The Death of an Irish Sinner Read Free Page B

city.
    As for gardening itself, McGarr had dismissed all the standard explanations for digging in the earth, from reestablishing touch with his ecology to taking a directpart in the cycle of birth, growth, harvest, and rebirth. McGarr believed—and he would insist, if asked—that he gardened for simple pleasure.
    Everything, from tomorrow’s yearly trip down to Kildare for the magic chicken droppings to enjoying the snappy crunch of fresh vegetables and herbs in all seasons regaled him in a way that was beyond words.
    He did it because he did it, he once told Noreen, for whom all urges required some explanation, and he couldn’t think of anything else that would provide him with such pleasure. There was no other word for it.
    “I think I’ll go look at the plants,” he said, moving toward the door to the cellar.
    “Can I come too?” asked Maddie, who had heard his voice and now joined them.
    “Of course. Let’s see if the chervil has sprouted.”
    “Don’t get distracted now. Your tea will be ready in a jiff,” Noreen said, reaching for a pot on the speed rack above the cutting board in a way that spread the apron and firmed her lower back.
    Mindful of urges and distractions, McGarr opened the door and allowed Maddie to precede him.
    Down below in the darkness they could see the purple glow of the growing lights. “Wait.” He put a hand on Maddie’s shoulder, stopping her. “Smell that?”
    “Smell what?”
    “Just breathe in.”
    “Right—and what?”
    “Can’t you smell it? The oxygen? Plants take in carbon dioxide and give off—”
    “I know, I know—don’t you think we study that at school?” Now a confident eleven and a miniature version of her mother, she switched on the lights and tripped down the stairs. “The only thing I can smell is that stuff in your glass. How can you?”
    McGarr glanced down at the brimming glass of malt and wondered the same.
    But not why.

CHAPTER 3
    SO, IT CAME TO PASS that spring arrived with the dawn of the next day in the form of a high sky and a hot sun.
    Instead of taking the quick route along the dual carriageway southeast to Naas and then on to Dunlavin, the McGarr caravan of a battered old pickup and Noreen’s Rover sedan journeyed due south, climbing to the tops of the treeless Wicklow Mountains, “Where we’ll gain perspective on spring,” McGarr enthused.
    The air was so clear and the sun so bright that they caught glimpses of the dark blue and spangled waters of the Irish Sea in one direction and the rocky crags of Mullaghcleevaun in the other.
    Even the usually bleak mountain moorlands were changing the dun colors of winter for the new green of spring, seemingly right before their eyes. McGarropened the pitted window of the old pickup, the better to see, and was rewarded with the call of a cuckoo overhead and the sight of a pair of red grouse pecking at the edges of a mountain bog.
    Drifting slowly down out of the mountains, they could see Dunlavin in the valley below them—a neat village at the junction of several country roads where the Wicklow hill country meets the rich limestone plain of Kildare. Unlike the treeless mountain barren, the land was rich here, and tall oaks and beeches—their boughs fringed with the chartreuse of new leaves—girded the hamlet.
    As did a number of tall walls, built as make-work projects during the Famine. Some ran for miles on both sides of narrow country roads, ringing estates that were once the country manses of Dublin’s Anglo-Irish elite. In most cases the holdings had passed on to those who could afford not only the purchase price but also the yearly expense of maintaining the walls, the acres, the stables and other outbuildings, and finally, the large main house. Some of those dwellings were truly stately, others merely substantial.
    Noreen’s parents’ place— Ilnacullin, or “Island of the Holly”—mediated between the two conditions. No mansion, it was instead a large Georgian country house of