Tarry Flynn (12 page)

‘Two hundred and fifty,' Tarry said amazed. ‘Of course it's worth twice that. I only mentioned the hundred and twenty because I thought maybe you got it cheap.'

‘Do you know what the place is worth?' the woman said, with her half-shut fist stuck in her jaw. ‘Do you know how much the solicitor said he could get for it if the Carlins were out? Hut! man!… I believe that this Cassidy one is home, Mary. Were you talking to her?'

‘No, I wasn't,' snapped Mary.

‘She'll get a man this time or lose a fall,' said the mother. ‘And for all that she's not a bad girl. Back to England she wouldn't go if she got the chance of a man.'

‘She came to the right place,' said Mary, ironically.

‘Eusebius offered a hundred,' said the mother. ‘That's about all the money they have in spite of the stallion. From now on
you'll have to put an inch to your step and quit the curse o'God dreaming.' She was silent a while as she filled her mouth, for the next remark.

Tarry was at first tremendously excited over the purchase, but as his mother spoke and he thought the matter over he began to pity himself. Even with the eleven or twelve acres added to their present farm what would they still be but poor? What chance would he have of marrying a girl like Mary Reilly? The new acquisition only set him up firmly among the small farmers – fixed him forever at the level of the postman and the railway porter. The new farm only drew attention to their real state. A tramp poet would be above him.

‘Lord! these shoes had the feet burned off me,' Mrs Flynn said. She had removed her shoes and was walking through the house in her stockinged feet.

‘ – Not a bad girl at all,' she mused aloud, ‘far from it, and I'm sure they'd give her all they have if she got a good take. And mind you, Molly Brady is a good healthy girl that 'id do a bad turn to no man.'

When the daughter was absent the mother turned to her son and said: ‘In two or three years it's you that could be the independent man. These ones will be going sooner or later. Whether they get men or not out they'll go at any rate. Let them start an eating house in Shercock or something. And remember, Tarry, it's not of meself I'm thinking. That little place of Brady's would put a real bone in yours – and what's better, would give you another outlet to the big road. If you'd take a fool's advice what you never took instead of the oul' books and the writing you could be richer than the Reillys. Look at Eusebius cutting calves and pigs and every damn thing to make a penny; and Charlie Trainor that 'id lift a ha'penny out of a cow-dung with his teeth. Oh, it's well I know these parties and that's why I'd like you to be independent of the whole rick-ma-tick of them. In troth, you would. Give me over them oul' boots of mine from in under the table. Troth, you could. Hut, man, I wouldn't be bothered with these ones that you do be talking about – May up here and this Reilly one. Sure that poor girl, everyone belonging to her died
of consumption, God protect everyone's rearing. There's seven of as nice a fields up there as there is in the parish. If you give them any kind of minding it's you that could take out the a crop. Do you know, now when you have the chance you might do a bit of scouring to that drain and not have us near up to our knees in water in the winter.'

‘I'll start the morrow,' said Tarry.

‘Lord! but doesn't the years slip by in a hurry,' mused the mother as she stood looking out the open door. ‘Lord O,' she sighed, ‘it's only this blessed day I was thinking that your father, the Lord have mercy on the whole lot of them, will be dead five years next week. Ah, the Lord may have mercy on them all.' Tarry had slipped upstairs. ‘Tarry, where are you?' called his mother. He sat very still, not wishing to annoy his mother, for he knew that she would be annoyed at his going upstairs to what she called ‘the curse-o'-God rhyming'. When she left the doorway and went outside somewhere he came down and walked about the street as if he had been outside all the time. He wished he could have been manly and stayed upstairs. This concealment made him unhappy. Later in the evening he climbed Callan's hill and looked across at his new possessions and it looked so small and mean now as his mind considered the epic plains of Louth beyond. And Reilly's big house and huge fields that he could see from here. He was still a beggar. His mood changed again as he came down the hill and he began to think that a man married to Molly could be very comfortable. It would be an easy way.

