Foggage

by Patrick McGinley

  His father was pounding the bedroom floor with his stick when he entered the kitchen.

  “I wonder what he can want now,” said Maureen, “after me turning him on his left side only twenty minutes ago.”

  Kevin went upstairs to find the bedclothes on the floor and his father waving his arms like a windmill, struggling to cover his spindle shanks with the sheet.

  “I had a terrible dream,” he said faintly. “I woke up sweating with the covers on the floor.”

  Kevin tucked him in and got him a fresh pillow from Maureen’s room.

  “I dreamt that I died of brucellosis and that Donie Dunne came up to dance a hornpipe on my coffin.”

  “It was Donie Dunne that died,” said Kevin.

  “Ah, go ’way.”

  “Murt Quane told me only ten minutes ago.”

  “Well, praise be to God and St. Patrick, not to mention Michael Collins himself. But tell me, tell me, Kevin, what did he die of? Brucellosis?”

  “He died because he didn’t spend a penny. He died of chronic constipation, or so they say.”

  “They were always a mean tribe, the Dunnes.”

  “And to think that a penn’orth of Epsom salts would have shifted the blockage. They took him to Portlaoise Hospital, but he was too far gone. The system was already poisoned.”

  “Epsom salts, did you say? What he needed was a good rodding. But thanks be to God, for now I can die in peace.”

  Kevin fled down the stairs from his father’s gloating. He was not the sort of man who could sit quietly for half an hour in broad daylight, so he decided to fell an awkward tree to keep himself occupied until Murt arrived.

  “I’m going to cut down one of the beeches,” he told Maureen. “It’s so close to the house that it keeps the light out of the kitchen.”

  “Isn’t there plenty of time for that? Sit down there on the sofa and I’ll make you a hot sup in your hand while you’re waiting for Murt.”

  “It isn’t only the light. It makes the walls damp and it clogs the gutters. I’ve been meaning to cut it down all winter.”

  He got the chain saw from the workshop and walked round the offending beech, pondering how he should fell it. When it was first planted, perhaps it seemed far enough from the sidewall, but as it grew it spread until it overhung the roof. No wonder the slates on the north side were green with moss and fungus.

  He cut a neat wedge out of the tree on the side on which he wanted it to fall. Then he went round to the other side and began cutting through the bole. He liked cutting with a chain saw because of the effortless way it went through the wood while it spat sawdust on the uppers of his boots. He was almost there. The tree creaked defiantly as it began to move away from him. With the puttering saw in his hand, he looked up to see the nose of a tractor coming round the corner of the house.

  “Look out, Murt,” he shouted at the top of his voice.

  Weak at the knees, he watched the tree fall in slow motion. He turned off the saw and shouted, “Murt!” again until his throat hurt. Murt looked up, but too late. The tree caught him on the head and shoulder, knocking him out of the seat while the tractor continued its course and crashed into the wall of the unroofed shed.

  He ran to Murt, asking him how he was, but there was no audible reply. The tree had fallen on top of him and Kevin was unable to move it. He picked up the chain saw and blindly began to cut through the branches, shouting, “Murt, are you all right?” above the deafening whine of the motor and the blade.

  “What on earth are you doing?” Maureen asked from behind.

  “The tree, it fell on him.”

  “Oh, no!”

  He grasped Murt’s hand and felt the wrist with his fingers.

  “Christ! There’s no pulse,” he said, beginning to cut his way through the remaining branches.

  At last he got to the branch that was pressing on Murt’s chest. He pulled him out and put him lying on his back, then felt for a heartbeat inside his shirt.

  “If he’s alive, it’s only just,” he said. “We’ll have to get him to the hospital right away.”

  Murt’s right cheek was gashed and the hair on the back of his head was soaked in blood. A trickle of blood had run down his neck from his cheek, but it was only a trickle.

