“With milking pail she sought the vale,
And bright her charms’ display;
Outshining far the morning star
At the dawning of the day.”
Kevin jumped out of bed and the voice in the corridor faded away.
“I’m afraid it’s not my week,” said Maureen, putting the pillow over her head.
Chapter 5
“We understand each other, you and me,” said Billy Snoddy. “And as long as we understand each other, nothing can go wrong.”
They had put the girders and purlins in position and on top them wire netting and a layer of felt. All was ready for the corrugated iron sheeting which was to form the roof of the shed.
Kevin refused to answer, and Snoddy went down the ladder for the bolts. He had his back to Kevin, stooping over a cardboard box, and for a moment Kevin’s mind whirled on the edge of blackness. It would have been so easy to drop the edge of the corrugated sheet on Snoddy’s neck, but the moment passed and the sheet remained in his hand. An accident perhaps, an accident on a farm which seemed to be jinxed.
“We’re both men of the world,” said Snoddy, coming up the ladder. “And men of the world never show surprise. They know the world but the world doesn’t know them.”
“Never mind the philosophy, just hand me the drill.”
“If the world got to know what a man of the world was really like, it might turn its back on him.”
Kevin took the drill from Snoddy, bitterly regretting that he had not dropped the iron sheet on his neck. He would be insufferable now, his conversation more mysterious than ever. But he, Kevin, would have to keep a grip on himself, pretend that what Snoddy knew did not matter. If Snoddy got the idea that he was afraid of him, that would be the end. Though Snoddy was a hard worker, he might conceivably wish for a sinecure and security for the rest of his life. There was no doubt that he would exact a price for the concealment of his ill-gotten knowledge. But what price?
Kevin was uneasy, because he could not see Snoddy as he would a bullock or a tractor. He felt, indeed he knew, that the man he saw was not the real man at all. It was as if the light kept changing so that the colours beguiled the eye and the contours of the object remained unseen. One moment he saw Snoddy as his salvation, as the man who would take Maureen off his hands and rid him of his heart-eating guilt; and the next he would squirm at the thought of Maureen in bed with him, his twin sister making love to a man with a rumen, reticulum, omasum, and abomasum. It seemed to him that he must have an hour of quiet to put distance between himself and the Abominable Ruminant. He told him that he was going to Killage for more bolts and drove off in his dung-spangled Mercedes, glad to be alone. About half a mile down the road he parked the car in the entrance of a disused laneway and walked up the darkly enclosed path to the Grove, the entanglement of trees and bushes on each side entwining overhead, reminding him of one of his oldest memories, the day he saw the pooka on horseback.
He must have been about four—he certainly was no more because the Grove still belonged to his father—when he wandered down the road on a windy October day to pick blackberries and hazelnuts. The wind was so strong that he told himself that the branches were galloping up and down, and then he heard real galloping and a tall, straight-backed man with a moustache passed him on horseback, the reins in one hand and a long-legged barstool in the other. As he approached the corner, he reined in quickly and vanished straight through the hedge. Kevin took the shadowy path that led to the Grove, stopping every now and then to pick a blackberry or a sloe while the lukewarm sun gave the look of death to the yellowing leaves. Suddenly he stopped behind a big tree to find the dismounted horseman tying the reins to an overhanging branch only ten feet away. Then he placed the barstool behind the horse and got up on it while he held the horse’s tail in his hand. Next the man’s trousers fell to his ankles, the horse raised his head, and its penis grew like a stout blackthorn with great rings along its length. Kevin could not see what the man was doing to the horse, but whatever it was the horse was enjoying it, because it turned round and bit its shoulder in near ecstasy. Just then a wood pigeon broke cover with a clatter and Kevin took to his heels in terror. As he reached the road, he heard the thud of hooves on soft turf behind him and he took refuge in the hedge, keeping his head well down and grasping his paper bag of nuts and blackberries as if it were a magic shield. Then the horse was on the road, because the thudding changed to a ringing clip-clop that struck terror into his pounding heart. He looked up from under a branch and saw the man once more in the saddle, straight-backed and moustached with a green hat on his head, the reins in his left hand and the stool in the other.
