by Edna O'Brien
And still such a long way to go in between stopping and starting and eating Brussels sprouts.
Christmas is not long gone. It went by without too much event. I did not partake of the sacraments. I received three presents, a nightdress that will be perfect for my lascivious nights, a frothy affair; a casket, and a teacloth which has scripted in it my character according to my astrological sign. If I am well-placed, I am magnanimous, faithful, bashful, aspiring in an honourable way at high matters, a lover of fair dealings, of sweet and affable conversation, wonderfully indulgent, reverencing aged men and full of charity and godliness. If the stars are ill-placed, then I shall waste my patrimony, suffer everyone to cozen me, am hypocritical and stiffe in maintaining false tenets, am ignorant, careless, gross, of dull capacity and schismatical.
If again I come to love a member of the opposite sex or even a member of my own sex, I shall try not to gabble. It won’t be easy for me, brought up as I was among hens and bullocks and buckets and winds and clotheslines and people, all gabbling themselves to distraction. But even if I default in that I shall spend my spirit in other things, spirit is spirit the way gut is gut and limestone, limestone.
To see a door close and know that the very last person has gone out, that is a most unsettling thing. No one to call to, no one to cling to, no one. Not even Humpty Dumpty or Old King Cole. I reach out and grip the fur, the grey fur of the ample quilt. Armenian goat as far as I can tell from my desultory knowledge of wild life. A blow. The hairs of this quilt are not nearly sturdy enough to bask in, to tug at, to wallow. They give way. They come off in the fingers as mere tufts. I touch the wall behind the sateen headboard. Knock knock. It is not knife-edged as I feared. Something is. Something goes whirr whirr, like the Duke’s lawn-mower; and snip snip like blind Dr Rath clipping the stitches. Big ungainly stitches in those days, when Lil gave birth. Black herringbone stitches made out of catgut, same substance, got from sheep as in the strings of a fiddle. I resemble her, except in one particular. She had a little green floating spot on the white of an eye, a purty little spot it was, and if I am to develop any new characteristics I shall plump for one, one that moves slightly according to the curvature and gaze of the eye. Not a bright green, more or less misted. I think I perceived the bottles of syrup as being shaken while I was still in her, in her chambers. I wrote and asked if she had any inkling, any hunch, about the exact colour of her innards, my earliest known abode. I thought it was very likely she would come up with suggestions, being as she had such a talent for colour schemes in the linoleums, the madeira cakes, the wallpapers, the borderings and the wool rugs that she fashioned through the long nights. I seem to remember streaks of colour, zebras, sometimes pink, sometimes green, sometimes too green, likewise too pink. I reamed off a list, became prodigal, even resorted to shadings. I filched my ideas from nature, various spools of thread, a paint card, seed catalogues, and a luxurious vanitary shop where I sometimes go and pretend that I am contemplating buying a topaz bath. I love going there. I dress up in borrowed plumes, look like a toff. I said she might like to be extravagant, she might like to sally into inventiveness, give vent to herself, lie if needs be. No sooner had I posted the letter than I realised what a débâcle I had made. My mother is dead. To make matters worse, my mother is only fairly recently dead and I realised that the postman, who is a dunce and a dunderhead, and bunioned from his peregrinations, would deliver it out of habit. I knew that his feet would conduct him there and some other part of his palsied anatomy would haul the epistle out of his big grey canvas bag, and that he would say, as he so faithfully says, at the sight of any foreign postmark, in sentimental tones, “Hands across the water.” I realised that Boss would be aghast by the untowardness, by the brazenness, by the cruelty of such an action. Pleasant to know that he could not take action, that he would not be able to throw sticks and stones as they did to Dick Studdard. Water divides us, and more than the nine Dedannan waves at that. Hurray for all waters, spa waters, bog waters, lone wells, tobhairs, lakes, rivers, streams, Baptism fonts and of course the oyster-breeding seas.