  There were no other signs of injury, yet he was unconscious and his pulse was weak. He stretched him out on the back seat of the car and told Maureen to get in. She got a towel from the house, put it under Murt’s head, and rested it on her lap. She sat looking out of the window as he drove mechanically, doing everything without thinking, praying that they would get him to the hospital before it was too late.

  “I told you not to cut the tree,” Maureen said.

  “If only he had brought his new tractor, the cab would have saved him. He had to bring the old one, the one without a cab.”

  They took Murt to the casualty department and sat alone in a white-emulsioned room with red and green posters.

  “You should ring Elizabeth,” Maureen said after a while.

  The thought of her gave him a start. He went to the telephone in reception but he could not lift the receiver. He got into the car and drove to Larch Lawn like a sleepwalker who could not be woken from his desperate mission.

  “I’ve got terrible news for you,” he said when she came to the door. “Murt’s been injured. I left him in the hospital, unconscious.”

  “What injured him?”

  “A tree?”

  “Did he fall off it?”

  “No, I was cutting it and it fell on him.”

  “You clown, you fool, you eejit.” She pummelled his chest with both her fists. “It’s just the kind of thing you’d go and do.”

  He seized her wrists and held her, telling her to get a grip on herself.

  “I’ll drive you to the hospital,” he said.

  “No, you won’t. I’ll drive myself.”

  He let her go first and followed respectfully at a distance of fifty yards. He could not take his eyes off the back of her car, telling himself that, though she was in a hurry, she was driving carefully.

  Maureen was at the hospital gate with wet eyes.

  “He’s dead,” she sobbed. “The doctor said he never regained consciousness.”

  Chapter 4

  Kevin was tempted to see in Murt’s death the red hand of the Almighty. He had been expecting retribution, but not in the form it had taken. He had expected a tree to fall on himself, not on his friend, which led him to believe that this was only a warning shot, a promise of carnage to come. It was meant to hurt, though. Murt was dear to him, not just a boon companion like Festus O’Flaherty but a mate with whom he shared. O’Flaherty filled a different need in his life. He was a man of fun, whose tirades against women made evenings dwindle into half-hours, but he was at once everyone’s friend and no one’s friend, because at the centre of his heart was a vacuum or at best a cube of ice. Murt was different. Under his many-coloured cloak of gaiety was a deep seriousness; and though Kevin enjoyed his dry humour, he enjoyed even more his well-pondered opinions on such matters as four-wheel-drive tractors, stubble-burning in autumn, and the best method of sowing winter barley. They had shared machinery and made plans, but they never went for a drink together. And because they had never stretched their legs in a pub, Kevin felt that there were large tracts of life, of their own lives even, on which they had never exchanged an opinion. They had never talked about women, for example, because, whenever they met, cattle, machinery, and the weather seemed more important. Once, admittedly, Murt had mentioned Polly Nangle, B.Agr.Sc., but only to say that she had explained to him something about the pH of soil, about hydrogen-ion concentration, which he had never understood before. His death was such a waste, their friendship a tale of opportunities missed, a fragment without resolution.

  As he did his jobs about the farmyard, foddering and bedding the cattle and tidying up for the night, he tried to understand why he expected retribution for incest. Now, if he had killed a man and
set fire to his house, he would expect to feel guilt because he had acted against society, because he had committed a crime against the person and violated another man’s property rights, both of them offences punishable by law. But in going to bed with his all-too-willing sister he was not acting against the interest of society; yet he felt as if he had done something abhorrent to humanity as well as God. Maureen and he were consenting adults. He had not inveigled her to his bed, as might a dirty old father his innocent daughter. She had come of her own accord.

  Why the taboo against sexual relations within the family? Such knowledge harmed no one, and it shed a ray of warmth on lives that had known too much cold. Festus once said that in every country of the world, even in countries where cannibalism was still practised, incest was forbidden; that even a just ruler in ancient Babylonia, someone called Hammurabi, had made incest a capital offence; that in the course of human history it was permitted only here and there among certain groups—among the royal families of ancient Egypt and Peru, for example. It was all very confusing. His intellect told him that sexual intercourse with his sister could be no more harmful than a good rough tumble with a black woman from Timbuktu. Yet his intellect was like chaff in the wind compared with the insistent force of his feelings, which now discoloured his life as an inky cloud would drain the brightness from the greens and blues of Slieve Bloom.

