by Tom Phelan
A horse-taxi took us to the hotel in Edinburgh at midnight. As I drifted off to sleep with my front to David’s back and my arm around him, I imagined our Sarah close by, five miles away, in a mental hospital. Our beautiful Sarah was mad. I cried silently.
As we neared Pine Haven the next morning, I felt the same as I would have felt if I’d been approaching a morgue to identify the body of my dead child. My desire to get to the hospital to see Sarah was opposed by my dread of what I would find. And when the hospital loomed into sight, a fist of cold steel squeezed my insides. The dreary, three-storied building might have been beautiful once in its newness, but after years of sooty wind and rain it was now an ugly wart. Its pillars, and the balustrades of its stone balconies, were like the short legs of fat women. Bay windows, piled three high on top of each other, were divided into angular pieces by the stained, cut stone. A forest of sooted chimneys sprouted like black weeds from the grey roof slates. Maybe my impression of the place was coloured by my frame of mind, but this was the least mind-lifting, least encouraging place in the world.
The welcome we received matched the coldness of the building. From the moment Nurse McMurray opened the front door, it was obvious that we were interfering, that we were gravel in the gears of the hospital. We argued our way into a parlour. On straight-backed, hard chairs we waited for hours until David sallied forth and fought his way into a doctor’s office.
Interference from families set the patients back, Dr. Robertson told us. Their progress was halted rather than helped by visits from the outside.
“But our Sarah,” I asked, “how is she? How bad is she?”
“Miss Hodgkins, at the moment, refuses to sit down with a staff member,” the doctor said. “She does not speak to anyone.”
“What happened to her?” David asked quietly.
“She was in a fire. She saw some people being burned to death.”
“Can we see her?”
“I already told—” Dr. Robertson’s lined face was the face of a man who was overworked, who needed a good night’s sleep.
“I mean can we see her, look at her from a distance?”
“It would be too risky. If she knew you were looking at her, it would upset her too much.”
“For Christ’s sake, man,” David blurted out, and I put my hand on his leg. “Let the woman see her own daughter, even from a distance. Just let the mother see the child. Surely that much can be arranged. We’ve come a long way—”
“You should have written first and saved yourself the—”
“You’re a heartless man,” David said in a strong voice. “You made the rules here. Surely you can bend them and let a woman look on her own child.”
He let us see Sarah. For three hours we sat concealed behind some aucuba bushes on the far side of the driveway. The front door opened and closed many times before I buried my fingers in David’s arm. There she was, dressed as they told us she would be. The most obvious thing about her was the veil, and the veil was no more revealing than the chador of a Moslem woman. It could have been anyone, even a nurse sent out to satisfy us and get us off the grounds. But it was Sarah’s walk; it was her body. Her hands showed no signs of burns or injury. Her legs below her calf-length skirt were not marked. And oh, God, I wanted so badly to run to her.
David stood up as if to move out of the bushes, but at that same moment a large man walked into the driveway with his arms folded across his chest. He was a figure of threat. When I stood, David turned and buried his face in my shoulder. He shuddered like a horse with the flu. He sobbed.
Slowly, Sarah walked the length of Pine Haven hospital twice, and then she went in. With hands as fluttery as the tail of a courting wagtail, she must have touched her veil a hundred times.
Con Hatchel
The Machine Shed at Enderly was Charlie Coffey’s kingdom. All the hand tools of farming hung on the walls, everything in a state of readiness, no tool put away until it was cleaned, tightened, sharpened, and rubbed with an oily rag that had its own hanging nail. The machines of farming had their own special space on the floor, all accessible from narrow walkways between them, all as ready as the hand tools.
On wet days during the winter, while overseeing the repairing and making of lesser equipment, Charlie Coffey worked on the McCormick reaper with Matt as his apprentice. They took the machine apart one small section at a time. Charlie knew every cotter pin and cogwheel, knew the smoothness of every canvas rivet. He showed Matt the path of the binding twine through all its loops and holes and eyes. He examined each link of the heavy driving chain. He cleaned and greased and oiled.
