The Woodcutter and his Family

by Frank McGuinness

  Not a sound. Not a sausage. Not a rasher nor an egg. Christ, the breakfasts the hard-working men of Galway could demolish. Boys fit for a day’s work weaklings would take a fortnight to finish. They were carved from marble, and their hearts – they were the flowers of the forest, beating to their own music, ceasing when they chose to stop. My most beloved, you are among their number. Let me feed you a last time, before you leave me. Do not leave me – I beg you, do not leave me. I will do whatever you ask to keep you by my side. I will free my son to be his own man. I will love my daughter, let her be what she is. Father, remember your children who need you. Husband, heed the wife who cries to you in this valley of tears, my life, my sweetness, my hope, most clement, most loving child of Adam and Eve.

  What more does he want?

  It goes without saying. Her, his daughter.

  Let her loose. From far away in France, he will hear what she says. Fit her better it was the Rosary or her prayers she was reciting, but who am I to talk, I never let her learn them.

  Again, all for him.

  Let them be well suited. I could never come between them, try as I might. They can have each other now. And maybe she can do what I admit I cannot.

  Save him.

  Chapter Three

  Daughter

  Beatrice

  Ivar, France

  My mother will visit me soon, I expect. She is a tennis champion, and this time of year, summer, she will be chasing one tournament after another, I expect. I have no interest in the game where she has made such a name for herself, so our conversation will, as it always has been – it will be limited, I expect. Yes, her diary is full, with commitments to travel and to play and to stay in expensive, well-run hotels, hundreds of servants attending to her every need, all very necessary for her continued well-being, I expect. My father indulges his wife, as only a rich husband could afford, I expect. Her dresses, both on and off the court, are beautifully made and fabulously expensive, costing more than a year of a doctor’s salary, certainly doctors who are unlucky enough to find themselves working in this establishment, I expect. Anyway, Mama is a woman who enjoys being spoilt, and father enjoys spoiling her, so she would be, as he would be, furious to hear me even hint of her extravagance, I expect. She has simply never learned the value of money, and she never will now, I expect.

  There is something odd about all I’m telling you, in strictest confidence of course. Have you noticed? I’m certain you have, I’m sure you are sharp as a knife. You are remarking on how sure I am this is summertime, and if it is so, why am I stuck in a room? It is a room, isn’t it? And I live in a hotel, don’t I?

  A hotel that is not quite so grand compared to where my mother lodges on her travels through Europe, but I am, as always, content with my lot and do not envy her a life of wandering from one capital to another, eating, sleeping, causing riot and havoc, blasting tennis balls to kingdom come if that should help her triumph in the games she plays, rounding up innocent and guilty to come and watch as she decrees they should, applauding, cheering when they’re told, the mob obeying as she demands they do. As far away as I am in rural France, I can see here the havoc she creates when she decides to visit and destroy wherever her heart’s desire leads her. A noisy woman, a strange woman indeed, but not a dancer. Dear me, no.

  That was the first thing my teacher observed about her and told me immediately. Mama overheard and was furious. She went into quite a frenzy, as could be her wont. I had seen her in a temper before – hadn’t we all? But this was of an exceptional violence.

  My instructor, a frail lady, who now walked only by aid of a cane, was clearly in fear of her life and really had to defend herself as best she could with that cane against my mother’s pushing and kicking, while screaming blue murder in a language I did not know, nor could I make any effort to have her calm down until an idea struck me. I might turn on Mama with all the ferocity she herself was summoning from whatever source inside her and I should direct these exertions towards her so that, physically, she could concentrate her attack on someone other than the old ballerina.

  It worked, but here’s the weird thing. As she lashed out against me, people came running to her defence, holding me back, and when they succeeded in doing so, from their behaviour towards me, I was regarded as the sole villain of the piece, mauling my mother, her brutal assault on a woman who was herself a fragile remnant from an earlier age, that was quite forgotten, and when I looked to this delicate soul for confirmation of what had happened and that I was only doing my best to protect her, hadn’t she vanished into thinnest air, leaving me without a witness to testify why I’d had to stoop to these impetuous blows and put an end to Mama’s antics?

