The Wily O'Reilly: Irish Country Stories

  “‘… of Clusium,’” I countered, “‘by the nine gods he swore, that the great house of Tarquin should suffer wrong no more.’ Macaulay’s Lays of Ancient Rome.”

  O’Reilly grunted. “So you’re not altogether unread. At least you recognize the source.” He shook his head. “No. I was thinking of my brother. The one in Portaferry.”

  I had one of those flashbacks that are only supposed to come to patients with recovery of suppressed memories. I pictured Lars Porsena O’Reilly’s youngest son devastating the school Christmas pageant by venting his wrath, very publicly, on the boy who’d replaced O’Reilly Minor in the part of Joseph.

  “That Lars Porsena,” I said.

  “Himself,” said O’Reilly. “It’s his oldest lad, Liam.”

  “Who can be a bit odd,” I prompted.

  “As two left feet,” said O’Reilly.

  I started. Could O’Reilly have read my mind just a few seconds ago?

  “Do you know what he’s just done?” O’Reilly asked.

  “No,” I replied, taking some comfort that if O’Reilly could have delved into my thoughts he wouldn’t have needed to ask the question.

  “Daft bugger,” he continued, then, noticing my hurt look, added, “Not you, Pat. Liam.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “He’s just passed his final examination for his B.Sc. up at Queen’s University.”

  “I wouldn’t have thought that qualified him for what you just called him.”

  O’Reilly shook his head. “He should have had a first-class honours but he managed to upset one of his professors.”

  “Never.”

  “Oh, aye,” said Fingal. “Daft B.” He busied himself lighting his pipe. “I got the story from Frothelbottom.”

  “Frothelbottom?”

  “Professor John Stout—known to his old school friends as Frothelbottom. Froth for short.”

  I waited.

  “Seems Froth had Liam in an oral. Asked him a question about barometers and a block of flats.”

  I remembered the same question from my own undergraduate days. “If you had a barometer, how could you tell the height of a tall building?”

  “Do you know what Liam said? ‘Go to the top, let down the barometer on a piece of string, and measure the length of the string.’”

  I confess I’d considered a different approach, but Liam’s solution would have worked.

  “Froth told Liam he could do it that way, but could he suggest another. ‘Sure,’ says Liam. ‘Go to the top, chuck the barometer off, and time its descent. Then use the acceleration formula to calculate the distance fallen.’

  “‘Um,’ says Froth, ‘but is there another way?’

  “‘Yes. Measure the barometer and walk up the stairwell. Turn the barometer end over end and multiply the length by the number of revolutions.’”

  At this point I was quite intrigued. Fingal’s nephew must have been possessed of a keen mind to come up with these original approaches. “Seems that he should have got his pass mark by this point,” I observed.

  “I agree,” said O’Reilly, “but as Froth admitted to me, by this time he wasn’t getting the answer he wanted, and was beginning to take a dislike to young Liam.”

  “Oh, dear.”

  “Indeed. Oh dear. ‘Try again,’ says Froth. ‘Measure the barometer, stand it vertically on the ground, and at noon measure the lengths of the shadows cast by the barometer and the building. Now you’d have a ratio and could calculate the height from that.’”

  For the life of me I could see nothing wrong with that answer.

  O’Reilly sighed, blew out a cloud of tobacco smoke, and muttered, “I wish old Froth had packed it up after that, but he told me that by then he was determined to wring the real correct answer out of young Liam. ‘Mister O’Reilly,’ says Froth, ‘there’s only one more way and if you tell it to me I’ll give you a pass with honours.’”

  “Seems to me that was a pretty fair offer.”

  “It was,” said O’Reilly, “but Froth hadn’t allowed for the O’Reilly oddness.”

  Neither had I when I joined his practice, but you already know that.

  Fingal shrugged. “I thought I understood a bit of physics, and I tell you, Pat, by that time I could only think of one more way to skin that particular cat. When old Froth started the last of the story he had me rightly flummoxed.”

  I waited.

  “‘Only one way?’ says Liam. ‘Rubbish.’” O’Reilly sighed. “Students don’t say ‘rubbish’ to senior professors.”

  “Liam did.”

  “I know,” said O’Reilly, “and do you know what? He was right. He finally allowed that if he measured the difference in barometric pressure between the ground and the roof he’d be able to calculate the height of the building.”

