A Pagan Place

by Edna O'Brien

  Edna O’Brien

  A Pagan Place

  Table of Contents

  Epigraph

  Part One

  Part Two

  Part Three

  About the Author

  also by Edna O’Brien

  Copyright

  for Harold Pinter

  I carry a brick on my shoulder in order that the world may know what my house was like.

  Bertolt Brecht

  Part One

  Dan Egan is in Drewsboro

  The Wattles at the gate

  Manny Parker’s in the Avenue

  And the Nigger’s walking straight.

  Manny Parker was a botanist, out in all weathers, lived with his sister that ran the sweetshop, they ate meat Fridays, they were Protestants. Your mother dealt there, found them honest.

  They put chocolate aside for her because it was rationed, six bars of plain and six bars of fruit and nut. These she stored in the sideboard along with jams and jellies. The sideboard was dark brown, the keys missing, but since the doors opened with a terrible creak it was nearly the same as having them locked. No one opened those doors without the whole house knowing. When the bitter oranges came from Seville in the spring, Manny Parker’s sister made a marmalade and the pound pots were put to cool on the counter where everyone could see them and compliment her on them. She favoured a coarser marmalade than your mother and the shreds suspended in the dark jelly were like seeing pet fish in a tank.

  The Wattles were in the gate lodge, across the road from the gates. The gates were green, and speared along the top, the hasp missing. One gate was loose in its pivot and when it slipped out you had to hold on for dear life or you fell, gate and all.

  They were named the Wattles because their daughter Lizzie went to Australia and came home, and had yellow jaundice. Before she came she sent snaps of herself and they got the gramophone mended and bought a record Far Away in Australia but she said that was the last thing she wanted to hear and asked bitterly where the pipers were. She threatened to go back but didn’t. The Wattles never opened gates because they didn’t get paid. The two old people had the pension.

  Mr Wattle called everyone Mister and when Mrs Wattle bought a cane chair he said Am I in my own house at all Mister? When the cow did number two into the pail of milk, Mr Wattle who was milking didn’t see it. The women strained the milk over and over again through a strainer and through muslin but it was still yellow and it smelt. The other time when milk had a smell was when the cows were given turnips or the grass was too rich.

  That rich grass was called aftergrass and your father prized it for his horses. If the gates were left open, or if the big stone was not put to them cattle got in or got out and either ways there were ructions, investigations as to who was to blame. Your mother could not bear to see and hear stray cattle dispersing all over the fields because she had a presentiment that they were going to be there for ever, fattening themselves for free. Yet they were never turned out. Only the tinkers’ stock was driven out. Tinkers’ ponies were canny. They grazed on the roadside, never shied when cars and lorries went by and if they saw a guard coming had the good sense to saunter off. The tinkers settled in the evicted field that belonged to no one because two married brothers fought over it and neither would let the other till it. Some nights there were lots of caravans there with lights shining through the half doors, some nights it was like every other field, dark and empty and dangerous.

  Dan Egan was dead but his name lived on because there was a tree named after him, a horse chestnut. Boys shook it for conkers and if they got caught they got a hammering from your father. Dan Egan was buried over on the island where your mother said she would not go because there would be no passersby to pray for the repose of her soul. You were afraid your mother might die, before you.

  Over on the island there were birds and ruins. The ruins had metal plaques on them saying what period in history they were built in. Saints and scholars had lived there. One door had a lintel with four recesses and the stones were as brittle as bread crumbs. Visitors went in rowboats and walked around the ruins. On a fine day the surface of the lake glittered like tin but it never happened to be like that for a regatta.

  There were cattle on the island belonging to the butcher, bullocks. They made themselves at home on the graves, disentangled the wreaths, trampled on the glass domes and chewed flowers that were supposed to be everlasting. Those flowers were of calcium and looked like bones but no corpses showed above the ground because the graves were dug deep.

