If any born of kindlier blood
Should ask what maiden lies below –
Say only this: A tender bud
That tried to blossom in the snow
Lies withered where the violets blow.
The bottom of the page which contained this poem was encrusted with dried cow-dung and the pages were stuck together in the same way. Tarry shoved the old book between the rafters and galvanized roof of the horse stable, and completed the buttoning of his trousers. The sunlight was beaming through the stable door but it was at the light seen through the slit in the wall over the manger that Tarry was looking. A large nettle waved to and fro in front of the slit almost humanly. He lit a cigarette and took several deep pulls, for he was starved for a smoke.
His mother was standing at the road gate gossiping with Mrs Callan. These two women delighted in giving each other the quiet dig and in these arguments Tarry’s mother seldom got the worst of it. But on this morning Tarry didn’t particularly like the way his mother appeared to be reacting.
‘Bridgie,’ she said as they parted, ‘it would fit us all a lot better if we minded our own business.’
The mother went into the house and Tarry heard her inquiring where ‘this blackguard’ was. She must have thought either himself or Bridie was upstairs. He sucked hard at the cigarette, dropped it into a wet piece of hen manure and went into the house taking with him a pair of hames, which he was examining with a very concerned air. ‘I have to fix the hook on these hames,’ he muttered and put on a worried farmer’s face.
Mrs Flynn was stooped on the centre of the floor over a fat hen which she held between her knees, and which she was about to kill for the next day’s dinner. Under the hen was an enamel basin.
‘Give me that knife off the ground,’ she snapped at her son. She cut the head off the hen and hung the bird on the back of the dairy door with the basin under it. She wiped the carving knife in her apron and then opened up:
‘Hell won’t be full till you’re in it. Hell won’t be full till you’re in it. To think that a man that never saw nothing but what was right in this house should have us the talk of the country. Oh, his uncle Petey all over again.’
Tarry was on all fours under the table. ‘I can’t get that hammer,’ he said at last as he withdrew his head and stood up. He pretended not to have heard. ‘Night, noon and morning, it’s me that’s sick, sore and sorry with the whole lot of yous,’ said the mother.
‘What’s wrong?’ said Tarry, very surprised.
‘What in the Name of Father, Son and Holy Ghost had you to do with this Molly one?’ said she, suiting her voice to the seriousness of the charge. She was speaking slowly and rather softly and all the more terrifying for that.
‘I don’t know what you’re coming at,’ he said with the pout of a man in a hurry to do some important business who was displeased at being interrupted by trifling affairs. ‘If I knew where that bleddy hammer is I wouldn’t care.’ His eyes swept into dusty corners and he moved the six-gallon pot from its place in the corner of the hob and looked behind it.
The mother sat by the fire on the low stool and blew her nose defiantly into the ashes.
Speaking in a low solemn voice she began to say:
‘Never had a day’s comfort in me whole life. Never a day that I hadn’t some misfortune to contend with. Oh, it’s me that reared the family I should be proud of. Will you leave that pair of names there, and if they want repairs bring them to the forge and not knock an eye out of your head like poor Joe McArdle. You be to have some curse o’ God carry-on with her or this sneak up the road wouldn’t have it. And sure it’s only now its dawning on me why oul’ Molly hasn’t an eye to see me last Sunday coming from Mass, one that always had a little story for me.’
‘I never went near her in me whole life,’ said Tarry with the weakness of an innocent man. ‘Never, never, never. I wouldn’t go near her if I was paid for it – you ought to know that?’
He wandered to the door in the hope of escaping the torture, and as he stepped outside the postman was getting off his bicycle. The mother, too deeply in argument, had missed him coming up the road, which was a wonder. Tarry slipped quietly to the gate and collected a letter which was addressed to himself. He stood in the doorway of the carthouse and hurriedly scanned the letter. It was from the solicitor who was dealing with the transfer of Carlin’s farm to the Flynns, and it said that there appeared to be some trouble over the boundaries of the holding. Two fields appeared not to be included in the purchased property. Would Tarry and his mother call to his office some day soon? Tarry stuffed the letter in his pocket and returned to the house with a very innocent look.
‘You got a letter,’ said she at once.
‘Who said I got a letter?’
‘Isn’t there the postman going back the road?’
‘Must be in Cassidy’s he was.’
‘I thought it might be this rodney of an uncle of yours who was threatening to come back to lie up on us – we’re not bad enough.’
Tarry was too deeply shocked over the news contained in the letter to be able to conceal his distress from his mother. She, however, thought that his nervousness was due to the scandal about Molly, which was only what she would expect.
‘Hang on that six-gallon pot till I make a drop of gruel for the calves and bring up a couple of goes of water from the bog-hole to wash the praties for the dinner. Oh, never during soot was there such a family as mine, one worse, than the other… The dirty pot-walloper,’ she was referring to Molly now, ‘sure it’s not that I’d care a hair if you had to keep away from her. And you needn’t try to tell me that you did, for I saw you with me own two eyes no later than a month ago when you were running the turnips. How many a night last winter when she used to call here on her ceilidhe did you not sneak out and it used to make me laugh the way you thought we didn’t know. Yes, standing down there at the corner of the back garden with the rain pouring down, I could hear you sighing. Sure, you needn’t think we’re all blind. Yes, waiting for her to lave till you’d waylay her.’
