Riordan - The Water Stealer

It happened on the cinder path between the playing field and the graveyard one afternoon in October when all the leaves of the aspen flipped over and stayed, the way a skirt might blow up and hold in a gust of wind except there was no wind, one of those days when the thud of a football hangs in the deadened air. But there was no thud, no sound from man or bird.

So Id swear if Id looked at my watch just then the digits would have stuck if I could have looked, for it mustve been a time when time was snagged in its fluid escapement and in that lull no one can enter the world, or leave it; the cars stand on the motorway, the greyhounds legs are knotted above the track, a missile is framed in mid-flight, no sound comes from the childs mouth, the open beak, and the shoal of herring is a sculpted cloud shimmering under the glass of the rolling downs. At this moment, when the joker palms the room-key, the punching fist can be opened, the egg slipped back under the nesting bird, and each of us could scurry to forestall one mischance, or undo one wrong choice whose thorn of consequence has lodged till now, before whatever it is keeps the world scary and true breaks loose. A squirrel turns tail overhead, a chestnut rolls to the ground, and with it a drawn-out scream arrives from childhood.

The boy has come across fields to the ring-fort under the barbed wire, through the wet barley, over the stream. Hes listened to the stonechat on the thorn above Keefes Well and fingered the grass where a rabbit slipped out of sight. Now he approaches the mound in earshot of the river below if only he could stop, he could balance the slender jug of his body unspilled, while his thought turns on some dream of football or riding bareback across prairie, before hes waded into the shoulder-high wave of bracken onto the fort, and there in the dip (where Ahern or Carney the Knacker set the trap) the hare sits on her haunches, her nostrils twitching between fronds and thistles, so calm it seems he will gentle her in from the wild, when his shadow dulls the chestnut of an eye and she jumps, outstretched in air and free for a second, but held in the frame of her leap by the rusted teeth sunk into her hind leg.

So the boy finds a stone, as he must, smooth as carbolic soap, and aims to connect with the head the hare though is quick, as she yanks and tosses the leg-iron, to herself unwounded. But she cant snap the raw bone from its grip. So now hes dense and accurate, until the eyes go dim, a thread of blood loops from the mouth, and the hare lies before the boy, who will dream of the mooncalf that leaned then from the bracken, and smirking took the stone out of his hand.

appear from the orchard. There now says Uncle Ned, pouring us lemonade. My prize cocks gone lame! He lifts each ringed foot singly, slowly to shoot the short film frame by frame. My prize cocks gone lame! He lifts each ringed foot singly, slowly to shoot the short film frame by frame.

On rue Ortolan I hear the chorus of gobbles roll across the mossed cobbles from distant Ophir.

Whats the Dun Cow doing on the Old Kent Road, Im wondering, when who should blow in But this bucko wearing the moss-green gabardine My mother wore when out feeding the hens. Those beaks were taking it in turns to coax Crushed oats from between her toes, her horny Old toes covered over with sores, with the bunions And warts that stuck out through her brogues. So howre they keeping? Theres rheum in his eye. I had truck with them all all the old crowd.Yer da and yer ma, and the man in Dungourney? Tucked up with their rosaries, they are, Piled one on the other at home in Lisgoold, Pushing up daisies many the long year.

Where no ones been for days, months maybe. Nothing but mice under the scatter of hay, swallows and wind in-and-out of the slates.

As I step into the dun light, an owl slips dream-quick from the corner of my eye. I must have usurped some horny old Lar, or fretful ghost at ease here for the night.

Last night in the box where you name the person to inform in the event of death I wrote Mother my mother who lives on most nights in my dreams where Im young again, alone, home for holidays or about to fly to Canada running this time for the plane (the airports in the farm next to ours) while carrying a shorn Christmas tree and worried will I be allowed to board, when I wake then drift to a house Ive lived in years it seems, spacious, but with a leaking roof and timber walls so frail the rickety bedrooms on the point of caving in. It isnt Surrey Road, and then it is but has an added room, which somehow all that decade the children growing up I never knew was there, an old-style parlour with sideboard, knick-knacks, gramophone, cuckoo clock, and a Sacred Heart offering its coal of glowing flesh, which coils and swells, yet is solid in the Virgins hands, its geometry elusive, or rather as I wake in the full coherence of the dream, at the first thought the image slips beyond perception as once in Victoria Station heading for home, for Lisgoold, and about to find the train to take me there, I stood in bliss under the departure boards, those mechanical wooden ones, when with the noise of skittles they flipped to Sanskrit. But now Im back in Hickeys passage (the next-door farm) in a damp, strip-lit tunnel from which I climb into the yard, a stop on the old Cork-to-Youghal line, where its the Age of Steam with limestone walls, an Avery scales, wrought-iron gates and grilles. The sky is vast with pinnacled slowly tumbling cloud palaces, marble-white and interspaced by lapis blue an active spring day of wind with the view across the Weald, the orchards dense with butterflies, finches, cuckoos and I am loath to turn for home, our dark boreen, the leafless privet, vacant dwelling, when I see its light outside the curtain, a dawn of dampened sun, pigeons, trucks on Linden Grove, the trickle of the water feature, and in my chest the hissing thumping piston 14 years on of grief.