Emerald Germs of Ireland

by Patrick McCabe

  Let’s all gather at the river….

  Pat gripped the timepiece, his fingers entirely closed around it, and sprang suddenly to his feet.

  “No!” he cried out. “We can’t allow it to happen! We can’t allow it, you hear me?”

  Rosa’s eyes shone with both helplessness and the promise of promise. She spread her nut-brown hands.

  “But what can we do, Señor Pat?” she pleaded heartbreakingly. “What can we do?”

  It was night. The moon shone. It looked like a sickly eye. The military had occupied the cantina, and inside what could be said to be chaos reigned. Bare-chested soldiers waved carafes of wine and flung their unpolished boots on the tables. Aloft upon a decrepit podium, as he had been instructed, a trembling guitarist frantically sought the minor chords that would save his life, to accompany the words:

  Out in the West Texas toum of El Paso

  I fell in love with a Mexican girl

  Nighttime would find me in Rosa’s cantina

  Music would play and Felina would whirl!

  A crimson scarf of jettisoned wine curvaceously wound itself around his neck as the air was rent with cries of, “H’ho! Good man! The man from Dundalk every time! Sing up, you boy you!”

  The musician complied.

  Blacker than night were the eyes of Felina

  Wicked and evil while casting her spell.

  Sadly his efforts were not to satisfy everybody, and a number of bullets embedded themselves in the wall behind him, one or two of them extracting troubling music from a bronze gourd suspended upon the wall, another skimming off the gleaming face of a frying pan. But such discordant notes were heard no longer when a vision emerged out of the all-encompassing cloud of dust and transformed the foul-smelling cantina, the belching, recumbent military men finding themselves in the presence of what were surely two of the most beautiful girls in all Mexico. It was only a matter of moments—they had barely time to get to the bar—before Pat (for it was indeed he—clad from head to toe in Rosa’s finest cheesecloth and linen) found themselves the focus of attention which perhaps only females well versed in certain skills might accept as a matter of course. Initially—not without some justification, surely—Pat was intimidated—not to say mortally embarrassed—by his pigtails—but gradually, with the assistance of some wine, and the flawless tutelage of Rosa—who seemed to be having a whale of a time!—he found himself slowly graduating toward a sense of ease. “Heh heh heh!” snarled the soldier as he gripped Pat by the thigh and rolled his eyes. “Now now!” chirped Pat, tapping him playfully on the nose with his index finger.

  My love was deep for this Mexican maiden

  I was in love but in vain I could tell.

  The faint echoes of the song drifted out through the open door of the cantina into the clammy cicada-chirping night to the scaffold where Honky awaited his fate, the remnants of one of his cigarettes still clogging up his nose. Deep within his nostril, a tiny speck of tobacco taunted him to within an inch of his sanity, vibrating, teasing—

  Had the fly not arrived he might have found it within him to withstand such torment. But this was too much.

  “Get away!” he cried (his wrists were handcuffed). “Get away, you bastard! Go!”

  He prayed for whatever strength remained within him not to desert him, but it was all to no avail. His head fell upon his chest as though it had been increased to five times its normal weight.

  Then—inexplicably!—the insect’s tentative perambulations ceased! Just as it reached the corner of his left eyelid. A sensation close to euphoria took hold of Honky. But then the litde bastard began walking all over again.

  The soldier lying prostrate on the bed was feeling very pleased with himself. Rarely did señoritas such as this find their way into the barracks, he reflected. And even more rarely still did they see fit to apply themselves with such fervor to the tickling of—not to mention the cooin into—ears of underling soldiers such as he whose station was fated never to rise above the rank of mere custodian.

  ‘You señoritas!” he cried with the near whoop of a young boy who has captured a bee in a jar. “You want to be my friends? You want to be my friends? Eh—heh—heh—heh!”

  Rosa fluttered her black eyelashes.

  “You are the nicest man in the whole Mexican army!” she said.

  “Hey, señorita—you know zomezing?” he said. “I like you! You like some more wine?”

  The pigmentation of the soldier’s cheeks attained an even more incredulously incandescent crimson. His plump hand huzza’ed uncertainly.

