Wild Decembers

by Edna O'Brien

  “Dominus illuminatio,” Joseph said as he stood in the path and looked at the sprawling stone building with small blind panes of glass in the several windows, its vestibule pillars flaking.

  To one side was a grotto made of thick knobbled stones, the white plaster Virgin, with both arms outstretched, giving audience to a kneeling girl. Breege thought that maybe it was erected there to encourage people to put aside their enmity and quash their cases. O’Dea confided to her that often cases were quashed just prior to being heard, people sobered up once they saw the gravity of things. O’Dea was her ally now, imploring her to talk sense to her cracked brother with his Greeks and Red Branch knights.

  In there in those stale rooms, in the biding dust, lay all the wrongs and all the rights, worn ledgers with the backs scarred, their edges frail and frayed, yellowing page following yellowing page, histories long forgotten.

  From the branches of a big tree soft damp blobs of ice fell on their heads, and she knotted her scarf tight, then pulled it tight down over her face so as not to be seen. The scarf was of georgette and smelt of camphor. It had been her mother’s. From the corner of her eye she searched for Bugler’s frame, Bugler’s shadow, her heart in jeopardy.

  “You shouldn’t have drunk,” she said.

  “Two Sandemans,” Joseph said, and challenged her to make him walk a straight line on the edge of the steps.

  “Three Sandemans,” she said. The knot of the scarf hurt her swallow.

  There was much commotion around the entrance door, people running this way and that, beckoning to each other, the barristers with a sort of suave ascendancy, strands of their wigs flying, giddily, like a young girl’s.

  “There’s still time, Joseph,” she said, squeezing his arm.

  “I’m no Joe Chicken,” he said, separating himself from her.

  Inside it was quite dark and dingy, a tiled floor of oxblood red, with some tiles missing and windows grimed with dust and cobweb. People huddled in groups, most of them smoking and talking to each other in very low voices with expressions of doom. All of the wigs cried out for washing and combing. Two men in almost identical pullovers looked as if they were bracing for a fight as they paced and muttered oaths to each other.

  “He trains lions,” O’Dea said, pointing to one and then pointing to the other, “He also trains lions, for a different circus,” then turning to Joseph remarked on his being like a boiled egg in a pot, hopping up and down. The moment the doors were opened people filed in.

  It was cold as an outhouse. Green walls oozing a darker green damp and the wooden benches full of marks and scrawls like the counter of a public house. A young man in handcuffs with two guards on either side of him, already seated, kept staring at nothing, his eyes like hot coals.

  At that instant Bugler came in and sat directly across from them. He had had a haircut, and his beard and his sideburns were trimmed. He sat looking down at his hands as if he was reading something on his lap, and as often with him, his real life seemed to be running on inside him and outside things seemed of no consequence at all. Breege thought he had never looked so handsome or so lean. Behind him eight or nine guards sat very close together with an air of stiffness, the brass buckles of their belts brazen as weapons in the sere light that dropped down from a skylight window.

  The judge seemed in a very irritable mood, tapping his fingers at the inanities that were being said to him. From time to time he lifted his wig, scratched his head vigorously, then glancing down at the witness in the box, he wagged his finger and spoke rebukingly: “Moving cattle when you shouldn’t and where you shouldn’t is an offence … The Brehon laws are out, finished.”

  “Yes, your honour.”

  “Adjacent lands, even on a godforsaken mountain, are not your own lands.”

  “Yes, your honour.”

  “Is that your defence?”

  “I won’t do it again … It was just a prank.”

  “If you do it again you’ll be in gaol for your prank.”

  “And no one in the whole wide world wants to be in one of those places. Dungeons.”

  “My dear man, cut out your philosophics and corral your cattle.”

  “Your honour … I know you’re a family man, as I am myself … To leave wife and child would be a bitter blow.”

  “Family man,” Judge Dalton said, unable to repress a smile.

