The Searcher(63)

“How would you know?”

“What’ve you read? Bitta Shakespeare, is it?”

“I’d read that one.”

“If it was a picture book.”

Mart ignores this. He says, “About eight year ago, it was, Lord Muck moved here.”

“All ready to civilize us savages,” Senan says.

“Ah, no,” Mart says fairly. “He started out grand. Lovely manners on him: always Excuse me, Mr. Lavin, and Might I trouble you, Mr. Lavin.” Senan snorts. “Don’t be jeering, you. A few more manners would do you no harm.”

“D’you want me to call you Mr. Lavin, is it?”

“Why not? Bring a bit of elegance to this aul’ place. You can bow to me off your tractor, when you go past.”

“I will in me arse.”

“Where it all went off the rails,” Mart tells Cal, settling to his story, “is when Lord Muck found out about the badger-baiting. D’you know what that is?”

“Not exactly,” Cal says. The first violent flare of the poteen is dying down, but it still feels smarter to stick to short sentences.

“It’s against the law,” Mart says, “but the cattlemen don’t like the badgers. They spread TB to the cattle, d’you see? The government does cull them, but some of the men, they prefer to take matters into their own hands. They’ll send a coupla terriers into a sett to find the badger, and then the men’ll dig it out. They might shoot it or they might let the dogs finish it, depending what kind of men they are.”

“A few of the lads were making plans one night, in here,” Senan says. “And didn’t Lord Muck overhear them.”

“He didn’t approve of that carry-on, at all,” someone else says. “Outrageous, it was.”

“Persecuting the helpless creatures.”

“Disgraceful.”

“Barbaric.”

The men laugh again. This time there’s a low rumble to it, a dark layer running underneath.

“The English are pure mad,” Mart tells Cal. “They’ve more compassion for animals than they have for any human being. There’s childer going hungry in that fella’s own country, his army does bomb the living shite outa civilians all round the Middle East, and he wouldn’t bat an eyelid, but the thought of that badger had him almost in tears. And him only on his second pint.”

“Fuckin’ sap,” says Senan.

“I don’t like the badger-baiting myself,” Mart says. “I done it once, when I was a young lad, and I never done it again. But I don’t have cattle. If a man’s afraid the badgers’ll ruin his livelihood, it’s not my place to tell him to sit back and hope for the best. And if it’s not my place, then it’s not the place of some blow-in that was never on a farm in his life except to write a poem about it.”

“A pity Lord Muck didn’t see it that way,” Senan says.

“He did not,” Mart says. “Lord Muck showed up at that sett on the night, with a big torch in one hand and a video camera in the other.”

“Screaming and yelling out of him,” someone else says, “about how he was going to take his footage to the Gardaí and the television.”

“He’d have the whole townland thrown in jail. Get the bloody rotten operation shut down.”

“He never got that footage to the Gardaí and the media,” Malachy says, “the poor creature. Somehow or another, his video camera didn’t survive the night.”

“Ah, he smashed it himself,” someone says. “Throwing himself about like a lunatic, he was.”

“Trying to batter people away from the sett with that torch.”

“Gave himself a bloody nose with it.”

“Coupla black eyes, and all.”

“One of the dogs went for him, and didn’t the little fucker up and kick it in the ribs. Some animal-lover, hah?”

“He shot John Joe in the arm,” Bobby says impressively.

“What are you on about?” Senan demands. “What the hell would he shoot John Joe with?”

“A gun. What the hell do people usually—”

“How would he hold a gun? He’d the torch in one hand, the video camera in the other—”

“How would I know how he held it?”

“—he wasn’t a fuckin’ octopus—”

“Maybe he’d the torch in his teeth.”

“Then how did he shout at them?”

Bobby says stubbornly, “All I know is, John Joe showed me the bullet wound.”

“Your man caught John Joe a clatter with his torch, is all he ever done. If John Joe showed you a bullet wound, he done it to himself; that fella wouldn’t know one end of a rifle from . . .”

An impassioned all-parties argument gets under way, and Cal is left looking at Mart, who is smiling back at him.

“Don’t be listening to them eejits,” Mart tells him, “about Belinda. She’d have your head melted. She’d want you out dancing round fairy rings at the full moon, and you haven’t the build for it. You stick to Lena.”

Cal’s sense of distance is still screwy; Mart’s face seems very close, and slightly watery around the edges. “So,” Cal says, “Lord Muck doesn’t live round here any more.”