The Best of Frank O'Connor Page 6

  ‘Midnight,’ he said. ‘They’re cutting the wires now. You fellows may as well try and get an hour’s sleep. Will I quench that candle?’

  He did so. After a little while he continued softly, to me.

  ‘There! What did I tell you? That old fellow is a devil!… You’re lying on Patrick’s bed now. They keep it made up in case he’d come back without warning – and it’s shown to everybody who comes inside the door.… A queer old pair!… And they say the same blessed prayers still! I’d forgotten they’d be doing that.’

  ‘They are a queer pair,’ I said. ‘The old woman looks as if she was crushed.’

  ‘So well she might be.’

  ‘And hopeless!’

  ‘Patrick would have been crushed too if he’d stayed at home,’ Lomasney added, as if he had thought of it for the first time.

  After that it was silence. The lad beside me was asleep, as I soon knew by his regular breathing. Lomasney’s cigarette died out, and for close on an hour the two of us remained alone with our thoughts. Once we heard a distant explosion that reminded us sharply of the men who had been out since midnight, felling trees and destroying bridges. I thought of the policemen below listening to that, poor devils! Already they probably knew there was something in the wind, and were padding around half-dressed in their slippers, erecting a barricade behind the doors, and asking one another whether they could hold out till morning.

  At last, able to bear it no longer, I rose, and stood beside Lomasney, who was leaning with his two elbows on the windowsill, looking down at the little village in the darkness of its valley. His watch lay before him on the window-sill, loudly and petulantly ticking the moments away, and his fingers were drumming a tattoo on the sill. I saw that the barrack was in total darkness. Lomasney told me in a whisper that there had been four lights on the top of the building. All had gone out together. Someone must have heard the explosion and tried to phone.

  ‘For God’s sake, let’s get outside for a bit,’ he said with ill-suppressed excitement. ‘I’m suffocating in here.’

  We tiptoed to the door and opened it softly. Suddenly he caught my arm and drew me back, but not before I had seen something that startled me far more than his gesture. As I have said there was a ladder in the centre of the kitchen, and it gave access to a loft. Now the trap-door that covered the top of the ladder was open and a light was showing through, but even as we looked, it was closed with the utmost care, and the kitchen was in darkness again.

  I could feel the excitement of the chase working in Lomasney; his hand twitched against my arm. Then he made a bound for the ladder. It shook under his weight with a squeak; the old woman’s voice from another room was suddenly raised in bitter protest, and – I leaped after him.

  I can still see myself with my head through that trap and Lomasney standing above me with a drawn revolver. We must have looked a rare pair of grotesques in the light of the candle that old Kieran was holding – on the defensive too, for if ever there was murder in a man’s eyes there was murder in his. But what drew our attention was not he, it was the figure that lay on the straw at his feet. Bearded, emaciated, half-savage; this strange creature was lying sideways, his body propped on two spindly arms, staring dully up at us. He wore only a shirt and trousers.

  We must have been staring at one another like this for some time before Lomasney seemed to become conscious of the old woman’s shrill crying below. To add to the confusion our companion was awake and shouting hysterically at me from the foot of the ladder.

  ‘Go down and stop that woman crying,’ said Lomasney harshly.

  Old Kieran looked as though he would resist, but Lomasney stared coldly past him, pocketed his revolver, and knelt beside the man on the straw. The old man laid his candle on the dresser. I made way for him, and he climbed heavily down the ladder, without as much as a backward glance. I heard him talking to the other man, his voice charged with rage, but I did not catch what he was saying. I had eyes and ears only for what was going on in the loft. I noticed even the heap of weekly papers on the floor and the three or four child’s games like ‘Ludo’ and ‘Snakes and Ladders’ beside them.

  ‘You’d better come down too, Paddy,’ said Lomasney gently.

  I ran to help him lift young Kieran, but he waved us both aside and feebly rose without our assistance.

  ‘Have you been here always?’ asked Lomasney. ‘All these long years?’ but again the other man just waved his hands, vaguely, as though begging us not to force speech from him.

  ‘Poor devil!’ said Lomasney with an anguish of compassion. ‘Poor devil! If only I’d known it!’

