Graveyard Clay- Cré Na Cille

by Máirtín Ó Cadhain

  Oh! You’ve heard about that already, Muraed … Faith then, he spent six months on the flat of his back … The devil a tap of work he did since he came home, just going about on two crutches. Everybody thought it was all up with him …

  The children are no help to him, Muraed, apart from the eldest scamp, who’s a blackguard … Why wouldn’t he be! Taking after his grandfather, his namesake Big Brian, the ugly streak of misery. Not to mention his little granny Nell. Nell’s people haven’t made a spring sowing worth mentioning for the past two years … The injury is a hard blow for Big Brian’s Mag and for Nell. Serves the pussface right! We had three times the potato crop she had this year.

  Oh! God bless your innocence, Muraed, wasn’t the road as long and as wide for him as it was for everyone else, to keep out of the lorry’s way … Nell’s son lost the case, Muraed. “I won’t give you a red cent” said the Justice … He took the lorry driver to the Sessions since, but the judge wouldn’t let Nell’s son as much as open his mouth. He’s to take the lorry driver to a High Court in Dublin soon, for all the good that will do him. Mannion the Counsellor told me personally that Nell’s people wouldn’t get a brass farthing. “For what?” says he. “On the wrong side of the road!” … It’s true for you, Muraed. The law will take the last penny off Nell. Serves her right! She won’t be going past our house so often from now on singing “Eleanor of the Secrets”10 …

  Poor Jack isn’t keeping at all well, Muraed. Of course, the devil a bit of caring Nell ever gave him, or Big Brian’s daughter either, since she moved in there … Isn’t Nell my very own sister, Muraed, and why wouldn’t I know? She never took the slightest bit of care of poor Jack. She was all for herself. She cared for nobody else in the whole wide world … I’m telling you, Muraed, and I’m telling you the truth, Jack had a hard life at the hands of that little bitch … Tomás Inside, Muraed? The same as ever you saw him … He’s still in his little hovel. But it will fall in on top of him any day now … Well, indeed, didn’t my Pádraig offer to go up and put a layer of thatch on it for him. “Now, Pádraig,” says I, “don’t demean yourself by going thatching for Tomás Inside. Let Nell thatch his house for him if she wants to. If she goes thatching for him, then so will we …”

  “But Nell doesn’t have a soul to help her since Peadar injured his leg,” says Pádraig.

  “Everyone has enough to do to keep his own house thatched,” says I, “never mind that useless old Tomás Inside’s little hovel.”

  “But the house will fall in on him,” says he.

  “Then let it fall,” says I. “Nell has enough to do now without stuffing Tomás Inside’s big gob. Hold on now, Pádraig, my fine man!” says I. “Tomás Inside is like a rat in a sinking ship. It’s to our house he’ll have to run from his leaking roof …”

  Nóra Sheáinín, did you say? That I would be pleased to get acquainted with her again here! Too well acquainted I am with that one, and with every one of her breed … She’s listening to the schoolmaster every day? To the Big Master, the poor man … The Big Master reading to Nóra Sheáinín! … To Nóra Sheáinín … Ababúna!11 … Isn’t it little respect he has for himself as a schoolmaster, reading to Nóra Sheáinín … Of course, there isn’t a word of learning in that one’s head. Where would she get it? A woman who never set foot in a schoolhouse unless she went there on polling day … Upon my soul it’s a strange world if a schoolmaster is having conversations with Nóra Sheáinín. What did you say, Muraed? … That he’s very fond of her, even? He doesn’t know what sort she is, Muraed … If he had her daughter in the same house with him for sixteen years as I had, then he’d know the sort she is. But I’ll tell him … about the sailor and everything …

  —… “Mártan Sheáin Mhóir12 had a daughter

  And she was as broad as any man.”

  —… Five times eight is forty; five times nine is forty-five; five times ten … I can’t remember, Master …

  —… “He went ranting after women

  And he headed for the fair.”

  —… I was twenty, and I led with the Ace of Hearts. I took the King off your partner. Murchaín hit me with the Knave. But I had the Nine, and my partner had the fall of the play …

  —I had the Queen and a saver.

