Lies the Mushroom Pickers Told

by Phelan, Tom;

  “Sure it’s the school holidays now, Mattie, and Mikey won’t be going to the bank again till Sept—”

  “What’s Doul Yank spending the money on at all, Simon Peter? Can you think of anything?”

  “I can’t, Mattie. Not unless he’s buying a whole lot of masses for when he dies.”

  Mattie Mulhall was stunned into momentary silence by Lamb’s suggestion. “Masses for when he dies! Feck! Do you think so, Simon Peter?”

  “Well, Annie and myself were trying to figure it out, too, Mattie. He doesn’t drink, he doesn’t smoke and he doesn’t gamble. What else could he be spending it on?”

  The thatcher rolled on over Lamb’s question. He said, “Peggy thinks he has a child from when he was in America, and he’s sending the money there. ‘But if he had a child,’ says I, ‘wouldn’t he have been taking out money against the farm for years, since he came home from America?’ ‘And who’s to say he didn’t?’ says Peggy. The whole thing has me terrified. Here I am, after spending years ridding the place of praiseach, and the fecker could be giving the farm to the bank the whole time.”

  “But Mattie, if he was taking money out against the farm since he came home from America, wouldn’t someone have seen him long ago? For all you know he only did it once.”

  “For all we know he might have done it a hundred times, too. I am always afraid the fecker will do something to diddle me out of the farm in the end, and as well as that Peggy can’t talk about anything else. It’s driving me mad not knowing what he’s up to.”

  “Well, Annie and me think he’s buying masses for when he dies. You might put your mind at rest if you asked Father Mooney. It’s not something he wouldn’t be able to tell you, especially because everyone knows the money belongs to the farm and that the farm will be yours when your uncle dies.”

  “That’s an idea, Simon Peter. Be jakers! Couldn’t I walk down the road and ask him now if he’s at home? Would you mind standing beside the cart for a few minutes while I go and ask him?”

  The two neighbors picked their way through the buyers and the sellers and the curious and the gawkers and the hawkers. They went down the line of carts—all with their shafts resting on the road, all with their donkeys or ponies tied to the tailboards—until they came to Mattie’s load of piglets. Because of the slope of the cart, the piglets were piled on top of each other against the front creel.

  “God, they’re grand-looking sucks,” Simon Peter said, more to bolster Mattie’s deflated sense of his porcine husbandry than to compliment him. “How many’s in there?”

  Mattie looked around hoping that some jobber had heard Simon Peter, but none were in sight. “Twelve,” he answered, “eleven and a runt. There’s always a fecking runt,” and he walked away toward the priest’s house. The reluctant piglet protector looked at his pocket watch and decided if Mattie was back in ten minutes there would still be time to go to Morgan’s shop.

  Simon Peter stood with his arms resting on top of the cart’s front creel, his gaze fixed on the pile of piglets, all moving in their sleep in the eternal pig-hunt for the warmest spot. His mind drifted to Eddie Coughlin, about how his brother’s attempt to collect money from the neighbors was bothering the hell out of Eddie. And here was Mattie Mulhall driven to distraction by his suspicions that his own uncle was trying to rob him. It wasn’t outsiders a fellow had to worry about in this life—a sharp eye had to be kept on a fellow’s family members. He remembered the story of his own father’s will, how some years before he died, Simon Peter’s mother had asked her husband to make a will—“to put everything in order,” as she had delicately worded the request. “I made a will a long time ago,” his father said. “The year we got married, I went into the solicitor on my way to hospital in Marbra to get that hernia mended. I didn’t want anyone trying to take the farm from you if I died.” “Sure, there was no need to do that. Your family would have taken care of me,” his mother said. “It was my family I was protecting you from,” his father replied.

  Mattie Mulhall was back in less than five minutes. Barely above a whisper, he made the report to Simon Peter. “Well, he hasn’t been to Father Mooney for masses,” he said. “The priest knew Doul Yank took the money out of the bank like everyone else knows, but he only heard of him doing it the once. So he’s not buying masses, at least not from Father Mooney. Was there any jobber around?”

  “Your man Gallagher from Clonaslee. He wanted to know did you sell yet.”

