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

by Taylor, Patrick

  I became aware of a presence at my shoulder, heard a disdainful sniff, and turned to see the tall, angular, black-suited figure of Doctor “Thorny” Murphy.

  “I see your senior associate is up to his usual uncouth antics,” he remarked in condescending tones. I don’t know how he did it, but he always struck me as being arrogantly subservient, a cross between Gilbert and Sullivan’s Pooh-Bah and Dickens’s Uriah Heep.

  “Doctor Murphy.” O’Reilly’s voice boomed across the room. All heads turned to where we stood.

  “Doctor O’Reilly.” Murphy inclined his head. His tones were the ones he might have used if he’d stepped into a cesspit.

  “How very pleasant to see you.” O’Reilly’s voice oozed charm.

  I glanced round, trying to find cover. Before going anywhere near something that might be a bomb, army bomb-disposal officers don a thing called an “explosive ordnance device suit.” It’s made of Kevlar. Its protective attributes are of such magnitude that compared with it, a mediaeval suit of armour would offer about as much protection as silk thermal underwear. I knew O’Reilly was going to explode and frankly wished to be well out of range.

  “I thought you did a very nice job with the worms,” O’Reilly said in his most sincere tones. He addressed the throng. “Doctor Murphy here is our local expert on traditional healing.”

  O’Reilly had once told me that the secret of being a good physician was sincerity. Once you could fake that, everyone would trust you.

  Doctor Murphy inclined his head. “Well, I…”

  “Now don’t be modest,” O’Reilly said. “If anyone here needs to know how to make a nettle-leaf decoction or a mustard plaster, Doctor Murphy’s the man to ask.”

  I swear a little blush of pleasure tinged the sere wattles of Murphy’s scrawny throat.

  “Oh, yes,” O’Reilly continued. “Doctor Murphy has been in Ballybucklebo for thirty-five years and the local customers are always talking about his wondrous cures.”

  Murphy’s pink turned to a deeper hue. “Well, I…”

  “I myself heard, only yesterday, about his cure for infertility.”

  “What was that?” a voice asked from the back.

  “Gunpowder,” O’Reilly said conspiratorially.

  “Now, Doctor O’Reilly…” Doctor Murphy’s brow wrinkled into the beginning of a frown.

  A juggernaut was a huge wagon under the wheels of which devotees of Krishna hurled themselves and were crushed to death. It was unstoppable. It was but a wheelbarrow compared with O’Reilly, once he got up a head of steam.

  “Gunpowder,” O’Reilly continued. “One of Doctor Murphy’s first patients, Paddy Finucane, couldn’t get his wife pregnant. Our esteemed colleague told the man to substitute one teaspoonful of black powder for the sugar in his cup of tea, the tea to be taken three times daily.”

  “I did no such…”

  “Worked like a charm. Do you know that when he died, old Paddy left six children, fourteen grandchildren…” O’Reilly’s timing was impeccable. He paused and swept his gaze over the clearly enraptured audience before adding, “… and a bloody great hole where the crematorium used to stand.”

  The famous roar of the crowd of soccer supporters when Manchester United scored a goal would have been a muted whisper if ranked against the gales of laughter that filled the meeting room.

  Doctor Murphy flushed scarlet, gobbled like a cock turkey that had just noticed the pre-Christmas axe, spun on his heel, and fled.

  “Keep up the good work, ‘Thorny,’” O’Reilly roared at the departing back. He lowered his voice and turned to me. “Maybe now he’ll think twice before inflicting his rubbish on the poor unsuspecting supplicants,” he said.

  And do you know? He was right.

  OCTOBER 2001

  The Smoking Gun

  A lesson in the hazards of tobacco

  “Bah! Rubbish! Fiddlesticks! Unadulterated twaddle. Them eejits in London think they can prove anything with their statistics. This here fellah Vessey’s utterly, absolutely, categorically wrong.”

