Kate and Mikie Donovan lived on a hill in the shadow of the mountains. In winter, the tallest of the peaks cut off the sun from them soon after noon; that peak, according to Kate, was only the first of their troubles. “Ah, now, Kate,” Father Conroy had told her more than once, “Sure, you can’t blame Mikie for putting that there!”

The boreen down to the house was long and aimless. It wandered around the edges of the fields, sometimes diverging where Jimmy, the son and heir, had suddenly thought of cutting a corner. Father Conroy never saw these double lanes without chortling, “Just like the Donovans! They can’t even decide on their way home.”

The house itself had its back to the visitor, reminding him of Mikie turning away to open his purse. Roofed with thatch at one end and corrugated iron at the other, it was a disconcerting house to be in when it rained; in the kitchen, the rain drummed overhead and all outside seemed awash; in the parlor, under the thatch, an ominous silence gave the impression of waters pent up, ready to roll down in a mighty flood.

The approach to the house was through the cow yard.

Knowing the usual condition it was in, Father Conroy left his car at the gate and walked, or rather, leaped, stiff-legged, from hummock to hummock. The yard was strewn with electric cable, some of it sunk under the mire. He passed a tumbledown shed in which was an enormous harvester, red and shiny, with hens perched on top of it. No doubt several harvests had been mortgaged to buy it, so heavily that Jimmy probably could not afford the necessary seed. The Donovans were like that, gambling on a great future.

There was a slow, creaking noise in the inner yard, a straining of timber, a brief gush of water, followed again by the slow creak. Old Mikie was bent over the pump, one hand turning the great wheel, the other supporting all the effort on his hip. Most of his life had been passed at the pump, squeezing gouts of water out of the ground. Signs on, he was permanently bent over to one side. It was too late now to straighten him up; as Father Conroy remarked, he couldn’t have reached the handle with his other hand.

Under his breath, Mikie carried on a continual, low-pitched monologue – his work song, Father Conroy called it, because from a distance it had something of an African rhythm. Every now and then a loud exclamation broke through, something between a groan and the self-satisfaction of a belch. Possibly it was his comment on the way the water was coming, grudgingly or otherwise, into his seemingly bottomless bucket.