Relief works

The road started at the crossroads above Ballinaboy and went nowhere at all. The engineer from the Board of Works had drawn it on a map in Dublin, a straight line across the bog, and it ended in the middle of the bog because that was where the money ran out.

Forty men worked on it that winter for a pound of Indian meal a day. Tomás Joyce was twenty-two, a stonemason’s son, and the only man on the crew who knew how to lay a proper drain under a road. The ganger said it didn’t matter. Nobody would ever use it. Tomás laid the drain anyway.