Wild Decembers Read online

  Squeeze the trigger —

  Exhale —

  Your heart won’t stop —

  Close the disengaged eye —

  Fire —

  Fire —

  Fire —

  He stopped then, deliberating on the crazy things a young man does.

  “Would you like to have been a soldier?”

  “I suppose I would, it’s in the blood … An uncle was shot dead twenty miles from here. Him and a comrade … His dying words would wring your heart. I’ll show them to you sometime … A priest copied them for my mother. A grand-uncle had to emigrate or face the firing squad, and a great-grandfather fought at Vinegar Hill … Wounded … He walked with a stick after that. They called him Da Stick. Brave men or foolish men,” he said, and stopped shy. A lump had risen inside him, as it always did when he fell to remembering. He thought of his plans to go away and be someone and how they got thwarted, his mother finding the letter, begging him to stay, saying that if he left what would happen, their little farm would be chopped up, like in a butcher’s shop, different people getting different cuts, strangers crossing in front of the kitchen window. So he stayed, and now there was him and Breege, the empty waiting woods when he went out at night, the suspense of it, each time like the very first time, humbled and excited, finding a reason for living, and a gleeful one at that.

  “It’s a lust … a lust,” he said then, breaking open the gun barrels.

  “You never married,” Bugler said after a long interval.

  “I nearly did … A girl called Catherine. Beautiful girl … She went off to be a nurse. She’d ring me every Saturday night … We hadn’t a phone at home then. I’d wait down in the town outside the kiosk … Ah sure, she was in one place and I in another … Hundreds of miles,” and then his voice trailed off as if he could not bear it.

  “Marriage is a big thing,” Bugler said.

  “You can broil them or roast them, whichever you fancy.”

  “I don’t deserve them … I missed.”

  “What’s yours is mine … We’re friends,” Joseph said. He had never mentioned Catherine, not in the fifteen years, even though he had often relived it, the letter, the stamp with the picture of a stout hero, and the terse words: I am moving to London. I will have better chances there. I’ll write to you when things get less hectic. Best of luck, Catherine.

  They were almost home when Bugler volunteered it, quite flat, as if it was incidental: “I’m engaged to be married.”

  “Ah stop … From the New World?”

  “From the New World.”

  “Good man. I hope she likes it, it’ll be a change, it’ll be a challenge.”

  “I like it. But will she?”

  “Out there I suppose you were on your lonesome.”

  “Not really, blokes, sheep … You muster sheep. You shear sheep. You lamb sheep. You eat sheep. You dream sheep … Then the ladies come, and before you know where you are, you’re engaged. Rosemary.”

  “We’ll make her feel at home … Breege and herself can go to the city once a month.”

  “Breege,” Bugler says, the mention of her somehow jolting him, his remembering seeing her that Sunday, walking up and down the road in good shoes and good clothes, like a girl in a picture.

  “She’s very young, isn’t she?”

  “She is … a foundling. I’m like a father to her. You see, she came late … I often think it killed my mother those years later. My father died within the year. That’s love for you.”

  They walk on, and then very stiffly Bugler says, “Oh, by the way, I’d rather the engagement was kept a secret.”

  “Mum is the word,” Joseph said, and they parted as friends.

  * * *

  Rain rushed down, its sound preceding it, not the usual rain; heavy with hail, and a wind from the four corners of the world gathering force, gusts of wind storming the treetops, branches wayward, Goldie’s plate spinning and whirling down the yard, and the two dead birds that were laid on the bonnet, for plucking, coming alive, their breast feathers unfolding as they lifted off and did a small circuit that simulated freedom, simulated life. When she caught them they felt soft and furry, like cold gloves that had been left outside.

  The place had been empty for storm, for things to be stirred up, uprooted, and put down somewhere else, the way she had been empty for something and now it was there. Her brother and Mick Bugler were friends.

  “My brother and Mick Bugler are best friends.” She wrote it with a bit of white flour on the top of the range after she had made bread. She often wrote things in that manner, to make them lasting.

