Death and Nightingales

by Eugene McCabe

‘Our near-neighbour and tenant . . . Liam Ward. Thinks he’s evil.’

  ‘Evil, Sir?’

  ‘That’s the word he used.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘He refused to say . . . confessional stuff.’

  ‘I doubt if Ward confesses, I’ve never seen him in Church.’

  ‘Maybe his ladies confess; if you could call his consorts “ladies”.’

  ‘Would that make him evil, Sir?’

  ‘His exact words were, “he’s a bad egg . . . near evil”.’

  Beth thought about this, then said:

  ‘I suppose most humans are, more or less . . . this way or that.’

  What was she implying? Sensing accusation, his mind sought and found an answer.

  ‘There’s foolishness,’ Billy said, ‘and there’s evil.’

  After the drunken night and the beaver gold, he had talked the following morning at breakfast about malt whiskey being ‘an awful man’, about ‘falling into bad company’ in Enniskillen and that he ‘couldn’t remember a damnation thing; nothing; lucky to have a big pony like Punch who could find his way home in the dark.’

  She knew then and he half or wholly knew what had happened. Often growing up she would say aloud ‘I wish he was dead.’ Sometimes, half-awake, half-asleep, it calmed her to plan his death, push him from the quarry edge, spike his whiskey with poison or – the terrible answer she had read in Carleton – set the house on fire when he was in a deep drunken stupor and watch from the ring-fort, the kyle or the fountain hill . . . burning, burning, burning away the wrongdoing of the past; retribution, not vengeance. The impossibility, the awfulness of such actions made dreaming of them a kind of exhilarating solace.

  As they ate scones with butter and marmalade, Billy got up during a silence, went over to the sideboard and took an envelope out of the drawer. Out of it he then slipped what looked like a ticket, and placed it before her. She read:

  MR PERCY FRENCH

  OF WORLD RENOWN

  WILL SING HIS INIMITABLE SONGS

  AND RECITE HIS FAMOUS RECITATIONS

  AT THE TOWN HALL

  ENNISKILLEN

  ON THURSDAY 3RD OF MAY 1883

  TIME: 7 P.M.

  Silly ballads, banjos, idiot recitations of wretched doggerel which she found unfunny and all of it spiced with a painful sentimentality. Every other public house in the country and many private ones reverberated with drunken renderings. To have to listen to the creator of such stuff singing them in public would be a kind of torture. In any case she couldn’t go. For weeks the imagining of this coming night had filled her mind night and day. She heard herself say:

  ‘I don’t much care for Percy French, Sir.’

  ‘You don’t like Percy French?’

  ‘No, Sir.’

  ‘What don’t you like about him?’

  ‘The silliness I think . . .’

  Billy’s hand came out and retrieved the ticket slowly as he repeated, ‘Silliness?’

  ‘Yes, Sir.’

  ‘All the world is singing his songs . . . is the whole world silly?’

  Silly seemed to her now a kind word for what the world considered wonderful:

  ‘I don’t care about what he does.’

  ‘What do you care about?’

  ‘John Keats.’

  ‘And what does he sing about?’

  She paused, thinking, then said: ‘Death and nightingales.’

  ‘Maybe he’ll come and warble for us in the Town Hall sometime.’

  ‘You know he’s dead and gone, Sir.’

  ‘Where no birds sing.’

  ‘If you can quote him, why pretend?’

  ‘Because I know and like Percy French; it’s your birthday . . . it’s an outing. But no matter, I can find someone for your ticket.’

  Her mother all over again . . . punishing . . . not dislike of Percy French; dislike of anything I like.

  Beth had known for years that Billy had known Percy French as a student. He would sit in the front row of the Town Hall, clap too loudly and afterwards very likely bring her backstage to meet Mr French. Then the probability of drunken groping on the way back in the gig, the stumbling and mumbling as he unharnessed the colt in the yard, the obligatory piano recital and singing. All this he would have to do on his own tonight while the heart-chilling plan with Ward would begin. Thereafter she would be gone from here forever, and ever and ever and ever . . . Amen.

  ‘You’re missing a rare chance.’

  ‘I dislike concerts, Sir . . . I thought you knew that.’

  ‘You seemed to go every other week in Italy.’

  ‘That was opera.’

  ‘You’ll be alone here.’

