The Wily O'Reilly: Irish Country Stories (Irish Country Books)

by Taylor, Patrick

  O’Reilly pursed his lips. “It’s ringworm, Mother, but we’ll have to send the wee lad up to the skin clinic in Belfast to find out what’s the cause.”

  She looked worried. Mister Brown sniffled and scratched his head.

  “All the way to Belfast, Doctor O’Reilly?” she said, doubtfully. “He’ll miss a day of school.”

  “I’m sorry,” said O’Reilly, “but he may miss more than that.”

  I noticed her frown and her son’s grin as O’Reilly continued. “If it’s one of the animal fungi that’s the cause, it’ll not spread, but if it’s the human kind it could infect every kiddie in the class. He’ll have to stay home until we know the answer to the test, and if it is the human kind he’ll be off school until he’s cured.”

  Her mouth rounded into a silent “O.” Mister Brown’s grin widened.

  “And,” said O’Reilly, “burn his cap.”

  “But it’s brand-new.”

  “I’m sorry,” said O’Reilly, “the bloody thing gets into the cloth and could be given to another youngster. Now just you wait until I make the arrangements at the Royal Victoria Hospital.”

  The arrangements were made, the patients dismissed, and O’Reilly fired up his briar. “If it is Microsporum audouinii, I hope to God we’ve caught it in time. Once that one gets into a school it can go through the place like wildfire.”

  * * *

  It was, we hadn’t, and it did. Within a week, every boy in the school had shown the telltale symptoms and signs. Every boy had been given a prescription for Griseofulvin. Every mother had been given instruction about shaving the affected parts of the scalp. The smoke of the funeral pyres of yellow and orange school caps hung over the village. The streets of Ballybucklebo rang to the sounds of childish laughter, and would continue to do so for at least six more weeks until every child was considered fungus-free. The boys rejoiced in their unexpected holiday. Their mothers wrung their hands and O’Reilly grumbled that unless we could trace the source of the outbreak, the whole epidemic could break out again at any time. He was right and it did. Two days after the last of the lads, who looked like a group of tiny tonsured Trappists, was safely ensconced behind his desk, Mister Brown and his mother were back in the surgery.

  “Bugger,” said O’Reilly, glowering at the boy’s scalp, “here we go again. We’ve got to find out where it’s starting.”

  I had to agree, but the mystery seemed to be unsolvable—unsolvable, that is, until O’Reilly discovered that he’d run out of Erinmore Flake, his favourite pipe tobacco, a product of Messrs. Gallagher and Sons, who in my opinion added sulphur, Greek fire, and a whiff of the great nineteenth-century fogs of London to their product.

  “Come on,” he said. “We’ll nip down to the shop.”

  We strolled along the main street to the little store. The door opened and who should appear but William Butler Yates O’Reilly. His cheeks were bulging. In his left hand he carried a paper bag and in his right a brightly coloured school cap. His eyes widened when he caught sight of his uncle.

  “Morning, Willy,” said O’Reilly.

  Willy’s reply was unintelligible. He had difficulty forming the words round an enormous mouthful of peppermint gobstopper.

  “Buying sweeties?” O’Reilly inquired as he stared at the paper bag.

  Willy nodded.

  “Huh,” said O’Reilly. “I thought you’d no money.”

  Willy blushed, and tried to hide the cap behind his back.

  O’Reilly struck like a cobra. His big hand shot out and grabbed Willy by the ear.

  “Spit out that gobstopper,” O’Reilly roared.

  Willy spat and a great spherical lump of multi-hued hard candy hit the gutter.

  I had no idea what was happening, but of course that was often my state of mind when in the company of Fingal Flahertie.

  “Give me that cap.”

  The item in question was surrendered.

  “How long have you been at it?” O’Reilly tugged on his nephew’s ear.

  At what? I wondered as Willy whimpered.

  “How long?”

  “Six weeks, Uncle Fingal.”

  “Jasus.”

  “You won’t tell my dad?”

  O’Reilly paused, pursed his lips, then said, very slowly, “Not if you tell me how much a rub.”

  “Sixpence.”

  “You little…”

  “Sorry, Uncle Fingal.”

  O’Reilly pointed an admonitory finger. “No more, do you hear?” He tweaked Willy’s ear to add emphasis to his words.

  “I promise. Honest.”

