Lies the Mushroom Pickers Told

by Phelan, Tom;

  With teeth flashing, spittle spraying and eyes darting, Bridie released the fetid energy that never ceased to build up from working side by side on their farm with her bachelor brother—two forgottens unnaturally paired in middle age in a relationship where unexpressed anger was pressurized, where dead-endedness and bitterness and regret and envy were the filters through which they both interpreted the world.

  In tones full of sharp-edged judgment or cynical wonder, Bridie recited everything she had heard from every person who had spoken to her since her last post-Sodality visit. “But how,” wondered Annie Lamb, “does she ever hear what anyone else has to say?”

  Without her even noticing it happening, the doors to Annie’s ears swung slowly shut until she was only hearing a distant drone, a sound like a trapped bee buzzing in a bottle. With arms folded loosely under her breasts, her eyes fell down toward the floor, and she began the exercises she had developed over the years that would keep her from nodding off and subsequently snapping into wakefulness, jerking all over the hearth like a poleaxed cow in a slaughterhouse, nearly falling off the chair.

  Into Annie’s descending eyes the hem of Bridie’s brown skirt appeared; then came a few inches of the thin, hose-clad legs exposed between the hem and the man’s socks—the tops turned down to the knotty calves. The thickness, the grayness, and the wooliness of the socks were loud declarations that Bridie Coughlin never dressed with an eye jaundiced by feminine delicacy. The brown booties, worn on Sundays only, twenty-nine years old and resoled six times by Ralph Behan-the-cobbler, were styled after the footwear of Robin Hood and Peter Pan in Mikey’s comics.

  With heroic determination Annie kept the doors to her ears ajar, and she heard Bridie talking about thatching, about her brother Eddie and about Mattie Mulhall.

  “Eddie says to Mattie, ‘Sure I didn’t know till yesterday myself I’d have to go to the fair, and anyhow Bridie says she’ll serve you on the roof. She can pull the thatch as good as any man, and the ladder won’t be any bother at all, she’s up and down the ladder at the reeks in the haggard oftener than myself.’ ‘Ah, Jazus, no Eddie,’ says Mattie, ‘sure I’d never have a woman on a ladder, it’s terrible unlucky to have a woman on a ladder. If only you’d told me sooner I could have got one of the young Kearnses, but they’re all on the bog wheeling turf.’ ‘Sure, I told you the minute I knew myself,’ says Eddie. ‘Bridie’s as good as any man, Mattie, like a monkey on a ladder.’ ‘Begob, I won’t have a woman on a ladder, and that’s that,’ says Mattie. ‘No, Eddie, I’ll do a bit of work on my own land tomorrow meself, open the turnip drills, and I’ll be back on Wednesday. The only thing is I promised Willie Reid I’d start over at his place next Monday and I hate telling a man I’ll be there and then not turning up. If you see anyone at the fair that lives out near Willie Reid, tell them I told you to tell them to tell Willie I told you to pass the word along that I won’t be there till Tuesday.’ And with that Mattie went off home leaving Eddie half afraid he might be in a bit of a snit, sort of afraid Mattie wouldn’t come back to finish the job, he was so cross. ‘For God’s sake,’ says I to Eddie, ‘did you ever hear of Mattie Mulhall never finishing a job that he started?’ I was just saying that he even finished the job on the roof his own father fell off of and got killed, was there a few hours after the funeral to get on with the job.”

  Long after her attention had lost its grip on Eddie and Mattie and thatching, Annie Lamb came to herself again. She found herself examining Bridie’s face and, because she didn’t know how long she’d been staring, she quickly pulled her eyes away. But even so, Bridie’s skin was trapped in her mind. Like the leather of an old discarded boot, there were cracks and wrinkles in Bridie’s skin telling the story of exposure and abuse. Like the real laboring farmer that she was, Bridie even had the line on her forehead an inch below the hairline—the track of corpse-white skin protected by the man’s peaked cap she wore winter and summer in the fields and the farmyard. Her eyes were slightly apop; the gashed mouth framed in thin lips curled forever in disappointment; the nose a severely bowed bridge covered in skin as lifeless as the leaf of an ash tree lying in a December ditch.

