The Star Factory

by Ciaran Carson

  The first is a thimble-holder, carved from one bit of wood in the shape of a thumb-sized owl perched on a hollow tree-stump; it is nicotined with age, but where it has been scuffed by accidental history, there are traces of a blond wood that might be ash. I have it before me now, trying to return its quizzical gaze, for its eye-beads of black resin have been slightly misaligned. Its ears have long since been knocked off, the scars worn smooth by generations of caressing thumbs and fingers. This owl was and is a small, powerful icon. Looking into the ink-well abyss of its thimble-receptacle, I re-imagine fairy-tales in which such black holes are adits to an underworld, patrolled by speaking dogs, I remember, in the Falls Park, the scoop in the bole of a tree, which had acquired a mossy basin sometimes filled with rainwater, where I would conceal coins and come back to retrieve them weeks later; I knew, then, that no one else had stumbled on this portal to the universe, and only I had access to it. Then, the gravel walks on which I ran back to my family assumed a grave significance of dance-step patterns, which I tried to follow with my Plimsoll footprints; I’d run faster, faster, till I took off like an owl, and, gliding low, I could intercept my shadow, and tell it to slow down.

  The owl reminds me of its kinship to the bat, both night foragers, denizens of barns, attics, belfries and hollow trees; of hieroglyphic deities; of how the apparition of the Great White Barn-owl can be attributed to the banshee, how owls are general harbingers of doom; of harvest-mice, scurrying amid their cereal arcades, transfixed by a pair of searchlight eyes; of the time-bending, oracular call of the owl.

  The second ornament is a milkmaid figurine of Dresden mode. So, I remember Dresden, which I visited briefly some years ago, not long after the fall of the Berlin Wall. They were in the initial stages of rebuilding the Frauenkirche, a Baroque mass of rubble tumbled between the remnants of a tower and the apse, and had begun to sort out its chaos; neatly numbered stones lay arranged on steel racks. I was aware of such jigsaw techniques from the Ulster Folk Museum, which relocated old buildings to its domain at Cultra; but there, the curators were merely taking apart and putting together again a 1:1 scale model; here, the whole enormous lapidary havoc was beyond me, a Humpty-Dumpty task as impossible as piecing together O’Neill Street from its dislocated, scattered fragments. Yet, reconstruction of the Frauenkirche proceeds apace, and they reckon to have the edifice finished by the year 2006.

  Walking into a kitchen house in ‘Rowland Terrace’ in the Ulster Folk and Transport Museum, to give it its full title, I am returned to 3 O’Neill Street, even though the Rowland home has, since its relocation, lost its patina of being lived in, and buzz of conversations past. And, though Rowland Street came from off Sandy Row, on the opposite side of Belfast’s sectarian divide, I recognize its furniture and ornaments: the mantel-clock; the dresser backed against the staircase; the Singer treadle sewing-machine, which in O’Neill Street occupied a niche opposite the foot of the stairs, between the chimney-breast and the yard window. The Singer looked like a prototype time-machine in its shellac-black, gold-scrolled body-armour and fitments of chromed-steel chattering parts; for one pedal movement of the treadle, the seamstress got about sixty split-seconds of stitches, as she distributed the fabric of needle-punctured time away from her in piecework fashion.

  When not in use, the Singer was hidden from sight beneath its curved wooden cover, that looked like a small catafalque or tabernacle on an altar; yet one could still sense, within that dark interior, a darker, magnet-heavy, die-cast presence brooding in a must of gramophone machine-oil. De luxe models folded surreptitiously, on greased hinges, into a matrix of the table, and when the operator concealed the prostrate machine with a fitted panel, the whole console was transformed into a piece of furniture – a davenport, perhaps, or an occasional table with its case of dried flowers placed on a frilly doily. This is an engaging management of space, where the Singer is horizontally entombed between the table’s laminates like an Egyptian fossil. There is a hide-and-seek philosophy about it, reminding me that when I looked up ‘davenport’ (I wanted another word for ‘writingdesk’) in Chambers 20th Century Dictionary,1 I chanced on ‘davenport-trick’, ‘an artifice by which a man can free himself from ropes wound round him and tied. [From two imposters who practised it (fl. 1845-65).]’ The next four entries read:

  Davis apparatus, a device making possible escape from a crippled submarine [From the inventor].

  davit, one of a pair of erections on a ship for lowering or hoisting a boat. [App. from the name David].

