Wild Decembers

by Edna O'Brien

  “I suppose you think I’m mad,” Bugler said, turning round to explain that he is tapping to find which of the render is hollow and which is sound, which he has to strip and which to merely make good. He comes down the ladder backwards, then raises his hand as if it were his hat and says, “Welcome.”

  “I’m afraid of what might happen to my brother.” She blurted it out.

  “What might happen?”

  “That he might go to the reservoir.”

  “The reservoir!”

  “People have … One man after he got out of gaol and a woman … a young woman … Drowned themselves.”

  “You better come in,” he said.

  “I won’t.”

  “Come on.”

  The joists swayed a little as she tiptoed over them, and he pointed to the gutted room, the missing staircase, holes in the wall which one day would be long windows. All his energy has gone into planning it, it is his dream, his castle, can she understand that?

  “I can … It’s my brother,” she says feebly.

  “What would be the point of my building a house if I can’t make a road up to it … If I have to go halfway around the mountain to drive to it … It makes no sense.”

  “I know,” she says.

  The kitchen with the mattress and duvet in one corner is obviously his makeshift bedroom, a razor on the table next to a cold chop bone, washing to be done, all the signs of a bachelor life.

  “I better go.”

  “Let me show you my Rolls-Royce,” he says, and leads her to the new stove of dark green enamel with metal hoods shiny as mirrors. As he lifts them and opens the oven doors, she has a memory of something childish, some lost moment, the opening of a cardboard door into a doll’s house, into a realm of magic. He holds his hands out to be warmed, gestures her to do the same thing. The woodwork is warm and cheerful, a butcher’s block and an old dresser with gold knots and beaded gum, the life of the trees still within them and his shirts drying on the backs of chairs.

  “We have the same jugs,” she hears herself say.

  “They’re very old, I believe,” he says, and coming closer to meet her eyes, he says, “What has your brother got against me?”

  “Everything.”

  “What do you feel?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He says that at least she can sit and have a cup of coffee with him and maybe go away not feeling so antagonistic.

  “I’m not antagonistic … I’m worried.”

  Taking a new coffee machine out of a box, he asks her to read the instructions, then he fills it with water and they sit and wait as the boiling water bubbles up, then the coffee percolates quietly and the kitchen filled with the enticing smell makes them talkative. When he has poured their two mugs, he drags a second stool close to her and sits with his legs extended, saying she is his first visitor ever and perhaps she has brought him good luck. It is as if he has forgotten or has decided to forget why she came.

  “I’ll talk to my brother,” she says then.

  “Are you able?”

  “Oh yes,” she says rapidly, too rapidly, trying to banish the memory of him in his pyjamas in her bedroom in the middle of the night and her having to lead him back in a fluster.

  “I’m willing to pay … I’ve said so more than once.”

  “I’ll get O’Dea to talk to him,” she says.

  With the stealth of someone who has thought up a little surprise he opens the drawer of the kitchen table and takes out a worn leather case, its gold clasps slackened, and inside it in various cavities, a spoon, a knife and fork, their silver handles a fretwork as of lace, snug in their recesses, the purple of the velvet bleached and faded from time.

  “It’s beautiful,” she says.

  “It’s yours,” he says, thrusting it into her hands.

  “I can’t,” she says.

  “Yes, you can … There’s still a debt to be paid.”

  EVERYTHING SEEMED THE SAME, the same chores, the same crows, rain, Goldie with her wet fawn back to the window feeling sorry for herself, then sudden shafts of sunlight yellowing the rained-on grass and around the roots of the beech tree a crop of weirdly orange-coloured mushrooms.

  Then one night everything was overturned.

  She had gone out to close the hens, and finding Bugler’s dog, stretched, lying in wait for Goldie, she chased him off with bits of sticks. At the gate she came on Bugler calling and whistling.

  They stood for a few minutes, saying what awful weather and how many trees had come down in the freak storm, and when they heard a car down at the crossroads, then hurtling up the mountain road, they guessed by the sound of the stalling engine that it was the sisters.

  “Jesus,” she said.

  “Jesus,” he answered. They ran together into the yard, stepping over puddles, on down towards the hayshed to hide as the car swerved into the drive and the headlights bounced off their retreating shadows. They had to jump over the platforms of baled hay and then wade through a corridor of it that had been forked loose, going farther and farther in, sliding through it, until they sank down with a muted double thud.

  Soon the voices were within hearing. The sisters lavish in their praise of Joseph, saying how well he looked, how well he was bearing up, and he with the big court case looming and God’s curse on that bastard Mick Bugler.

  “We lost a cow with the red fluke,” Rita says, her voice plaintive.

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “I think one of Bugler’s animals infected her.”

  “It’s a bad thing, that red fluke … I’ve had it in the past.”

  “To see her die would wring your heart, and we had to pay to have her taken away … Money, money, money.”

  It was from that to the fact that they had bought too much hay in the summer and now needed to sell it.

  “Oh, I have hay to burn … As you can see,” Joseph says anxiously.