Wearing boots, without socks, and with his trousers turned up above his knees, capless, and with the old torn shirt open wide at the neck, Tarry was striding through the thistles and rushes of the meadow on his way to clean the drain. The drain was the stream that separated his farm from those of the Bradys and Larry Finnegans In the summer the cress and sorrel spread over the surface of the stream and the roots of flaggers at one point made a floor across it upon which a man could cross without wetting his feet. If the drain were cleaned every summer it would benefit a dozen small farmers all the way towards its source in Miskin.
This was one of the reasons why Tarry felt not perfectly satisfied when he attacked it with shovel and drag. Cleaning the drain was of much more benefit to the Flynns, no doubt, than to anybody else, for it meant that a three-acre meadow would be partly free from flooding in winter. But it
did
do good to others: that corner of Larry Finnegan's where when the drain was choked a horse would be bogged in the middle of summer could nearly be ploughed when the drain was free. But would Larry give a hand? No fear. He might – and it was as much – come and look on at Tarry Flynn up to his knees in the mud and might even pass comments on the fact that Tarry was shovelling all the mud on to his own side.

Larry's main interests looked out on the main road and he had as a result something of contempt for Drumnay and the methods of the natives in that townland. Tarry meant to spend a few bits of days at the drain before the cutting of the hay and the spraying of the potatoes, and here he was on the first days of July making a rush at the work.

The drag was a specially made instrument which had been bought in Shercock by his mother who had a penchant for old iron. He had an improvised knife for cutting the green scraws; it was made from the blade of an old scythe.

He started at the spot near Brady's well which was the worst spot on the drain. He cut the roots of the flaggers in squares and then began to drag them on to his own bank. It was very heavy work, but he loved it. Indeed, dragging the drain was one of his favourite jobs, the job that most softened about his burning thoughts and desires.

The heavy squares of flagger roots yielded very slowly to his strain. They carried a huge backside of oily mud that was sometimes a hundred weight. Bit by bit he dragged it up the bank and as he eventually landed it safely he was filled with deep satisfaction. The pool left behind by these sods was like a clear well. It was in the long run easier to clean the drain where the flaggers were than at other places, for although the roots of the flaggers were hard to cut and had a high hydraulic soakage, once you had them out you had that part of the drain cleaned.

The purchase of the farm meant that none of his sisters would get a fortune. It would take some doing to get the two hundred and fifty, never mind fortune the girls.

He was leaning back on the handle of the drag, slowly sliding a mighty square of dripping roots and mud upwards and upwards. He slipped on his backside and wet the seat of his trousers.

He had to get a new grip of the sod so he stood up for a moment beside the poplar and took a breath.

Man alive, he was getting on gallant.

Molly stood on the height above him and stared through the sunlight at him but he wasn't interested in her.

The wild bees which nested in the swamp on the other side of the drain filled the air with their hum. A couple of crows descended from theparched sky and landed in Tarry's plot of turnips. He walked up the field from the drain and gave a look at his turnips. He was satisfied; no natural crow would be able to pull one of those turnips.

Tarry's face was half covered with mud from wiping the sweat off with wet muddy hands. If Mary Reilly saw him now what would she say? Not that at that moment he'd care, for now he was hot with a profounder passion… Even all the work he had done in that bit of a morning would tell in the meadow in winter. A powerful job.

He stopped and pulled a small scraw up with his hands like a man rescuing a drowning person by the hair of the head. He clapped the sides of the dreeping bank with his palms and had a mind to set down and take a rest and a smoke. But not yet. He would do to beside the next poplar and then take a good long rest. A clag rested on the back of his hand and was sucking blood before he had time to kill it.

Molly came to the well for water and they had a few quiet words. The girl looked at the work he was doing and thought it a very good job.

She was dressed in her most seductive raggedness – big rent in her flimsy blouse, cotton skirt that clung to her fat thighs emphasizing contours of sluttish appeal – but he was not thinking about her. He had other things on his mind.

‘Man, that's a dousing job,' she said.

‘If I had time… ' he said.

