The Barrow Lover

If she noticed him looking at her she didn't show it. She was breathtaking, even more beautiful now that her freckles on her cheeks and on the bridge of her nose had come up in the sunshine. She sat on the bench in the main street, tracing her finger along her palm as her long copper hair danced along her shoulders in the breeze. Perhaps she was reading some future there, foreseeing some events ingrained, like hazards or bounties on her own hidden treasure map.

It had been years since he had seen her and he found it hard to believe he was seeing her again so far from home. He didn't even want to speak to her; he knew well that his inadequacies would out in his voice. In this moment at least, his eyes were his strength and seeing her again was all the perfection he had dreamed of. His uncle slapped him on the back of the head.

‘What you doing Danny? You never stop dreaming boy, will help me out.’
Danny spat on the dirt covered street and rolled up his sleeves and turned to his uncle who was already setting out the turf on a crusty old woolen blanket. The hinny stood as stoic as a statue beside him, despite the mountain of turf that had been heaped into the willow baskets drooped on either side of her back. It was not sadness in her eyes, more a resignation. The donkey roped behind her, her mother, always eyed people warily yet never bucked or gave out and she waited patiently for the turf stacked upon her to be slowly removed, bit by bit by bit.

‘This is a good spot,’ said his uncle. Danny nodded as he unloaded the sods and stacked them upright on the blanket as though they were being footed out in the bog.

‘I’m telling you now,’ said his uncle. ‘With this hot summer we're having, most of these will expect a cold winter as punishment. I reckon we’ll be sold out be lunchtime.’

They had traveled over eighty miles through the night, from the treeless west into the bountiful and timber filled lands of South Tipperary where turf such as theirs gave scents of nostalgia for people who had never before burned turf. They were early for the market, but as they worked activity began to pick up about them. The early morning sun trickled through the morning haze and dust crystals glittered in the muck on the street. Soon farmers and traders and tinkers and merchants who had traveled through the night began to arrive and to set up their own patches. Tired sheep and goats lumbered with heads down through the street, farmers with sticks skirting the ground lightly and speaking to them a soothing language, whissssht whissssht, suk suk suk suk suk. A language prehistoric, passed down along from those ancient pioneers who had first farmed such beasts.

When Danny had unloaded the first basket and stacked it, he turned to the bench where she was and upon seeing it empty, felt his heart shrink in his chest.

‘Jemmy.’

‘What.’

‘I’m sorry. I have to go.’

‘What? What do you mean?’

Danny turned from his uncle as though he meant nothing to him, and walked away down the street and soon his uncles calls faded out with the sounds of beasts baying and of commerce awaiting. He had to see her and he could care less about anything else. Her smile, white and pure as gold. He looked at all the faces and none were hers nor could compare. He saw her then, just a rumour of her, enter the alley beside the tea merchants. He walked to the corner and stopped at the mouth of it and his heart filled with air when he looked inside and saw her amongst the shadows. She was talking to a big pig of a man with a greasy moustache, his rounded belly looping over the waist of his trousers. He was black with dirt and his balding head was matted sporadically with black and oily hair. A blacksmith possibly. She placed something in his big black hand and he looked at it and smiled, before exiting the alley through some ramshackle doorway. As she turned around Danny pulled his head in and leaned casually against the wall of the tea shop waiting for her to emerge, his heart oscillating in his chest. When she did emerge she passed by him, the sunlight bathing over her hair. She looked both ways and Danny looked nowhere but at her. As she walked passed him, he opened his mouth to call her but the words wouldn't form in his throat. Instead, an impulse charged through him and he stepped forward and touched her arm. She turned to him, confused at first, but as recognition clouded into her eyes her jaw slacked slightly.

‘Daniel,’ she said.

‘You remember me,’ he said. His hands were trembling as they clasped each other behind his back.

'Of course,' she said. 'I remember.'

Her eyes beamed at him as big as two suns.

‘Would you like to walk with me?’ she said.

He smiled and told her that he would like nothing in this earth more. They walked through the streets of the town, through all manners of shunting man and shunted animal. Old women and young girls walked with tired feet, baskets of leek and of turnip and of carrot heaped in their wicker baskets, the dried muck on them sparkling in the sunlight. As they walked Daniel noticed the men looking at her and he liked that they thought she was his. Her words left her mouth as soft as feathers though he couldn't really recall a word she said. Soon they reached the river which dissected the town at the quay. They walked along it, the river flowing beside them. The branches of the trees which grew on the banks leaned over the water as though they were bowing to hear its confidences, and the birds that fluttered through the bushes sang melodious tunes of happiness born. He was here, walking with her, they and the world around them in a paradisal harmony.

Soon they had left the town behind and were walking through fields of greenest grass dotted with wild daisies and buttery dandelion. Bushes of sloe crept from the steep banks below them, dipping their beaks into the water as though they were drinking the river itself. Little flies no larger than dust bustled chaotically over the surface and small ripples bobbed on it as they landed there. When she turned to him and she asked him was he sure, he told her that he was, that he had loved her since he had first laid eyes on her when he was just a boy. She smiled to him and stroked his wrist with the tip of her finger yet the feeling stayed on him long after.

As a little boy he had first come upon her standing above his father as he lay in his bed, lifeless. His father, the poet, the balladeer. There was a smile of serenity stroked into his dead face, and he had not seen his father smile since the death of his wife many years before. When young Danny cried in fright he startled her and she turned to him. She crouched down and kissed his cheek and told him he was too young, yet from that day on he had wanted her. He had wanted to be hers and for her to be his even though he knew she would never be his, for she had many men and no men had her.

Standing with her by the river banks, drowning in sunlight and nature, Daniel heard from some place the hypnotic shouts and calls of traders, the baying of animals, the raucous laughter of children.

‘Are you sure?’ she said to him.

‘Yes,’ he said, his eyes watering. ‘My God yes.’