The Sagum and the Shave

Rita here, thirty-four, and I'll tell you right off that my life in Corrofin had gotten so predictable by last October that I could tell you what Nigel Grayson was going to say to me at any given event before he said it, which is a strange thing to be able to do about a man who's supposed to be one of your closest friends.

The CSA pick-up picnic was set for the second Saturday of the month, same as always, and the sky over the fields was the flat gray it always is out here in the west, the kind of sky that can't be bothered to decide whether it's going to rain or not. I'd spent the morning shaving besom handles down at the workshop end of my shed, birch poles whittled smooth and stacked in bundles of ten, and my hands had that lovely faint ache they get after a few hours of good honest work. So at least my body was in decent form when I walked out to the long trestle tables set up between the vegetable rows, even if my brain was running on the same tired loop it had been on for months.

And then I saw Declan getting out of his car by the gate, and I swear the whole afternoon shifted under me like a floorboard.

He's thirty-five now, my friend Declan Silva, and he's been the basketball coach up at the school for going on nine years, and he was married and then he wasn't, same as me, and none of that changes the fact that when the man climbs out of a car and stretches, half the field finds an excuse to look at him. He'd grown the beard out since the summer. I noticed that. I noticed it more than I probably should have, standing there holding a paper plate I hadn't put anything on yet.

Declan and I met in a college hiking club back when I was twenty-one and he was twenty-two, which means we've been circling each other for thirteen years now, and in all that time nothing has ever happened, not properly, just a couple of weeks of flirting that went nowhere and then years of friendship where we both pretended that was all it ever was. He's one of my favorite people on earth. That's the problem, if you follow me.

He spotted me and came across the grass with that easy walk of his, and I felt something in my chest unknot that I hadn't even realized was tied.

"There she is," he said, and hugged me, one arm, quick, the way friends do. "Rita Malone, in the flesh. I was worried you'd send word you were too busy with the brooms."

"The besoms," I said, because he knows fine well what they're called and does it just to wind me. "And I'd never miss Nigel's picnic. He'd hunt me down."

"He would, yeah." He looked out at the tables, the wheelbarrows of carrots and leeks and the whole gray sprawling field of it. "God, it's good to be back out here. I've been in a gym since August. Do you know what it does to a man, being indoors that long? I've started talking to the cones."

"I don't doubt it," I said, and laughed, and it came out easier than anything I'd said in weeks.

And I keep coming back to this, the thing I can't quite put down: I'd been bored. Properly bored, the kind where the days stack up identical and you stop noticing them. Two years divorced, living alone at the edge of town, shaving handles and selling brooms at the market and thinking that was going to be the shape of the rest of it. And then Declan Silva walked through a gate and the boredom lifted, just like that, first time in months, and I stood there feeling the wind come off the fields and thought, oh no, oh no, we're doing this again, are we.

Because we always do this. We get close, and something hums between us, and then one of us gets frightened and we go back to being sensible, and we stay sensible for a year or two, and then we do it all over again.

* * *

Nigel found us within twenty minutes, because Nigel always does. He's thirty-six, runs the CSA, has known us both since college, and has made a hobby out of the two of us for so long that I think he'd be genuinely lost if we ever sorted ourselves out.

"Well, well," he said, coming up with a crate of squash on his hip and the biggest grin you ever saw. "Declan Silva. And standing next to Rita Malone. At the same picnic. Somebody pinch me."

"Go away, Nigel," I said.

"Thirteen years I've watched you two dance around each other," he said, setting the crate down with great ceremony. "Thirteen. I've a whole theory about it. I tell the wife about it. She has a theory too, hers involves the winter formal in second year, and don't think I haven't noticed neither of you ever talks about that night."

"Nothing happened at the winter formal," Declan said, a bit too quickly.

"Right," said Nigel, drawing the word out so long it nearly fell over. "Right, sure. Anyway, there's soup on, and the Hendersons brought that honey whiskey you like, Rita, so behave yourselves, or don't, honestly, either way suits me fine."

He walked off whistling. Declan stood with his hands in his pockets, a man standing in a draft.

"He's going to be unbearable," Declan said.

"He's always unbearable. That's his whole character." I tipped my head toward the far end of the yard, where the old farrier's workshop sat leaning into itself, stone walls gone soft with damp, the roof sagging in that patient way old roofs do. It's been empty since before I moved here, and the Hansen family's been trying to sell the ground out from under it for years, young Marshall especially, and nobody's bought it, so it just sits there. "Come on. Walk with me. If I have to stand in the middle of a picnic being discussed, I'd rather not be present for it."

So we walked, across the rough grass and along the fence line, and the sky stayed gray and low and it never quite rained, and Declan told me about the team and his mum and the flat he'd moved into after the divorce, eighteen months back now, and it was easy, the way it's always easy with him, and that easiness is exactly the trap, if you ask me.

The workshop door was never really a door anymore, just a frame with a half-hanging board, and we stepped through into the cool dim of the place, smelling of wet stone and old iron and rust.

That's when we saw them. The molds. Great heavy things, shapes of horses cast in metal, sitting in the flooded floor where the water never dries because the building sits low and the drainage gave out years ago, and this cold snap had come early and frozen the lot of it solid. Horses standing in ice, half-sunk, their flanks gone green and brown with age, and the ice holding them still like the whole shop had been told to hold its breath.

"Rita," Declan said quietly, "look at them."

"I know."

"Someone just left them. All these years."

I stood there looking at the frozen horses and felt that lifted feeling again, the one from the gate, and it scared me a little how much I liked it.

