The Best of Frank O'Connor

by Frank O'Connor

  ‘I’d spare my breath to cool my porridge,’ Tom replied scornfully. ‘I dare say you gave up your own still so?’

  ‘I didn’t, Tom, I didn’t. The drop I make, ’twould harm no one. Only a drop for Christmas and Easter.’

  The lamp was in its own place on the rear wall, and made a circle of brightness on the fresh lime wash. Their mother was leaning over the fire with joined hands, lost in thought. The front door was open and night thickening outside, the coloured night of the west; and as they ate, their father walked to and fro in long ungainly strides, pausing each time at the door to give a glance up and down the road and at the fire to hoist his broken bottom to warm. Ned heard steps come up the road from the west. His father heard them too. He returned to the door and glued his hand to the jamb. Ned covered his eyes with his hands and felt that everything was as it had always been. He could hear the noise of the strand as a background to the voices.

  ‘God be with you, Tomas,’ the voice said.

  ‘God and Mary be with you, Teig.’ (In Irish they were speaking.) ‘What way are you?’

  ‘Well, honour and praise be to God. ’Tis a fine night.’

  ‘ ’Tis, ’tis, ’tis so indeed. A grand night, praise be to God.’

  ‘Musha, who is it?’ their mother asked, looking round.

  ‘ ’Tis young Teig,’ their father replied, looking after him.

  ‘Shemus’s young Teig?’

  ‘ ’Tis, ’tis, ’tis.’

  ‘But where would Shemus’s young Teig be going at this hour of night? ’Tisn’t to the shop?’

  ‘No, woman, no, no, no. Up to the uncle’s I suppose.’

  ‘Is it Ned Willie’s?’

  ‘He’s sleeping at Ned Willie’s,’ Brigid chimed in in her high-pitched voice, timid but triumphant. ‘ ’Tis since the young teacher came to them.’

  There was no more to be said. Everything was explained and Ned smiled. The only unfamiliar voice, little Brigid’s, seemed the most familiar of all.

  Tom said first Mass next morning and the household, all but Brigid, went. They drove, and Tomas in high glee sat in front with Tom, waving his hand and shouting greetings at all they met. He was like a boy, so intense was his pleasure. The chapel was perched high above the road. Outside the morning was grey and beyond the windy edge of the cliff was the sea. The wind blew straight in, setting cloaks and petticoats flying.

  After dinner as the two boys were returning from a series of visits to the neighbours’ houses their father rushed down the road to meet them, shaking them passionately by the hand and asking were they well. When they were seated in the kitchen he opened up the subject of his excitement.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I arranged a grand little outing for ye tomorrow, thanks be to God,’ and to identify further the source of his inspiration he searched at the back of his neck for the peak of his cap and raised it solemnly.

  ‘Musha, what outing are you talking about?’ their mother asked angrily.

  ‘I arranged for us to go over the bay to your brother’s.’

  ‘And can’t you leave the poor boys alone?’ she bawled. ‘Haven’t they only the one day? Isn’t it for the rest they came?’

  ‘Even so, even so, even so,’ Tomas said with mounting passion. ‘Aren’t their own cousins to lay eyes on them?’

  ‘I was in Carriganassa for a week last summer,’ said Tom.

  ‘Yes, but I wasn’t, and Ned wasn’t. ’Tis only decent.’

  ‘’Tisn’t decency is worrying you at all but drink,’ growled Tom.

  ‘Oh!’ gasped his father, fishing for the peak of his cap to swear with, ‘that I might be struck dead!’

  ‘Be quiet, you old heathen!’ crowed his wife. ‘That’s the truth, Tom my pulse. Plenty of drink is what he wants where he won’t be under my eye. Leave ye stop at home.’

  ‘I can’t stop at home, woman,’ shouted Tomas. ‘Why do you be always picking at me? I must go whether they come or not. I must go, I must go, and that’s all there is about it.’

  ‘Why must you?’ asked his wife.

  ‘Because I warned Red Pat and Dempsey,’ he stormed. ‘And the woman from the island is coming as well to see a daughter of hers that’s married there. And what’s more, I borrowed Cassidy’s boat and he lent it at great inconvenience, and ’twould be very bad manners for me to throw his kindness back in his face. I must go.’