  —Murchaín was about to lead with the Five of Trumps and he would have swept your Nine. Wouldn’t you, Murchaín?

  —But then the mine13 blew the house up …

  —But the game would have been ours all the same …

  —Don’t be so sure of that! Were it not for the mine …

  —… God help us, now and forever …

  —… A bald-faced mare.14 She was the best …

  —Muraed, you can’t hear a finger in your ear in this place. Oh! Blessed Son of God tonight … “A bald-faced mare.” May yourself and herself go bald if you don’t stop talking about her …

  —I was fighting for the Irish Republic …

  —Nobody asked you to …

  —… He stabbed me …

  —If he did, it wasn’t in the tongue. A plague of baldness on the pair of you! … You have me demented since I came into the graveyard. Oh, Muraed, if only we could find a quiet nook to ourselves! Above ground, if you didn’t like your company you could leave them and go elsewhere. But alas and alack, the dead will never leave their place in the graveyard clay …

  3

  … And I was buried in the Fifteen-Shilling Plot after all! In spite of my warnings … Nell must have been grinning all over her face! She’ll go into the Pound Plot herself for sure now. I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if it was Nell got Pádraig to bury me in the Fifteen-Shilling Plot instead of the Pound Plot. She wouldn’t have had the cheek to come next or near the house until she knew I was dead. She never set foot inside my door since the day I got married … unless she sneaked in unknown to me when I was in the throes of death …

  But Pádraig is a bit simple. He’d give in to her sweet talk. And Pádraig’s wife would go along with her. “Indeed now, you’re perfectly right, Nell dear. The Fifteen-Shilling Plot is good enough for anybody. We’re not landed gentry …”

  The Fifteen-Shilling Plot is good enough for anybody. She would say that. What else would she say? Nóra Sheáinín’s daughter. I’ll take it out on her yet. She’ll be here on her next childbirth for certain. I’ll take it out on her, by God. But in the meantime I’ll take it out on her mother—I’ll take it out on Nóra Sheáinín herself.

  Nóra Sheáinín. From over there in Mangy Field! Mangy Field of the puddles. We always heard they milk the ducks there. The upstart! Learning from the Master now! Faith then, it was time for her to start, so it was. A schoolmaster wouldn’t speak to her anywhere else in the world but in the graveyard, and he wouldn’t speak to her even there if he knew who she was …

  It’s her daughter has left me here twenty years before my time. I’m worn and wasted for the last six months minding her plague of children. She’s sick when she’s having a child and she’s sick when she’s not. The next one will carry her off for certain … Poor Pádraig would be better off rid of her, whatever way he’d manage without her. Pádraig himself was the unbiddable son. “I’ll never have anyone else, mother,” says he. “I’ll go off to America and let the place go to wrack and ruin, since you’ve no liking for her …”

  That was when Baba was home from America. She begged and implored him to marry Big Brian’s Mag. Very concerned indeed she was, for that matter, about the ugly little skin-and-bones. “She took good care of me in America,” says she, “when I was very sick and far away from all my own people. Big Brian’s Mag is a good resourceful young woman, and she has a well-lined purse of her own apart from what I’ll be giving her. I was fonder of you, Caitríona,” she says to me, “than of any of my other sisters. I’d rather see my money in your house than with anyone else belonging to me. I’d like to see your son Pádraig bettering himself. The choice is in your hands now, Pádraig,” says she. “I’m in a hurry back to America, but I wo
n’t go till I see Big Brian’s Mag settled here, since she wasn’t getting her health over there. Marry her, Pádraig. Marry Big Brian’s Mag, and I’ll not leave you in want. I have more than I’ll ever see spent. She’s already asked for by Nell’s son. Nell herself was talking to me about it the other day. She’ll marry Nell’s son if you don’t marry her, Pádraig. Either that or go and marry whoever you want, but if you do …”

  “I’d sooner go begging for my keep,” says Pádraig. “I won’t marry any woman on the face of the earth but Nóra Sheáinín’s daughter from Mangy Field …”

  And he married her.