  “Come! More wine, señorita!” he gurgled.

  And Pat—skipping with tiny litde steps—obliged.

  Some thirty-five minutes later, the atmosphere in the room had metamorphosed utterly, as Rosa, holding up her skirt, spat viciously into the face of the snoring soldier. “You son of a pig!” she hissed as Pat nodded. You son of a pig of the mother of a thousand pigs! Raper of virgins! Thiever of sacred objects! Passer of counterfeit money! Armed robber of banks, citizens, and post offices! Bigamist! Kidnapper! Receiver of stolen goods! Murderer! Enciter of prostitution! Perjurer!”

  “Come, Rosa! We must not waste our time!” said Pat, turning toward the window and flinging his pigtails and skirt onto the bed.

  The cellar was cold and musty and you could have sliced the darkness with a knife, peeled off large chunks of it. The beads of sweat shone on Pat’s face as, breathlessly, he shifted a large wooden packing case marked upon which the word DYNAMITE was stenciled in black.

  “How are you getting on, Rosa?” he whispered.

  Rosa nodded as, with all her strength, placed all the weight of her body behind the Gading gun and heaved with all her might.

  “I am doing fine, Señor Pat,” she replied.

  “Soon it will be all over,” was the answer she received from Pat McNab.

  In the village square, all was quiet. Even the chickens had turned in, and were lying on their sides dead to the world. It seemed like the quietest town in all of Mexico. Until a huge explosion set the sky aflame and the air was filled with the sound of rearing horses. Back in the barracks, the duped soldier leaped awake and reached furiously for his pistol, crying, “Caramba!”and pulling on his boots.

  What followed was not chaos but something beyond that state for which perhaps there is no word which can truly encapsulate the wild and random—not to say terrifying—nature of what was to subsequently transpire. As, within seconds, the entire village had been transformed from a quiet sleeping town of seeming tranquility to a living, pulsing sheet of flame which might well have served as a depiction of hell itself. And through which the boots of disorientated military now thundered as officers hoarsely cried, “No! Not that way! This way, you fools!”

  Until the heart-stopping words, “Look out! Ees a trap!” reached their ears.

  “You beesh!” cried the generalissimo’s brother, breaking ranks and attempting what can only be described as a valiant attack, circumscribing huge arcs all about him with a sword, only to be almost riven entirely from head to foot by the hail of bullets which Rosa—to Pat’s delight (for he was jumping up and down, clapping his hands along with Pasty—as though his protracted wearing of pigtails had finally taken their giddy toll)—had ebulliently released from the Gatling gun expertly positioned by her on the hill overlooking the square. In what seemed hardly the wink of an eye, the dusty main street was piled high with lead-perforated bodies. But just then the church bell pealed and Rosa looked at Pat and Pat looked at Rosa and frantically it dawned on them what they had completely forgotten in their obsessive thirst for retribution.

  “Honky!” barked Pat, as he flung a rifle at Pasty and gestured toward Rosa. “Let’s go!” he snapped.

  It was heartbreaking to see Honky, a broken man now, being led like the meekest of lambs to the scaffold and the white bag being placed over his head. The gulp he made as the rope’s knot was tightened against his throat seemed to carry for miles across the landscap
e. The padre stepped back and began to read. Each word seemed black as molasses. Until at last the clergyman cut a cross into the air and said, “May the Lord have mercy on your immortal soul.” Even now, the ungiving sentry who had mercilessly taunted him throughout his incarceration in the stable could not see fit to let the moment pass. “Perhaps you like one last request before you die—a cigarette, no? But zen I forgot—you don’ smoke! Eh—heh—heh!” he sneered through stripped, tobacco-stained teeth.

  With all the strength he could muster, from behind the flapping bag (it tickled his nostrils), Honky croaked, “Someday I’ll get even with you, you dying-looking son of a hoor!”

