Judge Dr. Chea Parton has selected “Blood Brother” by Jeremy Haworth as the Best Short Story for the 2024 Best in Rural Writing Contest. Listen to Jeremy read his submission below.
The audience helps choose the winner between the Best Short Story and Best Essay for the overall winner of the Best in Rural Writing Contest and the $500 prize. You can listen to and read Dr. Parton’s choice for Best Essay, “Rebounders” by Don Stewart, here. You can vote at the end of either entry. Voting will remain open until January 7th, midnight GMT.
Blood Brother by Jeremy Haworth
Same green carpet. Same mahogany gloss tables. Same chrome clock on the wall. Twenty five years the same office, second floor, 25 Great Water Street, Longford Town. Through the office blinds, the cold almost-half-light of dusk. Shimmers of streetlight in the river murk.
‘And so, this evening, it is our privilege…’
It was the voice of Marion Hearney, Assistant Senior Manager. Michael Riordan pulled his eyes from the window, glanced down at his polished brown shoes, felt a flutter in his chest.
‘…to present you with a small token, a momento for all your years of hard service…’
Michael glanced at Marion’s face, overdubbed with make-up as usual, the swift ghost of a smile in her eyes. He threw a glance across the room. A half dozen other colleagues had turned up at the fag-end of the week to see him off. He registered a few familiars. Kevin O’Brien (Building and Facilities), furtively scrolling. Luke Murray (Logistics) eyeing his watch. Aleksandra Wójcik (IT, sleep-deprived mother of three) yawned a smile.
‘…Congratulations on your retirement, Michael,’ concluded Marion. ‘We’ll miss you.’
Desultory applause. Michael took the wrapped gift from Marion’s hands, leaned in to kiss her cheek. She smelt of Versace and cigarettes. He turned for a quick photo with the Secretary General, a few selfies with his closest colleagues.
Somebody uncorked a bottle. Prosecco made the rounds in small plastic cups borrowed from the water dispenser in the corner. He peeled the gold wrapping from a black box, opened the lid to unveil a Waterford Crystal vase. Read the engraving:
In Commemoration of
A Quarter Century of Service:
Michael Riordan
Senior Executive Officer
Longford County Council
Peeled open the envelope, read aloud the greeting in the signature-scrawled Hallmark card. Raised the enclosed Brown Thomas voucher in a gesture of thanks, and offered a brief speech.
More desultory applause. Another bottle popped its cork.
The after-party was dull. Steak dinner in Fleming’s. Pints to follow in O’Loughlin’s. The few stragglers, drunk now, slurred improvised speeches, wobbled to the karaoke booth. Chuckles over his misdemeanours, more compliments, more words of thanks, empty promises to stay in touch. The others peeling away one at a time until it was just himself, nursing his vase in the backseat of a taxi. Home to an empty bungalow on the outskirts of Keenagh.
He woke the next morning with a light hangover. Fumbled into his dressing gown and slippers, made his way into the quiet kitchen. While the kettle boiled, he stared out the window. Noted with a wry smile that it was Wednesday morning, and already 10.37. He thought of his colleagues at their desks, soothing their heads with Solpadeine, cigarette breaks and coffee. Dragging themselves through another day at the council office. Automatically, his mind ambled through the corridors, the toilet cubicles, the photocopier room, over the now-uncluttered Formica surface of his desk, the bare walls of his empty office. He could smell the place: carpet dust mingled with the light whiff of the cleaning ladies’ detergent, the damp of raincoats and brollies slowly drying in the fug of humming radiators. Phones ringing. Murmurs of conversation in the next room.
The kettle boiled, clicked off. He opened the cupboard, lifted a clean mug. Stared into the white, empty bottom. Glanced up again at the window. The morning sky was clotted with dark clouds. Beyond the garden a marshy field stretched into the line of firs that bordered Buckley’s farm. He stood listening to rook caws, the soft chug of a distant tractor. Eased himself into a chair at the kitchen table, flicked the pages of yesterday’s Independent, gazed vacantly at the headlines.
