Claire Keegan’s second collection of short stories, Walk the Blue Fields, is shorter, tighter and more mature than her first. Also, it seems to me that the strongest stories are concentrated in the first half of the book.

Walk the Blue Fields (2007) is Claire Keegan’s second collection of short stories, after Antarctica (1999). It’s shorter than the first, eight stories over 180 pages, as compared with fifteen in just over 200 pages for Antarctica. Walk the Blue Fields is, as you might expect, a more mature and in some respects a more unified book than its predecessor. Most of the stories are set in Ireland, with just one, “Close to the Water’s Edge” in the US, while Antarctica contains a number of American-set tales. I’ve read about half of the stories in the earlier collection just once, and the others twice, whereas I’ve read the stories in Walk the Blue Fields three times. Keegan says that the stories need to be read twice. I’d add “at least”.

For these reasons, I intend to concentrate in this post on the second collection. There’s one story in the first, “The Ginger Rogers Sermon”, that I found particularly disturbing, and I may write about it separately once I’ve read it at least once more, but I’m not making any promises about that.

One story from Walk the Blue Fields particularly stands out. It’s “The Forester’s Daughter”, the longest story in the collection at about 40 pages. It was later published separately by Faber in their “Faber Stories” series. We’re often told that a short story should focus on a single moment or event, or that its scope should be limited in some other way. “The Forester’s Daughter” doesn’t conform to this pattern. It’s rather like a miniature novel, covering a 20-year period, from the forester’s courtship of the woman who becomes his wife and the mother of his children, to an event that might well mark the end of that relationship. It’s told from several different points of view, including that of a retriever, whom the forester’s daughter names “Judge”.

Judge is intelligent and observant. When the forester, Victor Deegan, finds him, he is hiding from his owner, a hunter named O’Donnell, who treats him brutally. The dog goes home with Deegan, who intends to sell him eventually, but in the meantime gives him to the first of his children that he meets. That’s the youngest, the daughter, whose birthday it happens to be, though this is not something that crosses Deegan’s mind. The daughter — we learn very late in the story that her name is Victoria — takes this supposed gift as an indication that her father does love her after all.

While the family is eating, Judge explores the farm and makes some calculations as to where his interests lie.

His urge to roll in the cow-dung is almost irresistible but this is the type of house where they might let a dog sleep inside. He stands a long time watching the smoke, considering his circumstances. O’Donnell will be out looking for him. Judge picks up a sod of turf and carries it into the house. The Deegans, who are eating in silence, watch him. He drops the sod in the basket at the hearth and, before they can say a word, goes out for more. He does not stop until the basket is full. The Deegans laugh. (pp. 80–81)

Later, when a fox kills three of Martha Deegan’s hens, the forester produces a gun.

The retriever’s excitement grows. He hadn’t known Deegan owned a gun. Together they run out to the yard. A white moon is spinning, shredding the light between the clouds. The taste on Judge’s tongue is hot like mustard but they are too late: the henhouse door stands ajar and the fox is gone. (p. 89)

The girl becomes very attached to Judge, who goes almost everywhere with her and sees her off when she gets the bus to school. When her mother, Martha, saw Deegan give the dog to the girl she foresaw that her daughter’s heart would be broken. Deegan would inevitably want to sell the animal and would take back the supposed gift. So Martha decides to drive the dog away before the girl becomes too attached, but then she relents. Judge understands perfectly: “she is just the protective bitch minding her pup” (p. 81).

Martha has been disappointed with her marriage from the beginning. She accepted Deegan’s proposal because she was 30 and she might not get another, and at least he danced with her. He had talked up the farm he owned but she hadn’t seen it before the wedding. The house, though big, turned out to be in poor condition, badly furnished and infested with woodworm. Deegan, who is employed as a forester but also owns an inherited farm which he mortgaged to buy out his brothers’ share, is preoccupied with the land, and with paying off the mortgage so that he will finally own it unencumbered.

Martha keeps hens and buys rose bushes which she plants so that the roses grow around the door. Deegan thinks that she’s wasting his money. They have two sons older than Victoria. The elder isn’t interested in the land and intends to become apprenticed to Deegan’s brother in Dublin. The younger, generally referred to as “the imbecile”, doesn’t go to school and his main interest is in building a kind of model farm on the livingroom floor. He clearly has some artistic or perhaps architectural talent. Victoria teaches him things, including some biology and how to light a fire. Martha and the others often seem to forget that he’s there.

Martha very occasionally invites the neighbours in for food and drink and on these occasions it seems to Deegan that her behaviour is different. “Her voice is strange. Her voice is not the one she uses” (p. 97). When the neighbours are there, she will entertain the gathering with a story.

