Tarry Flynn

by Patrick Kavanagh

  The net of earthly intrigue could not catch him here. He was on a level with the horizon – and it was a level on which there was laughter. Looking down at his own misfortunes he thought them funny now. From this height he could even see himself losing his temper with the Finnegans and the Carlins and hating his neighbours and he moved the figures on the landscape, made them speak, and was filled with joy in his own power.

  The rattle of buckets, rolling of barrels under

  Down-spouts, the leading in of foals

  Were happenings caught in wonder

  The stones white with rain were living souls.

  He was in his secret room in the heart now. Having entered he could be bold. A man hasn’t to be on his best behaviour in Heaven; he can kick the furniture around. He can stoop down and pick up lumps of mortality without being born again to die.

  Tarry rose from his chair and began to search under his bed. He dragged out a large black wooden box, one of the old boxes in which his mother’s trousseau had come. This box was filled with papers and faded documents – old letters, rent receipts, bills, the Anglo-Celt for the year 1905.

  He pulled out a bundle of the papers and spread them on the bed and then got sitting beside them very caressingly.

  Here were two long damp-stained envelopes. Within was the correspondence over the right o’ way to Finnegan’s well which had been such a bone of contention between the families forty years before. The Flynns won that law suit – and as was often the case with the winners they were more bitter than the losers, and Tarry’s grandfather had encouraged him to carry on the feud. Tarry had been taught how mean and low the Finnegans were when in fact they were only amusing. One of the letters from the solicitor for the Finnegans said: ‘My client denies the alleged assault on your wife. When your wife came to the well my client remonstrated with her for leaving the gate to the well open so that the cattle in the fields could go down and pollute the spring. My client absolutely denies that she pulled your wife’s hair out; the hairs, if any, which were found on the bushes were not hairs from your wife’s head but from the tails of the cattle which your wife’s carelessness caused to get down to the well.’

  When he was replacing the letters in their envelopes he noticed another small note inside. Taking it out he found that it was a letter from his uncle Petey dated nineteen nineteen and addressed from West Africa to Tarry’s mother. It was a pleasant childish hand much faded now, but Tarry could make out that the man was asking for money in the most oblique way possible. He had nine hundred and ninety pounds he said and all he wanted was the other ten to buy some great bargain – something to do with a mine. How his mother must have sneered at that letter.

  ‘Holy smoke,’ said Tarry dreamingly aloud. He put the correspondence back in the box and shoved it under the bed with his foot. Then he sat down at the machine again and lit a candle.

  He wrote about his own room:

  Ten by twelve

  And a low roof,

  If I stand by the side-wall

  My head feels the reproof.

  Five holy pictures

  Hang on the walls:

  The Virgin and Child,

  St Anthony of Padua,

  Leo the XIII,

  St Patrick and die Little Flower.

  His mother had been out of the house a few minutes talking to somebody at the gate. Presently she walked slowly towards the dunghill, and as she passed the window Tarry knew that she had heard something. She came in in the company of Bridie who had the milk with her, and having put the vessel on the bottom step of the stairs cried in a broken voice:

  ‘Tarry, Tarry, Tarry. Are you in or are you out?’

  He rattled on the floor with his feet.

  ‘Oh, what in the wide earthly world are we to do at all?’ she cried, and there was no fake about her emotion now. If all belonging to her had died suddenly she could not have been more disturbed. Tarry jumped up from his seat and went down to console her.

  ‘What is the matter, mother?’

  ‘God! O God! O God!’ she lamented, ‘and you told me that you saw the map and knew everything!’

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘Everything’s the matter, everything’s the matter. Oh, I was better dead and in the boneyard than have to put up with this. Oh, it’s me that’s to be pitied if ever a woman was to be pitied!’

  ‘Try to pull yourself together,’ said Tarry. ‘Is it over Carlin’s?’

  ‘Is it over Carlin’s? Lord! O Lord! Oh I was better dead and buried, a thousand times better.’

  Bridie, straining the milk in the dairy, beckoned to her brother to come outside and let the temper wear off the mother. ‘It’s the only cure for it,’ she said.

