Emerald Germs of Ireland (27 page)

The saucepan Pat held in his right hand made harsh music on the cluttered counter.

“What do I care about Tommy Noble?” he replied, with a hint of iron.

The master hooked his thumb in his braces and extended his stomach, grinning widely.

“Sure don’t I know, Pat!” he said. “Which is why I suppose you don’t want to hear who I happened to meet coming up the lane!”

There was a tanginess to Pat’s saliva, like marmalade. He whirled, simultaneously wiping his hands on his apron.

“Tommy Noble!” he gasped, incredulously.

“No! Timmy Sullivan!” chuckled the master.

Pat’s heart sank anew and he was about to turn away when he felt a thick-fingered hand on his shoulder, the triumphant cry ringing out, “No! Tommy Noble!”

Pat could not believe his eyes. He gasped as it appeared before him,
the plain spotless white envelope expertly poised on the improvised tray of Butty Halpin’s upraised fingers.

Moments later, they found themselves together in the quiet confines of the library, Butty’s head almost completely enshrouded in blue smoke from his pipe, fragments of paper from the envelope fluttering all about Pat as he endeavored to make his way inside the communication he had just received.

“Oh, master,” he cried, “I can’t do it! I’m all butterfingers!”

Butty Halpin puffed on his briar and advised, avuncularly, “Patience, Pat. Take your time, dear boy.”

Pat gasped, a nerve tapping furiously over his right eye, as if being worked upon by the shoemaking implement of an infinitesimal, painstaking elf.

“That’s right!” he said. “That’s right, master! Patience!”

There was not a sound to be heard—save the distant lowing of a cow—as Pat ran his eyes across the letter which he now held, quiveringly, in his hand. It would not be an exaggeration to say that his entire countenance was then consumed by an expression of pure horror.

Butty Halpin frowned, removing his pipe from his mouth.

“What’s wrong, Pat?” he enquired, scratching the upper part of his cheek with his index finger.

“It—,” began Pat, hoarsely.

“What? What are you trying to say, Pat? Come on, man!” continued the Master.

“It—,” repeated Pat, his lower lip trembling.

“Here! Give me a look at that!” Butty Halpin demanded, a sudden and unexpected peremptoriness in his voice.

Pat might have been a marble statue erected in the center of the library as the master digested its contents.

“Well man, dear oh dear. Isn’t that a pity now?” he said, running his soft hand along the shining runway of his head.

“Maybe it’s a mistake. Maybe it’s a mistake, master!” exclaimed Pat hopefully.

Butty lowered his head and folded the letter in a manner that was strangely tender. It might have been the regretful denial of an official pardon.

“I’m afraid not, Pat. These people don’t make mistakes, I’m sorry to have to tell you!”

Pat lowered his head.

“No, master,” he compliantly replied. “They wouldn’t, would they? They wouldn’t make a mistake.”

The schoolteacher handed the folded white square to his landlord.

“Who knows, Pat,” he said, “please God—maybe next year. Hmm?”

Pat nodded, shamefully.

“Yes, master. Please God.”

“Well, good luck now,” went on the master, with a sudden breeziness, “I have to rehearse below in Sullivan’s this evening so I’ll be home late. Not long now before the big day is upon us!”

“That’s right, master. Not long now. It won’t be long now!”

“As the monkey said when it got its tail cut off! Ha ha! Well—good luck now, Pat, me auld son!” replied the master.

Throughout the entire evening, Pat endeavored to avert his eyes from the glittering sculpture of crystal that was the decanter reclining on the sideboard and when, the following afternoon, his tenant remarked, “God Pat but I had to laugh yesterday when I seen your face! You really thought you had it, didn’t you?” it required all the resources he harbored within him to brightly smile and respond, as though he hadn’t a care in the world, by saying, “Oh now, master! Don’t be talking! Doesn’t it just show you the class of a cod I really am!”

The master shook his head.

“And the two wee eyes of you—dancing away with unbridled hope!”

Now it was Pat’s turn to shake his head.

“It was nearly as bad as the days when I used to think I was going to get my place on the school team!”

“Aye! Do you mind that!” replied Butty, lighting his pipe.

“Some hope of me ever being able to kick a ball, eh, master?”

“Oh now, Pat—would you quit!” was the renowned pedagogue’s reply, elevating himself in his chair as he mused, “Do you know what I was thinking there, Pat? I wouldn’t mind a wee dram of the you-know-what?”

“The you-know-what?” replied Pat, taken slightly by surprise.