In fact, she was at her best with stories. On those rare nights they saw her pluck things out of the air and break them open before their eyes. (p. 76)

On the nights when she has told a story, except the last one, she and Deegan have sex:

After such nights he always took his woman to bed to make not only her but himself sure that she was nobody’s but his. Sometimes he believed that was why she told a story well. (p. 76)

That doesn’t happen after her final story, which becomes a very thinly veiled account of the circumstances in which her youngest child, the daughter, is conceived, in Deegan’s absence. Deegan had always had his doubts about the girl, “who bears a strong witch-like resemblance to her mother” (p. 71) but he didn’t dwell on those doubts. Now he and the neighbours are in no doubt. The neighbours are discreet about it; they leave quietly. Martha had at first intended to “tell it in disguise and make the disguise as thick as possible” (p. 103), but her intentions changed in the telling.

After this, Deegan stops going to Mass. He hadn’t been a believer anyway but regularly attended Mass because of what the neighbours would think. Martha said he was afraid of the neighbours. There’s no longer anything to be afraid of now they know the worst.

Neighbourly discretion features too in the title story, in which a priest has just officiated at the wedding of a young woman to a local farmer. Afterwards, he is expected to attend the reception and he does so reluctantly. He clearly has strong feelings for the woman but it’s not till late in the story that we learn that she and the priest had been lovers a few years earlier. She had broken up with him because he refused to leave the priesthood for her.

She said self-knowledge lay at the far side of speech. The purpose of conversation was to find out what, to some extent, you already knew … She said that a man could not know himself and live alone. She believed physical knowledge lay at the far side of lovemaking. Her opinions sometimes galled him but he could never prove her wrong. (pp. 56–7)

Keegan stilfully shows us the priest’s jealousy of his former lover’s new husband. At one point, when they are both at the hotel bar, the groom pays for his drink.

The priest looks up. At the far counter, holding a fresh pint of stout, stands the groom. He raises his glass and smiles. The priest lifts the whiskey and takes a sip. It had never occurred to him, until now, that Jackson might have known. (p. 43)

(At this point, the reader does not yet know for sure what it is that the groom might have known.) Jackson wasn’t the only person who perhaps knew about the relationship. The priest and the young woman had been circumspect but that might not have been enough:

Always, they met in out-of-the-way places: on the rough strand at Cahore or Blackwater, in the woods beyond the common paths of Avondale. Once, they ran into Miss Dunne on the strand. She was walking towards them and it was too late to turn away but just as they were about to meet, she turned towards the sea. She had not on that day nor ever since given any hint that she had seen them. (p. 53)

Keegan captures very acutely the chit-chat and tiresome banter at the priest’s table during the wedding dinner. There’s a hint that a man named Sinnott may know the priest’s secret, though he might just be taking a shot in the dark. When someone cautions him that there’s a “man of the cloth” in the company, he responds, “And we all know the white cloth is aisy stained” (p. 46). From the chat, the priest learns that there’s “a Chinaman” (p. 45) who lives in a caravan near where the priest habitually takes his long walk. This man works as a labourer in a nearby quarry but people also visit him as a healer: he’s reputed to have the cure.

After he leaves the hotel, the priest in his agitation walks the fields, which are blue in the twilight, and finds himself without intending it at the healer’s caravan.

The last story in the collection, “Night of the Quicken Trees”, is the second-longest, just a few pages shorter than “The Forester’s Daughter”. It revisits some of the themes and tropes of the earlier stories, but treats them as more mysterious than they have seemed in the earlier stories. Here too there’s a sexually active Catholic priest, though this one is dead by the time the story opens. He fathered a child, who died — a cot death, according to the doctor. The child’s mother, Margaret Flusk, is the story’s central character.

The priest has left Margaret his house and she moves into it at the start of the story. She’s then about 40 and she no longer ovulates. She’s from County Wicklow and the house is close to the west coast of County Clare, near the Cliffs of Moher. Margaret is in some respects a realistic, pragmatic woman but she’s also very superstitious:

If she believed in the forces of nature she was yet determined to avoid bad luck. She’d had her share of bad luck so now she never threw out ashes on a Monday or passed a labourer without blessing his work. She shook salt on the hearth, hung a Saint Bridget’s cross on the bedroom wall and kept track of changes in the moon. (p. 146)

Her fertility mysteriously returns and she conceives a child, another son, with the man in the house next door, whose name is Stack and who, until Margaret came along, had been sharing his bed, and his life generally, with a goat named Josephine.

Before this happens, she visits a fortune-teller who is either the genuine article or else knows a lot about Margaret, her history and circumstances. The fortune-teller reads her tealeaves and tells Margaret that it wasn’t her fault that the first child died, that the fisherman to whom she’d refused to sell the child’s caul had drowned and “The next child will make your life worth living” (p. 168).

