by Ray Bradbury
And he drove softly away.
Let twenty-three hours of sleep, breakfast, lunch, supper, late night-cap pass. Let hours of writing bad script into fair script fade to peat mist and rain, and here this young writer comes again, another midnight, out of that Georgian mansion, its door throwing a warm hearth of color before me as I tread down the steps to feel Braille-wise in fog for the car I knew hulked there. I heard its enlarged and asthmatic heart gasping in the blind air, and Mike coughing his “gold by the ounce is not more precious” cough.
“Ah, there you are, sir!” said Mike.
And I climbed in the sociable front seat and gave the door its slam. “Mike,” I said, smiling.
And then the impossible! The car jerked as if shot from the blazing mouth of a furnace, roared, bounced, skidded, then cast itself in full, stoning ricochet down the path among shattered bushes and writhing shadows. I snatched my knees as my head hit the roof in staccato.
Mike! I almost shouted. Mike!
Visions of Los Angeles, Mexico City, Paris, jumped through my mind. I gazed in frank dismay at the speedometer. Eighty, ninety, one hundred miles; we shot out a great blast of gravel to hit the main road, rocked over a bridge, and slid down in the midnight streets of Kilcock. No sooner in than out of town at one hundred ten miles, I felt all Ireland’s grass put down its ears when we, with a yell, soared over a rise.
Mike! I thought, and turned.
There he sat, only one thing the same. On his lips a cigarette burned, smoking first one eye, then the other.
But the rest of Mike, above the cigarette, was changed as if the Adversary himself had squeezed, molded, and fired him with dark hands. There he was, whirling the wheel round about, over around; here we frenzied under trestles, out of tunnels, here knocked crossroad signs spinning like weathercocks in whirlwinds.
Mike’s face: the wisdom was drained from it, the eyes neither gentle nor philosophical, the mouth neither tolerant nor at peace. It was a face washed raw, a scalded, peeled potato, a face more like a blinding searchlight raking its steady and meaningless glare ahead while his quick hands snaked and bit and bit the wheel again to lean us round curves and jump us off cliff after cliff of night.
It’s not Mike, I thought, it’s his brother. No, a dire thing’s hit his life, some affliction or blow, a family sorrow or sickness, yes, that’s it.
And then Mike spoke, and his voice, it was changed too. Gone was the mellow peat bog, the moist sod, the warm fire in out of the cold rain, gone the gentle grass. Now the voice cracked at me, a clarion, a trumpet, all iron and tin.
“Well, how ya been since! How is it with ya!” he cried.
And the car, it too had suffered violence. It protested the change, yes, for it was an old and much-beaten thing that had done its time and now only wished to stroll along, like a crusty beggar, toward sea and sky, careful of its breath and bones. But Mike would have none of that, and cadged the wreck on as if thundering toward Hell, there to warm his cold hands at some special blaze. Mike leaned, the car leaned; great livid gases blew out in fireworks from the exhaust. Mike’s frame, my frame, the car’s frame, racked all together, shuddered and ticked wildly.
My sanity was saved from being torn clean off the bone by a simple act. My eyes, seeking the cause of their plaguing flight, ran over the man blazing there like a sheet of ignited vapor from the Abyss, and laid hold to the answering clue.
“Mike,” I gasped, “it’s the first night of Lent!”
“So?”
“So,” I said, “remembering your Lenten promise, why’s that cigarette in your mouth?”
Mike cast his eyes down, saw the jiggling smoke, and shrugged.
“Ah,” he said, “I gave up the ither.”
“The ither?” I cried.
“The other!” He corrected the word.
And suddenly it was all clear.
For what seemed like a thousand nights, at the door of the old Georgian house, I had accepted from Odd John a fiery douse of Irish “against the chill.” Then, breathing hot summer charcoal from my scorched mouth, I had walked out to a cab where sat a man who, during all the long evenings’ waiting for me to phone for his services, had lived in Heeber Finn’s pub.
Fool! I thought. How could you have forgotten!
