An Irish Country Practice

by Patrick Taylor

  Donal frowned. “It’s a man’s duty til provide for his family, so it is.” O’Reilly, who now was scrubbing his hands, heard the sincerity in Donal’s voice. “I’d spent the thirty bob I’d won playing poker last week. The dosh went at the circus this afternoon.”

  O’Reilly dried his hands on the sterile towel. Some men, and Donal was one of them, couldn’t resist betting on things even if they were hard up. O’Reilly gave a fleeting thought to Ronald Fitzpatrick. Had he been behaving himself in that regard? He shook his head and pulled on the rubber gloves. O’Reilly couldn’t help but have a sneaking admiration for how the man before him now was trying to meet his obligations. Perhaps, he thought, it appeals to the not-so-well-hidden sense in your own soul that some laws were meant to be broken?

  He walked over to where Donal sat. “Shove your hand onto the table, Donal. Palm up.” To satisfy O’Reilly’s curiosity and to distract Donal from what initially was going to be uncomfortable, O’Reilly continued, “And while I’m working I want to hear the rest of your story. Now this will be cold and might sting a bit.” He used the syringe to spray a small amount of local onto the raw edges of the wound. It would numb the exposed flesh a little so the washing and actual deeper injections would be less painful. He’d learned the trick from Barry three years ago.

  Donal sucked his breath in and said, “Do you keep that stuff in the fridge, sir?”

  “Actually we do sometimes. We’ll give it a minute or two to work. Now, come on. What happened?”

  “I done a couple of stupid things.” Donal hung his head then looked up at O’Reilly. “I’d been out you-know-where doing a bit more ‘bird-watching’ last night. Feeding them whisky-soaked grain. Then I popped intil the Duck. Julie had given me a couple of bob for a pint.” Donal smiled. “She’s quare and smart about the housekeeping money.” There was pride in the man’s voice. “Anyroad, Dapper Frew was in, him single and it being Saturday night, so him and me was colloguing and he asked where I’d been. I should have told him, ‘A policeman wouldn’t ask you that,’ but did I tell him til mind his own business? No, I didn’t. I let slip, on the QT, like, what I was up til and where I’d been. I’d trust Dapper with my life, so I would.”

  “So would I,” O’Reilly said. “Sound man, Dapper. Now, Donal, I’m going to wash it with disinfectant. But go on.” O’Reilly bent to his work using the sponge holder loaded with Dettol to wipe away old clots. A small trickle of fresh blood started.

  “I don’t know if I’d been overheard, but Dapper whispers til me, ‘Donal, don’t look now, but see yer man Hubert Doran…’”

  O’Reilly muttered, “Gobshite,” under his breath, then said, “Hold your hand still. I’m going to put in the local. Go on.” He began to inject one lip of the cut with Xylocaine. “I didn’t think Doran went into the Duck much.”

  “I heard he’s been coming more often since that wee bit of trouble at borough council last month. Trying to get in folks’ good books again.”

  “Some chance,” O’Reilly said, starting on the other lip of the cut.

  “I kept staring ahead. Dapper says, ‘I know Doran and I hope he wasn’t listening til you. He’s a sleekit bugger. Always eavesdropping. Don’t you go out again tonight, Donal.’” He sucked in his breath. “I felt that one a bit, sir.”

  “Sorry. I’m all done freezing. It’ll only take a couple of minutes for the whole wound to go numb.” He laid the towel with the central hole over Donal’s palm so only the wound was accessible.

  “Fair enough. Anyroad, Julie’s parents are coming up from Rasharkin today and she wanted til give them something special for dinner. So I reckoned I’d chance it anyway.”

  O’Reilly nodded.

  Donal sighed. “That was my first mistake. I should have heeded Dapper.”

  “You should have,” O’Reilly said. He could picture Doran, who had been forced to resign from the borough council for lying. Was the man trying to rebuild his stock by being an upright citizen reporting a possible crime? If so, he was a sillier bugger than O’Reilly’d thought. You’d think an Irishman would know about the utter contempt in which informers were held in this country. More likely, he was getting back at Donal for the remarks he’d made at that fateful council meeting.

  “Tell me if you can feel that,” said O’Reilly, and jabbed the needle along the length of the edges of the wound.

  “Just a wee bit of pressure, sir. It’s all froze, so it is.”

