The Wily O'Reilly: Irish Country Stories

  A very knowing look spread across the old Scotsman’s face. “Aye, son. Chust so.”

  My heart soared as I sped to the back garden. It took about five minutes to attract O’Reilly’s attention. He lowered the bag and the moaning ceased slowly. The noise would have been described locally as “the tune the old cow died to.”

  “What do you want?” he roared.

  Do not try to take a raw steak from a pit bull. Do not interrupt O’Reilly’s pibroch.

  “There’s a Mister MacKay to see you, Fingal.”

  O’Reilly flinched. “Lord,” he muttered.

  “He says something about your not getting your grace notes right.”

  O’Reilly looked as if he had been struck by lightning. His voice fell to a whisper—the first bit of peace and quiet I’d had for what seemed like hours. “Did he?”

  I nodded.

  “Jasus. Do you know who he is?”

  I shook my head.

  “Angus MacKay was the Lord of the Isles piper before he moved here to Ballybucklebo.” By the look on Fingal’s face the position must have been on a par with the Archangel Gabriel’s in a more elevated sphere. “He taught me to play.”

  “And,” I said, “he says you need a lot more practice. On the little chanter.”

  O’Reilly hung his head.

  And for a while, I thought, blessing the name of Angus MacKay, there will be peace in the valley.

  MARCH 2000

  Sam Slither

  What noise annoys an oyster?

  Doctor Fingal Flahertie O’Reilly was a man of definite likes—you know about his terrible strong weakness for the product of John Jameson’s distillery—and his share of well-formulated dislikes.

  When it came to certain members of the species Homo sapiens—Councillor Bishop immediately springs to mind—O’Reilly regarded them with the distaste of a South Seas cannibal for banana fritters. Nor did he confine his animus to specified individuals. Certain subspecies—district health officials, a well-defined breed of Presbyterian minister (the Angus McWheezles of this world) and lawyers, for example—he would condemn to perdition en bloc. Not that he ever let his general disgust stand in the way if the opportunity to attack a particular member of one of the subsets presented itself.

  Take the case of Samuel P. Shaughnessy, LLB, known to the citizens of Ballybucklebo as “Sam Slither.” The “slither” part was an allusion to the man’s slippery courtroom carryings-on.

  The legal eagle in question had visited us because he was troubled by a persistent cough. Shaughnessy was a little man, birdlike. He had beady eyes and a hooked nose that wouldn’t have been out of place on the face of a peregrine falcon. He strutted into the surgery, breast thrust out like a pouter pigeon—and a particularly haughty pouter at that.

  From his opening, “Well, O’Reilly?”—not, you will note, “Doctor O’Reilly”—he treated my senior colleague as a duke would treat a scullion. He simply ignored me. He left without as much as a thank you.

  O’Reilly had dealt with the man in an entirely professional manner—and about as much warmth as the blizzard that finally saw off Scott of the Antarctic.

  “Jasus,” said O’Reilly as soon as Slither, S., had left the surgery, “I can’t abide that man. He’d better not go swimming.”

  “Because it would be bad for his cough?” I asked naively.

  O’Reilly snorted. “Not at all. If he ever went in the water, the whole of the coast guard would be out to clean up the oil slick.”

  I knew of Shaughnessy’s reputation. “You’re right, Fingal,” I said, but contained my desire to laugh. O’Reilly’s nose tip was pure alabaster.

  “I don’t like Mister Shaughnessy,” growled O’Reilly. “Not one bit.”

  It seemed superfluous to remark that I could have guessed that. I assumed that Mister S. was in O’Reilly’s bad books as a side effect of the little lawyer’s profession. As usual when it came to guessing why Doctor O. behaved the way he did, I wasn’t entirely right.

  O’Reilly rummaged in his pocket and produced and lit up his briar. “Come to think of it, keeping him away from the water’s another good reason that he should never be let loose on the deck of a yacht.”

  Aha, I thought, there’s more to this than immediately collides with the contents of the eye-socket.

  You’ll remember that O’Reilly was a keen sailor. So was Shaughnessy. Indeed he was commodore of the local yacht club, and to add insult to injury, his boat and O’Reilly’s were tied at four wins each in the biweekly race series.

  “It’s your day off on Saturday,” O’Reilly remarked, catching me quite off guard. “What are you up to?”

  With my unerring ability to fabricate a plausible excuse on the spur of the moment, I answered, “Um…”

  “Good,” said O’Reilly. “It’s the last race in the series and I…”

  “Need a crew?”

  “Exactly, my boy.” He beamed and exhaled a cloud of tobacco smoke that would have cleared the first two lines of enemy trenches in World War I. “I’m sure we can get a locum down from Belfast. You’ll have a wonderful sail.”

  I wondered if Mister Christian had offered similar comforting words as he cast Captain Bligh adrift on the start of his two-thousand-mile journey in an open longboat.

  * * *

  I won’t weary you with the details of the great yacht race. I’ll merely remark that O’Reilly’s boat and Shaughnessy’s crossed the start line bow to bow and immediately engaged in what I’m told is referred to as a tacking duel. The shining hours passed with tacks, gybes, luffing ups, and sundry other arcane manoeuvres, all accompanied by roars of command to the crew—me—and abusive bellows of “Starboard!” and “Water!” hurled from vessel to vessel. I believe if O’Reilly’s boat had been armed he’d have given Shaughnessy a broadside and ordered me to “board him in the smoke.”

  The ferocity of the competition would have made an America’s Cup race look like the endeavours of two model boats on a duck pond. O’Reilly’s boat crossed the finishing line a mere two feet ahead of the competition.

  I was soaked, frozen, and felt as though single-handedly I’d hauled a grand piano to the summit of Mount Everest. Pulling on ropes on a yacht isn’t called grinding for nothing. But I confess there was a sense of satisfaction. Not only had O’Reilly beaten Shaughnessy, he had, as far as I understood these things, won the series.

  I glanced at Shaughnessy’s boat and noticed a red flag flying from the piece of string that ran from the blunt end to the top of the mast. Assuming this signal to be some kind of gracious concession of defeat, I happily drew the matter to O’Reilly’s attention.

  He erupted. “Bloody lawyers! Bloody Sam Slither. Trust him to hoist a protest flag.”

  “Protest?”

  “Protest. He’s saying that somewhere we broke one of the rules.” Given the ferocity of the recent competition, I couldn’t help remarking, “The Marquess of Queensberry Rules?”

  “No, you nitwit. Racing rules. We’ll have to meet with the race committee. He’ll present his case—bloody lawyer—and we’ll have to try to defend ourself. That little weasel knows the laws of sailing better than a Talmudic scholar knows the Torah.” The sound of O’Reilly grinding his teeth was so intense that I thought we’d run aground—again.

  * * *

  The atmosphere at the post-race buffet was frosty. The committee had met. Shaughnessy had presented his case, and to the obvious disappointment of the committee members and the huge chagrin of O’Reilly, they’d had to find, purely on some abstruse point of maritime law, in Slippery Sam’s favour. It wouldn’t be entirely accurate to describe O’Reilly as crushed, but he was distinctly subdued.

  I believe revenge has been described as “a dish best eaten cold.” If the originator of the remark had been at the buffet he might have changed the remark to “a dish not eaten at all,” but then its author Joseph Marie Eugène Sue couldn’t have known O’Reilly.

  He stood at the table, pint in one h
and, plate in the other. He was accepting the condolences of his many cronies.

  Shaughnessy pushed his way through the little throng. He carried a plate of raw oysters.

  I listened as he addressed O’Reilly.

  “To make up for my victory,” I saw the man’s chest puff out farther than usual, “let me buy you a drink.”

  O’Reilly did not speak.

  Nor did any other member of the yacht club. A dropping pin would have sounded like the eruption of Krakatoa, so deep was the silence.

  “Well, at least have an oyster. Quite delicious.”

  I saw O’Reilly’s grin start and steeled myself.

  “Shaughnessy,” Fingal said in gentle tones, “you’re a quare dab hand at the law.” Sam Slither’s pullover nearly burst.

  “But my trade’s medicine, and you know … so I’ll pass on the oysters.” His pause wasn’t merely pregnant. It was carrying triplets. He inclined his head to the plate of slithery bivalves and said in gentle but very widely audible tones, “I always advise my patients never—never—to eat anything as slimy as a lawyer.”

  APRIL 2000

  A Matchless Experience

  Pity the stranger visiting Ballybucklebo

  Occasionally, outsiders wandered into Ballybucklebo. Some of them, when confronted with the likes of Maggie MacCorkle, Donal Donnelly, the Reverend Angus McWheezle, and indeed the redoubtable Doctor Fingal Flahertie O’Reilly himself, must have wondered if they’d stumbled into a dress rehearsal for one of the more bizarre efforts of Le Théâtre du Grand-Guignol.

  I’m sure that collectively the denizens of our little village could have kept teams of geneticists happily employed for years. Behavioural psychologists could have filled countless journal pages with arcane articles with titles like, “The Immediate Onset of Incomprehensible Gibbering Among Strangers on First Being Introduced to Maggie MacCorkle” or “The Impact of Entering the Mucky Duck on the Cognitive Processes of Otherwise Well-Balanced Persons.”

  Usually, the poor benighted who stumbled into our little backwater had arrived there by mistake. Most had taken a wrong turning on the Belfast-to-Donaghadee Road. Even the mere act of seeking directions to return a wayward traveller on their merry way could lead to nervous exhaustion. Such clearly stated navigational tips as, “Go down the road ’til you come to a red barn, sir. Now don’t turn right there,” or, “When you’ve not turned at the red barn, go on three more fields. There’ll be a black-and-white cow there unless Willy John has her in the red barn for milking. Go two fields past and follow your nose.”

  I once heard Donal Donnelly at his most helpful reduce a bewildered-looking city gent to a state bordering on hysteria. The party in question halted his Rolls-Royce, wound down the window, and said to the passing Donal, “My good man, how would I get from here to Donaghadee?”

  Donal, as you’ll remember, was a bit slow. Indeed snails had been known to cover vast distances while Donal puzzled out the answer to a question.

  “Come on, man. I haven’t got all day.”

  “It’s Donaghadee you want, sir?”

  “I just told you that.”

  “Donaghadee? Aye, indeed. Donaghadee.”

  “Yes. Donaghadee.” There was a great deal of drumming of fingers on the steering wheel.

  “That’s a hard one, sir. That’s a very hard one. You know”—here Donal paused and a beautiful smile plastered itself across his normally bland face—“if I was you I wouldn’t have tried to get to Donaghadee from here in the first place.”

  * * *

  You can understand why few non-natives, apart from impecunious assistants to established general practitioners, would decide to let their caravans rest in that rural loony bin. And yet once in a navy blue moon someone would appear from the great world outside, sample the village, and decide to stay. They usually didn’t last long unless they were able to adapt to the aboriginal ways and, more importantly, gain acceptance into the Ballybucklebo social circle. In Ireland such recent arrivals are known as “blow-ins.”

  It might have been his acknowledged virtuosity on the great highland bagpipe—after all, the man had been piper to the Lord of the Isles—that led to the initial acceptance of Angus MacKay.

  The fact that he’d had the temerity to point out to O’Reilly his inability to master certain grace notes as he throttled a thing called a pibroch from his tartan-clad octopus would have raised MacKay’s stock further with the locals. His complete bringing into the fold was assured on the night when MacKay simultaneously reaffirmed his Scotsness and succeeded in discomfiting a visiting Sassenach.

  Angus worked as a shepherd. He lived in a cottage about ten miles from the village and it had become his wont to walk into Ballybucklebo on a Saturday, stop at the Mucky Duck for a wee dram, purchase one bottle of single malt, and hike back to his cottage.

  O’Reilly had hauled me into the Duck. The place was relatively quiet. Only one or two of the usual suspects held up the far end of the bar. A stranger leaned dispiritedly, alone as a heron on a mudflat, toying with a half-pint. The poor man had probably popped in to ask directions.

  O’Reilly and I were sitting at a table when Angus came in. As usual he wore a tam-o’-shanter and was bekilted and besporranned.

  “Good evening, Doctors,” said Angus.

  “Evening, Angus.”

  He propped his cromach, the long crook beloved by Scottish shepherds, in a corner and walked over to the bar. He was so short his nose barely reached the countertop.

  “Evening, Angus.” Arthur Osbaldiston, our red-faced, spherical host, beamed over the bar. “The usual?”

  “Chust so, and a packet of Woodbines.”

  “Twenty?”

  Angus rummaged in his sporran, produced a handful of coins, consulted them with the concentration of a Viking warlock examining his runes, shook his head, and said, “No. Ten will be chust fine.”

  Spendthrift and Angus MacKay did not have quite the happy relationship of say, peaches and cream.

  Arthur delivered the cheap cigarettes and a glass of whisky.

  “There you are, Angus.”

  “Thank you, Arthur,” he said, lifting his tam-o’-shanter with the courtesy of a Spanish grandee. He pulled out and lit one cigarette, leaving the packet on the counter, said, “Slainte,” and sipped his drink.

  Perhaps it was his accent, so different from those of the locals, that persuaded the stranger to sidle along the bar and try to strike up a conversation.

  “Hello, old chap,” the man said by way of introduction. Immediately I recognized the plummy, marbles-in-the-mouth tones of an English ex–public schoolboy. No wonder, I thought, that he’d been ignored by the others in the place.

  Angus inclined his head, but said nothing.

  “Couldn’t help noticing you’re having a smoke.”

  Angus nodded, but kept his counsel.

  The Englishman’s voice was louder than those usually heard in the Duck and I could see that the others in the place were now paying avid attention to the little drama unfolding at the other end of the bar.

  “Um … don’t suppose you could spare a match?”

  Aha, I thought, the ask-for-a-match gambit as a way of striking up a conversation. I wondered how successful the Englishman would be.

  Silently Angus opened his sporran, fumbled in its depths, produced one single match, and gravely offered it to his newfound acquaintance, who accepted the match and said, “One is terribly grateful. Live round here, do you?”

  Angus’s nod was barely perceptible.

  “Nice place, what?”

  I began to rise as the man spoke. His hands were moving rapidly over his body, patting himself here and there. I thought I was witnessing my first case of Saint Vitus’s dance.

  “Do you know”—the man’s hands stilled and he nodded his head toward the packet of Woodbines on the bar counter—“terribly stupid of me. I seem to have come out without my cigarettes.”

  Every eye in the place was focused with the
pinpoint accuracy of radar sets on the pair at the bar.

  The stranger finally succeeded in getting Angus to say something. He probably wished he hadn’t.

  The little Scotsman’s usually soft speech was softer yet, but not a word was lost on his audience.

  He held out one hand and said, “In that case, sir, you’ll no’ be needing my match.”

  MAY 2000

  A Humble Apology

  O’Reilly comes to the rescue once again

  I’d last seen Angus MacKay, shepherd and piper extraordinaire, in the company of the Reverend McWheezle. The man of the cloth had tried to suggest that the splendour of Angus’s garden was largely attributable to the work of the Almighty. Angus, and I must say I’d thought he’d been pretty diplomatic, had simply asked the Lord’s local representative if he could recall what the garden had looked like when the Celestial Being had been left in sole charge of the then-weed-infested plot.

  The Reverend McWheezle took to being bested verbally with all the enthusiasm of a man having a fingernail yanked out, and from that day had gone out of his way to belittle Angus MacKay. The schism between them had developed into a chasm that would have made the Grand Canyon look like an irrigation ditch.

  Mister McWheezle took every opportunity, usually thinly veiled as prim pastoral piety, to take a verbal swipe at Angus. The old Scot bore this vituperation with apparent sangfroid, although unknown to all of us in Ballybucklebo, the sang that ran in the little Scot’s veins was coursing at about absolute zero.

  I confess that from time to time I wondered when Angus would stop turning the other cheek and turn the other set of knuckles—as in a right cross or jab and uppercut. But no matter how hard the reverend pushed, Angus would mutter a civil, “Chust so,” and walk away. He kept his counsel until the day McWheezle moved from Angus-baiting to a direct frontal assault upon Angus’s nation—an attack as forceful as the one that delivered Badajoz into the hands of the Iron Duke.

  “Ah,” said McWheezle, in front of a small crowd of his congregation outside the kirk at the end of morning service, “been praying, MacKay?”