Tarry Flynn

by Patrick Kavanagh

  Tarry and Eusebius were of one mind now in hoping that the man with the collecting box would have left the chapel door. Passing the forge they saw Charlie Trainor’s old mother looking for two ha’pennies for a penny, and though they thought her mean they themselves never gave even a ha’penny at the door. Indeed they could not very well afford a ha’penny, for cigarettes and dances and an occasional Saturday evening in the town required every penny and ha’penny they could rap or run.

  The man with the collecting box, luckily enough, was disappearing round the gable of the chapel on his way to the sacristy with the takings as they came up the incline through the graveyard to the chapel door.

  The Catholic Church of Dargan was a building like a barn – a common rectangle, with a square belfry at the north gable; the church was scaling its mortar rough-casting and its pink wash was almost faded white. The roof span was wide and the roof timbers rotten so that only people with a strong faith in God’s goodness-to-His-own would risk sitting in the centre aisle. The centre aisle was always packed, which proved that both faith and piety abided in the parish of Dargan. Standing on a rise in the middle of a weedy graveyard above the village with its shops and new dance hall the church looked shabby, but God would surely overlook this apparent disrespect in the blaze of the people’s devotion. There were faith and piety and all the richness of human character that goes with a deep faith in the Hereafter. Father Daly said First Mass on the Feast of Corpus Christi. The chapel was crowded, for as well as being a Feast Day of importance, on which the Faithful were exhorted to receive Holy Communion, this day was also the big summer fair day in the neighbouring town, and many of the congregation had business in the town and by coming to early Mass were able to serve both God and Mammon. The doors and windows were open, but still the place was stuffy with that morning closeness which comes before people are acclimatized to summer. Outside the door a group of men stood whispering while the less solemn parts of the Mass were being said. These men stared about them at the rolling country of little hills and commented on the crops, the weather, the tombstones or whatever came into their dreaming minds.

  ‘Very weedy piece of spuds, them of Mick Finnegan’s.’

  ‘He doesn’t put on the dung, Larry: the man that doesn’t drive on the dung won’t take out a crop.’ A pause, ‘Nothing like the dung.’

  ‘Give me your cap till I kneel on it,’ someone said with a laugh.

  ‘All the kneeling you’ll do, Charlie…’

  John Magan, the puce-faced publican, and his flat-footed wife were coming up the incline. The men at the door made way for them and Charlie Trainor the calf-dealer, who was kneeling on one knee with his eye to a chink in the half-open door, gave the big man a quick salute with his upraised fingers.

  ‘I say, quit the bloody spitting on my boot,’ someone growled to his neighbours.

  Tarry and Eusebius had now arrived and were standing quietly by the sidewall of the chapel near the door, unobserved. Presently Tarry moved through the crowd in the porch.

  ‘He couldn’t see the women from here,’ said Charlie.

  Tarry ignored their banter and when the Mass Book was being changed for the first Gospel he took advantage of the commotion of the congregation rising to slip in unobserved, except by the young women who made it their business to watch every man as he came in. Tarry disliked staying at the door, not because he had any strong faith or piety, but because he found the atmosphere there annoying. As he edged his way into a place behind a pillar he gave a quick look round the women’s side of the chapel. The sexes were on different sides of the Dargan chapel. The congregation was in danger of becoming squint-eyed owing to this arrangement. Even plain women look pretty in a church. As he knelt down after the Creed he leaned on the back of the seat before him and through the crook of his arm surveyed the priest and the people. He had neither prayer book nor rosary beads, nor any other devotional pass-the-time.

