‘Where the devil did I put me cap? Did any of you see me cap?’ Tarry Flynn was standing on a stool searching on the top of the dresser. He lifted an old school book that lay in the dust of the dresser-top and temporarily suspending the search for his cap was taking a quick glance at the tattered pages.
His mother, who had just come down stairs and was sitting in her bare feet by the fire with her shoes beside her on the floor, forgot for a moment the corn on her little toe which she had been fondling and said with exasperation:
‘What in the name of the devil’s father are you looking for at such an hour of the morning? Are you going to go to Mass at all or do you mean to be home with them atself?’ She swung round. ‘Looking on top of the dresser! Mind you don’t put the big awkward hooves on one of them chickens that’s under you.’
Tarry glanced down at the hen and chickens that were picking crumbs off the floor. ‘A fine bloody place to have them,’ he said.
‘They’ll make more money than you anyway,’ said the mother. ‘Well, of all the mane men that ever was you’re the manest. Of a holyday morning to be looking for the oul’ cap at twenty-five minutes past eight. Anything to be late for Mass. And if it wasn’t the cap it ’id be something else – the stud or there ’id be a button off the coat. Just like your uncle Petey that never gave himself more than five minutes to walk to Mass. I remember him and he’d keep looking at himself and looking at himself in the looking glass till, honest to God, it ’id make a body throw off their guts to see him.’
‘Ah don’t be bothering me.’
‘Oh, that’s your uncle all over. Nobody could talk to him; he knew everything. He’d take on to put a leg in a horse – and the whole country laughing at him. Will you get down to hell out of that and go to Mass? On the blessed day of Corpus Christi to think of a man sling-slanging about the house and first Mass near half over.’
‘Amn’t I taking the bike, I tell you.’
‘Hens not fed, the pot not on for the pigs – and you washed your face in the well water, about as much as we’ll have what ’ill make the breakfast.’
Mrs Flynn had stuck her feet in her shoes. She rose and looked out the window. ‘Where’s this one?’ she asked in a growl.
‘I’m here,’ called ‘this one’, who was Mary, a daughter, from upstairs.
‘Lord God of Almighty, but you’re another of the Sunday girls. Lying up there in bed like a churn a-drying that – that–Have you any shame at all in you?’
‘Shut up,’ the daughter shouted down.
‘Oh, it’s me has the good family that I ought to be proud of,’ the mother said with broad irony. ‘If it’s not this man here it’s one of yous. That’s what left the Carlins where they are – getting up, one of them at eight and the other at nine, making two breakfasts. If they had one breakfast now they wouldn’t be as hard to talk to. When you’re coming down don’t forget to bring down that vessel and not have a smell in the room that ’id knock a dog down. I want it to feed the calves anyhow.’
Mrs Flynn crossed the floor and stared out the back window. She had to screw her eye at the corner of the window to get a full view of the Drumnay lane where, at the top of a rise behind the house, it joined the main road. The whitethorn hedges heavy with summer leaves could give Tarry’s imagination the idea of a tropical jungle, but the mother did not like those hedges.
‘There, it’s now half eight and no sign of you going.’
‘Don’t I know well you put that clock on a half hour last night,’ Tarry said.
‘I didn’t nor half a minute.’
Mary came down the stairs carrying a bucket. Standing in the doorway for a moment she glanced up and down the road to see if anyone was coming or going. Then she dashed across the street and flung the contents of the bucket against the face of the dunghill.
She returned to the house with her fist in her yawning mouth. ‘A terrible close morning,’ she said.
‘Did you look to see if the hen in the barrel broke any of the eggs?’ the mother asked her.
‘None, as far as I could see.’
‘I wouldn’t put it past you but you didn’t look at all. Will you try and get this fellow his cap and get him away to Mass – the oul’ haythen!’ She turned to her son, who was now sitting on the edge of the table by the front window lighting a cigarette.
‘Lord! Lord! Lord!’ she exclaimed, ‘starting to puff at the curse-o’-God fag at such an hour of the morning. Have you any cutting-up in you at all?’ Crossing the floor she looked out the front window. ‘I see that young calf out there licking at the dirty hen’s dishes and he’ll get a scour out of it as sure as God’s in Heaven.’
‘There’s the oul’ cap,’ said Mary, lifting an old newspaper that lay in the back window. ‘He must be blind that he couldn’t get it.’
‘Didn’t want to get it,’ said the mother. ‘Will you, like a dacent girl, run out to the cart-house and see if his bike is pumped?’
‘It’s hard enough,’ she said when she came in again, ‘it ’ill carry him.’
