‘I declare to God!’
They were both still watching when they felt the ground vibrate followed by a heavy rumbling from the direction of the quarry. The cubs were gone before the rumble became silence. Mercy half-pushed up onto her elbow staring after the cubs:
‘Nice wee playboys,’ she said, ‘give them a month and they’ll be villains; it’s bred in them.’
She lay back closing her eyes again.
‘I suppose,’ Beth said, ‘we should go.’
‘Go, go, go! The mother says it’s a class of slavery.’
‘What is?’ Beth asked.
‘All the “go” what we’re at now and every day, slaves to the fire, luggin’ grub miles to feed men, baking and boiling and cooking, and sloisterin’ with buckets and mops, Sunday to Sunday, Christmas to Christmas: men, dogs, pigs, hens, cats, calves and then childer till they’re fit to fend for theirselves and then we’re fit for nothin’ but the chair in the corner or the box in the ground. “It’s a wonder to God,” she said, “there aren’t more hoors in the world: it’s a short life they have, but more sport in one week than most of us have in a lifetime!” Then she said, “God forgive me, I could be damned for sayin’ the like,” so we all prayed the beads twice over that night so as the Mammy wouldn’t burn for praisin’ hoors!’
Through laughter, Beth said:
‘If we hadn’t this to lug to the bog, we’d have missed the smell of whins and the May blossom and the sun in the fields, and the fox cubs and talking here like this. She could be right though, your mother, in a way.’ Mercy opened her eyes squinting up at Beth:
‘Oh you’d need to be fierce brassy for the like of that, and begging your pardon, Miss, but I’d make a better hoor than you.’
As they were both laughing again Beth said:
‘I’m going to miss you, Mercy Boyle.’
Mercy swivelled round staring up as Beth added:
‘When we do part.’
‘Part? I’m two townlands off . . . that’s no woeful parting, is it? Unless you’re for off somewhere far?’
Beth moved and began to pick up a basket and can saying:
‘This tea’ll be tepid; they don’t like it that way.’
‘Are you Miss?’
‘We’ll talk later.’
‘Goin’ somewhere?’
‘We’ll talk later.’
When they came to the cutting bank, there was no one in sight. They could see one barrow loaded ready for wheeling and spreading, the other empty. High above, a curlew wheeled fluting, desolate, faraway. Its mate replied closer. On an upside-down slipe, they placed the cans of buttermilk, tea and baskets of bread, cold bacon and eggs. They could hear the men’s voices coming up from the floor of the bog. Mercy went to the edge of the bank to call them. The three men were about twelve feet down. Jim Ruttledge seemed to be digging sideways into the face of the bog with his slane. Mickey Dolphin hunkering, watched. Mercy’s brother Gerry was on all fours, peering to see what Jim Ruttledge was digging out.
‘What are yis at?’ Mercy called down.
No one answered. Mickey Dolphin glanced up and motioned with his hand, much as to say, ‘not now’ or ‘go away’ or both. Mercy went back to Beth:
‘Don’t pour yet, Miss, they’re scobin’ into the bank. They’ve found somethin’ or they’re after somethin’.’
‘Did they say what?’
Mercy shook her head. Both women now went over and looked down. Mickey Dolphin looked up:
‘Jim’s hit on something; he has it near out.’
‘What is it?’ Mercy asked.
‘A go of auld bog-butter . . . or maybe someone was murdered long ago; not gold, that’s for sure.’
There were five, deep, rough-cut steps shaped out of the bank. The girls went down and stood watching Jim Ruttledge who had now hived a neat bole over what looked like a lump of wet black leather. With both hands, he was taking out fistfuls of blackish debris clinging to the back, top and sides of the buried bulk. He then put both arms around his find, removed it and walked toward the steps. All followed. The wrapping leather was removed revealing butter which looked white as lard, mottled with tiny black and green choppings of herb. Each of the men in turn hooked a forefinger or nail into the butter and smelled, wrinkling their noses. When Beth and Mercy did the same, they looked at each other:
‘I’d as lief take dry bread,’ Mercy said.
