My Oedipus Complex (30 page)

‘ 'Twas the best day I ever had,' he said. ‘I got porter and I got whiskey and I got poteen. I did so, Tom, my calf. Ned, my brightness, I went to seven houses and in every house I got seven drinks and with every drink I got seven welcomes. And your mother's people are a hand of trumps. It was no slight they put on me at all even if I was nothing but a landless man. No slight, Tom. No slight at all.'

Darkness had fallen, the rain had cleared, the stars came out of a pitch-black sky under which the little tossing, nosing boat seemed lost beyond measure. In all the waste of water nothing could be heard but the splash of the boat's sides and their father's voice raised in tipsy song.

The evening was fair and the sunlight was yellow
,

I halted, beholding a maiden bright

Coming to me by the edge of the mountain
,

Her cheeks had a berry-bright rosy light
.

Ned was the first to wake. He struck a match and lit the candle. It was time for them to be stirring. It was just after dawn, and at half past nine he must be in his old place in the schoolroom before the rows of pinched little city-faces. He lit a cigarette and closed his eyes. The lurch of the boat was still in his blood, the face of Cait Deignan in his mind, and as if from far away he heard a line of the wild love-song his father had been singing: ‘And we'll drive the geese at the fall of night.'

He heard his brother mumble something and nudged him. Tom looked big and fat and vulnerable with his fair head rolled sideways and his heavy mouth dribbling on to the sleeve of his pyjamas. Ned slipped quietly out of bed, put on his trousers, and went to the window. He drew the curtains and let in the thin cold daylight. The bay was just visible and perfectly still. Tom began to mumble again in a frightened voice and Ned shook him. He started out of his sleep with a cry of fear, grabbing at the bedclothes. He looked first at Ned, then at the candle and drowsily rubbed his eyes.

‘Did you hear it too?' he asked.

‘Did I hear what?' asked Ned with a smile.

‘In the room,' said Tom.

‘There was nothing in the room,' replied Ned. ‘You were ramaishing so I woke you up.'

‘Was I? What was I saying?'

‘You were telling no secrets,' said Ned with a quiet laugh.

‘Hell!' Tom said in disgust and stretched out his arm for a cigarette. He lit it at the candle flame, his drowsy red face puckered and distraught. ‘I slept rotten.'

‘Oye!' Ned said quietly, raising his eyebrows. It wasn't often Tom spoke in that tone. He sat on the edge of the bed, joined his hands, and leaned forward, looking at Tom with wide gentle eyes.

‘Is there anything wrong?' he asked.

‘Plenty.'

‘You're not in trouble?' Ned asked without raising his voice.

‘Not that sort of trouble. The trouble is in myself.'

Ned gave him a look of intense sympathy and understanding. The soft emotional brown eyes were searching him for a judgement. Ned had never felt less like judging him.

‘Ay,' he said gently and vaguely, his eyes wandering to the other side of the room while his voice took on its accustomed stammer, ‘the trouble is always in ourselves. If we were contented in ourselves the other things wouldn't matter. I suppose we must only leave it to time. Time settles everything.'

‘Time will settle nothing for me,' Tom said despairingly. ‘You have something to look forward to. I have nothing. It's the loneliness of my job that kills you. Even to talk about it would be a relief but there's no one you can talk to. People come to you with their troubles but there's no one you can go to with your own.'

Again the challenging glare in the brown eyes and Ned realized with infinite compassion that for years Tom had been living in the same state of suspicion and fear, a man being hunted down by his own nature; and that for years to come he would continue to live in this way, and perhaps never be caught again as he was now.

‘A pity you came down here,' stammered Ned flatly. ‘A pity we went to Carriganassa. 'Twould be better for both of us if we went somewhere else.'

‘Why don't you marry her, Ned?' Tom asked earnestly.

‘Who?' asked Ned.

‘Cait.'

‘Yesterday,' said Ned with the shy smile he wore when he confessed something, ‘I nearly wished I could.'

‘But you can, man,' Tom said eagerly, sitting upon his elbow. Like all men with frustration in their hearts he was full of schemes for others. ‘You could marry her and get a school down here. That's what I'd do if I was in your place.'

