Lies the Mushroom Pickers Told

by Phelan, Tom;

  “You’re right, Patrick,” Elsie said. “Look at the way we treated Spud Murphy in our own town of Gohen. Spud was relegated to the other side of the line because he wasn’t all there. We didn’t kill him, but once he was on the far side of the line, all the men felt free to give him a whack or a kick whenever they felt like it, and who objected? Everyone laughed.”

  Again the three of them fell into contemplative silence. Then Sam asked, “Do some people place themselves on the far side of the line with the rats and fleas of the world?”

  “That doesn’t matter. They still must not be mistreated,” Elsie said.

  “Of course not, but you haven’t answered the question.”

  “What you’re asking, Sam,” Patrick said, “is do some people make it easier for others to mistreat them? You said yourself that Father Coughlin and Lawrence Gorman behaved so badly they had no one to stand up for them when they died. They made it easy for people to dislike them.”

  “But did they go to the other side of the line by their behavior or did we place them there?”

  Elsie said, “It’s all a matter of likes and dislikes. We don’t like rats, and our dislike makes it easy for us to kill them. Nobody liked Coughlin or Gorman, and it was easy for everyone to simply bury them and get them out of the way. Look at the priest—from the minute he stepped onto the bus in Dublin, he was a pain in the backside. Gorman was as big a pain. Both of them thought the world was all about them. It’s easy to dislike people like that. And yes, Sam, I think some people cross over the line and join the rats and the fleas, but at the same time that doesn’t entitle the rest of us to treat them like the rats and—”

  “That’s a different question, Else,” Sam interrupted. “That’s a moral question with a simple answer. And I agree that some people do have the unfortunate knack of appearing to join the rats and the fleas. It was only Spud Murphy’s mild insanity that saved him to some degree, but the other two—they had such weak egos that they behaved as if the universe revolved around them. After a while, the people get tired doing all the revolving. Gorman and Coughlin probably grew up in houses where their mothers were adoring satellites. I am now off to exfuse because le bladaire is about to exfluse.”

  “Exfluse?” Elsie asked.

  “French for explode,” Sam said, and he left.

  When Sam turned the corner out of the kitchen, Missus Howard leaned toward Patrick, her voice low. She spoke fast, her eyes constantly turning to where her husband would reappear when he had finished in the bathroom. “Patrick,” she said, “when you were talking about your sister drowning herself in Shipley, I wanted to tell you that one of our sons killed himself in Canada, but it upsets Sam too much to talk about it.”

  “Oh, Jesus. I’m—” Patrick said, but Missus Howard held up her hand.

  “How were you to know?” she asked. “Of course it’s still a terrible pain for both of us. Sam listens to my sadness but never talks about his own. David was his name, a lovely sensitive boy. He won a scholarship to study architecture in McGill University in Montreal. He had Trinity behind him, and he would only be away for four years. The plan was that he’d come home to visit after two years; travel wasn’t what it is now. He did wonderful . . .” Missus Howard saw her husband returning.

  Sam Howard stood in the doorway and looked at his wife. “Else, I’m going to tell Patrick about our David,” he said, as if asking permission. “If it’s going to upset you, then maybe you should—”

  “Oh, Sam! I always want to be where our David is spoken about, and it doesn’t matter a damn if I cry,” his wife said. As Sam turned and went to his chair, Elsie looked at Patrick, raised her eyebrows and opened her hands like she was releasing a bird. Gladness and sadness fought for her face.

  “Patrick,” Mister Howard said. “You told us the painful truth about Mikey Lamb. You told us about your sister AnneMarie, how she went off one morning and . . . and killed herself. You told us about your father dying in the mental institution. I want to tell you something in return.” Sam Howard paused for a moment, swallowed hard. “We had a son, David, who killed himself, too.” His eyes filled with water, but it did not flow. He held out his hand to Patrick to forestall an interruption. “David was a lovely child, curious about everything, full of delight at everything he found. It was like . . . it was like he never lost his sense of wonder, always in amazement as if he’d only been hatched two minutes ago; he made you see things that you’d been looking at all your life without seeing them. Even his adolescence was peaceful for him and for us.”