And there in Heeber Finn’s, during the long hours of lazy talk that was like planting and bringing to crop a garden among busy men, each contributing his seed or flower, and wielding the implements, their tongues, and the raised, foam-hived glasses, their own hands softly curled about the dear drinks, there Mike had taken into himself a mellowness.
And that mellowness had distilled itself down in a slow rain that damped his smoldering nerves and put the wilderness fires in every limb of him out. Those same showers laved his face to leave the tidal marks of wisdom, the lines of Plato and Aeschylus, there. The harvest mellowness colored his cheeks, warmed his eyes soft, lowered his voice to a husking mist, and spread in his chest to slow his heart to a gentle trot. It rained out his arms to loosen his hard-mouthed hands on the shuddering wheel and sit him with grace and ease in his horsehair saddle as he gentled through the fogs that kept us and Dublin apart.
And with the malt on my own tongue, fluming up my sinus with burning vapors, I had never detected the scent of any spirits on my old friend here.
“Ah,” said Mike again, “yes; I give up the other.”
The last bit of jigsaw fell in place.
Tonight, the first night of Lent.
Tonight, for the first time in all the nights I had driven with him, Mike was sober.
All those other one hundred and forty-odd nights, Mike hadn’t been driving careful and easy just for my safety, no, but because of the gentle weight of mellowness sloping now on this side, now on that side of him as we took the long, scything curves.
Oh, who really knows the Irish, and which half of them is which? Mike? Who is Mike—and what in the world is he? Which Mike’s the real Mike, the one that everyone knows?
I will not think on it! I thought.
There is only one Mike for me. The one that Ireland shaped herself with her weathers and waters, her seedings and harvestings, her brans and mashes, her brews, bottlings, and ladlings-out, her summer-grain-colored pubs astir and advance with the wind in the wheat and barley by night: you may hear the good whisper way out in forest, on bog, as you roll by. That’s Mike to the teeth, eye, and heart, to his easygoing hands. If you ask what makes the Irish what they are, I’d point on down the road and tell where you turn to Heeber Finn’s.
The first night of Lent, and before you could count nine, we were in Dublin!
The next night I was at Kilcock and coming out of the great himself’s house, and there was my taxi waiting and puttering its motor. I leaned in to put a special bottle in the hands of dear Mike.
Earnestly, pleadingly, warmly, with all the friendly urging in the world, I looked into that fine man’s raw, strange, torchlike face.
“Mike,” I said.
“Sir!” he shouted.
“Do me a favor,” I said.
“Anything!” he shouted.
“Take this,” I said. “It’s the best bottle of Irish moss I could find. And just before we leave now, Mike, drink it down, drink all or some. Will you do that, Mike? Will you promise me, cross your heart and hope to die, to do that?”
He thought on it, and the very thought damped the ruinous blaze in his face.
“Ya make it terrible hard on me,” he said.
I forced his fingers shut on the bottle.
“Give up something else for Lent, Mike,” I said.
“There’s nothing else to give up, in all of Ireland. Wait a minute! I’ll give up women!”
“Have you ever had any?”
“No,” said Mike, “but I’ll give them up anyway!”
He drank.
And as he drank, a great calm, a great peace, a great serenity came over his mouth, his eyes, his face; his bones quietly slumped in his clothes.
I looked
into that face.
“Ah, Mike, Mike,” I said, “you’re back!”
“I was long away,” he said.
We drove to Dublin, slowly.
Chapter 23
It was when I was going into the Royal Hibernian Hotel that a beggar woman shoved her filthy baby in my face and cried:
“Ah, God, pity! It’s pity we’re in need of! Have you some?!”
I had some somewhere on my person, and slapped my pockets and fetched it out, and was on the point of handing it over when I gave a small cry, or exclamation. The coins spilled from my hand.
In that instant, the babe was eyeing me, and I the babe.
Then it was snatched away. The woman bent to paw after the coins, glancing up at me in some sort of panic.
“What on earth?” I guided myself up into the lobby, where, stunned, I all but forgot my name. “What’s wrong? What happened out there?”
