The Hunter

Lena walks homewards in a morning that’s already hot and zipping with insects. Sometimes she leaves her car at home when she goes to Cal’s, specifically so that she can have this walk the next morning, sauntering lazily in her rumpled clothes, with the sun on her face and Cal’s smell on her skin. It makes her feel young and a little reckless, as if she should be carrying her shoes in her hand, as if she’s done something wild and enjoyed every minute. It’s been a long time since Lena ran across something wild that she actually wanted to do, but she still likes the taste of it.

She was planning to stay clear of Noreen for a while. Lena gets on well with her sister, mainly by letting Noreen’s flood of advice and suggestions wash right over her, but she would prefer to wait a while longer before she discusses Johnny Reddy, and Noreen has a low tolerance for waiting. Being nosy goes with Noreen’s job. Lena suspects that she married Dessie Duggan at least in part to get her arse behind that shop counter, the gravitational center to which is drawn every piece of information from Ardnakelty and beyond. When they were kids, the shop was run by Mrs. Duggan, Dessie’s mam. She was a big, slow-moving, heavy-lidded woman who smelled of Vicks rub and pear drops, and Lena never liked her. She was nosy, but she was a hoarder with it: she sucked up everything she heard and then kept it stored away, for years sometimes, bringing it out only when it could wield the most force. Noreen, by contrast, is generous-natured and gets her satisfaction not from stockpiling or using information but from dispensing it by the armload, to anyone who’ll listen. Lena has no quarrel with that—in her view, Noreen has earned every bit of satisfaction she can get, by looking after Dymphna Duggan, who is now massive, almost housebound from sciatica, a flat cold-eyed face at her sitting-room window watching the village go by. And it means that if anyone has an inkling of what kind of trouble Johnny might have picked up in London, it’s Noreen.

Lena stays out of other people’s business. She came to that decision the same day she decided to marry Sean Dunne. Up until then, she was planning on freeing herself from Ardnakelty’s mesh by the traditional method of getting the hell out of Dodge: she was going to Scotland to train as a vet, and not coming back except for Christmases. Sean, though, was going nowhere off his family’s land. When she decided he was worth staying for, she had to come up with a different way to keep the townland from poking its tendrils into every crevice of her. For thirty years she’s held it at arm’s length: no having opinions on Oisín Maguire’s planning permission, no giving Leanne Healy advice on her daughter’s dodgy boyfriend, no joining the TidyTowns or coaching the girls’ Gaelic football; and, in exchange, no giving anyone a single word about the farm’s finances, or the workings of her and Sean’s marriage, or the reasons why they never had children. Minding your own business isn’t a trait that’s prized in Ardnakelty, especially not in women, and it’s brought Lena a reputation for being either up herself or just plain odd, depending on who’s talking. She quickly discovered she doesn’t care. Sometimes it amuses her, watching how desperate people get for a handle to grab her by.

She doesn’t like the feeling that Johnny Reddy, of all people, is her business now. What she wants to do about Johnny is watch this place work itself into a tizzy about him until he hightails it out of town, pursued by the debt collectors or whoever it is he’s pissed off, and then dismiss him from her mind all over again. But there’s Cal, unsettled, and there’s Trey, with no choice about being smack in the middle of it all.

The dogs have bounded ahead of her towards home, working off the day’s first burst of energy. Lena calls them back with a whistle and turns for the village.

Ardnakelty’s two brief lines of square-set, mismatched old buildings have their windows open to catch breezes—windows that had been shut for decades have been pried open, this summer. Everyone who has the option is outdoors. Three old men, settled on the wall around the Virgin Mary grotto, nod to Lena and hold out their hands to her dogs. Barty, who runs Seán Óg’s pub, has been inspired by the dry weather to do something about the walls, which have needed a coat of paint for at least five years; he’s press-ganged a couple of Angela Maguire’s lads, who are hanging off ladders at precarious angles, armed with buckets of paint in a violent shade of blue and a radio blasting Fontaines D.C. Three teenage girls are leaning against the wall of the shop eating crisps, turning their faces up to the sun and all of them talking at once, all manes and legs like a bunch of half-wild colts.