Tarry Flynn (26 page)

Tarry changed colours. The mother sat up and stuck her feet in her shoes. They waited anxiously to see if the car would go past the gate. Next thing they heard the rattle of the gate and a man's voice guiding the driver who was driving through to turn the car in the street.

‘Father, Son and Holy Ghost!' prayed the mother, ‘did something happen to one of these in Shercock? One trouble never comes alone.'

Tarry dashed to the door. Bridie took the vessel from the foot of the stairs and ran up with it.

The headlights of the car swung round catching Tarry in the doorway. The disturbed hens cackled on their roosts. The mother terrified was frozen to the tiles of the hearth praying ‘Father, Son and Holy Ghost, Father, Son and Holy Ghost. God protect everybody's rearing.'

‘Are you the man I heard so much about from your mother whenever she took the notion of answering my letters?' a loud
affable voice sang as the figure of a man moved in the enlarging light of the car's lamps towards the door.

‘Bad luck to him into hell and out of it, it's your uncle,' his mother whispered viciously.

He was well enough dressed, better than Tarry was, but very disreputable. If it had been anyone else but a relation Tarry would possibly have thought him a man to be avoided. He led his tramp uncle into the house and without waiting for his sister to welcome him ran to her and shook her hand: ‘How are you, Mary?' Then he added: ‘My God, but you aged a lot, Mary.'

The mother was inclined to feel relieved that the news wasn't worse. ‘Hang his coat on the back of the door, Bridie.'

She herself took his old suitcase and weighing it in her hand left it under the stairs.

The taximan outside blew his horn and this reminded the uncle of something: ‘Mary, will you go out and pay that driver the few shillings he's owed. I have no small change on me.'

She nodded her head sadly and took two half-crowns off the dresser and went outside. The uncle was a tall man with a bald head of which he was unconscious. His unconsciousness of his whole personal appearance was his outstanding characteristic in Tarry's judgement. What the world thought of him didn't seem to matter. Just now he was not quite sober, but he was steady on his feet and fully competent.

For awhile Tarry did feel disappointed in the uncle because he had no money. This feeling was unconscious. Money was only another word for success. His uncle was a failure. He had no wife, no family and no achievement to his credit. The only aspect of his character that could be called an achievement was that he had learned not to care.

When the mother and sister went to bed Tarry and the uncle stayed up by the fire, the uncle telling the story of his wandering all over the world. He was a good story-teller and he was also a sympathetic listener. For all his travel his accent was still the flat Cavan accent even to calling calves, ‘caves'! From his casual allusions he appeared to know something of music and art and literature – and he was sad when he mentioned these things.

‘A man without talent is a nobody,' he said once. ‘The only things worth having are talent and genius. The rest is trash.'

He did not think it strange when Tarry told him of the beauty that lived in stones and in all common things. He was receptive to the wildest ideas. It was a relief to have the uncle present in these troubled days – a man who didn't care. Tarry almost felt that he had no problems to contend with.

Another wet day dawned. Tarry rose from the bed where his uncle still lay asleep and looked out the window at the townland dripping all over with water. But he was unable to think of the townland as ugly. He remembered the wet days more vividly than the sunny ones. Standing in the doorway of a stable, leaning on a graip, his mind sunk in the warm thought of the earth. The wet dunghill steamed. The hens standing on one leg in the doorways of the stables and under the trees made him love his native place more and more.

The rain beat on the slates. Below him in the kitchen he could hear the soft pad of his mother's feet on the floor.

‘Is he getting up for his breakfast?' said she to Tarry when he went down. Tarry said he was still asleep and the mother said: ‘The right rodney if ever there was one. Hasn't a thing in the suit-case except a lock of oul' rags – and a couple of books.'

Books! Tarry was interested. He could hardly wait till his uncle came down to see what they were. When after breakfast the books were produced they turned out to be – there were only four – the
Imitation of Christ,
H. G. Wells'
History of the World,
a book about Ireland and a cheap American edition of
Das Kapital
by Karl Marx.