  True they had a large house, a garden with azaleas, cups on the mantelpiece from his hunting days, but he saw as little of wife and boy as possible. Boy, mammy’s boy, already twenty-one and still considering a career. Mammy topped his eggs in the morning and asked if he had a nice sleep and nice dreams. Although retired from the chase, he was still welcome at the several dos, and life could be said to be tolerable except for the gout. Each day after sitting listening to these drones, he drove to the hotel and stayed there until he was sure that mammy and mammy’s boy were habu in their beds. The conjugal duties, frozen in an era that seemed as distant as the Flood, had left him a disenchanted man. Either his virginity or Agatha’s intercession to saints and blessed martyrs marked that night in that hotel room as a complete fiasco. That and the damage to Agatha’s insides when mammy’s boy was born. Whiskey doubled as wife and rarely did he lose his grip on the wheel. The few times that he was caught out and pulled in off the road ended happily. Ergo, a guard recognised him and either apologised or offered to drive him home. Scientifically speaking, he would describe his heart as resembling a bit of gizzard and his lower region as pickled in a similar solution in which onions and gherkins are pickled. A successful man, oh yes, a Rotarian, their first house replaced with a bigger house and still a bigger one as he progressed and buttressed his income with livestock and show horses. They were asked to lunches and dinners, met other judges, high commissioners, diplomats, receptions where Agatha was extravagant in the praise of the dresses and jewels of the other ladies, tugging at their sleeves and bemoaning her own humble wardrobe. She reckoned that these strange women had lovely houses with big clocks and antiques and bone china on their breakfast trays.

  “You’re talking tosh,” he shouts to the farmer who has now resorted to the time-honoured subject of moiety.

  “Moiety … What does it mean?”

  “I’m not fully able to answer that, your honour, except to say that the mountain where I drove my cattle is mine as much as his. It’s commonage.”

  “I’m fining you one hundred pounds, and I don’t want to see you back in this court again.”

  “God bless your honour.”

  There was a sudden moment of consternation as the man in the handcuffs decided to free himself and dragged his captors down some steps, followed by two of the three reporters.

  Scanning his list the chief clerk decided to change the order of things. Breege hears Joseph’s name and Bugler’s name being called out and sees Bugler walk up to the witness box, calmly. Having sworn on the Bible, he spoke of a friendship which turned sour after he rented the grazing of some lands which the defendant used to rent. Prior to that, they were, as he said, friends and neighbours, they shot woodcock together, helped each other on the farm, he being available to do things with his tractor, cutting timber and removing stones from a field, something the defendant had welcomed. What he minded most was not the assault but the hurt to his dog Gypsy, who had been locked in a shed for three days while he was away in the city on business.

  “He’s a no-good dog … He was driving our Goldie astray,” Joseph was heard to shout as local guards glared across at him to shut up and the clerk called for order. When Bugler had finished, the judge thanked him for being such a reliable witness who did not waste his words.

  Next it was the turn of the guards and the witnesses. The court heard of bruising, lacerations, abrasions, fractures, and stitches. The woman who had taken Bugler in surpassed herself with a detailed description of the night in question.

  “I am the wife of Malachi O’Byrne. We came to this parish less than a year ago to breed ponies for po
ny trekking in the summer. Our clients are mostly foreign and we don’t mix much. On the evening of the eleventh instant it was late and I was trying to get my daughter Patricia to go up to bed. My husband was off on a job. Next thing the dog began to bark like mad, and I opened the door to see what was wrong. The fright I got. Patricia began to scream, she thought it was the pookah man. He was covered in blood, soaking wet, and I thought he was going to have a heart attack. I had no choice but to bring him into the house and sit him down. I called the barracks. Guard Slattery came in very good time. I learned then who the injured man was. I had never seen him before. He was very shook.”

  Having given her evidence, she looked, waited, was told she could go back to her seat, and before doing it took the opportunity to bow to the three sides of the court.

  The attention quickened once Guard Slattery began to speak. At last they were going to hear Joseph’s side of things. The guard read very slowly, allowing them to imagine he was Joseph; even his accent had thickened that little bit.

