The Dirty Dust (23 page)

Patrick's daughter is back at home … Maureen is back home! Are you sure she's not just taking a break from school? … She failed her exams. She failed! … She's not going to be a schoolteacher after all … Shag her anyway! Shag her! …

Nora Johnny's grandson from Gort Ribbuck has gone … On a boat from the Fancy City … He got a job on the ship … Just like his grandmother, he really likes his sailors …

Say that again … Say that again … Nell's grandson is going for the priesthood. Blotchy Brian's daughter's youngfella is going to be a priest! A priest! That little feckless fart face going to be a priest! … He's already gone to the seminary … He was wearing the priest's garb at home … And the collar … And lugging a huge big prayer book around under his oxter … Reading his office up and down the new road at Lack Ard! You'd think that he'd never make a priest overnight, just like that … Oh, he's not a priest yet, he's just going to the college. Aha, Poxy Martin, they'll never make a priest out of him ever …

What then, what did Blotchy Brian say? … Don't be chewing and chomping, just spit it out … You're afraid to, is that it? You're afraid to! … Because Blotchy Brian is related to me by marriage. It's to that wench of a sister he's related. Spit it out … “My daughter has money to burn to make a priest.” Money to burn on a priest. The wrinkly old wretch! … Spit it out, or go to hell! Hurry up or they'll have whipped you off too. You don't think that I'd let you down into this grave and you riddled with bedsores for months … “Caitriona Paudeeen's boy couldn't even do that much …” Spit out the rest of it, you old gimp … “He didn't have enough to put as much as a stitch of a college petticoat on his daughter.” Blotchy bastard Brian! The bumming bastard! …

Screw you! You're muttering again … Nell is singing “Eleanor
Aroon” up and down the road every day! Get stuffed, you mangy rash-arsed mong. You never had a good word to say, nor anybody belonging to you …

—… Do you think this is “The War of the Two Foreigners”? …

—… There I was giving a word for every pint to the Great Scholar, and he was giving me a pint for every word …

Over and back again the next day. The third day he had the car under his arse. The journey over and back was flaying us out.

“Paul, darling,” my mother says to me that evening, “there should be a good bit of drying on the grass from now on.”

“What do mean, drying, Ma?” I says. “You could never dry that crappy grass …”

She was on about it for a fortnight before I succeeded in making a few haycocks. Then I took it down again, and turned it up and turned it over and turned it around.

It was like that until one day when it pissed rain and the two of us were inside in Peter's Pub. I had to up and lay it all out again to give it some more sun.

Then I gutted the gullies, flattened the fences, built them up again, then I cut the grass on the side of the road, brushed away the bracken, bundled the briars out of the way. I carved out culverts. We spent nearly a month in the front field, except that we'd be over and back in the car to Peter's Pub all the time …

I never met anyone as nice as him. And he wasn't stupid either. He collected about twenty to thirty words of Irish every day. He had bags of money. A big fat Government job …

But the day he headed off without me Peter the Publican's daughter took him into the parlour and started to jizz him up …

I was really very fond of him. The week just after he left, I got flattened and that was the end of me … But hey, Postmistress … Hoora, Postmistress! … How do you know that he never paid for his lodging? You opened the letter my mother sent about it to the Government …

—And how do you know, Postmistress, how do you know that The Goom didn't accept my collection of poetry,
The Yellow Stars
? …

—Ah, for feck's sake, it's too bad about you. They'd have published you yonks ago if you did as I said and wrote from the bottom to the top of the page. But, hey, how about me,
The Irelander
rejected my short story “The Setting of the Sun,” and the Postmistress knew that too …

—And the Postmistress knew well the advice I gave to Cannon how to crock the Kerry team in the letter I sent him two days after the semifinal …

—And how was it, Postmistress, that you knew about what I had said to the Judge about the Dog Eared crowd when we were taking them to court? …

—And how was it, Postmistress, that your own daughter, who just happens to be a postmistress now, how come she knew that I wouldn't be allowed into England because I had TB, how come she knew it before me? …

—You opened a letter that Caitriona Paudeen sent to Mannix the Counsellor about Fireside Tom. The world and its mother knew what was in it:

