Irish Portraits

by Liam O'Flaherty

  “That’s a hundred,” said Mr. Kenneally. “I’ll let you have the rest in monthly instalments. It’s no good giving you the lot together. Now hand me that paper in your pocket.”

  “What for?” said Brunton.

  Mr. Kenneally shrugged his shoulders.

  “Supposing anything happened to you with that on your person?”

  Brunton looked at him suspiciously.

  “How do ye mean, if anything happened to me?” he said softly.

  “Why,” said Mr. Kenneally, raising his eyebrows, “couldn’t you drop dead in the street same as anybody else, or meet with an accident or …”

  “How d’ye mean … eh? … meet with an accident?” said Brunton.

  “Look here,” said Mr. Kenneally with a show of anger, “hand me back that cheque. I’m not going to argue with you. A bargain is a bargain, isn’t it?”

  Brunton drew the cheque closer to him and thought for a moment. Then he looked at Mr. Kenneally closely again and pursed up his lips.

  “Now I warn ye,” he said, “not to try any o’ them accidents on me. I got friends yet. Ye can get me, maybe, but they’ll get you. Don’t forget that. Here. Ye can have the paper. After all… I’m not an informer, even though you’re a rat. Here. May they burn ye. Ye’ll burn anyway later on.”

  He threw the envelope across the table. Mr. Kenneally grabbed it. Brunton put the cheque into his pocket. He rose to his feet.

  “One a month’ll suit me all right,” he said. “Where?”

  “Here,” said Mr. Kenneally in a low voice, as he stowed away the envelope.

  “Well! I’m going,” said Brunton.

  “Good-bye,” said Mr. Kenneally.

  They stared at one another for a few moments and then Brunton moved off. Mr. Kenneally raised his glass and had another sip. When he was near the door, Brunton suddenly stopped and came back a few steps rapidly. He thrust out his clenched fist towards Mr. Kenneally and nodding his head he muttered:

  “Mind what I told ye about tryin’ on any o’ them accidents.”

  Mr. Kenneally rolled his whiskey around his palate and then swallowed it. Brunton turned and rushed out of the bar. Mr. Kenneally stared at the door through which he had disappeared. Then he leaned his chin on his doubled fists and stared at the table. After sitting motionless for over a minute that way, he sighed and shrugged himself.

  “Have to get rid of him … somehow,” he muttered.

  Colic

  It was Saturday afternoon in the village of Cregg. There had been a little pig fair that morning and everybody was drinking his neighbour’s health. It was a June day and very hot. From end to end of the Main Street people were standing outside the doors of the public-houses, with pint glasses full of black cold porter clutched in their strong red hands. There was loud laughter, hearty oaths and the smacking of thirsty lips. Here and there a man was drunk and singing some ridiculous song as his wife tried to bring him home.

  The only two thirsty and unhappy men in the village of Cregg were Tom Hanrahan and his friend Mick Finnigan. They had no money. Their credit was valueless because of their liquor debts. None of the farmers would treat them, since neither of them had any land and were therefore people of no account. Hanrahan was a kind of botch carpenter and Finnigan always acted as his labourer.

  They leaned against the fence outside Mrs. Curran’s public-house. Hanrahan had his hands in the pockets of his ragged old dungaree overalls. He wore an old blue coat, very shiny at the elbows and with a big tear, unmended, over the right pocket. The uppers of his light unpolished shoes were level with the ground on the outside of each heel and the inside of each heel was almost as high as when it was bought. So that when he walked he had to lift his feet up high, like a Chinaman wearing slippers without heels on a cobbled street. His shoulders slouched and he had a slight hump, less by nature than because of his habit, when he cracked a joke, of bunching himself together with his mouth wide open and his elbows dug into his sides as if he were hugging himself. He was a short, thin man with little blue eyes, a sharp, long nose, a big mouth and a sallow complexion.

