The Dead School

by Patrick McCabe

  Eventually the whole thing went too far and two men climbed in after her. ‘Come on now, Mrs, you can’t be shouting like this,’ they said, ‘you’ll have to come up now out of that.’ When they saw this everyone heaved a sigh of relief and said to themselves at last it’s all over thank God but then, inexplicably, she lashed out and hit one of them. Whether it was by accident or not, no one could tell, but she was screaming, ‘Leave me alone! Leave me alone!’ The screaming was bad enough to begin with but by then it had become so intolerable that in the end there was no point in anyone pretending or even hoping that they could ever go away from that cemetery saying it had been a glorious day or a day of community solidarity or anything like it. An utter disaster would be a more honest and accurate description. Malachy was standing beside Nobby who lit another match, then tossed it away into the flapping wind as he said out of the side of his mouth, ‘I seen a mongrel one time that had the rabies. That’s what she reminds me of. I wouldn’t get into that grave for love or money.’

  It looked like he was right because not long after he said that the two men came climbing back up out of the grave with nothing to show for their trouble only one bruised eye and a scratched face. There was a sort of last lingering hope that Mrs McAdoo would come up of her own accord and when she didn’t a gloom began to descend and all anyone could think of doing was looking down at the toes of their shoes and producing something to examine in great detail – wallets, rosary beads, anything. The Canon did his best under the circumstances but he was only wasting his time trying to reason with her for she swore at him too and told him yes there was something he could do for her, die in his bed that night. That comment alone put paid to any hope of sympathy there might have been for the woman, and after that everyone became very agitated indeed. As it happened, Nobby was the first to break the silence. ‘Ah this has gone to hell,’ he muttered under his breath. ‘It’s about time someone did something. I’m supposed to meet Herbie Molloy in the hotel at seven-thirty. We’re going to Longford dogtrack!’

  Someone asked him did he think the guards would have to be sent for and he said, ‘All I know is I’m supposed to be meeting Herbie and look at the time it is now.’

  An argument started as to whether the guards should or should not be called. Some were for and some against, but as it turned out, it didn’t matter because Mrs McAdoo’s head appeared out of the grave and she came climbing back out and walked off in the direction of the cemetery gate without a word. When they saw her, a few of the women cried out and ran after her calling, ‘Mrs McAdoo! Mrs McAdoo! I say! Mrs McAdoo!’

  They were only wasting their time however. No matter what they called after her, she just ignored them and carried on walking towards the town with bow legs like she was after wetting herself or something.

  After that the crowd began to disperse and drift homeward. There was a feeling of bitter disappointment that seemed to pervade the entire town like a drab grey sheet you could almost reach out and touch. And any time for years afterwards that the funeral was mentioned, Nobby Caslin would clench his pipe between his teeth and launch into his by now familiar speech, ‘Don’t mention it! Don’t mention it! It’d be a queer sort of a world if we were all to go jumping into graves every time a bit of trouble comes our way! Jesus Mary and Joseph does she think she’s the only one ever suffered in the town?’ Sometimes he would leave it at that but other times it would get too much for him and he’d shake his pipe bitterly and hiss, ‘A sorry-looking sight now a sorry-looking bloody sight a sad pathetic sketch and no mistake.’ Then he’d add, ‘He went off and left me standing outside the hotel – Herbie.’

  There was little else to say about Mrs McAdoo after that. By the looks of things there were only two people to whom it mattered now – Mrs McAdoo and her son Thomas, for all anyone had to say was that their stomachs turned over even thinking about it.

  Malachy would often see her sitting there in the cemetery on his way home from school, just sitting alone by the graveside, which by now was covered in grass and weeds. The first time he saw her he didn’t realize it was her at all. What was sitting there only bore a passing resemblance to her. She looked like she hadn’t eaten for months.

  Sometimes he went in and sat beside her but she rarely spoke. Perhaps an occasional moan but very little else. ‘Why are you waiting here, Mrs McAdoo?’ he asked on one occasion. ‘I’ll be joining him soon – my little fellow, Thomas,’ she responded. ‘Do you remember Thomas?’

