A Pagan Place

by Edna O'Brien

  Your father had given the Nigger a site and that meant he had a right of way and he went in and out at all hours, tearing drunk. They christened him the Nigger because he had berries on one cheek that were the colour of beetroot and when he moved his jaw they swayed and made everybody laugh. Some called them carbuncles. On fair days and race days strangers bought pints for him, to do the trick with the jaw. Though they laughed and split themselves laughing, he himself never did, he just did the trick and downed the pints.

  Going home drunk he took off his breeches by the water pump and when girls and women went by, he said Come here missie, until I do pooly in you, but if the guards or the Sergeant went by he insisted that he was having a footbath. The girls used to fly past and when he couldn’t catch them he did pooly anyhow, that was not pooly at all but white stuff. Then he went on home cursing and blinding and laughing like a jackass.

  Your mother said he would burn the house, which was a shack, over his head, and that he would die without a priest. He kept a roaring fire going and he read all the old almanacs and knew the predictions about wars and weather and the end of the world and things. His hero was Christopher Columbus. He used the almanacs as handles to grip the kettle and though the edges were scorched he never let the words burn, he loved the words.

  Your father said he made a great cup of tea, your mother said it was like senna. Your mother tackled him one day, asked when he was moving on to his own part of the country and his relatives.

  He looked at her, he said You’re an ignorant woman, I hasten to tell you, you’re an ignorant woman. After that he went in and out with a sack over his head so that she couldn’t accost him.

  Your father said what harm was it to give right of way and a bit of land to a poor man that needed it. Poor man, she said, sourly.

  Your mother and father were goodnatured in two different ways. Your mother sent slab cake and eggs to Della, the girl that had consumption but your father gave potatoes away and turf banks and grazing. Often there was strife over it.

  One day your father had a pitchfork raised to your mother and said I’ll split the head of you open and your mother said And when you’ve done it there will be a place for you. And you were sure that he would and you and your sister Emma were onlookers and your sister Emma kept putting twists of paper in her hair, both to curl it and pass the time. Later when your mother felt your pulse she said it was not normal, nobody’s pulse was normal that particular day.

  Later still, when your mother told her sister your Aunt Bride, she added things that did not happen, like that the prongs of the fork were on her temples and heading for her eyes, like that she stamped her foot and dared him to. Which she didn’t. She added touches of bravery. An emergency might have occurred but that Ambie came to the rescue.

  Ambie lived in your house but was always threatening to go. He and the Nigger were mortal enemies, Ambie stood up for your mother and the Nigger sided with your father. They could not be left alone, together, for fear of attacking each other over ancient political issues. They had to be together when the cattle were being hauled into the lorry and sent to the city to a mart.

  The city butchers favoured the cattle that came from the sweet land. The grass differed from place to place, was sweet, was sour, was saline, depending on the mineral content. The clover made it sweetest of all and the cows even munched the clover flower.

  It took three men to get them into the lorry. They were up at cockcrow. It was teeming. The beasts kept slipping and sliding over the runway and Ambie and the Nigger were cursing and blinding at each other and the beasts were bawling, and no one could get understood. Ambie positioned himself on the back of the lorry, intending to grab them by the horns as they were hustled up, but it was a right tug-of-war between him and them, they trying to pull him down and he trying to pull them up and the Nigger saying Shag whenever Ambie let go and the beasts slipped back down again. It took the best part of an hour. Afterwards everything was very quiet and the dogs were disappointed when all the commotion died down.

  Your mother said that their language was choice but she was not scandalized as she was hoping that the cattle would fetch a good price.

  She told Ambie that they would never have got dispatched but for his presence of mind. From time to time she flattered him. She was afraid he might take a figari and leave.

  He was saving money. He earned extra money through the killing of pigs at which he was adept. He had his own knife and his own spattered overalls. He slit their throats then held them upside down over a container to catch the blood that was essential for the black puddings. You seldom watched but you heard. The squeals of each particular pig reached you no matter where you hid, no matter where you happened to crouch, and it was heart-rending as if the pig was making a last but futile appeal for someone to save him. Hens never did that, hens only wriggled and expired.

  The dogs did not like those squeals either, they hid under the table and appeared only when there was offal and things being sorted out, not that they ate it, they merely examined it. They had selective tastes.

  Your mother gave strips of pork away, the choice bits to the professional people, the doctor, Manny Parker’s sister and the Sergeant; for cottagers got lesser pieces, knuckles, and crubeens for boiling. It took hours allocating the different portions. When you delivered them you got praise or sometimes a sixpence.

  At card games Ambie cheated and won geese and turkeys which he sold. Before he sold them he stuffed them with oats to put the weight up. Some buyers were crafty and waited for the geese and turkeys to do number two and the tailor’s wife presided with the brass scales.

  Ambie shot a neighbour’s goose and would have got summonsed only your father squared it with the guards. Your father had influence, got a crime hushed up a long time before, not for himself, but for one of his friends. One of his friends shot a girl because she wouldn’t serve him another drink, shot and missed. But it was still a crime and the man was charged with attempted manslaughter. And your father went and saw the girl and her mother and gave them soft soap and money. The man was deported to Australia instead of getting jailed and he was never heard of again and your mother said that was gratitude for you.

