The Wily O'Reilly: Irish Country Stories (Irish Country Books)

by Taylor, Patrick

  “No,” I said, forestalling the inevitable suggestion that as O’Reilly was much bigger and stronger than I, then I would be the logical choice to be swayed aloft to try to effect a rescue. “We’ll just have to wait for her to come down.”

  “I think,” said an obviously chastened O’Reilly, “I think we should head back to port.”

  “Agreed.” I put the helm over. “And Fingal?”

  “Yes?”

  “If she doesn’t come down once we’ve docked, someone’s going to have to stay aboard until she decides to budge.”

  “I know. You wouldn’t…?” He must have seen the look on my face. “Thought not.”

  He sat quietly on the short trip home, docked the vessel, and stared up the mast. “Come on down, sweetie,” he crooned in his gentlest voice. “Push-wush. Pushy-wushy.”

  I’ve never mastered catspeak but I guessed, judging by the arch in the cat’s back, the way her tail fluffed like a semi-electrocuted lavatory brush, and the loudness of her hissing, that she was politely declining his blandishments.

  She must have continued to do so for some considerable time, because O’Reilly didn’t reappear chez himself until just before my bedtime. I expected him to be somewhat out of sorts, but perhaps the hours of quiet reflection he’d spent on his boat had given him time to mellow.

  Mind you, I could be wrong. He never went to sea without enough beer aboard to quench the thirsts of the entire supporters’ contingent of the Irish rugby football team, and his breath had a certain hoppy quality.

  “Get her down?” I asked.

  “Eventually. You know, Pat, I think I know what went wrong.”

  “Oh?”

  “Indeed. It dawned on me while I was waiting for her. Who’s ever heard of a sea cat?”

  “Right.”

  “Mind you, ‘sea dog’ is an expression with a long and honourable history.”

  “Drake, Frobisher, Nelson.”

  “How do you think Arthur Guinness would enjoy a day at sea?”

  I stared at him, trying to decide if he was being facetious. He wasn’t.

  And if you want to know how the big black Labrador fared on the boat, I’m afraid you’ll have to wait for next time.

  (no column in july 2001)

  AUGUST 2001

  O’Reilly’s Dog

  Yet another sailing adventure

  “I must down to the sea again / To the lonely sea and the sky / And all I ask is a tall ship / And a star to steer her by…” O’Reilly’s memory for the words of Johnny Masefield’s “Sea Fever” was, as with all things literary, phenomenal. His voice was not. He may have thought he was singing. I’d assumed he was in some late stage of mortal anguish, so doleful was the noise.

  Arthur Guinness, who was standing upright in the backseat of the old Rover car, front paws draped over my shoulders, took a break from salivating down my neck and joined in. His “Ooowwlll…” did give a certain harmonic counterpoint to O’Reilly’s off-key bellowing. When they got to the bit about “… for the call of the running tide / Is a wild call and a clear call…” I could in all honesty only agree with the first of the sentiments. Clear, in their combined rendition, it definitely was not.

  What was clear was that O’Reilly had learned nothing from his disastrous experiences when he’d tried to persuade Lady Macbeth, his demoniacally possessed white cat, to enjoy a short sea voyage. Apparently neither her dousing the saloon’s upholstery with liquid high in urea content, nor the rents that had miraculously appeared in the mainsail when she’d gone up the mast like one of Nelson’s topmen pursued by a bad-tempered bos’n wielding a knotted rope’s end, nor the claw marks that had barely healed on his cheek would convince him that taking animals to sea, unless of course your name happened to be Noah and you were under divine protection, was probably not a very good idea. (Parenthetically, I believe that’s the longest sentence I’ve ever managed to write.)

  He’d promised last week, and he was a man who always kept his word, that he intended to retry the nautical experiment, this time with the unsuspecting Arthur Guinness as the subject.

  “Dogs,” he remarked, pulling the car into the marina’s parking lot, “are much more stable creatures than cats.”

  And certain rural general practitioners, I thought, but naturally kept the idea very much to myself.

  “Out,” he barked.

  Arthur and I complied.

  “I think that’s where we went wrong with Lady Macbeth last week.”