‘No,' Ned said gravely. ‘We made our choice a long time ago. We can't go back on it now.'

Then with his hands in his trouser pockets and his head bowed he went out to the kitchen. His mother, the coloured shawl about her head, was
blowing the fire. The bedroom door was open and he could see his father in shirt-sleeves kneeling beside the bed, his face raised reverently towards a holy picture, his braces hanging down behind. He unbolted the half-door, went through the garden and out on to the road. There was a magical light on every thing. A boy on a horse rose suddenly against the sky, a startling picture. Through the apple-green light over Carriganassa ran long streaks of crimson, so still they might have been enamelled. Magic, magic, magic! He saw it as in a children's picture-book with all its colours intolerably bright; something he had outgrown and could never return to, while the world he aspired to was as remote and intangible as it had seemed even in the despair of youth.

It seemed as if only now for the first time was he leaving home; for the first time and forever saying good-bye to it all.

Old Dan Bride was breaking brosna for the fire when he heard a step on the path. He paused, a bundle of saplings on his knee.

Dan had looked after his mother while the life was in her, and after her death no other woman had crossed his threshold. Signs on it, his house had that look. Almost everything in it he had made with his own hands in his own way. The seats of the chairs were only slices of log, rough and round and thick as the saw had left them, and with the rings still plainly visible through the grime and polish that coarse trouser-bottoms had in the course of long years imparted. Into these Dan had rammed stout knotted ash-boughs that served alike for legs and back. The deal table, bought in a shop, was an inheritance from his mother and a great pride and joy to him though it rocked whenever he touched it. On the wall, unglazed and fly-spotted, hung in mysterious isolation a Marcus Stone print, and beside the door was a calendar with a picture of a racehorse. Over the door hung a gun, old but good, and in excellent condition, and before the fire was stretched an old setter who raised his head expectantly whenever Dan rose or even stirred.

He raised it now as the steps came nearer and when Dan, laying down the bundle of saplings, cleaned his hands thoughtfully on the seat of his trousers, he gave a loud bark, but this expressed no more than a desire to show off his own watchfulness. He was half human and knew people thought he was old and past his prime.

A man's shadow fell across the oblong of dusty light thrown over the half-door before Dan looked round.

‘Are you alone, Dan?' asked an apologetic voice.

‘Oh, come in, come in, sergeant, come in and welcome,' exclaimed the old man, hurrying on rather uncertain feet to the door which the tall
policeman opened and pushed in. He stood there, half in sunlight, half in shadow, and seeing him so, you would have realized how dark the interior of the house really was. One side of his red face was turned so as to catch the light, and behind it an ash tree raised its boughs of airy green against the sky. Green fields, broken here and there by clumps of red-brown rock, flowed downhill, and beyond them, stretched all across the horizon, was the sea, flooded and almost transparent with light. The sergeant's face was fat and fresh, the old man's face, emerging from the twilight of the kitchen, had the colour of wind and sun, while the features had been so shaped by the struggle with time and the elements that they might as easily have been found impressed upon the surface of a rock.

‘Begor, Dan,' said the sergeant, ‘ 'tis younger you're getting.'

‘Middling I am, sergeant, middling,' agreed the old man in a voice which seemed to accept the remark as a compliment of which politeness would not allow him to take too much advantage. ‘No complaints.'

‘Begor, 'tis as well because no one would believe them. And the old dog doesn't look a day older.'

The dog gave a low growl as though to show the sergeant that he would remember this unmannerly reference to his age, but indeed he growled every time he was mentioned, under the impression that people had nothing but ill to say of him.

‘And how's yourself, sergeant?'

‘Well, now, like the most of us, Dan, neither too good nor too bad. We have our own little worries, but, thanks be to God, we have our compensations.'

‘And the wife and family?'

‘Good, praise be to God, good. They were away from me for a month, the lot of them, at the mother-in-law's place in Clare.'

‘In Clare, do you tell me?'

‘In Clare. I had a fine quiet time.'

