The river, the bridge, the meadows that surrounded them— these were the places where he frittered away his time, alone for the most part, for Rose developed sudden, unexplained absences over the following weeks which produced sharp words in the house, and one time Michael entered her room to find her sitting crying on the bed. This was a shock to him, a break in the natural order of things. He wanted to exit immediately and forget it, but then Rose looked up at him and he found himself hugging her clumsily, feeling like an impostor.
He was aware that his grandparents, and his Aunt Rachel too, for that matter, disapproved of Rose for some reason, and that she was fighting an obdurate battle against them, but the whys and wherefores of it were kept from him. He heard snatches of talk about 'bringing disgrace on the family' and 'not even one of her own kind', but these merely baffled him further. It was Aunt Rachel's voice he heard saying these things. She was a big woman, like her mother, in her late twenties and thus ten years older than her sister. She was unmarried, austere, prematurely grey. Michael had seen photographs taken of her before he was born, and in them she had been a smiling dark girl with squarer shoulders and slimmer hips, one hand clasped round a prayer book and the other fighting to keep a broad-brimmed straw hat on her head in a wind from an older, black and white world. She had been 'disappointed in love', Rose had told him once in a portentous whisper.
Michael came to know the warning signs. The family would take up what he had come to think of as their battle positions in the kitchen, with Rose bright-eyed and defiant, Rachel looking strangely vindicated, his grandmother haggard, her husband weary, and old Mullan sneaking out of the door with a shake of the head. It was grown-up business, a squall to be weathered.
Then there was the dreadful night the parish priest walked in, grim and ashen-hatred, his black cassock sweeping the ground, and Michael had been hustled upstairs to bed. He was glad to stay clear of it.
Set against the tension in the house were weeks of the finest weather imaginable. In the fields the barley was being slowly touched with gold and the hay was paled steadily by the sun. A wet spring had meant a much later hay crop and Michael's grandfather had fussed and worried over this one as though it were a wayward chid. Field mice by the hundred had woven their hanging nests in the stalks, unaware of the coming apocalypse. Pat walked through the forest of stems with a smile in his eye, rubbing the ears between his hard hands and winnowing the result with a swift pucker. Ten acres of fine barley, four more of hay—very soon now, the haymaking— and the pastures thick with the dung his cattle had so kindly donated. With Sean's talk, it would be the last time perhaps that they would use the old horsepowered thresher for the barley.
He talked to Mullan of buying a horse, at one of the autumn fairs perhaps, 'just a wee, high-stepping thing for the trap', whilst his wife listened in stony silence. There was such a thing as stretching sentiment too far. Mullan told a wistful story of seeing a British transport column moving to Ypres in '15; thousands of big heavy horses taking up the roads for miles, hardly a truck among them, towing wagons, ambulances, limbers, guns. And never a one to be seen now. Just damned tractors, keeping a man's feet from the earth, lifting him out of the furrow. You could plough a field these days without even getting its soil on your boots. And he shook his head whilst he and Pat shared a pouch of Warhorse, and even Michael's grandmother was seen to smile a little wistfully, which made Pat and Mullan share a private grin.
It was the calm before the storm, the storm being harvest time, that deliciously busy, back-breaking time of the year when the long, slow days suddenly contracted and seemed too short, when the men sometimes worked on into the nights and the women would bring them massive sandwiches and bottles of cool porter out to the fields. They would work by the light of storm lanterns, eyeing the sky nervously. When the hay was cut and lying one day's rain was all there was between a fine crop and a ruined one, and in spite of Mullan's protestations they would be glad of the tractor then and the angular bundles that the baler tidily excreted in its wake. The tractor was an innovation, and the year before Pat muttered about the square-built towers of bales that dotted the fields instead of the old blunt-headed ricks. Progress. Life was speeding up, he complained, like the cars on the roads. It took a wary hand on the reins to make the trip to the village, with the horse snorting at the passage of the metal monsters. He was a simple man, was Pat, his life built in black and white, as nostalgic as any Irishman when talking of his own land. To the hands he appeared to be absolute master, but even Michael knew how his wife prodded him on, like an old cob reluctant in the shafts. His son Sean was full of the ideas he had picked up at agricultural college. Farming was a science, according to him, whereas to Pat and Mullan, and to Michael's grandmother too, if truth be told, it was a way of life, as natural as the return of the swallows in the spring. It had resisted change for generations, but now it was succumbing at last, as was the land itself. It was being battened down and circumscribed, made smaller. The seasons were becoming elements in an equation.