  I took hold of his legs and Lomasney of one arm as we helped him down the ladder to the kitchen. A candle was lighting on the mantelpiece, and the old man, his face and beard thrown into startling relief, was sitting with his back to the ladder, glaring at the ashen heap of burnt turf on the hearth. He said nothing, but the boy’s mother, who wore an old coat over her nightdress, held out her bare arms and raised a piercing screech when she saw him. We put him sitting beside her on the settle, and she dropped into a quiet moaning, holding his two hands in hers and caressing them tenderly.

  Lomasney jerked the old man’s shoulder, and anger and contempt mingled in his voice when he spoke.

  ‘Listen to me now,’ he said. ‘I’m taking charge here from this on. And I want no more of your cleverness, understand that! You’ve been too clever too long, confound you, and now you’re going to do what I say.…

  ‘In two or three days’ time you’ll go to the city with Patrick. You’ll leave him there, and come home without being seen. After that he can come back whenever he pleases – from America that is. We won’t say anything about it, and you won’t say anything about it, and so far as anybody will know, he will have come from America. Do you understand me?’

  ‘And the policemin?’ asked old Kieran sullenly, after a moment’s silence. ‘How long do you think they’ll leave him here? Hey?’

  ‘Tomorrow,’ said Lomasney, ‘there won’t be any policemen there, please God!’

  Kieran started. He glanced from Lomasney to me and back again. A look, half cunning, half triumph, stole into his bitter old face.

  ‘So that’s what he’s here for?’ he asked, pointing at me. ‘That’s what ye’re out for? Do you tell me you’re out to ind them? Do you?’

  ‘That’s what we’re out for,’ Lomasney answered coldly, fetching his rifle and swinging it across his shoulder.

  Kieran chuckled, and the chuckle seemed to shake the whole crazy scaffolding of his bones.

  ‘And I thinking ye were only like children playmaking!’ he went on. ‘Do it, do it, and remember I’ll be on me bended knees praying to Almighty God for ye. Divil a wink I’ll sleep this night!’

  We left them, old Kieran, who seemed to be possessed of a new lease of life, grown garrulous and maddeningly friendly; the mother sitting very quietly beside her son, who had not as much as opened his mouth but down whose beard the heavy, silent tears were rolling as he gazed vacantly at the candle flame.

  Lomasney’s voice was exultant as we strode down the fields and picked our way through the wood to join the rest of the attacking party who were assembling in the village street from every house around.

  ‘Lord, O Lord!’ he exclaimed gleefully, nipping my arm with his fingers. ‘I never went out on a job with a clearer conscience!’

  And a few moments later he added:

  ‘But old Mike Kieran isn’t quit of me yet, Owen – damn me but he isn’t quit of me yet! I’m a bad judge, Owen, if we haven’t signed on our best recruit!’

  JUMBO’S WIFE

  I

  WHEN HE had taken his breakfast, silently as his way was after a drunk, he lifted the latch and went out without a word. She heard his feet tramp down the flagged laneway, waking iron echoes, and, outraged, shook her fist after him; then she pulled off the old red flannel petticoat and black shawl she was wearing, and crept back into the hollow of the bed. But
not to sleep. She went over in her mind the shame of last night’s bout, felt at her lip where he had split it with a blow, and recalled how she had fled into the roadway screaming for help and been brought back by Pa Kenefick, the brother of the murdered boy. Somehow that had sobered Jumbo. Since Michael, the elder of the Kenefick brothers, had been taken out and killed by the police, the people looked up to Pa rather as they looked up to the priest, but more passionately, more devotedly. She remembered how even Jumbo, the great swollen insolent Jumbo had crouched back into the darkness when he saw that slip of a lad walk in before her. ‘Stand away from me,’ he had said, but not threateningly. ‘It was a shame,’ Pa had retorted, ‘a confounded shame for a drunken elephant of a man to beat his poor decent wife like that,’ but Jumbo had said nothing, only ‘Let her be, boy, let her be! Go away from me now and I’ll quieten down.’ ‘You’d better quieten down,’ Pa had said, ‘or you’ll answer for it to me, you great bully you,’ and he had kicked about the floor the pieces of the delf that Jumbo in his drunken frenzy had shattered one by one against the wall. ‘I tell you I won’t lay a finger on her,’ Jumbo had said, and sure enough, when Pa Kenefick had gone, Jumbo was a quiet man.

