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him.
    These other moments, however, plunged him into a funk.
    In such a mood, McGarr climbed into the Cooper, collected Dan O’Malley at the Garda barracks, and drove toward the Quirk farmhouse.

THREE
In the Irish Countryside
    THE QUIRK FARM lay along the road between Lahinch and Kishanny, up a winding, hilly road between tall earthen banks and hedgerows. McGarr had to slow at each turn to make sure the car didn’t slam into the side of a cow or clip through a flock of sheep. He waited twice while farmers waved their arms and directed their dogs after errant sheep. The farmers only smiled and tilted their heads to the side, a form of silent hello all over Ireland. Superintendent O’Malley, who was sitting beside McGarr, waved to them all.
    The Quirk property ran up the side of a steep hill. The garden by the road became in turn a potato patch, a pasture, rough forage, and finally, like much of the terrain in this part of Clare, a bald summit of rough gray rock. Near the top McGarr could see the odd white patch—sheep that had been left out to God and were collected twice a year for shearing, dipping, or sale. In all, the Quirks had little more than forty acres.Had they tried to farm it all, they could barely wrest subsistence from this poor land.
    Like many farm families, they had two houses. The smaller, its lime now fading back to mortar, was doubtless the house John Quirk had been born in. It was now used as a stable. The new house was, to McGarr’s way of thinking, one of the finest accomplishments of the Republic. For the last thirty years the government, through low-interest loans, subsidies, and direct grants, had been helping farmers build new houses with modern facilities. McGarr had visited other English-speaking countries in which no planning was evident in the selection of dwelling styles, and the tastes of the builders who had raised whole square miles of tight-packed oddities—some mere boxes with roofs, others grotesqueries conceived by addled brains—were suspect, to say the least. The new Irish farmhouse was no work of art, mind you, but it was pleasant to look at. The structure blended with the landscape and was built to last generations, if not centuries. Even the interior walls were either poured concrete or cinder block. The rooms were spacious and well lit by casement windows. Each house had at least a full bath and water closet. Most roofs were tiled. In short, the government had provided its people with a house any European peasant could be proud of.
    McGarr suffered no delusions about Ireland. The base of his country’s economy was agriculture, and most of his countrymen were farmers. As one who had lived with the effects of industrialization in other countries, McGarr wouldn’t have Ireland any other way than what it had been since recorded time—perhaps the finest bit of natural pasturage in all Europe. Certainly there was a hot demand for the productssuch a country could supply on a grand scale, given certain improvements in farming methods. Many of the Continental countries even now couldn’t feed their populations.
    But Clare was another story. Clare was rock, albeit picturesque rock. Stepping out of the Cooper, McGarr remembered what an old woman in Lisdoonvarna had once told him when he had remarked about vistas in that rugged terrain: “Ah, lad—could we but eat that beauty, things would be grand.”
    Superintendent O’Malley said, “I’d prefer to do the telling alone, if you don’t mind.”
    “I’ll take a gander out back, then,” said McGarr.
    An old man was standing in the doorway now. “Is it about May that you’ve come?” he asked O’Malley.
    O’Malley removed his blue Garda cap. “Maybe we better go inside, John. The news isn’t good.”
    McGarr walked around the outbuildings: an old barn in which cows were once kept before the new house was built, a three-bay hayrick, the old house, in the main room of which a Massey-Ferguson tractor now sat—and stopped at