Tarry Flynn (15 page)

His thoughts turned to the practical girls he knew and whom he had up to this ignored. He would be happy in that country, happily married with children, and would go to the forge with the horses and converse with the blacksmith, and wander over to the cross-roads of a Sunday afternoon and discuss the football team and politics. He would be among the old men with his hands in his trousers pockets dreaming about the past. Then he would walk slowly home for his tea and the children and wife would be there waiting for him and everything would be as it was in his father's life. How right his mother was! Why should a man seek crucifixion? And that, up to this, was exactly what he had been doing – seeking crucifixion.

Then he raised his eyes to the eastern horizon and he saw the queer light again. But this time he would not be deluded into being one of the Christs whom the world forever seeks.

O clay of life, so cool.

The division between this field and the portion of the farm which ran down the other side of the hill was a clay bank upon which yellow-blossomed whins grew. Flinging his jacket across
the fence he walked back a few steps and took a race to the fence to see if he could leap it. His second love had always been athletics and on summer mornings he was usually to be seen running in his stockinged feet round the home farm, over hedges and drains and palings.

He leaped on to the fence among the whins and found himself standing above the world of Drumnay and Miskin and looking far into the east where the dark fields of Cavan fanned out through a gap in the hills into the green fertile plains of Louth.

The rain had stopped and the sun was coming out and the bees and stinging clags were coming alive again.

On the height beyond to the right stood Joe Finnegan's long thatched house. He listened for sounds and his keen ear could recognize from footsteps in Finnegan's street and from the heightened talk that some stranger was there. Like Eusebius. He walked along the march fence between himself and Finnegan's potato field, to see how many trees and bushes had been cut. There was a lovely ash cut down and the fresh stump covered with mud and weeds. That showed that whoever cut it knew its ownership was doubtful. Greedy devils. In fencing the many gaps Tarry was going to make sure that he would cut only those bushes which grew more on Finnegan's side than on his. He'd get what was doubtful first, the law would give him what really belonged to him.

In ordinary circumstances a terrible lethargy descended upon Tarry when starting a job like this. Now the energy of a man who was grabbing something that didn‘t belong to him urged him on, made him strong, decisive. He kept his eye on the laurels behind Finnegan's house and once thought he had seen one of Finnegan's five young daughters moving between the laurels and the back of the house. There was a lane at the back of the house, the lane which served this part of Carlin's farm and Paddy McArdle's bog field farther up. How glad Tarry was that he didn't have to use that lane.

A few moments after the young girl had disappeared Tarry
heard a wild commotion in Finnegan's street and the violent rattle of buckets being flung down. He also heard the soft retreating footsteps of Eusebius going off by the front of the house. Then the ferocious voice of Joe:

‘Bleddy pack of foreigners, bleddy pack of foreigners. I'll break his bleddy neck.'

‘Joe, Joe,' his wife appealed, ‘be careful, for you know as well as bread that that man isn't like another. If that man was to drive the fork in you there wouldn‘t be a thing done to him. Look out for yourself for he's not square.'

‘I'll make him square, Maggy,' roared Joe. ‘Give me that graip, give me that graip. I'll drive it to the handle in him.'

He was wrestling with his wife for possession of the graip.

‘The graip 'ill only give him the chance to let your guts out, Joe.'

‘By the sweet and living God he's not going to cut my bushes, Maggie. By the living God I'll…'

‘Joe –'

The wild man appeared at the top of the potato field in his shirt and trousers and clutching his cap in his hand. He raced diagonally down and across the potato drills stumbling among the stalks in the hollow and bawling ‘bleddy foreigners' as he ran. He slowed down as he came along the level ground and stopped shouting, but now his face was fierce with a helpless hate. Tarry was afraid.

Joe walked along the hedge, panting, trying to swallow some of the hate that was choking his words. In the end he said in a low poisonous whisper: ‘Flynn, I'll get you, I‘ll get you.'

These words were ordinary enough but they carried a heavy load of danger. Tarry trimmed away at weeds and briars as quietly as he could to keep the continuity of his legality.

