An Irish Country Girl

by Patrick Taylor

  “What’s stirabout?” Irene wanted to know.

  “Porridge,” said Kinky. “Connor always had a plate of stirabout for his breakfast, ‘but,’ says he, ‘it’ll do no hurt to throw a few logs on the fire too and begin building my woodpile, so I’ll start by getting these back to the cottage.’ He laid the axe on top of the bundle and lifted them in his two arms. He didn’t notice that as he did, some sap dripped onto the left side of his face, where it clung like a blob of red jelly. If he could have seen it in a mirror, he’d have noticed that it was shaped like a spider and the same colour as the vixen.”

  “And didn’t you say the farmers marked their sheep with coloured paint?” Dorothy asked.

  “I did.”

  “Oooh. Did it mean the Shee had marked Connor as their own?”

  “Maybe,” Kinky said, “but Connor didn’t even know the sap stain was there. ‘Home, Tess,’ says he, as he strode out. ‘We’ll get back now and tomorrow we’ll rise up early and go and move the sheep in the upper pasture. They’ve been in the big field long enough. It’ll still give us time to go and collect Art for the match; then on our way home we’ll come by here and bring a clatter more branches for our woodpile. Doov Shee be damned. We’ll still be warm when all the turf’s done.’ Tess tucked herself at her master’s heel as they made for home.

  “And the vixen followed them every step of the way, her gaze never leaving the red sap stain on Connor MacTaggart’s face.”

  6

  “As soon as he got home, Connor sent Tess to her kennel. He glanced back to the drystone wall and saw the vixen sitting on one of the flat coping stones.

  “ ‘You can smile at me all you like, fox,’ says he. The animal was starting to irritate Connor. Foxes were meant to be scared of people, not pursue them. ‘You’ll smile on the other side of your face after I’ve told the foxhunters or the harriers where to find you. And, by God, I will, whether you are a fox or—and I doubt it yet—a Doov Shee. Get on with you, now.’

  “But the fox just sat and stared.

  “Connor bent and dumped the bundle of logs and the axe beside the small turf pile at the gable end of his whitewashed cottage. He straightened and looked at the place. It was a tidy little spot. The thatch of the steeply pitched roof was spotted with patches of moss, and the bundles of straw it was made of jutted out over the front wall. Four sets of red-shuttered windows, two to each side, flanked a door that was also painted red. He’d done that job three years ago and it was weathering well.

  “He’d lived here, except for his time in the army, for all his twenty-three years. It was small, but when Da and Ma had been alive and his brothers and sister still living there, it had been a happy place. It had been his home.

  “His home. The word meant a lot.

  “He glanced back at the fox. ‘All right,’ says Connor, ‘maybe I was a bit hasty. Maybe that ould tree was your home, yours and your cubs—for I do not think you’re a faerie. So I’m sorry you’ve been evicted, but what’s done is done. If you’ll go away with you now, I’ll not say a word to the hunt. I’ve done you hurt enough.’

  “The vixen stared right back at Connor.

  “ ‘Go on with you,’ he said, softening more. ‘I suppose the tree had memories for you. This place does for me.’ Memories of his elder brothers, both emigrated, one to New Zealand and one to California; of his sister Clodagh, married to a man from Belfast up in the north; and of Da and Ma, God rest them both, gone, both taken by the 1918 Spanish flu.

  “Connor knew he was like the Red Indian fellah Chingachgook in one of the books Connor’d loved as a child. He might not be the last of the Mohicans, but he was looking like the last of the MacTaggarts of Beal na mBláth in County Cork, Ireland.

  “And if he didn’t get warm soon he would freeze, and then he would certainly be the very last and he’d not want that. He had plans to carry on the MacTaggart line—with a bit of help from Fidelma O’Hanlon.

  “The thought of her made his smile broaden. He was going to ask her to go with him to the moving-picture house in Clonakilty. Art, who’d been up there last week, had told Connor they’d be showing a flicker called The Kid with Charlie Chaplin. The kinematograph would be nice and warm inside—and dark.

  “But that was next Saturday. Connor needed heat tonight. He looked up. There was no blue smoke coming from either of the chimney pots on top of the red-brick stack to put a bit of colour onto the dark face of the sky, but there would be by the time he had a few logs cut to size. He looked over and the animal was still there. ‘Suit yourself, fox,’ says he, ‘but I’ve work to do.’

