Walk the Blue Fields by Claire Keegan Page A

up!’
    â€˜Who brought it up? Who?’
    â€˜It’s his birthday, for Christ’s sake!’
    â€˜Who said anything?’
    The young man looks down. At the hot tub, a mother braces herself and enters the bubbling water. Screams from racing children pierce the night. He feels the same trepidation he always feels at these family occasions, and wonders why he came back here when he could be in Cambridge in his T-shirt and jeans, playing chess on the computer, drinking Australian beer. He takes the cufflinks from his pocket, a gift his grandmother gave him shortly before she died. They are gold-plated cufflinks whose gold is slowly wearing off revealing the steel underneath.
    *
    When his grandmother first married, she begged her husband to take her to the ocean. They were country people, pig farmers from Tennessee. His grandmother said she had never laid eyes on the Atlantic. She said if she saw the ocean, she could settle down. It wasn’t something she could explain but each time she asked her husband, hisresponse was the same.
    â€˜Who’ll take care of things round here?’
    â€˜We could ask the neighbours –’
    â€˜What neighbours? That’s our livelihood out there, Marcie. You know that.’
    Months passed, she grew heavy with child and finally gave up asking to see the ocean. Then, one Sunday, her husband shook her awake.
    â€˜Pack a bag, Marcie,’ he said. ‘We’re going to the coast.’
    It wasn’t yet light when they got into the car. They drove all that day, across the hills of Tennessee towards the coast. The landscape changed from green, hilly farmland to dry plains with tall palms and pampas grass. The sun was going down when they arrived. She got out and gasped at the bald sun sinking down into the ocean. The Atlantic looked green. The coast seemed a lonely place with the stink of seaweed and the gulls fighting for leftovers in the sand.
    Then her husband took out his pocket-watch.
    â€˜One hour, Marcie. I’ll give you one hour,’ he said. ‘If you’re not back by then, you can find your own way home.’
    She walked for half an hour with her bare feet in the frothy edge of the sea, then turned back along the cliff path and watched her husband, at five minutes past the appointed hour, slam the car door and turn the ignition. Just as he was taking off, she jumped into the road and stopped the car. Then she climbed in and spent the rest of her life with a man who would have gone home without her.
    *
    His twenty-first birthday is marked by a dinner at Leonardo’s, the fancy seafood restaurant overlooking the water. His mother, dressed in a white pants suit with a rhinestone belt, joins him on the balcony.
    â€˜I’m so proud of you, honey.’
    â€˜Mom,’ he says and lets her embrace him.
    His mother, a small woman with a hot temper, likes to go marketing. She drinks a glass of fresh grapefruit juice with vodka before she goes and makes out a list on the counter. Olive oil, artichoke hearts, balsamic vinegar, veal. All the things she could never afford. She avoids the aisle of toilet paper and dog food, goes straight to the deli and points to the monkfish, the prosciutto, the organic cheese. Once, she bought a ten-ounce jar of beluga caviar and ate it with her fingers in the parking lot.
    â€˜I’m so proud of you,’ she says now, staring at his throat. She puts her glass down and reaches out to knot his tie. ‘There,’ she says, standing back to look at him again. ‘How many mothers can look at their sons and say, “My boy’s going to Harvard University?” I’m a pig-farmer’s daughter from Tennessee and my boy is going to Harvard. When I’m low, I always remember that, and it cheers me up no end.’
    She takes a sip from her glass. Her nails are painted a hard and shiny red.
    â€˜It’s no big deal, Mom.’
    She looks out at the water and down at the strand.