Wild Decembers (10 page)

“Think down the road . . . How unhappy you would be with a man like that,” he said as he went out. She could hear the outside tap running as he splashed his hair and face to cool off, then she heard the van tearing out of the yard, lurching over the worn cobbles and grazing the buff pier that wobbled from so many of these hurried comings and goings.

“He hit me . . . He hit me,” she said stroppily to Goldie as she began gathering up shallots that had got overturned.

But she was not stroppy inside. She was afraid. They would hunt her down, and with a bloodthirst they would take from her that lit taper of hope.

“I’ll have to hide what I think, what I feel . . . the way you bury the nuts in the autumn,” she said to Goldie.

I
WANTED TO GO
outside and let Gypsy loose and chase it up home, but I daren’t. It barked and barked all night, and I could picture it on its haunches barking its guts out. It was a sparry dog, it sparred with everyone. No one knew exactly where Bugler got him, it was just there one morning in the front of the tractor, like a mascot, yapping, a mongrel, lean and with spots, so that by right he should have been called Spot, but instead Bugler christened him Gypsy. My brother hated him from the start, said he was not like a dog at all but like a hare with the ears pointed, or a little piglet ready to be roasted. The grudge my brother bore Bugler was all visited on Gypsy. He went on about how it corrupted our Goldie, made her reckless, brought her off at night. He forgot that for hours on end the two dogs lay side by side under one wall or another, depending on the sun, lay there quiet, moving only as the other moved, to bark at a car in the distance or jump up when I came out with their dinners. He said it was to teach the dog a lesson. He always referred to it as “it,” not giving it the benefit of being a man or a woman. It was a he-dog, Gypsy, and it used to come at night, luring our Goldie away. They went miles off and would come back in the mornings sleepy, sated, and with blood on their mouths. Gypsy knew where to go, where to find foxes or the lambs or sheep that were wounded. Joseph put it in an empty cow stall with a sack over it to muffle the roars, holes in the sacking to keep it from expiring altogether.

All night it cried, and Goldie from the warmth in the kitchen cried back. It was the first time she had been let sleep inside, so she must have been satisfied with herself. The cries from outside got more lonely, more eerie as the night went on; they ate into me.

In the morning the tractor tore into the yard at a terrible speed, mud flying off the big wheels and Bugler already up in his seat, ready to get out.

“I want to talk to your brother.”

“He’s asleep,” I said, calling out from the landing window.

“Get him.”

“Can I talk to you?” I said.

“No, you can’t,” he said, savagery in the voice.

From inside I watched them argue. Joseph kept taking off his cap to scratch his head and putting it back on again. A bad sign. By mistake he put .it back at a rakish angle. Then he stood up close to the tractor as if he were trying to mount it, to unseat his opponent. I could guess the language, the wrongs of years and the recent wrongs all lumped in together. All of a sudden Bugler began laughing, no doubt mocking the puniness of a man pitting himself against a machine, the half-baked idiocy of thinking that a foot in a torn felt slipper could kick in a mudguard. When Bugler got down I knew that they were squaring up to each other and that it could lead to blows. My brother turned away, went to the shed, and came back with Gypsy, whom he gripped by the forelock and flung across the yard in a vicious motion.

Coming back into the house, he ordered me to get a notebook and tot up any journeys, any errands that Bugler had done on my behalf. We would refund him. Picking up a jug of milk off the table, he went to drink from it, but put it down in disgust.

“This milk is sour . . . it’s putrid,” he said.

“I can’t help it if the refrigerator is broken and no one will come to fix it. I can’t help it.”

“What did people do long ago . . . What did our mother and father do before they had refrigerators?”

“Look, I know you’re cross and I know why.”

“You don’t know the half of it.” “We can’t send him money . . . it’s an insult.” “You’re still soft on him,” he said, glaring. “I am not soft on him,” I said in a burst of defiance, but the blushing gave me away.

When I scooped the milk out of the jug, it felt peculiar, it felt alive, like a plasma in my hand.

Hello, Breege.

THE CASTLE OF DROMORE

October winds lament around the Castle of Dromore,

Yet peace is in its lofty halls,

My loving treasure stored.

Though autumn leaves may droop and die,

A bud of spring are you.

Sing hush-a-bye, lul, lul, lo, lo, lau,

Sing hush-a-bye, lul, lul, loo.

Bring no ill wind to hinder us, my helpless babe and me—

Dread spirit of Blackwater banks, Clan Eoin’s wild banshee,

And Holy Mary pitying me, in Heaven for grace doth sue,

Sing hush-a-bye, lul, lul, lo, lo, lau,

Sing hush-a-bye, lul, lul, loo.

Take time to thrive, my Rose of hope, in the garden of Dromore;

Take heed, young Eagle—till your wings are weathered fit to soar.

A little time and then our land is full of things to do.

Sing hush-a-bye, lul, lul, lo, lo, lau,

Sing hush-a-bye, lul, lul, loo.