Rain began to stipple the window. He sploshed milk into his tea. Watched clouds curl brown in the mug for a moment, then stirred. Tinked the spoon softly on the rim and set it down. He heard the rumble of the cattle grid: the postman on his round. The letterbox flapped open. He heard envelopes and circulars flop to the carpet, the soft crush of gravel as the van receded.
Now there was nothing but the tick of the clock. He felt the silence of the house fold its weight around him.
Take up gardening. That’s what Billy Murphy in HR had told him. That’s what everyone does in retirement. Great time to get back to nature. Find yourself.
Michael’s garden was bare. Mostly grass. A hummock of cotoneaster and brambles beside the decking he had installed years ago for summer barbecues, when the kids were younger and Mary was still alive. The decking was grimy and rotting in places, no longer fit for purpose. The barbecue was busy rusting under a piece of silage tarp, fastened with bungee cord.
He scraped open the shed door. The gloom smelled of petrol. Cobwebs fogged the corners and shelves. Bicycles, stiff with age, leaned in a heap. Swallow shit snowed the floor. He rummaged for a fork and spade, returned with the tools to the middle of the garden. He had marked the boundaries of the new vegetable patch with a rectangle of baler twine, fastened it at the corners with tent pins.
He set to with the spade, shaving off the grass in knotty clumps. The evening was humid, the sun like a cold pearl buried in the ashy clouds. Before long, he was sweaty and out of breath, cursing the midges and the thick, claggy soil. He cut open the sack of compost he had picked up that morning in the agristore, upended it on the bare earth and forked the dark mound flat. Opened a tub of manure pellets and scattered them pell-mell. The light was fading now, and he had difficulty reading the instructions on the back of the seed packets.
He ploughed a few rough furrows with his fingers, scattered beetroot and carrot seeds. Made holes for plugs of lettuce and kale, sank a furrow for the seed potatoes he’d been told were steady growers. He covered them over, scatter-bombed the plot with slug pellets, egg-shell blue on the wet soil, and stashed the tools back in the shed.
He stood for some time in the night-blackened garden, breathing the scent of opened earth. Soft rain dripped down from the trees. Soil had dried to clay on his fingers. There was a pleasing ache in his knees and back. He checked his watch. Time for a nightcap and the nine o’clock news.
The days meandered. He checked the progress of the vegetable plot, hoed down the young weeds, willed on what he guessed were beetroot seedlings. Drove to Keenagh for the daily paper. Loitered through his weekly grocery shop. Attended Sunday Mass.
One Tuesday morning, on the parish noticeboard, he spied an ad. ‘Chair Yoga For Seniors.’ With his eyes on the blurb, he hadn’t noticed the other man standing behind him.
‘Worth a go, Michael. Does wonders for the sex life, all that stretching. And the best of it is, you don’t even have to get up off your arse.’
He turned to see Paddy Boyle’s large face grinning at him.
‘That right?’
‘So I’ve heard. Classes are full of women, though,’ winked Boyle. ‘Make sure you turn up in a new tracksuit. And a splash of aftershave can’t hurt. You might get lucky.’
Michael coloured slightly. He didn’t like the direction the conversation was taking. There would be an awful ribbing over Friday pints in Charlie’s. He could already see the other regulars chuckling at his expense, Boyle holding forth at the bar, regaling them all with talk of Michael Riordan’s new exercise regime.
He pulled a smile. ‘We’ll see what happens, Paddy.’
It took three weeks before he steeled himself sufficiently to turn up to the class, in cotton jog pants and a pair of well-worn Adidas. He acknowledged the welcoming smiles with some awkwardness. Three of the faces belonged to women he knew: one was a neighbour, the other two were married to men he had been in school with. The exercises were more strenuous than he anticipated. With mild panic, he realised too late he had stumbled into the advanced class.
He felt too much like a sweaty elephant to stick the female company for more than ten minutes. With the instructor’s back turned, mid-pose, he stood to his feet and felt a sharp, sudden twang in his right buttock. The pain triggered a wheeze of expletives. In the ensuing silence, all eyes on him, he sidled across the creaking floorboards and slipped out red-faced through the open door at the far end of the hall.