*
Her funeral was a comic event, despite the keenings and the ululations. A sizeable crowd, all in sable, the mourners. Grievously stung they were by nettles that grew in abundance. We took a short cut in order not to have to walk over the bordered paths. It was as if we couldn’t get her in quick enough, into the bowels of the earth, where the moles and the sprites are reputed to be, have their intricate routes and conduits. On the way, a bicycle was espied, propped up against a yew tree, a man’s bicycle, an upstairs model, flung. Some of21 the men, the more loquacious ones, interpolated on whose it could be, suggested various names, Christian names and surnames and nicknames, but having reached no conclusion then started to wonder aloud why the owner had left it thus, what importunity had overtaken him, and they agreed that he had either gone because he got taken short, or to have a fit, or to find a well of water, or to pray to God, or to lie down for bucolic reasons with a woman or a travelling woman, or a married woman, or a beast, or no other agent at all. Then came the suggestion that the rider of the bicycle might have been a she who had gone to do any one of the aforementioned things or to deliver herself of a bastard child. Not the most reverential thought. The clay got richer, redder, the deeper they dug. They were quick with the spade, made darty incisions; and of course there were fine manifestations of sorrow – dribbles, sniffles, tears, gulps all stifled by handkerchief or make-do handkerchief. A stripling went by, a fellow with unmatching eyes, looking for sheep of his that had strayed. Five or six. God dammit, a matchless eyed man of miserable means ought to know whether he had lost five sheep or six. Seeing the coffin and the mourners, he realised what he had blundered into and squatting to denote his sympathy, he removed his cap and asked whose funeral it was. At the crucial moment I made an ape of myself, behaved in the following manner. I jumped in, prostrated myself, bawled, and woe betide, a second, a more ludicrous disaster, I sprained my ankle. I need hardly tell you of the furore that ensued. Excitement craned its head. Maybe that is22 why I jumped in, to leaven the occasion. I doubt it. I lack the talent for instigating comedy. They put it down to grief. Some said a seizure, some said cracked, some said highly strung. Highly strung! I eat like a horse, the reason I eat is to encase my heart in a solid fortress of fat, so that I can at last decently and uneventfully expire without much ado, to return in the end to materiam primam whate’er it be.
There were refreshments after the funeral. The catering! She would not have tolerated it. There was spotted dick and big biscuits that were damp, and had somewhere in their lifespan been neighbours to paraffin oil. On the savoury side there were chunks of ham thrown on to plates, some with a dollop of potato salad and others with a yellow piccalilli, depending on the whim of the two serving ladies. The whole event lacked finesse. Naturally there weren’t enough chairs. People had to sit on the edges of chairs, which made the cutting of their ham precarious. Then the catsup was thin and scalding and restraint was not executed in the pouring of it. This was due to the seating more than to any avidity. Things were said, not too many things, her praises sung. They discussed her memoriam card, discussed what mottoes it could contain. I had always noticed her penchant for the colloquial, for things like “The early bird catches the worm,” but I had to sit there and hear the adages of Saints Jerome and Bonaventure trotted out as applicable material. How little we make of what we know of anyone, how little we employ it.
Of course she did not die without a long illness, mothers never do. Fathers likewise.
I went to nurse her, grudgingly, no, not grudgingly, with pangs. Birth pangs, life pangs, death pangs – they must be cousins. She was upstairs, same bed as she had given birth in, had had her lumbago in, and numerous other afflictions. I remained out of the room as much as possible, out in the hallway, humming so that she would know I was there, doing chores. I varnished a floor but the fumes of the turpentine did not agree with her, in other words I varnished ha
lf a floor. While in the room I washed her sores, polished the mirrors and made plans for future times – Christmas, holiday, and so forth. There is nothing so offensive as hoodwinking the nearly dead. We die by degrees but there is one part of us that decidedly knows when it is all just over. There is one strand of the mind that reckons with that passing over and she was in possession of it. I could hear it, registering, like a clock and invisibly ticking. There was altar wine on the window-sill and it bore a label from the land of Spain. She declined that. It was the priests’ wine, the canons’. Poor canons, their old scrotums like dust, shedding maybe, shedding dust. Their organs, pink or whey? Poor canon, he coughed when he came, to shrive her. Not a bit standoffish. No preamble. The sacrament was always under a cloth, a cloth that had little darns in it. She swallowed with agony, to hear her swallow was to have pity for her, the stitches under her throat, jabbing like needles. Some distraction always intervened, like a cat sidled in, a kettle sang, or a bird sang, or something fell off the bed, usually her comb. Once he came with the chalice empty. After that the curate came. Poor canons, old, grey, teetering, lonely and loony, with their frock coats and their faithful housekeepers, that breed of dark warted women that do wait upon them.
