Wild Decembers

by Edna O'Brien

  WHEN HE SAW the figure beyond the kitchen window Bugler thought for a moment that he was imagining it. A case of bad conscience. The old guilt thing. “Don’t expect miracles” were his last words to her when she phoned the week before. Now she’s in the kitchen, putting a hat on him, saying, “Mick, Mick.”

  “Surprised to see me?” Her voice so raucous, so full of vitality.

  “Of course.”

  He takes her hand almost formally; her nails are painted bright red and long as beaks. He remembers that she used to bite her nails and put brown stain on them to break the habit.

  “I can’t believe it.”

  “You better believe it.”

  “You’ve got thinner.”

  “Not from shagging,” she said, and from one of her bags she pulled out a sheepskin and held it to his chest for him to smell, to remind him of that smell of before.

  “I can’t believe you’re here,” he said, looking from her to the naked bulb on which the dead flies from the summer had scummed.

  “That’s because you don’t expect miracles,” she said, burying his face in the sheepskin, which brought it all back, the station, his favourite dog that lost a paw, the dark of the mornings, the weird lonely bleating of thousands of lambs, rain and drought, the old macrocarpa trees always creaking, full of magpies, thousands of magpies cawing and Rosemary coming one day into it to bail him out.

  “How long was the journey?”

  “I don’t know, thirty hours or something.”

  “You must be exhausted.”

  “That’s not a romantic thing to say.”

  “Oh, baby, baby,” he said with her mouth everywhere on him, his face, his neck, his chest.

  “Yes, I’m your baby, and you were beginning to forget her.” She pulled him down on the sheepskin then and began to undress him with a remembered excitement for his body, his flanks, his knowing cock, the same sequence of words, half girlie, half whore, words that he was too shy to tell even his best mate Stuart of, when Stuart asked how they did it. Words that were triggers to some mad voltage in him and would be to any man, and he knew now that he would make love to her for days. She knew it too, she had come, his piece of pie.

  * * *

  It was the same as before and yet not the same. In that other place with the mates, jealousy, her spunkiness, there was a thrill to it, a danger, but in this place it did not seem so right.

  Not her fault that something had shifted inside him. Not his fault, either. Remembers the good times, that first day when she sallied into the sheep station in her woolly jacket, all businesslike, determined to keep her end up, not to be intimidated by so many blokes. “What’s it like to be the only female around here?” the Swede asked, and Kitty, the wizened cook, called out from the kitchen, “Hey, cheeky, I’m a female in case you didn’t know.” All Rosemary did was shrug.

  “Why do you all carry knives?” she had said, looking down the length of the mess table at the weathered faces, the totem knives, and the piled plates of greasy stew.

  “In case we have to slit a sheep’s throat,” the Swede said. He didn’t like the idea of women coming there, women took all the simplicity out of things and got the men into scrapes. He tried to frighten her then with tall tales about wild dogs and wild shearers having fighting bouts because there always had to be a winner and a loser. She ignored him.

  “Ever see an eyeless sheep?” he said.

  “Not that I recall,” she said, and he insisted on describing how the gulls swooped down on the unfortunate sheep and took an eye out, then a second eye, for a snack.

  “That’s interesting,” she said, and began to write it down for her report.

  Out on the trail the mates were betting as to which of them would get a leg over her. That next Saturday night with the old roustabout, the guitar, and the beers, things got heady. Her sitting on the arms of different chairs in a short satin dress and the guitarist getting fresh with her and pulling her onto the sofa. Having to take him outside and give him what’s what. That did it. They danced, and it was from that to his quarters, the mates on the veranda with their ear to the door, wondering how in hell’s name he got her in there so fast. Academia no more. A little avatar. Like being with a bloke. Picked him, she said, because he had a good bum. Love didn’t come into it. She didn’t want love. Wouldn’t allow for sleep either. Why sleep? Eskimos sleep. Not shepherds. Shepherds wouldn’t miss the razz, would they?

