Emerald Germs of Ireland (28 page)

What is perhaps tragic is that the following morning the old familiar Butty Halpin had returned with a vengeance. It was as though the flawed, humane characteristics which had lately become a feature of the man’s personality had been nothing more than a temporary, ephemeral aberration, of no lasting consequence whatsoever. Which made Pat sad as he watched him now, marching down the lane—confidently—brashly!—swinging his briefcase and singing, “Have you ever been in love, me boys, have you ever felt the pain?” in practice for the
contest that evening. For the truth is that Pat had—to his exquisite surprise—been developing something of an affection for what might be called the “new Butty.” But soon, he felt—a thesis eventually—heart-breakingly, perhaps—proven correct—such emotions would be destined to belong only in the dungeons of the past.

With an alacrity, indeed, that not even Pat—an atavistic caution where Butty Halpin was concerned notwithstanding—could have begun to anticipate!

It was well after midnight that evening when Pat, immersed in a book—
The Actor’s Craft
—was startled by the crunch of gravel beneath heavy boots and the intermittent bursts of heavy coughing and loud, triumphant singing of a by now very familiar song. A glutinous unease took hold of Pat’s stomach as he heard, “For the girl I loved was beautiful and I want you all to know That I met her in the garden where the praties grow—yeehoo!” Pat stiffened as the key turned in the lock, instantaneously the room reeking of repellent body odors and stale whiskey. If Pat had had any doubts, it was now clear that the “new” Butty Halpin had vanished and the “old” made its brash, triumphant reappearance. The teacher’s eyes seemed as two insanely burning beads set back in a pulping ball of incandescent pink flesh as he stumbled forward and jabbed the air pointlessly with his Yale front door key.

“What are you reading there, McNab? Give me that!”

“It’s a book about acting. Mammy got me a subscription, you see!”

“Her! That flaming lunatic! We were just talking about her down in the pub! Well, the effing trouble I had with that gawshkogue!”

“Gawshkogue, master?”

Pat went cold from head to toe.

“Aye! Gawshkogue! Isn’t that what I said? Storming into my classroom giving me orders! The gamey auld haybag! Small wonder you grew up half-queer! Ha ha—sorry, Pat!”

A nerve flickered beneath Pat’s eye.

“It’s all right, master.”

The round teacher stood backward as he proceeded to open the boxlike brown-paper package he carried beneath his left arm.

“Well, Pat! I got it! I won the biggest prize of all! Eloquence beyond eloquence this time, Pat, I have to say! A beautiful quill pen made entirely of Waterford crystal—to symbolize all my learning, you see!”

The sharp spear of the quill pen as it caught the light was truly beautiful. Any number of cities might have collapsed to nothingness within the landscape of Pat’s mind at the sight of it.

“Well, Pat. I’d best be off up the wooden hill. I think I’m entitled to a snooze after achieving my life’s ambitions. Wouldn’t you think so, Pat?”

There was a long pause. Before the old Butty—very much so the old Butty—caustically rasped, raising his voice as of yore, “Wouldn’t you think so, McNab?”

‘Yes. Yes, master,” came the instinctive reply, Pat automatically raising his bottom as though from the seat of an old pine desk in the long ago.

There is a dream—as though an Eastman-colored reverie, a psychedelic minuet danced in a garden of fantasy—which comes to those whose inner peace is that born of triumph in the field of private, long-held aspirations; of planets bursting in a firmament glowing with a light which is hardly bearable to one’s eyes; of towering sunflowers sprouting as from nowhere; of flower-filled fragrances drifting past on a breeze that is for ever summer. But, always, there will reveal itself an aspect which to that ethereal landscape must belong and to no other, as if all private endeavor had been striving toward that moment when the mundane transforms itself, miraculously, into something which is truly celestial; and the sight of Butty Halpin, unremarkable schoolmaster in a small two-room establishment in a barely known hamlet on the side of a windswept road for well nigh forty years, bore all the hallmarks of the apotheosis of such qualities: declamatory, elegant beyond words as he stood by the bar, the sparrow-taunting notes of “The Garden Where the Praties Grow” trilling wantonly from his lips as—absurdly!—and without the slightest warning of any kind, upon this warmly glowing landscape of achievement began to perambulate none other than Mrs. McNab, mother of Pat, attired now from head to foot in a bridal gown of white, handwoven lace, smiling from ear to ear as through the air,
elegantly cast from her sculpted, vein-blue hands, curved a magnificently floral bouquet, her voice, he noted, oddly huskier than he remembered it as she intoned, “Hello there, master.”

