Authors: George McWhirter
The Gift of Women
THE GIFT
OF
WOMEN
GEORGE MCWHIRTER
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
McWhirter, George, author
The gift of women / George McWhirter.
Short stories.
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-1-55096-425-7 (pbk.).--ISBN 978-1-55096-428-8 (pdf).--
ISBN 978-1-55096-426-4 (epub).--ISBN 978-1-55096-427-1 (mobi)
I. Title.
PS8575.W48G53 2014 C813'.54 C2014-904192-6
C2014-904193-4
Copyright © George McWhirter, 2014
Design and Composition by Mishi Uroboros
Digital formatting by Melissa Campos-Mendivil
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TO ANGELA AND HER FRIENDS
SITTINGS FOR A PHOTOGRAPH IN A GREEN ROOM
LONELY RIVERS FLOW TO THE SEA, TO THE SEA, TO THE OPEN ARMS OF THE SEA
AN ULSTER GLOSSARY OF UTTERANCES
Re:
Deilf
as observed St. Colum Cille in a stream swollen by rains in the vicinity of Bangor and its recently established abbey, subsequently recorded in this elaboration.
River dolphin return to their small streams when they rise in
great rains. Sometime these returns take decades or centuries, to
come, but as we know, though it never changes, the dolphin
appearance is always in keeping with those times in which they
reappear
.
âFrom the Irish. Anonymous, Iona, AD 599
Meta had four or five misdemeanours against her. Dalliance with U.S. soldiers was growled about, daily, but unpunishable â unless Meta could be got up for running a bawdy bungalow. When they discovered she had sloped in with a foreigner, not by way of her front door, but the river around the back, they thought they had her for espionage and harbouring an alien.
Still, they didn't actually see her smuggle him in or hold out her hand to help him up the stone steps she had put in to kneel on and do her washing in the river. They'd have taken the fella for a visiting dignitary, a dark prince, arriving by water to take her to the Town Ball in Bangor or the Plaza in Belfast, where girls danced their legs off with anything in bellbottoms, air force blue or khaki.
Dressed in his blue-black sweater, thick worsted trousers and wool toque, they might also have spotted him as one of those Italian frogmen, who had dumped his wet-suit and goggles somewhere so that he might land and blend in. The toque, which he never took off, appeared to cover a bald head or hair so close cropped it shone as bluely as the wool toque on top. The sideburns, razored so each jutted down his jaws like a jackboot, had cinched his nationality for Meta.
He was an
I-tie
.
Meta's was a mecca for anything beginning with
“i”
: anything
in
solent,
ill
egal,
irr
egular or
in
decent. How illegal, improper or improvident was chalked up on lavatory walls, milestones, under railway arches and the slate in Redman's shop, where Meta owed a small fortune.
“She'd slide into bed with any pair of odd balls â it's second nature to her,” said Mrs. McLarnen as Mrs. Redmond cut and paddled a square of butter for her, then stamped her ration book.
“More's the pity she isn't in it for the money. It'd wipe her slate clean with me.”
So, their getting wind of the crime after the fact, when the
enemy alien
had done a bunk, made the story one more Meta myth the village of Carnalea chalked up to her second nature.
At Whin Hill Meta stands to shower her head. The stream divides in two around it before joining again to flow over a tiny delta of stones to the sea. The wind beats her skirt against her thighs. A storm has been and gone in the night, and on the morning tide the American aircraft carrier weighed anchor and went with it. Meta is watching the carrier clear the horizon. The sky goes bluer and the sea, too â not summer blue, but cold-as-a-mackerel winter blue, whose contagious colour everything on land and water catches, everything, except the yellow whin. This is why she doesn't see y'r man, dressed in navy blues. He gleams, either because he is soaking wet, or his woollens are saturated in lanolin or woven from short fine hairs sleek as seal skin. One moment, the only sound is shallow water running across the stones below, then their tops clack and grate as his feet slither over them in a pair of deep blue swimming pool slippers.
Cox, the retired Major in the big-windowed house above, uses them to walk down his path and wade in here. The Major also uses his binoculars to watch the coast for things washing in. Will he see this bit of jetsam who's waded ashore under his own steam? Vapour rises from his mouth and slowly off the toque at the top of his head. Where's he from â the carrier? An American deserter? Or one of those poor souls from the submarines, deserting Italy now that it's losing, like slaves off a sinking galley?
