by Edna O'Brien
“Will you stop that moping and get some clothes on you,” Rita says, hurrying in and flinging down the groceries — sliced bread, butter, chicken and ham paste, and a home-made apple pie with the design of a cross on the browned pastry.
“I think I’m in love,” Reena says, fixing the last little bow onto her temple for that cutie look.
“Don’t talk shit.”
“Suppose, Reet, suppose he fell in love with me and me with him and we had a baby.”
“You listen to me, this is business … Do you hear … Business.”
“I hear you.”
“Hay … And grass. Then grazing … Then a weeny little bit of a field … Then a field.”
“You’re the brains, Reet.”
“And you’re the brawn … Wait till he sees your bubs.”
“Wouldn’t you like a dip of his wick?”
“If I want a dip of his wick, I’ll have it.”
“Suppose! Suppose I fell in love with him and you did too … We’d be clawing each other and scratching each other’s eyes out.”
“Get dressed,” Rita said for the second time.
“I’m all itch. I’m roasting.”
“Go out and douche yourself in the river.”
“You were the one that first spotted him down at the docks … You said he had limbs on him that would crack a woman’s thighs. Tell me, Reet, will I wear a petticoat?” she says, affecting flounder.
“Of course you’ll wear a petticoat … You’ll wear the camisole, bloomers and petticoat combined … Our dear dead grandmother’s.”
“With the little buttons!”
“With the little buttons.”
“Reet … Suppose he doesn’t come after all this.”
“He’ll come … He’ll come … I know when a man is hungry or thirsty.”
“Jesus … I’m upside-downy … I’m all goosepimples.”
“Douche yourself and be quick about it.”
* * *
It was by the light of a lantern that Bugler threw out the bales of hay and watched them jump, jostling each other, like tough opponents jumping for a ball.
“Ye’re as good as men.”
“We’re better,” Rita said. The talk then got on to men and women, the difference between the sexes, and soon it was to the married men who were back on the game and a new masseuse, who insisted that her clients completely undress since she undressed herself.
“We saw her through the window … Guard Cuddity was there for his bad back,” Reena said.
“Ye’re terrible women altogether.”
“We’re terrible women altogether,” Rita said, taking the pitchfork from him as the work was done.
He brushed the hay off himself and kicked the dust from the toes of his shoes while he waited for his money, a half smile on his lips.
“You’ll come in for the tea?” They both said it.
“I won’t … I’m rushed off my feet.”
They began goading him then, asking him was it so that he couldn’t trust himself with any woman, and especially not with gorgeous specimens like themselves.
“I’ll come some Sunday when I have time.”
“You’ll come now … We can’t let you go without a bit of supper,” Rita said, ignoring his excuses and telling the world at large that men who live alone are right fools, don’t even know how to fend for themselves.
“Friends … Friends,” he said, raising his arms in some sort of appeal.
“We’ll unchain the dog,” Rita said, pointing to a gaunt mongrel at the opposite end of the yard, whining with hunger.
“Is he vicious?”
“He’d eat you,” she said, and laughed, and linked him across to the house.
Low-lit candles in little clumps and a blazing fire were what met him. As he looked around they pointed to some heirlooms, jugs and vases along the dresser, a sausagey cushion of velvet to keep the draught out, and then with coquetry Rita pulled a cloth away to show him the apple pie, made with her own humble hand.
“Well?” Reena said, her eyes on him, dancing, shining, two shades of yellow in the iris, like a cat’s.
“Oh, very nice,” he said, and watched her take a knitting needle, warm it in the fire, and then dunk it into the wine. She whirled it a few times, took it out, the red liquid dripping off it, and held it to his nostrils.
“It mulls it,” she said, winking.
Soon they had him sitting down, drinking, talking of store cattle, the risks, the way the prices changed in the marts from one week to another so that a person never knew, and milking itself going out of fashion.
“I love milking … It’s my therapy,” Rita said.
