Emerald Germs of Ireland

by Patrick McCabe

  “Yes, Daddy,” croaked Pat.

  His father’s eye burned into him.

  “You do, eh? What do you understand?”

  “That it’s the way a woman talks.”

  “Correct. The way a woman talks. And how do you expect to get into the army if you talk the way a woman does? How do you expect to do that if you talk like a woman?”

  Pat locked his thumbs together.

  “I don’t, Daddy,” he said, lowering his head.

  His father coughed.

  “You don’t what?”

  “I don’t expect to get into the army.”

  His father nodded.

  “That’s right. Expect nothing for it’s what you’re going to get. O, sewing shirts or mending flies—but shouldering a weapon or bashing a square? No! Do you hear me? No! What did I say?”

  “No!”

  “That’s right! Now get out there and stand in that snow for three hours until I call you in!”

  His mother rallied from beneath the dresser and tried to raise herself to her feet as she pleaded, “Ah, Victor! For the love of God don’t do that to him!”

  But it was to no avail for he felled her with another blow.

  “Ah, shut up, you!” he growled. “It’s you has him the way he is!

  Pat cut a sad shivering figure in the falling snow, an invisible sliver of ice forming in his heart as he endeavored, without success, to think of anything but his litde comrade of whom he was now entirely bereft. Beyond him the snow capped garden stretched like some heartbreaking Siberia. In that long three hours, it became clear to him that the truth about the world was that it was as a well-scrubbed void, a white emptiness that continued forever but in the end counted for absolutely nothing. He would never understand how the thing you loved could be taken from you, its place usurped by a pain so unimaginable that no words at your disposal would ever make it known to someone else. “Where is he? Where is my friend?” he croaked anew. A phrase which kept ringing, piercing like a persistent drill inside his mind as the tips of his Fingers slowly turned to stone. Just then he heard his father’s footsteps coming grinding toward him across the snow.

  “Can I look for him?” pleaded Pat. “Please, Da!”

  His father’s left eye narrowed suspiciously.

  “Look for what?” he hissed. “What are you talking about?” as he spat some phlegm onto the hard, icy snow. “Get in there till I teach you about war!”

  The Fire flickered in the library grate as Pat’s father chomped on the stem of his briar and moved the small black cannon a litde further to the east. The battle Field was arrayed with lines of Napoleonic infantrymen in perfectly formed military formations. Through a cloud of smoke, Victor McNab informed his son, “I had to execute two men once. Oh, yes.”

  In his heart, Pat McNab longed to reply, “That must have been so hard for you, dearest Father. Unskilled as you are in the art of casual brutality, I mean.” But, sadly, at that moment, he did not possess such courage, and simply found himself playing with his Fingers and replying, “Oh, really?”

  “Yes,” his father continued, “barely older than yourself I was, actually. But I knew it had to be done. It was a matter of regimental discipline, you see.”

  Pat felt a shadow falling. Not his father’s this rime, however, but one deep inside his own soul.

  “So what did you do?” he heard a whisper echo. “Bash his head in with your gun butt? Make him eat dynamite? Is that what you did, Daddy? Please tell me!”

  His father lowered his pipe and observed his son quizzically.

  “Did you say something?” he said then. “I could have sworn I heard you saying something—”

  “I said,” smiled Pat, “I said—hard as it might be, it has to be done. Everyone expects it, don’t they?”

  “That’s right, son,” his father replied. He seemed pleased now. He lit his pipe, which had just gone out.

  “And they are well aware that it takes a courageous man to do it,” he assured his son.

  “So what did you do, Daddy?” asked Pat, swinging his legs and crinkling up his eyes, a litde more confident in his father’s company now.

  “I shot him three times in the mouth,” replied Captain Victor McNab.

  A field marshal was deftly moved west as a cloud of blue smoke went skyward.

  Later that same night, a pall of gloom setled on Pat McNab as his mother tucked him into his bed. She stroked his cheek tenderly and said, “Don’t worry your head, son. It’sjust stories. Your father and these wars—he’s imagining things. You understand that, don’t you?”

  Pat hesitated. He knew his eyes were red. He could feel them. Like small pieces of meat stuck onto his face.

