Donncha Ó Laoire (Human, Celtic Union, keeper of the holding)

The afternoon was still, which was the first thing he would be asked, and the only thing he would be sure of.

The holding had been his mother's and was his, and the post up the hill was newer than the byre. Donncha Ó Laoire had three goats in the top field, a dog at his heel and a brush standing where he had left it, and at some time after the middle of the afternoon the three goats went to the far wall all together, the way they went for a dog, and the dog was at his heel. Then the straw by the gable got up off the ground. Not much of it. A skirt of it, the height of a man, turning in air that had not moved all day, and it went along the yard wall and over the wall, and he was at the door by then, and there was nothing in the lane. The straw lay down along the wall where it had been carried and stayed lying.

A sí gaoithe, his mother would have said, and gone in to see about the milk.

He went in to see about the milk.

The custom had three parts, and he kept them the way he kept the gate, without asking whether the gate agreed with him. A bowl on the threshold stone before dark. The brush left standing after dark, wherever it stood. And the words at the door, by your leave, going out and coming in, said to nobody he could have pointed at. He had never claimed the three did anything. Nobody he knew claimed it; the post up the hill had a form with a line for them and he had answered that line before, with a plain yes and no more, and the Ranger had written the yes and nothing more. They were manners. You did not go through a door without a word in a house that was not your own, and for the evening after a wind like that it was not entirely settled whose house it was.

He put his hand to the back door, going out with the bowl, and the door went away from him.

Outward. On its hinges, which were on the inside, where his grandfather had hung them. He stood with the bowl and looked at the hinges, and they were where they had been, and the door was open the wrong way on them and holding there in the still air, with no complaint from the wood.

He did not force it back. He did not go through it either. He went out by the front, round the gable, and set the bowl on the stone by the back step from the outside, and said what his mother said, and went back round.

The shears were the other thing. His were ground for the left hand, and he found them on the right-hand peg, in his father's kit, which he kept as it had been kept. He put them back on his own peg. He did not look about for what might have been put in their place, because nothing had, and he knew the kit.

The Ranger came down the lane before the light went, with the case. Na Maoir Réalta, the valley called them, when it did not call them the post. She said the greeting at the gate the way the valley said it, and he gave her the valley's answer, and she had five bars on the tab, which the valley could read now, since the mast went up on the ridge. She asked him four things. The time, as near as he had it. The wind, which there had not been. The animals. What was changed. He told her the goats and the straw and the shears, and then he said, "You'll want the door, a Mhaoir," and took her round by the gable, because he was not going through it and did not intend to say so.

She tried it herself, which the form did not ask of her. It opened out under her hand the way it had opened out under his. She looked at the hinges the way he had looked at them, and wrote.

"Is anything missing," she said.

"No."

He had looked. He had looked twice, and the second time he had not known what he was looking for, and had looked anyway.

She wrote that too. Then she went in by the front, as he had, and when she came out again by the back step she stepped over the bowl on the stone without looking down, the way you step over a thing you know is there, and at the door she said the words. Going out. Quietly, and not to him.

That was not on the form. He had seen the form.

The light went. He left the brush where it stood. He went to bed with the back door open the wrong way on its hinges in the dark, and the bowl out, and the dog across the front step, which was the dog's own custom and had no form at all.