The Country Girls Trilogy and Epilogue: The Country Girls / Girl with Green Eyes / Girls in Their Married Bliss

by Edna O'Brien

  “Go on, can’t you,” my father said, and I smoked a cigarette to oblige him. I wondered when he would let me back.

  “I’m for your good, of course,” he said. “It nearly killed me the day I got that letter, to think of you mixed up with a hooligan like that.” The word “hooligan” incensed me, but I held my temper.

  “I’m in the world longer than you and I know right from wrong.” He spoke apologetically and wiped his crying eyes in the sheet and blew his nose.

  “I’ll be better when I go back. I’ll be careful,” I said.

  “What back?” he said, rising up in the bed. “You’re not going back. You’ll get a little job here and help Aunt Molly and myself. I was thinking,” he said—and winked knowingly at me, as if he were going to say something of the greatest secrecy and importance—”I was thinking that we might open a little business down the road, redo the gate lodge and start something going. We might pull ourselves together and buy this place back.” He was quite serious.

  “I’ll just go back and get my clothes from Joanna’s house,” I said, trying not to sound too eager. I’d have said anything to get away.

  His grip on my wrist tightened, and he said, “We’ll go to Limerick someday, the two of us, and get you some new clothes.”

  “That would be waste,” I said.

  He asked for another drink, and as there was very little soda water in the siphon, my aunt suggested that I go over to Jack Holland’s and get some, before closing time. She was in the kitchen making a soda cake in a big tin basin, the cellophane packet of brown caraway seeds on the table beside her. We all liked caraway seeds in the bread, except Maura, who picked them out, thinking that they were insects or something.

  I collected the empty siphons and set off for Jack Holland’s public house.

  “Ah, my little auburn poem, ‘Sweet Auburn! loveliest village of the plain,’ “ Jack recited as I went into the shop. He rushed outside the counter to kiss me, and the tip of his nose was cold and wet.

  “Things cooled down at home, temperature normal?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I said, “we’re just clearing up. We’ll have a cartload of empties for you.”

  “And I’ll have a big bill for you,” he said, grinning, as he tapped my chin with his finger. “You know what your dad said when I refused him credit?”

  “No.” I knew it well.

  “He said,” Jack began. “ ‘Isn’t it as good to have it in the bloody book as in the bloody barrel.’ Not funny. Not funny at all. But let me show you an example of something humorous.” Jack pointed to a white cardboard sign on which he had inked a message—NO CREDIT TODAY BUT ALL FREE DRINKS HERE TOMORROW.

  I gave a little laugh to make him happy.

  It was Monday night and business was very slack. A tinker woman sat with her back to us, cursing into an empty porter glass. Her plaid shawl was faded. He filled her another pint and had to let it stand for a minute until the froth settled and he could add more from the barrel. It took ages. When he had placed it on the counter and taken her money, he said to me, “Yours truly is in danger of becoming imminent.”

  “Congratulations,” I said. “What is it?”

  Imminent; he’d have to do something about the shop then—a thick dust had settled on the wine bottles, there was flypaper hanging since the previous year, and great cobwebs in the corners of the shelves. Imminent; he’d have to wipe his nose and wear different shirts. He wore a gray flannel shirt, a tweed waistcoat, and black boots.

  “As a result of recent private archaeological exploration made by yours truly in the Protestant graveyard, some important objects have come to light,” he whispered, so that the tinker would not hear him. Opening a drawer he pointed to several rusted things which lay on a heap of sugar—two brooches, a pewter mug, a sword, a chamber pot, and coils of raveled wire. The tinker got off the form and came across to have a look. He closed the drawer at once, and she muttered some insult to the dying turf fire.

  “Jack, will you do me a favor?” I asked.

  “Ah,” he said, “you want to marry me now that I am likely to be imminent.”

  His long gray face beamed at me, and I realized as I looked into his water-gray eyes that he was the only human person in that whole neighborhood.

  “Jack, will you help me?” I begged.