  Other times she’d answer questions in ways that made no sense at all. ‘I won a book at school for never missing a day,’ she said once, and another time, ‘Tide has gone up a penny.’ When she said that she was waiting to join Thomas, Malachy thought she must be joking. But sure enough not long afterwards he looked in on the way home and she was nowhere to be seen. Soon after, he was going past her house and saw that there was a black-bordered card on the door saying she was dead. On his way home he met Nobby on the square and told him the news. ‘Oh – is that right?’ he said, and carried on walking up the street opening the lid of his tobacco tin.

  So that was the end of Mrs McAdoo. She had been born in 1926 and lived for forty years. Not that it mattered much what she did, any more than it did an old schoolmaster dressed in what were little more than rags sitting by a window with moist eyes, waving to his mammy and daddy who were oh so proud of him, and had been ever since the day little Raphael Bell was born sixty-three years before in a tiny County Cork village that had nestled since time began at the foot of a mountain that rose majestically into the clear blue sky.

  Me Like Spheets

  Approaching along a dirt track at the side of that mountain is a fat woman in a plaid shawl and her name is Mrs Evelyn Bell. She is fat because she is pregnant and inside her sleeps a tiny boy with tiny fists. The time is long ago in Ireland and we are in a quiet village where nothing much has happened for around a hundred years, and probably never will. Not that anybody minds. They are more than happy with the way things are, working hard in the fields, saying their prayers at night and being good for the Lord who looks down over all.

  And where was Evelyn going on this warm summer’s afternoon in the little town of Charleville, where the birds were singing and her neighbours called ‘Grand day, Ma’am!’ and ‘Did you ever see the beat of it?’ as her skirt swished along the dusty road and she smiled and cried ‘Thank God for it!’? She was on her way to the shop to buy some tobacco for her husband Mattie’s pipe and a packet of pins for a dress she was making. That was what she was doing, at least until out of nowhere she emitted a cry of great pain and collapsed right there and then in the main street. The woman who happened to be standing next to her was of no assistance whatsoever, with neither rhyme nor reason crying, ‘She fell on the ground, she fell on the ground!’

  Fortunately, however, Mrs Bernadette McAdam who was made of stronger stuff happened to be nearby filling a wooden bucket at the parish pump and she rushed over to Mrs Bell. ‘Get out of the way,’ she cried to the distraught, mute bystander. Within minutes, Mrs Bell found herself effortlessly transported to a settle bed in a nearby cottage through the efforts of a number of sturdy females instantly recruited by the crusty Mrs McAdam who already had managed to rustle up a basin of steaming water and was applying herself industriously to the problem. ‘Quit out from that whinging now, ma’am,’ she ordered, ‘between me and the Sacred Heart we’ll soon have this little baba out and about and right as rain.’

  Whether or not Evelyn heard what was being said to her was hard to say, but in any case she continued to howl and abuse all about her asking what she had done to deserve pain the like of this and why didn’t men have to endure it for if they did they’d soon keep it in their britches. When they heard that the other women present went pink and crossed themselves but they were not a little amused for they in their time had seen the walls of their stomachs come in for some serious abuse and would have liked nothing better than to inflict the same on their husbands. The beads of sweat
on Mrs Bell’s head were the size of thumbnails. ‘Is it ever going to come out that’s what I’d like to know,’ remarked one of the women in exasperation only to find herself at the sharp end of Mrs McAdam’s tongue. ‘Maybe you’d like to come down here and give me some help and never mind your moaning?’ she said and after that there was no more complaining from anyone in the room. In the end their patience was rewarded when on the third stroke of the Angelus bell a wet wine head appeared and they shrieked with delight when it was followed by two chinky eyes and a pudgy face and two little fists ready to take on the world. ‘Well – what do you think now, Mrs Evelyn Bell? Wasn’t it worth all the screaming and pulling and dragging?’ beamed the impromptu midwife. Mrs Bell accepted the squirming moist bundle in her arms. ‘God bless you and the Sacred Heart, Mrs Mac,’ she said, and that was how Raphael Bell first saw the light of day on a warm July afternoon in the year of Our Lord 1913.