“It’s your therapy,” he said. He knew he should get out.
“I’m all itch, Reet.”
“Why don’t you change, love … It’s the fecking hay. It gets into the pores.”
In the candlelight amid bursts of laughter he saw garments being pulled off and pelted across the kitchen, a jumper, a vest, a flowered cotton skirt, which she had to peel down, nothing left but a garment that was knickers and slip. She walked across and stood before him, her breasts in the candle flame pink, pink shelled, yet with the sturdiness of gourds when she held them.
“Can you open the wee buttons?”
“What’s this … the Black Arts?” he said, half-blasé.
“Are you afraid of us?” Rita said in his ear.
“Ah, no, he’s shy … I love a shy man,” Reena said, taking his hand in hers to undo the eight tiny mother-of-pearl buttons from the navel down.
Naked now, she begins to dance, her hair, then her head, then her torso working themselves into a frenzy, the various organza bows dropping of their own accord and the kitchen now like some den of malarkey and wantonness. Jumping onto his chair to reach for the melodeon that was above the mantelpiece, Rita has one foot on the seat of the chair and the other locked into his groin. She paused. Then his hand of its own accord went under the skirt to where she was stark naked.
“Is this an invite?” he said, the hand just resting there, feeling the cool of the flesh in contrast with the warm bush, his blood starting to pump.
“Was that nice?” she said as she took down the melodeon and sat on a wooden barrel, her legs wide apart, and began to play a rousing medley. Reena danced with abandon, using her hair as if it was some fetish, and splaying open her fingers to show vivid hennaed crevices. Almost twice she fell, then staggered, regained her balance, and eventually she threw herself upon him, her arms coming around his neck, her legs girdling his middle as she kissed him repeatedly with a repertoire of lewd and coaxing words.
He felt the other one undoing his laces, then his shoes being taken off and his socks as he dug his buttocks into the back of the chair to stop her from removing his trousers.
“What’s all this?” he said.
“Two for the price of one,” Rita said, and began to fumble, saying where in hell’s name was that codpiece, and finding it, she measured it in her mind, then from under a vase got the ruler and measured him for fun, telling her sister not to forget it, to make a note of it for her little table of measurements in years to come.
“Give a poor man a break,” he said then.
“Draw the shades, Reena dear,” she said, and crossing she dragged a folded mattress from under the milk stool, unrolled it, and flung it down.
“I’m an engaged man,” Bugler said, reaching for his shoes and socks.
“Bollocks … You rode the songstress in her father’s saddle room, we heard.”
Caught like that and with Rosemary coming before the summer, he feels trapped.
“Look,” he began, getting earnest. “Why don’t we sit and talk and have a glass of wine like good friends.”
“Strut your stuff, Reen,” Rita said. It was the cue for Reena to lie out on the mattress, lift her hair above her head, and then, with each and every articulation of arms, legs, and limbs, try to entice him over, the movements reflected on the wal
l as limbs of flame, inflammatory.
“For God’s sake,” he says, rising. Rita, having divested him of his trousers, is now hanging them on the kitchen clothesline next to the broderie anglaise garment. She stands back from it then with a little song.
As I was going to the fair of Athy
I saw an aul petticoat hanging to dry.
I took off my drawers and hung them thereby
To keep that aul petticoat wa-rm.
Reena is now propped with cushions and stroking a georgette scarf to add to her enticements, moving and arching, serpentine, a corpus of different pinks, all of her in a quiver and the mouth emitting little gasping sighs. He stares with a prolonged and mesmerised stare.
“Better than the lakes of Killarney,” Rita says from behind his back, and pushes him forward as Reena’s arms come up to lessen the thud of his fall on the thin mattress.
“Sweetheart,” and she holds him a fraction above her so that she can see him seeing the gluttony that is in her eyes.
“The business,” Rita says, settling herself on the barrel with her melodeon.
“His coconut’s shrunk,” Reena says from the floor.
“Nurture it.”
