As he walked down Dawson Street his phone vibrated in his pocket. The case must have ended early. But it was not Joanne, it was his mother, and he cursed as he remembered that he had agreed to go home this weekend. Now that the meadows were bare of grass, they needed to be spread with manure, and his father was wondering, his mother said, whether Mark would come for a couple of days and get the job done. So you’re literally asking me to come down to shovel shit, he wanted to say. But he just said that, yes, he would try to get down, and his mother had sounded so grateful that he’d felt more guilt than frustration as he hung up. Now he looked at the screen as it flashed again with Home. He didn’t answer. He stuffed the phone back into his pocket and stopped to look at the display in the bookshop window.
Joanne understood that he had to go down home sometimes. She had grown up on a farm. She knew what it was like. She knew what it was like to have a father who expected things. Though that was something else he had not asked her about much. It had come up a couple of times, usually when she was drunk and running off at the mouth a bit — which meant, he knew, that it was probably something she really needed to talk about, that it was on her mind, but it was territory he didn’t want to get into with her. Not while she was drinking. Or not while she was sober.
She seemed to have no idea of what had taken place between their fathers years ago. She showed no sign of knowing that they had been friends once, his father and hers, or something like friends, and that they had fallen out badly. But she would have been young when it happened; six years old, maybe, or seven. There would have been no reason for her to notice. It would not have mattered in her house the way it had mattered in Mark’s.
His father never talked about the Lynches now. He did not curse them. He did not articulate the things he felt about them. And his father was not, Mark thought, afraid of them. He just wanted to act as though he did not have to share a world with them. Yet that was impossible. He could not ignore them. And it did not take the sight of Lynch’s widow Irene, or of one of his sons, or of their big farm at Caldragh, or of their jeeps on the road, to remind his father of that fact. He needed only to drive half a mile over his own lane. He needed only to see the fields and the yard and the fallen-down cottage where, for nearly fifty years of his life, he had spent a large part of every day. Where he had worked with the man who had treated him like a son, old Tommy Burke; the man who had told Tom, always, that one day those fields and those gates and that cottage would become his own. It was the old story, Mark thought now, but it was a story that was never going to disappear. There was a book of essays by Declan Kiberd in the bookshop window; he stood and stared at it for a moment. It was a book he should have read. He thought about going in and buying it. But he had only thirty euro in his pocket and he needed it for the champagne. He walked on.
Tommy Burke’s farm up the lane had hardly been worthy of the name, just the cottage, with two or three rooms in it, and a few acres not much better than bog. Tommy was a bachelor, maybe thirty years older than his father. Mark could remember him only faintly — a flat cap, a battered old suit and battered old boots, a lot of rotten teeth, and a smell that became so familiar it was almost charming. Mark had never known what it was, that smell, until a few years ago when the smoking ban had come into effect and he had walked into a pub in the middle of the day and felt his nostrils twitch at the bang of stale booze, of spilled pints, of Guinness soaked into the carpet; the smells that there was no longer any smoke to hide.
His father had believed, for a while, that he had been named after Tommy; that was how close he had felt to him when he was a boy. He had told Mark about it; how he had spent so many hours every day with Tommy, helping him out on the farm. How he had annoyed his own father, the grandfather Mark had never known, by wanting to work with Tommy rather than with him. For Mark, Tommy was just there, and then one day he was just not, and he could still remember the shock of seeing his father cry at Tommy’s funeral. It had been like watching a wall of the house fall away.
Frank and Irene Lynch had been at that funeral. Frank Lynch had laughed when, imitating his father, Mark had laid his hand out for a shake in the graveyard. Lynch had put his hand on Mark’s head instead, had ruffled his hair, had told him that he had to be his father’s companion now. His father had said that he was more of a hindrance than a help. Lynch had laughed again and said that he didn’t believe it for a minute, and then he had moved closer to Mark’s father and the two of them had got into a long conversation about the other people who were standing around the grave.
It was probably the last civil conversation his father and Lynch had ever had, that one; afterwards, very soon afterwards, the trouble had begun. At the time, to Mark, it had seemed just a blur of shouting and cursing. Of silences at the dinner table. Of slamming doors. It was only years later that he understood what had happened; understood just how deeply his father felt he had been betrayed. Tommy had promised his father the farm. He had involved Tom in decisions about the future of the place. He had encouraged him to graze his own cattle on the land behind the cottage. He had encouraged him to save hay from the meadows. And he had never bothered himself to make a will.
Tom had asked Frank Lynch to look into the matter of the will, and when it emerged that there was none, he asked Lynch to advise him on what would happen next. Lynch told him that, by law, everything would go to Tommy’s nearest surviving relative, and that he would be happy to find out who that was. Shortly afterwards, he phoned Tom to say that the relative had been found: a cousin in Chicago, whom Tommy had never met. Lynch wrote to the cousin, and the cousin wrote back to say that he was touched and honoured by the inheritance. He was proud of his Irish ancestry, he said, and he was praying for the soul of his cousin Tom. And as soon as the ownership was legally transferred to him, he was putting the farm up for sale, and in this he wanted Lynch to act for him, because he could tell by the tone of his letter, by the kind sympathies it had expressed, that Lynch was an honourable man. When Lynch phoned Tom the same evening, it was to tell him that the auction would take place in Tommy’s yard. When Lynch’s secretary phoned Tom the next morning, it was to instruct him to remove his cattle from Tommy’s land. Bewildered, Tom refused. Overnight, Lynch had the cattle taken from the land. Mark would never forget his father’s face that morning when he came in the back door. It was rage and it was incomprehension. But most of all it was fear. His hands were shaking too much for him to be able to pick up the phone. Maura had to make the call. The cattle, it turned out, were being held in a pound near Cavan. There would be a fee for their return, and if they were placed back on the estate of Tommy Burke, the further consequences would be much more serious.