The Wily O'Reilly: Irish Country Stories

  O’Reilly shook his head. “Doctor Taylor doesn’t know anything about pigs.”

  Arthur Turloch was so upset he allowed some of the beer to spill. “Ah, dear,” he said, handing O’Reilly his pint and a small sherry for me. “I’ll just have to carry on with your advice then, Doctor O’Reilly.”

  “You will,” said O’Reilly, neglecting to pay, as he headed back toward our table. He sat, set my second drink beside the unfinished first, and took a deep pull of his own.

  “Pigs,” he said, mournfully.

  I flinched. This, more or less, was where I’d come in. I thought it wiser to agree.

  “Yes, indeed,” I said. “Pigs.”

  “Bloody animals. Pity you don’t know more about them.”

  “Yes, indeed.”

  He rummaged round in his jacket pocket, hauled out his briar, stoked the bowl, and lit up. At least it gave me time to see if I could offer any solace on the subject that was troubling him. I could not.

  “Fat and very rotund,” he said.

  I nodded. Did he mean Osbaldiston or the subject of the moment?

  “Bloody difficult to tell if they’re pregnant.”

  Pigs. Definitely not Arthur Turloch.

  “And Arthur there needs to know.”

  “If he’s pregnant?” I asked.

  “Not him. His sow.”

  Light began to dawn. Our landlord ran a smallholding on the side. He’d bought a sow last year. She would have been ready for breeding this year, and every visit to the boar cost money.

  “Yes,” said O’Reilly, “and he asked me how he could tell if the boar had scored a winner.”

  “Yes,” I said, “I know.”

  “What do you know?”

  “About pigs? Nothing.”

  O’Reilly growled, stabbed the stem of his briar in my general direction and said, “How did you know I’d given him advice?”

  “Because he said, a moment ago, that he’d just have to go on taking it.”

  “Damn silly advice too.” The man had the decency to look slightly embarrassed. “Do you know how the farmers round here breed pigs?” he asked.

  It seemed not the most opportune time to remind him that we’d established beyond reasonable doubt that the sum of my knowledge on that subject was zero. I merely shook my head.

  “The usual procedure is to load the sow in a wheelbarrow and trundle her off to the boar.”

  “Seems sensible.”

  “Not,” said O’Reilly, “if you have to keep repeating the exercise. Gets expensive.”

  “Oh.”

  “And you know Arthur would wrestle a bear for a farthing.”

  I nodded, thinking to myself that Doctor Fingal Flahertie O’Reilly could probably give Osbaldiston a few pointers in the sport of ursine mat-grappling—certainly if there was any prospect of a pecuniary payoff.

  O’Reilly sighed. “The best I could think of was an old farmer’s tale that I’d heard years ago.”

  I listened.

  “Seems there was a local belief that recently pregnant sows, if given a choice between mud and grass, would always roll in the mud, so after you’d bred her you waited to see if she’d go to the mud.”

  “Well,” I said, “that makes sense.”

  “What?”

  “Oh yes. The raised progesterone levels of pregnancy would put the animal’s temperature up. Naturally she’d prefer the mud. Help her cool off.”

  O’Reilly looked at me suspiciously. “You’re not pulling my leg?”

  “Me, Fingal? Never.”

  He brightened up. “Perhaps I did give him good advice after all. I just hope the wee sow gets into the mud soon.” O’Reilly chuckled. “It’s a sight every evening to see Arthur toiling up the hill, pushing the barrow with the pig in it.”

  Before I could reply I became aware that Arthur Turloch had reappeared. He didn’t look happy.

  “Ah,” said O’Reilly, grandiloquently. “You’ll be glad to hear that young Doctor Taylor has applied his understanding of basic science to our problem. He concurs with my opinion.” O’Reilly held up his now-empty glass and looked hopeful. “I’ll bet your sow will be rolling in the mud already.”

  “No,” said Arthur, lugubriously. “She’s not. She’s sitting in my wheelbarrow with a smile on her face.”

  SEPTEMBER 1997

  Barometer Falling

  Flying would be more accurate

  There’s an anaeroid barometer hanging in the hall of the house of Doctor Fingal Flahertie O’Reilly. Barometers, as you know, measure atmospheric pressure. This one no longer does. It’s battered, the glass is broken, and the needle is stuck permanently indicating “fair.” Let me tell you why.

