In the Forest

by Edna O'Brien

  Flinging it down, Maeve is suddenly petulant, as if something in it irks her — “These artists, these would-be artists … they’re all haywire, full of complexes … If you ask me, they need to do a proper job and respectable work.”

  “A beautiful lady … but her feet are not on the ground,” Edward says roguishly, mainly to himself.

  Fiesta

  IT WAS A PAGAN FEAST on the mountain, an old recitation, old lusts, debauchery and division between men and women amplified to the brazen beat of fiddle and pennywhistle.

  Since noon they had been blaring, cordant and discordant. Calling the country people, saying, “Come, come and hear the old story, the hedge-master’s recital of the Women of Munster upbraiding their pusillanimous men folk.” The barren field with its coarse grasses and weepy reeds had been transformed into a Mecca, the marquee like a pale temple set down there, torch flame, candle flame, and red-and-yellow fairy lights plump as tulips in the trees and along the hedges, revellers sloshing their drinks, a jig in their old bones at the novelty of it all.

  They came to marvel at the audacity of the girls, the imperiousness of the Ruling Queen — Queen Eevul of the Grey Rock, draped with dead squirrels, leaves, and the accoutrements of the forest — and at the benighted husbands in their hobnailed boots, their hoary beards and torn waistcoats, side by side on a long stool, having to endure the taunts of these gaudy girls. There was Winnie in harlequin suit, Cindy in black corset and fishnet stockings, May in nun’s habit, Agatha a dairy maid, Peg a scrubber with her battered bucket, and Eily the Princess poured into a lamé dress with a white fur stole, a silver handbag dangling from her wrist.

  Harry, the master of ceremonies, told the audience how a poet who was also a hedge-schoolmaster fell asleep one day by the lake that was within spitting distance and had the most outlandish dream concerning the argument between the sexes.

  O’Kane was there, too, at one with the dark, squatting outside, quiet as a cat, the marquee’s canvas flap uplifted on this sight of her in a purple dress and purple gloves up to her elbows, tears streaming down her face, and that Harry spiv skimming them onto his finger as if they were pearls and asking the audience to behold “her tearful eyes red and hot, her passions burning as in a pot.”

  The fiddlers outdid one another accompanying her verse:

  Heartsick, bitter, dour and wan

  Unable to sleep for want of a man

  But how can I lie in a lukewarm bed

  With all the thoughts that come into my head.

  The disgruntled husbands, loath to listen to these tirades, had to be held back from attacking her.

  There you have it. It has me melted

  And makes me feel that the world’s demented

  A boy in the blush of his youthful vigour

  With a gracious flush and a passable figure

  Finds a fortune the best attraction

  And sires himself off on some bitter extraction

  Some fretful old maid with her heels in the dung

  Pious airs and venomous tongue.

  Dissenting old maids hoisted on wires poked her with broomsticks, but she mocked them.

  Couldn’t some man love me as well

  Aren’t I plump and sound as a bell

  Lips for kissing and teeth for smiling

  Blossomy skin and forehead shining

  Look at my waist. My legs are long

  Limber as willows and light and strong

  There’s bottom and belly that claim attention

  And the best concealed that I needn’t mention.

  Then one of the husbands rose, tottered, and staggered onto the rostrum to have his say. He decried the baseness of womankind, asked what were they but scratching posts outside public houses, tramps naked to the skies in empty bogs, turf cutters astride them. Pointing to the painted Jezebels, he said he could guess at the layers of dirt under their petticoats, singled out Winnie, his wife, with her brazen hips and her bullock’s hide, who had tricked him into marriage and who had made him realise, on that very first night when he saw her stripped, that he was a father before he had even started.

  The Queen poo-poohed his gripes, egged on the mutiny, as with shouts and hisses he was sent back to his stool to sulk.

  The girls became more daring, did headstands and somersaults, flirted with the fiddlers, lampooned the husbands, and cheered at the secrets Eily admitted to.

