Wild Decembers

by Edna O'Brien

  “You’re not yourself today, Moira,” he says.

  “I’m low in energy,” she says, and kicks off the second shoe to show friendliness.

  “And why is that?”

  “I was out late. I went to listen to this band … Marvellous … Outstanding, I would say … You should go yourself. They’re every Wednesday. They’re two miles outside the town. There’s a pound admission but they’re well worth it; outstanding,” and as she rambles on he hears footsteps, the door being banged, and almost at once she is summoned by telephone. He has to crane to hear what she is saying. He guesses that what she is saying is that the mountainy man is back again and what is she meant to do and what is she meant to say. Her voice gets even lower as she mutters sorry a few times, obviously in answer to a reprimand, and when she replaces the receiver she starts to write very studiously into her big black notebook, ignoring the question he has put to her.

  “He’s in there … He’s on the other side of those double doors,” Joseph says. He has risen. He is staring lividly into the huge grey fogged eyes.

  “He’s with a client,” she says, slightly apprehensive because of his nearness and his fist.

  “I’m a client,” he says.

  “God’s sake, will you keep your voice down or he’ll flip.”

  “That makes two of us … Because I’m about to flip.”

  “Look,” she says, and it is whispering time again, “I wouldn’t advise it … He’s in a foul mood. Effing and blinding. He must have been on a bender … Wait till after the weekend and I’ll have talked to him, and with the help of God and St. Anthony I’ll have it for you … He’s always sparky on Monday mornings after he’s followed the hunt.”

  “How can I believe you.”

  “Joseph Brennan, that’s a horrible thing to say,” and as umbrage wells in her she reminds him of the four days when she allowed him to sit and wait, twice making him coffee and listening to rubbish about the countryside, the gold dome of the mountain, bog cotton, and the tasty way his sister poached trout in milk and scallions.

  “All I want is my piece of paper with my rights. I don’t care what I pay for it. I don’t care if I have to break his neck in … I want it.”

  “Oh Jesus, I don’t envy him,” she says, tears of commiseration in her eyes now as he dares her to lift the telephone and announce him, and in the fracas which follows as they call each other names he hears a door, then the hall door being banged, and in an ecstasy of righteousness she jumps up and says, “Mr. O’Shaughnessy has gone a-hunting.”

  Later, she finds Joseph walking up and down the street, talking to himself.

  “The town crier,” she says, mocking.

  “I’m sunk,” he says, making one last and desperate appeal to her. She scolds him, says he should not have spoken to her in that insulting manner, but being a good sport she is prepared to forgive him. She has a brainwave, she had it a minute or two after he left, he is to go down to Daffy’s, the drapers, get himself togged out with cavalry twills, find a horse somewhere, and next morning join the hunt, and out there Mr. O’Shaughnessy is a different man altogether, hot punches, lords and ladies, hills and dales; out there they would be equals and they could do business.

  “Where would I get the money for cavalry twills?”

  “You have lots of money … Farmers always have money. I know that from the boss … The money that’s found once they’re dead. In jugs. Under mattresses. Fortunes.”

  JOSEPH STANDS IN his new shoes, good blazer, and best white shirt already regretting his impudence for having come at all. It was a junior who found him out on the street looking after Moira as she drove off in her bubble car. He was aware of the trouble and said that if it were him he would go and see Mr. Barry, a very highly regarded man who ran the firm before Mr. O’Shaughnessy came and was a sort of father figure to him.

  “You think he’d help?”

  “I’m sure he would.”

  They are out in the grounds, Mr. Barry’s grounds, with Mr. Barry pointing to the cedar tree, taller, more striking than all the other trees, and in the roomy spaces between the paw-like branches, pigeons are rustling and cooing. The house itself is of brick, softly mellowed, the steps up to it covered with mosses and blue flowers faint as drizzle. The setting sun has turned the long windows into panels of fire.