  “Yes, Mammy,” he said. “I think so.”

  His mother smiled maternally.

  “That’s a good boy.”

  But the truth was that Pat didn’t understand. And as the door closed softly behind his mother, he knew that he didn’t. But was still not expecting it when later that night he awoke with the moon’s light pouring onto his face and the perspiration breaking on his skin, the young soldier who had been so casually dispatched to eternity by his father appearing before him white as a corpse and saying, “He killed me. Why did he do it? Why did your father kill me?”

  He had not meant to scream. It was the last thing Pat had wanted to do that night. But it was already too late. The door of the bedroom burst open and the light from the landing filled the room. Before Pat stood his father with a heavy leather belt (of standard military issue) wrapped around his knuckles.

  “What in the hell do you think you’re doing?” he barked. “Do you want to wake the whole house? Is that it?”

  The words had left Pat’s lips before he realized it.

  “You killed him! You killed the young soldier!”

  His mother pulled her candle-wick dressing gown about her as she appeared in the doorway of the bedroom.

  “What’s wrong, son?” she cried, then, turning to her husband. “Did you hit him?”

  “No!” snarled Victor McNab. “But by the living God I will now!”

  “No, Victor! Please, no!” begged Mrs. McNab.

  “Get out of my way!” he cried, as she stumbled backward across a vacuum cleaner. “It’s you has him the way he is!”

  The noise of the whuppiting leather belt rang loud and long into the night.

  It seemed defeat had finally come to the fore behind the eyes of Pat McNab.

  Some days later, his father decided that it was time to teach Pat how to shoot a gun. They went together into the field directly across from the house and his father placed a revolver in Pat’s hand.

  “You’ve got to make sure and hold it steady,” he instructed. “Grip it good and hard and hold it nice and steady! Now!”

  The bullet lodged itself in a tree stump some hundred yards wide of the target.

  “Jesus!” cried his father. “You’d be court-martialed for that!”

  He grabbed the revolver.

  “Still—at least you’re trying,” he remarked, in a voice bearing an infinitesimal ingredient of warmth.

  The tailor-made military tunic arrived a week or so later and Pat marched rigidly up and down the library floor with his wooden rifle angled on his shoulder. His father reclined imperiously in the chesterfield, calling, “Left right! Left right! Private McNab! About turn!”

  “Sah!” replied Pat, with impressive bearing.

  “Private McNab! Fall out!” commanded his father, as Pat two-stepped off out the library door.

  The transformation in Pat seemed remarkable, but for his obsessive interest in the military history book he kept hidden in his bedroom, which contained innumerable pictures and photos savagely obliterated in what must have been some kind of maddened frenzy, die extremities of flight lieutenants and, indeed, four-star generals, reduced to a state of disfigurement by what can only be described as unmercifully applied streaks of the heaviest of lead pencil. But, apart from this, all seemed w
ell.

  It seems fanciful to suggest now that each night as Pat McNab repaired to bed he was secretly looking forward to the dreams he was about to savor, many of which concerned his father experiencing his demise in military maneuvres which would go horribly wrong. But it was true, nevertheless. And provided an explanation—simple and uncomplicated—for the smile which played regularly upon Pat’s face as he chuckled into his hands and repeated, “Go on, Germans! That’s it! Blow him up with sticky bombs and grenades!”

  His most exciting dream of all, however, it was his habit to reserve for the weekend, the Friday night upon which Pat McNab—hero!— would at last find within himself the courage to perform the deed himself.

  “Go on! Go on then, Miss Pat! Little Miss Patty!” he would hear his father sneer at him. “Do it! Shoot your own father! You great big dangerous girl, you! Oo! I’m so scared!”

  Except that it was never to happen. Not even—at least, not yet!—in the landscape of the imagination could some small glimmer of hope be sanctioned. All that happened was Pat falling to his knees as his father pushed him aside, striding past disdainfully as Pat’s mucus and tears mingled inextricably, making their way in pathetic rivers toward the hopeless churning mud into which his knees now sank.

