Tarry Flynn (25 page)

‘I think,' said he to his mother later, ‘I'll go up as far as Carlin's and see about them heifers that's in calf.' In-calf heifers and cows were not subject to the blackleg, and it was this class of animal that the Flynns had put to graze on the new farm since the bullocks took the disease and died.

The mother felt that Tarry was now taking her advice and attending to his place, but when she saw him go to the top of the dresser when he thought she wasn't looking and slip an old book into his pocket she wasn't so sure. She said nothing, for Paddy Reilly's man had jumped up just then saying: ‘It's time for me to be looking for feet.'

Tarry threw a corn sack over his shoulders and took his bicycle out of the car-house. The mother came out and said: ‘If they're lying don't put them up, for I don't think there's any danger of them having the red water, and some of them are heavy in calf.'

Tarry laid his bicycle against the stone fence of the first of his fields alongside the lane that led to Carlin's and Joe Finnegan's,
and was about to spring over the fence when Jemmy Carlin, the silent sneerer of the family, came rushing from his street with a rusty graip in his hands which he had poised like a javelin and bawled: ‘Trespassers will be prosecuted, trespassers will be prosecuted.'

Tarry stood taking in the situation. He had plenty of experience with Joe Finnegan, but somehow this looked more dangerous, more like business, than anything Joe had done.

He got down off the stone fence and stood with the bicycle between him and his approaching enemy.

‘I'll put the grains of this graip in your guts, you grabber, if you put a foot inside me fields.'

‘What fields?' said Tarry, wondering.

‘My fields, avic'

‘Didn't we buy them, Jemmy?'

‘Buy
my
fields,' sneered Jemmy, ‘sure yous couldn't buy my good fields. You bought Tom's farm, but you didn't buy mine. By God, you didn't buy mine, and you couldn't buy mine.' The man settled some mossy stones on the fence with an air of ownership. ‘Buy my good fields, buy my good fields,' he kept saying.

‘Let me drive the cattle to the drink atself.'

‘I drove them to the field with the drink in it, avic, and I may as well tell you that if they put their noses into one or other of these two good fields of mine they'll calve before their time.'

‘But how am I going to get to them?' Tarry appealed.

‘Go round the lane the way that any dacent man id go.'

With that Jemmy moved off along the fence, shifting a stone here and picking up a dead branch there while Tarry stood by his bicycle beginning to understand the mistake they had made in purchasing the farm without having the boundaries properly defined. He suddenly remembered too that day in Shercock when he had bought a second-hand copy of the poems of Byron and how Eusebius had said it was ‘bleddy fine', but himself bought an Ordnance Map of Drumnay and Miskin.

Tarry was forced to walk with his bicycle round the narrow, rutted, muddy lane that led past the back of Finnegan's house, and down along the field of potatoes. It had been one of his causes for
thankfulness that he didn't need to use this old lane about which the Finnegans were forever grumbling. The gate that had to be closed every time you went through would be enough to keep the lawyers in trade for the rest of their lives. The lane at the back of Finnegan's led through the bottom of a dunghill, and the briars that hung overhead were often decorated with the bits of dung which caught there when Joe was flinging dung out of the cow house.

Tarry got safely past the bottom of Carlin's garden and he hardly cared what happened to him as he picked his steps and sometimes had to carry his bicycle over some parts of the lane. He knew that he would have a poor chance of getting past Finnegan's with the five small girls and the mother who was so starved for gossip that she would be liable to spot anything in the shape of news. The row he had had with Joe Finnegan was liable to flare up again. Joe was sure to have heard about the mistake in the boundary and would be delighted with the chance of pouncing on a man who was down.

Tarry was surprised and grateful when Joe who was barrowing rotten mangolds from his haggard and dumping them on the side of the pane behind the house merely gave a loud forced laugh as he passed. ‘Oh, ho, the big farmer,' he cried wildly. ‘Hah, hah, hah, hah,' he laughed.

