Wild Decembers

by Edna O'Brien

  “I’ll top it,” he said.

  “I gave the other party my word.”

  “May I ask who the other party might be?”

  “Mr. Bugler,” she said, irked at being questioned so.

  “You could at least have discussed it with me.”

  “This Bugler chap was so insistent, called, telephoned, so friendly.”

  “But you and I are friends for a long time … Breege comes to help you out.”

  “I know. I know … I’m just a silly old woman. All I could think of was — the roof’s rotted, the greenhouse has fallen down, the tennis court is all nettles.”

  “You could still cancel it.”

  “Oh no … It wouldn’t look good,” she said, and she rose then and with a sharpness showed him out.

  He was on the step when she mentioned that she would like his herd removed in the next seventy-two hours, as Mr. Bugler was anxious to take possession.

  He stood in the dark grounds, made gloomier by the encircling maze of rhododendron bushes, feeling not yet the hot anger that he would feel, just a kind of wretchedness, like a child being shut out, and all of it done so skilfully, with such aplomb. He would lose on those cattle on which he had hoped to make a pile.

  He passed Nelly’s Bar vowing not to go in, because if he went in he would blabber. At the end of the street he met the Crock coming up with two dead hares which he was hoping to flog to the Dutch couple who ran the hotel. Soon they were in the bar, him telling it, the Crock goading him on, interjections from one or another about Lady Harkness with jewellery hanging off her, man-mad, always was. There were those who had seen Bugler go there more than once, and always at night.

  “He’s a thief … That’s what he is,” Joseph said.

  “What will you do, Joe?”

  “I’ll have to sell them.”

  “You’ll be giving them away at this time of year.”

  “I know. But I can’t get grass. There is no grass to let and there is no hay.”

  “And you and he, weren’t ye friends?”

  “Friends! He could park the tractor whenever he wanted. He could take timber for his fire. My sister leaving eggs and cakes for him …”

  “Ah, she’s in with him … That’s why he gave her the ride.”

  “What ride?”

  “She went on the tractor with him. Off up the mountain.”

  He was still hearing them as he stood at the counter, on which two complimentary drinks awaited him; listening, feeling with a shocking calm the turbulence which had started up in him, digesting the enormity of it, her silence more telling, more significant than the venom with which they were trying to unsettle him.

  He tasted one of the drinks, passed the second one back, and after a couple of mouthfuls he said, in an anxious voice, “I’ll be off.”

  They watched him go.

  “Hark, hark, the dogs do bark,” the Crock said, and added, “Poor Joe, poor cuckold.”

  * * *

  Finding her out-of-doors angered Joseph even more. She was in the disused dairy sorting out a pile of shallots, their pink skins in the light of the lamp giving off a pearled glow. She looked the picture of contentment, sitting on an upturned box, the wireless on, talking to Goldie. Everything that had been insinuated became true, became fact. Blind of him not to have noticed the change in her appearance, the glow, bits of her hair held up with a tortoiseshell comb and other bits straggling down, come-hitherish.

  “What’s wrong?” she said, seeing his face so white, that shocked sere white of a burnt-out fuse, consternation over something and a rage with her.

  “The bastard.”

  “Who?”

  “Who! Your Shepherd went down to Lady Harkness two nights ago and rented the lake field behind my back … the field I have rented for fourteen years.”

  “Who told you?”

  “She told me … She sent for me. I have three days to move my cattle so that his pedigree herd can be driven in … three days, seventy-two hours. You’ll never wash her linen again.”

  “Calm down, Joseph.”

  “Is it true that you drove up the mountain with him … to the wild?”

  “So!”

  “Sat in the creel on the back of his tractor … like Cleopatra on her barge … You forgot to tell me. It slipped your memory.”

  “I don’t have to tell you everything,” she says overcalmly.

  Then, as if it was to her stomach: “Was he a gentleman?”

  “More of a gentleman than some.”

  “I expect you pointed out to him the boundaries between his lands and ours.”

  “I don’t even know them … no more than you do,” she said, and the sarcasm of it was too much for him.