  Within a week things had changed. She had resorted to old-fashioned things like hand-holding, kissing, and on the last night admitted to be “absolutely melting inside.” Got to like her more from her letters. Stories of her childhood on the beach, baked from the sun, boys and girls up to no good in the bamboo huts, and then at fourteen deciding she wanted a good education. Wanted it for him too. Their huge appetite for passion made it all the more essential. She would take him out of there. He was wasted on a sheep station. He was made for bigger things and a shepherd was not that. Promising him the trip of a lifetime, not just in the sack but in the workplace. He’d lie on the bed pulling at the florets of the candlewick bedspread and imagine her naked and wet under her jeans and sweatshirt, her nipples a dripping painted cocoa colour. He was homesick, Rosemary sick. He wrote poems and soppy letters. Very soon he was in the city working as an assistant in a shoe shop, which, as she said, was step one. Daddy would see to step two. Daddy a right pseud, flaunting his atheism.

  * * *

  She wakens baffled, not sure where she is. He has been watching her while she slept. Watching the fire flames licking the brown-black nap of soot in the chimney stack and thinking what he would say. For a moment he was quiet. Looking at him she sensed that in the time since he left her he had altered.

  “Are you okay?”

  “I’ve come halfway across the world and you haven’t even asked me why.”

  “Tell me why.”

  “I was starting to feel unsure, Mick.”

  “You needn’t.”

  “I think the deep-down passion isn’t changed … But your letters … Your letters made me quite angry. Don’t expect miracles. Shit.”

  “That’s me, Rosemary.”

  “No, it isn’t … You’re hiding something.”

  “You’re just tired.”

  “I’m just tired,” she says, and holds her engagement ring to the light of the fire, the blue stone itself a lit spark. He remembers with a qualm the Saturday he bought it, the second-cheapest one on the velvet-backed tray, the only one he could afford.

  “Did you think this would keep me quiet?” she says, holding it up.

  “You know I didn’t.”

  “I don’t know … Maybe you thought, I’ll scoot back here to Ireland and leave her dangling … I wasn’t in good shape, Mick.”

  “I know, I asked you to come with me.”

  “And I said, I’ll come when we’re married … Try to understand, Mick … My folks … They wanted the best for their daughter. The country is small, even if it’s big, the society is small, they want a wedding.”

  “They’ll have it.”

  “You don’t understand how much I love you,” she said.

  “I do,” he said.

  For the first time he realised there were no curtains on the window and that anyone could have been looking in. Jumping up, he jerked and pulled on the buckled shutters that had not been dislodged in years and when he closed them there was a hollow clatter. Then a folded butterfly drifted out and opened up before his eyes into a tautened beige-and-orange fan of tortoiseshell.

  “A visitor,” he said as in his cupped hand drops of moisture leaked from its thin fidgety fibres.

  “THIRTY! She’ll never see thirty again, or thirty-one or thirty-two.”

  “And the skin — sallow.”

  “Excuse me, Josephine … It’s yellow … It’s jaundicy.”

  “And what about the accent?”

  “Deadly, Miriam … Deadly.”

  How they chuckled, how they gloated
in their demolishment of Rosemary. They were back from Mass, they had made their Holy Communions, and they pushed two tables into the corner of the bar, then sat on stools and window ledges, each bettering the other in their dissection of her. To Breege it was as though the words came down out of the air, disembodied, ugly words, about a woman who had no existence for her until a short while before when she saw her linked to Bugler in the chapel grounds and people congratulating them.

  “Yous are very pass-remarkable,” Derek said, bringing their tray of Irish coffees while the Crock predicted that they would outdo each other in their choice of wedding presents.

  “June, I’d say.”

  “Sooner …”

  “What do you say, Breege?”

  She doesn’t answer. She thinks, If they come in, I will have to go out, but I can’t go out yet, I might bump into them, and so she sat there, half heeding, and then saw him put his head through the door and withdraw. He saw her at once and touched his hat, but the look he gave her was inscrutable, neither a liking nor a disliking, a blankness as if something had been erased in him.

  Within minutes they had returned, and there was something almost rehearsed about it, the way Rosemary linked him as he introduced her to each one. The women were lavish now in their welcome, each offering her a place as she was being begged to hold out her hand for each one to admire the engagement ring. They marvelled at its blueness, one minute sapphire, the next minute amethyst, rating it much more original than the ordinary diamonds that you see in the jewellers’ shop windows. It was Miss Carruthers who asked her if she missed home.