  “Not ‘we’; you, Fingal. I tried to talk you out of it. Remember?” With, I thought, about as much success as was obtained by a certain King Canute when he commanded the tide to stop coming in.

  “Slip of the tongue,” he said. “You’re absolutely right. Come on, Arthur.” And with that he set off across the tarmac, followed by the unsuspecting hound.

  * * *

  I’d learned early in my acquaintance with Doctor Fingal Flahertie O’Reilly that he was always at his most placatory when he wanted something. I knew he wanted me to accompany him on the boat. He didn’t know that he need not have been one bit polite to me. After last week’s debacle, I wouldn’t have missed this Saturday’s outing for the world.

  And it was one of those glorious summer days that grace Ulster with roughly the frequency of a planetary conjunction, a blue moon, and a total eclipse of the sun—all in one twenty-four-hour period. The sun beamed from an azure sky. Not even the thin, diaphanous wisp of an aircraft’s contrail marred the unblemished firmament. Had I not been in the company of O’Reilly and his distinctly ditsy dog, I could easily have been persuaded that God was in his heaven and all was right with the world.

  “Are you coming?” he called, as he led Arthur onto the finger where his sloop was moored.

  “Right.” I trotted down onto the dock and followed the pair of them.

  O’Reilly stopped while Arthur investigated the dock’s planking, happily trotting from side to side, sniffing here, cocking his leg there, doing the usual doggy things.

  “I want to give him time to get used to his new surroundings,” O’Reilly said.

  That seemed reasonable. I was a bit lost myself. It was only in the last week that the new facility had been opened. Boats had always been moored to buoys out in Ballybucklebo Bay, but now, borrowing from the American experience, a proper marina had been constructed. Several long docks stuck out into the bay. At right angles to each were shorter slips. There was room for two boats to be moored, stern in, between each slip.

  “We’re out at the very end,” said O’Reilly. “It’s not far.” He’d grabbed Arthur Guinness by the collar. “Get out of there, Arthur.”

  When I looked to see the nature of the dog’s transgression, I noticed that he was standing rigidly, nose thrust forward, tail sticking out astern, staring fixedly at a Siamese cat that lay languidly on a velvet cushion in the cockpit of a very smart yawl that was tied up closest to the shore.

  “He’s just being inquisitive, Charley,” I heard O’Reilly reassure the skipper of the yawl. “I’ll get him down to my boat.”

  “Don’t worry about it, Fingal. Cleopatra here can look after herself.” Charley stroked the cat’s head.

  Obviously, I thought, he hadn’t been present when Arthur Guinness had treed Maggie MacCorkle’s cat, General Sir Bernard Law Montgomery, in O’Reilly’s sycamore —twice.

  O’Reilly sauntered along, pausing at each moored vessel to exchange pleasantries with other members of the yachting fraternity. It must have been the sunshine that had brought them out in their droves, much as mosquitoes appear in swarms when the sun follows the rain.

  Men in shorts, blazers, and Dutch captains’ caps, women in short skirts and blue-and-white-striped T-shirts lolled in the cockpit of almost every vessel. I noticed that each member of the nautical set grasped a glass of something, and judging by the sparkling beads of dew on the outsides of the glasses, something cold. If this had been imperial India, it would have been the sahibs and memsa’bs at tiff
in.

  All terribly civilized, dontcha know? It was a scene of peacefulness, tranquility, and, unbeknownst to anyone, about to be disrupted by a force with the strength of those mild tropical breezes that used to be identified with women’s names—like Hurricane Gladys.

  O’Reilly hustled the Labrador onward and it seemed that any interspecies unpleasantness had been avoided. Things may not always be what they seem.

  I joined O’Reilly as he encouraged Arthur Guinness to clamber aboard his sloop. The big dog jumped into the cockpit, gave one happy “Woof,” turned round three times, curled up, and promptly fell asleep.

  “Told you,” said O’Reilly. “To the manner born. Nothing’s going to go wrong this time.”

  I was just about to agree when something caught my eye. A small feline figure was moving along the dock. Cleopatra must have taken a short shore leave and was exploring her domain.

  “We’ll just give him a few minutes to settle in,” O’Reilly said. “Fancy a beer?”

  “Please.”

