There Are Little Kingdoms. Kevin Barry

of fowl. He goes outside again and puts three lengths of ply across a muddy pathway. He paints another bit of wall. He fetches the hard-wire sweeping brush and goes through the yards, grimly janitorial. You’d swear that royalty was coming and in a sense, it is: the woman from the Organic Certification Board is on her way. He gets a cloth and a basin of water and goes out to the road, where the Meadowsweet Farm signage has lately been erected—cheerful yellows and reds, a cock crowing against a blue Iowan sky—and he wipes it down. He drags some fertiliser bags out of a ditch and piles them for a bonfire. He goes up to the house and into the kitchen and he eyeballs his wife and he says:

      ‘Mary? I’ll ask you again. How many times did you come?’

      This is no rosy-cheeked farmer. This is a gaunt and sallow man, long-armed, with livid, electric hair.

      ‘Fuck off,’ says Mary.

      He stands in the middle of the kitchen floor, with his feet planted for strength, and his neck warily hunched. He is watchful and tense, five foot eleven of peeled nerves.

      ‘All I’m saying is get it out in the open. Can’t we talk about it now, while she’s at playschool? How many times, Mary? I swear I won’t hold it against you.’

      She looks up from the computer. She scrunches her eyes tightly shut and then opens them again hopefully, as if by mercy he might have disappeared. It all reduces down to this thin sour broth: you open your eyes and there’s a nutjob on the floor in front of you.

      ‘Why are you doing this? Haven’t you enough to be doing outside? Do this much for me, John, okay? Turn around. And fuck off.’

      Wounded, his mouth a grey slit, John Martin goes again into the weather, and a filthy breeze has worked itself up, and he retreats to the shelter of the chicken shed. Poultry management is no joke at the best of times. You would be amazed what can go wrong. At present, it is the heating. He has not been able to regulate the heat for five days, and the shed is like Zaire. Unaccustomed to the luxury of such warmth, the chickens have been unpleasantly lively but this seems to be subsiding now to a kind of rattled exhaustion. They screech and gasp in a terrible, grating way.