Emerald Germs of Ireland

by Patrick McCabe

  “The you-know-what?” replied Pat, taken slightly by surprise.

  “Yes,” his tenant responded, rubbing his hands expectantly, “after all—we should put to some use my beautifully engraved Waterford crystal decanter which I won only recently in the intensely competitive ‘Spot the Talent ‘competition, don’t you think? Don’t you think so, Pat, you great big famous actor, you!”

  Pat’s mouth went dry as he responded.

  “Yes, master. Why yes, of course.”

  The master’s proud grin stretched from ear to empurpled ear as he tentatively poured the amber liquid.

  “Ah!” he murmured as he ran his nose along the rim of the glass. “There’s no doubt about it, Pat. A drink is not the same until you sip it from an aristocratic receptacle such as this.”

  “Yes,” agreed Pat. “How was it you described it on another occasion? Elo-elo-ocky something?”

  “Eloquence, Pat. Eloquence in glass.”

  Pat shook his head in admiration and stared into the life-giving waters below.

  “You know, master,” he continued, “of all the people who ever stayed in this house, you’re the brainiest.”

  It was as though a small transformation had taken place, the sun suddenly radiating from Butty Halpin’s entire being.

  “Do you really mean that, Pat?” he replied humbly.

  “No! I’m only making it up!” laughed Pat unexpectedly giving him a firm litde push on the shoulder.

  The master laughed uneasily and then said, “Oh, Pat! You always were a cad!”

  “Ha ha!” laughed Pat as the amber liquid touched his lips once more.

  They remained sipping for another hour or so and then, eventually, the master stretched and said, “Well, Pat—it’s the wooden hill for me. I have the inspector coming in tomorrow.”

  “I hope everything goes well, master,” said Pat, leaving down his glass.

  “Oh indeed and it will,” the master assured him. “I know what to expect.”

  “Of course you do! Sure you know everything!”

  “Ha ha!” laughed the master, a litde uncertainly.

  Pat did not reply, simply staring at him with glittering, purposeful eyes.

  It was approximately 3:00 a.m. when the sinister figure on the stairs mutely crossed the landing, suddenly shaking the old dark house to its foundations with a furious, almost intolerable pounding on the door of the bedroom where Butty Halpin up until then had been sleeping soundly as a child. Out of his dream of Dots (he and his beloved wife had been waltzing in a field of daisies) he awoke sharply, crying, “Aagh!” only to find himself covered in a clammy sweat as a blood-curdling scream issued from the very bowels of the house. Then—nothing, only silence.

  “Pat,” queried Butty as he advanced upon a crispy rasher the following morning at the breakfast table, did you happen to hear anything unusual last night about three o’clock?”

  Pat moved a plate with some bread on it and said, coolly: “About three? Three o’clock, master?”

  “Yes,” replied Butty, buttering a potato cake (with some effort, it has to be said, his knife skidding haphazardly across his plate a number of times).

  “Like what?” replied Pat.

  “Like a knock on my door?” the master said, adding, “A hammering, in fact. Loud hammering.”

  Pat shook his head decisively.

  “No, master. I was asleep around that time,” he said.

  The master frowned, the bubbled triangular cake suspended directly in front of his lips.

  “It’s the strangest thing,” he said, pouting his lips until they formed a round, crinkly o.

  Pat stiffened and suddenly turned, pressing his open palms to his cheeks.

  “Gosh!” he said. “I hope the house doesn’t turn out to be haunted!”

  There was the tiniest echo of anxiety in the master’s response, despite his somewhat forced cheeriness.

  “Haunted! Hah! Would you go away out of that, Pat!”

  Pat smiled and shook his head, rubbing his hands on his apron.

  “Aye, master!” he said. “Do you hear me! I’m at it again! Am I ever going to learn? Cripes, I’m getting to be a bigger eejit every day!”

  That evening Butty arrived home, exhausted, he claimed, and looking forward to nothing more than a nice “wee dram” from the interior of the eloquent receptacle. “Isn’t that right, Pat?” he said to his landlord as he poured it, not having urne to hear Pat’s reply before spewing the contents of his mouth across the flowers which decorated the wallpaper directly opposite him.

