Wild Decembers

by Edna O'Brien

  “You did.”

  “You were mad for the shotgun because it made a bigger bang, and I used to say to you, ‘Take care, we think we’re alone up here, but there’s always eyes watching us, there’s spies everywhere.’”

  “I hope I’m not bothering you,” Joseph says.

  “Bother! You bring sunshine into my life … You’re the only visitor I would have wished for, and I’ll tell you something strange, I’ve dreamed lately of the two of us on that mountain and your wearing the man’s cap and your handing me the bullets to load the magazine … Yes, that tweed cap you wore, we left it behind … And now you’re here, and if it isn’t destiny I don’t know what name to call it by.”

  “I should have come sooner …”

  “Do you ever think of those times and the fun we had?”

  “Often.”

  “Old Danno trying to get you to zero in on the bull’s-eye, and you a kid … At first you pulled the trigger too fast. I had to learn you to squeeze it, just squeeze it, and eventually you did … Cripes, the day you got the cluster was the breakthrough … So you haven’t forgotten.”

  Even before he asks, Joseph knows that he will not be refused. He knows the wardrobe upstairs where they are kept, wrapped in rags and old newspapers; he can see them as he saw them as a youngster: the shotgun, the rifle, the old leather holster, and a revolver case that belonged to an ancestor, the hoard of bullets and cartridges, and as he asks to be let see them again, the old man’s clouded eyes light up as if the sun is beaming in or as if they are back on the mountain.

  They are upstairs now, the wardrobe door creaking over and back, a smell of damp and must, old cartridges and a belt scummed with dust, all thrown onto the bed, as Danno laughs and cries by turn. He recalls the mountain carpeted with heather, the curlews, and the bullets that were able to put life and spark into an empty and desolate space. Then he remembers that strange dog that appeared one day out of nowhere and sprung on them and had to be hit with the butt of the rifle before it went away.

  “I often think of it … And I’ll tell you something, I don’t think it was a dog at all.”

  “What was it?”

  “’Twas the supernatural … Some kind of a warning sign. After that I wasn’t welcome in your house anymore. They thought I was bad news.”

  “Ah, they did not.”

  “They did so … They were afraid for you,” he says lamentingly, and then, “You never married.”

  “No … Someone has to stay sensible.”

  Danno laughs again and says what lovely girls there used to be all around, lovely girls with thick crops of hair.

  “And little Breege, how is she?” he asked.

  “She’s a big Breege now. I’ll bring you over one day.”

  “Wait till I have the operation … Till we see how I get on. I’d want good eyes to look on the old scenes.”

  Joseph braces himself to ask it. He takes the old man’s hand, and it is like holding a reed, its life gone.

  “I was wondering,” he begins, but Danno guesses it and, with rapture in his voice says that there was no need to ask, that sure it is only an honour to give a good friend a weapon.

  “Lock that door,” he says, and then reaches into the back of the wardrobe and takes out the shotgun and a box of ammunition.

  “It’s yours,” he says, taking a bandage off the long muzzle.

  “It’s only for a while.”

  “It’s forever … You’ll bring this home and hide it, and when Danno is dust you’ll remember him.”

  “Don’t talk like that.”

  “I’ll be well butchered when they get me into hospital,” he says, and he is crying now, but joyful too at being able to pass on the only valuables he has ever had, his little armoury, and pass them to one who will revere them and not throw them in a ditch or hand them over to the authorities. To make things less melancholy Joseph picks up the wooden whistle made to lure foxes to their end. As he whistles into it, the squealing cry of a wounded rabbit is mimicked back, and they nod to one another, recalling how once or twice it worked and Mr. Reynard himself from upwind walked into the firing line. The whistle too is to be taken as a memento.

  “Thanks a million,” Joseph says.

  “Do your stuff … Do your stuff,” Danno says, and they pile them into a bolster case.