“Will you clip back my hair … It’s in my mouth.”
“Good girl … The Resurrection and the Life.”
From time to time Reena lifts her face to breathe or to arch her neck, Rita watching with a rapt attention, the accordion on her lap, half opened, with now and then random notes of stray music coming from it until the moment she feels drawn to crouch down, her voice now a repetition of urgencies — “Give it to him, Reen … Give it to him … The rich reluctant bastard. Show him who wears the trousers in this hideaway house.”
* * *
When he wakened it was almost light; a slit of it came through the crack in the shutters which she had drawn. He saw himself up and dressed and off out, gone, and Jesus, the mess. He would have to knock a few quid off the hay to keep them from spilling. They were sound asleep, two bodies clasped together in a mimicry of galling innocence, a strand of Rita’s long hair under his elbow as he eased his way out. On the barrel the half-open melodeon, strangely obscene, the fawn semi-parted pleats as if about to start up again and jinx his getaway. He saw her eyes, narrowing, scheming, darting from his face down the length of his body and up again. It was Rita wide awake.
“What time is it?” he said as nonchalantly as he could manage. “It’s morning,” she said.
“Morning,” he said, and crawled out to pick his own clothes from the jumble of garments in the corner. His trousers were still hanging up.
“There’s an outside tap,” she said as he went towards the door, and as an afterthought she threw him a bit of torn towel.
After he’d washed, he looked up at the sky and tried to figure out what time it might be in western Australia.
“Well,” he said, coming back in, his shirt sticking to his wet back.
“Well,” she said in an unceasing blink.
“We’d better settle up,” he said.
“Settle what! Love,” she said, her voice oversmarmy.
“For the hay.”
“Ah, go on with you.”
“I had to buy that hay myself … I had none of my own. I paid dear for it.”
“You’ll have hay this year. Plenty of it. The fine fields you’ve reclaimed … Or stolen.”
“A deal is a deal,” he said, angry.
“After what we’ve done for you … Buttering your bread on both sides … We’re not whores, mister. We’re ladies.”
“Ladies pay their way.”
“We can give you an IOU if you want to frame it …” and she turned and lifted her rear end to him, muttering, “Pog mo hón.”
“Is that Dutch?”
“It’s the local Dutch … Kiss my arse.”
“Where’s your purse, missus?”
At that she began to shout, and Reena wakens, her sleepy green eyes like mashed gooseberries as she is told to sit up and witness Mr. Mick Bugler trying to ravish her sister.
“Rape … Rape.” She keeps repeating it as he opens the door and goes out.
Standing in the hayshed he whistles to control his temper. The bales were already cut and forked in amongst their existing little pile of hay. She had done it while he slept and had not even bothered to sweep away the scraps of coloured binding twine.
“Bitch … Bitches,” he shouts out, going back to find the door being closed in his face.
“Give me my trousers.” He hammers on the door, only to find that they have put music on to drown out his voice.
As he drove away, Rita stood in the yard, barefooted, a grey blanket over her, like some venging effigy carved out of a living clay.
“You’ll be back … You’ll be back,” she kept shouting.
The morning had a jubilance, the dew melting and lifting off the hedges like a torn gauze, small birds no bigger than thimbles daft and doughty, chirping their first uneven notes, and a fruit tree in flower, the soft pink tassels tapering back and forth, forth and back, and not a stitch on his lower quarters. He drove fast to avoid the Noonan twins, who would be going to prepare the altar for first Mass, and he was out of the town and up the mountain road congratulating himself when lo, he is ambushed by the Crock, rushing forward with a leaflet in his hand.
“I cut this out for you. It’s on how to make silage.”
“Creep … Creep.”
Laying the newspaper cutting on his lap, the Crock commiserated: “And the eyes of them were both opened and they knew they were naked and they sewed fig leaves to make themselves aprons.”
His cackling laugh reached a bed of hot young nettles and an oak tree, where a colony of brown birds had assembled, some grooming themselves, others piping their lusts out joyously.