  Sometimes, too, the most beautiful dream of all it would come, and there would be Pat sitting sadly by the fire with his litde drummer boy soldier cradled in his lap and his father (“Da!” he would call him then! Like a real boy!) being brought home from the war with a bandaged hand. Pat and his mother would hear him outside and run to the door to help him in to sit down by the fire, crying, “It’s all right, Da! We’ll look after you!”

  Why, it would be the most wonderful world of all to have lived in, if only even a tiny portion of it had happened!

  “Look at him sleeping by the fire,” Pat would hear himself say, “bandaged Da—our closest living friend, Ma,” as his mother smiled and darned a sock.

  “What do you think they did to him over there Ma?” Pat would enquire innocently then, the way any son might.

  “Blew him up, son,” his mother would reply.

  And Pat would nod.

  “It affected his nerves, didn’t it, Ma?” he’d say.

  ‘Yes, son. That’s why he beats you up with the belt and calls you names. Like saying you’re a girl.”

  And then everything would make sense. It would have all made sense and he wouldn’t feel so badly about it at all.

  “It’s hard being in the army—isn’t it, Ma?”

  “Yes, son. We’ve no idea, you and me. We shouldn’t judge your father too harshly.”

  “No, Ma. We shouldn’t,” he’d say—and feel all warm and understanding.

  Something which he would relate to his litde un soldier friend later on in the library, repeating as he stroked his red-and-blue drum, “Little tin soldier. Even if it breaks our hearts, the truth is we shouldn’t judge him.” And there would be a glittering moistness in his right eye as he contemplated his pal’s painted, impassive face and added, “Not even if he were to break our hearts on what is supposed to be the most beautiful day of the year!”

  Which is, sadly, what he did, of course. What happened was, Pat had been moping about in the snow (having foolishly been horseplaying and gone and lost his litde friend!) which had begun to fall that Xmas morning when suddenly his heart gave a leap—he could see the tip of the litde rifle bayonet protruding from behind a pile of boxes covered in the lightest blanket of snow. He was so excited that by the time he reached it he had already fallen over three times! Simply because he could not believe it had happened—he had once more found the best friend he had ever had in the whole world! On the happiest morning of the whole year! It was fantastic! It was by sheer good fortune that he did not take another tumble as he hurtled toward the back door calling out, “Ma! Ma! Guess what! You’ll never believe it! Oh boy! What news!”

  But it was news his mother was not destined to receive—not at that particular time, at any rate—for Pat found himself hesitating, to say the least, clutching his scarlet-coated companion close to his heart as his words seemed to ice over deep within his mouth when he perceived the sight which now confronted him. His mother was kneeling on one knee on the kitchen floor with both arms raised in the manner of two irregular boughs of a tree sprouting from a formidable trunk in what was clearly an effort to protect herself. His father’s eyes, as he towered above her, burned with a by now familiar fire.

  “I distinctly said medium!” he shouted. “Did I not say medium, woman?”

  “Yes! Yes, you did, Victor, but—” pleaded Mrs. McNab.

  “Yes, you did Victor, but! Yes you did Victor but!’ If you were in the army they’d strip you of whatever godforsaken miserable rank you possessed and make you run the gaunttlet! And these—you call these Brussels sprouts? Well—do you?”

  “Yes, Victor! No, Victor!” was Pat’s mother’s hapless reply.

  “’No, Victor!’ Well ‘no Victor’ is exactly the right answer! For you know what I call them? Mush! What’s that I said, woman?”

  “Mush, Victor!”

  “Correct. And as for the rest of this muck masquerading as Christmas dinner, why you wouldn’t feed it to a barrack house rat! To a what, madam?”

  “To a barrack house rat, Victor!”

  “Clever girl. Now take it away and cook it again!”

