Pat coughed and looked around him.
“I think I hear someone at the back door!” he said. “I have to go in.”
“Imagine that!” continued the turfman—oblivious of Pat’s previous comments—”Someone screaming—night after night, over and over again, You did it! It was you did it!’”
“There it is again,” Pat said, inclining his head toward the back of the house.
“Shouting it without end! You did it!’ Never giving you a minute’s peace! Every time you’d turn on a light, there she’d be at the window …”
The words hung in the air as if each one was ringed with fire.
The turfman seemed to take half an hour to draw his breath. Then he lowered his head and said, “I’m sorry. I’d best be on my way. I knew I made a mistake coming here. They never liked the Ardee people about this town.”
He lifted his bag of turf and placed it across his left shoulder.
“Well—good-bye, mister. I’ll go on down to the station so and be off about my business. I hope I didn’t trouble you too much.”
Pat gulped.
“The station?” he whimpered.
The turfman contemplated his blackened thumbnail and nodded.
“Aye. I want to have a few words with the sergeant, you see. About doing a bit of digging.”
Pat’s skin grew clammy all over as his eyes instinctively traveled—as two small cameras whose lenses came to rest upon a particular spot adjacent to a laurel bush.
“Digging?” he asked, hesitantly, and somewhat hoarse.
“Aye. There’s a bog below in Ardee full of turf. But I need a permit, you see. Aye. Well—I’d best be off. I have my ass round here at the back where he’s been standing all this time. Isn’t he a patient soul? Good man, Neddy.”
Some moments later, he was gathering up the frayed rope which was tied around the ass’s head and leading the sad-eyed donkey down the lane toward the main road. But before he reached the elm tree, Pat found himself crying out, “No! Wait! Turfman—please!”
Both animal and hawker of peat hesitated.
“Eh?” he called back.
“Why don’t youse stay the night?” cried Pat. “I mean, like—it’s a long way to Ardee from here!”
The turfman shook his head.
“Oh, we couldn’t do that, now. The sergeant is below waiting for me.”
“No! Please!” Pat pleaded. “We can put on a big roaring fire and make caraway cake! Griddle bread! Toasted griddle bread—wouldn’t that be nice?”
The turfman scratched his head and said, “Now I don’t mean to be a class of what you might call ungrateful—but you wouldn’t be lying to me, would you? You wouldn’t be trying to make a cod of the Ardee man, would you?”
Standing there in a shaft of evening sunlight, Pat thought, “Oh no! Now why on earth would we do that when all they do is come about your own private place with stupid, droopy-eyed animals! Oh no, why Neddy, we’ll have to get him a mouthful of hay too, after we’ve bought some of your shitty old bags of turf!!”
Words which he did not utter, of course, or give the slightest indication of ever having harbored. Instead, rubbing his hands and buoyantly crying, “Absolutely not! Please! Please accept my invitation—both of you!”
Which, happily, they did, with the result that that very evening they found themselves as he had promised, devouring large slabs of hot, butter-soaked griddle bread and reclining beside a nice roaring fire, with Neddy giving all his attention to the hay that Pat had liberally forked for him into the plywood crate that had once housed Jaffa oranges. Pat smiled as he considered the industriously masticating jaws.
“He likes it, doesn’t he, turfman?” said Pat. “He sure does like that old hay!”
The turfman beamed.
“Oh indeed and he does! The Ardee asses like their dinner, sure enough! They’d ate you out of house and home if they were let, Pat!”
Pat handed the donkey another handful of hay.
“There you are,!” he said. “Come on now—eat up! Eat up, you auld divil you!”