“We will take him to the Fancy City in a car. We will get him drunk. If you had a couple of hot broads in the office getting him turned on, maybe he'd sign over the land to us. He's a whore for the young ones when he's pissed …”

—Abuboona! …

—You slitted open letters from the woman in the bookies in the Fancy City that she sent to the Young Master. You used to have tips about the horses before he had a clue about them himself …

—Holy God, Mary, Joseph, and all the saints! Ababoona! …

—You opened a letter that Caitriona Paudeen sent to Blotchy Brian saying she'd marry him no problem …

—Abuboona, boona boona! That I would marry foul fuckmouth Blotchy bastard Brian …

—Just so, Postmistress, I had nothing to thank you for. You always
had the kettle simmering away in the back room. You opened a letter my son sent to me saying he married a Yid. The whole country knew about it, and we said neither a jot nor a tittle about it to nobody. What was that about? …

—You opened a letter that my son had sent me from England telling me he had married a black. The whole world knew about it, although we weren't mentioning a word about it to anyone.

—I wrote to de Valera advising him what he should say to the people of Ireland. You kept it buried in the Post Office. You shouldn't have done that …

—Every single love letter that Caitriona's Paddy wrote to my daughter, you opened it first. I never opened one of them that I didn't know that you had peeped at it already. Honestly. I remembered the letters I got long before that. I warned the postman he had to give them to me directly into my paw. Their lovely exotic smell. Exotic paper. Exotic writing. Exotic stamps. Exotic postmarks that were poetry to my ears: Marseilles, Port Said, Singapore, Honolulu, Batavia, San Francisco … The sun, oranges, blue seas. Sun beauty skin. Peninsulas of Paradise. Gold-rimmed garments. Ebony-toothed glittering grins. Lusty lapping lips … I'd suck them to my heart. I'd kiss them with my mouth. I'd cuddle them to my heart … I'd open them up … I'd take out the
billet doux.
And it's only after that, Miss Postmistress, that I would see your slimy slinky paw on any of them. Ogh! …

—You opened the letter I sent home to my wife, when I was working on the turf in Kildare. I had nine pounds in it. You kept the lot …

—And why not? Why didn't you register it? …

—And don't you think that The Old Man of the Graveyard might have something to say also? Let me speak. Let me speak …

—Most certainly, Postmistress, there's no way I'd be grateful to you or to your daughter, or to Billy who gave you a hand in the back room. Every single letter that came to me from London, after I came home, you had opened it. There was an
affaire de coeur,
as
Nora Johnny might say, involved. You told the whole world about it. The priest heard about it, and the Schoolmistress—my wife—heard about it …

—That's slander, Master. If you were aboveground I'd sue you …

—That time when Baba wrote to me from America about the will, Nell, the blabbermouth, was able to tell Patrick what she said:

“I haven't made my will yet. I hope I won't come to a sudden end, as you hoped in your letter …”

You opened it, you pisshead pustule … You got that nasty streak from Nell.

—Not at all, Caitriona Paudeen, I didn't open the letter about the will at all, but a letter from O'Brien Solicitors in the Fancy City threatening you with the law within seven days if you didn't pay Holland and Company for the round table you had purchased five or six years previously …

—Abuboona! Don't believe her, the mangy maggot! Margaret! Margaret! … Did you hear what the Postmistress said? I'm going to burst! I'll burst! …

—… I'll tell you a story now, my good man:

“Colm Cille was in Aran when St. Paul visited him there. Paul wanted to have the whole island for himself.

“‘I'm going to open a pawnshop,' Paul says.

“‘You will in your balls,' says Colm Cille, ‘but I'm telling you straight up in plain Irish to get the fuck out of here.'

“Then he spoke to him in Legalese. Then he spoke to him in Latin. And then in Greek. In childish gibberish. In Esperanto. Colm Cille knew the seven languages of the Holy Ghost. He was the only one to whom the apostles gave the gift of tongues, when they were dying …

“‘OK, so,' says Colm Cille, ‘seeing as you won't fuck off, by virtue of the powers that have been invested in me, we'll fix it like this. You'll go off to the arse end of Aran and I'll go to the west of the
island as far as Bun Gowla. Both of us will say Mass at the crack of dawn tomorrow. Then we will walk towards one another, and howsomuchever of the island we will have walked when we meet, we will own that much.'

