A Pagan Place

by Edna O'Brien

  She never kissed you good night, there was no need for that. When you turned to the wall she turned too, put her arms around you, underneath your ribs, clenched you once or twice. You prayed, she prayed, the same prayer.

  As I lay me down to sleep

  I pray to God my soul to keep

  And if I die before I wake

  I pray to God my soul to take.

  You did not want her to die.

  Her own mother nearly took her own life once, went out to the hayshed with a carving knife, having bade good-bye to everyone like it was a proper bed scene. Her own father was a toper too. History repeating itself. The crucifix slipped out of her hand and fell in the warm bed between you. The metal edges wakened you up.

  She often dreamt that she was back in New York and was grieved to find herself in the blue room with the uncultivated hills and boring fields around her. The hills were old mountains, mountains that had lost their peaks and that is why she often said she felt as old as the hills. They were always either misted over or were a nice shade of blue. A navy blue like night although it occurred in the morning. The cows came round the paling wire, lowing and lowing.

  It was Ambie’s job to call her but he over-oiled the clock. The tick was like a sputter, the alarm soft and unobtrusive. Your father was bucking. The milk was late for the creamery, three days in a row. The creamery refused it. It had to be thrown out and not even the beasts came to lick it up. It stayed there, in curds on the grass until the rain washed it.

  The tankard was green and smelly inside, had to be scalded with several kettles of boiling water whereas normally one kettle full was enough. There was a way of doing it, letting trickles of water down the side of the tank and then rubbing it with a cloth and then swishing the water round the bottom of the tank. When you stuck your head in there was a dank smell and your echo was funny. The strainer had muslin laid into it because the metal holes were too big and straw or anything could get through.

  Your father wrote a letter to the creamery manager, a snorter. You were sent with it. The creamery manager was a sissy and his wife was a sissy and they called each other Betty love and Jack darling and he said Are you all right Betty love? and she said If you’re all right Jack darling, I’m all right. They shared a prayerbook at Mass, took turns with it, it was a missal really, his, from the time he was going to be a priest. It had lots of different coloured ribbons to mark the different gospels for the different Sundays and holy days. They had no babies but they had a pram in case they should and the pram was in the porch with logs laid into it. They kept you waiting in the porch. There was a smell of fried onions. The creamery manager came back with you to apologize to your father and your father wasn’t abusive at all and told your mother to put the kettle on. Your mother said under her breath that if there was one thing she hated it was two-facedness.

  Your mother was very straightforward and committed a terrible sin once, went to a Protestant service, to Manny Parker’s mother’s funeral, and after perjury that was the biggest sin of all and the priest had to refer it to the bishop. But even after forgiveness came the priest made a show of her by giving a sermon about it and although he didn’t mention her by name everyone knew and she got up in the middle of the sermon and walked out, tapping her umbrella on the tiles as she went. Ambie said she had great gumption to do it.

  People said different things depending on who they were talking to. That priest was not a friend of hers but the other priest was and he got sent away because of the greyhounds he kept. He was always occupied with them, walking them, training them, taking them to the tracks on Saturday nights. Put a big grey scarf over his white collar so that he wouldn’t be identified as a priest. Gave them codliver oil and had girls’ names for most of them. The man that helped him was called Ryan and he was always saying Ryan, give the dogs some water, Ryan, give the dogs some codliver oil, Ryan, give the dogs some oatmeal biscuits. They used to gnaw the jambs of the door, not because they were hungry, but because they were nervous. At Mass, Ambie and others watched like hawks to see how much wine he drank from the chalice, had their doubts about him, used to throw their heads back, imitating his gulps, quaffing, though of course they had nothing to drink only the air. It made them thirsty. After Mass they all converged on the pub to slake their thirst. They went to a pub belonging to the woman who passed biscuits around. She said it was to soak up the porter but your mother said it was to keep men away from their Sunday dinners.

