That They May Face the Rising Sun (eBook)

‘We’ll go now. You can go back to sleep,’ Patrick said.

‘Goodbye, Pa,’ Edmund used a family name for Patrick that Ruttledge hadn’t heard him called in years. ‘Remember me to all of them around the lake.’

‘They are all asking for you,’ Ruttledge said. ‘They are waiting for you to come home.’

‘You can go back to sleep now,’ his brother repeated, but Edmund was already sleeping. A nurse came into the small room and when Patrick engaged her in conversation about the patient, Ruttledge went out to the corridor to wait.

‘We were wrong to wake him,’ Ruttledge said as they walked through the wards and down the long pale green corridor.

‘Our lad isn’t long for this world, I fear,’ Patrick Ryan answered vaguely.

At the car, Ruttledge asked, ‘Where would you like me to leave you?’

‘I never left this town yet without leaving them money. I’m not going to start doing anything different now.’

‘Where would you like to go?’

‘We’ll call to see how Paddy Lowe is getting along, in the name of God.’

A young girl was serving behind the counter in Lowe’s Bar. Except for a party of two girls and five men of different ages who were on their way home from a football match, the bar was empty.

‘Where’s Paddy?’ Patrick asked the girl as she was drawing the glasses of beer.

‘He’s out on the land,’ the girl answered.

‘Me and Paddy are great friends,’ Patrick Ryan said, but the girl was not drawn further into the conversation. As soon as they raised the glasses of beer, all Patrick’s attention veered to the crowd returning from the football match. ‘I’ll dawnder over to see where this crowd is from,’ he laughed apologetically, and approached their table with a theatrical slowness that engaged the attention of the table even before he spoke. ‘Did yous win?’ he asked with charm. They had lost. The match had been played in Boyle and hadn’t been even close. Their team was Shannon Gaels. ‘Ye must have a crowd of duffers like our crowd,’ he said amiably.

‘They are not great but it’s a day out,’ a man said. ‘Only for football we might never get out of the house.’

‘You can say that again.’

‘Over and over,’ another man said.

There was more talk and some laughter. When Patrick Ryan rejoined Ruttledge at the counter, he was a man restored and refreshed.

‘They are all from Drumlion,’ he confided. ‘Their frigger of a team lost. We might as well drink up and go now, in the name of God. Don’t forget to tell Paddy Lowe I was in and was asking for him.’

‘Who will I say …?’ the girl enquired politely.

‘Tell him the man who wore the ragged jacket called. Once he hears that he’ll know. ‘“For none can tell the man who wore the ragged jacket.”’

‘The man who wore the ragged jacket,’ she repeated, puzzled and amused at his confidence and theatricality.

‘“And when all is said and done, who can tell the man who wore the ragged jacket?”’ he repeated. The men who had been to the football match shouted out to them. Ruttledge waved. Patrick Ryan stood at the door and shouted, ‘Up us all! Up Ceannabo!’

‘“May we never die and down with the begrudgers,”’ they chorused back and pounded their glasses on the table. One man cheered.

‘God, you could have a great evening with that crowd,’ Patrick Ryan said as they got into the car. ‘I can tell you something for nothing, lad. Only for football and the Mass on Sunday and the Observer on Wednesday, people would never get out of their frigging houses. They’d be marooned.’

They drove out of town and were soon back in the maze of small roads. Except for the narrow strip of sky above the bending whitethorns they could have been travelling through a green wilderness.

‘I’ll be round tomorrow. We’ll finish that shed,’ Patrick Ryan said as they drove slowly, Ruttledge blowing the horn loudly at every blind turn of the road.

‘There’s no hurry.’

‘You were anxious enough to get building done once,’ Patrick Ryan said.

‘That was a long time ago.’

‘You’ve got on a sight since you first came round the place, lad.’

‘We managed. Most people get by in one way or another.’

‘Some get on a sight better than others. What do you put that down to – luck? Or having something behind you?’

‘They all help,’ Ruttledge said.

‘Do you miss not having children?’ Patrick Ryan asked aggressively as if sensing the evasion.

‘No. You can’t miss what you never had. It’s not as if there aren’t enough people in the world.’

‘Was she too old when you started?’

