A Pint of Plain

by Bill Barich

  And now the school approaching near,

  A humming noise salutes the ear,

  The door unbarred with mirth and glee,

  They rush and hail sweet liberty,

  With rosy cheeks and laughing eyes,

  Each to his dear amusement hies.

  Napper Tandy, the revolutionary, and Edmund Burke, the political philosopher, were among Shackleton’s illustrious pupils. Burke became a close friend of Mary’s father, Richard, and traveled from London to Ballitore on occasion with his wife, who once caused a sensation by stepping from her coach without a bonnet. Mary, observing from a nursery window as a little girl, expressed her shock at the sight of a woman with “no covering on her head but her beautiful unadorned auburn tresses.” Mrs. Burke, who moved in sophisticated circles, explained that she dressed “conformably to her husband’s taste,” although she donned a hat of sorts for appearance’s sake the next day.

  Mary’s own husband, William Leadbeater, landed at the school as a Huguenot orphan, and joined the Quakers “perhaps unconsciously attracted by an attachment he formed . . . to the youthful subject of this memoir,” as a biographer of Mary’s put it. She bore William four children, actively opposed slavery, labored on behalf of the poor, and rose an hour or so before dawn to steal some time to write. A volume of her poetry came out in 1808, but it’s The Annals of Ballitore, compiled just before her death from dropsy, that most impressed me with its mix of whimsy and intelligent commentary. Fairies had no luck entrancing the villagers, Mary informs us, because they were too learned and pious. She also took note of the first Jew to arrive in Ballitore—Emmanuel Jacob, an itinerant con man, who showed off a fake mandrake root in a glass case to fleece a few shillings from the gullible.

  The Annals paints such a charming, pastoral portrait of a society in harmony that I hoped I might still encounter traces of it, but Mary Leadbeater wouldn’t know Ballitore now. Though the village is only a mile or so from a highway, it feels remote, as if it’s been bypassed and forgotten. It isn’t ugly or rundown, just dormant somehow. Apart from the three pubs I meant to try, the only business on the town square is a franchised convenience store. A ruined stone building, weeds sprouting through its roof, stands as an emblem of Ballitore’s past, while the Abbyfield tract (“Fabulous new semi-detached houses, easy commuting distance to Carlow, Newbridge, Kildare, Dublin . . .”) represents its future. Shackleton’s school, closed in 1836, has long since gone to dust.

  To see the countryside Mary loved, you must take a side road out of the village. I did it on foot, a welcome bit of stretching after the drive. The afternoon, though cool, offered plenty of sunshine. I had walked no more than fifty yards before a sweet farm landscape wrapped itself around me, its fences posted with warnings to city folks that I was happy to heed—“Beware of the Bull,” for instance. By late afternoon, I’d covered about five miles and returned to Ballitore in a virtuous state of mind, ready for a well-deserved “victory” pint, but the only pub open was Kelly’s or Kirwan’s. It seemed to go by both names, judging by the mismatched signs.

  As thirsty as I was, I couldn’t handle Kelly/Kirwan. A pint would taste of defeat, not victory. Formula One races played on the TV, flashy cars were going down in flames, and a lone drinker hunched over the bar in a slump-shouldered posture of misery. Some youths were hanging out there, as well, and probably racking their brains for a solution to the boredom that might afflict any kid growing up in Ballitore, population 750. The other pubs, O.Connor and E. Butterfield, looked more favorable, so I spent some time at the Quaker Museum instead and talked about California with Mary Malone, the librarian, who’d toured it that summer and confessed to a fantasy about sitting behind the wheel of a big rig. At Harris Ranch in the Central Valley, where truckers stop to eat steaks the size of small children, she had almost climbed into a vacant cab but lost her nerve at the last minute.

  Having admired Mary Leadbeater’s writing desk and her statue in the garden, I gravitated toward O.Connor and E. Butterfield, but they were still locked up tight at five o’clock. They might open around six, a clerk at the convenience store advised me, although she wasn’t certain. I wouldn’t be going back to Dublin that night, obviously, so I drove to nearby Moone and booked a room at the High Cross Inn, where I demonstrated some laudable restraint. The inn’s bar was named for Moscow Flyer, a champion steeplechase horse I once enjoyed an interspecies chat with—but that’s another story, as they say—and I could have begged off Ballitore, asked the non-traditional Polish barmaid for a Guinness, and pulled up a chair by the coal fire, but my intuition and the specter of Cong—of failure—wouldn’t let me.

