Mart’s eyebrows twitch at an amused angle. “A Guard and a blow-in. Johnny doesn’t know you the way I do, sure. You’ve a dacent respect for the way things are done here, and you can keep your mouth shut, when that’s the wisest thing to do. But he doesn’t know that.”

That answers the question of why Johnny came running over to Cal’s place to shoot the breeze before he even got his stuff unpacked. Not to check out the guy who was hanging around his kid; to find out whether the ex-cop was the kind who would screw with his scam.

Cal says, before he plans to say it, “He’d know it if you vouched for me.”

Mart’s eyebrows leap. “What’s this, now, Sunny Jim? Are you looking to get in on the action? I wouldn’ta had you down as the prospecting type.”

“I’m full of surprises,” Cal says.

“Are you getting restless already, or have you been turning up gold nuggets with the parsnips?”

“Like you said. There’s nothing on Netflix.”

“For God’s sake don’t be telling me Johnny Reddy’s after bringing out the eejitry in you, as well. I’ve enough of that to be dealing with. You’re not feeling an urge to dust off the aul’ badge and haul the bold fraudsters up to the Guards by the scruffs of their necks, now, are you?”

“Nope,” Cal says. “Just reckon if my land’s involved anyway, I might as well find out what’s going on.”

Mart scratches meditatively at a bug bite on his neck and considers Cal. Cal looks back at him. All his gut rebels against asking Mart Lavin for favors, and he’s pretty sure Mart knows that.

“You want entertainment,” he points out, “watching Johnny try to figure out what to do about me oughta up the ante.”

“That’s a fact,” Mart acknowledges. “But I wouldn’t want him getting an attack of nerves and whisking Paddy Englishman away from under our noses before things have a chance to get interesting. That’d be a waste.”

“I won’t make any sudden moves,” Cal says. “He’ll hardly know I’m there.”

“You’re great at being harmless, all right,” Mart says, smiling at Cal so that his whole face crinkles up engagingly, “when you want to be. All right, so. Let you come down to Seán Óg’s tomorrow night, when Johnny’s bringing Paddy Englishman in for inspection, and we’ll see where we get. Is that fair enough?”

“Sounds good,” Cal says. “Thanks.”

“Don’t be thanking me,” Mart says. “I’d say I’m doing you no favors, getting you mixed up with that fella’s nonsense.” He drains his tea and stands up, unsticking his joints one by one. “What’ll you spend your millions on?”

“Caribbean cruise sounds good,” Cal says.

Mart laughs and tells him to get away to fuck with that, and stumps out the door, pulling his straw hat down over his fluff of hair. Cal puts away the cookies and takes the mugs over to the sink to wash them out. It occurs to him to wonder why Mart decided to tell a Guard and a blow-in about a plan that might be fraud; unless, for reasons of his own, he wanted Cal on board.

The main talent Cal has discovered in himself, since coming to Ardnakelty, is a broad and restful capacity for letting things be. At first this sat uneasily alongside his ingrained instinct to fix things, but over time they’ve fallen into a balance: he keeps the fixing instinct mainly turned towards solid objects, like his house and people’s furniture, and leaves other things the room to fix themselves. The Johnny Reddy situation isn’t something that he can leave be. It doesn’t feel like something that needs fixing, though, either. It feels both more delicate and more volatile than that: something that needs watching, in case it catches and runs wild.

—

Trey has to go to the shop for her mam because Maeve is a lickarse. It’s Maeve’s turn, but she’s snuggled up on the sofa with their dad, asking one stupid question after another about the Formula 1 on the telly, and hanging off his answers like they’re the secret of the universe. When their mam told her to go, she pouted up at their dad, and he laughed and said, “Ah, sure, leave the child be. We’re happy here, aren’t we, Maeveen? What’s the big emergency?” So, since the emergency is that they have nothing in for the dinner, Trey is trudging down to the village dragging a wheeled shopping trolley behind her. She doesn’t even have Banjo for company: she left him sprawled on the coolest part of the kitchen floor, panting pathetically, rolling an agonized eye at her when she snapped her fingers to him.

Trey dislikes going to the shop. Up until a year or two back, Noreen used to stare her out of it whenever she went in, and Trey robbed something every time Noreen shifted the glare away to serve a customer. These days Trey generally pays for the things she wants, and Noreen nods to her and asks after her mam, but occasionally Trey still robs something, just to keep the parameters clear.

