“And the boy?”
“He’s very small, not four pounds, and we’ve got him in the incubator.”
“Can I see her?”
“She’s resting, but you can go in.”
She was lying on her back, a face on a pillow, pale as the sheet that was tucked under her chin, the sunken eyes closed as if she had come through death or worse. He stood by the bed, but he could not bring himself to speak in case she should say something he might not want the nurse to hear. After a while the nurse touched his sleeve and he turned and left the ward. In the corridor he met Dr. Blizzard, who took him aside and placed a long-fingered hand on his shoulder.
“We’ll have to keep her in for a week or two till she regains her strength.”
“What about the boy?”
“He has a fifty-fifty chance. He’s as strong as you could expect a baby of his weight to be in the thirtieth week of pregnancy.”
In a rush of relief, the tiredness spread from his torso down his arms and legs, not an unpleasant tiredness, more a desire for luxurious relaxation.
“I’ll go home now but I’ll be back this evening. She was asleep when I went in, and I didn’t want to disturb her.”
“Will you do me a favour before you go?” Dr. Blizzard asked in his darkest basso profundo. “Will you have a word with Festus O’Flaherty in the next ward? He’s just had an operation for a gallstone in the bile duct, and he’s convinced that it was for cancer, that he’s about to die.”
“Well, has he got cancer?”
“No, but he won’t believe us doctors. He says that we told the same story to your mother four years ago.”
“What can I do?”
“He’ll believe you perhaps. You’re his friend.”
Festus, in a gaudy dressing gown at the far end of the ward, pretended not to see him when he came in the door.
“The first of the vultures come to hover over me,” he said. “But I’m not carrion yet, believe me.”
“You’re looking well.”
“The curious thing is that I never felt better. The real pain is gone, but I know it’s the end. I’m facing it like a man or, better still, like a mute animal.”
“But there’s nothing wrong with you.”
“Who said that?”
“Blizzard.”
“He’d lie to his own mother. He had one of the doctors bring me what he called my gallstone in a jar, but I saw through his little ruse. It was someone else’s, not mine.”
“Look, Festus, there’s nothing the matter with you. You’ve just said you feel fine.”
“Cancer’s a treacherous bastard. It retreats for a week only to come back in greater force the next.”
“I can see you’re not interested in the truth.”
“You wouldn’t tell me it if I asked you.”
“Dying men are supposed to know the truth,” said Kevin. “If you don’t know it, you can’t be dying.”
“You’re wrong. The only truth a dying man knows is about other people, not himself.”
“It’s a good beginning.”
“Do you want to hear the truth about yourself, Hurley?”
“Only if it can be expressed briefly. The last time a man promised to tell me the truth, it took two hours.”
“When was that?”
“At the last mission in Killage. A Redemptorist preacher took two hours to tell us we’d all go to hell.”
“I won’t keep you two minutes. All I’ll say is that you’re inoperable, a terminal case. Your trouble is women, not cancer, but you can’t say I didn’t warn you.”
“Goodbye.”
“Before you go, will you make me a promise? Will you see to it that my last words on this earth don’t die with me? I’ve given them some thought. I’ve honed and polished them, and I want them preserved like gallstones in a jam jar. The only problem now is knowing when to say them.”
“What are they?”
“Life is a bowl of filberts and only bitches have nutcrackers. Repeat that till I see if you’ve got it.”
Kevin repeated the famous last words until Festus had satisfied himself that he would not forget them.
“I don’t wish to see you again, so go now and don’t come back. Standing there on one leg, you remind me of a hooded crow in February waiting for a weak lamb to drop.”
Kevin drove back to Clonglass in a state of near euphoria, a reaction from the anxiety in which he had spent the night. Elizabeth was well and the boy was alive, though weak. It had been a close thing. For once White Cloud had not kicked him in the ballocks. He knew that he should be worried about what Elizabeth would say to him when she opened her eyes, but the knowledge that he now had a son and heir was so thrilling that he could think of nothing else.
He did not go to bed but changed into his old clothes and started his round of jobs in the yard. After dinner he went back to Larch Lawn and lay down until it was time to go to see Elizabeth. When he got to the hospital, one of the nurses told him that his wife had spent most of the day asleep, that it almost seemed as if she did not wish to wake up. He did not try to wake her now. He sat by the bed watching her face like a calm lake reflecting the shadows of racing clouds. As he listened to her even breathing, he became aware of how he had come to love her, first from reading her diary while he was ill and then from sensing the grace and goodness in everything she did and said.
Is it now a hopeless love? he asked himself as he got up to go.
The nurse told him that his son was still in the incubator, so he drove home in a more sober and reflective mood than in the morning. In bed he opened her diary and stared for an hour at the entry for December 21st, not knowing what to make of it:
I am only an interlude in his life, a wife between ploughing and harrowing, between sowing and reaping. The days are dark. Dusk surrounds Kevin on his tractors. He and they are inseparable. He can hardly cross a field without one of his Massey Fergusons. As he drove into the yard at twilight, I thought of Death. As I looked, I saw the macabre austerity of the grille and the sunken headlamps like the empty eyesockets of a skull. Is farming death, and am I half in love with easeful farming?
He must have slept heavily because he could hear a telephone ringing for a long time in his dream before he realized that it was the one in the hallway. He went downstairs in a hurry, prepared for the worst news about the boy.