  Everyone loved Raphael. They adored the way he came up to them at the village pump and said, ‘Me like spheets. Hab you got any spheets?’ They made him say it over and over again they found it so amusing. ‘Say it again for us, Raphael,’ and sure enough he would. Hab you got any spheets. Hab you got any spheets. Me like spheets. He was the funniest little fellow in the village. And was his mother proud of him! As indeed she should be when her own husband informed her that Sister Camillus who was little Raphael’s teacher had told him that in all her years teaching she had never come across a pupil who showed such promise. It filled her with great pride too when she was stopped in the square and the neighbours said, ‘I hear great reports about this young fellow of yours.’

  She herself had to marvel at the neatness and tidiness of his schoolwork. In his copybooks there was never so much as a blot or a dog ear and where other children might display reluctance when prevailed upon to attend to their books, Raphael spent hours upstairs in his room inscribing his exercise in a copperplate hand. What a diligent boy he was – and so good-mannered. Never once did she have to reprimand him. When she asked him to go to the shop for a message he always replied, ‘Yes, Mother.’

  She was moved to tears when, having won a prize for best attendance in the school, he had used his prize money to make a small purchase in the gift shop to present to her, a little brooch which she wore to Mass, proudly displayed on her lapel. Whenever visitors came by, he was always on hand to sing a song or perform a little recitation. One that never failed to bring the house down was his Uncle Joe’s favourite – ‘Wee Hughie’. Whenever Uncle Joe produced the tobacco-stained penny from the depths of his pocket, out with Raphael into the middle of the kitchen, clearing his throat and closing his eyes as off he went:

  He’s gone to school, Wee Hughie

  And him not four

  Sure I saw the fright was in him

  When he left the door

  But he took a hand o’ Denny

  And he took a hand o’ Dan

  Wi’ Joe’s auld coat upon him

  Och, the poor wee man!

  And the clapping that would follow that! As Uncle Joe said, ‘You could hear it in three townlands!’

  Then, with the penny proudly clenched in his fist, Raphael would tear off down to the corner shop and buy as many spheets as he could get. Always of course getting an extra one or two from the sweety man who just loved the way he said that word. He would hit the counter a little punch with his fist, repeating, ‘Me like spheets! Me like spheets! Lord but you’re an awful man, young Raphael!’

  Back then to the house, out of breath and all excited and in your hand this time a lovely stick of barley sugar for your mammy!

  ‘Now there’s the good boy doesn’t forget his mother!’ said Uncle Joe.

  ‘Our Raphael always thinks of his mammy, don’t you, Raphael?’ said his daddy.

  ‘That’s a sign of a good child,’ said Uncle Joe, packing baccy into his pipe while Raphael’s mammy beamed and the happiest child in the world sat down by the window to think of millions more days when he would have money to buy spheets, and to look at the warm and happy navy-blue night coming down over the fields.

  Eggs and Hairy Bacon

  The yelps out of Raphael when the eggs and hairy bacon would start! ‘Well, between the pair of youse with that old carry-on youse have my head astray!’ Evelyn would say and go off out into the scullery to peel the turnips or scrub the floor. Anything, anything but listen to them and their eggs and hairy bacon. ‘I don’t know which of youse is the worst,’ she’d call and then smile of course because she was only pretending. Raphael even knew that. You could tell by the sound of her voice and the way her eyes twinkled when she said it. ‘Come on up here out of that, you wee divil you,’ Mattie would say then, and up young Raphael would get onto his lap and away they’d go with the eggs and hairy bacon song, clapping and jig-a-jigging and laughing their heads off at the funniest song that was ever made up in the whole world. ‘Good man!’ Mattie’d cry. ‘Come on again now – louder!’ and Raphael’d clap and sing, ‘Eggs and hairy bacon, eggs and hairy bacon, eggs and hairy bacon for me and Da to eat!’