  Now there was a further cloud. If he had not committed incest, Murt would still be alive. Maureen would not have been pregnant; and if she had not been pregnant, he would not have asked Murt to help him with the girders on that particular day. No one knew that except Maureen and himself, but Elizabeth Quane may have sensed it. She had not spoken to him since her brother’s death. At the wake she had ignored him, and at the graveside she had turned her straight back on his obvious distress.

  He was now back on square one. Maureen was still pregnant, and he still had not found her a man.

  “What will we do now?” she asked over dinner as soon as Murt was decently buried.

  “I’m thinking,” he said.

  “You’ll have to think quickly. In a month or two I’ll look as heavy as I feel.”

  “I’ve solved our problem,” he told her the following day.

  “Tell me first and then I’ll tell you if I agree.”

  “We’ve been going about this the wrong way, trying to find a man who would take a fancy to you.”

  “Thank you very much!”

  “What we need is a man who will live here with us, and then it will not matter if he takes a fancy to you or not.”

  “Why should anyone want to live with us?”

  “I’ll pay him. What I’m saying is that I’ll hire a farm labourer to help me out.”

  “The depth of winter is a strange time to hire a farm labourer.”

  “Don’t worry, I’ll find plenty for him to do. There’s the drainage not to mention sixty acres of bog to reclaim.”

  “And what will I have to do?”

  “You’ll have to take an interest in him and make him take an interest in you.”

  “But I thought you said that didn’t matter?”

  “It would be better if he gave you a bit of a tumble, and I’m sure that’s something you can arrange. But if he doesn’t, it won’t be the end of the world. The neighbours are bound to jump to the wrong conclusion.”

  “They will think the child is his?”

  “That’s right.”

  “It will look bad for me. People will call me a trollop.”

  “Better to be called a trollop than to end up in prison.”

  “You’re a cruel man, Kevin, just like your father, not very sensitive.”

  “The world has little use for sensitivity. You know, as I was crushing oats yesterday, I thought I was looking at life and what it does to you. I picked up a handful of the crushed oats and I felt like God with a platoon of broken men in his fist, all of them pummelled and flattened, waiting to be consumed. Every one of us is consumed—by life, by death, by the earth itself.”

  They spent an hour after dinner discussing likely candidates. She was very choosy, but at last they managed to settle on a short list of four. During the following week he went to Killage three times and to two Masses on Sunday in order to meet them, but every man jack of them turned him down. They all had other fish to fry.

  On the following Saturday he was having his weekly drink in Phelan’s with Festus O’Flaherty when a man from the edge of town called Billy Snoddy came across to them.

  “You’re a stranger here,” said Festus.

  “I only came in to see Kevin.”

  “What can I do for you?” Kevin asked.

  “I hear you’re looking for a man. If you are, I’m for hire.”

  “He doesn’t want a man, not at this time of year,” said Festus. “What he wants is a husband for his sister. You’d better look out, Snoddy. If you’re not careful, you’ll be hanged, drawn, and betrothed before you know where you are.”

  They all laughed, Kevin more loudly than the other two.

  He seemed to remember that Maureen had been out with Billy Snoddy when she was a girl, but he felt that now she might consider him too old. He was at least fifty, and Maureen, he knew, fancied younger men like Murt. He decided to play for time, to discuss the matter with her before taking him on.

  “It’s true I’m looking for a man. I’ve asked someone already, and he said he’d let me know tomorrow. If he doesn’t say yes, the job is yours. What Mass do you go to on Sunday?”

  “Late Mass in Killage.”

  “I’ll see you outside the chapel gate afterwards.”

