Lies the Mushroom Pickers Told

by Phelan, Tom;

  “Your breakfast is getting cold, Uncle Lawrence,” she said pleasantly, and she continued on her way to the turf shed. Inside her skull her maledictive brain said, “I hope it chokes you.”

  8

  In the Sunroom

  In which Elsie Howard, wife of David Samuel, Esq., explains why the divide between Protestants and Catholics in a tight community can make the reaping of gossip difficult.

  A LOUD CLATTERING at the front of the house intruded into the sunroom. “The lion roareth,” Mister Howard said, and his wife stood up as if she were a thirty-year-old; her knees didn’t even creak.

  “The Thatcherette did seethe till she died,” Elsie said. “And not only because she didn’t become a landowner; it was having to buy Doul Yank’s passage home that put a burr in her brassiere for the rest of her life.”

  “Else, I think you’re getting into the realm of gossip here, and as well as that I doubt if the woman ever wore a brassiere. And how a woman could get a burr in her brassiere defies the imagination,” Mister Howard said.

  “No, Sam, this isn’t gossip and I am allowed a figure of speech. This is what I saw with my own eyes and heard with my own ears. As well as the ticket home there was the humiliation of not inheriting the land. . . . Remember she had already prepared the neighbors for her induction into the land-owning class. It was like that farmer in Carlow who got the telegram and thought he’d won a fortune when he saw the advertisement on the envelope for the Irish Sweepstakes. After he’d run around telling all his neighbors he’d won the Sweep, someone who’d had experience with telegrams told him the message was inside the envelope. The message was that his sheep in the far field had worms.”

  The lion’s nose ring clattered again, and Elsie said, “That’s a Catholic. They’re more impatient at front doors than Protestants.” As she walked out she said, “And that farmer in Carlow had never bought a Sweepstakes ticket in his life.”

  “Else has been the gatekeeper since the day we came home from our honeymoon many moons ago, Patrick. Even though I’m long retired, people still come knocking, especially the older ones I’ve known all my life. Else directs them to the new man, who happens to be our son. When you’re a small town solicitor, many people don’t differentiate between your office and your house. I don’t think I’ve ever answered a knock on our front door.”

  “Your father was a solicitor too, wasn’t he?” Patrick asked.

  “Yes, and his father before him. We’re a bit like the old Brehons that way—from father to son. The Howards are as much a part of Gohen as the River Owonass. My grandfather lived in this house, too, and my son says he’s going to live here when Else and I kick our respective buckets. I tried to persuade him to get a house ten miles away so he won’t be bothered night, noon and morning. Living in the same town is as bad as living over the shop—you’re never free of the business.”

  “If your grandfather lived here, then this house is fairly old,” Patrick said.

  “It was being built in 1798, during the United Irishmen rebellion, for a Freemason by the name of Hogg. When the Gohen lads who’d been in the fighting in Monasterevin were brought back to be hung, they passed by here just as the lintel of an upstairs window was being put in place. One of the workmen called out to the Redcoats, ‘Bring them in here, and we’ll hang them from the lintel.’”

  “Jesus,” Patrick said.

  “Jesus be damned! The Redcoats brought them to a house at the far end of the town and hung them by tying a rope around a rafter and throwing the poor buggers out through the upstairs window.”

  Missus Howard came back into the room. “The hang-them-from-the-lintel story,” she said. “I wonder, if they had hung them from the lintel would your grandfather have bought it, Sam?”

  “No, Else, I don’t think he would. He was a great admirer of Wolfe Tone—fellow Prod.”

  “Even the Catholics admit that Tone was a good Protestant.” Else sat down. “That was the G.A.A. club at the door selling raffle tickets; first prize is a pair of ducks; tuppence each, and I bought five books.”

  “We’ve been lucky with the Catholic raffles, especially the Gaelic Athletic Association—never won their ducks,” Mister Howard said. “But Else is a great supporter of raffles.”

  “Anything to let the Catholics know we’re as Irish as they are; that it’s our country, too. And anyhow, Protestants play Gaelic games every bit as good as Catholics, even if they call us Left-Footers. We even speak Irish as good as they do.”