  They sat together on a bag of bran in the dairy, and Bridie confessed to her brother for the first time that the parish of Dargan, and the people in it, was no place for a civilized man or woman. ‘A girl was better sell herself openly on the streets of a city,’ she declared.

  ‘What do you think of the Molly one?’ Tarry asked.

  ‘What the hell about it?’ said Bridie quietly. ‘What the hell do you care if you had nothing to do with her, and even if you had for that matter.’ They listened. ‘She’s slowing down a bit now. Don’t say one word when you go up now.’

  ‘Not a word,’ Tarry promised.

  The mother’s crying and sighing died down and the brother and sister went up to the kitchen, moving about the floor on tip-toes and saying nothing.

  Tarry was being very good but he could not restrain himself from taking a nip out of the cake of raisin bread that stood on the dresser. His sister grinned her disapproval, but Tarry ate away, and afterwards took a drink out of the cream jug where the fresh milk had been put for the breakfast.

  Bridie was disgusted. ‘You’ll start her off again,’ she whispered viciously.

  ‘Leave us alone,’ he said.

  The clock ticked on in the room. The cat climbed up on the dresser and began to fumble among the plates.

  ‘Put that cat down,’ said the mother, raising her head from her knees.

  They were half way through the Rosary when the mother knelt straight up and listened. Tarry awoke and listened too. A motor car was coming slowly up the Drumnay road, its slow purr ominous, like news of death.

  Tarry changed colours. The mother sat up and stuck her feet in her shoes. They waited anxiously to see if the car would go past the gate. Next thing they heard the rattle of the gate and a man’s voice guiding the driver who was driving through to turn the car in the street.

  ‘Father, Son and Holy Ghost!’ prayed the mother, ‘did something happen to one of these in Shercock? One trouble never comes alone.’

  Tarry dashed to the door. Bridie took the vessel from the foot of the stairs and ran up with it.

  The headlights of the car swung round catching Tarry in the doorway. The disturbed hens cackled on their roosts. The mother terrified was frozen to the tiles of the hearth praying ‘Father, Son and Holy Ghost, Father, Son and Holy Ghost. God protect everybody’s rearing.’

  ‘Are you the man I heard so much about from your mother whenever she took the notion of answering my letters?’ a loud affable voice sang as the figure of a man moved in the enlarging light of the car’s lamps towards the door.

  ‘Bad luck to him into hell and out of it, it’s your uncle,’ his mother whispered viciously.

  He was well enough dressed, better than Tarry was, but very disreputable. If it had been anyone else but a relation Tarry would possibly have thought him a man to be avoided. He led his tramp uncle into the house and without waiting for his sister to welcome him ran to her and shook her hand: ‘How are you, Mary?’ Then he added: ‘My God, but you aged a lot, Mary.’

  The mother was inclined to feel relieved that the news wasn’t worse. ‘Hang his coat on the back of the door, Bridie.’

  She herself took his old suitcase and weighing it in her hand left it under the stairs.

  The taximan outsid
e blew his horn and this reminded the uncle of something: ‘Mary, will you go out and pay that driver the few shillings he’s owed. I have no small change on me.’

  She nodded her head sadly and took two half-crowns off the dresser and went outside. The uncle was a tall man with a bald head of which he was unconscious. His unconsciousness of his whole personal appearance was his outstanding characteristic in Tarry’s judgement. What the world thought of him didn’t seem to matter. Just now he was not quite sober, but he was steady on his feet and fully competent.

  For awhile Tarry did feel disappointed in the uncle because he had no money. This feeling was unconscious. Money was only another word for success. His uncle was a failure. He had no wife, no family and no achievement to his credit. The only aspect of his character that could be called an achievement was that he had learned not to care.

  When the mother and sister went to bed Tarry and the uncle stayed up by the fire, the uncle telling the story of his wandering all over the world. He was a good story-teller and he was also a sympathetic listener. For all his travel his accent was still the flat Cavan accent even to calling calves, ‘caves’! From his casual allusions he appeared to know something of music and art and literature – and he was sad when he mentioned these things.