  Maureen was baking bread for the morning when he got home.

  “I met Billy Snoddy in Phelan’s,” he told her.

  “Going into Phelan’s with the quality, is he? My, my, he has come up in the world.”

  “He wants to come to work for us—he heard I was looking for a man.”

  “Oh, no!” she said, putting her flour-whitened hands to her face.

  “He’s the last chance.”

  “He was born in soot and reared in smoke, his father a cottager who never did a day’s work.”

  “You’ve been out with him before, haven’t you?”

  “I was only a scutcher then, no more than fifteen. But have you thought of this? Is there e’er a lep left in him?”

  “That doesn’t matter if people think there is.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “I said I’d see him after late Mass tomorrow.”

  “Tell him what you like.”

  “I’ll tell him to come then,” he said, beginning to unlace his shoes.

  “It’s an odd coincidence,” she said. “He crossed my mind just before you came in. I happened to be thinking that now you never see a man with an overcoat on the handlebars of his bicycle.”

  “That’s because there are no bicycles.”

  “When we were growing up, all courtin’ men used to carry an overcoat on the handlebars to spread under the girl, and the better-off ones used to have two—one to wear if it rained and one to lie on. The way I came to think of Billy Snoddy was that he always carried two, and he only a cottager’s son. I remember one evening meeting him at Dooley’s Cross and he wearing a heavy overcoat and a heavier one rolled over the handlebars. We walked towards Gravel and went into Lar Teeling’s old turf shed near the next cross. It was a handy shed. A lot of people used to go in there for all sorts of reasons. We were kissin’ in the corner when he went out to his bicycle for his spare overcoat to spread on the floor. He lit a match to see what he was doing, and there between his feet was a filthy thing as thick as a cable. We moved to the opposite corner and lay on his overcoat, but I couldn’t concentrate. I kept laughin’ an’ gigglin’ till he lost all patience. ’What’s come over you?’ he asked ’It’s the Lad in the Corner,’ I said, and laughed even louder. From that evening I could never go out with him again. And whenever I saw him on his bicycle with two heavy overcoats, I wou
ld burst out laughing at the Lad in the Corner.”

  “You’ll have memories in common, then.”

  “Memories that will lead to nothing good. He was buckin’ mad with me when I gave him up. If he’s a bachelor today, it’s because of me—”

  “—and the Lad in the Corner.”

  “I would prefer someone who never had any feeling for me. It would be simpler and more natural.”

  Billy Snoddy came the following week. Because he had worked all his life as a farmhand and never had a house of his own, he had to sleep at Clonglass in the small bedroom next to their father’s. Kevin disliked him from the start, if only because he destroyed by his mere presence the unthinking sense of peace Kevin used to feel at mealtimes. Kevin enjoyed his food. In particular, he enjoyed breakfast, which he prepared himself and ate alone before Maureen got up, and which invariably consisted of cold beef with mustard, cold baked beans, and soda bread washed down with two mugs of strong, sweet tea. He would eat after feeding the cattle, while he listened to the news and weather forecast on the radio and threw bread crusts to Pup, who sat on his haunches begging for more. He did not blame Maureen for being a late riser. He preferred to make his own breakfast, because he liked to eat in silence so early in the morning. At dinnertime he had Maureen for company, but her unceasing chatter complemented rather than vexed his thoughts. She was the kind of conversationalist who is essentially a monologist. To enjoy a “conversation,” she merely required a sympathetic presence, and if, as sometimes happened, her observations required a reply, she was willing to repeat herself twice or even three times without discouragement.

  Billy Snoddy changed all that. He got up at the same time as Kevin and tried to make small talk over breakfast when Kevin wished for silence. At dinnertime he would sit at the far end of the table looking from brother to sister and back again, never missing an inflexion or even the cast of an eye. He seemed to find as much meaning in silence as in speech, so that Kevin ruefully told himself that silence at table was no longer golden but glaringly pregnant.