  For a moment, Mister Howard paused, looked at something in his memory and left it in there. The water in his eyes had ebbed away. “David won a scholarship to a university in Canada, McGill in Montreal. He wanted to be an architect. He wasn’t there a year when he fell for a girl from Boston. Of course, we didn’t know . . . it was only after he died that we . . . he did mention her in several letters, and Else divined in her female way that David had found the woman he would marry. Her name was June Whelan. The plan was that at the end of his second year he would come home and bring June with him. The night before they were due to leave, a young man was sideswiped by a city bus, and he lost control of his motorbike. The bike went up on the footpath and whipped June out of David’s hand and broke her neck. She died immediately. We knew nothing except that we got a telegram from David saying their departure was delayed for a week. Our David did the same as your AnneMarie—only he stepped out in front of a train. You can imagine what the . . .”

  Mister Howard stopped again, and his mouth opened like that of a child who has been visited with a devastation of adult betrayal. Sam’s eyes flooded again, and for a moment the surface tension held the tears in place, but the dam pushed from behind and the rivers of sadness ran down. But he still managed to speak. “Else and I have some idea what it was like for your family when your AnneMarie died, and I feel very sad for your mother and father even though they are dead now.” He paused again and looked over at his wife. “How did I do, Else?” he asked, and Elsie stood up and went to her husband. She stood beside his chair and pulled his head into her chest. “That was grand, Sam, grand. Our David was a beautiful child. Everything about him was beautiful.”

  Sam’s body was gently rocking in his wife’s embrace as Patrick went to the door leading out into the garden. He closed it quietly and walked over to the small fish pond. Lengths of string tied across the shallow water protected the goldfish from birds. A fist-sized stone beside the pond was surrounded with broken snail shells—a thrush’s midden. Patrick sat on the wooden bench and let his eyes get lost among the water plants. When his chilled body shivered him back to the present, he found himself hunched over, his face enclosed in his hands and water running down his wrists into his shirt cuffs. He felt drained as he returned once again from his remembrances, from the numbness of his family as the distressed policeman stood in the doorway telling them about AnneMarie. Patrick dried off his face and hands and stood up. He watched the fish moving languorously through the stalks of the plants, and he breathed his body back into its normal rhythms.

  Twenty minutes later, when Patrick returned to the sunroom, Else was standing at the table holding a green teddy bear.

  “Patrick,” she said as she turned the bear toward him. “We gave this to David on his fourth birthday.”

  “He called it Saint Patrick,” Sam said.

  “I’ve had it wrapped up in a pillowcase for years and hidden away. I’d take it out every so often to give it a hug and have a good cry.” She moved the bear’s legs at the hips and placed it against the china table lamp with ceramic roses strewn on its base.

  “You weren’t the only one, Else. I discovered your hiding place a long time ago, and I hugged Saint Patrick and cried for David, too.”

  “Oh, Sam, Sam, Sam. Men, men, men.” Elsie, tears flowing on her cheeks again, went to Sam and put her hand on his head. “Why do men have to hide their grief? We are going to keep Saint Patrick here in the sunroom. We
are going to keep David in the sunroom and not worry about the crying.”

  “That’s what we’ll do, Else—keep David out in the open.” Then he turned to Patrick. “It was David who named the lion on our front door MGM but not because of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. He had a friend when he was small, Malachy Gillespie. David once told Malachy’s mother that she looked like our lion.”

  Elsie kissed her husband’s bald and freckled head. “And, unfortunately, he was right. Poor Missus Gillespie was living proof that the ancient Irish had sexual relations with animals outside their own species.”

  Patrick’s jaw dropped, and Sam said, “Jesus, Else!”

  “Oh Jesus yourself, Sam. The truth always has a way of squeezing itself into the sunlight no matter how unpleasant it is.” Else went to her chair and sat. She reached over and touched the bear’s paw. She looked at Patrick, “Your story about AnneMarie restored David to Sam and me. And I’ll leave it at that for now.”

  “But I have to say,” Patrick said, “that both of you have my sincere sympathy for the loss of your son.”

