Lies the Mushroom Pickers Told

by Phelan, Tom;

  Mattie rolled his eyes to the ceiling. “The bastard Yank,” he said, and he closed the door.

  7

  Wrestling on the Edge of a Cliff

  1951

  In which, Mattie Mulhall, a.k.a. Matt-the-thatcher, is enslaved by the conditions of a promised inheritance from his uncle, Lawrence Gorman, a.k.a. Doul Yank.

  MATTIE MULHALL, THE NEPHEW, and Lawrence Gorman, the uncle, were entwined in a business relationship binding them together till death would them part. If nature followed her usual course, Lawrence would die first, but whenever Mattie Mulhall became apoplectically angry at his situation, the normal course of nature was threatened.

  Of course, Mattie’s Peggy did not try to calm the waters when one of Mattie’s angry fits was already in its gathering stage. Mattie’s fits always primed Peggy’s own anger at the predicament in which she lived; and while Mattie’s fit raged, she couldn’t help insinuating that, had she been around at the time, the agreement which now bound her and her husband to Lawrence Gorman would never have been reached. Not caring that her husband couldn’t hear her when his pounding blood was bottlenecked on its way to his brain, Peggy would pick the most suitable pearls from her collection: When you lie down with dogs you get up with fleas; If you sup with the devil, you must use a long-handled spoon; You made the bed, now the two of us must lie on it; If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.

  Peggy knew her old saws were as useless as the useless scriptural passages thrown out by jaded priests as bandages for broken hearts and spirits. Her recitation of them was her way of knifing her mother-in-law.

  The worst aspect of the relationship between uncle and nephew was that they lived in the same house, the uncle upstairs where his every fart and slashing piss into his metal bucket could be plainly heard. The sound of the lid carelessly dropped back onto the commode made the nephew’s blood cells sprout spikes. But when Lawrence Gorman demanded the presence of someone from downstairs by banging the heel of his boot on the floor beside his bed, the nephew frothed like a distempered dog having a fit.

  When Lawrence Gorman emigrated to America in 1912, he left behind a cantankerous, begrudging and bitter father who owned fifty acres of praiseach-infested land, as well as a defeated mother and two sisters, Lizzie and Helen. Because Lawrence had missed the Titanic by three weeks, many of Mattie Mulhall’s laments began with the words, “If only . . .” and ended with, “the fucker would have taken a child’s place in a lifeboat, thrown the child into the water.”

  According to Uncle Lawrence, he had become a shopman in America, and had once served as chairman of the Christmas Ball sponsored by his emigrant county society. To prove he had risen to such heights of organizational acumen, he still had a printed program, the original green fading out of the paper, with his name under the bold letters of “Chairman.” He also had a committee photograph in which he himself was seated in center front of a large group of men, all with large mustaches, starched collars and shoestring ties, all with hair parted along the ridges of their skulls, all so tense-looking that each could have been sitting on a chair with a missing leg. The light from the photographer’s flaring magnesium was reflected in the greased coiffure on every head. There wasn’t a woman in sight.

  The best-known Lawrence-in-America story was set in a speakeasy where liquor of doubtful purity was served. All the patrons’ suspicions were laid to rest one night when a man drank a shot of the house whiskey and dropped dead at Lawrence’s feet. Whenever the nephew heard this story being repeated, his thoughts began with, ‘If only. . . .’

  “Speakeasy” was one of the two American words Lawrence dropped when impressing a listener with the extent of his foreign travels. The other was “ketchup.” Other than this expanded vocabulary, all he brought home from America were the clothes he wore, the art-deco metal commode and its lid, the Christmas Ball program and the committee photograph. He did not bring money.

  During Lawrence’s fourth year abroad, his oldest sister, Lizzie, married Mick Mulhall-the-thatcher, and from then on she was referred to, behind her back, as the Thatcherette—authorship for the name credited to Pascal Lalor-the-postman. Lawrence-in-America did not send a wedding present of dollars or anything else. On the day of the nine-month anniversary of her wedding, the Thatcherette gave birth to a boy and named him Matthew. When he heard about the new arrival, Pascal Lalor-the-postman did his sums and said, “Mick must have slipped his scollop into her thatch in the church porch.”