Tarry hurried on expecting every moment to have a stone or at least a rotten mangold hopped off his head, but the man let him pass on, apparently contented to be a spectator of a most enjoyable play.

Tarry didn't need to make a close examination of the property to know how much of it was his. The two best fields which comprised more than the half and which alone gave access to the lane at the point west of Carlin's had been fenced off ostentatiously by Jemmy Carlin that day with large green whitethorn bushes, and the cattle had been driven without concern for their condition into the other section of the property. They were lying in the wet soaking mud, bedraggled looking as if they had been roughly driven – which no doubt they were – out of the two good fields. There were bits of briar and bushes stuck in their tails
showing that they had been forced through the heavily bushed gaps out of which the bushes had not been first removed.

Three of the five fields which remained were bounded for a considerable length by Finnegan's, the last thing Tarry or his mother would want. The five fields were composed of soil as poor as was to be found in the county Cavan – which was saying a good deal, and without the two good ones to balance them out they would be a millstone around any purchaser's neck. The cattle hated the sour grass which grew in them, and the only saving feature was the drink in them. Indeed, so wet was the soil that even in the middle of summer they could get a drink from the pools that formed on the spongy heights.

What would Tarry tell his mother? It was on his advice she had paid over the bulk of the purchase money – two hundred pounds – and it was doubtful if they could get any of that money back now. Didn't they buy it with their eyes open would be said.

‘Well, how are they?' she inquired when he returned.

‘All fine,' he answered.

‘That atself. There's a bit of rice there in the pot that I made for you, you must be tired after pitching that hay. The best of a farm if it was minded. Two of as good a fields… ' Tarry was stooped over the pot of rice, trying to forget.

The mother stayed in the kitchen making bread. Tarry went upstairs and sat beside the old Howe sewing machine – the father of all sewing machines – in the corner of the room facing the front window.

This corner was his Parnassus, the constant point above time. Winter and summer since his early boyhood he had sat here and the lumps of candle-grease on the scaly table of the old machine told a story.

He carried out his usual ritual, for the Muse is attracted and held by the little gestures just as women are. Beside him he arranged the verses which he knew would excite him – at the right moment. He had
Madame Bovary
within reach. His method of getting a thrill out of this book and of all exciting books was
not by reading them through, but by opening them at random and giving a quick look inside. Then he would shut the book again lest the magic should escape. He crossed his legs, got out the puce pencil and the blue notepaper and let his mind become passive.

A thrush was singing his plagiarized version of the blackbird's song in one of the poplars behind the house. Callan's hill, all white with Michaelmas daisies, looked in at him. For a moment his passive mind was being wooed by the clump of black sallies at the bottom of the garden. In among the sallies on the shaky scraw there were water-hens hopping.

The net of earthly intrigue could not catch him here. He was on a level with the horizon – and it was a level on which there was laughter. Looking down at his own misfortunes he thought them funny now. From this height he could even see himself losing his temper with the Finnegans and the Carlins and hating his neighbours and he moved the figures on the landscape, made them speak, and was filled with joy in his own power.

The rattle of buckets, rolling of barrels under
Down-spouts, the leading in of foals
Were happenings caught in wonder
The stones white with rain were living souls.

He was in his secret room in the heart now. Having entered he could be bold. A man hasn't to be on his best behaviour in Heaven; he can kick the furniture around. He can stoop down and pick up lumps of mortality without being born again to die.

Tarry rose from his chair and began to search under his bed. He dragged out a large black wooden box, one of the old boxes in which his mother's trousseau had come. This box was filled with papers and faded documents – old letters, rent receipts, bills, the
Anglo-Celt
for the year 1905.

He pulled out a bundle of the papers and spread them on the bed and then got sitting beside them very caressingly.

