Foggage

by Patrick McGinley

  “The world is full of badness,” said his neighbour. “And the good are not much better than the bad.”

  Kevin was pleased that the farmer had seen him. He would tell the story in the pub that evening, and by tomorrow everyone in the area would know that Snoddy had been lusting after Maureen and had become so insane in his lust that he accused her brother of lusting after her as well. Even if Snoddy tried to spread stories about incest in the afternoon, nobody would now believe him. All in all, things could not have worked out better.

  Maureen was sobbing in the kitchen when he got back.

  “You had to do it. You couldn’t fast for a week or two while I was sick, could you?”

  “He made me do it,” she cried. “He threatened to tell Elizabeth about us two if I didn’t.”

  “I thought that was just what you wanted.”

  “I’m not that bad,” she moaned. “It was just that he gave me no peace.”

  “You’ll have all the peace in the world now,” he said, putting the gun back in its place above the dresser.

  That evening he drove down to Larch Lawn to tell Elizabeth the good news.

  “Snoddy is gone. I put a gun in his back and chased him down the lane. You can come home now.”

  “Did you see Maureen off as well?”

  “What has she got to do with it?”

  “It’s either one of us or the other. Quite simply, you can’t have both.”

  “I can’t show my own sister the door.”

  “Leave her at Clonglass and come down here to me. It isn’t too far to come, is it?”

  “I’ll think about it,” he said, knowing that she had defeated him.

  Chapter 12

  November 1st

  From the kitchen window I watched him coming through the Wide Gate with the calves. In everything he does is the inevitability of authenticity. He may be aware of other ways of doing things, but from the way he chooses flows the grace that slays the demon self-consciousness. If only I could put on his intuitive knowledge like a coat and exude with him the aroma of hedge and field. I took his old tweed jacket from the peg in the hallway and sat at the piano. The lining was torn and it hung loosely from my too-narrow shoulders, one pocket heavy with clamps and bolts. I played Liszt’s “Liebestraum” in A flat major and Grieg’s “Wedding Day at Troldhaugen,” and he came through the door with a peal of incredulous laughter.

  “You’d make a fine scarecrow,” he said, but when I grasped his hand he did not kiss me as I had expected.

  She closed her diary and went to the parlour window. The day was mild, with a clear sky and a sharp lukewarm sun. It had been a mild autumn so far, and the leaves, though changed to yellow and lighter greens, still clung to the branches of the trees. Kevin had sown the winter barley, and now he was in the field by the Grove ploughing for winter wheat. As she thought of him, she imagined him perched on the new tractor that Murt bought, moving slowly and precisely up and down, looking back over his right shoulder at the cleanly turning sod. Since he had joined her at Larch Lawn in the beginning of October she had never known such domestic peace. At last they had privacy, a house to themselves where they could sit in the evenings listening to the ticking of the clock. For a man of his character he had an unerring sense of delicacy. Since she had grown big, he never forced himself upon her in bed, and now he seldom went out in the evenings. He had stopped going to Phelan’s on Saturdays. He was in all respects a happily married man. If he had a fault, it was not a fault of character. It was merely his lack of music. Sometimes she would ask him to come into the parlour, but she knew that Chopin made him yawn, that only Irish ballads could enliven his flagging interest.

  The mildness of the morning enticed her into the open air. She got into her car and drove down the road to the Grove. Before her was a big Ford travelling along the straight road, two farmers in the front with their caps sitting at different angles, the driver’s over his right ear, the passenger’s over his left. They were travelling at speed, hurrying to the mart and then to the pub, looking straight ahead, unaware of the day in their headlong conversation. Seeing them, these typical midland men, gave her an inexplicable sense of comfort, of all being right with the world, of being part of that world, the world of practical men, the world of work rather than thought, and she felt that it would be nice to follow them into Killage, stand beside them in the mart, and join in a snatch of their conversation.