  “That’s the hure that offered me fifteen shillings a pig.” Still making sure his neighboring pig sellers could not hear him, Mattie asked, “Do you think if I went and talked to the bank manager maybe he wouldn’t give the Yank any more money against the farm?”

  “You could talk to him, Mattie, but all he’ll tell you is that there’s nothing he can do. The farm is in Doul Yank’s name till he dies.”

  “I wish the old bastard would die,” Mattie hissed, “shoot himself when he’s getting out through a gap after his snipe, slip and fall into a ditch and get drownded. The fecker! He’s nothing but a bastard.”

  A jobber in dung-splattered boots and not-so-clean clothes called from the end of the cart’s shafts, “Did you sell yet, boss?” and Simon Peter used the interruption to restart his journey to Mister Morgan’s shop. Bidding Mattie goodbye, he stepped over a shaft of the cart and set off before he became privy to the bargaining that was about to start.

  Simon Peter knew he would not have time to buy the milk separator now—Mikey and Barlow Bracken would soon be waiting for him outside Smiley’s shop. But at least he could ask Mister Morgan about it, how a machine could separate the cream and the milk, send the cream out one spout and the skim milk out the other—maybe it wouldn’t be as great as the Farmers Journal said it was.

  As Simon Peter was stepping into Mister Morgan’s shop, the boys were arriving, panting and sweating, at the stall of the huckster who sold cheap tools to farmers. They had run all the way from Barlow’s house in Tile Town, each elated for different reasons: Barlow, because of the disbelief, relief and pride he saw on his mother’s face when he held out his palm with the two sixpences in it; Mikey, because he had been finally persuaded that he was Barlow Bracken’s best friend. Mikey had heard Barlow whispering, asking his mother would it be all right if he stayed for another week at the Lambs’ house, promising he would never miss bringing the film reels from the Dublin bus to the Picture House. And Missus Bracken had torn a piece of paper out of a school copybook, had written on it with a pencil, and Barlow had put the folded paper in his trousers pocket.

  The huckster of cheap tools stepped up on his wooden box, a penknife held above his head. Smiling, and revealing bad teeth, he looked around at the circle of curious faces tilted toward him. Then, in his loud Dublin accent that was, to the natives, an attraction in itself, he yammered out the lies he had used for years to sell his shoddy merchandise to gullible audiences. The piece of rubbish in his upheld hand became a fire-hardened, double-bladed penknife, make in Germany before the war. “And would I ask you fine gentlemen of the land to fork out five shillings for this perfectly forged and perfectly balanced knife that would slit a turkey’s throat without the turkey even knowing? No, I would not, I would not ask you for five shillings. Would I ask you four shillings for this . . . this instrument with blades made of the finest Ruhr Valley steel? No, I would not ask you to pay me four shillings. Would I ask you intelligent people of the countryside to give me three shillings for this knife with a handle made of the finest African elephant ivory? Of course not, of course not, because I would not try to make a profit off the people who make their living by the sweat of their brows. I did not come here to Gohen to make money off decent, hardworking people. I came here to bring to you the finest knives that will last a lifetime. Would I ask the salt of the earth to pay two shillings for this perfect tool, a knife that will hold its edge forever the steel is so hard? This tempered steel as tough as the bayonets of Hitler’s armies; steel that was toughened in the hottest
steel mills in the world; this steel that came to earth in a falling star and buried itself in the heart of Germany thousands . . . no, not thousands, millions of years ago? This steel that cannot be engraved, it is so hard? Any intelligent person knows that any steel that can be engraved is not worth the name of steel, because if steel is steel, it is so tough that not even diamonds could mark it. And am I asking you to pay two shillings for this miracle product of the modern machine? No, I am not. I am not. No, I am giving away these knives for one shilling. One shilling. I’m giving them away, and if my wife knew what I was doing she’d murder me. One shilling each. You, sir. How many will you take sir? And you sir, how many for you?”

  Despite his enthrallment with the voice of the huckster, and despite his amazement at the number of eager hands reaching in over his head with shillings in them, Mikey was remembering his dismay when he and Barlow had fled Smiley’s yard after the penning of the two bullocks. Barlow, without reference to Mikey and with a silver sixpence clasped in each hand, had taken shortcuts to Tile Town, had used back lanes and gaps in hedges that Mikey didn’t know existed. Mikey, desperate in his fear that he was in the process of losing Barlow for ever, pleaded with him to slow down. And when he caught up with the Townie, he gasped at him, “Why have you to give her the money now, Barlow?”