  O’Reilly released his grip. “Go on home, but if I catch you at it again…”

  Willy fled.

  “And that’s the end of that,” said O’Reilly, clearly pleased with himself. “No wonder we couldn’t stop the outbreak.”

  “What are you talking about?” I was as much at sea as the Ancient Mariner.

  “Ach,” said O’Reilly, “in the immortal phrase that the great detective never actually uttered, ‘Elementary, my dear Watson.’ Nephew Willy has restored his exchequer by selling a rub of his cap—his infected cap—at sixpence a pop. The kids get the ringworm and don’t have to go to school and Willy…” O’Reilly began counting on his fingers, then whistled, “… by my reckoning he’s made nearly two pounds. Crafty little bugger.”

  “I wonder where he gets that from,” I muttered, but O’Reilly had already gone into the shop.

  When we returned to his back garden, I had some difficulty deciding which made the worse stink, O’Reilly’s recharged briar or the fumes from the bonfire that consumed Willy’s cap. The smoke drifted upward and dissipated, and with it went the great ringworm plague of Ballybucklebo.

  “Do you know,” said O’Reilly, exuding a certain tangible family pride. “That nephew of mine’s going to go far one day. You just watch.”

  DECEMBER 2001

  Jingle Bells

  Sammy the sweep rises to the occasion

  While watching a TV quiz show I fell to pondering how popular these things are. In the Yuletide spirit of giving and, as O’Reilly would remark just before he laid into some miscreant, “It is always more blessed to give than to receive,” I thought I’d offer my readers a little quiz.

  Translate the following: Airy tipsies, slabbergub, bit of a lig, bletherskite, beelin’, boggin’, and boke. [Montgomery, M. and F. Montgomery, Barnish County Antrim Dialect Dictionary 1993 © Doctor Robert Montgomery. Courtesy Doctor T. F. Baskett.]

  Give up? I’m not surprised. You’d not come within a beagle’s gowl of the answers unless of course you speak fluent Ulsterese. Please understand, Ulsterese isn’t a foreign language but an abstruse form of English embellished with the local expressions used daily in Ballybucklebo and its environs. When rendered at full speed by an upset Ulsterman whose accent would be, in the local parlance, “thick as champ,” attempts to comprehend what was being said would have left no less a linguist than Professor Henry Higgins babbling with incomprehension.

  Once, at the height of the Ulster Troubles, I saw an NBC documentary filmed in Belfast. Naturally the ubiquitous man-on-the-street had been interviewed. The folks at the network had thoughtfully provided their viewers with English subtitles. And a good thing too. “Beagle’s gowl. Thick as champ.” Indeed.

  Let me instantly explain that failing to “come within a beagle’s gowl” is translated as falling short of expectations by the distance from which a howling beagle dog could be heard, and that’s a fair stretch of the legs. “Thick as champ” refers to the density of a peculiar Irish dish of potatoes, buttermilk, and scallions. It has the gastronomic qualities of a lump of spent plutonium and, when eaten, “sticks to your ribs like glue.” Applied in a descriptive fashion to an accent, this phrase suggests a degree of impenetrability that would make the front armour of a main battle tank seem as thin as tissue paper. When used to describe intellectual capacity—say in the case of Donal Donnelly—well, I’m sure you get my drif
t.

  If you’re still wondering about the Airy tipsies list, I’m afraid you’ll have to wait until this story is finished before you get the answers, because I really want to explain the expression “thon one has a heart of corn.”

  “A what?” I hear you ask. That’s right. “Thon one has a heart of corn,” is precisely how O’Reilly described Samuel St. John (pronounced “sinjin”) Slattery, our local chimney sweep, after the man had left the surgery. He’d been in to see about a nasty cough, an occupational hazard of the sweep’s trade. I must say I was glad to see him go. It was Christmas Eve and I was going to a dance in Belfast. I really didn’t want to be held up by one of O’Reilly’s rambling expositions so I merely nodded.

  “You can’t always tell a book by its cover,” said O’Reilly, washing enough soot from his hands to have replenished the entire York, Notts, and Derby coalfields. “Just because your man looks like an escapee from a travelling minstrel show…”

  “Grunts when you ask him a question and has a perpetual scowl on his face that would make the Medusa on a bad hair day seem as mild as a cooing dove…”

  “I’m telling you,” said O’Reilly. “You can hardly blame him for being covered in soot. He’d come here straight from his work.”