  Your father was a Peace Commissioner and spoke up for Ambie, said the shooting of the goose was accidental, said Ambie thought it was a wild swan that had strayed in off the lake. Normally they were at loggerheads, disagreed about everything, how to foot turf, or how to treat a dog for distemper.

  Ambie came from a rocky place where hardly anything grew and where the small fields were divided by stone walls instead of grass banks or lines of trees. At Easter time they killed a kid there. That was their speciality. His mother sent your mother a red Christmas candle. His mother and your mother had never met. Ambie carried the candle the whole way, in his left hand, and only when he was getting down off the bicycle did it snap and your mother said A bull in a china shop and Ambie laughed as he handed it to her.

  When she got cross you quaked but Ambie had a different ploy, he sucked air between his teeth. His teeth were rotten. He sucked air or he twiddled the signet ring that was made of aluminium. It was aluminium culled from a plane that had crashed. People went to look at the wreckage the way they went to look at scenery or quins if they had been born. It was a two-seater German plane that crashed by mistake. The pilot went into the sea. There were notes about it between heads of government. But it did not break hearts the way the doctor’s death did, because the pilot was a stranger. There were bits of him everywhere and parts of the car were taken as souvenirs. Your father took a door handle.

  The doctor crashed into a telegraph pole and everyone said he must have had homebrew taken. Homebrew deranged the senses. The telegraph pole was new, otherwise he would have known it because he knew that road backwards. A hurley field got christened after him.

  He had had two wives but he never acknowledged the second one and when patients asked how she was he always said My wife is deceased. His second wife
was drunk at first Mass, fell off the end of the seat and into the aisle. When he got killed she went away and was never heard tell of again. Then the new doctor came and he and his wife were all the rage at first, and had card games specially in their honour. His wife had a teddy bear coat and a flapjack and said that her people were people of note. Your mother said she was artificial. They kept their bread in an enamel tin with Soiled Dressings written on it.

  *

  When your mother tore her vein on the rim of the milk bucket Ambie went for the doctor on the bicycle. She was in the house by the time he came. There were dark gunnels of blood in the rifts between the flagstones so that he could see what he was walking into. The hens were mesmerized by it and pecked at it if you can call that pecking.

  He knew where to tie the vein and wrapped clean white gauze round and round it. He refused the ten shilling note that was offered as a fee. It was a crinkled note retrieved from under the oilcloth of the kitchen table. There was a small set-to. Your father insisted that the doctor take it, stuffed it in his pocket behind his spotted silk handkerchief. The doctor rolled it up like a toffee paper and flung it far away. It flew over the top of the oil lamp and landed in the corner of the window ledge near a spool of black thread. It was a lovely moment, the lids of the stove gleaming, your mother speechless and grateful like a heroine in a play; the doctor accepting a cup of buttermilk, and your father remonstrating but in gratitude. The hairpin on the globe of the lamp gave out a little clatter as the lamp warmed up. Your father sang,

  Oh doctor, dear doctor

  Oh dear Doctor John

  Your codliver oil is so pure and so strong,

  I’m afraid of my life

  I’ll go down in your sight

  If I drink any more of your codliver oil.

  Sang in admiration even though it was a song composed for the other doctor, the dead doctor who’d crashed.

  Your mother did not want to hear an account of his death again. It turned her stomach. The other things that turned her stomach were breast-feeding and shellfish. You heard her telling Mrs Durack so, when Mrs Durack was having a baby and though your mother stressed the direness of her nausea, Mrs Durack kept saying, You don’t say.

  Mrs Durack had her hair veined in the centre and then drawn back into a bun and people said she did it to look like Mrs Simpson who was in love with the Prince of Wales. At their wedding Mrs Durack sang There’s a Bridle Hanging on the Wall and sang very screechy and all the locals thought she was going to be a toff but soon she lost her airs and had improvements made in her husband’s pub and a sink put in.

  There were thirty pubs. They did business at night. In the daytime they were cold and had to be scrubbed out but at night when the blinds were drawn and the men assembled they were enthralling places. Ambie went every night and your father went periodically. If women went they were put in a place partitioned off by frosted glass and your mother used to cross-examine Ambie on the drinks they had had and the condition they went home in.

  Ambie often got you a bar of chocolate and presented it to you in the morning. It was usually dark chocolate with white cream in it. The shopkeepers had their cronies and could decide who to give rationed things to. Once Ambie got you Peggy’s leg that was cinnamon coloured and sticky. Your mother didn’t mind if you ate it before breakfast, your mother spoilt you, let you make little loaves which she affixed to the top of the big loaf before consigning it to the hot oven, let you put on her dance dresses which were nearly in shreds. During Lent and Advent you didn’t eat the chocolate, saved it up, and it was like owning a shop having so many bars all at once, and an assortment.