She has no intention of robbing anything today; she just wants to buy potatoes and bacon and whatever other shite is on the list in her pocket, and go home. By now Noreen will have extracted every detail of last night from Dessie, with ruthless expertise, and will be on the hunt for more. Trey doesn’t want to talk about any of it. The men stayed late into the night, getting louder and louder as they got drunker, and laughing in great eruptions that brought Alanna stumbling into Trey’s room, confused and scared, to climb in with her and breathe wetly on the back of her neck. Johnny has them eating out of his hand. Trey is starting to feel like a fool for ever thinking she could do anything about any of them.

Noreen—of course—has company. Doireann Cunniffe is nestled up to the counter, where she can lean in to Noreen to catch every word first, and Tom Pat Malone is settled well into the corner chair that Noreen keeps for people who need a rest before they start home. Mrs. Cunniffe is little and excitable, with funny teeth and a head that sticks forward, and she wears pink cardigans even in this heat. Tom Pat is a curled scrap of a man, well into his eighties, who can tell the weather and is the hereditary possessor of a recipe for wool-fat salve that cures everything from eczema to rheumatism. He was named after his grandfathers and has to be called by both names in order to avoid offending either, even though they’ve both been dead for fifty years. Mrs. Cunniffe has a packet of boring biscuits on the counter and Tom Pat has the Sunday paper on his lap, to add legitimacy to their presence, but neither of them is there to buy things. Trey keeps her head down and starts collecting what she needs. She is under no illusion that she’s going to get out of here easily.

“Begod, Noreen, ’tis like Galway station here today,” Tom Pat says. “Is there anyone in this townland that hasn’t been in to you?”

“They’re only following your good example, sure,” Noreen points out smartly. She’s dusting shelves—Noreen is never not doing something. “How’s your daddy today, Theresa?”

“Grand,” Trey says, finding ham slices.

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, it’s well for some. He must have a head made of titanium. What were they drinking, at all? I asked Dessie, but he couldn’t turn his head on the pillow to answer me.”

Mrs. Cunniffe giggles breathily. Trey shrugs.

Noreen shoots her a sharp bird-glance, over one shoulder. “He was talking plenty when he came in, but, God help us all. Four in the morning, it was, and him shaking me outa the bed to tell me some mad story about gold nuggets and beg me to make him a fry-up.”

“Didja make it for him?” Tom Pat inquires.

“I did not. He got a piece of toast and an earful about waking the kids, is what he got. Come here, Theresa: is it true, what he said, or was it just the drink talking? There’s some English fella coming to dig up gold on everyone’s land?”

“Yeah,” Trey says. “He’s rich. His granny came from round here. She told him there was gold.”

“Holy Mary, mother a the divine,” Mrs. Cunniffe breathes, clasping her cardigan together. “ ’Tis like a film. Honest to God, I’d palpitations when I heard. And will I tell you something awful strange? Friday night, I dreamed I found a gold coin in my kitchen sink. Just lying there, like. My granny always said the second sight ran in our—”

“That’ll be ating cheese too late at night,” Noreen advises her. “Once we had a baked Camembert at Christmas, and I dreamed I was after turning into a llama in a zoo, and I was annoyed ’cause my good shoes wouldn’t fit on the hooves. Leave the cheese alone and you’ll be grand. Now, Theresa”—Noreen abandons her dusting to lean over the counter and point the duster at Trey—“did your daddy say who this fella’s granny was?”

“Nah,” Trey says. “Don’t think he knows.” She can’t see the jam they normally get. She grabs some weird-looking apricot thing instead.

“That’s men for you,” Noreen says. “A woman woulda thought to ask. Myself and Dymphna, that’s Mrs. Duggan, we spent half the morning trying to get it straight who she mighta been. Dymphna reckons she musta been Bridie Feeney from across the river, that went over to London before the Emergency. She never wrote back. Dymphna says her mammy always thought Bridie had gone over to have a baba and was hiding the shame, but I suppose it might be that she just didn’t bother her arse writing at first, and then she married some fancy doctor and got too many notions to write to the likes of us. Or both,” she adds, struck by the idea. “The baba first, and then the doctor.”

“Bridie Feeney’s sister was married to my uncle,” Tom Pat says. “I was only a wee little lad when she went off, but they always said she’d do well for herself. She was that kind. She coulda married a doctor, all right.”

“I know Anne Marie Dolan,” Mrs. Cunniffe says triumphantly, “whose mammy was a Feeney. Bridie woulda been her great-aunt. I rang Anne Marie straightaway, as soon as I got my breath back, didn’t I, Noreen? She says neither her granddad nor her mammy ever said a word to her about any gold. Not a peep outa them. Would you credit that?”

