Lies the Mushroom Pickers Told

by Phelan, Tom;

  As the humor seeped out of the room, Patrick said, “I know who killed Lawrence Gorman, and it was not his nephew.”

  The Howards glanced at each other and then looked at Patrick expectantly. Elsie asked, “You’re not going to say it was an accident after all these years, Patrick?”

  “No, I’m not,” Patrick replied, and before he could finish, Elsie eagerly asked, “Then who shot him if it wasn’t the nephew?”

  “The nephew’s wife, Peggy.”

  “No!” the two Howards said in unison. Then Elsie said, “Sam, oh Sam, we’ve been wrong all this time.”

  Sam was glaring at the preposterous thing Patrick had suggested. But then his face changed, and he looked out into the garden as if trying to force Peggy Mulhall into the jigsawed landscape of those long-ago years.

  Elsie sat at her side of the table staring at the floor, her face reflective of the workings of her brain as it tried to adjust itself to the new information.

  Sam returned from his thoughts first. “We have to be very careful here, Patrick. We are talking about murder and a reputation.”

  Elsie said, “But how could you know this, Patrick? You’ve been away all this time and we have been—”

  “I was with Mikey and Fintan Lamb the day Lawrence Gorman was killed, and Fintan saw Peggy Mulhall in the vicinity of the shot.”

  “But Fintan was what . . . three or four, not much more than a baby?”

  “I also saw her at the stile when we heard the shot. And Peggy Mulhall told me herself that she’d killed Gorman.”

  “Well, I’ll be!” Missus Howard said again. “The wife! The woman! The nurturer! I wonder how she felt about it later on. Does that kind of thing bother a person till they die, especially a woman?”

  “It didn’t seem to bother Peggy Mulhall,” Patrick said. “As a matter of fact, she was very devout in her belief that she did a good thing.”

  38

  The Reluctant Good Neighbor

  1951

  In which Barlow Bracken and Fintan and Mikey Lamb see what no one was supposed to see, and Barlow and Mikey almost get killed by a shotgun blast.

  DEVOUT IN HER BELIEFS and envious of saintly ecstasy portrayed in holy pictures, Annie Lamb was always mindful or hopeful that someday she might see her own heavenly apparition. Often, in her solitary moments, she fantasized that she might be a Bernadette of Lourdes, a Jacinta of Fatima or a Juan Diego of Guadalupe. She imagined a book with her own picture on the cover, eyes turned up to God in the sky, hands joined in supplication and adoration, a nice Italian scarf carelessly but artistically placed around her face. She had always been sensitive about the size of her ears.

  Annie Lamb would have been satisfied with a visitor less majestic than God, would have been delighted to be like that woman in Knock in County Mayo who saw John the Baptist on a wall—recognized him, she told ecclesiastical investigators, from his picture in the stained-glass window in the parish church, the one with the Baptist’s head on a plate and that woman’s hairpins in his tongue.

  Several times, Annie had thought her heavenly moment had come, only to realize there was nothing otherworldly about what her senses had picked up. Her most promising heavenly connection had lasted for three days, until a distant and indistinct voice turned out to be coming from a newly installed amplification speaker in Humphrey Smiley’s Hardware and Farm Supply yard almost three miles away. It was only a casual comment by Mikey which had revealed the truth to her, and in silent prayer, Annie thanked heaven she had not made an enormous arse of herself by running to Father Mooney to tell him she had been chosen to be God’s messenger.

  At two minutes past ten on the morning of the discovery of Father Coughlin’s body on Sally Hill, Annie Lamb was in her haggard reaching into a hole in the remains of last year’s hayrick, cautiously feeling for hens’ eggs. With the side of her face pressed into the hay as she stretched in her fingertips, Annie’s mind was full of the scene on Sally Hill which Simon Peter had painted when he finally came home to milk the cows. She was thinking about how, for the rest of her life, she would be afraid of the hill in the dark because Father Coughlin’s ghost would be in the vicinity.