There can be no doubt but that there is something idyllic about the surroundings in which Pat McNab resides—the spacious and well appointed if somewhat cobwebbed rooms and fabulous whitewashed outhouses could not but be the envy of many in these property-coveting days, not to mention the stables. Especially the stables, indeed, which in days gone by housed all the trusty steeds which ferried gentlemen in their galloping pursuits of unfortunate foxes. In the month of September, there is something particularly peaceful and poignant about the house and its surroundings, and if a visiting tourist or even just casual stroller, perhaps, happened to be passing by, they would be hard-pressed not to produce a camera and take any number of photographs to record the scene for posterity. Thoughts which occupy the mind of Pat McNab as he stands by the window once more, peering out through the curtain now that some months have passed and all is quiet again and the telltale creak of the garden gate announces no more unwanted callers. “By all means photograph my residence,” he muses, “but do not call.” Although, he had to admit, that he might have to insist that any would-be recorder for posterity make an exception of the stables. “For their sake more than anything,”—meaning the turfman and his “animal”—he murmurs as he chortles a litde into his hands. For the simple reason that he hasn’t gotten around to cleaning up the unfortunate outhouses yet! Well, actually—that’s not true. The truth is that he simply couldn’t be bothered any more! “Auld bucking ass,” he thinks, “who cares about him and his auld guts!” Who, indeed, for the scene can hardly be described as a “palatable” one. Reminiscent, perhaps, of one of these Friday the Thirteenth or Chainsaw Massacre-type films—indeed any horror vehicle specifically targeted at the youth market. It might well be argued that the outbuilding concerned is now virtually unrecognizable as a stable. For daubed across the ceiling now are huge big sploshes of blood, and in great long streaks along the side and back walls are the very same. Nailed to the half door in the most casually dismissive fashion are two crimson-stained donkey’s ears. A ghost-hunting, infrared-type camera might reveal a photographic negative impression of Pat, cold yet crazed with his pitchfork, performing a crude and primitive blood-soaked cabaret interspersed with heartrending brays and squeals. A torn halter providing a sad, heartrending epitaph. Who owns the scarlet mask that leaps into the air and raises hands now gloved with blood? It may not be, it cannot be, but is—the one known as Pat McNab!
A long way from the smiling, benevolent host whose countenance had once glowed in the firelight of a September evening as a contented visitor burped a litde and placed his plate upon the table, with the grateful remark, “Boys but that was a powerful dinner, Pat! I tell you, you wouldn’t get better in Ardee!”
As a gracious landlord replied:
“Why, I’m honored that you liked it—at least now you’re beginning to understand that all of us are not hostile toward the town of your birth.”
“No! Indeed and youse are not, it’s true, Pat!”
“And to prove it to you more, I’ve taken the liberty of supplying Neddy with a litde surprise!”
“A surprise, Pat? No!”
“Oh but very much yes! Just so long as you will make a promise!”
“A promise?”
“You’ll sing my favorite song of all!”
“Not—”
“The very one! You promise?”
“Well, what can I say? Begod and I do!”
“Hold on till I get my pitchfork! I have it here behind the door! And Neddy’s already without?”
“He’s in the stable, Pat.”
“Where you and me are going now! For we’re not going to abandon old Ned when there’s a bit of a come-all-ye in the offing! Would I be right?”
“Indeed, and I dare say you would,” the Ardee man replied, the tiniest bit flummoxed.
It is a quiet evening now. The birds are twittering brightly and clearly in the trees and the footsteps of Pat and
his visitor echo around the rectangle of a manure-covered yard. “Ah but that air would do your heart good,” he remarks. “I’ll bet it smells good all the way from here back to the station.”
“I’ll bet it does,” his visitor replies, unguardedly.
Pat lifts the pitchfork across his shoulder and places his hand on the older man’s shoulder.
“So—is the Ardee man going to sing?” he smiles as he sits himself down on a tightly packed hay bale.
“Begod and he is! He is that! Try to stop the turfmen from singing!” the County Louth man laughs.
“I wouldn’t dream of it!” laughs Pat as the mucus in his visitor’s throat rolls loud and strong and musical.
“Good man!” claps Pat as a cow—visible over the half door—leans quizzically over a hedge. “Away with you now!”
