Lies the Mushroom Pickers Told

by Phelan, Tom;

  Mikey couldn’t stop the world whizzing past in the spyglass. Lalor had to tell him three times to lower it onto the bike saddle to steady it.

  With his body adjusted to the distance between his feet and the spyglass, with one eye clamped shut and with his teeth bared in a snarl, Mikey finally slowed down the picture at the end of the barrel.

  “I can’t see Sally,” he said. “But there’s a big pile of straw moving around in the front garden.”

  “You mustn’t be looking at the Coughlins’ house,” the Civil Servant said.

  “It’s the Coughlins’ all right. I just saw Eddie’s cap flashing by. He’s leading the horse by the winkers and there’s the biggest load of straw I ever saw. He’s backing up the horse and cart. Bridie’s behind the cart telling him where to go with her hand.”

  “I don’t think you’re looking at the Coughlins’ front garden at all,” the Civil Servant said. “That’s where Bridie has her geraniums and her sweet peas. Can you see the dog at the door?”

  “She’s not there. She must have moved.”

  “Give me a look,” Kevin demanded.

  “Wait. There’s Bridie still waving at Eddie.”

  “They can’t be in the flower garden.”

  “Amen’t I looking at them? They’re in the flower garden, Kevin.”

  “You’re cracked, Mikey. What would they be doing with the horse’s cart in the flower garden? Give me a look.”

  “Wait. They’re opening the ropes on the shafts.”

  “Give me a look,” Lalor demanded again. “You can look through the spyglass all day after I’ve gone home.” He held out his hand.

  Mikey ignored Lalor. “Eddie tried to heel up the cart by himself,” he said dramatically, “but Bridie had to help him. There it goes . . . there it goes, and the horse is moving up, and Eddie had to jump away. The straw’s all over the place.”

  “Mind yourself, Mikey,” Kevin Lalor said with impatience. “I’m going to move the bike. I have to go home.” He gently swayed the bike and shook the spyglass.

  “Aw, Kevin, don’t move the bike. I just saw Sally for a second near Eddie.”

  Kevin Lalor blocked the end of the spyglass with his hand. “Mikey Lamb!” he said. “Mikey! Take your eye away from that spyglass and look at me.”

  Holding the spyglass on the saddle with both hands, with one eye still closed and his face still distorted, Mikey bent his head back until he was squinting up into the Civil Servant’s face. “What?” he asked.

  “Stand up straight, take the spyglass off the saddle and let me go home.” Mikey finally heard the impatience in Lalor’s voice.

  The boy straightened up. Afraid he had upset the only person outside his family who treated him better than a dog, he held out the spyglass. “Take a look, Kevin. The straw’s all over the place.”

  Kevin’s curiosity about the straw in Bridie Coughlin’s flower garden was stronger than his annoyance at Mikey Lamb. He took the proffered spyglass out of the dirty hand.

  Sure enough, the eternally becapped Eddie Coughlin had just pulled down the shafts of the cart, was putting the backband into the wooden bridge on the straddle. Bridie was at the far side of the horse, and from the way she was moving and bending, Lalor knew she was helping with the yoking. A pile of yellow straw behind the cart stood out against the dark green of the Esker as bright as a solitary votive candle in an evening church. “They’re hardly going to thatch their house again,” the Civil Servant said, the spyglass still at his eye. Then he muttered, “They only thatched that roof a few years ago.”

  Kevin Lalor handed the spyglass back to Mikey. “Don’t bring that to school or the Townies will take it from you.”

  “But I want to show it off.”

  “Show it off to everyone in Clunnyboe, but don’t take it to school. Do you hear me, Mikey? Look at me. Do you hear me?”

  “What use is it if I can’t show it off to the lads?”

  “Did you hear what I said about not taking it to school?”

  “I did.”