Evenings he ate alone. Mostly microwave Ready Meals off the supermarket shelf, like the chicken korma steaming inside its tin-and-plastic packaging on the kitchen table. He had a habit of bulking up the portion with a slab of mashed potato. That way, he felt satisfied he was dining at a bargain and filling his belly for the price of it.
He stabbed a potato out of the boiling pot and carried it piping across the room. Crushed in a knob of butter with several twists of salt. Plopped the mash in the tray and mixed it into the curry and rice. As he sat blowing the heat off the first spoonful, he ran his eyes over the neat line of postcards in the middle of the table. The act had become something of a ritual, the way he perused the front images, imagining the exotic sights and smells of each place in turn, chewing his dinner in the company of the burbling radio, occasionally turning the postcards over between mouthfuls to re-read the scrawl of news, the date on the postmarks.
After the miscarriage, his daughter Fiona had taken off on some kind of world pilgrimage. She referred to it as a ‘spiritual detox’. Now that she had unplugged from social media, the only link between them were the notes she scrawled on the postcards she sent home every other week. There were seven of them now, neatly arranged in order of arrival: images of islands ringed with frangipani, the streets of Bangkok and Ho Chi Minh City, a stone Buddha in Laos, the elaborate Angkor temples in Cambodia, a route map of the Camino de Santiago. The latest had arrived this morning from Reno. It had pictures of cacti and neon lights. She was on her way to something called Burning Man in the Nevada desert.
After dinner, he walked the usual circuit. Out the rear gate and left, along the empty backroad, the sun low and firing in the hedgerows, pigeons who-whooing in the dusk, rooks rising and circling to roost in the dark pines. On past Murray’s horse paddock and stable, the scent of soiled straw on the air, past the gates of Doyle’s scrapyard, past the unfinished new-build, still roofless, and on as far as the edge of the lake, the only other soul Tommy Greene in his rusted Massey with a hay bale on the fork. He stood watching the old man totter down the ladder from the cab, plumes of cattle breath in the headlights. Then home again to three large whiskeys in front of the TV. He nodded off to the sound of a shootout in a late night Western.
One night he dreamed he was out in the cold dark, pacing the garden, the wind hissing through Buckley’s forestry, and his mother whispering from somewhere unseen, over and over. Turning in the grass, he saw no one. Next moment he was on his knees, rummaging through endless nettles for a single beetroot. He looked down then, and saw a hole burning wide in his chest. He woke with a start, sweaty, short of breath, the front of his pyjama top balled tight in his fist.
For weeks beforehand, he had been troubled with chest pains, and could only surmise that his recent diagnosis of heart disease had sparked the nightmare. Maybe he had fallen asleep ruminating on the words of his GP, or maybe it had been the thought of the ruined vegetable plot. He had been neglecting the patch for weeks. By day, mooching around the house, he avoided the back garden, needled by the sight of the overgrown plot, the creeping buttercup, the thistle heads fluffy with seed.
The dream sparked a creeping sense of urgency that lingered through days of rainy lassitude. Trees began to spot a sickly yellow. The nights drew in. Restlessness descended. Shut up in the bungalow, fuggy with Scotch and the heat of the kitchen stove, his head began to cook with notions of escape.
One by one, he struck off the possibilities as they presented themselves. Shops and cafes would be choked in this weather. He soured at the prospect of a crowd. The library was out of service. The nearest cinema was an hour’s drive away. He was sick of the pubs. He googled sun holidays in Gran Canaria but was stymied by the variety of choice, and shelved the search. He thought of the Leitrim coast, imagining the wind-strewn stretches of sand and the sea boiling in the rain, but couldn’t rouse himself to face the brunt of the elements.