The mother hung on the kettle and began to turn the fan bellows wheel. With her left hand she poked the fire with a long pot-stick and her handling of that pot-stick showed better than her talk her annoyance with her son. ‘A poor thing,’ she growled as she stirred up the clinkers and dragged them aside, ‘a poor thing to rear a man that doesn’t care for God, man or the devil. And him knowing as well as the head’s on his body that I have to go to the market this day with them cocks that we caught last night. I hope I’ll be able to swop them for pullets,’ she was now addressing her daughter. ‘I won’t get very big pullets for them, but they’re good March chickens and I oughtn’t to do too bad… Lord, O Lord! Aggie left here to go to Mass at five minutes to eight and there’s that man still steaming away at the fag like a railway engine. Take Carroll’s factory to keep him in fags. Mary, go up the loft steps and see if you can see Bridie coming with the milk. We haven’t a drop for the breakfast that that fellow there didn’t slug into the long gut of his before he went to bed last night. Tarry, will you for my sake and for everybody’s sake get up and go to Mass?’
‘I’m always an hour too soon when I go by you,’ said Tarry.
‘I’ll quit talking, I’ll quit talking,’ the mother sighed.
Bridie passed in front of the window carrying the cans of milk and trying to keep the calf from knocking the lids off.
‘The strawberry is looking the bull,’ Bridie said when she laid the cans down in the kitchen. ‘She didn’t give me half as much milk as she ought to.’
‘She couldn’t be looking the bull, I don’t think,’ said the mother, making a mental calculation. ‘She took the bull a fortnight ago, and unless she was the devil’s ranter altogether she wouldn’t be coming round till three weeks. Be a terrible loss if she won’t keep the bull,’ she reflected pensively.
‘There’s a lot of cows going wrong that way,’ said Bridie.
‘Will you,’ the mother shouted at Tarry, ‘hurry up and be home early from Mass in case you have to go with that cow. We’d have to sell her a stripper if she doesn’t keep the bull.’
‘The white cow has a tear on her teat that’s a total dread,’ Bridie said, ‘like a tear from a buck wire.’
‘Oh, that’s more of this man’s doing!’ cried the mother. ‘How many times did I tell him to fix that paling and not have the buck wire trailing half way across the field. To look at this place a person would think we hadn’t a man about it. Do you think will the teat need to be bathed? Oh, look at him there with his big nose on him and the oul’ cod of a face like his uncle that – that a Protestant wouldn’t be worse than him… ’
‘And there’s more than that, the dirty oul’ dog,’ said Bridie. ‘There’s other things going on that might get us all into trouble.’
‘Arra, what?’ the mother cried, very dramatically.
Bridie was being mysterious. ‘If some fellows we know are not in jail before the next week or so I’ll be surprised.’
‘God, O God! O God! O God!’ lamented the mother. ‘Is it something to do with this fella here?’
‘Huh! Is that the way it’s with you? A girl knocked off her bicycle at Drumnay cross and there’s going to be a lot of trouble about it.’
The mother had heard enough to drive her to the heights of dramatic intensity. By the tone of her daughter’s voice she knew that something really desperate must have been done to some girl.
‘Was heavy hands laid on some poor girl?’ she asked. Heavy hands was a term Mrs Flynn had for the worst that a man could do to a woman. ‘And who was she?’
‘Mary Reilly,’ said Bridie. ‘Whatever was done to her I don’t know only what I heard.’
Tarry, finishing his cigarette, was trying his best to defeat the discussion with a sneer. But the drama was beating him.
‘It’s all nonsense,’ he said, ‘all nonsense.’
The mother started to cry. ‘Isn’t it a poor thing that I can’t have one day’s peace with the whole rick-ma-tick of yous? Amn’t I the heart-broken woman? And me going to the market the day. I won’t be the better of this for a week.’
‘Quit whinging anyway,’ said the daughter.
‘How can I quit! how can I quit!’ She suddenly rallied sufficiently to say to Bridie: ‘Go and strain that milk into the big pan-crock before you feed the hens… And what was done to the girl?’ she asked Tarry when the daughters were absent.
‘Nothing,’ said Tarry, ‘nothing.’
‘There be to be something or Bridie wouldn’t have it. Lord, O Lord! why can’t you be like another and not have us the talk of the country? Not that I care a straw for that whipster of Reilly’s – a big-faced stuck-up thing that… a bit of mauling wouldn’t do her much harm. But you to get your name up with it, that’s what I can’t stand. It’s a pity you wouldn’t try to keep away from that cross. Get up now and go to Mass and be back quick in case you have to go to Kerley’s with that cow.’
The mother’s imagination followed her son as he cycled down the lane towards the main road. She loved that son more than any mother ever loved a son. She hardly knew why. There was something so natural about him, so real and so innocent and which yet looked like badness. He hated being in time for Mass. He had always slept soundly through the Rosary in the days when his father was alive to say that evening prayer. And he was forever reading and dreaming to himself in the fields. It was a risk to let him out alone in a horse and cart. The heart was often out of her mouth that he’d turn the cart upside down in a gripe while he was dreaming or looking at the flowers. And then the shocking things that he sometimes said about religion and the priests. She was very worried about all that. Not that she loved the priests – like a true mother she’d cut the Pope’s throat for the sake of her son – but she felt the power of the priests and she didn’t want to have their ill-will.
He was a queer son in some ways. There was a kink in him which she never had been able to fathom.