  It was a squalid grey-faced throng. The sunlight through the coloured windows played on that congregation but could not smooth parchment faces and wrinkled necks to polished ivory. Skin was the colour of clay, and clay was in their hair and clothes. The little tillage fields went to Mass. No wonder that Father Daly had such a low opinion of his parishioners. When he first came to the parish he said there was only one decent man in the whole place and that was the publican – with the miller a bad second. Decency referred in this connection to the size of the property and not to the character of the individual. In the heat the drone the ceremony and the hum of the prayer sounded like an airplane hovering in the distance, or a wasp at the window. Father Daly was a fine cut of a man; he had been educated at Rome and Louvain and was full of a pedantic scholasticism which he somehow managed to relate to the needs of the people. When he left this acquired pedantry at home and took on to speak on politics or economics, which he often did, he made himself look silly. But never to the people. The people of Dargan thought him the loveliest and best educated priest in the diocese and even Tarry Flynn in moments of excitement conceded that the man was above the average country priest. When he turned round to preach, the congregation sat up and admired his fine-shaped head, his proud bearing and his flashing green eyes behind the rimless glasses on which the sun was playing.

  He had a silvery voice, so that even nonsense from him sounded wise. He took out a white silk handkerchief from the folds of his chasuble and wiped his glasses. Then he made a dramatic gesture with the fluttering handkerchief before blowing his nose with a loud report like a motor horn. Father Daly was up to every stage trick and would have made an excellent Hyde Park speaker. When (as happened on this Sunday) he had something important to say he usually led up to it by a cleverly constructed runway of philosophy, so that his listeners would be wondering what he was coming at. They knew his ways and his tricks and when, on this occasion, he started off, not with a philosophical but a poetical theme, they guessed that something interesting was in the air. ‘There was a great poet one time,’ he began, slowly, and in a minor key, ‘and his name was Tom Moore. He wrote a song called “Rich and Rare. ‘Rich and rare were the gems she wore —”’ The priest spoke solemnly, enunciating every word separately. Then he blew his nose again, and as his eyes swept the corners of the chapel his glasses flashed on the walls and were spots of light in the mirroring glass of the Stations of the Cross.

  ‘Rich and rare were the gems she wore

  And a bright gold ring on her wand she bore;

  But O her beauty was far beyond

  Her sparkling gem and snow-white wand.

  Lady, dost thou not fear to stray

  So lone and lovely on this bleak way?

  Are Erin’s sons so good or so cold

  As not to be tempted by woman or gold?

  Sir Knight, I fear not the least alarm,

  No son of Erin would offer me harm.

  For though they love women and golden store,

  Sir Knight, they love honour and virtue more.’

  Father Daly took his time with the verses, and he spoke so well, and his words seemed the prelude to so much that not even the greediest man for the world, waiting to go to the fair, nor the Communicant with the thickest fasting-spit was annoyed.

  The priest stared into the distance as he said: ‘That couldn’t be said by a lady passing through the village or parish of Dargan today. No, it could not,’ he sighed. He raised his voice to a roar that quivered the rafters and echoed in the galleries. ‘Rapscallions of hell, curmudgeons of the devil that are less civilized than the natives on the banks of the Congo. Like a lot of pigs that you were after throwing cayenne pepper among?’ The people opened their eyes wider and listened, leaning forward – delighted with the sermon. The men at the door came into the porch and Charlie Trainor peeped through a chink in the woodwork. ‘Come to hell outa that or he’ll see you,’ someone warned him.

  ‘Everything’s game ball,’ Charlie said, and winked.

  ‘Hypocrites, humbugs,’ the priest went on,
‘coming here Sunday after Sunday – blindfolding the devil in the dark as the saying goes. And the headquarters of all this rascality is a townland called Drumnay.’ The congregation smiled. Tarry Flynn stooped his head and smiled, too, although he was a native of that terrible townland. The calf-dealer at the door cocked his ear more acutely; he too, was interested in his townland and pleased when its evil deeds got the air.