  Sam said, “The Catholics like to think the Protestants don’t know what goes on among them, but we knew everything. The Catholics and Protestants work too close together for it to be any other way. But it doesn’t work as well the other way around because there are far fewer Protestants. We are inclined to keep our own peccadilloes away from Catholic ears as a form of defense.”

  Patrick said, “But still things can seep out into the community no matter what defenses you have. That conversation between your father and mother about the language Lizzie Coughlin used when she was told her brother was alive was told to me as gospel truth.”

  “That’s it,” Sam said, and he clapped his hands. “I knew I wanted to ask you something. How could anyone have known what my father said in his own house?”

  Neither Elsie nor Patrick rushed to answer his question, and the three of them sat in silence for a while. Finally, Elsie said, “Sam, you don’t know how gossip works. You have to give a bit to get a bit.”

  Again they sat in silence until Sam finally exclaimed, “No, Else, you never—”

  But Elsie cut him off. “Oh, Sam, don’t blow a gasket. I never gave away any of your privileged confidences because you never told me any. And you listen to gossip as eagerly as everyone else.”

  “I never traded in gossip.”

  “But you listened to it.”

  “I will admit that like my father I had a good source of community news—the postman, Kevin Lalor’s father.”

  “Community news! Patrick, Sam applies his self-serving alchemy to words to suit himself. And I wish there was no such thing as Protestant and Catholic. I wish religion had never been invented. It leads to all kinds of stupidity and stupid thinking. Do you remember a Willie Collins, Patrick? He would have been about your age.”

  Patrick was momentarily nonplussed by the sudden question. “Yes, we were in the Boys’ School together. Didn’t he get killed—?”

  “Yes, about twenty-five years ago. A sawmill blade jumped out of its anchors and more or less split him in two from the waist up. He had a day off and was helping the Mangan lads with the sawing. Some Catholics said that Willie was killed by God because he was working with the Protestant Mangans on a Catholic holy day. The things people make their God do!”

  Elsie’s searing tone established silence in its wake for a few moments.

  Then Patrick said, “Religion encourages people to do many strange things to ensure instant and painless entry . . .”

  9

  The Sister

  In which Bridie, sister of Eddie-the-cap Coughlin, expresses her anxiety to Annie Lamb about the impending six-month visit of her brother, Jarlath, a missionary priest.

  TO ENSURE HER INSTANT AND PAINLESS ENTRY into the hereafter, Bridie Coughlin’s spiritual exercises included attendance at the Women’s Sodality in the church at seven o’clock on the fourth Sunday of every month.

  Bridie recited morning and night prayers while kneeling beside her bed. She prayed the rosary every day after dinner while kneeling at a chair on the concrete floor near the fire; she said grace before and after her three meals, her eleven o’clock tea, her four o’clock tea and before her tea and slice of bread at bedtime; she dipped her finger in the Souvenir of Lourdes holy water font inside her front door and blessed herself every time she went out of the house; she prayed the Angelus at 7 a.m., 12 noon and 6 p.m.; she did the Stations of the Cross while in Gohen on her weekly shopping excursions; she never passed the church without going in to say hello to
Jesus, lonely in his tabernacle; she attended the 7 a.m. mass every day during Lent and scrupulously observed the Lenten fasting laws; she had observed the rituals of the nine first Fridays many times over; she blessed herself when she heard the dead bell announcing a death in the parish and when she saw a flash of lightning and saw a falling star and when she heard the corncrake for the first time in the spring, whenever she heard a hen trying to crow like a cock and whenever she heard bad news. She wore various medals and scapulars next to her skin. But she had read in The Messenger of the Sacred Heart of Jesus that faithful attendance at the Sodality of Our Lady of Mount Carmel guaranteed the safe delivery of the soul to the hereafter in a handbasket lined with hay.

  No matter how severe the weather, when it was time for the Sunday evening service Bridie hauled her bike out of the turf shed and headed off to salvation, her head scarf tied tightly under her chin. On the occasions when she pedaled the three miles against a harsh north wind laden with horizontal rain that felt like icy pebbles on her exposed face and ungloved hands, Bridie knew the octane of the credit she was stashing away in her heavenly storage tank was very high. She hoped Saint Peter, infamous for falling asleep at the wrong times, was paying close attention to her efforts.

