The Best of Frank O'Connor

by Frank O'Connor

  There was the same hasty step and a second girl descended the stairs. It was only later that Ned was able to realize how beautiful she was. She had the same narrow pointed face as her sister, the same slight features sharpened by a sort of animal instinct, the same blue eyes with their startled brightness; but all seemed to have been differently composed, and her complexion had a transparency as though her whole nature were shining through it. ‘Child of Light, thy limbs are burning through the veil which seems to hide them,’ Ned found himself murmuring. She came on them in the same hostile way, blushing furiously. Tom’s eyes rested on her; soft, bleary, emotional eyes incredibly unlike her own.

  ‘Have you nothing to say to me, Cait?’ he boomed, and Ned thought his very voice was soft and clouded.

  ‘Oh, a hundred welcomes.’ Her blue eyes rested for a moment on him with what seemed a fierce candour and penetration and went past him to the open door. Outside a soft rain was beginning to fall; heavy clouds crushed down the grey landscape, which grew clearer as it merged into one common plane; the little grey bumpy fields with the walls of grey unmortared stone that drifted hither and over across them like blown sand, the whitewashed farmhouses lost to the sun sinking back into the brown-grey hillsides.

  ‘Nothing else, my child?’ he growled, pursing his lips.

  ‘How are you?’

  ‘The politeness is suffocating you. Where’s Delia?’

  ‘Here I am,’ said Delia from the doorway immediately behind him. In her furtive way she had slunk round the house. Her bland impertinence raised a laugh.

  ‘The reason we called,’ said Tom, clearing his throat, ‘is this young brother of mine that’s looking for a wife.’

  Everyone laughed again. Ned knew the oftener a joke was repeated the better they liked it, but for him this particular joke was beginning to wear thin.

  ‘Leave him take me,’ said Delia with an arch look at Ned who smiled and gazed at the floor.

  ‘Be quiet, you slut!’ said Tom. ‘There are your two sisters before you.’

  ‘Even so, I want to go to Dublin.… Would you treat me to lemonade, mister?’ she asked Ned with her impudent smile. ‘This is a rotten hole. I’d go to America if they left me.’

  ‘America won’t be complete without you,’ said Tom. ‘Now, don’t let me hurry ye, ladies, but my old fellow will be waiting for us in Johnny Kit’s.’

  ‘We’ll go along with you,’ said Nora, and the three girls took down three black shawls from inside the door. Some tension seemed to have gone out of the air. They laughed and joked between themselves.

  ‘Ye’ll get wet,’ said Sean to the two brothers.

  ‘Cait will make room for me under her shawl,’ said Tom.

  ‘Indeed I will not,’ she cried, starting back with a laugh.

  ‘Very shy you’re getting,’ said Sean with a good-natured grin.

  ‘’Tisn’t that at all but she’d sooner the young man,’ said Delia.

  ‘What’s strange is wonderful,’ said Nora.

  Biting her lip with her tiny front teeth, Cait looked angrily at her sisters and Sean, and then began to laugh. She glanced at Ned and smilingly held out her shawl in invitation, though at the same moment angry blushes chased one another across her forehead like squalls across the surface of a lake. The rain was a mild, persistent drizzle and a strong wind was blowing. Everything had darkened and grown lonely, and, with his head in the blinding folds of the shawl, which reeked of turf-smoke, Ned felt as if he had dropped out of Time’s pocket.

  They waited in Caheragh’s kitchen. The bearded old man sat in one chimney corner and a little barelegged boy in the other. The dim blue light poured down the wide chimney on their heads in a shower with the delicacy of light on old china, picking out surfaces one rarely saw; and between them the fire burned a bright orange in the great whitewashed hearth with the black, swinging bars and pothook. Outside the rain fell softly, almost soundlessly, beyond the half-door. Delia, her black shawl trailing from her shoulders, leaned over it, acting the part of watcher as in a Greek play. Their father’s fifteen minutes had strung themselves out to an hour and two little barefooted boys had already been sent to hunt him down.

  ‘Where are they now, Delia?’ one of the O’Donnells would ask.

  ‘Crossing the fields from Patsy Kit’s.’

  ‘He wasn’t there so.’

  ‘He wouldn’t be,’ the old man said. ‘They’ll likely go on to Ned Kit’s now.’

  ‘That’s where they’re making for,’ said Delia. ‘Up the hill at the far side of the fort.’