  “I remember the night of the eleventh instant. Mick Bugler and myself were in Nelly’s Bar, though not drinking together. We had words and a scuffle broke out which was quickly quashed. I left Nelly’s at about ten o’clock and got into my van, which was parked nearby. Just after Lyon’s Cross there was a car stopped letting somebody out. I knew this car to be Mick Bugler’s. I gave him plenty of time to let the person out, it was a woman, a ladyfriend. I then blew the horn a good few times, and still he did not move. He opened the door and shouted back at me and told me to eff off. He then closed the car door and stayed where he was on the road. I blew the horn several more times. I then got out and went over to his car. I opened the driver’s door and started punching him with my right fist. That is how I got the bruise and the mark on my knuckles. I was going to leave him alone, but he got nasty and started calling me things. I then went over to the wall and picked up a stone. I went back to the car and hit him with the stone across the face as he was sitting in the car. There was blood on my hand at this stage. When he got out I punched him under the jaw until he fell back. I kept hitting him with the stone as hard as I could on the face and on the head. While he was on the ground I gave him a good few kicks, anywhere and everywhere.”

  It was too much for Joseph, hearing this exaggerated, trumped-up version of what he had said in his statement, and though he had sworn to Breege and to O’Dea that he would not go in the box, he had sprung up now, full of vindication. All of a sudden there was excitement, people craning to hear and to see, the sisters on the edges of their seats, Rita saying to Reena that the acoustics were fecking deadly. From the sway of Joseph’s back Breege knew that he was going to disgrace himself.

  “It’s concocted evidence.”

  “You mean you did not assault that unfortunate man on the night of the eleventh instant at about 10:35?”

  “He asked for it … Handing me back a cheque in front of everyone … ‘I return your cheque uncashed.’”

  “Apparently it was not enough … He lifted stones with his machine, he harrowed and seeded your field to grow turnips …”

  “The seeds were mine, they were my seeds. All he did was lift the stones and spread manure on the field.”

  “That was a lot of work.”

  “He owed it to me … He parked his tractor in our yard. He could take timber whenever he wanted. My sister spoilt him with cakes and things.”

  “Let us keep to the point … He harrowed your field.”

  “He dragged a bush over it.”

  “Mr. Brennan, do you deny that all was palsy-walsy between you until he rented the grazing of certain lands?”

  “He stole them.”

  “You seem to have a grudge against this man.”

  “His tractor is driving us mad … At all hours. Droning … Droning. It’s destroying the hedges. It’s stopping the birds singing. They don’t sing so sweetly any more … As for the roads … they were not made for a machine like that. He’s wearing them down.”

  “You speak as though the roads were yours.”

  “They’re more mine than his … My family were the first in Cloontha. We’ve been there for ever … His were Buglers from Wales. They followed the soldiers playing bugles … That’s why people call them buglers, in case you didn’t know.”

  Breege turned to this one and that, her face full of apprehension, fear in her eyes. O’Dea had been called out, and the only one to meet her gaze was Guard Slattery, who looked at her, peeved. Bugler sat stiffly with his head down.

  “Is his dog Welsh?” the judge asked, with a note of mockery which was lost on Joseph.

  “He’s a nothing dog … A mongrel. I would never pick a male dog. I always pick bitches … They’re more intelligent. They have a protrusion on the crown of the head that proves it.”

  “My, my, you are a scholar.”

  “I try, your honour.”

  “You could have settled this row, you could have gone up to your neighbour or met him somewhere and said, ‘Let’s shake on it,’ you could have atoned.”

  “Not if you paid me. Not for all the wealth that freighted into Orchomenus even into Thebes, Egyptian Thebes.”

  “A scholar?”

  “The Greeks, your honour,” and feeling now that the judge was partial to this erudition, he began to spout, regardless of the laughter that was beginning to splutter out from the visitors’ seats.