  Seven years after becoming a grandmother, Lawrence’s mother died roaring. It was cancer of the breast that killed her, but superstition and prudery did not allow for the enunciation of either “cancer” or “breast.”

  Five years later, the younger sister, who had sported hectic cheeks since middle adolescence, finally surrendered to tuberculosis. Within six years of her funeral, Lawrence’s father died while violently haggling over the price of a heifer with a Protestant on a Fair Day in Gohen. The local Protestants saw old man Gorman’s sudden death, and his ignominious collapse into the fresh cowshite splattered all over the main street, as a sign of favoritism on the part of the God of Protestants.

  In America, in 1935, Lawrence received a letter from the Gohen solicitor, William Stewart Howard, father of David Samuel, informing him of his father’s death and of his inheritance of the family farm. Absent from the letter was any hint that the father had kept the farm in the family name at the expense of deeding it to “that useless little robin-shite in America.” Unmoved by the tone of congratulations in the letter, unwilling to relinquish his new landowner status, but also doubtful about the wisdom of returning to a farm whose best crop was praiseach—that yellow-flowered, Attila the Hun of the world of weeds—Lawrence did not respond to Howard’s letter.

  Back in Clunnyboe, Lawrence’s silence quickly mutated into the hope that he had died in America. His sister, the Thatcherette, began fantasizing aloud to her neighbors about the prospect of moving up the social and economic ladder when she became a landowner by default. Her husband would retire from the practice of his servile trade and, for the first time in his life, he wouldn’t have welts on his thumbs and the palms of his hands from twisting and bending half-scollops into staple-shaped keys. “His hands are as rough as dry thistles on my body,” she complained and boasted at the same time. No longer would he have welts on his knees from kneeling on the rung of a ladder on a sloping roof, and no longer would he have to work for a wage, eating his meals in other people’s houses—“I won’t mention any names”—where the cat walked around the table during mealtime with its tail up in the air. “Trying to eat the dinner and look at a cat’s hole at the same time makes me sick. Them and their fecking cats!” was the complaint she had heard a thousand times. Eighteen-year-old Mattie-the-son would not have to finish out his apprenticeship to his father.

  As time wore on, and there was still only silence from America, the neighbors began to notice a change in the angle of the Thatcherette’s nose and in the way she spoke. With uptilted face, and seemingly suffering from a mild case of lockjaw, she began the process of separating herself from her landless neighbors. She spoke about the profits of ownership; the turkeys she would raise for the Christmas market; the eggs and country butter she would sell in the shops in Gohen; the buttermilk which the landless masses would buy at her back door, their jug in one hand and pennies in the other; the sheaves of rhubarb stalks she would bring on the back of her bike to the Fair Day in Gohen every third Tuesday of the month. She and her husband would have a farm to leave to their heir.

  Up to that point in time, the only heir the neighbors had heard of was Her Royal Highness, Princess Elizabeth of York.

  Then one day, Pascal Lalor-the-postman, his approach telegraphed more by the clomping of his wooden leg on the stairs than by his cheery “Guten tag,” dropped a thick letter on the desk of William Stewart Howard, Esq.

  “Nice stamp there, sir,” he said. He limped around the desk and bent over the solicitor’s shoulder. They p
eered at the tiny, blue portrait of Benjamin Franklin, and the solicitor said, “Wasn’t he a fat old devil? Will you look at all the chins on him? Five cee. That’s five cents, I suppose. What’s five cents worth? About tuppence hapeney? Tuppence hapeney to get a letter from America to Ireland in two weeks! Isn’t that a miracle altogether. Three thousand miles for less than thruppence.” He slapped the envelope with the back of his fingers. “Do you have this one, Pascal?” he asked.

  “I don’t, but I do have the fifteen-cent airmail in brown. I got it from Missus Dunne-of-the-shop. Isn’t that a bigger miracle altogether, sir? Twelve hours from Idlewild to Riananna for about sevenpence hapeney. Lawrence must be in a bad way if he couldn’t . . .” Pascal Lalor blushed and brought his hand to his mouth. “I’m sorry, Mister Howard.”