There is a tentadveness within the world of masquerade, of chimera, a fragility intrinsic to its essence that can be shocking in its rawest manifestation; a darkness encircling those crimson planets which burst, a sinister supplication about the heads of sunflowers now which well may threaten to droop if not expire; a heart-stopping bluntness about the crack of lightning which darts across the sky—as it does now, at this very moment—revealing in an instant none other than—Maimie McNab!— no longer about her gowned and lace-clad form the shimmering perimeter of light that is the signature of poesy, fancy, and imagination, but cold and poker stiff, her face a mask of chalk-white flesh from which feeling has been long since banished. His dream crumbling as a window by a propelled stone shattered, a paper bag by a closed fist crushed, Butty Halpin shot awake, a Niagara of sweat upon his back.

“Mrs. McNab!” he cried, astonished, pulling the striped collar of his pajamas about his neck.

There was a long pause as Mrs. McNab, in a voice unexpectedly low and sonorous yet resonant throughout die entire room, replied, “Master—I’m sorry about Pat. He’s giving you trouble again, isn’t he?”

Butty Halpin gulped. Mrs. McNab threw a huge, startlingly vast shadow on the wall.

“No, Mrs. McNab. He’s not!” he replied unconvincingly.

“Ah, Mr. Halpin, he is,” replied Mrs. McNab. “He can’t do his sums. And he’s no good at the football.”

Butty felt his lips go dry—but the clack of the stickiness inside his mouth was almost deafening.

“No good at the football?” he replied, weakly. “No, Mrs. McNab, he’s powerful at it. He’s a great trier. A great trier altogether.”

Mrs. McNab moved a little step closer and lowered her head. Then she looked up sadly and said, “I know, master. But trying’s not good enough, is it? You’ve always said that. It’s simply not enough to try!”

Butty Halpin tried to wet his lips with his tongue as he said, “Mrs.— would you mind if I went? I’ve been in the house annoying Pat long enough. I’ll be off so—”

As if unaware of his own actions, he noticed his feet fall to the floor and his pipe smoke-stained fingers reach for his trousers which lay draped across the back of a chair. He felt Mrs. McNab’s presence. Her deep and steady breathing had the effect of unnerving him to a terrible degree. He could feel individual beads of perspiration breaking out on his forehead with a rhythmic precision as if each one was announcing, “I’m here! Present and correct!”

“Why did you have to call him names?” he heard her say. “He was only a boy, Mr. Halpin!”

“Mrs. McNab,” he croaked as he raised one leg to insert into his trousers, “I have to go now. I really would like to stay but I have no choice, I’m afraid!”

“He was only a boy but you had to call him names! Why did you have to do that, Mr. Halpin?”

It was unfortunately at that moment—one foot becoming entangled in the leg of his trousers—that the blood rushed to the schoolteacher’s head, leading him to involuntarily ejaculate, “Ah for the love of God, woman, can you blame me! It was you did it! You and your mad carry-on!”

Almost instantly he placed his hand over his lips and cried, “No!” his trousers ballooning about his ankles as he did so, the sudden arrow of blue lightning outside disorienting him as the huge silhouette loomed above him, its tenebrous texture of glimmering—glimmering? yes!—immaculately blown glass all the way from Waterford, a sinuously curving quill, the plinth of which dealt him a glancing blow to the side of the head as his flailing arm drew wild arcs of both shadow and light from the oscillating lampshade, the screeches of his assailant seeming to issue from an abyss far beyond before coalescing to form the words, “What with the way you had him, you and your carry-on!”

There could be only one response from Butty Halpin, schoolmaster, in the face of the ferocity of such an onslaught, and it was thus, “Aaargh!” as a rapid succession of large, poppy-red blotches broke in lakes against the window before becoming thin irregular rivers coursing downward along the sporadically illuminated, blue-lit glass.

A figure alone in a field, elbow angled on the wooden shaft of a spade, his soul weighed down by melancholy as he ponders and mur-murs
quietly in the midge-ridden quiet of the gloaming, “Even if only one time you’d said it, master. Just said, ‘I don’t want to be the big fellow anymore. Tonight I don’t want to be the big fellow. Instead let’s just you and me go down to Sullivan’s and have ourselves a litde chat about the future and the way things are going to be.’

“From now on, not the past, not the old days. Nothing but the future, master. The future and you and Pat McNab. But you couldn’t do it, could you, Halpin? Couldn’t do it, could you, you scuttering great tub of mouldy shite!”

