Walk the Blue Fields

Walk the Blue Fields is a collection of seven short stories set mostly in rural Ireland, exploring themes of loneliness, desire, secrecy, and the weight of the past. Each story centers on characters shaped by isolation, unspoken truths, and the landscapes they inhabit.

In "The Parting Gift," told in the second person, a young woman prepares to leave her family's farm for New York. She eats a silent breakfast with her mother and her brother Eugene, the eldest son pulled out of school at 14 to work the land. As she prepares to leave, she recalls a childhood of neglect and abuse. Her father saw no use in educating girls. After her parents stopped sharing a bedroom, her mother sent her into her father's room, where he sexually abused her until she began menstruating at 12. Before she leaves, her father summons her upstairs. She enters hoping for money but receives only a handshake and a message for Eugene about mowing the meadows. She lies to her mother, saying he gave her 100 pounds. Eugene drives her to the airport and reveals he knows the father gave her nothing, offering his only 20-pound note. He reveals he plans to leave the farm, having stayed only to protect her, and acknowledges the abuse for the first time. At the airport, Eugene embraces her, but she flinches when his stubble grazes her cheek. She passes through security and locks herself in a bathroom stall, where she finally cries.

The title story, "Walk the Blue Fields," follows a Catholic priest performing the wedding of a woman he once loved, the only daughter of John Lawlor, a widowed farmer. During the reception, the groom's drunken brother Donal accidentally breaks the bride's string of pearls. The priest picks one up, warm from her skin, and places it in her palm; she looks at him with unshed tears. In flashback, the priest recalls their affair: secret meetings on strands and in woods, then a trip north where she told him she could not continue unless he left the priesthood. Unable to go home after the reception, he walks the country road and finds the caravan of a Chinese healer on a local farmer's land. The man performs an intense physical manipulation, and a cry escapes the priest that is the bride's name. Afterward, he walks into the spring night feeling that God answers through nature, remembers his time with Lawlor's daughter without shame, and climbs the fields toward the road, thinking about tomorrow.

"Dark Horses" centers on Brady, a lonely farmer in County Cavan who wakes from a dream of the woman who left him. His kitchen is neglected, and the garden she planted has gone wild. He drives to town, helps a farrier shoe a mare, and drinks at a pub. He recalls meeting the woman at a dance: she had horses and asked him home, and for a time he felt whole. Later he reveals what happened: She asked him to buy food, pay bills, and take her out. He told her off and put her horses on the road. She gave him a second chance, but nothing recovered. He drives home drunk and climbs into bed still wearing his boots, imagining her return, her dark horse grazing his fields.

"The Forester's Daughter," the longest story, follows the Deegan family in Aghowle, County Wicklow. Deegan, a forester, courted Martha Dunne through persistence; she accepted his proposal partly from fear no one else would ask. Martha found Aghowle lonely and realized she had married a man she did not love. She bore three children: an eldest boy uninterested in farming, a second son with an intellectual disability who speaks uncomfortable truths, and a youngest girl with brains and a way with animals who was fathered not by Deegan but by a travelling salesman. One day Deegan finds a golden retriever in the woods and gives it to his daughter on her 12th birthday. She names the dog Judge and embraces the gift as proof of her father's love. Martha secretly saves over 500 pounds, planning to leave. Then Judge's original owner, O'Donnell, arrives and reclaims the dog, revealing Judge was always his. The girl stops eating and talking. Martha invites neighbors over and tells a story transparently based on her own life, exposing her affair with the salesman. The second son shouts that his mother had a boyfriend. Silence descends. Later, the boy lets in a dog who turns out to be Judge, returned. Trying to light a fire, he accidentally sets the parlour ablaze, and the fire engulfs the house. The family escapes and watches Aghowle burn. Deegan asks Martha if she is sorry she strayed. She replies she is only sorry he took it out on the girl. The boy, intrigued by his enormous fire, whispers, "Who cares?" (90).

"The Long and Painful Death" follows an unnamed woman writer arriving at the Böll House, a working residence for writers on Achill Island named for Nobel Prize-winning German author Heinrich Böll. She settles in, but the next morning a retired German professor of literature insists on visiting. He arrives that evening, shows no interest in the house, tells her Ireland has changed for the worse, and stresses how many writers compete for the residency. At the gate he turns hostile, accusing her of knowing nothing about Böll and of swimming naked instead of working. That night she sits at Böll's desk and begins to write, giving the professor a name, and cancer, and drafting his long and painful death. She works through the night into sunrise, having found her subject.

"Surrender" is set in wartime Ireland and follows a sergeant, a former Irish Republican Army (IRA) fighter, who has carried a letter from his fiancée Susan in his uniform pocket for five days. He bullies his subordinate Doherty, cycles into town, and buys a crate of oranges. Back at the barracks, he opens the letter: Susan returns his engagement ring, saying she has waited long enough. He studies the ring, then turns his bicycle upside down and oils the chain, savoring how each link engages the sprocket. He eats all 12 oranges by the fire, burns the evidence, and before dawn sets out in his good suit toward Susan's country. Climbing her mountain, he dismounts, feeling his future: a woman's bony hand, a boy with a hungry gaze. He is surrendering to a life of austere domesticity.

The final story, "Night of the Quicken Trees," draws on Irish folklore. Margaret Flusk, a woman approaching 40 who believes she has lost her ability to bear children, moves into the house of her recently deceased first cousin, a priest, on the Hill of Dunagore overlooking the Cliffs of Moher in County Clare. Her neighbor Stack is a 49-year-old bachelor who lives with Josephine, a pampered nanny goat. The priest was Margaret's first love; they planned to marry, but he entered the seminary. Years later she confronted him in a wood of quicken trees (mountain ash), and they had sex. She became pregnant, but the child died of cot death, or sudden infant death syndrome. On the night before Christmas Eve, Margaret discovers her fertility has returned. She throws dirty feetwater out the door onto Stack, who has been secretly standing outside, and the water acts as a kind of spell. Over the following months they draw closer: she confides in him about the priest and her dead child, showing him her caesarean scar. People begin coming to Margaret for folk cures, believing she has healing powers. She and Stack sleep together, and she becomes pregnant. She buys a sledgehammer and knocks a hole in the wall between their houses, breaking through to light on the other side. She gives birth to a son named Michael and baptizes him with Josephine's milk. The parishioners eventually turn hostile, leaving peacock feathers through her letter-box and slashing her tires. One morning a boat of Aran Island men rows to shore. Margaret wades out with Michael and climbs in without a word. Stack watches from the strand, considers following, but stays. He returns home, resolving to brick up the wall and never again let anyone near him with feetwater.