by Phelan, Tom;
Making sure not to turn her face toward Eddie, who was milking the cow behind her, Bridie walked out of the cowhouse and carried her bucket to the dairy. She poured the milk through the strainer into the white enamel bucket and, by the time she had rinsed her milk bucket at the pump in the yard, Eddie had untied the four cows. With a full milk bucket in hand, Eddie went in silence to the dairy, and Bridie in silence went to the pasture gate, a ritual which had wordlessly evolved over a lifetime of shared work.
The cows sniffed aimlessly around the surface of the farmyard. Some lazily lifted their tails and uncaringly relieved themselves as they continued to walk; some stood and gaped at nothing in particular with their shortsighted eyes. They all waited for Bridie to come and shoo them out into the field. One of them, hearing the distant bawl of a calf, stretched her neck and mooed unmusically until Bridie smacked her with uncharacteristic viciousness with her ashplant. “Get up ouha that.”
Before Eddie had rinsed his bucket, Bridie was walking around the side of the dwelling house to the front door and wished, as she wished every time she walked around the side of the house, that there was a back door. But Eddie! “Sure, it was good enough for Daddy and Mammy wasn’t it? It’ll only make the house colder with the wind blowing in one door and out the other no matter what way the wind’s blowing, and what’s a few extra steps to take around the side of the house?” and on and on and on, till Bridie, drowning in his torrential verbiage, regretted having brought up the subject.
Standing on the new, rough-ridged sisal mat outside the front door of her freshly thatched and newly whitewashed house, Bridie heeled off her dirty Wellington boots. The remembrance of her quiet excitement when she was buying that mat, when she was watching the golden straw being thatched onto the roof, when the house gleamed under its fresh coat of whitewash—brought the scalding, secret tears back to her eyes. And as she swiped at her face with her sleeve, she had no way of knowing she was in the tube of Mikey Lamb’s spyglass and only ten inches away from Barlow Bracken’s right eye.
By the time Eddie finished his chores in the farmyard, Bridie had the supper ready: in the center of the table a plate piled high with buttered slices of homemade bread; two place settings with generous plates of sliced ham and tomato; the tin teapot under its Bridie-knitted tea cozy at the end of the table. When Eddie came into the kitchen, he took off his cap and said, “And to think it was for him that we bought the ham.”
“We can’t let it rot just because he’s not here to eat it.”
The bald bachelor brother and the spinster sister ate in silence, Eddie holding out his teacup when it was empty, pointing with his knife when he needed the mustard. Bridie anticipated most of his other needs, and he did not have to ask for milk or sugar or salt. Because she was anxiously expecting Eddie to start with his words of comfort at any moment, every sound of cutlery against delft, every cup dashed against saucer was like thunder in Bridie’s ears. She was afraid every new noise would set Eddie off, like one cow answering when another cow bawls. However, it was the scraping of his own chair on the floor as he stood up at the end of the meal that activated Eddie’s vocal cords, produced gratingly comfortless words.
“Sure, everything will be all right when he comes home again. He’ll only be in the hospital for another week, and then all your worrying will be over.”
As Eddie spoke, he did not see that his sister was whisking around the kitchen like a witch’s broomstick. He didn’t notice that for the first time in her life, Bridie simply piled the plates and cutlery into the white enamel basin and threw a tea towel over the whole thing. She didn’t even wait for her brother to finish a sentence before she interrupted him.
“I’m going to get ready for the Sodality now,” she said, and as she closed her bedroom door, her brother was still talking.
Two hours later Bridie was standing outside Annie Lamb’s back door. Despite the lingering heat of the July day, she was dressed in her heavy winter topcoat, and her hair and ears were hidden under her black headscarf. Even though it was eight o’clock, the summer sun was still casting shadows in the pewter farmyard.
“Are you at home, Annie?” she called through the open kitchen door and was startled when she heard a noise behind her. Bridie turned around and saw Mikey and Molly and a strange boy galloping into the far end of the yard, sounding like there was a whole herd of them.