“‘That's a deal, then,' Paul said, in Yiddish. Colm Cille said the Mass and off he walked towards the arse end of Aran, and that's where we get the saying, ‘being caught arse-ways' …”

—But, hey, Coley, John Kitty in Bally Donough used to say that Colm Cille never said a Mass in his life …

—John Kitty said that! John Kitty is a heretic …

—So what if John Kitty says what he likes? Didn't God himself—all praise to him—reveal himself there? The sun was up just as Colm Cille was saying his Mass. Then it went down, and God kept it down until Colm Cille had walked to the arse end of Aran. And it was only then that St. Paul saw it rising for the first time! …

“‘You may as well toddle off now, Shnozzle,' says Colm Cille. ‘I'll leave you weeping when you return to the Wailing Wall: the exact same horsewhipping you got when Christ drove you out of the Temple. You should be ashamed of yourself! Who would give a damn only that you are so greasy and sneaky as you slither away …'”

“That's exactly why no Jew boy settled in Aran ever since …”

—This's the way that I heard that story from oldfellas in my own place, Coley: when the two Patricks—Old Patrick
alias
Cothraighe,
alias
Calprainnovich, and Young Patrick—when they were hawking around Ireland trying to change the country …

—Two Patricks! That's a heresy …

—… There was a day like that, Peter the Publican. Don't deny it …

—Master, my darling, the bed was very hard. Really very hard underneath my poor arse, Master …

—I was only in it about a month, Poxy Martin, and I found it very hard …

—My back was totally flattened, Master. There wasn't even a screed of a shred of skin left on my backside …

—Not as much as a screed, Martin, you poor hoor …

—Not as much as a screed, my dear Master, and there was a very tender spot in my groin. The bed was …

—Let us forget about the bed until some other time. Tell me this much, Poxy, how is … ?

—The Mistress, Master. O, she's flying, not a bother. She earns her money every day at school, Master, and then she looks after Billy from then until the morning. She flashes over from the school twice a day to look after him, and they say that the poor thing hardly sleeps a wink, but is only sitting on the edge of the bed giving him his medicine …

—The cuntish gash … the brasser …

—Did you hear, Master, that she brought him three doctors from Dublin? Our own doctor visits him three times every day, but I'd say, Master, that it's kind of wasted on Billy. He's been laid up so long now that he couldn't not be riddled with bedsores …

—I hope he lies and never rises! I hope he gets the thirty-seven diseases of the Ark! I hope all his tubes get glutted and his bunghole stuffed! That he gets a clubfoot and a twisted gut! The Ulster flies! The yellow bellies! The plague of Lazarus! Job's jitters! Swine snots! Lock arse! Drippy disease, flatulent farts, wobbly warbles, wriggly wireworm, slanty eyes, and the shitty scutters! May he get the death rattle of Slimwaist Big Bum! The decrepit diseases of the Hag of Beare! May he be blinded without a glimmer and be gouged like Oisín after that! The Itch of the Women of the Prophet! His knees explode! His rump redden with rubenescence! Be lanced by lice! …

—Bedsores are the worst of them all, dear Master …

—May he get bedsores too so, Poxy Martin.

—She makes the Stations of the Cross twice a day, Master, and the trip to Killeana's Well every week. She did the Mountain Pilgrimage this year, and Croagh Patrick, and Colm Cille's Well, Mary's Well, Augustine's Well, Enda's Well, Bernine's Well, Cauleen's Well, Shinny's Well, Boadakeen's Well, Conderg's Bed, Bridget's Pool, Lough Nave, and Lough Derg …

—Isn't a great pity I'm not alive! I'd drain Brickeen's Well on the thief, on the …

—She told me too, Master, that if it wasn't for the way things are so dicey at the moment she'd go to Lourdes.

“Lough Derg is the worst of them, Poxy Martin,” she said. “My feet were pumping blood for three whole days. But it didn't matter to me how I suffered as long as it did poor Billy some good. I'd crawl from here to …”