  If dead people appeared it could only be at night, the way Dan Egan was said to appear under the shade of the tree named after him. Whenever his name was mentioned your father said Poor devil, God rest him. Your father and he got drunk together, played cards and clicked girls. Your father didn’t mention girls but there was a photo of them both on a sidecar, each with a girl, and each couple with a rug over the knees. It was taken at the Horse Show to which they went annually. They went everywhere together although Dan Egan was a lot older. When the lake was frozen they walked nine miles to an all-night dance, and Dan Egan insisted on dragging a boat behind them and your father was bucking, but providential it was because on the way home in the morning the ice began to go. When they got in the boat they found they had no oars and Dan Egan was cursing and blinding and they were bobbing around like that between the floats of ice until a coal boat went by at midday.

  Your father met your mother at that dance but didn’t throw two words to her. Your mother was all dolled up, home from America on holiday, had a long dress and peroxide in her hair. Your mother put the eye on him then and got her brother to invite him up to their house to walk the land.

  Your father could guess the acreage of any field by walking it. That and horses was his hobby and off nights with Dan Egan for sing-songs and out on the lake shooting duck. Dan Egan and he lived in a big house with an old tiddly nanny and when they got home drunk in the mornings she used to bring up shaving water and whiskey, a mug of each. Kept a roaring fire they did in one room and in all the other rooms there were bats, and mice and dark pieces of furniture.

  Your father was an orphan but his old tiddly nanny took care of him and when he wanted shaving water or a headache powder all he had to do was press a bell and when the green gong trembled in the kitchen his old tiddly nanny said Bad cess to you but went to him all the same.

  Your father burnt the house sooner than let the Black and Tans occupy it as a barracks. Not even a candlestick or a cruet could he take away as a memento because that would have been theft. The house got burnt but the old cellar remained and your mother used it as a dumping-ground. Your mother dumped ashes there and the empties that were not charged on and broken crockery and the entrails of the cockerels that got killed and drawn every Saturday in summer, in preparation for Sunday’s dinner. She gave herself the worst parts of the chicken, the skin, the Pope’s nose, the posterior bits. She sent one once a month to your sister Emma along with a cake and some butter.

  Emma had airs because she was born in New York. Often she slighted you and said you were trash and said Be off, trash. She pedalled fiercely on her bicycle so that you couldn’t catch up.

  She was his favourite. He called her Whitehead. She got the watch. The watch made a black rim on her wrist and she told you that was known as oxidization. She had a bracelet too that was expandable. Once it got caught above her elbow and had to be damped and forced down. It got buckled.

  There was not much jewellery lying about the house, his gold watch, some necklaces and loose pearls in a soap-dish that were skinless and without glow. Your house had no gongs, either, or no cellar but it had marble mantelpieces in all the rooms and constellations of flowers in the centres of the ceilings.


  In the chimneys crows nested. Crows preferred the chimneys to the trees because the trees were prey to the wind. Around the tree trunks were plaits of ivy so thick and matted that they were like shields. The crows pecked at the ivy. They were black and lustrous and were always on the go, circling round and round, cawing and crying.

  What was classified as a front garden had pampas grass, Devil’s pokers and apple trees that hadn’t grown to their full stature but weren’t dwarfs either. The pampas grass was in wayward clusters, more blue than green. It was a foreign grass, stiff in stem and with a knife edge. It was from the old days, the gone days, when the place had its ornamental garden. You put that part of your hand between thumb and forefinger to the knife edge, that flap which if it got cut could lead to lockjaw. That was courting disaster. The grass was scythed once a month, the hedge clipped. Nettles had to be kept at bay. Nettles had a white flower that no one admired. She sent you around the fields to gather some for young chickens. She gave you a saucepan and a shears and told you to drop them directly as you cut them, so as to protect your hands. You suffered a few stings to be devout. You crooned, baritoned, in order to intimidate small animals that were lurking in briars and low coverts of foliage. Nettles had an iron content. Cabbage had iodine. Cabbage was frequently on the menu. It was one of her specialities. She was liberal with salt and pepper and these condiments combined with cabbage and mashed potatoes made a lovely compound. Good with turnips too or for that matter any of the root vegetables. If there was fresh meat he had it, a chop nicely done. The dogs got the bone. They tussled over it. They were huge and were the colour of lions. They were called Bran and Shep respectively. Bran after an ancient hero’s dog and Shep because it was such a convenient name. They went off at night, across fields, so did badgers and hares and foxes and wildcats and owls and rats and weasels and moles, all enemies, all springing at each other, all letting out primeval cries.

