Lies the Mushroom Pickers Told

by Phelan, Tom;

“It’s no secret that you’ve been digging into this thing in Gohen and Clunnyboe and Drumsally for several years. I suspected you would eventually come here to our house. But why is it so important to you? We’re talking about something that happened, what? Fifty-five years ago, for Christ’s sake.”

  “As a child I did not realize there were contradictions in what I saw and heard about the deaths of Father Coughlin and Lawrence Gorman, things that were never spoken about by the adults. For my own satisfaction I want to know what really happened. And yes, over the years I have been collecting bits and pieces of the story. The people who were involved or who know the details are dying off and—”

  “And that’s why you’re here now, Patrick,” Else said. “You’re afraid Sam and I will fall off the perch soon.” She was smiling.

  “Sam is the only one left who—”

  “I had my own part to play in the drama,” Elsie said, determined not to be sidelined.

  “Else, for God’s sake! You had nothing to do with anything,” her husband growled.

  “I did, too, Sam. For one thing, I spilled tea on Deirdre Hyland’s skirt.”

  “Be serious, Else. The man doesn’t want to hear your asides.”

  Elsie was not intimidated. “Patrick, I know as much as Sam, probably more.”

  Patrick tried to break up this back-and-forth. “When I spoke to the others, I promised I would not write about what I discovered. I told them that I simply wanted to find out what happened for my own satisfaction. I quickly realized that what I knew was only the glimpse of an outsider—and an outsider child at that. Of them all, Peggy Mulhall was the most suspicious. Before she told me anything, she accused me of trying to disassociate myself from my poor beginnings because I now call myself Patrick instead of Barlow.”

  “I didn’t know you were called Barlow,” Missus Howard said. “Why did you change your name?”

  “My first editor thought Patrick was more dignified, that Bartholomew was archaic and Barlow undignified.”

  “He must have been an—”

  “Else, can you hang on for one minute?” Mister Howard said. He turned to Patrick. “You must have some reason besides curiosity for dragging up the past about Coughlin and Gorman.”

  “I’m curious about how and why an entire village covered up the murder of two men.”

  Missus Howard clapped her hands and sat up straight. She was beaming. “Sam! Sam! I always told you.” She looked at Bracken. “I always told him, Patrick. I always said it—the two of them were murdered. But Sam will only admit to the official finding that both deaths were accidental.”

  “You will stop this, Else. You are in the realm of gossip and calumny.” Sam’s voice was stern. “This is a very serious matter. The Coughlin inquest determined the priest’s death was accidental, and Inspector Larkin from Dublin concluded that Doul Yank Gorman unintentionally killed himself.”

  “Sam. Sam,” Patrick said, his hands out as if trying to calm the impatience that had crept into Sam’s tone. “What about this approach: if I tell you everything I know, will you tell me everything you know?”

  “No, I can’t make a sweeping promise. But I will consider individual questions you may have.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake, Sam,” Else said, and she shifted in her chair like a fussy hatching hen. She addressed Patrick. “I know as much as he does about the two deaths. I’ll fill in the gaps for you.”

  “But only if it is not privileged information,” her husband reminded her.

  “David Samuel Howard! You have never shared privileged information with me. My information comes from the grapevine.”

  “Gossip, Else.”

  “You call it gossip when I hear something on the grapevine.” She turned to Patrick again. “What Sam hears on the grapevine he calls community news.”

  “It’s a matter of discernment.”

  “You’re saying again that I’m gullible.”

  “No, Else. I simply believe that I have had more training and experience at weeding the fiction out of what is presented as fact.”

  “God! The delusions of the man!”

  “But she loves me, Patrick, and I love her,” Mister Howard said. “We’ve had a good life together. We were lucky.”

  “People make their own luck,” Patrick said by way of compliment.

  The three of them sat in silence for a few moments to absorb the little pleasantnesses. Then Patrick said, “All right! Should I start?”

  “Go ahead,” Sam said. “And Else . . .”

  “I know, Sam. I know. You don’t have to say it.”

  Patrick began. “Mikey Lamb—”

  Elsie immediately interrupted. “That young man who died in Amsterdam? How many years ago was it?”