  “Jesus Mary and Joseph!” he squealed, frantically running his sports-coated sleeve across his mouth.

  “What’s wrong, master?” Pat cried, running to his assistance.

  “The whiskey! Why, it tastes like—”

  “What, master? It tastes like what?”

  “Pish!” exclaimed the shocked schoolteacher, who rarely employed such coarse vernacular.

  Pat placed his open palm on his lips and paled. Beyond the library window, it seemed, the entire village was throwing up its hands in horror.

  There was some consternation in the hallway the following morning as Pat knotted his apron and set about doing the breakfast dishes. “Cursagod!” and “cripes!” and “mother of Divine—!” are some examples of the irate ejaculations reaching his ears. At once he repaired hallward where he found the master in a state of some confusion.

  “Master—,” he began.

  “Pat,” said the master, “you didn’t by any chance see any of my books around the place, did you?”

  “Books, master?” frowned Pat.

  “Aye. Sums books. And writing ones,” the schoolteacher continued.

  Pat’s brow became knitted.

  “No, master,” he said. “I didn’t see any books at all, I’m sorry to have to say.”

  The master scratched his head and pondered.

  “I don’t know what the hell is wrong with me these days at all.”

  “Make sure you mind yourself for Monday anyhow,” advised Pat.

  “Monday?” replied the master. “What’s on on Monday?”

  “Isn’t the inspector coming in?” said Pat. “Isn’t that what you said?”

  “Jesus Mary and Joseph, Pat, you’re right! I completely forgot!”

  Pat smiled as a slight tremor announced itself on the upper part of the master’s right cheek.

  There were seven books all together arranged before Pat on the polished mahogany table of the library as he good-humoredly applied the scissors to them. They included a Hall and Knight’s Algebra, Adventures in English, and My Friend Matso. Soon, however, to be no books at all, nothing so much, in fact, as a loose arrangement of sliced-up tragedy which Pat was to happily confine to the dustbin. But not before stopping in front of the framed oval portrait of his mother to remark, “We’ll soon show him! We’ll soon show Mr. Fatarse Bossy Boots. I really do think we will, Mammy.”

  The remainder of that day was used up by Pat to clean the kitchen and complete the one hundred and one tasks which were the stuff of the everyday. And which included preparing a nice hot cup of Complan` for the tired post-inspector master who would doubtless be home soon. It amused Pat emptying the contents of the packet—a fine white powder—into the thick depths of the energy-giving food drink, for he had never perpetrated anything quite like that before.

  The master proclaimed himself delighted by Pat’s thoughtfulness.

  “The nicest cup of Complan I ever drank, Pat,” he declared.

  “Thank you, master,” replied Pat, an almost girlish blush tingeing his cheek.

  “Pat, I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

  “Drink up now, master,” Pat said. “Like Mammy used to say, it’ll put a bone in you.”

  “A bone in you! Is that what she used to say? Your mother, God rest her?”

  “Yes, master. That was one of her ‘old sayings.’”

  “Boys oh boys. Pat—do you mind me asking you someth
ing? Pat—you wouldn’t mind?”

  “No, master. Of course not. Go right ahead, for God’s sake!”

  “It’s just that—do you think I’ve been acting a litde strange lately, by any chance?”

  “Strange? Lately? Not at all, master! It’s just the pressure of next Monday night! The ‘Spot the Talent’ final and all! That’s what it is, I’m sure you’ll find!”

  The master frowned and cupped his hand around the Complan mug.

  “It’sjust that…he began. “It’sjust that, this morning I lost my keys. And yesterday—do you know what I did? I went the wrong way to school!”

  “The wrong way to school?” replied Pat incredulously.

  “Yes, Pat. It’s true. I went down by the Candy Box instead of up by Higginses.”

  Pat smiled, bent one of his fingers back and straightened it again.

  “God but aren’t you the desperate man now to go and do that! Japers, if you keep that up, soon you’ll be getting as bad as me!”

  The master swallowed and replaced his mug on the table.

  “I think I’d best get myself an early night, Pat.”

  Pat nodded understandingly and rose to his feet.

  “I think you’d better, master—if you’re to win the prize next Monday!”