  But it was the sight of the brother of the boy that had been murdered rather than the beating she had had or the despair at seeing her little share of delf smashed on her, that brought home to Jumbo’s wife her own utter humiliation. She had often thought before that she would run away from Jumbo, even, inher wild way, that she would do for him, but never before had she seen so clearly what a wreck he had made of her life. The sight of Pa had reminded her that she was no common trollop but a decent girl; he had said it, ‘your decent poor wife,’ that was what Pa had said, and it was true; she was a decent poor woman. Didn’t the world know how often she had pulled the little home together on her blackguard of a husband, the man who had ‘listed in the army under a false name so as to rob her of the separation money, the man who would keep a job only as long as it pleased him, and send her out then to work in the nurseries, picking fruit for a shilling a day?

  She was so caught up into her own bitter reflections that when she glanced round suddenly and saw the picture that had been the ostensible cause of Jumbo’s fury awry, the glass smashed in it, and the bright colours stained with tea, her lip fell, and she began to moan softly to herself. It was a beautiful piece – that was how she described it – a beautiful, massive piece of big, big castle, all towers, on a rock, and mountains and snow behind. Four shillings and sixpence it had cost her in the Coal Quay market. Jumbo would spend three times that on a drunk; ay, three times and five times that Jumbo would spend, and for all, he had smashed every cup and plate and dish in the house on her poor little picture – because it was extravagance, he said.

  She heard the postman’s loud double knock, and the child beside her woke and sat up. She heard a letter being slipped under the door. Little Johnny heard it too. He climbed down the side of the bed, pattered across the floor in his nightshirt and brought it to her. A letter with the On-His-Majesty’s-Service stamp; it was Jumbo’s pension that he drew every quarter. She slipped it under her pillow with a fresh burst of rage. It would keep. She would hold on to it until he gave her his week’s wages on Friday. Yes, she would make him hand over every penny of it even if he killed her after. She had done it before, and would do it again.

  Little Johnny began to cry that he wanted his breakfast, and she rose, sighing, and dressed. Over the fire as she boiled the kettle she meditated again on her wrongs, and was startled when she found the child actually between her legs holding out the long envelope to the flames, trying to boil the kettle with it. She snatched it wildly from his hand and gave him a vicious slap across the face that set him howling. She stood turning the letter over and over in her hand curiously, and then started as she remembered that it wasn’t until another month that Jumbo’s pension fell due. She counted the weeks; no, that was right, but what had them sending out Jumbo’s pension a month before it was due?

  When the kettle boiled she made the tea, poured it out into two tin ponnies, and sat into table with the big letter propped up before her as though she was trying to read its secrets through the manila covering. But she was no closer to solving the mystery when her breakfast of bread and tea was done, and, sudden resolution coming to her, she held the envelope over the spout of the kettle and slowly steamed its fastening away. She drew out the flimsy note inside and opened it upon the table. It was an order, a money order, but not the sort they sent to Jumbo. The writing on it meant little to her, but what did mean a great deal were the careful figures, a two and a five that filled one corner. A two and a five and a sprawling sign before them; this was not for Jumbo – or was it? All sorts of suspicions began to form in her mind, and with them a feeling of pleasurable excitement.

  She thought of Pa Kenefick. Pa was a good scholar and the proper man to see about a thing like this. And Pa had been good to her. Pa would feel she was doing the right thing in showing him this mysterious paper, even if it meant nothing but a change in the way they paid Jumbo’s pension; it would show how much she looked up to him.

  She threw her old black shawl quickly about her shoulders and grabbed at the child’s hand. She went down the low arched laneway where they lived – Melancholy Lane, it was called – and up the road to the Keneficks’. She knocked at their door, and Mrs Kenefick, whose son had been dragged to his death from that door, answered it. She looked surprised when she saw the other woman, and only then Jumbo’s wife realized how early it was. She asked excitedly for Pa. He wasn’t at home, his mother said, and she didn’t know when he would be home, if he came at all. When she saw how crestfallen her visitor looked at this, she asked politely if she couldn’t send a message, for women like Jumbo’s wife frequently brought information that was of use to the volunteers. No, no, the other woman said earnestly, it was for Pa’s ears, for Pa’s ears alone, and it couldn’t wait. Mrs Kenefick asked her into the parlour, where the picture of the murdered boy, Michael, in his Volunteer uniform hung. It wasdangerous for any of the company to stay at home, she said, the police knew the ins and outs of the district too well; there was the death of Michael unaccounted for, and a dozen or more arrests, all within a month or two. But she had never before seen Jumbo’s wife in such a state and wondered what was the best thing for her to do. It was her daughter who decided it by telling where Pa was to be found, and immediately the excited woman raced off up the hill towards the open country.

