Wild Decembers

by Edna O'Brien

  In the passage they see a figure advancing towards them with something bulky in its arms. It is Nuala, the stout nurse, fussing, scolding, and, seeing remains of the picnic, asks if it is a five-star hotel they think they are in.

  “It’s Christmas, Nuala.”

  “Christmas! I did a twelve-hour shift, two admissions and that Ryan woman broke windows again.”

  “Sit down, Nuala … We’re telling stories.”

  “Stories!” she says, and hands Breege the large bunch of heather with some sort of sarcastic grunt.

  It is a vast bunch of two colours of heather tied with twine. Holding it is like holding an infant and she can smell the mountain off it, the misted, brooding mountain. She thinks that it must be Bugler, but equally she thinks that it couldn’t be.

  “Big swank of a fella … tried to get past me,” the nurse said. When she heard him described and the hat he wore, she was certain that yes, it was him.

  “Ah now, Nuala, you’re jealous,” Ger said.

  “Of course I’m jealous … It’s always the young ones that get the flowers … that get the diamonds. Who gave me flowers? Nobody.”

  “Here you are,” he says, offering her one of the mince pies, which she refuses, saying pastry gives her indigestion.

  “You’re a hard woman, Nuala. You should have let him up.”

  “Rules are rules,” she says, but she is no longer tetchy, she will be home having a footbath in an hour.

  It was as the nurse snatched the flowers away from Breege, to put them in water, that the note fell out. Breege held it and looked at it. She did not want to read it in front of them, and sensing it, Ger and Mrs. Hegarty moved away. She thought, Suppose I don’t open it, suppose I just invent what it says, and then she thought of the morning on the road, how cold he was and how locked-in, when all she had wanted was one word, one word not to harm his future but to make her own less shorn. She had wanted so little, she had asked so little, yet that little would have been a lot. She opened it suddenly and without thinking, and looking down at the words she read them many times:

  Dear Breege,

  I picked this where we saw the salmon leap. Something will come to make things better. I’ll think of you and I hope that you won’t think too unkindly of me.

  Fond love,

  Mick

  If she keeps staring at the candle flame, at the way it veers, she will not cry, she will be able to hold back her tears. Then she is unable. The tenderness of the words becomes harder to bear than all the cruelty. The tears, the trapped tears of shame and love come pouring out of her.

  “They’ll soon stop,” she says, embarrassed, as Ger hands her a wet flannel to wipe her face.

  “I’m all right now,” she says, though she is still crying.

  “This guy … Is he why you’re here?”

  “Yes.”

  “And the song you sang this morning … Is that your story?”

  “That’s my story, except that I can’t tell it,” she says.

  “Good God … A love child,” he says reverently, and raises his hands as if he is saying a prayer.

  “My brother will kill me.”

  “No one’s going to kill you … We’ll mind you.”

  “How, Ger … How?”

  “We’ll tell him for you.”

  “Ah no. I’ll tell him myself … I have to.”

  “Is he a free man … this fellow?”

  She turned then to the window and looked out at the stars, the same stars as he had driven home under. What would she not have given for just one minute of his being allowed up, just one minute for something to be said to bind them. What would she not have given.

  “If he was a free man, I wouldn’t be in here,” she said, in a breaking voice.

  JUST AS IT fell to Duggan to bring Rosemary there, it fell to him to take her away. They stood, as he put it, like two pillars, next to the tractor, down at the end of the track, not speaking, Rosemary holding a suitcase and wearing a headscarf.

  “Let me know where you are,” Bugler said after she got into the car.

  “Find me,” she said, shouting it through the half-open window.

  She shook then so that Duggan had to light her cigarettes for her; her moods changed by the minute, missing Bugler, then abusing him, calling him all the nasty names she could think of, then asking for them to stop by a pub to get her a brandy for her nerves. She drank it in the car. Afterwards she was subdued and then got a little maudlin and said life with Bugler would be hell but life without Bugler would be a worse hell. She asked him if he had ever been in love, but did not wait for the answer.

