The Wily O'Reilly: Irish Country Stories

  It was always tricky—as in trying to remove a piece of well-decayed cow from a starving alligator—to suggest to O’Reilly that he might not be entirely up to date. It was going to be even more so because I did remember the hypochondriac who’d insisted on calling O’Reilly in the middle of the night. Doctor O. had instructed the victim to pass urine every hour on the hour until morning and use dipsticks on every specimen. So he couldn’t have been entirely unfamiliar with the things.

  In the spirit of scientific inquiry, and with a precautionary glance to assure myself that the door was still open, I began.

  “Er,” I asked, “er, Fingal, would it not have been easier to use a dipstick?”

  “Of course,” he said benignly, dumping the fuming mixture down the drain, “but remember, there’s art to medicine as well as science.” He chuckled. “Maggie would never have believed the results of a wee bit of cardboard but she’s absolutely convinced by my pyrotechnics.”

  Lord help us, I thought, if he ever decides she needs leeching, but although I kept the sentiments to myself, my cynical look must have betrayed me.

  “You don’t believe me?” he asked.

  I have difficulty with the concepts that the Earth is flat, the moon is made of green cheese, and Darwin and armies of palaeontologists are wrong. “Well…”

  “There’s nobody—I mean nobody,” he shook his head, “absolutely nobody as resistant to change as Ulsterfolk.”

  There was some truth to that. Half of us were still fighting a battle that officially ended in 1690—with no need for a couple of periods of overtime, never mind three centuries of rematches. There was, however, an increasing subset of the inhabitants of the northeastern corner of the Emerald Isle who had moved with the times. Instead of pikes and muskets, they used Semtex. “Yes, but…” I tried, but he rolled over me.

  “I’ll prove it. Do you remember Sunny?”

  “Sunny? The chap who lives in his car?”

  “The very one.”

  Of course I remembered Sunny and his run-in with Councillor Bishop, he whose wife had had herself cremated, with the family wealth in ten-pound notes in the coffin.

  “I should remember him. Don’t I call to see him and his dogs every week or so?”

  “Still living in his car?”

  “Yes.” I was having some difficulty following Fingal’s line of reasoning—but that was something that would never change. As is a corkscrew to a ruler, so was O’Reilly’s convoluted logic to linear cogitation. I suspected he was probably the originator of divergent thinking.

  “But,” I said, “I don’t see what that has to do with the inflexibility of the average Ulsterman.”

  “Huh. Do you know what Sunny’s chief delight was—other than his dogs?”

  I had to admit I did not.

  “His car had a wireless. He’d listen to it for hours.”

  “And I suppose you’re going to tell me that when the BBC added new stations he refused to listen to them because he’s an Ulsterman and Ulsterfolk are resistant to change.”

  “Not at all. He took to them like a duck to water.”

  “So he did change.”

  “Up to a point,” said O’Reilly. His face softened. I knew he had a warm spot for his eccentric patient. “But the car was 1940s vintage and eventually the radio stopped working.”

  I’m sure that on occasions in darkest Africa Stanley must have despaired of ever finding Doctor Livingstone.

  “I don’t see…”

  “’Course you don’t.” A smile played round O’Reilly’s lips. “But somebody bought Sunny a television set and ran an electrical cable from his deserted house to the car.”

  Archimedes is reputed to have leapt from his bathtub yelling, “Eureka.” I had an urge to mutter the same Hellenic expletive—not because I had the faintest idea what this piece of intelligence had to do with O’Reilly’s thesis about stubbornness, but because I was certain who the “somebody” had been.

  To accuse O’Reilly of anything resembling kindness would have upset the big man. Like the Good Lord, Fingal liked to “move in mysterious ways his wonders to perform.” Lest my expression give me away for a second time, I tried to steer O’Reilly back to his original argument.

  “So,” I said, “Sunny did change. He switched from listening to the radio to watching television.” Adopting my best Perry Mason manner, I remarked, “I rest my case.”

  “Almost,” said O’Reilly. “You’re almost right.”

  “Oh?” The argument seemed pretty solid to me.