  ‘A man without talent is a nobody,’ he said once. ‘The only things worth having are talent and genius. The rest is trash.’

  He did not think it strange when Tarry told him of the beauty that lived in stones and in all common things. He was receptive to the wildest ideas. It was a relief to have the uncle present in these troubled days – a man who didn’t care. Tarry almost felt that he had no problems to contend with.

  Another wet day dawned. Tarry rose from the bed where his uncle still lay asleep and looked out the window at the townland dripping all over with water. But he was unable to think of the townland as ugly. He remembered the wet days more vividly than the sunny ones. Standing in the doorway of a stable, leaning on a graip, his mind sunk in the warm thought of the earth. The wet dunghill steamed. The hens standing on one leg in the doorways of the stables and under the trees made him love his native place more and more.

  The rain beat on the slates. Below him in the kitchen he could hear the soft pad of his mother’s feet on the floor.

  ‘Is he getting up for his breakfast?’ said she to Tarry when he went down. Tarry said he was still asleep and the mother said: ‘The right rodney if ever there was one. Hasn’t a thing in the suit-case except a lock of oul’ rags – and a couple of books.’

  Books! Tarry was interested. He could hardly wait till his uncle came down to see what they were. When after breakfast the books were produced they turned out to be – there were only four – the Imitation of Christ, H. G. Wells’ History of the World, a book about Ireland and a cheap American edition of Das Kapital by Karl Marx.

  Tarry didn’t think the books very exciting. The uncle said that the Imitation was his bible. ‘Give me it over,’ he said. He began to quote from it:

  Behold! eating, drinking, clothing, and other necessaries, appertaining to the support of the body, are burdensome to a fervent spirit. Grant that I may use such things with moderation, and not be entangled with an inordinate affection for them… Seek not to have that which may curb them of thy inward liberty.

  More spiritually elated than he had been for many months Tarry went outside leaving his uncle sitting smoking by the fire.

  He stood under the wet lilac bushes near the gate and let his eyes wander up the misty valley. He picked up a scrap of galvanized iron and looked at its frayed rusty edges till it came alive in his imagination. He opened and closed the gate merely for the pleasure of opening it and closing it. He walked past the parlour window and looked in sideways at the reflection of himself in the glass. That window always made him look attractive. He walked backwards and looked again. He was not bad looking, he knew that. Then he went past the dunghill and lifted the graip which was stuck aslantwise in the side of the heap and the graip became a magic wand of evocation.

  ‘So this is your farm?’ said the uncle as they wandered through the fields later in the day. ‘Aren’t they very small?’

  They were passing along the headland of the potato field and Tarry was just thinking how big that field seemed with the stalks of potatoes nearly four feet high, which gave the field a new dimension.

  The uncle looked across the drain and up towards Brady’s. ‘I knew oul’ Molly well,’ he said, ‘a hot piece. She married an oul’ fella, I heard.’

  ‘He died, two years after.’

  ‘Any family?’

  This question gave Tarry the chance of broaching the subject of Molly. ‘They say there’s something wrong with the daughter, Molly. One daughter is all she has.’

  ‘Ah, a trout in the well! These things do be in it, Tarry. And worse can happen a woman. The mother was a hot piece.’

  ‘They’re putting it out that I had something to do with the daughter, but I may as well tell you I hadn’t.’

  The uncle seemed to have forgotten the remark made by Tarry. He fingered an ash tree in the corner and commented on the great size it had grown since he as a boy had been able to bend it to the gound. ‘Fifty years ago.’

  ‘What do you think about the business?’ asked Tarry.

  ‘What do you want to do?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘My advice is this – and I have always acted on it – do whatever pleases yourself. These things don’t matter. What does matter is that if you have anything worth while in you, any talent, you should deliver it. Nothing must turn you from that.’

  The uncle took such tremendous affairs so lightly that Tarry felt rather ashamed to trouble him with the affair of the farm. When he did so the uncle said: ‘We’ll dodge up that far and take a look at the dominion of Miskin.’

  Far in the misty distance they could see the plains of Louth and out of the rain the limestone spire of a church.