  She was clever enough to deny all to my father and brother, so they were suspicious of me, suggesting that maybe I should stop going to these classes as they might be exhausting and making me conduct myself in such outlandish fashion as they now accused me of behaving.

  What would you have me do then for exercise? I challenged her, play tennis like you? Like me? What are you talking about? she dared ask.

  You well know what. I let her understand she was not to take me for a fool, the whole world is aware that tennis is how you’ve chosen to waste your life – neglecting us, your children, discarding the needs of my father, all to satisfy your vanity and be acclaimed for your athletic brilliance on the courts.

  The tennis courts? I heard her repeating, where I have never set foot in my entire life. I can no longer deal with this, I cannot take this insanity a moment longer, if your father will not confront it and do what must be done, Archie, will you take charge and save your sister’s life, and spare what’s left of your mother’s sanity? I swear it is running out, second by second, as we speak. Did you hear what she says about me – a tennis champion? Where under Jesus does she get these notions from? There’s only one source, and he’s there sitting on a chair, listening to all this, and I swear he’s smiling. What’s there to smile at? What’s the fun in this? How can you laugh at your mad daughter?

  I would not give Mama the satisfaction of proving her right by lifting the nearest object and hurling it hard in her direction, although you would agree her outburst sorely tempted me to do so. But like my father, I am a creature of graceful restraint, and so I merely smiled and nodded in his direction. She does this to infuriate me, my mother said, they both do, sending secret signals, one to the other, but I will not give in to the temptation they put before me. I will ignore them, as they deserve.

  I’m smiling because it amuses me how our daughter sometimes can access my dreams, Father explained, and this tennis – anchoring you to a tennis court, seeing you there, well, it’s as if we have stumbled on the same connection, for you, my dear, have often come to me in my sleep as the great French player, Suzanne Lenglen, La Divine. You are where our daughter’s agility, her speed, her flamboyance come from, and no mistake.

  La Divine? That is who you think I am? No, I don’t think so, she said, not that, not in dreams, but in reality a laugh, a mockery, a dirty great Galway sow, fit only to be prodded and poked by you pair that see me as being there for your ridicule and a good time had by all who came to the party to jeer. Are you proud of yourselves? Proud? he repeated. Are you happy that all your brains let you do is sneer at me, a woman who’s done neither of you any wrong? Suzanne Lenglen, is that what you make of me? she asked, but they did not reply.

  A woman too busy showing her legs, Mama continued, and her arse to the nations of the world to be considered as anything other than a word I won’t stain my soul using, since in this family there are too many souls – well, there’s certainly one – stinking to high heaven, looking for punishment to be rained down on his head and the heads of any tragic enough to call him their own. Laugh on, laugh on, it will soon be on the other side of your face.

  She was very upset, my mother. There would be no denying that.

  Perhaps that is why she has not yet paid me a visit. But she will come soon. I am certain
she has not forgotten me. She prides herself that we both have ferocious memories. And my brother, he can recall, he claims, the day he was born. That, you know, is an affliction to bear as much as forgetfulness.

  I was married once, or nearly so, to an Irishman, a Dubliner, and he too was stricken with the plague of seeing everything, hearing everything, tasting – touching – smelling everything. What became of him? I wonder. Does he ask ever, What became of her? Her, me – what is the difference? This, he told me, was the kind of question he most liked to pose, but I could tell what he really desired, and that was to see me piss.

  I declined to satisfy this proclivity, but not without much persuasion from this gentleman that this was a habit customary in his neck of the woods. You mean, I asked, in Dublin men are inclined to spy on ladies relieving themselves in what they imagine to be the privacy of their bathroom, but which are in fact more open to the world than the most squalid pissoirs? No, not through the whole of Dublin, but in certain suburbs it is the fashion, he assured me, most especially his own, Foxrock, a highly desirable quarter that houses some of the best families associated with the Church of Ireland or the Royal Bank, architects and dentists also being most welcome within this salubrious vicinity.