  Dear Bugler,

  You asked me to tell you of some of the old customs, things our folks did and that I saw and did as a youngster. Well, my grammar isn’t always correct, nor my turn of phrase, but you will be able to cope with that. I will start with stones, because they were the bane of our lives. They sprung up in the fields like mushrooms, hosts of them, big stones, medium stones, and scutty little stones that refused to budge out of the earth. It was a menial job, but it had to be done. To put it into perspective I will go back a little and explain its place in the crop rotation. The green field was ploughed in November, so that the frost would make the soil friable and easy to till. The oat crop was sown in March and harvested in August and September. The stubble was ploughed so that potatoes or turnips could be sown the following spring. When they were harvested, wheat or barley was put in, and before the next crop, which would be hayseed, was the time to pick the stones. Once the hay grew, the stones would be disguised and break the blades of a mowing machine. The bigger stones would have been removed two years before, turned up by the plough and taken away in a horse and cart to mend a wall, to keep cattle in and other people’s cattle out. Now, some stones were too big and could not be moved, so they had to be blasted with gelignite. That was the dangerous bit and naturally the most exciting bit, so I will save that for the end. As for the smaller stones, you had to pick them up and put them in a bucket. The bucket could only be half full because of the weight of it. You couldn’t use a horse and cart, because the horse wouldn’t stand still in the freezing cold. So the stones were put in little piles and carried away in the buckets. It was torture. In frosty weather the coldest time was one hour before dark. They would stick to your fingers, the very same as putting your hand inside a freezer for a minute or longer. That was the time of year when the woodcock came, and just at nightfall my friends and myself would wait for them, then maybe go down to the village and fool around, and then back up to the woods with flash lamps to shoot pigeons. I said I would tell you about blasting the rocks. It was a tricky business. It called for great skill and great concentration. The procedure consisted of a stick of gelignite the size of a candle, a detonator which is a little brass cylinder full of fulminate of mercury, and, finally, a length of fuse cord about five or six feet long. The fuse cord was at one end inserted into the detonator, it was closed — sometimes with the teeth — and stuck into the stick of gelignite which had already been inserted into a hole in the rock. It was packed with clay to make it airtight, the cord hanging out from it, then the fuse was lit and you got behind a stone wall or some safe cover, and with luck the rock would shatter to pieces and blow all over the field. That kind of work is history. People just hire a mechanical digger or a bulldozer, but let me be the one to say that there was something exciting about that wait behind the wall, the first sound of the blast and bits of stone flying up like birds, solid birds that could kill you with one blow.

  As for the present, our way of life is changing, but some things remain the same. Take the bogs, the blanket bogs, as they are called; they are sacred places and the storehouse of our past. To dig deep into a blanket bog is to cut through time to unearth history. There is layer after layer of living vegetation. The peat is a haven for wildlife of every kind. Were you to explore it you would find more birds and beasts and insects than there were in Noah’s Ark. No one cuts turf now, as they say
we do not have the summers anymore to allow it to dry. Laziness. Yet in one sense we are preserving our past. We may not be the richest county, but we have more memories and more mystery by far.

  Joseph

  EVENING IN THE TOWN. Strains of music pulsing out. Husky notes. Pounding notes. Thu-thump. Thu-thump. Thu-thump. Near. Far. The dinner dance. Love on the cusp. The sweets of sin. Hotel doors wide open for casks of porter to be wheeled in.

  “You’d think it was Christmas,” Noreen says.

  “It won’t be long now,” Eamonn replies.

  In the street levity, expectation. In the lanes, kids with old curtains and straw hats, in hiding, to scare the grown-ups. New blouses hauled out of carrier bags. Satin with little pearl buttons that come undone. Platform soles to kick out the beat. Mothers ironing white shirts for their wild colonial boys. Streamers, pale primrose, pale pink, flung up to the rafters. Noreen on a ladder tacking their scalloped ends to the cornices, a stout arm, her full breast heaving.

  “What about your man?” It is Eamonn talking to the monk, a frocked figure in a stained-glass window, shades of a time when the premises were a convent.

  “Put a frill around him,” from Noreen. Eamonn goads her to give the poor sod a little birdie. She stretches higher, thighs bare, braced.

  “I bet he’d like a one-to-one.”

  “Wouldn’t we all.” Noreen says.

  Comfort in that. A dance is for a one-to-one.

  By nine o’clock the place will be packed, a cave of colours, blues, magentas, heads of hair still wet with a mermaid’s wetness, men in white shirts, fledgelings in the doorway, eyeing the form. Mick Bugler too, in a red bandit-style shirt. Cries and hollers. Howya Dessie, Howya Gussie, Howya Pat. Howyas. Fields forgotten. Cattle forgotten. The price of cattle forgotten. The pits of slurry, the gassy issue of ammonia quite quite forgotten. Diversion. The sweets of sin. You only live once.

  “The nuns used to be starving … They could ring a bell for alms, but they were too proud.”

  “The creatures.”

  “I wonder if McQueen had to have it desanctified when he bought it … Got it for a song.”

  “Desanctified … With the things I see here. Five and six on that banquette … Wife-swapping,” Eamonn tells her.

  From her a shriek of laughter, with a tinge of indignation and modesty.

  Black frost all day, the ground, the fields, rock solid, and the roads treacherous, but nevertheless there will be a crowd on account of the dance being for a good cause. The cause of charity. The sweets of sin. Out the back road from the town two youngsters are assaulting the hedges and terrified of the dark, marauders scrambling for holly.

