by Edna O'Brien
“I WILL LAY a trap for her.” From the moment Josephine told him, the Crock was berserk. Could it be. Ivory Mary and Micky Dazzler. Could it be. And she so modest and her long chaste white nightgown on the clothesline that he often went to and touched, imagining her wearing it at night with a candle beside her bed, and him getting in the window and scaring the bejesus out of her, lifting the gown to see her white legs and her white thighs and her furry Mary. It could be. He should have smelt a rat at Christmas time. She bought three pairs of socks in the drapery and Joseph only received two. Bugler and herself meeting at all hours, anywhere, everywhere, a spider getting into her web, hi diddle diddle, their springtime rite. The boathouse, he reckoned, would be one of their couches. Easy as pie. Bugler had reason to go down to see his pedigree herd, and she went twice monthly to the graves to cut the grass and tidy them. In the boathouse, pillowed, heave-ho; whispering levitation, a water lily stuffed into her mouth and Bugler brandlebuttocking her. Ivory Mary no more. Mary Magdalene now. “I will lay a trap for her.”
IT WAS ABOUT a month in all that she lived this heightened state, this vertigo, finding messages here, there, and everywhere to unsettle and stun her. She had a secret, a purse of secrets.
Peace O Queen
I will hie me to the myrrh mountain
To the Frankincense Hill
You are all fair my darling
No blemish is you
My love is a light illuminating the shadows
By night I thought of thee
The utterance of thy mouth.
Her energy was prodigal. She painted windows and wainscoting, and the hall, which had been a weeping shade of blue, was now a silted gold.
“You have gold on the brain,” Joseph said to her.
Before he wakened she was out in her little plantation, searching, reading, rereading, memorising, then tucking them into an old purse that she hid under the laurels. The first communication had been puzzling — “I beheld thee and.” It was in capital letters and had been left in the milk parlour beside the old churn where she kept eggs and vegetables to keep cool. The second was on a large sheet of paper, folded into a tight pert square. She had found it when she went out one night to get wood and read it in the back kitchen by a faint light:
Oh you Queen Sabbath
Oh anointed bride.
The page was daubed from having been in a dirty pocket. She took it upstairs, read it again, thought to leave it under her pillow, but was so smitten with it that she brought it down to the kitchen where Joseph was having his supper.
“You look wild,” he said, and fearing that he might see it tucked inside her blouse, she rushed over and threw it into the range. She could picture the shape and the curve of each letter, vowels and consonants, and the way the two lines ran on from one another, the only disappointment being the ink, which was faint. “Oh anointed bride.” Curling now into a crescent of pale ash.
In bed she allowed herself to dwell on them. It must be Bugler. It had to be. After all, he had left the words of the song secretly like that and another morning a can of fresh mushrooms. On Saturday night when she got back from Mass she went to the dairy knowing that there would be something waiting. She had felt it when she prayed. What met her first was the smell, the pungent smell of wild thyme, something about it so suggestive, a dark green spray of it laid along the letter, perfuming the words:
Tell me my true love
Where do you pasture
Where do you fold at noon
Follow the sheep’s tracks
And graze your kids
Close to the shepherd’s huts.
That he had dared use the word shepherd was a further proof, and she walked up and down the yard to control her nerves.
That night in a dream a bird lay next to her on her pillow, its beak soft, not needly, and from its soft beak drops were squished into her ear. They were gold drops. Within the dream she heard Joseph say, “You have gold on the brain, Breege.” In the morning the bird was gone. Monday she went to the village to enquire about the dress. She had seen it all summer on a hanger outside Mrs. Bolan’s drapery, locals and visitors stopping to admire it. It was a black crêpe de Chine with cloth roses appliquéd throughout that from a distance looked like real roses in bloom. Only close up could one see the fine needlework, the scarlet threading shot with gold.
“You remember the black dress,” she said. Mrs. Bolan remembered, raised her hands in an exclamation, and said, “Do I not.”
“Is it gone?”
“Well, it was gone, and then one morning it was back on the doorstep,” and shuffling off into the back, still grousing, she returned with it on its hanger, a ruff of white tissue around the collar to keep it from getting dirty.
“Wasn’t it waiting for you?” she said to Breege, and holding it up estimated that two and a half inches would have to come off the bottom. Yet in the tiny fitting room she changed her mind, said it was the perfect length, as it came just to the calves of the leg, a flattering thing on a young woman. In there, both of them sneezed uncontrollably because of the bales of cretonne curtain material that were stacked against the wall.
“It’s made for you,” Mrs. Bolan said, adding the proverb about there being no need to gild the lily. Unlike other older people she did not begrudge young ones their style and the fancies that they got into their heads. She put her open-mindedness down to the fact that she read novels and was always pestering the librarian for another book by Tolstoy. He was her favourite because the book lasted an entire winter and she loved reading about balls and hunts and Natasha eloping in the dead of night. Seeing Breege, the face so cream-coloured with the eyes an inky black, reminded her of Natasha and of being young herself once and her husband proposing to her as they cycled down the lake road.
