by Eamon Kelly
The settle, which was a bed at night, was placed by the back wall a little down from the fire and below it the dresser. These were brightly painted in blue and white and the dresser, even with the dinner plates and drinking bowls in use, carried a fine array of shining delf. Between the window and the front door and high on the wall was an open-shelved piece of furniture called a clevvy. A hanging piece, it carried a display of tin mugs, lustre jugs and highly polished saucepan covers on hooks. Directly under it stood the separator, screwed down to the gravel-filled box in which it came from Sweden. Alpha was the name at the side. There was a large bowl at the top into which the new milk was poured and as the handle was turned the milk went through the machine and cream came out one spout and skimmed milk out the other. The separator replaced the broad shallow pans in which the milk was set and left for the cream to come to the top and in a short time it too was replaced by the travelling creamery.
In olden times and indeed still in some houses there was a coop beside the back door in which fowl were kept at night. It was a splendid piece of furniture, painted the same as the dresser and the settle. It had two compartments into which a dozen hens could be packed, six above and six below. The shutters were slotted and through them the hens poked their heads and carried on a constant cluck-cluck until the lights were put out and everyone went to bed. The cock was never cooped up. He sat on top or perched high up on the crossbeam. At the crack of dawn he flapped his wings and crowed and the hens clucked so that there was little peace in the house until someone got up and released them into the yard. The rafters were blackened from maybe a century of smoke but for three feet before they entered the walls they were whitewashed. These were the rafters that echoed to the loud cries of sorrow when there was a tragic death in the family, or in happier times to the sound of music at a wedding dance or to the tingling of the consecration bell at the station Mass.
There was a notion creeping in lately of having a cup of tea after the dinner. The older men wouldn’t hear of this. They preferred to wait for the tea break at about four o’clock. I drank the tea and so did my father, while the masons smoked their pipes. After a suitable lapse of time to allow the food to settle, one of the masons, much to the farmer’s relief, got up with a ‘This’ll never pay the rent’ and the men walked back to the building site and my father and I went to our temporary workshop in the hayshed. Everyone was in good form after the dinner. We could hear the masons singing as they worked. They were expert tradesmen and in a matter of days they had the walls high enough to receive the joists for the upper floor. When the walls reached the eaves and the two gables were built, my father put on the roof. The rafters, each two coupled, had been made on the ground and hoisted into position with a bird’s beak shape at the end of each rafter finding a resting place on the wall plate. With the slating machine I punched holes in the bluish-purple Bangor slates. The men tending drew the slates to my father and with some help from me he covered the two sides of the roof in one day. The chimneys were lead-flashed, the roof ridged and the eaveshoots and downpipes fixed in position.
We glazed the sashes and put them in the window frames. I loved pressing the soft putty between my hands and if it got too soft I added whitening to bring it to its proper consistency. My mind often wandered and, making small animals with the putty, I populated my corner of the bench with cows, horses and sheep. A shout from my father would bring me back to reality and I would proceed to bed the sash rebate with soft putty to receive the glass. With the sashes glazed, the weather was excluded from the house and the woodwork of the inside began. First the timber floors were put down. I became an expert at driving black brads shaped like a 7 with a long leg into the boards. The last blow of the hammer had to be so timed that the head went below the surface without leaving the mark of the hammer on the board. If I did this I’d get a rap of my father’s hammer handle on the knuckles. He hated slovenly work. He was a kindly man and lost his temper only if I did something extremely stupid like this. He expected me to learn the trade by watching him rather than telling me or demonstrating the work like an instructor. Only if I persisted in doing something wrong would he take the tools from me and show me how to do it the correct way. But Rome wasn’t built in a day and it took much practice and hours of hard work before I achieved proficiency in the use of the woodworking implements. I often spotted him watching me out of the corner of his eye and if I got something dead right a smile of satisfaction would light up his face.
When the floors were down we made a workbench inside the house and here we made the staircase. A simple knowledge of geometry was needed to work out the rise and the going of each step. The two heavy string boards which support the steps were marked and chased to take the treads and the risers. My father with the tenon saw cut into the wood and I with the chisel and mallet scooped out the channels. Chips flew before the chisel as I did the rough work. My father finished the channel with the paring chisel to the correct depth. The steps, risers and treads were glued and wedged and with a newel post at the top and the bottom the staircase was manoeuvred into position. I was the first to run up and down. Seeing my obvious delight at treading on my own or partly my own handiwork, my father as he stood back admiring the structure said, ‘Will you ever grow up!’
