by Eamon Kelly
The sound of the blind going up woke me and the sunlight flooded into the room. ‘Are you going to get up at all today?’ It was my father and he didn’t sound cross as he added, ‘You’ll be the death of your mother!’ And, I thinking of the resolution that was forming in my head as I went to sleep, said, half under my breath, ‘I won’t be troubling her long more!’ As I dressed and went downstairs I recalled the strange dream I had and the vision of my mother smiling and holding out her hand to me as I drowned. She was standing in the middle of the kitchen floor holding out a pair of girl’s stockings which she had found hanging out of the pocket of my coat. My whole being went into a jelly at the thought of what she and my father would think. There was a look in my mother’s face I had never seen before.
‘What have you done?’ she demanded. ‘Have you shamed us?’
My love for my mother was stronger than that for my father. I treasured every thought of how she cherished us when we were young. I couldn’t live under the same roof with a mother whose love had turned to ice, a mother who believed that I had done something that was terrible to her way of thinking. These thoughts went through my mind in a flash as I explained to her what had happened.
‘Coming home from Griffiths’ dance,’ I told her, ‘the flood was over the stepping stones and we took off our shoes and she put her stockings in my pocket.’ My mother wanted to know who I was with and I told her it was Jude Scanlon. ‘Our feet were too wet to put on our stockings when we reached the bank. We laced on our boots and forgot to put on our stockings after. If you don’t believe me, see in my other pocket and you’ll find my socks.’
She gave me a look and I didn’t know whether it said, ‘I believe you,’ or ‘I don’t want ever to see you again.’ I went back upstairs and put a few things together and threw them out the window. On my way down I took my coat, then went out of the house, hopped on my bicycle and rode away. As I pedalled on, tears of temper blinded me and I had no notion of where I was going. What was driving me on? Was it the bitter pang inside of me of being rejected for something I didn’t do? I knew from my catechism and from the sermons of the holy fathers at the missions what was wrong, but I hadn’t done anything. Jude Scanlon and I were as pure in our love as the driven snow. I thought again of the dream I had of being in heaven with her. To be dead and that dream a reality was what I wished for now; to go on forever walking hand in hand through the flower-filled fields of paradise.
A magpie perched on a birch sapling let out a raucous screech at me. Mocking me. It was unlucky to see one magpie. One was for sorrow. I cycled on through the next village and the next. I had had no breakfast and I wasn’t hungry. I stopped in Millstreet, almost twenty miles from home. The church was being repaired. I left my bicycle against the gate and went in to look at the work. Who should I see but Dan Cronin, who used to build houses with my father. He was surprised to see me and wanted to know where I came out of. I told him that there was a row at home and that I ran away. He laughed. ‘All part of growing up,’ he said. ‘I ran away from home myself but I was soon back when the hunger picked me.’ The hunger was beginning to pick me now.
‘Was it a woman?’ he asked. ‘Ah, but you are too young for that caper!’
‘Maybe it was!’ I admitted, a manly tingling surging through my boyish frame.
‘I’ll ask the boss if he has anything to do for you and maybe you’d be over your tormas (sulk) in the evening.’
He went and asked the contractor and I was taken on to help a carpenter who was making a framed and sheeted door for the sacristy. I had no tools and he was lazy enough to let me use his. Tradesmen are noted for their attachment to their implements and stonecutters have been known to bury their favourite chisels in the mud floor of the workplace if they are going away for a few days.
I mortised the stiles of the door and the carpenter cut the tenons on the cross pieces. He was pleased with my work. He wouldn’t let me bead the sheeting as I hadn’t used a bead plane before. The top of the door had a Gothic head and I had a lot of sawing to do to shape the head from a wide plank. I did the rough work and the carpenter finished it. At the midday break Cronin remarked that people who run away from home don’t have any money.
‘I have a ten bob note that’s in two halves. I don’t know how I tore it. If you can fix it,’ he said, ‘you are welcome to it.’