  As she thought about the ejected eye on the priestly cheek, sharp, needle-like pieces of dry hay pressed into her face, and in the far distance of Doul Yank’s Back Batens, Annie saw flashes of light as bright as sunshine. Her heart quickened, and through her mind fled a herd of stampeding fears and hopes: God’s chosen one, Father Jarlath Coughlin, not yet cold in death, was coming to her; she was going to receive a message from heaven, and maybe she would be granted the power to heal. People would come from all over Ireland to be cured, and Simon Peter would have to make a place for all the motors like that bone-setter down in Carlow had to do, and one way or another, her husband would have to install running water in the house for a flushing lav for the pilgrims, holy pictures all over the place. No longer conscious of the hay sticking into the side of her face, and unaware that her exploring fingers were annoying the hell out of a hen in the act of laying her egg in the dark nest, Annie watched openmouthed as the glints of sunshine danced over the top of the green grass in Doul Yank’s field. There was no doubt that the glints were moving toward her, and as she slowly withdrew her hand she was not aware that the angry hen had pecked her several times on the back of the hand and had drawn blood.

  During her past pious fantasies, Annie had often wondered if she should kneel in the presence of a heavenly apparition. Now, as she stared at the approaching bits of glinting sun, as bright as a soul in the state of sanctifying grace, her knees felt weak, and she was afraid she was going to totter to the ground whether she wanted to or not. She grasped at the hay for support and saw a drop of bright blood on the back of her hand exactly in the place where a nail would have come through if she had been crucified. Her brain was full of words—asterisk, asthma, astigma—but she knew none of these was right. She tried to feel the pain Saint Teresa felt when her wounds bled, but there was nothing, except that strange feeling on one side of her head as if a crown of thorns had been lately removed. And then Annie saw that the soul of Father Coughlin was dancing around two boys running for their lives. Then she saw that the two boys were Mikey and Barlow—that the sun was glittering off their swinging mushroom cans, and she knew the soul of Father Coughlin was in some place other than Doul Yank’s Back Batens.

  Annie Lamb sighed a mixture of disappointment and relief.

  As she walked into the farmyard with sixteen brown eggs in her praskeen and still wondering how blood had got on the back of her hand, the mushroom pickers arrived at the gate, bursting to tell their concocted story to explain their late homecoming. Before they could launch the lies from their lips, Annie, still breathing hard after her escape from sainthood, said, “I have something to tell you, boys. I told Molly when she got up, and she’s gone into Quigleys on her bike for the day.”

  Mikey and Barlow flung cautionary glances at each other.

  “Your father’s inside, Mikey, putting on his good suit and Sunday boots to go over to the Coughlins’ house for a while. Now, I don’t want the two of you getting all upset, but there was a terrible accident, and Father Coughlin got killed last night.”

  The boys looked at each other and, after a split-second pause, Mikey asked, “What happened to him?”

  “He fell off his bike on Sally Hill.”

  “Sally Hill!” Barlow echoed.

  “Your father’s putting on his good boots to bring stuff to the Coughlins to feed all the people who’ll be calling to see them, and when he comes back I’ll go to stay with Bridie. Your father is so cross it would be better to keep out of his way. Take Fintan out to the haggard, and you can eat your breakfast when your father’s gone.”

  The boys did not get to tell their lies.

  Two days later at half-past twelve, Mikey and Barlow were sitting at the kitchen table eating fried bread and fried eggs, when a freshly shaved Simon Peter, looking for assistance with the back stud
of his shirt collar, came into the kitchen from the room behind the fireplace. He stumbled over Fintan on the floor, playing with an empty thread spool. “For God’s sake, Fintan,” Simon Peter muttered, “will you get up out of that and stop sitting in the dark where a man could trip over you and break his neck. Here, Annie,” he said, and he held out the stud to his wife. His wife, all dressed in her best clothes, stopped adjusting her hat in the shaving mirror on the kitchen table to help her impatient husband. She gently slapped his fidgeting fingers out of the way.

  Simon Peter said, “We’ll never get the barley cut, and the sun splitting the trees for the last three days. It’s a terrible time of the year for a funeral.” Then, using the tone which bode no contradiction, Simon Peter commanded Mikey and Barlow to be available to work in the barley field the minute he got home. In the meantime, the two boys were to keep Fintan from falling into drains and stepping in cow dung; keep him away from nettles, and if he did get stung to rub him with a dock leaf; hold up the leg of his trousers when he had to do his pooley and make sure it didn’t run down his legs into Molly’s First Communion shoes.

