Country Girl: A Memoir (6 page)

Our farmhand was nicknamed Carnero. He was roguish, lackadaisical, and disinclined to wash. He ate like a glutton. My mother had to carve the bacon or the chicken in the pantry, otherwise he would grab slices of it when her back was turned. He buttered his bread on both sides, muttering under his breath in defiance, “Let’s larrup it on, let’s larrup it on.” He was about eighteen. On Saturday nights, in his pelt, when he washed in the rain barrel for Sunday Mass, he would sing some of his favourite songs. One was “Oh, Miss Nicholas, don’t be so ridiculous, I don’t like it in the daytime, Nighttime’s the right time. So, Miss Nicholas, don’t be so ridiculous…” He wasn’t particularly religious. Very few of the men were. They would stand at the back of the chapel and nudge one another when the priest drank the wine from the chalice, whispering about him being a toper. By contrast, most of the women prayed fervently, their eyes raised to the whitewashed ceiling, the better for God to hear their pitiful supplications.

Carnero went to the pub each night, or rather, one of the several pubs, depending on the welcome. Remarkably for a small one-horse town, there were twenty-seven public houses, three grocery shops, one drapery, one chemist, no cinema, and no library. Carnero struck oil when an elderly publican skidded on the cobbles in his own yard and needed help lifting the hooped wooden barrels of porter. Carnero got to be his adjutant and in return had free drink, but to ingratiate himself even more, he stole wood and timber from us and had a blazing fire in that bar that lured customers away from other premises.
Every Saturday night he would bring me a bar of chocolate, dark chocolate with a white filling, or milk chocolate with raisins and almonds, along with Peggy’s Leg, which was sweet, cinnamon-colored, and sticky. Since I was fasting a lot to save our family from various disasters, I kept these things in an attaché case, which I would open from time to time, as might a shopkeeper, resolving not to eat them. The taste and texture of the Turkish delight surpassed all, and even thinking about it often made me break my resolve. I would open the suitcase and eat two whole bars in a gulp. My other indulgence was, with my bare hand, to scoop some of the trifle that my mother had put to set in a glass bowl on the vestibule floor and then, to hide my crime, flatten the surface with the back of a soup spoon to make it smooth again.

On Saturdays in summer I would be sent to the bog with Carnero’s lunch, which consisted of thick slices of soda bread that was buttered, with sugar sprinkled on because of his sweet tooth. The tea, already milked, would be in a bottle. I loved that journey. Mad Mabel never set foot there, and there were no men or hobos lurking to try and get one behind a wall for a kiss, which they called a “birdy,” as they fumbled with one’s coat and skirt. Already, in my daft ambition to be a writer, I was studying nature so that I could submit pieces to the local weekly newspaper. There was an anonymous scribe, of whom I was jealous, who wrote articles about storms and seabirds and shelving sea cliffs. That was in the western part of the county on the Atlantic Ocean. We were inland, and I thought Drewsboro the loveliest, leafiest place in the whole world. On either side of the track there were grassy banks full of wildflowers and burdock and flowering weed, bees buzzing and disporting themselves in and out of those honeyed enclaves, and the smell
of the nettles so hot. Birds swooped in random gusts, and butterflies, velvet-brown, maroon, and tortoiseshell, their ravishing colors never clashing, never gaudy, moved in the higher strata, like pieces of flying silk.

When I got to the entrance to the bog, Carnero would be beckoning to me to hurry on, because he had “hungry grass.” The bog itself (another venue for my future composition) was a vista of colors that stretched miles and miles to the next parish, where we could see the slate blue of the church spire. The cut turf was still black, but the sides of the turf banks were a blacker black that oozed bog water, and the heather, blasted by winter winds, bloomed purple and purple-brown. A tall fringing of soft-green sedge circled the lake where waterbirds nested and let out occasional shrieks of alarm. On the brackish water a few yellow irises, sun-shot and golden, left one in no mistake but that it was high summer. He didn’t like the tepid tea, so, pulling heather by the roots and using a few birch branches, he started up a fire to heat it in a billy can. The smell of the fire in the open air was so clean and the thin smoke drifted up in sputters. I had a surprise for him. “What, what?” I kept stringing it along. It concerned Sacko, who was both his friend and his rival. I had brought a newspaper, wrapped around the bottle of tea, in which Sacko’s rash adventures were graphically relayed. Carnero lay back, rolling his tongue repeatedly over his unwashed, yellow teeth. He was agog. At that time I was too young to notice that Carnero could neither read nor write.

Only the week before, we were in stitches reading of a Mrs. Considine, up in West Clare, who took a swing at a Mrs. Berg for the larceny of two pounds of sugar, four penny buns, and two candles. The witness, who had been wheeling Mrs. Considine’s bicycle, identified himself in the court as having kept apart “from the scenery,” but did allow that both women had scratches on their faces and also blood and loose teeth. Still
another woman had been charged with a theft of a piece of mutton, worth one shilling and sixpence. Her excuse was that she had laid her own parcels on the counter and, since the butcher was very busy, had erroneously picked up the piece of mutton. “So the mutton got off the counter and walked in under your shawl?” said the district judge, who was known for his asperity, at which she pleaded poor sight and old age. She was fined ten shillings and sixpence for her chicanery.