  “Buy a little bit. Enough to tide us over.”

  “I can’t. I’m hoping I could sell some.”

  “You wouldn’t call this hay, would you,” Rita says, as obviously she put her fingers through it and then struck a match to pronounce that it was sawdust.

  “Jesus, keep back, keep back,” Joseph shouts.

  Goldie, sniffing something within, comes scampering, finds the submerged pair, starts to yelp with delight, then runs her snout over each of their two faces. From the tweak Breege gives to her nose she knows not to bark, and after a silent investigation of things leaps off, bounding, high-shinned.

  They lay there quite quiet; miscreants, suspended in time and place, close and barely breathing, not touching, but their eyes agog in the dark, the voices and the footsteps coming nearer, then receding, the parrying and the joking, an ugliness creeping in as the sisters now realise that they cannot persuade him. They made one last and desperate appeal to him, said that if he helped them they would go as character witnesses for him into the High Court.

  “I’m nearly bankrupt,” Joseph said.

  “Shite,” Rita said, and added vindictively that maybe his hay would burn after all.

  With his hat Bugler brushed her down, and with his hand he removed wisps of hay from her hair, fingering each strand as if he were unbraiding it. Then he moved very close to her, the shape of his mouth searching out the shape of hers. The kiss withheld for so long, given, taken, and retaken. Their ripe lips. Unfolding once more. Once more. Silently wooing. Silently clasped. He held her then, and the constraint that was between them was gone.

  “I didn’t think anything as nice as this could happen to me,” he said.

  “Is it wrong?” she asked in a whisper, meaning Rosemary.

  “Do you think it’s wrong?”

  “No.”

  “Then it’s not wrong,” he said.

  A promise was struck although no words were said. They merely stood in that radius of astonishment until the rattle of the car died away, and then raising his hand in the air and making the sign of
the cross he said, “We have to thank the sisters for this.”

  BUGLER KEPT BUSY, that was his way. Off at six on the tractor, up to the woods to saw bits of scrub and fallen trees. It was a new saw, a block-breaker, it was called, and it could be heard for miles around, rasping, sucking into the wood as it cut. It wakened people, it aggravated people, it made him more unpopular. Rosemary had grown suspicious. She had taken to phoning even though they both agreed that it was too expensive. His phone was ringing the night he came in the door after he had that kiss in the hayshed. She felt there was something wrong. Was he sick? Had he fallen into a ditch? Had he hurt himself? She was ringing at some godawful hour of night, talking low so as not to be overheard, repeating her hunch that she felt something was amiss. No. No. No. He tried to put her at her ease. She wanted reassuring, wanted the words that are expected at a time like that, ringing on an instinct, wanted to be told that she was the only one and that was It. He saw his own face guilty and enlarged in the back of a ladle that was on the kitchen table, near where he stood. He was shaking. Women could do that. Rosemary, who always referred to herself as a witch, and Breege, light as a leaf yet full of passion, passionate. He had promised her to go dancing. Jesus. A dance hall in which they would be noticed even if it was a hundred miles away, and her brother and himself bound for the courts. He could taste her kiss, so fresh, so fearless, fresh as that river they had seen that day months before, from which he had cupped water for them to drink. He made himself a hot whiskey and walked around his house proud of his own handiwork, the more practical half of himself gauging how many more months until the rooms were completed, plastered, papered, beds put in them, rugs put down on the wooden floor, which he would lay himself. There was a load of teak advertised in the paper and he had put a bid in for it. It was somewhere in a lorry in Gambia, probably waiting for a middleman to give the permits for it to be let out. Someone’s livelihood for a year or maybe two years packed into that lorry. It would be a beautiful floor, the colour of a ripe cornfield. Gypsy followed him around the house, his tread as light as if he had donned slippers. He was not supposed to be indoors. You are not supposed to be indoors. He was supposed to stay outside like the dogs on the station, obedient to a master. The important thing was not to go dancing. Maybe she would forget it. Maybe she never heard it. He thought of something then that he had not thought of in twenty-odd years — how he slept with his brother Charlie and they had feasts under the pillow, and when things were very happy between them he called his brother Tom and neither of them could ever say why he called him Tom, but they found it funny and laughed over it. He thought of how he looked up to Tom, adored him, and the same weak kind of emotion washed over him the night he proposed to Rosemary in a dark room watching television. He could still see her as she was, curled up on the sofa bed, her foot inside his pocket, not fucking him, but begging to, and she so quiet, so unusually quiet and vulnerable, because she had come back to the station unexpectedly and he had been curt with her; the two of them quite silent watching Frankenstein, and her toes curled and trying to rouse him and his sudden spontaneous certainty that she was the girl for him, that they were for each other, and his joy and yes his tears when he proposed to her and she said yes, yes, I will marry you, Mr. Moody Mick Bugler. Now Breege, soft as moss, mossy, quiet-spoken, one kiss, admittedly a very long kiss, and there were rainbows inside his head and danger signals. Women sapped his will. The love of a woman or the fear of a woman, and now the unthinkable, two women, having to fail one or the other, or both. A traitor whatever he did.

