Walk the Blue Fields Read Online Free

wood. Half the parish is here; a small wedding will no longer do. At the head table,every seat but the groom’s is taken. Why had he assumed that a chair would be reserved up there for him? Awkwardly, he does the round of tables, looking for his name. Miss Dunne signals, points. He’s been seated at a table with relatives. On his left, the bride’s uncle. To his right, the groom’s aunt.
    ‘I see they’ve put you down with the rest of the sinners,’ says the aunt.
    The priest offers no response. They milk the subject of the weather for a minute or two then look at the menu. The courses are printed in gold, and they are given a choice: cream of vegetable soup to start or crab meat in an avocado pear. Then poached salmon with parsley sauce or lamb in a rosemary jus.
    The groom’s aunt sees no need for all the fuss.
    ‘Wouldn’t a piece of boiled ham do us? It’s far from alvocadoes we were reared,’ she says, looking for praise.
    ‘I wonder where they poached the salmon?’ Sinnott says. ‘I hope it wasn’t my part of the river.’ He is a wiry man who seldom pays his dues and has confessed to stealing sheep off Jackson’s hill.
    Lawlor, at the head table, taps a glass and the crowd turns silent. A member of staff comes over with a microphone and hands it to the priest. Mechanically, he begins.
    ‘Bless us, O Lord, and these Thy gifts …’
    Heads bow. A crying child is taken from the room. As soon as he reaches the Amen, platters of avocado pears and bowls of soup appear. Bread rolls are buttered. Heads dip. Girls with a bottle in each hand pour red and white wine. Dishes of roast potatoes are brought out, vegetables, boats of gravy. Comfort is taken in the food and silence presides until the first wave of hunger is satiated. Then the talk begins.
    ‘You never put on an ounce, Father,’ the aunt says. ‘Don’t mind me asking but how do keep the weight down?’
    ‘I walk,’ he says, letting out a sigh.
    ‘The walking is great, they say. Do you go far?’
    ‘I go out the road as far as the creamery and on down to the river,’ he says. ‘I go any day I’m able.’
    ‘I know that way,’ Miss Dunne says. ‘Were you ever down wud the Chinaman, Father?’
    ‘No.’ He laughs. ‘What Chinaman?’
    ‘Well, you wouldn’t know him – he’s not a Christian – but there’s people goes down to him for the cure.’
    ‘The cure?’
    ‘Aye,’ she says, reaching for the salt.
    ‘Where, exactly, does he live?’
    ‘Down below Redmond’s in the caravan. You know there at the back of the hay shed? You must know it if you do be down that way.’
    ‘He’s a refugee, some relation of them people wud the Chinese,’ the Jackson man says. ‘Redmond of the quarry hired him as labourer and now he’s down there tending the ewes.’
    ‘Says he hasn’t lost a lamb yet,’ Breen says. ‘They say, in all fairness, that he’s a good man even though he doesn’t always do it our way.’
    ‘He won’t have a dog. Has some terror of dogs,’ says Mike Brennan from the hill.
    ‘He’d probably ate the bloody sheep dog,’ Sinnott says, stretching out for the last roast potato.
    ‘What, exactly, does he do?’ the priest asks.
    ‘He’s shepherding, didn’t I say?’ says Miss Dunne.
    ‘No. I mean, what cure does he have?’
    ‘I don’t rightly know, Father. All I know is there’s people goes to him. I never go near him. If an’thing’s ailing me, Igo to Nail the bone-setter.’
    ‘A great man if you’ve a dish out in yer back,’ says Breen ‘Only you could be behind a greyhound.’
    ‘Or a fecking pony!’ says Sinnott. ‘I had to wait two hour after a lame piebald.’
    There is laughter.
    ‘If you’ve an’thing ailing you, the Chinaman’s the man.’
    ‘It’s all talk. Sure what use could he be? Hasn’t a word of English. There’d be no way of telling him what’s ailing ya.’
    ‘Well, there’d be nothing to stop you telling him!’ Mike Brennan laughs.
    ‘You could point!’ says