Tarry Flynn (3 page)

The respectable people, like the police and the stationmaster and the schoolteachers, and the miller and the publican and his wife all put on mouths of righteousness and narrowed eyes. This was not good enough in a Catholic country. This was not good enough for County Cavan in the year nineteen hundred and thirty-five. And the men leading the revolt against decency and authority were Tarry Flynn and Eusebius Cassidy. Weren't they the two ends of hypocrites coming to Mass the same as decent men? Should be chased to hell out of the parish. And that whole bunch of half-chewed idiots from Drumnay, they weren't so bad if fellows like these didn't come putting ideas into their heads. And Charlie Trainor, that was another prize boy. But
he
would never do any harm so long as he was doing well at his business. But the other pair, they were the right blackguards. So thought respectability. ‘I'll not rest or relax,' the priest concluded, ‘till I make an example of these scoundrels who are sullying the fair name of this parish. I'll bring them to the bar of justice if it takes me ten years. Yes, Drumnay cross-roads where a decent man or woman can't pass without a clod being thrown at them or some nasty expression. They come here to Mass and they were better at home – a thousand times better.' The priest broke off suddenly and began to read out a list of notices, including one that a grand carnival dance would be held in the hall on that same evening, the charge for admission – gentlemen three-and-six, ladies half-a-crown. And furthermore, the right of admission should be strictly reserved. Tarry had an attack of conscience. When the priest turned away to face the Altar he knelt with his chin on the heels of his shut fists and a faraway look of childhood piety in his eyes.

Outside the chapel the little knots of the congregation picking up their homing companions hardly mentioned the sermon. There were other more urgent things to fill their minds – the crops and the fair and their neighbours.

Even Mrs Flynn, who was standing by her yard gate with the two baskets of cocks ready to move off to the railway station, had no time to discuss the scandal. Tarry had expected her to go into terrible tantrums when he got home and was pleasantly surprised at her temper.

‘That cow is not looking at the bull, thank God,' she said. It was probably this that put her in good humour.

Tarry helped her with the baskets of cocks the short distance to the railway halt.

‘Take off that good suit,' she advised her son, ‘and not have everything on the one rack like the Carlins, and give Aggie a hand with the dinner.'

Tarry promised to do as advised.

The quiet time between the two Masses on Sundays and holy-days was for Tarry the happiest time of his life – especially when all the rest of the household was at second Mass and he was in sole control. He could read and smoke his fill without his mother's interruptions. His mother disliked his reading and smoking far more than any of his other habits.

He washed the potatoes for the dinner in the tub before the door and put on the ten-gallon pot.

Then sitting by the fire, keeping it stoked, he sat smoking and reading the
Messenger
. The
Messenger of the Sacred Heart
was bought every month, and with
Old Moore's Almanac
and the local newspaper constituted the literature of Flynn's as of nearly every other country house.

Flynn's house had the reputation of being possessed of some wonderful books. Tarry's father, who died some years previously, had an interest in books and had bought several second-hand volumes in the market of the local town. His books were not very exciting, but they
were
books. A gazetteer for the year 1867, an antiquated treatise on Sound, Light and Heat, and a medical book called
Thompson's Domestic Medicine.

The only one of the three which Tarry had ever known father to read was the ‘doctor's book'. His father had taken a few prescriptions out of it for the common illnesses of his friends. Once he gave a prescription for jaundice to a man which must have worked; for from that day to the day he died the father had the reputation of having a traditional cure for the jaundice and men and women came from far and near for the ‘cure'.

Tarry had no books except these and a couple of school readers. One was a famous Sixth Book which he had stolen from a neighbour's house some years before. It was in this book he got all the poetry he knew.

He could read anything, so hungry was he for reading. So he read the
Messenger
, all of it from the verses by Brian O'Higgins on the Sacred Heart – a serial poem which ran for a year or more – to the story of the good young girl who had a vocation, and who was being sabotaged by the bad man, right through to the Thanksgivings ‘for favours received', at the back.