  That was the very answer I’d given some years before. But apparently Liam had known another way. “He should have called it a day right then,” I said.

  “I know. I know. But he didn’t. ‘Right,’ says Froth, and as he admitted to me, he was just about ready to forgive the young fellow his impertinence when Liam says, ‘Do you not want to know the other way?’ ‘I do,’ says Froth. You’ll never guess what Liam said.”

  He was right.

  “Says Liam, ‘I’d go to the caretaker’s flat, knock on the door, and when he opened it, I’d say, ‘Mister, if you tell me the height of the building, I’ll give you this bloody barometer.’”

  I couldn’t stop laughing.

  “It’s all very well for you to cackle like a broody hen, Pat Taylor. You don’t have to wonder what it is about your family.”

  OCTOBER 1999

  Flight of Fancy

  The dog who loved planes

  When I introduced you to Doctor Fingal Flahertie O’Reilly, I numbered among his attributes his propensity for kindness to small children and animals. There is of course an adage that “the exception proves the rule,” and loyal readers will remember that even O’Reilly’s faunophilia didn’t extend to Sus scrofa, the domesticated pig. Perhaps it was to compensate for his mistrust of all things porcine—unless roasted, glazed, or served in thick rashers by Mrs. Kincaid—that he was especially attached to members of the tribe Canis familiaris, defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as a “domesticated carnivore.” Arthur Guinness, O’Reilly’s Labrador retriever, was assuredly carnivorous. His domesticity was another matter. One word from O’Reilly and the brute did exactly as he pleased. The merest sight of my corduroy trousers either drove him into a state of sexual arousal previously recorded only at some of Nero’s classier Roman orgies or reminded him that his bladder was full. In my opinion he was as domesticated as a rabid Tasmanian devil.

  But O’Reilly doted on Arthur G., and showed his adoration in some of the most peculiar ways. (Please do not misinterpret that last remark. Remember, Honi soit qui mal ’y pense.) On reflection, perhaps a few words of explanation are warranted. Bear with me and I’ll give you an example.

  It was a perfect late-summer evening. O’Reilly and I had retired to his spacious back garden to ruminate on the state of the universe in general and the vagaries of medical practice in Ballybucklebo in particular. The air was soft, rose-perfumed, and drowsy with humming bees. O’Reilly sat on a wooden chair clutching his John Jameson, sucking contentedly on his briar. I squatted on the grass at his feet. We must have looked like the setup for an early Edwardian photograph. All I needed was an Eton jacket and a tasselled cap. Even Arthur Guinness, lolling under O’Reilly’s chair, seemed hypnotized by the tranquillity.

  I thought, occasionally God really is in his heaven and all is right with the world. I became aware of a distant droning, but before I could turn to try to identify the source of the increasingly loud noise, Arthur Guinness crawled out from under O’Reilly’s chair, sat erect, and stared at the sky.

  I knew that Labradors owed their retrieving ability to remarkably accurate vision so I followed his line of sight and saw on the horizon a small monoplane c
oming our way. Probably going to the Belfast airport, which at that time rejoiced in the name of Nutt’s Corner. Honestly.

  As the aircraft approached, Arthur began to ululate. I’d never heard him make the noise before. It fell somewhere between the falsetto keening of professional mourners at an Irish wake and the harsh wailing attributed to the banshee. And its volume increased until, as the plane passed overhead, I glanced hurriedly at the kitchen windows to assure myself that Arthur’s yodelling hadn’t cracked them.

  I had only enough time to note the panes’ integrity when I caught a blur of movement. Guinness’s wailing had changed to a bark that would have been the envy of a California sea lion, and I swear he was already approaching Mach 1 as he raced the length of the garden, staring upward and roaring his battle cry. Only the distant hedge stopped his career, and his ranting didn’t cease until the aircraft was out of view.

  O’Reilly was on his feet. “Come in here, sir.”

  Arthur looked over his shoulder, his view interrupted by his still-raised hackles.

  “Come here, I say.”

  Presumably misinterpreting this command for one to “sit,” Arthur planted his glossy behind, wagged his tail, but kept his back to O’Reilly.

  “Daft bloody dog,” O’Reilly rumbled in my general direction.