  Ambie went from one pub to the next, depending on where the activity was. Your mother did her best to keep your father in at night, kept up a roaring fire, praised the programmes on the wireless, rubbed his head. The smell of his scalp got under her nails, that and the scurf. If in spite he turned the wick too high, the mantle got black and fell away in a shroud of soot. She kept an eye to it, turned it down when he went out to relieve himself. Did it from the top step and always aimed at the same place of flag, night after night. The flag had many a feature, rims of rust where buckets and rain barrels had lain, a lodge of slime around the metal lid that concealed the manhole, repeated hen-droppings and chicken-droppings, which were not the same thing, and a bleached bit where the rain fell perpendicularly without either wall or hedge to deflect its course.

  No three days went by without rain occurring on two of them. That was due to being in the Gulf Stream. You learned so in Geography. You learned Geography by heart and important dates in History and human touches of history as well, such as that Brian Boru got stabbed on the strand at Clontarf, got stabbed by a wicked Dane while giving thanks to God. You knew where straw hats were manufactured, and sewing machines, and cutlery. Your teacher Miss Davitt said how Shane O’Neill was disarmingly attractive and that Queen Elizabeth was light about him which was why she tried to have him poisoned at a feast because Hell has no music like a woman playing second fiddle.

  Miss Davitt had no romance at all. She had a cataract in one eye. A cataract was a little cloud that came down over the eye like a veil. There was another kind of cataract that meant running water. Everything meant more than one thing. Miss Davitt was too brainy. She got excited when she discussed politics. Your father and her had a flaming row one night and you were afraid to go to school next day in case she avenged it on you, which she did. She called you a snib, kept referring to the day when she sent you down for twopenceworth of chalk and you misheard and came back with twopenceworth of a chop.

  She was for de Valera and your father was for Cosgrave. Cosgrave’s crowd had sent blueshirts to fight for General Franco in Spain. Your father’s sage was an ex-Minister for Agriculture, who when a heckler threw the question How many toes has a pig? said Take off your boots and count. Your father relished that story and told it when he was in good form and sang Sweet Slievenamon, the song to the mountain that enshrined woman. He sang one way when he was drunk and another when he was sober.

  When you were born he and his brother were at issues but upon hearing the good news they burst into song, sang Red River Valley through the nose and fell in over the bed trying to get a gawk at you, to discern your sex and your features. The midwife said you were lovely but said it out of shock so preposterous were you. They sang in first and seconds and your father used the unfinished roll of lint to conduct with. The midwife stitched your mother, made a botch of it. Your mother didn’t tell these things but you knew them. You were three then and comprehending.

  After she’d done her day’s work you sat on her lap. You put your ear to the wall of her stomach and you could hear her insides glugging away, what you felt through one ear was transmitted through the other, her heartbeat, the busyness of her digestion and the leisureliness of her breath. Your father told you to get down out of there, to get down. Put his hand under her chin and forced her face up, told her to smile, smile, told her she was getting old, told her she had wrinkles, called her Mud, short for mother. She had to go across the landing to his room. An edict.

  The landing was big and cold. There was a sofa that never got sat on and a fringed mat that hardly ever got shook out. There was an embroidered picture that said There’s a rose in the heart of New York. A funny thing to say. You saw New York on a postcard and it was all skyscrapers.

  Before she went across the landing she put tissue paper in the inside of her pussy. It made a crinkly noise. Even without a candle you knew what she was doing. She saved tissue paper from the boxes that new shoes came in. Over there she moaned and groaned. His sinews crackled. You ate sweets, small chocolate buttons that congealed on the roof of the mouth

  You were frightened of lockjaw and also of being kidnapped. In your mother you were safe and that was the only time you couldn’t get kidnapped and that was the nearest you ever were to any other human being. Between you and your mother there was only a membrane, wafer thin. Being near someone on th
e inside was not the same thing as being near them on the outside, even though the latter could involve hugging and kissing.

  Once you were one with her. She didn’t like it. She told the woman with the hair like Mrs Simpson how she was sick and bilious all the time. You were conceived in New York, where the rose was purported to be.

  Emma was born there, long before you, Emma was born soon after they got married. Emma was a love child. Emma learnt to walk in a park in New York and was brought to Coney Island and given ice-cream.

  They had gone there to make their fortune. Your father tried to kill your mother but she said her brother who was a teetotaller would avenge her death and your father said he never could because he was as dead as doornails. And that was the first your mother knew about her brother being dead.

  He didn’t die a hero’s death like he should, being as he was a wanted man and had organized ambushes against the Tans, he died from a bomb that he was using to catch fish with, in the Blackwater river. It exploded. His cartridge belt got soldered to his stomach and when the ambulance came all they could do was gather the bits into a blanket. Just before he died he spoke a letter to his mother and a priest copied it down, all about God and patriotism and how happy he was to be dying. That letter was in an arbutus frame and when you wanted a good cry you went into the room and read it and the tears came almost as soon as you started to read the words.

  You cried at plays too, everyone cried at plays, even the men standing at the back of the hall who minutes before would be talking or laughing. The actors had to shout because of all the sobbing and crying. Handkerchiefs were passed around from one to another, from those who had them to those who had not, among the women that is. The men used the cuff of their coats and blew snot between their fingers and threw it from them like butts of apple.