  “I’ll get them.” He vanished below.

  Just as O’Reilly appeared in the hatch, a brimming beer glass held in either hand, thus of course breaking the first law of seagoing vessels, “One hand for the ship, one hand for yourself,” Cleopatra jumped nimbly aboard.

  The Americans of the time had developed a sophisticated early warning system to alert them to the presence of anything slightly antisocial—like several gazillion incoming megatons of nuclear firecrackers. I suspect they pinched some of the technology from our animal friends. Although the cat had landed soundlessly, Arthur was awake in one instant and on his feet in the next. Cleopatra let go the contralto-crossed-with-a-bandsaw howl that the Creator gave only to Siamese cats. On this occasion it was the feline equivalent of the orders, “Dive! Dive! Dive!” screamed from the conning tower of a submarine that has unexpectedly found itself directly in the path of an enemy destroyer.

  Cleopatra didn’t dive. She took off at maximum revolutions, nimbly leaping from deck to deck of every one of the moored boats as she frantically fled for sanctuary on her own yawl.

  Arthur boosted himself from the gunnels with the force of one Dick Fosbury trying for yet another Olympic high-jump record, and, if you remember your physics, “To every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.”

  O’Reilly’s sloop pitched horribly, thrashing from port to starboard like a gazelle caught in the coils of a boa constrictor. I was too busy grabbing the nearest fixture to see what had caused, almost simultaneously, a roar from O’Reilly, a massive “thump” from belowdecks, and the sounds of smashing glass. All I can tell you was that when I did look inboard, he was no longer in the hatchway.

  I would have gone to his aid but was distracted by a chorus of screeches, curses, more glass-breaking noises, and the crashing of a series of tsunamis displaced by the rocking hulls of a fleet of wildly tossing yachts. I realized that I could gauge the extent of Arthur’s trans-decks progress by the way each mast in succession began to thrash to and fro and the chorus of imprecations increased in volume. The last to be hit was the yawl.

  Eventually, I’m told, all good things must come to an end. The churned-up waters returned to their previous calm. In sequence, the masthead gyrations lessened in duration and amplitude. In another sequence, nearest vessel first, farthest boat last, the owners of the battered boats began to form a mob, something akin to the one that I imagine stormed the Bastille, on the dock beside O’Reilly’s boat.

  The last to arrive was Charley. His blazer was very damp and his yachting cap seemed to have gone missing. He was a big man, much bigger than O’Reilly. The calluses on his knuckles might have been caused by their obvious ability to trail on the ground.

  “I’d like a word with your skipper,” he said. “Now.”

  “Oh,” I said, wondering if maritime law, as well as giving captains the right to perform marriages, also waived the usual civilities surrounding suspension from the nearest yardarm. “He’s below.”

  “And he’ll soon be going aloft,” Charley growled.

  They were going to hang O’Reilly. I could only hope that there was no such crime as aiding and abetting in the nautical legal lexicon.

  “You don’t mean…” I glanced up and swallowed.

  “I bloody well do,” said Charley. “Somebody’s going to have to get Cleopatra down from my masthead.”

  SEPTEMBER 2001

  O’Reilly’s Rival

  Doctor Murphy feels the wrath of his fellow physician

  O’Reilly smacked his empty pint glass on the bar top of the Mucky Duck, nodded at mine host Arthur Osbaldiston, and turned to me. “One day…” muttered O’Reilly. The tip of his nose was alabaster. His eyes flashed with the kind of light that must have given the Hamburg fire chief pause for serious thought in July 1943. “One day I’m going to marmalize that monstrous mountebank Murphy.”

  “Indeed,” I remarked, taking a step backward and wondering what Doctor “Thorny” Murphy had done this time to, well, rile O’Reilly.

  “He’s a qualified quack, a certified charlatan. He’s not fit to be a bloody benighted barber-surgeon.”

  You may recall that deep in hillbilly country there once was a minor misunderstanding between the Hatfield and McCoy families. Their falling-out was an entente cordiale compared to Fingal Flahertie O’Reilly’s feelings for his medical competitor in the village of Ballybucklebo.

