Tarry Flynn

by Patrick Kavanagh

  It was the same in matters concerning women. Nobody knew more than Tarry about the theories of love, and nobody was more foolish when it came to practising them.

  ‘Sound man, Eusebius,’ said Tarry leaning over the gate.

  Eusebius took the hay fork off his shoulder and used it to lean on. He glanced at the sky: ‘Do you think will it howl out?’

  ‘I think so,’ said Tarry.

  Tarry could see that his neighbour was bursting with delight at his misfortune, but he needed someone in whom to confide, and Eusebius had that soft, easy, feminine way with him which was so deceptive, so dangerous, and which could suck information out of the least confiding of men. Considering the matter, Tarry realized that Eusebius knew more about him than any other man or woman alive. How much did he know of Eusebius’ private life? Practically nothing. On the other hand was there such a lot to know? Tarry consoled himself with the thought that there was not. And the surprising thing, thought Tarry between the words they were speaking, was that Eusebius never came without some sensational gossip. He was always confessing his sins, but the sum did not add up to anything a man could remember.

  ‘Anything strange on your travels, Eusebius?’

  ‘Curse o’ God on the haporth, Tarry, if you haven’t something yourself. Why, did you hear something?’

  Tarry opened the gate and went to the middle of the road where he stood and stretched his arms and yawned as if filled with the greatest indifference to Drumnay and Dargan and life in general. ‘I had a mind to draw in the hay the morrow,’ he yawned.

  ‘Nothing like it, Tarry. Begod,’ said Eusebius looking narrowly at Tarry, ‘I have a kind of notion you heard something funny. Don’t be so bleddy close. Go and tell a fella.’ He prodded the gravel with the prongs of the fork. ‘You heard something?’

  ‘Don’t you know very well I’d tell you if I heard anything, Eusebius, don’t you know that?’

  ‘You might,’ nodded Eusebius doubtfully, and started to make a pattern on the road with the fork prongs.

  ‘Well, and it’s hardly worth me while telling you, I was only thinking you might have heard something about the Brady one. She wasn’t seen at Mass this past month, and people are talking, do you see?’

  ‘I see,’ said Eusebius as if he were hearing something very sensational.

  Tarry gave a sickly laugh designed to throw cold water on the story as a story. ‘And the funny thing is,’ said he with the same unhealthy laugh, ‘some people were trying to say that I was seen with her. Wouldn’t that make you laugh, heh? Of course it’s all Charlie’s doing – wouldn’t you say?’

  ‘Jabus, that’s a dread,’ said Eusebius, ‘that bates the little dish as the fellow said. And are you doing anything about it?’

  ‘Sure the thing isn’t worth talking about,’ said Tarry fluttering his hands to show the limit of carelessness. ‘Sure, Holy God… ’

  He stopped talking to let Paddy Callan who was mooching suspiciously on the other side of the hedge, pretending he was examining his oats, but trying to hear what was being said – a habit of his – pass.

  ‘It’s coming in nicely,’ sang out Eusebius with his affected gaiety to Paddy. ‘It should be in for the Fifteenth, Paddy?’

  ‘What’s that you said, young fella?’ inquired Paddy.

  ‘You have a good crop of oats, Paddy, except that wee spot on the scrugan that’s a bit short of itself.’

  ‘It’ll have to be doing,’ said Paddy philosophically.

  Tarry as usual was impatient to get rid of the intruder and showed it by signs that would be obvious to the blindest ass.

  Paddy took the hint, but before going winked at Eusebius as much as to say – ‘who’d think he had it in him?’

  ‘Yes –?’ said Eusebius to Tarry.

  ‘There’s no doubt about it I can’t help laughing when I think of it. Wouldn’t it make you laugh, Eusebius? now wouldn’t it?’

  Eusebius was very doubtful and disinclined to comfort his neighbour. ‘They say the woman’s word is law,’ he said.

