Cold spring, p.3
Cold Spring, page 3
‘Neat poteen gives me terrible heartburn,’ he explained, raising his tumbler. ‘Here’s to Paddy, may God be good to him. We may complain about the weather, but, when all is said and done, it’s good to be alive. As Paddy himself used to say, “Nach maith a bheith beo.”’
They drank to Paddy’s memory, and in the silence that followed you could hear for a moment or two the hissing of the fire and the moaning of the wind in the chimney. Muiris smacked his lips as if to lose none of the flavour of either the cloves or the whiskey. From the way he sat in his armchair, you could tell that he considered himself to be in charge of the proceedings. He stretched out his legs and held up his glass against the light. He had a high forehead, a long, thin nose and prominent cheekbones with shadowy hollows underneath. It was the face of a man who knew his own mind and took little note of anyone else’s.
‘Paddy was a good friend to all of us,’ he began. ‘We must honour his memory by doing what is right and fitting. First, we must look after his sheep and cow until his nephew comes home, if he ever does.’
They had a long discussion to which each man contributed his pennyworth. Finally, it was decided that they would take turns looking after Paddy’s sheep and do their best to make sure that no lambs were lost. Daniel Burke, who had little practice in lambing, said he’d fodder the cow morning and evening instead. The arrangement seemed to satisfy everyone, including Muiris. He got up from his armchair and poured more poteen. This time he didn’t make himself a hot whiskey. Instead he knocked out his pipe on the hearth and filled it. Picking up the tongs, he took a coal from the fire and held it over the bowl. It was a ritual they’d all witnessed before, but still they watched as he made loud smacking noises with his lips until the desired amount of smoke began to rise.
‘Where would we be without a drink and a smoke?’ someone remarked.
‘We’d better enjoy them while we can,’ Muiris said. ‘There may be harp music in heaven but there’s no tobacco and no poteen.’
He listened in silence as they made light-hearted conversation about the nature of heavenly pleasures. After a while he shifted his weight in the chair from one buttock to the other, a sure sign of growing impatience.
‘Paddy is gone and we’re left,’ he said. ‘The priests talk about the thief in the night but now we’ve got a more deadly thief to reckon with—a thief of life. It’s up to us to make sure he gets the reward he deserves. The Sergeant isn’t making much of a shape, so what should honest men do?’
‘We must wait and let the law take its course,’ Daniel Burke said. ‘There’s a detective coming from Sligo tomorrow. We must give him all the help we can.’
‘The schoolmaster is right,’ Tom Barron said. ‘We must let the law do its job.’
‘Meanwhile there’s a murderer on the loose,’ Muiris said. ‘Has any of you thought of that?’
‘We’ll have to be careful and bolt the door every night before going to bed,’ Cormac said.
‘Like Paddy, we’re all past our best. He was no match for that young bugger,’ Muiris reminded them.
‘Paddy wasn’t expecting trouble,’ Tom said. ‘Now the rest of us have been warned, we won’t do anything foolish.’
Muiris was not impressed by their lack of purpose. He asked if anyone knew whether Paddy had kept much money in the house.
‘Paddy was like the rest of us. He had no reason to lose sleep over his few coppers,’ Cormac said.
‘Whatever he had, he probably kept in the house,’ Muiris reminded them.
‘It would be a foolish man who’d kill Paddy for his money,’ Daniel said slowly.
‘A pound isn’t much when you have it in your fist.’ Muiris raised a clenched fist as he spoke. ‘It’s a small fortune if you’re without it.’ He opened his fist and showed them the empty palm.
‘You’re right,’ Neil Durkin said. ‘We must look for a man with a pound to spend, a pound he didn’t have yesterday.’
‘Only a man with nothing to his name would kill for a pound,’ Muiris declared. ‘There’s only one man in Leaca who fits that description.’
‘We’re jumping to conclusions,’ Daniel reasoned. ‘We don’t know if Paddy had money in the house and we don’t even know if any money was taken.’