Then Declan, who'd gone poking along the back wall where the old tack hooks were, made a sound, and when I turned he was dragging something out from under a collapsed shelf, cloth of some kind, gray with dust. He shook it and a cloud went up and we both coughed and laughed, and when it settled we were looking at a cloak, a huge heavy thing of dark wool, broad and rough-woven, with a clasp that had gone black with tarnish.

"That's a sagum," Declan said, and I looked at him, and he shrugged. "What? I coach, but I read. Roman military cloak, the big rough kind they threw over armor. A soldier's cloak."

"It's got to be worth something."

"Or it's a hundred-year-old blanket some farmer left." He was holding it up against himself, and it hung off his shoulders enormous, and he looked, there's no other word for it, he looked like something off a Roman coin, dust and all. "What do you reckon, Malone? Do I get to keep it, or is that theft?"

"Finders keepers in a building nobody's owned up to in thirty years," I said, and then Nigel's voice came faint across the yard, calling something about soup and about the two of us, and Declan and I looked at each other and the grin that went between us was the oldest thing about us, older than the horses in the ice.

"Quick," he said, holding the cloak out, "before he finds us in here. That'll be a whole year of jokes."

He swung the sagum around my shoulders before I could argue, and the weight of it landed on me like a hand, all that wool, heavy and dense and surprisingly warm against the cold of the building, and I stood there in the dim with the clasp scratching at my collarbone and felt completely ridiculous and completely wonderful at the same time. "Well?" he said. "It's like being hugged by a legion," I told him, and he laughed, that real laugh he does, the one from down in his chest, and then he took it back off me and put it on himself and stood up straighter, and I swear the man found a posture I didn't know he had. "You'd follow me into battle, wouldn't you," he said, arranging it, playing at it, and I said I'd follow him as far as the gate, maybe the fence, depending on the weather, and he said that was the most honest offer he'd had all year.

We passed it back and forth a couple of times the way children do with a curtain, and the wool smelled like wet sheep and old dust and something under that, something older, and the light through the broken board went a little grayer, and I thought, this is the most fun I've had in months, and that thought had a sad little tail on it that I chose not to look at. "You know what's mad," he said, "we've known each other thirteen years and this is the first time you've put a cloak on me."

"Technically you put it on me first."

"Technically I did, yes!"

And then a voice came from the doorway, and it wasn't Nigel's.

"Right, that's enough of that."

Marshall Hansen stood in the gap where the door used to be, hands in his pockets, looking around at the molds and the ice and the two of us like we'd been caught going through his mother's drawers. "This is private property, you know. Hansen land, all of it. There's signs."

"There's one sign," I said. "It's fallen over."

"It's still the law." Declan stepped forward with the cloak still on his shoulders, which I think was half the problem, because Marshall looked at him standing there like a Roman centurion in a ruined shed and plainly didn't know where to put his face. "Mr. Hansen," Declan said, in his coach voice, the one that makes sixth-year boys stand up straight, "we didn't touch anything, we didn't break anything, and we were just leaving. Though I'll say, whoever left those molds in the ice left you the finest free ornament in the county, and if I were selling this place I'd put it in the brochure."

"You don't know the first thing about selling this place."

"I know nobody's bought it in thirty years, and I know a good photograph when I see one. Horses frozen in a flooded forge, Hansen, that's a calendar cover. That's a tourism board ringing you up." Marshall shifted his weight and looked at the molds despite himself, and I watched the exact moment the thought landed in him, because his face went from annoyed to calculating in about a second and a half. "The developer wants it cleared," he said, but he said it slower.

"Then sell him the molds too," Declan said. "Sell him the whole story. Nobody tears down a thing with a story if you price the story in."

There was a silence, the ice ticking somewhere under our feet, and Marshall said, "You're a strange one, Silva," but he said it the way you say a thing when you're already walking out the door with more in your head than you came in with, and he went, and the yard noise came back in around us, soup and fiddle and children shouting.

Declan took the cloak off and folded it, badly, and looked at me.

"Did I just do a good deed for a man I can't stand?"

"You did a sales pitch for a man you can't stand."

"Same thing on a Saturday." We left the cloak folded on a dry shelf, ours by whatever law governs these things, and went back out into the gray.

* * *

The picnic had settled into its evening shape by the time we got back, blankets and folding chairs and the long trestle where Nigel's soup steamed in enormous pots, and the pick-up baskets full of the month's vegetables going off to their owners a crate at a time. The Hendersons' honey whiskey was already making a circuit and being refused by exactly the people who'd be complaining about it tomorrow. I found a bottle of red somebody'd left near the bread table, red you could stand a spoon in, and two enamel mugs, and I carried them over to where Declan had claimed the bench at the end of the trestle like it was a throne he'd inherited. "Mugs," he said. "Is this a picnic or a siege?"

"It's whatever the Hendersons' whiskey hasn't already made it." We poured, and clinked, and drank, and the wine was honestly terrible and we both said so, and then drank more of it, because that's how wine works at a picnic in the west of Ireland in November.

"So," I said, and pulled the word out long like Nigel would have. "Eighteen months in the flat. How is it, really, when nobody's asking at a picnic." He turned his mug around a couple of times on the wood. "It's quiet. It's fine. I have a sofa and a kettle and a view of a wall, and I coach, and I go home, and I sleep, and I get up, and some weeks I genuinely could not tell you one day from the next." He looked over. "How's the shed?"

"The shed's the shed. I shave handles, I sell besoms, I