  “Good,” said O’Reilly. “I’ll get the stitches in now.” He opened the packet of sutures swaged to curved needles and loaded the needle driver. “And what was your second mistake?”

  “I reckoned if—if Doran had tipped off the peeler, he’d probably be expecting me til get out there as soon as I left the pub. He’d need to set an ambush. I know how Malcolm Mulligan works. You’re dead on, Doc, he’s single-handed, he can’t stay in any one place for too long. He has his rounds til make.”

  O’Reilly took the first stitch and cut it short with the scissors. “Go on.”

  “I didn’t think he’d stay. So I went home, but out again to do the wee job after one in the morning.”

  O’Reilly clipped the second stitch and kept working. “Wasn’t the moon a bit bright? It’s full tonight.”

  “Bright as bloody day, but it wouldn’t matter if there was none there til see me.” Donal blew out his cheeks and expelled an exasperated breath. “More fool me. I’d just got my brace of birds and shoved them in my bag when up pops the bloody peeler from out of a fern thicket.” Donal hesitated. “Malcolm Mulligan’s a good head. He’s just doing his job. Anyroad, I took off like a liltie. I had my balaclava down and hoped I’d not been recognised. Your man came pounding after, yelling, ‘Come back here, you. You’re only making it worse for yourself.’”

  “That’s the last stitch, Donal,” O’Reilly said, and straightened up. He had a vivid image of a startled Donal, only his eyes showing from the eyeholes in his mask, slung bag bouncing on his hip, charging out of the wood and across the field, chasing his own moon shadow, breath burning in his chest, and the heavyset police constable in hot pursuit, boots pounding on the ground, arms pumping.

  “I’d have got to my bike, and maybe could have got away, but I got stuck in a barbed-wire fence, so I did. That’s where I cut my hand. And that’s where Malcolm got me. He hauled off my balaclava. Says he, ‘So it is yourself, Donal.’ He had to take another breath, then says he, ‘I hate til do this to you, Donal Donnelly, but I’m going til arrest you for taking game birds out of season.’ Then he saw my hand. ‘That’s not so good. Come on, we’ll get you fixed up first,’ and he brung me here.”

  “I see.” O’Reilly realised how difficult it must be for the policeman to arrest one of his neighbours, an out-of-work man with a family, for stealing a couple of birds. Malcolm was a humane man. O’Reilly removed the sterile towel and bandaged the hand. “All done,” he said.

  “Thank you, Doctor,” Donal said. “I don’t know what I’m going to tell Julie, so I don’t.”

  “The truth,” O’Reilly said. “She’s a very understanding lass, your Julie.” He stripped off his gloves into the pedal bin. Kinky’d tidy up in here tomorrow before surgery hours. “One last thing. I’ll have to give you a lockjaw jag.”

  Donal sighed. “I suppose if you must, you must.”

  The deed was swiftly done.

  “Now come on, Donal. I have to give you back to Malcolm.”

  “Fair enough, sir, and thanks for fixing me up.”

  “Here.” O’Reilly gave Donal a dozen Panadol. “Take one every six hours. It’s going to throb once the local wears off. And come back in a week. I’ll take your stitches out.” O’Reilly led Donal through to the dining room where Constable Mulligan was sitting on a chair reading. He leapt to his feet, thrusting Analog magazine, a science-fiction digest, into his tunic pocket. “All done, sir?”

  “He’s all yours, Officer.”

  Constable Mulligan’s voice was full of concern. �
��And are you all right, Donal?”

  “I’ll live.” He pointed at his torn trouser legs. “I’m not sure they will.” He shook his head. “What now?”

  “Doctor, you’ll agree that this here’s Donal Donnelly?”

  “To the life, Constable.”

  “Thank you.” He licked a pencil and scribbled in his notebook. “And, Donal, do you understand what I’m saying til you?”

  “Aye, certainly. Some might think I’m a stook short of a haystack, but I know fine what you’re about, so I do.”

  O’Reilly harrumphed and Constable Mulligan drew himself up to his full height. “Donal Donnelly, I arrest you under the Northern Ireland Game Preservation Act of 1928 for taking game birds, namely two cock pheasants, out of season. You have the right to remain silent but anything you say may be taken down in writing and used as evidence against you. Understand?”