  It was to be sooner than Honky could have dreamed as a single shot rang out and instantly severed the rope in two. Who can say whether it was the sudden sense of elation which consumed Honky that was responsible for what happened next or whether its occurrence was inevitable? Regardless, within a matter of seconds, the acerbic sentry was lying on his back and the bagless Honky was squatting astride him administering a liberal number of head butts to the face, raising his head to apply yet another, to his further delight deciphering the familiar figures of his old friends Pat and Pasty (and now Rosa) coming tearing down the road in a buckboard. Hard and fast close by the raised platform of the scaffold, Pat cried, “Jump, Honky!” An instruction with which he more than competently complied to the delight of all, and to which their unrestrained applause amply testified.

  Rarely had such a feeling of well being enfolded the village as a moist-eyed Papa quieted the throng and exultantly declared, “Now you see what happens when you get off your knees, my peoples!”

  In that instant, a community once clad only in cotton and ragged linen trousers considered themselves now tailored after the manner of kings. In each set of eyes shone two tiny, triumphant suns.

  “Never again must we tolerate such evil in our midst!” said Papa.

  As a thousand cheers rose up and myriad trouser legs fluttered as, without the need of further instruction, the what had once been considered “rabble” united as one and charged off in the direction of the military barracks, Papa shaking his head as he took his daughter’s hand, clearing his throat as he began his famous song anew, “South of the border, down Mexico way—”

  The farewell was scheduled to take place in the cantina, and once more almost the entire village had deigned to attend. Obviously, because of the size of the building, many had to have admission refused and were heartbroken as a consequence, falling to their knees and weeping in the village square, some even hurling themselves to certain death in the penumbral, engulfing blackness of the well. Pat, Pasty, and Honky smiled warmly as the time came for Papa to rise to his feet. They were stuffed to the gills and had eaten so many portions of blackened beans and enchiladas they felt certain they would burst.

  “And now—a toast to our three friends from—where ees?”

  “Gullytown,” said Pasty. “It’s only fifty mile!”

  Papa smiled and held his glass aloft.

  “To all in Gullytown!” he smiled and placed his hand across his chest, beginning to sing:

  The mission bells told me that I couldn’t stay

  South of the border down Mexico way!

  As all—with one voice—rapturously affirmed:

  “Aye—yi yi yi! Aye—yi yi yi!

  Behind Rosa, a small insect did its best to climb up the intense, if precarious, green slope of a palm tree frond. She lowered her head and gave her nails full attention. How beautiful they were, Pat thought…

  “Will you ever come back to me, Pat?” she whispered, a glimmering moistness in her eyes.

  “You know I will, Rosa,” Pat replied.

  The insect was almost halfway there. His valor could almost have served as a metaphor for—

  “Perhaps one day,” Pat added. “One day—who knows?”

  Rosa moved closer to him and touched his upper arm tenderly. Her kiss on his cheek was something that he would remember for a long, long time.

  “Good-bye, Pat,” she said.

  He took her in his arms and looked into her eyes.

  “Adios, my Rosa,” he said. “I’ll never forget you.”

  Just then, a familiar sound reached his ears and they looked up to see Papa, standing by the open window, inside the adobe hacienda, his declamatory gestures accompanying a now familiar melody:

  South of the border down Mexico way!

  That’s where I fell in love when stars above came out to play …

  Rosa reddened a litde then leaned in to Pat’s chest as a burst of affectionate chuckling took hold of her.

  There wasn’t a sound as Pat McNab, Honky McCool, and Pasty McGookin stood by the side of the road. In actual fact, there is only some measure of truth in that statement, for there was one, in fact, albeit of a very low, almost inaudible nature. And possessing an eerie, whistling quality. Pat shivered and ran his hands along his arms in a stroking, reassuring motion. Across from them, beside the stiff if abbreviated sentinel of the village pump, three chickens poked industriously in the dust. Above the door of a dilapidated roadside house, a sign which had once borne the name (its letters long since faded) The Border Bar creaked yearningly with each occasional gust of wind that happened to come floating by. Honky looked at Pat from beneath hooded eyes and gave an involuntary shiver. As if to emphasize his discomfort, the faint peal of a mission bell tinkled skeletally behind the clouds.

  “This is some weird place, man,” he said.

  As if to answer him, out of the heat haze, over the cusp of the road, what appeared as the bright red distorted grin of some indeterminate medieval creature approached but seemed to take an age, as though in one spot inexplicably restrained by wavering lines of heat, only to suddenly and without warning leap forward, its metal jaws springing open to reveal the shadowy occupants within.

