Tarry went to the horses’ stable for the winkers. Happening to look into the manger he found a fresh-laid egg. He picked up the egg, cracked it on the edge of the old pot in which the mare got her oats and drank it. It was not that he liked raw eggs but he believed that raw eggs produced great virility. Stallions got a dozen raw eggs in a bucket of new milk every day during the season.
Standing in the doorway of the stable he felt good and terribly strong. A man is happy and poetic in health and strength. The stable in summer with the dust of last year’s straw on the floor was to Tarry the most romantic place he knew. Sitting in the manger smoking and reading was paradise. But he had work to do now.
Walking through the meadow in summer was a great excitement. The simple, fantastic beauty of ordinary things growing – marsh-marigolds, dandelions, thistles and grass. He did not ask things to have a meaning or to tell a story. To be was the only story.
The sun had come out through the haze and the morning was very warm. The cackle of morning had ceased. The songs of the birds were blotted out by the sun.
Paddy Callan, May’s father, was walking diagonally across the hill beside their house looking a little sadly at his rood of turnips which had failed badly. This gave Tarry much satisfaction. His pleasure did not live long for just then he heard the wild neigh of a mare coming down the lane at Cassidy’s gate and presently sighted the animal. Eusebius was getting some trade for that stallion of his, though Tarry, wishfully thinking, thought that no sane man would bring a mare to such a miserable beast that wasn’t sixteen hands high. Considering that Reilly had a prize stallion, seventeen three in height, at stud less than a mile away this was surprising. Tarry satisfied himself that only bad pays, men with ponies and old mares, would come to Eusebius’ stallion. Flynn’s mare was in foal by Reilly’s sire, although Eusebius had been letting his beast to mares the previous year.
He caught the mare easily enough, for she was lazy at this time, and led her after him to the stable.
The harness wasn’t in the best condition. The collar needed lining and the traces were tied with bits of wire in two places. He couldn’t find the hames-strap. Searching for it between a rough wooden ceiling and the galvanized roof he found a torn school reader which he usually enjoyed reading while evacuating his bowels in the stable. He put it in his pocket in case he’d take a notion to read in the field.
‘Come home for your dinner about half-twelve,’ said his mother.
‘Right.’
‘And don’t come till we call you.’
‘I’ll not come at all if that ‘ill satisfy you,’ said Tarry peevishly.
‘Begod there’s a powerful piece of turnips,’ Eusebius was saying as he leaned over a low stone fence upon which moss and briars were growing, and which was the march-fence dividing a field of Cassidy’s from Flynn’s.
‘Not so bleddy bad, as the fella said,’ Tarry agreed. The field of two and a half acres was one-third taken up with turnips and the rest, with the exception of three drills of cabbages, with potatoes. Tarry looked across at the drills and the goodness of the crop flowed through the heat of his passionate desiring mind like a cool river. He remembered the damp evening on which he sowed them with love. The dry clay too was so beautiful. As they talked, Tarry’s mind adventured over and back that rutted headland with its variety of wonders. From where he stood to the cross hedge bordering the grazing field. Every weed and stone and pebble and briar all along that ordinary headland evoked for him the only real world – the world of the imagination. And the rank smell of the weeds!
What is a flower?
Only what it does to a man’s spirit is important.
Something happened when Tarry looked at a flower or a stone in a ditch. Sometimes he went with visitors to what were called beauty spots and these fools would point and say: ‘Isn’t that a wonderful scene?’ But these scenes did nothing to him and were not wonderful.
Eusebius had his elbows on a flat stone as he spoke. He had tackle – hobbles and ropes – on his shoulder as he was on his way to castrate young bulls for someone.
‘Isn’t it a bit late in the season for cutting calves?’ Tarry suggested.
‘Not at all, the flies didn’t start yet.’
Eusebius was a marvellous man for trying to pick up loose money in this way. He was always on the look-out for any game that had ready money in it. He also went in for castrating young pigs but he had the name of not being very lucky so that his trade in this line was rather thin. At the time he was also dabbling in smuggling. Then there was the stallion.
Tarry thought Eusebius a greedy man for the world, and a mean man too in spite of all his gaiety.
‘See any women lately?’ Eusebius asked.
‘None that counted, anyway.’
‘Any word about the Reilly one?’
‘I think that all blew over. The Mission killed it. All the same it was a damn mean thing of Charlie to give out my name that night. That was a dirty lousy thing to do. I’ll get that fella yet or I’ll call myself a damn poor class of a man.’ Tarry spoke petulantly, as a weak man. Eusebius crossed the fence and accompanied Tarry down the drill.
‘I say, there’s flaming great spuds. You must have shoved on the potash, no matter what you say.’
‘Only the hundred,’ said Tarry with an in-drawn breath of self-satisfaction.
‘Near closing the alleys. That’s fierce for this time of the year.’
‘Easy there, Polly. You’re not in earnest about that, are you?’
‘Only what I hear. All women’s as bad as the Dillons if they get the chance.’
These remarks wounded Tarry very deeply. He wanted to sustain his illusions about human nature. He did not want to believe these things – until, perhaps, he had had his fill of lust.
