The Woodcutter and his Family
Page 13
If he did, no one was saying, and neither was he. There were, as always, rumours, but we had learned not to credit them. Weren’t there enough spread about ourselves and not a glimmer of truth to be found in any? We were reputed to be master brewers, our beer exclusively served to the gentry, but all we did was drink the stuff in such copious quantities that had we the licence to make it, I do swear we might be the richest family in the land. No, we learned to swallow tall stories with a large packet of Saxa salt. Take the one about the witch who was supposed to have stolen him to be her husband, while he was innocently planting bluebells in a convent garden. Her ugliness was said to have put him under a trance, her face as pitted as if it had been carved from honeycomb or from red spuds, and she had a wart as big as a pear on her nose. To add insult to injury, it was claimed she had three nipples, but I’ll stop there and ask the only question that needs answering, was he a husband in the first place? One pretty girl smirked, who would take him? As far as such a suitor was concerned, she had her hand safely glued to her ha’penny.
Then there came an evening, long and bright, when the word emerged that he was, as they say, spoken for. I can no more give you the exact time and place where he made this revelation than I can identify the smart arse who had the brilliant idea of slipping a sup of Bushmills into the scalding sweet tea he liked to down in one go, priding himself on the power of his swallow.
The woodcutter tasted nothing strange, and he was too innocent a creature to realise what change had crept upon him. Well, this drop of the jar, didn’t it loosen his tongue – loosen it a little, but enough to make sure the craic would be ninety if you could get this geezer more ancient than Noah’s Ark to wheeze out every secret buried in his bones and blood and spill the beans about himself since – who knows? – there might be a bob or two hidden where he nested, not trusting banks nor shares, or what have you. Thus it came to pass one morning in July, the sun beating down, splitting the stones, the ould fellow’s throat dry as a Welsh dresser, his tea was so strongly laced he was more than three sheets to the wind and though not quite drunk as a skunk, didn’t he tell the nosy parker of a neighbour indeed he was married, and it was to the forest.
When the world and its wife caught wind of this piece of news, glee and merriment at the poor fool’s expense were the order of the day. There were some who sympathised, though. For years it was believed among a few who had carpenters in the family that working with timber, in some cases, it could perplex the brain. Coarser folk wondered if he might be suffering from splinters stuck in a most tender part of his anatomy, acquired when he was on the job with a sycamore? Another wag expressed his opinion no chair nor table in any house would be safe from his amorous intentions. A third revealed he was quite determined to make an honest woman out of a garden gate that had been in his possession for years, swinging to and fro, it was time to stop her gallop and stand by her at the altar. A local clergyman got wind of this threat, and the following week preached a sermon denouncing the end of marriage and civilised family life, if such perversities as this proposed alliance between a man and a piece of garden furniture were allowed. There would be no chance of such an outrage occurring in his church, he assured his parishioners, many of whom shifted uncomfortably in their pews, betraying perhaps the beginnings of bad thoughts that, without the priest’s assistance, might never have troubled them.
For some reason, the young took a particular pity on the woodcutter. One girl left a note pinned to a tree in a pink envelope she got in a Christmas stationery set, warning him of this mission to discredit him. He never got it. If he did, he gave no sign, not even bidding her the time of day, passing her. So she soon forgot about him, a stranger who was married to a forest.
It was true though, for among his kith and kin, this was the done thing. A custom in which his breed believed, a breed where boys could take up to nine years – years, I said – before they were fit and ready to leave the womb and leap, weeping, into the arms of their utterly exhausted mothers. These poor women suffered from no maternal deficiencies, but can you blame them if they were utterly delighted, certainly putting up no resistance, when the male infants were left to shelter under and indeed suckle from a chosen tree – silver birch or oak, larch or elm, willow tree and rowan? From this solid presence in the soil stretching to infinity down its trunk and its roots buried securely under the ground, the male child drew strength, as you would from father or mother.
He must revere the tree. Worship it even. Never let harm come upon its head. Pray to it, if he was of a mind to imagine prayers could be heard. Defend it – be its champion, its warrior, whatever the elements of the earth or the waves of the sea might hurl against it. For many years, if necessary, he must prove his mettle doing this. Then would come the terrible test – the ordeal he must endure without complaint. From all the trees waiting in the forest for the killer blow, the one he lay under, the chosen branches, that must be the first one he would fell, weeping that it was no more, slain by his cruel hand, both patricide and matricide.
For such an act of unspeakable, inexplicable violence, there would be only one punishment. He must prostrate himself before the whole forest and all the creatures living within it. Begging mercy, he would let the trees whom he had defiled choose a bride for him. They left him to wait the customary period of a year and a day – if he made his mother wait nine years in the womb, he can bloody wait for us, they figured – until he heard their voices whisper through the leaves where he would find her. She was waiting under the chopped branches of that tree now fallen but sacred to his destiny.