  Downstairs they each drink a mug of tea and eat damp biscuits, talking of the escapades they had, the fires they made on the mountain, the eggs boiled in the same water as they used for tea, then a smoke, night coming on, the stars like pieces of diamond on the cloth of the heavens.

  “Did you know that the Aborigines think that stars are holes in the sky?” he said then.

  “They could be right,” Danno says, and talks of the evils of modern mankind with no longer any faith in God or the stars or Mother Nature.

  “You could stay a few days with us,” Joseph says, rising to go.

  “I have a friend in you … I always had,” Danno says. He is reluctant to let his visitor leave, repeats the goodbyes, utterly sorrowful, talks of the great things, the wild things, and the uncanny things that transpired on the mountain, like the crying they once heard and a gypsy woman saying afterwards that that crying could be traced to unborn children, the unborn children of sweethearts that were never allowed to marry. Something about it moves Joseph, moves him to thinking that he should kneel down and confess and say why he has wanted the gun at all. But then something stops him.

  “You won’t get me into trouble?” the old man says, half throttled.

  OCTOBER. THE WINDS. Like the song about Dromore he once gave her. The winds ripping all before them. The small trees, the alders, stooped from it, the tall ones skeletons, their leaves gone. Leaves in the air tumbling about, thick piles of them, gold and apricot on the sides of the road where the winds have whooshed them together, winds so very determined, ripping and tattering. A few roses clung to a bow of a briar and she was glad of it.

  In bed at night she listened to the wind, thinking, was he thinking of her up there. She had sighted him only once and he seemed not to see her. It was in the chapel and he was wearing a green tweed coat that she had never seen before.

  She wrote their two names with a bit of white flour on the top of the stove — Breege and Bugler, Bugler and Breege. She wiped it with her sleeve as she heard Joseph coming down the stairs.

  Self knows before all else and self is useless to prevent it. Hopes starting up and dying down and starting up again, like different lenses, rose-tinted lenses slipped in between her dark thinking and her fancies. Then it was not fancy. Very early one morning, coming in from the yard with four eggs — one too many — in the palm of her hand, she dropped them, and bending to wipe them up she felt sick and went to the outside tap, retching.

  The following Friday down in the town she made a mistake, quite a big mistake. The butcher’s had run out of sausages and Niall, the young assistant, told her that there were a few packets left in the freezer at Mac’s but to be fast about it. She walked her bicycle up the towpath, the ten-pound note in her hand.

  In the shop waiting to pay for them she had one of those sudden longings, and already she pictured the sausages cooked, sizzling, ready to eat. Then her turn came to pay and the note was not in her hand. Where had it gone? She couldn’t remember who she met in the short journey up the street. Soon she was convinced that she must have given it to Mrs. Mac, unknownst to herself. They argued, with Mrs. Mac opening the till to prove it was not there and lifting out a little wad of notes with a paper clip around them.

  “One of those must be mine,” she said.

  “It is not … I clipped those notes myself a short while ago.”

  Voices rising, tempers rising, other customers turning aside in dismay. She tried then to give back the sausages, but Mrs. Mac would not hear of it, she plonked them back in her hand and said, “Take them and take your business elsewhere.”

  Out on the street, she wheeled the bicycle down the towpath,
all the while hoping that she would find it, knowing that she would not, and thinking, I have made an enemy of a woman whom I have known for many years.

  Early the following morning, she bicycled to the Glebe, where the Dutch woman lived. She had heard of her, how she cured people with different ailments, using herbs. She waited in the yard for the first stir of life, for a blind to be raised. In the shed across the way a huge hairy dog, the size of a calf, looked out at her sullenly but could not muster the energy to bark. In the greenhouse nearby the few remaining panes of glass held the tracings of a white frost as beautiful and as intricate as the lace of a mantilla.

  I DREAMED. A gold bird. It landed on my pillow and lay there, not like an ordinary bird at all. The beak was soft. It dropped drops into my ear. In the morning it would be gone. I’d look for it under the pillow and under the covers, but it would be gone. Then one morning it was dead on the pillow.

