PENGUIN BOOKS
Tarry Flynn
Patrick Kavanagh was born in Inniskeen, County Monaghan, in 1904, the son of a cobbler-cum-small farmer. He left school at the age of twelve, apparently destined to plough the ‘stony-grey soil’ rather than write about it, but ‘I dabbled in verse,’ he said, ‘and it became my life.’ He was ‘discovered’ by the Literary Revival veteran, AE (George Russell), in 1929 and his poems began to appear in Irish and English journals. In 1936 his first book of verse, Ploughman and Other Poems, was published, and in 1938 he followed this up with The Green Fool, an autobiography. He spent the lean years of the war in Dublin, where The Great Hunger was published in 1942. After the war he published the novel Tarry Flynn (1948) and two further collections of verse: A Soul for Sale (1947) and Come Dance with Kitty Stobling (1960). The bulk of his verse was included in his Collected Poems, and some of his prose in Collected Pruse. He died in 1967 and is buried in his native Inniskeen.
PATRICK KAVANAGH
Tarry Flynn
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First published by The Pilot Press 1948
This edition first published by Martin Brian & O’Keeffe 1972
Published in Penguin Books 1978
Reprinted in Penguin Classics 2000
7
Copyright © Patrick Kavanagh, 1948, 1965
Copyright © Katherine B. Kavanagh, 1968, 1972, 1975
All rights reserved
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject
to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent,
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EISBN: 978–0–141–91236–3
1
‘Where the devil did I put me cap? Did any of you see me cap?’ Tarry Flynn was standing on a stool searching on the top of the dresser. He lifted an old school book that lay in the dust of the dresser-top and temporarily suspending the search for his cap was taking a quick glance at the tattered pages.
His mother, who had just come down stairs and was sitting in her bare feet by the fire with her shoes beside her on the floor, forgot for a moment the corn on her little toe which she had been fondling and said with exasperation:
‘What in the name of the devil’s father are you looking for at such an hour of the morning? Are you going to go to Mass at all or do you mean to be home with them atself?’ She swung round. ‘Looking on top of the dresser! Mind you don’t put the big awkward hooves on one of them chickens that’s under you.’
Tarry glanced down at the hen and chickens that were picking crumbs off the floor. ‘A fine bloody place to have them,’ he said.
‘They’ll make more money than you anyway,’ said the mother. ‘Well, of all the mane men that ever was you’re the manest. Of a holyday morning to be looking for the oul’ cap at twenty-five minutes past eight. Anything to be late for Mass. And if it wasn’t the cap it ’id be something else – the stud or there ’id be a button off the coat. Just like your uncle Petey that never gave himself more than five minutes to walk to Mass. I remember him and he’d keep looking at himself and looking at himself in the looking glass till, honest to God, it ’id make a body throw off their guts to see him.’
‘Ah don’t be bothering me.’
‘Oh, that’s your uncle all over. Nobody could talk to him; he knew everything. He’d take on to put a leg in a horse – and the whole country laughing at him. Will you get down to hell out of that and go to Mass? On the blessed day of Corpus Christi to think of a man sling-slanging about the house and first Mass near half over.’
‘Amn’t I taking the bike, I tell you.’
‘Hens not fed, the pot not on for the pigs – and you washed your face in the well water, about as much as we’ll have what ’ill make the breakfast.’
Mrs Flynn had stuck her feet in her shoes. She rose and looked out the window. ‘Where’s this one?’ she asked in a growl.
‘I’m here,’ called ‘this one’, who was Mary, a daughter, from upstairs.
‘Lord God of Almighty, but you’re another of the Sunday girls. Lying up there in bed like a churn a-drying that – that–Have you any shame at all in you?’
‘Shut up,’ the daughter shouted down.
‘Oh, it’s me has the good family that I ought to be proud of,’ the mother said with broad irony. ‘If it’s not this man here it’s one of yous. That’s what left the Carlins where they are – getting up, one of them at eight and the other at nine, making two breakfasts. If they had one breakfast now they wouldn’t be as hard to talk to. When you’re coming down don’t forget to bring down that vessel and not have a smell in the room that ’id knock a dog down. I want it to feed the calves anyhow.’
Mrs Flynn crossed the floor and stared out the back window. She had to screw her eye at the corner of the window to get a full view of the Drumnay lane where, at the top of a rise behind the house, it joined the main road. The whitethorn hedges heavy with summer leaves could give Tarry’s imagination the idea of a tropical jungle, but the mother did not like those hedges.
‘There, it’s now half eight and no sign of you going.’
‘Don’t I know well you put that clock on a half hour last night,’ Tarry said.
‘I didn’t nor half a minute.’
Mary came down the stairs carrying a bucket. Standing in the doorway for a moment she glanced up and down the road to see if anyone was coming or going. Then she dashed across the street and flung the contents of the bucket against the face of the dunghill.
She returned to the house with her fist in her yawning mouth. ‘A terrible close morning,’ she said.
‘Did you look to see if the hen in the barrel broke any of the eggs?’ the mother asked her.
‘None, as far as I could see.’