  “Thank you, Patrick,” the Howards said in unison.

  The sunroom was silent for half a minute. Finally, Sam said, “We’re fine for now, aren’t we, Else?”

  And Else said, “We’re grand, Sam. Grand.”

  “Then let’s get back to the happenings of nineteen fifty-one,” her husband said.

  Patrick hesitated for a moment as if putting a long train back on its tracks. Finally, he said, “Everything about Simon Peter Lamb’s farmyard was gray . . .”

  20

  In the Burnished Pewter Bowl

  1951

  In which Barlow Bracken, age eleven, comes home after school with Mikey Lamb and sees his future wife, Molly Lamb, for the first time.

  EVERYTHING ABOUT SIMON PETER LAMB’S FARMYARD WAS GRAY, except for the doors of the various sheds. They were of the blackness of tar, being coated once a year to protect them from the damp—outside, inside and the four edges. The doors were two hundred years old.

  The yard was surfaced with gray gravel, pounded into solidity by years of hooves and feet—human, bovine, porcine, equine and avian—and the iron-shod wheels of carts and farm machinery.

  The buildings which gave the yard its rectangular shape were built of gray stone, the irregular lines of pointing between the stones a mixture of gray sand and gray cement. The south side of the gray rectangle was edged by the dwelling house, with the turf shed at its far end. Splashes of lichen, in yellows and purples, spotted the gray slates covering the roofs of all the buildings.

  When mountainous clouds lowered the sky, the grayness of the farmyard was depressing. When rain cascaded out of those clouds for unending days, the grayness of the yard was the color of desolation, its soddenness that of the deck of Noah’s ark.

  But when the sun did shine, the grayness was transformed into burnished pewter; the stones in the walls stored and reflected the heat; the purplish-greenish-yellowish lichens on the dry slates and in the wall crevices took on colors which were not visible for the rest of the sopping year. In the summer sunshine, when all the animals were afield, the farmyard was a beautiful place, with only the random hen, turkey or duck dropping creating unpleasantnesses to be avoided.

  Three weeks after the arrival of Father Jarlath Coughlin from India, the youngest of the Lamb children, Fintan, was pulling a cardboard box around the farmyard. Without its lid, and showing signs of wear and tear, it was attached to the boy’s fist by a piece of raveling binder twine. On the outside of the box were words pleading for the safety of the day-old chicks within. But there were no chickens. Instead, reacting tremulously to every bump and hollow in the yard, was a punctured, yellow, rubber duckie with a red beak—the anachronistic bathtub birthday present from the misguided aunt in Yorkshire two years earlier.

  The child’s brown hair had not been combed, and the thatch on one side of his head was flat from its last sweaty contact with a pillow. Held up with gray braces, his knee-length, brown corduroy trousers had once belonged to his older brother, Mikey. Two of the three buttons of his green jersey, also a hand-me-down, were in the wrong buttonholes. One of his fawn ankle socks had disappeared into the once-white canvas shoes reluctantly handed down by his older sister. “I don’t care if they’re too small for me—they’re my first communion shoes,” Molly had complained, “and he’s always walking in hen dung.”

  Dust had stuck to the drools around the boy’s mouth, and he looked dirtier than he actually was.

  As he dreamily floated in the sunny pewter bowl, Fintan gently clicked his tongue and made the sound of a trotting horse, audible only to himself. Behind him, the sprung brougham, decorated with the most intricate and colorful lines of marquetry and cornices of filigreed silver, luxuriously glided over a surface as level as a tarred road, while its crowned princely occupant, in robes of red and yellow, sat in the soft upholstered seat looking out, admiring his castle in the distance. Around and around the castle the boy drove his four white horses.

  In the castle, during the daylight hours, a dozen Rhode Island Red chicks dwelt, all three weeks old. The cuteness, the cuddliness, the chirpiness were all gone, and twelve scraggly chickens, caught between losing their down and growing their first feathers, scrambled awkwardly around in their own dung on lanky legs which were not yet completely under the control of their owners. They carelessly bumped into each other in their large chicken-wired box, stepped on each other’s toes, and generally exhibited a selfishness unencumbered by any concern for their brothers and sisters. Their toneless squawking was not unlike the breaking voices of adolescent boys. With one of their monocular eyes, all the chickens nervously followed the orbit of the circling boy with the cardboard box in tow. The birds did not yet know the difference between a child lost inside his own head and an attacking cat.