  “Because I’ve never had so much money to give her before,” Barlow said. “Wait till you see her face, Mikey. Only for living at your house I wouldn’t have the shilling. I wish I could live with you forever, with your mother and father and Molly and Fintan and bring my mother a shilling once a month.”

  But now, as the people around him responded to the oratory of the hucksterman like a flock of hungry chickens at a battered basin, Mikey’s mind wandered to the piece of paper in Barlow’s pocket. The whole world had changed for Mikey, and he was in love with life, he was in love with Barlow. There were colors and brightness where he had never seen them before. The voice of the huckster was music, and the reaching, buying hands were applause for a song beautifully sung. The sun was warm on his face, and everything had fallen perfectly into place for him. He had never been happier. He could easily have put his arms around Barlow and hugged him the way he used to hug the dog at home when it was a pup. Mikey could have floated away over the high roof of Horans’ Bakery; he could have danced wildly, cartwheeled and somersaulted through the streets of Gohen and not once have touched a cow dung with his hands or feet.

  The Angelus bell rang, and Mikey poked Barlow. “We’re late,” he said, and, because his father had embedded in his brain the imperativeness of being on time, he turned and squeezed his way through the wall of big men behind him.

  At a gallop, twisting and spinning and dodging and leaping as if they were hares chased by baying hounds, the two boys reached the big window of Humphrey Smiley’s Hardware and Farm Supply Company before Spud Murphy had finished ringing the Angelus. As they stood with their backs to the display of spades, pitch forks and mattocks, they looked to their left and saw Mikey’s father coming out of Mister Morgan’s shop on the far side of the street. At the same time, Eddie-the-cap Coughlin came out through Smiley’s front door with the head of the newly welded four-grained fork in his hand. As Coughlin tied the fork onto his bike with a piece of binder twine, Simon Peter signaled to the boys, indicated they should follow him. At the same time he put a finger across his lips.

  When the boys joined him, Mikey asked, “Who were you trying to miss?”

  “Eddie Coughlin. Did you see him at his bike with the fork and that cap of his? He got me for twenty minutes already, and I don’t want to hear the same stuff all over again. He’d talk the back leg off a jennet. Did you buy anything from the huckstermen?”

  “No,” Mikey answered, and then he prepared the ground for a future request, a preparation he felt was necessary because of his father’s visceral reaction when permission was sought to be in the town outside of school time. “I’m saving the money to go to the pictures, if you will let me go with Barlow.”

  Simon Peter ignored the request, knew he had a carrot that could be used if Mikey was reluctant to help with the farmwork.

  “What about you, Barlow?” he asked. “Did you buy anything from those crukes from Dublin?”

  No, I didn’t,” Barlow responded. Simon Peter only discovered that the boy had brought his shilling to his mother when Mikey was preparing the ground for the request on the piece of paper in Barlow’s pocket.

  As they were passing the Blennerhasset Stud on the way home, a boy shuffling along on each side of the long-striding man, Mikey threw a stone at a flock of starlings in an ash tree. As the flock took off into the sky like a black bedsheet in the grasp of a playful breeze, he asked his father if it was true that a starling would sing like a goldfinch if its tongue was cut with a silver sixpence.

  “Well, Mikey, let me ask you a question,” the father responded. “Do you think it’s true that you can catch a chicken by pouring salt on its tail?”

  “I always wondered about that,” Mikey said. “How could anyone catch up with a chicken to pour the salt on its tail?” Mikey said.

  “And as well as that,” Barlow said, “if you are close enough to pour salt on the tail, aren’t you close enough to catch it without using the salt at all?”

  “That’s right, Barlow. And I think the story about the starling and the silver sixpence is like the story about the chicken and the salt,” Simon Peter said. “First of all you’d have to catch a live starling. And supposing you do catch a starling, how would you cut its tongue with a silver sixpence? The rim of a sixpence is so wide and blunt you couldn’t cut butter with it.”

  “You could sharpen the edge,” Mikey said, “keep rubbing the edge on the side of the pump trough where mammy sharpens the knives.”