“I would,” Tom Pat says. “I’d say that’s only typical. Anne Marie’s granddad was aul’ Mick Feeney, and Mick had no use for girls. He thought they were awful talkers, the lot of them, couldn’t hold their water—no harm to the present company.” He smiles around at them all. Mrs. Cunniffe titters. “And he’d only daughters. I’d say he told no one, and waited for Anne Marie’s young lad to get old enough that he could pass it on. Only didn’t Mick take a heart attack and die, before he got the chance.”

“And no surprise to anyone but himself,” Noreen says tartly. “I heard his back room was that full of bottles, they had to get a skip in. No wonder he never done nothing about the gold. He’d other things to keep him occupied.”

“And if it wasn’t for this English chap,” Mrs. Cunniffe says, a hand to her face, “the secret woulda been lost and gone forever. And us walking over the gold our whole lives, without a notion.”

“That’s what you get when people do nothing,” Noreen says. Having stood still for as long as she’s capable of, she goes back to her dusting. “God knows how many generations of Feeneys, every one of them doing feck-all about that gold. At least this English lad got sense enough from somewhere to do something. About feckin’ time.”

“You’ll be meeting this English chap, won’t you, Theresa?” Mrs. Cunniffe asks, edging closer to Trey. “Would you ever ask him if there’s any of it in our bitta land? Noreen was telling me it’s in the river, and sure we’re only a few yards away. I couldn’t be digging myself, my back does be at me something terrible, but Joe’s a great man for the digging. He’d have the garden up in no time.”

Somewhere on its way down the mountain, the gold has apparently turned from a possibility into a solid thing. Trey isn’t sure what she thinks of this.

She dumps her shopping on the counter and adds a packet of crisps, as her fee for taking Maeve’s turn. “And twenty Marlboro,” she says.

“You’re too young to be smoking,” Noreen tells her.

“For my dad.”

“I suppose,” Noreen concedes, throwing her one more suspicious glance and turning to get the cigarettes. “Cal’d malavogue you if he smelled smoke off you. Remember that.”

“Yeah,” Trey says. She wants to leave.

“Come here to me, a chailín,” Tom Pat orders Trey, beckoning. “I’d come to you, only I used up all the strength in my legs getting here. Come over and let me have a look at you.”

Trey leaves Noreen to ring up the shopping and goes to him. Tom Pat takes hold of her wrist, to bend her down so he can see her—his eyes are filmed over. He smells like a hot shed.

“You’re the spit of your daddo,” he tells her. “Your mammy’s daddy. He was a fine man.”

“Yeah,” Trey says. “Thanks.” Her granddad died before she was born. Her mam doesn’t talk about him much.

“Tell me something, now,” Tom Pat says. “Yourself and that Yankee fella up at O’Shea’s place. Do ye ever make rocking chairs?”

“Sometimes,” Trey says.

“I fancy a rocking chair,” Tom Pat explains, “for in front of the fire, in the winter. I do be thinking about the winter an awful lot, these days, to keep myself cool. Would ye ever make me one? A small one, now, so these little legs of mine can touch the ground.”

“Yeah,” Trey says. “Sure.” She says yes to just about any work that comes their way. She’s aware that, for government reasons she doesn’t understand and doesn’t care about, Cal isn’t allowed to get a job here. One of her fears is that he won’t make enough money to live on and he’ll have to move back to America.

“Good girl yourself,” Tom Pat says, smiling up at her. His few teeth look as big as horses’ teeth in his fallen mouth. “Ye’ll have to come down to me, now, to sort the ins and outs of it. I can’t see to drive any more.”

“I’ll say it to Cal,” Trey says. His hand is still around her wrist, loose bony fingers with a slow tremor shaking them.

“Your daddy’s doing a great thing for all this townland,” Tom Pat tells her. “A thing like this doesn’t stop with a few diggers in a few fields. A few years from now, we won’t know ourselves. And all because of your daddy. Are you proud of him, now?”

Trey says nothing. She can feel silence filling her up like pouring concrete.

“Sure, when did the childer ever appreciate their parents?” Mrs. Cunniffe says with a sigh. “They’ll miss us when we’re gone. But you tell your daddy from me, Theresa, he’s a great man altogether.”

“Listen to me now, a stór,” Tom Pat says. “D’you know our Brian? My Elaine’s young lad. The redheaded fella.”

“Yeah,” Trey says. She doesn’t like Brian. He was in Brendan’s class. He used to wind Brendan up till Brendan lost his temper, and then run to the teacher. No one ever believed a Reddy.