  Inside the kitchen window, stooped over the kitchen table with one eye on what she was doing and the other on the chicken frame, Annie Lamb was thinly slicing a tightly packed bunch of stinging nettles with a kitchen knife, the blade sharpened to within a whisper of its existence on the wall of the sandstone pump-trough in the yard. The pungent smell of the nettle sap wafted up into Annie’s face and made her nose run. The sound of water vigorously boiling four eggs in a battered saucepan on the open fire bubbled around the kitchen. As she glanced through the window, Annie saw the shape of her youngest son in the apogee of his journey around the chickens.

  She moved her gloved left hand down along the bunch of nettles to give herself more slicing room, rubbed the back of the knife-wielding hand across the tip of her nose. She sliced.

  This morning, one of the farmyard’s two semi-feral cats had made an assault on the chickens by jumping over the side of the frame, only to unexpectedly discover the frame had a top. The cat had not been aware that its stealthy approach had been observed or that, at the very moment it had launched itself into the air, Annie Lamb had stepped out through her kitchen door with a knobby ashplant in her hand. No sooner had the cat found itself mysteriously suspended above the chickens, with its feet enmeshed in an uncertain surface, than the knob of the ashplant made contact with its arse. The cat’s wild screech unleashed terror into Annie’s veins and, before it had scrabbled its way off the chicken wire, the cat had received another whack sending it staggering across the yard and into the darkness of the cowhouse to lick its wounds. By the way the chickens were still behaving, Annie knew they had not yet recovered from the hysteria induced by the sudden attack and ferocious counterattack which had taken place in the sky above them.

  In Annie Lamb’s world, cats had one role to play in God’s plan, and that was to keep the mouse population in check.

  Releasing the pressure of her left hand, in which she kept the nettles bundled, Annie shook off her husband’s too-big, stained leather glove. She straightened up, pushed her shoulder blades against each other and rested from her task for a moment.

  She looked at Fintan with his box and duckie. When
the two older children were at school, the child often spent hours circling the yard in a daze; the lullaby of the box on the rough gravel imprisoning the boy in his own world. Once, for a few fretful days, Annie had tortured herself with the worry that he might be demented and had only been satisfied when Doctor Roberts had snapped sense into her—“The child’s supposed to talk to himself, woman!” As she gazed at her child, Annie Lamb was overwhelmed by a rush of maternal feelings. When she instinctively hugged herself, a primordial moan squeezed through her clenched lips. A mother frog or elephant or crocodile or ostrich could have made the same sound.

  And then, yahooing and yip-yipping and slapping the soles of their boots on the hard ground, Mikey and Barlow Bracken came bounding into the yard through the haggard gate, each with a bunch of dandelion leaves in one hand, while the other hand urged on the imaginary horse each was riding, their legs and knees imitating the galloping of half-tamed stallions. Even when the cowboys loudly jumped over the passing princely conveyance, Annie’s youngest child remained oblivious to the world outside his own.

  Mikey had not yet changed out of his school clothes.

  Through the kitchen door the two stallions pranced and when they reached the kitchen table, they proudly laid down their contribution to the chickens’ mash. “Janey Mack,” Annie Lamb said, “there’s enough dandelions there to feed a cow.”

  “We got them in Dan Deegan’s kitchen, and there’s armfuls in the other two rooms as well,” Mikey exclaimed. “Barlow found them, and we saw Father Coughlin in the spyglass sitting in the chair outside the front door.” He put the spyglass in the cutlery drawer.

  “He’s all wrapped up in a blanket, and has a cap on,” Barlow Bracken said. “I never saw a priest not wearing black clothes.”

  “I’d say he has the black clothes on under the blanket,” Annie said. “He’s not used to our weather yet after all that sun in India.”