The old man looked about him and then retired to the bedroom, from which he returned a moment later with an old shirt. With this he solemnly wiped the seat and back of the log-chair nearest the fire.

‘Sit down now, sergeant. You must be tired after the journey. 'Tis a long old road. How did you come?'

‘Teigue Leary gave me the lift. Wisha now, Dan, don't be putting yourself out. I won't be stopping. I promised them I'd be back inside an hour.'

‘What hurry is on you?' asked Dan. ‘Look, your foot was only on the path when I made up the fire.'

‘Arrah, Dan, you're not making tea for me?'

‘I am not making it for you, indeed; I'm making it for myself, and I'll take it very bad of you if you won't have a cup.'

‘Dan, Dan, that I mightn't stir, but 'tisn't an hour since I had it at the barracks!'

‘Ah, whisht, now, whisht! Whisht, will you! I have something here to give you an appetite.'

The old man swung the heavy kettle on to the chain over the open fire, and the dog sat up, shaking his ears with an expression of the deepest interest. The policeman unbuttoned his tunic, opened his belt, took a pipe and a plug of tobacco from his breast pocket, and, crossing his legs in an easy posture, began to cut the tobacco slowly and carefully with his pocket knife. The old man went to the dresser and took down two handsomely decorated cups, the only cups he had, which, though chipped and handleless, were used at all only on very rare occasions; for himself he preferred his tea from a basin. Happening to glance into them, he noticed that they bore signs of disuse and had collected a lot of the fine white turf-dust that always circulated in the little smoky cottage. Again he thought of the shirt, and, rolling up his sleeves with a stately gesture, he wiped them inside and out till they shone. Then he bent and opened the cupboard. Inside was a quart bottle of pale liquid, obviously untouched. He removed the cork and smelt the contents, pausing for a moment in the act as though to recollect where exactly he had noticed that particular smoky smell before. Then, reassured, he stood up and poured out with a liberal hand.

‘Try that now, sergeant,' he said with quiet pride.

The sergeant, concealing whatever qualms he might have felt at the idea of drinking illegal whiskey, looked carefully into the cup, sniffed, and glanced up at old Dan.

‘It looks good,' he commented.

‘It should be good,' replied Dan with no mock modesty.

‘It tastes good too,' said the sergeant.

‘Ah, sha,' said Dan, not wishing to praise his own hospitality in his own house, ‘ 'tis of no great excellence.'

‘You'd be a good judge, I'd say,' said the sergeant without irony.

‘Ever since things became what they are,' said Dan, carefully guarding
himself against a too-direct reference to the peculiarities of the law administered by his guest, ‘liquor isn't what it used to be.'

‘I've heard that remark made before now, Dan,' said the sergeant thoughtfully. ‘I've heard it said by men of wide experience that it used to be better in the old days.'

‘Liquor,' said the old man, ‘is a thing that takes time. There was never a good job done in a hurry.'

‘ 'Tis an art in itself.'

‘Just so.'

‘And an art takes time.'

‘And knowledge,' added Dan with emphasis. ‘Every art has its secrets, and the secrets of distilling are being lost the way the old songs were lost. When I was a boy there wasn't a man in the barony but had a hundred songs in his head, but with people running here, there, and everywhere, the songs were lost.… Ever since things became what they are,' he repeated on the same guarded note, ‘there's so much running about the secrets are lost.'

‘There must have been a power of them.'

‘There was. Ask any man today that makes whiskey do he know how to make it out of heather.'

‘And was it made of heather?' asked the policeman.

‘It was.'

‘You never drank it yourself?'

‘I didn't, but I knew old men that did, and they told me that no whiskey that's made nowadays could compare with it.'

‘Musha, Dan, I think sometimes 'twas a great mistake of the law to set its hand against it.'

Dan shook his head. His eyes answered for him, but it was not in nature for a man to criticize the occupation of a guest in his own home.

‘Maybe so, maybe not,' he said noncommittally.

‘But sure, what else have the poor people?'

‘Them that makes the laws have their own good reasons.'

‘All the same, Dan, all the same, 'tis a hard law.'