  Finnigan, on the other hand, was a huge heavy man, with a rosy, fat face, sleepy blue eyes and a sandy moustache. He never smiled. He hardly ever spoke, and when he stood still anywhere he always crossed his arms on his massive chest. He once drank four pints of Guinness’s porter without drawing breath.

  Suddenly Hanrahan clapped his hands together, opened his mouth wide and began to laugh without making any noise. Tears began to glitter in his little eyes. Finnigan looked at him stupidly with his mouth open.

  “What’s up?” said Finnigan.

  “I know how we can get drinks,” gasped Hanrahan at last. Tears had begun to run down his sallow cheeks with laughter. Then he was seized with another fit and doubled up against the fence, mumbling: “Oh, my side, I’m afraid I laughed too much, oh, my side.”

  “Foo,” said Finnigan, shifting his back to get a more comfortable stone in the fence for the support of his shoulder blades. Then he opened his mouth again to speak, but forgot what he was going to say before he could say it, owing to laziness and the heat of the day. He subsided against the fence in silence, like a bladder out of which the wind is escaping slowly. He crossed his legs and dropped his chin on his neck.

  Then Hanrahan suddenly became serious. He came over to Finnigan. Putting one hand on Finnigan’s chest and the other hand on the fence he reached up and began to whisper in Finnigan’s ear. He was whispering a long time rapidly. When he had finished Finnigan shook his head several times, scowled and said “No,” with great emphasis. “Now look here,” said Hanrahan in an irritated tone, “listen to me.” He began to whisper again. Gradually the look on Finnigan’s face changed. The scowl vanished. The fat, red cheeks, with little white flakes on them from sunburn, broke into creases. He opened his mouth and guffawed three times, just like this: “Haw,” then a gasp and then again “Haw.”

  “D’ye see?” said Hanrahan, digging him in the ribs with his elbow.

  “Yes,” blubbered Finnigan, laughing down in his chest heavily. “I… I see what ye mean now.”

  “Well, are ye game to do it?” said Hanrahan.

  “Would I get arrested?” asked Finnigan, with his forehead wrinkled and a suspicious look in his eyes.

  “Devil a fear of ye,” said Hanrahan. “Who’s to know the difference.”

  They were both silent for a long time, almost a minute. Hanrahan was watching Finnigan’s face anxiously. Finnigan was looking at the ground, his forehead wrinkled, his mouth open, his eyes staring vacantly at something to the left of him. At last he looked up and said, “All right I’ll do it. Where?”

  “Here. Here where ye stand,” cried Hanrahan excitedly “Now mind what I told ye. Just do what I told ye. Now go ahead. It’s dead easy. Leave the rest to me. Just do what I told ye. Hurry. Go ahead, man.”

  Finnigan cast a suspicious glance about him and then he let himself fall heavily down by the side of the fence. He made a terrific, crumbling, brushing, dull noise falling. He was wearing grey heavy frieze trousers, a navy blue jersey and heavy hob-nailed boots that were white with caked mud and dust. He lay in a cumbersome soft mass on the ground, lying on his stomach. He gripped his stomach and began to yell. He bellowed like a bullock. Hanrahan rushed over to him, tried to turn him on his back, shook him and then jumped to his feet.

  He ran out into the middle of the road, waved his hat into the air and began to shout: “Help, help. A doctor, or he’s dead. Help, help,” People rushed out of Mrs. Curran’s public-house crying: “What’s the matter, what’s the matter?”

  “He’s got the colic,” shouted Hanrahan, rushing over to Finnigan and going down on his knees. “He’s got the colic. My God, if I had only a drop of brandy for him.” He began to rub Finnigan’s stomach furiously. Finnigan writhed and bellowed with monotonous regularity.

  “What is it?” cried Mrs. Curran, a short, stout woman in a black dress, with a silver watch hanging on
her right bosom from a black satin strap. Her son had become a General in the Free State Army and she gave herself “airs,” as the people said. She pushed up through the crowd until she faced Hanrahan and Finnigan.

