He Got Hungry and Forgot His Manners

by Jimmy Breslin

  Shortly thereafter he was on a folding chair in the bar on the second floor of the hotel in the capital city, drinking an oversized bottle of strong beer. Over these big bottles of beer, Cosgrove decided to attack the British educational system. As supervisors of the missionary schools, the British were truly disappointed each time a student learned to read. “This is a plot against these people,” Cosgrove said. “And this is the only place on the earth where such a thing could be allowed to happen. It is the act of savages not to help children learn to read.” The few textbooks in the mission school were over forty years old and the printing in them was so small that even young eyes watered. Therefore, he was astonished at the language capabilities of the students, most of whom wore no shoes and came from families in which nobody could read or write in any language, yet these barefoot students knew Yoruba, passable English, and those who had been exposed to the French priests were able to get along in that tongue, too. Cosgrove felt that great strides could be taken by his students if they could ever get as much as a few grammar and literature textbooks to pass around.

  After consuming several more bottles of beer, which led him to see himself as Africa’s savior, Cosgrove drove over to the British education office, which was on the second floor of a government building. The school overseer, a lanky man with a pasty face, sat in a yellow swivel chair that squeaked loudly. The desk in front of him was bare. There was no other furniture in the room. A telephone sat on the windowsill behind the man.

  “A requisition such as this requires a special order,” the man said.

  “May I make one?” Cosgrove asked.

  “We need a special form for the special order,” the man said.

  “May I have one and I’ll fill it out?”

  “Oh, dear boy, we don’t have those forms here. We never have had a call for them in the past. I must send to Liverpool for such a form.”

  “Wouldn’t one letter saying what we wanted —”

  “Oh no. Proper form always. I’ll just get on to Liverpool for our special forms.”

  “How long will this take?”

  “Oh, dear boy, time is precisely what these people have. They have centuries to waste.”

  The yellow wooden chair squeaked as he leaned back, spun around slowly, and reached for the telephone on the windowsill. Cosgrove coughed.

  “Oh yes,” the man said, looking back over his shoulder and seeing Cosgrove with his hand filled with pound notes. “Just leave your message on the desk, thank you,” the man said.

  Cosgrove threw the bribe on the desk. The overseer’s head turned and, looking out the window, the man placed a phone call.

  When he returned to the village, Cosgrove told the mission school pupils that soon there would be the first new textbooks they had ever seen, and those who worked hardest at their lessons now would be the first to receive a new book. The black faces smiled sarcastically. One boy, Joof, laughed aloud. Rather than causing happiness, Cosgrove’s promise of textbooks only reminded the students of the hopelessness of expecting anything from whites. A notice then arrived from the British office in the capital, saying the request made by Cosgrove had arrived. Cosgrove pointed a finger at the most skeptical, Joof, and announced that he would travel to the capital in the Land Rover as a special assistant in charge of carrying books.

  “There will be no books there,” Joof said.

  “Of course there will.”

  When he arrived at the second-floor office, Cosgrove found a new man sitting at the desk. The man was just as thin and his face just as pasty and idle as the previous man’s. That person had returned to London, the new man said as he inspected Cosgrove’s notice.

  “Of course,” the man said, “no matter who is at this desk, our system and our people in Liverpool are quite efficient.” He reached into a manila envelope for a thick form. “Fill out all six copies, please.”

  Cosgrove looked about for a seat.

  “Why don’t you just get it back to me at your convenience?” the British man said.

  “Yes, but you see, I’d like to take the books with me now.”

  “The books? Oh, dear boy, I have no books. Not now. These are the forms you must fill out. When the forms are processed and approved, they’ll hunt up the books for you. If, as a matter of actual fact, the books are even available.”

  “How long will this be?” Cosgrove said.

  “Oh, we’ll hear.”

  Cosgrove turned with the forms in his hand, and as he started to explain them to Joof, he saw weariness and disappointment cross the boy’s face.

  Cosgrove sent Joof out of the room and then he stepped up to the desk and threw down pound notes.

