Lies the Mushroom Pickers Told

by Phelan, Tom;

  Missus Howard silently clapped her hands together. “There are saints all around us, even though I don’t believe in God. They make up for the rest of us.”

  “Mister Charrot was a good man, a saint if you like,” Patrick said. “On alternate Mondays during my years in Birmingham, I received a brown envelope with a red ten-shilling note inside. Even when I told him I had a secret benefactor straight out of Dickens, he never admitted his assistance. ‘Abel Magwitch is still alive,’ I’d tell him to assure him the money was reaching me.”

  “A story like that gives me a warm feeling all over and at the same time makes me feel so inadequate. I haven’t given back near as much as I’ve taken.”

  “Like you said, Else, the saints make up for the rest of us. And I do know that you ran a thrift shop here in Gohen for many years.”

  With her left hand, Missus Howard waved away Patrick’s reference to her care of the poor of the town.

  “Mister Charrot would have shrugged off any reference to his goodness just like you did now, Else.”

  “Is he still alive—Mister Charrot?” she asked quickly, as if embarrassed that her own saintliness had entered the conversation.

  “No, he died sixteen years ago. When he retired he moved to Muker, and we—Molly and I—got to know the Dales from visiting him. He always insisted that we climb to the top step of the Literary Institute in Muker when we went for a walk. ‘So we can sit and look down on the pheasants,’ he’d say.”

  “He must have been very proud of you, must have had a wonderful sense of fulfillment through you.”

  “He did. He was a widower, had no children, so I became his son and then Molly became his daughter. One day when we were walking around the cemetery surrounding the village church, he showed me the place where he would be buried beside his wife. A few months later we were sitting at the institute and I told him Molly and I had bought the plot beside his. He put his arm across my shoulders and pulled me into himself—not bad for an Englishman.”

  “Not bad for an Englishman, indeed,” Missus Howard echoed, “and very touching for a man with no children of his own.”

  “Who had no children?” Mister Howard asked as he approached the door to the sunroom.

  “Sam! You know I hate it when you do that—walk into the middle of a conversation and say ‘what?’”

  “I didn’t say what. I said who.”

  Patrick wondered if the Howards kept their relationship lively and healthy by knocking sparks off each other at every opportunity. At first, he’d been uncomfortable with their sniping, but now he thought they weren’t sniping at all. They were like two pieces of old field-flint keeping each other sharp and showing their love with their gentle whacking off each other. They were like two children who slap and smack and push each other at every passing to show their affection.

  Mister Howard stood beside his chair. “A man often has great thoughts when he’s relieving himself,” he announced. “There must be some chemical infusion into the brain with the exfusion of urine from the body.”

  “It must be a male thing,” his wife said. “And there’s no such word.”

  “Maybe it is a man thing,” her husband said absently. “Patrick, you have surely read The Valley of the Squinting Windows? I finally read it ten years ago after hearing about it all my life. I think it’s a hateful book, and so does Else. MacNamara revealed himself as the most scrofulous old yenta in the village, even though he didn’t write a word about himself. He must have been a miserable old bollicks, a genuine gobshite. There was only one observation in the whole book that had some validity for me: ‘they,’ the village people, ‘hate the occurrence of new people in their midst.’ I don’t agree with the word ‘hate’; I would agree, though, that the occurrence of new people in any group can give rise to a general anxiety.” Sam looked at his wife and Patrick.

  “And . . . ?” Else asked.

  “And . . . and Father Coughlin and Doul Yank Gorman, for all practical purposes, were new people even though they were born here.”

  “Wait now, Sam,” Else interrupted. “Are you saying Coughlin and Doul Yank Gorman were murdered simply because they were new arrivals among an old, established group?”

  “Stop saying ‘murdered,’ Else. All I’m saying is that they were new people in our midst, and they both caused anxiety among some people. Else, you must stop saying they were murdered.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake, Sam! Will you give up on that? Everyone in Gohen knows that Mattie Mulhall shot his uncle Doul Yank Gorman, and everyone knows there was hanky-panky on Sally Hill where the priest died. And why are you bringing The Valley of the—?”