Our next job was to erect the partitions to divide the rooms upstairs. These partitions were sheeted with ceiling boards, four and a half by a half inch and ‘veed’ and rebated. With the same boards we ceiled the rooms upstairs and the parlour below. The kitchen joists were left bare. From these would hang the flitches of bacon when the farmer killed a pig in October or November. The window-sills were put in and the reveals boarded. With the architraves in position around the doors and windows the woodwork of the house was complete, but before we were entirely finished all the exposed wood was sized, stained yellow ochre and then varnished. The masons had put in the concrete window-sills, put down the cement floor and plastered the walls. When the plaster dried out the farmer and his family left their snug house in the hollow and took possession of their castle on the hill.
The last time we all sat down to a meal in the farmer’s old kitchen the talk turned to the new system that was creeping in of building houses with poured concrete. The masons realised that houses built with stone would soon be a thing of the past. There was a sadness in their voices as they spoke of their ancient craft, a trade that went back to the legendary Gobán Saor who built the round towers and was so respected that he, the bard and the storyteller sat at the same table as the king.
FUGITIVE
The hayshed in which we had our temporary workshop was built by my father. The rick thatched with green rushes and the round stacks of oats with their pointed roofs looking like an African village were no longer seen in farmers’ haggards. Haysheds to hold hay and corn were going up everywhere when I started my apprenticeship to carpentry. My father was in great demand for this type of work and had the reputation of building a hayshed in a day. He had to in order to cope with the call on his services. But he had to have help. The farmer, his sons and maybe a neighbour or two had the holes already dug and were in readiness in the early morning to stand the poles in position and pack the earth firmly around them.
Wall plates were secured to the tops of the poles, the roof couples made and by the break for the midday meal the skeleton of the structure stood in place, crying out to be covered with corrugated iron. It was a very mean man who wouldn’t have a few dozen of stout in the house for an occasion like this. The men had a bottle each with their meal instead of a bowl of milk. After we had eaten our meal the sheets of zinc were stretched on the purlins and I helped my father nail them down. For the next few hours an almighty din of metallic sound filled the countryside and before the sun sank at the end of a long summer’s day the roof was capped and two sides and one gable were sheeted and secure. When my father had driven the last nail home he threw down the hammer and struck his hands together as much as to say ‘I’ve done it again!’ If there was
a bottle of stout left he got it and the men praised him and said no other man alive could have accomplished what he did in one day. When the farmer gave him the money which was agreed to, after a little bit of humming and hawing, my father put it in his pocket and when we came home he gave it to my mother and she put it in the small box with the sliding top. When he was paid for a smaller job in the workshop he kept the money to buy a half-quarter of plug tobacco, or for the security of feeling a pound or two in his pocket if he met a man in town and they went for a few drinks.
Haysheds weren’t long up when they became trysting places for courting couples on their way home from all-night dances. Indeed they often housed two or three couples locked in fond embraces. We were told that a farmer in the dark of a winter’s morning, collecting an armful of hay for his cows, unknown to him pulled the slip-on shoes off a young woman’s feet and carried them buried in the hay to the cattle shed. She uttered no syllable of protest because she and her partner were afraid of being caught in such a place. The owner would go out of his mind if he knew the hayshed was being used for such a purpose. Morals didn’t trouble him. What did bother him was the lighting match of a cigarette smoker. The winter feed of corn and hay for his stock could go up in flames. When the coast was clear we presume the lass and her lover stole out, very careful not to arouse the dog, and she went home barefoot.
I slept in our hayshed for nearly a week one time and my parents didn’t know I was there. This is how it came about. After a few years working with my father and doing a man’s share I was in my view a man and should be doing the things young men were doing. One of these was going on Sunday nights to house dances. My mother, who was the boss in these matters, didn’t mind but she objected to my staying out until three or four o’clock in the morning at all-night dances. Dancing in an overcrowded, unventilated kitchen with a blazing fire in the hearth and coming out into the freezing winter air covered in perspiration could result in a very bad cold. Getting wet going to a ball night and leaving the clothes to dry on my back often gave me a cough so severe that my mother likened it to the sound of two stones striking together. Many people died of consumption around where we lived. In one case a whole family was wiped out.
‘You’ll never stop,’ she used to say to me, ‘until you bring it into the house to us.’
Her brother Mike had died of tuberculosis a few years before and my racking cough filled her with horror.
But I went against her wishes. I had met someone for whom I had a true wish, and she was the attraction which drew me to any dance where I thought she might be. Because I was a good dancer she liked being asked out in a set dance with me. There were two kinds of set dance, a jig and a polka. Each comprised three figures and a slide, but the jig set ended with a hornpipe tune and the polka set with a reel. I used to whirl my girl like mad in the wheel of the hornpipe, but I never lost my footing as I did the first time I went dancing. Jude was slim and fair-haired and her blue laughing eyes were before me every waking hour. It took a long time before she agreed that I could walk her home, but at last when she fell in with my wishes I was in the seventh heaven. Holding hands was the only liberty she allowed and after a few words at her father’s gate she was off like lightning into the house.