  ‘Oh, we may as well all go,’ said Tom.

  It blew hard all night and Tomas, all anxiety, was out at break of day to watch the whitecaps on the water. While the boys were at breakfast he came in and, leaning his arms on the table with hands joined as though in prayer, he announced in a caressing voice that it was a beautiful day, thank God, a pet day with a moist gentle little bit of a breezheen that would only blow them over. His voice would have put a child to sleep, but his wife continued to nag and scold, and he stumped out again in a fury and sat on the wall with his back to the house and his legs crossed, chewing his pipe. He was dressed in his best clothes, a respectable blue tailcoat and pale frieze trousers with only one patch on the seat. He had turned his cap almost right way round so that the peak covered his right ear.

  He was all over the boat like a boy. Dempsey, a haggard, pockmarked, melancholy man with a soprano voice of astounding penetration, took the tiller and Red Patrick the sail. Tomas clambered into the bows and stood there with one knee up, leaning forward like a figurehead. He knew the bay like a book. The island woman was perched on the ballast with her rosary in her hands and her shawl over her eyes to shut out the sight of the waves. The cumbrous old boat took the sail lightly enough and Ned leaned back on his elbows against the side, rejoicing in it all.

  ‘She’s laughing,’ his father said delightedly when her bows ran white.

  ‘Whose boat is that, Dempsey?’ he asked, screwing up his eyes as another brown sail tilted ahead of them.

  ‘ ’Tis the island boat,’ shrieked Dempsey.

  ‘ ’Tis not, Dempsey. ’Tis not indeed, my love. That’s not the island boat.’

  ‘Whose boat is it then?’

  ‘It must be some boat from Carriganassa, Dempsey.’

  ‘ ’Tis the island boat I tell you.’

  ‘Ah, why will you be contradicting me, Dempsey, my treasure? ’Tis not the island boat. The island boat has a dark brown sail; ’tis only a month since ’twas tarred, and that’s an old tarred sail, and what proves it out and out, Dempsey, the island-boat sail has a patch in the corner.’

  He was leaning well over the bows, watching the rocks that fled beneath them, a dark purple. He rested his elbow on his raised knee and looked back at them, his brown face sprinkled with spray and lit from below by the accumulated flickerings of the water. His flesh seemed to dissolve, to become transparent, while his blue eyes shone with extraordinary brilliance. Ned half-closed his eyes and watched sea and sky slowly mount and sink behind the red-brown, sun-filled sail and the poised and eager figure.

  ‘Tom!’ shouted his father, and the battered old face peered at them from under the arch of the sail, with which it was almost one in tone, the silvery light filling it with warmth.

  ‘Well?’ Tom’s voice was an inexpressive boom.

  ‘You were right last night, Tom, my boy. My treasure, my son, you were right. ’Twas for the drink I came.’

  ‘Ah, do you tell me so?’ Tom asked ironically.

  ‘ ’Twas, ’twas, ’twas,’ the old man said regretfully. ‘ ’Twas for the drink. ’Twas so, my darling. They were always decent people, your mother’s people, and ’tis her knowing how decent they are makes her so suspicious. She’s a good woman, a fine woman, your poor mother, may the Almighty God bless her and keep her and watch over her.’

  ‘Aaa-men,’ Tom chanted irreverently as his father shook his old cap piously towards the sky.

  ‘But Tom! Are you listening, Tom?’

  ‘Well, what is it now?’

  ‘I had another reason.’

  ‘Had you indeed?’ Tom’s tone was n
ot encouraging.

  ‘I had, I had, God’s truth, I had. God blast the lie I’m telling you, Tom, I had.’

  ‘ ’Twas boasting out of the pair of ye,’ shrieked Dempsey from the stern, the wind whipping the shrill notes from his lips and scattering them wildly like scraps of paper.

  ‘ ’Twas so, Dempsey, ’twas so. You’re right, Dempsey. You’re always right. The blessing of God on you, Dempsey, for you always had the true word.’ Tomas’s laughing leprechaun countenance gleamed under the bellying, tilting, chocolate-coloured sail and his powerful voice beat Dempsey’s down. ‘And would you blame me?’

  ‘The O’Donnells hadn’t the beating of them in their own hand,’ screamed Dempsey.

