Lamb by Bernard Maclaverty Page A

churning through the night. Michael had never liked the city – any city – but he knew the mentality of country people well enough to know they would be conspicuous in a village. The city hid them and he was grateful and annoyed at the same time.
    He had been raised in the country, on a small Ulster farm outside Ballycastle. The place had been poor, although they had never gone really hungry.
    A grey cement house, surrounded by a clutter of outbuildings set with its back to a hill. In the middle of the buildings and at the back door of the house was the yard, always in his memory glistening with muck. The front door, which had a small concrete path on to the road, was rarely, if ever, used. The only times he could remember seeing it open were at his parents’ funerals. When his mother died, and as she lay stiff and white on the bed, his father with rusted garden shears wept as he cut the front door free of the overgrown rambling rose so that her coffin could be taken out that way and not through the mucky yard. The front door had been closed originally to preserve the beautiful rug in the front hallway. Then with habit the passageway had fallen out of use and Michael, at his father’s funeral a fortnight ago, had seen the rug in the dark behind the closed door, still covered with its sheet of clear plastic.
    There was a rule that wellingtons had to be left at the back door, and his father padded about the house in grey socks. Always the heel of his sock worked its way to the arch of his foot after a day in the wellingtons. His mother knitted the socks when she was well enough.
    When he was five she had been crushed against a concrete gatepost by an unruly heifer. The doctor said that she would be paralysed from the waist down for the rest of her life.
    â€˜It’s the spine,’ his father had said, and had a bed set up for her downstairs. She lived on like this for six years, knitting when she was able, crying when she was not. Each night before the family rosary, his father would freshen her up, washing her face and hands with a damp face-cloth. Although she could do this herself, she always let her husband do it. It became a sort of ritual, when he would caress her face with the cloth, looking at it as if for the slightest speck of dust. Then she would put her head down and let her hair fall forward while he washed and massaged her neck. She always said that part was nice.
    â€˜Michael, give me my beads out from under the pillow,’ and they would kneel at her bedside by the slight ridge of her legs beneath the coverlet and recite the rosary.
    His father did everything for her. Michael felt that he sacrificed his life for her. He refused to have a nurse in and, with the time taken up looking after her, the farm began to go down.
    He was a man who had respect for every living thing. Although he was plagued by rabbits, when the myxomatosis came he would take the trouble to kill them with a blow of his hand as they sat trembling, saying that he did not want to waste a cartridge on them. He pulled chickens’ necks so fast and expertly that they never felt a thing. He showed Michael the best black pools, with their slow wheels of foam, to find trout and taught him how to distinguish the various birds of prey. The sparrow-hawk, the kestrel, the harrier, and when they were on Tor Head, the eagle. If he saw a hawk he would stop and freeze and watch until it was out of sight. He would put his hand on Michael’s shoulder and whisper, ‘Watch now, son, and you might learn something.’ They would stand and watch the bird hovering in the air, as his father said, ‘like a trout facing upstream’, and watch it stoop out of sight, or if they were lucky see the kill. The fact that he lost several lambs a year to them did not diminish his admiration for them. ‘The rulers of the air,’ he would mutter, almost in disbelief. And yet he hated the gulls. In early May he took the boy on