‘There’s wild garlic in it,’ Beth said, smelling again.
‘Aye,’ Jim Rutledge said, ‘the men and weemen that milked the cows, and buried this, are dust this brave time theirselves.’
‘They’d be quare and agey if they weren’t,’ said Mickey Dolphin.
All laughed and Mickey went on, as mugs of tea and food were passed around:
‘I seen me above in the home place and we dug up a wad of butter and it twice as big as this one here.’
‘Twice as big?’ Jim Rutledge asked.
‘Aye,’ Mickey said, ‘and sour too like this, and there come two men up from Dublin, scholars they were, to view it and weigh it and they had to see where it was dug, and then they had to trick and test and measure and God knows what all, and in the latter end one scholar, the younger man, declared it could be buried there before Saint Patrick come here. The auld man, the professor, he stepped farther back, “it could be down there,” says he, “before Christ came into the world, at all, at all”.’
‘Maybe those wise men should be told about this find,’ Jim Ruttledge said winking.
‘For why?’ Mickey asked. ‘To be tortured with questions? It’s no buried child, it’s a lump of butter; we don’t need codgers in bowler hats to tell us what we know: it’s bog-butter.’
‘What’ll you do with it, Jim?’ Mercy asked.
Jim Ruttledge pushed the turf barrow sideways, put a smear of the bog-butter on the axle bearings and spun the wheel:
‘That’s all it’s fit for now: greasing axles and feedin’ pigs.’
‘Poor Albert missed that feed!’ Mickey said. ‘And didn’t he go off horrid noisy in the end.’
‘You’d be noisy too,’ Jim Ruttledge said, ‘if there was three men holdin’ you down for Blinky to cut your throat.’
After laughter and out of nowhere, Gerry Boyle said:
‘March’ll search’
‘And April try’
‘It’s May’ll tell’
‘If you live or die.’
‘If that’s true,’ Jim Rutdedge said, ‘pray God we stagger on to the month of June.’
Tea was poured. The men sat and wiped sweat from their eyes with sleeves and shirt-tails. Beth added sugar to the mugs, stirring. The early-evening sun was in the bog and a cool wind came from the north; weather to dry turf without the labour of turning. The men’s faces were reddened by sun, arms scorched to the elbow, eyes dazed from work. Nobody said anything much till they had eaten all the food in the baskets and drunk three or four mugs of tea each. High above the slurping, eating and burping, the curlew wheeled, piping. Shading their eyes against the sun, the girls looked up. They could not see it against the blinding brightness. Neither began to eat or drink until the men were replete. When they did, the talk was of bog-finds and infanticide, of Parnell and Lord Leitrim, of Percy French and Martin Luther, of pishogues and miracles, of cockfights and hunts, of the power of the priests, of the weather, of horses, of Lord Erne’s new American bride at Crom Castle, of America itself, of emigration, of the caves under the ground where they sat and the mad Frenchman down there mapping them, of cures and remedies for the jaundice, the sprain, the shingles, the piles, for sterility, the wonder of wells, mountains and fountains, the tragedy of the old famine of forty-eight, of the present near-famine in the west.
As always, there was edginess between Mickey Dolphin and Jim Ruttledge; some of it good-natured, some of it less so. When it was learned that Mickey would be leaving the bog early to get ready for Enniskillen and the Percy French concert, Jim Ruttledge’s spikiness became obvious.<
br />
Mickey was saying that old Grue the hedgemaster told him once it was an Irishman showed the Roman engineers how to make the great roads of the empire.
‘How is it,’ said Jim Rutdedge, ‘we’ve such poor sign of them here?’
‘If we had the reins in our own hands,’ Mickey said, ‘you’d see silver chariots here on golden roads to blind the world.’
‘More like,’ says Jim Rutdedge, ‘you’d make a hames of the whole show . . . that’s if you were fit to make a hames.’
There was laughter which Mickey did not join. After quite a silence he said:
‘Now there’s a thing.’
‘What thing is that?’ Jim Rutdedge asked drily.
‘There’s a man and that man’s not too far from here; you could say straight out he was in this bog. You can go stronger and say he’s close-by; he’s here.’