‘I believe that nearly every girl in this place is a virgin,’ said he, hopefully. Eusebius laughed loudly. ‘Huh, huh, huh. Jabus, you’re a very innocent fella. I’d say there wouldn’t be more than twenty per cent – if there is that.’
The mare stopped on the side of the hill. Tarry stood with his back to the plough and standing between the handles settling his mind for a good long talk on his favourite theme.
‘You’re a desperate man, Eusebius,’ he opened. ‘To hear you talking a person would imagine all the women in your country was blackguards. That’s the kind of Charlie Trainor. Nobody’s out for anything else according to him. After all there’s more than that in it.’
‘You might be right, right enough.’
‘I’m sure I’m right. There’s very few women like that when it comes to the whipping of crutches. Remember the night we saw him with the Dillon one?’
‘Look!’
‘Wonder who the devil is it.’
‘Might be the bailiffs coming from Carlin’s. They have a betten pad up to them.’ The two boys stared across the fields watching the clear in the hedges at the turn of the Drumnay lane, two hundred yards distant.
‘They’ll be sold out before long,’ said Eusebius.
‘Indeed they will not, Eusebius; they’re not that far gone,’ said Tarry, who had a greedy notion in his head that they, the Flynns, might be able to slip in and get the Carlins’ place for half-nothing – maybe for fifty pounds. It did not occur to him that Eusebius might have eyesight just as good and maybe better, for seeing through deal boards. It is foolish not to recognize the other fellow as as far-seeing a rogue as yourself.
In the middle of the conversation Eusebius suddenly remembered that he had business on hand; the chance of making a few shillings always crashed like a stone through the window of his romantic mind, and he was off. His father was just the same, all gaiety and jocosity till it came to business and then he changed his mood altogether.
Tarry stood in the shadow of the poplars beside the stream musing on the general moral situation in a day-dreamy way. He could get no perspective on life, for life lay warm, too warm, around him, and too close and nearly suffocating. He was up to his neck in life and could not see it to enjoy it. His whole conscious mind was strained in an effort to drag himself up out of the belly of emotion.
Sometimes he would concentrate, saying to himself: I am alive. Those are potatoes there, and that is a blackthorn’s root. Life was like a terrible pain which he was trying to analyse away.
He found a long cigarette butt in the lining of his waistcoat and reflected on the irony of it; for the night before when he hadn’t a cigarette he had searched every pocket, including the linings, and could find nothing. Now when he had nearly a full packet he found this great long Player butt.
Tarry, musing, got a feeling that someone was near at hand. He was right; his mother was standing on the height above him in the middle of the plot of turnips surveying the scene after having taken good stock of the turnips and of her son’s morning work.
She had approached the field from the other end and had managed to come across the stone fence.
‘How do you think they’re doing?’ she asked.
‘The best turnips in your country,’ he said; ‘they’re butting a dread; some of them as thick as your thumb. They’re fierce turnips.’
‘Don’t be always boasting like the Callans. The Callans never had anything that wasn’t better than anyone else’s. Troth you may thank me that they’re so good. Only I was at you, you wouldn’t sow them that evening. Was that Eusebius you had with you?’
‘He was just passing; I hardly had time to talk to him.’
‘Oh, that’s the right careful boy that knows how to make a shilling. There was two mares up there this morning to his stallion – and you always making little of the animal, not sixteen hands high. It’s a terror the trade he’s getting for that young stallion.’
‘He’ll get all the bad pays the first year, don’t you know that? A new stallion or bull is like a new shop in that way. Nobody ever made money of a stallion or bull.’
‘Oh, that ’ill do you, now. A drunken oul’ rake never made money of a stallion, but I’ll bet you Eusebius won’t be so. Troth they’ll all pay him. Lord God of Almighty!’ Mrs Flynn reflected as her eyes scanned yellow-weeded fields to the east. ‘Them Carlins are the unfortunate people. The whole farm – and that’s the good dry farm – all going wild. Yellow weeds like a forest. Oh, that was a bad family that couldn’t have luck. The abuse they used to give to their father and mother was total dread. Getting up in the morning, at every hour, if the tay wasn’t fresh more would have to be wet. And there was a time when Jemmy was as consaitey a boy as went into Dargan chapel. And all the girls that were after him!
“‘I could thatch a house with all the women I could get,” says he to me. “Yes, I could thatch a house with all the women I could get.’”
The mother had come slowly down the drills while her son was driving the mare towards her. ‘You shouldn’t drive that unfortunate mare too fast,’ she said, for in her presence the son had put on a great spurt.
He pulled up. The mother began to speak in a confidential whisper. ‘Had Eusebius any news?’
Tarry thought that perhaps his mother had been listening to their talk about girls and was a bit embarrassed. ‘Curse o’ God on the ha’porth.’
‘Aw-haw, catch that fellow to tell you anything! They tell me the grippers were up at Carlins’ again. As I said, as bad as they are I was glad the oul’ cow, the only four-footed animal they have about the place, wasn’t taken. They drove her into Cassidy’s field. They’ll be out of that before you’re much older. They’ll be on the broad road as sure, as sure, as sure. And mind you, that’s as dry and as warm a farm of land as there is in the parish. There’s a couple of fields there and do you know what it is you could plough them with a pair of asses, they’re that free. It’s a terrible pity you wouldn’t take a better interest in your work and you could be the independentest man in Ireland. You could tell all the beggars to kiss your arse. This rhyming is all right but I don’t see anything in it. Sure if I thought there was anything in it I’d be the last person to say a word against it, but – Stand over here!’