‘I wouldn’t put it past you but you didn’t look at all. Will you try and get this fellow his cap and get him away to Mass – the oul’ haythen!’ She turned to her son, who was now sitting on the edge of the table by the front window lighting a cigarette.
‘Lord! Lord! Lord!’ she exclaimed, ‘starting to puff at the curse-o’-God fag at such an hour of the morning. Have you any cutting-up in you at all?’ Crossing the floor she looked out the front window. ‘I see that young calf out there licking at the dirty hen’s dishes and he’ll get a scour out of it as sure as God’s in Heaven.’
‘There’s the oul’ cap,’ said Mary, lifting an old newspaper that lay in the back window. ‘He must be blind that he couldn’t get it.’
‘Didn’t want to get it,’ said the mother. ‘Will you, like a dacent girl, run out to the cart-house and see if his bike is pumped?’
‘It’s hard enough,’ she said when she came in again, ‘it ’ill carry him.’<
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The mother hung on the kettle and began to turn the fan bellows wheel. With her left hand she poked the fire with a long pot-stick and her handling of that pot-stick showed better than her talk her annoyance with her son. ‘A poor thing,’ she growled as she stirred up the clinkers and dragged them aside, ‘a poor thing to rear a man that doesn’t care for God, man or the devil. And him knowing as well as the head’s on his body that I have to go to the market this day with them cocks that we caught last night. I hope I’ll be able to swop them for pullets,’ she was now addressing her daughter. ‘I won’t get very big pullets for them, but they’re good March chickens and I oughtn’t to do too bad… Lord, O Lord! Aggie left here to go to Mass at five minutes to eight and there’s that man still steaming away at the fag like a railway engine. Take Carroll’s factory to keep him in fags. Mary, go up the loft steps and see if you can see Bridie coming with the milk. We haven’t a drop for the breakfast that that fellow there didn’t slug into the long gut of his before he went to bed last night. Tarry, will you for my sake and for everybody’s sake get up and go to Mass?’
‘I’m always an hour too soon when I go by you,’ said Tarry.
‘I’ll quit talking, I’ll quit talking,’ the mother sighed.
Bridie passed in front of the window carrying the cans of milk and trying to keep the calf from knocking the lids off.
‘The strawberry is looking the bull,’ Bridie said when she laid the cans down in the kitchen. ‘She didn’t give me half as much milk as she ought to.’
‘She couldn’t be looking the bull, I don’t think,’ said the mother, making a mental calculation. ‘She took the bull a fortnight ago, and unless she was the devil’s ranter altogether she wouldn’t be coming round till three weeks. Be a terrible loss if she won’t keep the bull,’ she reflected pensively.
‘There’s a lot of cows going wrong that way,’ said Bridie.
‘Will you,’ the mother shouted at Tarry, ‘hurry up and be home early from Mass in case you have to go with that cow. We’d have to sell her a stripper if she doesn’t keep the bull.’
‘The white cow has a tear on her teat that’s a total dread,’ Bridie said, ‘like a tear from a buck wire.’
‘Oh, that’s more of this man’s doing!’ cried the mother. ‘How many times did I tell him to fix that paling and not have the buck wire trailing half way across the field. To look at this place a person would think we hadn’t a man about it. Do you think will the teat need to be bathed? Oh, look at him there with his big nose on him and the oul’ cod of a face like his uncle that – that a Protestant wouldn’t be worse than him… ’
‘And there’s more than that, the dirty oul’ dog,’ said Bridie. ‘There’s other things going on that might get us all into trouble.’
‘Arra, what?’ the mother cried, very dramatically.
Bridie was being mysterious. ‘If some fellows we know are not in jail before the next week or so I’ll be surprised.’
‘God, O God! O God! O God!’ lamented the mother. ‘Is it something to do with this fella here?’
‘Huh! Is that the way it’s with you? A girl knocked off her bicycle at Drumnay cross and there’s going to be a lot of trouble about it.’
The mother had heard enough to drive her to the heights of dramatic intensity. By the tone of her daughter’s voice she knew that something really desperate must have been done to some girl.
‘Was heavy hands laid on some poor girl?’ she asked. Heavy hands was a term Mrs Flynn had for the worst that a man could do to a woman. ‘And who was she?’
‘Mary Reilly,’ said Bridie. ‘Whatever was done to her I don’t know only what I heard.’
Tarry, finishing his cigarette, was trying his best to defeat the discussion with a sneer. But the drama was beating him.
‘It’s all nonsense,’ he said, ‘all nonsense.’
The mother started to cry. ‘Isn’t it a poor thing that I can’t have one day’s peace with the whole rick-ma-tick of yous? Amn’t I the heart-broken woman? And me going to the market the day. I won’t be the better of this for a week.’
‘Quit whinging anyway,’ said the daughter.
‘How can I quit! how can I quit!’ She suddenly rallied sufficiently to say to Bridie: ‘Go and strain that milk into the big pan-crock before you feed the hens… And what was done to the girl?’ she asked Tarry when the daughters were absent.
‘Nothing,’ said Tarry, ‘nothing.’
