August Is a Wicked Month

by Edna O'Brien

  ‘Well what about the war, what about it?’ Jason kept saying as his wife accused him of having no feeling.

  ‘I always knew you were hard, always,’ she kept saying.

  ‘Should make us all think a little deeper,’ Jason said then as if he were making a speech.

  ‘Poor bastard,’ Bobby said.

  ‘He died on his face,’ Gwyn said suddenly and with animosity.

  ‘He was on his back,’ Ellen said, and looked to the others for confirmation.

  ‘Listen, my girl, we picked you up and brought you out of that dump tonight, otherwise you’d have gotten nowhere,’ Gwyn said and one of the men said to shut up, that a man was dead.

  ‘We know he’s dead, nobody’s saying he’s not dead,’ Jason said, and they were all a little on edge and sober now. The driver was taking it easy too. Ellen kept looking out of the window. There were no landmarks except signs advertising night-clubs, and road danger-signals, and high walls around houses. Sometimes there was no wall and it felt dangerous then. The fields when she could see them were very steep and tilled. Each row of tillage was buttressed by a row of stone. The stone kept the soil from being washed down the steep hills in heavy rain. She wanted to be like that, supported, by a solid man. Her husband would be asleep now, under stars, with frogs and other night animals moving about in the hay field out-side. He was a strong man whom she’d thrown away, not for a year, not for an age, but for ever. She was afraid she might cry, so she started to hum blithely: ‘Anyone who had a heart.’ Someone said she was callous.

  When they got to Sidney’s house the other two cars were already there. They’d got off the main road, they said, after they saw the hold-up of cars.

  ‘Was that boy lying on his face or not?’ Gwyn asked one of the oriental girls. The girl just looked at her and said nothing. Ellen hurried in the house in case there might be a scene. She entered a huge hallway with tapestries on the wall and a big table covered from end to end with sunhats. There were hats with their crowns laid into other hats and some piled on each other, their straw canes sticking up like haystalks. There must have been hundreds of hats in all. Suddenly she wished that she had not come. The evening had turned sour after what they’d seen. People climbed the marble stairs in silence. Only the homosexuals seemed close but that may have been because they were manacled together.

  ‘You saw it?’ she said, first to one, then to the other.

  ‘Oui,’ they said as calmly as if they had seen a leaf drop from a tree.

  ‘I think I ought to go home,’ she said, turning to Sidney who was on the bottom step directing people up.

  ‘I wouldn’t hear of it,’ he said.

  ‘Chrissake relax, we haven’t beaten you yet,’ Bobby said. She went on climbing but was not happy about it, any more.

  Chapter Ten

  ‘LISTEN FELLAS WE DON’T have to turn it into a wake,’ Jason said when they were all in. Some of the men said, ‘Quite right,’ and Sidney said a drink wouldn’t be a bad idea. When he rang, white-coated waiters came in from the shadows of the hall. The elder women grouped together comparing what they had seen of the accident and one of the oriental girls sat on a chair that tipped back when she sat, so that she appeared to be floating. Her long brown legs stretched out in front of her. The homosexuals took down a book of illustrations that they’d obviously been engrossed in before they went out because there was a fairly fresh blue delphinium as a bookmark. They were coloured drawings of diseased parts of the human body. She saw a warty breast discharging pus and looked to see their responses. Their faces were quite calm and they took turns in moving the pages. Their prisoned hands were out of sight under the table. She moved away and hid her bag behind a chair – a habit from her young days when she went to dance halls in Ireland and hid the purse that contained her cloakroom ticket, her rosary beads and perhaps a shilling.

  ‘It’s beautiful,’ she said to Sidney as he stood there waiting for her to say something about his house. It was an enormous room, a garden really, with the heavens as a roof and for walls a serration of trees that stooped harmoniously towards the sea several hundred feet below. Lights nesting in the trees were softened by the lantern of leaves and there were mirrors in the loops of branches to multiply those lights. Wooden and stone busts rose like ogres out of some trees and in the spacious darkness everyone seemed enhanced. So different from the place they’d left. The long refectory table was being laid at that hour.