  ‘And this is Carlin’s,’ said the uncle with a smile. ‘I remember it well. I wed potatoes in that longish field beside the land – and the devil’s bad spuds they were. What a life! How do you endure it, Tarry?’

  ‘It’s all right,’ said Tarry.

  ‘But there’s no necessity to live in this sort of a place, is there? The best way to love a country like this is from a range of not less than three hundred miles. And the same applies to the women of it. I wonder how Joe Finnegan is, poor oul’ Joe. We’ll dodge up as far as his house and see how he is. He was the second greatest blackguard I ever met and I like him for it. Poor Joe Finnegan.’ Tarry tried to dissuade his uncle from going to see Joe Finnegan. He explained that a short time ago they had had a fierce quarrel. ‘I tell you he won’t speak to us.’

  ‘Don’t be foolish. Is it Joe Finnegan? And I knew his wife too, many’s the good coort I had with her.’

  Tarry refused to go farther when they got to the hedge, but the uncle said: ‘Come on, con, man. Wouldn’t I be a mean man if I left the country without seeing poor oul’ Joe.’

  On their way through Finnegan’s back yard the uncle examined everything with a bemused eye. He could hardly believe that any human being could endure life in this backward spot. ‘I wouldn’t blame him if he had to kill you,’ he said to Tarry.

  The encounter between Joe and his uncle surprised Tarry a little. Joe felt small and did his best to speak ‘grand’ in the presence of the travelled man. The wife appeared with a shamed expression on her dirty face and crawled out of sight as quickly as she could. Joe even went so far in his effort to show himself a man above petty affairs to pretend to be a very warm friend of Tarry’s, asking about this and that in the farming line.

  Yet he was glad when they got away.

  ‘That fella was always afraid of me,’ said the uncle. ‘I could make him run into a rat hole.’

  ‘But what do you think of him, really?’

  The uncle gave the impression that he didn’t waste thought on such matters. He
considered Joe as an interesting animal rather than as an equal human being. ‘Do you know,’ said the uncle with lofty reflection, ‘it often occurred to me that we love most what makes us most miserable. In my opinion the damned are damned because they enjoy being damned. All the angels in Heaven couldn’t drag a damned soul out of the Pit – he likes it so much.’

  On the third day of the uncle’s visit he suggested to Tarry that he could do worse than leave Drumnay with him. ‘I may have no money,’ said he, ‘but I have some influence. I could get you a job and I could get you what’s better, a living. It’s not what you make but what you spend that makes you rich.’ The uncle had explained that a car was calling for him on the next morning, they would meet it in the village, and if Tarry thought well of it why there was nothing to prevent him coming.

  ‘But what will my mother say? How will she carry on without me?’

  The uncle laughed. ‘Will the dunghill run away?’ said he.

  The uncle did not realize how beautiful Tarry thought the dunghill and the muddy haggard and gaps and all that seemed common and mean. He told him how much he loved this district and the uncle said: ‘Haven’t you it in your mind, the best place for it? If it’s as beautiful as you imagine you can take it with you. You must get away.’

  ‘What about money?’ said the weakening Tarry.

  ‘Isn’t there money in the house?’

  Before going to bed that night Tarry, while the uncle kept up a noise in the kitchen and talked as if Tarry were beside him to curb the suspicious mind of the mother who had just gone up to bed, Tarry prised open the trunk in the parlour and extracted four pounds.

  ‘Any more in it?’ asked the uncle.

  ‘Five.’

  ‘Well get it, we might be short-taken on the road.’

  They slept soundly that night.

  ‘Father, Son and Holy Ghost! where are you going in the good suit?’ cried the mother the next morning when Tarry came down for breakfast.

  ‘As far as the village.’

  ‘And with the good suit?’ She eyed her son with a look of annoyance, and then suddenly her eyes flashed in scalded grief. Her lips moved in prayer. She spoke in a low whisper. ‘Oh my God, oh my God.’ Her lips went on moving but there were no words. Her eyes were wide, son – and as he stared they darkened, in brown earthly sadness.