An Irish Christmas Feast (38 page)

As the night drifted into morning at the Mokely wake people began to drift away to their homes so that when the hour of one struck only a handful remained. These, for the most part, would have been immediate neighbours, one or more of whom would be expected to sit up with the corpse until morning when the normal activities of the lane and nearby streets resumed.

One of the last groups to leave the wake-room was the Toper family which consisted of Moya and her four children. They made their goodbyes to Mattie and went out into the night. They tiptoed silently downwards to their home where the head of the family was just beginning to stir having spent three hours of unbroken sleep in his bed and might well have spent several more had he not been awakened by the cold of his own waters which would not be restrained such was the earlier intake of liquor by their proprietor. He hurried from the little back room where he generally slept alone only to be confronted by his family who happened to be entering the house as he was leaving it. He issued a stern lecture about late hours and cuffed the children. As Moya passed hurriedly inwards he drew a kick at her but he was caught off balance and fell out on to the street where small clusters of mourners were still gathered. Smiling benignly at those who spared him a glance he increased his normal gait to a frantic run lest all the wake-room liquor be consumed.

His fears were groundless. The wake-room was empty and all he could see was the corpse clad in his Clydesdale and good shoes. He immediately lifted a whiskey bottle to his head and sought around for a bottle of stout which would serve as a chaser. He was delighted to see that a full crate of bottled stout occupied an honoured position under the deathbed. He would guard it with his life as he would the mortal remains of Mattie. As he sat a handful of neighbours silently entered, looked around, smiled knowingly and made no comment. They would return later and dutifully perform their stint by the corpse.

Sam ignored them and was pleased to observe that they had not interfered with the crate beneath the bed. There was many a man of proven courage and many a truly pious man who would face a raging bull rather than sit alone with a corpse. For Sam, however, the remains beside him on the deathbed presented no problem. Mattie had presented no threat in life and should therefore present even less of a threat in death. Anyway Sam was never a man to be intimidated by the hereafter or by the thought of the hereafter or so he said himself. His only fear in life was that some disaster might befall the world and close down the breweries and distilleries thereby leaving him threatened by the long thirst which he had always feared.

‘As long as I have a bottle of stout in my hand,' he once declared to a neighbour, ‘I have no fear of the hereafter or the hereunder but as little. Let 'em come at me sideways or downways or upways and you'll find me standing my ground. You can keep your guns and your swords and put a bottle of whiskey by my side, preferably a bottle of ten-year-old Jameson, and we'll see who'll come out on top.'

He drank contentedly for an hour and then he recalled the offspring who had reduced his income by high-tailing it to the United States. He never made vocal threats when he was alone. Instead he liked to growl at the absent faces of those he believed to have wronged him. People who had been privy to this growl would declare afterwards that they had never heard a sound like it, that it resembled nothing on the face of the earth. They would solemnly swear that no animal, domestic or wild, was capable of such spine-chilling utterances.

***

Dr Matt Coumer once heard the very same sounds emanating from the local grave-yard on a fine summer's night as he rambled through the suburbs with his wife. She had stopped dead and would not budge an inch. Matt would be the first to admit that he was not the bravest man in the community but he allowed his curiosity to get the better of him. Assuring his wife that there was nothing to fear he followed his ears to the horrific noises. After a brief search he noticed the human form rolled up against the side of an ancient tomb.

‘I was reminded of Shakespeare,' Matt informed his friend the Badger Loran with whom he was drinking in the back lounge of Crutley's. ‘You remember the ghost in
Hamlet?'
Matt recalled.

‘Why wouldn't I?' responded the Badger, who had never even heard of
Hamlet
not to mind the ghost.

‘You remember where the ghost describes the secrets of his prison house?'

‘Course I do,' the Badger answered with a wink at Mrs Crutley.