Tarry could not deny this allegation, which was quite true.
If his mother only knew he was now rather pleased that she had this lesser of the two evils to engage her attention until such time as things straightened out. He was wondering if Eusebius wasn’t behind this business of the land. He must have known something or he’d have been more jealous at the time of purchase. Tarry would inform his mother right away if he thought that she could find a way out of the dilemma.
He poured a bucket of water into the pot and the mother twisted the bellows’ wheel. ‘If you’d tell me,’ said she, ‘you might find that I’d be a better advice than some of these cute customers up the road with their ballads and the devil knows what. How well Eusebius never gets his name up with anything. He’s in with everybody. Don’t slash the water all over the floor. Oh, Eusebius knows how to mind number one.
‘And another thing,’ said the mother while poking the fire under the pot, ‘it’s about time we heard from that solicitor about the farm. One of these days I must go out meself and see him and find what’s keeping him with that deed. I never liked the look of that man even if he is Father Daly’s cousin. I hope you put the haggard in order for the hay atself.’
‘I did, I did.’
Bridie arrived at this point. She came in through the dairy and as she was closing the door behind her the mother called to her to bring up a plateful of barley meal to put on the pot. But Bridie had something on her mind and first rushed to the kitchen saying: ‘Did you hear about pet Tarry?’
‘What talk with you?’ said the mother.
‘His name all over the country with Molly,’ said Bridie.
‘He never had a haporth to do with the targer, Bridie, you whipster, you, and how dar’ you say he had?’
Bridie shook her shoulders with a jeer and went for the meal. Her mother’s voice pursued her: ‘Choke you and double choke you, he never left a hand on the trollop. Have we not enough trouble without you putting in your cutty?’
Tarry went outside to think. He deceived himself into believing that he could think himself out of his various problems. He walked to the road gate consciously thinking – but nothing was happening in his mind. The threatened lawcase by the Finnegans had petered out, but no thanks to his thinking. There was a worldly wisdom which looked so much like stupidity that he could not tolerate it. He had seen and observed the worldly-wise men of the place with their platitudes and their unoriginality, and he knew that he could never bring himself to act as they acted. Eusebius was coming down the road whistling ‘Does Your Mother Come from Ireland’. Eusebius was a man who combined the stupidity of the world with a veneer of the other-world gaiety, and as Tarry waited for him to come up he was wondering how it was that a man could see all this worldliness and observe its workings, and yet be quite incapable of using it himself.
It was the same in matters concerning women. Nobody knew more than Tarry about the theories of love, and nobody was more foolish when it came to practising them.
‘Sound man, Eusebius,’ said Tarry leaning over the gate.
Eusebius took the hay fork off his shoulder and used it to lean on. He glanced at the sky: ‘Do you think will it howl out?’
‘I think so,’ said Tarry.
Tarry could see that his neighbour was bursting with delight at his misfortune, but he needed someone in whom to confide, and Eusebius had that soft, easy, feminine way with him which was so deceptive, so dangerous, and which could suck information out of the least confiding of men. Considering the matter, Tarry realized that Eusebius knew more about him than any other man or woman alive. How much did he know of Eusebius’ private life? Practically nothing. On the other hand was there such a lot to know? Tarry consoled himself with the thought that there was not. And the surprising thing, thought Tarry between the words they were speaking, was that Eusebius never came without some sensational gossip. He was always confessing his sins, but the sum did not add up to anything a man could remember.
‘Anything strange on your travels, Eusebius?’
‘Curse o’ God on the haporth, Tarry, if you haven’t something yourself. Why, did you hear something?’
Tarry opened the gate and went to the middle of the road where he stood and stretched his arms and yawned as if filled with the greatest indifference to Drumnay and Dargan and life in general. ‘I had a mind to draw in the hay the morrow,’ he yawned.
‘Nothing like it, Tarry. Begod,’ said Eusebius looking narrowly at Tarry, ‘I have a kind of notion you heard something funny. Don’t be so bleddy close. Go and tell a fella.’ He prodded the gravel with the prongs of the fork. ‘You heard something?’
‘Don’t you know very well I’d tell you if I heard anything, Eusebius, don’t you know that?’
‘You might,’ nodded Eusebius doubtfully, and started to make a pattern on the road with the fork prongs.
‘Well, and it’s hardly worth me while telling you, I was only thinking you might have heard something about the Brady one. She wasn’t seen at Mass this past month, and people are talking, do you see?’
‘I see,’ said Eusebius as if he were hearing something very sensational.
Tarry gave a sickly laugh designed to throw cold water on the story as a story. ‘And the funny thing is,’ said he with the same unhealthy laugh, ‘some people were trying to say that I was seen with her. Wouldn’t that make you laugh, heh? Of course it’s all Charlie’s doing – wouldn’t you say?’
‘Jabus, that’s a dread,’ said Eusebius, ‘that bates the little dish as the fellow said. And are you doing anything about it?’
‘Sure the thing isn’t worth talking about,’ said Tarry fluttering his hands to show the limit of carelessness. ‘Sure, Holy God… ’
He stopped talking to let Paddy Callan who was mooching suspiciously on the other side of the hedge, pretending he was examining his oats, but trying to hear what was being said – a habit of his – pass.