  “Yes, that was Mikey. Thirty-two years ago, and he was thirty-four when he died.”

  “He was murdered, wasn’t he? Was anyone ever caught for that?”

  “Mikey Lamb?” Mister Howard asked. “Oh, of course. He was your wife’s brother.”

  “The family believes Mikey worked for the C.I.A.”

  “The Americans?” Elsie said, as distastefully as if she were talking about tapeworm.

  “Yes. He was good with languages and was probably recruited in Trinity. He was tortured and shot in the heart and thrown in a canal.”

  “Jesus Christ tonight!” Sam whispered.

  “I’m sorry, Patrick,” Else said. “That must have been terrible on everyone.”

  “It was. The family didn’t tell anyone about the torture or the shooting. They let everyone believe he’d been robbed and drowned. Anyhow . . .” The Howards’ eyes wandered out into the garden.

  “How terribly sad,” Sam eventually said.

  Patrick sighed, expelling the painful memories. Then he broke the somber mood. “Mikey Lamb and I became friends when we were eleven, and only for him I would not have known anything about the Coughlin and Gorman deaths, nor would I have married Molly. The Lambs lived in Clunnyboe and the father’s name was Simon Peter, and like all . . .”

  2

  The Birthday Present

  1951

  In which eleven-year-old Mikey Lamb, eldest son of Simon Peter and Annie Lamb, is disappointed in the birthday present he receives from his aunt in England.

  LIKE ALL THE FARMERS in Clunnyboe, Simon Peter Lamb worked six days a week, from seven in the morning to evening’s last light. On Sundays he only worked four hours. Every year he ran up bills in the shops in Gohen, and even though he settled some accounts when he sold an animal on a fair day or his barley at harvesttime, he was never out of debt. His animals seldom brought in top price, and his barley was never of the superior quality to interest the Guinness buyers. It was Simon Peter’s belief that good fortune only happened to other people.

  Simon Peter Lamb was secure in his belief that, if he accepted his lot in this life without whining, he would be rewarded in the next life. He wallowed in his many miseries, miseries he saw as trials sent by a testing God. To enumerate these divine whims in a list inures the mind to their immediacy and their irritancy; the quality of the miseries is appreciated all the better when savored one at a time.

  Simon Peter existed in a perpetual state of unkemptness, looking as if he had just climbed out of a boghole. Every day since he was a child, the bodily waste of some farm animal had stuck to his clothing and his boots. On most days his feet were wet, the wetness seeping in from the water lying in his fields or running down the legs of his trousers into his footwear when it rained. Sometimes, the water from a urinating animal splashed warmly over his boots’ hard leather rims.

  Simon Peter Lamb smelled more like the back end of cow than a newborn calf, more like stinkweed than roses. But the only person in the townland of Clunnyboe who appreciated Simon Peter’s odors was the Civil Servant—Kevin Lalor—the one person in Clunnyboe who not only washed himself every day, but who put on a clean shirt and clean socks every Monday morning.

  When his oldest son was born, Simon Peter Lamb
insisted that the boy be named Simon Peter. To distinguish between the two, Missus Lamb had taken to calling the baby Mikey.

  By the age of eleven, Mikey Lamb had begun to molt out of the cuteness of childhood and had taken his first steps into the disconnectedness of adolescence. There were times when he looked like a disheveled chicken. His hair was black spikes sticking up like metal shavings on a magnet, and his nose was growing faster than the rest of his face. The legs of his knee-length trousers hung unevenly, and one of his gartered knee stockings was often crumpled at an ankle. Always, as if he were wearing the family coat of arms, some kind of animal dung clung to his boots. From the bottom of his nostrils to his right ear there was evidence that when Mikey had a runny nose he used his sleeve instead of a handkerchief. When he became excited he passed a gas which pierced surprised nostrils like needles dipped in rotten eggs. Dirt was so embedded in his hands and knees that it would take caustic soap, scalding water and a wire brush to remove it.