  ‘With fowl in the yard and the fields full of sheep and cattle and crows and pigeons, thousands of them, and all the swallows now and a corncrake who never stops and when he does a donkey starts. It’s the least lonely place in the whole world.’

  ‘It’s good to see you smile, Beth, I thought maybe you were out of sorts about something.’

  ‘I’m content enough, Sir.’

  ‘Then we’ll mark your birthday some other way, some other day.’

  ‘That would be nice, Sir.’

  ‘You won’t change your mind?’

  ‘I’d rather not go.’

  He had been moving towards the door and then opened it slightly, hesitating, listening as voices came through from the kitchen. Beth could half-hear and recognise Jim Ruttledge’s slow guttural voice, all laughing when Mercy’s brother Gerry rhymed something. Then Mickey Dolphin giving a detailed account of how he had once trekked up to the lough field, the canula going in ‘lek a whiplash’, the hiss of trapped gas, and laughter as Gerry stammered out an inanity. Then Mickey talking through him, saying ‘I wouldn’t tangle with Miss Beth if she’d that yoke in her pocket; she could do harm, she could puncture a body badly.’ Then Jim Ruttledge’s deep voice: ‘What about Mercy here, could you be punctured Mercy?’

  In an eruption of good-natured laughter and banter, Mercy could be heard saying, ‘Lek a pack of silly wee boys, the whole lot of ye!’

  Billy half-smiled, blinking over at Beth, cleared his throat and went through to the kitchen. A sudden silence, then a gradual pick-up in talk. She could hear Billy saying:

  ‘The Canon tells me the Dummy McGonnell is prowling the country again. Do you know him, Gerry?’

  ‘I do, Sorr.’

  Gerry Boyle, Mercy’s brother, had the same large, dark, staring eyes as his sister. He listened to everything with his mouth open, showing gapped teeth, and when he did speak it was to stammer out a rhyme or folk maxim he had memorised. ‘A wee want, poor fella,’ kindly people said. He was mostly described, though, as ‘an eejit’.

  ‘Deed and I do, Sorr; he, he, he scars weemen, and he’s fierce strong, he, he, he, hisses at them like a goose, and that frights them tarror to give him all about the place . . . he’s a class of harmless rogue, Sorr.’

  ‘I’m sure,’ Billy said, ‘and smokes that pipe of his in every barn he’s let into . . . trail of barn-fires after him. I don’t want him next or near the place and if he gets contrary send for me, I’ll deal with him.’

  As Beth put the breakfast dishes on the dining-table she could hear them talking about the bog, turf-cutting and the weather, heard Billy tap the barometer and talk about change and Mickey Dolphin saying, ‘The paper give it good all this week,’ and Jim Ruttledge saying, ‘How would you know that Mickey, you can’t read.’ Then the men all leaving the kitchen.

  She went through to the kitchen with the breakfast dishes, then out to the scullery where Mercy was placing his lunch in a black leather bag as she did every weekday morning: rasher sandwiches wrapped in damp butter muslin, a slice of caraway-seed cake and a sauce bottle of cold tea. Billy Winters looked out the scullery window at the three men crossing the yard as though trying to remember something. Twenty-five years ago on this day and about this time, he had heard an infant’s cry coming down the well of the
staircase, mixed with old Doctor McAllister’s voice talking to the midwife. Overwhelmed he had left uncertain of where he was going or how long he would stay away. Here, now, the same green eyes looking from the same face, a living portrait of treachery? Beth was replacing the canula that she had washed and scalded in the drawer of the veterinary press. What to say? how to say it? He moved towards her, took her elbow and steered her toward the back door. He opened it, stepping out onto dry cobbles under cloudy sunlight and the sudden high skreek of early swallows:

  ‘Seems poor enough some way . . . your birthday.’

  ‘I’m content, Sir, truly.’

  ‘With this house, these fields . . . not me.’

  ‘Sometimes.’

  ‘Say what it is that has you moody?’

  ‘Now?’

  ‘Yes, let’s hear and be done with it. You bear me some resentment.’

  Beth felt suddenly tired of pretending and said:

  ‘I think you know, Sir, and I know you know.’

  ‘I’ve never harmed you, Beth.’

  In the silence that followed, the corncrake on the fort hill began a far-away coda.

  ‘Have I?’

  ‘I don’t know, Sir.’

  ‘I’d rather die than harm you, girl . . . you know that.’

