Eva Ferry

Wellies

by Eva Ferry

I know a man who always wears bright green wellies. To me, the wellies have become his very essence - well, that and his beard. It’s full and curly and was pitch black not long ago; now is growing patches of gray. You can tell he makes every effort to keep presentable - which mustn’t be easy for a farmer like he is -, but it doesn’t quite sit well with the rest of his face: round and red, long eyelashes, cheeks slightly sharp at the top. Still, I cannot picture him without the beard - or the wellies.

I walk past his farm whenever I go for a stroll in the countryside. It’s never long before I hear his wellies - squelch, squelch - coming to meet me. I should say first hear his dog - a pocket-sized breed of Pekingese and something else: she smells me from her cubicle in the backyard and rushes to chase me away from her property. After all this time, she sometimes still finds me unprepared. My heart jumps in my chest. I very seldom see her companion, who is four times as large as she is: small dogs are quick, sharp and noisy; big dogs are strong, resilient and sharp-clawed - and, it would seem, best kept out of sight.

“Would you please forgive Ruby?” the farmer says every time. “She’s just an old crazy dog, this Ruby. Don’t you know the lady already, eh, don’t you know her, Ruby?”.

He squats and caresses Ruby’s head, and Ruby lets out a high-pitched squeal, as if agreeing that she is indeed going old. The next time, she still runs after me.
It admired me at the beginning that he always had his wellies on; never slippers, trainers or nothing at all. It also embarrassed me: it was a reminder for the idle stroller that some people never get time off.

The farmer shares his farm with his parents and wife. I first thought the wife was an older sister or a young aunt - because in the countryside families are peculiarly put together, and one tends to find a sediment of relatives of all ages, parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, all sorts of in-laws, living under the same roof. Her face is wrinkly and bony, as if dried up, her hips incongruously broad.

After the wife saw me a few times and established that I was trustworthy, she started scoffing him in front of me.

“Take those wellies off!,” she would command him, in a raspy voice. This frightened me the first couple of times, almost as much as Ruby’s barking did. Then I realized her tone lacked any thrust or any emotion, almost as if she felt she had to say it.

Sometimes she would add: “Don’t you walk into my living room with dirt on your feet.”

She never looked or talked to me beyond saying “Good morning” or “Good afternoon” (never “Hello”; she was polite in her own way). I developed a theory: she was from a city and still ill-used, even after decades of marriage, to the ways of the countryside. Otherwise, she would have known that the farmer may have to run at any time to tend to a labouring cow, or to cornfields harassed by heil: he should never have to waste a minute getting rid of his slippers and putting his wellies on.

There was a flaw in my theory, though: her accent didn’t sound from the city, but very local.

One spring, the farmer didn’t come to greet me in his wellies for two or three times in a row, although Ruby still did. I thought he might have fallen sick, and didn’t see the wife either. After a few days, I knocked on his door.

The farmer’s mother came to open, her hair tied up under a headscarf. I explained that I hadn’t seen her son for a few days and was concerned he may be unwell.

“No,” she shook her head. “He is perfectly well, or so I hope. In fact, they are now in Romania.”
It seemed too exotic a holiday destination for a couple who, I supposed, had never travelled much in their lives, but I didn’t comment anything.

“Well, please let me know if I can be of any help,” I said instead. “I don’t know much about cows or harvests. But -”

She shook her head.

“No, dear. There aren’t any cows here anymore, and we don’t harvest either. But they might cows again in the future. And harvests. It all depends. Although, let us not be too optimistic.

I said goodbye and kept walking. I realized I had never heard the mooing of cows or felt the sharp smell of manure.

The farm was a carcass, the green wellies the last splash of colour left on it.

The farmer resurfaced a couple of weeks later, and trailed after Ruby in his bright green wellies to welcome me.

“Your mother told me you were in Romania,” I said after the customary exchange with the dog. “How was that? Did you enjoy it?”

He shook his head.

“I always knew it would come to nothing,” he said. “But the wife wouldn’t believe it.”

We stayed silent for a minute, then he looked left and right.

“Would you care to come somewhere with me? It will only be a few minutes.”

We crossed the road, treated into the deserted esplanade where fairs used to be held and walked past the parish church - home to an effigy of Our Lady very popular among sailors and fishermen. He then turned left into the cemetery, which resembles most rural cemeteries in those parts - a square of land encircled by brick walls, still to be painted white (in many places, this never happens at all), rows of three-storey niches on a floor of nude concrete, the heart and soul never quite settling on the idea that this is a place of eternal rest.

The farmer stood in front of one of the niches and made the sign of the cross. On the tombstone I read a name.

“Our boy has been dead three years,” he said. “Our boy, our only boy. I don’t know how we could ever think that taking in a child of strangers, and from the other end of the world, no less, would work. Now we know it wouldn’t. He could never be our boy.”

I still walk past the farm and the farmer still comes to see me in his wellies - squelch, squelch. On one occasion he was missing for a few days and I wondered whether he was in Romania again, but the issue of his son - either the deceased or the prospective one - has never come up again. We talk about all sorts of things and I’d like to think that nothing has changed. He still wears his wellies and grows a beard. Cows don’t moo, manure doesn’t stink, but things do inevitably change. Ruby doesn’t come chasing me anymore every day. She only does every now and then and her hips oscillate. The farmer’s father, on one of the rare occasions he’s opened his mouth in front of me, told me that it is an illness that affects ageing female dogs, particularly those who have never bred and also large ones - although Ruby isn’t, by any means, large.

The farmer still always comes to see me. His face has aged: the cheeks rounder, the nose bigger, although you only notice if you pay attention: the gaze always goes to the beard, which is
magnificent as ever and now fits better with the rest of his face.

The wellies don’t, though. I have been thinking and conclude that a man who is past his youth should never wear green bright wellies. But I don’t say anything and pretend nothing has changed, because I appreciate the farmer’s company.

I hope he appreciates mine.

Originally from Galicia in Spain and a resident of Glasgow in Scotland, Eva Ferry's fiction and non-fiction work has been published or is forthcoming in the journals Salome Lit, The Public Domain Review, The Creative Truth, Novelty, The Cold Creek Review and Jumbelbook, among others.