  ‘A young girl was passing through this village the other evening,’ said the priest sorrowfully. ‘She was riding her bicycle home from Confession. When she was passing Drumnay crossroads she was set upon by a crowd of blackguards – and blackguards is no name for them – and the clothes torn off her back. Good God, good God, what is this country coming to? Atheists, scallywags…’ Then relaxing the intensity of his passionate outburst he continued softly, ‘I don’t blame the unfortunate wretches so much, but I do blame the half-educated blackguards who put them up to such work – the men who make the balls for others to fire.’ What was he driving at? Who was the girl? What really happened? The ordinary members of the congregation took the priest’s words with a grain of humorous salt and peasant doubt, knowing what wonders Church and State can make out of the common affairs of life when seen in their official mirror. Somebody winked across at Tarry Flynn, who sat with his head bowed and the pleasant smile on his face being thrown to the shadows between the seats. Charlie Trainor never smiled when the priest was preaching; he kept peeping through the woodwork, taking everything in with a serious look.

  The respectable people, like the police and the stationmaster and the schoolteachers, and the miller and the publican and his wife all put on mouths of righteousness and narrowed eyes. This was not good enough in a Catholic country. This was not good enough for County Cavan in the year nineteen hundred and thirty-five. And the men leading the revolt against decency and authority were Tarry Flynn and Eusebius Cassidy. Weren’t they the two ends of hypocrites coming to Mass the same as decent men? Should be chased to hell out of the parish. And that whole bunch of half-chewed idiots from Drumnay, they weren’t so bad if fellows like these didn’t come putting ideas into their heads. And Charlie Trainor, that was another prize boy. But he would never do any harm so long as he was doing well at his business. But the other pair, they were the right blackguards. So thought respectability. ‘I’ll not rest or relax,’ the priest concluded, ‘till I make an example of these scoundrels who are sullying the fair name of this parish. I’ll bring them to the bar of justice if it takes me ten years. Yes, Drumnay cross-roads where a decent man or woman can’t pass without a clod being thrown at them or some nasty expression. They come here to Mass and they were better at home – a thousand times better.’ The priest broke off suddenly and began to read out a list of notices, including one that a grand carnival dance would be held in the hall on that same evening, the charge for admission – gentlemen three-and-six, ladies half-a-crown. And furthermore, the right of admission should be strictly reserved. Tarry had an attack of conscience. When the priest turned away to face the Altar he knelt with his chin on the heels of his shut fists and a faraway look of childhood piety in his eyes.

  Outside the chapel the little knots of the congregation picking up their homing companions hardly mentioned the sermon. There were other more urgent things to fill their minds – the crops and the fair and their neighbours.

  Even Mrs Flynn, who was standing by her yard gate with the two baskets of cocks ready to move off to the railway station, had no time to discuss the scandal. Tarry had expected her to go into terrible tantrums when he got home and was pleasantly surprised at her temper.

  ‘That cow is not looking at the bull, thank God,’ she said. It was probably this that put her in good humour.

  Tarry helped her with the baskets of cocks the short distance to the railway halt.

  ‘Take off that good suit,’ she advised her son, ‘and not have everything on the one rack like the Carlins, and give Aggie a hand with the dinner.’

  Tarry promised to do as advised.

  The quiet time between the two Masses on Sundays and holy-days was for Tarry the happiest time of his life – especially when all the rest of the household was at second Mass and he was in sole control. He could read and smoke his fill without his mother’s interruptions. His mother disliked his reading and smoking far more than any of his other habits.

  He washed the potatoes for the dinner in the tub before the door and put on the ten-gallon pot.

  Then sitting by the fire, keeping it stoked, he sat smoking and reading the Messenger. The Messenger of the Sacred Heart was bought every month, and with Old Moore’s Almanac and the local newspaper constituted the literature of Flynn’s as of nearly every other country house.

  Flynn’s house had the reputation of being possessed of some wonderful books. Tarry’s father, who died some years previously, had an interest in books and had bought several second-hand volumes in the market of the local town. His books were not very exciting, but they were books. A gazetteer for the year 1867, an antiquated treatise on Sound, Light and Heat, and a medical book called Thompson’s Domestic Medicine.

  The only one of the three which Tarry had ever known father to read was the ‘doctor’s book’. His father had taken a few prescriptions out of it for the common illnesses of his friends. Once he gave a prescription for jaundice to a man which must have worked; for from that day to the day he died the father had the reputation of having a traditional cure for the jaundice and men and women came from far and near for the ‘cure’.