  The desperation that had first appeared as she approached the last of her child-bearing years had been etched permanently into Bridie’s eyes by the dreadful realization that no man would ever woo her. And now, many years later, the etchings were still plain to see.

  “Wasn’t the Martyr very cagey about drawing the horse in the Grand National in the Protestant raffle?—never told a soul. Tuppence the ticket cost her, and the horse came in third. If she’d only drawn the winner she’d have won a hundred pounds, but Eddie says, ‘It’s just as well she didn’t or she’d a died with the fright.’ Some Protestant won that of course, money attracts money, or as I was just saying, have a goose and you’ll get a goose. The second horse went to a Protestant, too, fifty quid. Eddie says they had to make sure a Catholic won something to keep the Catholics buying the Protestant tickets the next time around, so they went through all the stubs till they found the one belonging to the Martyr Madden and gave her the horse that came in third. Fifteen quid, the most money the Martyr ever had in her life, and she told no one. Only Eddie was talking to Mister Morgan-of-the-shop we’d never have known, and the Martyr eating her breakfast and dinner and supper in our house six days a week. Eddie says the Martyr wouldn’t tell anyone in case they’d ask her for some of it or for a loan she’d never get back. I was just saying, did you ever notice how the Protestant prizes are always bigger than the Catholic ones? Protestants give money, Catholics give ducks and who, I ask you, wants two more bloody ducks around the place? Duck dung is a terrible nuisance, and they do it everywhere. I was just saying, I’m always stepping in duck dung. And as well as that the raffle was for the repairs on the Protestant church, and the Martyr shouldn’t have supported that. I’d let it all fall down on top of them, and that’d show them who is right.”

  Bridie’s train of thought lurched onto another track and careened ahead at full speed. Annie Lamb stored away the news of Biddy Madden’s winnings in a cerebral pigeonhole, and her barely focused eyes fell down onto Bridie’s lap.

  Bridie’s hands, resembling the scaly feet of a turkey, were resting in the clothed valley between her thighs. Annie knew that on the surfaces and in the bones of those hands was carved the history of Bridie Coughlin; a story etched by newly-surfaced stones picked off the land every cold and wet springtime; by the thorny briars furiously gathered with barley straw into sheaves at harvesttime; by the razor edges of clutched grass slipping through fingers when a handful of bum-wiping fodder was gathered under a hedge. The hands had been permanently marked with dirt pressed into the skin by the hard handles of dung-spreading forks; by the jerking reins of toiling and fly-annoyed horses; by the spring-loaded handles of castrating pincers that changed bull calves into bullocks; by the staining juices of weeds angrily pulled from the long drills of sugar beet and turnips and mangels and potatoes; by the handles of two-pronged, hay-pitching forks; by the rough twine used for tying the necks of coarse burlap sacks full of wheat and barley and oats at harvest time.

  Not all the perfumed soaps in all the chemist shops in the world could soften and clean those hands; neither could the oleiferous glands, elbow-deep inside calving cows; nor the grease of butter scraped off the sides of churns; nor the slime of eggs hand-mixed into weekly dough; nor the milk used to wet caressing fingers on cows’ teats; nor the diluted Jeyes Fluid swished around empty chamber pots; nor the rough tongues of suckling calves learning to bucket-drink from fingers hidden under the surface of the milk; nor the rubbing of salt into pigs’ meat after the yearly slaughter; nor the squashing of potatoes in milk for the dogs’ dinners; nor the mixing of delicate mashes of boiled eggs and chopped dandelion and nettle leaves for newborn turkeys and chicks and goslings and ducklings. On her waking bed, Bridie’s hands, clutching a set of rosary beads on her chest, would be as scarred and as stained as they were at this present moment. />
  The sound of Bridie’s other brother’s name whispered along the tendrils of sleep creeping across Annie Lamb’s brain. She changed her position on the chair, hoped she was giving the impression she had been paying attention all along.