  As he rode the last half mile home, Kevin Lalor made a bet with himself that Mikey would bring the spyglass to school, that one of the Townies would talk it out of him for a few dated and torn English comics. Then he wondered if Bridie and Eddie Coughlin were going to patch a leak in their roof. A full load of straw would not be needed for a small repair. Maybe they didn’t want a few feet of new thatch to stand out like a beacon against the old faded straw, so they were going to do the whole roof. That was it! Bridie was fastidious about the appearance of her house. Besides that, people like the Coughlins who had a priest in the family were inclined to improve the setting from which one of their members had rocketed to the top of the social heap by way of a religious rite. A repaired thatched roof was as socially indelicate as a missing front tooth. Bridie Coughlin would no more have a repair on her roof than she would ride her bike to town with a patch in her good blue coat.

  4

  The Peeper

  1951

  In which Simon Peter Lamb mourns his dead father, uses Mikey’s spyglass to peer into the distant garden of Eddie-the-cap, bachelor, and Bridie Coughlin, spinster, and speculates on what he sees.

  EVEN THOUGH THE FARMYARD was behind their house, the Coughlins did not have a back door. And so it was that on the morning after Mikey Lamb’s birthday, when Bridie Coughlin hesitated for a moment before stepping out through her front door at seven o’clock, Simon Peter Lamb trapped her in Mikey’s spyglass. When Bridie appeared to stare straight at him, Simon Peter snatched the spyglass away from his eye and quickly dodged behind the door jamb of the turf shed.

  “Janey Mack!” he said. Then he glanced around fiercely to see if anyone had heard him. But it was only a red hen, busy giving herself a dust bath in the turf mull, that had heard him.

  Cautiously, Simon Peter moved his body until one eye was exposed to the Esker. He could barely see Bridie’s house in the distance. He took in a deep breath and held it. “Amen’t I a terrible eegit? Bridie couldn’t see me unless she had a spyglass, too.” He put the telescope back to his eye and held it against the jamb to steady it.

  Bridie was still standing in the doorway. She was holding something in her right hand, but she kept it out of sight while she stuck out her head and peeped to her left. Then she stepped forward and walked quickly to her right with her head down. Just as she disappeared around the corner of the house, Simon Peter moved the spyglass and there, not an arm’s length away, was Bridie Coughlin’s white porcelain chamber pot with a bunch of red flowers painted on its side, its rim gold-leafed.

  “Janey Mack! Flowers on her pisspot! And she carries it with her thumb on the inside.” Simon Peter lowered the spyglass and looked at it. “This is a great yoke altogether.” He turned it over in his hand. “So smooth and nice to feel.” He put the wide end to his eye and looked over at the Esker again. “Janey, everything’s miles away.”

  He looked around for something to sit on. There was nothing but the x-framed sawhorse for holding tree branches steady when the two-handled crosscut saw was used. Carefully, he placed the spyglass in the turf mull and pulled the sawhorse over to the open doorway. The bathing hen muttered and Simon Peter absentmindedly kicked it in the arse, sending it into the air in a flutter of wings and dust and squawkings.

  Simon Peter should have been milking one of his cows, his forehead against a warm, bovine belly, the squish-squish of the milk into the bucket lulling him back to sleep. But Mikey’s announcement last night about what he saw in the Coughlins’ flower garden was too much for Simon Peter to be wondering about all day. Mikey wouldn’t be up for school till eight o’clock. By then the spyglass would be in its place at the back of the knife-and-fork drawer in the kitchen dresser.

  It took Simon Peter some time to find the Coughlin house again. When he did, the front door was closed. Blue chimney smoke was rising straight into the sky. The stillness of the air, and the possibility that the Coughlins were getting ready to thatch reminded
him of the Irish proverb Mikey had learned during the winter. Over and over the child had chanted it while staring into the red flames of the turf fire, driving everyone in the house half-mad. Ní hé lá na gaoithe lá na scoilb. The day of the wind is not the day of the scollop. Don’t try to thatch on a windy day. Don’t piss into the wind. Don’t fart in the confession box.

  In the eyepiece Simon Peter found the heap of yellow straw in the Coughlins’ garden, and there, too, was Eddie-the-cap. “So that’s why Bridie was waiting; for Eddie to turn his back before she’d take her pisspot out to the dunghill at the back of the house.”

  Eddie’s shirtsleeves were rolled up past his elbows. He was teasing the straw, going through it looking for bits of grass and weeds and briars, removing them with a flick of the two-pronged fork, cleaning the oaten straw as carefully as a woman preparing wool for spinning.