The sun shone on the little hills. Hens were flying over gates and fences to scratch in potato and turnip fields.
The headlands and the hedges were so fresh and wonderful, so gay with the dawn of the world. Tarry never tired looking at these ordinary things as he tired of the Mass and of religion. In a dim way he felt that he was not a Christian. In the god of Poetry he found a God more important to him than Christ. His god had never accepted Christ.
Then the place of things alive overflowed his analytic thoughts and he heard the robins and sparrows in the hedges. A crib cart with a load of young pigs passed on its way to the market, for as well as being a Church holyday this was also a big market day in the local town. Ahead of him at the Miskin lane he could see another late Mass-goer whose walk he recognized. A good friend of his own, a poetic man who disliked being in time for Mass as much as Tarry. This was Eusebius Cassidy, his young neighbour. Eusebius was on foot, which meant that Tarry would catch up with him.
‘Hello,’ Tarry said as he slowed down and cycled beside Eusebius, who had gripped the back of the saddle.
‘Damn nice morning,’ said Eusebius.
‘A terror,’ said Tarry.
‘Well?’ said Eusebius with meaning.
‘Damn to the thing doing, Eusebius,’ said Tarry.
‘Be jabus! did you see her?’
‘I did. She has no fella as far as I know.’
The two young men were talking about girls. Ninety per cent of their conversation was about girls. Only talk. Always talk. They were idealists and always very lonely. Something had gone wrong with the machinery of living and nothing they ever planned in this line ever came to anything.
They were both more than twenty-seven in those enthusiastic years of nineteen hundred and thirty-five, yet neither had as much as ever kissed a girl. Not that kissing was much in favour in that district. Reading about lovers kissing, Tarry often reflected on the fact that he had never seen anyone kissing anyone, except poor old Peter Toole whom he once saw kissing a corpse in a wakehouse in the hope of getting a couple of glasses of whiskey.
Tarry loved all nice young girls. He loved virtuous girls, and that was one of the things he admired the Catholic religion for – because it kept girls virtuous until such time as he’d meet them.
Tarry was not bad looking, and up to a point he was a great favourite with women. Once a girl in a dance hall called him ‘an oul’ monk’. The last thing he wanted to be was an oul’ monk, and in his heart the last thing he was. Beneath the crust was the too soft heart of a romantic idealist. He had written some verses at that time, too, but these poems did not jut out of his life to become noticeable or make him a stranger to the small farmer community of which he was a child. Eusebius shared most of Tarry’s views on everything; for Eusebius was a product of that semi-human Gaelic enthusiasm which had swept the country in his father’s day. Eusebius had caught the contagion from an uncle and he had a sentimental regard for poetry – especially the poetry of Mangan and translations of Gaelic poems such as Callanan had done. One of his favourite pieces was Mangan’s Nameless One, in which he saw the reflection of his own loneliness and lack of female companionship.
I saw her once one little while and then no more,
Twas Paradise on earth awhile and then no more.
‘Did you hear anything about the other thing, Tarry? – no developments?’
‘Heard she went to the Big Man about it.’
‘Holy God! To Father Daly?’
‘She was seen going up to the Parochial.’
Eusebius jerked his shoulders somewhat hysterically and giggled, ‘There’ll be sport about this, there’ll be sport about this.’
‘They can go to hell,’ was all Tarry said.
Near the village they came up with the last Mass-goers. Down the Mass-path that served the hilly part of the parish two old women were coming. ‘That’s like your mother,’ Tarry remarked.
They left the bicycle among the other bicycles against the wall of the graveyard and, while Tarry took the clips off his trousers, still kept running along so that their hop-and-go-constant gait was like the progress of kangaroos or horses with itch in the heels. Every one, who till he came within sight of the chapel was in no hurry at all, suddenly developed that anxiety which will be noticed among people who, approaching a football field, hear across the paling the first cheers or the referee’s whistle. Tarry, too, was infected.
Tarry and Eusebius were of one mind now in hoping that the man with the collecting box would have left the chapel door. Passing the forge they saw Charlie Trainor’s old mother looking for two ha’pennies for a penny, and though they thought her mean they themselves never gave even a ha’penny at the door. Indeed they could not very well afford a ha’penny, for cigarettes and dances and an occasional Saturday evening in the town required every penny and ha’penny they could rap or run.
The man with the collecting box, luckily enough, was disappearing round the gable of the chapel on his way to the sacristy with the takings as they came up the incline through the graveyard to the chapel door.