  “And the fox sat and stared. “Connor lifted the axe. He trimmed the branches away from the lengths of main trunk. The small ones would make grand kindling. He chopped the larger pieces into short lengths. He’d burn a few of those with the turf tonight. He stacked the rest in a pile, laid the axe on top—he’d see to it later—and carried the logs he had cut into the cottage.

  “His kitchen was a friendly place, with its black-oak roof beams, grey tiled floor, and whitewashed walls. There were a couple of faded photos hung on the wall beside a large Welsh dresser, snaps of Ma and Da in their Sunday best. His good china, white plates with blue edging, stood upright on the shelves of the dresser.

  “It was the work of moments to build a fire in the stone grate.

  “He lit the kindling and as the blackthorn branches started to burn, Connor heard a noise. It was very faint and he had to strain to make out what it was. For all the world you’d have thought it was a baby crying. ‘It’s a grand evening for my ears,’ says he. ‘Voices. Falling trees that sound like wounded hares, sap crying like a baby because it’s being forced from the wood by the heat of a fire. What’ll be next? A ram bleating but sounding like the roaring of an elephant?’ He laughed, and now the twigs were well lit, he banked the fire with four pieces of his remaining turf.

  “A kettle, already filled, hung from a cast-iron gallows at the side of the hearth. He swung it over to have water boiled for his tea, chucked his coat over the back of a spindle-backed rocking chair, and left to go to the shed where he kept his tools. It wouldn’t do to leave the axe uncleaned. The sap from the tree could start the blade rusting.

  “The shed was lit by only a small window, but a hurricane lantern stood on the workbench. Connor laid the axe on the bench top, opened the lamp, and adjusted the wick. The smell of paraffin filled the small room. He fumbled in his trouser pocket and pulled out his dudeen and a box of matches, lit his short clay pipe and inhaled the sweet tobacco smoke. Before the match went out, he lit the lamp and closed the little glass door. The light brightened the room and cast his shadow, large and misshapen, against one wall.

  “ ‘Right,’ says Connor, ‘let’s be getting this blade cleaned.’ He started to wipe, but the harder he wiped, the more the sap seemed to stick. He was just about to give up when the flame in the hurricane lantern guttered and almost went out. That was strange. The thing was designed to burn in the highest winds.

  “The thought distracted him for a second, and losing his grip on the rag, the palm of his hand jerked forward.

  “Connor felt the steel bite. The pipe fell from his mouth when he yelled, ‘Aagh, Kee-rist!’

  “Now I’m sorry, children,” Kinky said, “but I know you all recognize that grown-ups do swear now and then, and Connor was no saint, and he’d hurt himself, so.”

  She looked around and saw sympathetic nods.

  “It would not surprise you to hear that Connor dropped the axe, and as he shook his right hand, bright drops of blood spattered the bench top and the front of his waistcoat. ‘Sweet mother of Jesus,’ he growled, grabbed his right wrist in his left hand, and stared at the wound. The blade had sliced a cut a good two inches across the palm of his hand and—”

  “That hurts,” Colin Brown said. His face was screwed up into a frown. “I cut my hand on one of my Da’s chisels last August, and Doctor Laverty had to give me stitches.”

  “And
like yours did to you, Colin, his wound stung Connor sore. He stared at it for a moment, shook his head, and bent to retrieve his pipe. He knew he had better wash the cut and bandage it up. He blew out the lantern, left the shed, and crossed the yard. In the short time since he’d gone inside, the wind had come up from the east, cold and raw. It was a lazy wind, the kind that wouldn’t bother to go round a man. It would just go straight through him.

  “He heard a window shutter banging as it flapped.

  “It wasn’t until he had snibbed the shutter back against the wall and turned for the front door that he noticed the vixen sitting on the wall. Still staring at him. Still sneering. The half gale ruffled her red fur, so beneath it Connor could see the grey of the deeper hairs like the roots on the head of an old woman who used henna.

  “Connor shuddered. ‘That wind’s like a stepmother’s breath,’ he said, closing the front door behind him. ‘Thank goodness I got the fire started so at least it’s cosy in here.’