  I myself had to put a shirt on her back. She didn’t even have the marriage fee, not to mention a dowry. A dowry from the Filthy-Feet Breed! A dowry in Mangy Field of the puddles, where they milk the ducks … He married her, and she’s there with him ever since like the shadow of death. She’s not able to raise a pig or a calf, a hen or a goose, not even the ducks she’d have been used to in Mangy Field. Her house is dirty. Her children are dirty. She can’t work the land or the strand15 …

  There was full and plenty in that house until she came into it. I kept it scrubbed clean. There wasn’t a Saturday night in the year I didn’t have every stool and chair and table out by the stream to wash. I spun and I carded. I had yarn and I had sackcloth. I raised pigs and calves and fowl … for as long as I had the energy to do it. And when I hadn’t, I shamed Nóra Sheáinín’s daughter into not letting everything go by the board completely …

  But how will the house be now without me? … The bold Nell will be satisfied at any rate … So well she may. She has a good woman in her house for baking and spinning: Big Brian’s Mag. It’s easy for her to laugh at that little fool of a son of mine who has nobody but that untidy slut. When Nell’s going up by our house now, won’t she often be saying: “Indeed we got thirty pounds for the pigs … It was a good fair if you had cattle raised for it. We got sixteen pounds for the two calves … Even though it’s not the laying season our Mag still manages to collect eggs. She had four score eggs in Brightcity16 on Saturday … Four broods of chicks hatched for us this year. All the hens are laying a second time. I set another clutch yesterday. ‘The little clutch of the ripening oats,’ Jack called it when he saw me putting them under the hen …” She’ll have a right swagger in her bottom now, going by our house. She’ll know I’m gone. Nell! The pussface! She is my sister. But may no corpse come into the graveyard ahead of her! …

  4

  —… I was fighting for the Irish Republic, and you killed me, you traitor. Fighting for England you were, the time you fought for the Free State … An English gun in your hand, English money in your pocket, and an English spirit in your heart. You sold your soul and the heritage of your ancestors for the sake of a “bargain,” for the sake of a job …

  —That’s a lie! A criminal you were, rising up against a legitimate government …

  —… By the oak of this coffin, Muraed, I gave Caitríona the pound …

  —… I drank two score pints and two …

  —I remember it well, Glutton. I twisted my ankle that day …

  —… You stuck the knife into me between the lower and upper ribs. Through the edge of my liver it went. Then you gave it a twist. The foul blow was always the mark of the One-Ear Breed …

  —… Permission to speak! Let me speak …

  —Are you ready for the hour’s reading now, Nóra Sheáinín? We’ll make a start on a new novelette today. We finished Two Men and a Powder-puff the other day, did we not? The title of this one is The Red-Hot Kiss. Listen now, Nóra Sheáinín: “Nuala was an innocent girl until she met Charlie Price in the nightclub …” I know. There’s no peace or seclusion or opportunity for culture here … and as you say, Nóra, paltry trivialities is all they ever talk about … cards, horses, drink, violence … he has us demented with his little mare, day in day out … You are perfectly right, Nóra dear … There’s no opportunity here for one who wants to cultivate the intellect. That is the absolute truth, Nóra. This place is as bad-mannered, as dull-witted, as barbarous as the Wastelands of the Half-Guinea Plot down there. We’re truly in the Dark Ages since the sansculottes who accumulated piles of money “on the dole” began to be buried in the Fifteen-Shilling Plot … This is how I would divide up this graveyard now, Nóra, if I had my own way: university people in the Pound Plot, and then … Isn’t that so, Nóra? It’s a crying shame indeed that some of my own pupils are lying up here beside me … It depresses me how ill-informed they are, when I think of the diligence I wasted on them … And they can be quite disrespectful at times … I don’t know what’s coming over the young generation at all … You’re right, Nóra … Lack of cultural opportunities, I suppose …

  “Nuala was an innocent girl until she met Charlie Price in the nightclub.” A nightclub, Nóra? … You were never in a nightclub? Well, a nightclub is not unlike this place … Ah no, Nóra. The places frequented by the sea-going fraternity are not the same as nightclubs. “Dives” is what those places are, Nóra, but cultivated people go to nightclubs … You would like to pay a visit to one of them, Nóra? … It would be no bad thing, to give your education the final touch, a bit of polish, a cachet … I was in a nightclub in London myself that time the teachers got a pay rise, before the two cuts. I saw an African prince there. He was as black as a berry, and drinking champagne … You’d love to go to a nightclub, Nóra? Aren’t you the shameless one … Naughty girl, Nóra … Naughty …