  “I’m trying to paint in some background so Patrick will better understand any conclusions he may reach.”

  “Sounds to me like you’re preparing Patrick . . . like you’re getting ready to put . . . What do the Americans call it? Spin . . . sounds like you’re preparing to do some spinning to keep Patrick from finding what he’s looking for.”

  “Me a spin doctor? That’s a good one, Else.” Sam sat down. “By the way, did I interrupt something when I came back from the john?”

  “Not at all, Sam,” his wife said. “But I have often wondered in the past why you sound more intelligent when you came back from the loo. And now in my old age I have finally discovered it’s because of exfusion and infusion.”

  “Yes, Else. I always feel a little bit inspired after peeing.”

  “Maybe you should start drinking more water,” his wife said. The two of them laughed and Patrick joined in.

  With the passing of the laughter, Patrick grabbed the ball and ran with it. “Lawrence Gorman, the returned Yank!” he said, like a conductor tapping the podium with his baton. “Lawrence Gorman may have given the farm to his nephew Mattie Mulhall in return for being cared for till he died, but it was Mattie who got the very short end of the stick. Mattie Mulhall would have been . . .

  6

  On the Kitchen Floor

  1951

  In which Peggy Mulhall, wife of Mattie, a.k.a. Matt-the-thatcher, diffuses her husband’s anger at Eddie, a.k.a. Eddie-the-cap, Coughlin for interrupting a job on an ideal thatching day.

  MATTIE MULHALL WOULD HAVE BEEN thatching the Coughlins’ house except that Eddie Coughlin had eight big bullocks to sell, and the Fair Day in Gohen was on the third Tuesday of every month.

  “It wouldn’t have killed him to hold on to the bullocks for another month and not interrupt the job,” Mattie Mulhall complained to his wife. “The man’s a bit of an eegit, if you ask me. Why is he selling eight big animals all of a sudden?” he asked rhetorically, but he got an answer from his wife.

  “Maybe he’s going to buy a tractor,” she offered.

  “Tractor me hole!” her husband said, the edges on his words honed to a fine point by his annoyance at Eddie Coughlin.

  With high and prominent cheeks, beaky nose and black hair, Mattie Mulhall could have been a conquistador if he’d had an upside-down tin bucket on his head. He had fierce black eyes with fierce black eyebrows. While his teeth were not bucked, they were as noticeable as his nose. His Adam’s apple continued the line of prominence from forehead to trachea and it moved up and down his neck with every word spoken. One of his ancestors had been washed up on a beach on the west coast in 1588, part of the flotsam of the Spanish Armada. “Is this Spain?” the ancestor had asked a passing Paddy. “Spain, me hole!” the Paddy answered and gave the Spick a clatter across the head with a fish because he looked different. “And that’s just for looking different. Leave our women alone.” But the Spaniard had not.

  “Couldn’t he at least have told me last Saturday about going to the fair? Then when we finished yesterday, he was all offended when I said no to having Bridie pull the straw and serve me on the roof. I put the kibosh on that one right away—a woman running up and down the ladder with straw and scollops, and the whole world looking at her pink knickers!”

  Mattie Mulhall was sitting in his kitchen having h
is elevenses. Slices of homemade bread, lathered with butter and rhubarb-and-apple jam, were piled on a willow pattern dinner plate in the middle of the table. A mug of milked and sugared tea was in his right fist.

  Peggy Mulhall had heard her husband’s complaints last night and at breakfast this morning. With her back to Mattie as she poked at the fire, she was only half-listening to the dreary dronings. But Bridie Coughlin’s pink knickers suddenly presented her with a way to jostle Mattie out of his rut. “How do you know Bridie’s knickers are pink?” she asked without looking around.

  For a minute, the wife thought she hadn’t even put a ripple in the husband’s self-pitying wallowings. “Didn’t Eddie ever hear of ladies first everywhere except up a ladder?” he asked. Then he said, “The only knickers color I ever saw was pink on a clothesline.”

