‘My lips are sealed, sir. You can depend on me. An’ ... an’ ... I’d just like to say I’m proud to have been able to help ye. The like of ye isn’t in Ireland for the hurling.’
The captain gave no sign that he had even heard the compliment, only turned on his heel and walked away to where his men were waiting. Larry did likewise and when he paused a moment later to get a last glimpse of them he found himself staring at an empty field with never a person in it, living or otherwise.
Fright began to prod at him then, but he was consoled somewhat to feel the purse crumpled between his fingers and hear low broken groans from within. He made no more delay, only hurried to his own house – where he found another problem awaiting his attention. For there, hands on hips, stood none other than Sara, armed with that most lethal of weapons, her tongue. She meant business; that much was clear. But Larry surprised even himself when he marched past her, in the door, swinging the purse and humming a little tune, as if she were invisible. She was dumbfounded. Not a single threat, not even a word could she muster; just stood there paralysed and foolish as he sauntered into the kitchen and skipped lightly on to the chair nearest the dresser. With a flick of his wrist he threw open the lid of the box on top of the dresser where they kept their few valuables – American letters, rent receipts and such like. Sara’s eyes never left him as he threw in the purse and snapped the lid closed.
‘Now,’ he beamed, ‘where’s my supper? I have a fierce hunger on me from all the praying I did at that wake.’
He pulled in the chair to the table and sat waiting, whistling a little tune all the while.
Still shaken, not believing what she was hearing and seeing, Sara meekly went about preparing the food, though throwing suspicious glances now at Larry, now at the box.
But even when he had eaten enough and was smoking his pipe at the hearth afterwards, never an attempt at explanation did he make in spite of all her pointed looks. At last he stretched himself and knocked the ash from the pipe.
‘Time for the bed, I s’pose,’ and he yawned, and began to climb the stairs. Sara could bear it no longer.
‘Hi! Are you going to tell me what’s that thing you brought in, or not?’
He paused, but did not turn.
‘Time enough you’ll know about it,’ he said quietly, then continued on his way.
She followed close on his heels, still questioning, but getting no answers. They went to bed, but even when Larry at last turned towards the wall and began to shake the rafters with his snores there came no peace to Sara. Try as she might she could not sleep. Instead, she tossed and turned, her mind wrestling with the mystery. Finally she could bear it no more.
‘I must know what’s in that box – an’ I will!’
She got out of bed, padded downstairs, and without even pausing to light the lamp, climbed on to the chair and pried up the lid of the box. She rooted around inside until her fingers touched on what she was searching for. With a little squeal of satisfaction she lifted it out and carried it to the hearth. There, in the dim glow of the dying embers, she tried to open it. But Larry’s three knots had, if anything, been made more secure by the battering on the hurling-field.
‘I won’t let it beat me, whatever else,’ she muttered, crossed to the dresser and returned with the carving knife. That made short work of the thong.
Her thumbs scrabbled to tear open the mouth of the purse, but though it gaped darkly no gold tumbled out. Or silver. Or coppers. Nothing. She shook it, mystified.
‘If this is his idea of a joke, I’ll ...’
She was interrupted by a hissing noise from that small patch of blackness, followed by a terrible smell, as of some-thing long dead and rotten. Then a head popped out, but the features were of no person who had ever walked this earth. The eyes were bloated and almost closed. A large gap was where teeth should be. Every inch of skin was torn, lacerated or covered in welts and bruises.
Sara screamed and would have flung the purse from her as though it were a live coal. But the Devil was faster. He leaped bodily from his prison, head-butted Sara between the eyes and streaked towards the door.
All at once the kitchen was filled with a clamour of noises: the chair clattering, Sara falling, shrieking and clutching her head, the Devil hissing, and then, above it all, an ear-splintering crash as he struck the front door and carried it and the jambs before him in matchwood out into the yard, then galloped into the night, raising sparks from the ground as he went.
