by Peter Murphy
Mrs Nagle made sympathetic throat noises. She was a tall mannish woman with a loud hee-haw of a voice. Always went by Mrs, even though she’d never married. She lived in a draughty stone cottage about a quarter-mile down the road, right next to the freshwater well, the ownership of which was the subject of some dispute. Mrs Nagle maintained it was on her property and erected a Keep Out—Private sign at the mouth of the narrow lane that led to the pump. This didn’t go down well with the locals, particularly Harry Farrell.
At that time, Harry was an impudent jack-of-all-trades who could be seen riding his Honda 50 around the back roads at all hours of the day or night. He took a shine to my mother and was always offering to do jobs around the house. Every birthday without fail he sent me a tenner in an envelope. As I got bigger, it became a twenty. My mother made me put most of it in the post office. Said he was like the godfather I never had.
Harry was a hard worker when he was sober. My mother sometimes got him to chop logs or strim the hedge or take clippers to the overhanging trees. But when he hit the drink he’d hock his bike and tools and chainsaw and stay in the pubs until he ran out of money, at which point he’d sleep for a week, straighten up and go looking for work all over again.
Harry—or Har The Barrel as he became known when his weight ballooned after finally giving up the drink for good—was livid when he saw Mrs Nagle’s hand-painted Keep Out sign. He could be heard arguing in Donahue’s that the well had been public property since god was a boy and that old biddy had no claim on it. And when he was really jarred he’d brag that since the day that sign went up, he never passed the well without availing of the opportunity to tap his bladder, polluting its crystal waters with his own off-yellow tributary. When Mrs Nagle got wind of this affront, she flew into a rage and, according to my mother, requisitioned a hurling stick from some young lad on the way home from school, stalked into the village and prowled from pub to pub until she found Har, whereupon she bet him from one end of the street to the other, bet him scaldy. Since that day, a savage grudge festered in Har’s heart.
‘What age is the chap?’ Mrs Nagle brayed, adjusting her wool knit hat, the one that looked like the base of an acorn turned upside down.
‘Seven,’ my mother replied. ‘No, eight.’
‘The age of reason.’ Mrs Nagle dunked a digestive and took a bite. Maybe a Marietta.
‘Put him out in the fresh air,’ she said, biscuit pulp bulging her cheek. ‘Sunlight is nature’s tonic. It cures rickets, goitre, skin conditions, ulcers and certain cancers. He’ll grow feeble if he stays inside all day. Simple-minded.’
The sibilance sprayed soggy crumbs on the good tablecloth.
‘He should be vigorous.’
‘Vigorous,’ my mother repeated, tearing the filter off a Major.
Mrs Nagle nodded.
‘Mm-hm. The young men now are not like the young men in our time, Lily. They’re pure fools in comparison.’
The rasp of a match.
‘You’re not wrong, Phyllis.’
My mother had her humouring voice on, like when I’d gab her ear off but she wasn’t really paying attention.
‘Know what I put it down to, Lily?’
‘Tell me, Phyllis.’
‘Porter. Drink is the proven causation of dropsy, jaundice, gout, colic, peevish irritability, catarrhs of the mouth and stomach. It’s the ruination of young men. The reason they won’t do a tap of work, god blast ’em for chaps.’
And my mother said: How much more abominable and filthy is man, which drinketh iniquity like water.’
But Mrs Nagle always had to get the last word in.
‘The devil has no end of work for those hands.’
So after that I got rooted out of bed early to help weed the flowerbeds and pick blackberries and all kinds of outside stuff. At that hour it was so cold the air tasted like it was doused with mint. Berry juice stung the briar cuts and nettle welts on my hands. And because the sky had been rumbling like a big belly during the night, my mother had mushrooms on the brain.
‘The three things you need for mushroom picking,’ she said, ‘are thunder, rain and cow-dung.’