The sunlight came in through the dusty window, making a magical sunbeam right across the kitchen.

Aggie had gone to the well for water.

When she came in she offered to keep an eye on the pot and not let it boil all over the floor. She had also to see that the delicate chicken who was rolled up in a black stocking in a porringer by the hob did not get scalded or burned.

In the midst of this beautiful repose there was a great hen flutter in the street and brother and sister both rushed out. It was the hawk of course, but as far as they could see he had got nothing.

Tarry put the
Messenger
in his pocket and climbed Callan's Hill, a favourite climb of his.

Walking backwards up its daisied slope he gazed across the valley right across to the plains of Louth, and gazing he dreamed into the past.

O the thrilling daisies in the sun-baked hoof-tracks. O the wonder of dry clay. O the mystery of Eternity stretching back is the same as its mystery stretching forward.

That was Tarry: Eternity and Earth side by side.

Suddenly his mind came back to the precise particulars of the immediate scene. Drumnay –

Drumnay was a long crooked valley zig-zagging West-East between several ranges of hills in Cavan. The valley part of it was mostly cut-away bog, so that the only arable land was a thin stripe along the bottom of the hills and the hills themselves. It is not to be wondered at that the minds of the natives were shaped by and like the environment. In cul-de-sac pocket valleys all the way up the length of the townland were other smaller farms, inaccessible, and where the owners were inclined to be frustrated and, so, violent. At the western end of the valley Flynn's comfortable farmhouse stood. The poplar-lined lane that served the townland branched off the main road about two hundred yards from the Flynn homestead. With the whitethorn hedges in full leaf the road seemed no more to one looking across country than a particularly thick hedge.

Tarry sat on the crown of the hill with his back to a bank of massed primroses and violets, and as he sat there the heavy slumberous time and place made him forget the sting of the thorn of a dream in his heart. Why should a man want to climb out of this anonymous happiness in the conscious day?

Cassidy's field of oats was doing very well. A beautiful green field of oats. He was a bit jealous of the oats, and doubted if his own was doing as well. He stared into the hazy blue distance and heard the puff-puff of a train coming in through the boggy hollows five miles away. The earth under him trembled.

‘Tarry, Tarry, Tarry!'

His sister's cry recalled him to reality.

‘What?' he shouted down.

‘Come down and give us a hand to teem the pot.'

Wasn't that a nuisance? Just when he was beginning to be happy something like this always disturbed him.

As he was coming down the hill the first people on bicycles were coming from second Mass – his two sisters amongst them. His next-door neighbour, May Callan, was with them. May was one of the girls with whom he was in love. She was reality. But nothing was happening after all his spring daydreams. The land
keeps a man silent for a generation or two and then the crust gives way. A poet is born or a prophet.

Teeming the pot into a bucket, he put a sack apron around him, and holding one of the legs of the pot with his right hand and the pot lid with his left he drained off the water.

Even teeming the pot was very important in his life and in his imagination. Any incident, or any act, can carry within it the energy of the imagination.

Outside at the gate he could hear his other two sisters in loud giggling conversation with May.

As soon as he had the pot teemed he found an excuse to wander in the direction of the girls so as not to make the overture seem too deliberate. He pulled the saddle-harrow out from where it lay against the low wall before the house with a very concerned air. All the time he was trying to impress his personality on May. But it was no use. He could not understand why he was ignored by young women, for he knew he was attractive.

Could it be that girls knew that beneath his poetic appearance was primitive savagery and lust? In his innocence that was his surmise then. So he put on yet a further coat of apparent virtue. This made the situation worse, but he did not notice the worsening.

His own sisters, too, treated him with little respect. One day he struck Aggie with his open palm and knocked her across the kitchen floor – and curiously enough, from that day forward she was the only one who deferred to his masculinity.

With women in general he was truthful and sincere and would talk philosophy or Canon Law (Canon Law fascinated him, though what he knew of the subject was utter nonsense) to them on the slightest provocation. Women cannot understand honesty in a man.