The turfman begins to tap his foot and sing, with unmatchable gusto:
We chatted very freely as we jogged along the road
He said my ass is tired and I’d like to see his bad
For I got no refreshments since I left home you see
And I’m wearied out with traveling, said the turfman from Ardee.
It is not true that the “greatest” of conversations—as attested by the first verse of the song—passed between Pat McNab and his visitor, the turfman from Ardee, at least not on that last evening in the halflight by the half-door of the stables. In fact, the only words exchanged between them on that occasion, from the moment the song concluded (“A fine rendition!” Pat had trumpeted) until the entire quota of blood had been drained from the journeyman’s face, were: “What are you doing with that pitchfork, Pat?” And ones fated to receive in response nothing other than the succinct and unadorned sentence: “Sending you back to Ardee once and for all, you interfering peddler of dirt!”
As for the animal, it too went to its doom in the same hopelessly insouciant manner which it had displayed all its life, regardless of world politics, trauma, or incident. Even Pat’s deranged cries (for how else can they be described?) along the lines of: “Carry turf now! Go on, you bollocky bucking ass! Let’s see you do it now!” failed to make any impression upon it, even as it buckled hopelessly to its knees, on its last, sad journey toward eternity’s meadow.
It may be so that Pat’s visitor upon that fateful evening one September long ago was well regarded and always had been so in the small County Louth town of Ardee, it somehow ordained that his absence not only be noted but for generations mourned with Niagaras of tears and wailing lamentations. It is indeed possible that he and his turf-bearing ass were as part of the landscape itself in their travels throughout the length and breadth of the county. But if such were the case, no evidence to suggest it ever came the way of Pat McNab who, occasionally, long after he had cleaned out the stables, and was satisfied that all trace of any event, terrible or otherwise, ever having taken place within those walls had well and truly been removed forever, would pause for a moment from his polishing (inveterate cleaner, Pat McNab!) and, satisfied once again that the sound which had distracted him had not, in fact, been the strange and lonely braying of a restless ass from some unmapped, timeless phantom zone, but the simple, insignificant whine of a broken fence post buffeted by the wind, give himself once more to his work and the soft humming, contented and protracted, of a certain popular tune from the oft unfeted county of Louth, which in its own special and unspoken way was destined to be his forevermore.
Old flames
Downtown tonight I saw an old friend
Someone who I used to take comfort from
Long before I met you
I caught a spark from her eyes of forgotten desire
With a word or a touch, Lord,
I could have rekindled that fire.
Chorus
But old flames can’t hold a candle to you
No one can light up the night like you do
Flickering embers of love I’ve known one or two
But old flames can’t hold a candle to you.
Sometimes at night I think of all the lovers I’ve known
And I remember how holding them made me feel not so alone
Then I feel you beside me, even their memories are gone
Like stars in the night lost in the sweet light of dawn.
One evening in or around five past six, Pat was conning along past Brennan’s Gap (Billy Brennan was a farmer who concerned himself mostly with milk cows) when who should he meet, only Mrs. Ellen McCrumley. Now Pat was in a little bit of a giddy mood (perhaps because of the grand stretch in the evenings—for he had only had two bottles of Guinness!) and was on the verge of saying to her, “Oh hello there, Mrs. McCrumley! And how might you happen to be getting on this evening in this wonderful Town of Liars?” Which, as he turned the corner past Ned McGahey’s welding shed, he was glad he didn’t, for he knew only too well the answer he could expect. A croaky old scrake of a whine to the effect that Mrs. Ellen McCrumley “really wouldn’t know” or didn’t “quite hear him,” perhaps. And why? Why because she herself was a citizen of the esteemed place to which he referred. The place thenceforth to be known as Town of Liars! But which it always had been, of course, as Pat well knew. Along with everyone else in Gullytown, but of course they would never admit it. Why? Simply because they couldn’t, as every time they opened their mouths all that appeared to come out was lies. “Oh yes!” Pat turned suddenly and cried, pointing his finger at Mrs. McCrumley, who was now making her way up the hill with her shopping bags, “Oh but yes, Mrs. Mac! Oh but yes, you see!”