It was the baby, the beggar’s child. It was the same, same nose and mouth, but the eyes, the same eyes seen years ago, when I traveled Ireland and saw the poor. Far back in 1939, yes, but—my God!—the same!
I walked slowly back to the hotel door and opened it to look out.
The street was empty. The beggar woman and her bundle had run off to some other alley, some other hotel, some other arrival or departure.
I shut the door and wandered to the elevator.
“No!” I said. “It can’t be.”
And suddenly remembering to move, got in.
The child would not go away.
The memory, that is.
The recollection of other years and days in rains and fogs, the mother and her small creature, and the soot on that tiny face, and the cry of the woman herself, which was like a shrieking of brakes put on to fend off damnation.
Sometimes, late at night, I heard her wailing as she went off the cliff of Ireland’s weather and down upon rocks where the sea never stopped coming or going but stayed forever in tumult.
But the child stayed too.
I caught myself brooding at tea or after supper over the Irish coffee and saying, “That again? Silly! Silly!”
I’ve always made fun of metaphysics, astrology, palmistry. But this is genetics, I thought. That is the same woman begged my gaze and displayed an unlovely unwashed child fourteen years ago! And what of that child; did she have a new one, or borrow one to display, as the seasons passed?
Not quite, I thought. She’s a solved puzzle to me. But the babe? There was the true and incredible mystery! It, like her, had not changed! Incredible! Impossible! Madness!
And so it was I found myself, whenever I fled encounters with the two destroyers, film director and Whale, searching the Dublin streets for the beggar woman and her changeless babe.
From Trinity College on up O’Connell Street and way around back to St. Stephen’s Green, I pretended a vast interest in fine architecture but secretly watched for her and her dire burden.
I bumped into the usual haggle of banjo pluckers and shuffle dancers and hymn singers and tenors gargling in their sinuses and baritones remembering a buried love or fitting a stone on their mother’s grave, but nowhere did I surprise my quarry.
At last I approached the doorman at the Royal Hibernian Hotel.
“Nick,” I said.
“Sir,” said he.
“That woman who often lurks about at the foot of the steps …”
“Ah, the one with the babe?”
“Do you know her!”
“Know her! Sweet Jesus, she’s been the plague of my years since I was thirty, and look at the gray in my hair now!”
“She’s been begging that long?”
“And forever beyond.”
“Her name …?”
“Molly’s as good as any. McGillahee, I think. Beg pardon, sir, why do you ask?”
“Have you looked at her child, Nick?”
His nose winced at a sour smell. “Years back, I quit. These beggar women keep their kids in a dread style, sir, a condition roughly equivalent to the bubonic. They neither wipe nor bathe nor mend. Neatness would work against beggary, do you see? The fouler the better, that’s the motto, eh?”
“Right. Nick, so you’ve never really examined that infant?”
“Aesthetics being a secret part of my life, I’m a great one for averting the gaze. It’s blind I am to help you, sir. Forgive.”
“Forgiven, Nick.” I passed him two shillings. “Oh … have you seen those two lately?”
“Strange. Come to think, sir. They have not come here in”—he counted on his fingers and showed surprise—“why, it must be a couple of weeks! They never done that before.”
“Never? Thanks, Nick.”
And I wandered down the steps, back to the search.
It was obvious she was hiding out.
I did not for a moment believe she or the child was sick.
Our collision in front of the hotel, the baby’s eyes and mine striking flint, had startled her like a fox and shunted her off God-knows-where, to some other alley, some other road, some other town.
I smelled her evasion. She was a vixen, yes, but I felt myself, day by day, a better hound.
I took to walking earlier, later, in the strangest locales. I would leap off buses in Ballsbridge and prowl the fog, or taxi halfway out to Kilcock and hide in pubs. I even knelt in Dean Swift’s church to hear the echoes of his Houyhnhnm voice, but stiffened alert as the merest whimper of a child carried through.
It was all madness, to pursue such a brute idea. Yet on I went, scratching where the damned thing itched.
