Lies the Mushroom Pickers Told

by Phelan, Tom;

  The handkerchief was dragged out into the open again as if Bridie were preparing for some unpleasantness ahead. The bony, broken-nailed fingers began to worry the damp cloth.

  “In the end I sort of wobbled back into Jarlath’s ward with the nurse ready to catch me with her hands out. She left me sitting beside the bed and told me to send Eddie for her if I thought I was going to faint again. She must have been gone for five minutes before anyone spoke, and me waiting for Jarlath to light into me for the fuss I’d caused. He lay there facing the wall, and while I waited to be et I kept looking at Eddie and asking him questions with my face, and all he did was turn his eyes to heaven and not make a sound. That made me think Jarlath had et him before I came back into the room. I was just going to tell Jarlath that we’d brought him apples and pears and oranges when he said real quiet, ‘Is the nurse gone?’ And at the same time Eddie and me said she was. Then Eddie and me looked at each other and waited for Jarlath to say something. But we waited so long, I couldn’t stand it anymore and I said, ‘Sure we brought you a nice bit of fruit, Jarlath. It’ll help you with the evacuation of the bowels.’ And then real quiet he says, ‘Bridie, come here till I tell you something,’ and I started to think that after all my bad thinking about him he was going to say he was sorry that I’d fainted, the soft way he was talking. I stood up and leaned in a bit over the bed because he was still facing the wall. Then he says, ‘Bridie, for as long as I’m in the hospital, I don’t want you to come to see me again with your fainting and the way you smell like a cow and the way you’re dressed, you’d think it was the middle of winter.’ The soft way he talked to me was worse than the worst shouting that was ever done at me by anyone, and a terrible feeling came into me, nearly the way you feel when someone belonging to you is dying and you can’t do a thing about it. It was terrible, Annie, and I just stood there with my jaws open and my mouth getting all dry. I looked at Eddie, and he looked like someone who was hit with a swingletree, and his mouth was open a foot if it was open an inch. Then Jarlath started talking again real low like before. ‘You can leave now,’ says he, ‘and you can take the fruit with you.’ Oh, Annie, it was terrible, and all I could say was, ‘Sure we bought the apples and oranges and pears for you, Jarlath, and they’ll be good for your bowels,’ and I don’t know what else I was saying, and I was only saying anything at all to keep out of my head what Jarlath had said to me. Jarlath made his voice loud enough not to be heard outside the ward. ‘Bridie,’ says he, ‘go home and take the blessed fruit with you. Go home this instant.’ But I was still trying not to believe what I was hearing, and I said, ‘But I can’t go home without Eddie driving the motor.’ Nobody said anything for a long time. Then, like an eegit, I started crying the way I cried when Mammy was dying, not out loud but trying to hold it in, and you know the way your throat hurts you when you do that. And I was just saying that I don’t remember one thing about coming out of the hospital and getting into the motor or about putting my coat and headscarf back on. But hadn’t Eddie only got the motor car as far as the hospital gates when I got as sick as a dog, and I was lucky to have the towel in my lap just in case. And Eddie says, ‘It must be something you et,’ and we were in the car all the way home from Dublin, one and a half hours, and neither one of us said a word till the motor car stopped outside our gate and I says, ‘It was nothing I et, Eddie.’”

  The handkerchief fluttered to Bridie’s face, and silently she cried, her body trembling, and she rocking backward and forward like an old woman in her sadness who can’t think of anything else to do with herself but rock. And once again, Annie Lamb reached out the connecting hand and placed it on the skeletal shoulder. “Aw, Bridie,” was all she could muster, and she found herself fighting back the tears of empathy she felt for Bridie Coughlin, and the anger, too, that she felt toward the returned missionary.