“Mr. Hurley?” a voice at the other end inquired. “I’ve got bad news for you, I’m afraid. Your wife has just died. She had a post-partum hemorrhage in the night, and in spite of blood transfusions, she failed to rally.”
He drove to the hospital, trying to make sense of “she failed to rally” but incapable of pursuing the simplest thought for one moment at a time. It was a cold morning in the black no man’s land between Christmas and the New Year. The fields were frozen, the hedges grey in the headlights, and the flat road unrolled before him like a lonely and desperate life that would never end. He had turned up the heater, but the cold lurked in the lining of his overcoat and between his toes, and the wind that came down from Slieve Bloom in the north blew icy twigs against the windows. He drove quickly as if her life depended on it, as if the cold of the inanimate could yet be beaten into retreat.
“Did she wake up before she died?” he asked the sister on duty.
She looked at him as if he were not quite human, or perhaps not quite shaven, and told him that she had been delirious and confused.
“She kept asking for ‘Kevin and the Lad in the Corner.’”
“Kevin is me. Did she say anything else?”
“Before she died, she may have mumbled something about ‘Kevin… and my last best friend,’ but I can’t really be sure.”
My last best friend. The arresting simplicity of the words almost made him weep. After all he had done to her, she had forgiven him at the end.
The next three days were a nightmare. Neighbours came to the house and consumed large quantities of food and drink, smoked their pipes, and went away. E
ach morning he rang the hospital to inquire about his son while Elizabeth lay frozen in the coffin upstairs. Twin images struggled for supremacy in his mind during the day and in his dreams at night: the cold corpse in the coffin and the puny body in the warm incubator struggling to retain its grip on life. He came back from the funeral and changed into his old clothes, but as he was pulling on his Wellingtons the telephone rang again.
“It’s my son,” he cried aloud before picking up the receiver.
He listened without speaking and went into the parlour to sit down. His wife had died, and now his only son and heir. He told himself that it was no more than he had expected in his deeply pessimistic heart. For a single moment he had an intoxicating sense of freedom, of release from the toils of human connection: he felt that he was a man to whom everything except death itself had been done.
He buried his son beside his wife on the last day of the year. Cold and bruised, almost insensible, he drove back from the cemetery in the rain between empty fields and naked hedges. After changing into his farming clothes, he carved himself a plate of beef while Maureen ladled out the sliced turnips and parsnips, the days of baked potatoes with cheese and parsley and parsnips with nutmeg over. He ate in silence, waiting for the steaming food to warm him, while Maureen made sucking noises like a feeding calf. Outside, the daylight was draining away as the misty rain stole in over the hedges. All round were low-lying farms with slushy yards and cattle chewing the cud in contentment. Men were going about their business, carrying buckets of mash that would put flesh and fat on pigs and bullocks. In six weeks would come the first stirrings of spring and a new year in the Grove and fields. Slowly, he peeled a potato and thanked heavens for jobs to be done.
He remembered the day almost a year ago when Maureen told him that she was with child. It had been the most eventful year of his life, and now he was back where he had begun. It was as if for a twelvemonth his life had leant out of the true and had now regained its perpendicularity. Yet that was not correct. He was no longer the man who unthinkingly invited Murt Quane to help him with the shed. He was in debt to Elizabeth if only because she had called him her “last best friend” at the end. He now owed it to her to live in a way that would not horrify her if she were alive. He must somehow ensure that her life and death were not in vain.
“There’s a talk about foggage on the radio at four,” Maureen said. “Are you going to listen to it?”
“No.”
He wished to put distance between himself and his sister, but he could not live at Larch Lawn on his own. He needed the familiar sounds of another human being, eating, breathing, and shuffling about the kitchen. And he needed someone to cook his meals and wash his shirts.
“I’ve put the hot water bottle in the bed,” she said after a while.
“No, Maureen, all that’s over.”
With all his heart he hoped that it was over. That it wasn’t to be like his attempts to give up the pipe. He would go without tobacco for six months, and then a calf would die and he would need the solace of a smoke. He would decide to have just one pipe, and he would not be able to give it up again till the next Lent.
“You’re going to listen to the talk about foggage, then?” She placed his bottle of ale before him.
“No, I know more about foggage than anyone else in the country, and with reason.”
“What are you going to do, then?”
“I’m going down to Larch Lawn to be quiet for an hour.”
A Note on the Author
PATRICK MCGINLEY was born in Donegal in 1937 and was educated at Galway University. He spent four years teaching in Ireland before taking up a career in publishing in London. He now lives in Kent with his family but regularly returns to Donegal in the Irish Midlands.
Discover books by Patrick McGinley published by Bloomsbury Reader at
www.bloomsbury.com/PatrickMcGinley
Foggage
Goosefoot
The Devil’s Diary
The Lost Soldier’s Song
The Red Men
The Trick of the Ga Bolga
This electronic edition published in 2012 by Bloomsbury Reader
Bloomsbury Reader is a division of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 50 Bedford Square,
London WC1B 3DP
First published in Great Britain 1984 by Jonathan Cape Ltd
Copyright © 1984 Patrick McGinley
All rights reserved
You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise
make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means
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printing, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the
publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication
may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
The moral right of the author is asserted.
ISBN: 9781448209569
eISBN: 9781448209576
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Foggage Page 21