Meta calls to him, but the gurgled answer could be the river's or something like Italian. She picks her way down, takes off her shoes to stand beside him in her bare feet. He looks down at them on the cold stone. “Feet,” “sweet,” “cheep?” She can't catch it, but will have to take him up to her house by the river, to hear what he has to say and see what she can do. “Italian,” she asks, “
Ital-iano
?” She has him under the arm. “Were you after the American carrier?”
“
Deilf
,” he says. She wrinkles her nose. He wrinkles his nose back at her and touches the top of his toque to scratch the wool there. “Brass Eel,” he says next, and studies her face to see if this registers.
“Pull the other leg, Basil,” she tells him, but he shivers and she feels sorry for him. She puts her hand on his toque. “Did you fall off? Get left behind?” she asks when his eyes roll up to where her hand is laid on his toque. “You were after the American carrier. I was after the carrier myself. Ended up, same as you, just watching it bugger off.”
She points up the river. When she stops pulling him by the arm and pushes ahead of him, he matches her step. The thin, shaggy shanks of the hawthorns intrigue him as much as her heels. He stares up and touches the crimson haws.
“It must be dark in the water. Specially at night?” says Meta. “Bet you're glad you're here in Carnalea.”
“Carn-allee.”
“Not Carn-allee, Car-na-lea.” She looks into his eyes. “Are you a singer?” They approach the tunnel that goes under the railway line. “A tenor, a Benjamino Gigli? Lovely'n' all as your voice is, no arias in here. We don't want a living soul to know you're here.” She puts her finger to her lips, then points the same finger at the tunnel. The trickle and ripple in the tunnel must amuse him, he chirps and chatters along with it.
At the tunnel's other end, he stops before the opening to the light. Plants that have overgrown the railway station railing dangle into it. Honeysuckle and fuchsia that remind Meta of female private parts and sea things: anemone. He stops her under them with the grip of his hand. She feels the fingers, fine, hard as knitting needles. “Never fear. My bungalow's a couple of houses up. Other side of this tunnel. I'll have you in, out of sight.”
Why should she want him in? If he has no ration book, emergency grubstake â she will have to share hers. No tinkle of change in his pocket either. Perhaps the money's sewn into the lining of his trousers, all in notes. “You made off with some treasure? Off those boats the Nazis use to transport loot from everywhere they invaded?”
Meta sighs. She would steal all she could, off them nasties â every brass tack. She hopes his pockets have little velvet pouches tied up with string. She's seen pirates in the pictures empty them onto tavern tables. “Diamonds?” she asks.
“Dye-a-monds,” he replies and Meta beams. He undulates in a Carmen Miranda samba. And as they say in the movies, she can't keep her eyes off his rhythm section. “You know Harry James, Betty Grable?” But before he can answer, she says, “Both of us better samba inside.”
He looks at the whitewashed stones bordering the back garden path. They wiggle toward the river and the steps she uses to do her washing. The neighbours will be watching the front for her, as usual. They peer over their hedges to see her head pass by with the different types of military headgear. They guess what service, what rank by the cap beside Meta's turban. Out of pride, Meta never brings anyone in by the back door, but Basil is special. On her back doorstep, he pauses to put his nose high into the air.
Sniffing the state of her bungalow, is he?
“Any Ardglass herrin'!” comes the Wednesday call from the fish cart. The neighbour women won't have seen a thing. They're on the road, or at their gates, plates ready for the herring. No dirty newspaper parcels for them, straight to the plate and into the pan.
Meta watches Basil twitch his nose and ears. Maybe he thinks the Ardglass herrin'-howl is a siren. The fishmonger's son prolongs it, like he's offering the Carnalea women the love of their lives. “Anyyyyyaaaaah Aaaardglaaaaas heeeeruuuuuun?” He makes one stop for each stretch of road between the bends in it. He collects the women's plates, like a clergyman his alms takers' at the altar on a Sunday. Meta always elbows and upsets the others' plates so badly, they give her leeway.
“It's only the herrin' man.”
This information catches Basil twisting from side to side.
“Kar-na-lee, dye-a-mond, ear-ring man,” he says.
“Not an ear-ring man, it's th' Ardglass 'errin' man. I didn't forget it's Wednesday. I have the money to get some.” She nods at the back door. “I'll get a plate and buy a dozen â a dozen and a half. That'll do us a day or two.”
The herring only last one meal and the last is gone before the first has hit the pan.