He ran all the way home, and when he told his mother that he’d seen the pooka on a horse, she said that he was a regular visitor to Clonglass, that he was looking for boys who stayed out late picking blackberries. He never told any one else about the pooka, but he thought about it every day because it puzzled him more than the schoolmaster’s arithmetic. He was still puzzled by it. Now he did not know if he’d seen it or imagined it, because like many early “memories” it could have been the result of suggestion rather than experience. If he had not seen it, had he imagined it because he was inherently evil? And if he had seen it, why had the horseman chosen a stallion rather than a mare, and why did the stallion get an erection so quickly after the man got up on the stool? Once, when Festus O’Flaherty was very drunk, Kevin told him that he had heard the story from a tinker at a horse fair in Galway, and when he asked Festus why the stallion had got an erection, Festus laughed as if Kevin were a simpleton. Though he was drunk, he did not forget the story. In fact, he was so taken with the idea of a horseman with a barstool riding about the Irish midlands that he used to ask Kevin every now and then to refresh his memory.
“Tell me the story of the Hippophilous Pooka,” he would say. And then he’d laugh till the froth shook on the pint of stout in his hand.
Because of what he had seen or imagined, the Grove was a place of mystery to Kevin. The weak February sun struck obliquely across the bare branches, and here and there a few green plants were starting to peep through the winter carpet of dead leaves. The dead leaves were crisp underfoot, and the green plants anaemic as if their hold on life was not yet strong. He went straight to the Pooka Tree, sat on a decaying log, and rested his back against the trunk. Words came to him from a distance, and he did not know what they were until he heard the sound of them on his lips:
“What we call the comforts of life are an illusion. My land, my cattle, my house, my tractors, my sister, my Saturday evenings with Festus in Phelan’s—none of them truly belongs to me. Land is just waiting to swallow you, cattle die, tractors rust, Maureen could marry Snoddy, and Festus could go back to Connemara.”
A long, ringed earthworm crawled from under a dead leaf between his legs. Compared with a man, it was a low form of life, barely warm, barely sensible. Yet, when you thought of human life as it might be, you realized that an earthworm was only a little less than a man. They both fell so short of the ideal that only a fool or a university professor would wish to differentiate between them.
“I am impotent in my own house. I should horsewhip Snoddy, but I won’t. I should take him by the scruff of the neck and boot him down the lane as far as the lower gate, but I won’t. I can’t. I can only sit tight, breathe quietly, do nothing. Three years ago I would have strangled him for talking to me like that, but that was before Mother died, before Maureen.…”
For a long time his mother had had a pain in her stomach, especially after meals, but still she refused to go to the doctor. He lost patience finally, and on the next mart day he called on Dr. Blizzard.
“Bring her to the surgery tomorrow afternoon. I’m free after four,” Blizzard said.
“But she won’t come. She’s headstrong, always was, and my father is too old to get round her any more.”
“I’ll call in to see her, then,” said Blizzard, placing the tips of his lady fingers to
gether to form a little cone.
Blizzard arrived in the farmyard the following afternoon, picking his steps between the car and the house, lifting his feet higher than necessary, lifting them like a spancelled gander on ice.
“I was passing and I called in,” he said to Kevin’s mother. “I heard a few weeks ago that you were having pains in the tummy and I wondered if they had gone away.”
She was reluctant to let him examine her, but finally she asked him to come into the parlour while Kevin and Maureen waited in the kitchen.
Kevin accompanied Dr. Blizzard to his car. Though the day was warm, he was wearing a long tweed overcoat; and though he walked daintily, there were two specks of slurry on his neatly pointed patent-leather shoes. Kevin led him towards a cake of cow dung in the yard, but he gave it as wide a berth as if it had been an infectious disease. Kevin could not help feeling that vets were more human, that for their sins of pride and pomposity doctors should be made to treat cattle.