“What’s the big occasion?” she said then.
“Oh, nothing,” Breege said evasively.
“Ah, go on … a twenty-first or something?”
“Could I pay in instalments?” Breege said.
“Of course you can pay in instalments … that’s what friends are for,” Mrs. Bolan said, then unzipped it, helped her out of it, and in the shop folded it carefully and put it in a cardboard box, like a sleeping doll being put there to sleep. It looked so beautiful, so poised.
“And sure if you don’t pay up, I know where to find you,” she said, winking, as she copied in her cash-book the first deposit of five pounds, then drew a rudimentary calendar for the amounts owed for the next seven weeks.
Breege hid it in the very back of the wardrobe with coats and a bolster to keep him from seeing it. Joseph had his own wardrobe, but for some reason he kept his best suit and his overcoat in hers. After he had gone to sleep she would get out of bed and try it on. Even the roses seemed to breathe in the panel across her stomach. When Bugler saw it he would guess it was new; it smelt new.
To keep them from getting damp she changed the hiding place of the letters. She brought a biscuit tin from the house and put them in the dairy, adding each one as it came.
To a mare among Pharaoh’s cavalry.
I compare you my darling
Your cheeks adorned with bangles
Your neck with beads
Your groove a pomegranate grove.
She looked it up in Joseph’s dictionary: “The pomegranate has been known to man since time immemorial; largely regarded as a symbol of fertility, possibly because of the large number of seeds contained in the fruit. The Phoenicians took it from Western Asia to Carthage.” He had requested a meeting for the Sunday at two.
She chose the corner of the field that was farthest from the road. There being no wall to sit on, she piled a few stones together and made a perch of them. It was stifling. The dress was hot and so were her black stockings. She was really dressed for indoors and for nighttime. No matter where she moved to, the sun bore down. There was no shade to be found anywhere. One half of the field had been ploughed and the earth looked cross and disgruntled at being overturn
ed. By contrast the young grass seemed to drink in the sun and gave back rays of greenish golden light. She listened, not knowing whether he would come on the tractor or on foot. What would they talk of? Not Carthage and pomegranates, not the myrrh mountain, and yet not their own mountain with its rock face and morsels of earth in the crevices. A black cat came sneaking through the grass to look at her, a miscuriosity. Black cats that were supposed to be for good luck.
After a little while she realised that he was not coming and that those letters were not in his hand at all. She felt helpless, helpless to get up though the sun beat down on one side of her neck.
* * *
Joseph was dozing on the outside step when the telephone rang. He decided to let it ring, assuming it was Lady Harkness trying to coax Breege to make pies and scones for her. It stopped but then started almost at once, and he went into the house in an exasperation. There was no hesitation, simply a voice, a woman’s voice overloud, overenthusiastic, saying, “You ought to know where your sister is … look in the dairy and you’ll find out.” Then there was laughter at the other end as the phone was slammed down.
Out in the dairy he knew even as he lifted the lid of the biscuit tin, knew it by the smell of the thyme, smelling its way into the letters, knew their poison. When he read the first few words, he put them down, mortified by the lewdness, the vileness, the ravishment.
He met her out on the road, but heard her footsteps before he saw her, the brazen high heels on the hot dust-baked surface. Then he saw her as he had never seen her before, a Jezebel in a clinging dress with a gash of sunburn shaped like a fish down one side of her neck. She smiled at him to brave it out, but there was no braving, as she saw by his eyes.
“You tramp.”
“For God’s sake, Joseph,” she said, and walked past him. He walked behind her, studying the glints in her brown hair, trying to read her body by the suppleness of it and by the seam of one black stocking, which was crooked where she had redonned it in a hurry. It was like a spider crawling up her leg until it disappeared under the flounced hem of her Jezebel dress.
“NO BETTER THAN a streetwalker,” Joseph said as he backed her against the kitchen wall. She didn’t answer, as there was no time.
She saw what was coming and that she was helpless to prevent it. In the sockets of his eyes rage, that mad rage that is the inverse of love. He struck her first with his hands, struck wildly and sometimes in his fury missed altogether. He laughed, bitter mirthless laughter, and challenged her to admit it, that yes, yes, she would have thrown herself at Mick Bugler, craven. His temper grew all the greater because she refused to answer. He struck her now viciously. Her confession was essential to him. If she did not admit it, it would lurk inside her, like a child, like Bugler’s bastard seed to contaminate her. When she refused to answer, he picked up the nearest thing — it was a clothes brush — and with the wooden back he hit her on the face, the face which had signalled its debauch. Hearing her teeth champing off one another, she thought they were cracking, and swerving to avoid him, she fell and struck her temple on the edge of the kitchen table. In some gasp of sanity he pulled back at the sight of blood.
“Holy Jesus,” he said, covering up his eyes, and she got past him and up the stairs and along the landing to her bedroom.
There was no key to the door and she stood with her back to it, feeling with her hand the blood wetting her hair and running down the side of her temple, feeling no pain at all, only the enormity of what had happened. In one hour on a sultry Sunday, a lifetime of hope and battered hope and discovery.