  “Yes,” the clerk said, nodding as he saw the money. The chair squeaked as he spun around to reach for the phone. “All the best.”

  Over the hours on the way back to the mission, with the sun turning the Land Rover into a hot plate, Cosgrove regarded himself as truly defeated.

  Suddenly of a sullen morning, a printed notice arrived stating that the British, as preparation for departing from the country, were placing several departments, including banking and education, under local jurisdiction. This meant black. As the boy Joof had been present at defeat, Cosgrove had him accompany him once more to the capital, this time to see that the enemy had been vanquished.

  Once there, he passed two bank buildings with two long lines in front of them. At the old British building he found the education offices locked and silent. He waited with Joof in the hall until three o’clock, when a short black man in a crisp white shirt came along and opened the door to the education office. Inside, the man sat at the desk once occupied by the hated British overseer. He patted the breast pocket of his shirt.

  He explained that this was a bank deposit slip. “Tomorrow the color of all the money of the country will be changed from green to gold. It has not been announced yet because there is a great deal of black market money being held by unscrupulous persons. The first act of our new treasury will be to change the money and leave these people with their pockets filled with worthless paper. My friend is part of the group that takes over the treasury today, the same as I am in charge of education. We will be one of the few with correct currency.” The white shirt smiled. When Cosgrove told his story, the clerk made proper faces and wrote boldly on a pad. “This is excellent that I have this information, for if you did not tell me, then I would not have it,” the man said. “We will act on this once we get ourselves in good order here. Thank you.”

  The yellow chair squeaked as he spun in it and reached for the phone on the windowsill.

  Cosgrove pulled out pound notes and, coughing, placed them on the desk.

  One day Cosgrove sat in his village and began to draw up charts of his baptized Catholics and where they lived. Using his students to provide family information, Cosgrove drew elaborate charts, and Cosgrove became alarmed at the similarity of family bloodlines. Cosgrove discovered that, even from his preliminary charts, the number of baptized Catholics in his mission district who were living within the third degree of kindred was so high as to freeze his breath.

  He had always questioned the Book of Genesis, which begins with Adam and Eve destroying world peace by having intercourse and producing Cain and Abel. In the Book of Genesis, the paragraphs after Adam and Eve all deal with Cain as the murderer of Abel. A following paragraph ends with Cain going off to the land of Nod. Abruptly, the next paragraph says, “Then Cain’s wife conceived and presented him with a baby …” If you were to believe Genesis, Cosgrove always thought, you either suspended credibility or you assumed that for the human race to start, there had to be several generations of incest. Perhaps covering as long as a full half century. This had to lead to a world population strewn with mongoloid children or hemophiliacs. One prominently placed thorn bush, Cosgrove thought, could have killed a significant part of the world’s population.

  Now, perhaps a million years later, Cosgrove felt that nothing had changed. The lines on his
family charts, rather than going up and out to the tops and bottoms of the paper, kept coming together in horizontal V’s. Sisters and brothers seemed reasonably safe. But each time the chart got to nephews and nieces, the lines simply joined and refused to leave. No outcrosses. Cousins, the lines showed clearly, apparently never got out of the same beds; Cosgrove’s charts showed that anyone past a first cousin was a complete stranger.

  Cosgrove went out with a lantern, much as Redemptorist priests had once patrolled the lovers’ lanes about Limerick Junction. At the hut of a man named Robinson, who lived with his first cousin Rig, Cosgrove patiently lectured about bloodlines.

  “You must live your lives outside the third degree of kindred,” he said.

  Robinson appeared to be listening.

  “Otherwise it makes people crazy.”

  Robinson hugged his first cousin while he listened.

  Cosgrove then tried to get Great Big’s lineage. Great Big said he had been born in Idjebo. Happily, he began to name people in his family and their marriages and children. Cosgrove stopped writing. Great Big’s family rarely got past an uncle and niece. “You cannot marry within the third degree of kindred,” Cosgrove told Great Big, who yawned.