  “. . . until the Suez Canal was open for passenger ships. He’ll never go around by Good Hope again after that journey back just when the war started. Sure, he was terrible lucky to get back at all then, and he can’t even hear the word ‘Africa’ now without feeling like he’s going to die. He vomited all the way down the one side of Africa and across the bottom of Africa, too, and halfway out into the Indian Ocean he said in a letter. The middle of June he’ll be in Southampton and two more days home from there. I was just saying that’s why we have Mattie doing the bit of thatching, so the place looks a bit decent when Jarlath gets home. The Martyr will do the whitewashing inside and outside. But she’s a terrible woman with the splatters. He’s used to all them nice things out in India, especially since he became the principal himself and three other priests helping him and the rest of them lay teachers, over a hundred of them altogether, so that’ll tell you how big the school is; hundreds of children and they all Indians. It’s as good as an English school, he says, but then didn’t Dinglish build it and they pay for the running of the whole thing, too, just too glad to have someone like Jarlath and his likes to do the work for them for next to nothing. Dinglish, you know! They’re all over the place like the scour of a sucking calf. He’s going to see a lot of changes since he was home before the war.”

  Then Bridie took off at a gallop about the new Protestant minister’s wife who would cut the socks off you with her style. It was Bridie’s opinion that a minister’s wife had no business looking as good as that, it being almost a mortal sin for a minister to have a wife that looked as good. Wouldn’t it be better for a minister to have a wife who was a bit on the dowdy side, a bit fat and wearing black, instead of a young one making the rest of the women in the world look shapeless with her indecent figure? And the seamless nylons!

  As she pursued the shapely and stylish Protestant wife around the town, yipping like an irksome terrier at her heels, Bridie tightly pulled her shapeless cardigan around her own timid chest as if to shield it from comparison with the Protestant promontories.

  And Annie Lamb, who had fallen behind Bridie in her relentless, begrudging pursuit, was thinking about a secret she had told Sheila Feeney, her very best friend since their first day in First Babies in the Convent School, married in Gohen to Quick Quigley-the-road-sweeper. Since early adolescence, when she had first realized what married people do with each other, Annie Lamb discovered she had the gift of imagining couples copulating. It was an instinctive thing with her, this instant placing of the woman on her back on the bed, the man on top sawing away. It didn’t matter if the couple was coming back from the altar rails at Mass looking as solemn as saints, or whether they were jogging to the fair in their ass-and-cart; they simply became suddenly naked in Annie’s head with the man between the woman’s spread legs, whacking away like the big dog she’d once seen doing it to a small bitch in the Protestant part of the parish cemetery. It didn’t matter to Annie if the couples were young and halfway handsome or old and ugly and fat as old pigs; she had a wonderful facility for undressing them in a flash and, until she told Sheila Feeney about what she could do, she thought everyone else did the same thing, at least women. ‘And what does Quick look like when we’re doing it?’ Sheila had laughingly asked. ‘Like a dunghill cock with a hen,’ Annie had said. ‘Up, flutter and down again, maybe because his nickname is Quick.’ ‘But his nickname is Quick because he’s so slow about everything. Long and thick, and not too quick, is what he whispers in me ear when we’re at it, and me under him trying not to laugh. I snorted the first time he said it and I shot him out of me.’ The two friends had laughed until they got stitches in their sides, their backs to the railing around the churchyard after running into each by accident.

  Annie Lamb surfaced for a few seconds to make sure Bridie Coughlin’s soliloquy was not in need of sustenance from the sidelines.

  “. . . and every Protestant minister I’ve ever seen in my life looked like he needed a good feed of cabbage and spuds with a good mug of buttermilk. And every Protestant minister’s wife I’ve ever seen in my life had thick legs, not like this one . . .”

  And as Bridie Coughlin continued to pester the Protestant minister’s wife, Annie Lamb was looking at the minister and his wife on their bed. Because the wife looked beautiful and delicate, the husband was delicate in his movements. Raised on his outstretched arms above her, he was sliding in and out so slowly he could have been keeping time to a solemn Protestant funeral hymn he was hearing in his head, or else doing press-ups like those soldiers training in the newsreel in the Picture House in Gohen during the war. The woman beneath him had a pair of compact breasts on her chest, not a couple of old sagging sacks falling away on each side into her armpits like Missus Dempsey. Every time he completed the gentle lunge, the minister’s wife, with skin of milk and hair of honey, moaned. Down along the female body Annie Lamb’s eyes crept, down to where the two people were joined, and she waited with bated breath for the man to raise himself so she could see the Protestant ministerial mickey. But the minister remained buried in his bride. Suddenly, his elbows collapsed and he sank down onto his wife. They dissolved into a pair of writhing eels on the bed, he moaning and she screaming through clenched teeth and sealed lips, the way a mother must in case her young children might think she was being murdered. Annie Lamb checked in with Bridie Coughlin again.

