Oh, Play That Thing

by Roddy Doyle

I carried sacks of onions and crates.

  —Careful with those bibles, son. I don’t want them spilling or breaking.

  I’d carried crates like these through Dublin – Bibles – No Commercial Value – past G-men and spies. Boxes of new oiled rifles and ammunition; I’d carried them for Ireland and Michael Collins. This time it was bottles of hooch in the boxes, and I carried them for Mister Norris. There were no spies that I could smell, but the crates made me nervous. I’d learnt my lesson: where there were bottles, there were guys looking after them. So I crossed the street, over the hardened muck and horse-shit, whenever I saw crates in the back of a truck outside Norris’s emporium, the Temple of Economy. I crossed and kept going and refused to see Missis Norris looking at me, her good-looking head between the two Rs in her husband’s window name, the beginnings of ice creeping across the glass. I’d walk on, past the stores, across the lane that was Pigtail Alley, its few shacks and laundry, over the train tracks that cut the town, through the big meat stink of the slaughterhouse, past the big open doors of the foundry, the shaking door of the diner. I saw the bare store windows, the peeling paint; Norris’s was the only front that roared ambition. I was tempted to start again, to cold-call, get going with the colour and words. But I didn’t. Not yet. I was careful. I was wise.

  It wasn’t well-digging weather but country people were always thinking a season or two ahead. No real city man would have thought of planting seeds or letting eggs hatch. So, once the half-sister let word out and around that her husband was a dentist and diviner, I was in quick demand. I found myself a forked stick, although I didn’t need it. I stripped the bark off it till it glowed white and dangerous as I walked it around the farmhouses and cabins, held out in front of me, twitching, and I cracked ice with my boots. I began to enjoy myself. It was all an act, a piece of open-air vaudeville. I’d been feeling water racing all around and under me since I’d run from Manhattan; water inviting me to dive and duck, pulling, dragging at me, demanding that I jump. The county sat on water.

  —They don’t need new wells, I told her.

  —You don’t think they know that? she said. —They want the show, daddio. It’s a long winter and we’re miles from Broadway.

  So that was what I gave them. The twitching stick, the even pace around the yard. Steady, bays, and step together. I marked the spots for the spring, when the ground would be soft enough to open. I made a mound of stones, like a baby’s grave, and let the women feed me before they handed over the cash. It was two bucks a well, real money in a farm family’s winter. The farmers held back with the cash, unwilling to cough up for a hill of stones right beside the old well.

  —You’ll be gone come spring, mister.

  I said nothing. I let the wives and daughters prise the creased banknotes from the pockets and fingers, from under the floorboards. The women were cute with the cash. I’d seen it in Roscommon, and everywhere. They had to be; there was never enough. But they knew what they were paying for now, and it wasn’t new water. It was the elegant, wandering man they were paying for, and they had him for the day.

  She was right, a long time before I understood it: we were a team. (And long before I knew it, we weren’t.) We were the gypsies, and we were welcome in a time of quiet plenty. Children and stock were thriving; cattle stood full and upright. Fruit trees were young, raring to deliver again when the year turned. Government was far away. They wondered and looked, admired and feared us.

  She was the barker. She announced their need, told them what they lacked and wanted. She worked on the women; the men came natural. They gawked as she passed. Loving her, hating her, wanting her, and more and more because they knew it wasn’t going to happen. And then, sweet Jesus, it did happen – they came home from a day in the woods, hunting meat or making moonshine, or from under a truck or from mending the fences, finger-killing winter work, and she’d be there, in their own homes, the piece they’d seen on Main or Liberty, her coat off now and that ass on their own chair, her elbows on their table. And they could invite themselves right in and feast on her while she sat right there talking quietly to the missis, woman talk. They sat and watched, and raised no Cain when the missis passed the seed money to the cute little carpetbagger. There wasn’t a bark or objection from those men; they were happily robbed. And the missises didn’t know what hit them later in the dark, and never made the connection between the thrusts and loving paws of their eager husbands and the visit of that strange young lady who read their hands and told them some of what they had to know. She was fucking both of them, husband and wife, while she sat on the bed back at the Trout Hotel, prop. Gideon MacCarlton. But, before she left them to themselves, she let them know that I’d be dropping by to sort out their teeth and water, and I’d arrive a day or some days later and fuck them all over again.

