by Edna O'Brien
“D’you think we’re mugs?” one of them said, and gestured to the others to pick up the two bags, which they did. Then they looked at us as if they might mutilate us, and I prayed to St. Jude and St. Anthony to keep us from harm. Before going, they insisted on being given new milk. They drank in great slugs.
“Are you afraid of me?” one of the men said to her.
He was the tallest of the three and his shirt was open. I could see the hair on his chest, and he had a very funny look in his eyes as if he was not thinking, as if thinking was beyond him. His eyes had a thickness ih them. For some reason he reminded me of meat.
“Why should I be afraid of you,” she said, and I was so proud of her I would have clapped, but for the tight shave we were in.
She blessed herself several times when they’d gone and decided that what we did had been the practical thing to do, and in fact our only recourse. But when my aunt came back and began an intensive cross-examination, the main contention was how they learned in the first place that there were feathers in the house. My aunt reasoned that they could not have known unless they had been told, they were not fortune-tellers. Each time I was asked, I would seal my lips, as I did not want to betray my grandmother. Each time she was asked, she described them in detail, the holes in their clothes, the safety pins instead of buttons, their villainous looks, and then she mentioned the child, me, and hinted about the things they might have done and was it not the blessing of God that we had got rid of them peaceably! My aunt’s son joked about the lace cloth for weeks. He used to affect to admire it, by picking up one end of the black oilcloth on the table and saying, “Is it Brussels lace or is it Carrickmackross?”
Sunday came and my mother was expected to visit. My aunt had washed me the night before in an aluminum pan. I had to sit in it, and was terrified lest my cousin should peep in. He was in the back kitchen shaving and whistling. It was a question of a “Saturday splash for Sunday’s dash.” My aunt poured a can of water over my head and down my back. It was scalding hot. Then she poured rainwater over me and by contrast it was freezing. She was not a thorough washer like my mother, but all the time she kept saying that I would be like a new pin.
My mother was not expected until the afternoon. We had washed up the dinner things and given the dogs the potato skins and milk when I started in earnest to look out for her. I went to the gate where I had waited for Carnero, and seeing no sign of her, I sauntered off down the road. I was at the crossroads when I realized how dangerous it was, as I was approaching the spot where the tinkers said their caravan was pitched. So it was back at full speed. The fuchsia was out and so were the elderberries. The fuchsia was like dangling earrings and the riper elderberries were in maroon smudges on the road. I waited in hiding, the better to surprise her. She never came. It was five, and then half past five, and then it was six. I would go back to the kitchen and lift the clock that was face down on the dresser, and then hurry out to my watch post. By seven it was certain that she would not come, although I still held out hope. They hated to see me sniffle, and even hated more when I refused a slice of cake. I could not bear to eat. Might she still come? They said there was no point in my being so spoiled. I was imprisoned at the kitchen table in front of this slice of seed cake. In my mind I lifted the gate hasp a thousand times and saw my mother pass by the kitchen window, as fleeting as a ghost; and by the time we all knelt down to say the Rosary, my imagination had run amuck. I conceived of the worst things, such as she had died, or that my father had killed her, or that she had met a man and eloped. All three were unbearable. In bed I sobbed and chewed on the blanket so as not to be heard, and between tears and with my aunt enjoining me to dry up, I hatched a plan.
On the morrow there was no word or no letter, so I decided to run away. I packed a little satchel with bread, my comb, and, daftly, a spare pair of ankle socks. I told my aunt that I was going on a picnic and affected to be very happy by humming and doing little reels. It was a dry day and the dust rose in whirls under my feet. The dogs followed and I had immense trouble getting them to go back. There were no tinkers’ caravans at the crossroads and because of that I was jubilant. I walked and then ran, and then I would have to slow down, and always when I slowed down, I looked back in case someone was following me. While I was running I felt I could elude them, but there was no eluding the loose stones and the bits of rock that were wedged into the dirt road. Twice I tripped. If, coming toward me, I saw two people together, I then felt safe, but if I saw one person it boded ill, as that one person could be mad, or drunk, or likely to accost. On three occasions I had to climb into a field and hide until that one ominous person went by. Fortunately, it was a quiet road, as not many souls lived in that region.
When I came off the dirt road onto the main road, I felt safer, and very soon a man came by in a pony and trap and offered me a lift. He looked a harmless enough person, in a frieze coat and a cloth cap. When I stepped into the trap I was surprised to find two hens clucking and agitating under a seat.
“Would you be one of the Linihans?” he asked, referring to my grandmother’s family.
I said no and gave an assumed name. He plied me with questions. To get the most out of me, he even got the pony to slow down, so as to lengthen the journey. We dawdled. The seat of black leather was held down with black buttons. He had a tartan rug over him. He spread it out over us both. Quickly I edged out from under it, complaining about fleas and midges, neither of which there were. It was a desperately lonely road with only a house here and there, a graveyard, and sometimes an orchard. The apples looked tempting on the trees. To see each ripening apple was to see a miracle. He asked if I believed in ghosts and told me that he had seen the riderless horse on the moors.
