Wild Decembers

by Edna O'Brien

  “How many fields do ye own now?” he asked, letting out a bitter laugh that was his trademark, and why not, himself with a stump of a foot, a hump, one wet field with clumps of reeds swaying uselessly and a caravan that leaked.

  “We’re doing okay,” Rita said. She was the brains and Reena the nymphet. She made the deals, bought and sold cattle, and harangued her friendly solicitor to write letters, to make hell for this person or that who got in her way. People feared her. Even those who did not know her feared her. At discos the men shied away from her, but that did not matter. Reena could coax them out, and soon after, Rita followed to ask if they would like to come for coffee later. The bachelors, especially the visiting ones, were the easiest prey. Rita had had her gearbox taken out a few years before. Boasted of having told the pup of a surgeon that it was no use to her and that he would be in court if he didn’t do it. Reena had to be watched, not the full shilling. From time to time broached the matter of love or, worse, a baby. Feck love, feck a baby.

  “Isn’t it marvellous … It’ll put Cloontha on the map,” Rita said.

  “Engage a gear,” the Crock said.

  “I’d love to … I’d love to get it going and go up there and congratulate the caveman,” Reena said.

  “I wouldn’t do that … He might have a ladyfriend,” the Crock said.

  “Who … Not the Breege one?”

  “He’d want something toffier.”

  “Like me,” Reena said, and drew her skirt up to her belly. Never wore underclothes in any of the seasons.

  “A child of nature,” Rita says, and recalls a day at a horse fair miles away when a Kerry man asked them a simple question and within a week was ensconced in their kitchen, the pair of them dancing attendance on him and a map of his holding on their kitchen table. She thinks of the young guard who came about a dog licence and was foolish enough to let Reena cuddle him a bit, and then her jumping up on a chair with her bush showing, shouting rape, rape, and a young simpleton summoned to be a witness. They got a good few bob out of that.

  Apparition-like Bugler appeared and was greeted effusively, compliments showered on him and on the new arrival.

  “Your servant,” the Crock called out, and lifted his good cap in deference.

  The sisters surpassed each other in praise of it, standing back from it, then close up to it, tweaking it as they might a baby. Next, they excused themselves cravenly for being so excited, but confessed that it wasn’t every day such a fandango appeared in the parish. At each and every opportunity they touch it, then touch Bugler as if both were interchangeable. Bemused and a little baffled he thanks them for their kindness. They have a teeny-weeny request. Has he christened it?

  “Hadn’t thought of that,” Bugler said.

  Names were trotted out, names of famous boxers, hurley players, and eventually, with some prompting, Reena came up with Dino the Dinosaur.

  “Dino the Dinosaur,” Bugler said, amused.

  “You must excuse her impudence at christening your child,” Rita said, and shook his hand very formally, introducing herself and her younger sister and assuring him that their father and his dear departed uncle were always on the best of terms.

  “Is that so,” Bugler said, tickled at their strategies, their touching the mudguard, then touching his arm, then asking if there was a name that he would have liked better, a saint’s name perhaps. Reena then wondered if it might be an impudence to sit on it.

  “Go ahead,” he said, but did not take the little soft plump hand, with its deeking of silverish rings.

  “Reet,” she said in a babyish voice, and soon she was settled squarely on the seat, her strong pink thighs cleaved together, confessing that she might just burst with the excitement.

  “Reen is the romantic type,” Rita said.

  “Oh really,” from Bugler.

  “Oh yeh … A rose on your breakfast tray.”

  “What colour rose?” His eyes meet Reena’s as she parts her thighs a fraction and says “Guess.” The invitation being quite blatant, he gives half a laugh. Then, to gloss things over, Rita says that if he has any bit of sewing or mending he knows where to come.

  “A Mary and a Martha,” the Crock says with a flourish.

  “Which is Mary and which is Martha?” Bugler asks, looking down at a pair of legs of colossal girth from the ankle up to the knees.