  Daft? Arthur’s recent display had been, at least to my mind, closer to raving lunacy than mere daftness. If the Baskerville canine had ever needed a stand-in, I could have pointed it in the right direction.

  “What on earth,” I asked, “was that all about?”

  “Ducks,” said O’Reilly, shaking his head. “He thinks they’re ducks.”

  I thought O’Reilly was finally beginning to assume some of the less balanced attributes of his gun dog but said, with a gently interrogative inflection, “Ducks?”

  “He keeps mistaking aeroplanes for ducks. You saw how happy he was chasing that one.”

  “That was happiness?”

  “Oh yes. Just look at him.”

  Arthur must have meandered back. O’Reilly bent and patted the dog’s head. “Who’s a good lad?” he inquired.

  Arthur’s tail moved so rapidly it seemed to stand still. The fact that it was in action was given away by the frenetic shimmy of his backside. His face wore a grin and his pink tongue dripped. In the fullness of time, disdaining even a sideways glance at my trouser leg, Arthur subsided under O’Reilly’s chair. Even I was convinced that the pursuit of the aircraft had in some inexplicable way brought great joy to the dimmer recesses of Arthur’s brain.

  It was then that I first glimpsed O’Reilly’s peculiar ways of demonstrating his adoration.

  “Um,” he said, a beginning I’d learned always prefaced his asking for a favour, “um, Pat, I don’t suppose you’d consider working this Saturday? I’d pay you a bit extra.”

  “Why, Fingal?”

  He hesitated. “It’s special or I wouldn’t ask.”

  “What’s special, Fingal?”

  “It’s Arthur’s birthday. I want to give him a treat.”

  I had to laugh. “I suppose you’re going to take him to the airport so he can really get close to some of those big ‘ducks.’”

  O’Reilly’s jaw dropped. “How in the hell did you know that? And keep your voice down.” He glanced at the black dog under the chair. “It’s meant to be a surprise.”

  I agreed to work on O’Reilly’s behalf. How could I be so unfeeling as to keep the pair of them from a trip they so clearly warranted? To Nutt’s Corner.

  NOVEMBER 1999

  Fuel for Thought

  O’Reilly and the Texan

  “Curious people, Americans,” observed O’Reilly as he helped himself to a plateful of Mrs. Kincaid’s devilled kidneys.

  It was suppertime chez O’Reilly and the pair of us was ensconced at the big mahogany dining table. I’d finished the afternoon surgery and Fingal, now masticating with the fervour of a cud-chewing yak, had come back from what I assumed must have been a successful confinement of Mrs. McGillicutty’s fourth. Certainly if the grin on his craggy face was anything to go by, something had pleased him enormously. Of course, what Americans had to do with the labour of a farmer’s wife was anyone’s guess.

  Forgetting the old adage about the impetuous entry of idiots into environs where the winged denizens of the celestial sphere would not venture, I decided to find out.

  “Curious, Fingal?”

  “Curious.” He mumbled, mouth full, fist-held fork on its way to deposit another load.

  “Do you mean they, like the ancient Greeks, are possessed of inquiring minds, or was that a comment about certain ethnic peculiarities?”

  He stopped in mid-chew. “What the hell are you on about, Taylor?”

  It was not an unreasonable question. I flinched. “Sorry, Fingal. Just—I was wondering aloud about what kind of curiousness the Americans had.”

  He grunted. “Odd bunch, the Yanks.” And lapsed into a digestive silence.

  I thought it better to follow suit, and let my mind wander on the subject under discussion. Americans. They’d started coming to our corner of Ireland in the late ’50s. They came by the coach-load—friendly, large people who dressed in baseball caps, tartan sports jackets, and Bermuda shorts and spoke loudly about “finding our roots in li’l ol’ Ireland.”

  The natives regarded their transatlantic cousins with gentle amusement and, ever with an eye to the main chance, grasping avarice. Prices in the Mucky Duck soared. Bed-and-breakfasts blossomed. Donal Donnelly had shown remarkable enterprise. He’d fashioned a leprechaun costume, complete with buckled brogues, knee britches, waistcoat, and stovepipe hat, equipped himself with a shillelagh, and parked himself on a stool outside the Duck. A hand-lettered sign beside him announced, “Will say ‘Begorrah’ for $1.” He’d done very well.

  My mental meanderings were interrupted.