Charlie was one of those lads who could have taken a rifle apart in the rainy dark in a mucky trench, cleaned it, and put it back together again. So fast could he disassemble and reassemble the three mechanisms that wrapped and knotted and cut the twine that bound the sheaves, that not three minutes were lost in a summer of scarce sunshine.
Every year, when Arthur J.’s gold hung heavy in the barley ears, the Cyrus McCormick was wheeled out of the Machine Shed like a purebred stallion, brought prancing out for inspection by top-hatted punters. Two of Charlie’s men pulled at the end of the beam, and two pushed from behind. Mister and Missus Hodgkins always attended this opening of the harvest season.
Charlie’s pride in the machine showed in the creases in his face, in the sparkle of his eyes. It was easy to see, too, that the Hodgkinses were proud of their ownership of this most up-to-date piece of agricultural machinery. And it was plain that all Charlie’s men, by the way they neatened themselves up for the occasion, were privileged to be associated with such a modern farm.
There was an air of expectation in the yard when the reaper made its appearance, a feeling that all the planning and toiling and weather-watching since springtime were about to richly yield up the rewards. The knowledge of the upstanding, wind-swayed twenty-five acres of golden barley had everyone in smiles.
The eight wooden beaters, hanging above the front of the reaper like the sails of a windmill, glowed in their fresh coat of red paint. Every metal part had been burnished with the oil cloth, and the canvases were stretched taut. The thirty-two triangular blades of the knife shone sharply in their toothed metal sheath, honed to mow through ripe straw with the ease of a hot knife slipping through butter.
Like a priest chanting in a cloud of incense smoke, Mister Hodgkins spoke in the wafting aroma of new paint, fresh oil and new goose grease. “God bless the harvest,” he said, and Charlie Coffey and his men answered, “Aye, Mister Hodgkins. God bless the harvest.”
“And God keep the reapers safe,” Missus Hodgkins added.
“And you too, Missus,” the men muttered, and they meant it.
“And God bless Matthias and Con on their upcoming adventure,” Mister Hodgkins said.
The blessing of men and machine was a pleasant little ceremony that had developed over the years in the shadow of the Machine Shed, Catholics and Protestants praying together in a farmyard when they weren’t allowed to pray together in a church, the unspoken defiance uniting the participants.
It was our last year at Enderly, and Poor Meg played her part in the little drama by bringing out a plate of hot scones soaked in melted butter and strewn with strawberry jam. She was sick then, limping from the pain, dying already I suppose. Missus Hodgkins, to spare Poor Meg the extra walking, sent Matthias and myself into the kitchen for the jug of sweet tea and the mugs. Missus Hodgkins was good like that, taking care of the people who worked for Enderly. “And make sure you bring a mug for Meg, Con. Nine altogether.”
It was early August of 1913. The old people said they had never seen such wonderful crops. All year the weather had magically struck a balance between light rain and hot sunshine. The black, fertile earth of Enderly had responded with the fecundity of a magician’s well-stocked hat.
“It’s not magic,” Missus Hodgkins said to me one day down in the gardens. “It’s a mistake, Con, when the weather is this good. Irish weather is a
lways bad because we wrongly think it should be better. The weather is normal in this country when it’s bad at all the wrong times. This amount of sun is unnatural. People will get sick.”
The people in Spain and Arizona don’t get sick from the sun, I thought, but I would never have contradicted Missus Hodgkins. All the people in Ireland, who knew about the sun in Spain and Arizona, were always thinking of those faraway lands when it was raining in Ireland, trying to imagine the unimaginable.
On the day after the rolling out of the reaper in 1913, I was harvesting the peas in the vegetable garden, dropping the fat pods into the basket that Danny Gowan had woven from sally scollops during the winter. Since early morning, the pleasant, droning clatter of the reaper had been part of the live murmur of that high summer’s day. The hum of the insects and the music of the birds folded over the silence whenever the distant reaper was stopped for the changing of knives or horses or men or the replacing of the roll of twine. And except for those brief stoppages, the reaper was kept moving all day. The harvesting of the ten barley acres in the High Field would be finished in twelve hours, if God was willing and if everything went right. And although God didn’t give a damn one way or the other, the reaper did not break down because Charlie Coffey had made sure it wouldn’t.