I was at my wits’ end to know how I could piece it together until I thought of the gummed strips torn from a stamp sheet. I went to the post office and there on the window-sill were plenty of them. I licked a long strip and put it at the back of the ten shilling note with half the strip protruding. Then very carefully I matched the two pieces of the note together. It looked perfect on one side and that was the side I kept up when I paid in a small café for tea, bread and butter and a plate of ham. The whole thing came to a half crown. I brought the change back to Cronin. He took only the price of two pints and left me the rest.
That evening with the door nearly finished, there didn’t seem to be any more work for me. The contractor gave me five shillings. I got on my bicycle and without thinking I headed for home. It was dark when I got near the house but I couldn’t get myself to go in. The tormas, as Cronin called it, hadn’t worn off. I hid my bicycle in the lime kiln and went into our own hayshed. Even though it was late spring there was still a pole of hay there. After being at an all-night dance the night before, I was worn out for the want of sleep. In no time I was fast asleep and it was the cock crowing in the morning that woke me. I stole out in the half dark and cycled away. Passing a neighbour’s house I saw that they were up and I went in. Paddy, the man of the house, was someone I could trust and I told him that I had left home and asked could I lie low for a few days. I stayed, and as I was in the house and idle he went to town and got ceiling boards to ceil the room. The stations were due next month. He had a good sharp saw and a hammer and that would do me to carry out the job. When the boards arrived I fell into work, Paddy tending me and holding up the board at the far end until I had nailed it in place.
In my innocence I told him and his wife Mary about my trouble at home and the situation that led to it. Paddy had often crossed those flooded stepping stones himself when he was courting Mary and they had often taken off their shoes and stockings. Paddy thought it a very comical occurrence going in home with the stockings of the girl next door in my pocket. He laughed heartily at it but it was no laughing matter for me. Still his attitude helped to thaw out the ice of ill-feeling between me and home just a small bit. I took my time with the job of ceiling the room. There were a few more things around the house which needed the attention of a tradesman and I did these as well.
Each night I came back home but as I couldn’t face in I slept in the hayshed. There were small insects in the hay which worked their way inside my clothes and irritated my skin. How I longed for my own bed and the pleasure of changing my clothes and putting on a clean shirt. When I was sitting by the fire in Paddy’s kitchen the heat aroused the insects next to my skin so that it was a torture to keep from scratching myself. I made excuses to go out and rub my back to the cornerstone of the house and give myself a good shaking.
Paddy pulled my leg about Jude Scanlon and it was a nice sensation hearing her name mentioned. She was never for one moment out of my thoughts. As Paddy said, ‘You have it bad! You are only a garsún (boy) yet. You will put many more women through your hands before you settle down.’
I was seventeen and I hadn’t my trade fully learned but no matter how long I had to wait to marry, Jude would be the woman I’d choose to spend my life with. I was firmly convinced of that.
‘If you went knocking at Scanlons’ door looking for Jude’s hand at your age old Scanlon would put the dogs after you,’ he laughed. Then he talked about Jude’s father, in his lighter moments as comical a man as there was in the parish. I knew him well. He was the life and soul of any house where people gathered. Paddy heard him say that when he was courting Jude’s mother he went to ask her fa
ther for her hand. He boasted that his was a love match, which was unusual at the time. Her father offered him a drink and a pipe of tobacco, and Scanlon in an effort to make a good impression said, ‘I don’t drink, smoke, play cards, go with women, bet on horses or take an active interest in politics.’
‘Tell me,’ the girl’s father enquired, ‘Do you ate grass?’
‘Oh no, I don’t,’ said Scanlon.
‘In that case,’ he was told, ‘you are not fit company for man or beast!’
Scanlon, reaching out his right hand for the glass and his left one for the pipe, said, ‘Now can I marry her?’
Suddenly Paddy changed his tune and said that Mary and he had humoured me along for most of a week and that it was time for me to go back home. ‘I am a friend of your family,’ he told me, ‘and I would be failing in that friendship if I didn’t urge you to return to your parents. Your mother will be out of her mind wondering what has happened to you. The tormas [Cronin’s word again] should be worn off you by now.’