  Sweet Afton and county had never had a winter like it.

  Our landlord noticed but couldn’t explain.

  —No one’s complaining, MacCarlton told the half-sister; he never spoke to me. —That’s what’s different.

  She leaned on his counter, shaving cents off the rent.

  —Don’t, please, misunderstand, said Mister MacCarlton. — We have a fine town here. Fine people. But, well, it’s winter.

  —Noticed.

  —I’m right sure you did, Missis Dalton, he said. —But, well, complaining comes with the season. It’s only natural. It is cold out there.

  —In here, too.

  —Not what you’re used to, Missis Dalton, he said.

  He held her eyes for a second.

  —You were saying, she said.

  —Yes. It is cold. It is a hard season up here, away from fancy living. The old bones do creak.

  —Not yours, I bet.

  —Mine aren’t that elderly, I guess, he said, and he looked over her shoulder at me; he was brave enough to flirt in front of me – because she demanded it.

  I left them to it.

  The Happy Lunch was always full now. People stood outside on the sidewalks, leaned against jalopies and carts – their jackets frozen to the paintwork. They walked hard miles into town, came out of their way and time to buy nothing that couldn’t wait. I knew what was happening. They were waiting for us, me and the half-sister. They had to see us. And, once they did, they turned to one another. They walked into town, these people, but they ran home. They prayed for the dark, for the livestock and kids to be fed and bedded. And sometimes, often, they didn’t wait; they couldn’t. Elderly couples fucked in weak daylight, and standing up, for the first time in lives that started during the Civil War – the American one. It took me a while to cop on but she was on to it from the beginning. She made an industry of it.

  And soon – we’d tumbled into the new year, January, February – we had money worth counting. I bought myself a coat and we had a coal fire in a better room, over the hotel kitchen, a room drenched in heat and fat smells.

  —These patsies sure seem to have taken to us, said the half-sister.

  This was true, and it wasn’t. The town itself hadn’t really noticed yet. Sweet Afton was home to the young and the professional classes, and a very small Niggertown across the tracks and creek. The professional men had running water, boilers, insulation. The half-sister never got to their wives’ soft palms. And the young lads who worked in the bagging plant, the slaughterhouse and foundry knew a sweetie when she walked herself past the double doors; they loved to hoot as they watched her arse turn the town’s one real corner. But they weren’t desperate for her magic. A good gawk kept till later, and they were too young to be sentimental. It annoyed her a bit, but she understood.

  —They ain’t the market, I guess.

  The farmers and their ladies were that. This was a small town, not a small city. It could survive without the foundry. It could do without the bagging plant. The bags and galvanised iron would come from elsewhere, anywhere, and the men and women who worked there would move on to bigger places, Nobleboro, Gloversville, Albany, and further, to Boston o
r New York. The town might miss them and cry a bit as the train pulled out, but the town could hang on and even thrive without them. But the town couldn’t do without its county. If the families didn’t come in on Saturdays, the town died. If they didn’t break their ploughs and need them mended, if they didn’t need axle grease, piece goods, wire for their fences, schooling for their children, Sweet Afton was fucked. It was a farmer’s town. The townies sneered and the farmers let them because they knew that it was they who called the real shots. There were hundreds of them out there, surrounding the town. If the farmers went down, if depression, flood or locusts took them, the town went with them. They knew it and the town knew it.

  Which is why the fourth tooth I ever pulled belonged to Norris.

  He pressed the gun barrel into my neck. The heat of its recent use burned and taunted me – Get out when you smell the cordite.