‘Giveover the wandery talk, Mickey; spake your spake, say out what’s in your head.’
Mickey Dolphin was not to be deflected from the shape, pace and intention of what was in his head, and how he wanted to tell it:
‘One night that man above in the kitchen at Clonoula said: “Your Pope in Rome could be a construction, he could be a made-up thing, a make-believe, a class of scarecrow.”’
‘That sounds like me,’ Jim Rutdedge said smiling.
Mickey turned to Beth:
‘You were three years down there, below Rome, Miss, you can tell us now: is the Pope a scarecrow or God’s first and proper man?’
‘The Pope,’ Beth said, ‘is the Bishop of Rome.’
‘Did ever you see him?’ Mickey asked.
‘Once, with a hundred thousand other people.’
‘And could you see his face, could you look in his eyes?’
‘He was very far away, like a small white cloud.’
Jim Ruttledge was pursing his lips to suppress open grinning:
‘It’s the roundy-hatted lads,’ he said, ‘in the purple frocks, they poke the fire; the Pope’s only a puff of smoke.’
‘And what could an auld black Protestant like you know about the lek of that?’
For a moment the talk seemed to cross the ditch of banter into the sheugh of insult. Jim Ruttledge refused to respond. He took his time before saying:
‘I know enough to stay away . . . to stand on my own hind legs and think for myself. I’m not on my knees; I’m free to say: “that’s alright . . . or . . . that’s a cod”.’
‘Are you saying our Pope’s a cod?’
‘More of a whale,’ Jim Ruttledge muttered.
In the laughter that followed, Mickey Dolphin was too annoyed to enjoy the teasing. Determined not to lose the argument he turned again to Beth for help:
‘What do you say Miss?’
She looked from Jim Rutdedge’s weathered face that seemed cut out of wood or stone, to Mickey Dolphin’s doggy bloodshot eyes under a fringe of black hair:
‘Does any of it matter?’ she asked.
Jim Ruttledge said very quickly:
‘Oh be God it matters, it matters who’s in charge and it matters to the death.’
Gerry Boyle smiled now, showing his brilliant white teeth as he stuttered out:
‘Meadowsweet to bring on sleep
And burdocks for the ass.’
His mouth stayed open foolishly as he stared at his sister. Clearly he had forgotten the lines that followed. Mercy prompted without looking at him: ‘No thatch can rot . . .’
‘No thatch can rot,’ Gerry continued, ‘on keep or cot that heeds the holy Mass.’
‘There’s your answer,’ Mickey Dolphin said.
Jim Ruttledge lit his pipe very deliberately before saying:
‘If there was an ass in charge of the world, it might run a bit sweeter!’
During this talk Beth and Mercy had tipped the dregs out of mugs and packed them in a basket, gathered up crusts, replaced lids on cans of tea and buttermilk. Mickey Dolphin asked for the time. Jim Ruttledge took out his pocket-watch and said it was just gone half-past five . . . then both Mickey and Mercy began to rib him. Would he talk with plain people after ‘the grandeur’ of this outing? Would he be wearing his navy-blue Sunday suit or his black funeral overcoat? Would he have time to milk the cows before leaving? And certainly he could carry a share of the tea-things back to the kitchen and not leave empty handed. Jim Ruttledge leaned over and whispered in his ear:
‘If you’re in charge of the gig, Mickey, take care; it’s not the blind drunk driving the blind drunk!’
‘I can handle myself,’ Mickey said aloud.
‘I don’t doubt that,’ said Jim Ruttledge.
All watched him leave, loaded with empty cans and baskets, heading up out of the bog, a small neat man trying to walk with dignity, aware that he was being watched by smiling observers and because of this his walk was somehow comical. Jim Ruttledge stood suddenly, saying:
‘We’ve three hours of light left; that’s two weeks’ winter burning . . . come on son,’ he said to Gerry Boyle.
‘You’ve done well, Jim,’ Beth said.
‘One lucky day can make all the difference,’ said Jim Ruttledge.