  “Well, do you want to know why I think Americans are curious?”

  I glanced across the table. No sign of nasal pallor. The grin was back. “Oh, indeed.”

  He chuckled. “What do you know about petrol tanks?”

  “Nothing.” I was about to add that I didn’t see the connection between petrol—what Americans would call gasoline—and Americans themselves, when O’Reilly charged on.

  “There’s a funny arrangement in my Rover car.”

  “Oh?”

  “Aye. The outflow pipe is an inch above the bottom of the tank.”

  His line of reasoning was like Maggie MacCorkle’s headaches—at least two inches above my head.

  “It’s to stop dirt in the bottom of the tank getting into the carburettor and clogging it,” he explained.

  “That’s nice.”

  His brows knitted. “It can be a bloody nuisance when you’re low on petrol and the engine stops.”

  “I can see that.”

  “But there’s a way round it.”

  “Go on.” I tried to sound enraptured.

  “I had to use it this afternoon.”

  I could only hope that O’Reilly, like Roald Amundsen, who, as you’ll remember, announced that he was setting off for the North Pole but arrived at the South to the disgust of one Robert Falcon Scott, would eventually come back onto his true course.

  “Bloody car conked out on the way to the McGillicuttys, and you know how fast her labours are.”

  Indeed I did. I’d confined her last year. The term “precipitate” when applied to Jean McGillicutty’s second stage was about as descriptive as calling the then-recent puncturing of the sound barrier as “a wee bit fast, like.”

  O’Reilly mopped up his gravy with a slice of bread. “Do you know what I did?”

  I shook my head.

  “I’d no time to walk to the garage. I had to get the car to go, so I got out and peed in the petrol tank.”

  “You what?”

  “Peed in the tank. The petrol floats on the pee, is able to get into the feed pipe, and the engine’ll run for a while longer—”
/>
  I sat in awe of his ingenuity.

  “—trouble was, I’d been in such a rush I hadn’t noticed the American tour bus parked at the side of the road—”

  Aha. Perhaps Amundsen was going to head north.

  “—one of the Yanks had been watching me. ‘Watcha doin’, buddy?’ says he.” O’Reilly gave a very creditable imitation of John Wayne. “‘Refuelling, pilgrim,’ I told him. ‘Is that a fact,’ says he. ‘Ah never heard of using that fer fuel—and ah’m from Texas and that’s oil country.’ ‘I’ve heard that,’ says I, ‘but this is Ireland—and this is Guinness country. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m in a bit of a rush.’ ‘Mighty fine,’ says he, ‘do you think it would work with Budweiser?’”

  I had no doubt that O’Reilly had assured the innocent that such indeed would be the case. My mental image of some poor bewildered Texan shaking his head over a stalled Lincoln Continental was too much. I had what was known locally as “a fit of the giggles.”

  O’Reilly’s guffaws drowned my strangled squeaks.

  “Told you,” he gasped, “they’re a curious people. And, by the way, I made it to the McGillicuttys in time.”

  DECEMBER 1999

  Times Are a-Changing

  Or are they?

  The smell in O’Reilly’s surgery would have gagged a maggot. He stood at the sink, test tube grasped in one hand, oblivious to the acrid fumes spewing forth with all the fervour of a genie who has been in his bottle for centuries too long.

  Maggie MacCorkle sat expectantly, awaiting the pronouncement from her oracle.

  “No sugar in that, Maggie.” O’Reilly looked pontifically over his half-moon spectacles. “Run along, now. And leave the door open.”

  “Thank you, Doctor.” Maggie rose, gave me her usual look of disdain, and left. Her departure allowed a modicum of fresh air to penetrate the fug.

  “God’s strewth, Fingal, what were you about?” My eyes watered and my words were muffled by a series of involuntary constrictions of my throat.

  “Fehling’s test, my boy.” He waved the noisome vessel under my nose.

  For readers who didn’t attend a medical school that boasted either Hippocrates or Galen as members of its faculty, Fehling’s test involved boiling one test tube of the mystical Fehling’s solution and another of the patient’s urine. The two were mixed. If nothing exploded, the appearance of a blue tinge indicated the presence of glycosuria. Maggie may not have had glucose in her specimen, but something had managed to slip through her glomeruli—probably, I thought, burnt Wellington boots.