We struck off for the far bog. My mother took great yard-long strides across the wet grass and clutched a punnet to her chest. I hurried in her footsteps, hair cowslicked with morning mist. We squelched across marshy wallow ground, circumnavigating a still pond filmed with green scum and circled by midges and gadflies. My mother pointed out all the different kinds of moss and fungus, puffballs and toadstools, lichen and liverwort, reeds and rushes and bulrushes, wrack and bladderwrack. She grasped the top rung of a five-bar gate, about to mount it, but just before pulling herself up she stopped and cocked her head.
‘Whisht.’
We took root, listening.
‘I don’t hear anything,’ I whispered.
‘Shhht.’
Some sort of mewling. She put her punnet down.
‘A kitten maybe.’
Her eyes searched the humps of grass. Again, that sound, small and hurt and pitiful.
She peered into the gripe and pointed to a bed of briars. A hare, stretched out, its eyes swollen and suppurating, like soft wounds.
‘Is it sick?’ I said.
‘Mixo.’
She took out her fags, cupped a match and sucked in smoke and contemplated the hare. Its hindquarters were caked with dried scutter.
‘We may put it out of its misery,’ she said. ‘Break its neck.’
Her hand rested on my shoulder.
‘You may do it, son. My nerves are not up to it.’
I stepped back, shaking my head.
‘I can’t.’
‘You have to. It’s not fair to let it suffer.’
My fingers were sweaty. I wiped them on my trousers.
‘I thought killing was a sin.’
‘Not if it’s a mercy killing.’
I didn’t want to go anywhere near the sick hare, but I had to obey my mother.
‘All right,’ I said.
She squeezed my shoulder.
‘Good man. Do it quick.’
I crouched down beside the hare, peering deep into the bleeding wells of its eyes. I lunged and snatched it up by the scruff. It bucked weakly as both my hands closed around its neck.
‘Not like that.’ My mother rolled her eyes. ‘I said break its neck, not choke it.’
She mimed snapping a stick of kindling.
I adjusted my grip and squeezed my eyes shut. I drove my knee into the back of the hare’s neck and pulled the head and belly towards me simultaneously. There was a sound like a knuckle crack. The hare took fit. I tossed it on the grass and watched its body twitch and finally go limp. My mother got the toe of her boot under the belly, hefted her leg and sent the hare’s corpse arcing into the ditch.
‘C’mon,’ she said. ‘Those mushrooms won’t pick themselves.’
The big old crow invaded my dreams. I didn’t know where he’d come from or what he was supposed to mean.
He spirals out of a hole in the belly of heaven from which the angered gods cast him, to helicopter-hover, bone tired and hungry and scanning for carrion.
See how far he has fallen. Once there was wind and thunder when he flapped his wings. Huns and heathens feared him. He heralded the sun into the sea and down through the underworld, and lent his form to Morrigan, goddess of war and fate and death, who wore his cloak as she flew low over the battlefields, spurring her warriors to berserker fits and spasms.
What happened, Old Crow?
Maybe it was as St Golowin said: once upon a time you sported brightly coloured wings, but after Adam and Eve’s banishment from Eden you took to eating the flesh of dead things and it turned your feathers black. Is that it?
But the old black crow (doesn’t answer, merely fixes me with baleful yellow eyes, beats his wings against the walls of my dream until the walls fall down, and, stretched to the full of his span, he flaps and cackles and then he’s gone.
II
Ano
ther year on earth.
Winter melted under drizzle and gave way to the first fine day of spring. My mother pulled on her work boots, sleeves rolled up, hands sheathed in rubber gloves.
‘For once and for all,’ she said, flexing her fingers, ‘I’m going to put manners on this garden.’
She attacked the overgrowth with a slash-hook, decapitating pismires, cut stalks oozing the white ichors of wart treatment. She squatted, skirt bunched up, rocked back on her haunches and wrenched up weeds. She planted her foot on the blade of a spade and overturned the borders, scoured the marl for earthworms and slugs, tossed their bodies onto squirming, itching piles. And when the garden was divested of weeds, and the soil smitten and chastised beneath her boots, she planted a clay-smeared hand against the small of her back and lit a fag and appraised her day’s work.
Next morning she arrived back from Purcell’s Nurseries with a box of shrubs and cuttings and planted them in the ground, her hands as precise as an artist’s.
‘Now,’ she said.
‘Now what?’
‘We wait.’
Spring bloomed, the world exploding with wildflowers, and our garden glowed, as though incensed. My mother shaped and tended it and sat out after work as the soil exhaled vapours breathed into its pores by the daylong sun. She plucked four petals from the rose bush and placed them in cruciform across her palm.
‘Look,’ she said. ‘The rosy cross.’
My mother among the flowers.
One stark morning, colder than usual, we looked out and saw the flowers were stricken by a late fall of frost, their frail remains preserved in sepulchral white. My mother pulled a coat on over her nightgown and walked through the deathly petals, her garden’s garlands turned to shrivelled wreaths. Disappointment pained her face for a moment, but she banished it with a throw of the head.
‘That’s the way,’ she said, and fumbled for her packet of fags. ‘Things die so things are born.’
A flick of lighter flint.
‘We’ll plant more shrubs in the morning.’
One day soon after my tenth birthday Har Farrell called to the back door.
‘Is your mother around?’
He had on an oilskin coat over baggy pants tucked inside green Wellington boots, a big brawny man with a muttonhead on him, smelling of sweat and yeast or hops.
‘She’s still at work,’ I said.
He tipped his head in the direction of the back yard.
‘C’mere a second.’
Outside, he’d placed a vicious-looking implement on the chopping block. Propped beside it, a quiver full of arrows.
‘Know what this is?’
His breath reeked of the pub, a grown-up smell that suggested a world of unshaven men and darts tournaments and late-night lamping expeditions.
‘It’s a bow and arrow,’ I said.
A smile creased his coarsely stubbled cheeks.
‘Close enough. What you’re looking at is a hundred and sixty-five pounds of crossbow rifle.’
He picked the weapon up and lovingly ran thick fingers over its various mechanisms.
‘Here you’ve got your trigger,’ he said. ‘Here you’ve got your string and cable system. And heeeere—this is the cherry on top, John—an adjustable rifle sight. In theory, she should fire a couple of hundred feet with reasonable accuracy, depending on who’s using it of course. Those are alloy arrows. Keep the quiver waxed and you’ll get indefinite use out of her. Happy birthday, son.’
He placed the crossbow in my hands. It felt like a very important moment. Like he was bequeathing me some sacred artifact in a tribal rite of passage.
‘You’re giving this to me?’
He nodded and beamed.
‘How does it work?’
He took the crossbow, braced the stock against his shoulder, hauled the bowstring back along the bolt groove with both his hands and cocked it evenly on the latch. Then he plucked an arrow from the quiver and placed it in the breech.
‘Like that,’ he said, a bit unsteady on his feet. ‘Pick a target.’
I scanned the yard and pointed to a tree sticking out of the back ditch.
Har thrust the crossbow back into my hands. He got behind my shoulder and helped me take aim.
‘The string centre has to align with the track,’ he said, ‘otherwise the shot will be off. Remember, the arrow obeys the string, not the bow.’
He arranged my arms like he was Geppetto.
‘For best shooting stance,’ he said, ‘tuck your elbow against your hip, left hand supporting the bow here at the trigger end. You have to lean backwards a bit in order to achieve what’s called the point of optimum balance. Safety off. And hold it tight.’
He patted my right pectoral.
‘There’s a kick off that thing’ll break your shoulder if you’re not careful. Ready?’
‘I think so.’
‘Shoot.’
I pulled the trigger. The recoil threw me off balance. The arrow left the track with an exclamatory thunk, sliced through one of my mother’s slips hanging from the washing line and sailed into the next field.
‘Fuck,’ Har said. ‘Sorry. Never mind, you’ll soon get the hang of it.’ He clapped me on the back. ‘Just don’t point it at anyone.’
As soon as he left, I wrapped the crossbow and quiver in a coal sack and hid it in the cubbyhole under the stairs.