‘It’s coming in nicely,’ sang out Eusebius with his affected gaiety to Paddy. ‘It should be in for the Fifteenth, Paddy?’
‘What’s that you said, young fella?’ inquired Paddy.
‘You have a good crop of oats, Paddy, except that wee spot on the scrugan that’s a bit short of itself.’
‘It’ll have to be doing,’ said Paddy philosophically.
Tarry as usual was impatient to get rid of the intruder and showed it by signs that would be obvious to the blindest ass.
Paddy took the hint, but before going winked at Eusebius as much as to say – ‘who’d think he had it in him?’
‘Yes –?’ said Eusebius to Tarry.
‘There’s no doubt about it I can’t help laughing when I think of it. Wouldn’t it make you laugh, Eusebius? now wouldn’t it?’
Eusebius was very doubtful and disinclined to comfort his neighbour. ‘They say the woman’s word is law,’ he said.
‘Not always, Eusebius. You remember the case that was reported in the Anglo-Celt, and it was the man’s word that was taken. Come down the road a bit, I don’t want that mother of mine to be coming out. I’ll fight it to the last ditch. I’ll fight it.’
‘What else would you do? You’d need to get a first-class man.’
‘Oh, I know some of the young fellas, Eusebius, they wouldn’t be so dear.’
Eusebius was emphatic that an experienced counsel would be necessary. ‘I could tell you your best plan only I don’t know enough about the case, Tarry. There’s no use in making up lies, you know.’
‘She can go to hell backwards,’ declared Tarry,‘ they can get nothing off me. You can’t take feathers off a frog, heh?’
‘You have Carlin’s.’
‘Maybe I have.’
Eusebius put the fork on his shoulder and hurried off. ‘I might see you coming back,’ Tarry called after him.
He could tell by the bones in the back of Eusebius’ neck which moved like the hips of a gamy woman that his neighbour was a happy man – happy in a next-door neighbour’s misfortune. Eusebius danced along the road kicking the pebbles before him. Tarry had to admit to himself that had their positions been reversed he would have been happy too. Hating one’s next-door neighbour was an essential part of a small farmer’s religion. Hate and jealousy made love – even the love of land – an exciting adventure.
If any man of them in that country were to open his eyes, if the fog in which they lived lifted, they would be unable to endure the futility of it all. Their courage was the courage of the blind. But Tarry had seen beyond the fog the Eternal light shining on the stones.
As he was clearing away the stones and rubbish from the haggard he thought the scene so enchanting that he sometimes felt that there must be something the matter with him. The three big nettles that grew in the ring of boulders upon which last year’s pikes of hay had stood were rich with the beauty of what is richly alive. The dust of last year’s hay and straw was so lovely it could almost make him want to prostrate himself upon it. Stones, clay, grass, the sunlight coming through the privet hedge. Why did he love such common things? He was ashamed of mentioning his love; these things were not supposed to be beautiful.
He scraped the dusty straw with the shovel and looked with admiration at the clean brown floor of the haggard.
He left the shovel standing against the hedge and stared across the townland towards his own fields. He could see the blue glint of the spraying stuff on the leaves of the potatoes and far in the distance of his farm the movements of the mare and her foal on the far side of a thick hedge.
Old Molly Brady’s shadow passed along the horizon at the back of her house; she looked contented enough. He turned his eyes to the hills on his left and saw with delight Callan’s scabby field of turnips. He tried to find in the badness of this neighbour’s crop a counter-irritant for his own troubles but it was no use.
He wandered into the cabbage garden to cool his mind in the ever-wet green cool leaves.
Under the broad leaves of cabbages how cool
Even in the middle of July the clay is –
Like ice-cream.
He nibbled at the caraway seeds that grew in the hedgerow running his mind back to the days of his peacefulness. It was like this that all terrible things happened to a man – casually. Thus a man might find himself with a broken neck or on trial for murder and he’d wonder how he arrived at such a place.
So far the affair with Molly was only a rumour. Tarry himself only knew about it from the gossip of the neighbours. He had seen the girl and her mother since the rumour had gone abroad, and on one occasion had nearly got up enough courage to put it to the test. But he was afraid of putting things to the test; it was better to live in doubt – which is the same as hope – than to have all one’s doubts and fears proven well-founded.
The last time he had been speaking to the girl Molly was about three weeks before when she was in her usual good spirits, and her mother bantered him from the height behind the house as he spoke to Molly at the well.
It might be put down as a remarkable fact that during all this time it never occurred to Tarry, or his mother for that matter, that the Bradys might be expecting someone – even Tarry – to marry the girl; that is, if there was anything the matter with her at all. At this moment the thought that the girl did want to get married flashed through Tarry’s thoughts, but his egotistical mind could no more entertain it seriously than it could anything in the shape of genuine sympathy for anyone but himself. He had moments in which he saw himself as he was, but he knew that he had his justification. There were some people who were fit for nothing else but to sympathize, but a man like himself had a dispensation from such side-tracking activities.
A man who had seen the ecstatic light of Life in stones, on the hills, in leaves of cabbages and weeds was not bound by the pity of Christ.
Or was he?
If he were, how much that was great in literature and art would be lost. He justified himself by the highest examples he knew of.
Is self-pity not pity for mankind as seen in one man? He had it all off. But, O God! if he could only transport himself down the years, three years into the future when all would be forgotten. The present tied him in its cruel knots and dragged him through bushes and briars, stones and weeds on his mouth and nose.