In the afternoon, it was Frank Shanahan who was driving the three horses, hupping and tongue-clicking, and wrist-flicking the encouraging reins onto the flanks of the outside animals. In the high seat of the reaper, he sat across from the spinning beaters that pushed the cut barley onto the first canvas. Mile after mile, Charlie Coffey walked behind the reaper, his eyes and ears on the bits and pieces of spinning and shuttling and clacking metal involved in the tracking, the packing, the making, the tying and the kicking out of the sheaves. He also gave unnecessary instructions to Frank Shanahan on the shifting of the various levers and, like any man receiving directions he had neither asked for nor needed, Frank Shanahan was annoyed at Charlie’s omniscient interferences.
Since Shanahan had taken over the reins, Mike Gallinagh had been busy in the shade of the elm near the gate, bent over a portable metal bench, hand-sharpening the blades of the spare knives with a red-handled whetstone. Nothing would slow down the cutting of the barley, neither tired horses, tired men, nor blunt blades.
“Keep the blades sharp, lads,” was one of Charlie Coffey’s unnecessary cants, and he applied it to many things besides the reaper’s knives. His uncombed and unwashed and pelt-clad ancestor of five thousand years ago probably canted the same thing to his men before they ran against the invaders: “Keep the blades sharp, lads.”
Poor Meg gave Matt and me the legs of a rabbit for supper that first evening of the reaping, told us there was only enough meat for two people, and that we wouldn’t be having it only the other men were still in the fields. But we knew Poor Meg was only using words to keep away her sadness for me and Matt leaving for the army in a few days. She knew and we knew that Poor Meg would be long dead before we would get home again. So I tried to distract her by asking her to tell the Enderly stories that she had seen unfolding since she was fourteen. She remembered and talked but the sadness did not go away, stayed there looking in over our shoulders. And when she finished, we told her what a good cook she was, how her new spuds, her boiled cabbage chopped fine and fried in butter, her rabbit and gravy was a feast fit for a king.
When we stood to leave, Poor Meg painfully pushed herself up. She supported herself against the back of the chair, and she could no longer keep the pain of our separation at bay. “Sure, lads,” she said, “why do you have to leave us at all?” and she could barely finish the sentence. She was crying but trying to control the tears at the same time by compressing her lips.
Like two awkward bullocks, we stood there gawking across the table, knowing what to do but too shy to do it. It was Matt who finally stepped around to her side to comfort her, to put his arm around her shoulder and, in the end, to pull her into himself to let her cry on his chest. I stood there looking, pushing down my own sadness and tears until they became an aching pain in the back of my throat. It was Missus Hodgkins passing through the kitchen who freed the three of us from the paralysing emotion. She took charge of Poor Meg and, using her eyebrows, sent the two of us on our way.
Matt took off at a near gallop because he had to be near Kitty. I had been keeping out of their way for several months now, so I took the long way home. I passed the fifteen-acred Back Batens where Jim Hanley and Danny Gowan had spent their third day cutting the headland with scythes, clearing a track for the first passage of the horses and the reaper in the morning. The two men were sharpening their scythes. They spotted me looking in over the hedge and acknowledged me with uplifted whetstones. Then, with the precision of two altar boys reciting the Latin responses at Mass, they called, “Night, Shakespeare,” because everyone on the farm knew Mister Hodgkins was teaching me from books—continuing my education, as Missus Hodgkins said.
If the weather had been threatening at all, Danny and Jim and Matthias and myself and anyone else from the town who could have been hired, even Mister Hodgkins, would have spent the day stooking the sheaves as they were kicked out of the reaper in the High Field. But in the firm belief that the summer weather was going to last, the sheaves were left where they fell, would be taken care of when all the headlands were cut.