  “I think…” said Doctor O’Reilly, and paused.

  “Therefore I am?” I suggested.

  He scowled at me as a gouty retired colonel might regard a scruffy teenager who’d just run a skateboard over the ex-military man’s bandaged foot.

  “Cogito ergo sum. I think, therefore I am,” I mumbled rapidly, citing my source for good measure. “Descartes.”

  “Idiot,” said O’Reilly. “Dostoyevsky.”

  I was relieved that Doctor Fingal O’Reilly hadn’t dipped further into his encyclopaedic catalogue of the classics. I shuddered to think what he might have called me if he’d taken his riposte from the works of D. H. Lawrence.

  “Sorry,” I said.

  O’Reilly harrumphed then said, “Should bloody well think so.”

  I wondered why O’Reilly’s mood, which had been so high earlier in the morning, was now giving a good impression of a pint of milk left out in the sun too long. Sour. Very sour. Morning surgery was over and he’d announced with a broad grin that this afternoon he would take a half-day holiday.

  This, I should tell you, was somewhat out of character. O’Reilly, and indeed most of his generation, took it as a matter of course that single-handed country GPs were on call twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, twelve months a year. What was even more curious, he’d made the statement immediately after consulting a heavy mahogany-and-brass barometer that hung in the hall. “Wonderful,” he’d remarked. “Barometer’s rising and it’s already at ‘fair.’”

  Pestered as I’d been for most of the pre-noon by a passing parade of perambulatory paediatric problems produced for my perusal by their painfully prolix progenitors, I’d forgotten that my senior colleague had some thoughts of recreation after lunch. And in some way the barometer’s cheerful prognostication had, in the fore part of the day, lifted O’Reilly’s spirits. Now he stood and scowled at the thing. “I think…” he began again.

  Discretion is always the better part of valour. I stood like the middle one of the three monkeys, speaking no evil, and wondering what weighty pronouncement was going to fall from O’Reilly’s lips.

  “I think…” he peered at the needle on the face of the anaeroid, “that sometimes the marvels of modern science could have been somewhat improved.”

  A glance through the window served to confirm his observations. The heavens hadn’t so much opened as gaped. I confidently expected to behold a bearded gentleman wearing a burnoose, muttering about cubits and spans, the tardy delivery of gopher wood, and the difficulty of housing diverse animal species two by two.

  “It’s raining,” I said.

  The look he gave me over the pallid tip of his nose would have induced Medusa’s serpentine hairs to shed their scaly skins simultaneously. “You should give up medicine,” he said. “You missed your calling. You’d have made a great meteorologist.”

  Some might call that remark brilliant repartee, others biting sarcasm, given the force of the deluge outside. I chose to remember that he who fights and runs away lives to be sworn at another day.

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “I was going golfing,” O’Reilly said mournfully. He pointed an accusatory finger at the barometer. “I trusted that bloody thing this morning and phoned an old friend, Charlie Elphinstone. He’s coming down from
Belfast.” O’Reilly tapped the instrument’s glass with the gentility of a caress from King Kong and scowled at the needle. The pointer, presumably terrified, swung farther into the “fair.”

  O’Reilly’s nose moved from ashen to ivory. His neck veins bulged. “Fair? Fair?” He ripped the insultingly inaccurate instrument from the wall and with the powerful grace of a caber tosser hurled it straight through the glass of the window and out into the downpour. “See for your stupid self!” O’Reilly yelled, as he set the Irish and all comers’ open record for anaeroid barometer throwing. “Bah,” he added, but the colour was returning to his proboscis. I could only surmise that his outburst had served the same purpose as one of those vents in the side of an active volcano and that O’Reilly’s internal pressure was beginning to subside.

  I ventured a query: “So what will you do?”

  “Do?”

  “With your friend from Belfast?”

  It might have been pouring outside, but the sun came up in O’Reilly’s personal heaven. “Charlie? Play golf, of course.”

  “Play golf? In this?”

  “No, you idiot. In the nineteenth hole.” He turned to leave. “Be a good lad,” he said. “Nip out and collect the barometer.”