Tired as he was, Larry shot up in the bed in the room overhead, landed his two feet on the floor and scrambled towards the stairs, thinking there must surely be robbers in the house. Three steps short of the kitchen floor he stopped and stared dumbly at the scene of confusion before him – his wife stretched, moaning, in the ashes, her chair upended, the front door gone. He could hardly take it all in.
Then he saw the purse, cast aside on the floor! His lower lip dropped foolishly and he clapped his palms to his ears.
‘Oh, no!’ he moaned. ‘Don’t tell me you ...’
He rushed towards the object, horror in his face.
‘Don’t tell me you let him out, you óinseach.’
If Sara was shocked by his reaction, she quickly enough recovered her wits and snarled: ‘What óinseach are you call-ing me, you bastún!’
She rose up before him, threateningly, despite her late injuries.
‘An’ why didn’t you bother telling me what was inside that cursed purse? Is it so you wanted me to get killed? You never tell me anything in this house. I’m sick an’ tired o’ you, so I am.’
Larry hardly heard her. He knelt, picked up the purse and examined it, rocking himself backward and forward, fear in every line of his face.
‘Oh! Oh! Oh!’ he sobbed. ‘Why did you do it? Why couldn’t you leave him where he was? I had him safe an’ you went an’ destroyed it all. Women!’ – and he spat out the words bitterly – ‘They’ll always be interfering, whatever else.’
‘Oh? Is that so, indeed? An’ what about the men of Ire-land, as useless a set of gobdaws as ever wore socks? Who are you to be giving out oul’ guff about women?’
The argument started in earnest then, and who got the best or worst of it concerns no one outside that kitchen. What concerns every one of us, though, is that a rare opportunity of keeping the Old One in his place was lost that night. But the sad fact remains: he escaped, even more vicious than before his tangle with Larry, and is out there in the big world ever since, lurking and waiting, as the catechism tells us, ‘for the ruin and damnation of souls’.
The terrible pity is that he need not be.
Jack o’ the Lantern
Everyone has heard of Jack o’ the Lantern, surely. But how many people know how he came to have that odd name?
It all started in County Clare, in a little place called Cratloe. A man named Jack McCarthy lived there one time, but no one called him by that name. He was known far and wide as Jack Murt, and the same man was the friendliest person in all that side of the country. He’d talk to anyone, anytime. And to do that he had to be meeting people, and what better way of doing so than by being out at night in every rambling-house in the district, for there were no better such houses in all of Ireland than there were in east Clare in those days. So good was the entertainment to be had in them that it was nothing strange for crowds to be heard laughing their way home across the land at three and four o’clock in the morning most nights of the week.
One particular night Jack Murt was out as usual, chortling his way past the graveyard in Sixmilebridge, remembering a specially cutting reply old Willie MacMahon had sprung on Jamesy Curran at the end of a most involved tale of family character-assassination. It had almost caused a battle, and would certainly have ended in bloodshed had not the woman of the house taken a hand in the proceedings by taking down her rosary-beads and ordering all present to follow her in a few prayers ‘for all them gone before us’. This tactic succeeded in calming tempers, for by the time that all
the ‘trimmings’ were said most of those present had quite forgotten what the excitement was about in the first place. The prayers and a final cup o’ tea ‘for the road’ had ended the outing on a relatively happy note, and here was Jack now, in the dead hours of the night, breaking into a whistle to keep himself company as he picked his steps in the moonlight, for the roads were in a deplorable state, and more than one of his acquaintances had turned an ankle on such a journey as this.
As always when passing a graveyard gate, he blessed himself and nodded a little prayer in the direction of the departed. And then he saw it! The shape of a man, standing with his back to the left-hand gate-pier. Jack stopped, drew in a breath sharply and then bowed a stiff little bow.
‘God save you,’ he managed. ‘An’ how are you?’
No reply from the figure.
Jack squinted at him again.
‘Are you all right, or is there something I can do for you?’
Still no reply.
