Lies the Mushroom Pickers Told

by Phelan, Tom;

  Across the late August field of barley stubbles he fled, his boots swishing in the short golden stalks. A flock of woodquests zoomed into the sky on frightened wings. From far behind him, Mikey heard Barlow’s cries, calling for him to come back and begin the race on the count of three. The demands for fair play did not slow Mikey, and when he reached the far hedge he hopped up on the stile. With arms raised in victory, he proclaimed himself king of all Ireland.

  But the royal reign was short-lived. Barlow and Fintan came puffing up and pushed him off his throne. On the seat of his pants in the stubble, Mikey watched as Barlow lifted Fintan onto the stile. Fintan tottered precariously on the narrow board, but Mikey wasn’t worried. If the boy fell, he would land in the thick grass of the headland. Barlow plonked down in the stubbles beside Mikey, and drew up his knees to keep the sharp stubbles from hurting the backs of his legs.

  Fintan stopped in the act of raising his hands above his head, and without thought he jumped off the stile. He bent over into the long grass and grunted as he came back up with a shotgun in his hands. He could only lift the gun to the height of his knees, but he managed to shuffle his feet until it was pointing in the direction of the other two boys. Before Mikey or Barlow could call out, the grinning Fintan said, “Bang, bang,” and the gun slipped out of his hands.

  As if controlled by the nimble fingers of a master puppeteer, Barlow and Mikey twisted away from each other, and Fintan moved his foot out of the way of the falling gun. The spread palms of the rolling boys came down flat onto the tops of the stubbles, and their bare knees were stabbed before the cropped straw gave way under their weight. But they were not aware of the sharp straw, they were not aware they were moving in the unison of long-practiced ballet dancers.

  As they twisted away from the imminent danger the gun exploded with the noise of a hundred thunderclaps, and both saw the passage of the shot as it ripped a narrow track through the clay and the stubbles between them. A small cloud of dry soil and shattered straw spewed into the air like coal smoke shooting from the chimney of a speeding, miniature, puffing train.

  At the far end of the field another flock of woodquests sprang into the air and disappeared over the hedge.

  Wide-eyed, the three boys remained motionless in the deafness created by the gunshot. Their pale faces reflected their fright, the two older ones frightened all the more because they had felt the passage of the shredding discharge, had fine clay on their faces and bits of straw in their hair.

  At the same time they all heard a cow lowing, and the familiar, soothing sound seeped into their ringing eardrums, releasing them from their terror. But, still, they spoke in whispers as if afraid the gun might be agitated into going off again.

  “Don’t stir, Fintan!” Mikey commanded. “Wait till we move away.”

  Slowly, the two boys stood up and silently high-stepped in a semicircle until they were standing behind the gun. “Now, come away from there, Fintan,” Mikey whispered.

  Shoulder to shoulder they stood looking down. When the gun had writhed on the ground after the blast, it had sprung itself open and the brass casings at the end of each cartridge glistened brighter than the wheaten straw in which they lay.

  “Well, it can’t go off anymore,” Mikey said.

  “Bad gun,” Fintan said. And then in a croaking voice, and in sounds only a brother could understand, he told how the noise had frightened him. Finally, his words were drowned in his bawling. Mikey knelt to him in the strip of cool grass between the stubbles and the wire fence, and Fintan put his arms around his brother’s neck, buried his face in his shoulder.

  After a while, Mikey said, “That’s Doul Yank’s gun—the two hammers, and he’s always showing off the ivy on the barrels. ‘My etchings,’ he says.”

  Fintan loosened his grip and slithered down into the grass between Mikey’s knees. He was still trembling.

  “I wonder why he left it there in the grass,” Barlow said.

  “Janey!” Mikey hissed. “Maybe he’s doing his jow on the other side of the hedge.”

  This surmise caused them to gape at the stile as if Doul Yank was already coming to punish them for touching his gun. Then Barlow whispered, “If he’s on the other side of the hedge, he would have heard us and started shouting.”

  Despite that bit of reasoning, they kept their eyes on the stile. They waited for a movement in the bushes on the far side of the barbed wire that would announce the approach of a very angry man dressed in feathered hat and knickerbockers.

