No Country for Young Men

by Julia O'Faolain

  ‘Who is he?’ James asked the woman.

  ‘Teaches at Queen’s University in Belfast,’ she told him.

  James was startled to find the man a colleague. ‘I thought he was a gunman.’

  The woman laughed. ‘Him? No, they’re much less bellicose. Here’s a chap escaped from Long Kesh Internment Camp.’ She swivelled her chair backwards towards the next table where a small, nutty-faced leprechaun of a fellow was drinking Guinness. The leprechaun acknowledged the woman’s introduction by slipping his hand into her blouse.

  ‘California,’ he said to James, ‘is that where you’re from? That’s a place I’d love to go, now. They tell me it’s a grand, warm, comfortable class of a place entirely.’ His hand travelled across the woman’s breast.

  ‘You’re far gone,’ she told him, taking the hand and slapping it like a child’s.

  ‘Not half as far as I’d like to be.’ The leprechaun winked at James. ‘How do you like our colleens?’ He put a hand on the woman’s bottom. ‘Isn’t she a fine hault? Mind, she doesn’t take me seriously. But she’s making a mistake. Oh aye, she is. There’s big goods in small parcels, as they say.’ Another wink. ‘Big surprises.’

  Delicately, James switched his attention to O’Malley, whom Kinlen had supplied with a fresh drink. O’Malley’s was a Tudor face, James thought: lean and long with a burst of hair rising above it like a bird’s crest. The lower lip surprised. Normal in repose, it grew prehensile in action, shooting forward like an anteater’s proboscis to scoop up prey. What the lip was geared to scoop were stray drops of liquor which it promptly funnelled back inside itself. Mobile as a second tongue, it looked as though it might be equipped with taste buds. O’Malley drained his drink, squinted at the empty glass for some seconds, then turned to James.

  ‘Corny’s been telling me about your film,’ he said gravely, ‘and I have a proposal to make. I would like to hire out the services to you of my great-aunt Judith.’

  4

  In the mornings, long ago, remembered Sister Judith, you’d be loath to put your foot out of the bedclothes for fear of the cold. Bridie used to come round the bedrooms with baskets full of kippeens for kindling and candle ends and bits of bacon rind to help coax the wet fuel to take. Downstairs, the fire in the kitchen was always banked for the night and had not been out since their father had moved into this house. He had lit it first with a few embers brought from his father’s house, so it was a very old fire, maybe a hundred years old. For all that, the kitchen could be freezing in the mornings and flooded when the rain was heavy. Bridie bailed out water with the help of Seamus and a couple of brooms. Upstairs, skirts flapping and boots unlaced, she raced to get the fires lit before the cold had her paralytic. It would freeze a snipe, she’d say and blow with puffed cheeks like a trumpet-playing angel. ‘God blosht the wet turf,’ she whispered and blasted it herself with spittly breath.

  Window panes were fogged and sometimes frozen with sunbursts of ice into which you could read signs and weapons. Swords. Monstrances. The water in the ewer was frozen as often as not. Judith boiled a saucepanful and tipped it in to take the edge off the rest. Cold water made her skin peel.

  Porridge for breakfast was followed by bread and tea. Her father complained if there were lumps. He was given to looking backward and kept remembering how poor Eamonn had complained of the tea he’d had to drink while on the run. The country people shared what they had with him but had no notion how to make tea. They kept it stewing in a teapot laid for warmth on a few pieces of glowing turf. Imagine the ignorance. Sure it would be pure tannin. Take the stomach off ye. That was the way they liked it though. Bitter. So strong a mouse could dance on it. Knownothings! Eamonn had complained of the difficulty of dealing with them. They’d never show what they were thinking to an outsider, only lead him on, polite and restrained, then go their own way. Couldn’t get it through their skulls that now the outsiders were their own people. That was what oppression did: created suspicion. Obstinacy. Eamonn used to curse their carelessness. They’d leave guns to rust and turn up late for a drill or even an ambush. Farmers had no knowledge of clocks. They went by the sun. Lloyd George had been reported as saying that giving self-government to Poles was like giving a clock to a monkey.

  ‘Maybe it was that same slackness got poor Eamonn killed?’