  Bridie wasn’t finished yet. Twisting and torturing and strangling the handkerchief, she wrung the pain out of her soul and it dripped down onto the hearth. “The first day he came home from India, the minute he walked into the house, he said, ‘You didn’t get the water in! There’s no lavatory, and it nineteen fifty-one! This is worse than India.’ And when we were milking the cows that night, Eddie said to me that he should have said, ‘Sure, we got a motor instead to bring you around, Jarlath, and as well as that we’d have to have the electric to have a lavatory because the electric makes the pump go that puts the water in the tank for the lavatory to work.’ Then Jarlath in the kitchen says, ‘If I’d only known there was going to be no lavatory, I mightn’t have come at all.’ And Eddie said when we were in the cowhouse that he should have said, ‘Sure, Jarlath, you’ll just have to use the stable like Mammy and Daddy did, and it was good enough for them.’ There in the kitchen the three of us stood, and Eddie and myself not able to say anything. And I thought to myself, that maybe if he’d noticed the new thatch and the new whitewashing and the new bluestone on the windowsills when he was coming in that he wouldn’t be so cross. And I have a new geranium in the kitchen window, too, Annie, with the reddest flowers you ever saw and the best smell you ever smelt. But I didn’t know what to say. It was like Jarlath was out of place in our kitchen, as much as I’d be out of place in a bishop’s palace. It was like he was too used to nice things to have landed in our kitchen, after living in style in India with servants to do everything for him, one to do nothing but polish his shoes, and another to do the cuffs of his shirt, another to cook, another to carry his dinner to the table, another to make his bed, another to fill up his bath, another to move the fan in the ceiling with a rope, another to lay out his clothes, another to brush his shoulders when he goes outside, another to carry his umbrella to keep off the sun, another to carry his books to school, and here he is in our house and we don’t even have a lavatory, and the three of us standing there and neither Eddie nor myself knowing what to do next. Jarlath was standing there with his back to us, and he looking around and I feeling there was nothing right in the house, there was something wrong with everything, and how would we be able to have Jarlath at home for four months after such a terrible start. No lavatory. I looked at Eddie and Eddie looked at me, and if you’d given us a thousand pounds apiece, neither of us could’ve said anything. Then after a terrible long time Jarlath said, ‘Well, I suppose you can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear—I’ll just have to put up with it.’ And Eddie says, ‘Sure, I’ll get your cases out of the motor,’ and I said, ‘I’ll be getting the bit of dinner going.’ After a few days he began to get used to the way we live, at least he stopped saying everything was worse than in India. He was a bit cagey at first about going out to the stable, but he soon got over that, especially when he saw there’s always a little pile of nice soft green grass for him and he saw he wouldn’t have to use straw. Of course, the first Sunday when he told us to let him out at Morgan’s shop there was another terrible long silence because Eddie nor myself would never talk back to him even if we knew what to say, Jarlath being a priest and all and being away on the missions for so long. But now there’s today in the Mater Hospital in Dublin. There’s nothing we can do right for him, Annie. And Eddie is terrible upset the way Jarlath was going around asking everyone for money for his school in India before he had the appendix attack. Eddie says nobody has money for themselves, let alone for a school in India. And the Martyr serving him tea in the good tea set with Jacob’s Biscuits—Assorted, no less—twice a day when Eddie and myself are out in the fields, and he all wrapped up in blankets and with his hat on sitting outside in the sun if there’s any.”

  Bridie ran out of words, and Annie Lamb again sought inspiration of the Mother of God, but the Mother of God was still keeping her distance.

  The first rule of gossip says it is socially suicidal to agree with someone who is badmouthing their own flesh and blood, and it was this rule that was keeping Annie Lamb’s tongue in a state of arrest. The flesh and blood could be as blatantly unkind and cruel as Jarlath was, but to agree with his sister about h
is egregious behavior was a deathly trap to fall into, no matter how strong the empathetic pull. There was always the possibility of reconciliation and, if the viscosity of the blood between the family members recovered its proper glutinousness, the enemy of one became the enemy of the other.

  “Maybe Father Jarlath is feeling under the weather, Bridie,” Annie-the-very-careful said. “He might be in a lot of pain where he was cut open, and people with a pain sometimes say things they don’t mean. I remember our old Shep the time Simon Peter backed the wheel of a cart over his paw, and when Simon Peter went to examine the paw didn’t Shep bite him and he never bit anyone before that or after. It was the pain that made him bite.”

  But Bridie ignored Annie’s weak attempt to make an excuse for the priest’s behavior. “Anyway,” she said, and her tone seemed dismissive of the whole topic, “after he gets out of the hospital he’ll be staying at the motherhouse near Dublin for a week, and he’ll have twelve lavatories there, he told us.”

  Annie Lamb could not determine if the “twelve lavatories” was Bridie’s attempt at humor after her foul journey through the valley of rejection and hurt. And so, Annie, still keenly aware of the first rule of gossip, did not make any laughing sound. Instead, she made an effort to step back from Bridie’s familial quagmire. “I’m sure when Father Jarlath comes home everything will be grand,” she lied, “and will you look at how dark it got while we were talking.” She stood up and took the two-wicker lamp off its nail in the whitewashed wall.