  The master smiled—an odd, almost sickly smile—as he bade Pat good night and left the room. Behind him, Pat’s eyes and those of his mother’s painted image seemed to fuse as one. “He’s doing it again,” her soft voice appeared to say, curling like a white smoke from her white, impassive lips. “After all the pain he’s caused us he’s gone and done it all over again. Hasn’t he, Pat?”

  Pat wished it were not thus. For well he remembered that day so long ago when to his horror he had glanced out the window of fourth class to perceive his mother advancing furiously on the school building in her large-buttoned coat and pillbox hat. Before appearing, taut with fury in the doorway of the classroom, rasping, “Oh yes, Halpin! You’d make a laugh of him all right but you wouldn’t teach him his sums like you’re supposed to! Sending him home to me with the hands slapped off him every day of the week! My litde Pat! Look at you, you turnip)— for what else are you—you couldn’t teach a spelling to save your life!”

  What is perhaps tragic is that the following morning the old familiar Butty Halpin had returned with a vengeance. It was as though the flawed, humane characteristics which had lately become a feature of the man’s personality had been nothing more than a temporary, ephemeral aberration, of no lasting consequence whatsoever. Which made Pat sad as he watched him now, marching down the lane—confidently—brashly!—swinging his briefcase and singing, “Have you ever been in love, me boys, have you ever felt the pain?” in practice for the contest that evening. For the truth is that Pat had—to his exquisite surprise—been developing something of an affection for what might be called the “new Butty.” But soon, he felt—a thesis eventually—heart-breakingly, perhaps—proven correct—such emotions would be destined to belong only in the dungeons of the past.

  With an alacrity, indeed, that not even Pat—an atavistic caution where Butty Halpin was concerned notwithstanding—could have begun to anticipate!

  It was well after midnight that evening when Pat, immersed in a book—The Actor’s Craft—was startled by the crunch of gravel beneath heavy boots and the intermittent bursts of heavy coughing and loud, triumphant singing of a by now very familiar song. A glutinous unease took hold of Pat’s stomach as he heard, “For the girl I loved was beautiful and I want you all to know That I met her in the garden where the praties grow—yeehoo!” Pat stiffened as the key turned in the lock, instantaneously the room reeking of repellent body odors and stale whiskey. If Pat had had any doubts, it was now clear that the “new” Butty Halpin had vanished and the “old” made its brash, triumphant reappearance. The teacher’s eyes seemed as two insanely burning beads set back in a pulping ball of incandescent pink flesh as he stumbled forward and jabbed the air pointlessly with his Yale front door key.

  “What are you reading there, McNab? Give me that!”

  “It’s a book about acting. Mammy got me a subscription, you see!”

  “Her! That flaming lunatic! We were just talking about her down in the pub! Well, the effing trouble I had with that gawshkogue!”

  “Gawshkogue, master?”

  Pat went cold from head to toe.

  “Aye! Gawshkogue! Isn’t that what I said? Storming into my classroom giving me orders! The gamey auld haybag! Small wonder you grew up half-queer! Ha ha—sorry, Pat!”

  A nerve flickered beneath Pat’s eye.

  “It’s all right, master.”

  The round teacher stood backward as he proceeded to open the boxlike brown-paper package he carried beneath his left arm.

  “Well, Pat! I got it! I won the biggest prize of all! Eloquence beyond eloquence this time, Pat, I have to say! A beautiful quill pen made entirely of Waterford crystal—to symbolize all my learning, you see!”

  The sharp spear of the quill pen as it caught the light was truly beautiful. Any number of cities might have collapsed to nothingness within the landscape of Pat’s mind at the sight of it.

  “Well, Pat. I’d best be off up the wooden hill. I think I’m entitled to a snooze after achieving my life’s ambitions. Wouldn’t you think so, Pat?”

  There was a long pause. Before the old Butty—very much so the old Butty—caustically rasped, raising his voice as of yore, “Wouldn’t you think so, McNab?”

  ‘Yes. Yes, master,” came the instinctive reply, Pat automatically raising his bottom as though from the seat of an old pine desk in the long ago.