  “We should have been at that barley three days ago, the morning he got killed,” Simon Peter concluded, “and only for that Sergeant Morrissey, him and his—”

  Annie Lamb hit her husband in the back, stopped him from saying in front of the children what he had said during the telling of the terrible news about Father Coughlin; how the sergeant was an eegit of a man who thought he could tell everyone what to do just because he wore a uniform—“him and his Cork accent, singing like a bloody woman.” In a moment of insightful and poetic inspiration, Simon Peter had declared, “The uniform may have helped Joe Morrissey with his authority, but it didn’t do anything for his brains, because he’s every bit as thick as he was before he put on his suit of silver buttons.”

  Annie moved around her husband to put in the front stud, too, and spared the household the sounds of huffing and puffing that went with the lunging and plunging of Simon Peter’s impatient fingers. As she lined up the two holes of the shirt with the two holes of the collar, her hand pressed against her husband’s Adam’s apple and cut off his air supply. Simon Peter’s face darkened until at last the stud was in place and his air flowed again. Everyone in the kitchen expelled their breath in unison.

  “And don’t be going near Sally Hill,” Simon Peter continued with his list of instructions. “There might be guards from Dublin still there measuring and stepping around like dunghill cocks trying to look as important as new priests. You can go across the fields to Tinnakill Castle, and the minute you hear three o’clock striking you’re to start heading home. And if you run into Doul—Mister Gorman, don’t be telling him anything. Just keep saying you don’t know, no matter what he asks you.” Simon Peter put his knotted tie over his head and pushed the knot up to his throat. “Even if he wants to know your name, tell him you don’t know. It’s better he thinks you’re stupid than to tell him anything.”

  “And make sure he doesn’t think you’re a rabbit or a partridge,” Annie Lamb added.

  “We’d have to be flying to be partridges,” Mikey said.

  “Mister Gorman’s the kind who’d shoot a sitting partridge,” Simon Peter declared, and his wife by way of another poke, reminded him that children repeat what adults say.

  “That collar is too tight for you,” Annie said trying to distract the children from her husband’s indiscretion, and she tugged at the knot of the tie until it was lined up properly.

  “All dressed up in the middle of the week and the sun splitting the trees!” Simon Peter said, as he raised a foot to the edge of the chair Barlow was sitting on. He laced his shining, soft Sunday boot. “And I don’t want you climbing up to that magpie’s nest in the Sandpit Field, either.”

  “One for sorrow,” Fintan sputtered through untrained tongue and undisciplined lips. An for sorry.

  “And Fintan, you’re to do everything Mikey and Barlow tell you, and you’re not to swing on anyone’s gates.”

  Simon Peter changed feet on the chair and laced up his other boot. “We’ll never get another day like this, and the barley bucking to be cut. Of all the days he had to . . . The middle of the week, for God’s sake . . . Wait till you see! It’ll be pouring tomorrow. Are you ready, Annie?”

  Annie Lamb went back to the mirror and inserted a six-inch pin into her hat, the one with the black swan. She hated black, so the black swan would have to be enough to show her respect for the dead.

  “Make sure to keep an eye on Fintan the whole time. That lad’s always getting into trouble, and don’t teach him anything wrong.”

  Mikey wished his father and mother would leave so that he and Barlow and Fintan could have the whole world to themselves—every big person in Clunnyboe gone to the funeral.

  When the hasp on the wicker gate clicked into its catch behind the big people and their bikes, the three boys, all holding hands, left the farmyard by way of the haggard gate, Fintan in the middle.

  The haggard, empty of everything except for the last bench of last year’s hay, was strangely empty, a track of lush green grass outlining the bare patch where the rick had sat all winter and a hundred winters before that, too. When they approached the ten-foot-wide wooden gate that led out into the fields, Fintan freed himself from the others. He ran ahead and slipped the short chain off the nail in the gatepost. He grabbed the third bar with his hands, stepped up on the bottom bar and said, “Push me, Mikey.”

  “Daddy will kill us,” Mikey said, as he pushed the gate and sent Fintan swinging in a wide arc.