THE ANIMALS SLIPPED and slithered over the wet cobbles in the makeshift pen where Boscoe, the part-time helper, and Joseph had driven them. As each one was pushed forward for its injection, Joseph caught the face and wedged it between the rungs of the gate, then held it down for the vet to inject twice. Sinead, the assistant, wrote down the particulars of each animal, the tag number, the age, the breed, the sex, and the measurement of the injection. Some jumped at the prod, others took it differently, whisking their tails violently on their clotted rumps, and some relieved themselves repeatedly. Goldie tried in vain to climb over the pen, which had been constructed from old bits of wooden creel and cart ends.
“That’s a lovely dog,” the vet said.
“She’s a no-good dog,” Joseph said, and swiped at her.
As the Crock came up the road, his singing preceding him, Sinead said he had some bit of news to report. They had met him down in the village when they stopped to get petrol.
“He has something juicy.”
“What?”
“He’ll tell you.”
“The Shepherd spent the night with the sisters.” The Crock shouted it as he came around the corner of the entrance wall.
“How do you know?”
“I saw him … He rode up home after six … and the gas thing … he was in his birthday suit.”
“Holy smoke!”
“The sisters kept his trousers as proof.”
“They’re demons,” the vet said, and reminded Sinead of the night he was called for a sick yearling and the way they didn’t want to let him go.
“I’m disappointed in him,” Joseph said, looking from Breege to them and back to Breege again.
“I’m not … He’d go with anything in a skirt,” Sinead said.
“Ah yes … But he’s engaged to be married,” Joseph said.
“Go on.”
“To who?”
“A lady in Australia … a Rosemary.”
“And you never let on,” the Crock said, irked.
“He asked me not to … He asked me to keep it to myself.”
Breege hears it and gives a little involuntary jump like some of the animals after the prod. She went
quite peculiar. She felt empty. What is empty. What is full. Full is when she couldn’t wait for night, when she lay down, piecing together moments, seconds, his wave from the tractor, the “Howya, Breege” and the can of mushrooms that he left on the step, small mushrooms, the pink insides, so evenly, so daintily, serrated as if a razor had slit each one, and that other time down at the pier when a lady politician in a maroon suit unveiled a plaque for the victims of the famine and Bugler had turned to her and said, “You’re better looking than she is.” Things. Things she had made too much of and would have to let go.
“We’ll see how they take,” the vet said, peeling off his plastic gloves, which Sinead refolded for him.
“We don’t want any sick ones. We don’t want any lumps … It would break me,” Joseph said.
“Sure you have piles of money,” the vet said, and jumped the wall, and then hoisted Sinead over to cries and giggles as to what would his wife say.
“What’s wrong with you?” Joseph said scoldingly to Breege. “You’re miles away, you always give these people coffee and cake.”
“We’ll have it when we come back,” Sinead said.
“You always give them coffee and cake,” Joseph repeated, even more stern.
“Ah now … She’s probably thinking what prezzie to give Bugler … whether it should be an eiderdown or bed linen. Aren’t you, ducks?” from the Crock.
The day would have to be got through. Then the night. Emptying. Emptiness.
BY NOT ASKING HIM IN, Lady Harkness showed her hand. Each year Joseph had sat in her little study with its red lacquered walls, two heaters, a rug over her knees, the opened ledger, and the pen and ink ready to mark the date of the renewal. She would even pour a glass of sherry. For well on ten years he had rented the grazing of her field down by the lake, he had kept half of his herd there. It was a good field, better than mountain grass, sweeter. He used to love going down there, he used to joke to Breege about having two kingdoms, one on the mountain and one in the valley. Sometimes of a summer’s evening he would sit and look out at the water, dotted with islands, reflecting and thinking that God had set him down in one of the loveliest places on earth. No more. She broke it to him snappily, said that sadly she had had a better offer for the field and had gone ahead with it.