Then the sudden thought of home occurred to him. He immediately dismissed it. Then he toyed with it, cogitating on it until he found himself fixated and thinking of little else. Years had elapsed since he had crossed the threshold of the old farmstead. But the twinge in his chest told him time was shortening. The thought of death, some long-buried need for closure, an instinct to finally lay the ghosts of the past to rest: these, he surmised, were the impulses that had triggered the sudden change of heart. Or perhaps he had been driven to it purely by the madness of his own boredom. He couldn’t be sure.
Whatever the reason, to his intense surprise, here he was, merging with the Galway-bound traffic on the M6. Overhead, dark clouds lined a sky of dull pewter. The industrial estates on the edge of Athlone flashed past on his left. The farmhouse was on the outskirts of Aughrim village, less than an hour’s drive away.
Tense with apprehension, he pulled off the motorway at the Ballinasloe exit. He found a parking space on the quiet main street, entered the nearest café, ordered the Irish Breakfast with coffee. He sat nursing a cooling Americano, food half-eaten and congealing on his plate. Through windows misted with condensation, he watched the fuzzy glow of late morning traffic and wondered whether it was wiser to turn on his heels. Customers came and went. He watched the doors swish open and closed on the streaming rain. Ordered a third Americano. A fourth, and felt the caffeine ping in his veins. He sat, fidgeting between resolve and indecision.
The café began to swell with the lunchtime crowd. The door opened, and for the first time, he noticed customers entering with their anoraks no longer dripping . The sky had cleared. He took the weather break as a sign. Stood quickly, slapped a generous tip on the table, and made his exit.
Seven minutes later, he was on the road into Aughrim village. He noted, here and there, the changes: upgraded bungalows, a new housing development on the outskirts of the village, two or more cars parked in every driveway. The heart of the village was more or less as he remembered it. Saucy’s chipper had been replaced by a local dog groomer. There was a new Chinese takeaway and an auctioneer’s office. The green-dark veneer of Finn’s Bar had not changed. The old post office was still in ruins opposite St Catherine’s Church, with its chalk-white effigy of the Crucifixion overlooking the graveyard. The lone diesel pump still stood outside Burke’s grocery and hardware shop, with a yellow sign outside advertising bales of briquettes and bags of coal for sale.
He turned slowly on to the bog road at the far end of the village. The way was pot-holed and twisting, hemmed by dry stone walls that gave way in places to clusters of yellow-flowering gorse, hawthorn and sheep wire fences, the windscreen raked every now and then by a stray rope of briar. Then he rounded the final corner, and saw the familiar white-washed gables, dirtied with the years, the peaked asbestos roof and the dormer windows peeping through a sheet of ivy. He slowed the car to a crawl and parked outside the gates.
The wild bog had inveigled its way through the rotted garden fence. He traced what remained of the concrete driveway, now hummocked with age, the branching cracks lush with grass. Stunted birch and dark evergreens sprouted in what had once been a tidy lawn. A lone, twisted rose was all that remained of his mother’s ornamental beds. Terracotta pots lay upturned or broken in pieces.
In one of the upstairs windows, there was a dark hole visible where a stone had entered, cracks spidering the pane. He followed the depressions in the grass, round to the back of the house. The backdoor had been forced wide open. Just inside, a used condom lay strewn on the floor. Loud graffiti sprawled the walls.
He entered the kitchen, and stopped. He stood there on the faded linoleum, a single drowsy bluebottle batting the pane. Cupboard doors wrenched from their hinges. Beer cans, bottles, pieces of broken china, cigarette butts and crisp wrappers everywhere, scattered about. But he saw none of it. He was gazing through the lens of memory at his father in the corner, hiding behind a newspaper, his mother busy at the hob. He could smell baking ham, potatoes boiling, the thick aroma of homemade gravy. A black and white TV burbled in the corner. Siofra, the aging collie, lay curled up sleeping in front of the stove.
He heard his own voice then: ‘Da, I’ll do it.’
The broadsheet crumpled down. His father peered over the rim. ‘You will in your shite. Don’t be wasting my time, son.’
‘John, language, please.’ His mother, always the suppliant.