  He flew into a passion then, and he hit her once across the face, a hard, chastising stroke, like a schoolmaster’s stroke, but when he saw her bare arm go up helplessly to defend herself, he drew back and looked down at his palm, constrained. It was ruddy from the stroke, the colour in his hand and his face that of two Josephs, the infuriated one and the one who felt ashamed.

  “Think down the road … How unhappy you would be with a man like that,” he said as he went out. She could hear the outside tap running as he splashed his hair and face to cool off, then she heard the van tearing out of the yard, lurching over the worn cobbles and grazing the buff pier that wobbled from so many of these hurried comings and goings.

  “He hit me … He hit me,” she said stroppily to Goldie as she began gathering up shallots that had got overturned.

  But she was not stroppy inside. She was afraid. They would hunt her down, and with a bloodthirst they would take from her that lit taper of hope.

  “I’ll have to hide what I think, what I feel … the way you bury the nuts in the autumn,” she said to Goldie.

  I WANTED TO GO outside and let Gypsy loose and chase it up home, but I daren’t. It barked and barked all night, and I could picture it on its haunches barking its guts out. It was a sparry dog, it sparred with everyone. No one knew exactly where Bugler got him, it was just there one morning in the front of the tractor, like a mascot, yapping, a mongrel, lean and with spots, so that by right he should have been called Spot, but instead Bugler christened him Gypsy. My brother hated him from the start, said he was not like a dog at all but like a hare with the ears pointed, or a little piglet ready to be roasted. The grudge my brother bore Bugler was all visited on Gypsy. He went on about how it corrupted our Goldie, made her reckless, brought her off at night. He forgot that for hours on end the two dogs lay side by side under one wall or another, depending on the sun, lay there quiet, moving only as the other moved, to bark at a car in the distance or jump up when I came out with their dinners. He said it was to teach the dog a lesson. He always referred to it as “it,” not giving it the benefit of being a man or a woman. It was a he-dog, Gypsy, and it used to come at night, luring our Goldie away. They went miles off and would come back in the mornings sleepy, sated, and with blood on their mouths. Gypsy knew where to go, where to find foxes or the lambs or sheep that were wounded. Joseph put it in an empty cow stall with a sack over it to muffle the roars, holes in the sacking to keep it from expiring altogether.

  All night it cried, and Goldie from the warmth in the kitchen cried back. It was the first time she had been let sleep inside, so she must have been satisfied with herself. The cries from outside got more lonely, more eerie as the night went on; they ate into me.

  In the morning the tractor tore into the yard at a terrible speed, mud flying off the big wheels and Bugler already up in his seat, ready to get out.

  “I want to talk to your brother.”

  “He’s asleep,” I said, calling out from the landing window.

  “Get him.”

  “Can I talk to you?” I said.

  “No, you can’t,” he said, savagery in the voice.

  From inside I watched them argue. Joseph kept taking off his cap to scratch his head and putting it back on again. A bad sign. By mista
ke he put it back at a rakish angle. Then he stood up close to the tractor as if he were trying to mount it, to unseat his opponent. I could guess the language, the wrongs of years and the recent wrongs all lumped in together. All of a sudden Bugler began laughing, no doubt mocking the puniness of a man pitting himself against a machine, the half-baked idiocy of thinking that a foot in a torn felt slipper could kick in a mudguard. When Bugler got down I knew that they were squaring up to each other and that it could lead to blows. My brother turned away, went to the shed, and came back with Gypsy, whom he gripped by the forelock and flung across the yard in a vicious motion.

  Coming back into the house, he ordered me to get a notebook and tot up any journeys, any errands that Bugler had done on my behalf. We would refund him. Picking up a jug of milk off the table, he went to drink from it, but put it down in disgust.

  “This milk is sour … it’s putrid,” he said.

  “I can’t help it if the refrigerator is broken and no one will come to fix it. I can’t help it.”

  “What did people do long ago … What did our mother and father do before they had refrigerators?”

  “Look, I know you’re cross and I know why.”

  “You don’t know the half of it.”

  “We can’t send him money … it’s an insult.”