A solitary figure in a kitchen, softly closing a drawer which contains a wig both sad and lifeless and a once vivacious bouquet of flowers from a wedding long since faded to the land of sepia. The flicker of melancholy still lingering in his eyes as he whispers, “No. Had to be all the big fellow and that’s all there is to it. Scuttering tubs of guts who have to have it all their own way and abandon the rest of us to melancholy.”

A melancholy hardly evident to stray passersby on the nights when the moon transmits its ghostly rays and sends them spilling out across the slates of the house which is the residence of Pat McNab, former pupil of Bernard “Butty” Halpin, Bachelor of Arts (by night), Gullytown. Although, it has to be said, there were occasions upon which even the most casually interested observers might have paused and, cupping a hand around one ear, remarked, “Why, I do believe it sounds as if there is a party of some description going on, right here in the McNab place!”

As indeed, perhaps there might well have been. But such is not how Pat McNab might have described it, no such words came leaping to his lips as he—some part of him finally having expired as a consequence of the behavior of his former educator—raised the teapot and enquired of his “sleeping” mother (utterly oblivious of the assortment of “minibeasts” which had clearly been utilizing her eye sockets as some sort of “minibeast hotel,” long before he had ever ferried her inside from her prone resting place beneath the laurel bush) as to whether she might “like some more tea at all?” before allowing himself a private litde smile and retiring to the library, where, dimming the lights to his satisfaction, he took up his pen and, beginning to hum softly to himself, inscribed, in the most copperplate of hands, “They’re all germs,
Mammy. You know that, don’t you? That’s what they are, you know. Each and every one of them—germs who have to die!” a heartwarming feeling of well-being overcoming him as his pen assumed a life of its own, the contentment he now felt effortlessly forming itself into the words which trembled for a moment upon his lips before-triumphantly, exultantly—soaring from them and disappearing through the window

as though for all the world some living, breathing fireflies of song.

A
common remark as time proceeded in the tranquil hamlet of Gullytown and the surrounding district began to be, “I think McNab’s getting worse, do you know that.” And there were few reasonable observers who would venture to disagree with such assertions whenever they’d encounter Pat strolling through the village with bottles of Double Diamond and Macardles Ale clinking in his pocket, biting at his thumbnail and erupting into what can only be described as edgy whoops of laughter for no apparent reason at all. In Sullivan’s Select Bar, the plain facts were that they had more or less given him up for lost. Even Timmy Sullivan, when he was approached about matters concerning his customer, merely tossed back his head—in the manner of one who, after months of stoic and almost heroic patience, has finally given up the ghost. “He was in here again last night,” he would remark, wiping a glass with his tea cloth, “talking about showbiz engagements on the moon, no less! The night before it was some kung fu expert tailing him! Ah look here—I give up.” At which the sober patrons (and there were a few) would just shake their heads and sigh. For it was clear as day to them and to anyone who had come into the slightest contact with him that if he continued in this fashion, Pat would soon be beyond redemption. “A complete and utter bucking head case!” was Josh Mulrooney’s verdict. “Not that it’s any surprise, mind you, what with him having that for a mother! If anything, she was worse than him!” Insensitive as it may seem, it would have been very difficult to find anyone in the hamlet of Gullytown and district who would demur. “I mind her coming down the
street one day wearing a hat with a plastic budgie!” recalled Tom O’Hal-loran.

“A plastic budgie? Sure that’s nothing! Didn’t she come down to the school and bate poor Butty Halpin over the head and the whole school laughing at him! Jasus, Butty was no angel, but he didn’t deserve that!”

“She slapped me across the face one day—in this very pub!” said someone else.

No, Mrs. McNab did not possess many fans in the small community collectively known as Gullytown. As neither indeed did her late husband, “the army man, McNab,” as he was known (the news of whose demise, after getting “blown up” in the war, was greeted with cheers in Sullivan’s and other establishments). And in a sense because of which there had always been a lingering sort of sympathy, however unspoken, for Pat and the way he was. “Ah sure, God help him” was a commonly employed platitude. But even in their very worst imaginings, there were very few—if any—who believed Pat capable of the most heinous crime of all, in all likelihood vouchsafing, “Pshaw! McNab! Sure that eejit’d run a mile before he’d do the like of that! He’s afraid of his own shadow, for God’s sake!”

