Quickly they chased past the Chair that evening, they didn’t even think of stopping. ‘It was nearly winter, the summer had gone, the ground was gettin’ too damp for playin’ on,’ and in ones and twos and threes they branched up their laneways till the girl and boy were left alone on the road to the village again. No rain had fallen, and their canvas shoes rustled through the dead leaves as they set to climb Cox’s Hill as on every other school evening of their lives.
‘Why were they all so quiet today? Was it because of the Chair, Teresa?’ he began at last.
She didn’t answer for a long time and then she smiled, inwardly, sure of her superiority. ‘It might be.’
‘But why, why did they cheer?’ Her playful nonchalance was enough to rouse his anxiety to desperation.
‘You don’t know very much, do you?’ she said.
‘No, but can’t you tell?’
‘You don’t know how you come into the world, do you?’ she said, and he was shocked numb. He’d been told so many ways. He couldn’t risk making a greater fool of himself before Teresa. There was so much confusion.
‘No,’ he admitted. ‘Do you know?’
‘Of course I know. Mammy explained everything to me and Maura ages ago, a day we were over at the bathing place in the lake. When we were drying ourselves with the towels after swimmin’ she told us everything.’
In his mind he could see the picture of the lake and bathing suits and the woman talking mysteriously to the girls while they dried their naked bodies with the towels, but he was again bewildered when she added, ‘That’s the cause they shouted when you fell on Nora.’
They shouted, ‘You’re in love,’ when he fell on Nora, he grasped back, desperate. What had the fall on Nora got to do with the way he’d been born? If they were the same thing, all Teresa had to do was to tell, a few words, and everything’d be explained. The cries at the Chair, the fear he’d felt around him all day would be explained – everything would.
If he’d been quiet and had pretended not to care she’d probably have told him then, but immediately he produced the toffee bar, she drew away.
‘If you tell me, I’ll give you the bar,’ he told her softly.
‘Tell you what?’
‘How we be born, why they shouted.’
‘Why should I tell you? Tell you for a toffee bar and commit a mortal sin by telling you?’ and she strode quickly ahead.
‘It can’t be that much harm to tell and the toffee bar is new. I got it in Henry’s yesterday,’ he pleaded, more fearful now, the halo of sin over everything.
‘Have you anything else to give? A toffee bar isn’t enough.’ She began to relent and his heart beat faster. Her eyes were greedy on the bar in his hand, tiny scarlet crowns on its wrapping. He had one thing more, the wheel of a clock, the colour of gold, and it could spin.
‘There’s nothing else,’ he warned anxiously.
‘Give them to me first.’
‘And then you won’t tell?’
‘I’ll cross my heart.’
She thumbed the rough shape of a cross on her dress and he gave her the bar and wheel.
‘Now,’ he urged when she seemed reluctant to begin.
‘I don’t know how to start,’ she said.
‘You crossed your heart.’
‘You have to try and guess first.’
‘You crossed your heart to tell.’
‘Can you not think?’ she ignored. ‘Do you not remember as we came to school Monday? Moran’s bull and Guinea Ryan with the cow? Can you not think?’ she urged impatiently.
The black bull in the field last Monday as they came to school, the chain hooked to his nose, dragging Moran towards the cow that Guinea held on a rope halter close to the gate. The cow buckling to her knees under the first savage rise of the bull. He shuddered at what he’d watched a hundred times related to himself: all the nights his father had slept with his mother and done that to her; he’d been got that way between their sheets; he’d come into the world the way the calf came.
‘Can you not think?’ the girl urged.
‘Is it like the bull and the cow?’ he ventured. It couldn’t be, it would be too fantastic, and he waited for her to laugh.
Instead, she nodded her head vigorously: he had struck on how it was.
‘Now you’ve been told,’ she said. ‘That was why they cheered when you fell on Nora.’
Suddenly, it was so simple and so sordid and so all about him that it seemed he should have discovered it years before.
They were silent now as they went downhill home, a delicate bloom on the clusters of blue sloes along the road, the sudden gleam of the chestnut, the woollen whiteness of the inside of a burst pod in the dead leaves their shoes went rustling through. ‘They’re in love! ‘They’re in love!’ coming again to his ears but it was growing so clear and squalid that there was hardly anything to see.
The whole world was changed, a covering torn away; he’d never be able to see anything the same again. His father had slept with his mother and done that to her, the same father that slept with him now in the big bed with the broken brass bells and rubbed his belly at night, saying, ‘That’s what’s good for you, Stevie. Isn’t that what you like, Stevie?’ ever since it happened the first night, the slow labouring voice explaining how the rubbing eased wind and relaxed you and let you sleep.
He’d come out of his mother’s body the way the calf came – all at school had seen the calves born on their farms. And in Aughoo churchyard, at the back of the sacristy and under the shade of the boundary ash tree, his mother’s body was now buried; the body his father had done that to, out of which he’d come; the body in a rotting coffin, under the clay, under the covering gravel. NT was after her name on the limestone cross they’d bought in Smith’s for thirty pounds. They’d lifted three withered daffodils out of the jam jar when they’d visited it last July, weeded the daisies and dandelions out of the white gravel. And there had been trouble too over the shrub of boxwood their aunt had planted on the grave. It had already taken root, and their father had torn it up in anger. He had called to their aunt’s house on their way home, shouting that she had no business interfering with his wife’s grave and he didn’t want to have them rooting up a stupid tree when it came to his own turn to go the way of all flesh.
