When he had finished with the chain harrow, and was laying its rusted lengths out behind the tractor, Sammy Stewart came around with a saw he wanted Tom to have a look at. It was a knack Tom had picked up when he was a young man, how to listen to a saw, how to look at the blade as it ran and as it was still, how to know what part of it to take out and clean or screw tighter, what part of it to leave alone. Sometimes strangers came to the house and paid him to fix an engine for them or to have a look at a lawnmower or a strimmer, but he wouldn’t take money from Sammy. Things went back too long between the pair of them. Sammy knew that too.
‘Maura’s not around today,’ Sammy said, as he put the chainsaw down on the ground between them.
Tom looked at him to see if he showed a sign of knowing anything. ‘She was talking about heading into Longford to get a few things,’ Tom said after a moment, and Sammy nodded.
‘I thought I saw her on the road there,’ he said.
Tom went down on his hunkers to take a look at the chainsaw. The chain could do with tightening, and the filter with a clean, but apart from that it barely needed to be seen to at all. He looked at Sammy. ‘There’s hardly a hilt wrong with this engine at all.’
Sammy seemed surprised. ‘I thought I felt a pull on it yesterday evening when I was using it.’
Tom stood and yanked the starter cord. The noise of the saw scared a clatter of birds out of the trees over the yard. The engine ran clear. Tom knocked it off again and took it across to the fence, to where the lower branches of the trees along the meadow drooped and jutted in towards the yard. On one of them, he tried the saw, leaning back as he did so, away from the yellow dust that leaped up around the blade. It sliced steadily through the damp green wood of the branch and Tom stood back to watch it fall. ‘You must have been imagining things,’ he said to Sammy.
Sammy shrugged. ‘Must have been.’ He took the saw and cut away another chunk of the same branch. It fell like a shot bird into the nettles clumped along the edge of the meadow.
‘Well, that’s grand, Tom,’ Sammy said, as he turned off the saw.
‘It’ll last you another while yet.’
‘I was in Keogh’s before I came here,’ Sammy said then, quickly, and Tom heard how careful his voice had become. So he knew.
‘Is that right?’
‘Paddy Keogh has the whole story, Tom. I’m just telling you, now. I thought you’d want to know.’
Tom nodded. ‘Thanks.’
‘So congratulations to you.’
Tom put his toe to the quietened blade of the chainsaw. The dog, who had disappeared at the first sound of the cutting, had come back to stand between the two men, her tail still low but wagging warily, and she stepped forward now to sniff at his boot as he took it back from the saw. ‘Did Keogh say where he heard it from?’
‘No, Tom, and I didn’t ask him,’ Sammy said, his voice full of apology. ‘You know that he’d only be dying for me to ask him that kind of thing. It’d make him feel important, to have people coming in and telling him the news, and for him to be giving it out.’
They stood in silence for a moment.
‘Lookit, Tom,’ said Sammy then. ‘Fuck Paddy Keogh.’
‘I’d say it made his morning.’
‘I’d say it did, the fucker, but sure lookit, isn’t it a sad state of affairs when you have to be waiting on another man’s news for there to be a bit of excitement in your own morning? Jesus, when you think about it, it’s little Paddy Keogh has to be grinning about. You don’t see any sign of one of those useless fools of his to be giving him any grand-childer.’
‘Still,’ Tom said, and wanted to say more, but nothing clear would come. ‘Still,’ he said again, and he looked to where the tractor and the chain harrow were parked outside the shed. The harrow was laid out behind it like a quilt. Have you your own harrow ready, he was about to say to Sammy, but then heavily, dramatically, Sammy sighed. Tom felt his throat tighten as he looked towards him.
‘Frank Lynch is dead a long time now, Tom,’ Sammy said. He shook his head. ‘You don’t find the years going by. Mark a father. My God.’
Tom said nothing. Sammy knew what had happened with Lynch. Sammy had been Tom’s friend. He had listened. He had given his advice. He had turned his back on Frank Lynch in solidarity with Tom. But he had said, also, that it was the fault of none of the rest of the family. That Irene was a good woman. That the lads were decent. He had never mentioned the girl. The girl would have been too young, and there would have been no reason for Sammy to know her.
‘Tom,’ said Sammy, breaking into his thoughts. ‘I have two grandchildren. Alan has them over in Prague. The little fella is three and the girl is just gone a year now. You remember the boy being born.’
Tom nodded. ‘I remember it well.’ Sammy had come to the house that morning, the horn blowing, the window down, nearly — to Tom’s discomfort — crying as he shouted the news. A boy. A boy had been born. Their son was a father. In a few days, he and Helen would be going out to Prague to see the child for themselves. He could hardly wait. Later, Helen had told Tom and Maura that Sammy had nearly driven her demented over those few days. Wanting to ring Alan and his wife every half-hour. Wanting Helen to go on to her email to see if there were any new photographs of the child. Wanting to see if any earlier plane tickets could be got.
‘Anyway,’ Sammy said, ‘they’re home here to us as often as they can. And they think they’ll be able to move back here in a couple of years.’
‘That’ll be grand for yourself and Helen,’ Tom was able to say.
‘It will,’ Sammy said. ‘But those children won’t be as small then as they are now. And those years when they were small and all that won’t come back to us again, no matter how close they build their house to us. I’m awful sorry I don’t see more of them sometimes. A lot of times, to tell you the truth. Do you know?’
‘I do, Sammy.’
‘The young fella talks to me over the phone at the weekends. David. Jesus, I don’t know what kind of accent he has on him. You wouldn’t understand the half of it. Granddad, I want to go with you on the truck, he says to me.’
‘The tractor,’ said Tom, and he was able, at least half able, to laugh.
Sammy pointed to the old Ford, half buried under logs in the turf shed. ‘Do you mind the time Mark was up with you on that yoke over there?’
‘Couldn’t get him off the thing,’ Tom said. ‘That was the sort of him.’
‘And a wee girl, of course, you won’t be putting a wee girl up on a tractor,’ Sammy said, and then he laughed. ‘Or maybe you might, if the mother will let you, but, Jesus, it’s nice to have them around you all the same, Tom. The small ones.’
Sammy bent to take the saw up again. As he lifted it, he shook his head. ‘Jesus, you wouldn’t know the years going by, Tom. Do you know?’
Was he drunk, Tom found himself thinking, but pushed the thought away. It wasn’t right, it wasn’t kind: Sammy was a good man, had always been a good friend. He was carrying the saw to the car now. After he had stowed it and slammed the boot down, he turned back to Tom. ‘That lassie could be nothing like her father, Tom,’ he said.
Tom looked at him. ‘The child?’ he said, and Sammy shook his head.
‘No, Tom. The girl. Mark’s girlfriend. Or his partner, I suppose.’
It was the first time Tom had heard her referred to like this. He swallowed. ‘The mother, you mean,’ he said.
‘The mother. What’s this it is?’
‘What?’
Sammy looked at him. ‘Her name, Tom,’ he said.
‘Oh,’ Tom said. ‘Joanne.’
‘Joanne. And any name on the child yet?’