Lies the Mushroom Pickers Told

by Phelan, Tom;

  “He’s getting poetic, Patrick,” Elsie said, “and Sam . . . you’re making it sound as if you can only sparkle and effervesce if courtroom or inquest-room rules are in effect, when you would have absolute control of the floor.”

  “Yes, I am more likely to talk at length if inquest-room or courtroom rules are in effect, where I can eject an interrupter with the flick of a finger like I did with Spud Murphy.”

  Elsie turned to Patrick. “Sam’s introduction of playfulness into a serious conversation is the equivalent of a cerebral guilt-grimace trying to be suppressed.” And turning to her husband, she said, “I believe I can observe inquest-room protocol if that’s what’s needed for you to make your public confession.”

  “Public confession?” Sam asked.

  “Semi-public, Sam. Else and I are hardly the public,” Patrick said. “And, a little bit of public confession never hurt anyone—makes us feel that we’re no worse than most of our fellows.”

  “I smell a conspiracy,” Sam said.

  “There’s no conspiracy, Sam,” Patrick said. “But I do think that Else and I have independently reached an expectation.”

  “An expectation, no less!”

  Elsie said, “Patrick and I are only assuming we arrived at the same expectation. We have not discussed the matter. And Patrick may have only reached his expectation since he arrived today, while I reached mine a long time ago.”

  “Actually, I reached mine several years ago,” Patrick said, “not long after I began talking to the old players in the Coughlin and Gorman saga.”

  “You go first, Else,” Sam said. “What expectation did you arrive at a long time ago?”

  Without hesitation, Elsie said, “That you, David Samuel Howard, Esquire, would confess that, because of your position in Gohen, you are the cork in the bottle in which the killings of Coughlin and Gorman are sealed—the bottle being the people of Gohen and its surrounds.”

  “That’s a terrible thing to say, Else,” Sam said, but the edgy, defensive tone which he invariably used within the confines of his cerebral legal castle was not there.

  Elsie wasn’t finished. “Count one, Sam: you have pretended since nineteen fifty-one that the wool was pulled over your eyes at the inquest for Father Coughlin. Count two: for all these years you have hidden behind the findings pronounced by that oracle from Dublin about Lawrence Gorman’s death being an accident, so that his murderer wouldn’t be prosecuted. Otherwise, as a servant of the law, as a citizen, you would have been obligated to initiate charges against Doul Yank’s killer.”

  “Anything else, Else?”

  “Everyone in Gohen with half a brain knows that you know as much as everyone else about what happened in both cases.”

  “This is serious stuff, Else.”

  “Not really, Sam. The only difference this public confession of yours is going to make is that you will be acknowledging you are the one flame that the Catholics and Protestants comfortably flutter around in Gohen.”

  “I am an ecumenical center!” Sam exclaimed. “Like Simon Peter Lamb said when Roberts, M.D., gave him the reins of his pony, ‘I always knew if I lived long enough I’d get to do something terrible important before I died.’ And here I am with the power to convene an ecumenical council around myself in the village of Gohen.”

  “He’s at it again, Patrick,” Elsie said, “introducing nervous humor onto the floor while losing control of the guilt-grimace that’s twitching around inside his brain.”

  Sam leaned toward his wife and assumed a defiant posture. “Tell me, Else, what led you to this expectation—this expectation that I’d make a public confession, and I not even a Catholic?”

  “All these years I’ve listened to the people of Gohen talking about Coughlin and Gorman. And don’t sit there and pretend that you don’t know what was said, because I brought it all home to you. You always tried to dismiss it as gossip, but you knew damn well you were hearing the truth. And the truth is that you were more complicit than anyone else in covering up what really happened to the returned natives, and I knew that someday you would tell me.”

  “Jesus, Else!”

  “Jesus yourself, Sam! And now I want to hear what Patrick has to say on the matter, what led him to his expectation.”

  Patrick hesitated as if waiting for permission from Sam. The old man waved a hand and cleared the floor, resigned himself to receiving the contents of the second barrel of a double-barreled shotgun.

  “Mister Howard—Sam . . .”