‘But I could do with the money – ’
‘ – For the big lights of Dublin, is it? Big man you are, fuckin’ off out of here, leaving the rest of us to manage the farm and your brother not even right in the head.’
The government was offering a Farm Relief grant to help needy families with home heating costs. A strip of ash had been made available for felling in a local plantation. The grant provided for the hours of labour required to fell and section the timber into firewood. Already his father had levelled the trees but an accident with the chainsaw had severed the ligaments in his right hand. The felled timber lay stacked in the rear yard, ready to be sectioned into firewood, but calving season was in earnest and none of the neighbours were willing to help.
‘Anyway, you wouldn’t be up for it, son. You’d only embarrass yourself.’
Michael swallowed his hurt. ‘Let me try, at least.’
‘Wood chopping is no task for the likes of yourself, anyway. Desk work’ll make you soft. Show me your hands.’
He ignored the jibe, and didn’t bother lifting his hands, both well-calloused from the work of the summer. He knew the real reason behind his father’s obduracy: the man was smarting with rage at his own powerlessness. Already his skin had yellowed with the blood cancer that was slowly killing him. The saw wound was an added burden. The thought of being outstripped was too much to bear. He’d rather lose the grant and see the timber sit idle through winter, than stand aside and watch his bookish son complete the task in his stead.
His mother called him to the table. The food was served. Nothing more was said until, half-way through the meal, his father looked up from his plate.
He broke the silence with a cunning smile. ‘Right. But have it done by tomorrow morning, first thing, and the grant money’s yours. If not, well, at least you’ll have worked for once in your life.’
His father was toying with him. The pile towered at over three tonnes. Axing it into logs before morning was a tall order for even the strongest of men. He checked the clock. It was almost four o’clock on a winter afternoon. The sky had already begun to darken.
He stood. ‘Fine, I’ll do it.’
His father’s eye-brows climbed a notch, amusement and outrage suddenly vying for the upper hand. ‘Don’t be stupid – ’
‘ – you suggested it.’
‘Don’t get thick with me, son.’ His father lunged forward, the grip of his uninjured hand sharp on his son’s forearm, a pin-prick light burning in the black intensity of his eyes. A small tear of gravy gleamed in the corner of his lip. ‘You won’t do it, you understand that? You haven’t it in you, son. You’re a fool.’
‘We’ll see.’
He left the table before his father could say another word. Walked to the back door, pulled on his boots, lifted the massive axe in his quivering hands, and set to.
He stood now, framed by the backdoor, all these years later, staring out over the rear yard where the pile of logs had been. He watched himself, at seventeen, swinging for all he was worth, the night air sharp with frost, logs piling slowly around him.
He recalled his father, peering from the threshold of the same backdoor, willing him to slip up. After midnight, he appeared for a third time. ‘Leave it be now, Michael. Leave it be.’
But he didn’t. He swung and split, swung and split, swung and split.
His father stood in a pained silence. Then, with a growled curse, he turned and walked back inside. The moon rose. Night creatures scurried. He chopped and chopped, his back and arms numb, seeing nothing but the wood on the block, the drop of the wedged blade, the frozen air spiced with the scent of severed trees.
He laboured until first light. For the final time, he swung the wedge down. The last log split apart on the block, and he collapsed to the ground, utterly spent.
A rustling in a nearby hedgerow brought him back to the present. A feral tomcat snarled and darted into the dark undergrowth. He turned in the back doorway. Climbed the stairwell. The landing opened into three bedrooms. The first on the left had been Fonsie’s.
The room was all dankness, the curtains torn, the mattress upended on the floor. Empty pill capsules littered the bedside locker, beside an overflowing ashtray and a dog-eared copy of Penthouse magazine. He walked across to the hang-nailing wardrobe doors and peered inside. Mostly empty hangers on the rail, bar a green anorak and dusty denim shirt. A pile of clothes crumpled in a heap beneath, and in the right-hand corner, a cardboard box.