And then by sheer and wondrous accident, while I took my nightly swim in a dousing downpour that smoked the gutters and fringed my cap with a thousand drops, I turned a corner …
And this woman shoved a bundle in my face and cried a familiar cry:
“If there’s mercy in your soul—”
She stopped, riven. She spun about. She ran.
For in the instant, she knew. And the babe in her arms, with the shocked small face and the swift bright eyes, he knew too! Both let out some kind of fearful cry.
God, how that woman could race.
She put a block between her backside and me while I gathered breath to yell: “Stop, thief!”
It seemed an appropriate yell. The baby was a mystery I wished to solve. And there she vaulted off with it, a wild thief.
So I dashed after, crying. “Stop! Help! You there!”
She kept a hundred yards between us for the first half mile, up over bridges across the Liffey and finally up Grafton Street, where I jogged into St. Stephen’s Green, to find it … empty.
She had absolutely vanished.
Unless, of course, I thought, turning in all directions, letting my gaze, idle, it’s into The Four Provinces pub she’s gone …
That’s where I went.
It was a good guess.
I shut the door quietly.
There, at the bar, was the beggar woman, putting a pint of Guinness to her own face and giving a shot of gin to the babe for happy sucking.
I let my heart pound down to a slower pace, then took my place at the bar and said, “Bombay gin, please.”
At my voice, the baby gave one kick. The gin sprayed from his mouth. He fell into a spasm of choked coughing.
The woman turned him over and thumped his back to stop the convulsion. As she did so, the red face of the child faced me, eyes squeezed shut, mouth wide, and at last the seizure stopped, the cheeks grew less red, and I said:
“You there, baby.”
There was a hush. Everyone in the bar waited.
I finished.
“You need a shave.”
The babe flailed about in his mother’s arms with a loud strange wounded cry, which I cut off with a simple:
“It’s all right. I’m not the police.”
The woman relaxed as if all her bones had gone to porridge.
“Put me down,” said the babe.
She put him down on the floor.<
br />
“Give me my gin.”
She handed him his little glass of gin.
“Let’s go in the saloon bar, where we can talk.”
The babe led the way with some sort of small dignity, holding his swaddling clothes about him with one hand and the gin glass in the other.
The saloon bar was empty, as I had guessed. The babe, without my help, climbed up into a chair at a table and finished his gin.
“Ah, Christ, I need another,” he said in a tiny voice.
While his mother went to fetch a refill, I sat down, and the babe and I eyed each other for a long moment.
“Well,” he said at last, “what do ya think?”
“I don’t know. I’m waiting and watching my own reactions,” I said. “I may explode into laughter or tears at any moment.”
“Let it be laughter. I couldn’t stand the other.”
On impulse, he stuck out his hand. I took it.
“The name is McGillahee. Better known as McGillahee’s Brat. Brat, for short.”
“Brat,” I said, and gave him my name.
He gripped my hand hard with his tiny fingers.
“Your name fits nothing. But Brat, well, don’t a name like that go ten thousand leagues under? And what, you may ask, am I doing down here? And you up there so tall and fine and breathing the high air? Ah, but here’s your drink, the same as mine. Put it in you, and listen.”
The woman was back with shots for both. I drank, watched her, and said, “Are you the mother …?”
“It’s me sister she is,” said the babe. “Our mother’s long since gone to her reward: a ha’penny a day for the next thousand years, nuppence dole from there on, and cold summers for a million years.”
“Your sister?!” I must have sounded my disbelief, for she turned away to nibble her ale.
“You’d never guess, would you? She looks ten times my age. But if winter don’t age you, poor will. And winter and poor is the whole tale. Porcelain cracks in this weather. And once she was the loveliest porcelain out of the summer oven.” He gave her a gentle nudge. “But mother she is now, for thirty years—”
“Thirty years you’ve been …!”
“Out front of the Royal Hibernian Hotel? And more! And our mother before that, and our father too, and his father, the whole tribe! The day I was born, no sooner sacked in diapers then I was on the street and my mother crying Pity and the world deaf, stone dumb blind and deaf. Thirty years with my sister, ten years with my mother, McGillahee’s Brat has been on display!”