  “Would you care to guess how old the cedar is,” Mr. Barry says, and without hesitation goes on to describe how a city man, an arborist, found the precise age by standing next to the trunk, measuring the girth, dividing, multiplying, and by some wizard calculations coming up with the age of the tree, which coincided with the age of the house.

  “Arborists!” he said, walking his guest around the grounds as Joseph follows on tiptoe, to smother the sound of the new leather rasping in the piling of gravel and marble chipping.

  “I wouldn’t have come to you only I’m desperate,” he says.

  “I’m very glad you did … I always say,” and here Mr. Barry breaks into song, “if I can help somebody as I pass along, then my living shall not be in vain.”

  “You have a fine place,” Joseph says awkwardly.

  “Shall we repair to the drawing room?” Mr. Barry says.

  “Whatever you say.”

  “Damn midges get you out here, it’s why I smoke,” he says, and laughs shallowly at his own mischievousness.

  “Sixty fags a day and never felt better.” He leads the way, boyishly, up the steps.

  As they step into the drawing room Joseph’s first thought rushes to Breege and how she would love it — the white ceiling, like wedding cake, crisscrosses of carvings the icing, thin branches running in all directions from a centre rosette, and from overturned flower pots heaps of flowers spilling out. On the walls trellises of plaster arbour in between the paintwork, which is a bright saffron colour. Sumptuousness. Leather-bound books, a piano, armchairs, sofas, fresh flowers in several bowls, and music coming from the four corners of the room as if it were coming out of the spheres.

  “Beethoven,” Mr. Barry says, and scoffs at the native balladeers with their goatskins and their unwashed locks beating out barbarian tunes. He pours a whiskey each and leads them across to the fire, which as he says burns winter and summer, a ritual of theirs. The fire is his job, the flowers Mrs. B.’s. Yes indeed, he does remember Joseph’s grandparents, especially the mother in her little black bonnet with the chinstrap.

  “You have a palace,” Joseph says, staring up at a plaster maiden offering a basket of fruit to a knight.

  “Francini Brothers … Swiss … Did all the great ceilings in the country,” and Mr. Barry tries to recall the exact locality which the brothers came from, then smites his failing brain cells and laughs jubilantly as he swishes the whiskey over the knuckles of ice, then winks at it.

  Either to put his guest at ease or because the memory of it has just surfaced, Mr. Barry thinks aloud of his childhood, his beautiful childhood, the young nurse in the nursery ladling the porridge, a Miss Delany with a marvellous crop of auburn hair, an incitement to every young man who clapped eyes on her. Wicked Miss Delany, stealing out at night to meet the gamekeeper in the malt-house, all of which, as he said, was hunky-dory were it not for the peeping Tom. A man with a flash lamp, who felt it his business to keep up with the erotica of the day or the night, spied on their courting, then went to the padre, who could not tolerate this on two counts, the commission of a mortal sin and with a man who was married. The upshot was that the priest called to the house and poor Miss Delany was dismissed and went to Spain to work for a duke and duchess, letters written back about her little dark-eyed charges, then no communication at all as she was put up against a wall, along with the royal family, and machine-gunned, by the Reds. He paused for a moment, blinked to correct a tear, and said how he always had a great interest in people, people were his adrenaline, he soaked them up. With an easy smile and wagging a finger, he said his antennae told him that there was something bothering his visitor.

 
“I’m worried sick,” Joseph said, blurted it out. Then, in as concise a way as possible, he described Bugler’s arrival to a farm that had been unoccupied for a few years and in no time at all lording it, first a field, then a bog, then a mountain.

  “A grabber.”

  “You said it.”

  “Without a yea or a nay,” Mr. Barry says, taking the letter which Joseph wishes him to read. He resorts to a more formal voice, occasionally looking through the open door lest they be overheard.