  A drove of bullocks spilled out of a hidden laneway, followed by an old man with an ashplant. She pulled up, opened the window, and watched him dragging his downturned Wellingtons so that the heels made a slithering sound on the road with each step. He was wearing a bandless felt hat with a battered brim sloping down over his ears, and his narrow eyes stared unseeingly into the distance while the dimple in his prominent chin, like the misplaced eye of a Cyclops, focused unavailingly on the rumps of his cattle. She waited for him to say “Day,” and when he didn’t she said it herself, and he raised his ashplant in a flamboyantly generous salute.

  She parked the car and walked slowly towards the Grove as the white scut of a rabbit vanished into a ditch. Bars of sunlight slanted between trees, catching the occasional leaf fluttering down the autumn-scented air. She sat on a log under an oak while the falling acorns pattered among the ferns, and she decided to make a batch of scones in the afternoon for Kevin’s evening tea. Surrounded by minute sounds that fell singly into bottomless silence, she felt herself move with the swing of the earth, but when she looked at her feet she was sitting in the same place. It was something that the Grove always did to her, filled her with a sense of the numinous, made her wish for incomparable talent and intelligence and the company of young poets, though her common sense told her that they were likely to be selfish, selfcentred, and too impoverished to afford the best dry sherry.

  “Please, God,” she said aloud, “give me grace to accept my lot, to love Kevin for the good and simple man that he is, to reject impure thoughts about fair-haired musicians with fine hair on their delicate wrists, and grant me the virtue of humility and resignation. Burn out of my heart, O Lord, the vice of hypercriticism, that thrusting outrider of rampant egotism.”

  The sound of her words made her stiffen as she realized that the person who said them could not conceivably be part of the world of the two farmers in the Ford. She felt that already she had moved too far from Kevin, that they would both need to start again at the age of eight, shipwrecked together on an island like a boy and girl in a story she had read as a child:

  “Where did you get it?” he asked when she came back to the hut with a baby son in her arms.

  “I found it in the wood,” she said.

  “It’s a baby,” he told her.

  “I know,” she replied.

  She wanted to be like that boy and girl, to burn her books and sheet music, to learn from Kevin the song of sensuous experience and from her son the purpose of her breasts.

  But she was being foolish, she told herself. She and Kevin had already sunk comfortably into the rut of good habits on which all happy marriages were founded. She had proof of that last night when she woke up to find him rummaging in her knickers. She listened to his deep, even breathing and realized that he was asleep, that only his hands were awake. An image of perfection in the marriage of man and woman came to her, a saying from Isaiah that she remembered from the convent: “The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid.”

  Pursued by the song of an ebullient thrush, she walked back down the lane and waited as she saw the postman dismount from his bicycle on the slight incline.

  “Have you anything for me today?” she asked.

  “A brown letter for Kevin and a white one for you.”

  As soon as he had gone, she opened the envelope and read the brief but lucid note:

  Dear Mrs. Hurley,

  In innocence you married an unnatural man. It is common knowledge that your husband lies with his sister, but can a just God puni
sh you for something you didn’t know? More of that soon from

  A Distant but Genuine Admirer

  She folded the letter and started the car, telling herself that unless she hurried home the roast would be overdone. As she drove, a phrase from the letter kept flashing at the back of her mind, as if someone was shuffling a pack of cards inside her head. It had come from “a distant admirer” but not an admirer of Kevin. It more than likely came from Billy Snoddy, but why had he waited a month before sending it? Did he wish her to be more advanced in pregnancy, thinking perhaps that she would be more vulnerable to evil suggestion at five months than four? Clearly, his intentions were not good. He wished her to fall victim to vague suspicions that she could not verify. She could not ask Kevin if he lay with his sister, and neither could she ask anyone else. But the story was patently ridiculous. While she lived at Clonglass, she had never been aware of any attachment between Kevin and Maureen. The attachment, if such existed, was between Maureen and Snoddy. She would not show the letter to Kevin. It would only make him angry and, if he broke Snoddy’s neck “in at least two places” as he often threatened, get him into trouble with the police.