They got half the hay home the next day, and would have done better seeing that Paddy Reilly had sent a man with a hay slide, but the rain came on in the early evening when the pike was at its widest. Tarry, who had heard that the wireless had said the evening before that there would be no rain, was yet not caught entirely unprepared. He had three nice lumps of cocks of bottom hay in the meadow right beside the haggard, and with this bottom hay they were able to put a good heart in the pike. Over the mound they spread a winnowing sheet, and when they went in for their tea Tarry was trying to think of all the men whose hay pikes had been caught at their widest in the downpour and with no winnowing sheets or bottom hay near at hand.
‘I think,’ said he to his mother later, ‘I’ll go up as far as Carlin’s and see about them heifers that’s in calf.’ In-calf heifers and cows were not subject to the blackleg, and it was this class of animal that the Flynns had put to graze on the new farm since the bullocks took the disease and died.
The mother felt that Tarry was now taking her advice and attending to his place, but when she saw him go to the top of the dresser when he thought she wasn’t looking and slip an old book into his pocket she wasn’t so sure. She said nothing, for Paddy Reilly’s man had jumped up just then saying: ‘It’s time for me to be looking for feet.’
Tarry threw a corn sack over his shoulders and took his bicycle out of the car-house. The mother came out and said: ‘If they’re lying don’t put them up, for I don’t think there’s any danger of them having the red water, and some of them are heavy in calf.’
Tarry laid his bicycle against the stone fence of the first of his fields alongside the lane that led to Carlin’s and Joe Finnegan’s, and was about to spring over the fence when Jemmy Carlin, the silent sneerer of the family, came rushing from his street with a rusty graip in his hands which he had poised like a javelin and bawled: ‘Trespassers will be prosecuted, trespassers will be prosecuted.’
Tarry stood taking in the situation. He had plenty of experience with Joe Finnegan, but somehow this looked more dangerous, more like business, than anything Joe had done.
He got down off the stone fence and stood with the bicycle between him and his approaching enemy.
‘I’ll put the grains of this graip in your guts, you grabber, if you put a foot inside me fields.’
‘What fields?’ said Tarry, wondering.
‘My fields, avic’
‘Didn’t we buy them, Jemmy?’
‘Buy my fields,’ sneered Jemmy, ‘sure yous couldn’t buy my good fields. You bought Tom’s farm, but you didn’t buy mine. By God, you didn’t buy mine, and you couldn’t buy mine.’ The man settled some mossy stones on the fence with an air of ownership. ‘Buy my good fields, buy my good fields,’ he kept saying.
‘Let me drive the cattle to the drink atself.’
‘I drove them to the field with the drink in it, avic, and I may as well tell you that if they put their noses into one or other of these two good fields of mine they’ll calve before their time.’
‘But how am I going to get to them?’ Tarry appealed.
‘Go round the lane the way that any dacent man id go.’
With that Jemmy moved off along the fence, shifting a stone here and picking up a dead branch there while Tarry stood by his bicycle beginning to understand the mistake they had made in purchasing the farm without having the boundaries properly defined. He suddenly remembered too that day in Shercock when he had bought a second-hand copy of the poems of Byron and how Eusebius had said it was ‘bleddy fine’, but himself bought an Ordnance Map of Drumnay and Miskin.
Tarry was forced to walk with his bicycle round the narrow, rutted, muddy lane that led past the back of Finnegan’s house, and down along the field of potatoes. It had been one of his causes for thankfulness that he didn’t need to use this old lane about which the Finnegans were forever grumbling. The gate that had to be closed every time you went through would be enough to keep the lawyers in trade for the rest of their lives. The lane at the back of Finnegan’s led through the bottom of a dunghill, and the briars that hung overhead were often decorated with the bits of dung which caught there when Joe was flinging dung out of the cow house.
Tarry got safely past the bottom of Carlin’s garden and he hardly cared what happened to him as he picked his steps and sometimes had to carry his bicycle over some parts of the lane. He knew that he would have a poor chance of getting past Finnegan’s with the five small girls and the mother who was so starved for gossip that she would be liable to spot anything in the shape of news. The row he had had with Joe Finnegan was liable to flare up again. Joe was sure to have heard about the mistake in the boundary and would be delighted with the chance of pouncing on a man who was down.
Tarry was surprised and grateful when Joe who was barrowing rotten mangolds from his haggard and dumping them on the side of the pane behind the house merely gave a loud forced laugh as he passed. ‘Oh, ho, the big farmer,’ he cried wildly. ‘Hah, hah, hah, hah,’ he laughed.
Tarry hurried on expecting every moment to have a stone or at least a rotten mangold hopped off his head, but the man let him pass on, apparently contented to be a spectator of a most enjoyable play.
Tarry didn’t need to make a close examination of the property to know how much of it was his. The two best fields which comprised more than the half and which alone gave access to the lane at the point west of Carlin’s had been fenced off ostentatiously by Jemmy Carlin that day with large green whitethorn bushes, and the cattle had been driven without concern for their condition into the other section of the property. They were lying in the wet soaking mud, bedraggled looking as if they had been roughly driven – which no doubt they were – out of the two good fields. There were bits of briar and bushes stuck in their tails showing that they had been forced through the heavily bushed gaps out of which the bushes had not been first removed.