  ‘Thanks be to God for all His goodness and mercy,’ shouted Tomas, again waving his cap in a gesture of recognition towards the spot where he felt the Almighty might be listening, ‘they have not. They have not so, Dempsey. And they have a good hand. The O’Donnells are a good family and an old family and a kind family, but they never had the like of my two sons.’

  ‘And they were stiff enough with you when you came for the daughter,’ shrieked Dempsey.

  ‘They were, Dempsey, they were. They were stiff. They were so. You wouldn’t blame them, Dempsey. They were an old family and I was nothing only a landless man.’ With a fierce gesture the old man pulled his cap still further over his ear, spat, gave his moustache a tug and leaned at a still more precarious angle over the bow, his blue eyes dancing with triumph. ‘But I had the gumption, Dempsey. I had the gumption, my love.’

  The islands slipped past; the gulf of water narrowed and grew calmer, and white cottages could be seen scattered under the tall ungainly church. It was a wild and rugged coast, the tide was full, and they had to pull in as best they could among the rocks. Red Patrick leaped lightly ashore to draw in the boat. The others stepped after him into several inches of water and Red Patrick, himself precariously poised, held them from slipping. Rather shamefastly, Ned and Tom took off their shoes.

  ‘Don’t do that!’ shrieked their father. ‘We’ll carry ye up. Mother of God, yeer poor feet!’

  ‘Will you shut your old gob?’ Tom said angrily.

  They halted for a moment at the stile outside Caheragh’s. Old Caheragh had a red beard and a broad, smiling face. Then they went on to O’Donnell’s who had two houses, modern and old, separated by a yard. In one lived Uncle Maurice and his family and in the other Maurice’s married son, Sean. Ned and Tom remained with Sean and his wife. Tom and he were old friends. When he spoke he rarely looked at Tom, merely giving him a sidelong glance that just reached to his chin and then dropped his eyes with a peculiar timid smile. ‘ ’Twas,’ Ned heard him say, and then: ‘He did,’ and after that: ‘Hardly.’ Shuvaun was tall, nervous, and matronly. She clung to their hands with an excess of eagerness as though she couldn’t bear to let them go, uttering ejaculations of tenderness, delight, astonishment, pity, and admiration. Her speech was full of diminutives: ‘childeen’, ‘handeen’, ‘boateen’. Three young children scrambled about the floor with a preoccupation scarcely broken by the strangers. Shuvaun picked her way through them, filling the kettle and cutting the bread, and then, as though afraid of neglecting Tom, she clutched his hand again. Her feverish concentration gave an impression that its very intensity bewildered her and made it impossible for her to understand one word they said. In three days’ time it would all begin to drop into place in her mind and then she would begin quoting them.

  Young Niall O’Donnell came in with his girl; one of the Deignans from up the hill. She was plump and pert; she had been in service in town. Niall was a well-built boy with a soft, wild-eyed, sensuous face and a deep mellow voice of great power. While they were having a cup of tea in the parlour where the three or four family photos were skyed, Ned saw the two of them again through the back window. They were standing on the high ground behind the house with the spring sky behind them and the light in their faces. Niall was asking her something but she, more interested in the sitting-room window, only shook her head.

  ‘Ye only just missed yeer father,’ said their Uncle Maurice when they went across to the other house for dinner. Maurice was a tight-lipped little man with a high bald forehead and a snappy voice. ‘He went off to Owney Pat’s only this minute.’

  ‘The devil!’ said Tom. ‘I knew he was out to dodge me. Did you give him whiskey?’

  ‘What the hell else could I give him?’ snapped Maurice. ‘Do you think ’twas tea the old coot was looking for?’

  Tom took the place of honour at the table. He was the favourite. Through the doorway into the bedroom could be seen a big canopy bed and on the whiteness of a raised pillow a skeleton face in a halo of smoke-blue hair surmounted with what looked suspiciously like a mauve tea-cosy. Sometimes the white head would begin to stir and everyone fell silent while Niall, the old man’s pet, translated the scarcely audible whisper. Sometimes Niall would go in with his stiff ungainly swagger and repeat one of Tom’s jokes in his drawling, powerful bass. The hens stepped daintily about their feet, poking officious heads between them, and rushing out the door with a wild flutter and shriek when one of the girls hooshed them. Something timeless, patriarchal, and restful about it made Ned notice everything. It was as though he had never seen his mother’s house before.