  Davy, Davy-lamp, the safety-lamp used in coalmines invented by Sir Humphrey Davy (1778–1829).

  Davy Jones, a sailor’s familiar name for the (malignant) spirit of the sea, the devil.- Davy Jones’s locker, the sea, as the grave of men drowned at sea. [Origin unknown].

  An inspired alphabetical sequence, which gives the bones of an elaborate narrative, a Captain Nemo–Houdini routine, where we visualize a globe-helmeted, leaden-booted figure in slow motion on the snowy TV-screen ocean floor, bearing a flambeau: upwardly streaming, empty word-bubbles.

  So I would sit in the submarine control-space of the Singer, guiding it through cloudy grottoes; sometimes, as my attention wandered, I would find myself gazing upwards into the steep crook of the stairs instead, thinking of the coal-hole underneath them and how it was reached by way of the scullery, where I hear the boom of the stove being lit with one of those will-o-the-wisp sparking devices.

  The coalman appears like Lucifer in a flash of clapped-out light, smelling of squibs, the whites of his eyes glaring from beneath his Pharaonic headgear. There are white dots on his knuckles as he clutches the twisted ears of the black dead weight on his back. Reaching the scullery, he stoops into the portal of the coal sack galaxy, undoes the ears, and jettisons a tumbling load of fractured lumps. The slack, exhausted bag is taken back to the lorry, flopped down, and another, packed with knobbles, is taken in for deposition. Long after he had disappeared, the coalman’s cloak of coal-dust aura lingered in the silty air.

  The coalman and the sweep were kinsmen, alter egos allied in a carbon-burning life, whose aeons’ residue was furred impalpably within the chimney. Yet both were independent agents, and the sweep was a solitary genius, teetering on his slow high bicycle down foggy gas-lit side-streets, balancing the fasces of his trade on his right shoulder. Arriving at the venue, he would unroll his equipment, and drape the fireplace with a pall; operating in behind it like a blind man, he socketed a length of cane into the brush-head, then another, feeling his way in integers of telescopic stalk. Arriving at the end of it, he’d ask us children to go out responsibly on to the street to check the apparition of the black chrysanthemum: up periscope!

  Now it is time for the lamplighter to make his rounds in the dusk. I used to see him from my bedroom window, propping his short ladder against the cold, cast-iron pole, opening the Aladdin glass door, applying his taper. The gaslamp popped and flared, then steadied to a bright oasis. Across the city, lights came on in ones and ones, linked by subterranean realms of gas.

  I am not quite asleep yet. My father sits on the bed. I feel his comfortable, draped weight on me. He coughs, as if it were a prelude to a great orchestral concert, or a Midnight Mass – a fusillade before the quiet of the Introit – then stubs out his cigarette, and begins to tell a story:

  1 What an appropriate name for a dictionary, with its implications of legal wranglings in book-lined inner sanctums, of precedents and antecedents, of rooms within rooms.

  WHITE STAR STREET

  Will Gallagher was a blacksmith; he maintained a smithy on the main road out of Carrick. Here he would spend days and parts of most nights working hard at shoeing horses. He’d work Sundays and Holy Days, for he had little fear of God; and in those bygone days, when train and motor-car remained to be invented, a smith had bags of work, since horses were a most important mode of transport.

  Every night, his day’s work done, Will would drop into the Wishing Well, and drink till well past closing time.
One night, in a drunken knot of conversation, he began to give off about this and that, about the hard life of the smith, and the sweat of his brow, et cetera.

  – It must be, says he to one companion, there must be an easier way to earn your bread, than to be humped over an eternal furnace, working from dark to dark, and my back near broken.

  – There is, indeed, his drinking partner says, have you ever hear tell of the Black Art?

  – I have, says Will, you mean to sell your soul to the Devil? And he started to think about it. He spoke no more that night. After a while, he went home, still pondering the implications of the Black Art.

  He’d heard somewhere that the way to contact the Devil was to recite the Pater Noster backwards. So he shut his eyes, and for the first time in many’s a long year, knelt down by his bedside, and began to say the Lord’s Prayer the wrong way round. No sooner had the last word passed his lips – or should I say, the first – than His Satanic Majesty appears in a zap of black lightning.

  – I am Lucifer, he says, why do you summon me from the Nether Regions?