Tarry stood facing the point his mother drew attention to.
‘Who would that be?’ the mother whispered.
They were watching someone, a man, coming at a stoop on the far side of a high hedge beyond Brady’s field. He had something on his back.
‘Do you know,’ said the mother, ‘just for cure-ossity you should slip down to the corner and see who the devil’s father it is. I’ll keep an eye on Polly.’
Tarry crossed the drills quickly and pulling a rotten bush out of a gap in the hedge went into the grazing field.
The man with the sleeper on his back was going at a stoop on the far side of the other hedge that divided Finnegan’s Big Hill from Flynn’s farm. It was Eusebius.
While he was developing a strong jealousy towards Eusebius who was making such a practice of stealing sleepers that they’d all be caught in the end he saw another man coming at a murderous gallop down Brady’s narrow garden. This man was not a railwayman but a small farmer from the opposite side of the railway. No normal observer of the scene would need to be told what it was all about.
Eusebius sized up the situation for he now was shoving the sleeper through a hole in the hedge into Flynn’s field.
Having pushed the sleeper through he saw Tarry and, never at a loss, stood his ground until Tarry came up. Then seeing the angry man approaching he climbed through the hole made by the sleeper into Flynn’s field.
‘Larry Finnegan, he’s mad,’ Eusebius panted with a laugh that was much strained. Tarry listened.
‘He had the sleeper ready to take away, had it over the paling and was going back for another – the greedy dog – when I snaffled it on him. Just for a cod, you know.’
By now the angry Larry had come up but instead of turning on Eusebius he went past without a word with an injured expression.
They hid the sleeper in some briars and Eusebius went back the way he had come.
‘Well?’ asked the mother when the son returned.
He told her the story.
‘There’s no luck in a thing like that,’ she said. ‘If I wanted a thing I’d pay for it and not have people throwing it in your face. Yes, aye,’ she said about nothing at all. ‘That mare won’t take long; you’d want to keep an eye on her. Oh, an unfortunate pack of poor devils. Do you know what?’ she declared suddenly on a new and enthusiastic note, ‘I think I’ll dodge up round Carlins’ one of these evenings to see what kind of a place they have at all. I don’t know the day or hour I was up there. Since the Mission, they don’t get up till evening I hear. When a party quits going to Mass it’s a bad sign.’
Tarry saw the possibilities in that move, but not all the possibilities his mother saw.
He had already another small problem in his mind – how to slip off with that sleeper before Eusebius returned for it. He knew what he would do. He would simply change the hiding place and if Eusebius found it well and good – well and good.
Tarry shook the clay out of the heel of his boot and pulled his sock, which had been creeping towards his toes till the heel part was half-way up, tightly on his shin.
He watched his mother as she walked along the bottom headland, slowly sauntering along it sideways looking up the drills with all the contentment that a good crop in a bad season can give to a tiller of the soil.
‘There’s a drill there,’ she shouted, ‘and what the devil happened it? You mustn’t have put any dung on it.’
She did not expect an answer, and did not wait for one, but opened the wooden gate that led into the field where the cows were. The gate dragged and Tarry could sense her silent criticism as she pulled it open and shut.
About this time Molly was in the habit of coming to the well, and as Tarry had not given up hopes of seducing her in reality as successfully as he did so often in his daydreams he was hoping that his mother would not delay too long with the cows.
A ploughman runs a risk when he daydreams in a stony field – unless his horses are extremely slow-moving and cautious.
The mare seemed to know every turn and twist of her master’s mind; instinctively, like a woman. When she stepped over a hidden rock she went still slower. Sometimes she twisted her head round to have a good look at the driver, and sometimes she seemed to be laughing at him.
His mother wandered slowly through the grazing field, musing on the grass.
Tarry settled himself down to enjoy moulding the potatoes. So interested did he get in his work that he didn’t ‘loose out’ till one o’clock. He threw the harness on top of the plough and let the mare eat around the headland.
How pleased his mother was that he hadn’t come home before the dinner was ready as he usually did, ‘coming in roaring for his dinner like a lion’, as his mother expressed it.
He returned to work in an hour, very satisfied, luxuriating in the big feed of potatoes, cabbage and bacon which he had eaten.
He left word with Bridie not to forget to get the paper off the breadman when she went for the bread. Going to look for the sleeper he found it missing, and this vexed him plenty.
Thus was life, and a sensitive man bogged in it.
The nettles, thistles and docks bloomed wildly at the backs of ditches. Life was very rich.
A spirit still buried in the womb of emotion. Tarry hardly ever had experiences that could be named. But one evening shortly afterwards a young heifer had to be brought to the bull, and on that evening he came into contact with something that almost awakened him.