The Catholic Church of Dargan was a building like a barn – a common rectangle, with a square belfry at the north gable; the church was scaling its mortar rough-casting and its pink wash was almost faded white. The roof span was wide and the roof timbers rotten so that only people with a strong faith in God’s goodness-to-His-own would risk sitting in the centre aisle. The centre aisle was always packed, which proved that both faith and piety abided in the parish of Dargan. Standing on a rise in the middle of a weedy graveyard above the village with its shops and new dance hall the church looked shabby, but God would surely overlook this apparent disrespect in the blaze of the people’s devotion. There were faith and piety and all the richness of human character that goes with a deep faith in the Hereafter. Father Daly said First Mass on the Feast of Corpus Christi. The chapel was crowded, for as well as being a Feast Day of importance, on which the Faithful were exhorted to receive Holy Communion, this day was also the big summer fair day in the neighbouring town, and many of the congregation had business in the town and by coming to early Mass were able to serve both God and Mammon. The doors and windows were open, but still the place was stuffy with that morning closeness which comes before people are acclimatized to summer. Outside the door a group of men stood whispering while the less solemn parts of the Mass were being said. These men stared about them at the rolling country of little hills and commented on the crops, the weather, the tombstones or whatever came into their dreaming minds.
‘Very weedy piece of spuds, them of Mick Finnegan’s.’
‘He doesn’t put on the dung, Larry: the man that doesn’t drive on the dung won’t take out a crop.’ A pause, ‘Nothing like the dung.’
‘Give me your cap till I kneel on it,’ someone said with a laugh.
‘All the kneeling you’ll do, Charlie…’
John Magan, the puce-faced publican, and his flat-footed wife were coming up the incline. The men at the door made way for them and Charlie Trainor the calf-dealer, who was kneeling on one knee with his eye to a chink in the half-open door, gave the big man a quick salute with his upraised fingers.
‘I say, quit the bloody spitting on my boot,’ someone growled to his neighbours.
Tarry and Eusebius had now arrived and were standing quietly by the sidewall of the chapel near the door, unobserved. Presently Tarry moved through the crowd in the porch.
‘He couldn’t see the women from here,’ said Charlie.
Tarry ignored their banter and when the Mass Book was being changed for the first Gospel he took advantage of the commotion of the congregation rising to slip in unobserved, except by the young women who made it their business to watch every man as he came in. Tarry disliked staying at the door, not because he had any strong faith or piety, but because he found the atmosphere there annoying. As he edged his way into a place behind a pillar he gave a quick look round the women’s side of the chapel. The sexes were on different sides of the Dargan chapel. The congregation was in danger of becoming squint-eyed owing to this arrangement. Even plain women look pretty in a church. As he knelt down after the Creed he leaned on the back of the seat before him and through the crook of his arm surveyed the priest and the people. He had neither prayer book nor rosary beads, nor any other devotional pass-the-time.
It was a squalid grey-faced throng. The sunlight through the coloured windows played on that congregation but could not smooth parchment faces and wrinkled necks to polished ivory. Skin was the colour of clay, and clay was in their hair and clothes. The little tillage fields went to Mass. No wonder that Father Daly had such a low opinion of his parishioners. When he first came to the parish he said there was only one decent man in the whole place and that was the publican – with the miller a bad second. Decency referred in this connection to the size of the property and not to the character of the individual. In the heat the drone the ceremony and the hum of the prayer sounded like an airplane hovering in the distance, or a wasp at the window. Father Daly was a fine cut of a man; he had been educated at Rome and Louvain and was full of a pedantic scholasticism which he somehow managed to relate to the needs of the people. When he left this acquired pedantry at home and took on to speak on politics or economics, which he often did, he made himself look silly. But never to the people. The people of Dargan thought him the loveliest and best educated priest in the diocese and even Tarry Flynn in moments of excitement conceded that the man was above the average country priest. When he turned round to preach, the congregation sat up and admired his fine-shaped head, his proud bearing and his flashing green eyes behind the rimless glasses on which the sun was playing.
He had a silvery voice, so that even nonsense from him sounded wise. He took out a white silk handkerchief from the folds of his chasuble and wiped his glasses. Then he made a dramatic gesture with the fluttering handkerchief before blowing his nose with a loud report like a motor horn. Father Daly was up to every stage trick and would have made an excellent Hyde Park speaker. When (as happened on this Sunday) he had something important to say he usually led up to it by a cleverly constructed runway of philosophy, so that his listeners would be wondering what he was coming at. They knew his ways and his tricks and when, on this occasion, he started off, not with a philosophical but a poetical theme, they guessed that something interesting was in the air. ‘There was a great poet one time,’ he began, slowly, and in a minor key, ‘and his name was Tom Moore. He wrote a song called “Rich and Rare. ‘Rich and rare were the gems she wore —”’ The priest spoke solemnly, enunciating every word separately. Then he blew his nose again, and as his eyes swept the corners of the chapel his glasses flashed on the walls and were spots of light in the mirroring glass of the Stations of the Cross.
‘Rich and rare were the gems she wore
And a bright gold ring on her wand she bore;
But O her beauty was far beyond
Her sparkling gem and snow-white wand.
Lady, dost thou not fear to stray
So lone and lovely on this bleak way?
Are Erin’s sons so good or so cold
As not to be tempted by woman or gold?
Sir Knight, I fear not the least alarm,
No son of Erin would offer me harm.
For though they love women and golden store,
Sir Knight, they love honour and virtue more.’