  “He used the set. No doubt about that—but do you know what he said to me after he’d had the thing for a month?”

  I shook my head.

  O’Reilly’s big frame quivered. “Sunny said—Sunny said, ‘Do you know, Doctor dear, but thon TV’s the powerful thing. All you have to do is watch it with your eyes shut and it’s near as good as my old wireless.’”

  I had to laugh.

  “Change an Ulsterman?” said O’Reilly. “You’d have a better chance getting Niagara Falls to run uphill.”

  Now, after thirty years, I can look back and laugh at myself, and O’Reilly was wrong. Some Ulsterman do change. If they didn’t, I’d be writing this with a quill pen instead of my trusty Underwood typewriter.

  JANUARY 2000

  The Sting

  O’Reilly bags a wasps’ nest

  “Holy thundering mother of Jasus,” O’Reilly roared, springing from his deck chair, dousing me with the contents of his glass, and clapping a hand to the back of his neck with enough force to have decapitated a lesser mortal.

  I leapt to my feet, simultaneously dabbing at the large John Jameson stain on my pants and wondering what could have provoked the big man’s outburst.

  “Little bugger,” O’Reilly growled.

  I thought he was addressing me—he was prone to using such terms of endearment—but he wasn’t looking at me. Instead he glowered at an insectoidal remnant clutched between his finger and thumb. It was a very wide, very flat, very dead wasp. One of the kamikaze breed. Only an insect with no desire to continue its existence would have had the temerity to sting Doctor Fingal Flahertie O’Reilly, MB, BCh, BAO.

  He discarded the corpse and rubbed the back of his neck. I could see the red weal. “Blue bag,” he grunted as he galloped from the garden and into the house.

  When he reappeared—fresh whiskey in one hand—a deep blue splodge covered his nuchal lump. I hadn’t the faintest idea what resided within the famous blue bag, but I did know that its application to insect stings was soothing. Certainly it seemed to have calmed O’Reilly.

  “Wouldn’t be summer without the odd wasp,” he said mildly.

  I nodded. The beasts were pests in late August and—I watched one as it clung to the edge of my sherry glass—there seemed to be more of them on that particular evening. Lots more. Two had joined the original sherry seeker and five were having a go at O’Reilly’s whiskey.

  I’ve neglected to tell you that we’d set our deck chairs under the shade of the sycamore tree at the bottom of O’Reilly’s garden. It was a magnificent specimen, tall, leafy, ancient, and from among its branches squadrons of the brutes buzzed in close formation. They made beelines, or perhaps that should be wasp-lines, for our drinks.

  I dislike physical pain and it seemed to me that the odds against my being stung were going down dramatically. There were so many yellow-and-black bodies on the wing that I began to wonder if Pharaoh and Moses had taken up residence in Ballybucklebo and that the old patriarch had given up on locusts and moved on to wasps as a method of softening Ramses’ ossified cardiac organ.

  “I think we should go in, Fingal.”

  He ignored me and stared up into the leafy canopy overhead.

  “C’mere, Pat.” He pointed upward.

  I moved beside him and followed the line of his outstretched finger.

  “What do you make of that?”

  High in the tree, suspended from a branch, was a grey thing, narro
w at the bottom, wide at the top, and about the size of the ill-fated Hindenburg dirigible.

  “It’s the biggest wasps’ nest I’ve ever seen, Fingal.” One settled on my ear. “I really do think we should be going in,” I remarked, sidling toward the house, leaving my drink on a garden table, hoping the wasps would be distracted long enough for me to make my getaway unscathed.

  He grabbed my arm.

  “It’s got to go,” he said. “Got to.”

  “I agree,” I said, and instantly regretted my words. Someone was going to have to make the nest go, and from the look on O’Reilly’s face I realized that he thought he’d found his volunteer. I imagine Lord Wellington’s eyes took on the same steely glare when he selected the poor devils to be first to storm the breach in the walls of a French-held fort. The term for those wretches was “the forlorn hope.”

  “Sorry, Fingal, but remember when Maggie MacCorkle’s cat got stuck up this tree?”