Now, in the evening, on the way back, the sight and smell of May blossom was so pervasive that they stopped from time to time to take it in.
‘I could look at this forever,’ Mercy said.
Now, Beth thought, I’ll have to tell her now. Mercy had stopped. Beth had walked on a few steps. She turned and said:
‘I’m leaving, Mercy, early tomorrow, and I’ll not be back . . . and I doubt if I’ll see you again. I couldn’t leave without telling you this, without saying goodbye.’
Mercy’s mouth was open. Her eyes began to glaze over as she swallowed before saying:
‘That’s put very bare; you’ll have to give me a track more, Miss.’
‘I can’t.’
‘Does the boss know?’
Beth shook her head. They walked in silence for a minute.
‘He’ll grieve something awful . . . When you’re gone for a day it’s “Miss Beth this and Miss Beth that” . . . “Have you told Miss Beth” . . . “we don’t want to worry Miss Beth” . . . betimes it can be a quare sickener; the man dotes on you.’
‘That’s partly why I’m leaving.’
‘It’ll break the man’s heart,’ Mercy said, then added, ‘and mine.’
Almost overcome, she turned away:
‘You’re havin’ me on, Miss?’
Beth shook her head.
‘There’s no head nor tail, no sense to it.’
‘There is.’
‘Are you not happy here?’
‘I’d be happier elsewhere.’
‘You think.’
‘Yes, I do.’
After another silence, Mercy blurted:
‘You’re never runnin’ off with a fella?’
The question was so unexpected, it caused a startled blush which Beth’s ‘don’t be silly’ could not hide. There was no avoiding Mercy’s astonished eyes staring now with disbelief:
‘Jesus,’ she uttered, ‘you are! . . . you’re elopin’ . . . You’re gone all red, Miss! You’re runnin’ off with a fella . . . are you?’
Mercy continued to stare:
‘It’s never any of them dull dogs the boss brings out betimes?’
Beth shook her head.
‘Is it anybody . . . I know?’
Beth looked straight back into Mercy’s eyes and lied:
‘It’s no one anyone knows . . . least of all me.’
Mercy now knew she would not be told:
‘This is the quare turnabout . . . If you leave here I won’t stay one day, that’s for certain . . . nor one night, that’s more certain.’
Far away they could hear Billy Winters shouting. Both their names: ‘Beth! Mercy!’
‘Whisht,’ Mercy said, ‘there’s the boss.’
‘I heard,’ Beth said. ‘There’s a salad set out for him.’
‘Someone’ll have to wet him
a pot of tea.’
‘He’ll not bother with tea this evening’ Beth said, and added, ‘let him drink whiskey.’
Mercy bit her lip and giggled. In three years working at Clonoula she had never once heard Beth being disrespectful.
Again the voice called out:
‘Beth! . . . Mercy!’
‘I should go, Miss . . . maybe he wants his shoes polished.’
‘If you want . . . I’ll bring in the cows.’
They parted at a point in the beechwood where the ground was level with the roof of Clonoula. They could see rooks and daws circling high above the chimney stacks, alert and startled by the sudden sharpness of the human voice calling in the yard far below.
9
Mickey Dolphin stood in the yard looking down sideways at the cobbles, a bird listening for worms. Billy Winters stared through the yard entry in the direction of the bog and shouted yet again:
‘Mercy! . . . Beth!’
‘Where in hell are they, Mickey? If they left the bog just after you why in hell aren’t they here now?’
‘Could be they stopped on to help spread.’
‘You get washed and togged, eat something and we’ll go.’
Billy crossed the yard, went in the back door, into the scullery and through .to the kitchen. Its bareness and cleanliness angered him. One place at the scrubbed deal table was set for Mickey Dolphin. He tipped up a covering plate and looked: two boiled eggs split, radishes, chives and a slice of cold boiled bacon. From where he stood he could see through the hallway to the dining-room where a place was set for him at the top of the table identical to the place set for Mickey Dolphin. Once in the early years during an upset she had left saying ‘I prefer to eat with my own people,’ and he had muttered, ‘Aye . . . and lie with them.’
Death and Nightingales Page 10