  In the morning on the way to school, you saw things, tracks, fur, feathers and once a paw with its cloven hoof and its long nail intact. You skirted the fort of dark trees.

  It was a pagan place and circular. Druids had their rites there long before your mother and father or his mother and father or her mother and father or anyone you’d ever heard tell of. But Mr Wattle said that was not all, said he had seen a lady ungirdled there one night on his way home from physicking the donkey. The ground inside was shifty, a swamp where lilies bloomed. They were called bog lilies. The donkey went in there to die and no wonder because the shelter was ample. No one would go in to bury it. It decomposed. The smell grew worse and worse and more and more widespread. The dogs carried the members around, the bits, big bones and little bones and they were scattered everywhere and in the end were as brown and as odourless as twigs.

  The dogs had a routine. They slept during the day. They had places under the hedge hollowed out to their shape and they moved around the house depending on the elements. The wind ruffled their coats, drew attention to the ranges of tawny in them. They were half brothers, had had the same mother, a Shep, but conflicting fathers. They conveyed her when she went to Manny Parker’s sister’s shop to collect chocolate or to pay something off her bill. Her bill was unending. No sooner had she paid something than she made a new purchase but there was an understanding between her and Manny Parker’s sister, a tacit understanding.

  You always ran home from school. Your friends jeered. Called you sutach, called you suck-suck, called you diddums and spoilsport and clown and pissabed. On the way home from Mass diarrhoea ran all down your legs and you got behind the wall and stayed there until everyone had gone, the men tearing to the pub, the doctor and Hilda in their cars, the people on bicycles, the pedestrians and the sacristan who had had to stay behind to quench candles and lock the big oak door. Your mother was not vexed, said it could happen to a bishop. Your friends passed remarks about it, wrote notes to each other, referred to it as the Incident. Your friend Jewel wrote on the blackboard to remember the Incident, marmalade in colour, behind a certain wall on the Sabbath day.

  Before your first Holy Communion, Jewel and you practised receiving the Host. You received bits of paper from each other. You had to hold it for as long as possible, for as long as it was likely to take the body and blood of Jesus to melt into you. The bits of paper soaked up all your saliva but it was not a sin when they grazed your teeth whereas it would be a sin if the Host were to. That was your main preoccupation on your first Holy Communion day, even though you were being admired by all and sundry because of your finery. Your shoes were buckskin and your veil had sprays of lily of the valley wrought into it. Yours was the finest veil. Your mother saw to that. Our Lord didn’t touch your teeth but there was a crisis afterwards. When Lizzie asked you to pose for a snap you stood against the railing and a corner of the veil blew up and got caught on a spear and would have been in shreds only that the priest rescued it. Your mother went on about what a close shave it was and you got five shillings and there were sun showers and that was your first Holy Communion. Jewel had a tea-party to which you were not invited. Your friends were not friends the way your father and Dan Egan were.

  When your father talked of Dan Egan his eyes filled up with tears. He and Dan Egan were arrested as they walked out of a public house and unfortunate it was because Dan Egan was carrying a bulldog revolver. Told the Black and Tans it was for shooting hares and rabbits but the Tans didn’t swallow that, and the pair of them were shoved in the lorry and brought to the nearest jail.

