The second part of their poor plan was to go to some central place and canvass passers-by. Neither could imagine how they’d start, how they’d ever bring themselves to walk bold up to strangers to ask had they met a girl called Moll Gladney, who was twenty, with brown hair and blue eyes, and here was a photo of her, and that was a year ago and her hair was a little bit longer now. But they girded themselves all the same, and they traced their steps back from Granby Row and they stood inside the mighty columns of the General Post Office, and they asked people to look at their photograph, the one Paddy had taken with the Box Brownie the previous summer at the front of the cottage and the wall newly whitewashed behind her and her hair back from her face and the sun lighting her and her white dress. They were timid at first and disinclined to approach people: everyone seemed to be hurrying and to know exactly where they were going and what they were doing, and everyone seemed to be stylishly dressed and to be carrying briefcases and handbags and umbrellas, even though there was no threat of rain.
But after a while they grew bolder and felt able to step out from the great storeyed eave of the GPO and to ask the people who stopped to talk to them had they seen the girl in the picture, and some people paused for a few heartbeats, and narrowed their eyes, and raised the photograph closer to their faces, and Kit and Paddy’s hearts would lift in momentary hope, but always the photograph was handed back with a shake of the head, or an apology, or a word or a look of sympathy, before the person rushed off again about their business. And a tall man in denim jeans and a leather jacket and round eyeglasses, like two purple mirrors, and a funny high-pitched voice took a real interest in their story, and he asked all about Moll, and Paddy wasn’t happy with the way the man grinned down at Moll’s picture and laughed at certain parts of their story, and the man said to them that they should take the fifty-three bus to the port and ask around out there, the security guards and the ticket people and you never know, and they thanked him and they said they would, that they were very grateful for his time and for his good advice. But, really, they hadn’t the heart for it, or the courage, and so they followed the green river back to the station and they waited on a bench beneath a monstrous clock that hung on chains from the vaulted ceiling until it was time to board the train for home.
Paddy wasn’t the better for the trip to Dublin. For the first time in his life he took to his bed. Or, rather, he refused to get out of it. There was nothing Kit could do or say to get him onto his feet. It was such a strange thing – stranger even than Moll’s absence, because at least an absence is an invisible thing, a thing that can’t be touched, and therefore pristine and incorruptible, holy almost – to see a man, especially a man the size of Paddy, inside in a bed with the late-morning sun shining in the window on top of him, with the undelivered post waiting below in the village and the cattle and sheep wondering to know where was their guardian, and all sorts of small jobs in the house and the yard and the Jackmans’ barn undone. Kit tied her scarf tight below her chin and walked to the post office to let them know Paddy was indisposed and that he’d be down the next day for certain, and Bride Maher said that was fine, that was absolutely fine, they managed away grand the day of the Dublin trip, and they’d manage away grand again for another day, and he probably caught some kind of a thing that was going around up there, did he? All those strangers’ hands and mouths. All those crowds of people. And no trace of Moll among them, no? No, Kit said, and she pulled the door hard behind her so the glass of it shook and the bell hopped wildly.
She walked the lane fast back up to the house where Paddy lay, and she went in through the half-door, and she closed it and bolted it high and low behind her, and she had a good look out of the back window to be sure there was no neighbour trotting down from uphill, and she checked the front window to be doubly sure there was no neighbour trotting up from downhill, and she went into the bedroom, and for the first time in her married life she raised her voice in anger, and she raised it as high as she was able. GET UP OUT OF IT, GET UP OUT OF IT IN THE NAME OF GOD, I WON’T HAVE IT, I WON’T HAVE IT, I WON’T HAVE A SHOW MADE OF ME LIKE THIS, STOP THIS FOOLISHNESS THIS MINUTE. And Paddy Gladney swung around from the wall in fright, and propped himself up on one elbow, and his eyes were wide and his mouth was open, and he swung first one foot out onto the cold floor and then the other, and he stood and straightened himself, and he looked at his red-faced wife standing with her shoulders hunched and her teeth gritted and her chin jutted forward, like a man about to fight, and he hardly dared stretch his limbs or scratch himself until she turned slowly on her heel away from him and left the room. And Paddy was shocked at and grateful for his wife’s anger, for the strange unfamiliar sound of her shouted words, and he was glad they had that now between them, that knowing of the limits of his acted grief, her tolerance for foolishness, and Paddy resolved that it would be the last time she’d have to strain herself that way on his account.
The Jackmans took four rows of cut turf in Annaholty bog that first summer without Moll and they asked Paddy to foot it and stack it and draw it, and in return he could keep for himself one full row of the four they’d reserved. Paddy said that he would, that he’d be more than happy to do so: it was years and years since he’d done such work, and bog air was a known restorative. And so every morning once he had his rounds done and his bicycle put away, he drove down the mill road and over past Grallagh to Kilcolman and out onto the Limerick Road and he turned off at Kilmastulla and onto the bog road, where he’d park in a wide gateway to an empty meadow and walk the last mile or so down to the soft peaty beds, the ancient blackened earth of the bog, and he marvelled at the straightness of the drills of sods, the cleanness of their cuts.
He opened a small hole in the spongy ground with his gloved hand at the start of each day’s work to bury his lunch in the coolness, the way his milk wouldn’t turn in the sun or his bread harden in the dry air, and he bent to his labour, lifting the moist sods out and up into small crossed stacks, tidy little weaves, so that the air could circulate in around them and dry them. And there were others in the bog that midsummer fortnight, but the plots were spaced well apart, and so he’d wave across the flat ground on arrival each day, and again as he was leaving, and the other people always waved back, because no one footed turf non-stop: a back bent to turf-footing had to be straightened every few minutes, and that straightening allowed the taking in of a good lungful of sweet air rich with minerals, and a look around at fellow toilers and up at Slieve Felim and the summit of Keeper peeping from behind it, and across the hidden river to the Clare Hills and the Arra Mountains on the near bank. And it pleased him to think that Kit was there, a few miles to his east as the crow flew, on the far side of those mountains, baking probably, or feeding the hens, or working bent-backed and bespectacled at the ledgers and the cashbooks from the shop, a tight ball of concentration. And it pleased him more to know that there was a chance, there was always a chance that Moll would be home before him. And some small bit of the gladness that had left his heart came creeping back.
Then there was a last cut of silage and two cuts of hay done, and by the time that work was finished, the turf was dried and it was ready to be bagged and drawn by tractor and trailer. The Jackmans’ only boy, Andrew, was sent with Paddy for the bagging and the filling of the trailer. Paddy had always thought he was a nice boy and a good little hurler but he was a bit cheeky at times lately, he noticed, a bit of a swaggerer. He’d told Paddy to go and find it himself when he’d knocked the previous week looking for the roll of wire that had been bought for the top fence of the haggard. And Paddy wasn’t keen on the amount of spitting the boy did, or the length of his hair, or the way he kept jumping into the cab of the tractor and shifting it roughly into gear and moving up the row too fast and too far so that Paddy was left a good few paces behind, dragging fertilizer bags of turf, one per hand. It was unnecessarily wearing on his arms and legs, not to mind a bit too forward of the lad to be getting in and driving the tractor without permission, as tall as he was and well-developed for his age.