She kept me on tenterhooks for ages. The more she resisted my well intentioned advances the more my heart ached to hold her in my arms, if only for a single minute. The more I thought about it the more I feared the muddle I would make of the whole thing if it ever came to pass. I wasn’t eating, my mother said, and my father had to call me from my daydreams to attend to the work in hand. Walking in the pitch dark one night coming from a dance, Jude and I bumped into a horse that was standing stock-still in the middle of the road. She held on to me because of the fright she got and I threw my arms around her to comfort her. The horse trotted off and my mouth found hers, and oh glory, the blood surged through my veins and bells and gongs and a delightful commotion took over my head. She was taken aback at my ardour but it was the start of many a blissful sojourn as we backed an oak tree close to her father’s house. She would never go into a hayshed or lie on the soft grass on the slope of the railway. We met on Sunday evenings and walked the quiet stretch by the river or picked whortleberries in Merry’s wood in October whose juice stained our mouths a bluish purple. I loved her but I was never sure if she had a true wish for me.
One night the stepping stones were dry as we crossed the wide river to a dance at Griffiths, but it rained so heavily during the night that they were covered when we were coming back. By the mercy of heaven the sky had cleared and the moon shone brightly, and we could see the tops of the stepping stones under maybe three or four inches of water. Rather than go the long way around by Gortacoosh we decided to cross the river. We took off our shoes and she gave me her stockings to put in the pocket of my body coat. I put my socks in the other pocket and we set out. The water was freezing cold and we doubled back a few times. Finally taking courage, we faced the river. I went first and when I reached a step I helped her to gain a foothold beside me. Halfway across, the surface of the stepping stones became very uneven and it was harder to get a firm footing. Nervousness on her part turned to sheer fright when she saw how far more we had to go. I had often seen the river when it was nearly dry and I knew the height of the stepping stones. If we fell off them, I told her, we wouldn’t drown only get very wet. The river was fordable at that spot and didn’t run very swiftly. We were quite safe. By the dint of assurance and reassurance she soldiered on from step to step until we reached the other side. What were tears on her part turned to laughter. We threw back our heads and roared merriment into the night. We ran barefoot up and down the bank till we got the blood in circulation again. As our feet were wet we put on our shoes barefoot and strolled along. We stopped and hugged and talked and hummed and sang till we came to her father’s gate. I doubled back home and the cock crew as I went in the door.
My mother was awake and scolded me severely for being out so late. She lost her temper as she was wont to do when I came in at what she called an unearthly hour. My smaller brothers and sisters woke and began to cry, and my father, ever a man of peace, pleaded with my mother to wait and thrash it out in the daytime. Half of my mind was savouring the happiness I had experienced walking from the river with Jude in the moonlight and the other half was revolting against a scene like this which was ruining the memory of that enchanted hour. My temper was as quick as my mother’s. Everyone said I was taking after her. I shouted back that I was a man now and that I would come in any time I liked. This unexpected outburst made her cry bitterly. To think that the son she had reared would shout at his mother. To think that he had so little respect for her and for his small brothers and sisters to stay out all night God only knows where, or in what company, and to come home now at cockcrow and turn the house into a place of turmoil.
‘Do you hear him?’ she said to my father. ‘He’ll come in any time he likes. He can come in any time he likes but it won’t be into this house!’
Now that her temper had taken possession of her she was in full flight vocally, her language almost poetic as she assailed me for being an ungrateful son. A son, for all she knew, lost in the depredation of sin. How could there be luck or grace in a house where a son had turned his back on God and succumbed to the temptations of the devil! I hung my coat on the newel post of the stairs and the daylight poured through the window as I climbed up to bed. Even as sleep claimed me I could still hear my mother sobbing and speaking to herself and praying the verses she often prayed:
Angel of God my guardian dear,
To whom God’s love commits me here.
Ever this night be at my side,
To light and guard, to rule and guide!
As I fell asleep, a resolution was forming in my mind. I would leave this house … yes, I would leave … I would go … I was dreaming and a torrent was raging in the river and sweeping my loved one from my arms. I struggled to save her but my head went under an
d the water poured into my lungs. Slowly darkness filled my head and the world slipped away from me. My mother was there in my dream. She stretched out her hand to me. She was smiling. ‘A leanbh’ (my child), she said, ‘I love you!’ Then through my open mouth my soul in the shape of a butterfly escaped from my body and hovered over the river. I could see the body my soul had left drifting with the flood. Beside it was the body of my sweetheart, Jude, her fair hair flowing with the stream. And as I called out to her a white butterfly came out of her mouth and fluttered up towards me. We winged our way to paradise and strolled together through flower bedecked fields. We had shed our wings and walked again with earthly bodies. We saw the bearded saints and St Joseph was making a wheel, our Lord a young man holding the spoke as St Joseph drove it into the stock. Mary brought tea to them in the workshop. Angels flew overhead and God when he appeared was a dazzling light …