‘No, Patrick. She wasn’t too old,’ Ruttledge said quietly but with an edge of steel. ‘Where do you want to be left? Or do you want to come back to the house?’

‘Drop me in the village,’ Patrick Ryan said.

There was nothing stirring in the small village. A few cars stood outside the two bars. A boy was leaning over the little bridge, looking down into the shallow river, and he lifted his head as the car drew up beside the green telephone box. The priest’s cows were grazing with their calves in the rich fields around the roofless abbey.

‘You’ll see me in the morning,’ Patrick Ryan said as he closed the car door, and went jauntily towards the Abbey Bar.

At the house Ruttledge called to Kate that he was back, changed quickly into old clothes, remembering that he had completely forgotten to look at the Shorthorn.

The cattle had left the ridged fields by the shore, their shapes still visible on the short grass. Two fields away he found them grazing greedily. At a glance he saw the old red shorthorn was missing. Anxiously, he went in among the cattle. She wasn’t there; neither was she in any of the adjacent fields. She was their last surviving animal of the stock they had first bought. It would be hard to lose her now through carelessness.

He searched the obvious places quickly. He said to himself as he grew anxious that it was useless to panic or rush. Nothing could be done now but to search the land methodically, field by field. Having searched every field, he found her finally in a corner of the young spruce plantation that had been set as a shelterbelt above the lake. At her back was a ditch covered with ferns and briars and tall foxgloves. She was lying on her side when he parted the branches. She tried to struggle to her feet but recognizing him fell back with a low, plaintive moan for help. ‘My poor old girl,’ he spoke his relief at finding her. She repeated the same low call. She wanted help.

The little corner of the shelterbelt was like a room in the wilderness. He could tell by the marks and shapes on the floor of spruce needles that she had been in labour for some time. The waterbag had broken. Afraid his hands were not clean enough, he felt lightly without entering the cow and found that the feet and head were in place. The Shorthorn began to press. The womb dilated wide. The feet showed clearly but did not advance. She fell back and moaned again.

‘We’re not going to lose you after all these years,’ he spoke reassuringly, without thought.

He had hardly said the words when he heard a sharp cough. He turned and found Jamesie staring at the cow. The spruce wood behind him was almost in night. He had crept up without a sound. ‘Hel-lo. Hel-lo,’ he called in a hushed, conspiratorial voice.

‘You’re an angel of the Lord.’

‘Have you felt the calf?’

‘The calf is coming right. She’s making no headway though.’

‘Get the calving jack,’ he said.

As Ruttledge turned to go to the house, he saw the soft ropes hanging from Jamesie’s pocket. He must have been watching the cow covertly the whole evening: he came prepared and didn’t expect to find Ruttledge there. At the house Kate put aside what she was doing and got warm water, soap, disinfectant, a towel. The jack was made of aluminium and light to carry. They hurried to the plantation.

‘Jamesie, it’s great that you’re here,’ Kate whispered when they entered the darkness of the small room beneath the spruce branches.

‘Kate,’ he smiled.

Both men scrubbed their hands and arms. Kate held the towel. Jamesie drew out the feet. Ruttledge slipped on the loops and drew them tight above the hooves. When he got the jack in place he ratcheted quickly until a strain came on the ropes. He then waited until the cow began to press. Each time she pressed he increased the strain.

‘That’s a great girl,’ Jamesie said. ‘Look how she’s pressing. There’s many an old cow that would just lie there on her side and give you no help at all.’

The long tongue and the nose appeared. At one moment there was a terrible strain on the ropes and the anxiety and tenseness were so near at hand they could almost be touched and felt, and the next moment the ropes went slack as the calf came sliding out on to the floor ahead of the quick ratcheting, covered in the gleaming placenta. Jamesie called out, ‘It’s a bull, a savage!’ as he plucked the veils of placenta from the nostrils and turned the calf over. Quickly Ruttledge lifted the navel cord and immersed it in a cup of disinfectant. Bellowing wildly, the shorthorn struggled to her feet.

‘Careful, Kate, not to stand in her way. You never can tell.’

The Shorthorn’s whole attention was fixed on her calf as if it was her first calf all over again, the beginning of the world. Between wild loos she began to lick the calf dry. So vigorous were the movements of her tongue that they moved the...