  I knew it was O’Reilly who was making these ex cathedra statements. No one could have mistaken the gravelly tones or the vehemence with which the words were uttered. And a good thing too, because any hopes of actually seeing the orator were roughly on a par with Captain Robert Falcon Scott’s chances of finding a room at the Savoy Hotel for a quick overnight stay on his way back from the South Pole. Fingal Flahertie’s dining room was filled with a fug of pipe-tobacco smoke that would have made the impenetrable clouds after the first black-powder broadsides at the Battle of Trafalgar seem as clear as the pure crystal air of the Mourne Mountains.

  I coughed and flapped an ineffective hand in a vain attempt to clear the pea-souper from which I confidently expected Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson to emerge at any moment. My efforts were about as useful as those of the cabin boy who thought he could use a teaspoon to bail out the entire Atlantic Ocean from the depths of R.M.S. Titanic’s hold.

  “I thought the article in the British Medical Journal seemed convincing.”

  “You would,” O’Reilly growled, “and you probably believe that duodenal ulcers are caused by some as yet unidentified bacterium.”

  “Don’t be daft. They’re caused by stress,” I said, wondering about the gnawing sensation in my epigastrium, “but I don’t think it’s unreasonable to suggest that there might be an association between smoking and ill health. Doctor Vessey’s figures looked pretty impressive to me.”

  “Aye,” said O’Reilly, “and if you draw a graph that shows the increase in the rates of purchases of television sets and the rates of heart attacks, they’ve been roaring upwards at about the same speed. If you want to, you can prove that television is the cause of coronaries.”

  He laughed at his own razor-sharp repartee. “Don’t believe everything you read in the BMJ.”

  “Well, I think…”

  “Jasus, Pat, you’d better watch yourself. If you’re that gullible, somebody’s going to try to sell you the Queen’s Bridge.”

  According to the late Jim Croce, “You don’t tug on Superman’s cape. / You don’t spit into the wind.” According to the still-living P. J. Taylor, you didn’t argue with O’Reilly when it was obvious that his mind on a given subject was firmly made up. This simple rule may account for my continued survival. Deciding that discretion was indeed the better part of valour, I conceded defeat. “You’re probably right, Fingal.”

  “’Course I am,” he said with the finality of the Spanish geographers who took great pains in explaining to Christopher Columbus that when it came to the configuration of this planet, “flat” was the word he was looking for.

  Clinging to the one remaining shred of my self-respect, I made a last feeble effort. “Is there anything at all that might convince you?”

  “That smoking’s bad for you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Not a thing, my boy. Not a single thing on God’s green Earth.”

  I sighed, not knowing that he was going to be proven wrong.

  * * *

  The question of any relationship between smoking and disease was forgotten in the general hurly-burly of rural practice. I probably wouldn’t have given the matter much more thought—although I confess I was developing an aversion to being bested by my mentor—if, some months later, fate hadn’t intervened.

  We were standing in the hall of his house.

  “Could you do me a favour, Pat?” O’Reilly’s voice oozed charm. My internal alarm bells went off.

  “What is it?” I asked, with as much trust in my tones as the housefly (order Diptera) must have used when invited into the parlour of a certain arachnid.

  “Have you noticed the weather?”

  If he’d ever given up the practice of medicine, there would have been a stellar career in elected office for Fingal Flahertie O’Reilly. The first rule for that merry bunch of pilgrims is never, never give a straight answer to a direct question.

  “W
hat favour?” He might be trying to divert the conversation. I was going to keep it on course with all the concentration of the master of a square-rigger trying to navigate through the Straits of Magellan down in Cape Horn country.

  “There’s a gale. From the south,” he said.

  Perhaps I’d misjudged him. Meteorology might be his avocation. It certainly must have taken an acutely honed weather sense to have noted the shrieking of the wind in the great sycamore tree at the end of his garden, the intermittent crashes as slates were ripped from roofs and hurled to the road, and the rattle of rain on the windowpanes.

  “It’s time Arthur Guinness got out to play, you know,” he continued. “You’d be doing him a favour too.”

  “No, Fingal. I am not going to take him for a walk.”

  O’Reilly laughed. “Mad dogs and Irishmen go out in the midday rain, and you’re not daft, is that it?”

  “Badly paraphrased Noel Coward. And right, I’m not going out in that lot.”

  “I wasn’t going to ask you to. But this is the very best weather for the ducks.”