  ‘Not always, Eusebius. You remember the case that was reported in the Anglo-Celt, and it was the man’s word that was taken. Come down the road a bit, I don’t want that mother of mine to be coming out. I’ll fight it to the last ditch. I’ll fight it.’

  ‘What else would you do? You’d need to get a first-class man.’

  ‘Oh, I know some of the young fellas, Eusebius, they wouldn’t be so dear.’

  Eusebius was emphatic that an experienced counsel would be necessary. ‘I could tell you your best plan only I don’t know enough about the case, Tarry. There’s no use in making up lies, you know.’

  ‘She can go to hell backwards,’ declared Tarry,‘ they can get nothing off me. You can’t take feathers off a frog, heh?’

  ‘You have Carlin’s.’

  ‘Maybe I have.’

  Eusebius put the fork on his shoulder and hurried off. ‘I might see you coming back,’ Tarry called after him.

  He could tell by the bones in the back of Eusebius’ neck which moved like the hips of a gamy woman that his neighbour was a happy man – happy in a next-door neighbour’s misfortune. Eusebius danced along the road kicking the pebbles before him. Tarry had to admit to himself that had their positions been reversed he would have been happy too. Hating one’s next-door neighbour was an essential part of a small farmer’s religion. Hate and jealousy made love – even the love of land – an exciting adventure.

  If any man of them in that country were to open his eyes, if the fog in which they lived lifted, they would be unable to endure the futility of it all. Their courage was the courage of the blind. But Tarry had seen beyond the fog the Eternal light shining on the stones.

  As he was clearing away the stones and rubbish from the haggard he thought the scene so enchanting that he sometimes felt that there must be something the matter with him. The three big nettles that grew in the ring of boulders upon which last year’s pikes of hay had stood were rich with the beauty of what is richly alive. The dust of last year’s hay and straw was so lovely it could almost make him want to prostrate himself upon it. Stones, clay, grass, the sunlight coming through the privet hedge. Why did he love such common things? He was ashamed of mentioning his love; these things were not supposed to be beautiful.

  He scraped the dusty straw with the shovel and looked with admiration at the clean brown floor of the haggard.

  He left the shovel standing against the hedge and stared across the townland towards his own fields. He could see the blue glint of the spraying stuff on the leaves of the potatoes and far in the distance of his farm the movements of the mare and her foal on the far side of a thick hedge.

  Old Molly Brady’s shadow passed along the horizon at the back of her house; she looked contented enough. He turned his eyes to the hills on his left and saw with delight Callan’s scabby field of turnips. He tried to find in the badness of this neighbour’s crop a counter-irritant for his own troubles but it was no use.

  He wandered into the cabbage garden to cool his mind in the ever-wet green cool leaves.

  Under the broad leaves of cabbages how cool

  Even in the middle of July the clay is –

  Like ice-cream.

  He nibbled at the caraway seeds that grew in the hedgerow running his mind back to the days of his peacefulness. It was like this that all terrible things happened to a man – casually. Thus a man might find himself with a broken neck or on trial for murder and he’d wonder how he arrived at such a place.

  So far the affair with Molly was only a rumour. Tarry himself only knew about it from the gossip of the neighbours. He had seen the girl and her mother since the rumour had gone abroad, and on one occasion had nearly got up enough courage to put it to the test. But he was afraid of putting things to the test; it was better to live in doubt – which is the same as hope – than to have all one’s doubts and fears proven well-founded.

  The last time he had been speaking to the girl Molly was
about three weeks before when she was in her usual good spirits, and her mother bantered him from the height behind the house as he spoke to Molly at the well.

  It might be put down as a remarkable fact that during all this time it never occurred to Tarry, or his mother for that matter, that the Bradys might be expecting someone – even Tarry – to marry the girl; that is, if there was anything the matter with her at all. At this moment the thought that the girl did want to get married flashed through Tarry’s thoughts, but his egotistical mind could no more entertain it seriously than it could anything in the shape of genuine sympathy for anyone but himself. He had moments in which he saw himself as he was, but he knew that he had his justification. There were some people who were fit for nothing else but to sympathize, but a man like himself had a dispensation from such side-tracking activities.