I thanked him and his wife for their kindness to me and went out into the black night. I took my bike and instead of riding off I walked with it through the dark, mulling in my head Paddy’s words. I wasn’t a man yet, no more than a boy trying to come to grips with growing up and coping with the miracle of being in love. I thought of what my father and mother must have felt all the days I was away. A warmth for my mother was burgeoning in my breast. The tormas was wearing off. I could go back tonight and sleep between clean sheets. I hopped on my bike and rode like a madman through the dark till I came to our own gate. I put the bicycle in the hayshed and went to the door of the house. Passing the window I saw that the men, the nightly ramblers, were still sitting in the kitchen. This would be the wrong time to go in. I waited in the hayshed until I heard them going. At the sound of the last ‘goodnight’ I went and opened the door and peered into the kitchen. There was no one there but my father. He had his boots off and was hanging his socks on the crane. As he reached for the tongs to rake the fire I said ‘hello’ very softly.
Without lifting his head he took the red coals and half-burned small sods and buried them in the ashes.
‘I came back,’ I said, in an effort to fill the painful silence.
‘If you were younger,’ he replied, ‘I suppose I’d have to take the stick to you. Have you anything to say for yourself?’
‘I’m very sorry,’ I blurted out, ‘for upsetting you and my mother. Where is she?’
My mother was in bed. I lit the butt of a candle, put it in the sconce, and went into the bedroom. I put the candle on the chimney-piece and, seeing me, she sat up in bed and looked at me for a while. I expected to get a telling off. But no. Suddenly her face softened and she smiled. ‘A chuisle mo chroí!’ (my heart’s pulse) she said. ‘A leanbh bán!’ (my dear child). Irish often came to her lips like now when she wanted to express her love.
‘A chuisle mo chroí,’ she said, ‘I believe what you told me the morning you ran away. I believed it then but I was in too much of a temper to admit it.’
She reached out her hands and I went and knelt by the bed. She put her arms around me, a thing she hadn’t done since I was a small child. I was overwhelmed by the suddenness of finding myself being embraced by my mother. She held me close and an uncontrollable spasm seized my body and I began to shake. I cried and buried my face in the blankets so that she couldn’t see me. Thousands of thoughts milled around in my head. Things I wanted to say to her, but when I raised my head all I could say was, ‘I’m sorry!’
I sat on a chair and she told me that she was worried to death while I was away. Expecting every minute that the door would open and I would be standing there. She spoke of my father, who had never uttered a harsh word to me. It was hard on him working alone and trying to cope with all the extra jobs that were coming his way lately.
‘Tomorrow,’ she said and she was in her old form now, ‘he is going building a hayshed for Scanlon.’
She looked at me to see what effect the name would have on me. I thought of Jude as she said it and I suppose I reddened up.
‘You are too young,’ my mother said, ‘to take a thing like that seriously. Your father was twenty-seven before he met me. Take your time, the world is wide. You’ll find that Miss Scanlon has other things on her mind. It’s only a couple of years since she was going to school. She’s too young to take on the cares of life. You wait. She has other plans, you’ll see.’
The episode of my running away was at an end and I was happy to be back. I would have dearly loved to talk to my mother as I sat there. To ask her how she met my father and what life was like when she was my age. I wasn’t able to bring myself to do it. Somehow some sort of barrier came down when I felt like talking about things like that to her or to my father. We thrashed out the ordinary everyday matters about the house. But when it had anything to do with the heart we were trapped in a web of silence.
‘Will you have anything to eat?’ she wanted to know.
‘I’ll have a cup of milk,’ I said, ‘if it’s there.’
‘There’s plenty of milk,’ she assured me, ‘and before I forget it. I put them in a paper bag. It’s there on the top of the press.’