  ‘Make yourself at home,’ Sidney said.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said.

  She looked around for Bobby. He was describing a scene to an elderly woman. It was obviously a scene where he came in and was shot in the belly straight away because he was staggering as he acted it. The woman, who had white cotton hair and an old rouged face, looked as if she was being made love to. And he was smiling. Soft and lovely now with the green forest light upon him.

  ‘Taste this,’ Sidney said as her eyes wandered.

  She sipped a colourless liquor that was made from coconut. Sweet on her tongue, it quickly turned to fire as it caught her throat.

  She gasped, smiled, took another sip and gasped again.

  ‘In Russia,’ she said, ‘there is a verb, created for what I am doing, a special verb for the special sigh…’

  ‘You’re full of shit,’ Denise said, overhearing the latter half of the sentence.

  ‘My lungs are on fire,’ Ellen said to Sidney, ignoring Denise. Sidney said he was already six months younger and drew her across to the table so that they could inspect the food which had just been brought.

  ‘Isn’t that precious?’

  ‘And look at the butter, he’s crazy, that cook.’

  A mound of butter had been patted into the shape of the house, with a wide door, big downstairs windows and turret windows along the top. Sidney was very pleased.

  ‘He’s a good boy, Antonio,’ he said then, and someone said wasn’t it true that no matter how late Sidney stayed out Antonio waited at the hall door to receive him.

  ‘Slavery,’ Ellen said under her breath. The story was both sad and loving. She remembered then that a middle-aged man in a white coat had been at the door when they drove up. He was standing there rubbing his hands together, but he disappeared as they got out.

  ‘ Eat, eat,’ Sidney said, touching her elbow. She moved away.

  There was a vast choice. Thick red soup had been brought in individual dishes, with blobs of sour cream on some. There was an enormous salmon, its skin the bright silver it must have been when hauled out of a river in Scotland, and the peaches were peeled of their cloth-like skins and purposely bruised so that the kirsch could soak through them. She loved the smell of kirsch and bent down to inhale it with both nostrils. She had soup first. It was thick as jelly and thrillingly cold. The look of the salmon disturbed her. She thought of them again, rivers, damp soil, hanging their wet socks on a branch to dry, the tent in a shady place, the special lyric purity of everything he did, even of the type of holiday he chose for the child.

  ‘Have a peach,’ Bobby said as he came across and searched her face for the cause of its sudden despondency.

  ‘I want you to send me one of your white peaches,’ she said, sucking a yellow one out of his hand. He had a spoonful of the kirsch too which he brought to her lips and coaxed her to drink, like a mother offering medicine to a favourite child.

  ‘They don’t travel, ma’am,’ he said and paused, his eyes roaming over her face. ‘But I’ll take you there, how about that?’

  ‘To an orchard,’ she said, hanging on his promise.

  ‘Don’t be greedy,’ he said, but in a nice way as he began to describe the place in New England where the peaches grew. She could see them, large and fleshy-white and hear the squelch they made in the ear as you pressed them. But she was thinking really of little white berries that grew along hedges in Ireland, with which they used to frighten each other at school, by suddenly bursting them in some unsuspecting ear. He brought her inside his
world, with his low voice, and his habit of saying ‘Ma’am’, and his face and his thin, hard, electric body that never rested. He had been all over. Rocky Mountains. Peru. Mexico. And in fights. He worked on a chain gang at sixteen. Drunk weeks. Sober weeks. And had muscle.

  ‘Feel that,’ he said as she touched the top of his arm and felt the caged strength and said, ‘Iron,’ looking into the green of his eyes and thinking again that they had the light, lucid green of the whey of the milk. The muscle seemed to grow in her grasp. He was sweet and childish. All that and white peaches.

  ‘Fall backwards,’ he said when she let go of his arm.

  ‘I can’t,’ she said, ‘I have no co-ordination.’