He flipped open the box. To his astonishment, he found his brother’s collection of Corgi books stowed inside. He reached down and picked up a handful. Mostly science fiction titles from the mid-70s, the covers emblazoned with slimy monsters, scantily clad women and space men toting laser guns, under skies of orange and ultramarine, double moons and distant suns. The pages inside were yellowing and crimped with damp.
He flicked through the half-dozen titles, recognising none save the last: The Invisible Man by H. G. Wells. The book had been one of Fonsie’s favourites. He flicked open the cover and saw his brother’s massive, spidery scrawl on the front page.
Fonsie Jimes Ridan
is book delongs to me and Michal
MY INVSBILE BROTHR MY BEST FREND
Kep out Tob Scret
He instantly recalled the day he had helped his brother write the inscription. They had been hiding, crouched in one of their favourite dens behind the cow shed. Fonsie pulled the book out of his knapsack, and asked for help writing the words, the pencil shaky in the grip of his spastic fingers, the page spotting with his dribble.
When Fonsie couldn’t cope with the heavy manual labour on the farm, they would escape together into the garden and surrounding fields, imagining themselves imperceptible to the gaze of human eyes. Unlike Jack Griffin, the novel’s anti-hero, in their make-believe games they were mainly valiant and heroic, using their power of invisibility to foil bank robbers and other evil-doers. In their imaginations, they harnessed their power to evade the curse of their father’s temper and his quick hand. They devised ways to punish him, to tie him up so they could run away together with their mother to New York or Shanghai or some other far-off-sounding place.
One torrid summer afternoon, in the fever of their play, he promised Fonsie he would never leave him: he would forge a path of escape, and Fonsie would follow him. With a blade of cutgrass, they drew a line of blood across their palms, clasped hands and shook.
The memories tightened in his chest. He shut his eyes and saw his father, tracking the pair of them in the long sedge grass, hot with rage: the shock of fright, the rush of blood in his veins as he ran, knowing Fonsie would fall first, hearing his brother’s cries behind him but running harder and turning and seeing his father knock Fonsie to the grass with his fist, landing blow after blow. Later, lying sleepless and sick with shame and remorse, Fonsie beneath him on the lower bunk, whimpering in the darkness.
He glanced again at the room and felt the dank walls close in around him. Quickly, he pocketed the paperback as a single keepsake, and walked back downstairs. He stepped outside, through the backdoor, grateful for the surge of cold air in his lungs.
The day after chopping the wood, he woke late in the afternoon, and found the grant money in an envelope on the kitchen table. He counted it, heady with triumph, his father nowhere to be seen. Two days later, he left for Dublin to begin his training as a civil servant. His aunt arrived to take him away in her blue Ford Cortina. Sunlight played on the dash, his body warm on the leatherette passenger seat, Elvis crooning on the radio as the house and farm fell away into the distance.
He left Fonsie behind. The pact they had shared, the promises he had made to return for his brother, came to naught. He was three years into his new life when his mother called to tell him his father was dead. Traipsing home drunk from the pub in heavy rain, too sick and weak to find his way to the front door, he had stopped to rest in Brennan’s hay shed, climbed into the loft and fallen asleep. Sometime in the night, he slipped down between the bales and suffocated to death.
He returned home for the funeral. Dry-eyed, he put his shoulder to his father’s casket and watched it sink into the black earth. Fonsie avoided his gaze, turned his back when he approached. The years passed. After their mother died, Fonsie inherited the farmhouse. He remained alone with his ghosts, the building slowly fading into disrepair around him until his mind buckled, and he was taken into the care of the Brothers of Saint John of God. The last time he had seen Fonsie, in the psychiatric ward some five years ago, he was pale and bloated with medication. He sat, and stared right through his older brother, as if he wasn’t there.
Michael stood on the worn flagstone in the rear yard, opposite the leaning wood shed, the carcass of his father’s tractor rusting into the nettle bed. He had to get away now, and he knew it was for the last time. With a glance over his shoulder, he pushed out into the bog, driven by the thought of his brother falling in the grass.
*
View the shortlist of the 2024 Best in Rural Writing Contest.
(Photo: Petri Damstén/flickr.com/ CC BY 2.0)
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