‘How's that it goes again?' Matt pondered. ‘Ah yes indeed. I have it now,' and he went on to quote the relevant lines:

would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood,

make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their spheres,

thy knotted and combined locks to part,

and each particular hair to stand on end,

like quills upon the fretful porpentine.

‘Well that's exactly how I felt my friend as I studied the crumpled heap of humanity before my eyes. At first I thought it must be a bear which had somehow escaped from a distant zoo but I had second thoughts and realised that it must be some truly formidable member of the ape family. I was about to depart and report the sighting to my friend Sergeant Bill Ruttle but then the creature leaped to its feet and looked me between the eyes. I wouldn't give tuppence for my life at that moment but then I noticed the face and the unmistakable whiff of stale whiskey. The creature had stopped sounding off at this stage. It was when the growling stopped that I knew who stood before me. It was the one and only Sam Toper. When he recognised me he resumed his former position and commenced his out-pourings once more.'

Matt admitted to the Badger that he was utterly overcome by laughter. He hurried to the grave-yard gate and informed his nervous wife of all he saw and heard. She accompanied him to the tomb where Sam had changed his position and was now sitting on his behind with his head resting on his knees. The awesome growling still continued. Matt and his wife laughed loud and long and indeed laughed loud and long for many nights afterwards.

***

As Sam sat near the deathbed he thought he heard a sound coming from that unlikely place. He took no notice and readdressed himself to the bottle of whiskey. After a goodly swallow he felt the pangs of hunger assailing his whiskey-drenched saliva. He stumbled around the wake-room in search of suitable sustenance. A milder growl escaped him. It was a growl of satisfaction for he had located an unfinished plate of pig's head. He devoured it like a starving lion, grunting and gasping as he did. Then and not till then did the corpse sit up on the deathbed.

At first Sam could not believe what he saw. He placed the pig's head and the whiskey on the ground and rubbed his eyes. He had often been confronted by strange apparitions before but he had always been able to trace them to the excessive consumption of whiskey.

‘I'm not that drunk,' he told himself, ‘so it can't be whiskey.'

Slowly he took his knuckles from his eyes. The corpse was now sitting on the side of the bed and it was speaking.

‘What's the hour Sam?' the corpse asked politely.

Sam replied with an ear-splitting scream. Other screams and assorted spasms followed as he bounded over the deathbed and disappeared into the starry night.

‘Save me, save me!' he called pitifully.

Outside awaiting their turn to sit up with the corpse were the three neighbours who had entered earlier. They made no move for they could see nobody from whom Sam might be saved.

‘Save me. Save me,' he shouted as he ran through his own front door, knocking it from its rusty hinges. He ended up under his bed and did not reappear until Mattie was safely buried later in the day.

It would be some time before the truth emerged. Shortly before the figure sat up on the bed Sam had stolen forty winks. While he snoozed, the corpse's brother, Mickey, found himself unable to resist the advances of sleep. Too much drink added to extreme physical exhaustion had driven him into a trance-like state so he did what he always did. He drew back the clothes and lay in the bed beside his brother. After a short while he felt the chill. With a few heaves and pushes he succeeded in dumping the corpse on to the floor. Mickey dropped off and slept for two hours by which time the intrepid Sam had instituted his search for suitable nourishment.

After the funeral an air of gloom hung over the lane-way. Most of the houses were left in darkness out of respect to the dead man. After a few days the pall lifted. Mickey re-opened his shop and was visited on an hourly basis by the neighbours. They brought him broth and they brought him pies and they brought him pancakes in their turn. One or more sat with him all day long and little by little he began to accept the sad fact that he would face the remainder of his life alone. Neighbours were fine and neighbours cared but in the last analysis neighbours had other priorities.

Nobody ever told the true story to Sam Toper. All concerned came to the conclusion that he was better off the way he was. It would be wrong to say that he wasn't the same after his experience but it would be true to say that minor changes occurred in the years that followed. He stopped kicking Moya for one thing. All he did now was slap her face and throw the occasional punch at her midriff. Other times he would rise from his couch in the middle of the night when the injustices he had suffered over a life-time surfaced and prevented him from going to sleep. After a spell of teeth-grinding and other rasping noises from mouth and throat he would commence his growling. He would never enter her room which she shared with the children. He would reduce himself to all fours outside her bedroom door and embark upon a long and highly varied session of hostile natterings and intimidatory mutterings. These were but the prelude to the spine-chilling snarls and warning snorts which were at the very centre of Sam's discontent. Moya and the children generally slept throughout unless, in a specially malignant fit of pique after too much liquor, he might throw the entire family out into the street. Almost immediately one of the neighbours would alert Sergeant Bill Ruttle who shepherded the family back indoors after which he never failed to implant several stinging, bone-shaking kicks on Sam's rear. These worked wonders with the temperament of Sam and never failed to reduce his growling to pitiful sobs and whimpers.

Bill took it upon himself to enlist the remaining boys of the Toper family in the Trallock boxing club. At fifteen and fourteen respectively Fiachra and Conn Toper were regarded as likely prospects although the sergeant never intimated that they should one day use their skills against their bullying father unless, of course, in self-defence.

Sam was the kind of fighter who, if he knew he was capable of defeating an opponent, would beat him senseless whereas he would run a mile from a better man. One might be tempted to ask why a better man or men were never called in to balance the situation. It was chiefly because there was an unwritten law at the time that the head of the household was the unquestioned master of his domain. Fine if Bill booted him around now and then but for a layman to intervene would amount to an invasion of the home and the home above all other things was regarded as sacred by church and state. Then there was the awful prospect that Sam might be injured or even killed if the security of his home was breached. Who would provide for his wife and family and who would pay for his funeral?

Sam survived and never changed his tyrannical ways. Time passed and a white Christmas presented itself for the dazzlement and delight of young and old. There had not been a white Christmas in the parish of Trallock for nine years. The flakes arrived first in faint flurries and rarely alighted on the ground. Instead they drifted around the streets and lane-ways, moving slowly westward and increasing slowly in density all the time. Four days before the great feast the snow began to come down in real earnest, whitening the roof-tops and the surrounding fields, brightening the hearts of the young folk and recalling for the older people happy days of childhood when somehow the snow never seemed as cold. Then just three days before Christmas a great event took place. A tall handsome man well-dressed and well-made alighted from the mid-day train at Trallock railway station. Immediately he commissioned two local bag carriers to take charge of his luggage which was considerable. He preceded the pair to the town centre where he entered the town's only travel agency. When his business was concluded he instructed his carriers to follow him to the poorest quarter of the town. The carriers showed no surprise. Often over the years and especially as Christmas drew near they would have been hired by well-off strangers to transport luggage to unlikely destinations. The lone strangers, it invariably transpired, would have been local men who had made good abroad, especially in England and America and occasionally in Australia. All these successful home-comers represented only a very small percentage of those who were forced to emigrate in the first place. Not everybody succeeded in their places of exile and not everybody who did remembered to come home.

As the party arrived at the corner which led to Cobblers' Lane they were ambushed by a cheerful party of snowballing youths and children who had grown tired of snowballing each other. The tall young man returned fire and instructed his carriers to do likewise. There followed a joyful exchange of snowballs which goes to show, if it ever needed showing, that bag carriers as well as visiting gentlemen are all children at heart. A man who does not know this, as Canon Cornelius Coodle might say, knows very little.

The four unexiled Toper siblings who were at the head and tail of the ambush went by the names of Fiachra, Conn, Aedh and Fionnuala which were the names of the Children of Lir, the great mythical sea god who married Aobh and had three sons and a daughter who were changed into swans by Lir's second wife Aoife. It was Mental Nossery the poet who suggested the names to Moya after the poet had found her wandering in tears round Trallock grave-yard with marks on her face one summer's morning a few weeks before she gave birth to her fourth child. The child was called Fiachra.