  Mikey Lamb was a sitting duck for every boy in the National School in Gohen. But he never complained to his parents, and he always had an excuse when his bruises were obvious. If Mikey himself wasn’t attacked, it was his bike that bore the brunt of hard boots. The sound of a wheel rubbing against a dented mudguard often accompanied him home along the road over the Esker into Drumsally and down into Clunnyboe.

  On the day of his eleventh birthday, Mikey came home from school with Indian-torture burns smarting on each of his wrists, but his expectation of a package from England took the edge off the pain. And when he ran into the kitchen after putting his bike away, the package was on the kitchen table.

  “Maybe there’s English comics,” he thought, seeing himself in the schoolyard, the envy of all the Townies. Valiant, The Hotspur, Eagle. He farted. Commando, Victor. And because he was hoping for comics, he would have been disappointed if the parcel contained a thousand pounds sterling.

  “Will you stop wondering what’s in it and open it?” Annie, his mother, said. She was curious to see what her daft sister in Leeds had sent this time. Last year it had been a rubber duck for a bathtub, and the sister knowing damn well there wasn’t one bathtub in all of Clunnyboe. Another time she had sent the makings of a kite with no instructions. The Lambs had asked the Civil Servant for help, but even he couldn’t figure it out. For two months everyone tripped over the pieces of kite until Simon Peter angrily threw them into the fire one morning after discovering a weasel had killed six hens during the night. “I wouldn’t mind so much if he et the hens. But he just cut their necks for the blood. Bastard!”

  Careful not to damage the stamps, which Molly would bring into the nuns for the African missions, Mikey cut off the wrapping. Inside was a box. He took off the lid, and he saw a layer of tissue paper. When he took out the paper, he didn’t know what he was looking at, but he knew it wasn’t comics.

  “What is it?” Annie demanded from the high, open fireplace, where she stood stirring a pot of calfshare. The heat and steam had unfurled her hair, and she pushed an annoying tress off her face.

  “It’s a yoke.”

  “What kind of a yoke? Bring it over here so I can keep an eye on the calfshare.”

  Mikey carried the box to the fireplace.

  “Hold it in the light of the chimney,” his mother said. Without missing a stroke with her stirring stick, she leaned over and looked into the box. “It’s a brass yoke,” she said, “a bit of a shiny brass. What will that aunt of yours think of next?”

  “How can I play with it?”

  “I don’t know. Take it out and give us a look at it.”

  Mikey brought the box back to the table. He took out the birthday gift and examined it, turned it around several times.

  “Well?” his mother asked. She pushed a strand of black hair out of her mouth.

  “It’s just a bit of a pipe with a bit of glass in one end.”

  “Well, isn’t that one a terrible cod,” the mother said to herself, and she thought of her sister Maggie living in her house in Leeds, a house with a stairs, no less. To Annie Lamb there was something secret and exciting at the top of a stairs. Things went on in the upstairs rooms that the children in the downstairs rooms couldn’t hear—running around with no clothes on, sinful things that Protestants in England did. The English were terrible pagans.

  “There’s a lump of glass at the other end, too,” Mikey said.

  “A bit of brass with a bit of glass at each end,” Annie Lamb said. “Look inside, Mikey. Maybe there’s sweets or something.”

  The boy held the brass up to one eye and scrunched the other shut; his top lip, pulled into a snarl, exposed his teeth. “There’s nothing,” he said.

  “Look at the other end.”

  Mikey turned the present around. “There’s nothing.”

  “Well!” Annie declared, and with that one word she expressed her annoyance at that Maggie. She thought of the two-storied, red-bricked house in Leeds with a fireplace in every room and a flushing lavatory outside the back door, and the sinful savages running around naked upstairs. No matter how careful they were, Irish Catholic emigrants in England were always in danger of losing their souls, what with black Protestants around them the whole time. Annie Lamb stirred the calfshare with a new vigor. It would have been as good if Maggie had sent nothing, she thought.

  “Well, birthday or no birthday,” Annie finally said to her son, “you’ll have to change your clothes and do your jobs, and then we’ll have the lemonade and the biscuits and sweet cake in the parlor. Put that yoke away before Molly comes home from school or Fintan wakes up. If you see the Civil Servant going by, you might show it to him. Maybe he’ll know what it is.”