  Every night when I went to bed

  I’d a stocking of apples beneath my head;

  I fasted three canonical hours

  To try and come round the heavenly powers;

  I washed my shift where the stream was deep

  To hear a lover’s voice in sleep;

  Often I swept the woodstack bare,

  Burned bits of my frock, my nails, my hair,

  Up the chimney stuck the flail,

  Slept with a spade without avail;

  Hid my wool in the lime-kiln late

  And my distaff behind the churchyard gate;

  I had flax on the road to halt coach or carriage

  And haycocks stuffed with heads of cabbage,

  And night and day on the proper occasions

  Invoked Old Nick and all his legions.

  O’Kane on his belly, midges eating him, bats in eerie whirl, seemed to lose contact with the earth as the compere cross-examined her on her vices.

  “Are you a witch, Eileen Ryan?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Do you dabble in the black arts?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Are you friends with Old Nick?”

  She drew her stole down and Harry gasped in mock terror and marched her around for everyone to see and be horrified by the devil’s hoofmarks on her breastbone, skewered in a vivid indigo colour. To the crowd it was all fun, make-believe, but to O’Kane it was real; she had stepped out of her own world into his, into his transmogrified dream of her, all-mothering, all-sinning, she-devil.

  Then it was the duty of the Queen to give judgement as to which side was the most deserving, and she sided with the women, decreed that the mettlesome young Whelps of Munster be brought into the chapel yard and tied with chains until they distinguished themselves in the bedchamber: “Mix and mash in nature’s can, the tinker and the gentleman.”

  The crowd applauded, stood on chairs, whistled, clapped, finding in the beat of their hands a waiting wildness, their pagan impulses brought to life in this heady carnival.

  By the Queen’s divination, the hoary old husbands tore off their beards, flung down their waistcoats, and became mettlesome whelps, partnering the women in a violent instantaneous dance to avenge the slurs and insults that had been hurled. The nun came onstage, riding a donkey, whacking it with her rosary beads, and when it lifted its tail, misbehaved, and brayed, the crowd laughed until they cried, tears and laughter all one. Outside, O’Kane rolled around on the grass in a frenzy for it to end.

  By the time the crowd spilt out, the moon had risen, and he stood, a raving shadow, to one side of the exit, knowing that she would come out, and she did, spivs congratulating her and jockeying to light her cigarette. She and they went on down to the lake, smoking and laughing, and he waited until people had scattered and the lights of the cars crawled along the road on the far side of the lake.

  “Chase me, chase me,” she taunted them, and suddenly she was running, running out of her clothes towards the water, the men chasing her and lifting her up, her half-naked body blanched under moonlight, a laughing queen being escorted on her litter.

  “Isn’t she plump and sound as a bell.”

  “There’s bottom and belly that claim attention.”

  “And the best concealed that we needn’t mention.”

  “Shame on her.”

  “Shame on you.”

  “She’s a water baby.”

  “Let’s throw her in.” A shanty song started up as they swung her back and forth, and then O’Kane could hear the big splash of water and her scream, half terror, half deli
ght, as she was thrown in, her voice gasping, “It’s freezing, it’s freezing, lads.” The men were stripping and leaping in after her, snorting, currents of water being churned up. He ran with wild eyes and wild teeth, pulling his shirt off, ran to the water’s edge and put his face down into it, peering to catch a sight of her, her white body, her trailing hair. They had stopped laughing and there was a silence down there. Six men and her. He couldn’t swim, so he put his face to the water and drank it and spat it out, and the shoreline sucked the water too and burped it back and he called urgently, but none answered. All was quiet, their bodies gliding together down there, through the orgies of the deep.

