Argosy: The Short Story Magazine — page 60: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

60 BRIAN CLEEVE had danced with Fran and come for her that same morning, laying his hand on her in broad daylight in the open street, and she letting him. ‘The slut, they said. We always knew she was that kind of girl, we always knew it. And I didn’t know whether I wanted to kill them for saying it, or Fran for giving them reason, or myself for misery. But I only asked them about the stranger. ‘From Clare,” they said, ‘“‘ where his father is an auctioneer. Rotten with money, and the boy down here spying out the land for a bit of a farm for himself. And maybe a wife.” | They looked sideways at me when they said that, and laughed, and I know now why men sometimes run crazy in the streets and kill whomever they meet. I walked the hills that night until I fell unconscious under a furze bush, and slept through until sunrise, and then crept home through the sleeping village, to sit at my window and watch for Fran to open up Mrs. Slattery’ s shop. She came out at nine o’clock, her red hair spilling to her shoulders, and a green cotton dress tight to her body like the green bark on a willow branch, smooth as her skin. I watched her take down the shutters, and stand for ‘a minute outside the door, yawning, her face still half asleep, her body bending as she stretched, first one way and then the other. She seemed to look different from any other morning. ‘The sullenness had gone out of her and she was contented, fulfilled. Even the way she moved was different. ‘“‘ Fran,” I whispered, and as if she had heard me she turned | towards my window and stretched again, her face alight with a kind of triumph, the sun washing her with gold. And then she took up the piled shutters with a strong, easy lift of her two hands and went inside, and there was nothing in the street, nothing for me anywhere. During the next weeks it became the scandal of the parish. Fran and the stranger. ‘That red-haired one and her fancy man. It’s an odd thing about scandals. It wasn’t anything they did or, at least, anything that people saw them doing. It was just who they were. If Fran had gone into a convent, there would have been people in Ballysaggart to put a bad construction on it. And in some ways the stranger was the same kind of man as she was a woman. The sort of man to get talked about, whatever he did. I can say that gently now, because all this was a long time ago. But at the time I hated him. I hated his yellow hair and his town-bought clothes and the sound of his voice, very loud comiclooks.comn