His eyes followed his feet as they went through the leaves. He had been shattered by his mother’s going, the unexpected mention of her name could still break him, but even that was growing different. His mother had lain down naked under his naked father years ago, his beginning: it was good to stand in the daylight of the others for once and not to be for ever a child in the dark.
While he walked, his wondering changed to what it would be like to rise on a girl or woman as the bull rose; if he could know that everything would be known. If he could get Teresa to lie down for him some evening on their way, behind the covering of some sloe bushes – could he ever bring himself to ask her to do that for him? His body was tingling and hot as the night in convalescence he’d watched his mother undress and get into the bed that she’d moved into his room at the height of his illness, snowflakes drifting round the windows that winter evening and robins about the sills, the room warm and bright later with the fire and low nightlight, and he’d ached to creep into her bed and touch every part of her body with his lips and the tips of his fingers. Teresa was now walking very fast ahead on her own.
He shuddered as the vision of the animals coupling came again, his father doing that to his mother years ago, out of which he’d come, her body in the clay of Aughoo now with worms and the roots of dandelions, and his father rubbing his belly at nights in the iron bed with the broken brass bells.
‘Our Father, who art in Heaven, hallowed be thy name; thy kingdom come: thy will be done on earth,’ broke suddenly on his lips as he gathered himself to catch up with the girl so as not to have to come into the village on his own.
Christmas
As well as a railway ticket they gave me
a letter before I left the Home to work for Moran. They warned me to give the letter unopened to Moran, which was why I opened it on the train; it informed him that since I was a ward of state if I caused trouble or ran away he was to contact the guards at once. I tore it up, since it occurred to me that I might well cause trouble or run away, resolving to say I lost it if asked, but he did not ask for any letter.
Moran and his wife treated me well. The food was more solid than at the Home, a roast always on Sundays, and when the weather grew hard they took me to the town and bought me wellingtons and an overcoat and a cap with flaps that came down over the ears. After the day’s work when Moran had gone to the pub, I was free to sit at the fire while Mrs Moran knitted, and listen to the wireless – what I enjoyed most were the plays – and Mrs Moran told me she was knitting a pullover for me for Christmas. Sometimes she asked me about life at the Home and when I’d tell her she’d sigh, ‘You must be very glad to be with us instead,’ and I would tell her, which was true, that I was. I usually went to bed before Moran came back from the pub, as they often quarrelled then, and I considered I had no place in that part of their lives.
Moran made his living by buying cheap branches or uncommercial timber the sawmills couldn’t use and cutting them up to sell as firewood. I delivered the timber with an old jennet Moran had bought from the tinkers. The jennet squealed, a very human squeal, any time a fire of branches was lit, and ran, about the only time he did run, to stand in rigid contentment with his nostrils in the thick of the wood smoke. When Moran was in good humour it amused him greatly to light a fire to see the jennet’s excitement at the prospect of smoke.
There was no reason this life shouldn’t have gone on for long but for a stupid wish on my part, which set off an even more stupid wish in Mrs Grey, and what happened has struck me ever since as usual when people look to each other for their happiness or whatever it is called. Mrs Grey was Moran’s best customer. She’d come from America and built the huge house on top of Mounteagle after her son had been killed in aerial combat over Italy.
The thaw overhead in the bare branches had stopped the evening we filled that load for Mrs Grey. There was no longer the dripping on the dead leaves, the wood clamped in the silence of white frost except for the racket some bird made in the undergrowth. Moran carefully built the last logs above the crates of the cart and I threw him the bag of hay that made the load look bigger than it was. ‘Don’t forget to call at Murphy’s for her paraffin,’ he said. ‘No, I’ll not forget.’ ‘She’s bound to tip you well this Christmas. We could use money for the Christmas.’ He’d use it to pour drink down his gullet. ‘Must be time to be moving,’ I said. ‘It’ll be night before you’re there,’ he answered.
The cart rocked over the roots between the trees, cold steel of the bridle ring in the hand close to the rough black lips, steam of the breath wasting on the air to either side. We went across the paddocks to the path round the lake, the wheels cutting two tracks on the white stiff grass, crush of the grass yielding to the iron. I had to open the wooden gate to the pass. The small shod hooves wavered between the two ridges of green inside the wheeltracks on the pass, the old body swaying to each drive of the shafts as the wheels fell from rut to rut.
The lake was frozen over, a mirror fouled by white blotches of the springs, and rose streaks from the sun were impaled on the firs of Oakport across the bay.
The chainsaw started up in the wood again. He’d saw while there was light. ‘No joke to make a living, a drink or two for some relief, all this ballsing. May be better if we stayed in bed, conserve our energy, eat less,’ but in spite of all he said he went on buying the branches cheap from McAnnish after the boats had taken the trunks down the river to the mill.