  “Right,” he said, “right. I’d forgotten you had acrophobia.” And a highly developed sense of self-preservation, I thought.

  “Donal,” he said. “Donal Donnelly’s the man for the job.”

  * * *

  Writers of tales of darkest Africa often mentioned the jungle telegraph, as in “… the heat, the heat, and the native drums.” Plains Indians reputedly communicated using smoke signals. How messages were transmitted in Ballybucklebo, where few of the natives possessed telephones, was a mystery to me, but communicate they did. I called this phenomenon the bog telegraph. It had worked with its usual celerity.

  Half an hour after O’Reilly’s pronouncement, Donal Donnelly showed up at the house, wheeling his psychedelic bicycle and wearing his simple smile.

  “Hear you’ve a wee job for me, Doctor, sir,” he said, knuckling his forehead—a very thin strip between his eyebrows and hairline—and bending to remove his bicycle clips, strange metallic devices worn around the ankles to prevent the ’cycle’s chain from devouring the wearer’s trousers.

  “Indeed I do,” said an avuncular O’Reilly, draping a fond arm round Donal’s narrow shoulders and regarding the victim with the expression I’ve always imagined Lewis Carroll’s walrus used when talking to a group of oysters. “Just a wee one. Come on in,” he said, “and I’ll show you.”

  Donal trotted in O’Reilly’s wake and I brought up the rear. Once in the back garden, O’Reilly started to explain the nature of the “wee job.”

  “Here’s your ladder, Donal.” O’Reilly bent, picked up a wooden extending ladder, and loaded it onto Donal’s shoulder.

  “Painting, is it, Doctor?”

  O’Reilly shook his head.

  “Here’s your sack.” Fingal handed Donal a large potato sack.

  Donal frowned as he accepted the thing.

  “There’s the tree.”

  Donal’s face lightened. “Another wee pussycat up your tree, Doctor, sir?”

  “Not exactly.”

  The frown came back.

  “It’s a wasps’ nest, Donal.”

  Donal froze. I believe his eyeballs swole in their sockets. “Jasus, Mary, and Joseph and all the little saints,” he whispered.

  “Nothing to it, Donal. Nip up the ladder, whip the sack round the nest, snap off its stalk, and hold the mouth of the sack tight shut.”

  Donal’s head nodded like one of those big-beaked, globular-bodied, feather-tailed toy birds which if clipped to the rim of a water glass would oscillate back and forth for hours.

  “There’s a good lad,” said O’Reilly, pushing Donal in the direction of the elm. “By the time you bring the nest down in the sack, I’ll have a bonfire lit. We can cremate the whole bloody lot of them.” This last was said with a leer that would have looked well on the face of a Roman emperor giving the thumbs down to an army of defeated gladiators.

  I retreated inside the kitchen doorway. Donal went to the tree. My last glimpse was of his legs disappearing up through the leaves. O’Reilly bent to his work making a heap of dried leaves and twigs, his ample behind pointing straight at the old elm.

  I heard Donal yelling from his leafy aerie, “I’ve got them, Doctor, sir. It’s going to be all right.”

  And it would have been—if the bottom hadn’t fallen out of the mouldy old sack and the nest’s infuriated occupants hadn’t been released when the nest hit the ground.

  FEBRUARY 2000

  Pipes of Wrath

  The man who silenced O’Reilly

  Very few people ever told that medical gentleman, Doctor Fingal Flahertie O’Reilly, what to do, but it could be done. I saw it happen. By the way, please remember that a gentleman may be defined as “a man who can play the bagpipes—but doesn’t.” By this account Doctor Fingal Flahertie O’Reilly was certainly no gentleman. His weekly practices with the local pipe band were one thing. They took place in an old barn sufficiently far from Ballybucklebo that the natives were scarcely if ever disturbed. I could even find it in my heart to forgive his solitary warbling on his miniature chanter.

  Chanter? For those unfamiliar with the great highland bagpipe and wondering what on Earth I’m on about, let me explain the arcane workings of the things. The bits that stick up over the player’s shoulder are the drones. There are no prizes for guessing why. The tube that connects the apparently apoplectic puffer’s mouth to the tartan-covered bag is the blowstick. The chanter is the perforated pipe up and down which the musician’s fingers ripple as though the digits’ owner had forgotten to take his anticonvulsants for at least a week. It’s from the chanter that the tune is wrung.

  Pipers with consciences can exercise their chanter fingering on a miniature version. The full-sized job roars like the booming of some long-dead dinosaur. A regimental pipe band can re-create the noises of the entire Jurassic period. Massed bands, like those at the Annual Edinburgh Tattoo, for example, can emulate the racket of the Mesozoic Era. The miniature version produces a gentler note—somewhere between an oboe and a ruptured duck—and is barely audible at a range of a spear’s throw, the average distance used by Sassenachs to decide whether to flee from the noise or try to show their disapproval in a more pointed way. No, I had little cause for complaint when O’Reilly confined himself to the mini version.

  Life only became auditorily awful when himself would fire up the whole set and march up and down the back garden playing something called a pibroch. According to O’Reilly, the pibroch was the classical music of the pipes. I didn’t seem to recognize the names of Beethoven or Brahms among the composers of these works but I’m sure it was due to an oversight. Mozart’s rarely if ever played K1007½ was probably a concerto for pibroch and orchestra.

  Picture if you will, O’Reilly, bag under left arm, drones on left shoulder, face florid, nose flashing from scarlet to white (the latter when he missed a note, although how anyone but him could tell was beyond me), pacing up and down the back garden, pipes roaring, birds fleeing from the trees in panic, and the faithful Arthur Guinness marching at his master’s side, gazing with the eyes of a besotted fool at the Labrador’s version of God and lending his not inconsiderable howling in counterpoint.

  The natives of Ballybucklebo tolerated these outbursts, less because of any great affection for their medical advisor, but rather from a deep-seated local belief that so awful was the wailing that the indigenous banshees fled in terror. And as everyone knew, no one could die in Ballybucklebo without a preliminary hullabaloo from the banshee.

  On the night in question I was cowering in the upstairs sitting room, praying that the row would stop, beseeching the Almighty with all the fervour of one of Custer’s cavalrymen asking that the Indians go away. Somewhere in my pounded ears I became aware of an insistent ringing. I knew that tinnitus could be provoked by too many decibels. For a happy moment I hoped it might be the harbinger of a merciful deafness, then I realized it was the front doorbell—and it was Mrs. Kincaid’s night off.

  When I answered the door, a small, bekilted man stood there. He looked like a Scottish garden gnom
e that had climbed down from its concrete plinth. His face was as weathered as if he’d spent his entire life—which must have been at least seventy winters—in the open air.

  “Good evening,” I remarked, expecting to be addressed in the almost incomprehensible burr of the Glaswegian.

  “Aye. Chust so.” His speech was soft, melodious. I was conversing with a highlander or a man from the Western Isles.

  “It will be the Doctor himself that I am hearing?”

  No, I thought, it’s the wrath of God. But I nodded.

  “Chust so. And could I be speaking with himself?”

  “Actually I’m on call tonight, Mister … er…”

  “MacKay of the Island MacKays.” He offered his hand as a laird would to a peasant.

  I shook it gravely. “Come into the surgery. Please.” I ushered him in. Even with the heavy door closed behind us the awful ululation thundered on.

  “What can I do for you, Mister MacKay?”

  “Well…” His face contorted into a rictus of such anguish that I thought the little man was having a heart attack.

  “Are you all right?”

  His features softened. “Fine. Ah’m grand. It’s himself.” He inclined his bald pate in the direction of the piping. “The Doctor cannae get the grace notes right.”

  “And is that why you wanted to see him?” I asked.

  He nodded.

  “Right,” I said. “I’ll go and get him.” At last, I thought, someone who can tell O’Reilly to shut up. Then a thought struck me. “Mister McKay, if he’s making mistakes, does that mean he’ll have to practise harder?”

  “Chust so.”

  “Could you do me a favour? Could you suggest he uses the practice chanter?”