I looked in the paper bag. It contained Jude’s stockings. I put them in my pocket and to cover my embarrassment I went out of the room. ‘Good night!’ I said to my father as I crossed the kitchen and climbed the stairs to bed.
STRAWBOYS COME DANCING
The day we went building Scanlon’s hayshed was a joyous day for me. I saw Jude going about her household duties, feeding the calves, giving mess to the fowl and drawing water from the well. She drew my mind away from my work and my father had to call on me to pay attention to what I was doing. At about eleven o’clock Jude and her mother brought out two bowls in which there were beaten-up eggs in steaming hot milk with sugar, and a few spoonfuls of whiskey in my father’s bowl. It was a drink my father loved; maybe Jude’s mother heard somewhere of his liking for it. He thanked the women and told Jude’s mother that she had a big heart to go to so much trouble.
‘It was no bother at all,’ she said. ‘You deserve it. Good tradesmen are to be cherished.’
She remarked then that she was related to my mother. Consanguinity again! She and my father began tracing relationships and I was praying that the connection wasn’t too near and that it wouldn’t be an impediment if Jude and myself ever thought of getting married. ‘This boy is your eldest, Ned?’ she said to my father, and without waiting for an answer she went on, ‘He is a great help to you. Shake hands with him, Jude. Maybe ye know each other already.’
I shook Jude’s hand and taking the hint from the gleam in her eye we both acted as if we were meeting for the first time. I was reluctant to look at my father in case he’d spill the beans, but on second thoughts I knew he wouldn’t, though my heart missed a beat when he said, ‘Nearly all young people know each other now. They get around more than we did, ma’am. The bicycle was a great invention.’ Though I was only seventeen I could hardly remember the first time I rode a man’s bike; it was so long before. When I started my apprenticeship I got a new model and my father and I cycled everywhere to work.
Dinnertime came and Jude came out to call us. I waited to talk with her until all the men had gone into the house. There was a small moment of embarrassment when I gave her the paper bag with her stockings. Blushing, she concealed the bag under her apron and when we talked about the night of the stepping stones, I never mentioned about my mother finding her stockings in my pocket. We both went into the kitchen. All the places around the large deal table were filled but mine.
‘An té a bhíonn amuigh fuaireann a chuid,’ Jude’s mother said (He who is out his portion cools). Old Scanlon sat at the head of the table, a big red-faced man with a sandy moustache and a good cover of thatch on his head. All the talk among the men was about a marriage that was taking place some distance away in a few days’ time. Getting married outside Shrove was very rare
, but the groom, who had spent some years in the city and was home on early pension from the prison service, had drifted a little from the old customs. It was a made match and he was marrying one of the Galvin girls of the Knob. There was no son in that house and the gaoler was getting the land.
‘She’s a prisoner now for life,’ Old Scanlon laughed.
‘And there will be hard labour too,’ managed another.
‘That’ll do,’ Jude’s mother said, drawing a rein on the conversation before it went too far. ‘It will be a great wedding. The Galvins always had the big heart. There’ll be no shortage there.’
‘What good is that to us,’ Old Scanlon replied, ‘when we won’t be invited? Unless we’d straw. Did you ever straw, Ned?’ he asked my father.
Strawboys were the uninvited guests who went to a wedding in disguise for a short visit. They were given a drink and a chance to dance a set, and many groups of them called in the course of a wedding night.
‘Many is the time,’ my father told him. ‘But strawing was an art in the old days. A week would be spent making a straw suit, complete with skirt, cape and high-caul cap. Our faces were blackened or covered with a piece of lace curtain. There was always a captain over a group of strawboys. He was the only one who spoke and the others had to obey him.’
‘Surely the girls went strawing as well,’ Jude’s mother asked. ‘We didn’t have the custom up our way.’
‘Of course they did,’ my father replied, ‘Where would we be without them!’
‘Strawboys in the old days were an orderly enough crowd,’ Old Scanlon held. ‘They added a bit of variety to a wedding dance. Was our wedding strawed?’ he asked Jude’s mother.