The Rough Country

When I was a little girl – lil’ sprog, my mammy used to call me – we lived way out in the middle of nowhere. Real back of beyond territory. You know, no electricity until the Sixties – or so that’s what they say – and still no cell network. Never mind Netflix, the folks round there would be hard pressed to tell you what Blockbuster was. Often in places like that there’s a real raw beauty. Nature, left right to do its thing. That wasn’t the case where I grew up though. No, this was all crags and weeds and plants with more spikes than flowers. Rough country, my mammy called it. Rough country for rough people. That’s who we were.

My parents owned a farm because it was what my father’s parents had done. Same thing had gone for grandpa and nanna, and their parents afore them, going back generations, all the way to when the first rough people discovered that patch of scrub and thought to themselves “yup, this is it; can’t do any better than this sorry patch of grass.” When my father died my mammy carried on, even though the farm came down on his side – she was from mining stock – and even though there was no real money to be made from it. Never had been. I asked her about it once and she said something long and rambling about how it didn’t matter if you couldn’t grow nothing so long as the government kept on paying the subsidies.

Anyway, this farm was a real run-down pile o’ planks. In fact, you could hardly tell the difference between it and the barn, both were just as decrepit as one another. I hated the house. It was where my daddy died, coughing his lungs up in his bed, rattling breath echoing round the empty halls. The ambulance came seven hours after he quietened; we didn’t really have hospitals out there either.

I loved the barn though. It was my happy place. We didn’t keep animals, but there were all sorts of tools and machines in there. I don’t know what half of them did – that was the fun of it. That made me like the barn. What made me love it was the owls that lived there. Barn owls, obviously, what other kind of owl would live in a barn?

I was nine when I first came across them. I’ll never forget it. I was going through a real climbing phase. I’d clamber up anything and had taken to practising on the wooden poles that held up the beams and the barn roof. I’d walk back and forth along the beams, pretending I was a circus acrobat.

One day, thinking I’d got so good at my tightrope routine that I had to take it up a notch, I decided to try to do it blindfolded. Youth and stupidity often go hand in hand. I fell, of course. Somehow – and I daresay it was more through luck than judgement – I caught myself. Oh, how I was shaking, my heart beating so fast I worried it might make me lose my grip. The blindfold had come loose when I took a tumble, and I found myself eye-to-eye with the barn owl, its big black eyes set inside a snow white face. It blinked, cocked its head, and cried. That’s when I fell. Somehow, I got away with nothing worse than a bruised ass. It was a fine price to pay for a lifechanging experience.

Every day, I went back to see the owl, the old tools forgotten entirely. I was cautious at first, loitering in the doorway, staring from a distance. It stared back at me. Then I started taking it scraps of meat. I’d wait until I knew that my mammy had gone to sleep and raid the bins, saving the little pieces in an old tobacco tin. At first, I threw the pieces way across the barn, right over to the far end. Even then, it would wait until I left to swoop down and fetch them.

Within a year, it trusted me enough to take the scraps from my hand.

That owl got me through my father dying and my mammy caving in because of it. Can’t have been more than two weeks after he went that I trudged into the barn to find a second owl. It felt spiritual, even though I knew it wasn’t. Nothing like mourning to find meaning in coincidence.

It wasn’t long before mammy had a new man and this one was nothing like my father. He was a real nasty piece of work and I think the only reason my mammy went for him was because she was so lonely and down about her life that she thought she couldn’t do no better than Ryan Johnstone. He was a swine of a man with a face to match. He hated me and she hated me because of him, focusing his anger like a magnifying glass. I basically lived in the barn back then. I must have been a real sight, had there been anyone around to see me.

Years went by living like that, me and hateful Ryan Johnstone and my bitter shell of a mother. And the owls of course. One day, I noticed they’d laid some eggs in their nest – I’d never given up with the climbing, especially once the owls accepted me. They were like a little huddle of full moons, bursting with potential.

Well, that’s when things took a real turn for the worse. That beast of a man, Ryan Johnstone, he must have wondered one day what I spent all those hours doing, because not long after the eggs first appeared, I came out to the barn to find the nest overturned and the eggs smashed. The little owlets had just started forming, their feathers not yet grown.

How I wailed. It was good that we lived out in the midst of nowhere, for if someone had heard me they would have assumed a murder had taken place. I raged at that murdering beast and he just laughed, boxed me around the ears, and threw me back into the barn to lie amidst the shrapnel of barn owl shells.

The owls did not return. I left soon after as well.

That was fourteen years ago, give or take a couple of months. I hadn’t been back once. Then, somehow – bad news always has a way of finding you – word reached me that my mammy had passed. Nothing on Ryan Johnstone. Turns out he’d moved on to rain misery down on some other woman not long after I’d left. Anyway, the long and the short of it is that I had to go back. Death involves many things, paperwork most of all it seems.

I didn’t dare go in the house at first. I sorted the house out – first time it had been cleaned in years, I reckon – and piled all of mammy’s things up into three lots, one for keeping, one for charity, and one for the tip. It didn’t take long, she wasn’t one for hoarding.

It was almost dark by the time I was ready to go. I didn’t mean to go to the barn, but my legs took me there anyway, treading the path of my younger self.

A cry broke through the night, piercing out across the rough country. The owls had come back. That’s when I decided to stay. This time, I’d get to see the eggs hatch.