“If you’re a Minnogue,” he said, “you should be getting out here,” and he pulled on the reins.
I had called myself a Minnogue because I knew a girl of that name who lived with her mother and was separated from her father. I would like to have been her.
“I’m not,” I said, and tried to be as innocent as possible. I then had to say who I was, and ask if he would drop me in the village.
“I’m passing your gate,” he said, and I was terrified that I would have to ask him up, as my mother dreaded strangers, even dreaded visitors, since these diversions usually gave my father the inclination to drink, and once he drank he was on a drinking bout that would last for weeks, and that was notorious. Therefore I had to conjure up another lie. It was that my parents were both staying with my grandmother and that I had been dispatched home to get a change of clothing for us all. He grumbled at not coming up to our house, but I jumped out of the trap and said we would ask him to a card party for sure, in December.
There was no one at home. The door was locked and the big key in its customary place under the pantry window. The kitchen bore signs of my mother having gone out in a hurry, as the dishes were on the table, and on the table, too, were her powder puff, a near-empty powder box, and a holder of papier-mâché in which her toiletries were kept. Had she gone to the city? My heart was wild with envy. Why had she gone without me? I called upstairs, and then hearing no reply, I went up with a mind that was buzzing with fear, rage, suspicion, and envy. The beds were made. The rooms seemed vast and awesome compared with the little crammed rooms of my grandmother’s. I heard someone in the kitchen and hurried down with renewed palpitations. It was my mother. She had been to the shop and got some chocolate. It was rationed because of its being wartime, but she used to coax the shopkeeper to give her some. He was a bachelor. He liked her. Maybe that was why she had put powder on.
“Who brought you home, my lady?” she said stiffly.
She hadn’t come on Sunday. I blurted that out. She said did anyone ever hear such nonsense. She said did I not know that I was to stay there until the end of August till school began. She was even more irate when she heard that I had run away. What would they now be thinking but that I was in a bog hole or something. She said had I no considerat
ion and how in heaven’s name was she going to get word to them, an SOS.
“Where’s my father?” I asked.
“Saving hay,” she said.
I gathered the cups off the table so as to make myself useful in her eyes. Seeing the state of my canvas shoes and the marks on the ankle socks, she asked had I come through a river or what. All I wanted to know was why she had not come on Sunday as promised. The bicycle got punctured, she said, and then asked did I think that with bunions, corns, and welts she could walk six miles after doing a day’s work. All I thought was that the homecoming was not nearly as tender as I hoped it would be, and there was no embrace and no reunion. She filled the kettle and I laid clean cups. I tried to be civil, to contain the pique and misery that was welling up in me. I told her how many trams of hay they had made in her mother’s house, and she said it was a sight more than we had done. She hauled some scones from a colander in the cupboard and told me I had better eat. She did not heat them on the top of the oven, and that meant she was still vexed. I knew that before nightfall she would melt, but where is the use of a thing that comes too late?
I sat at the far end of the table watching the lines on her brow, watching the puckering, as she wrote a letter to my aunt explaining that I had come home. I would have to give it to the mail-car man the following morning and ask the postman to deliver it by hand. She said, God only knows what commotion there would be all that day and into the night looking for me. The ink in her pen gave out, and I held the near-empty ink bottle sideways while she refilled it.
“Go back to your place,” she said, and I went back to the far end of the table like someone glued to her post. I thought of fields around my grandmother’s house and the various smooth stones that I had put on the windowsill, I thought of the sun garden, of the night my grandfather had died and my vigil in the cold parlor. I thought of many things. Sitting there, I wanted both to be in our house and to be back in my grandmother’s missing my mother. It was as if I could taste my pain better away from her, the excruciating pain that told me how much I loved her. I thought how much I needed to be without her so that I could think of her, dwell on her, and fashion her into the perfect person that she clearly was not. I resolved that for certain I would grow up and one day go away. It was a sweet thought, and it was packed with punishment.
Tough Men
“Throw more paraffin in it,” Morgan said as he went out to the shop to serve Mrs. Gleeson for the sixth time that morning. Hickey threw paraffin and a fist of matches onto the gray cinders, then put the top back on the stove quickly in case the flames leaped into his face. The skewers of curled-up bills on the shelf overhead were scorched, having almost caught fire many a time before. It was a small office, partitioned off from the shop, where Morgan did his accounts and kept himself warm in the winter. A cozy place with two chairs, a sloping wooden desk, and ledgers going back so far that most of the names entered in the early ones were the names of dead people. There was a safe as well, and everything had the air of being undisturbed, because the ashes and dust had congealed evenly on things. It was called The Snug.
“Bloody nuisance, that Gleeson woman,” Morgan said as he came in from the counter and touched the top of the iron stove to see if it was warming up.
“She doesn’t do a tap of work; hubby over in England earning money, all the young ones out stealing firewood and milk, and anything else they can lay hands on,” Hickey said.