‘Yerra, blast him,’ muttered Jack to himself then, ‘if he don’t want to talk let him scratch himself off o’ the pier till morning,’ and he walked on with one last salute over his shoulder as he went: ‘Good night to you, whoever you are. An’ take my word for it, you’d want to have a share more talk or you won’t go far in this world – or in the next, either.’
Little did he realise what it was he was saying. He was gone only three paces when he felt two hands grip his shoulders, wheel him around, and he found himself looking into a yellow face.
He was so shocked that he could do nothing for a moment, not even speak. But the man spoke, in a low hollow voice with an edge of excitement to it.
‘I’m two hundred an’ sixty-seven years, three months an’ fifteen nights with my back against that cold pier, an’ you’re the first person in all that time, the first one’ – his voice cracked with emotion – ‘that ever spoke to me three times. There’s a few of ’em that saluted me. An’ a drunk man on a September night – I’ll never forget it – spoke to me the second time, but you’re the only one that ever said the third word to me. An’ because o’ that I’m free. An’ you’re going to be rewarded.’
Jack stared at him, amazed.
‘Yerra, what reward? I want no reward. Isn’t that why we got mouths – to talk to people? What reward would I want for saying a few words to a stranger?’
He was scratching his head now, genuinely surprised, but the man held up a warning finger.
‘Never mind that kind o’ talk! You’re going to get three wishes, an’ you’re going to get ’em now.’
Jack shrugged his shoulders.
‘All right. I won’t be arguing with you here at this time o’ the night, but what in God’s name would I wish for? Haven’t we everything we want, myself an’ Máire – she’s my wife, you know.’
‘Wish!’ snapped the man. ‘You must take your wishes when they’re there.’ Jack saw that he was dead serious, and rather than be disagreeable, which went against his nature anyway, he said: ‘Ammm ... ah ... well, we have all we need at home, like I said’ – and then he brightened – ‘except furniture. We have nothing much in that line except a couple o’ stools an’ a few forms – as well as my oul’ rocking-chair by the fire, the only comfortable piece o’ seating in the house. But that same chair is purely cursed. An’ why? ’Cos as soon as anyone comes into the kitchen that’s the seat they’ll always make for. D’you know something? I’m hardly ever able to sit in it myself. Someone is always there, warming it, an’ I’m sick an’ tired of ’em all. So, all I’m asking you now – just for a bit of a joke, you know – is that the next person to put their backside in that chair won’t be able to stir out of it until I give my permission. Will you grant me that?’
The man looked at him.
‘That’s the talk of someone with little sense,’ he said, ‘but you have it. Now, make your second wish.’
If Jack had had trouble with the first wish, this was even worse. He hummed and hawed, whispered and muttered to himself, but could come up with nothing. The stranger began to get impatient.
‘Hurry on!’ he snapped. ‘I can’t wait here all night. I want to go home to my nice warm grave. It’ll be the first night I rested comfortable in it since I was brought here two hundred an’ sixty-seven years, three months an’ fifteen nights ago.’
The preciseness with which he repeated the numbers would have been a warning to another person, but not to Jack.
‘Don’t rush me. I’m not used to thinking at this hour o’ the night.’
Then a glimmer of hope. The garden!
‘Hold on! I’m after remembering something. Out in our garden at home there’s an apple tree, an’ a mighty tree for fruit, too, until the young blackguards o’ the place found out about it an’ started coming in over the wall to carry every apple that was ever on it. Myself and Máire, we didn’t get an apple off o’ that tree for the last five years, so we didn’t, an’ ’tis high time a stop was put to ’em. Will you ever grant that the next person that puts a hand on the fruit o’ that tree will stick to it an’ won’t be able to move from there until he gets permission from me.’
The man looked coldly at Jack.
‘By the Lord,’ he said, ‘that’s another wish from a man without too much between his ears. But you have it. Now, there’s only one wish left, an’ my advice to you is use it more wisely than those other two.’
Jack stood and thought, then plumbed the depths of his empty mind once more, but though he scratched his head, his palms and his backside, he could come up with nothing.
The stranger began to lose patience with him in all seriousness.
