Wild Decembers

by Edna O'Brien

  Good morning, Lady Harkness,

  A beautiful frosty morning.

  Your account from Bunting and Knowles for a memorial stone — overdue.

  A Christmas card from Daphne and John in the Seychelles.

  The minutes of the meeting for the Royal Foundation for the Blind.

  At last the estimate for the garden wall opposite the library window which collapsed. A bit steep.

  Magdalene sings while they eat. A light, sweet, tinkly voice. All about love. Waiting for love or just seeing it passing by like thistledown. She has donned black satin gloves, her arms reaching out to her audience, wooing them. Bugler is asked if he thinks she has It. He looks and listens. Seems a very nice girl. He is next to Breege. She can feel his wandering touch. They talk to everyone else at the table except each other. Two months passing on the tractor and now this, this. Baked apple and ice cream topped with lit sparklers are being passed around. A feverish feeling. Sudden darkness. Screaming. Jesus Christ. Is it a bomb? Sy announcing, “Yous are all to kiss the person next to you, and if there’s no one next to you kiss the wall.” “I have no wall.” “Kiss my arse.” Bugler turning to Breege, her blouse so cold and starched, her lips full and violet colour from the down spotlight. Drinks her in. Slow count to five. “Wakey wakey” from Sy. The moment has passed. Lights come brazenly on. “You dirty things. Was that nice?” Yes. No. No. Yes. Sy swears to God he read in a book that an apple a day keeps the doctor away and a birdie a day keeps divorce away. Bugler slowly detaches himself with Are you okay to her. She daren’t answer. Had no idea she would be so. So. The lips slightly parted, disclosure in the parting. Deep water.

  Rita, with cabbage crown and a frilled cabbage miniskirt, comes across, throws her arms around him, and says feck. She was next to a fella with no teeth. Elbows the cripple to hoof off in his wheelchair, sits herself next to Bugler, inclining onto his lap. Hey ho … Here we go. Has a request. Her kid sister, Reena, would like the next dance. Okay? And wouldn’t mind being brought home. We’ll ask you in for coffee and peppermints. A rose on the breakfast tray and a fresh egg in the morning. Ever put your hand in under her after she lays, going bloody berserk and then klook-klook-klook. Does he keep hens? No. Pity that. Great comfort. Klook. Klook. Klook. An egg flip for the constitution. She pulls him onto the floor. Chalices of Irish coffee, foam-crested. Elderly people asking for pots of tea.

  Blotched from crying, Mrs. Flannery asks Breege to stay with her, not to go back up. They are in the ladies’ room. Someone has draped the pale blue lavatory paper around the mirrors. Mrs. Flannery bemoans how much she loves that man. Would cut her wrists if he went with another. Asks in God’s name why she flipped. Why she made such a show of herself. Entreated to be told what exactly she did, then begs not to be told. Says then how kind Patrick was, how affectionate when they went into the garden to patch things up. She weeps afresh at that hot bitch sleeping only a wall away from them for two more nights. Loud cheering as obviously the winners of the raffle are announced. Breege longs to be back there, on the verge of the skaty dance floor.

  “Come on … We might be winning something,” she says, and coaxes the woman up.

  Bugler, with his jacket off, is onstage singing and holding the cookbook, which he must have won. It is a song about a town in the North devastated by war, his voice almost breaking as he laments a community divided. Magdalene watches enrapt. Buttons of his bandit shirt have come undone, his torso dark and bony. The crowd show their approval by joining in. Good on you. Well sung. Encore. When he comes off the stage, various girls touch him and he touches them back. Magdalene is helped down and walks beside him, her long velvet glove nestled to his bare arm.

  “Micky Dazzler,” the Crock says as Bugler on impulse hands his winning trophy to an old woman who has jumped up to kiss him.

  “Micky Dazzler.” Joseph is beside Breege now. Soon time to go. She sees her own hand twining and retwining a bit of her own hair in the gilded mirror. Crestfallen.

  * * *

  The tractor was back. In its old familiar place under the hawthorn tree. In the moonlight, veiled in frost, it seemed like a glass coach. Joseph crosses to it, scolding it at first for being so presumptuous as to come back without an invite. Bugler usually brought it up home, up to the Congo, but must have been in one big hurry to get on that dance floor. Having scolded it, he mellows somewhat and begins to talk to it in a maudlin way.

  “Oh, dear Dino, charmed to see you, how do you do, we thought you had gone up yonder for good and now it seems you’re back — do you prefer us, Breege and me … Go on, say it, you’d sooner us than the Shepherd. Micky Dazzler he has just been christened, in case you don’t know … Oh, what a swell, an all-round man, can cut a dash on the dance floor, level a field, shoot game, and click the girls. Three cheers for Micky Dazzler, hip hip hooray.”

  When he touches a knob on the dashboard, music starts to pour out, and he draws back from it alarmed.