Here were two long damp-stained envelopes. Within was the correspondence over the right o' way to Finnegan's well which
had been such a bone of contention between the families forty years before. The Flynns won that law suit – and as was often the case with the winners they were more bitter than the losers, and Tarry's grandfather had encouraged him to carry on the feud. Tarry had been taught how mean and low the Finnegans were when in fact they were only amusing. One of the letters from the solicitor for the Finnegans said: ‘My client denies the alleged assault on your wife. When your wife came to the well my client remonstrated with her for leaving the gate to the well open so that the cattle in the fields could go down and pollute the spring. My client absolutely denies that she pulled your wife's hair out; the hairs, if any, which were found on the bushes were not hairs from your wife's head but from the tails of the cattle which your wife's carelessness caused to get down to the well.'

When he was replacing the letters in their envelopes he noticed another small note inside. Taking it out he found that it was a letter from his uncle Petey dated nineteen nineteen and addressed from West Africa to Tarry's mother. It was a pleasant childish hand much faded now, but Tarry could make out that the man was asking for money in the most oblique way possible. He had nine hundred and ninety pounds he said and all he wanted was the other ten to buy some great bargain – something to do with a mine. How his mother must have sneered at that letter.

‘Holy smoke,' said Tarry dreamingly aloud. He put the correspondence back in the box and shoved it under the bed with his foot. Then he sat down at the machine again and lit a candle.

He wrote about his own room:

Ten by twelve
And a low roof,
If I stand by the side-wall
My head feels the reproof.
Five holy pictures
Hang on the walls:
The Virgin and Child,
St Anthony of Padua,
Leo the XIII,
St Patrick and die Little Flower.

His mother had been out of the house a few minutes talking to somebody at the gate. Presently she walked slowly towards the dunghill, and as she passed the window Tarry knew that she had heard something. She came in in the company of Bridie who had the milk with her, and having put the vessel on the bottom step of the stairs cried in a broken voice:

‘Tarry, Tarry, Tarry. Are you in or are you out?'

He rattled on the floor with his feet.

‘Oh, what in the wide earthly world are we to do at all?' she cried, and there was no fake about her emotion now. If all belonging to her had died suddenly she could not have been more disturbed. Tarry jumped up from his seat and went down to console her.

‘What is the matter, mother?'

‘God! O God! O God!' she lamented, ‘and you told me that you saw the map and knew everything!'

‘What's the matter?'

‘Everything's the matter, everything's the matter. Oh, I was better dead and in the boneyard than have to put up with this. Oh, it's me that's to be pitied if ever a woman was to be pitied!'

‘Try to pull yourself together,' said Tarry. ‘Is it over Carlin's?'

‘Is it over Carlin's? Lord! O Lord! Oh I was better dead and buried, a thousand times better.'

Bridie, straining the milk in the dairy, beckoned to her brother to come outside and let the temper wear off the mother. ‘It's the only cure for it,' she said.

They sat together on a bag of bran in the dairy, and Bridie confessed to her brother for the first time that the parish of Dargan, and the people in it, was no place for a civilized man or woman. ‘A girl was better sell herself openly on the streets of a city,' she declared.

‘What do you think of the Molly one?' Tarry asked.

‘What the hell about it?' said Bridie quietly. ‘What the hell do you care if you had nothing to do with her, and even if you had for that matter.' They listened. ‘She's slowing down a bit now. Don't say one word when you go up now.'

‘Not a word,' Tarry promised.

The mother's crying and sighing died down and the brother and sister went up to the kitchen, moving about the floor on tip-toes and saying nothing.

Tarry was being very good but he could not restrain himself from taking a nip out of the cake of raisin bread that stood on the dresser. His sister grinned her disapproval, but Tarry ate away, and afterwards took a drink out of the cream jug where the fresh milk had been put for the breakfast.

Bridie was disgusted. ‘You'll start her off again,' she whispered viciously.

‘Leave us alone,' he said.

The clock ticked on in the room. The cat climbed up on the dresser and began to fumble among the plates.

‘Put that cat down,' said the mother, raising her head from her knees.

They were half way through the Rosary when the mother knelt straight up and listened. Tarry awoke and listened too. A motor car was coming slowly up the Drumnay road, its slow purr ominous, like news of death.