Three of the five fields which remained were bounded for a considerable length by Finnegan’s, the last thing Tarry or his mother would want. The five fields were composed of soil as poor as was to be found in the county Cavan – which was saying a good deal, and without the two good ones to balance them out they would be a millstone around any purchaser’s neck. The cattle hated the sour grass which grew in them, and the only saving feature was the drink in them. Indeed, so wet was the soil that even in the middle of summer they could get a drink from the pools that formed on the spongy heights.
What would Tarry tell his mother? It was on his advice she had paid over the bulk of the purchase money – two hundred pounds – and it was doubtful if they could get any of that money back now. Didn’t they buy it with their eyes open would be said.
‘Well, how are they?’ she inquired when he returned.
‘All fine,’ he answered.
‘That atself. There’s a bit of rice there in the pot that I made for you, you must be tired after pitching that hay. The best of a farm if it was minded. Two of as good a fields… ’ Tarry was stooped over the pot of rice, trying to forget.
The mother stayed in the kitchen making bread. Tarry went upstairs and sat beside the old Howe sewing machine – the father of all sewing machines – in the corner of the room facing the front window.
This corner was his Parnassus, the constant point above time. Winter and summer since his early boyhood he had sat here and the lumps of candle-grease on the scaly table of the old machine told a story.
He carried out his usual ritual, for the Muse is attracted and held by the little gestures just as women are. Beside him he arranged the verses which he knew would excite him – at the right moment. He had Madame Bovary within reach. His method of getting a thrill out of this book and of all exciting books was not by reading them through, but by opening them at random and giving a quick look inside. Then he would shut the book again lest the magic should escape. He crossed his legs, got out the puce pencil and the blue notepaper and let his mind become passive.
A thrush was singing his plagiarized version of the blackbird’s song in one of the poplars behind the house. Callan’s hill, all white with Michaelmas daisies, looked in at him. For a moment his passive mind was being wooed by the clump of black sallies at the bottom of the garden. In among the sallies on the shaky scraw there were water-hens hopping.
The net of earthly intrigue could not catch him here. He was on a level with the horizon – and it was a level on which there was laughter. Looking down at his own misfortunes he thought them funny now. From this height he could even see himself losing his temper with the Finnegans and the Carlins and hating his neighbours and he moved the figures on the landscape, made them speak, and was filled with joy in his own power.
The rattle of buckets, rolling of barrels under
Down-spouts, the leading in of foals
Were happenings caught in wonder
The stones white with rain were living souls.
He was in his secret room in the heart now. Having entered he could be bold. A man hasn’t to be on his best behaviour in Heaven; he can kick the furniture around. He can stoop down and pick up lumps of mortality without being born again to die.
Tarry rose from his chair and began to search under his bed. He dragged out a large black wooden box, one of the old boxes in which his mother’s trousseau had come. This box was filled with papers and faded documents – old letters, rent receipts, bills, the Anglo-Celt for the year 1905.
He pulled out a bundle of the papers and spread them on the bed and then got sitting beside them very caressingly.
Here were two long damp-stained envelopes. Within was the correspondence over the right o’ way to Finnegan’s well which had been such a bone of contention between the families forty years before. The Flynns won that law suit – and as was often the case with the winners they were more bitter than the losers, and Tarry’s grandfather had encouraged him to carry on the feud. Tarry had been taught how mean and low the Finnegans were when in fact they were only amusing. One of the letters from the solicitor for the Finnegans said: ‘My client denies the alleged assault on your wife. When your wife came to the well my client remonstrated with her for leaving the gate to the well open so that the cattle in the fields could go down and pollute the spring. My client absolutely denies that she pulled your wife’s hair out; the hairs, if any, which were found on the bushes were not hairs from your wife’s head but from the tails of the cattle which your wife’s carelessness caused to get down to the well.’
When he was replacing the letters in their envelopes he noticed another small note inside. Taking it out he found that it was a letter from his uncle Petey dated nineteen nineteen and addressed from West Africa to Tarry’s mother. It was a pleasant childish hand much faded now, but Tarry could make out that the man was asking for money in the most oblique way possible. He had nine hundred and ninety pounds he said and all he wanted was the other ten to buy some great bargain – something to do with a mine. How his mother must have sneered at that letter.
‘Holy smoke,’ said Tarry dreamingly aloud. He put the correspondence back in the box and shoved it under the bed with his foot. Then he sat down at the machine again and lit a candle.
He wrote about his own room:
Ten by twelve
And a low roof,
If I stand by the side-wall
My head feels the reproof.
Five holy pictures
Hang on the walls:
The Virgin and Child,
St Anthony of Padua,
Leo the XIII,
St Patrick and die Little Flower.
His mother had been out of the house a few minutes talking to somebody at the gate. Presently she walked slowly towards the dunghill, and as she passed the window Tarry knew that she had heard something. She came in in the company of Bridie who had the milk with her, and having put the vessel on the bottom step of the stairs cried in a broken voice:
‘Tarry, Tarry, Tarry. Are you in or are you out?’
He rattled on the floor with his feet.
‘Oh, what in the wide earthly world are we to do at all?’ she cried, and there was no fake about her emotion now. If all belonging to her had died suddenly she could not have been more disturbed. Tarry jumped up from his seat and went down to console her.