“Hello Missus Coughlin,” Molly called as they passed. “Go on in. Mammy’s out in the turf shed, and she’ll be here in a minute. Fintan’s asleep.”
Not feeling that the child’s greeting constituted an adequate invitation to enter, Bridie waited until Annie Lamb arrived with two brown hen eggs in each hand. In a stream of Sodality incense wafting off Bridie’s heavy overcoat, Annie followed her visitor into the kitchen. Within a few minutes, the Bridie’s topcoat was hanging on a peg in the wooden rack attached to the parlor door, and the women were ensconced in the straight-backed wooden chairs, one each side of the open fireplace with its summer’s fire of ash-coated, smoldering turf sods. The ever-hanging cast-iron and black tea kettle was singing a very quiet tune, the lid making regular nervous tic-like jumps.
As they chatted back and forth, Missus Lamb realized that Bridie was not talking with her usual ferocity. Annie was able to add her own weather observations without interruption. She told Bridie about Barlow Bracken living with them since the beginning of the school holidays, that he had come for a week, was still here after a fortnight, and he was such a nice chap that they all hoped his parents would let him stay for the whole summer. Mikey was having the time of his life with the Bracken boy. Bridie spoke about Barlow’s father, Ned, how he was such a hard worker and such a nice man, that Eddie had hired him to turn the dunghill in the spring, and how his wife was such a toil-worn woman. “Thin as a rake, gray as a badger, bent as a scythe handle.”
Bridie teetered on the edge of her pool of self-pity, but each time, as if her brain had a mind of its own, something else came out. She now found herself talking about Doul Yank withdrawing a hundred pounds from the bank against his farm.
“Eddie thinks he’s buying in the stock market in America, that with the war over there’s going to be great money to be made in America, and Doul Yank’s getting in on the ground floor. But, I was just saying, stock or no stock in America, he’s doing a wrong thing by taking money out against Mattie Mulhall’s farm, even if it isn’t Mattie’s farm yet and even if the hundred pounds does make another hundred in the stock market in America. I was just saying Doul Yank should stick to his side of the bargain, that he shouldn’t be letting the bank in on the farm, and Mattie after working for years to put the place in order. There’s not one yellow praiseach flower in the whole place this year. Can you imagine that? And the farm nothing but a yellow sea when he started working at it.”
Then Annie told Bridie how she and Simon Peter believed Doul Yank was buying masses for his soul when he died, even if Father Mooney had told Mattie that Doul Yank hadn’t bought any—Doul Yank could have sent the money to a monastery for masses.
Then Annie asked about Father Jarlath’s appendix, and Bridie’s dam burst. Before any words came out, she was crying, sending several large drops over her lap and splashing onto the hearth near her Peter Pan bootees. As Bridie pulled a man’s handkerchief out of her sleeve, Annie stretched across and touched her shoulder.
“Is he that bad, Bridie?” she asked.
Loudly and bubbly, Bridie blew her nose. She wiped her eyes and said, “I hope the young lads don’t come running in and see me crying, nor Simon Peter either.”
“You don’t have to worry about them, Bridie. The lads won’t be in till dark, and Simon Peter’s across the fields looking at the cattle. It’s a bad time for the murrain. He looks at them three times a day.”
Bridie blew her nose again, and while she pushed the handkerchief back into its place she took several deep breaths, sounding like a child who has lost its breath from crying. Annie encouraged her to talk. “Is Jar
lath worse than you’ve been letting on to people, Bridie?”
“Ah, Annie,” Bridie sighed. “He’s worse than anyone can imagine. It’s terrible, and we looking forward so long to him coming home, and now things turning out like this. I feel terrible useless, a terrible failure.” She took the handkerchief out again and went through the motions of neatly folding it. She did not look up as she spoke. “When we bring him to say mass on Sundays, he makes Eddie let him out of the motor near Morgan’s shop so no one will see him with us. He’s ashamed of us.” A sob got away from Bridie before she could cover her mouth, but she would not give in to the tears.
Annie Lamb was aghast at this revelation. Priests were supposed to be nice.
