by Tom Phelan
Missus Byrne had diddies like two prize turnips. “I remember the first day you went to school holding hands and here you are off to see India. God bless you, lads.” Con took Matt’s hand and held it up over their heads. “We’re still holding hands, Missus Byrne,” he laughed, “and we’re hoping we get to India.”
Missus Dempsey had a pair of diddies that would make a fellow as nervous as he’d be looking down the barrels of a loaded and cocked shotgun. “I’ll pray you get to India, lads,” she shouted. “And you’ll never be the same. When you come home you won’t even remember us, you’ll be so lawdie daw.”
“Oh, we’ll remember you all right, Missus Dempsey,” Matthias called. “All the times you brought us in out of the rain coming and going to school … how could we forget you?”
“And the mugs of tea, Missus Dempsey!” Con called.
I was standing there with a big grin waiting to make my little speech that I’d been thinking up for a few days. Doctor Masters had told me five Indian words and it took me nearly a week to come up with one sentence with all the words in it: nabob, raja, jodhpurs, gymkhana and bungalow.
The lads passed Missus Dunne with diddies so big she could feed five sets of twins at the same time without running dry. “Now lads, behave yourselves and don’t be bothering them Indian nabobs,” says she, and I said, “Feck!’ to myself, and I didn’t hear what the lads said back to her. Real quick in my head, I tried to change my sentence, but the lads were coming right at me and I said to myself I’d have to leave “nabob” in there even if it sounded like I was only copying Missus Dunne. I took my chin off my hands on top of the shovel handle and took in a breath.
“Off to take the king’s shilling?” someone growled from behind me, and before I turned around and saw the galoot, I knew it was Johnjoe Lacy: a tall skinny fecker who cleaned chimleys and patched roofs, never seen without his ladder on his homemade handcart full of long-handled brushes and rags as dirty as himself. His nose had the kind of shape you’d think a nose would get from always smelling something bad, a bit turned up at the tip; maybe his wife was in a constant state of wind. And he had holes in his nose big enough and hairy enough to make you think you wouldn’t be surprised to see a couple of swallows flying up there into the thatch to feed their clutch of scalds.
Johnjoe Lacy was leaning on the far wingboard of my ass and cart, and he spoke again. “You’ll never get to India, you scallywags. For all you know, you could be shooting your own people here in Ireland in a few years. You’re traitors to Ireland and all the men who died in Ninety-Eight and every rebellion since the English came in 1169. Bad cess to the two of you; you’d rather die for England than for Ireland, your own country.” He sent a watery spit into my cart.
Lacy was the biggest-mouthed patriot in the town, and a real pain in the arse he was about it too. No matter how many times the snot was beaten out of him for his patriotic and insulting remarks, he still mouthed on about the Cause every chance he got.
What I wanted to do right now was give Lacy a slap across the mouth two times, one for ruining my speech with the Indian words, and the other for trying to squelch the happiness and excitement out of the beginning of the lads’ great adventure.
The lads came to a stop at the tailboard of my ass and cart. Con got as red as a strawberry very quick, and I could see his chest going up and down like he was ready to go on the attack. The two words that came out of him were so full of crossness they could have been made in a barbed-wire factory. But when he said, “Mister Lacy,” Matthias touched his arm and made him stop. Con was known to be afraid of no man, priest or teacher, and was inclined to speak the raw truth without dressing it up in a bit of softness. Matthias was calmer.
“Mister Lacy,” Matt said in a voice that was all the stronger because of its quietness. “We’re not going to die for any country, England or Ireland. But if you want to die so badly for Ireland then go home and write on a piece of paper, “I died for Ireland,” and then go out and find a tree and hang yourself. We’ll make up a song about you and the heroic thing you did, but don’t be so thick to think that Con or I want to hang with you.”
“Well—” Johnjoe started.
“Well nothing, Mister Lacy. You’re nothing but a loudmouthed gobshite. Haven’t you learned anything from all the times you’ve had the shite kicked out of you?”
Con was looking up at Matthias like a child looking at his big hero brother.
“Listen to me, you little scallywag—” Johnjoe Lacy tried again.