Half a mile farther along the dusty lane, I stopped at the gate of the High Field. The last few feet of the final swath of barley were disappearing between the two rolling canvases that fed the straw to the rear of the reaper. Charlie Coffey stuck his hand into the guts of the reaper and sprung the binding mechanism because the last sheaf was too light to do it on its own. The half-sheaf fell at Charlie’s feet, and from where I was standing, I thought I heard the men and the horses and the machine and the field itself sighing. Frank Shanahan disengaged all the gears and there was silence except for the whoosh of the wide, metal driving wheel through the stiff straw stubbles.
With my chin on my arms on the top bar of the wooden gate, I watched as the reaper was driven between the rows of fallen sheaves to the place where everything had begun that morning. The silent men, following a system developed over long years of working together, helped each other with the fitting of the transporting wheels, the winding up of the driving wheel, the lowering of the beaters, the shifting of the beam and horses to the new pulling position, the folding of the iron legs of the portable sharpening bench and the loading of the extra mowing knives in their long, thin wooden sheaths.
When they were ready to leave, I swung the field gate open. The tired horses had slowed after the sustained effort. Stained with sweat, they plodded home to the farmyard, Charlie Coffey walking beside the sagging heads, his hand in the ring of the winkers of the horse beside him. A few dangling straws hung upside-down from the back of the reaper. Too weary to talk, Frank Shanahan and Mike Gallinagh plodded along the dusty lane behind the clanking, miraculous collection of interconnected parts.
In no hurry to get home, I went out into the High Field and closed the gate behind me. Matthias and Kitty would soon be setting out for Ali Baba’s Cave down at the Canal. For weeks now, I had been wondering how long it would be before Mammy realized what was happening, what she would say when she did realize. Even though I sometimes found myself wondering how far they were going with each other, my imagination didn’t allow me to dwell on the matter because one of them was my sister and the other might as well have been my brother.
I strolled through the stubbles, listening to that peculiar sound of stiff straw against leather boots. At the huge elm, where Mike Gallinagh had been working in the shade, I stepped up onto the bank and sat down at the butt of the tree, sat in the same indent in the grass that Mike’s arse had made when he was eating his lunch. I started to reach for Twelfth Night in my coat pocket, but when my eyes swept down across the ten acres of reaped barley, my mind slipped off the question of music being the food of love.
The thousands of sheaves
scattered evenly over the ten acres of the High Field had an effect on me that I can only describe as sphincter-tightening. There were so many sheaves, as if the earth had been ridiculously wasteful in her generosity. In close lines they lay on the ground as far as I could see, the tight twine around the middles giving them the strange appearance of sleeping men who have cinched their belts too tightly. In the terrible silence that had taken over from the reaper and the birds and the insects, the sheaves lay there in the stubbles.
The same terrible silence descended on the Somme battlefield four years later. I was afraid to poke my head up. After a week of nonstop heavy guns, of screaming, screeching shells, I could see the silence in the bright sky like huge spinning Catherine wheels, their irregular speeding tails colliding against each other. Even the German machine guns had stopped their deathly twicking, and everyone in the stretcher corps waiting in the trenches knew something terrible had happened. Thousands of men had been going over the top since seven o’clock, and now at eleven, into the dreadful spinning Catherine wheels I poked my head above the rim of the trench.
It was the first day of July in 1916, and the soldiers lay there as far as I could see, most of them motionless. Of course, there were thousands more than I had seen in the High Field, and they were not as neatly laid out in straight lines. These sheaves near the banks of the Somme were carelessly scattered and there were no stubbles. The earth beneath these sheaves was torn up, as if a herd of giant, truffle-hunting pigs, ten million strong, had nosed its way across the landscape. Soldiers were hanging on the barbed wire barriers like bedsheets tangled on a clothesline after a storm, and there were piles of bodies where once there had been gaps in the mare’s nest of wire. The advancing English soldiers had tried to pass through those openings. The German soldiers had kept the same passageways in the sights of their machine guns, guns that could shoot out six hundred bullets every minute. Do your sums, my children.