  Someday I must take you there, he suggested, but I declined firmly, and none too politely.

  Do I strike you as the kind of woman who might indulge another’s perversions? I asked. He defended himself from any such charge of indecency, claiming a fascination with the urinary tracts of females was a winning aspect of any normal man who liked his fair share of female flesh sourly scented with her own waste material.

  Call me old-fashioned and a tad too attuned to the riddles of the Irish, but I could see clearly enough where this paradox was leading, and I was determined to halt the conversation between us. I do not care for normal men then, if that is how they court the opposite sex, I retorted, give me a pervert – or a pervert in your eyes anyway – on all romantic occasions. I shall bear that in mind, he informed me. Do, I encouraged him, and perhaps you might let the people of Foxrock reconsider what they judge to be decent behaviour as it is conducted between members of the opposite sex. There is no opposite sex in Foxrock, he let me know, there are only windows. Widows? I asked him, only widows? Has there been a war, or some epidemic, that only carried off the male of the species? I said. Windows, not widows, he instructed me, I made no mention of widows, though we have our fair share of them, and not one has ever been burned alive, to the best of my knowledge, but I could stand corrected, he admitted.

  Burned? The widows? I asked, who would encourage such barbarity? The Hindus have a form of ceremony that corresponds, he instructed me, I believe they call it suttee, but I hesitate to describe our ways in similar terms. Why? I wanted to know. I mistakenly thought, he admitted, it was Foxrock’s way of saluting its tribute to the British presence in India. So many of our residents held sway on that part of the Asian subcontinent. My childhood memories are replete with umbrellas of all shades standing desolately in a hollowed-out elephant’s foot. I used imagine the brollies come to life and charge through the princely residences of our village, goring my enemies to death with their powerful tusks, staining their ivory red. But this was simply not the case. There were other, less obvious reasons to fear fire in Foxrock.

  He enlightened me why. Something remarkably similar to suttee had happened a few years before he was born, so although he had no direct recollection of the event, it had caused sufficient scandal to be talked about, the pros and cons weighed, the right and wrong of the matter settled, or questioned, for years.

  He was reluctant to call the event by its Hindu name, for this self-consummation involved a woman, a Catholic, yes, but not a widow. No, this individual had prepared and set herself alight on her own funeral pyre. Her reasons for committing this apparently unhinged act were made quite clear in a letter she left behind to account for this more than a little bizarre exploit. She hated her husband, and this was her rather extreme way of being rid of him. He’d long been a disgrace to his own family, his father a quantity surveyor, and his mother, of saintly disposition, a nurse. Their son had travelled throughout Ireland, using the alias of the Sheik of Araby, to save bringing disrepute on the more rational members of his kith and kin. His act involved conjuring magic tricks. All the time he accompanied himself with mouth music that he claimed to have been taught to him in Arabia by a master of the Eastern Arts, calligraphy and falconry being his particular areas of expertise.

  No one ever saw the Sheik tame as much as a robin, so the latter practice had to be taken as assumed. His handwriting scrawled in so many directions a career as a schoolmaster was out of the question, but it may be such a style perfectly accommodated the beauties of the Arabic alphabet, maybe ever stretching to a proficiency in Egyptian hieroglyphics. Who can tell? Suffice to say a neighbour well-versed in the intricacies of Ireland’s hidden cultures identified the sounds emitted from the Sheik’s mouth while in a trance, performing his bag of tricks. They were ascertained to be nothing but a form of singing once common enough in the parts of the island where Gaelic is spoken and identified as sean-nós, meaning old style, providing much noise and little pleasure.