  “I know you’d never say a word, Pascal.” The solicitor pulled the middle drawer out against his stomach and brought out a scissors big enough to trim a box hedge. When he had carefully clipped the stamp out of the envelope, he gave it to the postman. Without looking at what he was doing, Lalor fiddled with the silver-colored, harp-embossed button of his navy-blue uniform pocket. Most people in Gohen would have recognized the soft, brown, leather purse he took out of his pocket.

  “The best-known bit of leather in Gohen,” Mister Howard said.

  “Aye, the famous LSP—Lalor’s Stamp Purse—for the sale of the new and the collection of the old. I’ll see you later if there’s anything in the second post. Thanks for the stamp.” Mister Howard waited until the postman had closed the door before he took out the contents of the envelope.

  Three days later, Mick and the Thatcherette Mulhall went to Gohen all dressed up in their ass-and-cart.

  Mister William Stewart Howard, Esquire, Protestant and suspect Freemason, unaware of the Thatcherette’s fantasies of fortune, was taken aback at the collapse he witnessed when he told her Lawrence was alive and well in America. Believing her distress was the result of her relief at hearing the good news, the solicitor, embarrassed by such a violent display of emotion, removed himself from the room to give Missus Mulhall privacy to compose herself. Standing outside his office door, Mister Howard heard words he had never heard coming from the mouth of a woman, and later told his wife how amazed he was at the language Catholics used to release their profound relief.

  Back in his office, the solicitor faced the red-eyed, hat-pinned and green-hatted woman and her Sunday-suited husband across his desk. Holding Lawrence Gorman’s letter in his hand, and without once looking at it, he told them about the emigrant’s proposal. The Thatcherette’s hopes soared or plummeted with each revelation. In the end they crash-landed into a tangle of anger and despondency when she heard that the terms of her brother’s proposal would all be for naught unless the price of his fare home from America was forthcoming from the fortunate recipient of his largesse.

  Mick Mulhall and the Thatcherette would have told Lawrence to drop dead if they hadn’t been blinkered by the prospect of their son becoming a landowner. Even though they had been denied ownership themselves, it was their greedy need to get their child’s hands on the land that blinded them to the eventual cost.

  And now, sixteen years later, Lawrence-the-uncle Gorman was living upstairs, and Mattie-the-nephew Mulhall was living downstairs with his wife Peggy and two young children. The six-and-a-half-foot-high kitchen ceiling allowed for the constant reminder that Lawrence was living in their midst. The two children thought everyone in the world spoke in whispers when indoors.

  It was Missus Mulhall, Peggy, who answered the banging boot-heel above, she who forced her way into the stale-aired, low-ceilinged bedroom that smelled worse than a ferret box that hadn’t been cleaned in a year. She took care of Doul Yank’s clothes. His shirt collars were starched and his trousers pressed after every use. She prepared the food he ate every day in the kitchen. A clean, white tablecloth and a bottle of ketchup were the two basic requirements at every meal. He did not like eggs, and on Fridays his dinner had to include fish. “Fecking fish, for doul bastard!”

  On the shortest and longest days of each year Mattie paid one hundred pounds to his uncle, and would do so as long as the uncle lived. Failure on Mattie’s part to take care of all the details of his side of the bargain would invalidate his right to ownership of the land when Lawrence died.

  It had quickly became clear to the nephew that trying to wrestle a livelihood from the farm would be as easy as milking a tiger with sore teats. To meet his first payment to the uncle, Mattie had returned to work with his thatching father. At night he read The Farmers Journal. He labored painfully over letters to the Department of Agriculture looking for ways to defeat the praiseach. He reddened iron spikes in the turf fire and shaped them into harrow teeth on an anvil outside the kitchen door. He let his tilled land lie fallow for three consecutive years and harrowed it every month in hopes of defeating the praiseach by thwarting its germination. Finally, in a late spring near the end of the war, he proudly gazed across his fields and did not see one yellow weed. Like Theodore Roosevelt with a victorious boot on the belly of a dead rhinoceros, Mattie stood posed with one triumphant foot on the bar of the wooden gate. He heaved a sigh of success and gazed with pride at what he had achieved.

  His moment of victory was disturbed by the sounds of feet swishing through the long grass behind him. It was the uncle setting out on his daily shoot, the shotgun resting in the crook of his left elbow.