The man on the other side of the hedge came up from the depths of his silent fury:

‘What the hell do you mane, Flynn?'

Tarry did not reply.

Joe walked a short distance away and examined a bush which Tarry had cut. ‘Oh, you hure you, you hure, you, Flynn, and
that's what every one belonging to you were. The good big bush!'

Now the man was shouting at the top of his voice. He pranced on the headland and made a dash as if to jump through the hedge, but fell back nursing his skin where it had been scratched.

‘If you come out here,' said Tarry softly, ‘I may as well tell you, Finnegan, that I'll cut the head off you. Do you hear that?'

Immediately the man had rushed through a gap and went for Tarry. As he rushed at him Tarry, who had studied a book on boxing, dropped the bill-hook and rammed out his left arm in Joe's general direction, half hoping that it would miss him, for he would give a good deal to be able to avoid a fight.

To Tarry's surprise the punch connected with the man's right eyebrow, cutting it right open. The blood streamed down Joe's face. To avoid further fighting Tarry tried to grapple with his opponent and when he did so he was surprised to find that this man who had such a reputation as a filler of dung and a carrier of thirty-stone sacks of wheat, was as weak as a cat.

Joe tried to scratch Tarry's face and what was worse than all he tried to give him the boot in the belly. To lift the boot to an opponent was considered the meanest of all, and any man who did so in a public squabble would be set upon by the rest of the crowd. Next he tried to pick a large stone off the ground but Tarry shoved him away.

Tarry knew now that he could easily beat Joe, but his faith in physical force was weakening and he wished he could scrape out of the argument in some easy way. In fact, although he was winning, he had a strong inclination to run. The blood on the man's face was now running down his shirt front, frightening him more than it did Joe.

Joe looked like a man who was refusing to believe that he, a man who had played football for the parish team and who had the reputation of being the toughest man in the team, could be bested by this – nobody of a Flynn. He fell to the ground but struggled to his feet quickly. He was surviving by the memory of his greatness. With victory so easily won Tarry's fear of the talk that would be about the fight among the neighbours, as well as
of the chance it would give people to draw attention to a land dispute that was going on over the farm, produced in him again the desire to run.

He did run right to the end of the field where the old ruins were and expected Joe to follow. But Joe did not follow. Tarry laid the tools across his knees as he sat down on a mossy boulder in the middle of what had once been the kitchen of a cabin and watched Joe in the hollow rubbing with the lining of his cap the blood away.

During this period the wife appeared on the scene coming in a state of terror across the potato drills.

‘Joe, what happened to you?'

Joe was now rubbing the back of his head. Would it be possible that the man got injured when he fell? Tarry tried to daydream that the row had never taken place. He tried to place himself back in the past and then forward in the future when there would be no more about the whole business. He was nervous. He wondered what he would say to his mother. He also knew that the unreason of the Finnegans would not let the matter drop; from now on his life would be in danger wherever he went – in pub or fair or at the cross-roads. The Finnegans were like wild animals. If Tarry had only one first cousin atself, he thought, he would be safe enough; but he had not a single relation to back him up.

Oh, as sure as his name was Tarry Flynn a week would not pass before he had heard more about this fight.

Maggy Finnegan led her husband away round the headland, for it seemed that he was too weak to walk through the potatoes.

From the legal point of view Tarry felt that he was safe enough. After all the man had no business coming on to his side of the hedge. And there was blood on the stones to prove it.

‘The hard man, the hard man.'

Tarry shifted round on the stone and was face to face with Eusebius who had a spade on his shoulder. ‘I'm just going to put in a lock of cabbage where the turnips missed, ‘he explained,' and I thought I saw you down here. You‘re fencing?'

‘Sticking a few bushes in gaps, Eusebius.'

‘A good bleddy idea.' Eusebius looked in the direction of the battle scene. ‘A lot of gaps in that hedge all right – but as the fella said, you have plenty of good strong bushes to do the job. See any women lately?'

Tarry, glad of the chance to keep the subject away from his nerves, entered into the spirit of the sentimental lead, but his enthusiasm was very forced.

‘I was talking to May Callan last night.'

