A Field Full of Folk by Iain Crichton Smith

thought, when I hoped you were going to be a comfort to me in my old age, look what happened, you were taken in and deceived by smooth words. And anyway Danny Young’s mother was a dirty woman incapable of keeping her house spick and span. And on top of that she smoked, at her age. What could you expect of people like that?
    When her daughter came to visit her it was as if she had been let out on parole. Of course she now knew that she had made a mistake but she wouldn’t admit it. She was too proud to tell her own mother that she was like a prisoner of war. Look at what they did to their womenfolk in Belfast, they tarred and feathered them and shaved their hair.
    She put the kettle on and went outside and shouted to the joiner to come down. He was a nice fellow, name of Murray, and his wife had run away with another fellow. A Catholic, she shouldn’t wonder. They were everywhere in Glasgow, the city was hoaching with them. Leaving him with those two little girls, it wasn’t right, nothing good would come of it. Murray was very quiet these days. In the early days you would hear his whistling as he worked but he didn’t whistle now. He came inside, his ruler in the top pocket of his dungarees and sat down in the chair that she had placed at the table for him. She had laid out a roll and tea for him. He said, “It’s just as well that you did the roof just now. The rain would be in in the winter.”
    She felt even as he spoke the stabbing pain in her hip. Actually she wouldn’t put it past that doctor to be a Catholic as well. Sometimes she wondered whether she shouldn’t throw away the pills he gave her though the pain was great. He didn’t belong locally, that was sure, and Stewart was a Catholic name. A lot of tinkers were called Stewart as well. Murray ate his roll quietly and drank his tea, as if he didn’t wish to speak, or as if he had nothing to speak about. He looked drained and blank. Why, she could remember when his children had been baptised in those days when she could go to church and didn’t have to stay in the house all the time.
    She didn’t know whether she ought to mention his wife. Sympathy was good for a man, but on the other hand he might not wish to talk about it.
    â€œI’ll tell you,” she said abruptly, “my own son-in-law should have done that roof for me, but these Catholics can’t do anything. He didn’t need to have been told about it. He could have climbed that roof with a ladder. Why couldn’t he do that? The priest maybe told him not to, because I’m a Protestant. He doesn’t care whether I have water coming in and ruining my good wallpaper.”
    Murray had become morose right enough. He had finished his roll and was making himself a cigarette. She had heard that if you gave workers tea they would add it to the time that they had been on the job, but she didn’t think that Murray was like that. She chattered on while he smoked.
    â€œOf course,” she said, “they usually have big families and that’s why they are poor. The Pope makes them have a good family and yet he’s not married himself. That’s to make sure that there are more of them than of us. He came to Ireland and told them all to have big families. He landed there in a ’plane. I’ll tell you another thing, he’s a Communist. They think he’s descended from St Peter, but Peter was a true Protestant and anyway you never found any of the disciples travelling about in ’planes. They were given a little food and they were told to go about the world preaching. That’s what Christ said to them. Now they have council houses.”
    As he sat at the table silently she thought that perhaps he ought to have married Kate. He had always been a good clean worker and look what happened to him: there was no justice in the world. If there was, how should a good workman who had harmed no one be shamed like that, in