  Mikey whispered, “Maybe he fell off the stile and the gun landed on one side and he landed on the other.”

  Barlow looked in alarm at Mikey. “He’d have to be knocked out, or he’d be shouting about the gun.”

  Before the two boys could paralyze each other any further with fear, Fintan jumped up and trotted over to the stile. He was already climbing up onto the step before Mikey hissed at him to come back.

  Fintan grasped the top strand of wire between the sharp barbs and looked out into the bushes beyond. He lifted one hand off the wire and pointed. “There!” he said.

  “What’s there, Fintan?” Mikey asked.

  Fintan half turned on the stile and looked back. “Doul Yank,” he said.

  Barlow and Mikey came to their feet. “Where is he?” Barlow asked, but Fintan had turned away and was pointing again.

  “Fintan!” Mikey demanded his younger brother’s attention. “Look at me. Where is he?”

  “There,” Fintan said, and he pointed up in the sky as he turned around to look at Mikey. “On the ground.”

  With hesitation and trepidation, Mikey and Barlow went over to the stile and stood on each side of Fintan. There, on his back in the long grass and the dwarfy bushes, was Doul Yank with no hat on, his upper false teeth halfway out of his mouth and a very big hole his chest. It wasn’t the empty space in his chest that frightened them—that immediately signified to them Doul Yank was dead. It wasn’t the dull eyes or the grotesque way he was lying twisted in the nettles and grass on the other side of the stile; it wasn’t the utter immobility of the body and its parts; it was his yellow false teeth, so out of place, hanging over his bottom lip. The sight of those fiendish fangs set atonal bells to clanging in the boys’ heads.

  Quietly, Mikey said, “Fintan, turn around and catch our hands.” The two bigger boys yanked Fintan off the stile and dragged him through the stubbles. They were halfway across the field before Fintan finally got his feet under himself, and he got no answer from the fleeing boys when he asked them repeatedly, “What’s wrong?” Hots ong?

  39

  In the Sunroom

  In which Sam Howard is not convinced by what three young boys saw, but Patrick Bracken then tells what Peggy Mulhall told him.

  SAM SAID, “PATRICK, YOU haven’t told us anything that proves it was Peggy who shot the uncle.”

  “Fintan Lamb saw Peggy Mulhall when he looked to the sound of the shot,” Patrick said. “I saw Peggy in the spyglass squatting over Lawrence Gorman, even if I didn’t know at the time that Gorman was on the ground under her.”

  “Come, now, Patrick, that’s stretching it too far altogether,” Sam said. “It’s almost impossible to pinpoint the source of a shot in the countryside.”

  “Sam, Peggy Mulhall never even hesitated when I brought up the subject of Lawrence Gorman three years ago. She was sitting in the corner of her room, surrounded with pillows and blankets to keep her upright and warm. She was an old woman who knew that nothing and nobody in this world could touch her anymore. She died six weeks after I saw her for the last time. After I had delicately suggested that everyone had been whispering the wrong thing since nineteen fifty-one—saying it was her husband who had shot Doul Yank, she said, ‘Oh, it was me who . . .’”

  40

  What Peggy Mulhall Said She Did

  1951

  How Peggy Mulhall became an outside servant, served death up on a stile with a shotgun and then washed the body.

  “OH, IT WA
S ME shot the old bollicks all right, so I did,” is how she put it. “Mattie couldn’t shoot the bastard because he hadn’t the nerve, even though he told everyone he felt like shooting duncle. But Mattie never said anything to contradict what he knew everyone believed. He enjoyed it—everyone thinking it was him, so he did. He told me he was protecting me, the woman murderer. You know yourself, mister, like everything else about men and women, a woman murderer is worse than a man murderer. Maybe he didn’t want people to know he was married to a murderess. Murderess is so opposite of giving birth, what a woman is supposed to do.” Missus Mulhall paused and stared at the wall for a few moments. Then she shuddered. “I’ll tell you something else, mister: not only did I shoot Doul Yank, I enjoyed shooting the bollicks. I’d do it again if I had the chance, and again and again, so I would.”