  “A very ominous word. How about a little kiss to cheer a bachelor’s dry lips?” he said, and he led me into the snug so that he could kiss me. The snug was a small compartment cut off from the shop, with frosted glass around it so that you could not see in. I kissed him quickly, to get it over with. I did not mind kissing him really, because he was sixty or seventy and I was just twenty-one and had known him all my life. He loved Mama, and later he loved me and wrote poems to us. We never saw the poems. He just hinted about them and then hid them between the yellow, fly-marked pages of Bryan Merryman’s Midnight Court. It was one of two books which Jack kept over the kitchen fireplace, along with rock salt and horn rosary beads. The other book was Moore’s Almanac, which gave a list of pig and cattle fairs and so enabled him to have plenty of drink in stock, and porter barrels tapped for the fair days.

  At night when the men left his kitchen and walked through the dark village to their little houses, Jack sat down to read Merryman aloud. Some local boys once listened outside the window and heard him repeat lines like—”The doggedest divil that tramps the hill, With the gray in his hair and a virgin still.”

  Jack had found his love in that bawdy book and in my bright reddish hair and in Mama’s small, shy words of gratitude whenever he pressed a bottle of sherry on her or coyly dropped apple pips inside the neck of her blouse on Sunday evenings.

  “I want to go away and they won’t let me,” I said.

  “Ah the little wanderer, faraway places with strange-sounding names are calling, calling thee,” he sang as he kicked an empty cigarette carton with the toe of his dirty boot. He went away and filled me a glass of cordial, never supposing that my taste might have changed with the years. The cordial was sickly sweet.

  “I love someone and they’re going to lock me up and not let me see him,” I said, exaggerating a bit to melt his heart. It did not offend him to hear me say that I loved someone else, because for him time stood still about fifteen years ago, and I was a child passing the shop window on my way to school, tapping to say hello, leaving a bunch of bluebells on the sill.

  “I’ve heard the whole story, all the town is talking of it,” he said.

  He recited at random from “Lord Ullin’s Daughter”: “‘And I will give thee a silver pound to row us o’er the ferry, come back, come back, he cried in grief, ‘midst waters fast relenting, the waters wild went o’er his child and he was left repenting.’ “

  “The walls have ears,” he said, guiding me into the hall and taking a candle with him from a new package. The candlelight emphasized the pale, unhealthy color of his face. He stuck his head through the door, to make sure that the tinker was not stealing anything.

  “When could you go?” he asked.

  “Any time.”

  The door latch clicked. Another customer came into the shop, and tapped the counter with a coin. He returned to the bar to serve. Alone in the dark because he had taken the candle with him, I heard the mice behind the wainscoting. There was electricity in the shop itself, but he hadn’t bothered to have the whole house wired. Too expensive.

  He came back in a moment and said, “We’ll make it Friday. Be here at nine o’clock and I’ll have a car to take you to Nenagh.”

  “And can you loan me money for the train?” I hated asking. He promised to loan me five pounds on the guarantee that I would return it.

  “One last thing,” he added. “I help you, you help me. What about influencing your dad and Auntie Molly to go back to the cozy cot?”

  The “cozy cot” was the damp gate lodge, and Jack wanted them back there so that he could let the big house. I promised to do my best, though I knew that my father had no inte
ntion of ever leaving.

  Jack got me a noggin of whiskey and three siphons of soda, and he put chaff in the bottom of the bag so that the things would not get broken.

  “Save the siphons and give Jack a little kiss,” he said, and I touched his lips and received two or three clumsy kisses.

  “Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,” he said as he kissed his fingers and waved after me.

  “You’re an angel,” I called, and meant it.

  Cycling home, I considered the various excuses for being out on Friday night. The dressmaker gave me the solution. I nearly ran over her as she emptied a slop bucket over the bridge into the river. She could only empty it at night when there was no one looking. She asked for my news and I invited her over on Friday night.

  At home, as I gave my father two aspirins and some tea, I said, “I’m going to the pictures in Limerick Friday night, the Brennans invited me.”

  When he had swallowed an aspirin he said, “Might go myself, if I’m up.”