“Yes,” his tenant responded, rubbing his hands expectantly, “after
all—we should put to some use my beautifully engraved Waterford crystal decanter which I won only recently in the intensely competitive ‘Spot the Talent ‘competition, don’t you think? Don’t you think so, Pat, you great big famous actor, you!”

Pat’s mouth went dry as he responded.

“Yes, master. Why yes, of course.”

The master’s proud grin stretched from ear to empurpled ear as he tentatively poured the amber liquid.

“Ah!” he murmured as he ran his nose along the rim of the glass. “There’s no doubt about it, Pat. A drink is not the same until you sip it from an aristocratic receptacle such as this.”

“Yes,” agreed Pat. “How was it you described it on another occasion? Elo-elo-ocky something?”

“Eloquence, Pat. Eloquence in glass.”

Pat shook his head in admiration and stared into the life-giving waters below.

“You know, master,” he continued, “of all the people who ever stayed in this house, you’re the brainiest.”

It was as though a small transformation had taken place, the sun suddenly radiating from Butty Halpin’s entire being.

“Do you really mean that, Pat?” he replied humbly.

“No! I’m only making it up!” laughed Pat unexpectedly giving him a firm litde push on the shoulder.

The master laughed uneasily and then said, “Oh, Pat! You always were a cad!”

“Ha ha!” laughed Pat as the amber liquid touched his lips once more.

They remained sipping for another hour or so and then, eventually, the master stretched and said, “Well, Pat—it’s the wooden hill for me. I have the inspector coming in tomorrow.”

“I hope everything goes well, master,” said Pat, leaving down his glass.

“Oh indeed and it will,” the master assured him. “I know what to expect.”

“Of course you do! Sure you know everything!”

“Ha ha!” laughed the master, a litde uncertainly.

Pat did not reply, simply staring at him with glittering, purposeful eyes.

It was approximately
3:00 a.m
. when the sinister figure on the stairs mutely crossed the landing, suddenly shaking the old dark house to its foundations with a furious, almost intolerable pounding on the door of the bedroom where Butty Halpin up until then had been sleeping soundly as a child. Out of his dream of Dots (he and his beloved wife had been waltzing in a field of daisies) he awoke sharply, crying, “Aagh!” only to find himself covered in a clammy sweat as a blood-curdling scream issued from the very bowels of the house. Then—nothing, only silence.

“Pat,” queried Butty as he advanced upon a crispy rasher the following morning at the breakfast table, did you happen to hear anything unusual last night about three o’clock?”

Pat moved a plate with some bread on it and said, coolly: “About three? Three o’clock, master?”

“Yes,” replied Butty, buttering a potato cake (with some effort, it has to be said, his knife skidding haphazardly across his plate a number of times).

“Like what?” replied Pat.

“Like a knock on my door?” the master said, adding, “A hammering, in fact. Loud hammering.”

Pat shook his head decisively.

“No, master. I was asleep around that time,” he said.

The master frowned, the bubbled triangular cake suspended directly in front of his lips.

“It’s the strangest thing,” he said, pouting his lips until they formed a round, crinkly o.

Pat stiffened and suddenly turned, pressing his open palms to his cheeks.

“Gosh!” he said. “I hope the house doesn’t turn out to be haunted!”

There was the tiniest echo of anxiety in the master’s response, despite his somewhat forced cheeriness.

“Haunted! Hah! Would you go away out of that, Pat!”

Pat smiled and shook his head, rubbing his hands on his apron.

“Aye, master!” he said. “Do you hear me! I’m at it again! Am I ever going to learn? Cripes, I’m getting to be a bigger eejit every day!”

That evening Butty arrived home, exhausted, he claimed, and looking forward to nothing more than a nice “wee dram” from the interior of the eloquent receptacle. “Isn’t that right, Pat?” he said to his landlord as he poured it, not having urne to hear Pat’s reply before spewing the contents of his mouth across the flowers which decorated the wallpaper directly opposite him.

“Jesus Mary and Joseph!” he squealed, frantically running his sports-coated sleeve across his mouth.

“What’s wrong, master?” Pat cried, running to his assistance.

“The whiskey! Why, it tastes like—”

“What, master? It tastes like what?”

“Pish!” exclaimed the shocked schoolteacher, who rarely employed such coarse vernacular.

Pat placed his open palm on his lips and paled. Beyond the library window, it seemed, the entire village was throwing up its hands in horror.