  “Noreen said it has to be with berries, otherwise it’s not festive.”

  “Her and her berries.”

  They snap a few sprigs off a young rowan tree.

  Breege won’t know until six o’clock whether or not they are going … Joseph won’t say. She has clothes airing by a paraffin heater upstairs. White blouse, black pleated skirt, black stockings.

  * * *

  Bugler stands in the doorway saluting with the warm smoulder of his eyes. Taller than all the rest. Thu-thump. Thu-thump. Thu-thump. Breege sees him. Shivers. All of her agog at being there — the excitement, the hollers, cigarette smoke, bare arms, bare shoulders, precious wineglasses gilded in the back mirrors and music flooding out. Mrs. Flannery keeps jabbing her to emphasise her fury with Patrick J. Flannery gazing at that American girl and talking God knows what bull.

  “Watch. He’ll light her cigarette now.” And so he does. She predicts how the match will be kept alight to roam over the girl’s gloating face, and so it does until it burns down to his grimy fingernails. Sue-Anne, a cousin from Boston, having to have her beauty sleep until six in the evening. Patrick, as promised, went up to waken his guest. Asked what kept him so long, he simply said he was learning about life in the fast lane.

  Joseph and the Crock are at the bar, with spare pints of porter, each pressing hospitality on the other to make up for the recent imbroglio. Joseph had caught the Crock stealing timber and ordered him and his wheelbarrow off their lands for saecula saeculorum.

  “I can’t take much more of it,” Mrs. Flannery says, searches in one pocket, then another for a handkerchief, and blows her nose repeatedly.

  “She’ll be gone back soon.”

  “You don’t know the agony of love.”

  Breege feels colour starting up and down her neck, zigzags behind the sheath of her white blouse. Bugler is smiling across at her. The smile has made up for those times when he passed her so abruptly, jumped over a wall to search for an animal because some dolt had left a gate open. As if she was the dolt who had left the gate open. She must not be seen to be overhappy, Joseph would suspect.

  “Tickets, ladies,” Eamonn says, pointing to the prizes with the rim of his straw boater — a big television, a set of Waterford glasses, and a vegetarian cookbook. Mrs. Flannery asks tartly if she could win a husband along with a television set.

  “Thought you had one.”

  “Him,” she says. Patrick is standing over them boyish and bashful. He is made to pay for the tickets. The Crock has arrived with two vodka-and-lemonades for the ladies. Bugler crosses, his smile preparatory to asking her up.

  “Later,” she says to the barely audible invitation. The floor is empty except for two old men dancing ceilidh in defiance of the boppy music that is being played, shouting to one another. “One, two, three, one, two, three,” to keep the beat.

  “Please yourself,” he says, and moves off as if a little daunted, tapping the tables that he passes in some kind of pique. The Crock lisps a low whistle.

  “Bet you’re the first lady ever to say no to him.”

  “Oh, he’ll siphon off all the talent till he gets to the last dance.” That from Josephine, standing above them, her body like a blancmange in her off-white crocheted dress.

  “Oh, Jesus, look,” from the Crock. They look. They see. Bugler is dancing with Lady Harkness, steering her solemnly, as if she were an ocean liner in her peppermint green; her smile seems to be saying that there is nothing in the whole world more beautiful than an old-time waltz.

  Gradually, the floor fills up. Young men with young girls in bold improvisations. Breege thinks that by the time he asks her again she will be prepared. She will have gone down to the ladies’ and dabbed herself with Mrs. Flannery’s powder. It is in a floppy pink swansdown powder puff that is stitched onto a georgette handkerchief. The lady visitor from Boston brought it. It smells like the chemist shop in the city, the counter away from the dispensary, with toiletries and perfume bottles on a tray. The four corners of georgette are knotted to keep the powder from spilling. Mrs. Flannery mashes her hands. The atmosphere is hectic now. Howya. Howya Gussie. Howya Dessie.

  Sy, the compère, is calling out the revels in store. First half, anything goes; around the house and mind the dresser. Interval for supper, with entertainment from the one and only Magdalene. Second half, rock, smooch. The one and only Magdalene is sitting on the stage, her ankle by way of a joke yoked to the leg of the piano with red crepe bunting. A gaudy stump. She smiles, tremulous. Sequins stitched to her black dress are likewise twinkling away. Sy says what an honour it is to have her in their midst. Yippees from the crowd. Barmaids, smiling, kerchiefed, weave through the mêlée with laden trays. Heads of hair mop the floor.

  Young men, ardent, bold, throw their partners up in the air as if they were puffballs.