There was a caterpillar and a wasp inside the jamjar. The wasp was ramming his stingers, what Harper called ovipositors, into the caterpillar, injecting eggs through the gaps in its exoskeleton. The caterpillar went into shock. When the wasp finished its business I screwed the lid off and let it fly off. It body-swerved into my mother, returning from the clinic. She swatted at the wasp and continued moving unsteadily up the front path, picking her steps like she was fording a stony stream. Her face was a fright. I’d never seen her look so shook. I asked her what was for dinner, not because I wanted to know, but because I wanted her to return to her normal self. She shook her head and stepped around me and went into the kitchen, moving like she was in a trance. The kettle went on, then the wireless. I shook the jar to try and get a rise out of the caterpillar. No response.
My mother set the fire and made the dinner and called me inside when it was on the table. I ran upstairs and stashed the jar in my bedroom and went to wash my hands.
My mother sipped from her teacup and looked out the window while I ate. She left her own plate mostly untouched. The fire crackled and the sacred heart glowed on the mantelpiece.
‘Son,’ she said, ‘we need to talk.’
I shovelled food in. Hot. I fanned a hand in front of my mouth.
‘Uh-huh?’
‘I have to go away for a little while soon.’
‘Where to?’
‘The hospital.’
My fork went down. It was getting dark outside and the wind moaned in the chimney. Winter was coming.
‘Why?’
‘I have to go for a little rest. It won’t be long. Only a week or so.’ ‘A week?’
An awful empty feeling spread through my stomach. Beside the potted geraniums, Haircut Charlie idiot-grinned atop the windowsill, bizarre tufts of green hair shooting upwards from his perforated skull.
‘Why don’t you just go upstairs for a lie down?’ I said. ‘Why do you have to go to the hospital?’
She shook her head, set down her cup.
‘Listen. I’ve arranged for Mrs Nagle to come and mind you. While I’m gone, I need you to be good. It won’t be long. When I come home everything will be the way it was. An dtigeann tú?’
‘Tigim.’
My mother took a taxi to the hospital. I went to school as per normal and Mrs Nagle came in the afternoons to make dinner. The food was the same, but it tasted different, slightly burnt. Plus, she left the door open when she used the toilet, and I could see her old lady tights puddled around her veiny ankles and thick brown brogues. The same brogues I heard creaking outside when it was my turn to use the ba
throom.
Mrs Nagle sent me to bed early most nights so she could watch the telly and shovel chocolates in her mouth. I lay awake and stared at the ceiling and thought about what they could be doing to my mother in the hospital. Every so often I checked the jamjar glass and watched for signs of what was happening inside the caterpillar’s body cavity. I waited for the wasp eggs to hatch, imagining the larvae as they tapped into the caterpillar’s energy sources, draining it of the will to live, or reproduce, making its little testicles shrivel so it wouldn’t want to have any more caterpillar sex. Drinking its blood and devouring everything but the vital organs. If I waited long enough, I’d get to see the larvae burrow out and turn into baby wasps. I’d see the caterpillar’s body crumble like the ash on a gone-out fag. And I’d throw open the window and let the baby wasps escape, the caterpillar’s death unrevenged by Mother Nature, because Mother Nature doesn’t care.
When my mother came home she moved like an old woman and had to take salt baths every evening. One time she called me into the bathroom, I was mortified, but her female parts were all covered with towels, except for where the scar rose up from her lower belly, white-lipped like a Nazi’s smile.
‘That’s from the operation,’ she said.
I grunted something in response and made my excuses and left her to her bath.
Even though my mother was on the mend, Mrs Nagle insisted on staying on a bit longer.
‘Just till you get back on your feet,’ she said. ‘I insist.’
That whole time, the house hissed with women’s whispering. I hid out in my room and read comics and drew pictures of crows or worms. After a couple of weeks my mother got well enough to go back to work, but Mrs Nagle showed no sign of leaving. No matter how many hints my mother dropped, it didn’t seem to register, until one morning there was a row and Mrs Nagle stormed out, complaining that people don’t appreciate a good turn any more, and bad luck to the lot of us.
After she left, things got back to normal.
But nothing felt the same.