  Confronted with proof of his deception that he hailed from royal, oriental blood, that in short he had faked his name, his career and his art, the so-called Sheik of Araby declared it an outrage to have been so uncovered and humiliated, he would thus abandon Dublin and go to live in a cave near Athlone. His poor wife had endured much through her nomadic life with this reckless vagabond, but the threat of Athlone, and she knew whereof she spoke, provoked her into choosing a hideous death by self-immolation, welcoming the hungry flames licking her to hell, since suicide was a mortal sin.

  Yet was it suicide? The very fact she chose and conducted such an elaborate method of exterminating herself, well, did that not betoken a mind that made its decision in a detailed, perfectly logical fashion? Others argued passionately that the very violence of her exit was sign she had surely taken utter leave of her senses, and the poor dear must not be condemned for her own reckless execution. For God’s sake, pity her.

  That was the response, by and large, among the Protestant side of the tribe in Foxrock, but of course in Ireland, no matter where you point the finger, you’ll find the opposite view in some form or other to some degree, small or large, and in this case, as in so many, things were complicated by the fact the woman herself was Catholic. The long and the short of this all came down then to one deeply contested fact – not was she in her right mind when she set a match to the paraffin, but by writing that letter in her own hand, abandoning her spouse, was it divorce and not suicide she was seeking?

  Well, her people knew where they stood on that issue. And the consensus was total. The slut insulted the truth of her faith. No room for doubt. She was not to be forgiven. Not our way. And the populace agreed her ashes be denied burial in the waters of the River Liffey or any of its tributaries, or indeed the wide expanse of the Irish Sea itself. Let that be a lesson to all sinners who would defy the sacred oath of the marriage vows. The Sheik of Araby – he continued with the old, assumed name, out of grief – he was complaining he found himself at a serious loss as to what then to do with her remains. For pure convenience he’d kept the ashes in that elephant’s foot mentioned earlier, together with a circumference of umbrellas.

  What became of her dust, he couldn’t say for sure, but it was rumoured that when they built a Roman Catholic Church in Foxrock, her spirit haunted it, laughing uproariously at inappropriate moments of the Mass, particularly in funeral services.

  The stories of my lover’s youth were, more or less, all like this, obsessed with death and ghosts, and here’s another strange detail about them, if bloody parasols or brollies in general did not feature, then you can be quite assured ladders will. We had arranged to go out walking one afternoon, and then drink tea in a sweet little establishment my father had been asked to leave for insulting the honour o
f France by farting deliberately at the mere mention of Joan of Arc, claiming he heard voices in the explosion, whose they were he was not allowed to reveal at the behest of the Saviour. Out – out, the owners demanded. But he finished his tea, stole a saucer and did not pay the bill. Such nerve, that wonderful man. Will he come and visit me? This word he is dying, it’s lies. How can he be put in the earth, when he is the earth? Is that not what he has told me, in our secret way, and I have believed it to be gospel truth? Father, wake up, sing – sing ‘The Sheik of Araby’.

  I’m the Sheik of Araby,

  Your love belongs to me.

  At night when you’re asleep,

  Into your tent I’ll creep.

  The stars that shine above

  Will light our way to love.

  You rule the world with me,

  I’m the Sheik of Araby.

  When you’re asleep – sleep, sleep. Into your tent, I’ll creep – creep, creep. Wake up, father. I have to tell you this story, about your acolyte, about his habit of walking the streets of Paris hauling a ladder after him and why he does so. His answer surprised me. While some do like to bring their children or dogs, even their cats and lobsters, out for a stroll, he brought a ladder for the exercise of carrying it, and for the company of its conversation. Are you telling me two things? I inquired. First is it always the same ladder we are talking about? And if it is, secondly, do you regard this object as some sort of companion?

  He confirmed, yes, it was indeed identical, always the same one, but declined to be so definite as to why it was frequently in his presence. Companion – well, it sounded not quite right. Too intimate? Perhaps. And yet he had come to depend on this ladder as a comfort much as one would a beloved pet that stands close by in times of need. Do you have a particular reason for bringing it with us on the day that’s in it? I demanded to know. Yes, I do, he softly whispered, as a romantic gesture, I would like us to climb the Eiffel Tower.