But the one I was about to read out was nearer home, occurred in the very shop where my mother bought jam and raspberry and custard biscuits when she was flush. It concerned Sacko, known as the “Nocturnal Thief.” He was a rover who would come and go, and after long absences would return sporting a silk handkerchief or a silver monogrammed cigarette case, saying he had been given them in return for his services to a lord or an admiral over in England. Everyone knew about the break-in at Eamonn’s shop and the eggs that had been stolen and how Sacko had been a suspect, but never was it so splendidly told as in the article that I read out to Carnero.

Eamonn the shopkeeper, asleep on the first floor, heard breaking noise underneath and came down to find the two panes of glass had been removed from a back window, a lamp had been overturned, a number of eggs and also two goose eggs were missing out of the cardboard crate. Eamonn the shopkeeper, though worried, went back to bed. In the morning, with the help of the local guard, they applied some detective work and came to the conclusion that the rude intruder was probably a person five feet six inches in height and weighing no more than twelve stone, so as to be able to pass through the window space. Sacko the suspect, when questioned, presented himself as a blameless neighbourly man and charted his movements from midnight ’til four a.m. He had taken a walk all around the village, he had stopped at the parish pump for a slug of water, he had an engaging discussion with the nightwatchman about the prospects of an oncoming war and being a Samaritan,
he had driven four stray calves that were wandering around the road into the shopkeeper’s yard, for safety. After that, he had walked a mile out of the town, to a place where a farmer had allowed him to doss, whenever he was stuck for a bed. However, his story had a “lacuna.” The cast made of his footprints matched the footprint in the backyard and, moreover, he was the only person around known to suck raw eggs. The plaintiff surpassed himself, telling the judge how he had spent the night, worn out from walking, he had gone to the shed, procured an old stick, which he rested crosswise in a corner, and sat upright with his hands folded, praying to God as he had always done in the trenches.

“Trenches, my backside,” Carnero said, but his interest was fully whetted.

Sacko went on to tell the judge that he had never in his life done any injury to anyone and had taken the eggs only since his rheumatism was awful bad from a life of a vagrant, sleeping in stables.

“Anything else exciting?” the judge put to him.

“Yes… I am a versatile man and skilled in musical accomplishments… I am a ventriloquist and a conjuror, gifts that I am sure our local superintendent does not possess… and hence tries to blacken me.”

“They are gifts I am happy to do without,” the superintendent said, jumping up, red in the face, furious at being mocked by a lying hooligan. But the judge, who himself liked a drink, was lenient that day, or else had enjoyed the repartee, so that Sacko got off on the grounds that the break-in was not serious, and what were a few missing eggs to a prosperous person known as Eamonn the shopkeeper.

“Christ, there’s no stopping him now,” Carnero said, staring at the photograph of Sacko in an ill-fitting blazer with brass buttons and steel-rimmed glasses that he had worn for effect.

Although the next item that I read out did not interest Carnero, he listened, anything to loll and keep idle. Did it, I
asked him, outshine my own more pallid pieces, about bogs and bees and butterflies?

On the west coast of Ireland between Clare and Kerry lies the mouth of the Shannon with Loop Head Peninsula on the Clare side aggressively spearing twenty miles out into the ageless and relentless foe, the Atlantic. Elemental wars of wind and water have vanquished all its supporting land fortifications to north and south and the great Shannon flood, allied with the ocean, has attacked the rear or landward end and all but isled it. Greyly and ever narrowingly the Peninsula lances out with its beetling cliffs, flanks to the Peninsula at Killala, whereon it carries a lighthouse from which, like the grand old warrior it is, it flashes the chivalrous warning, “Beware! I break the ocean, I wreck ships.”

It was time to go back home. If on the return journey I saw the same lucky butterfly, then the composition I was intending to write would soar. It had rested on a rock, and was opening and shutting its wings repeatedly, wings like jewels, deep violet with a dusting of marcasite, and it kept doing the same thing, the opening and the shutting of the wings, like a coquette, drunk maybe from the nectar it had just tasted on berries, or perhaps to entice another of its kind.

Then one wet night, as we sat by the fire, our dogs began to bark like mad, and we were surprised that any visitors would set out on such a night. We waited and waited, yet nobody knocked. Eventually my mother went out to the back kitchen, where a letter had been slipped under the door. It was that dreaded thing, an anonymous letter. She read the first lines aloud. Carnero was to be seen in our woods, with the doctor’s maid, each night after he left the public house. The subsequent lines were so shaming that my mother called my father out onto
the step and shut the door so that I would not overhear. When they came back in, she said, in a dire whisper, that Carnero would have to be given his walking papers. If that happened, we were truly sunk. He ran the place. He milked, he foddered, he plowed, he harrowed, he killed a pig twice a year, and on summer Sundays wrung the necks of cockerels for Sunday’s dinner, which consisted of boiled chicken and a white sauce with parsley.

Piecing together the contents of the anonymous letter and Carnero’s terrible tryst, I went wild with jealousy and feared for his soul, having no regard for hers. The only punishment I could wreak was to refuse to accept the bars of chocolate and, moreover, not speak to him. I can’t remember how long this sulk lasted, except that we learned that the maid, having been locked in a box room by the doctor’s wife, was later summarily dismissed.