  A man who had seen the ecstatic light of Life in stones, on the hills, in leaves of cabbages and weeds was not bound by the pity of Christ.

  Or was he?

  If he were, how much that was great in literature and art would be lost. He justified himself by the highest examples he knew of.

  Is self-pity not pity for mankind as seen in one man? He had it all off. But, O God! if he could only transport himself down the years, three years into the future when all would be forgotten. The present tied him in its cruel knots and dragged him through bushes and briars, stones and weeds on his mouth and nose.

  They got half the hay home the next day, and would have done better seeing that Paddy Reilly had sent a man with a hay slide, but the rain came on in the early evening when the pike was at its widest. Tarry, who had heard that the wireless had said the evening before that there would be no rain, was yet not caught entirely unprepared. He had three nice lumps of cocks of bottom hay in the meadow right beside the haggard, and with this bottom hay they were able to put a good heart in the pike. Over the mound they spread a winnowing sheet, and when they went in for their tea Tarry was trying to think of all the men whose hay pikes had been caught at their widest in the downpour and with no winnowing sheets or bottom hay near at hand.

  ‘I think,’ said he to his mother later, ‘I’ll go up as far as Carlin’s and see about them heifers that’s in calf.’ In-calf heifers and cows were not subject to the blackleg, and it was this class of animal that the Flynns had put to graze on the new farm since the bullocks took the disease and died.

  The mother felt that Tarry was now taking her advice and attending to his place, but when she saw him go to the top of the dresser when he thought she wasn’t looking and slip an old book into his pocket she wasn’t so sure. She said nothing, for Paddy Reilly’s man had jumped up just then saying: ‘It’s time for me to be looking for feet.’

  Tarry threw a corn sack over his shoulders and took his bicycle out of the car-house. The mother came out and said: ‘If they’re lying don’t put them up, for I don’t think there’s any danger of them having the red water, and some of them are heavy in calf.’

  Tarry laid his bicycle against the stone fence of the first of his fields alongside the lane that led to Carlin’s and Joe Finnegan’s, and was about to spring over the fence when Jemmy Carlin, the silent sneerer of the family, came rushing from his street with a rusty graip in his hands which he had poised like a javelin and bawled: ‘Trespassers will be prosecuted, trespassers will be prosecuted.’

  Tarry stood taking in the situation. He had plenty of experience with Joe Finnegan, but somehow this looked more dangerous, more like business, than anything Joe had done.

  He got down off the stone fence and stood with the bicycle between him and his approaching enemy.

  ‘I’ll put the grains of this graip in your guts, you grabber, if you put a foot inside me fields.’

  ‘What fields?’ said Tarry, wondering.

  ‘My fields, avic’

  ‘Didn’t we buy them, Jemmy?’

  ‘Buy my fields,’ sneered Jemmy, ‘sure yous couldn’t buy my good fields. You bought Tom’s farm, but you didn’t buy mine. By God, you didn’t buy mine, and you couldn’t buy mine.’ The man settled some mossy stones on the fence with an air of ownership. ‘Buy my good fields, buy my good fields,’ he kept saying.

  ‘Let me drive the cattle to the drink atself.’

  ‘I drove them to the field with the drink in it, avic, and I may as well tell you that if they put their noses into one or other of these two good fields of mine they’ll calve before their time.’

  ‘But how am I going to get to them?’ Tarry appealed.

  ‘Go round the lane the way that any dacent man id go.’

  With that Jemmy moved off along the fence, shifting a stone here and picking up a dead branch there while Tarry stood by his bicycle beginning to understand the mistake they had made in purchasing the farm without having the boundaries properly defined. He suddenly remembered too that day in Shercock when he had bought a second-hand copy of the poems of Byron and how Eusebius had said it was ‘bleddy fine’, but himself bought an Ordnance Map of Drumnay and Miskin.