  “I’ll kill him … I’ll kill that man.” Mrs. Flannery is seeing her husband’s ringed hand move slowly along the velveteen buttocks. Calls to him, simply calls his name, but peremptory. Standing on a chair, taunting — does he think he is a teenager and he the wrong side of fifty. Vixen-like, she is on the dance floor hitting him, aggrieved.

  “Oh, a shit attack.” Eamonn saunters across to rescue matters with a “Now now.” Couples pause in their capers to look. A lull in the esprit. Music comes to a halt. On
e of the old men who had been dancing says a recitation to the kneeling monk in his aspic of stained glass:

  My back it is deal

  My belly’s the same

  And my sides are well bound with good leather.

  My nose it is brass

  There’s a hole in my ass

  And I’m very much used in cold weather.

  * * *

  As supper is announced, folding chairs are slung down and there is a crush to a desired table. No use being with a bunch of dopes. Piping-hot stew in big urns, one for each table, and twelve earthenware plates. Noreen shouting out the orders: “Who’ll be mother, who’ll be mother?” No one wants to be mother.

  At their table it falls to Bugler to be mother. Sleeves raised, he ladles the stew onto the upheld plates. Says he can’t be too particular as to who does or does not like onions. Give them to your neighbour. Old Bill Muggavin with no teeth walks around looking for a place and tells the floating streamers that he lost his clock fifteen years ago. Words of praise for Bugler’s expertise. Comes from being on a sheep station. Fifty men in the mess. Half an hour at the most for lunch or dinner. Lambs and sheep in their thousands, waiting. Funny that you never got hitched up, Mick. From Josephine. Doesn’t answer. Rosemary’s face becoming fainter with the passing days. Not able to summon her up the way he used to, lying in his quarters at night, her photograph falling out of the last letter. Rebuke.

  Voices bassooning. Rifled crackers. Excitable whistles. Lady Harkness with fingers in both ears. The holly pickers ogling people to buy a last book of tickets. Get lost, Brud. Get lost, Ned. Sy promising that very special moment. So close to Breege does Bugler sit that she wonders, Is it accidental because of the tight squeeze, fourteen at a table meant for twelve? Joseph two tables away with his back to her. Bugler being quizzed about life in the outback. “Ah now” is all he will say. On his other side a cripple. Paralysed from the chest down. Road accident. Fella coming out a side road at a hundred miles an hour. Big settlement. Lucky not to be in a six foot by three foot. Words of sympathy. Never know the hour or the minute. Thankful for small mercies. Bugler offers a hand. Cuts the mutton in chunks with the short scissors which the cripple carries in his blazer pocket. Then a cry. An outcry. Where’s the wine. Where’s the bloody vino. Bottles slammed down, bottles with pictures of neat, ordered vineyards, and a view of a castle. Castle Gondolfo. Isn’t that a summer residence of His Holiness the Pope? Some gulping the food, others complaining of it being rough and ready. Assumpta, just back from Sun and Sea, thinks they could at least have been given a starter at that price — twenty-seven fifty. A melon fan or soup. How was the holiday, Assumpta? Brilliant, absolutely brilliant, nothing to beat the South of France. From Lady Harkness a yodel. Vacationed there in the hills above Nice. What a clientele. Sir Winston Churchill in one villa, Lord Beaverbrook in the next. The Aga Khan sending an emissary to her table. His Highness thought her the most beautiful woman in the dining room. Sir Clifford going mad, quite mad. Bought a pistol. Josephine galled at the cheek of Assumpta and her South of France when it was Lourdes with a group from the diocese, invalids. Dipping them in the holy baths and wheeling them around the grounds at Rosary time. Seconds for some, but not all. Lady Harkness averring that the best way to cook game is to do it while they’re still warm. Forget that rubbish about letting birds hang for a week. Game should be cooked straightaway before they toughen. Husband and wife, a wealthy couple who had been thought to have separated, at a table, cooing. The hypocrisy of it. Brian, an off-duty guard who was called to the scene, admitted that it got quite nasty. A certain person, the husband in question, meeting another person in his factory and growing attracted to her. What started out as a cup of coffee and a cheesecake ending in a full-blown affair in a hotel on the coast. Shocking altogether — wife having to go to casualty that Saturday night and husband wrote off two cars. Brian is begged to enlarge but won’t. Professional ethics. Says then that attraction is just addiction, nothing more. Is shouted down. Whoever heard such bollocks. Attraction is attraction, eh, Breege? She doesn’t answer. That gal is deep water from Lady Harkness. Lady Harkness with choker of black seed pearls, polite to all, but haughty. Shameless about the use of the only telex that is supposed to be for emergencies, for accidents, deaths, power cuts, yet receiving such trifles as: