Tarry Flynn (7 page)

Walking through the meadow in summer was a great excitement. The simple, fantastic beauty of ordinary things growing – marsh-marigolds, dandelions, thistles and grass. He did not ask things to have a meaning or to tell a story. To be was the only story.

The sun had come out through the haze and the morning was very warm. The cackle of morning had ceased. The songs of the birds were blotted out by the sun.

Paddy Callan, May's father, was walking diagonally across the hill beside their house looking a little sadly at his rood of turnips which had failed badly. This gave Tarry much satisfaction. His pleasure did not live long for just then he heard the wild neigh of a mare coming down the lane at Cassidy's gate and presently sighted the animal. Eusebius was getting some trade for that stallion of his, though Tarry, wishfully thinking, thought that no sane man would bring a mare to such a miserable beast that wasn't sixteen hands high. Considering that Reilly had a prize stallion, seventeen three in height, at stud less than a mile away
this was surprising. Tarry satisfied himself that only bad pays, men with ponies and old mares, would come to Eusebius' stallion. Flynn's mare was in foal by Reilly's sire, although Eusebius had been letting his beast to mares the previous year.

He caught the mare easily enough, for she was lazy at this time, and led her after him to the stable.

The harness wasn't in the best condition. The collar needed lining and the traces were tied with bits of wire in two places. He couldn't find the hames-strap. Searching for it between a rough wooden ceiling and the galvanized roof he found a torn school reader which he usually enjoyed reading while evacuating his bowels in the stable. He put it in his pocket in case he'd take a notion to read in the field.

‘Come home for your dinner about half-twelve,' said his mother.

‘Right.'

‘And don't come till we call you.'

‘I'll not come at all if that ‘ill satisfy you,' said Tarry peevishly.

‘Begod there's a powerful piece of turnips,' Eusebius was saying as he leaned over a low stone fence upon which moss and briars were growing, and which was the march-fence dividing a field of Cassidy's from Flynn's.

‘Not so bleddy bad, as the fella said,' Tarry agreed. The field of two and a half acres was one-third taken up with turnips and the rest, with the exception of three drills of cabbages, with potatoes. Tarry looked across at the drills and the goodness of the crop flowed through the heat of his passionate desiring mind like a cool river. He remembered the damp evening on which he sowed them with love. The dry clay too was so beautiful. As they talked, Tarry's mind adventured over and back that rutted headland with its variety of wonders. From where he stood to the cross hedge bordering the grazing field. Every weed and stone and pebble and briar all along that ordinary headland evoked for him the only real world – the world of the imagination. And the rank smell of the weeds!

What is a flower?

Only what it does to a man's spirit is important.

Something happened when Tarry looked at a flower or a stone in a ditch. Sometimes he went with visitors to what were called beauty spots and these fools would point and say: ‘Isn't that a wonderful scene?' But these scenes did nothing to him and were not wonderful.

Eusebius had his elbows on a flat stone as he spoke. He had tackle – hobbles and ropes – on his shoulder as he was on his way to castrate young bulls for someone.

‘Isn't it a bit late in the season for cutting calves?' Tarry suggested.

‘Not at all, the flies didn't start yet.'

Eusebius was a marvellous man for trying to pick up loose money in this way. He was always on the look-out for any game that had ready money in it. He also went in for castrating young pigs but he had the name of not being very lucky so that his trade in this line was rather thin. At the time he was also dabbling in smuggling. Then there was the stallion.

Tarry thought Eusebius a greedy man for the world, and a mean man too in spite of all his gaiety.

‘See any women lately?' Eusebius asked.

‘None that counted, anyway.'

‘Any word about the Reilly one?'

‘I think that all blew over. The Mission killed it. All the same it was a damn mean thing of Charlie to give out my name that night. That was a dirty lousy thing to do. I'll get that fella yet or I'll call myself a damn poor class of a man.' Tarry spoke petulantly, as a weak man. Eusebius crossed the fence and accompanied Tarry down the drill.

‘I say, there's flaming great spuds. You must have shoved on the potash, no matter what you say.'

‘Only the hundred,' said Tarry with an in-drawn breath of self-satisfaction.

‘Near closing the alleys. That's fierce for this time of the year.'

‘Easy there, Polly. You're not in earnest about that, are you?'

‘Only what I hear. All women's as bad as the Dillons if they get the chance.'

These remarks wounded Tarry very deeply. He wanted to
sustain his illusions about human nature. He did not want to believe these things – until, perhaps, he had had his fill of lust.

‘I believe that nearly every girl in this place is a virgin,' said he, hopefully. Eusebius laughed loudly. ‘Huh, huh, huh. Jabus, you're a very innocent fella. I'd say there wouldn't be more than twenty per cent – if there
is
that.'

The mare stopped on the side of the hill. Tarry stood with his back to the plough and standing between the handles settling his mind for a good long talk on his favourite theme.

‘You're a desperate man, Eusebius,' he opened. ‘To hear you talking a person would imagine all the women in your country was blackguards. That's the kind of Charlie Trainor. Nobody's out for anything else according to him. After all there's more than that in it.'

‘You might be right, right enough.'

‘I'm sure I'm right. There's very few women like that when it comes to the whipping of crutches. Remember the night we saw him with the Dillon one?'

‘Look!'

‘Wonder who the devil is it.'

‘Might be the bailiffs coming from Carlin's. They have a betten pad up to them.' The two boys stared across the fields watching the clear in the hedges at the turn of the Drumnay lane, two hundred yards distant.

‘They'll be sold out before long,' said Eusebius.

‘Indeed they will not, Eusebius; they're not that far gone,' said Tarry, who had a greedy notion in his head that they, the Flynns, might be able to slip in and get the Carlins' place for half-nothing – maybe for fifty pounds. It did not occur to him that Eusebius might have eyesight just as good and maybe better, for seeing through deal boards. It is foolish not to recognize the other fellow as as far-seeing a rogue as yourself.

In the middle of the conversation Eusebius suddenly remembered that he had business on hand; the chance of making a few shillings always crashed like a stone through the window of his romantic mind, and he was off. His father was just the same, all
gaiety and jocosity till it came to business and then he changed his mood altogether.

Tarry stood in the shadow of the poplars beside the stream musing on the general moral situation in a day-dreamy way. He could get no perspective on life, for life lay warm, too warm, around him, and too close and nearly suffocating. He was up to his neck in life and could not see it to enjoy it. His whole conscious mind was strained in an effort to drag himself up out of the belly of emotion.

Sometimes he would concentrate, saying to himself: I am alive. Those are potatoes there, and that is a blackthorn's root. Life was like a terrible pain which he was trying to analyse away.

He found a long cigarette butt in the lining of his waistcoat and reflected on the irony of it; for the night before when he hadn't a cigarette he had searched every pocket, including the linings, and could find nothing. Now when he had nearly a full packet he found this great long Player butt.

Tarry, musing, got a feeling that someone was near at hand. He was right; his mother was standing on the height above him in the middle of the plot of turnips surveying the scene after having taken good stock of the turnips and of her son's morning work.

She had approached the field from the other end and had managed to come across the stone fence.

‘How do you think they're doing?' she asked.

‘The best turnips in your country,' he said; ‘they're butting a dread; some of them as thick as your thumb. They're fierce turnips.'

‘Don't be always boasting like the Callans. The Callans never had anything that wasn't better than anyone else's. Troth you may thank me that they're so good. Only I was at you, you wouldn't sow them that evening. Was that Eusebius you had with you?'

‘He was just passing; I hardly had time to talk to him.'

‘Oh, that's the right careful boy that knows how to make a shilling. There was two mares up there this morning to his stallion
– and you always making little of the animal, not sixteen hands high. It's a terror the trade he's getting for that young stallion.'

‘He'll get all the bad pays the first year, don't you know that? A new stallion or bull is like a new shop in that way. Nobody ever made money of a stallion or bull.'