  She knocked at the door of a little farmhouse off the main road, and when the door was opened she saw Pa himself, in shirtsleeves, filling out a basin of hot water to shave. His first words showed that he thought it was Jumbo who had been at her again, but, without answering him, intensely conscious of herself and of the impression she wished to create, she held the envelope out at arm’s length. He took it, looked at the address for a moment, and then pulled out the flimsy slip. She saw his brows bent above it, then his lips tightened. He raised his head and called, ‘Jim, Liam, come down! Come down a minute!’ The tone in which he said it delighted her as much as the rush of footsteps upstairs. Two men descended a ladder to the kitchen, and Pa held out the slip. ‘Look at this!’ he said. They looked at it, for a long time it seemed to her, turning it round and round and examining the postmark on the envelope. She began to speak rapidly. ‘Mr Kenefick will tell you, gentlemen, Mr Kenefick will tell you, the life he leads me. I was never one for regulating me own, gentlemen, but I say before me God this minute, hell will never be full till they have him roasting there. A little pitcher I bought, gentlemen, a massive little piece – Mr Kenefick will tell you – I paid four and sixpence for it – he said I was extravagant. Let me remark he’d spend three times, ay, and six times, as much on filling his own gut as I’d spend upon me home and child. Look at me, gentlemen, look at me lip where he hit me – Mr Kenefick will tell you – I was in gores of blood.’ ‘Listen now, ma’am,’ one of the men interrupted suavely, ‘we’re very gratefu
l to you for showing us this letter. It’s something we wanted to know this long time, ma’am. And now like a good woman will you go back home and not open your mouth to a soul about it, and, if himself ask you anything, say there did ne’er a letter come?’ ‘Of course,’ she said, ‘she would do whatever they told her. She was in their hands. Didn’t Mr Kenefick come in, like the lovely young manhe was, and save her from the hands of that dancing hangman Jumbo? And wasn’t she sorry for his mother, poor little ’oman, and her fine son taken away on her? Weren’t they all crazy about her?’

  The three men had to push her out the door, saying that she had squared her account with Jumbo at last.

  II

  At noon with the basket of food under her arm, and the child plodding along beside her, she made her way through the northern slums to a factory on the outskirts of the city. There, sitting on the grass beside a little stream – her usual station – she waited for Jumbo. He came just as the siren blew, sat down beside her on the grass, and, without as much as fine day, began to unpack the food in the little basket. Already she was frightened and unhappy; she dreaded what Jumbo would do if ever he found out about the letter, and find out he must. People said he wouldn’t last long on her, balloon and all as he was. Some said his heart was weak, and others that he was bloated out with dropsy and would die in great agony at any minute. But those who said that hadn’t felt the weight of Jumbo’s hand.

  She sat in the warm sun, watching the child dabble his fingers in the little stream, and all the bitterness melted away within her. She had had a hard two days of it, and now she felt Almighty God might well have pity on her, and leave her a week or even a fortnight of quiet, until she pulled her little home together again. Jumbo ate placidly and contentedly; she knew by this his drinking bout was almost over. At last he pulled his cap well down over his eyes and lay back with his wide red face to the sun. She watched him, her hands upon her lap. He looked for all the world like a huge, fat, sulky child. He lay like that without stirring for some time; then he stretched out his legs, and rolled over and over and over downhill through the grass. He grunted with pleasure, and sat up blinking drowsily at her from the edge of the cinder path. She put her hand in her pocket. ‘Jim, will I give you the price of an ounce of ’baccy?’ He stared up at her for a moment. ‘There did ne’er a letter come for me?’ he asked, and her heart sank. ‘No, Jim,’ she said feebly, ‘what letter was it you were expecting?’ ‘Never mind, you. Here, give us a couple of lob for a wet!’ She counted him out six coppers and he stood up to go.