“But he’ll murder us if we stop.”
“Let him murder. We can pick no more. We’ll have to cover the heap before we go in, that’s all.”
“But I’m afraid.”
“It’s alright. I’ll tell him when I go in. There’s no need to be afraid.”
“I don’t want to go in,” it was Mona.
“It’s not the end of the world, you know, they’re only bloody spuds when all is said.”
But why had things to happen as they did, why could there not be some happiness, it’d be as easy.
“As I was going to the fair of Athy I met nine men and their nine wives, how many were going to the fair of Athy?”
“Only the one, the rest were coming.”
“Aren’t you clever now of the County Roscommon?” and they were beginning to laugh.
They had to tidy still the face of the pit and it looked strange no matter what. The long pyramid sloped palely upwards to the edge, the sides washed white, gleaming blobs of flesh in the rain. They covered it with the green rushes, and weighed them down with shovelfuls of clay.
“God, Ο God, Ο God,” they started to mimic, it was an old game between them, it brought relief.
“In the County Home you’ll finish up and don’t say then that your father didn’t warn you.”
“Wilful waste is woeful want. God, Ο God, Ο God.”
It was very dark, the wind had risen, sweeping walls of rain across the fields. Some of the last leaves fell lightly against them as they came through the orchard. He had the lamp lit and no blinds down, so they made straight for its yellow tunnel into the night, brilliants of the raindrops flashing through.
Mahoney sat in his dry clothes in the kitchen. The fire was blazing, traces of his eaten meal were on the table, he was more tired than angry, but he felt he had to squash the accusation of them standing there in dripping clothes.
“Did you pick them all?”
“No.”
“They’ll be in a grand state if the frost comes.”
“I never saw frost and rain together.”
“Did you not now? You’re bound to know all about it too, aren’t you, and you going to college too.”
There was no attempt to answer, but Mahoney did nothing, only kept complaining.
“And did you cover the pit itself?”
“We did — with the rushes.”
“I suppose you’ll be expecting a leather medal for that much,” he jeered.
The only answer was a curse under the breath, and a turning to the room to change, to break into a fit of weeping, the hands gripping the brass railing of the bed going white. When he was calm enough to change and come down Mahoney was still nagging wearily in the kitchen.
Even he had to tire and stop sometime and when he did the uneasiness grew if anything deeper in the silence where they listened to the overflow from the tar barrels spill out on the flagstones of the street.
5
ONE DAY SHE WOULD COME TO ME, A DREAM OF FLESH IN woman, in frothing flimsiness of lace, cold silk against my hands.
An ad. torn from the Independent by my face on the pillow, black and white of a woman rising. Her black lips open in a yawn. The breasts push out the clinging nightdress she wears, its two thin white straps cross her naked shoulders. Her arms stretch above her head to bare the growths of hair in both armpits.
REMOVE SUPERFLUOUS HAIR
The eyes devour the tattered piece of newspaper as hotness grows. Touch the black hair with the lips, salt of sweat same as my own, let them rove along the rises of the breast. Press the mouth on the black bursting lips, slip the tongue through her teeth. Go biting along the shoulder over the straps to the dark pits again. She stirs to life, I have her excited, she too is crazy, get hands under her. One day she must come to me. I try to pump madly on the mattress, fighting to get up her nightdress, and get into her, before too late, swoon of death into the softness of her flesh. One day, one day, one day rising to a breaking wave, and that shivering pause on the height before the seed pulses, and the lips kiss frantically on the pillow.
“I love you, I love you, oh my love, I love you to the end of the world, my love.”
The pulsing dies away, a last gentle fluttering, and I can lie quiet. The day of the room returns, red shelves with the books and the black wooden crucifix, the torn piece of newspaper on the pillow. Everything is dead as dirt, it is as easy to turn over. I’d committed five sins since morning.
The first time it had only been a matter of pressing, just time to get on the sock before it spilled out into the sheets, the second was easy too, but after that it was resort to the imagination: Mary Moran’s thighs working against the saddle of the bicycle as she came round by Kelly’s of the Big Park with a can of milk, the whiteness and hairs of Mrs. Murphy’s legs above the canvas shoes in summer, and silk and all sorts of lace. Nylons from Cassidy’s stretched on round thighs in the Independent and REMOVE SUPERFLUOUS HAIR, it had to be concentrate and use imagination then.
Five sins already today, filthiness spilling five times, but did it matter, the first sin was as damning as a hundred and one, but five sins a day made thirty-five in a week, they’d not be easy to confess.
Bless me, father, for I have sinned. It’s a month since my last Confession. I committed one hundred and forty impure actions with myself.
A shudder started at what the priest would say.
“One hundred and forty impure actions with yourself, my child?”
Flushed cheeks was all that was left to show what I had done, and the sock. Pull it off, the wool was wet, but it’d dry. Only for the discovery once of the sock’s uses the sheet would stain grey and stiff as with starch and Mahoney might notice.
The clock beat on the lowest of the shelves, twenty past three. A great clattering army of stares were black on the yew tree outside the window, and it was time to get up and dress and go downstairs.
“No care for your shoes. Wear away. And this old fool can sit on his arse all day and fix them, Ο God, Ο God,” I could hear as I came down.
He was mending boots, the old brown apron over his lap, Joan in attendance, and the hours I stood there in the same way as she stood, the solid misery and boredom of it.
“It was sprigs I wanted; not tacks, you fool. The stupidity of this house,” and the one thing worth waiting for was to see the hammer come down on his thumb and watch him dance and suck.
The boots were bargain boots from the Autumn Sale in Curleys, always a size too large in case our feet would grow. The strips of bicycle tyre across the sole couldn’t keep them from wearing for very long, and then it was wear them down to the uppers rather than have to listen to his nagging. At night they’d have to be hidden, but if he was suspicious he’d hunt them out, the rack of lying up in bed listening to him hunting for the boots downstairs.
“Anything but tell. Wear them away and let the old fool pay. Money comes down in a shower of rain,” was the tune, and joy to fling them away in April and go barefoot on the grass, Bruen’s paddocks with a can for mushrooms, and into the whole of summer to October.
“So you managed to get up, did you? Miracles will never cease.”
“I’m alright. I’ll go to school Monday.”
“And get a relapse and more doctors?”
“I’m alright.”
“Everyone’s all right and this old fool has nothing to do but fix!”
I could do little but get books and bury myself in them at the fire, he’d resent that, but he couldn’t do much more.
A Memoriam card slipped out of the first book. A black tassel hung from its centre, miniature of her wedding photo glued to the cardboard. Her small face was beautiful, the mass of chestnut hair. The white wedding dress drooped away from her throat. She was smiling.