Tarry Flynn

by Patrick Kavanagh

  Oh, good God! Molly was standing on top of the dunghill and she surely could see through a hole in the hedge. She was watching, there was no doubt about it. Well, let her look away, thought he: she can’t see very much from that range. Yet, it might be as well if he put on his trousers. It was always a risk going about in one’s pelt. He remembered how he was caught one morning before when he got up at about four of a summer’s morning to see about the mare due to foal and he didn’t bother putting a stitch on him – and May Callan saw him as he ran across the meadow. She was coming from a dance.

  Better be on the safe side. He put on his trousers and his boots and decided to abandon athletics for the day. He let the jump remain so that he could contemplate his prowess. He was very proud of his jump.

  He sat down beside the cock, took a drink out of the little can of thick milk and lit a cigarette. He crawled away from the cock to where his jacket lay and got out the book on phrenology, which was folded in the inside pocket. He read about Wendell Phillips, ‘the silver-tongued orator’, and as he read, dreaming that he was that ‘silver-tongued orator’, he felt his skull but doubted if it was the right shape and size.

  ‘Hello.’

  He swung round on his backside.

  It was Molly.

  ‘How did you get here?’ he asked, displeased.

  ‘I climbed through the bushes at the top.’

  He did not want to see the trollop. His mind was hard and clear and the athlete in him had no interest in short-legged women.

  ‘Don’t sit down there or you’ll put the cock to the hollow. If you want to sit at all sit on the hill-side of it.’

  The hill-side of the cock was a bunch of briars and Molly had to stand.

  ‘My mother,’ said Molly, ‘asked me to ask you if you could lend us the rake to gather the bog bedding that we got cut last week.’

  ‘I couldn’t give you the good American rake, Molly, but there’s a thick-set wire-toothed one at home – if it would be any use to yous.’

  Molly said that that rake would do fine. The rake was only an excuse.

  ‘I’m going away,’ said she suddenly.

  ‘What the hell are you doing that for?’

  ‘Amn’t I as well? Look at the way your two sisters went. There’s nothing for a lassie in these parts.’ She hesitated a moment and then said: ‘Do you remember that evening we were together up the oul’ road, Tarry?’

  ‘What night?’ said he sourly.

  ‘You know well, Tarry.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about, I just don’t know what you’re talking about. I do know that you were out one or two nights with Charlie, but you were never out with me.’

  He was disturbed. This sort of thing took all the good out of life. He didn’t like the attitude the girl adopted. There was a toughness about her, like the toughness of one who in her own defence would swear a man’s life away, and he was afraid. He was afraid to think what he was thinking and he shoved the thought back into his mind.

  The girl straggled off and he let her go without another word of farewell or of anything.

  This was only one of the worries that were congregating around his happiness, trying to drive it away. There were the Finnegans, both families, who were only waiting to attack him; there was the question of the new farm with the transfer deed still not completed, and now this.

  He put his hand in his trouser pocket and looked at his one and sixpence. He had often said it before and he said it now again – the whole problem was scarcity of money. If he had some money he could go away for a week and when he’d have come back all the cares would have dispersed.

  He chewed at a weed. He watched a beetle creeping through the rutted earth. He lifted a flat stone and underneath was a nest of pismires. A pity he hadn’t got Molly to sit on them.

  Clouds blew across the blue sky. He wouldn’t mind if it rained now that he had his hay safe and Eusebius had not.

  ‘Tarry, are you alive or dead?’

  He sprang to his feet and grabbed the fork and rake on hearing his mother’s voice. She had brought him his tea.

  She was in good humour, very pleased and proud as she surveyed the field full of cocks. ‘I can only count sixteen,’ she said and she had her palm edged over her brow.

  He put the navvy can of tea beside him and swallowed the bread in a hurry. ‘There’s seventeen if you count again,’ he said.

  ‘Aw yes, the one in the corner.’

  ‘The best hay in your country,’ he said.

  ‘Let others do the praising, Tarry. Nothing I hate as much as a man that’s always boasting about his own things. There’s that Mrs Callan and nobody has anything but her to hear her talking. Her three skinny cows give more milk and butter than anyone else’s. I say – Did this May get much of a show at the dance last night?’

  ‘She was only danced three times,’ said Tarry to please his mother.

  ‘And what about our Bridie?’

  ‘She got a great show.’

  ‘That atself. Was this slob on the hill at it?’

  ‘I didn’t see her.’

  ‘Poor slob. Keep away from her anyway. Last Sunday her mother had hardly an eye to see me coming from Mass and… What had you the thumb-rope for?’

  ‘Doing a bit of measuring, aye.’

  ‘Aye, too. Were you speaking to Father Markey last night?’

  ‘Of course I was. Don’t you know very well I was?’

  ‘I’m glad to hear it. I like keeping in with the priests. You never know when you’d want one of them to do you a good turn. And God forgive me some of them could do you a bad turn as quick as a good one. Don’t stay too long, I may want you to give me a hand with the churning. I hope these ones of ours make a fist of the eating-house. You’ll not be long.’

  ‘Be home in an hour.’

  When she had gone a short distance she turned and called back, ‘Do you know, I was told that one of the Dillon’s was having another youngster. Did you hear anything about it?’

  He didn’t.

  ‘There may be nothing about it. Ah, God protect everybody’s rearing. I got Bridie to drive up the two-year-old bullocks to Carlin’s this morning, what was the use letting the grass go to loss?’

  ‘I’ll be home shortly,’ Tarry said to get her away.

  ‘Mind you don’t leave the fork or rake behind you for someone to whip.’

  ‘They’ll be safe.’

  He went home feeling more at ease with the world than he had felt for a long time. In spite of all his worries the warm and gay heart of life was beating for him. New flowers were coming up and new scents and smells.

  Around the house, for a wonder, there was peace. He threw the old book in a corner of the horses’ stable and went into the house.

  His mother was sitting by the hearth with her head between her palms on her knees. His sister, Mary, had come out from the town and was sitting with a pout near the bottom of the stairs.

  ‘What the devil’s wrong?’ he asked on entering.

  ‘This is more of your reading of the books,’ said the mother without raising her head. ‘Two of the darling bullocks that nothing would do you but to leave up in Carlin’s are bad with the blackleg.’

  ‘The blackleg, good God! It can’t be cured,’ he said.

  ‘Just when things were going to pick up,’ lamented the mother.

  ‘That’s a terror. I better get the rest of them vaccinated.’

  ‘I sent for a man to do it,’ said the mother. ‘I suppose, like everything else, you’d take on to do that too.’

  ‘That’s a terror,’ Tarry kept repeating.

  ‘There’s always some trouble here,’ said the mother. ‘If it’s not one thing it’s the other. I only came back from the hay-field when Bridie had this news for me. And to add to me trouble this one here is back from the town saying that they can’t get any trade – with all their cookery books.’

  The mother had sent Bridie up to Cassidy’s to ask Eusebius to put
the vaccination pellets in the remaining cattle, Eusebius having a punch for that purpose. She had also made plans to get Charlie to take the dead beasts which would be cheaper than burying them; and it would do Charlie a good turn, for by all accounts in the new butcher’s shop which he had opened he needed no slaughterhouse.

  ‘I’m chucking the whole damn thing,’ he said to Eusebius when they were vaccinating the cattle.

  ‘Keep a good grip on them horns, Tarry,’ said Eusebius. ‘Chucking what?’

  ‘Drumnay.’

  ‘You are in me arse?’

  ‘I am,’ said Tarry, without really meaning what he was saying – at least he did not think he meant it. ‘And then you can have all the women to yourself, and all the land as well. I don’t give a tuppeny damn for the whole thing.’

  Eusebius registered pleasure, Tarry could see that. He would be pleased to see a man leave the district, one rival less.

  That day passed and another day and something was wrong in Tarry’s life, something was driving him – where, he did not know. Something was pulling him back, but he did know what that was, and he was seeing it now when he lifted his eyes to the lonely hills.

