room here but never did I go into it to find so much as a matchbox out of place. The room I live in is as good as what I’d own – and can’t I get up in the middle of the night and eat my fill, if I care to. And how many can say that?

‘The Croppy Boy’.

It took a stranger to come out with things.

Every man he’d ever kept on had turned out to be decent and wasn’t inclined to lean on the shovels or to complain. To get the best out of people, you must always treat them well, Mrs Wilson used to say. He was glad, now, that he always took his girls to both graveyards over Christmas, to lay a wreath against her headstone as well as his mother’s, that he’d taught them that much.

People could be good, Furlong reminded himself, as he drove back to town; it was a matter of learning how to manage and balance the give-and-take in a way that let you get on with others as well as your own. But as soon as the thought came to him, he knew the thought itself was privileged and wondered why he hadn’t given the sweets and other things he’d been gifted at some of the houses to the less well-off he had met in others. Always, Christmas brought out the best and the worst in people.

‘What it is to be a man,’ she said, ‘and to have days off.’ She gave another, harsher laugh and wiped her hands on her apron before putting the sale through the till.

Furlong shook his head but bought a bag of the Lemon’s jellies hanging on one of the hooks behind her head, as he did not like to go back out with one arm as long as the other.

Why were the things that were closest so often the hardest to see?

he found himself asking was there any point in being alive without helping one another? Was it possible to carry on along through all the years, the decades, through an entire life, without once being brave enough to go against what was there and yet call yourself a Christian, and face yourself in the mirror?

The fact was that he would pay for it but never once in his whole and unremarkable life had he known a happiness akin to this, not even when his infant girls were first placed in his arms and he had heard their healthy, obstinate cries.

He thought of Mrs Wilson, of her daily kindnesses, of how she had corrected and encouraged him, of the small things she had said and done and had refused to do and say and what she must have known, the things which, when added up, amounted to a life.

The worst was yet to come, he knew. Already he could feel a world of trouble waiting for him behind the next door, but the worst that could have happened was also already behind him; the thing not done, which could have been – which he would have had to live with for the rest of his life.

Taoiseach Enda Kenny