  OCTOBER 1997

  The Flying Doctor

  O’Reilly takes the wheel

  “Did you ever see the likes of that chase?” Doctor O’Reilly asked, fist curled round his second John Jameson’s, elbow nestled in its accustomed groove in the bar of the Mucky Duck.

  “Impressive,” I remarked, cuddling a small sherry and trying to make it last.

  “That Steve McQueen must be a powerful driver.” He was clearly in awe. I should tell you that he and I had just returned from the local cinema’s screening of the film Bullitt. The one with the classic car chase through the hills of San Francisco. It dawned on me, vaguely, that the good Doctor O. might be tempted to emulate McQueen’s driving. The prospect of the carnage that would be wrought among the local livestock and itinerant rustic cyclists hardly bore contemplation. Even with his present style of procession in his long-bonnetted Rover he was a force to be reckoned with.

  When they teach you about side effects at medical school, no mention is ever made of the fact that emergency house calls lead to an increase in the incidence of minor sprains and abrasions.

  If he truly believed that life or limb of one of his patients was at risk, O’Reilly would hurl his motorcar through the streets and byways of our district with all the enthusiasm of Toad of Toad Hall. In fairness, Doctor O. was able to refrain from yelling “poop poop” at the top of his voice. If Fingal Flahertie O’Reilly had been driving a panzer for Heinz Guderian in May 1940, the Battle of France would have been finished in two weeks flat.

  The natives, many of whom went about their lawful (and in the case of Turlough Tweezlethumbs the local poacher, unlawful) pursuits mounted on fixed-wheel bicycles, had evolved their own method of dealing with O’Reilly in one of his Charge-of-the-Light-Brigade moments. The fixed-wheel bicycle has no brakes. You stop it by standing on the pedals. It is a slow method of arrest. Too slow for O’Reilly avoidance. I can only assume it was some kind of Darwinian genetics at work. To a man, and the three lady cyclists of the townland, standard operating procedure was to recognize O’Reilly’s chariot, flinch, tuck in the head, and deliberately fall off into the ditch. Thus the abrasions and sprains.

  “I hope you’ll not be trying to drive like Bullitt,” I remarked.

  Doctor O. was in an expansive mood. He chuckled, swallowed his whiskey, and clapped an avuncular hand on my shoulder. (The bruise faded in four days.) “Don’t worry your head about that, Pat.”

  His grin bothered me. So did his next words: “The hills aren’t steep enough round here.”

  I forgot about the film and our conversation until about three weeks later. O’Reilly had gone off for the afternoon to visit his brother, Lars Porsena Fabius Cunctator O’Reilly, in the small town of Portaferry, which lies at the mouth of Strangford Lough. It’s connected to the village of Strangford on the other shore by a car ferry. By the way, the short road ending at the ferry loading ramp lies at the foot of a steep hill.

  I was enjoying the last scraps of one of Mrs. Kincaid’s steak-and-kidney puddings and wondering casually where Doctor O. might be. It was most unlike him to be late for supper. His head appeared round the door and his expression could only be described as sheepish.

  “Um,” he said in a small, very un-O’Reilly voice. “Um, Pat, could I borrow your car?”

  “Why?” I inquired with approximately the same degree of trust as would be evinced by a lamb that has been invited over by a starving lion.

  “It’s embarrassing.”

  It might have been emotionally upsetting for O’Reilly, but more so for me was the thought of what he might do to my poor secondhand Volkswagen—or, to be more precise, the Bank of Ireland’s Volkswagen. (They let me drive it while exacting their pound of flesh, two pounds of sinew, and one molar a month.) For once, facing the prospect of financial ruin if he wrecked the thing, I straightened my shoulders, emulated Pharaoh, and hardened my heart. “Why?” I demanded.

  He flinched, took a deep breath, and said, “If you were late and had to get back here from Portaferry, which way would you come?”

  “Take the ferry to Strangford.”

  “Right. Cuts a good ten miles off the journey.”

  I couldn’t quite grasp what this had to do with borrowing my car, and said so.

  “What would you do if you were at the top of the Portaferry hill and the ferry was just going to leave?”

  “Wait,” I said.