  He’d been killed fighting in the mountains. In an ambush. Mountainy men were a race apart.

  ‘Lloyd George feels the very same about the rest of us,’ Kathleen lit into their father. ‘What do you want quoting him for? That’s the slave mind: always ready to condemn our own. Eamonn wouldn’t be proud of you.’

  ‘Oh faith, I don’t know which of the two of ye, Owen or yourself, will be the slave,’ said their Da, ‘you’ve a tongue so sharp it would cut rope. That poor man, for all the Greek and Hebrew he studied, will be no match for it. A sharp tongue in a woman is a match for all the ancient tongues, ha ha!’

  His jokes were pathetic but a way of making peace. He was proud of Owen’s learning. Uselessness gave it price. Owen had been in a Jesuit seminary for a few years but had thrown it up to join the fighting.

  ‘You’re not going out?’ the Da asked Judith who had put on her hat and coat.

  ‘The First Friday.’

  ‘In that rain?’

  ‘It’s only a step.’

  ‘You’ll catch your death, Miss. Listen to me. You’ve got the weakness in your chest whether it’s shown itself or not. Didn’t your mother die of it? To hell with your Nine Fridays. What do you need making novenas for anyway, tormenting Almighty God? Don’t you think he has better things to do than to listen to the ulagoanings of females? What are you praying for anyway? What is it you lack?’

  He really wanted to know. Applying over his head to God showed lack of confidence. ‘Well?’

  ‘Ah, leave her go,’ said Kathleen, and nodded firmly to Judith who was hovering, upset by their father’s tone. He had grown pettish since Eamonn’s death, feeling that in one way or another they were all fixing to leave him.

  ‘I’ll take the umbrella,’ Judith conciliated and ran out into the rain. Her boots squelched and the bike skidded. The umbrella was useless so she hid it by the gate.

  The next trouble was the red setter, Bran, who ran after the bike.

  ‘Go home outa that. Bad dog! Home.’

  He wagged his tail, paused but then raced forward. Turning to roar back at him, she felt the bike skidding and gave up. She’d tie him to a tethering stone by the church. He’d be drenched but whose fault was that? Twice before he had followed her up the nave, cool as you please, and given scandal by walking inquisitively up to the altar to where the priest was saying mass. Horrified titters unnerved the congregation as the red-plumed animal, scandalous in his innocence, poked a damp snout under the celebrant’s skirts. An altar boy had grabbed and walked him in custody down the nave, demanding in a piercing whisper that his owner should come forward. Judith had been ready to sink through the floor.

  ‘So you can stay there now. Sit.’

  The soft resignation in his eyes reminded her of the Da.

  Coats steamed in the warm church. Judith had no precise intention to pray for. She was making the Nine Fridays for the same reason as Eamonn had joined the Volunteers and Owen the Jesuits: to stretch herself, to find a discipline. She had divined these aims from hints they let drop. The church smelled of wet tweed, leather, bad breath, the guttering candles which sank into molten pools in the sockets of their brass containers. She put a coin in the box and lit a fresh taper before deciding why, then remembered her father and decided it was for him. Let it ward off all evils threatening their house and protect its weakest inmate, the Da.

  Eamonn’s death had brought his loneness home to him. He felt – said he felt – superfluous, left over stupidly when the boy he had been working for was dead. What was the good of his success, the pub and custom he’d been building up, if there was nobody to take it over? Owen and Kathleen didn’t want it Seamus wa
s going to go back to medical school if the fighting ever finished. Maybe, he hoped, Judith might marry some steady fellow who wouldn’t mind standing behind a counter?

  ‘For God’s sake, can’t you sell it when you’re too old to run it?’ Eamonn had demanded.

  The Da had been outraged. Eamonn and himself had had terrible fights. The Da remembered them now, going over them uselessly while he sat looking into the fire or having little nips in the pub That was his latest habit and everyone knew that a publican who took his own medicine didn’t last long.

  The worst was the time he discovered that Eamonn was with the Volunteers. Dirty Fleming let it out It had been a Hallowe’en Young fellows kept coming to the door dressed up as ghosts Then Dirty Fleming came by for his supper. He was a tramp but a steady one. He had his regular days when people fed him. Nobody knew where he slept.