‘What is the matter, mother?’
‘God! O God! O God!’ she lamented, ‘and you told me that you saw the map and knew everything!’
‘What’s the matter?’
‘Everything’s the matter, everything’s the matter. Oh, I was better dead and in the boneyard than have to put up with this. Oh, it’s me that’s to be pitied if ever a woman was to be pitied!’
‘Try to pull yourself together,’ said Tarry. ‘Is it over Carlin’s?’
‘Is it over Carlin’s? Lord! O Lord! Oh I was better dead and buried, a thousand times better.’
Bridie, straining the milk in the dairy, beckoned to her brother to come outside and let the temper wear off the mother. ‘It’s the only cure for it,’ she said.
They sat together on a bag of bran in the dairy, and Bridie confessed to her brother for the first time that the parish of Dargan, and the people in it, was no place for a civilized man or woman. ‘A girl was better sell herself openly on the streets of a city,’ she declared.
‘What do you think of the Molly one?’ Tarry asked.
‘What the hell about it?’ said Bridie quietly. ‘What the hell do you care if you had nothing to do with her, and even if you had for that matter.’ They listened. ‘She’s slowing down a bit now. Don’t say one word when you go up now.’
‘Not a word,’ Tarry promised.
The mother’s crying and sighing died down and the brother and sister went up to the kitchen, moving about the floor on tip-toes and saying nothing.
Tarry was being very good but he could not restrain himself from taking a nip out of the cake of raisin bread that stood on the dresser. His sister grinned her disapproval, but Tarry ate away, and afterwards took a drink out of the cream jug where the fresh milk had been put for the breakfast.
Bridie was disgusted. ‘You’ll start her off again,’ she whispered viciously.
‘Leave us alone,’ he said.
The clock ticked on in the room. The cat climbed up on the dresser and began to fumble among the plates.
‘Put that cat down,’ said the mother, raising her head from her knees.
They were half way through the Rosary when the mother knelt straight up and listened. Tarry awoke and listened too. A motor car was coming slowly up the Drumnay road, its slow purr ominous, like news of death.
Tarry changed colours. The mother sat up and stuck her feet in her shoes. They waited anxiously to see if the car would go past the gate. Next thing they heard the rattle of the gate and a man’s voice guiding the driver who was driving through to turn the car in the street.
‘Father, Son and Holy Ghost!’ prayed the mother, ‘did something happen to one of these in Shercock? One trouble never comes alone.’
Tarry dashed to the door. Bridie took the vessel from the foot of the stairs and ran up with it.
The headlights of the car swung round catching Tarry in the doorway. The disturbed hens cackled on their roosts. The mother terrified was frozen to the tiles of the hearth praying ‘Father, Son and Holy Ghost, Father, Son and Holy Ghost. God protect everybody’s rearing.’
‘Are you the man I heard so much about from your mother whenever she took the notion of answering my letters?’ a loud affable voice sang as the figure of a man moved in the enlarging light of the car’s lamps towards the door.
‘Bad luck to him into hell and out of it, it’s your uncle,’ his mother whispered viciously.
He was well enough dressed, better than Tarry was, but very disreputable. If it had been anyone else but a relation Tarry would possibly have thought him a man to be avoided. He led his tramp uncle into the house and without waiting for his sister to welcome him ran to her and shook her hand: ‘How are you, Mary?’ Then he added: ‘My God, but you aged a lot, Mary.’
The mother was inclined to feel relieved that the news wasn’t worse. ‘Hang his coat on the back of the door, Bridie.’
She herself took his old suitcase and weighing it in her hand left it under the stairs.
The taximan outside blew his horn and this reminded the uncle of something: ‘Mary, will you go out and pay that driver the few shillings he’s owed. I have no small change on me.’
She nodded her head sadly and took two half-crowns off the dresser and went outside. The uncle was a tall man with a bald head of which he was unconscious. His unconsciousness of his whole personal appearance was his outstanding characteristic in Tarry’s judgement. What the world thought of him didn’t seem to matter. Just now he was not quite sober, but he was steady on his feet and fully competent.
For awhile Tarry did feel disappointed in the uncle because he had no money. This feeling was unconscious. Money was only another word for success. His uncle was a failure. He had no wife, no family and no achievement to his credit. The only aspect of his character that could be called an achievement was that he had learned not to care.
When the mother and sister went to bed Tarry and the uncle stayed up by the fire, the uncle telling the story of his wandering all over the world. He was a good story-teller and he was also a sympathetic listener. For all his travel his accent was still the flat Cavan accent even to calling calves, ‘caves’! From his casual allusions he appeared to know something of music and art and literature – and he was sad when he mentioned these things.
‘A man without talent is a nobody,’ he said once. ‘The only things worth having are talent and genius. The rest is trash.’
He did not think it strange when Tarry told him of the beauty that lived in stones and in all common things. He was receptive to the wildest ideas. It was a relief to have the uncle present in these troubled days – a man who didn’t care. Tarry almost felt that he had no problems to contend with.
Another wet day dawned. Tarry rose from the bed where his uncle still lay asleep and looked out the window at the townland dripping all over with water. But he was unable to think of the townland as ugly. He remembered the wet days more vividly than the sunny ones. Standing in the doorway of a stable, leaning on a graip, his mind sunk in the warm thought of the earth. The wet dunghill steamed. The hens standing on one leg in the doorways of the stables and under the trees made him love his native place more and more.