The following summer people start to visit her, looking for a cure. The fortune-teller has told them that, as a seventh daughter, Margaret is a healer. They come with toothache, boils, infertility, too much fertility, shingles, gout, bad knees and haunted outbuildings. The people from the locality bring her gifts and do household tasks for her, in return for the exercise of her healing powers. Margaret has soon had enough.

… the strangers were always coming, their palms filled with hatred and bitterness and even though she didn’t know half their names, it was all contagious. (p. 173)

She calls her new child Michael. Perhaps in an echo of Deegan the forester, Stack can’t see any “mark of himself in his own son” (p. 178) though in his case there really is no doubt as to his paternity. It’s not until Michael is seven years old and about to go to school that Margaret gives up healing. But the neighbours don’t immediately stop leaving her gifts and doing things for her: they still hope that she’d relent. Eventually, though, they begin to do her harm rather than good.

When she moved into the house first, Margaret had resolved that

… she would stay in that house for as long as she could without harming anybody or letting anybody harm her. If either one of these things happened, she would move on. She would keep her course, get in a boat and cross over to the Aran Islands, go as far west as she could without leaving Ireland. But until then she would do her best to keep people at arm’s length for people were nothing but a nuisance. (p. 147)

Finally, the time has come for her to do that.

I’m not sure why but, as I read this final story, I found my mood steadily darkening. I had been enjoying the earlier stories, particularly those in the first half of the book. (“The Forester’s Daughter”, at the centre of the collection, is the fifth story, “Walk the Blue Fields” is the third.) Perhaps my dissatisfaction with the last story was no more than the result of what Mavis Gallant warned about: reading a volume of stories straight through, as if it were a novel. Be that as it may, the stories in this collection that I think are strongest are four of the first five.

In the first story, “The Long and Painful Death”, a writer arrives late at night at the Heinrich Böll house on Achill Island. She is booked in for a two-week writing residency. The next morning, she gets a phone call from a German academic who would like to see the house; he says he’s just outside. She puts him off till 8 o’clock that evening and then wishes she’d let him in immediately: now prospect of the appointment will be distracting her all day. While shopping, she buys a cake mix. She bakes the cake and fills it with blackberries from outside.

When the man comes, he eats the cake she offers him but then starts to berate her for, in effect, wasting the resource of the house, which is greatly in demand.

“You come to this house of Heinrich Böll and make cakes and go swimming with no clothes on.”

“What are you saying?”

“Every year I come, and always it is the same: people going around in their night clothes in the middle of the day, riding this bicycle to the public houses!” (p. 17)

He’s being unreasonable, obviously. She can’t be expected to wake up on her first morning in the house and immediately start to write, to use every moment of her residency productively. But, unreasonable or not, it turns out that he has given her something she can use: a character and an idea for a story.

The second story is “The Parting Gift”, which is written in the second person singular. Here, a girl who has just done her Leaving Certificate (which she thinks she has failed) is getting ready to leave her home on a farm in County Wicklow as she emigrates to the United States. Her brother will be driving her to the airport. She must now be 17 or 18. For a few years up until she started to menstruate, her father used to abuse her sexually with her mother’s connivance. She believes her mother is a coward (who may never forgive her for going away and leaving her to cope with her husband on her own).

Now, the mother sends the girl in to her father, who is still in bed, expecting that the father will give her some money to send her on her way. She tells the mother that he has given her a hundred pounds, to which the mother replies sarcastically “He broke his heart” (p. 29), but afterwards when the brother suggests that the father didn’t give her anything at all, she doesn’t contradict him.

When they’re leaving, her brother drives through the gate and she closes it behind him. (Somebody having to get out of a car to open and close farm gates is a recurring moment in Keegan’s stories, such as Foster and “Men and Women” in Antarctica.)

As you put the wire on, the filly trots down to the edge of the field, leans up against the fence, and whinnies. She’s a red chestnut with one white stocking. You sold her to buy your ticket but she will not be collected until tomorrow. That was the arrangement. (p. 30)

An arrangement, presumably, that will come as an unwelcome surprise to her parents, but that they would be ashamed to try to get out of.

This post is the 104th in Talk about books, which has now been running for four years. That makes 26 posts each year. I expect to continue in much the same way as long as I can find books, plays or poems that I want to write about. Thank you for continuing to read. I think the next post is going to be about Iris Murdoch’s The Black Prince (1973) unless something else comes up in the meantime.

Edition: Walk the Blue Fields was first published in 2007. I’ve been using the Faber paperback edition from 2008. All ellipses are added.