Bess was in the garden before I’d finished my first cup of tea, which is earlier than usual even for her. I noticed her through the kitchen window, standing very still at the edge of the vegetable patch, the way dogs stand when they’ve either done something or are about to.
She’d done something.
The garlic I planted in October – two short rows, pressed in carefully, labelled with a stick and a bit of torn bag – had been dug up. Not all of it. Three or four bulbs scattered on the earth, sitting there like accusations. Bess herself was watching me watch her, tail going at a careful, diplomatic speed.
I went out the back. The gate stuck. It always sticks in the cold now, worse than it did in autumn, and I had to lean into it with my hip before it gave.
Tom was up the lane not twenty minutes later. He must have seen me from his yard, or Bess had form and he knew to follow.
‘She was in your garden,’ he said, over the gate.
‘She was,’ I said.
He looked at the vegetable patch. He looked at Bess, who was sitting close to the stone wall with the air of someone who has decided that stillness is the same as innocence.
‘The garlic?’ he said.
‘Three or four of them.’ I showed him where they’d been, the loose soil, the small holes.
Tom was quiet for a moment. A cold morning, the kind where your breath shows and the grass looks like it hasn’t forgiven the night yet. The light was thin and coming in low from behind Beenoskee, which at this time of year barely clears the ridge before it’s already heading back down.
‘She does that,’ he said. ‘Digging.’
‘I’d noticed.’
‘I’ll keep her in,’ he said.
‘She’s all right,’ I said, because she is. She’s fierce good company most mornings, Bess. She sits near the apple tree and watches the lane and doesn’t bother anything, usually. The garlic was bad luck. Or curiosity. Probably curiosity.
I replanted what I could, pressed the bulbs back down and firmed the earth over them with my palm. Whether they’ll come up in May now I couldn’t say. The ones I left alone might, the disturbed ones probably won’t, and I won’t know which is which until spring tells me.
Tom had gone by then, Bess trotting ahead of him back up the lane. He’d said he’d fix the gate when he had a minute, which he’s said before, and which I don’t hold against him because he does have a farm to run and the gate is, when all is said, my gate.
I stood in the garden for a while after they’d gone. December in Kerry at that hour is not something you’d linger in by choice, but there was something about the morning – the quiet of it, the low light, the turned earth – that kept me there a minute longer than sense would suggest.
The garlic might be grand. Probably not, but possibly.