  Tarry had no books except these and a couple of school readers. One was a famous Sixth Book which he had stolen from a neighbour’s house some years before. It was in this book he got all the poetry he knew.

  He could read anything, so hungry was he for reading. So he read the Messenger, all of it from the verses by Brian O’Higgins on the Sacred Heart – a serial poem which ran for a year or more – to the story of the good young girl who had a vocation, and who was being sabotaged by the bad man, right through to the Thanksgivings ‘for favours received’, at the back.

  The sunlight came in through the dusty window, making a magical sunbeam right across the kitchen.

  Aggie had gone to the well for water.

  When she came in she offered to keep an eye on the pot and not let it boil all over the floor. She had also to see that the delicate chicken who was rolled up in a black stocking in a porringer by the hob did not get scalded or burned.

  In the midst of this beautiful repose there was a great hen flutter in the street and brother and sister both rushed out. It was the hawk of course, but as far as they could see he had got nothing.

  Tarry put the Messenger in his pocket and climbed Callan’s Hill, a favourite climb of his.

  Walking backwards up its daisied slope he gazed across the valley right across to the plains of Louth, and gazing he dreamed into the past.

  O the thrilling daisies in the sun-baked hoof-tracks. O the wonder of dry clay. O the mystery of Eternity stretching back is the same as its mystery stretching forward.

  That was Tarry: Eternity and Earth side by side.

  Suddenly his mind came back to the precise particulars of the immediate scene. Drumnay –

  Drumnay was a long crooked valley zig-zagging West-East between several ranges of hills in Cavan. The valley part of it was mostly cut-away bog, so that the only arable land was a thin stripe along the bottom of the hills and the hills themselves. It is not to be wondered at that the minds of the natives were shaped by and like the environment. In cul-de-sac pocket valleys all the way up the length of the townland were other smaller farms, inaccessible, and where the owners were inclined to be frustrated and, so, violent. At the western end of the valley Flynn’s comfortable farmhouse stood. The poplar-lined lane that served the townland branched off the main road about two hundred yards from the Flynn homestead. With the whitethorn hedges in full leaf the road seemed no more to one looking across country than a particularly thick hedge.

 
; Tarry sat on the crown of the hill with his back to a bank of massed primroses and violets, and as he sat there the heavy slumberous time and place made him forget the sting of the thorn of a dream in his heart. Why should a man want to climb out of this anonymous happiness in the conscious day?

  Cassidy’s field of oats was doing very well. A beautiful green field of oats. He was a bit jealous of the oats, and doubted if his own was doing as well. He stared into the hazy blue distance and heard the puff-puff of a train coming in through the boggy hollows five miles away. The earth under him trembled.

  ‘Tarry, Tarry, Tarry!’

  His sister’s cry recalled him to reality.

  ‘What?’ he shouted down.

  ‘Come down and give us a hand to teem the pot.’

  Wasn’t that a nuisance? Just when he was beginning to be happy something like this always disturbed him.

  As he was coming down the hill the first people on bicycles were coming from second Mass – his two sisters amongst them. His next-door neighbour, May Callan, was with them. May was one of the girls with whom he was in love. She was reality. But nothing was happening after all his spring daydreams. The land keeps a man silent for a generation or two and then the crust gives way. A poet is born or a prophet.

  Teeming the pot into a bucket, he put a sack apron around him, and holding one of the legs of the pot with his right hand and the pot lid with his left he drained off the water.

  Even teeming the pot was very important in his life and in his imagination. Any incident, or any act, can carry within it the energy of the imagination.

  Outside at the gate he could hear his other two sisters in loud giggling conversation with May.

  As soon as he had the pot teemed he found an excuse to wander in the direction of the girls so as not to make the overture seem too deliberate. He pulled the saddle-harrow out from where it lay against the low wall before the house with a very concerned air. All the time he was trying to impress his personality on May. But it was no use. He could not understand why he was ignored by young women, for he knew he was attractive.