  “A job never got done by looking at it,” Lawrence heralded in the stentorian voice he used that proclaimed himself as the repository of all knowledge in the universe.

  Choking the words on the tip of his tongue—“Will you feck off, you fecking old Paddy-bollicks”—Mattie was too elated to completely hide his self-satisfaction. “This is the first time I’ve not seen the flower of the praiseach in one of my fields in June.”

  Lawrence hesitated in his onward pursuit of snipe, and said, “Even if I have willed the farm to you, those are my fields till I die. As well as that, any eegit could tell you that praiseach can lie dormant in a field for fifty years and, sure as shite, it’ll be back, tall enough to bite you in the hole.” The uncle resumed his progress to the hunt through the long grass.

  With his foot still on the bar of the gate, Mattie twisted his head and, with his brain sizzling in hatred, looked after his departing uncle and prayed that Lawrence Gorman’s gun would go off when he was climbing over a hedge and blow his fecking head off.

  When the thirtieth payment was due on the farm, Mattie Mulhall was still thatching. His father had died eleven years earlier after suffering a stroke and falling off a roof in Clonaslee. Mattie was now servicing his father’s customers and using every windy and wet day to take care of his own crops.

  In her kitchen, on the third Tuesday of the month, as the sexually depleted husband was on his way to open the turnip drills in the Middle Field, Peggy Mulhall rushed from table to cupboard to fireplace preparing Doul Yank’s breakfast. Very soon, the gentleman farmer would grandly descend the stairs carrying his art-deco commode out to the dunghill.

  Peggy always contrived to have something to do in the farmyard while Lawrence ate. She was heading toward the kitchen door as the footsteps upstairs moved across the kitchen ceiling. With her finger on the latch, she gave one last glance back to make sure everything was in its place. Satisfied that the table was properly set and that nothing embarrassing was hanging on the kitchen clothesline she turned back to the door and in the corner of her eye she saw her discarded pink knickers on the floor at the bedroom door. Her hand instinctively went to her crotch. “Holy Moses!” she gasped, as she felt her nakedness under her dress. “Lawrence will think it was me who dirtied the knickers.”

  She skipped back across the kitchen, scooped up the knickers and went into the bedroom. While she sat on the edge of the bed and carefully twisted a clean pair over her shoes, she heard Lawrence going out through the kitchen door with his bucket.

  Smoothing down her dress, she came ba
ck into the kitchen and crinkled her nose against the sour smell wafting in the wake of the commode. When she stepped out into the farmyard, the uncle had already got rid of his exudations and the still air was full of stink. He was already at the water pump sloshing the rinsing water around the commode. As she walked past him and said, “Good morning, Uncle Lawrence,” he flung the water onto the graveled yard at her feet. She did not allow the diluted splashes of the old body waste to divert her off the straight line she was taking to the turf shed. But Lawrence’s question brought her to a stop.

  “Who was that you were talking to a few minutes ago in the kitchen?”

  Because of the detestation she felt for him, Peggy found it distasteful to even look at her husband’s uncle. When she turned around she kept her eyes averted from his face. But in her mind’s eye, she saw the bridge of his arched nose pulling the rest of his face into a permanent sneer of disapproval; saw the dark pools of his unfeeling eyes, the gash of his hard mouth, and the deep wrinkles of his sallow face like contour lines on the map of a mountainous country. In her peripheral vision she saw the only pair of clean Wellington boots in the county, the shape of the ridiculous knickerbockers, the dark tie against the starched collar of the white shirt, the deep-green fedora with the feathers of various dead birds stuck behind the hat band like the aigrette in the turban of an Indian prince.

  The vapors of the foul bucket swinging in his liver-spotted hand seemed to reach out to Peggy and insert themselves into her nose. “That was Mattie,” she said in answer to his question.

  Lawrence took the lid of his commode off the corner of the pump-trough. “That fellow will never be a farmer if he’s in the kitchen at eleven o’clock on a day like today,” he said, and the sound of the lid returning to the commode underlined his pronouncement.

  Peggy said nothing. If she had lunged through the strictures which prevented her from saying what she would have liked to say, she would have brought about the immediate disinheritance of her husband. She was used to restraining herself.