  “So, they are going to thatch. And I was talking to Mattie Mulhall on the road yesterday and he never said a word. Cagey Mattie! Maybe it’s a rushed job, just patching a leak.”

  In the end of the spyglass Eddie Coughlin gathered the straw he had cleaned and carried it to where he had already started the bed convenient to the house. He swung the forkful of thatching back over his shoulder and then flipped it forward, the whipping action taking the tangle out of the straw and straightening it to some extent. “Not bad for a Sloper,” Simon Peter grudgingly allowed inside his own head.

  He kept Coughlin in the glass, and as he intimately studied his unsuspecting neighbor, a feeling of perverse delight glowed in Simon Peter’s belly. “Wouldn’t it be great if Eddie took off the cap? I’d be the first person ever to see his third ear. But, shag, I wouldn’t be able to let anyone in on the secret because I’d have to tell how I saw it. Still, I’d be the only one who’d know what’s wrong with his head.”

  As he watched Coughlin picking his way through another forkful of straw, Simon Peter wondered if Eddie had cut and cleaned the scollops yet, wondered if he was going to buy them from your man Dunphy over near Gohen. If it was a rush job, then Eddie would be buying, but of course the Slopers could afford to spend money on things that the Boggers had to scrounge out of the hedges.

  It was fifteen years since Simon Peter had cut and cleaned scollops for the thatching of his own house. It was also fifteen years since he had last felt that terrible anger at his father. It had been his father’s thick-headed reaction to the son’s adolescence that had placed the seed of anger inside Simon Peter. The seed festered over the years because neither father nor son had the tools to talk about the poison and draw it out.

  When Simon Peter had emerged from his teenage years, his father had continued to relate to his son as an adolescent. As well as remaining angry at each other, they grew to loathe being in each other’s company. Like two people caught in a balancing act on the edge of a cliff, neither could let go of the other. For the son, it was either the farm or emigration; the father needed the son to work on the farm, but he was unable to loosen his possessive grasp and graciously hand it over to the son.

  Over the years, communication between Simon Peter and his father had evolved back to the grunts of the first two communicating apes. It was the woman in their lives, the wife and mother, who bridged the gap for them. “Your father wants to know . . .” she’d say to Simon Peter. “Simon Peter wants to know . . .” she’d say to her husband. When she died, the apelike grunting evolved upward again to the point where a bare paucity was spoken. Both had become such adept wielders of Occam’s razor that they had honed their use of the language to the point where one word was sufficient to carry a day.

  Fifteen years ago, when Simon Peter was thirty-six, he and his father had set out in silence to look for scollops, each dressed in raingear of old cap, tattered topcoat and flopping Wellingtons. It was the last job they worked together. It was the last time the father treated the son like a child: picking up scollops Simon Peter had cut and cleaned and, with a grunt, pointing to a missed protrusion even though it wouldn’t have interfered with the thatching at all; handing the offending scollop back to Simon Peter for correction instead of nicking off the small imperfection with his own knife.

  Together in the drizzling rain, they plundered the clumps of slender shoots. They measured each scollop from armhole to tip of index finger, pointed each end with one swipe of the knife, and dressed each piece by nicking off every growth and bump. They placed the pliant rods in bundles across two pieces of old binder twine and finally tied them together, leaving them in the soaking grass to be picked up later in the pony and cart.

  They would need two thousand scollops, and it was the father who kept a running tally of the number gathered. The inside-out cigarette box, picked up off a street in Gohen, and the stub of pencil which his shaky fingers fumbled out of his waistcoat pocket before each bundle was tied up, were two more symbols of the father’s autocracy and the son’s subservience.

  Around the edges of the wet fields they went, ravaging stands of hazel, black sally and eggbush shoots. After each plundering, they set out for the next clump without reference to each other. Even if there had been a narrow channel of communication open between them, there would have been no need to discuss where to go next—each knew every bush, tree and briar in the hedges of the farm.