“No, Mister Lacy, you listen to me,” Matt said. “Everyone in Ballyrannel calls you ‘Nonstop’ behind your back because you never know when to keep your foolish mouth shut. You’re nothing but a bag of wind standing over there the far side of the cart where a fellow can’t get a swing at you. Now if there’s anything else you want to call Con and myself besides traitors, step out here in front of me and I’ll kick the shite out of you. Here, Con, hold my bag.”
“Well—” Johnjoe started again.
“Well, nothing, Mister Lacy. Just feck off to hell and leave us alone.”
Johnjoe said something under his breath as he pushed himself off with his cart.
“What’s that, Mister Lacy?”
“Nothing.”
“I thought that’s what you said,” Matthias said gently, like he was talking to a small boy. “Someday soon you’re going to say the wrong thing to the wrong man, and when he’s finished with you that face of yours is going to look like the face of a rotten perch after a horse stepping on it on the Towpath.”
As Johnjoe Lacy went away pushing his handcart, he hesitated like he was going to have the last word. But Matt pushed him on his way with, “If you say one more word, Mister Lacy, I’ll go over there and put my fist in your gob.” If Nonstop had been a dog, his tail would have been pulled in between his legs to cover his balls.
“God, that was great, Matt,” I said, but only loud enough for the lads to hear. After all, I still had to live in Ballyrannel with Lacy, the hure.
The two lads poked each other and tittered, and laughed like hell while I was thinking to myself, “Wait till I tell the wife.”
“Good luck, lads,” I said to them and shook their hands. “I hope you get to India.”
“We’ll make it one way or the other, Ralphie,” Matthias said. “And we heard you have a speech in Indian for us.”
I felt shy all of a sudden. “Ah, Matt,” I said, “nothing I’d say could match the speech you gave to Johnjoe. Be off with yourselves and keep your eyes out for tigers.” I had to turn away because tears started scalding the backs of my eyes. I took the yard brush out of the cart and swept like hell for a few minutes. When I looked after the lads again, they were kneeling in the street, caps off, heads bent, and Father Kinsella was blessing them. The few men on the footpath had their hats off, and when the blessing was over, some people clapped and encouraging words were called out to the lads. Con and Matthias waved their caps to the people before putting them back on their heads.
God bless you, lads, I prayed inside my head. Please bring them back safe, Lord. They’re too good for badness to happen to them. And I cried because I hate saying goodbye to someone I know I might never see again. When I looked up again, they were gone around the corner where Bops bent around to the station.
Kitty Hatchel
Matthias always put his letters in with Con’s, and Con always addressed his letters to me, and Mammy and Daddy pretended not to know.
Sweet Jesus! There were times waiting for a letter I’d be as tense as the stretched-out telephone wires along the Canal with the wind whistling through them in wintertime. I’d be scrubbing the kitchen chairs in the yard on a Saturday and driving myself mad in expectation of a letter, a pain in my neck from turning to the Bridge to see if Paulie Bolger was coming on his black bike with the iron frame in front for parcels and the canvas bag. The let-down was terrible when he didn’t come. Then there was the long wait till Monday. Sometimes I cried in vexation
.
The March after the August when Matthias and Con took off for the army, I got a great job in Enderly. It was pure luck that I heard about the sign going up in Smith the Chemist’s window.
Wanted: Girl to Work Inside at Enderly
Enderly was Buckingham Palace to Ballyrannel, and the Hodgkinses were the royal family.
When Con and Matt walked out of school for the last time at thirteen, they went straight to Enderly and got hired as apprentices because of Mammy’s aunt, Poor Meg. But as well as Poor Meg in the kitchen, Daddy had ploughed in Enderly every spring and Daddy’s father too, from the time he was a chap before the Famine to the year before he died. Con got the gardens, and Matthias the horses and machinery—to serve his time with Charlie Coffey. That’s how they got all the books to read. Mister Hodgkins even taught Latin to Con.
It was Paulie Bolger who told Mammy about the sign that Mister Sawtel put up in the chemist’s with a bit of sticking plaster at each corner. “Not too much plaster, mind you,” Paulie Bolger said. “That man’s as mean as a priest.”