  No one ever knew who split to the bishop but it happened that he called on the priest unexpectedly whereas it was a ritual that he came only every three years, for the Confirmation. When he saw the hounds he asked whose they were and the priest couldn’t lie, because the bishop would have known it later being as the bishop was the priest’s confessor. The priest got transferred, miles away, to a poor parish where there wasn’t even a dance-hall. Your mother always inquired after him and when she heard that he took to the drink in a big way, she said that at least greyhounds were harmless and that was unusual because she was opposed to all forms of gambling.

  She was against your father having horses, even his trophies irritated her. The ribbons that his horses won at shows maddened her and when he had the silver cup for a year she never cleaned it although she was fanatic about preserving silver. She even put vaseline on the cutlery to stop it tarnishing. She used vaseline for piles too and for chapped lips and when the hem of your new coat hurt your bare legs above the knees and made them red she applied vaseline and rubbed it round and round in nice circular movements. That was called ire. The horse that won the cup was called Shannon Rose.

  Nearly everybody loved a rose. There were wild roses and tea roses and roses that smelt like apples and the essence of roses was said to be green. Dog roses grew wild on the roadside in June. Hawthorn grew wild too but it was unlucky to bring in the house. Roses were lovely because they were connected with St Theresa.

  If you made a novena to St Theresa and were given a rose during the nine days of it, it meant your intention would be granted. You made novenas for all sorts of things but especially for your mother and father that they would be happy and that they would get out of debt.

  The day the bailiff came he sat you on his knee and asked you what you wanted to be when you grew up. You said a domestic economy instructress. You called him Father. He was so nice and kindly that you thought he was a priest. He smiled at that and so did your mother although she was crying just before and shaking holy water and saying Jesus and Mary.

  Your father wouldn’t come out of the room, he had locked the door and was in there with a revolver. The same room where you sat and put a doll’s big soft toe between your legs outside your knickers, and tickled yourself. Your father said he’d shoot if anyone entered. Your mother couldn’t figure out where he’d got the cartridges from. The gun was under the table on a spare leaf of wood. You risked splinters if you put your hand in there. Your father had come on the blackberry wine that was fermenting in the various bottles, even though she had put cloths over to disguise them. You could hear a cork popping and then glug glug as he poured. There were glasses in there, cut glasses with stems.

  Ambie was missing. Your mother said he never was where he was wanted. She lamented the wine. You and she had picked the blackberries, had gone specially to pick them when the sun shone, because wet blackberries impaired the flavour. You had to examine the base of each one for maggots. Some were overripe and some not ripe at all. Those that were underneath took longer to ripen. But you had to pick some of those because your mother said they improved the flavour, made it tart. Your mother envisaged the wine for happy occasions, for trifles, and for giving to visitors in secret, in the pantry.

  Your father was in there over an hour and you all tiptoed round to the side window and it transpired that he had gone to sleep. The same window where honey bees got in one summer and Ambie thought to catch them, and he sent your mother in with a sheet over her head and when she got stung she let out a scream, and
said Oh Jesus, does it have two stings?

  Your father was fast asleep, his backside at the very edge of the chair. It could have resulted in his falling off but it didn’t. His long legs were stretched ahead of him. Your mother lifted you up to see. There was wine spilt on the lino, the bottle had overturned. She held you so close to the wall that the stones grazed your knees. That was a good thing because you had suffered and God would note that suffering and put it towards easing her predicament.

  The bailiff went in to get the revolver and your mother kept begging him to be careful, be careful. It was little and rusted but lethal all the same. He said he had used one like it. He was all thumbs and she had to call him to point it elsewhere before touching the catch. He had to spin a thing to tip the cartridges out and it was so stiff that he had to do that more than once. She knelt to retrieve them. When she took the revolver she said it was in the river it would go. Its fighting days were over.

  She and you waited in the field and when you saw a light being struck in the room you remarked that your father had come awake and was lighting a cigarette. She prayed for the safety of the house. You were afraid of Druids. You had things to fear from the living and from the dead.