  I had a mental flashback to the violent ejection of one Donal Donnelly, who’d dared to show O’Reilly an unwashed foot, but decided that it would be wise to make no comment on that matter. I really did want to get away, but foolishly added, “Sammy St. John strikes me as a pretty mean-tempered bloke.”

  “You’d be wrong,” said O’Reilly, dumping himself in his swivel chair and firing up his pipe.

  “Prove it.”

  “All right. I will. Park yourself.”

  I glanced at my watch, sighed, and hitched myself up onto the examination table. “Go on.”

  “Do you remember Mister Brown and Miss Gill?”

  “The kids that came to see you because they wanted to get married but had to leave because Mister Brown had wet himself?”

  “The very ones. Well, I saw Mister Brown on the street today. He was sobbing his wee heart out.”

  “Fingal, I thought we were discussing Sam Slattery.”

  “Patience, my boy. All in good time.”

  I fidgeted.

  “‘What’s up?’ I asked him. It took me a few minutes to understand what was the matter. I tell you, Pat, between the howls of him and his wiping his nose on his sleeve, I thought I was going to be there all day. But you couldn’t leave a wee lad that upset. Not on Christmas Eve.”

  I had to smile. I told you years ago that O’Reilly was kind to widows and small children.

  “I finally got it out of him. One of the big boys had told him there was no Santa Claus.”

  “Ach no.”

  “Ach yes, and there was no comforting him. I know we all have to find it out sooner or later. I don’t think it’s right to lie to the wee ones when they hear the truth. But on Christmas Eve?” He shook his big head.

  “So what did you do?”

  “I took him by the hand and walked him home.”

  “Let his mother sort it out?”

  “I suppose that’s what I was thinking but, do you know, once in a while things have a habit of working out just fine. Guess who was at the house?”

  “Donner and Blitzen? Rudolph?”

  Instead of growling at my sarcasm, O’Reilly let go a guffaw that rattled the instruments on the stainless steel instrument trolley. “The next best thing. Samuel St. John Slattery was there sweeping the Browns’ chimney.” O’Reilly let go a mini-mushroom cloud from his pipe. “He was just about to climb his ladder when we arrived. ‘What’s up?’ says he to the little lad. He just went on sniffling so I told Sam what the trouble was. I suppose I was hoping maybe Sam could say something to help. ‘Is that fact?’ was all he said, and he went up the ladder like a monkey up a pole.”

  “Right enough. The man has a heart of corn. You’re not convincing me, Fingal.”

  This time O’Reilly did glower at me. “I will,” he said. “There was me, both legs the same length, a little boy by the hand, still in floods, no sign of the mother, and Samuel St. John up on the roof. Then it happened.” His frown vanished and was replaced by a smile so enigmatic that he could have posed for Leonardo da Vinci. “Sammy came back down, bent over the little lad, and held out a big black hand. The look on old Sam’s face was one of complete awe. ‘Look what I found up by the chimney,’ says he, and opened his hand.”

  “And?”

  “I watched the wee fellow. I’ve never seen anything like it. He rubbed his eyes, peered into the callused, sooty hand, and do you know what was there?”

  I shook my head.

  “A tiny golden bell. A sleigh bell. ‘I wonder what this came off?’ says Sammy. It was like the sunrise, the way the wee lad’s face lit up. He looked at Sammy. ‘You’d better have it,’ says Sam, and gave the boy the bell. He tore off into the house yelling, ‘Look, Mummy. Look what Santa’s reindeer left on our roof.’ Old Sam just coughed.

  “‘How the hell…’ I started to ask him. He stuck his hand into his trousers pocket and pulled out five or six little bells. ‘He’s not the first nipper I’ve seen like that. And you don’t have to lie to them. Just let them draw their own conclusions. The poor little bugger is going to find out soon enough. Let him enjoy one more Christmas.’

  “‘God, Sammy,’ says I, ‘you’ve a heart of corn.’”

  I was so amazed I just sat there on the couch with, to use a graphic piece of Ulsterese, my eyes turned up like a duck in thunder.

  Oh yes, I promised you a translation of other bits of my native tongue. Here you are. Airy tipsies: high winds. Slabbergub: a man with a foul mouth. Bit of a lig: a fool. Beelin’: suppurating. Boggin’: filthy. Boke: Throw up. And one more thing, in plain English: a merry Christmas and a happy New Year to all.