  ‘Damn right you haven’t,’ he said, ‘but I’ll teach you.’

  Then he spread his hand out and the quickness and deftness of that spread was like an eagle opening its wings, although she knew about eagles only from hearsay. He had the fingers apart, roughly the same distance between each one and the palm slightly hollowed to receive her fall.

  ‘Come on,’ he said, and with the other hand pushed her back a little, but when she sloped back she was like a rod that would not bend.

  ‘Trust me,’ he said; gently now so that she forgot the tough talk and the fights and drunk weeks. She fell but not naturally and he said, ‘Great,’ to give her encouragement for the next fall. He stood behind her, moving a little farther away at each new fall so that she was taking greater and greater risks. They did not say a word. Each time he caught her surely and beautifully and she loved the certainty of his hand and would stay like that for longer than was necessary, half-way towards the floor, her weight resting on him. And never once did he squeeze her neck or flirt with her but she knew he was making love to her all the same.

  In her lovely girl’s phase now she smiled slyly and made assignation with him and thought, ‘I have white thighs, long arms, a face, teeth, knees, hip bones, a curving belly and the tuft of silken hair that all men want to comb through, and I won’t let anyone else take him for this night’s pleasure,’ and she said, ‘I want to tell you a story.’

  ‘I wish you would,’ he said and linking her now he drew her over to the balustrade that faced the tropical garden as it ran down to the sea. She thought frantically of what story might amuse him, and tipping the last of the kirsch from the saucer fed it to him from the spoon and put her foot on his instep curling her toes around his, unfolding a story:

  ‘It is a long-legged bird in Ireland that lives alone near a lake. It eats raw fish all the time and shits it out straight away and sometimes gets so tired of eating and shitting and shitting and eating that it puts its behind on a stone and stays there to let the stone hold the fish in. A fisherman watched it for hours sitting on the stone and the minute it stood up…’

  He laughed quickly and said what a fine girl he’d met and they were really laughing and really happy.

  ‘It’s over here, it’s all happening over here,’ Denise said behind them.

  ‘Come on now, none of this sneaky laughing.’ Jason came between them and parted them with a breast stroke.

  ‘God that’s funny,’ Bobby said and told everyone how funny it was and she had to tell it again except that it was not funny the second time and when she’d finished she said, ‘It’s just a little . . . story,’ and drew away.

  Sidney followed her into the garden, down the steep steps towards the sea. So many steps it was dizzying. She couldn’t descend naturally. She kept using the same foot – the right one – all the time the way she did in a cinema if she came in and the picture was on.

  ‘Take your shoes off,’ he said, ‘and I’ll carry them.’ He carried them by their sling-back straps. Gold they were and like little lamps in his hand, hanging down.

  ‘It was a nice story,’ he said.

  ‘I’ve never walked barefoot before,’ she said, truly surprised that the pine needles were needly.

  ‘They should be carpet-soft,’ she said.

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘they should not,’ and they both thought of a song about ‘Where is the chicken that has no bone’, and they hummed it lightly, to themselves, but for each other, as they went down the steps towards the sea, purposeful.

  He brushed the marble seat with his handkerchief before she sat and sitting she found it cold and sobering and imagined it would be like that to sit on a glacier. By now she had reconciled herself to the fact that he would want to kiss her, but she did not mind that because she knew that Bobby was there and the night would not be desolate. All her outings and hopes were veered towards being with a certain kind of man that controlled and bewitched her. Bobby was such a man.

  The sea was busy, the waves moving in a frantic way as if mirrors were held creating mad disturbances.

  ‘What does the sea remind you of?’ she asked, in order to postpone the kiss.

  ‘Nothing, just itself. What about you?’

  ‘Thoughts,’ she said, and hoped it did not sound pretentious, because it was true. Thoughts batting in and out of her head. She had seen no birds and no bats since she came.

  ‘Like what?’ he said. He had trained himself to listen.

  ‘Oh everything,’ she said, wishing she had never started on it. She could see her son’s face now with blackcurrant jam all over his mouth and his eyes liquefying at the prospect of a new pot of jam.