  Cosgrove grabbed the goatskin and drank home brew which, mixed with the sun on his head, clouted him out. That night he heard a noise outside the building and on looking out saw Great Big standing in the hot night with a young woman who had a face so round and pleasant that his instinct was to reach out and pinch her cheeks. The young woman looked directly at Cosgrove and giggled. For some reason, he found this disturbing. Great Big then announced that the woman wanted to be baptized. Cosgrove walked to the corner of the room, picked up a bucket of water, and threw it out the open window onto Great Big and the young woman while calling out, “I baptize you in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.” Great Big and the woman with the happy cheeks stood outside, dripping and laughing. Cosgrove flopped on his pallet. He was suddenly tormented by sex and spent the night praying against temptation.

  At this time, the nation had a civil war, whose first objective seemed to be the total starving and maiming of all the helpless and isolated in the nation, particularly those with children. Cosgrove offered his own pain to God on behalf of the persistent hunger. Once Cosgrove went nine days without anything to eat and finally a government truck delivered a sack of rice. Cosgrove sat in his church and slowly ate a small bowl of it. Great Big grabbed the bowl and licked it clean. Cosgrove lectured him on his manners.

  “Manners,” Great Big repeated.

  But a short time later, Great Big scooped up a milk goat that was important to the women of the village and walked off into the bush with it. The women shrieked and the goat bleated, although not as loudly as the goat did when Great Big, in a hurry to eat, simply threw the goat into a cooking fire without bothering to choke him to death first. Later, Great Big walked into Cosgrove’s church and threw a leg on the table. The leg had some burned meat at the top and Cosgrove had an overwhelming desire to jam it into his mouth. This was a temptation he could resist, however, and he refused to touch the leg bone. He lectured Great Big on the sin of stealing the goat.

  As he was listening, Great Big picked up the goat’s leg and began to chew on it. “I got hungry and forgot my manners,” Great Big said.

  Perhaps it was the next day or the one after that — by then Cosgrove couldn’t tell — he heard a crackle in the yellow grass. Sparks shot into the air from the brush fire that devoured the dry thatch of the village. He and Great Big walked all the way to the city, drinking water from the copper streams. At one stop, as Cosgrove looked up at a sky colorless with too much heat, his teeth worked on a bitter long stalk of grass that was impossible to chew. He had suffered, Cosgrove told himself, but he had learned the depth and tenacity of the Devil, and beyond this he now knew well the one sin, the only sin on earth available to most people, Sin of the Flesh. Immediately after this came the good fortune to serve on the Pope’s African tour. Cosgrove regarded the subsequent assignment to America as a challenge worthy of a saint. On the plane to America, he had visions of the canonization ceremony in Rome and the resultant celebration in his town in Ireland.

  7

  EARLY ONE MORNING, COSGROVE left Great Big asleep in their bedroom in the rectory and by whim decided to cross the marshes to Howard Beach. Cold water welled up in the mud and Cosgrove rolled up his pants. He thrashed his way through the bull-rushes, forded a stream of cold salt water in the middle, and came up on the last street in Howard Beach, Seventy-fifth Street, in front of the last house on the block, a large yellow-brick house with a back yard made entirely of marble. Parked at the curb on the far side of the house was a Lincoln town car with a punctured roof. “The Chief’s car,” Cosgrove said. Quickly he walked to it. He glanced down the driveway running alongside the house and saw an assembly of burly men, all wearing Persian lamb hats and trench coats. They jumped into a line of Lincoln town cars in the driveway. The first car filled up and pulled away. Cosgrove saw the Chief in the front seat. He waved furiously at the Chief because he wanted to apologize to him for the punctured roof, but the Chief did not see him.

  A second town car pulled away and a third was about to go when a voice inside screamed to Cosgrove, “Come on! How could you be late!” Cosgrove got in the back with two others. The man next to Cosgrove, whose fur hat was tipped down over his eyes, shoved a black revolver into Cos-grove’s belt. “The gun don’t miss. The man better not.” Cosgrove was about to talk when suddenly everybody in the car displayed hand-held radios. Over the radios came the Chief’s voice: “One voice only from now on.”