The rain beat on the slates. Below him in the kitchen he could hear the soft pad of his mother’s feet on the floor.
‘Is he getting up for his breakfast?’ said she to Tarry when he went down. Tarry said he was still asleep and the mother said: ‘The right rodney if ever there was one. Hasn’t a thing in the suit-case except a lock of oul’ rags – and a couple of books.’
Books! Tarry was interested. He could hardly wait till his uncle came down to see what they were. When after breakfast the books were produced they turned out to be – there were only four – the Imitation of Christ, H. G. Wells’ History of the World, a book about Ireland and a cheap American edition of Das Kapital by Karl Marx.
Tarry didn’t think the books very exciting. The uncle said that the Imitation was his bible. ‘Give me it over,’ he said. He began to quote from it:
Behold! eating, drinking, clothing, and other necessaries, appertaining to the support of the body, are burdensome to a fervent spirit. Grant that I may use such things with moderation, and not be entangled with an inordinate affection for them… Seek not to have that which may curb them of thy inward liberty.
More spiritually elated than he had been for many months Tarry went outside leaving his uncle sitting smoking by the fire.
He stood under the wet lilac bushes near the gate and let his eyes wander up the misty valley. He picked up a scrap of galvanized iron and looked at its frayed rusty edges till it came alive in his imagination. He opened and closed the gate merely for the pleasure of opening it and closing it. He walked past the parlour window and looked in sideways at the reflection of himself in the glass. That window always made him look attractive. He walked backwards and looked again. He was not bad looking, he knew that. Then he went past the dunghill and lifted the graip which was stuck aslantwise in the side of the heap and the graip became a magic wand of evocation.
‘So this is your farm?’ said the uncle as they wandered through the fields later in the day. ‘Aren’t they very small?’
They were passing along the headland of the potato field and Tarry was just thinking how big that field seemed with the stalks of potatoes nearly four feet high, which gave the field a new dimension.
The uncle looked across the drain and up towards Brady’s. ‘I knew oul’ Molly well,’ he said, ‘a hot piece. She married an oul’ fella, I heard.’
‘He died, two years after.’
‘Any family?’
This question gave Tarry the chance of broaching the subject of Molly. ‘They say there’s something wrong with the daughter, Molly. One daughter is all she has.’
‘Ah, a trout in the well! These things do be in it, Tarry. And worse can happen a woman. The mother was a hot piece.’
‘They’re putting it out that I had something to do with the daughter, but I may as well tell you I hadn’t.’
The uncle seemed to have forgotten the remark made by Tarry. He fingered an ash tree in the corner and commented on the great size it had grown since he as a boy had been able to bend it to the gound. ‘Fifty years ago.’
‘What do you think about the business?’ asked Tarry.
‘What do you want to do?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘My advice is this – and I have always acted on it – do whatever pleases yourself. These things don’t matter. What does matter is that if you have anything worth while in you, any talent, you should deliver it. Nothing must turn you from that.’
The uncle took such tremendous affairs so lightly that Tarry felt rather ashamed to trouble him with the affair of the farm. When he did so the uncle said: ‘We’ll dodge up that far and take a look at the dominion of Miskin.’
Far in the misty distance they could see the plains of Louth and out of the rain the limestone spire of a church.
‘And this is Carlin’s,’ said the uncle with a smile. ‘I remember it well. I wed potatoes in that longish field beside the land – and the devil’s bad spuds they were. What a life! How do you endure it, Tarry?’
‘It’s all right,’ said Tarry.
‘But there’s no necessity to live in this sort of a place, is there? The best way to love a country like this is from a range of not less than three hundred miles. And the same applies to the women of it. I wonder how Joe Finnegan is, poor oul’ Joe. We’ll dodge up as far as his house and see how he is. He was the second greatest blackguard I ever met and I like him for it. Poor Joe Finnegan.’ Tarry tried to dissuade his uncle from going to see Joe Finnegan. He explained that a short time ago they had had a fierce quarrel. ‘I tell you he won’t speak to us.’
‘Don’t be foolish. Is it Joe Finnegan? And I knew his wife too, many’s the good coort I had with her.’
Tarry refused to go farther when they got to the hedge, but the uncle said: ‘Come on, con, man. Wouldn’t I be a mean man if I left the country without seeing poor oul’ Joe.’
On their way through Finnegan’s back yard the uncle examined everything with a bemused eye. He could hardly believe that any human being could endure life in this backward spot. ‘I wouldn’t blame him if he had to kill you,’ he said to Tarry.
The encounter between Joe and his uncle surprised Tarry a little. Joe felt small and did his best to speak ‘grand’ in the presence of the travelled man. The wife appeared with a shamed expression on her dirty face and crawled out of sight as quickly as she could. Joe even went so far in his effort to show himself a man above petty affairs to pretend to be a very warm friend of Tarry’s, asking about this and that in the farming line.
Yet he was glad when they got away.
‘That fella was always afraid of me,’ said the uncle. ‘I could make him run into a rat hole.’
‘But what do you think of him, really?’