“He can’t bear to be seen with us, and we after fattening eight big bullocks so we could have a motor for him when he came home, lugging buckets of mash and water all winter and then this. To say nothing of the new thatch after only three years and the new whitewash and the bluestone on the windowsills.”
Annie Lamb felt a response was expected. “Maybe he likes to walk down the town to talk to people he hasn’t seen for years,” Annie-the-very-careful weakly offered.
“Sure he told us, Annie!” Bridie sounded like a frustrated teacher. “He told us we’re dirty to look at and that we’ve smells off us like cows. He said he never saw an Indian dirtier than us, nor smelt a worse one either.”
Believing Bridie was waiting for some verbal support against her brother’s accusation, Annie Lamb desperately clawed around in her mind for the right words. She was unable to take hold of anything, and, instead, she put her hand on Bridie’s shoulder again, felt the fleshless bones under the green, Bridie-knitted cardigan.
Bridie folded and unfolded the handkerchief, used it to keep her eyes away from Annie’s. “We went to see him today, and when we got there he told me I was never to go to see him in the hospital again, he’s so ashamed of me.”
Saying out loud for the first time what had cut her to the quick that afternoon, Bridie sobbed aloud and her tears freely flowed on her crab-apple cheeks. The folds were shaken out of the handkerchief and there was loud blowing and snuffling. This time it took several minutes for recovery, and during the silence Annie Lamb prayed fervently to the Mother of God for inspiration to say something that would work magic. But the Mother of God was out of magic and at a loss for words.
Bridie fingered some loose strands of her hair and pushed them into new positions. Without warning, she began speaking again, and all the strain was gone out of her voice. From the first sentence, it seemed to Annie Lamb that the discussion about Father Jarlath had never taken place.
“Eddie and myself got up and milked and et a bit of breakfast before we went to first mass this morning so we’d get an early start. The day we brought him to the hospital, and he in the back of the motor moaning with the pain and the cold, it took us hours to get there, we got so lost, one man telling us the hospital was in one place and when we’d get there another one telling us it was in the place we came from. I was just saying that there’s no one in Dublin who knows where the Mater Hospital is. And me after begging him to let us take him to the county hospital in Marbra. But he wouldn’t hear of that at all. He nearly et the face off me for even saying Marbra Hospital. And today, thanks be to God, we only had to ask where the hospital was five times. Of course, the first man we asked was as deaf as a post. Doesn’t it always happen? You get all ready what to say and you clear your throat to ask a body how to get to the hospital; you open the window and shout, and your man turns out to be as deaf as a stone and he wanting you to talk louder with his hand cupped behind the ear, and he saying what, what. It’s always happening.”
The more Bridie spoke, the stronger her verbal spate surged, and Annie Lamb remained tense on her wooden chair hoping that nothing would be expected of her in the way of sympathetic, empathetic or encouraging sounds.
“So, right after first mass was over didn’t we set out, and I praying the whole way that we wouldn’t get lost and that I wouldn’t get sick in the motor. I hate when the motor goes over a quick bridge, and everything in your stomach gets shot up into your throat. I always bring an old towel to vomit in. We drove real slow through every town looking for a fruit shop, and the heat enough to make a body pant. It’s terrible hot in a motor with the sun shining in and nothing you can do to keep it out. There were times I thought I was going to faint. I was just saying that if you weren’t looking for a bit of fruit, wouldn’t all the fruit shops in Ireland be falling on top of you no matter where you went. There wasn’t one fruit shop from here to Dublin until we saw the one right beside the hospital, and the two of us afraid of our lives to go to see Jarlath with one hand hanging longer than the other. I nearly died of relief when we saw it. We got him three apples, three oranges and three pears; sixpence each! Sixpence each, and we feeding apples to the cows by the bucketful in the autumn. Four and sixpence for nine bits of fruit. They can charge what they like because it’s the last place you can get something for a sick relation in the hospital. The government should do something with gangsters like that. Eddie said the jail is too good for them kind of cornerboys. But even so, fresh fruit is good to eat for the evacuation of the bowels.”