  ‘Do you really want to hear.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘The last time you came in and sat in my bed, kissed me, not fatherly, said then something I’d rather not repeat. That’s when I got angry, Sir, and went to sleep in Mercy’s bed.’

  ‘Oh God,’ Billy groaned, ‘what stuff to launch a sunny day in May?’

  ‘You wanted to hear, Sir.’

  He moved across the yard, turned and said:

  ‘The day did start well though, you did well and I’ll be mindful of that.’

  Beth shook her head and shrugged trying to find words to conclude the encounter:

  ‘It’s what anyone would have done, Sir.’

  ‘We’ll talk again,’ Billy said, ‘I’ll make amends.’

  Too late, Beth thought, watching him walk after Mickey Dolphin with his two white enamel buckets which he used to fetch spring water for the house every morning from a surface spring-well half-way to the quarry. The water flowing through the yard from the fountain hill had an amber tinge and a boggy taste.

  In dry weather, summer or winter, Billy Winters preferred to walk to the quarry. There was a great deal more to see: cattle, sheep and, at the moment, the orchard in blossom – and always the view of the Lower Lough as he approached the quarry. It was also a mile shorter on foot than going down the avenue in the gig to the county road and then round to the quarry. Billy now walked on under the arched entry and down the back lane picking his steps carefully to avoid cow-dung on his fine leather boots. Mickey Dolphin, hearing him, turned and stopped, waiting. As Billy Winters approached he kept looking at the sky and it seemed to Mickey Dolphin that his master’s face was fixed in anger:

  ‘What can you read up there, Mr Billysorr?’

  ‘It tells me you were drunk last night and very likely still are . . . You’ll be got dead some morning, and no one to bury you.’

  Billy Winters did not hesitate and walked on past Mickey who picked up his buckets and went half-running after him:

  ‘You’d bury me, Billysorr.’

  ‘Why should I?’

  ‘You’re fond of me, a track.’

  ‘Why should I be . . . what have you ever done this thirty years but take wages for doing sweet bugger-all.’

  ‘Wages, Billysorr . . . ten shillings a month?’

  ‘Aye, and the run of your teeth, a roof over your head and my old shirts and boots and woollens.’

  ‘You’re horrid cross this morning, Billysorr.’

  Billy suddenly shouted:

  ‘Four men: you, me, Gerry Boyle and Jim Ruttledge and a cow blaring out her trouble and who saves her from the bone-yard? Not me, not you, not Gerry, not Jim Ruttledge but a slip of a girl, Elizabeth Rosaleen.’

  ‘Aye, Miss Beth, she’s a wonder, that girl. And sure the cow’s alive and well, Sorr.’

  ‘Will you tell me,’ Billy said in a measured voice, ‘what’s wrong with Mr Percy French? You’re a balladeer, you play the mouth organ, you’re a ceilidh and crossroads man, a foot-tapping jigger, a poteen guzzler; you tell me, Mickey Dolphin, what is wrong with Mr Percy French?’

  ‘Not a hate wrong with him, Sorr . . . by all accounts.’

  ‘Then you leave the bog at five, shave and put on your best wearables and have Punch harnessed and ready to leave at six. You’ll hear Mr French in the Town Hall tonight.’

  Billy suddenly stopped and put his left hand out to stop Mickey, his right finger going up to his lips to enjoin silence. They stood listening at a point where the farm-pass to the quarry fell away two graves deep to an acre of cut-over bog, a wilderness of birch, alder and sycamore where the refuse from Clonoula had been tipped and buried, topped up and overgrown, time out of mind, pram-wheels and cart-wheels, hoops, rotten barrels and bins, shards of vessels and crockery, rusting storm-lamps all mixed up with builders’ debris, lath and plaster, discarded invoices and ledgers and, grotesquely, a blind doll grinning sideways from a recent heap.

  In the silence they could hear what seemed like a steady snoring. Billy pushed his way down through dead bracken and briar till they got to the bog floor. Freckled light, dim as a cathedral and away in the middle of this they saw the Dummy McGonnell asleep, his head pillowed on bracken fronds in the fork of a birch tree on what looked like an island surrounded by the blackness of gleaming bog-holes. ‘The Dummy,’ Billy whispered to Mickey, who said, ‘He’ll hardly start a fire in here, Sorr.’

  After a minute their eyes became adjusted to the dim light and Mickey asked:

  ‘Would a body be better blind or deaf in this world?’