Father Daly took his time with the verses, and he spoke so well, and his words seemed the prelude to so much that not even the greediest man for the world, waiting to go to the fair, nor the Communicant with the thickest fasting-spit was annoyed.
The priest stared into the distance as he said: ‘That couldn’t be said by a lady passing through the village or parish of Dargan today. No, it could not,’ he sighed. He raised his voice to a roar that quivered the rafters and echoed in the galleries. ‘Rapscallions of hell, curmudgeons of the devil that are less civilized than the natives on the banks of the Congo. Like a lot of pigs that you were after throwing cayenne pepper among?’ The people opened their eyes wider and listened, leaning forward – delighted with the sermon. The men at the door came into the porch and Charlie Trainor peeped through a chink in the woodwork. ‘Come to hell outa that or he’ll see you,’ someone warned him.
‘Everything’s game ball,’ Charlie said, and winked.
‘Hypocrites, humbugs,’ the priest went on, ‘coming here Sunday after Sunday – blindfolding the devil in the dark as the saying goes. And the headquarters of all this rascality is a townland called Drumnay.’ The congregation smiled. Tarry Flynn stooped his head and smiled, too, although he was a native of that terrible townland. The calf-dealer at the door cocked his ear more acutely; he too, was interested in his townland and pleased when its evil deeds got the air.
‘A young girl was passing through this village the other evening,’ said the priest sorrowfully. ‘She was riding her bicycle home from Confession. When she was passing Drumnay crossroads she was set upon by a crowd of blackguards – and blackguards is no name for them – and the clothes torn off her back. Good God, good God, what is this country coming to? Atheists, scallywags…’ Then relaxing the intensity of his passionate outburst he continued softly, ‘I don’t blame the unfortunate wretches so much, but I do blame the half-educated blackguards who put them up to such work – the men who make the balls for others to fire.’ What was he driving at? Who was the girl? What really happened? The ordinary members of the congregation took the priest’s words with a grain of humorous salt and peasant doubt, knowing what wonders Church and State can make out of the common affairs of life when seen in their official mirror. Somebody winked across at Tarry Flynn, who sat with his head bowed and the pleasant smile on his face being thrown to the shadows between the seats. Charlie Trainor never smiled when the priest was preaching; he kept peeping through the woodwork, taking everything in with a serious look.
The respectable people, like the police and the stationmaster and the schoolteachers, and the miller and the publican and his wife all put on mouths of righteousness and narrowed eyes. This was not good enough in a Catholic country. This was not good enough for County Cavan in the year nineteen hundred and thirty-five. And the men leading the revolt against decency and authority were Tarry Flynn and Eusebius Cassidy. Weren’t they the two ends of hypocrites coming to Mass the same as decent men? Should be chased to hell out of the parish. And that whole bunch of half-chewed idiots from Drumnay, they weren’t so bad if fellows like these didn’t come putting ideas into their heads. And Charlie Trainor, that was another prize boy. But he would never do any harm so long as he was doing well at his business. But the other pair, they were the right blackguards. So thought respectability. ‘I’ll not rest or relax,’ the priest concluded, ‘till I make an example of these scoundrels who are sullying the fair name of this parish. I’ll bring them to the bar of justice if it takes me ten years. Yes, Drumnay cross-roads where a decent man or woman can’t pass without a clod being thrown at them or some nasty expression. They come here to Mass and they were better at home – a thousand times better.’ The priest broke off suddenly and began to read out a list of notices, including one that a grand carnival dance would be held in the hall on that same evening, the charge for admission – gentlemen three-and-six, ladies half-a-crown. And furthermore, the right of admission should be strictly reserved. Tarry had an attack of conscience. When the priest turned away to face the Altar he knelt with his chin on the heels of his shut fists and a faraway look of childhood piety in his eyes.
Outside the chapel the little knots of the congregation picking up their homing companions hardly mentioned the sermon. There were other more urgent things to fill their minds – the crops and the fair and their neighbours.
Even Mrs Flynn, who was standing by her yard gate with the two baskets of cocks ready to move off to the railway station, had no time to discuss the scandal. Tarry had expected her to go into terrible tantrums when he got home and was pleasantly surprised at her temper.
‘That cow is not looking at the bull, thank God,’ she said. It was probably this that put her in good humour.
Tarry helped her with the baskets of cocks the short distance to the railway halt.
‘Take off that good suit,’ she advised her son, ‘and not have everything on the one rack like the Carlins, and give Aggie a hand with the dinner.’
Tarry promised to do as advised.
The quiet time between the two Masses on Sundays and holy-days was for Tarry the happiest time of his life – especially when all the rest of the household was at second Mass and he was in sole control. He could read and smoke his fill without his mother’s interruptions. His mother disliked his reading and smoking far more than any of his other habits.
He washed the potatoes for the dinner in the tub before the door and put on the ten-gallon pot.
Then sitting by the fire, keeping it stoked, he sat smoking and reading the Messenger. The Messenger of the Sacred Heart was bought every month, and with Old Moore’s Almanac and the local newspaper constituted the literature of Flynn’s as of nearly every other country house.
