NEW potatoes were urgently needed and the potato merchant told Jim to get as many as possible dug on the first afternoon. No sooner had the squad come to the farmhouse than they were shown out to the fields where the green shaws, heavy with rain, lay in matted clusters across the drills. Every step taken relieved the green vegetable matter of an enormous amount of water, which splashed all over the workers as they stumbled along to their toil.
Work started. The men threw out the potatoes with short three-pronged graips; the women girt bags round their waists, went down on their knees and followed the diggers, picking up the potatoes which they threw out. Two basin-shaped wicker baskets without handles were supplied to each woman; one basket for the good potatoes and the other for “brock,” pig-food.
“It’s the devil’s job, as the man said,” old Maire a Glan remarked as she furrowed her way through the slushy earth. “What d’ye think of it, Judy Farrel?” But Judy, struggling with a potato stem, did not deign to answer.
Maire was a hard worker; and it was her boast that she never had had a day’s illness in her life. The story had got abroad that she never missed a stitch in a stocking while giving birth to twins, and the woman never contradicted the story. She gathered after Eamon Doherty’s “graip”; old Eamon with a head rising to a point almost and a very short temper.
Biddy Wor, the mother of seven children, “all gone now to all the seven ends of the world,” as she often pathetically remarked, gathered the potatoes that Murtagh Gallagher threw out. Biddy’s hair was as white as snow, except on her chin, where a dozen or more black hairs stood out as stiffly as if they were starched.
Owen Kelly, another of the diggers, was very miserly and was eternally complaining of a pain in the back. Micky’s Jim assured him that a wife was the best cure in the world for a sore back. But Owen, skinflint that he was, considered a wife very costly property and preferred to live without one. He dug for Judy Farrel, the stunted little creature with the cough. She was a very quiet little woman, Judy, had very little to say and, when speaking, spoke as if her mouth was full of something. When pulling the heavy baskets, weighted with the wet clay, she moaned constantly like a child in pain.
Two sisters worked in the squad, Dora and Bridget Doherty, cheery girls, who spoke a lot, laughed easily, and who were similar in appearance and very ugly. Dora worked with Connel Dinchy, son of Oiney Dinchy, an eel-stomached youth over six foot in height and barely measuring thirty-four inches round the chest. He was a quiet, inoffensive fellow, who laughed down in his throat, and every fortnight he sent all his wages home to his parents. Bridget Doherty gathered potatoes for one of the strange men. Both girls were blood relations of Murtagh Gallagher. The other strange man worked in conjunction with Gourock Ellen; Norah Ryan gathered for Willie the Duck; and Ellen’s companion, who was known as Annie—simply Annie—crawled in the clay after Thady Scanlon, a first cousin of Micky’s Jim. When the baskets were full, Dermod Flynn emptied the potatoes into large barrels supplied for the purpose.
The women worked hard, trying to keep themselves warm. Norah Ryan became weary very soon. The rain formed into a little pond in the hollow of her dress where it covered the calves of her legs. Seeing that the rest of the women were rising from time to time and shaking the water off their clothes, she followed their example, and when standing, a slight dizziness caused her to reel unsteadily and she almost overbalanced and fell. She went down on her knees hurriedly, as she did not want Micky’s Jim to see her tottering. If this was noticed he might think her unfit for the job. For the rest of the afternoon she crawled steadily, fearing to rise, and wondered how Gourock Ellen, who was giving voice to a loose and humorous song, could sing on such a day. What troubled Norah most were the sharp pebbles that came in contact with her knees as she dragged herself along. They seemed to pierce through rags and flesh at each movement, and at times she could hardly refrain from crying aloud on account of the pain. Before night, and when she knew that her knees were bleeding, she had become almost indifferent to bodily discomforts.
All the time she was filled with an insatiable longing for home. The farm looked out on the Clyde—the river was a grey blur seen through the driving rain, and a boat passing by attracted her attention.
“Is it an Irish boat?” she asked Willie the Duck, who was whistling softly to himself.