  “Jesus. He’s got a stereo in you … Well, I’ll be damned,” he says, searching for the place he had accidentally touched.

  “For God’s sake, Joseph.”

  “Listen, Breege … Listen …” She is dragging him away.

  “What’s the hurry? What I say is true … The Shepherd is number one, and very soon he will be growing rye … Rye fields in Cloontha and cranberries on his marshy land. I have it this evening from his very own lips. But a word in your ear, Breege … Tricky Micky means to take us over. Treasons, stratagems, and spoils.”

  “What’s wrong with rye … What’s wrong with cranberries?”

  “Everything!”

  Turning to face the carved bowl of the mountain, glassy in the moonlight, he delivered his ode—

  “Who came first, Bugler or Brennan? The Brennans came first, the Brennans of the moor. The Buglers played bugles and came hence from Wales with the soldiers … Welsh men … And on the last day the Brennans will be first, for many are called but Brennans are chosen.”

  * * *

  The dance hall was deserted, spare tables and folding chairs stacked in a corner, with Eamonn and two girls sweeping up the debris, sweeping it into the middle of the floor. There were cans, cigarette packets, a pair of red braces, and several odd earrings that sparkled untowardly in the dust. Rita is looking for Reena. Reena is looking for Rita. They miss because of going in two different directions, one to the ladies’ room, one to the car park. They meet back in the hall in a hail of risen dust.

  “Where’s Bugler?” from Rita.

  “He’s gone.”

  “He’s gone! Where to?”

  “He went with Magdalene … And the harp.”

  “Jesus Christ, in holy feck’s name, you mean to tell me that you let him go?”

  “I couldn’t stop him.”

  “You half-baked, big-arsed pollop, you let him go … You didn’t even try … All you had to do was hold your bush up against him.”

  “He wasn’t interested in me.”

  “Plan A — tell me what was Plan A.”

  “We were going to bring Bugler home and get our hooks in him.”

  “Plan A, we were going to bring Bugler home, and Plan B we were going to bring Bugler home and every fecking plan in the alphabet … Now he’s with that bitch with her lands in Tipperary … She’s loaded.”

  “Oh, Reet.” Reena starts to cry, the tears dropping onto the posy of chrysanthemums which she took from the table. Everyone grabbed something, but all she managed was this small bouquet and half a red candle. Eamonn sweeps around them while they outscream each other, tells them the party is over. Soon they are screaming at him, saying they are not fecking leaving, they want reimbursement. With shooing arms and the broom handle he herds them towards the exit, saying very quietly, and very gently, “Girls, girls,” then gets them to the front door, pushes them out, shuts the door, bolts it, and whistles a sweet Jesus of relief. The last thing he wants is to be up in court for assaulting them.

  Once out of the town they hit
a fog so thick that it is impossible to see twenty yards ahead. The car is like a sled on the icy road, not a glimpse of a house or a light of any kind, only Rita cursing and plotting her revenge on one and all. She is driving recklessly, her cabbage crown askew, the little bubble car like a cauldron because of her invective.

  “I’m sorry, Reet,” Reena said, picking off shreds of the chrysanthemums as if they were coconut, then spitting them out.

  “Sorry, feck … Two times twenty-seven pounds fifty, the price of a load of hay.”

  When they passed their turning, at the top of the town, Rita tore down the hill, through the fog, knocking some tar barrels put there because of roadworks.

  “Where are we going, Reet?”

  “See if that tin of turpentine is in the back.”

  “Why?”

  “His fecking tractor is in for a surprise.”

  “How so?”

  “Teach that bastard Bugler a lesson while he’s getting laid in the luscious Golden Vale.”

  THREE MEN ARE around the tractor, clutching it as though in a fervent embrace. Their hands and clothes already muddied and their faces taut with effort. They have been there the best part of an hour and tempers are fraying. At first it was quite jocular, Bugler giving the orders and the others complying, Joseph and the Crock at the back wheels and the salesman, a stranger, at the side, Bugler on the driver’s seat with the open manual shouting out the several orders, the men pushing and sweating, trying to rock it out of its inertia.

  At dawn he had got back and slept a couple of hours on a chair and then to work. He feels cranky. A mistake to have tarried in horse country. Daddy’s girl, the lady crooner, acting the helpless maiden in the foyer of the dance hall, with no one to bring her home. Her cousin hadn’t shown. Jonathan hadn’t shown. Nearly in tears. Silent in the car. A drive of thirty-odd miles, little towns fast asleep except for the neon glare of the petrol stations, then a country road, a big front gate, a cattle grid, a stately home, but ending up in the saddle room with all the gear, the rods and the brushes and a rocky horse, things to turn a bloke on. The gee-gees. Where did a nice girl like her learn the tricks? “Oh, I started when I was twelve.”

  “You’re sure it’s not the diesel?” the Crock calls out.