The uncle gave the impression that he didn’t waste thought on such matters. He considered Joe as an interesting animal rather than as an equal human being. ‘Do you know,’ said the uncle with lofty reflection, ‘it often occurred to me that we love most what makes us most miserable. In my opinion the damned are damned because they enjoy being damned. All the angels in Heaven couldn’t drag a damned soul out of the Pit – he likes it so much.’
On the third day of the uncle’s visit he suggested to Tarry that he could do worse than leave Drumnay with him. ‘I may have no money,’ said he, ‘but I have some influence. I could get you a job and I could get you what’s better, a living. It’s not what you make but what you spend that makes you rich.’ The uncle had explained that a car was calling for him on the next morning, they would meet it in the village, and if Tarry thought well of it why there was nothing to prevent him coming.
‘But what will my mother say? How will she carry on without me?’
The uncle laughed. ‘Will the dunghill run away?’ said he.
The uncle did not realize how beautiful Tarry thought the dunghill and the muddy haggard and gaps and all that seemed common and mean. He told him how much he loved this district and the uncle said: ‘Haven’t you it in your mind, the best place for it? If it’s as beautiful as you imagine you can take it with you. You must get away.’
‘What about money?’ said the weakening Tarry.
‘Isn’t there money in the house?’
Before going to bed that night Tarry, while the uncle kept up a noise in the kitchen and talked as if Tarry were beside him to curb the suspicious mind of the mother who had just gone up to bed, Tarry prised open the trunk in the parlour and extracted four pounds.
‘Any more in it?’ asked the uncle.
‘Five.’
‘Well get it, we might be short-taken on the road.’
They slept soundly that night.
‘Father, Son and Holy Ghost! where are you going in the good suit?’ cried the mother the next morning when Tarry came down for breakfast.
‘As far as the village.’
‘And with the good suit?’ She eyed her son with a look of annoyance, and then suddenly her eyes flashed in scalded grief. Her lips moved in prayer. She spoke in a low whisper. ‘Oh my God, oh my God.’ Her lips went on moving but there were no words. Her eyes were wide, son – and as he stared they darkened, in brown earthly sadness.
It was her wordlessness smote him. An impulse to cry out touched his throat. Words came to her again. They came in a spurt, on their own, like he had once seen blood spurt. ‘God help me and every mother.’ And then a storm of sobs swept her and words came in a deluge. ‘Your nice wee place; your strong farm; your wee room for your writing, your room for your writing.’
‘How will she carry on,’ he kept mumbling. ‘How will she carry on.’
He was very sorry for his mother. He could see that she was in her way a wise mother. Yet, he had to go. Why? He didn’t want to go. If, on the other hand, he stayed, he would be up against the Finnegans and the Carlins and the Bradys and the Cassidys and the magic of the fields would be disturbed in his imagination.
She was a good mother and a wise one and she would surely realize that her son was doing the right thing.
‘Women,’ remarked the uncle sensing his companion’s thoughts, ‘never have got full credit for their bravery. They sacrifice everything to life.’
Tarry, hesitating like an unwilling schoolboy, turned at the mouth of the Drumnay lane and looked once more and once more again up the valley. The field of potatoes in blossom was the full of his mind.
‘Shut your eyes and you’ll see it better,’ said the uncle paradoxically.
Jemmy Kerley was leading the shorthorn bull to a corner of his field beside a gate where a cow was waiting and Tarry remembered all the times he had driven a cow to the bull – up lanes banked with primroses and violets, and meeting men and women who were always so interesting.
They met Father Daly coming from saying his morning Mass in Dargan church and Tarry was shocked that his uncle did not raise his hat to him. ‘Terrible pity of that poor man,’ said he, ‘living here at the back of God’s speed. I met the Pope once and if I had known about him I’d have put in a good word for him.’
‘And you met the Pope?’
‘Yes,’ the uncle went on, ‘the only thing a man could do in a place like this is drink himself to death. I could have fixed him up if I had only known.’
The uncle continued talking but Tarry was not listening. He was back in Drumnay looking for his cap on top of the dresser. He was walking along the dry brown headland of the potato field. He was coming home alone from the crossroads of a Sunday evening and when he got home nobody was in the house save his mother who was making pancakes for him. He was wearing a new suit and he had a new soul, brand new, wondering at the newly created world.
O the beauty of what we love! O the pain of roots dragging up! He was visualizing a scene that took shape as a song.
On an apple-ripe September morning
Through the mist-chill fields I went
With a pitch-fork on my shoulder
Less for use than for devilment.
The threshing mill was set-up, I knew,
In Cassidy’s haggard last night,
And we owed them a day at the threshing
Since last year. O it was delight
To be paying bills of laughter
And chaffy gossip in kind
With work thrown in to ballast
The fantasy-soaring mind.
As I crossed the wooden bridge I wondered
As I looked into the drain
If ever a summer morning should find me
Shovelling up eels again.
And I thought of the wasps’ nest in the bank
And how I got chased one day
Leaving the drag and the scraw-knife behind,
How I covered my face with hay.
The wet leaves of the cocksfoot
Polished my boots as I
Went round by the glistening bog-holes
Lost in unthinking joy.
I’ll be carrying bags today, I mused,
The best job at the mill
With plenty of time to talk of our loves
As we wait for the bags to fill…
Maybe Mary might call round…
And then I came to the haggard gate,
And I knew as I entered that I had come
Through fields that were part of no earthly estate.