  “The doctor said you can’t get up until Sunday,” I warned.

  “Maybe your aunt would like to go?” he suggested.

  “Maybe,” I said, knowing that my aunt would have to stay at home and entertain the dressmaker.

  I got his razor and shaving soap and a bowl of warm water. I held the mirror while he shaved.

  “What picture is on?” he asked as he scraped the soaped hairs and then put them on a cracked saucer which I had left there for that purpose.

  “The Lieutenant Wore Shorts,” I said, recalling a title that I had once seen in Dublin.

  “That ought to be a good picture,” he said.

  The next three days dragged on. In my mind I imagined myself at the moment of escape being found out and dragged back. I worked very hard and talked a lot to my father. I rubbed his rheumatism with Sloan’s Liniment and brought tea to my aunt in bed each morning.

  “You’ll have me spoiled,” she said.

  Not for long, I thought as I smiled at her. I smiled a lot for those few days, fearing that if I talked I might betray myself. I smiled and worked. I cleaned the downstairs windows with a paraffin rag and scrubbed hen dirt off the yard flags. Maura offered to help me, and she scrubbed like a maniac for two minutes or so, but then lost interest and said she had to get potatoes out of the pit for my aunt. I swept the seven lonely, empty bedrooms because bat droppings dotted the floors.

  “There’s two bats upstairs,” I said to my father, merely making conversation.

  “Where?” He jumped out of bed and went upstairs in his long underpants, grabbing the sweeping brush on the way. He routed them out of their brown winter sleep and killed them.

  “Bloody nuisances,” he said, and my aunt swept them onto a piece of cardboard and burned them downstairs in the stove. She said that we must do something about the rooms. The walls were all damp and mildew had settled on some parts of the wallpaper. But we just closed the doors and hurried down to the kitchen, where it was warm.

  On Friday evening after tea I made up my face in front of the kitchen mirror and then went in to say good night to my father.

  “You’ll find a ten-shilling note in my britches pocket,” he said, and I rooted and found the note. It had loose tobacco flakes in its folds. A cigarette had burst in his pocket.

  “See you later,” I said.

  “All right,” he said. “You can make me a cup of tea when you come in. Wake me up if I’m asleep.” I didn’t shake hands or anything, in case he got suspicious.

  “Well, have a nice chat,” I said to my aunt. She was sitting in the kitchen waiting for the dressmaker. She had her good black dress on and her best shoes. Instead of shoelaces she used black ribbon to tie her shoes.

  “Enjoy yourself,” she said, smiling at me. She said it so nicely that I almost broke down and told her the truth. She looked pretty as she sat there, her face powdered, her hands fiddling with the chain and locket which she wore around her neck. There was a tray set for tea and sweet cake buttered.

  “Don’t wait up for me,” I said as I kissed her good night and went out.

  12

  Once outside the house, I ran. I ran across the fields (safer than going by the road) and came out at the stone stile near the creamery. Then I ran the rest of the way to the village.

  Jack had promised to leave the hall door ajar for me in case anyone should see me going into the bar. I pushed the door, and saw it fall in with a thud. It had come off its hinges the night of his mother’s wake and had never been repaired since.

  He must have heard the noise, because he came rushing into the hall from the shop with a candle in his hand.

  “God Almighty, it reminded me of the Tans,” he whispered, “the night they burst the door in.”

  I took the candle while he propped the door back, and then he gave me an envelope containing five pounds.

  “I’ll send it back,” I promised.

  “All set?” he whispered, and when I nodded he called to the men in the shop, “Hold on there, lads, till I come back.”

  He led the way down the narrow hall and through the kitchen, where two or three hens roosted over the fireplace.

  In the yard the candle blew out immediately. A figure coughed and came toward us.

  Jack announced, “Tom Duggan, here’s your woman.”

  I said, “Hello,” in a faint voice.

  I knew Tom Duggan by name; I knew that he lived up the country and that he had one iron hand. How like Jack to find me an escort with only one hand.