‘There be to be something or Bridie wouldn’t have it. Lord, O Lord! why can’t you be like another and not have us the talk of the country? Not that I care a straw for that whipster of Reilly’s – a big-faced stuck-up thing that… a bit of mauling wouldn’t do her much harm. But you to get your name up with it, that’s what I can’t stand. It’s a pity you wouldn’t try to keep away from that cross. Get up now and go to Mass and be back quick in case you have to go to Kerley’s with that cow.’
The mother’s imagination followed her son as he cycled down the lane towards the main road. She loved that son more than any mother ever loved a son. She hardly knew why. There was something so natural about him, so real and so innocent and which yet looked like badness. He hated being in time for Mass. He had always slept soundly through the Rosary in the days when his father was alive to say that evening prayer. And he was forever reading and dreaming to himself in the fields. It was a risk to let him out alone in a horse and cart. The heart was often out of her mouth that he’d turn the cart upside down in a gripe while he was dreaming or looking at the flowers. And then the shocking things that he sometimes said about religion and the priests. She was very worried about all that. Not that she loved the priests – like a true mother she’d cut the Pope’s throat for the sake of her son – but she felt the power of the priests and she didn’t want to have their ill-will.
He was a queer son in some ways. There was a kink in him which she never had been able to fathom.
The sun shone on the little hills. Hens were flying over gates and fences to scratch in potato and turnip fields.
The headlands and the hedges were so fresh and wonderful, so gay with the dawn of the world. Tarry never tired looking at these ordinary things as he tired of the Mass and of religion. In a dim way he felt that he was not a Christian. In the god of Poetry he found a God more important to him than Christ. His god had never accepted Christ.
Then the place of things alive overflowed his analytic thoughts and he heard the robins and sparrows in the hedges. A crib cart with a load of young pigs passed on its way to the market, for as well as being a Church holyday this was also a big market day in the local town. Ahead of him at the Miskin lane he could see another late Mass-goer whose walk he recognized. A good friend of his own, a poetic man who disliked being in time for Mass as much as Tarry. This was Eusebius Cassidy, his young neighbour. Eusebius was on foot, which meant that Tarry would catch up with him.
‘Hello,’ Tarry said as he slowed down and cycled beside Eusebius, who had gripped the back of the saddle.
‘Damn nice morning,’ said Eusebius.
‘A terror,’ said Tarry.
‘Well?’ said Eusebius with meaning.
‘Damn to the thing doing, Eusebius,’ said Tarry.
‘Be jabus! did you see her?’
‘I did. She has no fella as far as I know.’
The two young men were talking about girls. Ninety per cent of their conversation was about girls. Only talk. Always talk. They were idealists and always very lonely. Something had gone wrong with the machinery of living and nothing they ever planned in this line ever came to anything.
They were both more than twenty-seven in those enthusiastic years of nineteen hundred and thirty-five, yet neither had as much as ever kissed a girl. Not that kissing was much in favour in that district. Reading about lovers kissing, Tarry often reflected on the fact that he had never seen anyone kissing anyone, except poor old Peter Toole whom he once saw kissing a corpse in a wakehouse in the hope of getting a couple o
f glasses of whiskey.
Tarry loved all nice young girls. He loved virtuous girls, and that was one of the things he admired the Catholic religion for – because it kept girls virtuous until such time as he’d meet them.
Tarry was not bad looking, and up to a point he was a great favourite with women. Once a girl in a dance hall called him ‘an oul’ monk’. The last thing he wanted to be was an oul’ monk, and in his heart the last thing he was. Beneath the crust was the too soft heart of a romantic idealist. He had written some verses at that time, too, but these poems did not jut out of his life to become noticeable or make him a stranger to the small farmer community of which he was a child. Eusebius shared most of Tarry’s views on everything; for Eusebius was a product of that semi-human Gaelic enthusiasm which had swept the country in his father’s day. Eusebius had caught the contagion from an uncle and he had a sentimental regard for poetry – especially the poetry of Mangan and translations of Gaelic poems such as Callanan had done. One of his favourite pieces was Mangan’s Nameless One, in which he saw the reflection of his own loneliness and lack of female companionship.
I saw her once one little while and then no more,
Twas Paradise on earth awhile and then no more.
‘Did you hear anything about the other thing, Tarry? – no developments?’
‘Heard she went to the Big Man about it.’
‘Holy God! To Father Daly?’
‘She was seen going up to the Parochial.’
Eusebius jerked his shoulders somewhat hysterically and giggled, ‘There’ll be sport about this, there’ll be sport about this.’
‘They can go to hell,’ was all Tarry said.
Near the village they came up with the last Mass-goers. Down the Mass-path that served the hilly part of the parish two old women were coming. ‘That’s like your mother,’ Tarry remarked.
They left the bicycle among the other bicycles against the wall of the graveyard and, while Tarry took the clips off his trousers, still kept running along so that their hop-and-go-constant gait was like the progress of kangaroos or horses with itch in the heels. Every one, who till he came within sight of the chapel was in no hurry at all, suddenly developed that anxiety which will be noticed among people who, approaching a football field, hear across the paling the first cheers or the referee’s whistle. Tarry, too, was infected.
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