  Was it any wonder Evelyn would give out to them? I mean – was it now? Or what sort of a pair of cods were they singing a song like that? Raphael didn’t care what sort of a pair of cods. All he cared about was his daddy coming home after milking the cows so they could do it again. He’d wait for him in the doorway of the cottage and as soon as he saw him coming he’d tear off down the lane crying, ‘Daddy! Daddy! Eggs and hairy bacon!’ and Mattie would swing him round laughing, ‘Wait! Will you wait till we get into the house, you little divil you!’

  It was the best ever, that old eggs and hairy bacon. Raphael made him do it until he got exhausted and said, ‘Will you go away out of that now, our Raphael, and let me have me tay!’ Then Raphael would leave him alone and go off out into the fields to run about singing it to himself and the cows who looked over the fence chomped their big wet lips as if to say, ‘Do you know what – I think that young fellow in there is gone mad!’

  But he wasn’t gone mad at all. He was just as happy as Larry, and there was nothing wrong with that. He picked daisies for his mammy, helped her carry the bucket to the well and spent all day chatting to her about what he was going to do when he grew up and went out into the big wide world far away. He was going to be a doctor, a priest, a soldier and a sailor, he was going to have a million jobs. ‘What am I going to do with you at all?’ said Evelyn as she drew the needle in and out of the grey woollen sock, then stroked his cheek and said, ‘I’ll make some tea.’ Then they’d sit together sipping their tea, just Mammy and Raphael and Our Lady on the window ledge smiling over at them and saying, ‘I am proud of this happy and holy family.’

  Then – whee! – off into the fields again to sing eggs and hairy again and to play ball with Daddy who was coming up the lane with his coat thrown over his shoulder. ‘I’m the best!’ cried Raphael, as he kicked the ball away into the trees. ‘I’m even better than my daddy!’

  ‘Oh, no, you’re not!’ shouted Mattie as he chased after him. ‘I’ll soon show you who can kick!’

  And you should have seen Raphael’s eyes when the ball went sailing over the tops of the trees.

  ‘My daddy’s famous!’ he cried ecstatically.

  Reaping Race

  And he was – didn’t he win the reaping race? All the men for miles around came with their canvas bags and sickle hooks and beneath the burning sun moved like clockwork machines as they cut their way through the cornfield. ‘Oh, please God, our daddy’ll win!’ cried Evelyn as she squeezed Raphael’s hand. By noon they were halfway and Evelyn and her son raced to him with the bottle of cold tea stoppered with a twist of cardboard and a warm cake of soda bread, dabbing his forehead with a cloth as they cried shakily, ‘You can do it, Daddy! You can do it!’ and as he said later when it was all over it was their words had done the trick, for when the whistle blew once more he was like a man possessed and his sickle was a blur as he tore through the field for them and them
alone, then at last his red arms triumphant in the air as he cried ‘Criochnaithe!’, and it was over, over at last, and was it hard to keep the tears out of your eyes as you saw your daddy being lifted on high and all the men of the county crying ‘Mattie Bell has bested them all!’ bearing him across the bridge and off down the road until they came to Clancy’s bar and the doors were thrown wide open as Mattie called, ‘Pull out a stool for Evelyn and the little man they call Raphael!’

  A man with a nose like a sunburnt potato leaned over and said to Raphael, ‘You must be a proud young buck this day,’ and Raphael smiled as he sipped his glass of lemon soda and then just looked up and beamed, ‘I am.’

  She Lived Beside the Anner

  Then afterwards in the flickering shadows of the tilly lamp, proud once more as Mattie held his wife’s hand and looked into her eyes as he sang the song he had sung to her on their wedding day, a song that told the story of a love that had sadly gone away never to return. ‘Did you ever hear a tune that was sung so well?’ remarked Pony Brennan to the man beside him. ‘I’m telling you now, that man could charm the birds down out of the trees.’ ‘As well as show every man jack in this townland how to reap a field of corn,’ came the reply. His father’s eyes were still closed as he sang,

  She lived beside the Anner

  At the foot of Slievenamon

  A gentle Irish colleen

  With mild eyes like the dawn

  Her lips were dewy rosebuds