  3

  The Gift from Leeds

  1951

  In which Kevin Lalor, the Civil Servant, admires Mikey Lamb’s birthday present and they both discover what distant neighbors are doing in their garden.

  TWO HOURS AFTER OPENING his birthday present, Mikey Lamb was standing in the fresh weeds growing between the gable end of the thatched barn and the edge of the lane. He had done all his jobs. Besides bedding the animals with straw, he had pulped six baskets of turnips in the Mash House. After mixing a scoopful of beet pulp and a handful of bonemeal in the bottoms of eleven buckets, he filled them off with the sliced turnips and carried them to the cattle’s troughs. Lastly, he filled the plywood tea chest in the kitchen with two baskets of turf. It was now the precious time between the last job done and his father’s arrival in the farmyard from the fields when more orders would have to be carried out. He should have been doing his homework.

  With his back against the whitewashed mud wall, Mikey waited for the Civil Servant to come by on his way home from work in Gohen. Mikey regarded the Civil Servant as a tender version of his father. People said about the Civil Servant, “That lad has a great job,” “That lad’s terrible brainy,” “That lad’s terrible lucky,” “That lad’s so clean he must be always washing himself,” “I’d feel quare being as clean as the Civil Servant.”

  In the clump of knee-high weeds Mikey used his fingers in his pockets to count the number of days left until the first of May. “Bastille Day,” his father called it. That was the day the cattle were driven to the fields for the summer after their long sequester in the sheds. In thirteen days’ time Mikey would be freed from the winter drudgery. The anticipated joy of being released from the farmyard work left no room in Mikey’s head for the grind of summer in the fields that would ineluctably replace the grind of winter. At least during the summer the yard would not have to be swept as often with the heavy yard brush; what the two cows casually dropped in the farmyard as they came and went at milking time dried up quicker in the sunshine.

  When he saw Kevin Lalor coming in the distance, the boy stepped out into the middle of the lane. Lalor had no choice but to slow down and throw his leg over the saddle of his bike.

  Mikey’s father once said that when Kevin Lalor was being born he was pulled out of his mother so quickl
y that he’d been made unnaturally long and had never regained his proper shape. Everyone in Clunnyboe repeated this story to show how daft Simon Peter Lamb was and how smart they were.

  Beside his bike, Lalor was asymmetrically long and lean. There always seemed to be too many knees and elbows in his immediate vicinity. He wore a peaked cap, a brown tie on his white shirt and a brown suit under his khaki gabardine overcoat. Without a word of greeting, Mikey handed the brass pipe to Lalor and said, “What’s this oul yoke, Kevin?”

  “Where did you get it?”

  “From dant in Leeds, but I wanted English comics to bring to school,” Mikey said.

  “Why would you want English comics?” Kevin Lalor asked and then answered his own question. “So the Tilers could kick the bejazus out of you entirely?”

  Mikey always felt better about himself when the Civil Servant used grown-up language in front of him. But the child knew if he ever said “bejazus” back to the Civil Servant he would get a warning in the form of the question, “Do you want me to knock your block off?”

  “If you brought English comics to school, the Tilers would attack you and the bike at the same time.” It was the Civil Servant who repaired Mikey’s bike every time it was damaged in Gohen.

  With the saddle of his bike lying against his hip, Kevin Lalor pulled the ends of the brass pipe and elongated it to its full length.

  “Aw, Janey!” Mikey said. “I could have done that myself.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “I didn’t know it was a spyglass. Here, give it back to me.”

  “Hold your horses, Mikey. And since when did the word ‘please’ fall out of your vocabulary?” Lalor said. “This is a good spyglass. Will you look at that brass?” He took off his glasses and his face was different, his eyes smaller. He pointed the telescope toward Drumsally high on the slope of the Esker. “It’s not just a good spyglass,” he said. “It’s a great spyglass. Will you look at that! I can see the whiskers on Sally Coughlin. She’s lying down at the front door. Be jakers! Isn’t that great? This is better than any comics. Here, put that to your eye and you’ll think you’re in the Coughlins’ yard.”