His mother and sisters helped him with the heifer to the gate. They had intended bringing her to Kerley’s bull, the fee for which was only a half-crown, but when the heifer got out the yard gate she dashed up the Drumnay lane, and it’s a principle with the people to let a young beast go the way she chooses in a matter of this description. His mother handed him the five shillings which was the service fee for Reilly’s bull, a prize shorthorn, and Tarry was considering if he’d be able to slip back when his mother and sisters were gone into the house and ring her to Kerley’s bull and save a half-crown for himself. He had done that once before and saved not only a half-crown but the whole five bob, for he got the cow bulled by a young unlicensed bull that was grazing in McArdle’s field. He had encouraged his mother that a calf out of the famous double-dairy shorthorn that Reilly’s had at that time would be a real wonder, and when the calf grew up his mother was never done praising it. The only trouble in a case like this was that the cow mightn’t keep the bull the first time, and then you’d have to go back and would have the money spent. So he let the heifer go as she was inclined. She galloped up the road. He had a mind to go back for the bicycle, but changed his mind and slowly followed the heifer. He wondered if he would see Mary and he also hoped that the father had not been a joke and a jeer about his mother’s remarks in the market the previous week.
Callan’s gate was open but luckily enough she did not see it. The heifer went out of sight round the turn where the hedge was high and overhung the lane. A slight shower had fallen making the dust of the road like velvet. His business seldom took him up this way, so that this evening’s walk was for him a mystical adventure.
Places which he had not seen for a week seemed so mysterious, like places in a fantastic foreign land.
As he passed Callan’s back lane he looked up towards the house where the trees were dark with greenery. He could see Mrs Callan standing on top of a pit of rotten mangolds staring into the distances of the southern townland. The father’s whistle which never became an air – he had no ear for music, nor one belonging to him for that matter – could be heard from the region of the dunghill behind the wooden sheds. May was not visible.
He hurried to catch up with the heifer and found when he went round the next turn that she had strayed into Cassidy’s haggard and was nibbling in her wild way at some wizened old potatoes that lay against the wall of the boiler house. Mat Ward, the half-wit (an iron fool really), who worked off and on for Eusebius was squaring a dunghill in the yard; it was strange how Eusebius and his father could always get these loose-idiots to work for them for jaw-wages.
‘Will you give us a hand with this heifer?’ said Tarry.
Mat laid down the graip with an air of profound wisdom and came slowly towards Tarry and the heifer.
‘Nice wee stuff ye have,’ said he. ‘A bit rough o’ the head all the same.’
‘She’ll have to be doing, Mat,’ said Tarry, anxious to get the beast away from the dangerous potatoes which could easily choke a cow beast.
‘She’ll take no hurt,’ said Mat.
They drove the nervous animal on to the road again; Mat’s knowing scrutiny as he tried to get a line on the heifer from behind, amused Tarry very much.
‘She has the makings of a good bag,’ he said, ‘a bit shy in the left back quarter, but the makings of a good bag all the same.’
Mat helped Tarry with the heifer round the next turn. Then he stood rubbing the seat of his trousers as he stared after them. There were no gates or gaps on the next stretch of road – until he would be passing Toole’s house. He was able to relax and nibble at the leaves of whitethorn as he went along. He wondered if he would see Mary Reilly. He did not wonder too much for she was far beyond his dreams. A man cannot love the impossible.
On either side of him were the little fields. Three fields across was Carlin’s half-derelict house. The thatched part of the dwelling was down. The three brothers and two sisters lived in the small slated part. Queer.
A woman was coming down the grass-grown path from Carlins’, and Tarry hung on to see who it might be. The gap onto the main Drumnay lane was at this point, so she’d have to pass him. The woman was Eusebius’ mother, a very fresh woman for her years and light on her feet. She had a sharp tongue, Tarry knew.
‘You’ll soon have a free house down there,’ she said right out for a start as if she had been thinking about the matter for some time previously.
‘How?’ asked Tarry, stupidly.
‘I hear that Mary is getting a man. If one goes they’ll all go.’
‘I never heard a word about it,’ said Tarry, truthfully.
‘Oh, and a good man, too.’ Changing the subject with that suddenness which one finds among people with something on their minds, she said: ‘I was just over at Carlins’ with a wee can of milk – their cow is dry – and do you know what I’m going to tell you, they’re a proud family. I left her a wee can of cow’s milk on the wall beside the garden every morning and evening, and when I come back for me empty can there it is – full of goat’s milk. Poor Maggie is up there, and to listen to her you’d swear that they didn’t owe anyone a penny. Nothing for her but talk of ladies and gentlemen. One of my girls is coming on her holidays next month, Tarry, and do you know, the last time she wrote she said not to forget to tell you that she was asking for you.’
Tarry suspected nothing.
But he knew why Mrs Cassidy was being so considerate for the Carlins. They were manoeuvring for an opening. Already they had got to store – by the way – several articles of value which the Carlins wanted to put out of the way of the bailiffs. A good Ransome mowing machine that Tarry could have been doing with, and the best iron land roller in the country. And never during saecula would these articles be given back. Oh, never.
Tarry passed Jenny Toole’s whitewashed house and skirted the waste land which was the tail-end of what was once a big estate, ‘Whitestone Park’. At the moment there was some agitation to have the lands divided up among the small farmers, but as Tarry did not expect to be given any of this land he was inclined to frown on such greed.
Now he had arrived at the entrance to Reilly’s farm. The heifer turned in the entrance without any trouble.