It was left in the little plantation in an envelope.

J
OSEPHINE’S HAIR SALON
remains open all the year, and she prides herself on the fact that she does not just pander to summer visitors who breeze in, sit outside the hotel eating their toasted sandwiches and taking photographs.

The salon is half a terraced cottage with a concrete back yard for a coal shed and in the front window a placard of a brunette and a sample folder of nylon hairs, little switches, ranging in colour from ash blond to jet black. In that small linoleumed room with its smell of ammonia and hairspray everything gets told. Josephine is the first to know who is pregnant or who has miscarried, the first to ferret out secrets too terrible to tell. Lovers are her speciality, clandestine lovers meeting in their cars. Of Josephine, people say, “She would go down in your stomach for news.” Yet they confide in her because they cannot help it. Something in her invites it, her motherly way, her soft stout arms with the healthy growth of black under the armpits, and her thin lips permanently open, as if she is drinking her listeners in. Her particular forte is that she always agrees, never contradicts, always says, “That’s right . . . That’s right,” regardless of what she is thinking inside.

“I love when it’s just us,” Lady Harkness says. She says it faithfully each week as she rubs her hands to show off her bracelets, the envy of all, even Josephine, who jokes and says, “You’ll leave me them in your will.” Sometimes she even gives them a little kiss. Lady Harkness comes only on Thursdays to avoid the Bolshies, and usually there is that nice girl Fiona, who has just got engaged and has wedding jitters.

As Josephine looks up and sees Breege peering through the window, she winks and says, “I’d love to get my hands on that head of hair.”

Lady Harkness, although set and ready to bake under the drier, is reluctant to go because of the wonderful tips Josephine is relating about weddings. They are from a special issue of a magazine for brides—Bridal Clothing, the Bridal Beauty Box, the Bridal Secrets, and the Bridal Wedding Stationery. She reads excitedly: “The latest trend is not to insist on a June wedding at all, as hotels, not to mention friends, will be already chock-a-block. Move from the traditional June date and the traditional white dress to something more eccentric. Become a trend-setter.”

“No white dress,” Lady Harkness says, aghast, and shrieks as Josephine spells out the alternative: “ice-blue satin hot pants.”

“Say again.”

“Ice-blue satin hot pants.”

“That’s diabolical,” Fiona says. She has been paying £10 every Friday to a designer in Limerick and does not want to hear this hot-pants rubbish.

“There’s more,” Josephine says, propping the magazine as she mixes the colour for Fiona’s highlights.

“There is also a definite move away from the traditional gold ring.”

“Heresy,” Lady Harkness says, her left ear and her left jaw poked out so as to miss nothing. One half of her face is a scalding red, the other half less so, and her scalp pained-looking from the sharp teeth of the rollers.

“What else?” Fiona asks, soured.

“Break in that new bikini afore ye go.”

“How do you break in a bikini?”

“It doesn’t say . . . It just says to be very careful on the honeymoon of the nasty sun glare headache, as it will spoil the fun, and also to make sure the sun gets to those two dangerous spots at the bra strap and the bikini band in order to achieve an even tan.”

“Donal and I are going camping in the west . . . Hill-walking . . . We hate that sun glare,” Fiona says, and closes the magazine. Breege has been standing there taking it all in.

“You’re very quiet, Breege,” Josephine says in her soft, over-friendly voice. She has noticed the blushes. Breege’s blushes are something of a feature, being of a very rare and flaring shade of pink and seeming to wander over her cheeks in an intemperate way.

“What would you choose for your wedding day?” she asks her then.

“I haven’t thought about it.”

“That’s because she has no interest in men,” Fiona says.

It is too much for Lady Harkness, too sad altogether, and defying Josephine’s strictures, she has to come out from under the drier to give Breege a little talking-to: “No interest in men . . . My darling, at your age I was never off my back. The day it happens, Breege, you’ll know . . . And you must ring me up. Promise . . . Nothing in the world can stop nature. When we lived in the north of England, a local farmer had this pair of peacocks, and the male would come across to our barn because we left food and water for our own birds. He would help himself and often stay for a week at a time . . . We mentioned it to the farmer and he said, ‘M’lady, come the spring the hen will want him and he’ll come home,’ and we said, ‘How will he know that the hen wants him,’ and the farmer winked. ‘He’ll know . . . he’ll know.’ It will be just like that, Breege. You’ll meet the man that you have met in your dreams and you’ll go all gooey. You’ll melt in his arms . . . It was like that with my American lover, the other two were friendship. Pooh for friendship. You want to go all gooey . . . He was a bounder, of course, but it was worth it. A summer of absolute bliss. I always connect it with the smell of sweet pea. My bedroom windows open after lunch . . . He’d slip away from the other guests and climb up. My plumber, he called himself, my emergency plumber, and my poor Clifford downstairs playing backgammon . . . And he knew, but he loved me, he loved me so much, he always said, ‘If you buy a canary you’ve got to let it sing.’ Naughty really, but lovely.”