  We are obliged to tell you that the area between the lands marked red and blue, in other words the area marked brown, is not yours and desire you to give up all rights to it and to pay arrears for your usage of it for the last five years, profit made by you yourself without paying any rent or making any apologies for same. Our client intends to finish the road which he began some two months ago. His reason is quite logical, it is to make egress to his house more possible. All we desire to know is that you do not stop him in this endeavour. Our application to the Courts will be to establish the registration of the ownership of the brown section to our client and to warn you that servants or agents entering that disputed corridor or causing obstruction therein will lead to further proceedings, which would be strenuously pursued.

  “And you are quite sure that the brown area is yours?”

  “Certain … My great-grandfather got it from a grand-uncle of his who had no issue … He won it. It was signed and sealed above in their parlour. The uncle was a gambler. My father told it to me often and repeated it on his deathbed … The papers are missing. That’s my problem.”

  “And we need that piece of paper to take action against the depredations of the fly boy.”

  “If he finishes the road, I’m finished … The mountain becomes his.”

  “You’ve tried mediation.”

  “I hit him.”

  “Good man … A bar-room brawl. He deserved it.” Looking to the ceiling Mr. Barry wonders whither the next step and whispers aloud: “Regain de vigueur.”

  “Grimes and O’Shaughnessy are the firm of solicitors,” Joseph says, and as Mr. Barry hears it, he is struck once again by a bolt from the past, the distant past, and his eyes water as he remembers a Mr. O’Shaughnessy senior, a grandfather or possibly a grand-uncle of the present incumbent, who walked around with half his office in his overcoat pockets, yes, his big frieze coat with the pockets stuffed with all the evidence he needed to go into court, kept to himself, and hence earning him the sobriquet of Foxy O’Shaughnessy.

  “The present man won’t give it to me. Won’t even see me,” Joseph says balefully.

  “That’s very unprofessional.”

  “I go in every day and the secretary says to come tomorrow.”

  “Does she pass on the information?”

  “That’s what I don’t know.”

  “He is moody … He does go hot and cold. But he’s an okay fellow, likes a drink and so forth.”

  “I was wondering … Since you know him … Since you were partners, if …” Joseph begins, but Mr. Barry has already guessed.

  “Now, my dear Joseph, I will, if I may, interrupt you … If I ring Mr. O’Shaughnessy … And of course I could … Nothing simpler … It will seem presumptuous. Think on it. He’ll feel cornered. One of his ilk pulling him over the coals … It wouldn’t look good. It wouldn’t help. Now, the real solution … The cat’s pyjamas, you might say, is for you yourself to compose a letter … A nice letter. A human cri-de-coeur. In a twinkle you will have his sympathy and eventually your piece of paper.”

  “I tried that.”

  The fire has gone down, the burnt sods like bars of molten pink, a few sparks intermittently bursting. Out in the hall Joseph can hear people arriving, greetings being called out and answered back, some with foreign accents as Mr. Barry explained that they take paying guests to keep their beautiful Kincora from going to some fly boy. On impulse he threw a kiss of gratitude in the direction of the hall. There was a smell of roast at intervals as when a door swung open, and Mr. Barry tried to recall whether it was lamb or pork for dinner. Distantly, there came the sound of a bell, light, appealing. Joseph knew that he should be going, but sat there forlorn, hoping that he might be pressed to stay.

  “You and I should keep in touch,” Mr. Barry said, rising, then he bent down and removed a smear of cut grass from his velveteen slipper, saying he could not look ragamuffinish in front of paying guests.

  Joseph thanked him, thanked him profusely for the advice, even while knowing that he was going away disappointed.

  Out on the road, away from the talk, the painted ceiling, a hallstand with only one hat on it, and cars coming at a hectic speed, he is lost, frazzled, directionless.

  He stops to let the night air fall on his face and his features, trembling with disappointment, as if he were just finding out that there is only him …

  To help himself along, he starts to recite, bits of poems, poems that he learned at school and others when he was away in that place and a nurse brought him back to his senses, made him read poems and learn them by heart. A line, lines, comes into his head.

  We met

  At the Hawk’s Well under the withered trees

  I killed him upon Baile’s Strand.