  “Mrs. Curran,” cried Hanrahan pathetically, as he took off his hat. The crown of his head was completely bald. Some half-drunken man in the crowd giggled and cried: “Oh sweet Virgin, isn’t the full moon out early this quarter.” “Mrs. Curran,” continued Hanrahan, holding his hat in his hand, “may yer soul rest in Heaven and save his life with a drop of brandy. An’ didn’t he soldier under yer son General Curran an -”

  “Mary,” called Mrs. Curran shrilly, “bring out a noggin o’ brandy, quick.”

  Hanrahan raised his hands and eyes to Heaven and murmured a blessing on Mrs. Curran. At the same time he nudged Finnigan with his right knee. Finnigan bellowed and began to kick the ground with his heels. He made a noise like an earthen floor being beaten with a heavy hammer. The same half-drunken man who had remarked on Hanrahan’s baldness began to laugh, but somebody else told him to shut up and asked him whether he was a Turk or what. A quarrel started and the greater part of the crowd surged away down the road after the two men who had begun to quarrel.

  Then the girl came running out with a noggin of brandy in a tumbler. Hanrahan grasped the tumbler. Holding the tumbler in his hand he began to thank Mrs. Curran again. But the sight of the brandy was too much for Finnigan. He stopped bellowing and gripping his stomach. He sat up suddenly.

  “I must drink yer own sweet health, Mrs. Curran, first -” Hanrahan was saying, when Finnigan reached out over his shoulder and grasped the tumbler. A few drops of the brandy spilled as Finnigan wrenched the tumbler from Han-rahan’s hand. Then at one gulp he swallowed it, every drop of it.

  “Scoundrel,” yelled Hanrahan, gripping Finnigan about the body and biting at him with his teeth all over the chest. “Son of a wanton,” he hissed between bites, “robber, may yer bones be sucked dry in hell by hungry little devils, you -”

  But Finnigan jerked himself up and swung Hanrahan aside against the fence. He rose to his feet slowly and ponderously with Hanrahan hanging to his jersey. He looked around him foolishly.

  “I’ll have ye arrested, the two of you,” cried Mrs. Curran, beside herself with rage at the trick that had been played on her. The crowd was laughing.

  Finnigan, as soon as he heard the word “arrested,” opened his eyes and his mouth, looked about him wildly, struck at Hanrahan blindly and missed him. Then he yelled and started off at a bound through the crowd, headed westwards towards the road leading to his native village four miles away. He left a large strip of his blue jersey and of his cotton shirt in Hanrahan’s bony fingers. He ran up the road, the hobnailed soles of his boots almost hitting him in the broad back as he ran, his back all ripped open and naked in parts, with remnants of his clothes slithering about his body. The people yelled with laughter. Even Hanrahan forgot his anger and laughed.

  But Mrs. Curran did not laugh. She kept shaking her fist at Hanrahan and shouted: “I’ll have ye arrested for fraud unless ye pay me for that noggin of brandy. So I will.”

  “Yerrah, is it out of yer mind ye are, woman?” cried a fat farmer, with white side-whiskers. “Is it a mangy drop o’ brandy ye’d put in front of a good laugh. Here an’ be damned to ye is the price of yer whiskey. Come on,” he added to Hanrahan, “begob, yer worth a drink for that.” And he burst out laughing again.

  “Begob an’ he’s worth another from me,” cried another farmer. “Have one on me too, the curse o’ God on ye for a humorous cratur, Hanrahan.”

  Laughing, shouting, cheering, Hanrahan was led off to another public-house by the delighted farmers. As he was going away he turned on the retreating and discomfited Mrs. Curran and cried: “To hell with the upstart General Curran and up the Republic.”

  This electronic edition published in 2011 by Bloomsbury Reader

  Bloomsbury Reader is a division of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 50 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3DP

  Copyright © 1970 Liam O'Flaherty

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

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  ISBN: 9781448204106

  eISBN: 9781448203512

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