  The man next to Cosgrove scolded him. “You’re supposed to have a radio.”

  The Chief’s voice came over all the hand radios in the car: “What do we got at the courthouse?”

  Now another voice came over the radios: “I just come out of the courtroom. The judge says he folds at four-thirty today. I heard Big Paul say he stops at Milton the lawyer’s office right after that, but then he got an important meet at the restaurant on East Forty-sixth Street at five-thirty.”

  “He got some date,” the Chief’s voice said. “Big Paul got somebody with him?”

  “Tony the Driver, like always.”

  “Does Tony think something is going on?”

  “He’s like edgy. He just said to me, ‘What do you really think of me?’ I told him I think plenty of him. I say the truth, I’ll tell you that. I dream of this fucking rat Tony being dead so many times that I got a whole cemetery filled. Big Paul thinks he’s God, so he can’t see anything happening to him like it’s going to. We follow them from the court to the lawyer’s, we wait, and then we follow them uptown and keep calling you. They turn onto Forty-sixth Street, we disappear. Unless you want us to do something else. Go inside the restaurant first or something.”

  The Chief’s voice exploded. “Nothing changes! Three in the restaurant. Frank LaCarva’s son Frankie sits there crying. Jimmy Brown and Larry Salerno sit and hold Frankie’s hand. Sit and cry and wait.”

  Now the thug next to Cosgrove seemed perplexed. “Three in the restaurant? The Chief got that wrong.” The thug looked at Cosgrove. “You make a fourth in the restaurant, right?” Cosgrove, bewildered, did not answer. The thug frowned. “Maybe I better tell the Chief he made a mistake. No, I better not. He gets mad at mistakes.” He looked at Cosgrove carefully. “Boy, you sure look like a priest. They got you comforting the family, right?”

  “Family?” Cosgrove said.

  “LaCarva’s son Frankie. His father just died. Big Paul never got to pay his respects to the family, even go to the funeral on account of he’s on trial all the time. We asked Big Paul to come pay his respects to LaCarva’s son. Five-thirty. Big Paul got diabetes. He can’t eat nothing Italian. We tell him, come to the joint on Forty-sixth Street for a piece of fish. You probably get to eat his fish for him. Anything goes wrong on the sidewalk and Big Paul makes it to the restaurant, he sees yo
u, Big Paul don’t get nervous. He says ‘Good afternoon, Father.’ You take your piece out and shoot him right between his fucking eyes. You get a good payday. Where are you from, anyway?”

  The last question was the only part of the conversation that Cosgrove understood and he was pleased to answer quickly, “Africa.”

  “So I ask a silly fucking question,” the hoodlum mustache said.

  “Before that, Ireland,” Cosgrove said.

  “All right, forget about it,” the guy said. “At least I’ll tell you where I’m from. They brought me in from Cleveland.”

  A man in the front seat said, “What kind of animal could this Paulie be, lettin’ a wolf get into the police station and eat up Buster?”

  “That’s what they say Big Paulie done, sneak a big wolf into the cell with poor Buster.”

  “Where Big Paulie’s going, he could explain to Buster in person.”

  Everybody laughed and Cosgrove, who caught the name Buster, was about to ask a question when the car rushed onto a wide boulevard and nobody in the car uttered a word as they whistled through a tunnel and stopped in Manhattan on a late winter afternoon. When everybody piled out, Cos-grove took the gun out of his pants and said to the nearest thug, “What is th —”

  “You crazy?” The thug shoved Cosgrove’s hand and the gun it held into his pants.

  The Chief was barreling through the rush hour on Third Avenue. Cosgrove tried to run after the Chief to apologize for the car roof and to give him this dreadful gun. He also wanted to ask the Chief about Buster.

  “Walk,” one of the thugs said to Cosgrove. “You give it away by running.”

  They turned onto East Forty-sixth Street. In the cold shadows of high buildings at the front of the restaurant, the Chief intently inspected three men.