  “He crossed the tiled floor to the sink and turned on the cold tap. Since he’d had pipes put in the year before, he hadn’t had to use the cast-iron pump with the curved handle that stood outside in the yard. That was a blessing.

  “He stuck his hand under the flow, wincing both from the sting in the cut and the bite of the icy water. He forced himself to hold his hand there until the bleeding eased; then he bound the hand in a towel.

  “There was a tin box in the cupboard above the sink. The faded scene on the lid was of a heavy-jowled, large-bosomed woman wearing a crown and a severe black dress. She rode in an open carriage. The picture was dated ‘20 and 21 June, 1887’ and was in celebration of the English queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee. As he lifted out a bandage from his first-aid kit, a huge gust hit the cottage. Smoke was blown down the chimney and his eyes watered. The shutter must have become unfastened again because it made an unholy banging against the wall of the house. It was going to have to wait.

  “Connor walked to a corner of the room and looked up to where the timbers of the gable roof truss disappeared under the eaves. Sure enough, he saw what he wanted. A spider’s web.

  “He brought over a chair and scrambled up so he could get at the web, reached across, and pulled off as much as he could reach. Something scuttled up onto the beam.”

  “Yeugh. I hate spiders,” Jeannie Kennedy gasped. “I’d have run a mile. I’m scared stiff of them. Horrible creepy-crawlies.”

  “Indeed you’d have run from this one,” Kinky said. “And so would I. At first, Connor wasn’t even sure it was a spider, it was so big.”

  “Eeuugh.” Dorothy was frowning and pulling her head into her shoulders.

  “It was like no spider Connor MacTaggart had ever seen. Its belly was as large around as the silver dollar one of the Yankee soldiers had given him in France for a souvenir, and it was fat. The hairs of its belly were a dirty yellow, and he was sure he could see lichen growing in red spots among the hair.

  “Its thorax—that’s its chest bit between its belly and its head—its thorax was pitch-black except for a pale red mark. Connor peered at the mark and wasn’t it—”

  “A skull,” Mick Corry said confidently. “There’s a moth like that called a death’s-head hawk moth, so there is.”

  “Micky collects bugs,” Carolyn explained.

  “Well,” Kinky said, “I’m sorry to disappoint you, Micky, but it wasn’t a skull. It was the head of a fox.”

  Sometimes, Kinky thought, the old expressions are the best. You could have heard a pin drop in the upstairs lounge of Dr. O’Reilly’s house at Number 1 Main Street, Ballybucklebo. She waited before continuing. “Its eight legs were striped yellow and black, and each ended in a claw. The creature stared at Connor, and he saw its eyes, hard and black as anthracite. He heard its jaws click. He, who was scared of no man or beast, shrank back. . . .

  “It hissed at him like a cat, dropped down a gossamer thread, and scuttled across the tiles with its claws scratching before disappearing into a mousehole.

  “Connor wanted the gossamer to help dress his wound. He decided that as the owner was gone, horrid as it might be, he might as well get all he needed from the web before he climbed down. He stripped away more from the beam, and as he did he saw what the spider had been feeding on. It was no fly. It was a sparrow.

  “Poor wee bird,” she said, “and poor Connor. I know I told you Connor MacTaggart wasn’t afraid of anything, but the sight of that half-eaten sparrow in his rafters . . . well, let’s just say he was shaky on his feet as he stood on that chair. But he still had to dress his wound so he clambered down and got on with the job.

  “He carefully spread the spiderweb gossamer along the length of the cut in his palm . . .”

  “Would that not make it suppurate?” Billy Cadogan asked.

  “I asked Himself, Doctor O’Reilly, the very question, and he said no. He said it’s an old country cure that works well. The gossamer makes a framework for the blood to clot on, and it’s from the clot that healing starts, so.”

  “And did they start you off with gossamer, Colin Brown?” Hazel asked sweetly.

  “Why’d you think that?” he asked.

  “Because,” she said with more hardness in her tones, “you’re the biggest clot in Ballybucklebo, so you are.”

  Kinky had to join in the laughter. Nice one, Hazel, after Colin’s dig at you earlier, she thought. “Now settle down,” she said, “or I’ll never get this story finished. And I must because”—she looked at her watch—“in fifty-four minutes I’ve things to do in my kitchen, so. Now, hadn’t we left Connor in his kitchen?”