I tied the jennet to the chapel gate and crossed to Murphy’s shop.
‘I want Mrs Grey’s paraffin.’
The shop was full of men. They sat on the counter or on wooden fruit boxes and upturned buckets along the walls. They used to trouble me at first. I supposed it little different from going into a shop in a strange country without its language, but they learned they couldn’t take a rise out of me, that was their phrase. They used to lob tomatoes at the back of my head in the hope of some reaction, but they left me mostly alone when they saw none was forthcoming. If I felt anything for them it was a contempt tempered by fear: I was here, and they were there.
‘You want her paraffin, do you? I know the paraffin I’d give her if I got your chance,’ Joe Murphy said from the centre of the counter where he presided, and a loyal guffaw rose from around the walls.
‘Her proper paraffin,’ someone shouted, and it drew even more applause, and when it died a voice asked, ‘Before you get off the counter, Joe, throw us an orange.’
Joe stretched to the shelf and threw the orange to the man who sat on a bag of Spanish onions. As he stretched forward to catch the fruit the red string bag collapsed and he came heavily down on the onions. ‘You want to bruise those onions with your dirty awkward arse. Will you pay for them now, will you?’ Joe shouted as he swung his thick legs down from the counter.
‘Everybody’s out for their onions these days.’ The man tried to defend himself with a nervous laugh as he fixed the string bag upright and changed his seat to an orange box.
‘You’ve had your onions: now pay for them.’
‘Make him pay for his onions,’ they shouted.
‘You must give her her paraffin first.’ Joe took the tin, and went to the barrel raised on flat blocks in the corner, and turned the copper tap.
‘Now give her the proper paraffin. It’s Christmas time,’ Joe said again as he screwed the cap tight on the tin, the limp black hair falling across the bloated face.
‘Her proper paraffin,’ the approving cheer followed me out of the door.
‘He never moved a muscle, the little fucker. Those homeboys are a bad piece of work,’ I heard with much satisfaction as I stowed the tin of paraffin securely among the logs of the cart. Ice over the potholes of the road was catching the first stars. Lights of bicycles – it was a confession night – hesitantly approached out of the night. Though exposed in the full glare of their lamps I was unable to recognize the bicyclists as they pedalled past in dark shapes behind their lamps, and this made raw the fear I’d felt but had held down in the shop. I took a stick and beat the reluctant jennet into pulling the load uphill as fast as he was able.
After I’d stacked the logs in the fuel shed I went and knocked on the back door to see where they wanted me to put the paraffin. Mrs Grey opened the door.
‘It’s the last load until after Christmas,’ I said as I put the tin down.
‘I haven’t forgotten.’ She smiled and held out a pound note.
‘I’d rather not take it.’ It was there the first mistake was made, playing for higher stakes.
‘You must have something. Besides the firewood you’ve brought us so many messages from the village that we don’t know what we’d have done without you.’
‘I don’t want money.’
‘Then what would you like me to give you for Christmas?’
‘Whatever you’d prefer to give me.’ I thought prefer was well put for a homeboy.
‘I’ll have to give it some thought, then,’ she said as I led the jennet out of the yard, delirious with stupid happiness.
‘You got the paraffin and logs there without trouble?’ Moran beamed when I came in to the smell of hot food. He’d changed into good clothes and was finishing his meal at the head of the big table in tired contentment.
‘There was no trouble,’ I answered.
‘You’ve fed and put in the jennet?’
‘I gave him crushed oats.’
‘I bet you Mrs Grey was pleased.’
‘She seemed pleased.’
He’d practically his hand out. ‘You got something good out of it, then?’
‘No.’
‘You mean to say she gave you nothing?’
‘Not tonight but maybe she will
before Christmas.’
‘Maybe she will but she always gave a pound with the last load before,’ he said suspiciously. His early contentment was gone.
He took his cap and coat to go for a drink or two for some relief.
‘If there’s an international crisis in the next few hours you know where I’ll be found,’ he said to Mrs Moran as he left.
Mrs Grey came Christmas Eve with a large box. She smelled of scent and gin and wore a fur coat. She refused a chair saying she’d to rush, and asked me to untie the red twine and paper.
A toy airplane stood inside the box. It was painted white and blue. The tyres smelled of new rubber.
‘Why don’t you wind it up?’
I looked up at the idiotically smiling face, the tear-brimmed eyes.
‘Wind it up for Mrs Grey,’ I heard Moran’s voice.
I was able to do nothing. Moran took the toy from my hand and wound it up. A light flashed on and off on the tail and the propellors turned as it raced across the cement.
‘It was too much for you to bring,’ Moran said in his politic voice.
‘I thought it was rather nice when he refused the money. My own poor boy loved nothing better than model airplanes for Christmas.’ She was again on the verge of tears.
‘We all still feel for that tragedy,’ Moran said. ‘Thank Mrs Grey for such a lovely present. It’s far too good.’
I could no longer hold back rage: ‘I think it’s useless,’ and began to cry.
I have only a vague memory afterwards of the voice of Moran accompanying her to the door with excuses and apologies.