  Home Is the Sailor

  An Irish Country Doctor Story

  Author’s Note

  Since Tom Doherty and Associates first began publishing the Irish Country Doctor series in 2007 for a current total of seven novels with one in press, I have been overwhelmed by the number of kind letters that come to me through my Web site and as comments posted on Facebook. Readers have taken the characters in the books to heart and want to know more about them. A recurrent wish is for the works to appear more frequently. Like the title of the 1982 movie starring Jill Clayburgh, “I’m dancing as fast as I can”—for me, read, “I’m writing,” and my publisher is doing his best, but it takes a while to write 140,000 words and to turn them into a paper book.

  Sixteen thousand words do not consume as much time, and although this work has had all the technical attention paid to a paper book in terms of editing, design, and cover design, the Internet allows much more rapid publication.

  In this long short story, for want of a better term, you will learn how the recent widower Doctor Fingal O’Reilly returns to Ballybucklebo after the Second World War. His attempts to reestablish his practice seem doomed until, in her usual understated but effective way, Mrs. Kinky Kincaid comes to the rescue.

  Although this is not a giveaway—authors all have the same recurrent habits of needing to eat and find shelter—it is well priced and I hope will be regarded as a kind of gift from my publisher and me to help fill the gap before my first work about the Ulster Troubles, Pray for Us Sinners, a story of loss of faith and search for atonement, appears in June and Fingal O’Reilly: Irish Doctor, number eight in the Irish Country Doctor series, is on the shelves in October.

  All the citizens of Ballybucklebo and I thank you for your loyalty, encouragement, and patience.

  With my very best wishes,

  PATRICK TAYLOR

  Salt Spring Island,

  British Columbia,

  November 2012

  1

  First Impressions Are Things You Don’t Get a Second Chance to Make

  Surgeon-Commander Fingal Flahertie O’Reilly, M.B., B.C
h., B.A.O., R.N.R., D.S.C., gave a third hard shove then kept his thumb firmly on the porcelain push of a bell that was mounted on a brass plate. “Get a move on,” he said, and hunched his shoulders. It was nippy out here in the mid-February evening. His ship, HMS Warspite, had been placed in Category C reserve on February 1, 1946, and her remaining crew paid off. As soon as he had completed the formalities of his own demobilisation, O’Reilly had headed for the Liverpool cross-channel ferry to Belfast docks and then the train to Ballybucklebo. From there it had only been a short walk.

  An Austin Ruby of early thirties vintage rattled past the Presbyterian church on the other side of Main Street, part of the Bangor to Belfast road.

  He heard a distant ringing and a woman’s soft Cork brogue calling, “I’m coming, so. Take your hurry in your hand now.”

  He stepped back and regarded the familiar front of the big, old, three-storey house where he had been an assistant in general practice before the war had called him away on naval service for six long years. A steam engine whistled, coming from where the tracks of the Belfast and County Down Railway ran along the shore of Belfast Lough.

  When he looked at the house again he saw ground-floor bow windows flanking a green-painted front door—a now-open green door wherein stood a solid woman in her late thirties. Fire flashed in her agate eyes as she squinted into the low sun. She dusted flour off her hands then stood arms akimbo. “You did make the bell sound like the last trump, bye. There’s no need to—” She stepped back, smiling broadly with dimples coming into her cheeks. “Praise all the saints. It’s yourself, sir.” She stepped aside. “Welcome home at last. Come in, come in, come in, Doctor O’Reilly, sir. Come into the dining room and I’ll make you a cup of tea and a plate of hot buttered barmbrack, so, before I see to your dinner. I’ve made roast rack of spring lamb with herb stuffing and caper sauce.”

  O’Reilly’s tummy rumbled and his grin was vast. “By God that sounds like manna from heaven.” After years of eating the efforts of Royal Navy cooks, often little more than corned beef sandwiches and cocoa when the ship was closed up at action stations, one of Mrs. Kinkaid’s homemade meals would be bliss. “How are you, anyway, Kinky? I’m sorry I’m a bit late.” On Monday, to let her know he’d be arriving Friday, he’d phoned Mrs. Maureen “Kinky” Kincaid, until recently housekeeper to the late Doctor Flanagan, to whom O’Reilly had been an assistant before the war. The estate had provided for her wages to be paid until the house and practice had been sold—to O’Reilly.