  ‘Tell me,’ Tom boomed with mock concern, leaning over confidentially to his uncle and looking under his brows at young Niall, ‘speaking as a clergyman and for the good of the family and so on, is that son of yours coorting Delia Deignan?’

  ‘Why? Was the young blackguard along with her again?’ snapped Maurice in amusement.

  ‘Of course I might be mistaken,’ Tom said doubtfully.

  ‘You wouldn’t know a Deignan, to be sure,’ Sean said dryly.

  ‘Isn’t any of them married yet?’ asked Tom.

  ‘No, by damn, no,’ said Maurice. ‘Isn’t it a wonder?’

  ‘Because,’ Tom went on in the same solemn voice, ‘I want someone to look after this young brother of mine. Dublin is a wild sort of place and full of temptations. Ye wouldn’t know a decent little girl I could ask?’

  ‘Cait! Cait!’ they all shouted, Niall’s deep voice loudest of all.

  ‘Now all the same, Delia looks a smart little piece,’ said Tom.

  ‘No, Cait! Cait! Delia isn’t the same since she went to town. She has notions of herself. Leave him marry Cait!’

  Niall rose gleefully and shambled in to the old man. With a gamesome eye on the company Tom whispered:

  ‘Is she a quiet sort of girl? I wouldn’t like Ned to get anyone rough.’

  ‘She is, she is,’ they said, ‘a grand girl!’

  Sean rose quietly and went to the door with his head bowed.

  ‘God knows, if anyone knows he should know and all the times he manhandled her.’

  Tom sat bolt upright with mock indignation while the table rocked. Niall shouted the joke into his grandfather’s ear. The mauve tea-cosy shook; it was the only indication of the old man’s amusement.

  The Deignans’ house was on top of a hill high over the road and commanded a view of the countryside for miles. The two brothers with Sean and the O’Donnell girls reached it by a long winding boreen that threaded its way uncertainly through little grey rocky fields and walls of unmortared stone which rose against the sky along the edges of the hill like lacework. On their way they met another procession coming down the hill. It was headed by their father and the island woman, arm in arm, and behind came two locals with Dempsey and Red Patrick. All the party except the island woman were well advanced in liquor. That was plain when their father rushed forward to shake them all by the hand and ask them how they were. He said that divil such honourable and kindly people as the people of Carriganassa were to be found in the whole world, and of these there was no one a patch on the O’Donnells; kings and sons of kings as you could see from one look at them. He had only one more call to pay and promised to be at Caheragh’s within a quarter of an hou
r.

  They looked over the Deignans’ half-door. The kitchen was empty. The girls began to titter. They knew the Deignans must have watched them coming from Maurice’s door. The kitchen was a beautiful room; woodwork and furniture, homemade and shapely, were painted a bright red-brown and the painted dresser shone with pretty ware. They entered and looked about them. Nothing was to be heard but the tick of the cheap alarm clock on the dresser. One of the girls began to giggle hysterically. Sean raised his voice.

  ‘Are ye in or are ye out, bad cess to ye!’

  For a moment there was no reply. Then a quick step sounded in the attic and a girl descended the stairs at a run, drawing a black knitted shawl tighter about her shoulders. She was perhaps twenty-eight or thirty, with a narrow face, sharp like a ferret’s, and blue nervous eyes. She entered the kitchen awkwardly sideways, giving the customary greetings but without looking at anyone.

  ‘A hundred welcomes.… How are ye?… ’Tis a fine day.’

  The O’Donnell girls giggled again. Nora Deignan looked at them in astonishment, biting nervously at the tassel of her shawl. She had tiny sharp white teeth.

  ‘What is it, aru?’ she asked.

  ‘Musha, will you stop your old cimeens,’ boomed Tom, ‘and tell us where’s Cait from you? You don’t think ’twas to see your ugly puss that we came up here?’

  ‘Cait!’ Nora called in a low voice.

  ‘What is it?’ another voice replied from upstairs.

  ‘Damn well you know what it is,’ bellowed Tom, ‘and you cross-eyed expecting us since morning. Will you come down out of that or will I go up and fetch you?’