He carefully replaced the saddle-harrow and walked to the gate and glanced down the lane.

‘… so he said “me hand on yer drawers” says he, and says she… What the bleddy hell are ye listening to women's talk for?' It was Bridie who was speaking. May was looking at Tarry with cold indifference, as he thought.

‘The birds of Angus,' he said in a dramatically silly tone.

Tarry had a number of meaningless phrases which he used to astonish girls with. This particular phrase he had read somewhere. By saying something queer like this he expected to get the attention of the mystery-loving heart of woman. Women thought him a little touched when he made such remarks. This was not the arcanum to which they, were accustomed. He knew it was not the usual aphrodisiacal double-meaning, illiterate joking which a man such as Charlie Trainor was an adept at, but he felt that it ought to be much more effective. It wasn't.

And so the girls at the gate separated and Tarry was left – with his dreams.

He couldn't go to the town that day, because his two sisters, Aggie and Bridie, were going in the hope of getting a man, and he had to keep an eye on things. It was dangerous to leave a small farm without a steward for a day. Something was liable to go wrong, and then there would be a row with his mother. So all day he had plenty of time to read and smoke. Getting enough money to buy cigarettes was a problem; if it wasn't for all the eggs he stole and which Aggie sold for him he'd be without a cigarette many a time.

The day passed.

Cyclists passed down the lane on their way to the town. The bawl of unsold cattle could be heard as they were being driven home. Tarry was not unhappy.

Tarry was running a centre in the potato drills. As he was using only one horse to pull the old plough the work was rather bumpy–and in the local phrase ‘in and out like a dog pissing on snow'.

Was he interested very deeply in his work? In some ways, yes. Although he was trying to compose a verse as he worked he was also thinking with much comfort of the excellent progress his potatoes were making. They were three inches over the tops of the drills, the best spuds in the country. Growing potatoes was a thing he took a great pride in. By merely admiring the buds as they grew he felt that they responded and progressed. Indeed he was sure they responded. Clay climbed in the back of his boots.
The plough struck a rock and the handles flew high over his shoulders. Up and down the alleys he went for about an hour in a great hurry. Then he sat on the beam of the plough to dream.

As he dreamt Molly Brady came down the path on the far side of the dividing stream, towards the well. In one hand she carried a tin can and in the other a long pot-stick. She left the can beside the well and began to search with the pot-stick in the rushes that grew in the swamp; she was looking for hens' nests.

Molly was about twenty years old, a soft, fat slob of a girl who appealed to Tarry in a sensual way.

And for weeks in his daydreams he had been planning an approach to her. He knew the times she'd be coming to the well. Accidental-like he had a large plank lying across the stream for a week or more now – he had it there for the purpose of making a platform when he would be removing the big boulder that had rolled into the stream, blocking the flow of water. Molly's mother did not get up out of bed these mornings until near eleven. That would be a good time. Among his other arrangements he had two large corn sacks which presumably were for covering the horse when he would be cooling down after a sweat. And now the time had arrived.

Molly was obviously waiting for Tarry to open the conversation. It was plain that her interest in the hens' secret nests was merely collateral.

‘Hello,' he called.

This ‘hello' conveyed a different meaning from other hellos. In country places a single word is inflected to mean a hundred things, so that only a recording of the sounds gives an idea of the speech of these people.

This hello had in it a touch of bravado, the speech of a wicked monster making a bid for a woman's virtue, the consciousness of the wickedness producing a tremulous quality in the tones. Speaking, he felt that the whole countryside was listening to his vile suggestion.

‘Hello,' answered Molly. Her hello was a wild animalistic cry.

‘Fierce great weather, Molly,' said Tarry, going towards the edge of the stream.

‘I'm looking for a nest of oul' eggs,' said Molly with a pout of bitterness which was aimed at some hens unknown, ‘and bad luck from the same hens how well it's here they have to come to lay. How's your mother?'