  “My knickers aren’t pink,” Peggy said, and she already knew where she was leading her husband.

  “What color are they then?” Mattie asked, and he took another slice of bread off the pile.

  “That’s something you’ll have to find out for yourself.”

  With his teeth poised to chomp down into the rhubarb-and-apple jam, Mattie hesitated and asked, “What are you telling me, woman?”

  And Peggy knew she had him. “Nothing, man.”

  Mattie Mulhall lowered the slice of bread and dropped it on the table beside his mug. His Adam’s apple was yo-yoing. “At eleven o’clock in the morning?” he asked. “And your man,” he lifted his eyes to the ceiling, “will be getting up any minute?”

  “What are you talking about?” Peggy asked, and she heard her husband’s chair scraping on the cement floor. She ran to the front door. The moment she slid the deadbolt into place, she turned and dodged around her husband. But, as she knew he would, he caught her from behind and clasped her breasts.

  “Sweet mother of Christ!” he breathed into her ear. He pushed his pelvis against her, pulled her back into him, his fierce, welted hands strong on her breasts but tender at the same time, her clothing cushioning the hard skin of the thumbs that chased the nipples.

  Without very much fat on her, Peggy Mulhall was a big woman. Her russet hair was full of tight curls, and her skin was as smooth and as delicately colored as a Royal Worcester teapot. She was three inches shorter than her husband’s six feet.

  “Sweet mother of Christ,” Mattie said again, hardly enough blood left in his brain to send the message to his vocal cords.

  The feel of his hot, turgid breath in her ear sent a welcoming torrent plunging down Peggy’s body. “I’m weak at the knees,” she moaned.

  “The easier to pull them apart, said the wolf.” The hot steam of Mattie’s breath pierced her brain like a six-inch hatpin.

  “Oh, Mattie,” she shuddered, and she put her hands behind her to feel what he had to offer.

  One of his hands fell off a breast, and then it was on her bare leg beneath her dress. The hand climbed to the waistband of her knickers and immediately plunged down. But at the edge of her hair the fingers stopped and stealthily stole through her hirsute copse. She had trained him to be gentle by being funny, instructing him in a posh accent, “Don’t plunge into the plover, my dear.”

  But this kind of spontaneous aggression on his part made the usual subtleties redundant. All she wished right now was that he’d knock her down on the kitchen floor and stab her. With her toes, she pried off her shoes in preparation for what she knew he would do next. When they were excited like this, they understood each other best.

  He bent down, pushing her knickers to her knees. He raised his foot, pushed the knickers down to her ankles and held them pinned to the floor with his boot while she pulled herself free. By the time Peggy had kicked the knickers away, his fingers were probing.

  “Sweet mother of Jesus,” he grunted, when he felt her hot, silken, welcoming, grand entrance.

  She loved it when he swore during sex, like her ancestors of ten thousand years ago must have done when they were at it, tearing into each other in the dark, snarling and cursing and biting and scratching like cats. She loved the picture of the pelt-dressed man with the club on his shoulder dragging a woman by the hair into his cave. The size of that club!

  While Mattie lowered her to the floor, she pulled the buttons of his fly out of their buttonholes. Then she lay back and pulled up the dress that separated them.

  And then Mattie was nudging her front door, and she thought she would die, explode into a million pieces and go shooting off up into the stars. When he slipped in, she groaned like she’d been stabbed between the shoulders with the blade of a blunt scythe.

  She had trained him not to treat her as if she were a cow and he a bull doing it to a cow: up, in, squirt and fall down as if hit on the head with a forty-pound mallet swung by a savage. Of course, she had done it in such a way that he never even knew he was being trained. And now, on the kitchen floor, he was holding back, but moving against her with such precision that every time they came together she saw streaks of forked lightning behind her eyelids. The instant he heard her neighing, he turned into a stallion at the mercy of instinct, and by the time the toes of his leather boots were scraping the floor she was screeching through her teeth like a pig with its snout caught under a gate.