‘The Sergeant said he found twelve shillings and eleven pence in his jacket pocket,’ Tom said. ‘The jacket was draped over a chair in the kitchen. If it was money the murderer was after, he’d have taken it.’
‘Or he could have made off with the pound notes in the sock under the mattress and left the small change in the jacket to put everyone off the scent,’ Muiris said triumphantly.
‘How do we know all this?’ Daniel Burke asked.
‘Schoolmasters want proof of everything,’ Muiris told him. ‘What proof do we have that there’s a God above?’
There was silence in the kitchen for a full minute. The wind drew breath and the fire stopped its hissing. Muiris looked at the six faces before him. The faces were expressionless; they were looking into the fire as if they had not heard.
‘I’d advise you all not to leave your money lying around,’ Muiris said. ‘I’ve already hidden mine.’
‘That won’t do much good,’ Neil Durkin said soberly. ‘There was a story in the paper about an old man in England who was tortured for his money. He was a stubborn old man. He gave up the ghost before he was ready to give up his secret.’
‘Well, I’ve got the right medicine here,’ Muiris said, reaching in behind the bed curtains and drawing out a shotgun by the barrel. He patted the stock and stood the weapon against the wall by his elbow. ‘That’s the lassie will settle him. I oiled her this morning and I’ll keep her beside me in the bed every night from now on. If he puts his snout past that door, he’ll get the surprise of his life between the eyes.’
One or two of them laughed uncertainly. They all knew Muiris and respected him, but somehow they felt that he was taking things a bit far.
‘It’s the only gun in Leaca,’ Muiris said proudly. ‘So far it’s only killed crows and foxes.’
‘We’ll put round the story that you’ve got a gun at the ready,’ Daniel Burke smiled. ‘It’s one way of making sure you’re left alone.’
‘There’s nothing like a wee companion in the bed on a cold winter night,’ Cormac joked.
‘Every time you put over your hand, she’ll be there,’ Marcus Quinn smiled.
‘Ye may well laugh while ye can because it’s no laughing matter,’ Muiris said.
Marcus realised that perhaps he had gone too far in his joshing. They all knew that Muiris was sensitive on the subject of women. ‘Sure, we must be saying something,’ Marcus said in mollification.
‘The man who says something when he should say nothing doesn’t know the value of words,’ Muiris declared.
He refilled their glasses and made himself another hot whiskey.
‘I’ve asked Ambrose to help me with the lambing tomorrow,’ he said. ‘It’s one way of keeping an eye on him. He’ll hardly try to murder me in broad daylight.’
‘He’s a useful man to have around this time of year,’ Cormac said. ‘None of us is getting any younger. Where would we be without him?’
‘We can hire him on day’s pay without going soft on him,’ Muiris told them. Then he raised his glass against the light of the oil lamp and said, ‘To this year’s lambs, God bless them.’
4
Nick Ambrose didn’t like working for Muiris, but he needed the money. He didn’t need a lot of money, but he needed some to encourage Sharon to put off going to Dublin. ‘We’re down to our last half-crown,’ she’d said. ‘I’ll have to go to Dublin tomorrow unless you earn a few bob today.’ Whenever she went to Dublin, she stayed at least a week and came back in a new dress and with more than a pound or two in her pocket. She would stay with her sister, or so she claimed. In truth he didn’t know where she stayed, and he thought it best for his peace of mind not to enquire too closely. He couldn’t help wondering if all the cash came from the sale of her paintings; he was reluctant to consider how else she could get her hands on the readies so quickly. Her visits to Dublin were a personal defeat that rankled. Besides, he didn’t like having to cook for himself and Emily, especially since finding things to cook wasn’t all that easy.
Life here was not what you might call a piece of cake. In fact he hadn’t tasted cake since he and Sharon left Dublin. Still, he was determined not to complain. He loved Leaca and the people. The spume-showering sea, the wild, untameable landscape, and life pared down to mere essentials, all combined to inspire creativity. It was as if the absence of physical comforts reinforced the springs of imagination and invention. It was such a pity that Sharon could not see Leaca, even for an instant, through his poetic eye.