  ‘They’ll find him there,’ the old man said confidently.

  Ned felt as though he were still blanketed by the folds of the turf-reeking shawl. Something seemed to have descended on him that filled him with passion and loneliness. He could scarcely take his eyes off Cait. She and Nora sat on the form against the back wall, a composition in black and white, the black shawl drawn tight under the chin, the cowl of it breaking the curve of her dark hair, her shadow on the gleaming wall behind. She did not speak except to answer some question of Tom’s about her brother, but sometimes Ned caught her looking at him with naked eyes. Then she smiled swiftly and secretly and turned her eyes again to the door, sinking back into pensiveness. Pensiveness or vacancy? he wondered. While he gazed at her face with the animal instinctiveness of its over-delicate features it seemed like a mirror in which he saw again the falling rain, the rocks and hills and angry sea.

  The first announced by Delia was Red Patrick. After him came the island woman. Each had last seen his father in a different place. Ned chuckled at a sudden vision of his father, eager and impassioned and aflame with drink, stumping with his broken bottom across endless fields through pouring rain with a growing procession behind him. Dempsey was the last to come. He doubted if Tomas would be in a condition to take the boat at all.

  ‘What matter, aru?’ said Delia across her shoulder. ‘We can find room for the young man.’

  ‘And where would we put him?’ gaped Nora.

  ‘He can have Cait’s bed,’ Delia said innocently.

  ‘Oye, and where would Cait sleep?’ Nora asked and then skitted and covered her face with her shawl. Delia scoffed. The men laughed and Cait, biting her lip furiously, looked at the floor. Again Ned caught her eyes on him and again she laughed and turned away.

  Tomas burst in unexpected on them all like a sea wind that scattered them before him. He wrung Tom’s hand and asked him how he was. He did the same to Ned. Ned replied gravely that he was very well.

  ‘In God’s holy name,’ cried his father, waving his arms like a windmill, ‘what are ye all waiting for?’

  The tide had fallen. Tomas grabbed an oar and pushed the boat on to a rock. Then he raised the sail and collapsed under it and had to be extricated from its drenching folds, glauming and swearing at Cassidy’s old boat. A little group stood on a naked rock against a grey background of drifting rain. For a long time Ned continued to wave back to the black shawl that was lifted to him. An extraordinary feeling of exultation and loss enveloped him. Huddled up in his overcoat he sat with Dempsey in the stern, not speaking.

  ‘It was a grand day,’ his father declared, swinging himself to and fro, tugging at his Viking moustache, dragging the peak of his cap farther over his ear. His gestures betrayed a certain lack of rhythmical cohesion; they began and ended abruptly. ‘Dempsey, my darling, wasn’t it a grand day?’

  ‘ ’Twas a grand day for you,’ shrieked Dempsey, as if his throat would burst.

  ‘ ’Twas, my treasure, ’twas a beautiful day. I got an honourable reception and my sons got an honourable reception.’

  By this time he was flat on his belly, one leg completely over the edge of the boat. He reached back a clammy hand to his sons.

  ‘ ’Twas the best day I ever had,’ he said. ‘I got porter and I got whiskey and I got poteen. I did so, Tom, my calf. Ned, my brightness, I went to seven houses and in every house I got seven drinks and with every drink I go
t seven welcomes. And your mother’s people are a hand of trumps. It was no slight they put on me at all even if I was nothing but a landless man. No slight, Tom. No slight at all.’

  Darkness had fallen, the rain had cleared, the stars came out of a pitch-black sky under which the little tossing, nosing boat seemed lost beyond measure. In all the waste of water nothing could be heard but the splash of the boat’s sides and their father’s voice raised in tipsy song.

  ‘The evening was fair and the sunlight was yellow,

  I halted, beholding a maiden bright

  Coming to me by the edge of the mountain,

  Her cheeks had a berry-bright rosy light.’

  Ned was the first to wake. He struck a match and lit the candle. It was time for them to be stirring. It was just after dawn, and at half past nine he must be in his old place in the schoolroom before the rows of pinched little city faces. He lit a cigarette and closed his eyes. The lurch of the boat was still in his blood, the face of Cait Deignan in his mind, and as if from far away he heard a line of the wild love-song his father had been singing: ‘And we’ll drive the geese at the fall of night.’