  “I didn’t.” O’Reilly’s eyes flashed. “I went down the hill like Ben Hur in the Circus Maximus. There was only about ten feet between the ferry and the dock and the ferry was half-empty. There was as much space on the car deck as on the flight deck of the USS Enterprise. It would be like landing on a carrier with her forward speed making the runway seem even longer.”

  “You didn’t!” I asked, immediately regretting my superfluous use of words.

  “I did,” he said. His eyes adopted that glazed look of satisfaction only seen in the orbs of committed opium smokers after a full and satisfying pipeful. “And it was wonderful. My Rover flew like Bullitt’s Mustang.”

  “So why do you want to borrow my car?”

  “Because,” he said, “the bloody ferry was coming in.”

  NOVEMBER 1997

  Forty Shades of Green

  Another O’Reilly driving adventure

  You may remember Doctor O’Reilly’s attempts to emulate Wilbur and Orville Wright. As memory serves, and no, I was not a spectator on that memorable day at Kitty Hawk, the “Wright Flyer” successfully conquered gravity and landed in one piece. O’Reilly had managed, albeit briefly, the first part of the daring aviator’s feat. He’d defied gravity in a Rover car. His landing on the deck of the Portaferry ferry had been less of a three-point job than a full-blown kamikaze attack on the unfortunate vessel. I’m told the Hesperus after being wrecked was in better shape than the ferry after O’Reilly.

  I’d stuck to my guns and refused to lend him my Volkswagen, and until his own motor was returned from the body shop, a repair that made the raising of Lazarus seem like prescribing two aspirins for a cold, he’d been forced to make his way round on a bicycle. This had worked wonders for his figure and his wind, but had reduced his tolerance of delays to somewhere on the southern side of absolute zero. Which was unfortunate for Donal Donnelly.

  Donal, you will recall, was last seen handing out canapés at Lord Fitzgurgle’s annual “be nice to the peasants” evening. He was a gangly youth, as lacking in self-confidence as Uriah Heep, as unprepossessing as a sack of cold porridge, and to say he was as thick as two short planks was to do disservice to the local woodworking industry. Donal’s density made a couple of short planks look like a piece of microfilm. And he was terrified of Doctor Fingal Flahertie O’Reilly.

  I s
hould tell you that our town had a traffic light. (I know that stories are meant to have an internal logic and a sequential flow. You should recognize by now, however, that “logic” and “O’Reilly” are not two words with the happy congruence of, say, “love” and “marriage” or “peaches” and “cream.” Try “oil” and “water” or “Hatfield” and “McCoy.” Please accept that the town had a traffic light.)

  O’Reilly had asked me to accompany him by train to Belfast to collect his refurbished automobile. The old Rover, which must have been rebuilt from scratch, gleamed. The engine purred. O’Reilly beamed. O’Reilly purred. When the prodigal son returned, his father killed the fatted calf. When O’Reilly took possession of his motorcar, it was a good thing he did so in Belfast, not the countryside. In a more bucolic setting, herds of fatted cows, and probably several chubby sheep, would have been slaughtered, so great was Doctor O.’s rejoicing.

  “Come on, Pat,” he said, “let’s get her home.”

  “You’ll drive carefully?”

  “Of course.” I believe a piecrust promise is one that is made to be broken. O’Reilly’s pie that day was made of the transparent caramel used for special effects in the cinema. The ones where bad cowboys are hurled through windows to the accompaniment of shattering glass.

  I understand that once Mach 1 is exceeded, the pilot can no longer hear the engine of the plane. Either the mechanics had fixed the Rover’s motor to the specifications of Rolls-Royce or we were a tad above the speed limit for most of the journey. There were moments, usually in heavier traffic, when I could perceive a high-pitched keening noise. It took me a while before I recognized that I was making it.

  “Got to get home for the match,” O’Reilly said.

  I’d forgotten that Ireland was playing England in a rugby game. Actually, I didn’t care. I just wanted to get home in one piece.

  Now I made a point of mentioning our town’s traffic light and Donal Donnelly. On rare occasions planets line up in conjunction and astrologers foretell the coming of the apocalypse. Donal was driving his father’s tractor and was stopped at the light. O’Reilly’s home was visible not a hundred yards away, kickoff was in two minutes, and the Rover was stopped behind the tractor as we waited for the light to change.