Sharon never knew her father and mother. She was an illegitimate child who had been adopted at birth by an elderly couple who were childless. They did their best for her, but they both died when she was only fifteen. Her upbringing had taught her self-reliance, and above all it had made her equally suspicious of men and women. Sadly, she had acquired some of the prejudices of the type of ill-begotten Dubliner who sees all country people as ‘culchies’, in other words, bog-trotters. He had done his best to make her see Muiris and Daniel and the others with an eye of innocence, but she could only associate their faces with physical hardship and the total absence of anything that might bring comfort and support.
His own upbringing in England was little better than Sharon’s. His father and mother both drowned while on holiday in Cornwall when he was only three. He was brought up by his Irish grandmother, a wizened old lady who smelt of cloves and lilted him to sleep every evening and whispered unintelligible stories in his ear. He still remembered snatches of her songs and some of the sayings she repeated over and over again, the most memorable of which was, ‘Life was nivir like this in Bally-ah-ha.’ He couldn’t be sure if he’d got the spelling right, but that was what it sounded like on her puckered lips. Snatches of her songs still came to him on the brink of sleep: Kitty, my love, will you marry me? and merrily, cheerily, noiselessly whirring… something, something, something… sounds the sweet voice of the young maiden singing.
When he was ten, his grandmother had a fall from which she never recovered. He was bundled off to live with his Aunt Betty and her husband on a sheep farm on Romney Marsh. They did not think much of his Irish grandmother, and when he was old enough to question them, they pretended to know nothing about her. You could say that he had come to Ireland in search of her, or at least to refresh his memories of her. The first thing he thought he might discover was where she’d come from. He had hoped that ‘Bally-ah-ha’ would provide a clue, but hundreds of Irish place names began with ‘Bally’ and ‘ah-ha’, his version of the Irish Ath or Atha, was equally common. His grandmother’s identity had vanished through one of the gaps of unrecorded history. He looked up records in Dublin, but she did not even qualify for a mention in the short and simple annals of her kind. He gave up hope of ever finding her beloved Bally-ah-ha. He had come to Leaca with a different objective in mind.
Quite simply, he wished to become a writer. When he told Sharon that writing was as important to him as painting was to her, she laughed and said, ‘If wishes were horses, we’d all be riders.’ The faith she lacked in him, she put in herself. He stared at the whitewashed wall and then at the blank page before him. If only the first sentence would come, the rest would follow like sheep going through a gate.
‘I’m going for a walk,’ he said. ‘I’ll be back in an hour or two.’
‘Stumped again! Isn’t it time you realised that no amount of walking will unstump you?’ She laughed at her own easy humour and blew him an ironic kiss for good measure.
He went straight up the hill, head down and arms swinging. He thought he might kill two birds with one stone—look out for some bog oak for the fire while he waited for the all-important sentence to reveal itself. His mind was a patch of proliferating weeds. If only he could grub up the slippery image of Paul Flynn from his thoughts….
When he reached the bogland plateau, he sat on a rock to draw breath. Here, among the perfect geometry of turf stacks, he knew that contentment would finally come to him. Bogs were desolate and mysterious places. The old sites of stacks long vanished resembled the graves of mythological giants from a more romantic era. The thought appealed to him. Somehow it captured the essence of this barren terrain and the imagination of a people bred to hardship and adversity. It was a place that bred truth and purity because here falsehood could find no sustenance. He loved this grey, inhospitable coast pummelled by heavy seas and unruly winds, and he loved the people who had tamed the rocky slopes, fighting for every inch of ground against colonising sedge and rushes.
Rockwell Kent’s paintings celebrated the other-worldly atmosphere of this jagged coast. Instead, Nick himself would celebrate its stoical people, men and women who had pared down life to its essentials, who had no truck with either falsity or flimflam.