  I was tempted to remark that if he could see my feathers I’d venture out of doors, but unless such was the case I intended to stay as firmly put as King Arthur’s Excalibur in the famous stone.

  “They’ll have to come in low to the ground at evening flight tonight.”

  Gale. Arthur Guinness—a gun dog. Low-flying ducks. Somewhere at the back of my mind a series of small synapses went off in sequence. A little red light bulb glowed—dimly, I admit, but it definitely lit up. “And you want me to run the evening surgery so you can take Arthur and go shooting?”

  “Jasus,” he said, “your powers of deduction would make the Great Detective look like a candidate for a school for the hopelessly muddled.” He lit his briar. “I’ll make it up to you. I’ll do next Saturday and Sunday.”

  I examined the proposition. It seemed to be decidedly deficient in attached strings. No obvious catches were apparent. “You’re on,” I said, comforting myself with the thought that given the inclemency of the climate, only the true sufferers would brave the elements and make the trip to the surgery. I might have an easy evening.

  “Good man.” His craggy face lit up with the inner glow only seen on the countenances of small children who have been given the much-desired train set for Christmas. “I’ll be off then.” He galloped upstairs.

  I wandered to the kitchen to see if perhaps Mrs. Kincaid had made an afternoon cup of tea. Moments later O’Reilly reappeared, clad for his outing in hip-waders, a waterproof jacket, and a deerstalker hat. He had a game bag slung over one shoulder and a double-barrelled twelve-bore tucked in the crook of one arm.

  Mrs. Kincaid looked at him and asked, “Now have you got all that you need, Doctor dear?”

  O’Reilly checked in his game bag. “Cartridges. Tobacco. Pipe. Matches.” He looked at the teapot. “I don’t suppose there’s enough of that to fill a thermos.”

  “Aye.” Mrs. Kincaid found a flask, filled it with hot tea, and presented it to an obviously impatient O’Reilly. “Off you go now.”

  And off he went. He was too big a man to skip, but the lightness of his step was akin to the dances of “The Lordly Ones.” You know, the little folk that “dwell in the hills / in the hollow hills.”

  “I don’t know,” said Mrs. Kincaid, chuckling after he’d slammed the door, “whether himself or that great lummox of a dog has more fun when he goes out after the ducks.”

  Neither Mrs. Kincaid nor I could have had the slightest inkling what form O’Reilly’s fun would take on that particular evening.

  * * *

  Evening surgery was, as I’d predicted, light. I retired to the upstairs sitting room and was well into the new James Bond book when I heard the crash of the back door and a heavy tread on the stairs. O’Reilly entered, stage right, with as much force as the gale that still howled outside and all the drama of the Demon King in a Christmas pantomime. He spoke not one word but headed for the sideboard and helped himself to a large John Jameson.

  I simply stared. O’Reilly’s usually bushy eyebrows had shrunk as if an American Marine Corps barber had given them the full new-recruit treatment. His hairline had receded like a neap tide and his normally florid cheeks had a roseate hue that only John Turner could have rendered in oils. From him emanated a vague smell of something singed.

  “Lord,” he said, lowering a very large gulp of Irish, “you and that fellah Vessey were right.”

  “Pardon?”

  “About the smoking. Just look at me.”

  I did, and by herniating most of my face muscles managed to refrain from grinning. “What happened?”

  “I dropped my matches. Couldn’t light my pipe. So I did something a bit silly.”

  This confession coming from the redoubtable O’Reilly would have been on a par with King Charles I admitting that perhaps he had been a little over-optimistic in his opinion of the Divine Right of Kings.

  “Go on,” I said.

  “Well, I thought it was a brilliant idea at the time.”

  It had been, I thought, on a par with General Ulysses S. Grant’s notion of digging a ditch to divert the entire flow of the mighty Mississippi at the siege of Vicksburg—and obviously O’Reilly had had about as much success.

  “Aye. I really wanted a smoke so I split a cartridge and put the powder on top of a rock. Then I stuck the stem of the pipe in my mouth and the bowl in the powder.” He finished his whiskey. “Did you ever make sparks from a couple of pieces of flint?”

  “No, Fingal, and I never went looking for a gas leak with a lit match either.”