  The half-sister was out on her rounds, and this particular Friday the wind had its dogskin coat on; it was fuckin’ freezing. Aaron Hardwick looked out the window at nothing. It was dark and by staring at the glass he could gawk at the half-sister where she sat at the table Aaron himself had made in 1897. She’d just quietly told the missis, Cora, that she could see five grandchildren and a new coat in the lines that fought for space on the palm of Cora’s right hand. She knew that Aaron was giving her the eye. The other eye was glass. The real one, blue, was lost when some barbed wire, new bought from Norris, had jumped back at him as he cut it, seven years before. Aaron was smitten, had been since the first time he’d laid the good eye on her.

  —His words, daddy, not mine.

  She stood up, and slid into her coat.

  —You can’t walk back to town, said Aaron as he gazed out at the weather he couldn’t see. —We can’t let you do that.

  And Cora Hardwick cheerfully agreed; Aaron would drive her into town. He was one of the bigger farmers, comfortable, well respected; he had a flatbed truck that went and stopped when he wanted it to. So, in went the half-sister, tight beside Aaron. Aaron took them over the humps and holes that were most of the road to Sweet Afton, and talked all the way, and faster as she leaned across him and wiped the windscreen with her sleeve.

  —How come you never whimper, daddio? she asked me, later, three seconds before I did.

  He spoke about the farm, the truck, his eye.

  —That son of a bitch sold me wire that had a weakness in it, he told her.

  —The glass one’s kinda cute, Farmer Hardwick, she told him.

  —Nice of you to say that, young ma’am, said Aaron, —but it itches like by crikey. Not the glass, understand. The hole behind it. Too old to get used to it, I guess. It pesters me all times of the day. And night. To the extent that tears have rolled out of this empty socket, and I never did cry when the eye sat there. You explain that, ma’am?

  —Nopie.

  He rolled on and on. He told her about his great-grandaddy who had come over from Scotland, about his own hatred for all men who made moonshine, made or imbibed or profited by it, about his three children and their whereabouts, one at home, one married into a farm, south a spell from Rome, the New York one, and the last child, not the youngest, just the hardest to talk about, dead from the army, in Belgium over there, seven years gone now and it didn’t hurt any less.

  —Like the eye, she said, and he agreed.

  Then he told her, as the truck hit Main Street, that some folks in this town, naming no names, were about too big for their boots, that Cora surely appreciated her visits, that the truck had never let him down, and that he loved her, the half-sister; as a matter of fact he’d loved her since he’d first laid the good eye on her, and that his tooth was aching so bad it was knocking the top of his block clean off.

  —Know what? she said. —Those tears you were talking about? They’re from your son. Messages from beyond.

  And she saw them now for herself. Aaron’s tears. They rolled out from under the glass, and sent the eye off course; the pupil turned in on Aaron. Big baby tears, so fat and heavy they fell off Aaron before they reached his beard.

  He stopped the truck outside the hotel and cried. I saw the truck windows draw curtains of steam as I looked out from our window. Behind the steam, Aaron cried and cried. She put a finger to a tear and brought it to her mouth.

  —Sweet, she said – she told me all – when she’d sucked the tip and put her hand on his shoulder.

  He took the eye out and tried to dry it on his sleeve. It dropped to his lap. She picked it up. She blew on it. She dried it, turned it slowly in her fingers, dabbed it with the hem of her dress. She kissed the pupil, brought it to Aaron’s socket and popped it right back in.

  —Sweet Jesus, said Aaron.

  He gulped, looked at his lap, gulped again.

  —Thank you, ma’am, he said. —Thank you.

  He wiped his cheek. There were no more tears.

  —I guess I won’t be complaining about that itch again. Already starting to love it. Thank you.

  He gulped again.

  —Thank you.

  —Know what I think? she said.

  She’d done her homework; she’d been listening to Cora.

  She took his hand and straightened out the fingers. She’d never seen lines quite like them, scars and welts, fifty-more years of farm living. The lines themselves meant nothing to her – lifelines, heartlines – she couldn’t read them; there was nothing there to read. But the market demanded, so she sent her finger strolling along, pretending to explore and understand.

  —I think you lost your eye the exact same time that your boy got killed.