  8

  If any born of kindlier blood

  Should ask what maiden lies below –

  Say only this: A tender bud

  That tried to blossom in the snow

  Lies withered where the violets blow.

  The bottom of the page which contained this poem was encrusted with dried cow-dung and the pages were stuck together in the same way. Tarry shoved the old book between the rafters and galvanized roof of the horse stable, and completed the buttoning of his trousers. The sunlight was beaming through the stable door but it was at the light seen through the slit in the wall over the manger that Tarry was looking. A large nettle waved to and fro in front of the slit almost humanly. He lit a cigarette and took several deep pulls, for he was starved for a smoke.

  His mother was standing at the road gate gossiping with Mrs Callan. These two women delighted in giving each other the quiet dig and in these arguments Tarry’s mother seldom got the worst of it. But on this morning Tarry didn’t particularly like the way his mother appeared to be reacting.

  ‘Bridgie,’ she said as they parted, ‘it would fit us all a lot better if we minded our own business.’

  The mother went into the house and Tarry heard her inquiring where ‘this blackguard’ was. She must have thought either himself or Bridie was upstairs. He sucked hard at the cigarette, dropped it into a wet piece of hen manure and went into the house taking with him a pair of hames, which he was examining with a very concerned air. ‘I have to fix the hook on these hames,’ he muttered and put on a worried farmer’s face.

  Mrs Flynn was stooped on the centre of the floor over a fat hen which she held between her knees, and which she was about to kill for the next day’s dinner. Under the hen was an enamel basin.

  ‘Give me that knife off the ground,’ she snapped at her son. She cut the head off the hen and hung the bird on the back of the dairy door with the basin under it. She wiped the carving knife in her apron and then opened up:

  ‘Hell won’t be full till you’re in it. Hell won’t be full till you’re in it. To think that a man that never saw nothing but what was right in this house should have us the talk of the country. Oh, his uncle Petey all over again.’

  Tarry was on all fours under the table. ‘I can’t get that hammer,’ he said at last as he withdrew his head and stood up. He pretended not to have heard. ‘Night, noon and morning, it’s me that’s sick, sore and sorry with the whole lot of yous,’ said the mother.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ said Tarry, very surprised.

  ‘What in the Name of Father, Son and Holy Ghost had you to do with this Molly one?’ said she, suiting her voice to the seriousness of the charge. She was speaking slowly and rather softly and all the more terrifying for that.

  ‘I don’t know what you’re coming at,’ he said with the pout of a man in a hurry to do some important business who was displeased at being interrupted by trifling affairs. ‘If I knew where that bleddy hammer is I wouldn’t care.’ His eyes swept into dusty corners and he moved the six-gallon pot from its place in the corner of the hob and looked behind it.

  The mother sat by the fire on the low stool and blew her nose defiantly into the ashes.

  Speaking in a low solemn voice she began to say:

  ‘Never had a day’s comfort in me whole life. Never a day that I hadn’t some misfortune to contend with. Oh, it’s me that reared the family I should be proud of. Will you leave that pair of names there, and if they want repairs bring them to the forge and not knock an eye out of your head like poor Joe McArdle. You be to have some curse o’ God carry-on with her or this sneak up the road wouldn’t have it. And sure it’s only now its dawning on me why oul’ Molly hasn’t an eye to see me last Sunday coming from Mass, one that always had a little story for me.’

  ‘I never went near her in me whole life,’ said Tarry with the weakness of an innocent man. ‘Never, never, never. I wouldn’t go near her if I was paid for it – you ought to know that?’

  He wandered to the door in the hope of escaping the torture, and as he stepped outside the postman was getting off his bicycle. The mother, too deeply in argument, had missed him coming up the road, which was a wonder. Tarry slipped quietly to the gate and collected a letter which was addressed to himself. He stood in the doorway of the carthouse and hurriedly scanned the letter. It was from the solicitor who was dealing with the transfer of Carlin’s farm to the Flynns, and it said that there appeared to be some trouble over the boundaries of the holding. Two fields appeared not to be included in the purchased property. Would Tarry and his mother call to his office some day soon? Tarry stuffed the letter in his pocket and returned to the house with a very innocent look.