  At six o’clock, I sat in the car with the heater on full blast and stared at Ballitore’s deserted streets, like a cop on a fruitless stakeout. Had my intuition been wrong? Possibly the pubs weren’t in business anymore, new fatalities in the general demise. E. Butterfield resembled a defunct stable with its green half-door, above which a faded harp was faintly visible. The pub itself seemed to be fading into eternity. O.Connor was more substantial, a row house with neighbors on either side to keep it from falling over. Still, I was about to head back to the High Cross Inn when, precisely at 6:47 P.M., the lights switched on at O.Connor and someone pushed open the front door.

  I did not quite sprint toward the door, but you could call it a speed-walk. “You’re lucky,” the publican said wryly, sensing my eagerness. “I don’t usually open until seven.” This was Pat O’Connor, the licensee since 1955, whose grandfather had established the pub, formerly a Quaker-owned hardware store, around 1870. The space was utilitarian, with an interior of scrap mahogany Pat’s carpenter father, Joseph, had constructed. Farmers don’t ordinarily subscribe to House Beautiful or dwell on questions of aesthetics or design, so the pub showed a disregard for any aspect of the fanciful. The look was spare and unprepossessing, with a long front bar and a lounge at the back, once the family kitchen, that could not be said to encourage lounging.

  Pat O’Connor had a knack, perhaps genetic, for being instantly likable. You couldn’t be around Pat for a nanosecond without feeling warmer toward the human race. When he brought my pint, a symbol as potent to me by now as the glass of water a desert rat seizes upon, he asked how old I thought he was. This is a trick question, of course, since nobody who looks their age (or older) ever puts it to you, so you have to factor in some flattery and adjust the estimate accordingly. I put Pat at a well-preserved seventy-five. He was short and reasonably trim, and his thinning hair, combed straight back, was still jet-black with no telltale hint of a cheap dye job. He had a quick wit, savored a joke or an anecdote, and laughed readily at the world and his own foibles. He carried himself in an untroubled way, too, as if the aches and pains of aging had granted him a free pass so far.

  I did the math, factored and adjusted. “Early seventies?”

  “I’ll be eighty soon.” He sounded proud, really pleased with himself. To be eighty and in good health was an unexpected gift.

  Though Pat was a native of Ballitore, he’d tried to escape from it several times. He knew Ranelagh, and had boarded with an aunt there as a young man, while he worked as an apprentice barman in Booterstown on the marshes by the Irish Sea. He might have stayed, but he was drawn back home when electricity reached the village in the 1940s. (The first item to be electrified in most rural houses was a Sacred Heart lamp.) He couldn’t remember the exact year, so he slipped through a door behind the bar and into his living quarters. “When did we get the electricity, Sally?” he asked his wife.

  “Nineteen forty-seven,” I heard her say.

  Pat had been twenty then and full of beans, and he took over an old Quaker barn in a field behind the pub that had been used as a cinema. That’s what he called it—the Cinema. “Not very original,” he admitted. He ran movies twice a week, every Wednesday and Sunday, often to a packed house. Sunday was a guaranteed sellout, because it gave the men who’d been drinking all day, starting right after Mass, an opportunity to regain som
e face. The pub was required by law to close at seven, so the men dutifully escorted their wives to the eight o’clock feature. The Cinema flourished into the 1970s, but it finally lost out to television. Meanwhile, Pat helped at the pub, too, and learned from his dad, who taught him the tricks of the trade, such as how to cope with an obstreperous customer who’s three sheets to the wind.

  “You can see it coming,” he contended, and again I imagined a publican as the captain of a ship, capable of steering his way to safety through a storm. “You let him shout at you a few times, but you pretend not to hear him, and he gets the message sooner or later. You never confront him, though. That’s the worst thing to do! If you tell a man he’s overdone it, he’ll deny it. He’ll be indignant and insist, ‘I’ve not had too much!’ You need the temperament for it.” He was referring to an inner calm, the peacemaker’s ability to restore order. “When somebody’s growlin’ at you, you don’t go too near him.”