  “Jesus! I’m glad I’m not David Samuel Howard, Esquire, to you, too, Patrick. I thought for a minute Else was reading out a charge against me in a courtroom.”

  “The guilt-grimace is winning,” Elsie said.

  Patrick started again. “Sam, your grandfather and father spent their lives in Gohen. You did the same, and your son is following you. Your family belongs to Gohen, the place of Gohen—your family lives with the people of Gohen, the saints and the sinners, the Catholics and the Protestants, the one Jewish family, the Quakers and the Methodists, the foolish and the wise and the entire cross-section that is to be found in a spot of Gohen. I would even say that your family loves Gohen. From your grandfather to your son, the Howards were and are respected, are seen as the longest standing, the most solid and the most reliable pillars in the village. Your family is the safe repository of every legal secret in Gohen. You can’t help but know that the people of Gohen are as protective of the Howards as much as the Howards are of the people of Gohen.”

  Sam asked, “Else, why aren’t you telling Patrick that he’s getting poetic? What are you getting at, Patrick? Spit it out. And why do I feel that an avalanche is thundering down the mountain?”

  “You said that the occurrence of new people in any group might give rise to a general anxiety—remember The Valley of—”

  Sam interrupted, “The occurrence of Coughlin and Gorman did give rise to anxiety in some people, but I never met Coughlin, and I only had a nodding acquaintance with Gorman. They didn’t make me anxious.”

  “But you knew the effect both were having on the community of Gohen,” Patrick said, and he paused for a moment before he continued. “I think that subconsciously—”

  “Patrick, don’t bring Freud into this,” Sam said.

  “Especially,” Elsie said to Patrick, “if you are holding Sam’s Freudian feet to the fire.” She turned to her husband. “Sam, you wield Freud when it suits you. So just relax and listen and stop being so defensive.”

  “Jesus!” Sam said. “Go ahead, Patrick. What subconscious thing—whatever that means—did I do?”

  “You told Mattie Mulhall to kill his uncle when you—”

  “Mister Bracken!” The wicker chair creaked in loud protest.

  “And you felt so guilty about putting the idea into his head that you confessed it to your wife in your kitchen under cover of foretelling how Lawrence Gorman would die.”

  “Bullscutter! I never told Mulhall any such thing.”

  “Not in so many words, but you did tell him that death was the only thing that would stop Doul Yank from taking the money out of the bank. That was like applying a not-too-subtle spark to Mattie Mulhall’s smoldering mind.”

  “Freud again, Patrick?” Sam waved his hand dismissively. “You’re accusing me of—”

  “Oh, Sam,” Elsie said. “You’re being accused of nothing, unless it’s a crime to be human.”

  “Mister Howard . . . Sam,” Patrick said, “I don’t believe that anyone could accuse you of ever having been anything but scrupulous in your professional and private life. I would never suggest—”

  “What’s another word for suggest? Insinuate? Accuse?”

  “Oh, for God’s sake, Sam, will you just shut up and listen to the man?”

  “Is there more?”

  Patrick said, “Simon Peter Lamb’s wife, Annie—my mother-in-law—was the first person I spoke to about Father Coughlin and Lawrence Gorman-the-Yank. What she said, and what everyone else said aft
er her, revealed there had been a cover-up and, of course, it became obvious that the cover-up could only have been possible with your assistance. Father Coughlin and Lawrence Gorman belonged to Catholic Gohen, and the Catholics all covered for you by pretending the wool had been pulled over your Protestant eyes—that the Catholics had outwitted the cleverest Protestant of them all, and you, Sam, went along with the pretense.”

  “Cleverest?” Elsie asked.

  Patrick continued, “You yourself said some revealing things here today. And I suspect you said them, maybe subconsciously, to make way for your public confession.”

  “Bullscutter. More Freud.”

  “You said, ‘We all knew that Mattie Mulhall killed Gorman, and we were all relieved when the Dublin inspector said the death was an accident.’”

  “And?”

  “Were you not the one who was most relieved, Sam, because of what you had said to Mattie?”

  “God! You’re in there in my head along with Else, misinterpreting the cracklings in my brain. What else, Patrick?”