  “It’s the bus!” gasped Pat incredulously. “At last!”

  Honky drew his denim-clad arm across his forehead as Pasty steadied himself against the fence.

  “Thank God for that!” he said.

  There was a broad smile on Pat McNab’s face as he fingered out the coins to the bluff and genial driver. But one which faded as a small hand of ice slipped its fingers with a gentle firmness about the base of his spine as he—replacing his change in his pocket—turned to gaze upon the swarthy form of an oily figure some way down the aisle seats down the aisle, adorned with a two-pronged, satin-black mustache. His heart leaped. “The generalissimo! “he gasped.

  “Not a bad day now!” called the swarthy individual, returning to his Irish Independent. “Great to see it!”

  A similar experience was—although Pat was entirely unaware of it—being undergone by Honky who, having taken his seat, found himself positioned directly behind the despised sentry! Who, flipping the packet open, had then turned to him, chirping shamelessly as he brandished the cigarettes beneath Honky’s nose, “A smoke, perhaps?”

  There have been many arguments down through the years as to the nature of being and the benefits or otherwise of such substances as might substantially alter what we commonly refer to as empirical, tangible “reality.”

  Quite what Pasty and Honky’s views on such subjects were, Pat was never to truly ascertain for they never discussed them or indeed “that day” again. All that can be said is that had anyone been walking past on the road that day as the driver released the brake and called out: “Ballinafad next stop!” and had they investigated what they took to be the flap of a passing bird or a stray deposited dropping from that same creature, they would have found that the source of the dull, unexpected sound was nothing other than the glancing blow made by a small twisted root of peyote plant which the horrified Honky had cast from him (in a fit of anxiety occasioned by his recognition of “the sentry”) into the abyss of the dying summer evening through the open window of the bus.

  But somehow, in its own special way, it was an experience never to be absolutely entirely forgotten by Pat Mc
Nab, and there were nights when he would find himself sitting alone in Sullivan’s Select Bar poring over a drab pint of Guinness, listening to Hoss McGinnity as he gesticulated wildly—yet again!—making his way through his rendition of “South of the Border,” when, once more, he would see himself proudly attired in a crimson cummerbund, Rosa smiling by his side as she inclined her head ever so slightly just a litde to avoid the confetti, Papa shedding a tear and shaking his head, as off they drove (in a battered truck—who cared!—past the hitching post, the gospel hall, the well—and the chickens, of course!) into the dust and the shimmering heat, between them now a love to which none could compare, one which he knew was destined to be his forever, as bright and clear and infinite as the waters of the Rio Grande itself.

  Courting in the kitchen

  Come single belle and beau to me now pay attention

  Don’t ever fall in love, ‘tis the divil’s own invention

  For once I fell in love, with a maiden so bewitching

  Miss Henrietta Bell, down in Captain Kelly’s kitchen.

  Chorus

  Tooraloora loo, ri a tooraloora lady!

  Tooraloora loo, a tooraloora laddy.

  At the age of seventeen I was ‘prenticed to a grocer

  Not far from Stephen’s Green where Miss Henry used to go, sir

  Her manners were sublime, she set my heart a-twitching

  And she invited me to a hooley in the kitchen.

  Chorus

  Next Sunday being the day we were to have the flare-up

  I dressed myself quite gay and I frizzed and oiled my hair up

  The captain had no wife, faith, he had gone out fishing

  So we kicked up high life down below stairs in the kitchen.

  Chorus

  Pat was lost in contemplation, staring in the window of the greengrocer’s, wondering what he was going to have for his dinner, when he heard a shout coming from the far side of the street. It was Bullock McCoy, already halfway across the road on his way over to Pat. How best to describe Bullock? A cattle dealer-type man, perhaps, with exorbitantly large brown boots and a flat cap (extremely shiny) tilted on what was casually referred to locally as “the Kildare side.” “There you are, McNab!” exclaimed Bullock, landing as if with a thump beside Pat. “I was just looking at the spuds, Bullock,” replied Pat, “one pound fifty per stone. Isn’t that very dear for spuds?”