  But Bridie, like a terrier remembering the biting teeth and scratching claws of the rat in its mouth, was not willing to let go of her offensive brother yet. “Eddie says Jarlath won’t stay in the motherhouse for long because he’ll have to come home to do his collecting. And your paraffin lamp reminds me, Annie, that’s another thing he said—about the lights in his house in India are electric, and all we have is a two-wicker like yourself, Annie.”

  “Won’t it be great when rural electrification comes this way?” Annie-the-diverter asked as she replaced the glass globe around the two weak flames of the lamp. “Men were out in our fields on Thursday with their things for measuring and for making straight lines. Won’t it be great to have bright lights and a lavatory and a bath with hot and cold water?”

  Bridie let go of her priestly brother, but she still spoke out of her gloomy mood. “Ah, sure them fellows measured and marked in the fields around Marbra two years ago, and there’s not one pole in sight yet. It’ll be years before we get it.”

  Then, as Annie Lamb spoke again, she realized too late that she was veering back toward the Coughlin-family quicksand. “Sure, by the next time Father Jarlath comes home you’ll have a lavatory,” and she rushed on to get as far away as possible from the dreadful brother, “and a sink and a bath and it all done up with nice tiles like the one in the convent in Gohen, white tiles on the floor and white tiles on the wall and an electric light over the mirror, and the whole place white and gleaming and the taps shining like they were silver, and nice dry towels hanging instead of an old rag hanging on a rusty hook—big, warm, thick towels. That’s the kind of lavatory I think about when I think of rural electrification, a bath full of hot water to lie in for an hour when the children are in school and Simon Peter’s in the fields.” Annie poked the ashes off the smoldering turf sods with the long tongs, and the kettle began to sing. “Do you ever think of a lavatory like that when you hear them talking about rural electrification, Bridie?” she asked.

  “I can’t persuade Eddie to put a back door in the house, never mind a lavatory. I mentioned it to him one time, and he said what he always says about anything that’s new: ‘Sure wasn’t the cowhouse and the stable good enough for Daddy and Mammy?’ If the electric ever comes our way, Eddie doesn’t want it in the house. He said the electric would set fire to the thatch.”

  Annie Lamb put a kitchen chair beside Bridie, and she was placing the mug of tea and the plate of curranty cake on the makeshift table when Mikey, Molly and Barlow galloped in from the farmyard in a cloud of noise. They were sweating, their faces apple-red, and bits of golden straw was tangled in their wild hair. Their loud intrusion had the immediate effect of sweeping Father Jarlath Coughlin out of the kitchen. Annie Lamb relaxed and watched with amazement while Bridie shamelessly and mercilessly grilled Barlow. Bridie learned more about the Bracken family in ten minutes than Annie had discovered during the previous two weeks.

  23

  In the Sunroom

  In which Elsie Howard angrily tells Patrick Bracken about the vile injustices suffered by Bridie Coughlin at the hands of her brother Eddie, and Sam reveals a pleasant surprise.

  “PATRICK,” MISSUS HOWARD SAID. “Eddie Coughlin died about twenty years ago. Do you know that?”

  “Nineteen,” Sam said. “He died in 1987.”

  “Yes, he died six months after he told me—”

  “Then you must know—” Missus Howard said.

  “Else, Patrick just told you that he knows.”

  “How do you know what I’m going to tell him, Sam? And whether he knows or not, it’s a good story that can be repeated like a good joke. You said so yourself.”

  “But it’s not a good story; it’s a miserable one.”

  “Just because it’s a story about misery doesn’t mean it’s not good.” Elsie turned to Patrick. “Eddie Coughlin died nineteen years ago, and his will was published in the Irish Independent. He had three hundred thousand pounds in the bank.”

  “Three hundred and forty two thousand, nine hundred and eighty seven pounds to be exact,” Sam said, and his wife gave him a look, told him with her eyes to stop interrupting the story.

  “Over three hundred thousand pounds, and Bridie got up on her bike every morning all those years to go a mile for her bucket of well water for the kitchen. Three hundred thousand in the bank, and Bridie without the comfort of a flushing lavatory. Wasn’t he the—”

  “Now, Else,” Sam said, “don’t get up on your high horse about this again, and there’s no need for every little detail.”

  Elsie hesitated. But when she spoke again anger was still in her voice. “It’s the details that make this story so maddening and I got the details from a Protestant family who lived up the road, the Brynes.”

  “Protestants always tell the truth, Patrick,” Sam said.