  Later she had Mass said in that room. She sent for grapefruit for the priest’s breakfast but Ambie cut it the wrong way, cut it so it had no centre to insert the cherry in. Your mother said he was a yahoo. Her other sarcastic names for him were Plebeian and Aborigine. The cherries were soaked in a liqueur. There were other cherries that were in a carton and were all glued together and they were glacé. People’s eyes were glacé, when they were upset or when they had fever. The priest blessed the house, shook holy water from a thurible all over the furniture and things, but didn’t bless the people. Only newly ordained priests could do that.

  There was a local priest in the South Seas that everyone was in love with. You often invented situations where you were his sacristan, ironing his vestments and things, serving him but hardly ever encountering him. His name was Father Declan.

  When the parish priest was finished blessing, Ambie came in for the leavings, and ate them out of his hand. He ate grapefruit pulp, bacon and a piece of brown bread all together. He sang

  Oh Miss Nicholas,

  Don’t be ridiculous,

  I don’t like it in the daytime.

  Night time is the right time

  Afternoon or evening that’s too soon,

  So Miss Nicholas,

  Don’t be ridiculous,

  I don’t like it in the noon . . .

  Miss Nicholas was the priest’s housekeeper, a woman of fifty with warts. Your mother closed the door with a thud, then opened it again and stuck her head in and made a face, then slammed it again. He understood the castigation. The priest was in the hall saying goodbye. There was money being proffered because he was thanking them in a conciliatory tone. Ambie stopped singing, but winked because of the cash transaction.

  You told him that the greatest line ever written was by Shakespeare. And it was, This is my beloved son in whom I am well pleased. Ambie said they get their money easy, the priests and the Shakespeares. Ambie was a prime boy. Ambie got the doctor’s maid into trouble and she put newspapers all over her bed after she drank ergot and even at that the blood soaked right down through the mattress and she had to sleep on springs until it dried out. The doctor’s wife locked her in the room for five days and starved her.

  The doctor and your mother sat on the kitchen table next to one another and her legs were down, and his hand was somewhere under her apron, in the unknown, tinkering, and she was not laughing and she was not crying but the sounds were like laughing and crying rolled into one, and she was flushed. You took the dog by its mane and ran off.

  When you came back she was asking the doctor if he thought her plates were disgraceful. She had a display of plates on the dresser, some with fruits on them and others with representations of Japanese people that had a doomed love story attached to them. The mad woman had declared those plates disgraceful. The doctor said on the contrary that the dresser was as the poem depicted – Filled with shining delft, speckled and white and blue and brown. Many were held together with gum. The dried gum made a brown smear along the face of the plate but from a distance and in an evening light they looked perfect.

  Your father broke a platter, did it when looking for the strap of a safety razor. He lost his temper and threw the platter. It smashed on the tiled floor. She looked for the strap in the oak press, where flitches of bacon were stored. There were wings there too, white wings and grey wings, the wings of geese and turkeys, their handles a knuckle that oozed grease. The saltpetre was like frosting on the strap of the razor. He swung it like he was intending to slay someone. He went outside.

  When she gathered the pieces up there was a crack in her voice but she didn’t complain. She assembled it and put the pieces on the very top shelf out of reach. Then she got it into her head that there was someone outside the window waiting to shoot her. She couldn’t budge. She went rigid. She sat in the chair, the only time she sat for long, and brought her feet up under her. She was petrified.

  When your father came back she told him and he said that was her imagination. She said it was something. He said he wouldn’t have wished it over the blooming platter, knowing it was of sentimental value. They must have bought it together. She said to let it. She was overjoyed that he had come back sober.

  He had gone to hear Lord Haw Haw on someone else’s wireless. Lord Haw Haw was for Hitler, inflaming people to fight. Your father said the Germans were making great strides and that the Jerry was a clever bloke and would win the war.