  He heard his brother mumble something and nudged him. Tom looked big and fat and vulnerable with his fair head rolled sideways and his heavy mouth dribbling on to the sleeve of his pyjamas. Ned slipped quietly out of bed, put on his trousers, and went to the window. He drew the curtains and let in the thin cold daylight. The bay was just visible and perfectly still. Tom began to mumble again in a frightened voice and Ned shook him. He started out of his sleep with a cry of fear, grabbing at the bedclothes. He looked first at Ned, then at the candle and drowsily rubbed his eyes.

  ‘Did you hear it too?’ he asked.

  ‘Did I hear what?’ asked Ned with a smile.

  ‘In the room,’ said Tom.

  ‘There was nothing in the room,’ replied Ned. ‘You were ramaishing so I woke you up.’

  ‘Was I? What was I saying?’

  ‘You were telling no secrets,’ said Ned with a quiet laugh.

  ‘Hell!’ Tom said in disgust and stretched out his arm for a cigarette. He lit it at the candle flame, his drowsy red face puckered and distraught. ‘I slept rotten.’

  ‘Oye!’ Ned said quietly, raising his eyebrows. It wasn’t often Tom spoke in that tone. He sat on the edge of the bed, joined his hands and leaned forward, looking at Tom with wide gentle eyes.

  ‘Is there anything wrong?’ he asked.

  ‘Plenty.’

  ‘You’re not in trouble?’ Ned asked without raising his voice.

  ‘Not that sort of trouble. The trouble is in myself.’

  Ned gave him a look of intense sympathy and understanding. The soft emotional brown eyes were searching him for a judgment. Ned had never felt less like judging him.

  ‘Ay,’ he said gently and vaguely, his eyes wandering to the other side of the room while his voice took on its accustomed stammer, ‘the trouble is always in ourselves. If we were contented in ourselves the other things wouldn’t matter. I suppose we must only leave it to time. Time settles everything.’

  ‘Time will settle nothing for me,’ Tom said despairingly. ‘You have something to look forward to. I have nothing. It’s the loneliness of my job that kills you. Even to talk about it would be a relief but there’s no one you can talk to. People come to you with their troubles but there’s no one you can go to with your own.’

  Again the challenging glare in the brown eyes and Ned realized with infinite compassion that for years Tom had been living in the same state of suspicion and fear, a man being hunted down by his own nature; and that for years to come he would continue to live in this way, and perhaps never be caught again as he was now.

  ‘A pity you came down here,’ stammered Ned flatly. ‘A pity we went to Carriganassa. ’Twould be better for both of us if we went somewhere else.’

  ‘Why don’t you marry her, Ned?’ Tom asked earnestly.

  ‘Who?’ asked Ned.

  ‘Cait.’

  ‘Yesterday,’ said Ned with the shy smile he wore when he confessed something, ‘I nearly wished I could.’

  ‘But you can, man,’ Tom said eagerly, sitting upon his elbow. Like all men with frustration in their hearts he was full of schemes for others. ‘You could marry her and get a school down here. That’s what I’d do if I was in your place.’

  ‘No,’ Ned said gravely. ‘We made our choice a long time ago. We can’t go back on it now.’

  Then with his hands in his trouser pockets and his head bowed he went out to the kitchen. His mother, the coloured shawl about her head, was blowing the fire. The bedroom door was open and he could see his father in shirtsleeves kneeling beside the bed, his face raised reverently towards a holy picture, his braces hanging down behind. He unbolted the half-door, went through the garden and out on to the road. There was a magical light on everything. A boy on a horse rose suddenly against the sky, a startling picture. Through the apple-green light over Carriganassa ran long streaks of crimson, so still they might have been enamelled. Magic, magic, magic! He saw it as in a children’s picture-book with all its colours intolerably bright; something he had outgrown and could never return to, while the world he aspired to was as remote and intangible as it had seemed even in the despair of youth.

  It seemed as if only now for the first time was he leaving home; for the first time and forever saying good-bye to it all.

  THE BRIDAL NIGHT

  IT WAS sunset, and the two great humps of rock made a twilight in the cove where the boats were lying high up the strand. There was one light only in a little whitewashed cottage. Around the headland came a boat and the heavy dipping of its oars was like a heron’s flight. The old woman was sitting on the low stone wall outside her cottage.

  ‘ ’Tis a lonesome place,’ said I.

  ‘ ’Tis so,’ she agreed, ‘a lonesome place, but any place is lonesome without one you’d care for.’

  ‘Your own flock are gone from you, I suppose?’ I asked.