Tarry didn't think the books very exciting. The uncle said that the
Imitation
was his bible. ‘Give me it over,' he said. He began to quote from it:

Behold! eating, drinking, clothing, and other necessaries, appertaining to the support of the body, are burdensome to a fervent spirit. Grant that I may use such things with moderation, and not be entangled with an inordinate affection for them… Seek not to have that which may curb them of thy inward liberty.

More spiritually elated than he had been for many months Tarry went outside leaving his uncle sitting smoking by the fire.

He stood under the wet lilac bushes near the gate and let his eyes wander up the misty valley. He picked up a scrap of galvanized iron and looked at its frayed rusty edges till it came alive in his imagination. He opened and closed the gate merely for the pleasure of opening it and closing it. He walked past the parlour window and looked in sideways at the reflection of himself in the glass. That window always made him look attractive. He walked backwards and looked again. He was not bad looking, he knew that. Then he went past the dunghill and lifted the graip which was stuck aslantwise in the side of the heap and the graip became a magic wand of evocation.

‘So this is your farm?' said the uncle as they wandered through the fields later in the day. ‘Aren't they very small?'

They were passing along the headland of the potato field and Tarry was just thinking how big that field seemed with the stalks of potatoes nearly four feet high, which gave the field a new dimension.

The uncle looked across the drain and up towards Brady's. ‘I knew oul' Molly well,' he said, ‘a hot piece. She married an oul' fella, I heard.'

‘He died, two years after.'

‘Any family?'

This question gave Tarry the chance of broaching the subject of Molly. ‘They say there's something wrong with the daughter, Molly. One daughter is all she has.'

‘Ah, a trout in the well! These things do be in it, Tarry. And worse can happen a woman. The mother was a hot piece.'

‘They're putting it out that I had something to do with the daughter, but I may as well tell you I hadn't.'

The uncle seemed to have forgotten the remark made by Tarry. He fingered an ash tree in the corner and commented on the great size it had grown since he as a boy had been able to bend it to the gound. ‘Fifty years ago.'

‘What do you think about the business?' asked Tarry.

‘What do you want to do?'

‘I don't know.'

‘My advice is this – and I have always acted on it – do whatever pleases yourself. These things don't matter. What does matter is that if you have anything worth while in you, any talent, you should deliver it. Nothing must turn you from that.'

The uncle took such tremendous affairs so lightly that Tarry felt rather ashamed to trouble him with the affair of the farm. When he did so the uncle said: ‘We'll dodge up that far and take a look at the dominion of Miskin.'

Far in the misty distance they could see the plains of Louth and out of the rain the limestone spire of a church.

‘And this is Carlin's,' said the uncle with a smile. ‘I remember it well. I wed potatoes in that longish field beside the land – and the devil's bad spuds they were. What a life! How do you endure it, Tarry?'

‘It's all right,' said Tarry.

‘But there's no necessity to live in this sort of a place, is there? The best way to love a country like this is from a range of not less than three hundred miles. And the same applies to the women of it. I wonder how Joe Finnegan is, poor oul' Joe. We'll dodge up as far as his house and see how he is. He was the second greatest blackguard I ever met and I like him for it. Poor Joe Finnegan.' Tarry tried to dissuade his uncle from going to see Joe Finnegan. He explained that a short time ago they had had a fierce quarrel. ‘I tell you he won't speak to us.'

‘Don't be foolish. Is it Joe Finnegan? And I knew his wife too, many's the good coort I had with her.'

Tarry refused to go farther when they got to the hedge, but the uncle said: ‘Come on, con, man. Wouldn't I be a mean man if I left the country without seeing poor oul' Joe.'

On their way through Finnegan's back yard the uncle examined everything with a bemused eye. He could hardly believe that any human being could endure life in this backward spot. ‘I wouldn't blame him if he had to kill you,' he said to Tarry.

The encounter between Joe and his uncle surprised Tarry a little. Joe felt small and did his best to speak ‘grand' in the presence of the travelled man. The wife appeared with a shamed
expression on her dirty face and crawled out of sight as quickly as she could. Joe even went so far in his effort to show himself a man above petty affairs to pretend to be a very warm friend of Tarry's, asking about this and that in the farming line.