  – I’d like, says Will, to sell my soul to you, for I reckon I’m going to hell in any case.

  – OK, says Satan, what would you like in exchange for your soul?

  – Well, says Will, I’d like one of them inexhaustible purses, whereby no matter how much I withdraw from my account, I will always be in the black. And I’d like, of course, the standard three wishes: the first wish, should anybody sit in that chair in the corner, that he cannot be released from it except at my behest; the second – should a body lift the broom in the corner, he’ll stick fast to it, till I tell him to let go; and the third – should anybody lay his hand on the appletree in the back yard, he’ll be magnetized to it, until I give the word.

  – It’s a deal, says Mephistopheles, and he throws a bag of gold at him.

  There was another bolt of lightning, and the Cloven Hoofed One vanished.

  Will peeped into the money bag: it was filled to the brim. He spilled some bits of gold across the table; the bag stayed full. He began to dance a jig and a reel.

  – I am rich, immeasurably rich! Free forever from the forge!

  From then on, he spent his days and his nights in the pub, running the gamut of wine, women and song, till, one day, the seven years were up, and Your Man appears once more in a fart of brimstone.

  – Willie Gallagher, says he, your number’s up; the seven years are spent; and now I’ve come to take you to the Lake of Fire.

  – Fair enough, says Will, let you sit down in that chair and take your ease, for your feet must be killing you. The Lord of Flies sat down. When Will came back, wearing his hat, Satan tried to extricate himself, but could not. His nether region was stuck to the seat.

  – Let me out of here, he says to Will.

  By God, says Will, I will not – well, maybe I will, if you give me another seven years.

  – Oh, all right, then, says Old Nick, and he was gone again in the blink of an eye.

  Relieved of the presence of the Black Prince, Will went on the tear again; and seven years went by like seven weeks. One night, he was wakened by a thunderbolt: there was Old Scratch at the foot of the bed.

  – Come with me, O Billy Gallagher, says he, and you will come, for I’ll not sit down in your damned chair.

  – Fair enough, says Liam, I know when I’m beat, but would you mind giving the floor a bit of a sweep while I go and get my hat, for you’re a tidy man, and I know you’d like the house to look good for whoever might come after me.

  The Devil lifted a broom from the corner and began to sweep the floor. But he found that the broom had taken on a life of its own; nor would it let him go.

  – Get this brush off me! shouts Lucifer.

  – By God, says Will, I will not – well, maybe I will, if you go back to the Flags of Hell and leave me alone for another seven years.

  Mephistopheles had no option; he vanished in a cloud of smoke.

  The seven years went by, as had the other fourteen. One night, Willie was about to go out to cure his hangover. An almighty clap of thunder hit the house, and there stood His Black Nibs at the door. He gripped our hero by the shoulder, and said: – I have you now, Bill Gallagher, and I’ll never let you go, until I see you in the darkest pit of Hell.

  – Well, says Liam, I guess the game is up, and if a man has to go, he has to go, but tell me this, Satan, do you ever get thirsty?

  – Thirsty? says the Devil, do you not know anything about my habitat? The brimstone lakes? My minions turning boys like you on spits? You’ll know all about thirst when I’ve got you there.

  – Well, says William, there’s a fine crop of Cox’s Orange Pippins on that tree in the back-yard. Away out and pick yourself a couple for the journey, while I lace up these boots.

  Your Man goes out to the back-yard. No sooner had he laid his hand on an apple, but he found it stuck fast; and turn and twist as he might, he could not get free.

  – Release me from this tree!

  – Indeed I will not, says Billy: you can stay there till the Crack of Doom, and after it, as far as I’m concerned.

  – I’ll give you another seven years!

  – You will not, says Liam, for I’ll not free you from the tree till you swear blind to me that you’ll go back to Hell and leave me alone for the rest of time.

  The devil had no option; he vanished in a shower of sparks.

  Now Will was on the pig’s back. No more Devil to annoy him, and years of raking to look forward to; but that night, Will Gallagher died in his sleep. He found himself at the Pearly Gates. St Peter looks out, and says:

  – Is it you, Willie Gallagher? The boy that sold his soul to the Devil? Get out to Hell from here, and don’t come back! And he slammed the gate in his face.

  Down goes Billy to the Gates of Hell. The Devil looks out, and says:

  – Get out of here, you twister. There’s no room for you here, with your chair, your broom and your Cox’s Pippins.

