Lies the Mushroom Pickers Told

by Phelan, Tom;

  “When we get too cold we go to bed,” Barlow Bracken said.

  “I’d love to live in a place where the sun shines all the time,” Mikey said.

  “We saw Missus Madden bringing him out a teapot on a tray,” Barlow said. “Their teapot is made of the same stuff as our cups.”

  “Delft,” Annie Lamb said, “and it’s their best teapot for the priest.”

  “Can Barlow come down to see the pictures when Father Coughlin comes to our house?” Mikey asked.

  “He can, Mikey, but we won’t know when Father Coughlin’s coming.”

  “If Barlow’s not here when he comes, I could ride into Gohen and get him on the bar of my bike.”

  “We’ll see, Mikey,” his mother said.

  “Do you think Father Coughlin will come to see us, Mam?”

  “He’s going to see everyone in Drumsally and Clunnyboe, so I think he’ll come here, too.”

  “Can we crack the eggs, Mam, and mash them up?”

  After adjusting to the sudden switch of subject, Annie went to the fireplace, smiling to herself. This volunteering—this begging—to help with the feeding of the chickens was definitely due to the presence of the school friend. Using the corner of her apron, she lifted the saucepan off the turf fire and brought it out into the yard to the pump trough, the two boys trailing behind her.

  “Can Barlow pump?” Mikey called.

  “Of course he can,” Annie said, and she realized she was speaking differently because of the stranger in the house. “I’ll show you how to do it, Barlow. Put your hand down here.” The boy wrapped his hand around the tail of the iron handle just above the knob.

  As Annie Lamb encircled Barlow’s hand with her own, she remembered how one time she had been grooming Mikey’s hair with the fine-toothed comb. When she found two fleas, she asked her son who was sitting beside him in school; when Mikey had answered, “Barlow Bracken. Why?” she had said, “I was just wondering.” Now, with her hand on his hand, her sleeve touching Barlow Bracken’s hair, Annie said to herself, “Sure, what’s a few fleas, especially when he’s such a nice lad.”

  “Nice and slow now, Barlow. Up and down,” she said to the beat of the pumping handle. “Nice and slow. Just like that. Up and down. Nice and slow. Now I’m going to take away my hand and you keep doing it. Up and down. You’re doing it right.” And Barlow Bracken grinned as the steady stream poured out of the spout of the pump.

  As the sparkling water flowed over the boiled eggs, Barlow said, “I wish we had a pump like this.”

  “Oh, Barlow,” Annie Lamb said, “I wish we had a tap in the kitchen like your mother has. She doesn’t have to rise it when the weather’s dry or thaw it out in winter.”

  “What’s that, thaw it out?” the boy from the town asked.

  “When the water in the pump freezes in the winter, Mikey’s father has to wrap straw around it and burn it to melt the ice.”

  “It blazes up real quick, all red and yellow blazes,” Mikey said, “and then it’s gone in a minute, and the black ashes float up over the roof of the house like inky scribbles.”

  “That must be great,” Barlow Bracken said, his imagination sparkling in his eyes. “Great things are always going on here, and your house is so big and there’s so many places to hide, and there’s the straw rick for jumping off, and the hens’ nests in the hayrick, and Dan Deegan’s kitchen full of dandelions, and the piles of potatoes in the pits, and all the dark corners in the sheds, and a fire in the kitchen all day, and the cat with the kittens, and the twelve chickens and the two goslings and the little ducks, and yellow blazes around the pump in the frost.” Barlow Bracken, dismayed at his eruption of loquacity, put the fingers of one hand to his lips and looked up into Annie Lamb’s face as if he’d said a bad word.