  In the Forest

  O’KANE CANTERS across the several fields. O’Kane’s reflection in the sheets of standing water, scummed with weed and dock seed. O’Kane’s shadow, dark and furtive, scaling the lime-capped walls, in a jacket he has fecked from a shop. Flying it. The lull hour. Kids packed off to school, mammies and daddies gone their separate ways. Empty world except for her and the youngster and the smoke from her chimney. He knows the days she teaches and the days she doesn’t. Fields and roads drying off after a night of rain. In a pool of brown rainwater he dunks his face and in another pool studies his smart new moustache. Suits him. Then he hears a car hoot and leaps jumping Jesus onto a gateway to catch a glimpse of her going off, except that it is not her, not her creamy jalopy. It is a sports car with a fall of rain on the canvas roof and a fucker skimming it off with a bit of a branch. Feck shit. An all-night visitor while he dossed in a hay shed because of the fucking rain. Clean-shaven, not the bearded bastard he’d seen her having a bit of a to do with in a pub. Her windowpane with a sheet pinned to it. Private. Keep out. Fuck shit. He is waving his arms in wild rotary fury.

  * * *

  “Top o’ the morning to you.” He is in the kitchen as Eily starts down the stairs half dressed, her top through her white slip busty.

  When she realises that she has a visitor, she reaches back to the loft room, takes a sweater, and pulls it on over her head. Seeing the stranger, his movements manic, his eyes agog, she looks down, then looks back to think if they could escape through the skylight. Her hair is plaited and she is barefoot.

  “Want to watch that last step … the bastard should have fixed it,” he says, and dances across to confront her, wags his tongue because she doesn’t remember him: “What’s this? Don’t tell me you don’t remember me … we’re old friends. Maybe it’s the moustache … d’you like it? Goes with my mustard trim … So you forgot me, tough shit.” The words come in a welter, as if his thinking is going too fast for him, pell-mell, bubbles of foam on his lip and his eyes rolling.

  “Who are you?” she asks with as much composure as she can manage. She hears Maddie getting out of bed and coming to the top step of the landing to peer down.

  “Put the kettle on … that’s what a woman of the house does,” he says, then turning to Maddie: “What’s his name … Ben … Caimin?”

  “No … his name is Matthew, but he’s called Maddie.”

  “Maddie Baddie Daddie, and you’re Eily.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Never ask a man in my profession what’s his name. As a special favour you can call me Iggy, short for Ignatius … you got the fireplace fixed, I see.”

  “So you’ve been here in the past.”

  “In the past!” He is walking here, there, everywhere, looking at things, his talk fast, furious; he picks a pair of stones from her collection in a basket and, rubbing them, chuckles at the sparks that fly out. The sparks are of his own imagining. While he is doing this, Maddie runs out and comes back with a handsaw, to attack him.

  “We’re not cutting wood now, darling … that’s for later,” she says, snatching the saw and putting it to one side.

  Her visitor stands then in front of the wall calendar, which has a picture of a goddess, a flame infant a golden crocus inside her torso.

  “That you?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Read me what it says.”

  “Read it yourself.”

  “Haven’t brought my bifocals.”

  He stands dreadfully close behind her as she reads: “Thetis was one of fifty sisters and an ocean deity. Reluctant to marry a mortal Peleus, she changed her form to a wave, then a fish, then a burning flame. Chiron, a centaur, advised Peleus how to win her heart. She gave birth to Achilles and in attempting to avert his fate tempered his body with magical fire and water.”

  “Won her heart,” he says, and laughs a laugh that is bizarre.

  “I’ll make you a cup of coffee and then I’ll drop you off in the town. We have an appointment there,” she says.

  Without once looking in his direction she can feel his eyes following her, his mad curious eyes watching as she reaches for a mug and a sugar bowl. Then he gives a little tug to her plait as she crosses.

  “Now now now,” she says chastisingly.

  “I was fucked up and lonesome, and who walked in but long red hair.”

  “Look, there’s a child here,” she says.