  It may be that the relentless stress—for what else can you call it—of this particular period in Pat’s life could not have possibly have concluded but in the manner which it did. Or it may be that it was Pat’s proximity to his mother’s side on that particular evening as the tears (tears the size of plums, he reflected) rolled down her cheeks and onto the paisley patterned material of her dress which tipped him “over the edge,” for want of a better expression. Either way, the shift within Pat McNab’s soul which occurred in the kitchen that night, while if to others imperceptible, can for him be described as nothing short of seismic. As he trudged, his feet gradually acquiring, it seemed, the consistency of molten lead, his earlier anodyne reassurances to his mother (he had insisted that everything would be “all right”) now draped themselves about his body like chains. Thus it was a nine-year-old boy who seemed to weigh close on fourteen stone who climbed in beneath the covers of his bed on that eventful Xmas night. One which, almost within seconds of Pat’s head touching the pillow, was about to prove even more so. Eventful, indeed, beyond one’s wildest dreams, perhaps—the tiny crimson glow which slowly became apparent, expanding until it illuminated the entire room with a phosphorescence best described as immense! It was as if the diminutive musician had been consumed by a conflagration ignited from within yet utterly disproportionate to his size! Pat could barely conceal his excitement as he clutched the covers and leaped up in bed. For his best friend of all time was actually speaking now—addressing him! With litde lips that moved up and down, and small, perfectly formed wooden teeth through which emerged the words, “You know what we’re going to have to do, Pat, don’t you?”

  Initially, the toy’s appointed custodian was so taken aback that his reply was litde more than a dry, inaudible husk of sound anonymously lodged at the back of his throat. But soon, through a supreme effort on his part, this formed itself into the word “What?” a tingling beginning at the base of his spine as soon as the completed sentence—phlegmatically delivered by the miniature military man—”We’re going to have to kill him” reached his ears.

  Pat’s heart began to beat with great rapidity. Counterpane tassels were attacked with some fierceness.

  “But how, litde tin soldier? You’re just a peaceful litde drummer boy! Surely it would be impossible for you to kill someone!” he pleaded.

  The litde drummer boy nodded.

  “Yes it is, Pat,” he said. “But I’ve seen it done so often I really think I could be of some help in that area!”

  Pat’s eyes brightened as the moon’s light glanced off them.

  “You could?” he sai
d.

  The military man/toy nodded again, with a renewed enthusiasm that was unmistakable.

  “Yes! I could keep watch and if you got frightened I could encourage you to keep going, saying, ‘Do it now, Pat! Do it!’ and so on.”

  Pat clutched the coverlets close to his chest.

  “Oh, litde tin soldier! Little drummer boy! No!”

  “And play the drum so you’d keep going until the deed was done!”

  “Tin soldier! It’s impossible! I can’t! I simply can’t!”

  The miniature percussionist’s voice was low and tender.

  “I saw your mother crying today,” he said, adding ominously, “again.”

  Pat plunged his head into the pillow.

  “I hate him!” he wept bitterly. “I hate my father!”

  “He punched her in the stomach. I saw him!”

  “Why! Why does he do such things?” howled Pat.

  “I saw him make her crawl around on all fours with a potato in her mouth. It was terrible!”

  “No! Please tell me it’s not true!”

  “He made her call him general. ‘Call me general!’ he said. ‘General, Pat!’”

  “He’s not a general!” squealed Pat, leaping up in the bed. “He’s only a stupid old captain!”

  It was but moments later that a familiar, booming voice rang out across the landing.

  “What the hell’s going on, waking up the whole house on a Christmas night!”

  The door of the bedroom shot open and Pat found himself confronted by a slavering hulk in a dressing gown. Stabbing its index finger fiercely in the direction of the small, brightly colored figure now clutched tightly to Pat’s chest.

  “Give me that thing!” snapped Pat’s father.

  The painted metal figure spun in the air, smacking against the wall and making a heartrending ping noise as it did so.

  Quite which mistake Captain McNab had made that night he was never to know, Pat found himself reflecting now, all these years later, as he stared, glitter-eyed, into the heart of the library fire. And not without the hint of a smile, either! What he had not realized, of course, and possibly was incapable of doing, was that following the perpetration of such a heinous act, the effect on his son could not but be inevitable. And so it was to prove, for now Pat—why he simply didn’t care what happened! “As a matter of fact,” he recollected now, “it was as if my father couldn’t have done me a better favor! Bestowed on me at last my own personal and private Christmas! Belonging to me and the only person who mattered to me in the entire universe—the Little Drummer Boy!”