When she would attack him about this, and ask him, if there was no job wanting to be done about his own place, why wouldn’t he go look for work with a neighbour, Peetcheen always had an answer ready.
“Sure there’s no work going, these times! I must wait till the haymaking comes on. Then there will be good pay to be earned. The meadows is nigh-hand ripe this minute!”
So they were; Julia could see that for herself. But when Peetcheen went to Big Cusack to ask for a job at the hay, he heard that all the work had been laid out, and no more hands were needed.
“And didn’t I think,” said Cusack to him, “that you were too big a man, all out, now, to take a fork in your fist; and you with the rich wife and all!”
Peetcheen made no answer to this. He just went over to a shady spot, and sat down there, to watch the work going on; went home to his dinner, and then back with him to the hayfield, till quitting-time that night.
That contented Julia. And when she asked him for his week’s pay from Big Cusack, to go to the Shop, he saw no occasion to explain to her that it was out of her own money, that Heffernan had handed to him in the old stocking, that she was getting it. It satisfied her, and a man will do a great deal for peace and quietness.
What you do once, comes very easy the next time. By this kind of management, Peetcheen put the next few months over him very nice and handy. Haymaking, and harvest, and turf-cutting, all happened along for his convenience. He could go off, when any of them were on, and lob about through the neighbourhood. I won’t say that he never did a tap of work; he might, have, now and then. But it was seldom the like happened to him.
This was all well and good, as far as Peetcheen himself was concerned. But Julia was the sort of woman that never can be easy. No! and what’s more never can let any one else be, either. So when Peetcheen kept out of her way, and she hadn’t the excuse of him and his ways, she began to turn on the poor old mother. A stirring, active little woman she was herself. Julia would have the kettle boiling and the tea wet, while another would be thinking of where to look for a bit of firing. But if she was quick itself, that was no reason for her to go on the way she did to old Mrs. Caffrey.
“Give me that besom, here!” she said to her one morning, snatching the broom out of the old woman’s hand, and giving her a shove towards the door; “be off out, and gether some kindling for the fire! that work is all you’re fit for! Sick and tired I do be, looking at ye; and you not done sweeping the flure yet!”
“God be wid the time I was young and strong; and able to sweep a flure wid any one!” says Peetcheen’s mother.