  “Okay … Okay … point taken. You won’t see me losing the plot. Poor Jesus, poor fucker, he lost the plot. Number-one bloke. Him and me we did the odd gig. Like my trim?” and he brings his moustache close to her, then parts his lips to show his teeth, which are a fungused green.

  “In case you think that’s dirt … it’s moss … not a rotten tooth in me head.”

  “He’s a yucky,” Maddie says, beside her now, pulling on her sleeve, asking to be lifted up, and as she lifts him, she goes to the open door calling Smokey, calling Declan, then goes outside to pull on socks and wellington boots.

  Suddenly the visitor is hitting the table, pounding with his fists, no time for coffee, no time for a leak, time to go.

  “We’re ready, we’re ready,” she says as she grabs her shoulder bag and their coats.

  “He’s a robber,” Maddie whispers, and she pinches him to be quiet.

  * * *

  Crossing the field O’Kane talked back to the birds, shouted at them to belt up. As they arrive at the grassy fork where her car is parked, he runs to where he has stashed his weapon and she sees the brown gauntleted handle of dark wood and the barrel covered in different-coloured plastic paper.

  “I never let my child near guns,” she says.

  “Uncle Rodney … the boys in the north, the balaclava crowd want to recruit me … I’m a crack shot, but I’m no one’s poodle … a loner … a lone cowboy, that’s me.”

  “If that thing is loaded, I’d like you to unload it.”

  “Drama queen, are you … Get in the fucking car … we have business, missus.”

  Maddie begins to shout and kick, refusing to let the robber into the back seat.

  “That’s my seat … that’s my seat … it’s not his seat.”

  “Now now, darling … it’s only a short journey.”

  “Darling,” the stranger says, then grabs the long plait of her hair, runs it over his mouth, and nibbles it.

  The car starts, stalls, backfires with loud swift bangs as they go off.

  “You’ve got a small gun yourself in your exhaust,” he says jokingly.

  His arm is across the back of her seat, and he tweaks her hair from time to time.

  “I wish you wouldn’t do that,” she says.

  “Angry, are you … You should take a course in anger management … Noisy car you’ve got.”

  “Yes … they’ll hear us coming.”

  “But they won’t hear us going, baby. Baby. Into the sunset … had breakfast, have you?”

  As they approach the town, he huddles down in the back seat and pulls his jacket over his head, and Maddie is howling, trying to undo the straps of his car seat, yelling to get out, because the robber has turned into a monster. She slows down outside the pub only to find it closed, the green blind drawn, nobody about except a woman in the distance going down the hill, walking her dog. Outside the post office Birdie’s van
is parked under the palm trees, and Birdie is in the passenger seat sorting a bundle of mail. With her whole being she wills the woman to look in her direction. Birdie does look and merely shakes her head to indicate that there are no letters for her.

  “This is where we part company,” she says, turning to him.

  “Put your foot down … put your dainty foot down,” he shouts from the shelter of his jacket, and she feels the cold graze of the gun slide down the side of her neck.

  Once out of the village he begins to laugh, loud, gutsy peals of laughter, the laughter of somebody locked inside a barrel and frantic to be let out. They pass the town hall, the hurling field, the funeral parlour with a lit cross, ponies in a field, and clumps of yellow gorse just coming into bloom. A man at a gateway looks in her direction, then looks away as if he has not wanted to see her.

  * * *

  At the crossroads she swerves onto the tarred road towards the next big town, believing that their ordeal will end there. He is shouting at her to reverse, reverse, fucking bitch, fucking cunt. She reverses back to where there are two signs bearing the name of the wood — Cloosh Wood. One is high up and written in black on a white signpost, and the other is a fish-shaped oblong of oak with fancy lettering. At the first entrance to a dirt road there is a red-and-white barrier and he shouts at her to go on, go the fuck on. At the third entrance there is no barrier, and he leans forward and grasps the wheel, steering them towards a dirt road and a grid over which a carpet of young green branches has been laid.