  —You brazen hussy! Seáinín Robin’s daughter from Mangy Field! What was that place she said she wanted to visit, Master? … May she not live to enjoy it! Take care that you pay no heed to her, Master dear. If you knew her as well as I do you’d sing dumb to her. I’ve spent the last sixteen years bickering with her daughter and herself. You’re poorly employed, Master, squandering your time on Nóirín Filthy-Feet. She never had a single day’s schooling, Master, and she’d be more familiar with the track of a flea than her ABC …

  —Who is this? Who are you … ? Caitríona Pháidín! Is it possible you’re here, Caitríona! … Well, no matter how long it takes, this is the last shelter for all of us in the end … You are welcome, Caitríona, you are welcome … I’m afraid, Caitríona, you are … what shall I say … a little too hard on Nóra Filthy … on Nóra Sheáinín. Her mind has much improved since the time you used to be … what was the expression you used, Caitríona? … Yes … bickering with her … It is difficult for us here to keep track of time, but if I understand you rightly, she has been here for three years now, under the beneficial influence of culture … But tell me this, Caitríona … Do you remember the letter I wrote for you to your sister Baba in America? … That was the last letter I ever wrote … I was struck down by my fatal illness the following day … Is that will under discussion still?

  —It’s many a letter came from Baba since you were writing for me, Master. But she never confirmed or denied anything about the money. We got her reply to that letter you spoke of, Master. That was the last time she mentioned a will: “I did not make my will yet,” she said. “I hope I will not suffer a sudden or accidental death as you were imagining in your letter. Do not worry. I will make my will in due course, when I consider it necessary.” When that letter came I said to myself, “It must have been a schoolmaster wrote that for her. Our people never had that sort of talk.”

  It’s the Small Master—your own successor—who writes for us now, Master, but I’m afraid the priest writes for Nell. That hag can get round him with her chickens and her knitted stockings and her backhanders … She’s the one who’s good at that, Master. I thought I’d last another few years and bury the bitch before me! …

  Anyway, you did your best for me about the will, Master. You had a hand for the pen, Master. I often saw you writing a letter, and I used to think that your pen was able to blacken paper with words as fast as I could put stitches on a stocking … “May the Lord have mercy on the poor Big Master,” I used to say. “He was so obliging. If G
od had granted him more time he would have got the money for me …”

  I think the Schoolmistress—your wife I mean, Master—will soon be setting up house again. And why wouldn’t she? A strong active young woman still, God bless her … I beg your pardon, Master! Don’t heed anything I say. I’m always rattling on like that, but sure a person can’t help that … Master dear, I shouldn’t have told you at all. You’ll be worrying about her. I thought it would warm the cockles of your heart to hear the Schoolmistress was getting married again …

  Now Master, you’ll have to forgive me … I’m not a gossip … Don’t ask me to name the man, Master. Ah now, Master dear, don’t ask me that! … If I’d known it would upset you so much I wouldn’t have mentioned it at all …

  So she swore and she promised that if you died she’d never marry another man! Ah! Master dear! … Did you never hear: after the vows the women are easiest … You weren’t even cold, Master, when she had her eye cocked at another man. I think, between ourselves, she was always a bit flighty …

  The Small Master? … Indeed it’s not … The Wood of the Lake Master? … That’s a decent man, Master. Never touches a drop. Himself and the Parish priest’s sister are to be married soon—that dark miserable little slip who wears trousers. They say he’ll get the new school then …

  Indeed it’s not the Red-haired Policeman either. They say he has a fine stump of a nurse on a string in Brightcity … it’s not the seed potato man17 either … Guess away now, Master. I’ll tell you if you guess right … Padeen’s gone to England, Master. The lorry was taken off him and sold. There wasn’t a road he travelled buying turf that he didn’t leave a string of debts after him. Guess again, Master … The very man himself, Master, Billyboy the Post! You did well to guess him. You have a great head on you, Master, whatever anybody says …