  “You’re still soft on him,” he said, glaring.

  “I am not soft on him,” I said in a burst of defiance, but the blushing gave me away.

  When I scooped the milk out of the jug, it felt peculiar, it felt alive, like a plasma in my hand.

  Hello, Breege.

  THE CASTLE OF DROMORE

  October winds lament around the Castle of Dromore,

  Yet peace is in its lofty halls,

  My loving treasure stored.

  Though autumn leaves may droop and die,

  A bud of spring are you.

  Sing hush-a-bye, lul, lul, lo, lo, lau,

  Sing hush-a-bye, lul, lul, loo.

  Bring no ill wind to hinder us, my helpless babe and me —

  Dread spirit of Blackwater banks, Clan Eoin’s wild banshee,

  And Holy Mary pitying me, in Heaven for grace doth sue,

  Sing hush-a-bye, lul, lul, lo, lo, lau,

  Sing hush-a-bye, lul, lul, loo.

  Take time to thrive, my Rose of hope, in the garden of Dromore;

  Take heed, young Eagle — till your wings are weathered fit to soar.

  A little time and then our land is full of things to do.

  Sing hush-a-bye, lul, lul, lo, lo, lau,

  Sing hush-a-bye, lul, lul, loo.

  It was left in the little plantation in an envelope.

  JOSEPHINE’S HAIR SALON remains open all the year, and she prides herself on the fact that she does not just pander to summer visitors who breeze in, sit outside the hotel eating their toasted sandwiches and taking photographs.

  The salon is half a terraced cottage with a concrete back yard for a coal shed and in the front window a placard of a brunette and a sample folder of nylon hairs, little switches, ranging in colour from ash blond to jet black. In that small linoleumed room with its smell of ammonia and hairspray everything gets told. Josephine is the first to know who is pregnant or who has miscarried, the first to ferret out secrets too terrible to tell. Lovers are her speciality, clandestine lovers meeting in their cars. Of Josephine, people say, “She would go down in your stomach for news.” Yet they confide in her because they cannot help it. Something in her invites it, her motherly way, her soft stout arms with the healthy growth of black under the armpits, and her thin lips permanently open, as if she is drinking her listeners in. Her particular forte is that she always agrees, never contradicts, always says, “That’s right … That’s right,” regardless of what she is thinking inside.

  “I love when it’s just us,” Lady Harkness says. She says it faithfully each week as she rubs her hands to show off her bracelets, the envy of all, even Josephine, who jokes and says, “You’ll leave me them in your will.” Sometimes she even gives them a little kiss. Lady Harkness comes only on Thursdays to avoid the Bolshies, and usually there is that nice girl Fiona, who has just got engaged and has wedding jitters.

  As Josephine looks up and sees Breege peering through the window, she winks and says, “I’d love to get my hands on that head of hair.”

  Lady Harkness, although set and ready to bake under the drier, is reluctant to go because of the wonderful tips Josephine is relating about weddings. They are from a special issue of a magazine for brides — Bridal Clothing, the Bridal Beauty Box, the Bridal Secrets, and the Bridal Wedding Stationery. She reads excitedly: “The latest trend is not to insist on a June wedding at all, as hotels, not to mention friends, will be already chock-a-block. Move from the traditional June date and the traditional white dress to something more eccentric. Become a trend-setter.”

  “No white dress,” Lady Harkness says, aghast, and shrieks as Josephine spells out the alternative: “ice-blue satin hot pants.”

  “Say again.”

  “Ice-blue satin hot pants.”

  “That’s diabolical,” Fiona says. She has been paying £10 every Friday to a designer in Limerick and does not want to hear this hot-pants rubbish.

  “There’s more,” Josephine says, propping the magazine as she mixes the colour for Fiona’s highlights.

  “There is also a definite move away from the traditional gold ring.”

  “Heresy,” Lady Harkness says, her left ear and her left jaw poked out so as to miss nothing. One half of her face is a scalding red, the other half less so, and her scalp pained-looking from the sharp teeth of the rollers.

  “What else?” Fiona asks, soured.

  “Break in that new bikini afore ye go.”