  “Where do you want to go?” Tom Duggan asked abruptly. He had the rough voice which most people down there have. It is a voice bred in wind and hardship, and it is accustomed to shouting at things.

  “I want to go to Nenagh to catch the eleven o’clock train,” I said, and wondered if Jack had told him the whole story.

  “Get in,” he said. I sat in the car and found that my seat sloped peculiarly. Jack wished me good luck, kissed me dolefully, and slammed the door. The gears tore, rattling the windows deafeningly, and we took three or four labored bounds forward over the cobbled yard, as he swung out recklessly onto the main street.

  “Funny hour o’ the night to be going somewhere,” he said. I didn’t answer him. Suddenly I was afraid of him, because I remembered about this queer sister he had. She was neither a man nor a woman, but a mixture of both. She was called the Freak, and he was nicknamed the Ferret, because he poisoned so many rats. Together they were known as the Freak and the Ferret, although this sister was sometimes called the Stripper, because some of the local boys said they’d love to strip her and see what she was like underneath.

  “This is a nice car,” I said, trying to flatter him. It was a terrible car, a black, battered old Ford that rattled in every corner.

  Passing our own gateway I expected to see my father with a shotgun. I saw no one except a figure going in by the little wicker gate. It must have been the dressmaker.

  Soon we were out on the quiet country road, shaving the unkempt hedges as we turned corners. He was a reckless driver and I wished that he had had his two hands.

  “What are you up to?” he asked in an insolent voice. I wondered how much Jack had paid him, and if perhaps I should bribe him further.

  “Don’t ask me,” I said, trying to convey my panic without offending him. It would be no joke if he left me on the roadside.

  “Your father is a nice man. Everyone likes him, he’s a decent man. I bought a heifer off him the last fair day,” he said.

  “He often talks about you,” I said, lying.

  “Does he now?” I could feel his smile as he said, “That’s a fine head of hair you have, a fine head of hair to spread out on a pillow.” My aunt had washed it with rainwater for me the day before.

  I worried that he might twist back his arm and put his iron hand on my knee. I remembered a story I had once heard about his sister. The rate collector told how when he had gone to the Ferret’s house to collect the rates, the queer sister had tumbled him
in the hay. The rate collector said that rates or no rates he’d never go near that house again. Maybe it would be better after all if I got out and walked, I thought.

  “What age are you?” he asked. I told him that I was twenty-one, since December.

  “You’ll soon be settling down,” he said, and then he whistled, “If I were a blackbird I’d whistle and sing and follow the ship that my true love sails in …”

  Later he said, “If you married me, I’d give you tea in bed in the mornings.”

  I pretended that it was a joke and asked him how he made tea. I could see Eugene scalding the little china pot, swishing the hot water around it, saying, “One of the first things I have to teach you is to make a decent cup of tea, and then we must teach you how to speak properly, softly.”

  “We’ll have a pint,” this man the Ferret said as he slowed down outside a pub in the lighted street of Invara. There were twenty or thirty bicycles thrown against the shop window, all jumbled together.

  “We’ll do no such thing,” I said frantically as I touched his shoulder and begged him to drive on. He drove on. A little later he said, “Would you marry me?”

  I remembered then having heard that no woman would marry him because of this queer sister. He had put advertisements in different papers and had even written to a marriage bureau in Dublin.

  “No,” I said flatly, wearily. If I hadn’t been so worried I might have joked with him.

  “I’m not a bad match,” he said, “I’ve a pump in the yard, a bull, and a brother a priest. What more could a woman want?”

  Did he take off his hook in bed and hang it on the bedpost along with his clothes, I wondered hysterically.

  We were climbing a steep hill, and the car throbbed and puffed as if it was going to expire. I sat on the edge of the seat, my fingernails dug into my palms, praying. A luminous sign rising out of the ditch warned us that there were three miles of bends. Three miles of death, I thought, as he was a terrible driver. We passed a group of fellows who stood at a crossroads, and they yelled to us in that maniacal way which country boys have of yelling at strange cars. He hooted at them, to show that he was friendly.