He heard.
‘Sorry I was so cross with Daddy.’
‘’S’ OK.’
‘I’ll be the nice mummy tomorrow, I promise.’
‘OK.’ A loud yawn.
‘Sam?’
‘What?’
‘It’s not really OK to use the fu word.’
‘I know.’
‘Am I a horrible mother?’
‘No. You’re lovely.’
Brian smiled and crept downstairs. Later, when Edward had gone to bed having poured two enormous brandies for his guests, Brian turned to Julia. ‘You are lovely,’ he said.
‘Am I?’ She flushed prettily.
‘I’m sorry about … earlier today. And all the other times. You’re quite right, I am careless with Sam sometimes.’ He sighed and swallowed a mouthful of brandy. It left a pleasant little sting on his tonsils. ‘It’s just that – well – I just don’t want him to be afraid all the time –’ Brian broke off and smiled sheepishly. ‘Maybe it’s a father thing …’
‘But why should he be afraid?’
‘Like I say, maybe it’s a …’ Brian shrugged, he reached for her hand. ‘Anyway … Forgiven?’
‘Yes.’ Julia smiled. She cast him a sidelong glance, unsure if she was picking up the right vibes. The steady gleam of his blue eyes told her that she was. He stared meaningfully at the rug beside the still blazing fire.
‘Here? Now?’ she asked, a giggle catching at the back of her throat.
Brian raised his eyebrows. Julia drained her glass and shunted toward him on her knees. As they made love with their ears straining for any creaks on the stairs, she thought about the absurd revolutions within an ordinary married day. The pendulum swings through every contrasting emotion – five minutes – the difference between anger and reconciliation, love and hate.
Jeremiah preferred to do his own killing. That way, they got to use every scrap of the carcasses. He would slaughter up to twenty of the lambs at a session, sometimes a couple of aged ewes as well, if they were past breeding. The eviscerated bodies hung on hooks in an outhouse, awaiting collection by the local butcher’s truck. For some reason, they always reminded Brian of a line of strung-up babies. He got the job of sifting through the offal, selecting the finer morsels – liver, heart, kidney – for the butcher, the lesser – intestines and stomach – for his mother to boil up in a film of stomach lining later. She stewed the heads too, in a large cauldron over the open fire in the kitchen, making a broth with carrots and parsnips. The air was filled with the high sweaty scent of mutton.
The blood dripped from Jeremiah’s butcher’s block into a channel which ran into a tiled pit. When this was full to overflowing, either Brian or Edward used a bucket to tip the blood into a large square vat where it half congealed beneath a canopy of buzzing flies until Brian’s mother found the time to make black puddings. If they slaughtered a couple of heifers too, the contents of the vat could stand at nearly three feet deep. Occasionally, if the evening was warm and when all the work was done, Brian and Edward would squelch along the bloody channel in their bare feet, the soft, still-warm blood oozing between their toes like heavy cream.
Jeremiah’s method of slaughter was quick and effective. He caught the wriggling lambs high up between his waist and the inside curve of his elbow – one fast jerk of his arm and the neck snapped with precision. While the animal cast about on the ground in its death throes, Cathal or one of the twins would swing him the next keening lamb by means of its hind leg. Brian tried his father’s method once, but only succeeded in half wringing the creature’s neck so that it lay paralysed on the ground, staring up at him with terrified, unblinking eyes. Then he heard his father’s impatient growl as he swung the beast up to finish the job.
Cathal’s posh cousin, Martina, from Dublin, liked to visit the farm to watch the lambs playing in the higher fields. ‘Aren’t they sweet?’ she crooned.
‘You mean to eat?’ Brian said.
She cast him a disgusted look and flounced away in her pink petticoat. As Brian watched her take delicate faltering steps over the backyard, to protect her black patents, he had the curious thought that she was a bit like a little lamb herself. Sometimes after that, he would have erections as he watched the prinking babygirl steps of the lambs being led to slaughter. In later years, when he first heard of sheepshaggers, he remembered those eleven-year-old erections with a measure of discomfort. For all he knew, maybe that was how it started.
Apart from the one roast leg of lamb each Easter Sunday which the family could afford to keep back for themselves, the best thing about the slaughtering months was the hide man. Brian thought he was like a devil, appearing out of nowhere, twice yearly, to collect the animal hides. He was a tall man from the Midlands somewhere, with an accent which sounded strange to Brian and the others.
‘Talk some more,’ Cormac would plead.
‘Ahv no time for fooking tak and so ahant,’ the hide man always responded and then talked for hours anyway, but they could understand little of what he said. He smoked constantly, a fag butt clamped perennially between his thin lips, yet Brian never saw him strike a match and the fag was always the same length, curling smoke directly into his nostrils and up into his eyes, which Brian never managed to get a good look at either, because they were always tightly squinched against the smoke. He wore a long tan coat, down to his ankles, streaked and stiff with dried blood. Brian could smell him coming from the top of the road. He smelled like the bowels of hell.
By the time he arrived, the pelts in their separate outhouse looked alive again as they writhed with rats. The hide man carried a thick blackthorn for that purpose. The children jostled for space in the doorway to watch him swing the stick like a hurley, batting the rats into every corner. On occasion, an extra large black male would stand his ground, staring and hissing balefully, a moment off striking. In that moment, the hide man would suck on his cigarette, draw the stick back with silent expertise and launch it like a javelin into the jaws of the enemy. ‘Tak me on, woodyeh, yeh fooker yeh.’ He never missed.
He gave Brian a penny once, blackened copper with red specks of meat on it.
‘What’s that for?’ Brian asked.
‘Fir bean a gude lahd, I sees dah.’ The hide man tapped the side of his nose. ‘Pu dah i yoor mout now, dasas whir Ah allus kipt me muneh.’
That was the same day the hide man saved five-year-old Cormac’s life. Brian was down the fields about to bring the cows up for milking when he happened to glance up toward the outhouse where his father was still busy at work with the lambs. Two short skinny legs stuck up from the blood vat, kicking frantically in the air. Cormac had fallen in head first and could not lever himself out again. Brian broke into a run, desperately trying to estimate if he could cover the distance in time. He raced uphill, shouting at the top of his lungs to his father who he figured must have seen Cormac’s legs by now but continued