  Currently, Pat’s regulars include the elderly, the unemployed, and day laborers rather than farmers. The unemployed astound him, because they always have the price of a drink. As for the kids who hang out at Kelly/Kirwan, they never bother with his pub. “We only offer company,” he told me. “With the elderly”—a category from which he cleverly excluded himself—“a lot of these people are dying,” he went on, with his eyes twinkling. “You expect so-and-so to stroll in, and instead somebody says, ‘He’s dead, and he’s dead, and he’s dead.’ ” Pat reeled off the litany in a spirit of high hilarity. He could probably squeeze an ounce of mirth from a broken leg.

  Maybe Pat’s sense of humor kept him going. He didn’t need the money, really. He and Sally had even tried to retire not long ago, but they failed miserably. They bought a house in Dublin and managed to keep busy during the day, doing the shopping and running errands, but the nights were intolerable, so quiet and lonely with the two of them parked before the telly and no buzz anywhere. They had never had to hunt down a conversation before—the conversation came to them at the pub. They lasted only a month in the city, then rented out their place. “We were just proddin’ at it, like,” Pat said, applying some spin to the adventure. “Isn’t that right?” he asked Sally, who’d joined us at the bar. She’s an ideal match for her husband, smart and reflective, honest and ingratiating, another native of Ballitore.

  Sally remembered the exhilirating times they’d had together in the old days, when they would gather up some bottles after the pub closed and attend a house dance at the home of Jimmy Gibbons, a wizard fiddler. (The church disapproved of such dances because they could lead to sins of the flesh.) They cleared out the furniture and drank and danced until dawn, and the last dance was always a waltz. Ballitore was still a true village then, with a tailor, a cobbler, and a “high-class” draper; two hardware stores and three groceries; a bicycle shop that also sold radios; butchers and greengrocers; two ice cream parlors; and so on. People walked to O.Connor or rode a bike, Sally said, and they were all neighbors, so they had to behave agreeably. A publican could exercise control by a type of moral suasion. Now plans were on the books to build an apartment complex for forty low-income families, along with 130 houses in a tract similar to Abbyfield.

  The pub wasn’t so neighborly anymore, and Pat missed the characters who used to drop in, eccentrics who were never bland or boring and told terrific whoppers. “Oh, they could make it up!” he exclaimed. “The half of it was lies!” One regular had a repertoire of ghost stories, and you were sure to be his target if he knew you’d be heading home along the path by the Quaker cemetery. And speaking of characters, what about that scurrilous gang of writers at McDaids, where Pat drank at times during the war years? “The gibberish they talked! Patrick Kavanagh, and that other clown, what was his name?”

  I took a stab. “Brendan Behan?”

  “That’s it! Brendan Behan!”

  I leaned toward Pat, keen to hear literary history rewritten.

  “Brendan Behan, he was a terrible blatherer,” he said, with relish. “Always shoutin’ and roarin’ and carryin’ on. They’d be talkin’ a load of rubbish, and now they’re God Almighty! Only Paddy O’Brien could put up with that lot. He was the perfect barman!”

  O’Brien had led the flight of the faithful, I recalled. “What made him perfect?”

  “He believed in those fellas for some reason. Paddy couldn’t see the bad in people. He accepted them as they were, always lettin’ them drink without payin’. ‘I’ll have to put this on the tick,’ they’d say. Behan, he swapped Paddy a couple of copy books for some credit once, and he rushed in lookin’ for them weeks later. Borstal Boy was in those books, and he had an English publisher waitin’ for them at a hotel, so they dug under the bar and through all the cabinets and cubbyholes until Paddy found them. Any other barman would have tossed them away.”

  I wished Paddy O’Brien were still around, so I could consult him. For drinkers of a certain age, he has the status of a saint, much as Matt Talbot does for the abstainers. The challenges he dodged on a daily basis would have destroyed the average barman. As an example, Pat related the tale of a mysterious stink that emanated from the gents’ at McDaids. O’Brien inspected the plumbing, ordered the urinal scrubbed and disinfected, and replaced the water in the toilet, but the stink persisted. Only after tearing apart the room did he discover its source, a T-shirt stuffed behind a cistern. One of the writers (“a dirty, filthy fella”) had stowed it there. He’d worn it all winter without washing it, then discarded it, caked and sweat-stained, in the first warm blush of spring.