  Annie Lamb didn’t burst the child’s bubble, but she gently squeezed it. “Sure, it’s like you having water coming out of a tap in your kitchen and you not even giving it a second thought, while I keep thinking that water in a tap in the kitchen is great altogether. And you think things here are great, but every day someone has to collect the hens’ eggs or go out to look for dandelions or get the potatoes out of the pit and wash them or bring in the turf to keep the fire going or get the chickens’ food ready for them. What looks great to you right now looks like a lot of little jobs to Mikey that he has to do every day. We think it’s great for you that you live in the town where the roads are tarred and never mucky like our lane always is, that you don’t have to keep looking down so you don’t step in a hen dung or goose dung or cow dung or duck dung.” She rumpled Barlow’s hair and was annoyed at herself when she thought of fleas again. “Well,” she said in a changed tone of voice, “the eggs must be cooled off by now.” She put the saucepan in the trough and left the boys with instructions about saving the shells. “And you can mash up the eggs out here, too,” she said from the kitchen door. Annie Lamb did not like the smell of hard-boiled eggs in the nude.

  “The shells get dried out on the hob and then get smashed up for tomorrow’s mash,” Mikey told Barlow.

  “Nobody eats eggshells!”

  Mikey said, “Young chickens eat them to make their bones grow, and hens eat them to make the shell for their next egg.”

  Ten minutes later, like two acolytes leading a priest onto an altar, the two boys led the way from the kitchen door to the chicken frame. Behind them, in the same battered vessel in which the eggs had boiled, Annie Lamb carried her mixture of stinging nettles, dandelions, mashed eggs and smashed eggshells. Each acolyte held a chipped, dinged, many-patched enamel basin which, at some point in its life, had been used in the bathing of babies, the daily washing of the pots and pans, the kneading of dough, the Saturday night shaving of the man of the house, the gathering of eggs, the timely catching of emissions from young bodies with their various sphincters still in training, the daily washing before school, the soaking of aching feet, the transportation of dinners to distant fields, the mashing of boiled potatoes, the weekly brushing of teeth and the mixing of the curranty cake.

  The procession of victuallers crossing his path knocked Fintan out of his reverie. His cardboard box came to a halt, and he gawked with mouth ajar, satisfied himself that he knew the intruders of his dreamy kingdom.

  When the aviary was reached, Missus Lamb divided the mash between the two enamel basins, each boy holding up his receptacle as if presenting an offering to a god. Meanwhile, the chickens rushed in the direction of the food and piled on top of each other on the far side of the wire each trying to prove it was the fittest to survive. Claws and beaks attacked the imprisoning wire; wings flapped, feathers flew and squawks filled the air.

  As Annie Lamb prepared to remove the cover of the opening, Barlow Bracken said, “You put your basin in first, Mikey.”

  Mikey was intimidated, too, by the beak and claw battle being waged within inches of where he was standing. But the shame of being seen fearful of a few chickens, and his desire to impress his new friend, forced him to step up to the opening his mother was making. He sat down on his hunkers and, with his free hand, defended the ever-widening pass of Thermopylae against the barbarian attack. He steeled himself against beak and talon. The moment the gap was wide enough, he slithered the laden basin across the gravelly floor into the center of the frame. The chickens gave chase and attacked the food as if it were a rat invader.

  It was while the chickens were distracted that Barlow Bracken pushed in his basin of food.

  Fintan came over with his cardboard box and stood there with the others looking down at the chickens gorging themselves, jerking their heads backward and forward in the effort to move the food along their gullets and into their craws. When the last speck of food had been pecked, the stunned birds assembled around the battered and patched saucepan that served as their water dish. Trapping a drop of water in their beaks, they lifted their heads and elongated their necks to afford a smooth passage for the water as gravity pulled it down their throats.

  And i
n answer to Barlow Bracken’s question about this cervical stretching, Mikey casually explained the esophageal workings of a chicken, impressing not only Barlow Bracken, but himself. Barlow Bracken’s ignorance of country and farmyard ways was making Mikey realize how much he himself knew. During the explanation, Fintan, with rapturous visage, gaped at his brother as if he were seeing a heavenly vision.

  As the lecture on the drinking disabilities of chickens came to a close, the latch of the wicket door rattled, and everyone looked away from the wire cage. With the ease of someone who has done it many times, Molly Lamb was pushing her bike through the narrow doorway. She stopped, held the bike’s saddle with her left hand, turned around and caught the edge of the door. As the door gently swung back into its frame, she deftly followed, and assisted the latch back into its catch. She was wearing a yellow dress with its own white cloth belt, and the straps of her schoolbag were hooked to each other on her chest. It was only when she turned around that she realized she had an audience, but she did not immediately see Barlow Bracken. “What are you all gawking at, Mikey?” she asked.