  —I’m ahead of you there, young ma’am, he said, and smiled. —Thought the same thing myself not three minutes ago. And, got to say, it’s a huge weight off of my soul.

  —How’s the tooth?

  —Still there.

  —Not better?

  —Far from.

  —See, she said. —The tooth ain’t part of the deal. That’s just a regular ache, nothing special about it. And I know the sport’s going to get rid of it for you.

  I watched her climb out of the truck. The whole town watched. Then she stood in the street and shook her hair, parked my hat and turned. She gave Aaron a wave and trotted up both steps, into the hotel.

  Aaron drove home to Cora. She saw the tiny lipstick heart in the pupil of his glass eye and she fell into his arms. He drilled her on the kitchen table, on the stairs and up against the dresser. The fourth time Aaron came she was aiming his langer at a picture of Teddy Roosevelt, and he knocked the man clean off the wall.

  She told the half-sister. The day after.

  —Pow, said the half-sister.

  —Just fancy, said Cora.

  The half-sister told me about it, that night.

  —Reckon I did a good day’s work there, she said.

  —A good deed?

  —No harm if it’s a profit-maker, she said. —And it is. Think I’m getting soft?

  —Any softer you’ll float away.

  —Don’t bank on it, daddy. But it is kinda nice, spreading a little happiness. And there now, talking of which.

  And I began to wonder if there wasn’t real magic there. It wasn’t the palms or coffee grounds, but I wondered if she could really read, without the usual props of the con. She could feel those knots of unhappiness; and it was easy enough, then, to untie them. And I wondered if some of that magic didn’t come from me, from rubbing up to me. It was coming back, the feeling – the glow. I was, remember, the miracle baby. I’d made women feel special, not that long ago, as they gazed down at me in my padded zinc crib. I could still see and feel their eyes years after they walked away, with light in eyes that had been dead for years – dead babies in unmarked holes, poverty, age, sickness, damp, husbands buried in the Empire’s muck. One look at me had given them second thoughts, had brought back forgotten songs and the happy ache between their legs. And, long after my naming –

  (My father got up, the chair fell back.

 
; —His name’s Henry, d’you hear me!

  He came over to the crib. I heard the charging tap tap. He looked down at me. I saw an angry blur, shimmering fury.

  —Henry! Henry! Shut up, Henry!

  I screamed back up at him. I shoved my terror up into his face. And he stopped. He stopped shouting at me. He picked me up.

  —There there.

  I looked for a nipple in his coat. My lips met dust and blood. I tasted awful secrets. There was another Henry, the first and real Henry, up there in the sky, a little star waiting for his mammy.

  They picked me up, fed me when they could or thought of it – but they never called me Henry. I was the shadow, the impostor. The boy, the lad, himself, he, the child. I screamed as I stretched; my glow became a crust.)

  Those women still sang and walked like they were looking forward to the next day. I remembered seeing them later, when I took over the streets of Dublin. I always knew the ones who’d queued up to see me.

  Fast Olaf’s half-sister was doing the same thing now, glowing for Sweet Afton.

  —Talking of which, she said.

  It was only when Aaron and Cora Hardwick were crawling up to bed, at three in the dark morning, that Aaron’s toothache came back to scream at him. But he didn’t give it much care as he followed his wife’s hard but well loved arse up the stairs and he leaned ahead to catch up with it. He shoved the ache aside, with his tongue. He could do that, for now. Because he knew the man who’d get rid of it for him.

  And I made a bollix of it.

  —You look the part, daddio, she said, as she settled the white coat onto my shoulders.

  I had the coat and the pliers, presents from the half-sister. I had an air about me, authority, intelligence. Men had killed because I’d told them to, and Aaron Hardwick sat well back and opened his mouth, even before I asked him. Out in the yard, away from floors and good furniture. A sack around his neck for a bib, the old chaff blowing around us.

  He opened his mouth.

  She’d told me that the poor man had a rotten tooth but now I saw the truth: all of them were fuckin’ rotten. And it was too late to run. So I looked for the tooth that looked the blackest. I reversed the pliers and tapped my choice with the handle.