  When they passed the green gates and the sloping lawns of the castle, she asked what it was and he told her.

  “Let’s drive in there,” she said.

  “It’ll cost you an arm and a leg.”

  “I don’t care … I don’t bloody care … Let the bastard pay for it.”

  And going up the drive she got out a little mirror to make herself dishy before she went in there.

  A SWIFT FALL OF snow was what met Bugler when he raised the blind. He had never seen snow before except in a paperweight in Rosemary’s family drawing room. He stood by the window and watched it, the sheer zest of it, the flakes spinning, chasing each other through the air, a coat of it like ermine on the young conifers and along the top rung of the gate under which Gypsy lay, plaintive. New Year’s Day. A day of resolutions.

  Dear Brennan,

  This is Bugler writing, and what is more, writing on an auspicious day. I am giving up the fight over the mountain and with it I could say giving up a part of myself. I do it on account of your sister. Let’s meet and talk things over.

  Mick

  * * *

  Unshaven, in a tremor, Joseph began to walk back and forth, digesting the contents of the letter. Its brevity was galling. He saw treachery in it, something in it above and beyond what it said. Bugler intended wooing her, which is why Rosemary had been jilted. Walking around the kitchen he slopped the tea, and with each reading became more crazed; he saw red, as he put it. “I am seeing red,” he said as before his eyes there came some forgotten picture of a gored bull, its entrails puddling out. There was still time. He could persuade her, and if she defied him, he could keep her in there for a long time, for ever.

  He was kneeling now, imploring her, and it was as if she answered back and said to fear not, his fears were unfounded. In his frenziedness he saw her come through the kitchen door in the tweed coat with the little squirrel collar, and for a moment he would have sworn that he heard her. The kitchen without her was no kitchen, cold, vacant, everything out on the table — marmalade, sugar, mustard, spilt cornflakes, spoons, knives, forks, table mats with pictures of wild birds, all needing a wipe. Three milky roses, dried and with the pink dredged out of them, were in a jug where she had put them the morning she left. When he broke it to her, she did not answer, she did not remonstrate, still a mute, but the look she gave him he would never forget.

  He made to throw Bugler’s letter into the stove, changed his mind, withdrew it and put it in his breast pocket, then lifted the telephone and slammed it down, cursing whatever bureaucrat had cut it off. The bill had not been paid. Bills were not paid. Bugler’s doing. His stock now reduced to seven, and he would have to sell two more — “What you have done to me, what you have done to me,” he shouted out, invoking Bugler’s name. Feeling suffocated, he opened the door to let the fresh air in, and he was still talking to himself, remonstrating, gesticulating, when the Crock arrived, a crust of icicles on his nose and a black pixie cap that made him look like a wood sprite.

  “What kept you?”

  “I had to get the grub,” and with that he plonked down the sliced bread and the package of bacon and a bill with a red sticker.

  “They’re not back rashers … They’re streaky,” Joseph said, nettled about the bill, the shame of it.

  “You still have the flu,” the Crock said, walking to the stove to warm his
mittened hands. Seeing the copybooks with their glazed orange covers in which Joseph had written his monthly pieces, he exclaimed, “Christ, man … You’re not burning these … Your pensées.”

  “Pensées,” Joseph said, opening each little book at the centre page so as to be able to clutch a fistful and consign them. The sight of them being sucked in and the ensuing ribbons of hot flame which danced on his face made him almost jovial.

  “No one can say that I don’t keep the home fires burning,” he said bitterly.

  “You’re all dressed up.”

  The jacket of his good suit hung on a chair, but he wore the waistcoat, and in the buttonhole was a sprig of withered shamrock from the previous March. There was, as the Crock would later tell it, an irrationality to the man and a craziness in his eyes. He said conflicting things, such as he had corresponded with county councillors, senators, and the local TD and had had assurances from them that justice would be done concerning the mountain. Seconds later he spoke of setting the land and Breege and himself going on a cruise.