  Tied together they were and inveigled to split on their comrades but they didn’t and they even got kicked and belted but they didn’t give in. Bound together all night without being let talk and had their faces dipped in a rain barrel whenever either one of them nodded off. Grigged too, with stories of what they would fancy for supper, trout or chicken. And when Dan Egan had to do number two they were still left tied together and that made them buddies for ever.

  They were let out in the morning with a warning, but when they got out on the street no one would give them a lift home and they had to walk without benefit of either tea or whiskey. From the beltings he got, Dan Egan developed epileptic fits and when the Free State was established he applied for a pension and was given it, but your father got none and they came to a coolness and set it.

  Once he died, they became the best of friends again and your father often told of the evening soon after their arrest when they set fire to the big house and how methodical they were, soaked doors and wainscoting and floors and window frames all with petrol, and drenched rags which they scattered round. Your father told how they had to wait for nightfall and how all that long day they told stories and split matches and how just before they did it Dan Egan said he’d give his eyesight to see the Tans’ faces when they saw a conflagration on the site that was to have been their headquarters. The Tans had it all worked out that they’d occupy your father’s house being as it was spacious with ample accommodation for themselves and for prisoners; with fireplaces, and woods near by, an indoor pump, a ballroom, everything a battalion would need. When they’d done the deed they had to run for it, and in opposite directions along back roads and byroads. When your father got to the house that was supposed to shelter him they had the wind up so he had to go on and on, shanks-maring it, and finally the people who took him in were strangers altogether but they treated him nicely.

  He hid in a potato pit. It was there he contracted eczema and it stayed with him all his life and he had to get yellow ointment for it, from a woman who did cures. She cured warts and fits and your mother said she would not like to get in her black books because she wouldn’t be surprised if she was a witch. There was always smoke from her chimney and around her window, wraiths of it. At Mass she reeked of smoke and no one wanted to sit near her. She picked plants and gathered stones and when foraging she cackled to herself. She was a widow.

  When your father crawled out of the potato pit at night his legs were weak as water and when he went across to the farmhouse
there were girls there singing and cutting up seed potatoes for sowing. It must have been spring. Your father never asked them their names. Your father said how in the old days people would give you a shilling or take you in but your mother said that was all baloney and that distance lends enchantment and he told her she didn’t know what she was talking about because she didn’t know Dan Egan or any of these people and she said no she didn’t, but very standoffish like she didn’t want to.

  Jobbers she called them, his friends – the cattle dealers, the horse dealers, the feather merchants, and Sacco.

  Sacco came; he did tricks with matches and with a handkerchief, then he moved the lamp to appoint the shadow and with thumb and forefinger he did a movement that was like rabbits’ paws dancing on a wall. He made four shadows with only two fingers, one set higher than the other. That was magic. He was a magician. He had steel-rimmed spectacles. He complimented her on her bread. Before she cut it there was a perfect sign of the cross on the top where she had etched it unthinkingly on the raw dough. Sacco began to describe the marriage pattern. He said it was love at first, frequent journeys to the bed, matinée and evening performance, the hay not saved, the calves not fed, then after the first child a bit of a cooling off, the man going out nights and the subsequent children begotten in drink, then squabbles, ructions, first Holy Communions, shoes having to be bought, a lot of troubles and late in life the man back at his own fireplace spitting and banging and grunting inanities to his own wife.

  Your mother was furious, nearly took the cake of bread away. Your father changed the conversation, asked when the fair at Spancehill was. Sacco not only knew the day but had advance information on the breeds of ponies that were going to be on sale there.

  You knew your father and the Nigger would go together, the Nigger would put on his leggings and his accoutrements and your father would choose one of his soft felt hats, and bid for ponies he had no need of. They would lead them home – grey ponies or dappled – on a master reins and intern them in a house for a few days until they forgot the presence of their own mares and the sniff of their own lands. They would break them in then.