  “Jasus. It worked a charm. Went off like the crack of doom.”

  “Worked wonders for your haircut too,” I said, peering at his frazzled face. “Do you think maybe we should slap a dab or two of ointment on you?”

  “I do,” he said, “and I’ll tell you something else. Smoking can be dangerous to your health. Bloody dangerous.”

  I’m sure that Doctor Vessey, who was eventually knighted for his work linking cigarette smoking with lung cancer, would have been delighted to have received such a ringing endorsement of his theories from no less a personage than Doctor Fingal Flahertie O’Reilly, MB, BCh, BAO.

  NOVEMBER 2001

  Ring Around the Rosies

  O’Reilly’s nephew demonstrates his entrepreneurial prowess

  You may remember O’Reilly’s nephew, William Butler Yates O’Reilly, aged eleven. An enterprising boy. Something of an original thinker in the O’Reilly mould. His main claim to fame, at least in Ballybucklebo circles, had been won by his uttering one unscripted sentence at the infamous Christmas pageant.

  He’d been moved from his starring role as Joseph—a part that he’d carried off with dramatic flair in the two previous years—to a supporting spot as the innkeeper, and wasn’t one bit happy about his demotion. “Seething” is a descriptor often applied to superheated mud pits in remote parts of New Zealand. It would barely have done justice to the pent-up fury inside one small boy.

  It would be unfair to compare Ballybucklebo’s thespian retelling of the nativity story with the Oberammergau Passion Play or the Wagnerian Ring Cycle at Bayreuth, but it was nevertheless an annual fixture in our little village’s social calendar and well attended. Willy had dropped his bombshell on opening night.

  The effects of his ad lib on the audience had been on a par with the conflagration started by His Majesty’s Royal Air Force (Bomber Command), in February 1945 at a spot called Dresden. Willy’s father, Lars Porsena O’Reilly, had found himself at the epicentre of the firestorm. Well, you could hardly have expected Willy’s immortal lines when admission was sought to the inn by Joseph and Mary—“You can come in, Mary, but Joseph, you can just feck off!”—to have been greeted with thunderous applause by an audience of teachers, parents, and a convent’s worth of blushing nuns.

  Willy had eaten his meals standing up for several days after the event and his pocket money had been stop
ped for three months. The Wall Street Crash of 1929 would have seemed but a minor readjustment of the markets in the impecunious eyes of William Butler Yates O’Reilly. He was facing fiscal catastrophe. Monetary meltdown. But I did tell you that he was an enterprising boy. Wall Street recovered. So did Willy.

  In the process he caused his uncle, Doctor Fingal Flahertie O’Reilly, and Doctor O’Reilly’s junior colleague, myself, a great deal of head scratching—and we weren’t alone. We had the village schoolmaster and most of the children from Ballybucklebo’s primary school to keep us company. In the case of ourselves and our perplexed parish pedagogue, the capital clawing was metaphorical. In the cases of the little learners, it was literal.

  At first we were caught off guard, but our initial surprise soon turned to complete consternation. O’Reilly began to look like a U-boat skipper who’d surfaced directly under the fifteen-inch guns of one of His Majesty’s larger ironclads.

  The first inkling that we might be facing some difficulties came at the end of a busy surgery. The last patient was a small boy—you remember Mister Brown, who once before had come in for prenuptial counselling but had cut the interview short when he’d wet his pants—and his mother. She tugged at his hand and said, “Take off your cap.” He removed that peculiar head adornment favoured by the school authorities of the time, a soft, peaked cap embellished with concentric rings in the school colours, which in the case of Ballybucklebo Primary were horribly clashing yellow and orange.

  O’Reilly peered at the boy’s crown. “What do you make of that, Doctor Taylor?” he asked, pointing to a circular bald spot in the middle of the child’s head.

  I peered at the lesion in question. The hairs had broken off close to the scalp and the stumps had a frosted appearance. “Tinea capitis?” I suggested.

  “Brilliant,” growled O’Reilly. “I’d guessed that. But which fungus?”

  I shook my head. “Could be anything from Microsporum audouinii to Microsporum canis to one of the Trichophytons.”