  “Aye. Wi’a spider’s web in his cut,” Micky Corry said.

  She nodded. “So Connor looks at the cut. The gossamer’s dark now, but there’s no more blood seeping through, so he bandages it with the gauze. ‘It’ll be well on the mend by tomorrow,’ he says, ‘and just as well for I’ll have to go to the high pasture.’

  “Then he went out into the gale, latched the shutter, came back in, and made himself a cup of tea, extra sweet with three spoonfuls of sugar in it. ‘There’ll be no pipe practice tonight,’ says he, ‘with my hand cut, so. Aye, and no football either on the morrow.’

  “Still, he comforted himself while sipping his tea, ‘While I’ll miss playing in the match, with a bit of luck Fidelma will be home. That bears thinking about, and the wee half-un I’d promised myself would help with the thinking.’

  “He got up to fetch the bottle, still talking to himself, a habit which I hear comes easy to bachelor men. ‘So,’ says he, ‘if I did truly hear an ould woman’s voice, it told me to beware of the raven, the fox, and the spider.’ He poured a measure of poitín and put the bottle back where it belonged in the rear of the cupboard. ‘Well, I’ve had all three today and they’ve done me no harm—unless it’s this scratch from the bird.’ He glanced at his forearm. ‘So if that’s the worst the Shee can do—if it is the faeries—I don’t think I’ll worry too much even if it does snow tonight.’ He took a hefty swallow as he remembered the warning from the voice beneath the blackthorn tree, then threw another of the logs on the fire.

  “Connor didn’t see the spider staring at him from the mousehole. And he hardly heard the weeping of the blackthorn log over the gale outside that racketed and shrieked and banged and tried to rip the thatch off his cottage.”

  7

  “And it is what it was. When Connor arose early the next morning, the gale had nearly blown itself out. He washed his face, but didn’t bother shaving, didn’t even glance in the mirror. He wanted to get up to the high pasture as soon as he could, see to his flock, and then head on to let the O’Hanlons know why he’d not be joining Art for the football match against Dunmanway.

  “He had a quick breakfast; pulled on his heavy boots, his coat, and his caubeen; grabbed his crook; and whistled up Tess. As he was shutting the door he noticed the clock on the mantel said eight o’clock.

  “The wind of the dying storm was sharp against his ch
eek. There was a heavy rime of frost, but he grinned to himself when he saw there was no snow. So, he thought, I needn’t beware of snow today, and a backward glance reassured him that his thatch was intact despite the efforts of the wind the night before.

  “It wasn’t until they’d crossed the wall that he noticed the vixen. Had it waited all night? Connor wondered. Or with that great rock in the mouth of the hole under the felled blackthorn, had it gone to find another lair? No matter. She was there. A persistent animal to be sure.

  “He scanned the heavy grey skies. At least there was no sign of a raven, and even if the spider in the web at home was big enough to eat birds, it wasn’t big enough to climb outside and chase him.

  “And it is what he said: ‘Good luck to you, fox. It’s a hard climb to the upper pasture. I hope you do get tired soon, so.’ And on he strode.

  “Now,” Kinky said, “I’m not trying to tell you that part of County Cork has mountains like the Sperrins or the Mournes, for it has not. It’s mostly good farmland, but the first MacTaggarts had settled on acres fit only for sheep.

  “Connor did not know how many generations of his family had lived there. He only knew that MacTaggart was the English version of the Irish Mac an tSagairt, and it meant ‘son of the priest.’ ”

  Jeannie frowned as she said, “Maybe the Irish king was angry when he gave the land to Connor’s great, great, I don’t know how many greats, grampa, because priests aren’t allowed to get married. Father O’Toole’s not anyway.”

  Kinky smiled at the mention of the parish priest. He was a Corkman. “You could be right, Jeannie,” Kinky said, “but let’s get on with our story.” She shifted in her chair. “To get to the upper pasture, Connor and Tess had a brave ways to travel.

  “It wouldn’t be the first time Connor had wished his family lands were down in the valley. His fields were in a barren place, treeless and exposed on the very summit of the hills. Even in the summer it could be cold, particularly when the mists crept in. In the winter frigid winds swept the hilltops, often bringing snow even if there was none on the lower lands.