“For the evacuation of the bowels,” Annie Lamb repeated to herself. Bridie’s brother, Eddie, had used the same words at the fair last Tuesday to Simon Peter. They must have read it in “Ask the Doctor” in the paper. When Simon Peter came home from the fair that day he said, “Who the hell goes around telling other people to eat fresh fruit to make you shite regular. God! Them Coughlins are as quare as coots. Is that what they talk about sitting at the fire at night? Shiting? ‘Did you have a good shite today, Eddie?’ says she. ‘A grand one,’ says he, ‘and yourself, Bridie, how was your shiting today?’ ‘Grand, Eddie. Grand. That fresh fruit is a great yoke for the evacuation of the bowels.’ For Christ’s sake!”
The outpouring of Bridie’s words was picking up speed, and Annie Lamb knew that it would take a cataclysmic interruption to bring the deluge to a stop.
“You should have seen the looks we were getting when we went into the hospital; you’d think the people had never seen a big bag of fruit before. The smell of the place the minute we walked in through the door! If I was blind, I’d know the minute I stepped into a hospital from the smell, it’s so mediciney and clean. The woman at the desk told us the lift was busy and that we’d have to walk up to Jarlath’s room, and that’s where the whole trouble began because his ward was in the fourth story. I was just saying, the last time I was up a stairs was when I was in the Convent School when I was thirteen. We went up four stairs, and I thought we were there, but Eddie says we’re only halfway yet, that’s four flights but only two stories, and I panting like the Horans’ broken-winded jennet doing the deliveries. A stairs is the devil on your lungs, Annie, when you’re not used to it. Talk about the heat—it was terrible, and I said to Eddie wouldn’t you think they’d open a window or two to let in a bit of fresh air. When we got to the fourth story, I was in such a state that I had to tell Eddie to hold on a minute, and I gave him the bag of fruit to carry. I was leaning against the wall, and I had this full feeling in the chest for a minute and everyone passing by looking at me like I was going to do something terrible. Jarlath’s ward was off down at the other end of the corridor, a private ward, and it hotter than Horan’s Bakery when they have all the ovens going at the same time, and the minute I stepped inside the door I fainted.”
“You didn’t!” Annie said.
“I did. It felt like all my bones were gone, and the next thing I knew I was sitting on a chair with two nurses trying to get my topcoat off and another trying to open the knot of my headscarf under my chin. She gave up and just pulled it off from the back of my head, and all I could think of was my hair must look like the devil entirely, all pulled forward like that, and what would Jarlath say. The other two got the buttons of the coat open and pulled it down behind me off my arms. There was a terrible f
uss, one of them putting a wet towel on my head, another trying to get me to drink out of a glass and another trying to get my boots off—get my boots off, mind you—and me swaying like I was going to fall off one side of the chair and then the other. I couldn’t remember what socks I was wearing, but one way or the other I didn’t want them nurses seeing my feet. All I could think of was Jarlath getting cross about the fuss that was being made over me, and he lying over there in the bed with his face to the wall pretending he was dead. After a while, they took me out to sit in the corridor where it wasn’t so hot, but it was afraid of Jarlath I was. You’d a thought I was a patient the way they held on to me—the three of them, and then one of them telling Eddie to bring out a chair for me to sit on. There I was, sitting in the corridor with everyone going by looking at me and stepping over to the far wall like they were afraid they’d catch something. One woman even held a hankie over her mouth and nose like she’d get a disease off me. It took me a half hour to get back on my feet and one of the nurses stayed with me the whole time—she was terrible nice and kept asking me was I all right and telling me it was because of the heat and the stairs that I fainted because I wasn’t used to stairs. I told her I’d like to put my topcoat and headscarf back on, and she said it’d be better to wait till we were going home. I was feeling very awkward without the coat—you know how it is yourself, Annie, when you’re used to wearing something all the time and then not to have it on, and you know everyone’s looking at you. ‘At least give me the headscarf to cover up my few wisps,’ I said to her, and then she told me that the place where the most heat leaves your body is through the top of your head and that it would be better to keep the headscarf off for a while. Did you ever hear the likes—through the top of your head! My head never gets cold in the winter, it’s always my hands.”
