Last Look

In Memorium Eg

We came upon him, stilled and oblivious, gazing into a field of blossoming potatoes, his trouser bottoms wet and flecked with grass seed. Crowned blunt-headed weeds that flourished in the verge flailed against our car but he seemed not to hear in his long watchfulness by the clifftop fuchsias. He paid no heed that day, no more than if he were sheep’s wool on barbed wire or an old lock of hay combed from a passing load by a bush in the roadside. He was back in his twenties, travelling Donegal in the grocery cart of Gallagher and Son, Merchant, Publican, Retail and Import. Flourbags, nosebags, buckets of water for the horse in every whitewashed yard. Drama between hedges if he met a Model Ford. If Niamh had ridden up to make the wide strand sweet with inviting Irish, weaving among hoofbeats and hoofmarks on the wet dazzle and blaze, I think not even she could have drawn him out from the covert of his gaze.