  Tarry was forced to walk with his bicycle round the narrow, rutted, muddy lane that led past the back of Finnegan’s house, and down along the field of potatoes. It had been one of his causes for thankfulness that he didn’t need to use this old lane about which the Finnegans were forever grumbling. The gate that had to be closed every time you went through would be enough to keep the lawyers in trade for the rest of their lives. The lane at the back of Finnegan’s led through the bottom of a dunghill, and the briars that hung overhead were often decorated with the bits of dung which caught there when Joe was flinging dung out of the cow house.

  Tarry got safely past the bottom of Carlin’s garden and he hardly cared what happened to him as he picked his steps and sometimes had to carry his bicycle over some parts of the lane. He knew that he would have a poor chance of getting past Finnegan’s with the five small girls and the mother who was so starved for gossip that she would be liable to spot anything in the shape of news. The row he had had with Joe Finnegan was liable to flare up again. Joe was sure to have heard about the mistake in the boundary and would be delighted with the chance of pouncing on a man who was down.

  Tarry was surprised and grateful when Joe who was barrowing rotten mangolds from his haggard and dumping them on the side of the pane behind the house merely gave a loud forced laugh as he passed. ‘Oh, ho, the big farmer,’ he cried wildly. ‘Hah, hah, hah, hah,’ he laughed.

  Tarry hurried on expecting every moment to have a stone or at least a rotten mangold hopped off his head, but the man let him pass on, apparently contented to be a spectator of a most enjoyable play.

  Tarry didn’t need to make a close examination of the property to know how much of it was his. The two best fields which comprised more than the half and which alone gave access to the lane at the point west of Carlin’s had been fenced off ostentatiously by Jemmy Carlin that day with large green whitethorn bushes, and the cattle had been driven without concern for their condition into the other section of the property. They were lying in the wet soaking mud, bedraggled looking as if they had been roughly driven – which no doubt they were – out of the two good fields. There were bits of briar and bushes stuck in their tails showing that they had been forced through the heavily bushed gaps out of which the bushes had not been first removed.

  Three of the five fields which remained were bounded for a considerable length by Finnegan’s, the last thing Tarry or his mother would want. The five fields were composed of soil as poor as was to be found in the county Cavan – which was saying a good deal, and without the two good ones to balance them out they would be a millstone around any purchaser’s neck. The cattle hated the sour grass which grew in them, and the only saving feature was the drink in them. Indeed, so wet was the soil that even in the middle of summer they could get a drink from the pools that formed on the spongy heights.

  What would Tarry tell his mother? It was on his advice she had paid over the bulk of the purchase money – two hund
red pounds – and it was doubtful if they could get any of that money back now. Didn’t they buy it with their eyes open would be said.

  ‘Well, how are they?’ she inquired when he returned.

  ‘All fine,’ he answered.

  ‘That atself. There’s a bit of rice there in the pot that I made for you, you must be tired after pitching that hay. The best of a farm if it was minded. Two of as good a fields… ’ Tarry was stooped over the pot of rice, trying to forget.

  The mother stayed in the kitchen making bread. Tarry went upstairs and sat beside the old Howe sewing machine – the father of all sewing machines – in the corner of the room facing the front window.

  This corner was his Parnassus, the constant point above time. Winter and summer since his early boyhood he had sat here and the lumps of candle-grease on the scaly table of the old machine told a story.

  He carried out his usual ritual, for the Muse is attracted and held by the little gestures just as women are. Beside him he arranged the verses which he knew would excite him – at the right moment. He had Madame Bovary within reach. His method of getting a thrill out of this book and of all exciting books was not by reading them through, but by opening them at random and giving a quick look inside. Then he would shut the book again lest the magic should escape. He crossed his legs, got out the puce pencil and the blue notepaper and let his mind become passive.

  A thrush was singing his plagiarized version of the blackbird’s song in one of the poplars behind the house. Callan’s hill, all white with Michaelmas daisies, looked in at him. For a moment his passive mind was being wooed by the clump of black sallies at the bottom of the garden. In among the sallies on the shaky scraw there were water-hens hopping.