  A sparkle flashed across Peggy Mulhall’s eyes as bright as a falling star in a January sky. “The look on his face when he knew!” She paused to enjoy what she was seeing in her memory. “I love remembering that look, and he knowing. The pity was that it all happened too quick. I wish the stuff had come out of the gun real slow, that he’d seen it coming for a couple of hours. If I had a meat grinder big enough, I would have stuffed him down into it feet first, so I would, while I turned the handle as slow as I could, maybe one turn an hour. That’s what I would have done. He was nothing but pure bollicks.” Another meteorite flashed across the wintry sky, and she drifted away, her dreamy face wrapped in the long, thick strands of her own gray hair. “I remember the exact minute the notion to kill the bollicks came into my head, so I do. I was in Estelle Butler’s pony and trap going to Gohen and she was talking dirty. She loved talking dirty, that one. I think there was something wrong with her between the legs. Mattie had gone to your man, Mister Esquire Howard, to see if anything could be done to stop Doul Yank taking money out of the bank against the farm. And Mister Esquire told Mattie that the only thing that would stop Doul Yank was death, so he did. In Estelle’s trap I suddenly discovered how the bollicks and death were going to meet. In the weeks it took me to get around to doing it, I felt strange, so I did, like strong or something, looking at the bollicks and knowing what he didn’t know, that he was soon going to be a rotten corpse instead of a rotten bollicks. It was like I was playing with him like a cat with a mouse, and I liked it, I wanted to keep putting it off, it was so nice to know what was coming. And then when Eddie-the-cap killed his brother on Sally Hill, it was like the first drill in a potato field had been opened and all I had to do was keep the horse in the furrow to keep the rest of the drills straight. And it was so nice when I did do it, so it was—shoot the bollicks. Besides having a newborn babby on my chest, the best feeling I ever had was executing that mangy hure. It was the look of him that made it so good. It was like he saw himself in a mirror for the first time when he looked at me, saw for the first time in his life how other people saw him, saw what a terrible old bollicks he was. He saw in my face the pleasure I was taking out of scooping him up and throwing him out of our lives, like I’d shovel over the hedge a dung left by a dog in a wrong place. I enjoyed killing him, so I did, for being such a smelly bit of dung. God, I felt so good about that, pulling the trigger of his own gun. But I didn’t know what the gun would do to him. It lifted him right off the stile and into the air and bits of his chest went flying out behind him. I never knew till after, when I was home again, that the gun broke one of my fingers, this one.”

  Peggy’s right hand moved on her lap and she moved a crooked index finger that looked like a long-ago broken toe on a crow’s foot.

  “It hit me in the chest, too, so it did, and I was sore for a month, the end of the gun, the wooden part, right on the breast. And it was because he was such a bollicks that he gave me the gun in the first place. He always thought he should have an outside servant to carry his gun for him like the English in India, besides one to serve him in the house. Bloody breakfast every morning with ketchup and the fish on Friday with the ketchup. Ketchup! I hate that fecking word: ketchup. Him and his fucking ketchup! That’s why he called me over when he saw me in the field on the far side of the hedge. I was just the inside servant who happened to be outside, so I was. He was so full of himself that it never crossed his mind that I’d been waiting for him, that I’d waited at the stile every morning since Father Coughlin got killed, knowing he’d come that way sooner or later. I only had to wait two times. It was all so easy, so it was. My plan was to offer to carry the gun to the other end of the field for him and shoot him down there in the ditch like you’d shoot an old animal that’s never going to come to anything after digging its grave and walking it into the hole so you wouldn’t have to be dragging it all over the place dead. But here he was handing me the gun across the stile as if to say, sure, go on and do it here. When he stopped to get his breath on the step of the stile and saw me with the barrels three foot away from his chest, he said, ‘Never point a gun at anyone, it could go off.’ And the look on his face when he saw the hate on my face! If I could paint like them lads on the calendars, I’d paint that look on his face and hang it over the fireplace, so I would. I might be sorry to God that I killed someone, but there’s some people God puts on this earth to be killed, they’re such bollickses, and Lawrence Gorman was one of them; took money out against our farm so he could have his name carved on the frigging wall of a fecking school in fucking India. It was written down in Father Coughlin’s little book, so it was: “Lawrence Gorman, one hundred pounds,” as clear as daylight. Coughlin and that bollocks.