  “Are you going to lift me down?” Reena says. There is a strumpet gaze to her, her eyes yellow-brown, the dark tawny colour sullying the whites. They are more like half-sisters. She is asking again with little gasps for him to help her.

  “I will not,” Bugler says.

  She jumps in effrontery, then walks across and leaps onto her mare while Rita follows, unties the reins, and leads them away, Reena staring back at them, at him.

  “Who are they … Where do they live?”

  “They are the notorious sisters, and they live three miles up from the graveyard.”

  “They got here fast.”

  “You said it — Sarsfield is the word and Sarsfield is the man.”

  The Crock is only too pleased to relate the stories which have accrued, some true, some not. He describes the time when Reena took a man to court, a poor mountainy yokel, for throwing stones at her. The fellow’s defence was that stone-throwing in his part of the world, which was the backwoods, was a form of courtship. The judge was flummoxed and asked for two weeks’ reprieve while he deliberated on this curious custom. When they resumed on the appointed date, it seems there had been more chance meetings and more stone-throwings.

  “You can’t have objected too much” was what the judge said to her, and placing her soft pink arms on the bench, she asked him to look at her flesh and imagine her bruises, et cetera. She ended up receiving a hundred pounds in damages.

  “I get your drift,” Bugler said.

  “Jesus, she heard us,” the Crock said as he sees Reena walking towards them, smiling, her eyes gold-flecked and brazen, a stalk of grass between her teeth. She strolls up to Bugler like she has forgotten something.

  “I’ll give you a ring sometime — will I?” she says.

  “You’ll give me a ring sometime — will you,” Bugler says in reply. She stands there, the stalk of grass doing the circuit of her tongue effortlessly. She goes.

  “Demons … Demonesses,” the Crock says when she is out of hearing.

  “Can I drop you anywhere?” Bugler said, lolling backwards onto his machine as if it were an armchair.

  “No thanks … I’d sooner the fresh air,” the Crock said. To mount a thing like that required a boulder or a mounting block. He stood watching it go down the narrow road, grazing the hedgerows, the sound a steady put-putting. A new sound in that place, new to the birds and the briars and new to the inhabitants. He saw the Breege one watching it, half waving, then hiding behind a wet sheet that she was pegging on the line.

  Ivory Mary and Micky Dazzler. Girls and men all over the country clicking, all except the Crock, the exile boy. What sin had his strap of a mother committed to make him a freak? A stump for a leg, an iron prong for a hand, and a hump like a goblin’s. His strap of a mother. Had she done it on purpose, caused it when he was supposed to be gestating inside her?

  “Ugliest child ever born” was her chorus to visitors. A captain of the army home on holiday had come to see the newborn, the sixth child, and drawn back in disgust at the deformity. A captain of the army, no stranger to death and injury, was visibly revolted. The pairs of handmade shoes kept on the dresser down the years not in sentiment but proof of the inordinate expense.

  The Breege one half-waving to Bugler, a slight but innuendoing wave. The signal before anything gets said at all. Girls and men in the same hoopla, all except the Crock. The only bit of satisfaction was from the book he kept under his mattress. Phoenician kings and queens. Desert tracks. Pomegranate fruit. Cedar and balsam and nard. At night he pored over it, choosing his sandalled queens at will, his cavort ending in a dying roar that shook the caravan.
Sometimes his roars astonished him, but not too much and not for long. He had only to bring himself back, to the jibes, the insults, at home, at school, in the dances, in the discos; to that day on the train when he was twelve and learned what men and women are made of. He was going to see an orthopaedic doctor, his name and address pinned to his breast pocket, that and the bus fare to the hospital. Nothing extra, not even the price of a cup of tea. A couple got on, and minutes after they sat down they started in on it. The young man in a straw hat began to tend to the young girl. They both wore shorts and were very blond, nearly albino. She looked at her albino with a little utterance and then shut her eyes throughout. The young man’s hands, nicely washed, went under the leg of the shorts, one hand to raise a buttock, the other to do its dallying.