  Eamonn was blacking his face with burnt cork intending to go out himself and call at the house of a girl he liked. Dirty Fleming, who was said to have been a Fenian in his day, and could be any age from seventy to a hundred and ten, said he wouldn’t like to meet a black face like that of a dark night.

  ‘Though there’s plenty driving up and down the country in their Crossley Tenders with their faces blacked and tisn’t for sport either, God blasht them!’ He spat into the fire. Curfew might well be a problem to an old man like him of no fixed abode He had no teeth and his words were hard to follow. Kathleen cut the crusts off bread for him and he soaked it in tea, sucking this between his gums and feeding himself from a saucer ‘Ah well,’ he said to Eamonn, ‘I hope yous give them buggers a run for their money. Yous’ll need better fighting weapons than the yokes I seen yez drilling with beyond in the West field’ He laughed gently to himself, gleeful at having seen what he had. ‘I seen yez,’ he grinned, ‘sabre-charging with broom handles’ His grin was as ramshackle as their weapons.

  Eamonn said ‘goodnight all’, and was out of the door before his father could say a word. The girls tried to divert Fleming to memories of the distant conspiracies he’d known himself: hopes which had come to nothing, a litany of ineffectual planning, betrayal, imprisonment. While he mused over them, mashing soda bread between his gums, their father was silent: maybe he’d guessed all along? Eamonn had used his courtship of the girl he’d just gone to see to cover too many absences. It was happening in half the families around. Parents were like ostriches, willing away knowledge.

  Kathleen gave the old man a cup of beef tea. Between slurps, the dates of defeats dropped from his lips like the sorrowful mysteries of the rosary: 1848, 1867 … the Phoenix Park Murders … the Manchester Martyrs …

  Suddenly their father lit into him: ‘How fair ye never managed to do any good for the country! How fair ye were such bunglers that the young fellows today have to start from scratch, risking their necks all over again! What good were ye but a lot of cods? Idle lasthers! Windy!’

  The old man stopped chewing. Embarrassment paralysed them all. Kathleen pressed her hand on the shoulder of the insulted old Fleming, who was trying to mobilize his bones to depart in dudgeon.

  She whispered. ‘He didn’t know about Eamonn. Pay no attention. He’ll be mortified in the morning.’

  Judith couldn’t help enjoying the drama. Awful, really, but how not to be excited by the shock pulsing in her father’s cheek and in the aghast, bloodshot roll of the two men’s eyes? They refused to meet each other but, rambling in different directions, settled on things like saucepans as though they planned burning holes in them.

  The Da was out of step. Always had been, she suddenly saw. What he’d done and could never be made to see he’d done was insult a notion which was the cornerstone of Republicanism. It was – she groped her way towards seeing it herself – part of an argument which ran like this: the English had no right being here and never had had. This was proven by the fact that the Irish – Dirty Fleming among them – had always and always struggled against them. Their presence was therefore an interim, doomed, haphazard thing, no more disgracing to the native Irish than the presence of a cow who broke into your garden or of a neighbour who made a habit of walking through it. You had to stop cow and neighbour and assert your rights from time to time to prevent them establishing a right of way. That was the value of the old struggles. They kept us from being slaves who assent to their servitude. But the Da couldn’t see that. Didn’t want to. Pieties, he said, annoyed him. Hot air. He’d gone to America to make money and had convinced himself that you were what you had and the rest was blather. Now, twitching his shoulders inside his jacket and feeling at odds with the rest of them, he mumbled about how words never hurt anyone, so why not shake hands? They sidled towards a truce. Fleming accepted his usual sup of porter to warm him against the elements and Kathleen produced a pair of old boots with wear in them yet. He accepted these too. He couldn’t afford to stand on dignity.

  When he’d said good night, they heard him in the yard cursing a gang of Hallowe’eners who were singing their rhyme and baiting him. His voice broke in hoarse, spittly barks. ‘Ye have no respect … for age and infirmity … Domn and blosht! Give me back my stick. Where is it? Damn yez. I can’t see. Let go …’

  Bran began to bark and set off an answering chorus of barks and curses up and down the hill.