  At eight thirty, I was still O.Connor’s only customer. E. Butterfield hadn’t even opened yet and possibly wouldn’t bother, according to Pat, who had a quiz slated for later on and thought it might bring in a few people. He blamed the usual culprits— “lifestyle changes” and the drink-driving laws—but the decline of rural pubs really spelled the death of the traditional Irish village, with its distinctive shop fronts (not the logos of franchises) and an economy based on farming. Suburbs and commuters were the order of the day—a sobering sight, as it were, especially for someone like me, who grew up in a 1950s Levitt house and had watched the farms of Long Island disappear as the tracts ate up Nassau and Suffolk counties. One had to wonder, too, if the houses in Abbyfield would hold their inflated value, or would merely collapse when the Tiger’s roar was not so deafening.

  “Strangers always say, ‘Ballitore’s a lovely place, I’d love to live here,’ ” Pat remarked as I was leaving. “If you do live here, you look up and wonder, ‘What the devil are they talkin’ about?’ “ It could be the old familiar longing for Fairytale Ireland, I thought, a condition that induces a sort of blindness. A visitor sees only Mary Leadbeater’s gently rising hills and the River Griese still meandering, although just barely, and blocks out the new developments that are making the real Ireland ever more generic, suburban, and American.

  Crows. I woke to a racket of them, as black as cinders, attacking the stubble around the High Cross Inn. On my bedside table lay a copy of the Kildare Post, a giveaway paper I’d studied over dinner and beyond. I knew now that Athy had its first support group for gays, lesbians, and bisexuals, and that a Newbridge man who ingested magic mushrooms had been arrested for stretching out on a dark road to facilitate his trip. “It took a while to get his attention,” an officer dryly noted. The tripper had twenty-three prior arrests, and since his parents had moved to the country from Dublin to put some distance between their son and “the occasion of sin,” the judge was fairly lenient.

  I also found a tipster’s column in the Post. Its author, Father Sean Breen, the Racing Priest, advised his readers to back L’Antartique in the Paddy Power Gold Cup at Cheltenham “as soon as possible.” I copied the tip into a notebook below a late-night entry that read, “Curiosity is its own kind of punishment,” after which I’d added, “The next pub down the road may not deliver the revelation you seek.” In my defense, there was a reason for the mopiness—I was tired. The bar of the inn, once so i
ngratiating with its coal fire and Polish barmaid, was still hopping at closing time, and sleep became a state to be yearned for but never achieved. Here, too, I must pillage my notebook for an observation of Sally O’Connor’s. “The Irish have to be told to go home,” she said. “Whatever is wrong with them, I’m sure I don’t know.”

  After breakfast, I left for Athy, a place The Rough Guide to Ireland tends to scorn. “Prosperity has turned a handsome Georgian town with a fine main square into something much more ramshackle,” the guide says, but I liked Athy at first glance. Granted, it has its share of suburban sprawl, and traffic jams as knotty as midtown Manhattan on a Friday afternoon, but it retains a distinct flavor of the farm, more so than Ballitore. As if to certify that fact, there were clumps of turf and clods of mud on the sidewalks. One farmer’s car stalled on a main street had bunches of grass stuck in its bumper, clearly the result of a drive through a field to check on the livestock. The River Barrow wound through town and flowed past White’s Castle, a pretty stream full of such coarse fish (non-salmon family) as roach, bream, and pike.

  The Barrow meets the Grand Canal at one end of town, near a plant where barley is malted. I caught the roasted scent immediately, stronger even than at St. James’s Gate. The plant had big stainless-steel tanks and throbbed with the hum of machinery. For barley growers, the times were bullish. Ireland’s yield per acre has been the highest in the world for the past two years, due in part to the ideal climate. The harvest takes place in late July or early August, when the moisture content ranges from 17 to 20 percent. The Brewing Room Book at Greencore Malt admirably sums up the cereal’s healing properties. The thiamine in barley may prevent beriberi, for example, while its niacin helps to thwart pellegra—good news, indeed, for nineteenth-century sailors.