  He watched with a fierce and rapt concentration, gauging the refined hand, the momentum, the power in it that was more than hand, more than frigging; her ladyship with the eyes shut, dragging it on and on, the man saying things into her ear, it did not matter what, little cries then that were preparatory to the bigger cries, the hand moving with its sweet and knowing roughness, the cries being plucked out of her, louder, more, a thrill that she was mutely asking for, because they had played that little game before, many a time in private or in public, the hand squeezing that same fjord of flesh, the excitement as extreme for one as for the other, and then the honking of her, like geese going over the land, wild, ejaculant, the sound going up into a waiting sky, into an empty carriage with torn seats and two pieces of lizard luggage. Then he saw one eye open, one eye blue as a bead and calculant, then the second eye and her outrage at being watched, getting up, smoothing her shorts and hurrying along the corridor, muttering. The conductor returned with her, and he was hauled up to a little compartment beside the driver and told by a big fat man what a dirty boy he was and why did he stare at the nice girl and her nice boyfriend reading their book. She had brought a book to verify her story. Sonnets. He was told then that he could be sent to a correction school for a lifetime, and only out of the milk of human kindness would he be let go. He was made to kneel down and apologise to her, to say sorry. He did it.

  “You ought to be ashamed of yourself,” the big fat man said, and the girl agreed. He began then to laugh, laughing at something that was killing him inside, and his laugh was to be his weapon throughout his life, quite distinct from the thoughts he thought and the vengeances he hatched. The conductor told him to go to confession when he got home, and he pretended that he would, because what did it matter. They were rotten just as he was rotten.

  “I will hurt them somehow … I will always find a way to hurt lovers” was what he vowed to himself. Mothers, fathers, liars, lovers.

  “Breege,” he says, as he comes up behind her, his arms longing to gird the waist, his fingers twitching. His chosen sandalled queen.

  “Get out of here, Crock Hanrahan,” she says sharply.

  “A woman taken in adultery,” he says, and laughs, then goes his way, hopping and bobbing across the fields, laughing his mirthless laugh. Breege watched him retreating at a pained and jerky pace, his body like a sack of potatoes inflating and deflating, depending on whether he was in hill or hollow. She dreaded him. She knew the rhyme that he had circulated about her —

  She’s riddled in the tail

  And cockled in the skull

  And for twenty years of life

  She never saw the bull.

  THE WOODS. The dusk. The hour for flighting. The dusk through which the small and secretive bird will fly for its evening feed. Joseph is describing it to Bugler as he has known it over the years, waiting for that single silhouette against the sky, that long beak, the signature mark, curved like a crochet hook. They stand at the edge of the heath, Goldie beside them, crouched but expectant, guessing the excitement that is to come, an excitement transcending blood, a thing of the nerves, the breed. Wind is rustling the evergreens, the sound like the sound of a massive sea, steady, unceasing. They speak in whispers, standing there at their posts, each with a loaded shotgun and a pocketful of cartridges. How proud Joseph is to be the squire, giving over his spare gun and his fire, showing Bugler how to carry it under his oxter, and when the time comes how to cock it and to aim.

  “Are you cold?”

  “Not a bit.”

  They are staring into the impenetrableness of the dark wood in which the birds have recently arrived on their long migration from Siberia or wherever, to winter in loamy crevices, in hiding all day and venturing out at twilight to feed in any bit of water or swamp that they can find. Joseph had feared that he would have to call it off because of a dense mist which had shrouded the mountain, obliterated it, and turned the woods into an endless swell of grey, an ugly surly mist not like the white vapour, the white lady, that sometimes ran and danced on parts of the mountain, a dancing lady which drunk men believed was the banshee.

