The Collected Stories

Dolores imagined these foreign people asking her mother about the standing stones, and her mother telling them, using the same expressions she always did. When her mother wasn’t there and Dolores gave the directions herself she never used expressions like ‘to see you over the bit of water’ or ‘you’ll strike the stones standing up in the grass’. All that was her mother’s old-fashioned way of putting things. Dolores simply said that the visitors must cross the stream at a place they’d see and then keep straight on. Her father, no longer alive, had once carried her to see the standing stones and she hadn’t found them much to look at. But a visitor who had spent the whole afternoon examining them and had afterwards returned to the shop to verify the way to the Rossaphin road had stated that they were the most extraordinary stones of their kind in the whole of Europe. ‘I think he was maybe drunk,’ Dolores’s mother had commented, and her father had agreed.

As soon as they left the shop the Frenchman took the woman’s arm affectionately, both of them laughing at something or other. Dolores watched them walking on the left-hand side of the road, towards the mill and the towering grain stores. There had been prosperity in the place once, her father and her mother had said, at the time when the mill operated. Its owner had lived in the pink-distempered house with the fallen-in roof, a man called Mr Hackett, who had grown some special kind of plums in his garden.

The French couple stood for a moment by their car, a small, bright red vehicle, hired in Dublin, Dolores guessed. A group of English people and an American woman, returning from the stones some years ago, had been unable to start theirs and had telephoned the Dan Ryan car-hire organization from the shop. It was then, for the first time, that Dolores had realized it was possible for visitors from other countries to hire motorcars and to drive all over Ireland in them.

The Frenchman removed the pipe from his mouth and knocked it out on the edge of his shoe. He unlocked one of the car doors and took from it two pairs of short green gum-boots, which he and the woman put on. They stowed their shoes in the car and then the man put his arms about his companion. He bent her head backwards, leaning his body against her and pushing his lips on to hers, although Dolores could not quite see that detail of the embrace. He released the woman and she at once placed her hands, fingers splayed out, on his black hair, drawing his face down to hers again. After a moment they separated and set off, hand in hand, their arms stretched across the path they walked along. On either side of them nettles and docks grew in great profusion; daisy-heads and buttercups decorated the grass of the path; ragwort was everywhere. The afternoon was sunny, puffy little clouds were stationary in the sky. On the red roof of the car there was what appeared to be a shadow, small and rectangular and vividly black: it was an object, Dolores realized when she screwed her eyes up, not a shadow at all. Carelessly the two had left it there.

She dropped the edge of the half-curtain and limped back to her bed, where she had been reading Holster in the Dust by Tom K. Kane. She picked a cigarette from a packet of Afton Major, open on the candlewick counterpane. She lit it and inhaled. Because of her bad leg she lay down for an hour or so almost every afternoon, unless it was the time of year when the seed potatoes had to be put in on the slope at the back or the later time when the grown potatoes had to be gathered. Years ago, when Dolores was twelve, old Dr McDowell had suggested that a rest in the afternoon might be a relief. The leg, shrivelled to the bone as a result of infantile paralysis, necessitated the use of a crutch, although in making her way across her bedroom or the kitchen, or sometimes moving about in the shop, Dolores could manage without this aid, limping from one steadying surface to the next. The evening sun-rays reddened the canyon, she read. Dust was acrid in One-Draw’s nostrils and grimy on his cheeks. Her father had bought these yellow-backed books of the Wild West Library, which were closely printed on absorbent paper, a perpendicular line down the centre of each page, separating the prose as in a newspaper. Their soft covers were tattered now, creases running through horses and riders and gun-smoke, limp spines bent and split. Her father had bought one in Mackie’s the newsagent’s every Friday, making the journey to Rossaphin in the horse and cart, taking Dolores with him. He had brought to the town the carrots and cabbages he grew on the slope, turnips and potatoes when he had them, plums from the forgotten garden next door. A waste of time, Dolores’s mother had always maintained, because of the small profit there’d been, and when Mr Mullally died the practice had ceased and the horse had been sold. The cart was still in the yard at the back, its faded orange- painted wood just beginning to rot. Even though her father had died fourteen years ago, Dolores still missed those weekly journeys and the feeling of excitement their anticipation had engendered.

The shop, patronized by everyone in the neighbourhood, kept Mrs Mullally and her daughter going. The bus dropped off newspapers there, groceries and confectionery were stocked, and a rudimentary post office maintained. At the time of Drumgawnie’s greater prosperity Mrs Mullally’s father had run it profitably, with a public house as well. Dolores’s own father, once employed in Mr Hackett’s milling business, had married into the shop after the closing of the mill. In his lifetime it was still thought that Dolores’s affliction might miraculously right itself as she grew up, but this had not happened. He died in the kitchen armchair, having complained for several months of pains in the chest which Dr McDowell had not taken seriously. ‘Well, Mother of God, isn’t it the most surprising thing in three decades of practising medicine?’ Dolores remembered him saying in the kitchen, the body already covered with a bedsheet. ‘McDowell was drunk as a fish,’ her mother was afterwards to remark. ‘His breath would’ve knocked you down.’ Not used to that particular smell, Dolores had imagined it to be a variation of the disinfectant in Dr McDowell’s house in Rossaphin.

One-Draw slid from the saddle. His eyes were slits, measuring the distance. ‘Cassidy! ’ he shouted. ‘Reach, Cassidy!’ There was no reply, no movement. Not a sound in the canyon.

Dolores folded down the corner of the page to keep her place. She lit another Afton Major. There was never any pain in her leg; it was just the ugliness of it, the difficult, unattractive movement, the crutch she hated so. She’d become used over the years to all the cumbersome arrangements that had to be made for her, the school bus coming specially to the crossroads to take her to the convent in Rossaphin, the Crowleys calling in on a Sunday to take her and her mother to Mass in their Ford. Once a year, three weeks before Christmas, she and her mother went for the day to shop in Rossaphin, driven on that occasion also by the Crowleys. They had a meal in Love’s Cafe and didn’t return to the crossroads until six o’clock. Her mother had to get special permission to close the post-office counter, which was something Father Deane was able to arrange, just as it was he who persuaded the Crowleys to be kind in the way they were.

Now and again, between one December and the next, Dolores managed to get in to Rossaphin on the bus, but the journey home again had to be arranged carefully and in advance, with the cooperation of one of the drivers who called regularly at the shop. Sheedy, who brought the bread, was no good because he came out in the morning, but the Mitchelstown Cheese man always passed through Rossaphin in the late afternoon and then came on to the crossroads, and Jimmy Reilly, who brought the bacon, came in the afternoon also. Having chosen a particular day and made the arrangement to meet one or other of the delivery men at a time and a place, Dolores usually had three hours or a bit more on her own. Her mother didn’t like it though; her mother worried in case the van men might forget. Neither of them ever had, but something once did go wrong with Jimmy Reilly’s engine and Dolores was left waiting outside the Provincial Bank until five o’clock when she should have been collected at two. A boy had come up to her with a message, and then Father Deane had appeared on his bicycle. He rang the bell of the bank and the manager’s wife had allowed Dolores to sit on a chair in the hall until the Crowleys arrived in their Ford. The tears were running down her mother’s cheeks when eventually she arrived back at the crossroads, and after that Dolores never again went into Rossaphin on her own.

She squashed her cigarette-butt on the ashtray that lay beside Holster in the Dust on the candlewick counterpane. The ashtray was made of glass, with green letters advertising 7-Up on it, a free gift from one of the delivery men. She’d easily finish Holster in the Dust tonight, Dolores considered, she’d even start Guns of the Apache Country. She’d read both of them