I would go out on the landing again and talk in. She saw the treachery of those plans regarding Christmas and holidaying, and her eyes were as daggers, blue, cobalt blue, asking not, not to go. Ranting, raving. I heard things no one ought to hear, no one or everyone. She listened for a lorry going by, mentioned the driver, a big brute she said, bullet-headed, said he could jack it up, referred to his jockstrap, said Off with the jockstrap and fire. When the pain got less or the morphine got more she prayed. How she prayed. How she then smiled. The clouds she said, so similar to the bushes, to the bushiness of the bushes. The clouds had the ramble of bushes. She said why shouldn’t she walk and talk, though not even a buzzard was contradicting her. How she grieved. She said you could put all the pleasures that had gone into her life into a little thimble, and she looked for a thimble, though sewing was not one of her accomplishments. The pleasures she listed, a flower between the pages of a book, a journey to America, some hats with veiling, a return journey, and fresh peaches that she put her lips, her teeth, and finally her gums into. She said her little joys ever after were her little pullets, in their dust baths, dozing and sonoring away, cogitating to lay their first egg. She held it somewhere in her mind’s hand, the little egg. She scolded a pullet because of laying out, said did they not know there was a henhouse. She went in search of them, calling and cackling and stopped when she came to a mound, and said why shouldn’t she risk going up, and in sport crown herself high king or high queen of that place. And again without moving her body except to stir a toe in order to rub another, her head and eyes moved as she went up the mound and she said there was a fine view of the top storey of the house and announced that the slates that had been always missing were still missing. She uttered a snatch of a song, half song, half prayer. She said the place had three trees, a sycamore with its pods flat and empty, an oak and a little hazel bush. She said the bark on the oak was grey and shredding like she was. Then some children went by, a butcher’s son, a veterinary surgeon’s son, a druggist’s son, children all connected with the dark themes of life. Gabbling they were. She searched in the grass pretending to be searching for eggs. It seems they told her to beware of snakes and she said Insolent buggers they were, with their guns and their cowboy caps, and she sent them packing on their way, said No trespassing, no trespassers. And she stayed there and said how she longed for it not to be dark, but to be bright, bright days and shafts of light passing through her and her children all young again and around her as in a needlework, in their frills, in their finery, in their little buttoned boots; and she longed and she longed for it and she reproached God and man and said it was not happening but that everything was getting dark and the mound with it and that the house was waiting for herself to come in and trim the doddery aladdin and light it up. Suddenly she sat up and said was there an R in the month because if so, we were running a risk of pneumonia, sitting out there on damp dunged grass. I said no, which was all I could say. Her eyes were daggers asking not to go, not, not to go. She ran her fingers through the fringes of the coverlet as if they were rings, trinkets, and she said foul words that she could not have known. I had washed the sheets, four sheets washed per day because of the amount she haemorrhaged. We could hear them on the clothesline, as they flapped about. That, and the noise of the rain, rain of such urgency, blue in the far-off places, colourless close at hand, brown where it lodged, big drops falling on the blades of grass, appointing itself on hedge and grass blade, then more and more, buckets of rain and a wind, a whining wind, and everything shifting, even daisies and dandelions, particularly daisies and dandelions, small things uprooted, and the dogs at the steps moaning to get in to her, dogs wet and sated, sated from killing rabbits, coated in rain but tasting of blood. The dogs, she said. The dogs, I said. She was off on another transport.
Dogs. Some dogs have nice hair, some dogs hunt foxes, cross dogs bite, mountain dogs have stiff coats, dogs drink water and milk, dogs kill cats, dogs eat anything.