  Next day when the teacher asked the girls what their mothers suffered from some said headaches, some said lumbago, some said varicose veins and you were going to say imagination when the Melody one blurted out Piles and Miss Davitt who was laughing up to then took a swipe at one of her plaits and sent her outside. She went down to the closets and didn’t come back. Lena Sheedy was sent down after her and didn’t come back either.

  The closets got scrubbed once a month. Girls did it in pairs, the way girls did a Holy hour in pairs. Only the floor got scrubbed. The seats were crusted over. The wood was unrecognizable underneath. There was grey wood and red wood and yellow wood and blonde. Arbutus was the most prized wood of all. Mahogany was next. You had six dining-room chairs and a carving chair, all mahogany except for the seating which was leather. In the new plantation there was pine wood, Christmas trees, all the same height and the same colour, a graveyard green. The old woods were manifold treacherous in winter when boughs blew and stagnant on a summer’s day. Ambie went down there to shoot snipe and fell asleep and dreamt of being borne aloft on a hammock with crowds cheering. The green got into his vision. The woods created inertia whereas the seaside created vigour.

  At the seaside you ran about, splashed, got pink in the cheeks, tucked your dress up under the elastic of your knickers and hollered to people a long way off. On your way back to the seaside you visited a woman. She was a hunchback and wore silver shoes, night-time shoes. You were with your mother and father and your Aunt Bride. The woman had oysters. She caught them by putting a furze bush in the sand when the tide was out, then when the tide came in the oysters affixed themselves to the thorns of the bush along with seaweed and other addenda.

  You were given an oyster as a great treat. It would not go down. It was too big for your swallow. It was both cumbersome and slippery. It was a delicacy. Your father said that was the last time they would bring you anywhere. Your mother said to leave you alone.

  The women brought you into the bedroom that led off the kitchen and while you were vomiting your father called in to know if it was vomiting you were. You stooped over a green bucket that had a lid on it. The lid had a basketed button in the centre for lifting it on and off. There was a space under the button so that anything could slide through. They peed without lifting the lid. Your mother said all the old things were going out of f
ashion. The woman ran with the bucket to empty it in the sea. The tide was on its way out. She had to follow it. The sea had left its image on the sand, a purple patch. The wind got underneath and made the grains shift, each grain shifted separately. The other time you saw sand minutely was in an egg-timer. It was a way of watching time pass.

  She swished the bucket in the water and then threw the contents a long way off, ahead of the spray. She told you to suck a tomato if ever you felt sick. There were no tomatoes to be had. Her upper lip was yellow from smoking. She admired your coat. It was a tweed coat with a flared skirt. It had six buttons down the front.

  In summer you left the buttons open. It was your Sunday coat. You wore it to Mass on Sundays, and to Confession on Saturdays. You went to the curate because the parish priest was deaf and the sins had to be shouted at him. The same set of sins every week. I cursed, I told lies, I had bad thoughts. You sang dumb about the biggest sin of all, sitting on the carving chair in the front room and opening your legs a bit and putting the soft velvet paw of a boy doll in there, squeezeing with all your might and then when the needles of pleasure came getting furious with him and chastising him and throwing him face down on the floor with his legs and his jockey’s cap any old way.

  Afterwards you dusted, furniture, artificial flowers and his toe, just in case. When the priest inquired into the bad thoughts you didn’t divulge, but when he gave you a stiff penance like a whole Rosary you thought he must know something. Always before going into Confession your breathing got quick.

  Emma fainted once just after she went in and the door flew open and Emma thudded out and her prayer book and holy pictures scattered ahead of her. Hunger some said. Others said cold, because there was no heat in the chapel except that given off by the candles lit for special intentions. Lizzie said Emma had been paying too much attention to her finger nails, buffering them on the back of her fur-backed gloves, that were a present from a man that she had jilted. At any rate Emma fainted and was carried out. You thought maybe she fainted out of fright but you never said.