  – Well, where am I to go then? says Willie. Peter won’t let me in to Heaven, and you won’t let me in to Hell.

  – Hold on one sec, says Satan, and he came back with a rush-light in his hand. Here you are, says he, away off and make your own hell!

  So, from that day to this, Liam Ó Gallchóir wanders the bogs of Ireland. And should you be travelling the moors some night, you’ll see a wandering star, and if you try and track it down, it will recede from you forever; for it’s will-o’-the-wisp, carrying his private Hell.

  My father calls this story, which I have translated from his Irish, Liam na Sopóige, from sopóg, according to Dinneen, a wisp, a handful of straw, or a torch ‘of bog-deal splinters, or of straw, mounted on a pole for night-fishing’ (here Dinneen, in his customary fashion, presents us with a dramatic little genre vignette, and we imagine these fishermen, in catchless lulls, passing the time in telling serials of the ones that got away). L. Mc Cionnaith’s1 English–Irish Dictionary (2nd edition, 1943) provides some interesting variations: lochrann soluis na sídhe (fairy guiding-light), sop reatha, (wandering wisp), solus sídhe na bportaigh (fairy light of the bogs), teine sídhe (fairy fire), and teine shionnaigh (foxfire, which the OED defines as ‘the phosphorescent light emitted by decayed timber’).

  I carry these little wisps of language about me in my free hand as I consult Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable (new edition, no date, but the flyleaf is dedicated, in a careful italic hand, ‘To S.W.V. Sutton, Christmas 1929, with his father’s love’, which seems an oddly formal address, and a suspicion arises that maybe S.W.V. wrote it himself, as the repressed father could not allow himself such written vows of affection).

  Brewer’s2 great ramble of a book refers me, under Will-o’the-wisp, to these entries:

  Friar’s Lanthorn. One of the many names given to Will-o’ the-wisp, confused by Scott with Friar Rush (q.v.), whom Sir Walter seems to have considered as ‘Friar with the Rush(light)’–

  Better we had thr
ough mile and bush

  Been lanthorn-led by Friar Rush.

  Marmion

  Ignis Fatuus. The ‘Will-o’-the-wisp’ or ‘Friar’s Lanthorn’ (q.v.), a flame-like phosphorescence flitting over marshy ground (due to the spontaneous combustion of gases from decaying vegetable matter), and deluding people who attempt to follow it: hence, any delusive aim or object, or some Utopian scheme that is utterly impracticable. The name means ‘a foolish fire’ it is also called ‘Jack o’ Lantern’, ‘Spunkie’, ‘Walking Fire’, and ‘Fair Maid of Ireland’.

  When thou rannest up Gadshill in the night to catch my horse, if I did not think thou hadst been an ignis fatuus or a ball of wildfire, there’s no purchase in money.

  Shakespeare, 1 Henry IV, iii, 3.

  According to a Russian superstition, these wandering fires are the spirits of still-born children which flit between heaven and the inferno.

  We are now wandering well off the beaten track as, following Brewer’s suggestion to look up Friar Rush, we find that ‘in printer’s slang a friar is a part of the sheet which has failed to receive the ink properly, and is therefore paler than the rest. As Caxton set up his press in Westminster Abbey, it is but natural that monks and friars should give foundation to some of the printer’s slang.’ Here, at least two interpretations are possible, and I can see a good case being made for sudden apparitions of white-habited monks, ghosting the ink away from the sheet by their presence; or maybe we can attribute the term to the perceived untrustworthiness of these ecclesiastic fellows, whose literate closed orders were viewed with some suspicion by the lay population. Indeed, the five Friars cited by Brewer – Bungay, Gerund, John, Rush, and Tuck – all partake of some degree of subterfuge or rascality; they are Odd Men Out. Rush himself is ‘a legendary house-spirit who originated as a kind of ultra-mischievous and evil-dispositioned Robin Goodfellow in medieval German folk-tales (Bruder Rausch, i.e., intoxication, which shows us at once that Friar Rush was the spirit of inebriety)’, and I see a cartoon picture of a flushed drunk monk with a wench on his knee, hawking occasional gobs on to the rush-strewn tavern floor, pounding with his other fist the thick oak refectory table to emphasize the climaxes of his rambling, still-Jesuitical rhetoric of laissez-faire morality, since ‘his particular duty was to lead monks and friars into wickedness and keep them in it’.