  “I could never remember what happened to the gun, whether it fell out of my hands or whether I put it down somewhere. But I do remember hopping up on the stile and stepping over the barbed wire and hopping down on the other side where he was lying, dead before he hit the ground. He was staring up and the yellow teeth hanging out of him, making him look worse than when he was alive. I yanked off my knickers, so I did, without even getting it caught on the heels of my boots. I put a foot each side of his face, pulled up my dress and went into a sort of a half squat and did my pooley all over his face and into his eyes and into his mouth. The rotten bollocks. I hope he’s burning in hell, stuck on the end of the devil’s fork like a bit of bread against the grate on a frosty morning to toast it. I took off like a greyhound, so I did, and I got into Coughlin’s funeral in Gohen before the mass was over and nobody knew a thing.”

  41

  In the Sunroom

  In which Sam cogitates in the garden after being reminded it was he who told Mattie Mulhall that only death would stop Doul Yank from giving the farm to the bank.

  “GOD ALMIGHTY,” ELSIE SAID. “What terrible anger—to do that after shooting him. She must have gone over the edge thinking about Gorman selling the farm out from under them.”

  Patrick said, “It wasn’t just the money and the farm. It was the way he treated Peggy, spoke to her as if he was the liege lord and she the serf.”

  “And is that what she said I said?” Sam interrupted. “That death was the only thing would stop Gorman from taking the money?”

  “The exact words were, ‘Mister Esquire told Mattie that the only thing that would stop Doul Yank was death.”

  Sam sat back in his chair. His eyes drifted.

  Elsie was too taken up with Peggy Mulhall’s behavior after Doul Yank was dead to involve herself with Sam’s withdrawal. She asked, “What do you think, Patrick? Was she mad to do that, desecrate the corpse?”

  “I think if she were put on trial today, Else, the defense would claim her crime was one of passion, that she was temporarily insane.”

  Elsie pondered for a moment. “Is a crime of passion committed when we lose our humanness, when our animalness takes control? Was Peggy reduced to her animal state fighting for her life against a predator?” Elsie was musing more than talking to anyone. Then she saw that her husband was in a reverie, that only his body was in the sunroom. She signaled to Patrick with a finger. Patrick nodded.

  “Sam,” Elsie said.
“Sam,” she said again, and waited for her husband to turn to her. “You’ve been orbiting Mars, Sam.”

  “You’re right, Else. And I’m going to blast off again now into the garden for a minute.” He began to move forward in the chair, to propel himself slowly into a standing position. When he stepped out into the garden, he closed the door gently.

  “I know what he’s going to cogitate about, and I hope his cogitation helps him to come clean with himself after all these years.” Elsie said. “But I can’t get Peggy Mulhall out of my head, Patrick—what she did to the body. It’s such a desecration but at the same time it speaks to Peggy’s frame of mind. I knew her and she was always full of good spirits. She never behaved like someone who had murdered.”

  “I would think it was her delight with herself for having rid the world of Doul Yank that put her in a happy state of mind for the rest of her life,” Patrick said.

  “I could feel Peggy Mulhall’s anger when she was remembering, but I can’t feel sorry for him—Doul Yank.”

  “And I could feel her delight, too,” Patrick said.

  Patrick watched Sam through the sunroom wall; saw him scanning the seat of the bench before he sat down at the fishpond.

  Elsie came back from gazing at the pieta she had conjured up in her mind—woman giving water to wounded warrior. “I’m sorry for laughing, Patrick. Sometimes I laugh when I should be horrified or weeping,” Elsie said, “While Sam is out there, can you tell me what happened between Kevin Lalor-the-civil-servant and Deirdre Hyland?”

  “Women love the romantic,” Patrick said.

  “Even the breakup of romance,” Elsie said. “I wonder, are we always looking for clues to help us maintain our own relationships by examining the failures of others? Or is it simply that we love gossiping, need to chatter like magpies in the long grass of loneliness to keep in touch with each other, to give courage to each other?”