Tarry rubbed his face and cursed himself for not shaving, in case he met Mary. The patch on the knee of his trousers also disturbed his self-confidence. If he had only put on his good trousers! He took off his cap and ran his fingers through his hair. He softened the stare of his eyes so as to look more gentle and poetical. Mary had been going to the convent and Tarry knew that convents taught girls to appreciate the poetic things. He giggled to himself thinking on the foolishness of nuns. Poetry is the most lustful and egotistical of spirits.
Young Paddy Reilly saw the heifer coming and had the gate open. From some unseen place beyond the haggard the low, awful roar of the bull could be heard. Then he appeared profound and massive, pawing the earth in the corner of the big field beside the haggard.
The Reillys were not aristocrats. The father was a small farmer’s son who by hard work and the capacity for making others work for him had graduated into the ranks of the semi-gentleman farmers. His farm ran to the Louth border and partook of some of the qualities of a Louth farm – big fields, big horses, big carts.
Returning with his heifer, Tarry felt very disappointed at not having seen Mary Reilly.
He was trying to sneak up close to the heifer to give her a smart blow of the ash plant on the spine – to take the hump off her back – when who should appear coming slowly around the bend only Mary. She was dressed in a light blue cotton dress and her long black hair hung loose over her shoulders. He had seen this girl many times before, but this was the first time she was revealed to him. Like the average tiller of the soil he could not see men and women in terms of sex. A mare was as big and strong as a horse, a cow was, in her way, as impressive as a bull. Women and men were just people living, not sexes.
Tarry had never observed the sexual differences between men and women until this moment. Mary Reilly was tall, and if as Tarry’s mother had said she had a large bottom, Tarry suddenly realized now that this part of her was different from the bottoms of the ordinary country girls. All the girls, with the exception of May Callan, were squat, and as the country phrase had it – ‘duck-arsed’. They were made for work, for breeding, their centre of gravity was low. But here was someone who was made for joy, a breaker of hearts.
Tarry’s mind was paralysed by the sight of her. He tried hurriedly to think of something appropriate to say, but decided in the end that the best thing to do would be completely to ignore her until such time as he had some sort of plan. So when they met and she moved up on the bank to let the heifer pass, he gave all his attention to the heifer to avoid having to make a decision, and so he only guessed that she smiled and said, ‘Hello, Tarry.’
She was only about nineteen, nearly ten years younger than he was, but she carried within her what Tarry knew was a terrible power of which she was as yet unconscious.
He didn’t recover himself till he was passing Toole’s house, and then he had begun to daydream all the fine things he had said to her and she to him. So excited was he that he was now thinking his thoughts aloud. Being accosted by Jenny Toole, who came to the entrance to her street and was leaning on a graip watching him approach, he quietly changed his talk into a song.
‘You were at Reilly’s bull,’ she said. ‘Ah, indeed, nothing for some people only the rich.’
Jemmy Kerley was her first cousin.
‘That’s right,’ said Tarry with the suggestion of a sneer. He did not like Jenny Toole, a bitter old maid, and she was one of the few people of whose evil power he was afraid.
Although he was fairly scientific-minded he harboured old superstitions that a bad wish from someone like that could do him – or the heifer – no good. He knew that was all nonsense, but just to be on the safe side – the answer if it did no good could do no harm – he said quietly to himself, directing the remark back at the woman – ‘God bless your eyes and your heart’, which was the traditional remark in cases of this kind.
The summer sun was going down in a most wonderful yellow ball behind the hills of Drumnay. It turned the dirty upstairs windows of Cassidy’s house into stained glass.
O the rich beauty of the weeds in the ditches, Tarry’s heart cried. The lush nettles and docks and the tufts of grass. Life pouring out in uncritical abundance.
Tarry was lifted above himself now in a purer kind of dream. He concentrated on observing, on contemplating, to clean his soul. He enumerated the different things he saw: Kerley’s four cows looking over a hedge near a distant house waiting to be milked. A flock of white geese in the meadow beside Cassidy’s bog. He heard the rattle of tin cans being picked up from the stones outside a door – somebody going to the well for water. But what bird was making that noise like the ratchet of a new free-wheel? He stared through the bushes where the blue forget-me-nots and violets were creeping. No bird was there.
He hurried after the heifer. Passing Cassidy’s house Tarry was suddenly proud of the heifer, and it occurred to him now as it often occurred before how nice and idealistic looking, how gentle-eyed and good-natured were the cattle he reared compared to the wicked-looking ugly beasts Eusebius reared. There was something in it, he imagined.
Mrs Flynn was leaning over the low wall by the gate enjoying the peace of a lovely summer evening when Tarry appeared in sight. She was waiting to have conversations with passers-by.
She rushed to open the gate, saying as they drove the heifer in: ‘Had you much trouble with her?’
‘Plenty,’ said Tarry, to gain sympathy.
‘We’d better put her in for the night and not have the other cows lepping on her. Mary, give us a hand.’
Mary, who was shutting in the sow, grabbed a yard brush and turned the heifer towards the stable door.
‘Well, that’s that,’ said the mother. ‘I hope she keeps.’