  ‘You got a letter,’ said she at once.

  ‘Who said I got a letter?’

  ‘Isn’t there the postman going back the road?’

  ‘Must be in Cassidy’s he was.’

  ‘I thought it might be this rodney of an uncle of yours who was threatening to come back to lie up on us – we’re not bad enough.’

  Tarry was too deeply shocked over the news contained in the letter to be able to conceal his distress from his mother. She, however, thought that his nervousness was due to the scandal about Molly, which was only what she would expect.

  ‘Hang on that six-gallon pot till I make a drop of gruel for the calves and bring up a couple of goes of water from the bog-hole to wash the praties for the dinner. Oh, never during soot was there such a family as mine, one worse, than the other… The dirty pot-walloper,’ she was referring to Molly now, ‘sure it’s not that I’d care a hair if you had to keep away from her. And you needn’t try to tell me that you did, for I saw you with me own two eyes no later than a month ago when you were running the turnips. How many a night last winter when she used to call here on her ceilidhe did you not sneak out and it used to make me laugh the way you thought we didn’t know. Yes, standing down there at the corner of the back garden with the rain pouring down, I could hear you sighing. Sure, you needn’t think we’re all blind. Yes, waiting for her to lave till you’d waylay her.’

  Tarry could not deny this allegation, which was quite true.

  If his mother only knew he was now rather pleased that she had this lesser of the two evils to engage her attention until such time as things straightened out. He was wondering if Eusebius wasn’t behind this business of the land. He must have known something or he’d have been more jealous at the time of purchase. Tarry would inform his mother right away if he thought that she could find a way out of the dilemma.

  He poured a bucket of water into the pot and the mother twisted the bellows’ wheel. ‘If you’d tell me,’ said she, ‘you might find that I’d be a better advice than some of these cute customers up the road with their ballads and the devil knows what. How well Eusebius never gets his name up with
anything. He’s in with everybody. Don’t slash the water all over the floor. Oh, Eusebius knows how to mind number one.

  ‘And another thing,’ said the mother while poking the fire under the pot, ‘it’s about time we heard from that solicitor about the farm. One of these days I must go out meself and see him and find what’s keeping him with that deed. I never liked the look of that man even if he is Father Daly’s cousin. I hope you put the haggard in order for the hay atself.’

  ‘I did, I did.’

  Bridie arrived at this point. She came in through the dairy and as she was closing the door behind her the mother called to her to bring up a plateful of barley meal to put on the pot. But Bridie had something on her mind and first rushed to the kitchen saying: ‘Did you hear about pet Tarry?’

  ‘What talk with you?’ said the mother.

  ‘His name all over the country with Molly,’ said Bridie.

  ‘He never had a haporth to do with the targer, Bridie, you whipster, you, and how dar’ you say he had?’

  Bridie shook her shoulders with a jeer and went for the meal. Her mother’s voice pursued her: ‘Choke you and double choke you, he never left a hand on the trollop. Have we not enough trouble without you putting in your cutty?’

  Tarry went outside to think. He deceived himself into believing that he could think himself out of his various problems. He walked to the road gate consciously thinking – but nothing was happening in his mind. The threatened lawcase by the Finnegans had petered out, but no thanks to his thinking. There was a worldly wisdom which looked so much like stupidity that he could not tolerate it. He had seen and observed the worldly-wise men of the place with their platitudes and their unoriginality, and he knew that he could never bring himself to act as they acted. Eusebius was coming down the road whistling ‘Does Your Mother Come from Ireland’. Eusebius was a man who combined the stupidity of the world with a veneer of the other-world gaiety, and as Tarry waited for him to come up he was wondering how it was that a man could see all this worldliness and observe its workings, and yet be quite incapable of using it himself.