  A car has stopped, a driver with his head out to ask directions gets for answer Cuchulain’s adage: “And drew my sword against the sea.”

  “Oh, a basket case,” the driver shouts, and tears off.

  A HARVEST MOON LIKE an orange gong appeared over the ridge of the mountain, and soon it seemed to sail down in stately pearliness to hang above the lake, slits of moonlight creeping into the bottom of the boathouse as Bugler unties the rope, then, lifting an oar, he steers a slow passage through a lattice of tall bamboo and gold-rusted rushes. Water birds start up in revolt, their cries strangled, signalling outrage that the nighttime solitude of the lake is interrupted. A windless night, the water a mirror in which piles of moving cloud make soft, expiring patterns.

  They sit facing one another, Breege directing the route, steering him away from the rocks towards the island with its tall tower as grim and admonishing as some elongated monk. Their shadows tilt and dance in the water and moonlight spills over onto her lap. They rode in silence and in silence he tied the rope to the makeshift jetty and they picked their way over the wet grass where a herd of cattle, some with wheezing breaths, were guarded by a young bull who looked as if he might charge.

  The graveyard beyond the stone wall was divided into two sections, one for the remains of saints and ecclesiastics and the other for a few local families, including her own. There were several churches and a roofless stone oratory naked to the moonlight.

  The tombstones glittered and the rings of stone which circled their double crosses held haloes of silver light. The only sound came from the lake, water being sucked in, a slurp-slurp that became muted as it was drawn back out. On the tombs splotches of moony shadow in contrast to white medallions of lichen, black flowers and ashen flowers, both.

  It was Breege now showing him her world as if it were her house, a place she moved about in as easily as in her own yard or her plantation, walking over the graves, calling out the names, old people and not so old, young people, infants, handwritten mildewed messages under the broken glass domes where obviously the cattle had broken in and trampled. Last of all, she read him her own family names and then pointed to a strip of ground next to theirs but bordered off with smooth round stones which she had painted white.

  “Why do you want your own bit of grave?”

  “A bit of peace.”

  “Do you not have peace?”

  “Not much … There’s always something,” and by the way she said it he knew what she meant and said that he was sorry, he was really sorry, but that maybe one day her brother and he would be reconciled.

  “We’ll forget about it for this one night,” she said, moving across under the shadow of the tower, then opening a little gate that creaked and beckoning him into the
cold oratory that smelt of mortar and limestone. Alone, in pairs, in triads, were the carved faces, solemn, bulbous cheeks and hollowed cheeks, the stone eye sockets filled with a grainy nothingness, all around the spectres of death that were a spur to the living.

  “This church is named after you … St. Michael’s,” she told him.

  “What was he good for?”

  “A dragon slayer,” and as she said it they laughed.

  “We could live here,” he said, his hand touching the stones, saying that with a bit of heat the place would be half habitable.

  “We could an’ all,” she said saucily. Her shyness had lessened and she even accepted a cigarette to keep her warm. It was better than any hotel or any dance. Her reward for months and months of looking out at wet grass, or a bit of wet path drying in the sun, and sometimes even thinking that a garment blowing on the line prefigured the arrival of a visitor that just might be him. The tractor near or far, music to her ears and a gall to her brother’s.

  “Sometimes up at home at night I’d think of you only half a mile down the road,” he said.

  “Ah, men!” she said, pretending to be wise.

  “Except I didn’t know what would happen if I knocked on your door … What you would feel … What you do feel.”

  He stood before her, the light of the moon full on the top half of his body, so that his white shirt and his chest underneath it was like a ladder of dark stripes and lighter ones.

  “Is it all right if I take your hand?” he said softly.

  “I suppose so,” she said, but she did not let him hold it for long.

  Outside, she led him once again over the graves, telling him stories of the different families, loving families and feuding ones, families who had fought and wrangled and died wrangling, wills that had been changed on deathbeds, a husband and wife, Jack Darling and Betty Love, as they were known, dying within a week of each other and exiles brought from across the sea to be buried at home.