  As side by side they cut, measured, pointed and dressed, Simon Peter noticed his father straining to match him scollop for scollop. He became aware of his father’s breathing, saw that he hesitated each time he dropped a fresh scollop on the bundle. But in his heart, Simon Peter was not sympathetic to the older man’s distress. There was no reason why his father should be out in the rain working like this. But the old man was stubborn, and he would show the world he could keep up with his son. And by keeping up with him he would retain the right to make all the decisions that affected their lives.

  With the father leading the way, the two men were trudging to the far side of the Beech Field when the father stopped walking. He put his hand to his chest. Simon Peter quickened his step.

  “Are you all right?” he asked. Then, as he stepped over to the old man’s side, he realized his father was about to die. The son dropped his scollop knife and caught his father as he fell into him. Simon Peter eased the lifeless body down onto the wet earth. Then, as if reacting to some old instinct, he knelt down on the sopping ground, and with his arms around the shoulders he hadn’t touched since he was a child, he laid the side of his face on his father’s chest. From the depths of his belly, jagged sobs clawed their way up his throat and spread themselves over his father’s body like blankets of remorse and sorrow.

  When the sobs had worn themselves out, Simon Peter spoke in the gulping voice that can only be managed after a long cry. “I always thought we’d have time to talk to each other. I always thought there would be a time.” Then he whispered, “I’m so fucking sorry, so fucking sorry.”

  Twenty minutes after his father died, Simon Peter stood up, took off his raggedy topcoat and covered the cooling body. Across the soaking April fields he slogged, the chocolate-colored water from old hoof-holes squirting up in the air when he inattentively stepped into them. When he reached the farmyard, he wheeled his bike out of the shed and set off to get the priest and the doctor in Gohen.

  On the uncomfortable sawhorse in his turf shed, Simon Peter Lamb came to himself, his head bent and the spyglass dangling from his hands between his legs. “May God have mercy on him and on Mam, too. I hope Mikey and myself never get to the point where Pops and myself got.”

  He brought the spyglass to his eye and searched until he caught Eddie Coughlin still working the straw.

  “They won’t be ready for Mattie Mulhall for a couple of days.” Simon Peter folded the spyglass into itself. “I wonder are they expecting visitors. If they start whitewashing after the thatching, it’ll be a sure sign someone’s on the way. The only one they have is the brother in India. ’Course the pope could be coming to see them, and Bridie and Eddie wouldn’t tell anyone.”

&n
bsp; Simon Peter pulled the sawhorse back out of the doorway and went into the kitchen to the knife-and-fork drawer.

  5

  In the Sunroom

  In which David Samuel Howard, Esq., speculates that the ancient community of Gohen and adjacent townlands may have been unsettled by the occurrence of two new people in their midst.

  MISTER HOWARD HELD UP his hand like a child about to ask permission to go to the bathroom. “Hold on, Patrick,” he said. “The old prostate is encroaching on the urethra.”

  “Gosh, Sam, you could be a little more delicate,” his wife said. “We do have company.”

  Mister Howard levered himself onto his feet. “You know I am being delicate, Else.”

  A smile twitched at Elsie’s mouth, but she would not give in to it.

  “It’s nice to be at the age where one can live without fear of the reprimand,” Sam said as he went out.

  “Patrick,” Missus Howard said immediately, “Sam told me your entire family emigrated to England together.”

  “Yes, two girls, three boys and my parents.”

  “That must have been terrible for everyone.”

  “Yes, it was.”

  Missus Howard noticed twinges of pain in Patrick’s eyes, and she quickly veered off onto a different scent. “How did you manage to make a success of yourself in a new country in such a short time?”

  “It was luck to a large extent,” Patrick said.

  “We make our own luck, like you said yourself. What did you do to make it happen?”

  “I was an avid reader, and it showed in my school essays. A teacher took me under his wing.”

  “Ah!” Missus Howard almost purred the word, sighed the sound as if she could already see many pieces floating down out of the air to take their places in a grand design.

  “Mister Charrot was his name—Jules Charrot. After I took the O Levels he made sure I continued on into sixth form and took the advanced level in the General Certificate. He set my sights on the University of Birmingham and tutored me to win an exhibition to read English.”