  Whenever her determination to get to the Sodality wavered in the face of gale-force adversity, Bridie simply made herself think of the post-Sodality visit to Annie Lamb in Clunnyboe. Above and beyond the promise of the mug of hot sweet tea and the two cuts of curranty cake lathered in butter, there was the gossip to be dispensed and the gossip to be gleaned.

  And so it was, on the evening of the fourth Sunday of May, Annie Lamb was settling on a straight-back chair in front of the kitchen fire with a very tattered Jane Eyre. As she pulled her dress up to her knees and opened her legs wide to the heat of the glowing turf, the sounds of the spring storm howling in the chimney and the slates added to her feelings of coziness. There was no trepidation lurking in her breast that Bridie Coughlin would be rambling tonight, because only a madwoman would be out on her bike on such a night as this. The children were in bed, and Annie was wallowing in the prospect of four hours of uninterrupted reading. She sighed with contentment as the heat moved in and encased the upper reaches of her thighs with glowing warmth.

  Annie opened her book with more anticipation than when she’d read it the first time. Because of the scarcity of books, but also because she loved the story, this was her seventh adventure with Jane and Rochester. As if tasting the first sips of a longed-for cup of tea, Annie slowly savored the opening words, letting them slip deliciously into every nook and cranny of her brain. There was no possibility of taking a walk that day, the cold winter wind had brought with it clouds so somber, and a rain so penetrating, that further outdoor exercise was now out of the question.

  Annie heard a noise at the door. Thinking her husband, Simon Peter, was coming in with a basket of turf, and never suspecting for one moment that Bridie Coughlin was standing out there on the step, Annie, book in hand, went to the door and opened it.

  She almost screamed at the apparition she beheld.

  If only Annie Lamb could have imagined a buck-toothed, red-headed woman, smelling worse than the pelts she wore, who had lived locally in the days of melting glaciers, she would have seen that primitive’s direct descendant standing in front of her now. Buck-toothed, red-headed, looking like she’d been dragged across the Shannon at the wrong end of a rope, Bridie Coughlin stood there in the dim light of the kitchen’s paraffin-oil lamp. She was grinning with glee at her triumph over the elements, the grin as toothy and as gummy and as false as the grin of a performing orangutan.

  At the last moment, Annie Lamb’s strangled scream emerged from her lips high-pitched but reshaped into words: “Sure, Bridie, it’s grand to see you,” and she wondered what was hanging on the kitchen clothesline. She stood aside and, as Bridie stepped past her, the smell of the Sodality’s incense ascended out of her permeated and waterlogged coat. Once again, Annie was reminded that she would never smell church incense without Bridie Coughlin’s vaporous visage rising into her brain.

  With eyes closed in resignation, a finger still between the pages of Jane Eyre, Annie closed the kitchen door and turned around.

  Standing in the middle of the floor, Bridie was holding her head scarf. From the hem of her cloth coat, fat drops of water plopped down onto the concrete floor enclosing her in a wet circle. A pillar of steam rising out of the top of her head reminded Annie Lamb of a line drawing in the Penny Catechism showing the Holy Ghost descending onto the heads of the Apostles in the shape of tongues of fire.

  The redness of Bridie’s hair was that of a Rhode Island Red chicken’s feathers. The strands, as straight and as scarce as the hair on an old coconut that’s been in the sea too long, were as jagged as a young girl’s who has been at her own hair with her mother’s scissors. Her face, all teeth and gums and blond brows and popping eyes, was as eager for company as the gaping maw of an ascending baleen whale craves krill.

  Bridie wrestled her body out of the sodden overcoat, and when she turned to hang it on the wooden rack attached to the parlor door, Annie Lamb whipped a pair of her husband’s drawers off the clothesline. She rolled them into a ball and threw them onto the wide sill of the kitchen window among the untidy pages of the day’s newspaper, children’s caps and a ball of wool pierced with two long knitting needles.

  With, “I was just saying, Annie, that a wet and windy May fills the haggard with corn and hay,” and a teeth-jarring rubbing of her sandpaper-rough hands, Bridie went to the fire and turned her back to the heat. Steam rose out of her behind.