  ‘Deaf,’ Billy said. ‘What you hear is worse than what you see.’

  ‘I’d liefer be blind a hundred times; blind.’

  It was then that Billy Winters became aware that Mickey Dolphin had begun to tremble, his narrow head jerking his fringe like a mop on a mechanical toy. He did not see that Mickey’s gaze had shifted from the blind doll on the refuse heap to the white face of a drowned child staring up through the brown water of the bog-pool. Billy looked down into the water. He could see nothing and whispered urgently:

  ‘What’s wrong with you man?’

  The crying, when it came, was from within; a nasal whine so painful that Billy moved away a few yards, embarrassed and muttering, ‘You’ll have to quit the “singlings”, Mickey, no man’s a match for raw poteen.’

  He then saw Mickey Dolphin kneeling, staring into a bog-pool, tears plashing down through his fingers:

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ Billy muttered, ‘what is all this?’ He went over and hunkered beside Mickey putting an arm around his shoulder:

  ‘It’s all right Mickey. I was joking; we’ll bury you proper.’

  ‘No odds how I’m buried.’

  The sobbing then changed to something between giggling and laughing. It stopped as suddenly as it had begun with Mickey sitting back on his heels, wiping his face.

  The Dummy suddenly sat up, looking across at the two men, one kneeling, one hunkered. He half-growled, bent over the water in front of him, covered his face with his hands and began whining in what seemed like an imitation of Mickey’s grief. Billy said:

  ‘Leave him be, don’t look at him.’ Taking Mickey by the arm, he steered him up out of the bog onto the farm-pass.

  ‘What were you looking at down there?’

  Mickey Dolphin shook his head.

  ‘You’re going astray in the head, Mickey.’

  ‘Aren’t we all a track that way,’ Mickey said, and when he began to tremble again Billy Winters took him by the shoulders, turned him and pointed him towards the well saying:

  ‘Fetch your water; be ready at six.’

  As he watched Mickey go down the path to the well under the m
ountain ash he heard the Dummy coming out of the bog, a rope closing his long button-less coat, a great bone-headed man with three large yellow teeth in his top gums, a scissored stubble and blood-veined eyes.

  He came shambling down the farm-pass in two odd boots making sign language. Trying to avoid involvement, Billy Winters kept saying:

  ‘All right, all right.’

  The Dummy blocked his path shaking his head, forcing Billy to look at his mouth which was saying:

  ‘I’m not all right . . . I’m hungry.’

  ‘Go up to the house so,’ Billy said; ‘they’ll give you breakfast . . . And no malingering in the yard after; and no sleeping in lofts or haysheds.’

  The Dummy growled, twitching up his nose as though smelling something unpleasant:

  ‘And who in hell are you, McGonnell,’ Billy asked, ‘to mock at Mickey Dolphin?’

  The Dummy glared from angry eyes shaking his head and pursing his lips. Billy persisted:

  ‘He was distressed and you mocked him.’

  The Dummy shook his head in strong disagreement. By sign and gesture, his hand on his heart, he conveyed that Billy had mistaken mockery for sympathy.

  ‘And what could you know about Mickey Dolphin? He’s been with me twenty-five years.’

  With a knowing grin the Dummy conveyed that he knew almost everything about everybody.

  He then put his hand deep in his coat pocket and pulled out the stub of an indelible pencil. On the soft white palms of his work-shy hand, he drew a rough half-circle. Within this he pencilled the image of a child lying on its back at the bottom of the circle.

  ‘A womb?’ Billy asked, placing a hand on his own rib-cage. The Dummy shook his head. He pointed to the path where Mickey Dolphin had gone down with the buckets, went on his hunkers and described a circle on the ground with his forefinger.

  ‘A well?’

  The Dummy nodded. Using his thumb he then sketched a face with a fringe like Mickey’s, daubing tears and bending his thumb to show a figure kneeling and weeping over a well.

  ‘A drowned child?’ The Dummy nodded.

  ‘Mickey’s?’

  Again he nodded, and began to elaborate. Mickey had gone to a spring well one evening with his little girl. He was drunk, fell asleep, and woke-up to find his child staring up at him from the bottom of the well. His wife went off her head and left him for a neighbour man. Mickey drank more, was evicted, and took to the roads and that’s how the Dummy had met him long, long ago in the County Tyrone.