Pat had already strode onward when Mrs. McCrumley eventually lost her balance and collapsed over a stone which had been positioned directly in front of her.
The large hand lurched toward the hour, 8:00 P.M. “Ah, time for a cigarette,” thought Pat. He was sitting in the sitting room, tapping his thumbs together and thinking things over. As he puffed on his smoke, he fancied himself explaining his thoughts to a psychiatrist of some sophistication who had been dispatched for the very purpose of conversing at length with the sole occupant of McNab Mansions. “Hmm,” continued Pat through a cloud of smoke, “you ask me how come I live in Town of Liars, Hektor?” (for that would be his name). “Well, for a start—I was born here.”
The psychiatrist’s subject examined his nails.
“My mother—Mrs. McNab, wife of Victor (how alike your names are!), carried me in her stomach, you understand—and before I knew it, here I was! Surrounded by people who wouldn’t know what the truth was if it came up to them and sat in their lap, shouting, “Hello! Truth calling!” Or perhaps you didn’t know that, Hektor? What—I’ve told you before, have I? Hektor—I do apologize. But it annoys me, you see! It really does annoy me, you see!”
Without realizing it, Pat was leaving deep indentations around the rim of his cigarette with his teeth. There were two or three tiny beads of sweat which had just appeared over his right eyebrow as he drew a deep breath and said, “And as for Mammy—my own mother—you can imagine what it must have done to her!”
There was about one-half inch of actual cigarette remaining as Pat rubbed his forehead and Hektor proceeded to meticulously inscribe notes in his lined, spiral-bound notebook. Pat sighed as he saw his mother (in his mind’s eye, of course!) approaching the telephone in her slippers once again, deep anxieties etched all over her face as she tentatively removed the receiver from its Bakelite cradle.
“Hello?” she said, with an unmistakable catch in her voice, simultaneously tapping her chest with her hand as if mimicking the flapping of a trapped bird’s wing, before seeming to fold like a piece of crumpled paper tissue, saying chokingly, “Oh dear God no!” then adding hopefully, but without conviction, “But maybe it wasn’t him, Sergeant!”
His mother stood trembling in the middle of the floor as she saw it before her clear as day, the small, dome-shaped haystack erupting, the flames as flickering fingers reflected in a pair of wild and dancing eyes. Eyes which were set, unmistakably, in the scorch-streaked face
of her son, Pat McNab!
The howls which continued throughout the beating which Pat received as a consequence of that particular incident may only be described as pitiful. “Mammy!” he screeched, “I didn’t do it! I swear! They’re all against me because they don’t like me!”
His mother raised the strap anew (it was the belt from one of her husband’s army uniforms).
“Don’t lie to me!” she snapped harshly. “Don’t lie to me, you rapscallion you, lie to your own mother! I’ll tan you within an inch of your life!”
The tears hurtled from Pat’s eyes and smacked against the floor like pieces of broken glass.
“It’s not me!” he pleaded, but in vain, adding, “It’s them, Ma! It’s them that’s lying! It’s all they ever do!”
As he sat there now finishing his cigarette, the sound of his bedroom door closing and the key being turned that evening was as an open hand laid firmly across his already burning cheek.
It was 9.30 P.M. Pat rose from his chair and repaired to the drinks cabinet. “You see, Hektor,” he continued, as he liberally poured himself a measure of Bols Advocaat, “what makes me laugh is that according to them, I was out every night of the week! Well, excuse me but just how much do you think paraffin costs?” Pat shook his head as he sipped his drink. “Tsk! Tsk!” he sighed, adding, “Dear oh dear!”
Coincidentally, the record he selected to place on the turntable of the radiogram was entitled “Old Flames.” It brought a wry smile to his face as he stood there in the middle of the parlor, its lilting words melting into the gloom:
Downtown tonight I saw an old friend
Someone who I used to take comfort from
Emerald Germs of Ireland Page 6