When she heard the car starting up, she went across to the bathroom, wrapped a towel around her head, wedged it down with an old straw hat, not once daring to look in the mirror. In the room she dragged a chair and a chest of drawers to secure the door, but knew he could break it down if he so wished. She was still sitting there when darkness came on and the cows of their own accord came into the yard waiting to be milked. There was no one to milk them, because she would not go down. Phrases of the letters came to goad her:
Look up to the barren heights
Is there any place where you have not been ravaged?
How could she have not suspected? How could she have believed that Bugler, so taciturn, would ever have expressed himself in that way? She cringed as she recalled the waiting, fanning herself uselessly with her own hot hand, rehearsing the first shy words, then that cat slinking through the grass, a black cat with a white paw, and her hissing at it and it staying there with a knowing, spiteful look, then running away, urgent like a messenger. A black cat that was supposed to be for good luck.
She now saw through it completely. There was the Crock who would have conspired with Josephine and others waiting to catch her out so that they could nudge one another at Mass, then rush up to her afterwards and invite her for a coffee to the hotel. Bugler would soon be told of it and they would all have a good laugh.
When he came home late, she shouted out the window that cows were waiting to be milked. Later he turned the knob of her door several times and then went off to bed, desperate. He was up early, earlier than usual, and he left the first mug of tea outside the door, then another and still another, telling her that they were going cold. She knew by his abject voice that he was sorry. Never once in all their childhood or youth had he touched her. The opposite. When she cut her fingers once on a razor blade that was wedged into the top shelf of the dresser, he put them in his mouth to spare her the terror of the lively spurting blood. So many little memories came to her, the pair of them swinging on a gate on a summer’s evening, hoping for visitors, going down to the riverbank to find sorrel, talking to each other from their twin beds at night, his telling her how he was her knight and would defend her against all. When each of her parents died, it was he who broke it to her, said they were gone up to heaven and looking down. She was ten and eleven then.
By evening she felt strong enough to go down. The stove was piping hot and the table laid: signs of clemency. Taking one look at her bruises, like the purple of pansies, he flinched and idiotically began to hum. Fear had come into the house and with fear comes falsity.
“Do you need a doctor?” he said, mortified.
“For what?!” she replied, and by her intimation he did not have to ask any further. He searched in the drawer then for painkillers and put them beside her plate. They ate in silence. It was cooked ham and pickles that were oversour.
Even before she went to the dairy she knew that the letters would be gone. The biscuit tin was gapingly empty, the lid thrown to one side, the bunch of thyme on the floor dirty and trodden upon. It was as if bandits had been. She sat, then, for a long time among the cobwebbed mantles and talked to herself. She was telling herself that if she could live through it, allowing each and every second of it to go inside, the expectancy, the lunacy, the bitter fall, that then she would feel it to the marrow of her being and she would be able to bear it and the hurt of it would be hers and hers alone. It was like staring at the rock face of the mountain, its greyness, its sheerness, its cold despair going behind the eyelids, behind the eyes, into self so that self and rock face were one, hope and stone, stone hopes to kill any lingering memories of Bugler.
* * *
A week later his hired hand, Boscoe, and himself went to the City Mart and he came home with a gift. It was a leather handbag, the clasp a thick knob of amber with streaks of light running inside it like sun rays. There were pockets for her keys, her comb, her money, and her flapjack, as he said.
“Miss Carruthers chose it,” he said, and because it was made in Genoa he looked up the name in the encyclopaedia and read out its characteristics, the population, the climate, and the special attractions for a visitor to that city.
She was standing in the middle of the kitchen floor, the long corded strap dangling from her wrist.
“You can go to him if you want,” he said bashfully.
“I’m not going anywhere,” she said, quite crisp. She had missed
Mass for two Sundays, and when she heard the tractor coming or going she bolted and hid behind a wall.
IT WAS IN Nelly’s Bar that Joseph and Bugler finally came face to face. They had exchanged heated words up by a dumper and again at the garage when Bugler tried to return a cheque which Joseph had sent him. But it was in Nelly’s Bar, with its artefacts, its old stone crocks, and its three china sleeping dolls, that Bugler would confront him and make a mockery of him. Nelly watched it all, half smiling, presiding as she did behind the counter in her cardigan and her knitted cap skewered with a big hatpin.
“Is this your dirty work, Brennan?” Bugler asked, and tossed the newspaper cutting down the length of the bar. He merely cited the odd word from it. He did not read it in full, as there was no need. People had already read it when it appeared in the parish journal and was signed “Anonymous.” Everyone knew it was Bugler because of the references to the bearded one who came like a thief in the night. There were guffaws as Bugler read out the fancy quotations — “the arrow that flieth by day or the plague that walketh in the dark” — and joking objections about the eagle with divers feathers.
“Were you trying to say something to me?” Bugler said, strolling down the bar to where Joseph sat.
“If the cap fits, wear it,” Joseph said, refusing to look up.
“Afraid to fight me?” Bugler said.
“Easy now, Mick … easy. He has a short fuse,” someone said.