  ‘I never had but the one,’ she replied, ‘the one son only,’ and I knew because she did not add a prayer for his soul that he was still alive.

  ‘Is it in America he is?’ I asked. (It is to America all the boys of the locality go when they leave home.)

  ‘No, then,’ she replied simply. ‘It is in the asylum in Cork he is on me these twelve years.’

  I had no fear of trespassing on her emotions. These lonesome people in the wild places, it is their nature to speak; they must cry out their sorrows like the wild birds.

  ‘God help us!’ I said. ‘Far enough!’

  ‘Far enough,’ she sighed. ‘Too far for an old woman. There was a nice priest here one time brought me up in his car to see him. All the ways to this wild place he brought it, and he drove me into the city. It is a place I was never used to, but it eased my mind to see poor Denis well-cared-for and well-liked. It was a trouble to me before that, not knowing would they see what a good boy he was before his madness came on him. He knew me; he saluted me, but he said nothing until the superintendent came to tell me the tea was ready for me. Then poor Denis raised his head and says: “Leave ye not forget the toast. She was ever a great one for her bit of toast.” It seemed to give him ease and he cried after. A good boy he was and is. It was like him after seven long years to think of his old mother and her little bit of toast.’

  ‘God help us,’ I said for her voice was like the birds’, hurrying high, immensely high, in the coloured light, out to sea to the last islands where their nests were.

  ‘Blessed be His holy will,’ the old woman added, ‘there is no turning aside what is in store. It was a teacher that was here at the time. Miss Regan her name was. She was a fine big jolly girl from the town. Her father had a shop there. They said she had three hundred pounds to her own cheek the day she set foot in the school, and – ’tis hard to believe but ’tis what they all said: I will not belie her – ’twasn’t banished she was at all, but she came here of her own choice, f
or the great liking she had for the sea and the mountains. Now, that is the story, and with my own eyes I saw her, day in day out, coming down the little pathway you came yourself from the road and sitting beyond there in a hollow you can hardly see, out of the wind. The neighbours could make nothing of it, and she being a stranger, and with only the book Irish, they left her alone. It never seemed to take a peg out of her, only sitting in that hole in the rocks, as happy as the day is long, reading her little book or writing her letters. Of an odd time she might bring one of the little scholars along with her to be picking posies.

  ‘That was where my Denis saw her. He’d go up to her of an evening and sit on the grass beside her, and off and on he might take her out in the boat with him. And she’d say with that big laugh of hers: “Denis is my beau.” Those now were her words and she meant no more harm by it than the child unborn, and I knew it and Denis knew it, and it was a little joke we had, the three of us. It was the same way she used to joke about her little hollow. “Mrs Sullivan,” she’d say, “leave no one near it. It is my nest and my cell and my little prayer-house, and maybe I would be like the birds and catch the smell of the stranger and then fly away from ye all.” It did me good to hear her laugh, and whenever I saw Denis moping or idle I would say it to him myself: “Denis, why wouldn’t you go out and pay your attentions to Miss Regan and all saying you are her intended?” It was only a joke. I would say the same thing to her face, for Denis was such a quiet boy, no way rough or accustomed to the girls at all – and how would he in this lonesome place?

  ‘I will not belie her, it was she saw first that poor Denis was after more than company, and it was not to this cove she came at all then but to the little cove beyond the headland, and ’tis hardly she would go there itself without a little scholar along with her. “Ah,” I says, for I missed her company, “isn’t it the great stranger Miss Regan is becoming?” and Denis would put on his coat and go hunting in the dusk till he came to whatever spot she was. Little ease that was to him, poor boy, for he lost his tongue entirely, and lying on his belly before her, chewing an old bit of grass, is all he would do till she got up and left him. He could not help himself, poor boy. The madness was on him, even then, and it was only when I saw the plunder done that I knew there was no cure for him only to put her out of his mind entirely. For ’twas madness in him and he knew it, and that was what made him lose his tongue – he that was maybe without the price of an ounce of ’baccy – I will not deny it: often enough he had to do without it when the hens would not be laying, and often enough stirabout and praties was all we had for days. And there was she with money to her name in the bank! And that wasn’t all, for he was a good boy; a quiet, good-natured boy, and another would take pity on him, knowing he would make her a fine steady husband, but she was not the sort, and well I knew it from the first day I laid eyes on her, that her hand would never rock the cradle. There was the madness out and out.