  “Zeus, King, give me revenge …”

  “You have lost me.”

  “The husband of Helen getting his own back on Paris …”

  “Why are you wasting my time. What is a small farmer like you doing spouting this rubbish. You’re a bog-trotter.”

  “You’re an ignorant man, if I may say so.”

  “Do I hear correctly?” the judge asked, and his colour was beginning to change.

  “Making little of me just because you’re up there … A jumped-up grocer’s son … I’ve looked you up in the records.”

  The judge’s face reddened, purpled as he half rose from his seat. At that moment, O’Dea ran from the doorway towards the bench waving his hand with a pen in it. “Your honour, I wish to apologise.”

  “I have rarely seen a more reckless witness.”

  “Correct. But, your honour, imagine having to defend a man like that … Just put yourself in my shoes.”

  “Your client is drunk.”

  “Not really drunk, your honour. Maybe he had one or two.”

  “Do you expect me to fall for that?”

  “I am begging you to hold your fire … I mean, take the chastised Picasso.”

  “Picasso,” the judge said, and looked around as if he was in the company of raving inmates.

  “Yes, Picasso. He painted a lot of doves in the last year of his life, but because he was a Communist the public would not buy his doves. Even the Kremlin refused.”

  “Mr. O’Dea, I am not getting your drift.”

  “Your honour, people can change … Picasso changed. My client could, as you put it, atone for what he did.”

  “He’s a head case.”

  “He didn’t mean it … It’s in the genes. The family were all the same. A kink … The mother used to walk the roads in the moonlight … Up and down.”

  It was too much for Joseph. He rose now, kicked and stomped with his new boots, shouting out that his mother was a lady to whom present company could not hold a candle.

  The judge rose, his voice quaking with anger, his jaw bull-like and booming out the sentence as his fist hit the bench with the force of a gavel: “I am sending you for fourteen days to Limerick County Gaol.”

  “Your honour,” O’Dea begged.

  “Contempt of court and contempt of person.”

  “It’s Christmas, your honour … It’ll break hearts.”

  “Court adjourned,” the judge said, and hurried behind a folding screen with the clerk following and picking up documents which were strewn in his wake. The bit of floor which his gown had swept cl
ean emphasised the biding dust on either side.

  “In Jesus’ name, Joseph,” O’Dea said, making a gross and violent swipe at the reporters who had converged around them.

  “He rubbed me the wrong way,” Joseph said.

  “You blew it … Zeus, Thebes. Feck.”

  Bugler was standing and looking across at them as if he might come over. Breege, still sitting, kept her head down.

  “Will he go to gaol?” she asked, like someone coming awake from anaesthesia.

  “I’ll go down to the hotel and see if I can get a word with the judge.”

  “I don’t want his blasted pity,” Joseph said.

  “Muzzle him,” O’Dea said, hurrying off, biting his pen as if it were a liquorice stick.

  By the time they came out, everyone had gone, including Bugler. The grounds were deserted, only the seagulls stormed the sky, which was now packed with thick muttony cloud. It was a busy town, people hurrying to lunch and blowing their hooters, either in friendly or vindictive fashion. They began to walk. They were together and not together. She knew that if she spoke a single word he would explode right there in front of people. When he stopped to look at something she walked on, and when she stopped he did the same. From the cake shops there was a smell of warm bread and the meringues in the window were spewing apart, their insides a frail pink. In the butcher’s shop window prices of the different cuts of beef and mutton were chalked up and a little row of toy lambs was placed along the sill. From a loudspeaker a man kept urging people to give blood and gave the location of the caravan beside the monument at the top of the town. A shop window full of new shirts had ties done up around them.

  In the chapel he stood beside her and she could feel his agitation. Behind the sconce of lit candles and spluttery flame there was a prayer printed in red and gold ornamental lettering:

  May this candle be a light for you to enlighten me in my difficulties and decisions.

  May it be a fire for you to burn out of me all pride, selfishness, and impurity.