Yet he was glad when they got away.

‘That fella was always afraid of me,' said the uncle. ‘I could make him run into a rat hole.'

‘But what do you think of him, really?'

The uncle gave the impression that he didn't waste thought on such matters. He considered Joe as an interesting animal rather than as an equal human being. ‘Do you know,' said the uncle with lofty reflection, ‘it often occurred to me that we love most what makes us most miserable. In my opinion the damned are damned because they enjoy being damned. All the angels in Heaven couldn't drag a damned soul out of the Pit – he likes it so much.'

On the third day of the uncle's visit he suggested to Tarry that he could do worse than leave Drumnay with him. ‘I may have no money,' said he, ‘but I have some influence. I could get you a job and I could get you what's better, a living. It's not what you make but what you spend that makes you rich.' The uncle had explained that a car was calling for him on the next morning, they would meet it in the village, and if Tarry thought well of it why there was nothing to prevent him coming.

‘But what will my mother say? How will she carry on without me?'

The uncle laughed. ‘Will the dunghill run away?' said he.

The uncle did not realize how beautiful Tarry thought the dunghill and the muddy haggard and gaps and all that seemed common and mean. He told him how much he loved this district and the uncle said: ‘Haven't you it in your mind, the best place for it? If it's as beautiful as you imagine you can take it with you. You must get away.'

‘What about money?' said the weakening Tarry.

‘Isn't there money in the house?'

Before going to bed that night Tarry, while the uncle kept up a noise in the kitchen and talked as if Tarry were beside him to
curb the suspicious mind of the mother who had just gone up to bed, Tarry prised open the trunk in the parlour and extracted four pounds.

‘Any more in it?' asked the uncle.

‘Five.'

‘Well get it, we might be short-taken on the road.'

They slept soundly that night.

‘Father, Son and Holy Ghost! where are you going in the good suit?' cried the mother the next morning when Tarry came down for breakfast.

‘As far as the village.'

‘And with the good suit?' She eyed her son with a look of annoyance, and then suddenly her eyes flashed in scalded grief. Her lips moved in prayer. She spoke in a low whisper. ‘Oh my God, oh my God.' Her lips went on moving but there were no words. Her eyes were wide, son – and as he stared they darkened, in brown earthly sadness.

It was her wordlessness smote him. An impulse to cry out touched his throat. Words came to her again. They came in a spurt, on their own, like he had once seen blood spurt. ‘God help me and every mother.' And then a storm of sobs swept her and words came in a deluge. ‘Your nice wee place; your strong farm; your wee room for your writing, your room for your writing.'

‘How will she carry on,' he kept mumbling. ‘How will she carry on.'

He was very sorry for his mother. He could see that she was in her way a wise mother. Yet, he had to go. Why? He didn't want to go. If, on the other hand, he stayed, he would be up against the Finnegans and the Carlins and the Bradys and the Cassidys and the magic of the fields would be disturbed in his imagination.

She was a good mother and a wise one and she would surely realize that her son was doing the right thing.

‘Women,' remarked the uncle sensing his companion's thoughts, ‘never have got full credit for their bravery. They sacrifice everything to life.'

Tarry, hesitating like an unwilling schoolboy, turned at the mouth of the Drumnay lane and looked once more and once
more again up the valley. The field of potatoes in blossom was the full of his mind.

‘Shut your eyes and you'll see it better,' said the uncle paradoxically.

Jemmy Kerley was leading the shorthorn bull to a corner of his field beside a gate where a cow was waiting and Tarry remembered all the times he had driven a cow to the bull – up lanes banked with primroses and violets, and meeting men and women who were always so interesting.

They met Father Daly coming from saying his morning Mass in Dargan church and Tarry was shocked that his uncle did not raise his hat to him. ‘Terrible pity of that poor man,' said he, ‘living here at the back of God's speed. I met the Pope once and if I had known about him I'd have put in a good word for him.'