  THE MORNING HE took down the suitcase from the top of the wardrobe Breege begged Joseph not to go. Word had come of the name of the solicitors who had merged with another firm of solicitors who had acted for his grandfather and where the document might just be. He was surprised at her asking him not to go, and turning to her said with something of the old tenderness, “Don’t worry about me … I’ll be all right.” She could not say to him that which she wanted to say, which was that left alone she would find Bugler and Bugler would find her, because since the night in the hayshed it was pending.

  When he got to the town it was late, but having thrown his bag down on the bed he went to search for the solicitors’ office, just to know its whereabouts and to be there first thing in the morning and maybe home by evening, home on the evening bus.

  But it did not work out like that at all.

  Each day he went to the secluded street with its row of stone houses, stone steps up to the hall doors with their highly polished knockers, stiff from non-use because everyone rung the bell. In the downstairs windows on canvas blinds the faded but venerable names of solicitors, six firms in all, side by side and possibly rivals to each other, and each day he curses his luck at being at the mercy of an impostor, a chancer who refuses to see him. He has been three times in as many days, crawling out of the poky room at dawn, to walk, to inhale the fresh air, and to buy a roll when the bakery opens. Each day the same sight, a straggle of people going to convent Mass and a lorry with a double orange yard broom affixed to the back sweeping up the skins and rinds of the night before. Always the same, the chapel bells, pigeons in the convent trees, hooting lorries, and across the broad sweep of the river a view of the hooting courthouse where he once was and will be again, then down to the solicitors with the secretary calling out, “He’s not here,” before he has spoken at all. When he rings Breege at night he says nothing of these frustrations, of being humiliated so, he says that things are progressing slowly, asks if she has counted the cattle and if she has noticed if any of them might be sickly, then promises to ring at the same time the following evening.

  Each day he has been made to sit in a waiting room, his eye on the half-opened doorway leading to the hall through which everyone including the impostor must pass. He cannot get to see the man and is not told why. Moira, the secretary, keeps him in the dark, offering no explanation except that her supremo is a law unto himself, can’t be hustled, won’t be hustled, doing one hundred and one things at once.

  Moira sits behind the desk feigning surprise at each face, each arrival, people she has lied to or insulted or sent away disheartened.

  On the fourth morning he decides to be tough with her, to give her an ultimatum. He decides to go in there and threaten her boss with the Law Society, and he imagines how she will look up with her fat eyes and will get up, go through a door, and presently the double doors leading to the inner sanctum will unfold and he will be brought face to face with Mr. O’Shaughnessy. After some polite exchanges he will tell his story, and before long he will be let rummage in files and boxes, and as certain as he has been in each day’s disappointment he is equally certain that he will find it because it is there. Thinking thus as he walks down the quiet street, he feels buoyant, but then he thinks of the woman he will have to sit next to, steel-grey hair, steel-grey eyes, crocheting a long strip of white lace and counting the stitches to herself. For two days she ignored him, then the third evening just before closing time, with Moira bustling to get rid of them, the woman turned to him and said, “You’re here because of your land,” and before he could even answer she went on, “Go home and forget all about it or you’ll end up like me in the asylum.”

  “Are you in the asylum?” he had asked her.

  “For fifteen years. I come here days because it was here I came before I lost it all … And they won’t help me. And they won’t help you, my dear man.” She did not say it out of sympathy, not out of pity either, but in a kind of ecstatic revenge.

  When he arrives determined to tackle Moira, he says, “I’ll wait,” before she even uttered a word.

  “Oh, you could be waiting all day.”

  “I’ll wait,” Joseph says, and goes towards his usual chair, astounded by the fact that a screen has been erected around it, an ugly oat-coloured raffia screen blocking his view of the open door and the hallway.

  “This is new,” he says, and hits it with his elbow, hoping it might topple.


  “Good God, no … It’s always there,” she says, and as he sits he realises that he will have to crane his neck to communicate with her or else shout underneath it. He has a full view of her feet, one stockinged foot placed on top of the other, massaging and mashing it, a worn court shoe kicked to one side.

  “It wasn’t here yesterday,” he says.

  “It was away getting fixed,” she says, no longer the smarmy friendliness of other mornings: “Oh, poor you … the bother he’s putting you to … away from your farm. If only you had a car phone like him, I could phone you the minute he stepped inside that door and you could chase over here and the two of us could nail him … get the effing thing out of him and by now all would be roses.”

  “I’m not taking it anymore … Go in and tell him.”

  “Jesus,” she says, and with a hysterical laugh asks how anyone could risk doing that, intruding on a man with six different personalities, leaving herself open to a load of abuse and maybe getting sacked.

  “Is he that bad?” he says, realising that she is his one and only chance.

  “A divil,” she says, and puts her hand to her upper lip in case the crochet lady overhears.