  “. . . and the Martyr’s mind is going quicker by the week. There she was gathering the eggs out of the nests in the side of the hayrick, and she saying it over and over and over to herself. I was just saying, I don’t know how long more we’ll be able to keep her around the place. Last week she heeled up in front of Eddie and let fly with her water before he could get away, cutting the stones out of the yard with her squarts, not the stitch of a knickers on her. She’s always muttering to herself, ‘The Protestants. The Protestants. I have my bag and my handkerchief. I have my bag and my handkerchief. What’s so funny, what’s so funny?’ Nearly whispering it to herself, and I just after saying, that only I have the ears of a rabbit I wouldn’t know what she was saying. They say a rabbit can hear the grass growing.”

  Annie Lamb’s mind drifted from the Protestant minister’s sexual ministrations to her own nuptial bed, to the warmth she always felt when she was entangled in Simon Peter after their own sessions of moaning and tight-lipped screaming. The feel of his hairy skin on her skin, the feel of his body from face to toes, the feel of his entwining arms was better than any miracle at Lourdes—God forgive me. Annie Lamb loved the satisfaction of her skin-hunger, and when she heard her visitor in the distance, Annie realized that Bridie, since the time she had been held as a child, had never had another person put entwining arms around her body, clothed or naked. Bridie had never died and gone to heaven in another human’s arms. And Annie Lamb realized, as she forced her brain back into the sterile stream of Bridie’s steady flow of verbiage, that this very absence in Bridie’s life was the foundation of Annie’s sympathy for her. “Anyone who doesn’t skin with another must be lonely to the point of being mildly mad.”

  As she surfaced out of her reverie and was pulled deeper into Bridie’s swirling and polluted eddies, Annie wondered if the man’s life that Bridie was living, side by side with her brother, somehow made her less of a woman, robbed her of little things that Annie herself took for granted: the feel of a husband’s strong hand on one of her arse cheeks; the dirty talk about sex she and Simon Peter used when they were alone; walking past her husband and running her hand softly across the front of his trousers; the rough grab and kiss in one of the sheds when there was no danger of being discovered by the children; the sudden sex, almost frightening, in the dark in the loose straw at the foot of the straw rick, hands tearing at clothing, bodies heaving and plunging wi
th ferocious animalness; the feel of a sleepy child in the lap in front of a fire.

  As she straightened her back against the hard wood of the kitchen chair, Annie Lamb surreptitiously glanced at the clock on the wall. It was time to make the tea. She picked up the long tongs and poked the fire. The ever-hanging kettle changed its tune.

  “. . . that time the Civil Servant went off to Germany to hear the operas and saw Hitler. Wasn’t he terrible brave to do that, and Hitler going around shooting people by the hundred. I would have died, and he only a few feet away from him.”

  Annie stood up and took the tea canister off the high mantelpiece.

  “I was just saying, I’d love to hear the operas myself, all that music and singing. Sure, there’s nothing like a bit of music. Sometimes when we’re out in the fields, and the wind’s blowing the right way, we can hear the pipe band practicing in the football field in Gohen; the big drum and Bill Brophy on the pipes sending songs into the sky like he was a lark gone mad. I think if you go to the opera, you have to dress up. I’d have to buy a new hat and maybe a wristwatch.”

  Using the corner of her apron to protect her hand from the heat of the kettle’s handle, Annie Lamb poured the spluttering water and put the teapot near the fire to keep it hot while the tea drew.

  “Wasn’t it a fright during the war with no tea to be bought at all? That’s one thing Jarlath wasn’t short of in India and he would have sent us tons only he knew it would have got sunk with the ship it was on. That was the time all the ships were going to the bottom of the sea like stones, sunk by Hitler. Wasn’t he a terrible man altogether?”

  From under the kitchen table Annie Lamb swung another chair across to the fire. She put the steaming teacup and the plateful of butter-laden, curranty cake down on the makeshift table.