  “David Samuel Howard! Will you please stop interrupting?” Elsie demanded, and she speared her husband with her eyes, too. “Every morning when the cows were milked, Bridie got out her bike and set off in her Wellingtons with the bucket. It didn’t matter if it was raining cats and dogs. If there was ice on the road, she walked in the grass beside the road to keep from slipping. Eddie never went to the well, because drawing water for the kitchen was a woman’s job—Eddie was a man straight out of the Old Testament or the Koran when it suited him. When she’d get to the Well Field, she’d prop the bike in the hedge. Then she’d unlatch the gate and walk for five minutes, open another gate in the fence around the well. She’d kneel down on a flagstone and dip the bucket to three-quarters full. She’d carry it back to the road and put it on a small platform of stones she had made herself. She’d bring the bike over to the bucket, put one foot on the pedal, lift the bucket up to the handlebar and wobble off. Over the years she fell several times, and when that happened she had to go back to the well again. Sometimes she didn’t simply fall—she crashed on to the road, skinned her knees and hands, fell on the bike, fell on the bucket. She got water from that well every day of the week from the time she learned to ride a bike, and when her brother died he had over three hundred thousand pounds in the bank. It was his money, and he left two thousand to Bridie, and the rest, along with the farm and the house, he left to the religious order the priest-brother belonged to. Within a year, everything was sold off and Bridie was left homeless.”

  Sam dared to interrupt. “The order got exactly three hundred and forty thousand, nine hundred and eighty-seven pounds, the sixty-acre farm and the house.”

/>   Elsie continued, “Exactly one year to the day after Eddie died, Bridie was packing the last of her things to move into Mick Flanagan’s old bungalow at the far end of the town—she was going to rent. A distant cousin came with his tractor and trailer to transport her stuff, and he found her dead on the kitchen floor. He said it was like finding a stillborn calf in the morning at the hind legs of its tethered mother. Poor Bridie! Life can be so bloody nasty at times.”

  Sam said, “Eddie Coughlin said at the inquest of his brother that he never gave the Martyr Madden a raise even though she worked for him for almost fifty years. He said she never asked for it.” Then, without pause, Sam said matter-of-factly, “I have the transcript of Eddie Coughlin’s testimony at the inquest.”

  Patrick Bracken felt as if he’d heard the door into Mister Howard’s long-protected vault creaking on its hinges.

  It took a few seconds for Sam’s announcement to sink in, and when it did Else exclaimed in disbelief, “You don’t, Sam!”

  “I do,” Sam Howard said, and he held a palm up to his wife to forestall any questions. “Don’t ask, Else,” he said. He fussed himself together and stood up.

  “David Samuel Howard!” his wife said in a tone that was a prelude to an accusation.

  “If you say another word, Elsie Howard, I will sit right down again. You are to stay here with Patrick, and I will get the transcript.”

  “If you have one—” Elsie began.

  Sternly, her husband rebuked her, his eyes flashing, “Elsie Eloise Carter Howard!”

  His wife became silent, and Sam short-stepped out of the sunroom.

  “That bloody Sam! When he calls me Elsie Eloise Carter it’s like he’s dropping the Iron Curtain around himself. There’s no way through it. You think you know someone, Patrick, and now this after all these years. He’s been saving stuff and I didn’t know it. He has more bloody secrets than a priest in a one-horse parish. It’s so annoying. I keep telling him we’ll be dead in a few years, but he still won’t tell me things. I stuck the Bible in his face one day and swore I’d never tell anything he told me. ‘Frivolous use of the holy book in an attempt to get privileged information,’ he says. He can be so dismissive when it comes to his bloody privileged information.” Else had become an agitated, brooding hen furiously using her beak to roll one egg under her feathers while at the same time pushing another one out on her far side. “If he has Eddie Coughlin’s transcript, you can be sure he has all the transcripts and a lot more besides. I wonder where he hid them. And the best of it is, the transcripts of the inquest aren’t privileged at all. . . . What’s going on with him, Patrick? What did you say to make him do this? Sssh,” she hissed, and she cocked her head to one side. “I wonder where he is. He’s not upstairs, or we’d hear the floor creaking. But he went up the stairs. He hardly has a hiding place . . . but I’d have discovered . . .” She stood up and went to the door, one ear straining. “This old house,” she whispered. “I’ve often thought there must be hiding places, but I’ve never found one. Maybe Sam did.” She made a sudden move back to her chair and smoothed her dress, touched the cameo at her throat.