Were she asleep, under no circumstances was he to waken her, on pain of death, with a kiss. Linger instead for her eyes to open. He found her precisely where she was meant to be found. Her lids remained closed for what seemed eternity. Yet they did reveal themselves, and he asked her what her wedding gift should be. She greeted this request with silence. Still, he could hear the music of the forest, played through the mouths of its inhabitants, flesh, fish and fowl. Their song was low, but quite distinct. It seemed to carry within all the refrains and burdens, the ballads and rhythms of his life and its sorrows, illuminating him with their depth and number, more than he had ever confronted, bringing no peace but something else past understanding, making his lips move, yet neither word nor melody emitted from them, only a desire to do as she would have him. She read that in his face and then responded to him. She said, I want a city – build me a city.
What kind of city? A city more secretive than Ur of the Chaldees, she responded, with its shrieks of human sacrifice, tearing the heart out of a body made to listen to that suffering, longing for Abraham, our father, to heal it and make terror go away. A city more storied than Illium and all the towers of Troy, falling on its womenfolk now enslaved by Greeks, stilling the troubled mind of Queen Hecuba, broken by great pain, searching for her Priam, howling like a mad dog who has lost her pups, drowned before her eyes, yelping for their mother, swearing vengeance. A city more delicate than Kyoto, its temples cut from rice paper, its streets a swarm of flowers left before its pagodas, requesting the Shintu gods to spare Japan and all its islands, to bless the divine wind that will protect its ships and sailors from the vengeance of eagles and the bolts of lightning, lightning that is itself the gift of those same divinities, their blessings, which will destroy as much as they will desecrate all who worship. A city more dirty than Dublin, if that’s all you can rise to. But for Christ’s sake, spare us Cork and all its environs. Do that at least for me, she pleaded.
Then he wondered, where shall I build it? In the forest – out of the forest, she ordered. And he obeyed.
He did construct for her a palace of great beauty and awe, crafting his skill with miraculous speed, since only when it was complete would she lie with him. He did not question her insistence nor fear her reluctance, but he did wonder what she was getting up to all day when she would disappear from his sight. He determined to find out and, when he asked, received the answer she was lea
rning the language of the forest, its multitudes of grammars, its skeletons of syntax, its teeming womb of metaphors and similes, the ins and outs of irony, the lies of ambiguity, preparing herself for the day she would pass on such excellent knowledge to their young, as if what she acquired by instinct would transform itself into their intelligence.
Then it was ready, this glorious site. Soon she gave birth to sons and daughters that they might go forth and multiply to populate the gold dwellings and silver dens of splendid iniquity in this land. She had instilled in each of her young the value of frugal necessity and thrift, but they paid little heed, preferring to avail of their father’s plenty. They praised to the skies the beauty and daring of his handiwork. This pleased him, as it did beyond measure his wife, reigning here jointly with him in this, their paradise, which, in their contentment, she had bestowed on their brood of sturdy lads and comely maidens. They wasted all they owned, but they did love their father, the woodcutter. Well, they loved him for a time. Then they grew sick in their souls of the smell of timber.
When can we leave here? his eldest son demanded one day. I am tired of this place. Where else is there, his daughters longed to know, that we may see more marvels? How long must you cage us? They clamoured to discover what he would answer. And it did not stop, morning, noon nor night, wanting to be clear from home, as if they were bound by chains cut from beaten gold, or their fetters were carved from gorgeous ivory. They had wearied of the forest and all it could provide for them, merely by asking, and all was fetched immediately for their delight.
But nothing did delight in the end. Their desires turned now to creatures of the forest, breeding with them, giving birth to centaurs and to satyrs, gentle beings whom their human parents disowned, loved only by the goats and horses that knew them as their own, forgiving the filthy strain that linked them to our species, we who cursed them for resembling ourselves in their imperfect shape. And so the heartless sons and daughters grew more and more discontent.
How long, they repeated, how long are we to be held here? When will we shake the dust of this place from the soles of our feet?
When we die, their parents smiled.
And after that, what shall we do? And when will you–
Die? When you leave us.
Did that satisfy them? It was said not. A son, in the business of worshipping fire, devised rites and rituals that might empower him, should any believe him capable of unleashing chaos. Perhaps he did succeed – one night lightning struck the stump of that tree where beneath its broken branches the mother once dozed, waiting to be awakened by their father.