‘Come on, will you!’ he snarled. ‘It’ll soon be morning an’ I have to be back in there’ – jabbing his thumb towards the gateway – ‘before the light of day.’
Still no ideas from Jack. The man stepped closer, his nostrils twitching.
‘Didn’t you tell me you have a wife at home? If you can’t think of anything for yourself, maybe she’d like something.’
Jack beamed.
‘The very thing! A hard-working woman she is, too, the same Máire. An’ she has this bag that she puts all kinds o’ little bits an’ pieces o’ material into, collecting ’em up to make quilts an’ covers out of ’em. The only bother is that every time the cats come in around the house, the first place they make for is that bag, to make their load in it. Many’s the time the poor woman put her hand into something soft an’ ugly inside in the same bag. You couldn’t teach manners to cats that are dirty by breeding, you know, so can I ask you now that the next thing that’ll go into that bag won’t be able to come out of it until I’ll allow it? That way I’ll make ’em suffer even if I can’t change ’em.’
The man threw up his eyes to heaven, wondering, no doubt, what kind of an amadán he was dealing with, but he replied evenly enough.
‘You have it. An’ much good may it do you.’
With that, he vanished like a wisp of smoke between the bars of the graveyard gate and Jack saw him no more. There was nothing for him to do except go home, go to bed and sleep soundly. Which he did, too tired out to give a further thought to the strange thing that had happened him.
But all was not well, for first thing when he got up the following morning Máire confronted him with, ‘There isn’t a splinter o’ timber there for the fire. Go out, will you, an’ cut a few sticks?’ So he went up with a hatchet to the fairy-fort in the High Field behind the house and began to chop down one of the whitethorn bushes growing there. And all this in spite of the fact that it was a place his father and grandfather had always, from his earliest years, told him to keep away from: ‘Don’t have nothing to do with it. Keep out from the Good People an’ they won’t interfere with you. Anyone who has close dealings with the same crowd isn’t the better for it.’
Yet, here he was now on this morning, doing exactly the opposite. Obviously something had gone seriously wrong with his head.
But he had barely landed the
fourth stroke when a sliver of wood flew and struck between his thumb and forefinger – a most sensitive spot. He dropped the hatchet and tried first to pinch it, then to suck it out. But with no success. And since he could not continue working he hurried down to the house, called Máire and told her his bother: ‘Look, I’m after cutting my hand. Get a needle, will you, an’ try to pick out that bit o’ timber. ’Tis paining me.’
She tried, but even though she was a skilful woman at such things she could not come at it. In fact, all she seemed to do was drive it deeper and deeper until it was up almost as far as his elbow. She had to give over at last and by then Jack was so far gone with pain that he had no option but to take to the bed.
By the following morning the hand was swelled horribly. When evening came it was the size of a football. And by the morning after it had gone black. Altogether a most ugly combination.
Máire did not like the look of it one bit.
‘I’m in dread that you’ll lose that hand,’ she said, and all Jack could do was toss, turn and moan. He became delirious, and each day thereafter saw him worse than on the day before. He gave Máire no sleep or peace, but the only relief she could offer him was bucket after bucket of cold water from the well. In it she kept his hand and arm immersed, hoping and praying for a small miracle.
‘Ssssss!’ would go the steam out of the bucket as soon as hand and water met and shortly the bubbles would begin to rise, and so another bucket was needed, until Máire was worn out from the constant carrying.
For five days this went on. The doctor was brought then but could do nothing since Jack would not allow the hand to be amputated.
‘Sorry for your trouble, ma’am,’ said he as he left, pocketing his fee, ‘but I can do no more.’
The priest fared no better, and at last all was despaired of.
On the evening of that fifth day Máire was sitting at the foot of the sick-bed, sobbing quietly, when she heard a loud, firm knock. She looked up, half dazed from exhaustion and grief, then staggered to the door and opened it. Standing there was a tall swarthy man, his coat flecked with dust as if he had travelled many miles.
The Devil is an Irishman Page 6