  “Well, you sharpen a sixpence on the pump trough till it can cut, and you get down on your hands and knees and sneak up on a starling and pour salt on its tail,” Simon Peter said. “And you know, Mikey, a bird’s tongue is as hard as a bone; it’s not soft like ours. A starling singing like a goldfinch is every bit as quare as a cuckoo spitting.”

  “I didn’t know that cuckoos spit,” Barlow said.

  “They don’t,” Simon Peter said. “But some people believe everything they were told as children until the day they die. Show him a cuckoo spit, Mikey.”

  Mikey, followed by Barlow, went to the edge of the road and looked into the roadside growth as he walked along. Within a few seconds he stepped into the grass and pulled a stalk. He held it up to Barlow and pointed to the glob of bubbly, white froth sitting in a fork of the grass. “That’s the cuckoo spit,” Mikey said, as his father came over to join them.

  “It looks like spit,” Barlow said.

  “Now show him what it really is,” Simon Peter said.

  Mikey picked up the twig. He used its end to push the spit out of the fork until two small insects were seen moving in the remains of the froth like two swimmers in honey. Their light-green color, bordering on transparency, spoke of delicacy and vulnerability.

  “The spit protects them from birds,” Mikey said.

  “But it’s not a cuckoo that makes the spit,” Simon Peter said. “The insects make it themselves.”

  “They’re baby froghoppers,” Mikey said. He handed the grass stalk to Barlow.

  “But isn’t it nicer to believe it is cuckoo spit,” Barlow said. “Imagine a cuckoo with a cold with a scarf around its neck and it coughing and spitting onto the grass.”

  “You’re a daft lad,” Simon Peter said. “Throw that away and come on home. We have a lot of work to do.”

  Barlow pretended the stalk was a spear and he shot it into the hedge. Mikey shouted, “Last to the top of the Esker stinks.” The two boys raced ahead of Simon Peter, and Mikey ran with the energy of a boy whose body is full to overflowing with pure glee.

  22

  Visiting the Sick

  1951

  In which Bridie Coughlin tells Annie Lamb a story of her bro
ther Jarlath’s cruelty, during which Bridie cries, and Annie is helpless to provide comfort.

  WITH HER EARS AND HER SPARSE COCONUT HAIR concealed inside the brown French beret, Bridie Coughlin had begun milking the cow by furiously tugging the teats. The angry squirts whacking into the bucket trapped between Bridie’s Wellingtoned legs was metallic, raucous and high-pitched. The cow raised her far leg in warning, told Bridie to be gentle or else. The force of the squirts eased, and eventually their sound changed and deepened until the hypnotic swoosh-swoosh soothed the jagged edges of Bridie’s battered nerves.

  With forehead leaning against the red-haired belly of a warm cow, her hands worked independently as they rhythmically pulled the milk out of the hairy elder. Bridie slipped into sleep for a brief second. When she surfaced, the soothing effects of the swooshing milk had been routed by the fragments of wild dreams roaring across her dream screen with the ferocity of a March hail shower. Even though the dreamy fragments dissipated before Bridie could recall any of them, they left her feeling much worse than before she had nodded off. Her fury returned.

  As the cow’s supply ran dry, Bridie pulled too hard on the teats again. The cow flicked her tail into the milker’s face—a prelude to a kick. Bridie caressed the red flank and returned the cow into her bovine complacency. Still sitting on her three-legged stool, Bridie moved the milk bucket out of harm’s way. Then, in one flowing movement she lifted the sack-cum-apron off her lap with one hand, swung the stool out from under her with the other hand and stood up—a ballet dancer ankle-deep in the straw bedding of the cowhouse.

  Her mind was full of her brother Jarlath in his bed in the Mater Hospital in Dublin. She swiped at her stinging eyes with the hand holding the stinking milking sack. She would not let Eddie see her crying, did not want to hear again his unrelenting torrent of words—words intended to soothe, but which only pounded her down further into her misery. She was glad it was Sodality night, glad she had an escape from Eddie and glad it was her night to visit Annie Lamb—she could spill her heart to Annie, and Annie would sit there and listen, give succor by listening. “Our Lady of perpetual succor, pray for me.”