A scuttle she said her mind was, clumps where thoughts should be. Big bulbous clumps, black in the interior. She admitted that she was losing her faith. It was forsaking her at the very moment when she needed to have it in order to present her credentials. She raved but then became very coherent in the moments before dying. She said something about a hatpin. It was then I should have quiffed her hair, or put one of her Spanish combs through it, or told her some little things such as that chicory is an adulterative in coffee. But no, I let her rave. That hatpin prodded her. It turned out not to be a hatpin at all but a pair of shoes that had got stolen by a tinker woman from the window-sill where they were put to dry. The sergeant traced them for her and found that they had been sold for three and elevenpence and the matter went to court. In the court, the purchaser, a creamery manager’s wife, perjured herself, got flummoxed, and said she thought the tinker woman was a travelling saleswoman. The judge lit into her and gave a lecture about the sixth and seven Commandments. Lil said the scarifying bit was when she had to go up on the rostrum and identify the said shoes. According to her they looked wretched because of not having been dusted, let alone polished and buffed. She said she would have done anything to have wiped them with the nap of her coat, and have the case quashed. The culprit got a month in the county jail. “And I in dread of peelers” she said over and over again. It had gnawed into her, that crime, that cruelty, like the rats that gnawed behind the wainscotting in Bruges or Brussels or wherever I had made that dastard journey with my spouse, Dr Flaggler. I should have embraced her, praised her for her good deeds, but I didn’t. Maybe I didn’t want to. She rose, or at least she attempted to rise, held on to the brass rung, tried to heft herself up, ordered the pony to be tackled, asked to be taken out of the stifling room, to the slopes of yellow gorse, to pick blackberries. She begged to come back from death’s door. She mouthed it. She stopped mouthing it. Then it was so simple, so hideously simple, like the shutters going up on a big house once the season is over. It was not at all like the thing called death, it was like she was being carted, being borne in, in, in, to elsewhere, to nowhere. When I held her then, it was like holding a giant vegetable marrow. The absence of pulse and heartbeat changes everything. We did the thing with the pennies and ordered a brown shroud.
We put ourselves to the task of clearing and cleaning. She left no heirlooms, only a fan, her ring and a little reticule. There was Boss and I. He sat by the fire, and the cries that emitted from him were not cries he was aware of. He didn’t refer to her directly but kept recalling her contemporaries, girls with oaken hair, her murdered brother, blind Dr Rath. He said blind Dr Rath was a grand fellow and a great sport, had organised card games and had once put up his own table as a stake and lost it, a dining-room table, arbutus.
“You’ll stay,” he said. I
knew it would come but not as swiftly as that. I was not ready. I baulked. Why hadn’t they died together, the way each succeeding pair of dogs had done. I donned her brown astrakhan coat and set out on foot. I walked fields, then more fields, to a river and back. An uneventful walk, apart from the pondering. Heaps of stones, great galleries of stones to the sky, to the pissing heavens, rows upon rows of stone walls and kilns. Whereas the Egyptians made pyramids. The prevailing colour was grey – sky, stone, hemisphere, all alike, all grey, tapwater grey. The leaves fell off, it would be more precise to say that they were ripped off, because there was nothing efficacious about the winds that day. Then they got themselves tagged on to some sharp point, a spike or a stump or a barb of wire. I saw it all, the future, his spleen, the humours, going coursing, on the batter, his suits having to be soaked, then the recuperation, water bottles, powders, tisanes, and along with all that, the daily rages, the cabalistic outbursts. I could not, Dodge City or no Dodge City.
When I got back to the house he was sleeping on the bedchair. He had taken a draught, the beaker was beside him, stained brown from valerian. I packed so that he would know what he had to know before being told it formally. The suitcase was down by the hall door, along with some bullrushes that I had picked.
“You shite you,” he said. After he had closed the door I heard the upper and the lower bolts snap into place.
I see the animal starting up in people, first it is a paw, then the entire tendon of a leg that goes striped and furry, and the eyes, those soft savage instruments glint with a mania of murderous yellow. In such situations I look away. Would to God I were a knitter because in such situations I could knit, or better still crochet.