  “Aye.”

  “Good.” Mulligan closed his notebook. “Right. I’m off til the station til write up my report. You’ll get a summons to appear at the petty sessions in Bangor Courthouse in about a month.” He turned to O’Reilly. “And you’ll be asked, sir, to come as witness to what happened here tonight. You are proof that Donal got all due process in his arrest”—he held out the game bag and opened the flap—“and that this here bag had two cock pheasants in it.” He closed the bag.

  “Fair enough.”

  “Can I go home now, Constable?” said Donal, a touch of the plaintive child in his voice.

  “Aye, certainly. I’ll release you on your own recognizances. That’s a promise that you’ll show up on the court date. You’ll not need bail.”

  “Thank God for that,” Donal said. “I’m away on home. Thanks for fixing me up, Doc, and it’s all right, Malcolm. No hard feelings.”

  O’Reilly was still chuckling as he turned out lights and made his way back to bed.

  “So,” said Kitty as he snuggled under the blankets, “saved another life?”

  O’Reilly grunted, then said, “Bloody Donal Donnelly got nicked pinching pheasants by PC Mulligan because that piece of human slime Hubert Doran grassed.”

  “Doran? Oh dear. Poor Donal.”

  “He’d cut his hand so I had to sew him up.” He moved closer to Kitty, enjoying her nearness, her warmth. “And I’ll have to go to court as a witness when the case comes up.”

  “Indeed you will, pet, but not tonight.” She yawned mightily, kissed his cheek, and said, her words already slurred, “It’s a God-awful hour and time for sleep.”

  19

  The White Sail’s Shaking

  “So, let’s get this yoke afloat, hey.” Jack Mills’s County Antrim accent was as thick as—Barry inhaled deeply—as thick as Sue’s father’s. Barry had slept little last night, had been tossing and awake when the bell rang in the small hours. He’d heard O’Reilly going downstairs but was surprised by how little curiosity he had for the event. He seemed to have no room in his head but for thoughts of Sue and his God-awful gaffe.

  Wearing a kapok life jacket over his yellow oilskins, Barry took hold of the starboard gunwale of Andy Jackson’s loaned GP14, Shearwater. Andy was visiting his family in Donaghadee this afternoon and had been happy for Barry to use her. “You right? Ready to go?” Barry asked.

  “Aye.” Jack, similarly clad, lifted the car-hitch end of the boat trailer and started to push. Strong as an ox, that man. The two rubber tyres bumped over the dinghy park and up onto a concrete ramp leading down into the waters of Ballyholme Bay.

  Barry walked alongside, steadying the little craft heading stern first for the water. He looked under the boom to his parents’ seafront three-storey house on the Ballyholme Esplanade and wondered what Mum and Dad would be up to today. He often dropped in on them when he was out this way, but today he didn’t have the heart for it, and his mother would have had the truth out of him in about five minutes. He walked straight into the rapidly deepening water. He wanted to get afloat and think of other things. Holding on to the gunwale as the dinghy floated free, he felt the wind on his cheeks, the salt-sea smell in his nostrils, and the chill on his legs up to his knees. I hope this will clear the cobwebs, he thought, help me to start thinking straight. When the time’s ripe, I’ll ask Jack’s advice. The already hoisted foresail flapped with a series of cracks in the stiff northeast breeze.

  In very short order, Jack had taken the trailer back and waded in on the port side. “Jaysus. That would freeze the balls off a brass monkey,” he said as he climbed into the boat’s cockpit, sat for’ard on the port-side bench, and grabbed a paddle.

  Barry clambered over to starboard, sat aft, took a paddle too, and together they worked the dinghy out stern first and away from the shore.

  Barry as skipper had to give no orders. He and Jack had sailed Barry’s old dinghy Tarka together for years when they’d been schoolboys, and Jack had come to Ballyholme for summer holidays. Their friendship went back to 1953. And today Barry needed a friend.

  In no time the little boat had turned and made enough distance from the ramp that Barry stopped worrying about being blown ashore. He put her head into the wind so Jack could hoist the mainsail and Barry could drop the centre-board, the dinghy’s retractable keel. Barry headed them out toward the waters of Belfast Lough. The brisk breeze coming into Ballyholme Bay carried the almond scent of the gorse flowers on Ballymacormick Point and bittersweet memories of walks he and Sue had taken there among the sheltering whins.