Flynn’s house had the reputation of being possessed of some wonderful books. Tarry’s father, who died some years previously, had an interest in books and had bought several second-hand volumes in the market of the local town. His books were not very exciting, but they were books. A gazetteer for the year 1867, an antiquated treatise on Sound, Light and Heat, and a medical book called Thompson’s Domestic Medicine.
The only one of the three which Tarry had ever known father to read was the ‘doctor’s book’. His father had taken a few prescriptions out of it for the common illnesses of his friends. Once he gave a prescription for jaundice to a man which must have worked; for from that day to the day he died the father had the reputation of having a traditional cure for the jaundice and men and women came from far and near for the ‘cure’.
Tarry had no books except these and a couple of school readers. One was a famous Sixth Book which he had stolen from a neighbour’s house some years before. It was in this book he got all the poetry he knew.
He could read anything, so hungry was he for reading. So he read the Messenger, all of it from the verses by Brian O’Higgins on the Sacred Heart – a serial poem which ran for a year or more – to the story of the good young girl who had a vocation, and who was being sabotaged by the bad man, right through to the Thanksgivings ‘for favours received’, at the back.
The sunlight came in through the dusty window, making a magical sunbeam right across the kitchen.
Aggie had gone to the well for water.
When she came in she offered to keep an eye on the pot and not let it boil all over the floor. She had also to see that the delicate chicken who was rolled up in a black stocking in a porringer by the hob did not get scalded or burned.
In the midst of this beautiful repose there was a great hen flutter in the street and brother and sister both rushed out. It was the hawk of course, but as far as they could see he had got nothing.
Tarry put the Messenger in his pocket and climbed Callan’s Hill, a favourite climb of his.
Walking backwards up its daisied slope he gazed across the valley right across to the plains of Louth, and gazing he dreamed into the past.
O the thrilling daisies in the sun-baked hoof-tracks. O the wonder of dry clay. O the mystery of Eternity stretching back is the same as its mystery stretching forward.
That was Tarry: Eternity and Earth side by side.
Suddenly his mind came back to the precise particulars of the immediate scene. Drumnay –
Drumnay was a long crooked valley zig-zagging West-East between several ranges of hills in Cavan. The valley part of it was mostly cut-away bog, so that the only arable land was a thin stripe along the bottom of the hills and the hills themselves. It is not to be wondered at that the minds of the natives were shaped by and like the environment. In cul-de-sac pocket valleys all the way up the length of the townland were other smaller farms, inaccessible, and where the owners were inclined to be frustrated and, so, violent. At the western end of the valley Flynn’s comfortable farmhouse stood. The poplar-lined lane that served the townland branched off the main road about two hundred yards from the Flynn homestead. With the whitethorn hedges in full leaf the road seemed no more to one looking across country than a particularly thick hedge.
Tarry sat on the crown of the hill with his back to a bank of massed primroses and violets, and as he sat there the heavy slumberous time and place made him forget the sting of the thorn of a dream in his heart. Why should a man want to climb out of this anonymous happiness in the conscious day?
Cassidy’s field of oats was doing very well. A beautiful green field of oats. He was a bit jealous of the oats, and doubted if his own was doing as well. He stared into the hazy blue distance and heard the puff-puff of a train coming in through the boggy hollows five miles away. The earth under him trembled.
‘Tarry, Tarry, Tarry!’
His sister’s cry recalled him to reality.
‘What?’ he shouted down.
‘Come down and give us a hand to teem the pot.’
Wasn’t that a nuisance? Just when he was beginning to be happy something like this always disturbed him.
As he was coming down the hill the first people on bicycles were coming from second Mass – his two sisters amongst them. His next-door neighbour, May Callan, was with them. May was one of the girls with whom he was in love. She was reality. But nothing was happening after all his spring daydreams. The land keeps a man silent for a generation or two and then the crust gives way. A poet is born or a prophet.
Teeming the pot into a bucket, he put a sack apron around him, and holding one of the legs of the pot with his right hand and the pot lid with his left he drained off the water.
Even teeming the pot was very important in his life and in his imagination. Any incident, or any act, can carry within it the energy of the imagination.
Outside at the gate he could hear his other two sisters in loud giggling conversation with May.
As soon as he had the pot teemed he found an excuse to wander in the direction of the girls so as not to make the overture seem too deliberate. He pulled the saddle-harrow out from where it lay against the low wall before the house with a very concerned air. All the time he was trying to impress his personality on May. But it was no use. He could not understand why he was ignored by young women, for he knew he was attractive.
Could it be that girls knew that beneath his poetic appearance was primitive savagery and lust? In his innocence that was his surmise then. So he put on yet a further coat of apparent virtue. This made the situation worse, but he did not notice the worsening.
His own sisters, too, treated him with little respect. One day he struck Aggie with his open palm and knocked her across the kitchen floor – and curiously enough, from that day forward she was the only one who deferred to his masculinity.