Aggie and Bridie were dressed for the road, waiting in the kitchen for May to give them the call.
Tarry tested the tyres of his bicycle which stood outside the cart-house door. His mother followed him and began to speak very confidentially: ‘Petey Meegan sent word the day.’
‘About what?’ said Tarry.
‘He has a notion of Mary. But don’t breathe this to the face of clay. The Missioners must have shook him up.’
Tarry was a little astonished. ‘He’s a bit past himself,’ he said.
‘Arra, nonsense. He’s a good, sober, industrious boy with a damn good farm of land in Miskin. And an empty house. Oh, girls can’t be too stiff these days. they’re all hard pleased and easy fitted.’
‘But he must be well over the fifty mark,’ whispered Tarry devoutly.
‘That’s young enough for a healthy man. And mind you, Mary is no chicken. Only the day I was thinking that she’s within a kick of the arse of thirty. Troth if she gets him she’ll be lucky. The other two are often enough on the road, and the devil the big rush is on them. As Charlie Trainor says, they’re like horsedung, you never walk the road but you meet them. I always say to these here, marry the first man that asks you. There’s only three classes of men a woman should never marry – a delicate man, a drunken man, and a lazy man. I’m not so sure that the lazy man isn’t the worst. Are you goin’ away this evening, too?’
‘Had a mind to go down as far as the New Road.’
‘Surely to God you wouldn’t marry a thing like that,’ said May Callan to Mary Flynn as the two girls gossiped, with the hedge between them, at the bottom of Callan’s hill where May had come to milk the cows. ‘How could you bring yourself to go to bed with a hairy oul’ fellow like Petey?’
Tarry, who was scouring out a bog-hole at the bottom of the garden, from which water could be drawn during the drought, rested on the shaft of his shovel to listen in.
‘That could be got over,’ said Mary, a little pensively.
‘Well, my mother says you must be a shocking fool,’ said May. ‘After all, you’re not that hard up for a man.’
‘I don’t know,’ Mary sighed.
Tarry pulled a wisp of grass and ran it down the shovel shaft to wipe off the mud. This movement must have made the girls aware of his listening presence, for May hunkered by the side of a cow and the sing-sing-sing of milk going into an empty tin can echoed in the evening hollows like a new bird’s song.
‘Might see you later,’ said Mary, who was nibbling at the leaves of the bushes, very worried.
‘I’m not so sure, for my mother is going out,’ said May.
Mary Flynn wandered towards the house and presently was in conversation with Bridie who was cleaning the hen house.
‘You were talking to gabby-guts,’ said Bridie. ‘What had she to say?’
‘Oh, nothing.’
Tarry came up from the bog-hole and stood the shovel by the hen house in case Bridie should want it. ‘Who’s inside?’ he asked.
Tarry found himself staring half-vacantly at his sisters.
Between the three Flynn girls there was little to choose. They were all the same height, around five feet two – low-set, with dull clayey faces, each of them like a bag of chaff tied in the middle with a rope – breasts and buttocks that flapped in the wind. When they were unwashed and undressed in the morning a stranger passing seeing them would hardly be able to say who was who. They were all the daughters Mrs Flynn ever had. They had not advanced with the times sufficiently to change from the old notion of staying about the home until some man came looking for them. Most of the other neighbours’ daughters had gone off, lots of them to be nurses in England, or to become shop girls in local towns or factory workers in the newly established ropefactory in Shercock, but the Flynns had a great desire to be farmers’ wives.
Tarry saw them at the closest range, but he was too close to observe them as anything but sisters.
Mary, who was the eldest of the family, twenty-nine and a year and seven months older than her brother, was the most unattractive of the three. She seemed to be continuously wearing a pout like one with a grievance, yet for all that she was the one most likely to get a husband. Some women who are beautiful bring out a falseness in men, set up complexities which are unfavourable to marriage combines in the tillage country. A man meeting Mary Flynn would be his own natural self – except in the case of such a tragic person as Petey Meegan. And he had made overtures to Mary which proved to Tarry what he had often considered, that the attraction of the possible is in the end more powerful than that of the unattainable.
It was within the bounds of possibility that all the sisters would eventually get husbands of some sort. In that lay another worry of Tarry’s – The crookedest, oldest, poorest small farmer would be looking for money with a wife; and where in the case of his sisters was even one hundred pounds a piece to come from? He had often mentioned these worries to his mother, and she had always replied: ‘Let them produce the man first and then it ’ill be time enough to talk about money.’
He knew that his mother had a few pounds in the bank all right, but as far as he could make out it couldn’t amount to more than a single hundred at the very outside. He would like to know how much money she really had in the bank. He did remember one day being in the bank with her when a man who had been paid by cheque for cattle wanted to cash it. The bank manager signified that Mrs Flynn’s name on the back of the cheque would do, but she pretended that she couldn’t write her name.
It was on the strength of these few pounds that his sisters were depending, and Tarry did not like it. They should go and try to make a living elsewhere, but when he thought of them sympathetically, where could they go unless to England to be nurses? They were too proud to do that. So there wasn’t much chance of Tarry having a clear house into which to bring a wife. Yet, except when he wanted to make excuses for himself, he admitted in his heart that even if the house were empty he would hardly marry any girl in that country who would be willing to endure the life he could give her.