  She looks up at the Dutch woman, relieved that after an hour of silence she has managed to tell her something, in lieu of telling her why she is there.

  “What colour drops, Breege?”

  “Goldish.”

  “Saying what?”

  “I forget.”

  “And it died?”

  “It did.”

  “Who killed it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Unable to look at the woman, she stares at the pictures and drawings of flowers and plants, their Latin names and their healing properties written underneath them. There are yellow and blue flowers, thistles, balls of dandelion seed, flowers and plants she has seen all her life, walked over, driven animals over, not knowing that in them might be a cure. She looks from them to three marigolds in a jug, their spears on fire.

  “Is it loneliness?” the woman asks. She cannot answer.

  “Is it money?” Again she looks as if she has not heard.

  “Is it depression, Breege … Are you depressed?”

  She looks away at a shelf packed with tiny medicine bottles, the orange nozzles like the teats of babies’ bottles. Everywhere there are reminders.

  “It’s a man,” she said then, the sentence coming out suddenly, but the true sentence all the same.

  “Is he someone you know well?”

  “I did know him … He hates me now.”

  “Why would he hate you?”

  “Because …” She is unable to go on.

  “Maybe he’s afraid,” the woman says.

  “Maybe he’s afraid.”

  “Or maybe he’s torn.”

  “Is there anything you could give me to steady me?”

  “Let’s try … Let’s see if we can do that.”

  The woman has sat her in a deep rocking chair. A pink stone is being held in front of her chest, and from its oscillations the woman seems to derive a yes or a no to the questions she is asking the body. She writes down the names of the different medicines that she will prescribe. The curtains are closed, a nest of candles that have been stuck onto a dinner plate are all lit, flames shooting up, veering this way and that, licking one another, separating, faint music like the music she once heard when Lady Harkness put a seashell to her ear.

  The medicine which the woman drops onto her lips reminds her of her first Holy Communion and rehearsing the receiving of the Host, with Joseph putting bits of blotting paper on her tongue, out in the fields. Her eyes are fixed on a white rose floating in a bulbous vase of water, each gold thread of calyx a wisp as the woman tells her to send thoughts to him, how a thought, if it is powerful enough, can carry across fields, across counties, across continents, across anywhere. She feels warm, relieved, the woman telling her that her fears need no longer be bottled up, that instead of anguish, instead of hard feelings and dead birds, she will melt and remember the candlelight and the purity of the white rose. It is all true. Except. She knows that when she has paid she will have to leave, she will have to go out and get on her bicycle and ride home, pushing the bicycle up the last bit of hill, the crows swooping down, black plastic bags of silage, a world she had come away to forget.

  Then all of a sudden it is not like that. The woman has had an idea, a brainwave. In an excess of solicitude and not knowing the black heart whom it concerns, she hears the woman asking her if it is possible to get in touch with this man.

  “He lives here.”

  “Then you must go and see him.”

  “Could I?”

  “How do you know that he is not hoping for that? Women are always the stronger. It is the women who break the ice.”

  “What would I say to him?”

  “Say what you feel.”

  Already she felt heartened; she remembered how he held her that night in the graveyard, held her against the night, against the cold, against all that threatened.

  THERE WAS ACCUSATION in his eyes even as he hurried down the stairs. I had not gone to trap him. I might have gone to appeal to him in some roundabout way, but seeing his vexed eyes put a stop to that. The very early hour probably told him that something was not right. Not that I knew myself. I was still ignorant of it.

  “It’s six in the morning, there must be something wrong,” he said. We might never have known each other, so abrupt was he. But it was not to trap him that I had stolen out of my own house and gone up there. He closed his shirt buttons as if my seeing his chest had some impropriety in it. His eyes were narrow, narrowing, like eyes through a visor. Half his face was flushed up to the sternness of those eyes where he had slept on something hard.

  You learn lessons in a flash. Along with resenting my being there, he feared me as if I carried a plague. To have said anything, a soft word or a begging word, would have been useless.

  “I meant to let you know … Rosemary is arriving in the next forty-eight hours,” he said very pat, and immediately and with no alteration in his tone, “I shouldn’t have gone to the island. Being engaged is the same as being married and I swore … I swore.” To confirm it he held up a ring. It looked cheap and brassy in the dawn light, like a ring out of a plum cake which he had put on as a precaution. There was no mention of my being asked inside, and from the corner of my eye I saw that he had furnished the dining room with six mahogany chairs and a very long, lonely table, funereal-looking. There was a glass bell on it. An ugly black wrought-iron fender with stout knobs as thick as cannon balls stood before an empty fireplace. Then I saw a child’s cot, painted white, and it was like there was a child already in it. He saw me gasp.

  “The woman threw that in along with the furniture,” he said.

  One’s feet get one away from a place of their very own accord. I was out of there. Yet out on the muck road they lurched as if on ploughed land, and my mind was racing, racing, at all that I felt and saw.

  I could hear him following and he was breathless when he caught up with me.

  “We will be friends,” he said, his eyes looking into me through my raincoat as if he suspected something.

  “No, we won’t … We’ll be enemies,” I said calmly.

  “That will never happen.”

  “Oh, it will … They’ll all make sure it will,” I said, glad that I too could be cutting.

  “Emotions always get in the way,” he said with vehemence, and the strangest thing was that I knew then that he loved me, I knew it by that rebuff.

  Half an hour later we were still there on the road, morning things starting up, sounds, dogs, the mountain a cupola of gold, gold threads of light streaming down from the heavens and him trying to tell me what it was to be a shepherd, to be on a sheep station, to have felt a homesickness for something and then a woman coming along, Rosemary coming along, and now a homesickness for something else.

  “It’ll be all right when you see her,” I said, because I knew that was what he wanted me to say, to let him go.

  IT WAS HARRY DUGGAN who told of Rosemary’s arrival. Boasted of it in Nelly’s Bar. Described this fine lady singling him out at the airport where he had dropped off passengers and was on his way home. S
he was unmet because she wanted to surprise her fiancé by coming a day earlier. Her luggage, as he said, was something else — suitcases, bags, boxes, hatboxes, sheepskin rugs, and a gilded birdcage. A glamour girl in a long black leather coat and suede boots that went up to her fanny. He described the car journey, Rosemary laughing and smoking, asking him to pronounce the quaint place-names, then her good humour as three pieces of her luggage came tumbling off the bonnet. She sat, as he put it, on the ditch while he tied the pieces down with a rope that he had borrowed from a house nearby.

  At dusk they headed up the mountain road, and arriving at the mud track that led to Bugler’s house, she looked at it and said “Blimey,” then put out her arms for him to carry her.

  He spoke then of the lovers’ reunion. Never seen anything like it, Rosemary so vivacious and Bugler walking into the yard flabbergasted, asking why she hadn’t let him know. He described their eyes drinking each other in, something not easily discernible in the dusk, then Bugler taking her inside and himself having to bring the tractor down the dirt road to unload the luggage into it, ferry it up again, and lay it in the front hall. The most touching moment, as he put it, was when her ladyship took off Bugler’s old hat and donned a new one, identical, and said, “Until the hat dies … Or until we die.”

  That, as he said, put the smile on Bugler’s face.

  He was questioned again and again about her height, her colouring, her age, what sort of accent she had, and his answer varied with the moment, but one thing he could assure them of was her magnetism, as they would soon see for themselves.

  “They’ll be tears in the crowded congregation,” the Crock said.

  “What does that mean?” Nelly said.

  “Ivory Mary.”

  “I thought all that died down.”

  “It did, but it started up again.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I have reason to know.”

  “Well … There’s no woman in this neighbourhood that would hold a candle to Rosemary,” Duggan said.