With women in general he was truthful and sincere and would talk philosophy or Canon Law (Canon Law fascinated him, though what he knew of the subject was utter nonsense) to them on the slightest provocation. Women cannot understand honesty in a man.
He carefully replaced the saddle-harrow and walked to the gate and glanced down the lane.
‘… so he said “me hand on yer drawers” says he, and says she… What the bleddy hell are ye listening to women’s talk for?’ It was Bridie who was speaking. May was looking at Tarry with cold indifference, as he thought.
‘The birds of Angus,’ he said in a dramatically silly tone.
Tarry had a number of meaningless phrases which he used to astonish girls with. This particular phrase he had read somewhere. By saying something queer like this he expected to get the attention of the mystery-loving heart of woman. Women thought him a little touched when he made such remarks. This was not the arcanum to which they, were accustomed. He knew it was not the usual aphrodisiacal double-meaning, illiterate joking which a man such as Charlie Trainor was an adept at, but he felt that it ought to be much more effective. It wasn’t.
And so the girls at the gate separated and Tarry was left – with his dreams.
He couldn’t go to the town that day, because his two sisters, Aggie and Bridie, were going in the hope of getting a man, and he had to keep an eye on things. It was dangerous to leave a small farm without a steward for a day. Something was liable to go wrong, and then there would be a row with his mother. So all day he had plenty of time to read and smoke. Getting enough money to buy cigarettes was a problem; if it wasn’t for all the eggs he stole and which Aggie sold for him he’d be without a cigarette many a time.
The day passed.
Cyclists passed down the lane on their way to the town. The bawl of unsold cattle could be heard as they were being driven home. Tarry was not unhappy.
Tarry was running a centre in the potato drills. As he was using only one horse to pull the old plough the work was rather bumpy–and in the local phrase ‘in and out like a dog pissing on snow’.
Was he interested very deeply in his work? In some ways, yes. Although he was trying to compose a verse as he worked he was also thinking with much comfort of the excellent progress his potatoes were making. They were three inches over the tops of the drills, the best spuds in the country. Growing potatoes was a thing he took a great pride in. By merely admiring the buds as they grew he felt that they responded and progressed. Indeed he was sure they responded. Clay climbed in the back of his boots. The plough struck a rock and the handles flew high over his shoulders. Up and down the alleys he went for about an hour in a great hurry. Then he sat on the beam of the plough to dream.
As he dreamt Molly Brady came down the path on the far side of the dividing stream, towards the well. In one hand she carried a tin can and in the other a long pot-stick. She left the can beside the well and began to search with the pot-stick in the rushes that grew in the swamp; she was looking for hens’ nests.
Molly was about twenty years old, a soft, fat slob of a girl who appealed to Tarry in a sensual way.
And for weeks in his daydreams he had been planning an approach to her. He knew the times she’d be coming to the well. Accidental-like he had a large plank lying across the stream for a week or more now – he had it there for the purpose of making a platform when he would be removing the big boulder that had rolled into the stream, blocking the flow of water. Molly’s mother did not get up out of bed these mornings until near eleven. That would be a good time. Among his other arrangements he had two large corn sacks which presumably were for covering the horse when he would be cooling down after a sweat. And now the time had arrived.
Molly was obviously waiting for Tarry to open the conversation. It was plain that her interest in the hens’ secret nests was merely collateral.
‘Hello,’ he called.
This ‘hello’ conveyed a different meaning from other hellos. In country places a single word is inflected to mean a hundred things, so that only a recording of the sounds gives an idea of the speech of these people.
This hello had in it a touch of bravado, the speech of a wicked monster making a bid for a woman’s virtue, the consciousness of the wickedness producing a tremulous quality in the tones. Speaking, he felt that the whole countryside was listening to his vile suggestion.
‘Hello,’ answered Molly. Her hello was a wild animalistic cry.
‘Fierce great weather, Molly,’ said Tarry, going towards the edge of the stream.
‘I’m looking for a nest of oul’ eggs,’ said Molly with a pout of bitterness which was aimed at some hens unknown, ‘and bad luck from the same hens how well it’s here they have to come to lay. How’s your mother?’
‘Damn to the bother, Molly. They wouldn’t by any chance be laying on this side of the drain. Do you know what it is, Molly, I kind-a thought I saw one making a nest on this side.’
Molly was standing in the rushes with her legs wide apart and the pot-stick stuck between them, like a witch ready to take off on her broom. Tarry in his mind was crouching nearer his prey. If he could get her out on this side of the stream he would have the battle three-quarters won. But first he had to make his escape sure. If she started to screech what excuse would he make? Would he be able to pass the thing over as a joke?
Suddenly he realized that this game would take hours to develop. The game wasn’t worth the trouble. That was it; any man could have any woman provided he was willing to be patient. He decided to put the affair off until some other time. Molly would be liable to be visiting Flynn’s house one of these nights and he’d have a better chance if he waited and waylaid her as she went home alone through the meadows.