Mrs. Gleeson was an inquisitive woman, always dressed in black, with a black kerchief over her head and a white, miserable, nosy face.
“We’ll need to get a good fire up,” Morgan said. “That’s one thing we’ll need,” and he popped a new candle into the stove to get it going. He swore by candle grease and paraffin for lighting fires, and neither cost him anything, because he sold them, along with every other commodity that country people needed—tea, flour, hen food, hardware, Wellington boots, and gaberdine coats. In the summer he hung the coats outside the door on a window ledge, and once a coat had fallen into a puddle. He offered it to Hickey cheap, but was rejected.
“Will they miss you?” Morgan said.
“Miss, my eye! Isn’t poor man in bed with hot-water bottles and Sloan’s liniment all over Christmas, and she’s so murdered minding him, she doesn’t know what time of day it is.”
“Poor man” was Hickey’s name for his boss, Mr. James Brady, a gentleman farmer who was given to drink, rheumatic aches, and a scalding temper.
“Say the separating machine got banjaxed up at the creamery,” Morgan said.
“Of course,” said Hickey, as if any fool would know enough to say that. It was simple; Hickey had been to the creamery with Brady’s milk, and when he got home he could say he had been held up because a machine broke down.
“Of course I’ll tell them that,” he said again, and winked at Morgan. They were having an important caller that morning and a lot of strategy was required. Morgan opened the lower flap door of the stove and a clutter of ashes fell onto his boots. The grating was choked with ashes too, and Hickey began to clean it out with a stick, so that they could at least make the place presentable. Then he rooted in the turf basket, and finding two logs, he popped them in and emptied whatever shavings and turf dust were in the basket over them.
“That stove must be thirty years old,” Morgan said, remembering how he used to light it with balls of paper and dry sticks when he first came to work in the shop as an apprentice. He lit it all the years he served his time and he still lit it when he began to get wise to fiddling money and giving short weight. That was when he was saving to buy the shop from the mean blackguard who owned it. He even lit it when he hired the new shopgirl, because she was useless at it. She had chilblains and hence wore a dress down to her ankles, and he pitied her for her foolishness. Finally he married her. Now he had a shopboy who usually lit the stove for him.
“His nibs is off again today,” he said to Hickey, remembering the squint-eyed shopboy whom he hired but did not trust.
“He’d stay at home with a gumboil, he would,” Hickey said, though neither of them objected very much, as they needed the privacy. Also, business was slack just after Christmas.
“If this thing comes off we’ll go to the dogs, Fridays and Saturdays,” Morgan said.
“Shanks’ mare?” Hickey asked with a grin.
“We’ll hire a car,” Morgan said, and the dreams of these pleasant outings began to buoy him up and make him smile in anticipation. He liked the dogs and already envisaged the crowds, the excitement, the tote board, the tracks artificially lit up, and the six or seven sleek hounds following the hare with such grace as if it were wind and not their own legs that propelled them.
“Let’s do our sums,” he said, and together Hickey and himself counted the number of big farmers who had hay sheds. Not having been up the country for many a day, Morgan was, as he admitted, hazy about who lived beyond the chapel road, or up the commons, or down the Coolnahilla way and in the byroads and over the hills. In this Hickey was fluent because he did a bit of shooting on Sundays and had walked those godforsaken spots. They counted the farmers and hence the number of hay sheds, and their eyes shone with cupidity and glee. The stranger who was coming to see them had patented a marvelous stuff that, when sprayed on hay sheds, prevented rusting. Morgan was hoping to be given the franchise for the whole damn parish.
“Jaysus, there must be a hundred hay sheds,” Hickey said, and marveled at Morgan’s good luck at meeting a man who put him on to such a windfall.
“ ’Twas pure fluke,” Morgan said, and recalled the holiday he took at the spa town and how one day when he was trying to down this horrible sulphur water a man sat next to him and asked him where he was from, and eventually he heard about this substance that was a godsend to farmers.
“Pure fluke,” he said again, and lifted the whiskey bottle from its hiding place, behind a holy picture which was laid against the wall. He took a quick slug.
“I think that’s him,” Hi
ckey said, buttoning his waistcoat so as not to seem like a barbarian. In fact, it was John Ryan, a medical student, who had been asked not for reasons of his education but because he had a bit of pull. He tiptoed toward the entrance and from the outside played on the frosted glass as if it were a piano.
“Come in,” said Morgan.
He knew it was John Ryan by the shape of the long eejitty fingers. Ryan was briefed to tell them if any other shopkeepers up the street had been approached by the bloke. Being home on holidays, Ryan did nothing but hatch in houses, drink tea, and click girls in the evening.
“All set,” said Ryan as he looked at the two men and the saucepan waiting on the stove. Morgan had decided that they would do a bit of cooking, having reasoned that if a man came all that way, a bit of grub would not go amiss. Hickey, who couldn’t even go to the creamery without bringing a large agricultural sandwich in his pocket, declared that no man does good business on an empty stomach. The man was from the North of Ireland.