The ugliness of his sisters was a puzzle to Tarry. How did they come to be so indifferent-looking while he was well above the average of men in the place? The mother said it was from a grandfather on the father’s side – ‘a man that you’d think was reared in a pot,’ she said.
For all their seeming likeness to each other in externals they were quite individual. When Tarry forgot himself sufficiently to let his natural sympathy flow, he saw them as three souls as new and wonderful as individual souls always are.
They surely had their dreams, too. Beneath the conventional cliché which they wore as a defence the bleeding reality of intense life poured its red-hot stream of feeling.
Aggie was the most religious-minded, but all of them had strong faith. In the struggle it was hard contemplating the luxurious ecstasy of God in the fields or on the Altar. Yet they did. Their real devoutness, though they did not know it, was in their faith in life.
Bridie, the youngest, was only twenty-one. She had a wild temper and a sharp tongue. She was mean to her brother on many occasions, and did not fail to make a show of him in front of a crowd on a couple of occasions by charging him with stealing her money which she had been hiding in a flower pot deep down in the clay.
Except on very rare occasions Tarry realized that he did not care for his sisters, and was not worried how they fared in life. His own problems were too pressing.
While the girls were talking and Tarry was thinking, the heavy footsteps, which there was no mistaking, of Petey Meegan could be heard approaching Flynn’s gate. He coughed his usual short cough to announce his approach.
Before he had arrived at the yard gate Mary was in the middle of a savagely belittling speech about him – ‘the dirty oul’, crooked oul’ eejut. It’s saying his prayers he ought to be.’
Tarry was depressed on hearing her opinion of a possible husband. If she didn’t accept him – and by all appearances she would not – there was very little chance of his ever having a free house to bring a woman into.
Not to make the poor old fellow’s welcome seem too freezing, Tarry went towards the gate to say a few words of comfort. As he went he could hear his sister’s repeated – ‘oul’ eejut, oul’ eejut, oul’ eejut’ from the door of the hen house. How pitiful it was to hear an oldish man trying to be young in his talk and actions.
Coming up to the gate he sprightlied up his plough-crookened step and tried to straighten his humped shoulders. He looked any age between fifty and the age of an old oak. He was wearing his Sunday trousers, and this made still more obvious the man’s ancient position.
When he opened up the discussion on a frivolous topic – the previous Sunday night’s dance – Tarry’s embarrassment turned to sorrow for the man. Tarry switched the conversation to what he believed were more appropriate subjects by asking him how his turnips were doing.
‘Who cares about turnips in weather like this?’ said he.
‘I gave a second moulding to my spuds, Petey,’ said Tarry, struggling to swing the discussion.
But nothing could stop Petey from wanting to discuss light romance. The sow trailed through the yard and Tarry pretended to be driving her somewhere, but the man never noticed the animal at all.
In the end there was nothing Tarry could do but invite the man into the house. They sat by the half-dead fire alone for half an hour. The two sisters had slipped in and up the stairs without coming into contact with Petey. The upstairs floor creaked and Petey listened uneasily.
This was one of the most awkward situations Tarry had ever to deal with, and he wished his mother would soon return.
In the end the talk lagged.
‘Well, that’s the way,’ said Petey, which was the phrase he used to smother a sigh.
And Tarry replied, ‘That’s the way.’
Petey took out a packet of cigarettes, though he was a pipe smoker, and a tobacco chewer.
‘You’re getting swanky,’ remarked Tarry, in an attempt to break the deadness.
‘Yes, that’s the way,’ sighed Petey on a different note.
‘That’s the way,’ sighed Tarry back. He got up and put water in the kettle.
‘Where the devil’s these women of ours?’ he said, partly to himself. Petey did not answer. He was sitting with his head between his legs smoking the cigarette in amateurish fashion, one half of it wet in his mouth, while he stared at the tongs.
He rubbed his fingers along the bricks of the arch, and eventually forced himself to gulp: ‘The man that built that arch knew his job.’
‘The Ring Finnegan,’ said Tarry.
‘He was the right smoke doctor,’ said Petey, but without much enthusiasm.
Tarry hung on the kettle and blew up the fire. Then he went to the door to listen for his mother’s homecoming. Not a sign of her. If Aggie was here atself. The only sound he could hear was the soft laughter of his two sisters and May as they went giggling down towards the main road. He was properly in the lurch now.
God, how he wished his mother would come home and take a great burden off his hands. It wasn’t merely the boredom of having to keep a depressed man company, but he wanted to take a quick walk round by Drumnay cross-roads on the off chance of catching a sight of Mary Reilly.
He was worried about that girl as he never had been worried about any of the other neighbours’ girls. His mind overflowed her like a warm tide. He became jittery. He knew from experience that when he wanted anything, like this wanting to wander round by the cross-roads, he would have to wear out his patience. He knew that a man never got anything – while he desperately wanted it. To himself he said a quiet prayer: ‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph, keep Mary Reilly for me.’
‘I suppose I’m as well be on the move,’ said Petey, rising and stretching himself as if he were bored with it all. ‘As the man said, I have a few things to do, and, like that, I better go before night falls.’
‘Aw, take your time: I have the kettle near boiling.’