  “I haven’t had time,” she said, and looked at Bugler and smiled knowingly.

  She made a note of each of their names and said they would have to come up for the Christmas party and bring their hubbies.

  “Christmas!” Josephine exclaimed.

  “He’s promised me snow,” Rosemary said.

  “You’ve never seen snow?”

  “I’ve never seen it falling … I’ve never seen that bit of magic, have I, Mick?”

  “We’ll pray for a snowstorm,” the dressmaker and her twin sister said.

  Breege would always think that Rosemary had followed her into the ladies’ room because she saw, she sensed. There were two Rosemarys in there, one in the mirror and one in the room itself, her high heels blatant on the tiled floor.

  “And what do you do, Breege?”

  “Nothing … I look after my brother.”

  “No boyfriend?”

  “No,” Breege said, very distant.

  “If Mick gave me a good reason to shave my head, I’d shave it,” she said, opening a tin packed with flat discs of lipstick that were like the paints in Aziz’s paintbox, only cleaner. She blended the colours, brushed them on, pursed her lips, and smiled at herself. Then she held out the ring, and as if it had an enchanted power she said, “He’ll always come back to me … Because I have this.”

  Breege stayed there, not looking in the mirror, feeling the cold truth of things run up and down her body, and then it happened. When she tried to say something to herself the words would not come out. It was as if a stone or an implement had been put down her throat, cutting her, cutting the words, and when she tried to say just one word, any word to reassure herself, it would not come out. She opened her mouth and looked in at her gums, which were moist and beaded, and she tried desperately to say the letters of the alphabet as she had first learned them at school, but she couldn’t. They would not come. Holding on to one bit of ledge and then another and then to the glass door handle, she told herself to remember the things out there, normality, coffee, conversation, biscuits, Rosemary, Bugler.

  “I’m getting a stroke,” her mind said, though she did not know what a stroke was. Something awful had occurred and there was nothing else at all in her shattered world.

  Derek, who saw her run out, said that she ran like someone called to judgement.

  MRS. NOONAN, THE sacristan, about to lock up, hears noises in the rear of the church and runs to the sacristy calling “Help, help!” She lifts the intercom to the priest’s house and waits, fearing there will be no answer. No one there, no one to come to her assistance, only the vestments laid out for next morning’s Mass, white vestments, ghostly in the gloom. She had already turned off the lights and is now too afraid to walk out to the side of the altar and turn them back on again. Her heart is churning. She who used to be afraid of dead bodies in the coffins that were put there for one night is now more afraid of vandals. Half of her wants to escape through the sacristy door and out the garden, but her long years of service oblige her to stay. To leave now would be to allow the intruder, whoever it be, to rob the collection boxes and do unspeakable things in the sanctity of the chapel of which she is so proud — the scrubbed tiles, the polished pews, and the jugs of berries on the altar steps, there being no flowers in season. It is December. She thinks of this vandal as a him, out there, a sacrilege to the red glow of the sanctuary lamp, to the Host in the tabernacle, to the priceless stained-glass windows, those rivers of blue within blue, virgins and martyrs with infants being born not from lower down, but coming out of their chests in clean and undefiled incarnations, others holding the bruised and bleeding heart of Christ in an ecstasy.

  She waits, listens, opens the door a fraction, and, hearing nothing, decides it must have been wind or leaves that blew in, and so she ventures out, carrying her set of keys on a metal hoop and a broomstick. Slowly she goes down the aisle, and in the dark she hears what might be prayer or might not. Torn between going back behind the altar to where the set of switches are or going on down, she continues on, gropes in the big brass metal sconce for the matches, and relights the candles, which are still smoking, having been quenched only moments before. They are thin candles, halved for economy’s sake, and the pencils of wan light are barely enough to guide her towards the source of the murmuring. She is flabbergasted. A grown body has climbed into the crib, a woman’s body, as she can tell by the shoes. Leaning in, she sees Breege Brennan lying in the straw alongside the donkey, the zebra, the infant Jesus, and the Holy Family. Before shouting out she blesses herself, knowing that something profane has happened in the House of God, and soon she is striking out with the metal keys and the handle of the broom which she brought to defend herself.