  The moon is up, the very moon that was nature’s cue to their migration is now about to betray them, to show the passage of the feathers, so pale as to be almost colourless, the long beaks, their compasses into the sky before coming to land in the succulence of boghole or cowpat. She takes him by surprise, the very first of the season, not jigging and bobbing around as they sometimes do because of their poor eyesight, but a clear and radiant flight to which one of his round of shots calls a halt.

  “The bull’s-eye,” Bugler says, amazed.

  She drops murmurless, her wings flapping in consternation.

  “I didn’t kill it,” Joseph says, and Goldie scurries off, and both men watch her return with it held gently in her mouth as if it is cloth; the wings still flapping, though not so rapidly.

  “I don’t like doing this,” Joseph says, and taking the bird out of Goldie’s mouth, he conks the neck on the stock of his gun as easily as he might crack a monkey nut.

  Then he hands it to Bugler.

  “Not a mark on her,” Bugler says, feeling the feathers and the flesh.

  “No … Goldie holds her with the gums, not the teeth … Ultra, ultra gentle, aren’t you?” he says, touching her moist snout that is trembling. He rummages then among the feathers to find the one, the special feather, then snaps it off.

  “There’s a place over in England where I send them … They’re trying to build up a picture of a vanishing species.”

  “And we’re trying to kill them,” Bugler says ruefully.

  “Ssh … Sssh.” Joseph runs as if levitating, and the shots ring out, eerily muffled in the mountain’s silence, and once again the little parcel of near-invisibility comes teetering down, but this time the wings are mute.

  “You’re a great shot,” Bugler says.

  “It could be you that shot it.”

  “It wasn’t.”

  “The ultimate goal is to get a left and a right … But you hardly ever do, because they fly alone.”

  “Why so?”

  “No one knows … They are a solitary bird … They fly alone, they eat alone, they are alone, the only time you see a pair is when the mother has a chick under her breast.”

  “Under her breast!” Bugler said, touched.

  Goldie laid the second bird down with a similar delicacy, and holding it up, Joseph explains that there is so little meat because the creatures have no stomach, all they do is suck. Joseph was happy to be out with Bugler, their earlier enmity seeming to have dissolved the way the mist did, friends now on account of a first moon in November and thousands upon thousands of birds coming from the salt climes to stick their beaks down as their parents had done in holes and bogholes in Cloontha.

  “You don’t draw them … You cook them entrails and all.”

  “Go on!”

  “They’re delicious,” Joseph says, handing them both, assuring him that Breege will do the plucking, that she’s a dab hand at it.

  “I can’t take the two.”

  “Yes, you can … We’ll make a sharpshooter of you yet … We’ll put bottles up along the gate and you’ll be surprised how you
pick it up.”

  They sit on a fallen bough, a faint singed smell from the shells, the two dead birds insignificant, and the few stars that have come out a milky colour and a great distance from one another.

  “You’re in the Field of the Corpses,” Joseph says.

  “That’s a sad name.”

  “We have all kinds of names … the Calf Park, the Callows, Pony Hill … Yellow Dick’s Bog … Pet names that have been passed down.”

  “You were reared here?”

  “I was … It’s God to me,” Joseph said, and looking up at the few stars declared that God was not a bearded man in the sky but here … In Cloontha, especially at night, alone with nature.

  “You never craved the bright lights?” Bugler asked.

  “No way,” Joseph said, and described how as a young fellow he’d creep out of bed at night to shoot pigeons, put a flash lamp at the foot of a tree, adjust the beam, and wait. His voice got high-pitched as he remembered the shower of them coming out of the trees, trees, leaves, and birds all jittery, all mad.

  “Who taught you?”

  “A man called Danno. He’d put a row of porter bottles along the top of the gate … My poor mother used to go mad. Assassins, she’d call us … My poor mother, she nearly died when she found out where I was going two nights a week after I got my first bicycle. I was going to a shooting gallery down in Limerick.” Recalling the burly sergeant-major, he stood up and bellowed out the orders in a crisp voice:

  Fill your lungs with air —

  Have you got that —

  Release half of it —