“She has a lump the size of a horse chestnut on the left side of her abdomen,” Blizzard said without looking at Kevin. He was making a comparative study of his car keys while the breeze blew intimations of his aftershave in Kevin’s direction.
“What can it be?” Kevin asked.
“It’s not for me to say. She will have to go to hospital for an examination.”
“What could it be?”
“It’s too early to say.”
“But surely you must have some idea.”
“It could be a tumour,” Dr. Blizzard said, flicking a greenfly off his grey herringbone sleeve. Kevin cursed him for a coward and persisted.
“Could it be the bucko?”
“The bucko?”
“Cancer.”
“It could. But on the other hand it could be a benign tumour—harmless, not malignant. We shan’t know until we’ve had the results of the X ray.”
Dr. Blizzard was tall and narrow-chested, with an academic stoop that gave him an air of absent-minded condescension. It was not his academic stoop that made women tingle, however, but his syrupy bass, which had reassured many a patient who had thought herself beyond reassurance. Kevin listened to his basso profundo and was not reassured.
“We mustn’t leap to premature conclusions.” Dr. Blizzard smiled. “I’ll ring the hospital as soon as I get home.”
Kevin wondered why he had thought it necessary to smile. A vet wouldn’t smile at a Hereford heifer, however pretty, before injecting her, and neither would the A.I. man. But perhaps he remembered the story of the king who invariably executed bearers of bad news.
A month later he took his mother to hospital and went out to the pub while she was having a barium meal and X rays. When he came back, a sweet-smelling nurse took him to see an anxious young doctor.
“The results are indeterminate,” he said. “In other words, we still don’t know. We know it’s a tumour. About that there can be no doubt, but whether it’s malignant or benign is something the plates don’t show.”
He spoke carelessly, like a man who despised mere words, and kept one hand in the pocket of his white coat as if he were covering Kevin with a handgun. Another doctor, Kevin thought, who could do with a few basic lessons in the manger-side manner from a practising vet.
“What do we do now?” Kevin asked.
“She must have an operation.”
“Is it necessary?”
“It’s the only way we can find out the truth.”
“What if the truth is cancer?”
“The surgeon would have to remove the tumour and the parts of the intestines to which the cancer has spread. In some cases it is necessary to close the rectum, but there is no point in theorizing. We must wait and see.”
“What have you told her?”
“I did not want to alarm her unnecessarily. I told her that she must have an exploratory operation, that we suspect gallstones in the bile duct.”
When he told his father the news, he said that the anxious young doctor was right, that they must keep the truth from her at all costs. She did not want to have the operation, especially when she heard that she would have to go to Dublin.
“More people from this parish went up to Dublin than ever came back,” she commented with effortless accuracy, but thanks to Dr. Blizzard’s basso profundo Kevin found himself driving her to the capital on a Tuesday in July. The nurse told him that they would operate on the following Friday, so he said goodbye to his mother, telling her that he would visit her before the operation. He disliked leaving her to the mercies of briskly impersonal nurses, but he had his jobs to do and there was no one to do them for him. He drove up to Dublin again on Friday, and the same nurse told him that his mother had been on the operating table for the last hour.
“How long will it take?” he asked.
“It could take another three hours,” she said.
He sat in the waiting room turning over the pages of a women’s magazine. The nurse came back and rubbed one leg against the other by the door.
“The operation didn’t take as long as we expected. The surgeon would like to see you.”
“Is that good news or bad news?”
“The surgeon will tell you,” she said, leading the way.
The surgeon was a young man who exercised the fingers of one hand against the palm of the other as he spoke. Kevin had no idea that a surgeon could be so young, younger than himself. He had always imagined surgeons to be old and experienced, venerable as mitred bishops among a flurry of deacons.
“Complications, complications,” said the surgeon.
“Will she live?” Kevin asked.
“Let me put it this way. She won’t die yet.”
“What’s wrong with her?”
“She has cancer of the large intestine. It had spread all over. The liver is also affected. There is nothing we can do except to try to reduce her suffering.”
“How long does she have to live?”
“Three months, maybe four.”
“Will it be painful?”
“It is the most painful cancer there is.”