  “Dead sure.”

  It was the first thing he had tried, had put a rod into the tank thinking that maybe some hooligan came in the night and siphoned it off. Eventually, he ran up home to get the manual, and like a pupil calling instructions out to an adult he checked and rechecked every single thing — pistons, crankshaft, gasket, nozzles, clutch, stabiliser, bar and brackets, everything.

  “You should never have put it under a tree … The ground is always loamy,” Joseph says.

  “Fuck your loamy,” Bugler hisses between his teeth. If only they would push, if only they would put some brute strength into it.

  “Rock, lads, just rock,” he says. He is by turn coaxing and then abrupt. Once again he turns the ignition on, waits for the fuel to heat, and yells at them to push. As it moves a fraction, mud flies from the back wheels, flicking onto their faces, almost blinding them.

  “Push … Feck … Push,” Bugler shouts.

  “We are pushing,” Joseph shouts back, but already it has stopped and sunk with a deadliness. Bugler jumps out, tightens the axles, and says he thinks he knows what to do. It needs more pressure on the one side, it needs tilting to set it off.

  “It could swing around and do for us,” the Crock says.

  “It won’t … It’s rock solid.”

  “I have to go in a minute,” the salesman says. An hour of his day is wasted, and so few houses in sight, no one to sell cattle feed to.

  Bugler has slunk in under it, his legs as long again as the top half of his body, jutting out, his leather gaiters not nearly so swanky as in the dance hall, mud on them.

  “Tom-catting … You can tell.” The Crock whispers it. From underneath Bugler is ordering Joseph to do this, do that.

  “Hold on … Hold on,” Joseph says.

  “Use your eyes … Use your brain,” he shouts back, telling Joseph to turn the key, to turn the blasted key. Suddenly it starts to move, and as Bugler crawls out, they give a huzzah of victory. Within seconds it has stalled again, an ugly look to it, the brick-red bonnet mutely saying, “I am not moving out of this spot.”

  “We’ll tie it to the car and tow it,” Bugler says, pointing to the stranger’s very new Fiesta.

  “That’s not my own car, that’s a company car,” the man says, apologetic.

  “The company won’t know,” and turning to Joseph, he asks for a rope.

  “It’s in the shed,” Joseph says sullenly. Calves and cattle are lowing to be fed, milk has to be brought to the creamery and Breege fetched to Lady Harkness’s house with the laundry. It is something she does privately, for a bit of pin money. He thinks of the care she takes with those garments, the washing, the rinsing, the starching, and when they are ironed they look so regal on the big table in the front room.

  Bugler uncoils the rope quickly, knots the one end twice around the seat, and positions each of them so that they draw on it now like a team, like four oarsmen together in a race, their cheer restored, their eyes anxious, giving a show of strength almost superhuman. They get it almost to the gate when the rope breaks, and united in their frustration they each say “Feck” at the exact same instant, as if they had rehearsed it.

  “She’ll have to go to emergency,” the Crock says, and touches the mudguard almost fondly.

  “Come on … Come on, Dino,” Bugler said imploringly, and strove to lift it between his knees, hugging it, remonstrating with it as if the fault was a mere moodiness, not wanting, not yet able to admit that he had been sold a pup.

  “I’m afraid I have to be off … I have appointments,” the salesman said.

  “Wait … Wait,” Bugler said, and picking up a hen’s trough he wedged it under the back wheels.

  “What good will that do?”

  “The juice isn’t getting through … There’s a blockage.”

  “Aren’t you working arse-wise … It’s the back wheels you should be jacking up,” the Crock says.

  Tempers have risen again, and he thinks of that yard of tractors, useless ones, piled on top of one another and the rotten luck of picking a goner. Rosemary’s money, or rather Rosemary’s daddy’s money, who prided himself on his wealth and his agnosticism.

  “Maybe someone wanted it banjaxed,” the Crock says with a wink.

  “Or maybe witchcraft … I was told of a famous witch in these parts, she had a blue bottle for cures,” the salesman says.

  “She had the power,” the Crock answers back.

  “Did you or your sister notice anything fishy?” Bugler asks.

  “We’re not your caretakers,” Joseph says, nettled.

  Conceding at last that he will have to get help, Bugler asks where the telephone is.

  “Where do you think it is?” Joseph says, irked at the thought of him going into the house where Breege is, taking her unawares.

  “It’s a dead Dino,” the Crock says once he has gone.

  “Do you have anywhere I could wash?” the salesman asks.

  “That’s clean grass,” Joseph says, and to prove his point he bends down and wipes his hands in it and the salesman does likewise, flinching. They commiserate with each other on how they have been exploited.

  “He’s not bloody up,” Bugler says, hurrying back and flinging the various tools into his bag.

  “It’s early,” the Crock says.

  “If he was in any other country he’d be up.”