  “How is she?”

  “How do I know … No phone … No post … Nothing. I’ll go see her later this evening. I’m thinking of staying in a hotel. To be close by.”

  “Who’ll milk … Who’ll fodder?” the Crock asked.

  “I’m hiring you to do it.”

  “I’ve never worked a milking machine.”

  “Come on out, then.”

  As they crossed the yard the flakes of snow seemed thicker, more purposeful, and they scurried in out of it. The cows had been milked only a short time before, and Biddy, the first one, bridled, then kicked soon as she felt the nozzles being pulled up over her teats. The byre was suddenly a den of moaning and kicking, Biddy swinging her hindquarters as if it was a torture instrument that had been put over her. The others, taking their cue, set about struggling to come free of their rusted iron halters. Little dribbles of milk passing through the glass tube looked blue and watery. Outside, Goldie yelped to be let in.

  “Jesus, ‘tis a circus,” the Crock said.

  “’Tis a bloody lunatic asylum,” Joseph said, belting them on their clotted rumps until the stick broke in half, something which frustrated him even more.

  Inside, they sat close to the fire as Joseph lit one cigarette off the other and had a vast muttering cogitation with himself. To distract him, the Crock wondered aloud if Breege would make it, cited another young lady with the same complaint: Eily O’Grady, who never came back, died in there at the age of ninety, had grown a beard. When he got no answer he deferred to the ash pan that was overflowing.

  “You could bake great spuds in that ash.”

  “In Jesus’ name will you shut up and go home … You’re an eejit.”

  “One minute you’re kowtowing to me, you’re begging me to come up here, and the next minute I’m barred … I’m not a human football … I’ve had it. Kick someone else’s arse,” and as he rose to go, Joseph blocked the way and asked him in the name of God to stay, to have pity. Then, taking the letter from his pocket, he said, “That’s why … That’s why I am the way I am.” The Crock read it slowly, first by the fire and then by the window, and shook his head solemnly.

  “Oh … Helen of Troy. Blue seas … Blue seas and a romping woman,” he said.

  “No way … She wouldn’t mix with a man that’s wronged her brother.”

  “He went to see her in the place.”

  “Who told you?”

  “A nurse that works there … A cousin. Sat by her bedside, Bugler did.”

  “Oh Jesus, My Father hath chastised you with whips but I will chastise you with scorpions.” Joseph shouted it to the picture of the Sacred Heart, whose votive lamp had quenched for want of oil.

  “Go up to him … Have it out. Man to man.”

  “I will not go up there.”

  “Are you afraid of him?”

  “I’m afraid of no one,” he said, grabbing the letter and hurrying up the stairs as if a brilliant strategy had occurred to him. Up there he could be heard opening and closing drawers and wardrobes, singing, stopping only to call down that he required a hot toddy.

  “There is none. We drank it all.”

  “Get some.”

  “Where? There’s no money.”

  “Anywhere.”

  “I’ll tell you what … I could drive over to my godmother, she always has a drop.”

  “Don’t be long. I’ll need the van to go to Breege.”

  Coming down the stairs he seemed to the Crock to be revived, his hair plastered back with oil and his features sharper and more assertive because of it.

  “Go up and tell Bugler to meet me here.”

  “Suppose he says no.”

  “Tell him …”

  “It’ll be some summit,” the Crock said. Suddenly they both jumped as the door creaked and swung open. In the gust of cold air a robin flew in, its rust-brown feathers jewelled in ice so that it seemed not a real bird but an omen. It made three circuits around the kitchen as they leapt at it to kill it, then it flew towards their faces, then bashed itself repeatedly against the windowpane.

  “Jesus, ‘tis a weirdo,” the Crock said, chasing it now with the parted legs of the tongs.