  “Several items in the minutes of the inquest show how you controlled the answers given by the witnesses.”

  “Oh! For Christ’s sake, Patrick. You’re ascribing talents to me I do not have.”

  Patrick continued. “Two instances stuck out; you allowed the sergeant to wander all over the place with his irrelevant observations. At the same time you seemed to do all in your power to keep the talkative Eddie Coughlin from confessing. At one point Eddie was going to say why his brother was going to the Martyr Madden’s house, but you cut him off. The second instance was when you asked the Civil Servant if anyone had come to Sally Hill while he was standing watch over the body. The Civil Servant said yes, that Simon Peter Lamb had passed by on his way to Gohen for the sergeant. You let it go at that—didn’t ask him if anyone else had been there because you thought that Eddie Coughlin might have been there, too, and you didn’t want the Civil Servant to perjure himself.”

  “Is that it, Patrick? Is that what led you to think I would make a public confession?”

  “No, Sam. When you decided to get the inquest papers out of their hiding place, I believe you were consciously preparing the way for the confession.”

  “We’re out of the subconscious and into the conscious. Freud again! How did you know about the paneling on—?”

  “Deduction, Sam,” Patrick said. “Deduction, as the Civil Servant would have said to Mikey Lamb. And I suspect, too, that when you heard years ago that I was snooping around you asked your colleague, Mister Harrigan in Portlaoise—”

  “Alphonsus A., Esquire!” Elsie almost shouted. “Oh! Sam, you didn’t?”

  “Didn’t what, Else?”

  Patrick answered, “Ask him to keep the minutes of the inquest safe from prying eyes.”

  “Oh! Sam,” Elsie said, with reproof in her voice. “You always said Harrigan, Alphonsus A., Esquire, was an eegit.”

  “That’s exactly why I asked him,” Sam said, and Elsie clapped her hands together.

  “At last, at last,” she cried out. “Sam, you are finally admitting that—”

  “Now, Else,” Sam said, “don’t start. Don’t tell me what I am admitting. If I am going to admit anything, let me be the one to admit it.”

  “Oh, Sam,” Elsie said, “I am going to sit back and observe the formalities of the inquest room. I won’t say one word till you’re finished.”

  “Have you made a quick trip to Lourdes?” Sam asked.

  Elsie looked over at Patrick. Almost imperceptibly, she nodded. She folded her hands on her lap, pushed her shoulders into the cushion at the back of her chair.

  Sam asked, “Did you come here today, Patrick, to expose me? To steer me to the point where you could force me to make a confession?”

  “Not at all, Sam. If you had stuck to the village myth about you and Coughlin and Gorman, I would have gone away quietly. But when you began giving signs that you were ready to talk—”

  “—make a public confession,” Elsie lobbed in.

  “—I do admit that I tried to grease the way by telling you personal details about my own family, especially AnneMarie and my father and Mikey. I tried to obligate you to reciprocate. And when you told me about your David dying in Canada, I suspected you would eventually talk about yourself and Coughlin and Gorman. There was never any intention to expose you, because there’s nothing to expose. You and your family enjoy an enviable reputation in Gohen, and as far as I am concerned, that reputation is intact and well deserved.”

  “Maybe the reputation is not as well deserved as you want to believe, Patrick. In the cases of Coughlin-the-priest and Gorman-the-Yank, I flinched, turned a blind eye legally. I could be accused of aiding and abetting in the cover-up of two murders.”

  “Jesus, Sam, don’t put it that way,” Elsie said.

  “There’s no other way to put it, Else.”

  “You could be accused of taking care of the people of Gohen, protecting them from two predators,” Patrick said.

  There was silence in the sunroom. Elsie steered her eyes out into the garden, and she watched her pest-controlling thrush whacking another garden snail on the stone near the pond. Patrick turned and looked at a black and white magpie hopping across the short grass—a midget nun on a pogo stick. The snail shell broke, and the thrush tore the snail to shreds. Elsie could see the gobbled pieces swelling the gullet as they were forced down into the craw. For a moment the thrush seemed stunned or else was waiting for its body to adjust aerodynamically to the new load it had taken on board. Then, in a blur of wings it was up in the laburnum. The magpie went into a reflex crouch, sank down into the grass and scanned the sky with one eye in response to the thrush’s sudden movement, but it soon resumed its searching.