Indeed, had Pat burst through the doors of Sullivan’s and glassily declared, “I’ve done it! At last I’ve done it!” he would more than likely have been greeted with an assortment of derisive whoops. For the simple truth is that they would not have been able to bring themselves to believe it. Any more than they would have been capable of envisaging him lifting a finger to his old schoolteacher Butty Halpin! But oh how wrong they were in that particular case, as in so many others! For now that Pat had sipped a number of times from that most exciting, pungent of chalices, the prospect of its vivifying liquid again reaching his lips made his heart beat at a pace heretofore unknown! By the lone resident of the McNab house, at least! “Take that!” he had howled at poor Butty as he brought down the crystal instrument of death down again and again! Chuckling wildly as he swooshed handfuls of clear, cool water about his features to cleanse them, crying with abandon, “Free! Yes, free at last!” After which, of course, his adversaries were as nothing but perambulating sacks of human compost placed upon this earth for the sole purpose of the fertilization of Pat McNab’s back garden. There
were those who, insouciantly, on occasion might mutter, “Mrs. McNab—I wonder where does she be these times at all?” Finding themselves smartly silenced by implacable responses of, “Oh! She’s in America! Away this good while, I believe!”

Similar responses applied in the case of Butty Halpin. To the query, “Where the hell is Butty at all? He never seems to come in now!” would come the reply, “Ah since his poor missus died he hasn’t been so well at all. Gone to the sister in Dublin, so they say!”

As all returned to silence.

Unlike the clamor continuing inside the mind of Pat McNab at this time, which might be more accurately described as “disjointed” and “cacophonous,” pardcularly since the beating with sticks administered circa the moon episode and subsequent indulgence in more roots enthusiasdcally advanced to him by one Honky McCool. Not to mention his recent conversion to the world of the video nasty, one in which indeed he now passed a great proportion of his waking hours, settling himself in his chair with Taytos and red lemonade, flicking the button with his toe as the cathode-ray tube disgorged its all-enfolding light, and along with the raucous cries of Chuck Nortis, Jackie Chan, and Jean-Claude Van Damme. As for ninety minutes’ duration, an expression of peace, bliss, and utter contentment would assume residence in the soul of Pat McNab. But, being in such a fragile state (post-moon episode there was still a lump on his head the size of a balloon) it was perhaps unwise for Pat to dedicate such a generous portion of his time to indulgence in unreality. For the links between the world it represented and that of the tangible, temporal one which the rest of us attempt to negotiate daily were—without his knowledge—becoming ever more tenuous.

Which might perhaps explain why Pat on his way home from Sullivan’s on a perfectly ordinary Tuesday night—dreary, indeed, with not a litde drizzle—after one of his sporadic bursts of coughing raised his head to find a significant proportion of the countryside (in the main, the field between Henry’s beech and the barnyard gate) suffused with a shimmering silky green light. It disturbed him to observe this, and a certain coldness enveloped him as he perceived a razor-sharp wind whistling past, bending his black greasy hair back against his ears. By
the time he attained sanctuary, it is no falsehood to state that Pat McNab was close to tears and, as he sank into his library chair, he plunged his head into his hands and cried, “Why can’t you leave me alone? Why do these thoughts come back to haunt me now? Why can’t you be still, insistent drum of guilt?”

For three hours that night, he remained immobile in the chair, far off the thunder grumbling as though personally dissatisfied, the rain dribbling in tiny, multiplying rivers down the glass. At once Pat construed himself on fire and abandoned in the arctic snows. “When will it be?” he whispered, semidelirious. “When will it be that I shall be set free? To feel at last about me silence? What? What did you say? Did someone’s beautiful voice at this very moment bring me words of longed-for succor? Please say they did. I beg you now—affirm it for me! Affirm that for me!”

Unexpectedly, it was a smile of contentment that suddenly began to play about his lips as the first sound of throbbing bongo drums came drifting from afar. Followed by a voice that was the tiniest of whispers lost inside the blunt vastness of the wardrobe.

“Pat?” came the voice. “Pat, pet?”

Pat’s heavy-lidded eyes flickered ever so slightly as he smiled weakly and said, “That such a word it could be whispered and in this world be real would be to me as a balm in Gilead. But it could not. Alas, it can but be my fevered dreams.”

“Pat, love? Can you hear me?”

It was a glittering speck in a vast and sweeping cosmos.

“Mammy?” Pat heard himself say, with a feeling of hope that appeared to consume his entire being.

The bird cries came from afar, from a distant place he could not know.

“Is that you, Mammy?” he repeated tremulously.

The familiar feminine voice became more audible now, as though the birds in unison now deferred.

“It’s me, love. I’m over here,” she whispered.

It was as though another Pat, a secret, transparent one from pure light fashioned, now detached itself from his recumbent form and by a pulsating, compelling music led, attended by the wardrobe door, the hypnotic lilt of the macaw magically threaded about his cranium.

“Mammy?” he ventured apprehensively.

“Yes, love,” he heard his mother reply.

“Are you in there?”

It was as though Pat was on the cusp of complete happiness and utter despair.