  “We’re looking at you with your eyes so blue and your face is—”

  “Mikey!” his mother cut him off.

  Barlow Bracken looked at Molly, and her face was not like a kangaroo’s at all. Instead, for one blinding moment, she was a saint in a window in the church, all colors and niceness.

  Fintan said, “Molly Polly,” and he trotted off to his sister with the box in tow. As the others stood watching, Molly bent down and scooped her baby brother off the ground and landed him, legs held wide apart, on the carrier over the back wheel. Then, beeping like the Dublin bus, she rode around the yard, Fintan holding the saddle with one hand while he looked back at his box with its punctured occupant bouncing around in his carriage like a drop of water on a frying pan.

  It wasn’t until she had made a full circle of the yard that Molly saw there was a strange boy standing beside Mikey. Instantly, the Dublin bus stopped beeping, and Molly was off the bike, dragging the surprised Fintan off the carrier. She ran with the bike to the kitchen door and leaned it against the wall. Red-faced, she disappeared into the house.

  Fintan gaped at the kitchen door and said, “Molly Polly?”

  Annie Lamb said, “Mikey, you have to change your clothes now and bring tea to the men in the fields.”

  “Can Barlow come with me?”

  “No. Barlow should be getting on home. You can give him a lift on your bike to the top of the Esker. The next time you come, Barlow, ask your mother first. She’ll be worried to death about you.”

  “My mother doesn’t mind as long as I get home at five o’clock,” Barlow Bracken said. “I have to do my homework before I go to the bus for the picture reels.”

  “She’s right too,” Missus Lamb said. “Homework is terrible important. Mikey tells me you’re very good at your lessons.”

  “But Mikey’s the best in the whole school,” Barlow said matter-of-factly.

  Before he left, Missus Lamb gave Barlow two slices of her brown bread stuck together with butter and blackberry jam. With his schoolbag on the carrier, his rear end on the bar of Mikey’s bike and one hand holding the middle of the handlebars, the Tiler ate his sandwich with the enthusiasm of a three-week-old chicken. When he’d finished licking his jammy fingers, he said, “It’s well for you, Mikey.”

  “What’s well for me?” Mikey asked.

  “Everything; all the sheds and the animals. Your father must be terrible rich.”

  “He’s not rich at all,” Mikey said. “You go to the pictures more than I do, and you can play all the way home after school. I have to come home real quick to do my jobs.”

  “Still!” Barlow persisted.

  “Still what?”

  “Your father’s so rich your mother gives boiled eggs to the chickens.”

  “That’s only the way she feeds them. She gives potatoes to the pigs, but that’s only because that’s what pigs eat, not because my father’s rich.”

  “And your mother gave me jam and bread in the middle of the day.”

  Mikey almost said, “Sure, that’s nothing.” But even though he wasn’t old enough to hear the poverty behind Barlow Bracken’s words, he did realize that what was ordinary food for him was extraordinary for Barlow Bracken. All at once, Mikey saw jam and bread in a new light.

  For the last part of the journey up the Esker, the boys changed places on the bike.

  “Duck dung,” Barlow Bracken said, and laughed out loud. “Wasn’t your mother funny about duck dung?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Just the sound of it—duck dung. It sounds funny.” As they wobbled along on the bike, they sang out together, “Duck dung, duck dung, duck dung,” and the sound of their voices was absorbed by the lush greenery around them. When they finally crested the hill, they parted, and Barlow Bracken, with one final “Duck dung,” trotted off toward Gohen, his homemade cloth schoolbag bouncing on his right hip, its strap over his left shoulder.

  When Mikey arrived home, he changed into his old clothes and went back into the kitchen just as his mother was wrapping sandwiches in a tea towel.

  “What was wrong with Molly when she put down the bike and ran in out of the yard?” he asked his mother.

  “She was embarrassed because she didn’t know Barlow was looking at her.”

  “Why would that make her embarrassed?”

  “It’s hard to explain. You’ll have to hurry over to the field. The bellies will be falling out of the men.”