  “How do you break in a bikini?”

  “It doesn’t say … It just says to be very careful on the honeymoon of the nasty sun glare headache, as it will spoil the fun, and also to make sure the sun gets to those two dangerous spots at the bra strap and the bikini band in order to achieve an even tan.”

  “Donal and I are going camping in the west … Hill-walking … We hate that sun glare,” Fiona says, and closes the magazine. Breege has been standing there taking it all in.

  “You’re very quiet, Breege,” Josephine says in her soft, over-friendly voice. She has noticed the blushes. Breege’s blushes are something of a feature, being of a very rare and flaring shade of pink and seeming to wander over her cheeks in an intemperate way.

  “What would you choose for your wedding day?” she asks her then.

  “I haven’t thought about it.”

  “That’s because she has no interest in men,” Fiona says.

  It is too much for Lady Harkness, too sad altogether, and defying Josephine’s strictures, she has to come out from under the drier to give Breege a little talking-to: “No interest in men … My darling, at your age I was never off my back. The day it happens, Breege, you’ll know … And you must ring me up. Promise … Nothing in the world can stop nature. When we lived in the north of England, a local farmer had this pair of peacocks, and the male would come across to our barn because we left food and water for our own birds. He would help himself and often stay for a week at a time … We mentioned it to the farmer and he said, ‘M’lady, come the spring the hen will want him and he’ll come home,’ and we said, ‘How will he know that the hen wants him,’ and the farmer winked. ‘He’ll know … he’ll know.’ It will be just like that, Breege. You’ll meet the man that you have met in your dreams and you’ll go all gooey. You’ll melt in his arms … It was like that with my American lover, the other two were friendship. Pooh for friendship. You want to go all gooey … He was a bounder, of course, but it was worth it. A summer of absolute bliss. I always connect it with the smell of sweet pea. My bedroom windows open after lunch … He’d slip away from the other guests and climb up. My plumber, he called himself, my emergency plumber, and my poor Clifford downstairs playing backgammon … And he knew, but he lo
ved me, he loved me so much, he always said, ‘If you buy a canary you’ve got to let it sing.’ Naughty really, but lovely.”

  “Lady H., I’ll be needing that drier for Breege anon.”

  “Sorry, Jo … Sorry.” Lady Harkness mimics the fright of a little girl and shrinks back under the glass dome, blinking ceaselessly in a feigned apology.

  “So you’re for the chop,” Josephine says.

  “I just want it washed and set.”

  “These ends are all broken. I can’t let you out like that, no hairdresser would.” Ignoring Breege’s protestations, she takes the scissors and nips rapidly, the pieces like little question marks on the floor with coils of hair from early on.

  “I don’t want short hair,” Breege says, standing up. She is almost in tears.

  “Okay. Okay. So who’s the lucky man?”

  “There isn’t.”

  “There is … I’ve just had one of my hunches,” and skimming some of the tears onto her forefinger she walks around the salon, triumphant.

  “Teardrops,” she says.

  “Josephine, you’re beastly,” Lady Harkness says.

  “I’m only joking,” she says, but once she has Breege captive at the backwash she pursues her quest. She hopes against hope that it is not the new technical teacher with his sloppy cardigan and his macrobiotic diet. She has come to the definite conclusion that it is someone who has recently arrived. She thinks down one side of the street, then up the other, out the two roads, the lake road, the chapel road, then her guesswork takes her up the mountain and she suddenly realises who it is, recalls all that blushing and mopiness the night of the dance and hiding in the cloakroom with Ma Flannery.

  “It’s the Shepherd … It’s the Shepherd,” she says to herself. She can hardly wait for lunchtime, to have her ladies combed and primped so that she can shut the shop, go into the kitchen, make herself a cup of coffee, and then sit down to ring the Crock. Dynamite. She is not going to tell him in one swoop. He will have to guess. She will tease it out. She will give him one or two clues, then put him off his scent. It will kill him that she detected it first. It will kill him anyhow. Him always gawping after Breege and sending her that valentine and hiding behind the laurels to see her getting it from the postman, then opening it up.