  She wrapped her arms around his rear and held his pelvic bone against her as the last of the spasms jerked him. For a moment she teetered on the fine edge separating pleasure and pain, moved her hands around to his hips, ready to give him the signal if she started sliding down the wrong side. But then she felt him slumping as if someone had reached up inside him and yanked out all the bones. “It’s like he’s entirely deboned all of a sudden.” It was the only way she could explain how it felt to be under him after he being a stallion one minute and nothing but a sack of water the next. But she loved the feel of him still inside her.

  An extra dimension was added to their rutting on the kitchen floor while the Doul Yank was still in his bed upstairs—risk of discovery. Estelle Butler, Peggy’s friend since First Babies, often told Peggy where she and her Paul did it. Estelle and Paul liked to run the risk of getting caught; they often did it in the hay in their haggard; in a wheat field beside the main road from Gohen to Marbra, suddenly dropping out of sight and rolling around in the golden straw; they once did it standing up in a cemetery, she with her bare arse against a local politician’s ornate and cold headstone. They had even done it in Peggy’s front garden one night on their way home from the pictures in Gohen. When Peggy was disbelieving, Estelle told her where to look for the bent grass ten feet from her own bedroom window. In Peggy’s mind, Estelle’s galloping loquacity sometimes revealed things better left covered.

  “That’s it!” Mattie suddenly said. “I was wondering why they’re thatching so soon again. I’ll bet anything the priest brother is coming home from India. And that’s why Eddie’s selling the eight big cattle, too. I’ll bet anything they’re going to put in the water—have a lav for him when he comes.”

  Peggy didn’t respond. Although she was still marinating, she wondered about the workings of men’s brains: stallions one minute, geldings the next; ravishing sex one minute, building lavs the next.

  Mattie stirred, and Peggy knew he was getting ready to disconnect. Even though she held her breath against the feeling she knew was coming, she still moaned at the surge of emptiness.

  Mattie twisted over into a sitting position and bundled himself back into his britches. Peggy stood up and retrieved her knickers from under the kitchen table. There was a mud stain where Mattie had held them to the floor with his boot. She balled the knickers and threw them toward the bedroom door. While she smoothed her dress she asked, “So tell me, Mattie, what color is my knickers?”

  “Damned if I know,” Mattie said, and he stood up. “I’ll find out tonight.”

  “Only if you take them off me.”

  “That’s what I mean. This is something we should be doing oftener.”

  “What have I been telling you all this time
?” Peggy almost said, but she stopped her unsubtle self, and overhead they heard the loud, intentional coughing which reminded them of the chains of their bondage.

  Mattie lifted his eyes to the ceiling. “Doul Yank,” he muttered. He downed the remainder of his cold tea, used the same magic finger that had turned his wife into an animal to scoop the unmelted sugar out of the bottom of the mug. He stuck the finger into his mouth and the sweetness gladdened his gums. “I’m going over to open the turnip drills in the Middle Field,” he said as he put the mug down on the table.

  “I’ll hit the pighouse when the dinner’s ready,” Peggy needlessly said. Everyone in Clunnyboe knew the sound of Peggy’s ashplant against the galvanized side of the pighouse was the Mulhalls’ dinner bell when Mattie was working in the fields.

  As he was going out through the kitchen door, Mattie stopped. He indicated his uncle’s bedroom with the peak of his cap. “Maybe that’s what your man needs—a good roll in the hay with a woman who’s dying for it.”

  “She’d have to be more than dying; she’d have to be dead before he’d get her into the hay.”

  The kitchen door closed and opened again. Mattie stuck his head back in. “Don’t forget what I said about your man in India,” he said. “Aren’t they a terrible closemouthed pair, the two of them, Bridie and Eddie, not saying a word? And wait till you see—Ned Bracken will be up there building a lav any day now.”

  Peggy still had other things on her mind. When her husband stopped talking, she lifted up the front of her dress and exposed her naked self to him.

  “I married a slut,” Mattie said.

  The forced cough came from upstairs again. The signal had been given that Lawrence Gorman was about to rise from his bed. His cough gave the order for the preparation of his breakfast, that it should be waiting for him when he stepped onto the landing outside his bedroom door.