‘Oh, that 'ill do you, now. A drunken oul' rake never made money of a stallion, but I'll bet you Eusebius won't be so. Troth they'll all pay him. Lord God of Almighty!' Mrs Flynn reflected as her eyes scanned yellow-weeded fields to the east. ‘Them Carlins are the unfortunate people. The whole farm – and that's the good dry farm – all going wild. Yellow weeds like a forest. Oh, that was a bad family that couldn't have luck. The abuse they used to give to their father and mother was total dread. Getting up in the morning, at every hour, if the tay wasn't fresh more would have to be wet. And there was a time when Jemmy was as consaitey a boy as went into Dargan chapel. And all the girls that were after him!

“‘I could thatch a house with all the women I could get,” says he to me. “Yes, I could thatch a house with all the women I could get.'”

The mother had come slowly down the drills while her son was driving the mare towards her. ‘You shouldn't drive that unfortunate mare too fast,' she said, for in her presence the son had put on a great spurt.

He pulled up. The mother began to speak in a confidential whisper. ‘Had Eusebius any news?'

Tarry thought that perhaps his mother had been listening to their talk about girls and was a bit embarrassed. ‘Curse o' God on the ha'porth.'

‘Aw-haw, catch that fellow to tell you anything! They tell me the grippers were up at Carlins' again. As I said, as bad as they are I was glad the oul' cow, the only four-footed animal they have about the place, wasn't taken. They drove her into Cassidy's field. They'll be out of that before you're much older. They'll be on the broad road as sure, as sure, as sure. And mind you, that's as dry and as warm a farm of land as there is in the parish.
There's a couple of fields there and do you know what it is you could plough them with a pair of asses, they're that free. It's a terrible pity you wouldn't take a better interest in your work and you could be the independentest man in Ireland. You could tell all the beggars to kiss your arse. This rhyming is all right but I don't see anything in it. Sure if I thought there was anything in it I'd be the last person to say a word against it, but – Stand over here!'

Tarry stood facing the point his mother drew attention to.

‘Who would that be?' the mother whispered.

They were watching someone, a man, coming at a stoop on the far side of a high hedge beyond Brady's field. He had something on his back.

‘Do you know,' said the mother, ‘just for cure-ossity you should slip down to the corner and see who the devil's father it is. I'll keep an eye on Polly.'

Tarry crossed the drills quickly and pulling a rotten bush out of a gap in the hedge went into the grazing field.

The man with the sleeper on his back was going at a stoop on the far side of the other hedge that divided Finnegan's Big Hill from Flynn's farm. It was Eusebius.

While he was developing a strong jealousy towards Eusebius who was making such a practice of stealing sleepers that they'd all be caught in the end he saw another man coming at a murderous gallop down Brady's narrow garden. This man was not a railwayman but a small farmer from the opposite side of the railway. No normal observer of the scene would need to be told what it was all about.

Eusebius sized up the situation for he now was shoving the sleeper through a hole in the hedge into Flynn's field.

Having pushed the sleeper through he saw Tarry and, never at a loss, stood his ground until Tarry came up. Then seeing the angry man approaching he climbed through the hole made by the sleeper into Flynn's field.

‘Larry Finnegan, he's mad,' Eusebius panted with a laugh that was much strained. Tarry listened.

‘He had the sleeper ready to take away, had it over the paling and was going back for another – the greedy dog – when I snaffled it on him. Just for a cod, you know.'

By now the angry Larry had come up but instead of turning on Eusebius he went past without a word with an injured expression.

They hid the sleeper in some briars and Eusebius went back the way he had come.

‘Well?' asked the mother when the son returned.

He told her the story.

‘There's no luck in a thing like that,' she said. ‘If I wanted a thing I'd pay for it and not have people throwing it in your face. Yes, aye,' she said about nothing at all. ‘That mare won't take long; you'd want to keep an eye on her. Oh, an unfortunate pack of poor devils. Do you know what?' she declared suddenly on a new and enthusiastic note, ‘I think I'll dodge up round Carlins' one of these evenings to see what kind of a place they have at all. I don't know the day or hour I was up there. Since the Mission, they don't get up till evening I hear. When a party quits going to Mass it's a bad sign.'