Was it the eldest son? The very same, many swear. From its ashes he’d learned the mysteries of fire. He even went so far as to believe as an infant he’d sprung intact from within a burning bush. Nobody took the trouble to dissuade him. Anyway, all he did was breathe carefully upon a pile of cinders, let the sparks mesh, and then relish the flames now ascending, blazing the city in the forest.
Thus was his father’s, the woodcutter’s, handiwork turned to red dust. His mother’s happiness broke like sticks of furniture, hurled from the windows of an ancient house, dying with shame, burning to rags and fragments of bone his sisters and brothers. This oldest son, he threw himself on a funeral pyre of his own making, crying for his mother’s hand, holding it as they leapt together, cursing every ancestor that charmed them into living, leaving his father to grieve alone.
The forest buried their remains. It forgot them. It returned to its first shape.
The father banished himself. Yet it was he chose to work as a woodcutter near that very spot of great destruction. He remembered all those, who, if they had been spared, would ask him all these questions. Who was who? Where do we come from? Why be here, slaving all the hours sent to you, drinking tea with sugar, dining on bread too fancy for our like, dreaming of our family and they all consumed by – consumed by what? Was it fire?
Fire.
My father, fire?
Fire, Father.
About the Author
Frank McGuinness is Professor of Creative Writing at University College Dublin. A world-renowned, award-winning playwright, his first great stage hit was the highly acclaimed Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme. His other plays include The Factory Girls, Innocence, Carthaginians, Mary and Lizzie, The Bread Man, The Bird Sanctuary, Mutabilitie, Someone Who’ll Watch over Me, Dolly West’s Kitchen, Gates of Gold, Speaking Like Magpies, There Came a Gypsy Riding, Greta Garbo Came to Donegal, Crocodile, The Match Box, The Hanging Gardens, and a musical play Donegal (with music by Kevin Doherty). Adaptations of classic plays include Lorca’s Yerma; Chekhov’s Three Sisters and Uncle Vanya; Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera and The Caucasian Chalk Circle; Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, A Doll’s House, Peer Gynt, The Lady from the Sea, John Gabriel Borkman, Ghosts, The Wild Duck and Rosmersholm; Sophocles’ Electra, Oedipus and Thebans; Ostrovsky’s The Storm; Strindberg’s Miss Julie; Euripides’ Hecuba and Helen; Racine’s Phaedra; Molina’s Damned by Despair; and dramatisations of James Joyce’s The Dead and Du Maurier’s Rebecca. Television screenplays include Scout, The Hen House, Talk of Angels, Dancing at Lughnasa, A Short Stay in Switzerland and A Song for Jenny.
Awards include:
London Evening Standard Award for Most Promising Playwright, Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, Harvey’s Best Play Award, Cheltenham Literary Prize Plays and Players Award, Ewart-Biggs Memorial Prize, London Fringe Award, New York Critics’ Circle Award, Writers’ Guild Award for Best Play, Best Revival Tony Award, Outer Critics’ Award, Prix de l’Intervision and Prix de l’Art Critique at the Prague International Television Awards.
His first novel, Arimathea, was published by Brandon/The O’Brien Press in 2013.
About Arimathea,
also by Frank McGuinness
‘[I]nvested with weighty, parable-like intensity.’
— Times Literary Supplement
‘A work of passion and truth, in which imaginative daring is matched by deep psychological insight.’
— Declan Kiberd
‘[A] powerful, passionate novel … quirky, authentic, often humorous voices.’
— Books Ireland
‘[A] distinctively Irish book … echoes of Joyce.’
— The Irish Times
Copyright
This eBook edition first published 2017 by Brandon,
an imprint of The O’Brien Press Ltd,
12 Terenure Road East, Rathgar,
Dublin 6, D06 HD27, Ireland
Tel: +353 1 4923333; Fax: +353 1 4922777
Email: books@obrien.ie
Website: www.obrien.ie
The O’Brien Press is a member of Publishing Ireland.
First published 2017
ISBN: 978–1–84717–989–0
Text © Frank McGuinness 2017
Typesetting, layout, editing, design © The O’Brien Press Ltd
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or utilised in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or in any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
A NOTE ON THE COVER
When I was approaching the cover of The Woodcutter and His Family, I had in mind the bridge, as it were, that James Joyce’s work now is, between an older literary tradition and a new one, and found we were immediately presented with the chance to do something letterpress-inspired. And so I decided to mix a serif (Caslon) with a sans serif (Frutiger) wooden-cut typeface. The serif represents traditional letterform and the sans signals a modernist typeface. The work was carried out in The Print Museum, Dublin, in May 2017 with the assistance of Mary Plunkett and Declan Behan. The concept, coupled with different printing processes, gives a special resonance to the imagery.
Emma Byrne, designer