Mammy came running across the fields to where Daddy and I were sweating after getting a calf back out of Lamberts’ Twenty Acres. Such running we’d done and the calf only playing with us with her tail on her back and bucking her rump up in the air. I was hoping she had a letter from Con, but I didn’t want to show too much interest.
“A calf thumbs its nose by baring its backside at you,” I said.
“Or does a person bare his backside at you by thumbing his nose?” Daddy asked.
I liked working in the fields with Daddy. He was always in good humour, but he seldom laughed out loud in case God would hear him and throw some badness across his path. “Laughing out loud is dangerous,” he’d say. “Any man who laughs too loud will pay for it in the end.”
The buds were on the bushes and Daddy was laying a whitethorn across the calf’s gap when he saw Mammy coming through the field gate.
“Someone must be dead,” he said. He made another cut in the stem of the whitethorn. “Your mother never comes to the fields, running like that.” He was always afraid that something might happen to Con and Matt in the army, and there wasn’t even a war on. All I wanted was a letter, but if Mammy had one for me, she wasn’t carrying it in her hand.
Daddy kept poking the bushes as Mammy came nearer. He pulled the whitethorn down and pushed it into the gap without breaking it from the stem. It was like he didn’t want to be looking at Mammy when she told him the bad news. He pushed at the smaller branches with the back of the billhook, forcing them into place with his foot, making them look like a solid hedge for the calf’s weak eyes.
Mammy stopped. “Missus Hodgkins has the sign up,” she panted. She bent down and put her hands on her knees; she was never a good runner. My heart fell and my heart jumped at the same time. “She waited four weeks, after we all saying there would be a notice before Poor Meg got cold.”
Daddy gave no indication at all that he’d been afraid bad news had been coming. He stuck the point of the billhook in the ground, put his hands on the end of the handle and rested.
“We said nothing of the sort,” he said without any edge in his voice. “It was you who said Poor Meg wouldn’t be long in the ground before the sign went up.” He liked teasing Mammy. She wasn’t afraid to laugh out loud, especially not at the quare things other people did and said.
“I was the one who said Missus Hodgkins would wait simply because she is a Hodgkins,” Daddy said. “And what are you waiting for, Kitty?”
“Will I put on my good dress?” I asked.
“Good dress, my elbow!” Daddy said. “Get home as quick as you can, and go up to Enderly on Mammy’s bike. Half the town’s going to be looking for that job, and the early bird catches the worm. Run like a hare, and make sure to tell her Con and Matthias are your brothers and Poor Meg was your mother’s aunt and that I ploughed there every spring and so did my father before me.”
“Missus Hodgkins knows all that,” Mammy said.
“It’ll do no harm to remind her,” Daddy said. “Run, Kitty. Run!”
“Don’t let on you’re related to your father’s uncle Martin,” Mammy said. “Remember the nuns and Uncle Martin’s pens and inkwells.”
Uncle Martin had come home from the Boer War with a few screws loose from sunstroke.
I could hear the two of them laughing as I flew down the field. I leapt over cow dungs, twisted around big thistles, flew through the gates, tore across the Pasture and Neill’s Field like greyhounds with human heads were after me when I was small and Con and Matthias barked to frighten me, and without washing my face or doing my hair I got Mammy’s bike out of the turf shed and belted off to Enderly along the Canal bank, over the Bridge, out onto the road, past the Lamberts’ big house, past the Harbour and the Canal Stores.
Mary Keegan was stepping it out along Harbour Lane, dressed to the nines in her mother’s coat and hat. I don’t know where she got the shoes because there wasn’t one pair of shoes in the Keegan house, just boots. I got up speed to fly past her, but she heard me coming and looked around.
“Kitty!” she called. “Give us a lift on your carrier up to Enderly.”
“I can’t, Mary,” I shouted back at her. “I’m in a terrible hurry, and Daddy would kill me.” I kept going.
On into Ballyrannel I went, along Blessed Oliver Plunkett Street; Bops, the people called it, and made Father Kinsella cross. And there was Deirdre Hogan in her father’s ass and cart, standing up beating the ass with an ashplant. “Go up, go on up,” she was shouting, like she was drowning in the Canal and shouting for help. But the ass must have been used to the ashplant on its ribs. It didn’t even break into a trot.