‘I see,' said Eusebius as if he had heard something very special. ‘Had she any stir?'

‘If you knew but all!' said Tarry, making mystery.

‘Jabus.'

‘Charlie followed her from the cross the other evening when she was coming home and tried his best to get her to come out to Kerley's hayfield with him. What do you think of that?'

‘Aw, you're a liar?'

Tarry could not fail to observe that Eusebius' attention was not all on the conversation; it was only an excuse to hear all about the row. But Tarry would tell him nothing.

‘Begod, Charlie's a quare hawk,' he said without interest, for he was then staring analytically in the direction of Finnegan's house.

‘I'd say he was a bad egg,' Tarry offered.

‘Oh, the worst –'

‘What are you watching, Eusebius?'

‘There's a few gaps down there you'd need to stick bushes in, Tarry. If your cattle broke into the spuds after they‘re sprayed it wouldn't do them any good. Right pack of savages, them Finnegans, aren't they?'

‘They're as good as anybody else, Eusebius, if I know anything. Do you ever be up there at all, Eusebius?'

‘Do you know, Tarry, I was up with them this morning,' said Eusebius as if admitting something awful. ‘Joe borrowed me rope-twister last year and it was as much as he'd give it back when I went for it. That Joe hates me, hates the ground I walk on. There's the oul' one now coming along the lane. Must be going somewhere. She's dressed.'

‘God knows where she's going,' said Tarry with great indifference in a tone of deep weariness.

‘She has her hat on,' remarked Eusebius.

Tarry was worried. Had he injured Joe seriously? The wife was either going for the police or the doctor or both, he feared, but he did not let Eusebius see his mind. It would be best now for him to leave the fence as it was, in case the police might be coming. So he didn't return to the hedge.

They saw Mrs Finnegan go towards the village by way of the Mass path across the hills. Eusebius took a sudden notion to go back home for something he forgot. Tarry guessed that he was in a hurry home to tell his mother the good news that there had been a terrific row between Tarry Flynn and Joe Finnegan. It was plain to Tarry now that Eusebius had heard and maybe seen the row from beginning to end. He left Finnegan‘s, Tarry remembered, by the front way and had come around by the front of Carlin's and then appeared on the scene as if by accident.

Tarry stood in the ruins for a few minutes, walking through the nettles and docks and picking at the old mortar near the chimney – in the hope that there might be a secret hoard left there by long-dead misers. Of course he knew that such a hoard was most unlikely, but the idea fed his day-dream of getting very rich. If he could suddenly get rich all his troubles would be solved.

The thought that he had a sack of oats hidden in the old hay in the open shed in the haggard began to get on his conscience. He had been looking forward to selling that sack and having a roughness of money to spend but now such double-dealing seemed unfair to his mother in the battle which she was putting up against the world of Drumnay.

As soon as he went home he promised himself that he'd leave that sack of oats back on the loft.

He put the fork and bill-hook on his shoulder and made for home by the back of Callan's hills where they ran down to the bottom of Petey Meegan's garden where the flax-pit separated Drumnay from Miskin. He needed some moral support and even though Petey was a poor sort of man to have as support,
the fact that he had had – and probably still had – a notion of Tarry's sister brought him closer to him than a complete stranger.

The padlock and chain which secured the door of Petey's dwelling were lying on the window-sill, but Petey was out. Tarry was surprised that the careful and suspicious old bachelor who had reached that particular stage of bachelor queerness that he thought everyone was trying to steal from him should have gone off without locking the door. He was probably not far away, possibly in the field. He looked in the window at the kitchen. A pair of yellow boots hung by their laces on the far wall; a rake stood against the dresser, but for all that Petey's kitchen was in comparatively good order. Tarry noted that it had a good concrete floor and that there was an excellent clock on the mantle-board. He wouldn‘t be the worst take for a girl, and he would be a useful man to have as a relation, so near at hand if a cow was stuck in a bog hole or anything like that. He whistled to announce his presence, and he was gone off and across the drain and was making up the hill towards the top of the green road when he heard Petey's short cough at the door of his house. So he returned to get some consolation and advice.