  She took the rib of beef out of the oven and poured the water off the carrots and peas into a jug for gravy. She had cooked both the carrots and peas with the joint in the oven because it was less trouble, and she had baked five large potatoes in tinfoil, four for Kevin and one for herself. Gradually, she was getting him accustomed to the idea of eating less potato and more parsnips, peas, swedes, and carrots, of which they had plenty on the farm. She had also tried to wean him off mustard, reminding him that good cooking was wasted on a man who smothered everything in condiments, but he only said that he knew what he liked, and that he liked mustard. The business of laying the table and getting up the dinner made her forget the letter, and it was only when she saw him coming across the yard with his jacket on one shoulder that she wondered again if she should tell him.

  They fell to the minestrone soup without speaking, but she drew comfort from the fact that he was eating it at all and from the homely slurping sounds he made with his spoon. Soup before beef was a revolution in his life, believing as he did in “dry packing.” When she first suggested that they should have soup from Hallowe’en till May Day and none for the rest of the year, he asked for an explanation; and when she told him that the ancient Fianna lived indoors from November to May and in the open for the rest of the year, he laughed and said that it was the only good reason for eating soup he’d ever heard. She expected him to pass comment, but he pushed his plate aside and waited with obvious impatience for the real dinner.

  “It’s the first day of the Soup Year,” she said when she saw that he was determined to keep his opinion to himself.

  “So I see.”

  “I thought you’d notice.” She smiled.

  “I think you’re giving me soup so that I’ll eat less. It fills a man up before he starts.”

  “Did you like it?”

  “I prefer dry fodder. I might have it after my meat in future.”

  “No, you won’t. You’ll have it before the main course like any Christian.”

  She took the plates from the oven and they ate in silence, but she knew that he would speak as soon as he had taken the edge off his appetite.

  “I’m going to get the north pasture tested for lime before the weather breaks,” he said, halving a potato as if his knife were an executioner’s sword.

  “It mightn’t break for another month. After the late spring it’s a lovely autumn.”

  “It was a late year. If you went by the weather and not the calendar, as any good farmer must, you wouldn’t start soup for another month.”

  Again they were silent, aware of the ticking of the clock.

  “Are you going to do anything about the ragwort in Jack’s?” she asked.

  “I’ll spray it as soon as the cattle come off it.”

  “Noonan said yesterday that we should run one or two ewes with the dry cattle to keep it under control.”

  “I don’t like sheep,” he said, as if there was no more to say.

  He was attacking his heaped-up plate with gusto, putting plenty of butter on the baked potatoes and plenty of mustard on the beef. Sitting at the head of the table, he seemed to occupy its whole breadth. His shoulders were heavy and broad, and the sleeves of his check shirt were rolled up to the elbow, so that when he raised his fork the thicket of dark hair on his arm seemed to ripple like grass in a stiff breeze. His open-collared shirt revealed a sturdy neck with sinews like bull wire under the berry-brown skin, and his black wavy hair was closely cropped above the ears and combed back from a forehead that was too high for the rest of his face. He looked the picture of vigour and physical well-being, and she felt herself flush with the sudden warmth of her feeling for him.

  “It’s well for men,” she said. “Women are frail as gewgaws by comparison.”

  “There are women who wouldn’t say that.”

  “Men are stronger. They keep their good looks longer—”

  “And they die sooner,” he said dryly.

  “A man of fifty can look as handsome as a man of thirty, but at fifty most women, especially mothers, are shapeless dumplings.”

  “You’ll never be a dumpling, Elizabeth.”

  “I’ll be glad when this is over. I’m not sure I want to go through it again.”

  “We’ll see.”

  “I’m very fertile, though you wouldn’t think it to look at me. I fell in the first week.”

  “Will you get me my beer?” he said. “The soup has made me thirsty.”