  “Breege Brennan, if you don’t come out I’ll drag you out,” then receiving no answer she pulls first an arm, a leg, tugs at them to no avail. The hussy burrows herself down in the straw so as to be invisible. Hearing someone outside, she runs shouting for assistance, and presently Miss Carruthers and herself are tackling their stubborn charge. They pull in vain, they slap her face, they tell her the reprisals that will be hers. She has slumped down and is looking through the straw with huge and terrified eyes.

  “She’s possessed.”

  “With what?”

  “I can guess what,” Miss Carruthers says peevishly. “We better get the priest.”

  “He’s not there, he’s out on his farm.”

  “If he farmed less and paid more attention to the faithful, we wouldn’t have this catastrophe.”

  “Miss Carruthers, I won’t hear a word against Father,” Mrs. Noonan says, marching to the outer porch to ring the bell, to summon help from the town. The loud jerky peals ring out in a mighty consternation and Breege knows how everything is listening, outside and inside, the stations of the cross, the sanctuary wick in its bowl of oil, the purple half-curtain of the confessional door, and that soon the townspeople will come trooping in.

  They are mostly women who have foregathered. They ask if she is drunk or drugged or out of her mind. They lean in, sniffing her, and then Josephine, wondering if she is compos mentis, puts some test questions to her: “Breege, what day is it? Breege, name the President of this country, name the President of the United States of America.” She doesn’t answer.

  “She’s doing it for attention.”

  “Bold is not strong enough a word for her.”
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br />   “Flipped … flipped,” Lydia, a younger girl, says, and liking the word so much and her importance in saying it, she repeats it several times, saying shouldn’t a doctor be called. Reaching to lug her out, to end this nonsense, Miss Carruthers pulls Breege by the shoulders, but is sent skidding, her rimless spectacles falling ahead of her on the tiles. Mrs. Noonan, who had shuffled off, has returned with an ewer of cold water, and with a determination that could only be called vengeance she douches her, feet, stockings, coat, and last of all her face. They are laughing now, all of them laughing at how grotesque she is in there, wet stockings, wet hair, hunched up like a wet hedgehog. One remembers how she saw it coming, Breege Brennan going into Mrs. Mac and accusing the poor woman of stealing her ten pounds. They speculate on what she might next do, curse, scream, maybe even bite someone.

  “Keep back, keep back” is muttered now, all averring that something deadly has occurred. Hearing them, Breege raises her hand and moves her fingers to speak.

  “Sssh … sssh … She wants to say something.”

  “What is it, Breege?”

  She tries, but the words won’t come.

  WHEN THEY LED me in here and showed me my bed with the little plywood chest of drawers for my odds and ends and for treats that I might get, such as chocolate biscuits or orangeade, I wanted to die. Twenty beds in the ward, nearly half of them vacant. The counterpane was of a pale flowered stuff that feels coarse to the touch. A woman came and stood by me and offered to be my friend — Millie. She showed me around.

  “That’s the dining room, that’s the painting room, that’s the television room, and that’s the Quiet Room.” When she said the Quiet Room she made faces and stuck her tongue out. If anyone roars or screams, or smashes windows, or hits out, or goes effing and blinding, they’re for the Quiet Room. In there, alone, to scream their guts out. There’s a mattress on the floor. A room waiting for roars. The lamentations it has heard. If I were put in there, and I might be, there is no knowing what would transpire. Would I scream or recant? At the end of it something would have been hauled out of me. I don’t know. And they do not know either — the nurses, the doctors, the psychiatrists. They ask questions. Are our minds racing? Do we think other people are reading our thoughts? They write down what we say; then three times a day someone comes with a plastic eggcup of pills and stands over us to make sure that we swallow them, to make sure we don’t grind them between our fingers and put them in the potted plants. There are male and female nurses. Other staff sit in offices by their electric fires with sheaves of notes on their desks, trying to unravel the pickle of our lives. Country people. City people. Young and old. Strays. A woman across the way has not once opened the flowered curtain around her bed. Her meals are brought to her. We are of all ages. Two of the girls have teddy bears, they are studying for their exams in the summer.