  “She’s going like the clappers,” Barry said to Jack. They had their backsides on the port gunwale as the dinghy sped through the chop. Both men’s feet were tucked behind canvas straps in-board and they leant backward over the water to counterbalance the wind in the boat’s sails that was making her heel to starboard. Barry held a rope in his right hand and the tiller in his left.

  Jack sat ahead of him. His job was to work the ropes called sheets that controlled the triangular foresail. Barry would take care of helming and the single sheet controlling the bigger mainsail. “It’s good to be afloat again,” he said.

  Jack nodded. “For a country boy like me who’s not too keen on all the noise and stink of the big city, it’s grand. Nothing out here to listen to but the odd gull squawking, the wind in the rigging, the chop and slap of the waves…” One broke and threw spray in his face. He laughed. “And the now-soggy crew yelling, ‘Bugger it.’”

  In spite of how he felt, Barry managed to laugh. Jack Mills, with his mad sense of humour, was a tonic. Barry stared ahead. It would soon be time to change course. The wind met the boat’s port side, blowing the mainsail and foresail out to starboard, but as both their sheets had been hauled short the white wings were nearly flat. She was said to be sailing “close hauled,’” or “full and bye,” an old square-rigger term.

  “Remember that wonderful little hunchbacked man, Joe Togneri? He was the son of Italian immigrants who ran the Coronation Ice Cream Shop in Bangor. He had a small dinghy and taught me to sail her when I was thirteen.” A simpler time when girls hadn’t become important enough to complicate life, as they were doing now.

  “Who’d forget Joe?” Jack said. “One of nature’s gentlemen. And then you taught me, a farm boy from Cullybackey, miles from the sea. Thanks, mate.”

  “‘Hold her full and bye, Barry, son,’ Joe’d say, then he’d break into one of his innumerable ‘come-all-ye,’ songs that always began—”

  “‘Come all ye dryland sailors and listen to me song.’” Jack sang in a good tenor, one he used to sing at student parties. “‘’Tis only a thousand verses so I won’t detain youse long…’”

  Good old Jack. Barry looked ahead and saw they were getting too close to Ballymacormick. Time to change course. “Ready about?” His warning to prepare for the manoeuvre.

  Jack glanced back, grinned, and loosed the sheet until only one turn remained around its anchor point, a cleat. He held the rope in his hand.

  Barry nodded and prepared to cast off the main sheet.

  “Lee oh.�
� The executive command. Barry pulled the tiller to him and felt the rudder bite.

  The little boat responded like a thoroughbred. Her bows swung to port, and as they crossed the wind, he ripped the sheet from between serrated jaws called a jam-cleat and hauled in to control the boom as it swung across the boat.

  Jack had let fly his sheet.

  To the furious flapping of the headsail, the mainsail’s boom swung across the cockpit. Barry paid out line as the boom and sail ran out over the boat’s port side. Simultaneously, the hull righted itself before beginning to heel to port as he and Jack crossed the cockpit, got seated, and put their toes back in the opposite straps. When Barry was satisfied with their new course, he yelled, “Sheet home.”

  With both sails filled, Shearwater tried to heel further, but the men counteracted that by leaning backward.

  A sudden stronger gust hit. Barry felt his side of the dinghy rise as the low side dipped and the masthead moved closer to the sea’s choppy surface. He heard the slapping of waves on the little boat’s bow, tasted the chill spray that blew aft. He eased the tiller away from himself, allowing the bows to move closer to the wind so the pressure on the sails lessened and the boat became more vertical. The headsail began to flap and he ignored it until the gust had passed and he had once more brought the dinghy back on course, sails drawing beautifully.

  “God, but I love helming a dinghy in these kinds of conditions. Love it.” He knew he was grinning like a mad jack o’ lantern, but it was okay because Jack was grinning back.

  So what if once in a while Barry misjudged and the little boat fell on her side, sails in the water? Experienced sailors could right a dinghy in no time. Then he wondered, was his falling out with Sue just a temporary setback like that sudden gust? Was there a way to bring their lives together back on course too, or had he capsized things irrevocably? He shook his head. He simply didn’t know.

  Another gust, more easing of the tiller, flapping of sails and wind-blown spume before coming back on course.