  Judith, pierced by the imperfections of the world, imagined the rheumaticky old Fleming, spittle-threads escaping from his wobbly mouth, trudging into the wind. Where would he sleep? She felt pity for his fragile bones and imagined taking him in her arms and warming him in her own well-covered bed. But the too-vivid notion disgusted her. She had insufficient charity, pushing him away in fancy, despite her nobler strivings. He’d end in the workhouse and after that in a pauper’s grave. The inevitability of the thing choked her.

  ‘What’s up with you, Miss?’ Her father was still on the boil. ‘Weeping for the sins of your father, is it? And for what,’ he roared at Kathleen, ‘did you want giving away my second-best boots? Nobody in this family thinks anything of property, only how to get rid of it hand over fist. Saint Francis of Assisi isn’t in it with ye. Yez have him bet. He divested himself of what was his but ye’re so charitable ye have to give handouts of what doesn’t belong to ye at all. It’s easy seen no one of ye ever worked for a day’s wages in yeer lives. There’s Eamonn off playing soldiers with a broom handle. God help us! Soldiers. Make a cat laugh. But work? Oh no. They’ve no respect for it or what it earns. Is it out drilling he is this minute?’ he wanted to know. ‘In the wet? It would be the price of him, and him with a weak chest.’

  ‘He’s over at Eileen Cronin’s,’ Kathleen told him. She was making porridge for the morning and letting him have his say. He might as well get it all out now that old Fleming was gone and Eamonn not yet back. Judith could read her thoughts.

  ‘Eileen Cronin has a broad back,’ said their father sarcastically. ‘I thought he was leppin’ mad with the love for her he was there so often. But now it seems he wasn’t there at all. Tell me,’ he asked in sudden anxiety. ‘Does he only drill or has he been out doing real fighting? Taking risks?’

  ‘You’d better ask him that yourself.’ Kathleen kept stirring away.

  The Da poured himself another drink. He had clearly no intention of going to bed before Eamonn got home and Eamonn would of course stay out late in the hope of dodging him.

  ‘Bloody heroes!’ he said contemptuously and rattled the poker against the hearth. ‘A coupla years back they were fighting so as not to have to fight! Out demonstrating against the conscription. Yelling neither King nor Kaiser and throwing stones at the peelers. And now look at them. Broom handles! Shouting the day after the fair. Codology.’ He was working himself up.

  Kathleen took the whiskey bottle. ‘You’ve had enough of that,’ she said. But this was a mistake. The quiet man’s wrath was up. The worm had turned.

  ‘Give me that!’ He seized it, his hand trembling. ‘Your poor mother, God rest her, is dead and there’s nobody to say whether I can drink myself in
to the grave to join her.’

  ‘Ah wisha aren’t you full of pity for yourself!’ Kathleen was as cold as ice. ‘You’re terrible mawkish!’ she said, using her brogue for derision.

  The brogue was something you could thin or thicken, put off and take on. It was part of them but not an essential part. Judith and Kathleen had been taught elocution in the convent and the Da had lived for ten years in America where he had learned to talk like a Yank, a Wop or a Polack. When they were little he had done turns for them, acting out jokes about these funny foreigners, describing their antics in a saga which they ended by knowing as well as he did. A lone adult in a house of children, he had been closer to them than was usual in families. This made Eamonn’s betrayal hard to take. For it was a betrayal in this house that it might not have been in others up or down the street. Joining the Volunteers was to turn your back on the Da’s ideal of personal prowess which he had spelled out for them time and again. It was a dream which haunted him because he had been unfaithful to it. He had settled for too little, turning away from the vast, uncertain lure of America to bring home the small prizes which he had won too easily: a pretty wife and the money to buy a tidy pub by the age of thirty. It was not by quitting so soon that the Rockefellers had made their fortune nor the Fords. Dissatisfaction gnawed at him and his children knew he was dreaming old, obsolete dreams when he sat warming his toes at the fire and staring into its red, uncompromising gullet. If he hadn’t sold his share in a Boston grocery store, might he own a chain of stores today?

  ‘Maybe we shoulda stayed,’ he wondered often. ‘Your mother might not have died. They have grand doctors over there.’