‘Do you know what it is,' said he looking along the drain, ‘if about six inches was taken off the bottom there at the cutting it would lower the bog till you could nearly lough it. The only trouble is you'd get no one to help you, and when you'd do it they'd hardly give you credit for it. Sure, the McArdles object, saying that the drink for their cattle runs dry when the drain is cleaned.'

Tarry continued explaining the state of the drainage in that area and Molly showed that she was capable of appreciating the fine points of the subject.

‘That's the kind of people in this country, Tarry.'

‘Molly, did you fall in the well?' called Molly's mother.

The woman needn't have been worried about her daughter on this occasion and Tarry derived much pleasure and moral strength in the woman's misjudgement.

‘Wonder, yous are not up at the new place, Tarry? Your mother got a good bargain in it.'

‘She gave the full value for it if I know anything, Molly. They can all go to hell.'

‘Me mother was delighted to give the drop to them smart Cassidys. Eusebius is raging.'

‘Molly, Molly, Molly, what are you doing down there?'

‘How are you, Missus Brady?' Tarry called back, and his voice was full of the courage of the man whose dealing with anybody's daughter has been aboveboard. The woman hidden behind the shoulder of the hill could not mistake it.

‘Little the better of you,' she answered Tarry back, and he imagined that there was a disappointment in her voice.

Molly was gone and he was alone again with the mud, the lovely oily mud, and stones of the drain. He cut the scraws in squares again. He spat into the water. An eel wriggled out of the side of the bank trying to get back and Tarry made several futile attempts to stop its course.

The shirt climbed up his back and his braces slipped. The trousers were half off him.

He cleaned his hands in a tuft of grass and sat down on the headland at the ends of the turnip drills to smoke and read the old torn book that he had begun some days before and which he since carried in the hip pocket of his trousers. He stretched his legs across the headland and with his head on a pillow of growing rushes held the book over his eyes and started to read. The poplars and a blackthorn bush kept the sun from him and he was comfortable except for his feet, for his boots were full of water, and some pebbles, too, had got in. So he pulled off his boots and kicked them across the headland into the turnip drills.

The book, which had the first page torn out, was the best book he had read so far; there was something weird about the story although the book had all the appearances of the usual torn faded cheap novels with which he was acquainted. Madame Bovary was a wonderful character, he said to himself. Yet it wasn't her character but the queer difference that was in the book. Good as the book was, he grew sleepy as he lay there and he cast the book aside in the clump of rushes and from a lying position began to think what a curious strange world were these common fields that he knew so well.

The boortree at the other end of the field seemed to be hundreds of feet high. He stared straight up at the sky without a thought in his head. As he lay there, the pad, pad of soft slow footsteps coming along the headland roused him. It was his mother. She was saying:

‘Nothing kills me only these buck nuns that make out they wouldn't look at a man, Tarry. Lord, God of Almighty! If you had to hear the giving out to me I got from that Aggie there now you'd think she was made in a foundry. I hope Lough Derg does them some good. You're making a great job of the drain.'

Tarry, vexed with himself to be caught idle after all his hard work, was on his feet now.

‘Take your rest, you needn't mind me,' said the mother. Then: ‘Is that a miss I saw up there, Tarry?'

‘No, that's the little rock,' said Tarry looking round.

‘I thought it was a miss. Were you talking to this slob on the hill? I wouldn't tell much to that one, a real gabby guts… Them
spuds will soon need to be sprayed… Musha, who's is the big foot in the gutter there?'

‘Larry.'

‘And did he say anything, the dirty oul' rogue?'

‘No, he said nothing.'

A car purred slowly up the Drumnay road going very slowly past Flynn's gate in case there might be chickens there and the mother was watching it with some anxiety until it had gone past. ‘Bedad,' said she, ‘that young priest is nearly living in Reilly's these days. Nothing for these priests but the rich.'

‘They say,' said Tarry, ‘that he's going to get Mary into some music school in Dublin. She's a great player of the piano and Father Markey is very interested in music.'