The relationship from which they drew their strength was their relationship with the land and the sea, every man pulling in time, no man pulling against another, all with the same thought in mind, all bent on reaching the same destination. They helped one another in times of need and shared their meagre possessions whenever it mattered. A good man was not a plausible man but one on whom you could depend in a storm. What was meat and drink to him as a writer was the way they saw each other in terms of stories. Every man’s qualities were enshrined in the story that his name evoked. Tom Barron was a man whose word was gospel, Muiris was a man who never gave way, and Red Miller was a penny-pincher who had less need to count pennies than most.
He recalled the story of the day Red Miller went into a pub in Ardara. A stranger came up to him and asked if he knew a man called Red Miller.
‘Of course I know him. Wasn’t I talking to him only this morning,’ Red Miller said in his evasive way.
‘Next time you see him, tell him I pulled a ewe of his out of a bog hole the day before yesterday.’
‘Don’t you know I’ll tell him. I’m sure he’ll be very pleased.’
The story was told to illustrate Red Miller’s meanness. He couldn’t bring himself to say who he was and stand the stranger a drink for rescuing his ewe.
Leaca was a place of stories. He would spend his life here if only Sharon could be happy. She was lively and restless; she needed change and excitement. At times he wondered if Paul Flynn was at the back of it all. As Muiris might say, Flynn was the blister on his heel, the pebble in his shoe, and the thorn in the sole of his foot. Or to put it differently, he was the submerged rock in his life, what his neighbours called a boilg. Boilgs figured strongly in the local imagination because they were a source of danger to men in small boats and must be given a wide berth at all costs. Paul Flynn was such a boilg. He would surface in his thoughts at the most unexpected moments, and there was nothing he could do to stop him.
He could hardly think of Sharon without thinking of Flynn. Whenever she came back from Dublin, he would ask her if she’d met him. Invariably, she’d say no, and invariably he’d doubt her word. Flynn was a predator who made no distinction between young prey and old. It was said that he attended men’s funerals in order to cosy up to their widows. At one time he’d thought that by coming to Leaca, Sharon would escape his talons, and that he himself might enjoy the luxury of a mind at peace. He could not have been more misguided. Every time she went to Dublin, he couldn’t take his mind off Flynn. Sharon loved flattery, and Flynn was master of the flatterer’s art. He could flatter while appearing off-hand and matter-of-fact. And he had the knack of implying that anyone who did not agree with him lacked an appreciation of the finer things.
‘You come up here a lot. You must be fond of the old bogs.’ The voice came from behind. He didn’t have to turn his head; he recognised Cormac’s drone, which was not unlike that of a didgeridoo.
‘I come up here to think,’ he said, getting to his feet and facing his neighbour, a small, wiry man with narrow shoulders and sunken cheeks.
‘I hope I’m not interrupting.’
‘No, of course not. I was thinking that these old bogs look like graveyards. Full of mounds where vanished stacks once stood.’
‘It’s the men who cut the turf who are in the graveyard. Good men stood where we’re standing now. You must be short of turf yourself. I see you’ve only got half a stack left.’
‘It’s been a long, cold winter. On my walks I keep an eye out for bog oak for the fire.’
‘If it’s a smután you want, you’ll find a good one in my bog. The trouble is getting it out. It’s stuck in the gravel and it’s nearly twenty feet long. You’ll need a pick and a crowbar, and a saw to cut it into lengths you can carry. You can borrow my old pick and you’ll get a saw from Muiris. You’ll get the crowbar from Tom Barron, I’d say.’
‘It’s very kind of you. I’m supposed to be working for Muiris tomorrow. I’ll borrow your pickaxe the next free day.’
That’s what he liked about Leaca. They were all good neighbours together. Even Cormac, who was not his favourite neighbour, was eager to help.
‘I’ll show you where she’s lying,’ Cormac said, heading east. He led him to a flat stretch of cut-out bog where the remains of what was once a tree lay flat. After countless millennia it had been exposed in the turf-cutting, and now looked grey and weathered. The branches dug deep into the earth. He could tell immediately that it would be no easy job to dislodge it from its long resting-place.
‘You won’t mind if I have a go at it?’ Ambrose said.