I don’t remember how Deirdre was dressed, but it couldn’t have been in wonderful splendour because the Hogans hadn’t much. I remember seeing Wellington boots going up under the back of her dress and they were wet, like she had just washed them.
When I whizzed by I said, “Hello, Deirdre,” and the ass jerked its head up in the air at the fright I gave it.
“Are you going up to Enderly, Kitty?” Deirdre called.
I turned around in the saddle, but kept pedalling. “Where?” I shouted back.
“To Enderly,” Deirdre screamed.
“I can’t hear you, Deirdre,” I yelled back, “and I’m in a terrible hurry.”
Then I began to worry that all the girls in Ballyrannel were on the way to Enderly. I remembered a composition I had to write once when I was trying to get into the convent school in Marbra, how I was afraid all the other girls would get in before me and I’d be left out. Thinking about that entrance examination made my knees weak and I had to get off the saddle and pedal standing up for a while, sawing from side to side like an old farmer facing into the wind on his rusty bike.
When I shot around the corner at the far end of Bops, there was Lucy Gahan stepping along like she was trying not to run. Lucy had a good topcoat on that was twenty sizes too big; the shoulders were hanging down at her elbows. She was wearing Wellington boots, and they were loose on her feet. They must have been cutting the heels off her, the way they were slipping up and down with every step taken. I kept trying to miss the holes in the road so Lucy wouldn’t hear me coming, but she heard me rattling along.
“Give us a lift out to Enderly, Kitty,” she called, and she stood out in the road like she was going to pull me off the bike. I swerved around her and kept going.
“I can’t, Lucy,” I called back to her. “I’m in a ferocious hurry.”
“You’re nothing but a mean bitch, Kitty Hatchel,” she shouted after me. She must have thought I didn’t hear her, because she kept calling me all kinds of bitches, even a ferret’s bitch.
I suddenly had a vision of that terrible nun with her cruel rules who’d been in charge of that entrance examination in Marbra. I hoped Missus Hodgkins had no rules about asking for the job, and I thought that maybe I should have washed my face and racked my hair and washed my
legs. Daddy said I failed the exam because I said the sound of the Canal Song was nicer than the sound of Sheila Feeney singing at Benediction, and the nuns thought that was blasphemy. Mammy said it was because I wrote down Uncle Martin’s names for swans.
When I went out onto the Marbra Road, there wasn’t a sinner in sight. I put my head down near the handlebars and pedalled like the devil was after me with a red-hot poker. Every time the back wheel went around I could feel where Daddy had tied the solid tyre to the rim with a piece of wire. Thump, thump. I was afraid the wire was getting loose, that the ends of the broken tyre would soon get caught in the bike frame and send me over the handlebars. And my knees went as weak as water. Off the pedals I had to get again to saw from side to side, my down leg without a bend from hip to ankle, and when I went around the last bend before the avenue to Enderly, there was big Chrissy Wallace wobbling along at full steam, all dressed up in her best coat and shoes and a scarf around her head. Everyone in Ballyrannel was afraid of Chrissy Wallace. Daddy said Chrissy Wallace was born with a stone in her shoe. She was even mean on her First Communion day, told Monica Kirwin she was nothing but a pig’s fart dressed up in white, because Monica had a veil made out of the kitchen curtain and Chrissy hadn’t. I was always afraid to say hello to her and always afraid not to say hello. One way or the other, she could eat the face off you.
“Hello, Chrissy,” I said, as I went by on the other side of the road. She hadn’t heard me coming, and she jumped with the fright I gave her.
“Where you going, Hatchel?” she shouted. “You’d better not be going to Enderly, Hatchel. I was here first.” When someone calls you by your last name in Ballyrannel, you know they’re cross with you. I didn’t look back. “I’ll pull out your fecking hair for you, Hatchel, you and your oul one’s bike. I hope the two wheels fall off and you go into the ditch.”
I turned off the main road onto the avenue up to Enderly, feeling safer out of Chrissy’s sight.