  “Barlow, Barlow, push me back,” the child called, when the gate came to a stop against the hedge.

  Mikey and Barlow swung Fintan back and forth to each other in the long semi-circle, all making wheeing sounds to create the illusion of speed. Abruptly, Fintan grew tired of the game, and when he stepped off the moving gate, he fell on his face in the grass. He emerged laughing, his blond curls bedraggled with bits of straw and hay.

  When they came to the roofless remains of Dan Deegan’s house, the boys ran up the low pile of whitewash-speckled rubble that had once been the front wall. They looked down into the ruined kitchen, its gabled wall streaked with blackness where once there had been a fireplace and its chimney.

  “The dandelions are back since we pulled them when the chickens were young,” Barlow said.

  “And there’s the hole in the back wall with a blue tit’s nest,” Mikey said and pointed.

  When Fintan demanded that he be shown the tit’s nest, Mikey bent down, put his head between his brother’s legs and lifted him up on his shoulders. A shotgun banged in the distance. In unison, the boys turned to the sound and two voices said, “Doul Yank!” while one voice said, “Owl Ank!”

  As Mikey took a step down the pile of rubble, Fintan said, “Missus Mulhall on the stile.”

  “Where?” Mikey asked, but Fintan didn’t have the words and he pointed, his arm showing one direction, the pointing finger another.

  Barlow took Mikey’s spyglass out of his pocket, pulled the ends apart and brought it to his eye like an explorer in a Tarzan picture. He looked along the top of the barrel until he saw someone in Doul Yank’s Back Batens where the field begins to slope up the Esker. Then he peered into the narrow end. “It’s Missus Mulhall, all right. She’s looking around and she’s pulling up her dress and she’s . . .” Barlow took the spyglass from his face. He looked at Mikey. “I think she’s doing her pooley,” he said. Barlow and Mikey looked at each other. “Let me look,” Mikey said urgently, and he took the spyglass from Barlow. “Hold on to my head, Fintan.”

  “Let me look,” Fintan said. Et me uck.

  “I missed her,” Mikey said. “She’s standing up and looking down at what she did. I hope she kicks something over it if she did her jow. Now she’s going away. Why do girls sit down to do their pooley?”

  “Et me uck,” Fintan demanded and held out his hand for the spyglass, but Mikey gave it back t
o Barlow.

  “She’s gone, Fintan,” Mikey said, and he carefully picked his steps down the pile of rubble to the blue tit’s nest in the hole in the wall.

  “You can only see a little bit of the moss,” Mikey said, but Fintan had already reached into the wall and pulled the nest out, sending a shower of fine sand and pebbles down on Mikey’s head.

  Recriminations followed the vandalism.

  In the Sandpit Field, Mikey and Barlow threw two token stones each at the forbidden magpie’s nest before moving on to the Sandpit. Standing at a safe distance, they threw big stones and caused small collapses of fine sand on the sheer, vertical wall. Fintan wandered over to one of the lower side walls, drawn by the small, dark entrances of the sand martens’ burrows. Fearlessly, he plunged his hand into the darkness and when he found nothing, he moved on to the next hole. When Mikey saw what his brother was doing, he stood there holding an unflung stone in his right hand. “You’ll get bit,” he called, speaking off his own fear of poking his hand into a dark hole where there might be an angry bird with a sharp beak or a rat with sharp teeth on an egg hunt.

  As Mikey looked on, Fintan pulled his hand out of the burrow with the feet of a fluttering sand marten trapped in his fingers. Mikey and Barlow ran to him. Fintan covered the bird with his left hand and calmed the terrified wings. “Bud,” he said. He uncovered the marten’s head and held it out to the others. The tiny eyes were like two drops of black ink, the short beak as sharp as the thorn of a sloe bush.

  “Can I pat it?” Barlow asked, and when he stretched out his finger to touch the top of the head the bird pecked at him. Barlow jumped back, and Fintan, laughing, launched the bird into the sky.

  “Aw, Fintan!” Mikey said angrily. “Why did you let it get away? We wanted to touch it too.”

  Under the bottom strand of barbed wire, they crawled into Doul Yank’s Hollow Field, and the moment he stood up, Mikey said, “Last one to the stile stinks!”