  Annie Lamb had not yet recovered from the brutal intrusion. And as it became clearer how her evening had changed, a fierce disappointment came upon her, a disappointment all the more intense because of the time of month that was in it for Annie. She had the presence of mind to say, “I think I hear Fintan awake,” and she went through the door leading to the three bedrooms. She shuffled through the darkness of the hallway to her own room and sat down hard on the hard edge of the hard bed, her cheeks already as runny as the face of a bawling child. It was only when she brought her hands to her face that she realized she was still holding Jane Eyre, still had her finger stuck inside holding her place at the first page. She let the book fall at her feet, and within seconds her shoulders were heaving.

  Annie Lamb was a hormonally weepy woman, and the dam was full. The gates swung wide open. It took nearly four minutes of intense sluicing to flush out her emotional system. Then, as if she were slowly waking after a deep and dreamless sleep, she found herself relaxed. She dried her face in her handkerchief. The female-for-female sympathy she normally felt for Bridie had almost reestablished itself in her head.

  Annie Lamb, wife of Simon Peter, mother of Mikey, Molly and Fintan, felt around in the dark at her feet until she touched her book. She stood up and dropped it on her side of the bed. She would start again by candlelight when she came to bed. As she went back to the kitchen, she took the man’s handkerchief out of her apron pocket again and dabbed at her eyes.

  Bridie Coughlin was already in full gossip stride when Annie entered the kitchen. Simon Peter had finally come in with the basket of turf and had been ambushed by a volley from Bridie’s Gatling teeth. Annie could see plainly what Bridie, in her roaring hunger for human companionship, could not: that Simon Peter was an impaled worm writhing on a barbed fishhook. When he saw his wife coming through the door, Simon Peter sidled out of Bridie’s line of sight and turned his eyes to Annie in a plea for permission to escape. His wife nodded in understanding.

  With nowhere else to escape to, Simon Peter silently slipped through the door to the bedrooms. Annie brought a kitchen-table chair to the fire and quietly placed it on the bare concrete floor across from Bridie.

  Bridie had not missed a beat during the changing of her audience, and she continued to spate out a stream of words without full stops, commas, hyphens or paragraphs. Even on the inhalation of her
breath she shaped words that sounded like the gaspings of an asthmatic. From subject to subject she hopped with the ease of a stone skipping across a calm pond from the hand of a boy on the sunny afternoon of a summer’s Sunday. Bridie didn’t even notice Annie Lamb hadn’t yet sat down, that she was taking the dripping, Sodality-smelling coat off the parlor door and hanging it on the drying nail in the wall of the chimney.

  “. . . Doul Yank in those knickerbockers of his and he talking to me through a hole in the hedge with two snipes hanging from his belt and he complaining about Mattie-the-nephew the day Eddie was at the fair—last Tuesday, it was. I was just saying, I couldn’t take my eyes off the two snipes with their beaks as long as number eight knitting needles. I thought there was something quare about the birds, and it took me ages to figure out he had elastic garters around them to keep their wings all tidy-like against their bodies to keep them from flopping all over the place and getting in his way. ‘In the kitchen having his elevenses with the sun splitting the trees,’ says he, ‘when he should have been off thatching or out in the fields working. That lad’s not worth a pike’s shite,’ says he. The tongue of him! Then he starts talking about the snipes. ‘There’s wonderful medicinal qualities in the meat, and the grease is a great embrocation for the gout,’ says he, ‘all that suction out on the bog, sucking up nothing but goodness through them long beaks of theirs. If we could only live by suction we’d be as healthy as snipes ourselves. I’ve never met a sick snipe in all my days,’ he says. And then he starts telling me about how he was going to send the snipes up to the Convent for the nun with the teebee, all plucked and drawn as if he would be doing the plucking and the cleaning himself and not Peggy-the-niece-in-law. I was just saying, by the way that man talks you’d think he was giving the nuns the snipes for nothing and he charging them half a crown a bird. A half a crown, mind you! Peggy has to paunch and skin the rabbits he shoots. He wouldn’t get a bit of blood and guts on his hands. Embrocation, says he. That man’s a ferocious eegit!”