There was some consternation in the hallway the following morning as Pat knotted his apron and set about doing the breakfast dishes. “Cursagod!” and “cripes!” and “mother of Divine—!” are some examples of the irate ejaculations reaching his ears. At once he repaired hallward where he found the master in a state of some confusion.

“Master—,” he began.

“Pat,” said the master, “you didn’t by any chance see any of my books around the place, did you?”

“Books, master?” frowned Pat.

“Aye. Sums books. And writing ones,” the schoolteacher continued.

Pat’s brow became knitted.

“No, master,” he said. “I didn’t see any books at all, I’m sorry to have to say.”

The master scratched his head and pondered.

“I don’t know what the hell is wrong with me these days at all.”

“Make sure you mind yourself for Monday anyhow,” advised Pat.

“Monday?” replied the master. “What’s on on Monday?”

“Isn’t the inspector coming in?” said Pat. “Isn’t that what you said?”

“Jesus Mary and Joseph, Pat, you’re right! I completely forgot!”

Pat smiled as a slight tremor announced itself on the upper part of the master’s right cheek.

There were seven books all together arranged before Pat on the polished mahogany table of the library as he good-humoredly applied the scissors to them. They included a Hall and Knight’s
Algebra, Adventures in English,
and
My Friend Matso.
Soon, however, to be no books at all, nothing so much, in fact, as a loose arrangement of sliced-up tragedy which Pat was to happily confine to the dustbin. But not before stopping in front of the framed oval portrait of his mother to remark, “We’ll soon show him! We’ll soon show Mr. Fatarse Bossy Boots. I really do think we will, Mammy.”

The remainder of that day was used up by Pat to clean the kitchen and complete the one hundred and one tasks which were the stuff of the everyday. And which included preparing a nice hot cup of Complan` for the tired post-inspector master who would doubtless be home soon. It amused Pat emptying the contents of the packet—a fine white powder—into the thick depths of the energy-giving food drink, for he had never perpetrated anything quite like that before.

The master proclaimed himself delighted by Pat’s thoughtfulness.

“The nicest cup of Complan I ever drank, Pat,” he declared.

“Thank you, master,” replied Pat, an almost girlish blush tingeing his cheek.

“Pat, I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

“Drink up now, master,” Pat said. “Like Mammy used to say, it’ll put a bone in you.”

“A bone in you! Is that what she used to say? Your mother, God rest her?”

“Yes, master. That was one of her ‘old sayings.’”

“Boys oh boys. Pat—do you mind me asking you something? Pat—you wouldn’t mind?”

“No, master. Of course not. Go right ahead, for God’s sake!”

“It’s just that—do you think I’ve been acting a litde strange lately, by any chance?”

“Strange? Lately? Not at all, master! It’s just the pressure of next Monday night! The ‘Spot the Talent’ final and all! That’s what it is, I’m sure you’ll find!”

The master frowned and cupped his hand around the Complan mug.

“It’sjust that…he began. “It’sjust that, this morning I lost my keys. And yesterday—do you know what I did? I went the wrong way to school!”

“The wrong way to school?” replied Pat incredulously.

“Yes, Pat. It’s true. I went down by the Candy Box instead of up by Higginses.”

Pat smiled, bent one of his fingers back and straightened it again.

“God but aren’t you the desperate man now to go and do that! Japers, if you keep that up, soon you’ll be getting as bad as me!”

The master swallowed and replaced his mug on the table.

“I think I’d best get myself an early night, Pat.”

Pat nodded understandingly and rose to his feet.

“I think you’d better, master—if you’re to win the prize next Monday!”

The master smiled—an odd, almost sickly smile—as he bade Pat good night and left the room. Behind him, Pat’s eyes and those of his mother’s painted image seemed to fuse as one. “He’s doing it again,” her soft voice appeared to say, curling like a white smoke from her white, impassive lips. “After all the pain he’s caused us he’s gone and done it all over again. Hasn’t he, Pat?”

Pat wished it were not thus. For well he remembered that day so long ago when to his horror he had glanced out the window of fourth class to perceive his mother advancing furiously on the school building in her large-buttoned coat and pillbox hat. Before appearing, taut with fury in the doorway of the classroom, rasping, “Oh yes, Halpin! You’d make a laugh of him all right but you wouldn’t teach him his sums like you’re supposed to! Sending him home to me with the hands slapped off him every day of the week! My litde Pat! Look at you, you turnip)— for what else are you—you couldn’t teach a spelling to save your life!”