“Open the door, sweetheart!” his mother urged him.

“The door?” replied Pat, a litde confused.

“Yes,” said his mother. “I’m waiting for you.”

The what only can be described as a “foxfire flash” which ensued was instantaneous, but not in the least unpleasant—as neither, indeed, was the sight which now met Pat’s eyes, one which came close to bringing tears to them as he beheld his mother, a vision now in a mango-and-papaya-patterned one-piece swimsuit as she awaited him beneath the tallest of coconut trees. Pat felt slightly awkward and ill-prepared in his long, down-to-the-knee black coat. Behind his smiling parent, the bleached white coast trailed along by a clear, turquoise sea which seemed to stretch to infinity itself, the parakeets within the sprouting tropical palms as so many splashes of brighdy colored paint. Pat felt a lump coming into his throat.

“Mammy! I can’t believe it’s you!” he heard himself say.

His mother smiled.

“Oh, it’s me all right. I’ve waited so long for you, son,” she replied.

Pat gulped.

“Oh, Mammy,” he said.

“Waited for this day,” his mother repeated, her eyes glittering.

“Mammy, I can’t bear it,” Pat said.

“Come on, love,” said his mother, extending her hand.

The waves hushed as though teasing the edge of the strand as they both lay beneath the enormous tree that seemed to curtsey to the blushing sky. Far off a porpoise curved and was swallowed up by the warm waters.

“How many nights I’ve dreamed of this. You coming to visit me here,” his mother said, passing him a sliver of breadfruit.

“Me too, Mammy,” came Pat’s choked reply.

“You dancing. Me singing. I used to dream about it—and think that it would be the most beautiful thing in the entire world.”

Pat looked shyly at her.

“It is, Mammy,” he replied as she took his hand and began to sing, tapping the rhythm on his palm with her fingers.

She smoothed his hair back from his eyes and said, “Sing it, Pat. Sing it for Mammy, will you love?”

Pat was hesitant but gained courage as she squeezed his hand.

“My thoughts ever stray,” he sang, “to our last sweet embraces …”

“Over the sea on the island of dreams!” she sang aloud, embracing him as he cried, “Mammy!”

“Pat!”

“The most beautiful day since the world began!”

And it really was. The way he knew they would all be now, the days that spread before them, as, the evening closing in around them now, he watched her setting the table in the hut, carefully laying out the impressively crafted earthenware, the house goat sipping the milk, then masticating quietly in the corner.

“Here, Pat!” she said, passing her son a gourd. “Have yourself some fruit juice.”

“Thank you, Mammy,” replied Pat, good-manneredly.

“You get that down you now like a good fella—and help yourself to anything you want, won’t you? I have this skin to put out!”

His mother hummed softly to herself as she disappeared beneath the rattan door and was swallowed up by the sunshine. Pat stared at the goat’s matted beard for a moment and thought, “How can you be so lucky, Pat McNab? How can you have done such a bad thing on your own mother and then finding yourself waking up one morning having been given a second chance? Not only that but given a life which is so beautiful your mind is close to bursting thinking about it! A life replete with mango, banana, coconut, porpoise, paradise bird! Why, it’s fantastic! No wonder then you’d cry, ‘But this, it cannot be! Surely today this rainbow world will fall apart, everything within it turn to dust!’#x201D;

“Nothing is either good or bad but thinking makes it so,” the bard
would insist. And thus it seemed to Pat McNab as he lay there, his anxieties (thoroughly unnecessarily, and induced, most likely, by the torrid heat) transformed into night sweats of the most hideous kind as he strove for sleep in the straw and mud-baked hut he and his mother now called home. “No! No!” he cried, springing awake in his rudimentary settle bed to envision the goat laying in a corner on its side—dead! And placed directly—clearly significantly!—above its sad, unbreathing body, a talismanic arrangement of exotic fruits—bursting open like flesh! Pat cried out anew as he espied the irregular trail of crimson blood winding its ragged way toward the aperture that was the door—and, firmly nailed by the northwest corner, a human heart on fire—that single, vile, and unmistakable prognostication of voodoo! Out of nowhere an unearthly howl instilled fear of an undiluted kind into his bones, beside him now appearing a straw-braceleted figure behind a giant painted mask, uncurling from its pitlike mouth the cry, “Whoah—hoo—hah—hee—haw!” then total silence as it vanished as though never having existed.

“Pat! Pat! What is wrong?” he then heard his mother cry, his heart beating wildly in his chest. Only then did he realize that the entire hut was in silence. Beside him, he noted, his mother looked quite fetching in her native hair accessories.