The Left Hand Pillar

The old gate had stood open for as long as Brendan could remember.

he old gate had stood open for as long as Brendan could remember.

The oil company had been clear on the phone. Three point two metres, minimum, or the lorry would stop on the road and the driver would not be dragging the hose up a hill for anyone. Brendan measured the entrance twice. Two metres sixty. He wrote it on the back of his hand.

The pillars had never matched. The right-hand one was block, rendered and painted white by someone in the seventies, a hairline crack running down from its cap. The left-hand one was older. Rough stone, its joints packed with earth and moss, a flat slab on top furred green. The gate hung from it on two iron hinges leaded into the stone, and it had stood open against the ditch for as long as Brendan could remember, nettles grown up through its lower bars.

It was Halloween morning. He shook the can of yellow paint and marked the wall. A line down the inside of the left-hand pillar, another two feet beyond it, a straight run along the base between them. He stood back on the wet gravel and looked at it.

Dessie Lynch came at ten past nine with the digger on the back of a low-loader and reversed it off one-handed. He was in great form. He had views on the Kerry minors and the price of diesel, and on a man in Castleisland who had once paid him in heifers. He walked the line of yellow paint with his hands in his pockets, nodding.

Then he stopped at the pillar.

He didn’t touch it. He looked at the cap, and at the hinges, and at the paint going round its base. He went back to the cab and turned off the engine, and the quiet came in from the fields.

‘I’ll take the wall,’ he said. ‘I won’t take that.’

‘You said you’d widen the entrance.’

‘I will.’

‘Well, that’s the entrance.’

Dessie looked across at the white pillar, at the stretch of ditch beyond it where the ground fell away to the drain. ‘There’s another side to it.’

‘There’s a drain on the other side.’

‘There is.’ He took out his phone, then put it away again. ‘I’ll go down for a bit of dinner. Ring me.’

‘It’s half nine in the morning, Dessie.’

‘It is,’ Dessie said, and went.

Mrs Foley came over at eleven with a parcel the postman had left at hers. It was the third one since August. Brendan was beginning to think the postman did it on purpose.

‘Is that Dessie’s machine?’

‘It is.’

‘And where’s Dessie?’

‘Gone for his dinner.’

She let that pass without comment. She told him about her son in Perth, who was thinking of coming home and wouldn’t. She told him the Murphys’ young lad had his test passed at the fourth go. She looked at the yellow paint the whole time she was talking, the way you’d look at a stain on someone else’s carpet.

‘You’d be better off going the other side,’ she said.

‘There’s a drain.’

‘You’d pipe it. Dessie has pipe.’

‘That’s another eight hundred euro.’

‘It would be.’ She pulled her coat across her. ‘You’d get the morning sun on the gate, then.’

‘I don’t want sun on the gate. I want oil in the tank.’

She nodded.

‘Jer Carey wouldn’t bring a beast through that gate. Did you know that? He’d bring them round by the haggard.’

‘Maybe they didn’t like the hinge.’

‘Maybe,’ said Mrs Foley. ‘Mind yourself, Brendan.’

She had her hand on her own gate before he thought to ask what she meant.

He rang his aunt Nóra in Tralee at lunchtime, because she had known Jer Carey and because he wanted someone to tell him he was right.

‘Did Dessie start?’

‘Not yet. Listen—’

‘Good,’ she said. ‘What did you want, love?’

He told her.

‘Leave it till after the weekend anyway.’

‘Why?’

‘Because I’m asking you.’ A pause, a cup set down. ‘Jer always had that gate open tonight. You know that.’

‘I don’t know that. I was in Leicester for twenty-two years.’

‘Well,’ said Nóra. ‘You’re not in Leicester now.’

He put the phone in his pocket harder than he needed to.

The crowbar was in the shed where Jer had left it, leaning against a bag of lime gone solid. Brendan carried it down the gravel. It was his house. He had the deeds in a drawer. He had paid stamp duty on that pillar.

He put a hand on the cap to steady himself and his thumb sank into the moss, cold and wet, and came away with a dark crescent under the nail. He set the bar under the edge of the slab and leaned. It shifted with a small grinding sound.

A van pulled in on the road. Dessie, window down, engine running.

‘Leave that down, Brendan.’

‘You had your dinner, so.’

Dessie didn’t answer. He looked at the slab, out of its bed by the width of a finger.

‘My father moved that pillar for Jer’s father,’ he said. ‘Nineteen seventy-nine. Three feet in, to fit a tractor.’

‘And?’

‘And he put it back the following March. Never charged him for either job.’ Dessie looked down the road towards the bend, towards Mrs Foley’s chimney. ‘I asked him why, one time.’

‘What did he say?’

‘He said the cattle went through it grand after.’

Brendan waited for the rest. There was no rest. He stood with the bar in his hand while the van ticked over, and then he laid his palm flat on the slab and pushed until he felt it settle.

‘Pipe the drain,’ he said.

‘I’ll be up after two.’

Dessie worked the other side until the light went. The bucket took the ditch in long, careful bites. The white pillar came down, the pipe went in and the gravel went over it. Dessie said he’d come back during the week to build the new pillar. At ten to five he cut the engine. He lifted a hand from the cab and loaded the digger without once looking left.

The entrance was three metres forty. Brendan measured it twice.

By six it was dark. Voices carried from the village, and a banger went off somewhere towards the cross. He took the torch down to the gate. The nettles had died back. He pulled it from the ditch and the hinge gave out a long iron note. The gate came round slowly. He had to lean his weight against it.

There was nothing now for the latch to catch. He left it closed against nothing, the gap beside it about the width of a man, and walked back up to the house.

The phone rang while he was filling the kettle.

‘Brendan.’ Dessie, a television somewhere behind him. ‘Did you leave it open?’

Brendan looked at the window. In the dark glass, he could see only himself.

Then he went to find his boots.

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