Dear Margaret in Michigan,
Out past the cutaway there's a road that starts at the chapel turn and ends at a wall in the middle of a field. The Board of Works set it going in the famine times, black '47 for the relief wage, and it stopped where the money stopped. The wall was never finished either.
It's a wall that gave up. Forty yards of dry stone and it stops mid-field at chest height. A hundred and seventy-odd years it lay there, saying what it was to anyone who looked.
The grass has the road now, and the sheep walk it better than any car did. The turf men use the first hundred yards and no further. After that it belongs to the gorse and the wind.
Tuesday the council came and put a sign at the bottom of it. NO THROUGH ROAD. Mary and I walked up after supper to check.
They're right. It doesn't go through. Nettles around the new post already, and somebody in an office expecting traffic.
The sign is the shiniest thing for a mile of that road. Mary read it twice and said at least they spelled it right.
Marlene wrote to me from Bemidji, Minnesota, up by the lakes. She's clearing out her father's house and found a biscuit tin of money-order stubs, forty years of them, every one made out to the same address in Ireland. She asked was it a lot of money.
She said the tin was rusted at the corners and the stubs had gone curly with the damp. Forty years of small slips, banded by the decade.
Mary read the note over my shoulder and asked what the father worked at. Railroad maybe, or the mills. The stubs didn't say.
Then she folded the note back along its own creases and said nothing more about it.
Was it a lot. Ten dollars every other Friday, '86 to '90, and twenty after the raise. The line at the post office up on Broadway, men from Leitrim and Mayo and Kerry, all buying the same small slip.
The clerk knew the order of us by the end. Friday pay in the envelope, the walk up Broadway, the damp wool smell of the lot of us.
The letter that went with it said nothing. The work is good. The weather is middling.
My mother wrote back for my uncle. Five years of his words in her hand. He never took up the pen himself.
Her news was small and steady. The price of the turf, who had died, who had a son home.
He died the spring of '90 and I was framing houses out past O'Hare. The boss said a man who took the Wednesday off needn't come back the Thursday. I went home in an envelope.
The word came to the site office on the Tuesday. I finished the wall I was on. The house went up anyway.
The wreath money went in with the rest of it, extra folded in, like it was any other Friday.
I wrote back to Marlene. Yes, I told her. It was a lot of money.
I left the remainder of it where it was.
Denny bought a chainsaw at the auction Thursday, off a man who swore it was never used on anything but firewood. The bar was too clean and Denny wanted to believe him, so he did. He reckoned he'd finally stop having to borrow mine.
He's borrowed my saw six times and brought it back five. He started on the hedge between us at three. At half past four it stopped mid-roar, and the quiet was worse.
The crows were back on the hedge before the echo finished.
There's the door. It took me two tries to get up out of the chair.
It's Denny, with the saw under one arm and his thumb in the other fist, asking is it supposed to do that. Which of them he means, he didn't say and I didn't ask.
He's standing there waiting for a miracle, but he'll have to settle for Mary.
Mary's gone for the first-aid box, wearing the face she keeps for Denny. It's the retired nurse in her. She looks at a bleeding thumb the way a carpenter looks at a crooked nail — no pity, just the urge to fix it.
She'll have that thumb cleaned and wrapped before Denny finishes saying it doesn't hurt. I'd best get out of the way before she decides I need a bandage too.
Mary has the kettle on. I'll be in the post, Margaret.
— Oul Charlie
You'll be wondering who wrote that. Fair enough.
Mary, pour two cups there and sit down. We'll tell her while it steeps.