  “Don’t let it upstairs,” Joseph shouted. Too late. The bird had already curled itself on the bottom step. The Crock hauled himself onto a chair and waited so as to be level with it when it got to where the stairs turned and there was a pocket of dark. It moved jerkily, dropping onto each successive step with a soundless thud, and in time his waiting hand came around it, soft, covert, murderous. There were two sounds then, a screech of pure delirium, almost joyous as his fingers squeezed its neck, then a stifled cry as he throttled it, the sound ending in a splutter. Bringing the hand back he displayed it proudly, the neck swerved to one side as if it had just been unscrewed, the beady eyes wide open.

  “How much will you give me for it?”

  “Get rid of it,” Joseph said wildly. “Get rid of it now.”

  “Easy man … easy. It’s only a feathered friend,” and with that he consigned it to his pocket so that he could show it in the hotel that night, scare the ladies with it. There was a five-course dinner and with a stunt like this he might eat for free.

  * * *

  Joseph could hear him coming on foot. They met by the gate as he tried to put it back on its hinges.

  “You haven’t fixed it yet,” Bugler said.

  “Aren’t you frozen?” Joseph said. Bugler was bareheaded, with snow on his hair and on his thick eyelashes.

  “Warm heart,” he said, and wished a neighbourly Happy New Year. They were at a loss, not knowing exactly how to begin and looking vacantly at the tumbling, thralling snowflakes.

  “Do you want to come in?”

  “I can’t … I have a date,” and there was something smug and insinuating about the way he said it.

  “Good Christmas?” Joseph said then.

  “I got drunk … I even think I felt sorry for myself.”

  Their laughter, if it had been laughter, ceased as Joseph waited, his eyes smarting from no sleep.

  “You got the letter?” Bugler said.

  “I did. You shouldn’t have visited Breege in the hospital … Upsetting her.”

  “It didn’t upset her.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “I like her … A lot.”

  “She’s sick … She doesn’t need you.”

  “I’ve asked her to come up to the house.”

  “She won’t.”

  “She said she will … She has something important to tell me.”

  “And what would that be?”

  “I leave it to you as a man to guess.”

  “Don’t touch her … Don’t tamper with her … Don’t go near her.”

  “I have touched her,” Bugler answered back, the voice calm, unhurried, but pitched with the certainty of a man who has found what he has been seeking. There was no more time and no more explaini
ng; he turned and walked quickly away.

  Joseph held on to the gate because he had to, his world was flushing out of him, if what he heard was true. With a cry then of intent and infantile need, he called out to the Crock to come, Jesus, at once so that they could drive there. The thought that she might have given herself, that Bugler’s blood might be mixed in with theirs, drove him berserk, and he burst his hot heart’s delirium and his hot heart’s despair on the rungs of the gate.

  He turned to go back into the house, but he couldn’t.

  For one minute he thought the shotgun was stolen so well had he disguised it. The muzzle felt like a poker of ice and his fingers stuck to it. He put the cartridges in different pockets so as not to look too bulky. He needed to walk, to walk and talk. He was talking all the time as he went up the back field and under fences to the next field and the next. Bugler’s cattle were around a feeder; a bawling drove of them turned towards him, their moaning half supplication, half threat, the dark descending on them and on him.

  In the next field there was something that unnerved him, because he was not sure but that he was dreaming it. A foal was being born. It was more than halfway out, shaking its moist head, tilting from left to right. The front legs were out, the chestnut face swivelling above them, breathing, looking about, the white lining of the placenta draped around its shoulders like a shawl and the mare pushing, pushing for the rear and the back legs to come out. It was Bugler’s bay mare. Getting closer to it, he saw that at once she became agitated and tried to stand up, and even though he hated the man he did not hate the animal. She had gone in under those trees because like every mare she did not like to be watched when she foaled. In ten or fifteen minutes if he walked on, the foal would be out and up and suckling. So he walked on.