  “Of course, everything, or nearly everything, you have said—the two of you—is true,” Sam finally said. “And I agree with Else, I have been throwing roadblocks down across your way to slow down the arrival of this moment. The simple truth is that I failed the law.”

  “Sam,” Elsie said, “How can—?”

  “Else, the rules of the inquest room are in effect.” Mister Howard smiled faintly at his wife—smoothed the sharp edges she might have heard in his tone of voice.

  “First of all, Father Coughlin! I did go out of my way to elicit answers from the witnesses that would lead the jury to conclude the man’s death was accidental. I cut into every one of Eddie Coughlin’s answers to stop him hanging himself. Of course, what Deirdre Hyland almost said here in this house about Eddie killing his brother did influence me. Second, Lawrence-the-Doul Yank Gorman. For many years I was unable to decide whether I had purposefully told Mattie Mulhall how to solve his problem with his uncle. The fact that I couldn’t decide eventually persuaded me that I was simply avoiding accepting responsibility for what I had done. So, yes, I admit that I consciously—not subconsciously, Patrick—planted the idea in Mattie’s head that his uncle might have a hunting accident.”

  Mister Howard paused and narrowed his eyes as if ordering the points of an argument.

  “A day has not gone by since August nineteen fifty-one when I haven’t been tormented by my role in denying justice to Coughlin and Gorman. Of course, I have a rationale that I use to give myself some ease.” Another pause. “In a small community where everyone knows everyone else, more than the facts immediately surrounding a case influence the application of the law. In the larger, anonymous society of the big city, prosecutors concentrate on a couple of moments of unsociable behavior in the accused’s life. In the small community, the prosecutor, whether he likes it or not, and the coroner, whether he likes it or not, know the background of the accused and the backgrounds of the people close to sudden and violent death. In the case of Father Coughlin, most people saw him as a greedy spider. He was also unconscionably cruel to his own sister and brother. He even tried to get his hands on the Widow Madden’s tiny World War I pension. He had such an inflated opinion of his status that he never even m
ade his own bed. He was critical that our way of life hadn’t changed much since he had left it—judging it by standards that no one except himself was familiar with. He was the classic case of the returned emigrant with the enlightened attitude. To put it bluntly and crudely, the community collectively said to Father Coughlin, ‘To hell with you, Jack!’ When he died, there was no one to stand up for him, not even the servants of the law—because they too, by association with the village of Gohen, had been included in his scorn. If the coroner-as-resident knew more than the coroner-at-law, if he knew that to recommend further inquiries by the guards would allow an insufferable man to further disturb the community from his grave, then I believe the coroner-as-resident was wise and humane in this case. No members of the community ever approached the coroner to thank him for being wise and humane; as Else said, they all pretend that the wool was pulled over his eyes by witnesses who didn’t tell everything they knew. In this instance, the coroner is pleased to be perceived as a man with bushy eyebrows made all the more bushy with strands of sheep’s wool.” Sam smiled. “Doul Yank’s death was just a variation on the same theme, but he was a bigger fool than Jarlath Coughlin. He tried to impress on the natives that he was a gentleman farmer—thinking a gentleman was someone who gets up late, gives unasked-for advice, dresses up to shoot birds and has tomato ketchup with every meal. Lawrence Gorman had an overblown sense of his personal importance.”

  Mister Howard rested his hand on the book with the brass bookmarker beside him. “Not only had Doul Yank got the best part of the bargain when he promised to will the farm to the nephew, he was willing to put Mattie and Peggy Mulhall into debt so he could play the role of the great white benefactor. Instead of being anyone’s benefactor, he was one big pain in the arse and I don’t know anyone who wasn’t glad to be rid of him.” Sam stopped talking and looked at his wife. “That’s all, Else. You can now unloose your tongue.”

  “Sam,” Elsie said, “why didn’t you tell me this during all these years when our heads were on the same pillow in the dark?” She went to her husband and pulled the side of his face into her chest.