As he reasoned to himself – sure, good God, a man would be mad to try a thing like that on in the middle of the day.
When Molly went on her way and Tarry was halfway up the drill he remembered the technique which always worked in his daydreams. It would work in real life, too, if be had the gumption to put it to the test.
‘I’m the two ends of a gulpin,’ he said aloud to himself.
And all through that day he kept cursing himself for his cowardice.
At tea-time in Flynn’s the mother was chastising Bridie, and Bridie was not behind-hand in replying in similar coinage. The argument which was well under way when Tarry entered, had been started by Bridie, who accused her mother of going about with a face on her like the bottom of a pot.
‘Go lang, ye scut, ye,’ said the mother, ‘how dar ye say a thing like that to me.’
‘Oh nobody can talk to you,’ said Bridie with a pout, ‘if a person only opens their mouth ye ait the face off them.’
‘The divil thank ye and thump ye, Bridie, ye whipster, ye. Your face is scrubbed often enough and the damn to the much you’re making of it. I could be twice married when I was your age.’
‘A wonder ye didn’t make a better bargain.’
‘Arra what?’ the mother was rising in her anger, ‘arra what? Is it making little of your poor father – the Lord have mercy on him – ye are? May bad luck to ye into hell and out of it for a tinker that… Go out one of yez and bring in a lock of sticks for the fire… Oh a brazen tinker, if ever there was one. Oh a family of daughters is the last of the last. Half of the time painting and powdering and it would take a doctor’s shop to keep them in medicine.’
‘Will ye shut up.’
‘I will not shut up. There’s that poor fella there (Tarry) and he didn’t get a drop of tay and him tired working in the field all day. Go now and put on the kettle, Bridie, and make him his tay.’
‘He’ll die, poor chap, if he doesn’t get his tay. Nothing for the mother here only the big fella. There’s no talk of making tay for us when we come in. And we’re doing more than him.’
‘What are yez doing? what are yez doing? I don’t see much of your work… How did ye get on the day, Tarry?’
‘Nearly finished.’
‘Ye shouldn’t try to do a bull-dragging day. Isn’t there more days than years. Listen, listen.’ They all listened to the rattle of the road gate. ‘I hope to the sweet and honourable father,’ gasped Mrs Flynn, ‘that it’s not someone coming in on top of us at this hour of the evening. Whip that kettle off the fire and not have us making tay for him.’
Aggie took off the kettle, shoved it under the stairs and disarranged the clean tea-mugs on the table. The mother dashed to the door. It was Mrs Callan prowling for her ducks, which were laying out those nights.
‘Won’t ye come in and rest your stockings, Mrs Callan?’ Mrs Flynn said, with enthusiastic hospitality.
‘I can’t till I get me ducks,’ she said in her sneaky crying voice.
‘Would ye let me look into your stable to see if they might be there? I thought I saw them coming this way.’
Mrs Flynn did not like the suggestion that she was exploiting Callan’s ducks. Indeed this was not the first time that Mrs Callan had come round on a similar errand.
‘Troth, the only time, Mrs Callan,’ said Mrs Flynn, ‘that you’d be sure of finding your ducks about our street is when we’re feeding the hens. They are the boys for aiting me hens’ feeding, Mrs Callan, but as for dropping an egg here that’s the last thing they’d think of. Oh, catch them to lay about a stranger’s place.’
‘It’s a wonder they’d be coming, then, to ait your hens’ feeding seeing that they have the run of the fields and the bog – the two bogs at that.’
‘Troth, there’s damn all nourishment in the fields or in the bogs, Mrs Callan. If that’s all ducks get the devil the many eggs they’ll lay.’ Tarry went to the road gate to see if his neighbour Eusebius was coming.
The mother called him: ‘Tarry, did ye chance to see Mrs Callan’s ducks knocking about this evening?’
‘They were over in our field trying to look for worms in the drills after me about three hours ago. After that I saw them making for Cassidy’s field of oats.’
‘Aren’t they the terrible travellers,’ Mrs Callan drawled innocently. ‘It must be the breed.’
‘Troth,’ said Mrs Flynn, ‘it’s the breed of everything to look for the full of their bellies, Mrs Callan. The ducks will always come home if they’re sure of getting a feed when they come.’
When Mrs Callan was gone Mrs Flynn turned to her son: ‘That party never fed man or baste in their life. Even the cats come here and I often take pity on them mewing for a sup of milk. Mane lot of beggars and the consait of them. Why, that young whipster of theirs, May, you’d think she was the lady of the land. With her little black head and her sparrow-legs, ach, she’s not a girl nor a patch on a girl’s backside… Gwan, now, hen, into the house with ye.’ The woman shooed the wandering hen in the direction of the hen-house door. ‘I don’t like a hen that doesn’t go to roost early in the evening; she won’t lay the next day. My, isn’t it a lovely warm evening.’ She gazed up the valley.
‘Is that Petey Meegan I see? Another slack gelding. The devil the woman he’ll ever take now.’