  If you remember, it went back to the occasion when Doctor Murphy had publicly accused Doctor O’Reilly of playing God. O’Reilly had not so much bided his time as lurked, setting up an ambush that would have done credit to the skills of a squadron of the SAS hiding in the hills of County Tyrone awaiting the coming of a unit of the PIRA. And when O’Reilly did strike, his verbal assault had been as devastating as the cross fire from half a dozen assault rifles.

  Discretion, I decided, was definitely the better part of valour. No doubt he would explain his present agitation in the fullness of time. I merely nodded sympathetically and waited.

  “Are you pouring that bloody pint or brewing it, Arthur?” O’Reilly roared down the bar. “A man’s estate can sue the publican if he lets a customer die of thirst, you know.”

  “Sorry, Doctor, sir.” Arthur waddled along from the beer pump and set a full pint glass of Guinness before O’Reilly, who grunted, lifted the glass, and sank half of its contents before gracing me with, “The College shouldn’t suspend Murphy’s licence—they should hoist the bloody thing to the top of the tallest flagpole and burn it.” The second half of his pint disappeared. “Arthur!”

  I had no doubt that all of the unsuspecting gentlemen named Arthur who lived within a ten-mile radius of the Mucky Duck wondered who was shouting at them.

  “Right, Doctor, sir. Coming, Doctor, sir.”

  “Worms,” said O’Reilly to me. “What do you know about worms?”

  I wondered if we were going fishing but kept the question unspoken.

  “Come on, Taylor.”

  “Well, they’re blind helminthes that burrow around in the soil and turn vegetable matter into humus,” I tried, quite proud of remembering something from my first-year zoology class at medical school.

  “Not those ones, you ninny. Pinworms. Threadworms.”

  I was on safer ground now and happily trotted out, “Oxyuris vermicularis. Most common parasitic infection of children. Cause pruritis…”

  “Exactly. Make life bloody miserable for the wee ones. And how would you treat them?”

  “Piperazine.”

  “That’s how any self-respecting physician would. I just found out we’ve got an outbreak here in the Ballybucklebo kindergarten, and do you know what Murphy has been prescribing?”

  I shook my head. By the scowl on O’Reilly’s face, the answer might be interesting, but I had to contain my curiosity because of the arrival of Arthur and O’Reilly’s new pint. He grabbed the glass and muttered, “Lime water.”

  “Looks like Guinness to me,” I vent
ured.

  “Not this.” O’Reilly must have been calming down, I thought. His first swallow merely consumed the upper third of his beverage. “Lime water is Murphy’s miracle cure for worms.”

  “But…”

  “Not just lime water. He’s been telling the mothers to write ‘Et verbum carum factum est,’ on a piece of paper and make the sign of the cross over the concoction before they make the kiddies drink it.”

  “‘And the word is made flesh,’” I translated. “Biblical.”

  “Aye. It’s an old country remedy that goes back to a Franciscan friar. A fellow called Father Gregory Dunne.”

  “Your erudition amazes me, Fingal.”

  “Never mind amazing you. We’ve got to stop that bloody man.”

  “How?”

  O’Reilly shook his head. “Dunno. Yet.” I saw something in the depths of O’Reilly’s brown eyes that would have given Edgar Allen Poe nightmares. “But I’ll think of something.”

  * * *

  It took us three weeks to repair the wreckage wrought by Doctor Murphy’s ham-fisted practices. I confess that I felt rather smug as we basked in the gratitude of the mothers of the youngsters who, now properly treated, no longer had to suffer constant perianal irritation. The only one in the village who still had an itch that needed to be scratched was one Doctor Fingal Flahertie O’Reilly. His opportunity to do so came, as before, at a meeting of the county medical society.

  All of the GPs from County Down had assembled in Belfast, nominally to hear a learned address by some imported speaker. The added attraction was of course the splendid dinner and copious amounts of some very excellent claret, courtesy of an international pharmaceutical company.

  O’Reilly was in one of his expansive moods. He was a splendid raconteur and, after the lecture and the meal, had surrounded himself with a coterie of his cronies whom he was entertaining with yet another of his stories of naval life. I hovered at the periphery of the crowd. Judging by the gale of laughter that swept through the assembly, they’d fully appreciated his last rendition.