‘No, I’m better be going.’
At the doorway he turned: ‘I suppose,’ he said very casually, ‘these women of yours won’t be home for a while?’
‘My mother ought to be home anyway, Petey, and you’re as well wait.’
‘No, sure I can come some other evening.’
And he went.
No sooner had he departed than Mrs Flynn arrived. ‘What have you the kettle on for?’ she asked.
Tarry told her the whole story.
‘The devil thrapple her anyway,’ she said. She hung the umbrella, which she had used as a walking stick, on the side of the wall and hurried about the house. ‘You may as well make a sup now when you have the kettle boiled… Oh, no, I wouldn’t much mind Mary saying things like that. That doesn’t count. If I had to be here I’d tell her something. Yes, hard pleased and easy fitted, that’s what she is. Oh, I saw ones like her before and they’d want a man made for them. Ah-ha, I saw them after and they weren’t so stiff. Oh, wait till she comes home.’
‘All the same she’ll hardly take him,’ said Tarry, resignedly.
‘Be my safe sowl she will,’ said the mother with determination. ‘She’s not going to lie up on me here and a man coming looking for her… The tay is in the wee canister beside the soda… Be me safe sowl she’ll marry him or take the broad road and her health. Wouldn’t go to be a nurse in England like the Cassidy girls. If she couldn’t be trained in Vincent’s in Dublin she wouldn’t be a nurse at all. Wanted me to plank down a darling seventy pounds to get her trained in Dublin – the tinker! Where would I get seventy pounds?… You made this tay too strong. We won’t be able to sleep after this.
‘Do you know what, I’m just after coming down from Carlins and there’s not a blessed thing about the place that Eusebius hasn’t whipped over to his place – the roller that you were always saying you could get and the good reaping mill. Still, if you’d be said by, I have a little plan of me own and if all goes well we might do better than so.’
‘Will they be able to pay the debts?’ Tarry asked.
‘Oh, never, never, never. Sure they’re there and not the slightest bit of worry on them no more than if they were as rich as John Magan. I was putting it on to her about selling the cow – she’s as good a cow on her third calf as there is in the country – and I might as well be talking to the wall. They laughed at me.’
Tarry wished his mother would not be so mysterious about her plans. If she took him into her confidence she might find that he was as cute a businessman as anyone else. But she would tell him nothing. She was treating him as an irresponsible person and that wasn’t good for him.
‘You’re not going out at this hour of the evening, Tarry?’
‘I’ll not bother me head,’ said Tarry. He knew it was too late. He was easy. Mary Reilly would be home by now. He walked through the yard full of a great loneliness. Everybody was happier than he. The quiet night falling and the Evening Star and the young Moon and the sighing fields made him feel a queer sadness. There was something in him different from other men and women. He always did the peculiar thing, one peculiar thing which yet he could not define, which spoiled his chances of happiness.
In his self-pity he said to himself: I have to carry a cross. He did not want to carry a cross. He wanted to be ordinary. But the more he tried to shake the burden free the more weighty did it become and the more it stuck to his shoulders. His mother came out to the corner of the yard, listened for a while at the horses’ stable door, then took the poe which had been an-airing in the fork of a bush beside the dung-hill and returned to the house. The bats flew over Tarry’s head. From the main road came the loud laughter of boys and girls.
‘Do you hear Bridie?’ said the mother from the doorway. ‘She’ll be heard where she won’t be seen.’
While the mother was getting ready to say her prayers Tarry took a candle and went upstairs to a corner of his bedroom and sitting on the edge of the bed took a writing-pad and began to write verses. Yards and yards of despair he wrote about his love for Mary Reilly.
O God above
Must I forever live in dreams of love?
Must I forever see as in a glass
The loveliness of life before me pass?
The table at which he sometimes wrote was the remains of an old sewing machine, covered with dust and grease and candle-grease. The room was a typical country bedroom, its walls covered with holy pictures. Reading about artistic things Tarry had once suggested to his mother that they should take down all those ugly pictures. She thought him the most atrocious black-guard: ‘Is it them splendid pictures? Why there’s three pictures there and the likes of them is not in the parish. I bought them second-hand and gave fifteen shillings apiece for them in Mick Duffy’s last Easter was eight years. Troth and sowl they’ll not be shifted while I’m here.’ She didn’t stop at that but drove the matter home: ‘The pictures you do be talking about are like the bottle of wine. Yes, talking about giving five pounds for a bottle of wine.’
Tarry often regretted ever having mentioned the pictures or the bottle of wine. He had only read that there were rare wines which were sold at very high rates, and mentioned the matter to his mother. She threw it in his face at every opportunity.
The ghosts of night came in the uncurtained windows, and Tarry grew a little afraid. Afraid of his father’s ghost. It was in this room his father died less than five years ago.
While his father lived he often told him that he’d never be afraid, but his father said that we would be afraid to see our nearest and dearest. The flickering candle added to his nervousness. His mother starting her evening prayers might have added something more eerie still to the atmosphere – but it was a human voice near.
He couldn’t think while she prayed:
‘Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us… cat, down out of that and don’t be trying to lift the lid of that can… sinners now and at the hour of our… Tarry, come down out of that… death, Amen.’