  There is a dream—as though an Eastman-colored reverie, a psychedelic minuet danced in a garden of fantasy—which comes to those whose inner peace is that born of triumph in the field of private, long-held aspirations; of planets bursting in a firmament glowing with a light which is hardly bearable to one’s eyes; of towering sunflowers sprouting as from nowhere; of flower-filled fragrances drifting past on a breeze that is for ever summer. But, always, there will reveal itself an aspect which to that ethereal landscape must belong and to no other, as if all private endeavor had been striving toward that moment when the mundane transforms itself, miraculously, into something which is truly celestial; and the sight of Butty Halpin, unremarkable schoolmaster in a small two-room establishment in a barely known hamlet on the side of a windswept road for well nigh forty years, bore all the hallmarks of the apotheosis of such qualities: declamatory, elegant beyond words as he stood by the bar, the sparrow-taunting notes of “The Garden Where the Praties Grow” trilling wantonly from his lips as—absurdly!—and without the slightest warning of any kind, upon this warmly glowing landscape of achievement began to perambulate none other than Mrs. McNab, mother of Pat, attired now from head to foot in a bridal gown of white, handwoven lace, smiling from ear to ear as through the air, elegantly cast from her sculpted, vein-blue hands, curved a magnificently floral bouquet, her voice, he noted, oddly huskier than he remembered it as she intoned, “Hello there, master.”

  There is a tentadveness within the world of masquerade, of chimera, a fragility intrinsic to its essence that can be shocking in its rawest manifestation; a darkness encircling those crimson planets which burst, a sinister supplication about the heads of sunflowers now which well may threaten to droop if not expire; a heart-stopping bluntness about the crack of lightning which darts across the sky—as it does now, at this very moment—revealing in an instant none other than—Maimie McNab!— no longer about her gowned and lace-clad form the shimmering perimeter of light that is the signature of poesy, fancy, and imagination, but cold and poker stiff, her face a mask of chalk-white flesh from which feeling has been long since banished. His dream crumbling as a window by a propelled stone shattered, a paper bag by a closed fist crushed, Butty Halpin shot awake, a Niagara of sweat upon his back.

  “Mrs. McNab!” he cried, astonished, pulling the striped collar of his pajamas about his n
eck.

  There was a long pause as Mrs. McNab, in a voice unexpectedly low and sonorous yet resonant throughout die entire room, replied, “Master—I’m sorry about Pat. He’s giving you trouble again, isn’t he?”

  Butty Halpin gulped. Mrs. McNab threw a huge, startlingly vast shadow on the wall.

  “No, Mrs. McNab. He’s not!” he replied unconvincingly.

  “Ah, Mr. Halpin, he is,” replied Mrs. McNab. “He can’t do his sums. And he’s no good at the football.”

  Butty felt his lips go dry—but the clack of the stickiness inside his mouth was almost deafening.

  “No good at the football?” he replied, weakly. “No, Mrs. McNab, he’s powerful at it. He’s a great trier. A great trier altogether.”

  Mrs. McNab moved a little step closer and lowered her head. Then she looked up sadly and said, “I know, master. But trying’s not good enough, is it? You’ve always said that. It’s simply not enough to try!”

  Butty Halpin tried to wet his lips with his tongue as he said, “Mrs.— would you mind if I went? I’ve been in the house annoying Pat long enough. I’ll be off so—”

  As if unaware of his own actions, he noticed his feet fall to the floor and his pipe smoke-stained fingers reach for his trousers which lay draped across the back of a chair. He felt Mrs. McNab’s presence. Her deep and steady breathing had the effect of unnerving him to a terrible degree. He could feel individual beads of perspiration breaking out on his forehead with a rhythmic precision as if each one was announcing, “I’m here! Present and correct!”

  “Why did you have to call him names?” he heard her say. “He was only a boy, Mr. Halpin!”

  “Mrs. McNab,” he croaked as he raised one leg to insert into his trousers, “I have to go now. I really would like to stay but I have no choice, I’m afraid!”

  “He was only a boy but you had to call him names! Why did you have to do that, Mr. Halpin?”

  It was unfortunately at that moment—one foot becoming entangled in the leg of his trousers—that the blood rushed to the schoolteacher’s head, leading him to involuntarily ejaculate, “Ah for the love of God, woman, can you blame me! It was you did it! You and your mad carry-on!”