  “Barlow ate half of one of the eggs for the chickens when we were shelling them out at the pump trough,” Mikey confessed. Even though he knew he was risking having Barlow banned from coming again, he was unable to carry out the deceit against his mother.

  “Sure, the poor child,” Missus Lamb said, as she pushed a stopper of twisted newspaper into the neck of the tea bottle. “His poor mother! They’re very poor, even though his father is a terrible hard worker. I don’t know how they make ends meet at all. Try to get Barlow to come again, Mikey. He’s a very nice boy. Off with you now, and don’t bang the bag or you’ll break the bottle.”

  When Mikey stepped out into the farmyard, he saw Fintan sitting beside the chicken frame. The rubber duckie in the child’s hand was deep in conversation with the chickens. Neither duck nor boy noticed the passing of the big brother.

  21

  The July Fair Day in Gohen

  1951

  In which Simon Peter Lamb is told of the egregious behavior of Doul Yank by Mattie-the-thatcher Mulhall and of the cruelty of the returned missionary priest by his voluble brother, Eddie-the-cap Coughlin.

  ON THE THIRD TUESDAY OF EVERY MONTH, the Protestants and Catholics of Gohen were united not by Christian love, but by their common annoyance at the local Protestant and Catholic farmers.

  On the third Tuesday of every month, the farmers from the surrounding countryside drove their saleable livestock into the Square in the town. There were no pens for the animals, no corrals. The cattle were herded up against the front walls of the houses and shops and kept in their places with flailing ashplants and hard, loud shouting. Each farmer might only have three animals, some one or two. But sixty or seventy farmers, each trying to control a restless, noisy, ever-moving and multi-membered organism with the assistance of a child or a hired man, took up a lot of frontage along the footpaths.

  The urban homeowners, not used to what the farmers were inured to, and fearful of an encounter with an uncontrolled animal, timidly stepped through their front doors in the pursuit of their own polite livelihoods. They immediately encountered the stinking, greenish bovine waste that seemed to be everywhere—in neat piles like miniature extinct volcanoes where a standing animal had relieved itself, or spread out in a line like huge individual splashes of sloppy pancake mix where an animal had simply let go while in motion. Even the fronts of the houses and shops became daubed with streaks of dung as cattle in the act of spouting turned thei
r arses against the walls.

  Startled animals, making sudden moves to escape perceived or imagined threats, slipped in their own dung and banged their chins on the hard road surface, or, to their own amazement and the merriment of the onlookers, ended up like dogs sitting on their back legs, struggling to disentangle themselves.

  The simile which united a heavy downpour of rain with a cow pissing on a flat rock was on display all day. The possibility of encounters with out-splashes of bovine urinary waterfalls had to be anticipated with every step gingerly taken on the dung-stained streets.

  The coarse and dirty farmers in their coarse and dirty clothing sent their hacked-up sputum across the road like hailstones dancing on hot galvanized roof in summertime. Globs of nasal mucus were recklessly snorted onto the pavement by the placing of an index finger over one nostril and the shunting of air through the other with enough pent-up force to take the flame off a blowlamp. And over all the confusion, stretched like a giant circus tent, was the constant, loud bawling of the hungry, thirsty and frightened animals: big, boney, unmilked cows whose swollen udders were supposed to fool the jobbers and the jobbers the ones who had invented the trick; blatantly ungraceful and awkward bullocks, their lack of any intelligence every bit as obvious as their lack of testicles; young heifers giving off enough oestral scent to awaken memories in the bullocks and cause them to mount whatever was nearest them and go through the instinctual motions of rutting—the owners shouting at each other to do something about their fecking animals; young calves—fleet of foot and full of energy and fright—slipping in the dung underfoot, ruining their silken coats when they fell.

  Young boys dressed in above-the-knee trousers, leaking Wellingtons and torn clothes, none too surreptitiously pissed against the walls of the houses and shops. The boys, working under the direction of the loud, angry and commanding voices of their fathers, could not afford to look for cover, lest in their absence the animals in their care bolted into the surrounding mayhem.

  On many fair days it rained, and the rain was just one more element adding more sloppiness and slipperiness to the streets and footpaths.