Tiller of a Fertile Small Patch : AFTER RAIN: Stories.<i> By William Trevor (Viking: $22.95, 213 pp.)</i>

A William Trevor story characteristically begins with the rush of a train hurtling through a grade crossing. Characteristically, it ends with the long receding whistle of the train a mile or two away. Rousing rush and dying whistle; in between, the landscape sorrows and gleams.

Take a few of the beginnings in this new collection. “Violet married the piano tuner when he was a young man. Belle married him when he was old” introduces an ingenious and moving tale of love and mortality. “Waking on a warm, bright morning in early October, Catherine found herself a widow” opens a meditation on the tension between mourning and living.

At the start of “A Friendship,” two little boys fill their pompous father’s golf bag with wet cement; the story goes on to perform a wry three-part marital dance of fidelity and betrayal. “The Lost Ground” begins with magic whimsy--St. Rosa of Viterbo appears to a Protestant boy tending apples in his father’s orchard--and ends not merely with tragedy but national tragedy. It is one of Trevor’s most brilliant stories and among the best things ever written about the Northern Ireland schism.

Trevor, the Anglo-Irish author of 11 novels and 11 collections of short stories and novellas, is approaching 70. Seemingly, it is a small patch he tills. He writes Irish rural conformities and rebellions, middle-class English romantic stresses, an occasional shocker--last year’s “Felicia’s Story” where a prissy English sex-murderer is undone by an indomitable Irish girl--and, always, the fortitude and lonely illumination of old age. He tills it and tills it and, like the few acres of French vineyard that produce Le Montrachet, it yields a familiar astonishment.

His short stories have been compared to Chekhov’s, as tends to happen to the best practitioners of the art. Where the comparison comes closest is in the galactic desolation that is glimpsed, as if inadvertently, beneath a stoic tenderness--one that hardly another writer today is capable of.

Some of the stories are perceptive and ingenious without quite reaching astonishment. “A Day” is a touching account of a woman undone by alcohol and the discovery of her husband’s long-ago infidelity. In “A Bit of Business,” two small-time thugs come to realize they are not bad enough to make it big.

“Child’s Play,” on the other hand is a complex geometry. Here, as elsewhere, Trevor writes on an edge between the comic and the tragic. A boy and girl live with her father and his mother after they are divorced from their respective mates. Drawing on soap operas, movies and overheard recrimination, the children play a touchingly maladroit game of adultery, with comic embraces and assignations at an imaginary grand hotel. It ends when the girl’s mother decides to reclaim her. The fruit of adult heedlessness is children’s pain.

“The easy companionship that had allowed them to sip cocktails and sign the register of the Hotel Grand Splendide had been theirs by chance, a gift thrown out from other people’s circumstances,” Trevor writes. “Helplessness was their natural state.”

The strongest stories, as is true of most of the author’s work over the past dozen years, are set in rural Ireland. Every detail is visible and achingly precise. We know exactly where we are, we are strapped in securely as if for flight, and we fly.

“The Potato Dealer” is a perfect three-part fugue. A widow lives with her farmer brother in a grudging and begrudged servitude. Her daughter, Ellie, is pregnant by a visiting priest, a lyrical young man who stands for beauty in her penurious world.

The family shame is intolerable; the uncle pays the local potato dealer to marry her. There is advantage on both sides. Aside from the money, which will buy him a new truck, the dealer will move in and eventually inherit the farm. The farmer will get some much-needed help in his fields and a simulacrum of family honor; the real father is not to be mentioned.

This dour bass line is broken by Ellie’s soprano. Her child is the sign of her enduring love for the priest; after years of obedient silence, she scandalizes everyone by announcing his name. Then a third voice enters. It is the potato dealer’s. He has been honorable, gentle with Ellie, affectionate with the child, and now he gives voice to his humiliation. He speaks no more than a few oblique words to Ellie but for a moment--perhaps longer, Trevor doesn’t say--her private world is breached by the pain of a world adjacent.

“The Piano Tuner’s Wives” is another piece that suggests music as much as storytelling. A blind piano tuner marries when young, disappointing a beautiful woman who loves him. It is not just disappointment for Belle but humiliating bafflement. Violet, the wife, is older and uglier; when she dies after 30 years, Belle marries the widower.

Only then does she realize her predecessor’s accomplishment. Violet spoke beautifully; she described everything that was to be seen with a poetry that made her husband’s world enchanted. What use was Belle’s beauty to a blind man, when he had a wife who could render a primrose as “like straw or butter with a spot of color in the middle”?

As a new wife will redecorate a house, Belle redecorates her husband’s imagination. Everything that Violet had described, she describes differently. The changes themselves didn’t matter, Trevor writes, “what mattered was the damage done to a dream.” But no judgment is made in this wise and ravishing story. “Belle would win in the end because the living always do. And that seemed fair also, since Violet had won in the beginning and had had the better years.”

There are other splendid stories, but the most powerful and astonishing is “The Lost Ground.” Trevor sets it in a Protestant district in County Armagh. The farmers are sober and industrious family men, and the Leeson family is much looked up to. Leeson is prosperous and upstanding, his son-in-law is the local minister and his 16-year-old son, Milton, his devoted and reliable helper. Every year, on the anniversary of the Battle of the Boyne, the farmers celebrate the ancient Protestant victory by marching bowler-hatted into the nearby Catholic village. No words are exchanged, and they march off again to hold an uproarious and alcoholic picnic.

One day Milton is approached by a ghostly woman who kisses him, tells him she is St. Rosa, delivers a message of reconciliation and instructs him to be brave. Milton consults the minister, who orders him to forget it. He goes to the village priest, who gets rid of him--embarrassed and secretly indignant at the idea that the Protestants, who have everything, should be visited by one of his people’s saints.

Up to this point it is a beautifully satiric tale, delicately balanced between realism and parable. Then it turns grim. Milton preaches St. Rosa’s message through the countryside; his family locks him up. His brother, who belongs to a murderous Protestant militia gang, comes down from Belfast with a henchman. Milton is found shot to death in his bedroom.

The ending is harsh, unbearable. The parents are frozen in grief and horror. They and the community are even more frozen in righteousness. The country’s rigid tragedy is voiced in the last lines, recalling Yeats’ “great hatred, little room”:

“The family would not ever talk about the day, but through their pain they would tell themselves that Milton’s death was the way things were, the way things had to be: That was their single consolation. Lost ground had been regained.”