As a child he would go into her bedroom in the mornings and lie between her and his father. He would ask her what he had been like as a baby, and she would tell him that when he cried in the night she would take him into her warm bed and put him lying in the middle and tickle his little feet.
“And what would I do then?” he would ask.
“You would drink milk from my breasts.”
He asked her that question again and again because of the pleasure he got from the reply, from the world of wonder and warmth it invoked. One morning, when she was sleeping alone in bed, he climbed in beside her and put his mouth to her breast. She woke at once and pushed him rudely away, as if he were no longer her son, as if he had turned himself into an eternal stranger.
“I only wanted a drink of milk,” he said.
“You’re too old to be suckled.”
“Why?”
“You’ve got teeth now. If I suckled you now, you’d hurt me.”
It seemed a reasonable answer, but he could not forget the cast of horror in her eyes. She never touched him willingly after that, and when he would put his arms round her waist as she kneaded dough in the kitchen, she would take his hands and push him firmly away. She would fondle Maureen and Concepta when they came home from school, but she was determined to keep him at arm’s length. It was as if he had committed an unforgivable sin that obliterated forever the world of wonder and warmth he had glimpsed in her bed. At nine he took to sleepwalking at night, but she locked her bedroom door so that he would wake, so she said, when he could not open it.
They buried her in Killage churchyard on a wet November day with rain and mist enclosing the small group round the grave. As the first shovelfuls of earth drummed on the coffin, a blackened leaf fell on the engraved plate. After the funeral one of the neighbours who was in a hurry gave Maureen a lift home while Kevin stood a drink for the others in the nearest pub. A few of the n
eighbours came home with him and they had another drink in the kitchen while outside the rain closed in over the hedges. They did not talk of disease or death but of winter cereals and spring calving, and Kevin waited patiently for them to go, because he did not like drinking in the middle of the day. At last a patch of brightness appeared like a star in the west, and one of the neighbours said that he had a few jobs to do before nightfall. Kevin went to the door and watched the last of them going through the first gate.
“They’re not too drunk,” he said to himself. “They remembered to close the gate behind them.”
He went into the parlour and Maureen rushed to him and pressed her wet face against his chest. He stood like a pillar with his arms by his sides while she gripped him round the waist and shook with sobs. She was shorter than he, and he looked out of the window over her head, imagining the field beyond the Red Gate and the field behind that again, waiting until he could decently move away. The field behind the Red Gate was lea land and the field beyond that was under winter barley, but Maureen clung to him till he could feel nothing but the pressure of her groin and the heaving of her breasts from sobbing. He tried to think of winter barley yellowing because of nitrogen deficiency, only to find himself worrying lest she should feel the hard head of his erection through his trousers. Then she clasped him round the neck and drew his face down over her own, kissing him full on the lips until he backed away as if he had lost his balance.
“Put on the kettle and make a drop of tea while I have a look at Henry,” he said.
There was no need to have a look at Henry, so he walked through the Red Gate, up the lea field, and pulled a switch from a laburnum to slash against his trouser leg. His winter barley showed no signs of yellowing and the headlands showed no signs of slugs. It occurred to him that those were problems that could be solved by top dressing and slug pellets, whereas the dark stirring in his bones was as deep-seated as life itself. Within the space of three minutes in the parlour, Maureen had shown him the thin partition that divides order from chaos. Yesterday, though it had been taken up with visitors to the wake and arrangements for the funeral, had been the essence of order, but today bore the seeds of nightmare. All afternoon he could not put his sister from his thoughts, and it seemed to him that he had omitted to think about her before only because he had been blind to the swing of his own nature. He now knew that if he had made the “wrong” move in the parlour he would have found himself on top of her on the settee. The urgency of her kissing told him that there was no doubt about her intention, but he had rejected her, and now the opportunity for probing the darkness in them both might never arise again. He did not know whether he should feel glad or sad. One moment he felt that he had lost the chance to bring back wonder and warmth to his life, and the next he told himself that what he had sensed within him was so horrifying that it did not bear thinking about.
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