  ‘Tell me some of them,’ he said, ‘I’m really a dull chap.’

  ‘We’re all that,’ she said. She wanted to grow grey and decline under his eyes so that he would not ask for anything.

  ‘You’re not dull,’ he said. ‘You have the strength of aeons.’

  ‘Is that a quote?’ she said.

  ‘I’m sure it is, everything I say is a quote; even when I say movies are better than ever…’

  ‘Tell you a nicer quote,’ she said, placing her hand prayer-wise over his, ‘It’s about a bird, and it says, “Oh beautiful bird you fly so well no one would know you have but one wing, and you will never make the forest.”’

  ‘Wait a minute,’ he said, ‘I must catch up. Single syllables for years,’ and he then mimicked his own voice, saying, ‘No,’ and ‘No, no, listen, Charlie, I wouldn’t spring a deal like that on you…You know me, Charlie.’

  She thought of his money and wondered how great the sacrifice had been and how many people he had killed along the way. Yellow all around, the lemons in the trees like lobes of light, the odd lit bulb, and his face yellow like parchment, from age. His blue eyes were not dead but were something worse. They had the sick look of eyes that were wounded and for whom death would be a relief. Did he look at the illustrations too and reflect upon disease, taking pleasure in it as only the maimed can? Except that he was so sad.

  ‘You wanted to kiss me,’ she said. ‘Well you can do it now.’ And she closed her own eyes and sank back a little and offered it up. Her mouth. He’d put breath-odour on because he smelt not of food and kirsch but faintly of something from a chemist’s.

  ‘I can’t tell you,’ he said, when he released her, ‘what this means to me.’ The kiss was clumsy.

  ‘But you have girls,’ she said, ‘reclining right now on your floataway chairs.’

  ‘They’re for ornament,’ he said, ‘I don’t sleep with them. They’re just dolls…’

  ‘ I’m a doll,’ she said, and felt her stomach grow hollow with terror. She made a move by reaching down to grope for her sandals. He saw it at once and rose with her and offered his arm courteously as a balancer while she slipped the sandals on. He would not insist. She was warm and generous again. The minute she thought he wanted nothing she was able to flower, but if he reached out she closed and hardened.

  ‘And you were married?’ he said. Her third finger still bore the trace of the ring and had a small bruise where the ring had rubbed against it. They walked back in another direction so that she could see another part of the garden and inhale new smells. A white misty flower spread and sprawled over the rockery and gave a smell that she wou
ld always think of, rightly or wrongly, as the smell of orange flower. It was strong and sweet and so pervasive that it seemed as if the flower itself must do the merciful act of watering and rain sweet perfume on the dry stone and the dry, cracked, beseeching earth. The earth was thirsty because it was against the law to leave hoses on for very long.

  ‘We were all married,’ she said, slightly bitter. ‘It’s a habit.’

  ‘I did it three times,’ he said, as if he was congratulating himself.

  ‘Do you remember any of them?’ she said.

  ‘I remember the first, she was a scientist,’ and then corrected himself, ‘a sexy scientist, mind you.’

  ‘And what about her?’

  ‘Well, her problem was that she hated organizing family life, so, I decided we’d have a conference every morning after breakfast, and discuss the day’s menu and who would collect the children…’

  He talked slowly and thoughtfully and he lost her attention quite early on. She’d wanted something special, some moment culled and delivered from all the gross hours of menu and money and daily cares.

  ‘Now my second wife,’ he said, ‘turned jnto a nymphomaniac’

  ‘That’s tragic,’ she said but in an amused voice. They were on the last flight of stairs that led to the garden and she hurried on ahead, her hand trailing behind clasped in his, but all the rest of her fleeing.

  ‘I shot her,’ he said in a quiet, flat tone.

  ‘Jesus,’ she said.

  ‘By accident,’ he said.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘No wonder you’re dead,’ she thought, and took the last three steps in one bound.