  Knowing that women’s talk embarrassed him, she rose to get his ale though she herself had not finished. While she was on her feet, she filled the kettle and put it on the gas.

  “Don’t make tea for me,” he said.

  “Surely you’ll have a cup and a piece of the fresh cake.”

  “I’m going up to Clonglass to look at a heifer. I’ll have a drop there before I come back.”

  Without knowing why, she was distressed to hear that he was going to Clonglass without his tea. She realized that he went to Clonglass every day, that he had to because of the farm, but she would have preferred him to go in the mornings, not immediately after dinner. Somehow she had always imagined him in the fields, not in the house, but if he had his tea there he was bound to see Maureen, who was her enemy. She could not bear to think of him talking to her, laughing at her coarse humour, perhaps laughing at a joke about “the quare one.”

  The following week she received another anonymous letter, longer, more mysterious, more disturbing:

  Dear Mrs. Hurley,

  Kevin’s search for a wife began with his sister, but his incest didn’t end with his marriage. It still goes on. All afternoon farming at Clonglass ends in the double bed, but the punishment, you may have noticed, falls elsewhere. The pattern is already set. First Murt, then the boy Breffny, then your dog Judy. Who is next? You or your child? The punishment of the evildoers will come, not here, but hereafter, while those who are close to them in this life must die. Flee the Wrath to Come today.

  So says a Distant but Devoted Well-Wisher

  Though she did not for a moment believe that Kevin went to bed with his sister, the letter disturbed her more than the first. She could not help asking herself if he was somehow jinxed, the innocent victim of the wrath of a capricious God. His best friend had died, then his nephew, and finally her lovely Labrador, and what had he done to deserve it? It was not a subject she could discuss with him. Even if he himself were conscious of indiscriminate vengeance, he would laugh to reassure her and rightly tell her that her fears rose from superstition, not religion.

  As the December days shortened and the dark evenings drew in, she grew slower and heavier and more self-absorbed. She was in the seventh month of pregnancy, and she required all her strength to cook Kevin’s meals and keep the house tidy. Pregnancy was a most unnatural condition, she thought. There were wome
n who were born for motherhood, big, broody dams with wide hips and heavy eyes and breasts, who were not themselves unless they were breeding, but she was not one of them. Pregnancy was like being invaded by an alien intelligence that sought to change the temper of your mind and body, that unsettled you with the most ludicrous fads. She could no longer stand the smell of coffee or sherry, nor the smell of Kevin’s pipe, but she could not get enough marshmallows, though she had never been conscious of liking them before. So far the worst time was when morning sickness began in the third month. She would wake up with a sense of nausea, and after retching unsuccessfully over the washbasin she would go downstairs for a cup of tea only to run immediately to vomit in the kitchen sink.

  She went to Dr. Blizzard, who weighed her as if she were a bullock in a cattle mart and gave her what he euphemistically termed “an internal.” He put her lying on his narrow couch and made her open her legs wide so that he could rummage inside her with God knows what. A gloved hand? A fire tongs? A wooden ladle? The stem of a Peterson pipe? She felt half a dozen incongruous objects prodding her in quick succession, and she thought that she would sob in her lonely helplessness. She had always regarded her vagina as her very own. She could never understand women who did not share her strong proprietorial instinct, women whose vaginas were concourses through which whole generations of young men passed without meeting or passing the time of night. She felt so strongly about the privacy of her body that it was only by an effort of will that she could acknowledge the rights that Kevin had acquired in marriage. But here was a blasé old man poking about inside her as if she were a grate in an old-fashioned fireplace. Beyond doubt or exaggeration, it was the most distasteful thing that had ever happened to her. After one visit to Blizzard, after hearing him breathe the word “hyperemesis” as if he had invented it, she prayed that she would never become pregnant again. She also prayed for a boy, because she knew that if it were a girl, Kevin’s paternal instinct would merely be aroused, not satisfied. She composed a little ejaculation which she said morning and evening and at odd moments during the day: