Emerald Germs of Ireland (7 page)

“Three days?” gasped Pat.

“The doctors done all they could! But it was a waste of time! They said she was even worse when they finished with her! One of her eyes was blinded and there was a big red scorch mark the size of that all the way down her face. Then she started screaming in the night. Howling and howling! Howling, ‘You did it! You did it!’”

Pat coughed and looked around him.

“I think I hear someone at the back door!” he said. “I have to go in.”

“Imagine that!” continued the turfman—oblivious of Pat’s previous comments—”Someone screaming—night after night, over and over again, You did it! It was you did it!’”

“There it is again,” Pat said, inclining his head toward the back of the house.

“Shouting it without end! You did it!’ Never giving you a minute’s peace! Every time you’d turn on a light, there she’d be at the window …”

The words hung in the air as if each one was ringed with fire.

The turfman seemed to take half an hour to draw his breath. Then he lowered his head and said, “I’m sorry. I’d best be on my way. I knew
I made a mistake coming here. They never liked the Ardee people about this town.”

He lifted his bag of turf and placed it across his left shoulder.

“Well—good-bye, mister. I’ll go on down to the station so and be off about my business. I hope I didn’t trouble you too much.”

Pat gulped.

“The station?” he whimpered.

The turfman contemplated his blackened thumbnail and nodded.

“Aye. I want to have a few words with the sergeant, you see. About doing a bit of digging.”

Pat’s skin grew clammy all over as his eyes instinctively traveled—as two small cameras whose lenses came to rest upon a particular spot adjacent to a laurel bush.

“Digging?” he asked, hesitantly, and somewhat hoarse.

“Aye. There’s a bog below in Ardee full of turf. But I need a permit, you see. Aye. Well—I’d best be off. I have my ass round here at the back where he’s been standing all this time. Isn’t he a patient soul? Good man, Neddy.”

Some moments later, he was gathering up the frayed rope which was tied around the ass’s head and leading the sad-eyed donkey down the lane toward the main road. But before he reached the elm tree, Pat found himself crying out, “No! Wait! Turfman—please!”

Both animal and hawker of peat hesitated.

“Eh?” he called back.

“Why don’t youse stay the night?” cried Pat. “I mean, like—it’s a long way to Ardee from here!”

The turfman shook his head.

“Oh, we couldn’t do that, now. The sergeant is below waiting for me.”

“No! Please!” Pat pleaded. “We can put on a big roaring fire and make caraway cake! Griddle bread! Toasted griddle bread—wouldn’t that be nice?”

The turfman scratched his head and said, “Now I don’t mean to be a class of what you might call ungrateful—but you wouldn’t be lying to me, would you? You wouldn’t be trying to make a cod of the Ardee man, would you?”

Standing there in a shaft of evening sunlight, Pat thought, “Oh no!
Now why on earth would we do that when all they do is come about your own private place with stupid, droopy-eyed animals! Oh no, why Neddy, we’ll have to get him a mouthful of hay too, after we’ve bought some of your shitty old bags of turf!!”

Words which he did not utter, of course, or give the slightest indication of ever having harbored. Instead, rubbing his hands and buoyantly crying, “Absolutely not! Please! Please accept my invitation—both of you!”

Which, happily, they did, with the result that that very evening they found themselves as he had promised, devouring large slabs of hot, butter-soaked griddle bread and reclining beside a nice roaring fire, with Neddy giving all his attention to the hay that Pat had liberally forked for him into the plywood crate that had once housed Jaffa oranges. Pat smiled as he considered the industriously masticating jaws.

“He likes it, doesn’t he, turfman?” said Pat. “He sure does like that old hay!”

The turfman beamed.

“Oh indeed and he does! The Ardee asses like their dinner, sure enough! They’d ate you out of house and home if they were let, Pat!”

Pat handed the donkey another handful of hay.

“There you are,!” he said. “Come on now—eat up! Eat up, you auld divil you!”

There can be no doubt but that there is something idyllic about the surroundings in which Pat McNab resides—the spacious and well appointed if somewhat cobwebbed rooms and fabulous whitewashed outhouses could not but be the envy of many in these property-coveting days, not to mention the stables. Especially the stables, indeed, which in days gone by housed all the trusty steeds which ferried gentlemen in their galloping pursuits of unfortunate foxes. In the month of September, there is something particularly peaceful and poignant about the house and its surroundings, and if a visiting tourist or even just casual stroller, perhaps, happened to be passing by, they would be hard-pressed not to produce a camera and take any number of photographs to record the scene for posterity. Thoughts which occupy the mind of Pat McNab as he stands by the window once more, peering out through the curtain now that some months have passed and all is quiet again and the telltale
creak of the garden gate announces no more unwanted callers. “By all means photograph my residence,” he muses, “but do not call.” Although, he had to admit, that he might have to insist that any would-be recorder for posterity make an exception of the stables. “For their sake more than anything,”—meaning the turfman and his “animal”—he murmurs as he chortles a litde into his hands. For the simple reason that he hasn’t gotten around to cleaning up the unfortunate outhouses yet! Well, actually—that’s not true. The truth is that he simply couldn’t be bothered any more! “Auld bucking ass,” he thinks, “who cares about him and his auld guts!” Who, indeed, for the scene can hardly be described as a “palatable” one. Reminiscent, perhaps, of one of these
Friday the Thirteenth
or
Chainsaw Massacre-type
films—indeed any horror vehicle specifically targeted at the youth market. It might well be argued that the outbuilding concerned is now virtually unrecognizable as a stable. For daubed across the ceiling now are huge big sploshes of blood, and in great long streaks along the side and back walls are the very same. Nailed to the half door in the most casually dismissive fashion are two crimson-stained donkey’s ears. A ghost-hunting, infrared-type camera might reveal a photographic negative impression of Pat, cold yet crazed with his pitchfork, performing a crude and primitive blood-soaked cabaret interspersed with heartrending brays and squeals. A torn halter providing a sad, heartrending epitaph. Who owns the scarlet mask that leaps into the air and raises hands now gloved with blood? It may not be, it cannot be, but
is
—the one known as Pat McNab!

A long way from the smiling, benevolent host whose countenance had once glowed in the firelight of a September evening as a contented visitor burped a litde and placed his plate upon the table, with the grateful remark, “Boys but that was a powerful dinner, Pat! I tell you, you wouldn’t get better in Ardee!”

As a gracious landlord replied:

“Why, I’m honored that you liked it—at least now you’re beginning to understand that all of us are not hostile toward the town of your birth.”

“No! Indeed and youse are not, it’s true, Pat!”

“And to prove it to you more, I’ve taken the liberty of supplying Neddy with a litde surprise!”

“A surprise, Pat? No!”

“Oh but very much yes! Just so long as you will make a promise!”

“A promise?”

“You’ll sing my favorite song of all!”

“Not—”

“The very one! You promise?”

“Well, what can I say? Begod and I do!”

“Hold on till I get my pitchfork! I have it here behind the door! And Neddy’s already without?”

“He’s in the stable, Pat.”

“Where you and me are going now! For we’re not going to abandon old Ned when there’s a bit of a come-all-ye in the offing! Would I be right?”

“Indeed, and I dare say you would,” the Ardee man replied, the tiniest bit flummoxed.

It is a quiet evening now. The birds are twittering brightly and clearly in the trees and the footsteps of Pat and his visitor echo around the rectangle of a manure-covered yard. “Ah but that air would do your heart good,” he remarks. “I’ll bet it smells good all the way from here back to the station.”

“I’ll bet it does,” his visitor replies, unguardedly.

Pat lifts the pitchfork across his shoulder and places his hand on the older man’s shoulder.

“So—is the Ardee man going to sing?” he smiles as he sits himself down on a tightly packed hay bale.

“Begod and he is! He is that! Try to stop the turfmen from singing!” the County Louth man laughs.

“I wouldn’t dream of it!” laughs Pat as the mucus in his visitor’s throat rolls loud and strong and musical.

“Good man!” claps Pat as a cow—visible over the half door—leans quizzically over a hedge. “Away with you now!”

The turfman begins to tap his foot and sing, with unmatchable gusto:

It is not true that the “greatest” of conversations—as attested by the first verse of the song—passed between Pat McNab and his visitor, the turfman from Ardee, at least not on that last evening in the halflight by the half-door of the stables. In fact, the only words exchanged between them on that occasion, from the moment the song concluded (“A fine rendition!” Pat had trumpeted) until the entire quota of blood had been drained from the journeyman’s face, were: “What are you doing with that pitchfork, Pat?” And ones fated to receive in response nothing other than the succinct and unadorned sentence: “Sending you back to Ardee once and for all, you interfering peddler of dirt!”

As for the animal, it too went to its doom in the same hopelessly insouciant manner which it had displayed all its life, regardless of world politics, trauma, or incident. Even Pat’s deranged cries (for how else can they be described?) along the lines of: “Carry turf now! Go on, you bollocky bucking ass! Let’s see you do it now!” failed to make any impression upon it, even as it buckled hopelessly to its knees, on its last, sad journey toward eternity’s meadow.

It may be so that Pat’s visitor upon that fateful evening one September long ago was well regarded and always had been so in the small County Louth town of Ardee, it somehow ordained that his absence not only be noted but for generations mourned with Niagaras of tears and wailing lamentations. It is indeed possible that he and his turf-bearing ass were as part of the landscape itself in their travels throughout the length and breadth of the county. But if such were the case, no evidence to suggest it ever came the way of Pat McNab who, occasionally, long after he had cleaned out the stables, and was satisfied that all trace of any event, terrible or otherwise, ever having taken place within those walls had well and truly been removed forever, would pause for a moment from his polishing (inveterate cleaner, Pat McNab!) and, satisfied once again that the sound which had distracted him had not, in fact, been the strange and lonely braying of a restless ass from some
unmapped, timeless phantom zone, but the simple, insignificant whine of a broken fence post buffeted by the wind, give himself once more to his work and the soft humming, contented and protracted, of a certain popular tune from the oft unfeted county of Louth, which in its own special and unspoken way was destined to be his forevermore.

O
ne evening in or around five past six, Pat was conning along past Brennan’s Gap (Billy Brennan was a farmer who concerned himself mostly with milk cows) when who should he meet, only Mrs. Ellen McCrumley. Now Pat was in a little bit of a giddy mood (perhaps because of the grand stretch in the evenings—for he had only had two bottles of Guinness!) and was on the verge of saying to her, “Oh hello there, Mrs. McCrumley! And how might
you
happen to be getting on this evening in this wonderful Town of Liars?” Which, as he turned the corner past Ned McGahey’s welding shed, he was glad he didn’t, for he knew only too well the answer he could expect. A croaky old scrake of a whine to the effect that Mrs. Ellen McCrumley “really wouldn’t know” or didn’t “quite hear him,” perhaps. And why? Why because she herself was a citizen of the esteemed place to which he referred. The place thenceforth to be known as Town of Liars! But which it always had been, of course, as Pat well knew. Along with everyone else in Gullytown, but of course they would never admit it. Why? Simply because they couldn’t, as every time they opened their mouths all that appeared to come out was lies. “Oh yes!” Pat turned suddenly and cried, pointing his finger at Mrs. McCrumley, who was now making her way up the hill with her shopping bags, “Oh but yes, Mrs. Mac! Oh but yes, you see!”

Pat had already strode onward when Mrs. McCrumley eventually lost her balance and collapsed over a stone which had been positioned directly in front of her.

The large hand lurched toward the hour,
8:00 P.M
. “Ah, time for a cigarette,” thought Pat. He was sitting in the sitting room, tapping his thumbs together and thinking things over. As he puffed on his smoke, he fancied himself explaining his thoughts to a psychiatrist of some sophistication who had been dispatched for the very purpose of conversing at length with the sole occupant of McNab Mansions. “Hmm,” continued Pat through a cloud of smoke, “you ask me how come I live in Town of Liars, Hektor?” (for that would be his name). “Well, for a start—I was born here.”

The psychiatrist’s subject examined his nails.

“My mother—Mrs. McNab, wife of Victor (how alike your names are!), carried me in her stomach, you understand—and before I knew it, here I was! Surrounded by people who wouldn’t know what the truth was if it came up to them and sat in their lap, shouting, “Hello! Truth calling!” Or perhaps you didn’t know that, Hektor? What—I’ve told you before, have I? Hektor—I do apologize. But it annoys me, you see! It really does annoy me, you see!”

Without realizing it, Pat was leaving deep indentations around the rim of his cigarette with his teeth. There were two or three tiny beads of sweat which had just appeared over his right eyebrow as he drew a deep breath and said, “And as for Mammy—my own mother—you can imagine what it must have done to her!”

There was about one-half inch of actual cigarette remaining as Pat rubbed his forehead and Hektor proceeded to meticulously inscribe notes in his lined, spiral-bound notebook. Pat sighed as he saw his mother (in his mind’s eye, of course!) approaching the telephone in her slippers once again, deep anxieties etched all over her face as she tentatively removed the receiver from its Bakelite cradle.

“Hello?” she said, with an unmistakable catch in her voice, simultaneously tapping her chest with her hand as if mimicking the flapping of a trapped bird’s wing, before seeming to fold like a piece of crumpled paper tissue, saying chokingly, “Oh dear God no!” then adding hopefully, but without conviction, “But maybe it wasn’t him, Sergeant!”

His mother stood trembling in the middle of the floor as she saw it before her clear as day, the small, dome-shaped haystack erupting, the
flames as flickering fingers reflected in a pair of wild and dancing eyes. Eyes which were set, unmistakably, in the scorch-streaked face of her son, Pat McNab!

The howls which continued throughout the beating which Pat received as a consequence of that particular incident may only be described as pitiful. “Mammy!” he screeched, “I didn’t do it! I swear! They’re all against me because they don’t like me!”

His mother raised the strap anew (it was the belt from one of her husband’s army uniforms).

“Don’t lie to me!” she snapped harshly. “Don’t lie to me, you rapscallion you, lie to your own mother! I’ll tan you within an inch of your life!”

The tears hurtled from Pat’s eyes and smacked against the floor like pieces of broken glass.

“It’s not me!” he pleaded, but in vain, adding, “It’s them, Ma! It’s them that’s lying! It’s all they ever do!”

As he sat there now finishing his cigarette, the sound of his bedroom door closing and the key being turned that evening was as an open hand laid firmly across his already burning cheek.

It was 9.30
P.M
. Pat rose from his chair and repaired to the drinks cabinet. “You see, Hektor,” he continued, as he liberally poured himself a measure of Bols Advocaat, “what makes me laugh is that according to them, I was out every night of the week! Well, excuse me but just how much do you think paraffin costs?” Pat shook his head as he sipped his drink. “Tsk! Tsk!” he sighed, adding, “Dear oh dear!”

Coincidentally, the record he selected to place on the turntable of the radiogram was entitled “Old Flames.” It brought a wry smile to his face as he stood there in the middle of the parlor, its lilting words melting into the gloom:

Pat’s eyes twinkled as he tilted the yellow meniscus and discerned within the shimmering depths of that viscous liquid a myriad of swirling memories. “Why yes,” he mused quietly, “according to them, I didn’t seem to have spent a single night at home in over three years! First, it was the Widow McGinn’s mattresses! Oh yes—Pat McNab did it! Pat McNab, certainly—who else!”

It was so absurd Pat almost flung his drink—glass and all!—at the wall. It had even made the local papers—a photograph of the widow staring white-faced in her nightdress trying to explain how she had left some mattresses outside in the yard for airing and was awakened in the middle of the night by the sound of their crackling and burning. Swearing, to boot, that she had caught sight of a “small black-faced figure” making good its escape into the night.

Pat sighed as he refilled his glass. Eschewing the Bols Advocaat this time for some fine Glenfiddich whiskey. His eyes twinkled as the amber liquid made its warm journey through the sinuous tunnel of his esophagus. “Then there was the doctor’s car!” he chortled softly. “The famous doctor’s precious car! And it only a wreck!”

Which wasn’t exactly how it was perceived in those very same famous local papers, of course. “Oh no!” laughed Pat. “Why, it was a forty-thousand-dollar BMW! Of course it was!”

It was time for him to sit down again, thought Pat. He placed his glass on the arm of his chair and laced his fingers. “Yes—I did that, Hektor!” he said, with a smile. “Of course I did! I mean—I wasn’t at home doing my homework! How could I be? I was out setting fire to the doctor’s fine upholstery and beautiful bodywork! Just like I was supposed to have burned McGlinchey’s cat!”

The discovery of the smoking corpse had caused an uproar. McGlinchey’s cat was well known and loved in the area.

“Which is what you are accused of if you happen to be unlucky enough to live in Town of Liars, Hektor!” explained Pat. “Because, you see, if you live in a normal town, people have more to do with their time. They have more to do than go around blaming the wrong people. Not that they don’t have their reasons! Why, of course they do! O, if they don’t like you—if the inhabitants of Town of Liars don’t happen to like you—why, they’ll make up the most atrocious lies about you, won’t they?”

Something which they learned early on, thought Pat, as he sipped his Glenfiddich (very tasty!)—at their mother’s knee, in fact. In an instant, he found himself transported back to a small schoolroom round about the year 1965. There was an ink cupboard and a giant wooden compass and, of course, the turnip-shaped figure of Master Butty Halpin with his feet up on the desk. Pat’s young eyes burned with resentment as the boy beside him stood poker-stiff and made his brazen declaration: “Sir—it was Pat McNab burned Mrs. McGinn’s mattresses. He told me, so he did. And I think it might have been him set fire to Artie McCrann’s haystack!”

It was more than the nine-year-old Pat could bear.

“Sir!” he cried aloud, his hand shooting sharply into the air. “Sir, he’s making that up! He’s making it up because he hates me!”

The schoolmaster’s response was unyielding in its brevity.

“McNab! Out!”

It would be hard for Pat McNab ever to forget the punishment inflicted on him in the moments which followed. Or the fist-obfuscated sniggers of his “classmates.” “McNab!” the teacher had barked. “Get out into that yard and cut a good big switch. Then trot back in here till we see what we can do with it!” As he passed the playground alone, what he seemed to possess at the end of his arms (sunk into the pockets of his short trousers in a pitiful attempt at pain amelioration) were not hands but two pounds of raw bloody steak. There was no mistaking, muted as they might have been, the words which passed Pat’s lips as he leaned against the wall of the dog-dirt-spotted handball alley, observing his laughing, cavorting classmates. “One day they’ll pay. And so will Halpin. Most of all, Halpin! I’ll burn him, so I will!”

It was some nights later Butty Halpin was in his study preparing some work for Irish grammar and some mental arithmetic problems, when he heard his wife’s voice cry out into the night (she had gone to the back door to throw out some tea bags), “Butty! Butty! Come quick! The chickens are on fire!”

The sight which met his eyes as he appeared in his own backyard pulling on his dressing gown—of hopping, squawking—literally, balls of living flame—does not bear describing.

Pat stared at his reflection in the glass of Glenfiddich. “Oops!” he
remarked. “I seem a litde woozy.” He tilted the glass to see how far he could permit it to go without spilling it. Then he sniggered a litde bit. “He—Butty Halpin—tried to make me say I did it—but I wouldn’t!”

Pat lit a cigarette and puffed out some smoke. “No! I wouldn’t. Not in a million years!” he said. “No matter how many times he battered me!”

And batter him Butty Halpin certainly did. Shaking him, indeed, to within an inch of his life, and, on one occasion, actually slamming his head directly against the blackboard, crying, “Can’t you admit it, can’t you! We all know you did it! Do you hear me?”

No conclusion was reached on that occasion, with the master eventually collapsing from exhaustion, still pleading, “Why can’t you admit you burned the chickens, McNab?” and Pat’s eyes for all the world like stones inside in his head.

The record had long since finished. Pat rose from his chair and replaced the stylus at the beginning of his “favorite song.” He smiled as its waltzing melody consumed the night once more. Angling his elbow, he leaned against the mantelpiece and said, “Yes, Hektor, that is the way it is, unfortunately. You believe the people of Liar Town and soon you are convinced that Pat McNab had nothing to do with his time only be out every night burning things. Burning things, Hektor! Burning, burning, burning!”

A thought struck Pat: “You know—I think I wouldn’t mind some ice!” He repaired to the kitchen and popped a pair of ice cubes into his glass—which he then replenished—except this time with some fine old Hennessy brandy (VSOP brand). As he sipped anew, he continued, “Although I did burn some things. I’m not about to deny that. But only things that deserved to be burned.”

He paused for a moment as the life-enhancing liquid settled itself deep within him.

“But,” he continued then as he puffed on his Major cigarette, “all the things they said I did? Why, Hektor, there would have been a million Pat McNabs running around the town if even a quarter of the things were to have taken place! But then I guess—that’s what liars do, in the place called Town of Liars!”

A thin serpent of smoke wound its way out of Pat’s left nostril as he continued, “What I find most amusing about liars, of course, is that
they’re so busy lying they get all the other things wrong! Like poor old Bat McGaw! Dear oh dear! What a dreary old idiot!”

It was late now so Pat turned on his tilley lamp, which sent out its big large shadows across the room like people of the night. It was time for a glass of wine, Pat thought, as he opened his book and donned his reading glasses. A nice Bulgarian, perhaps, he thought.
The Towering Inferno,
announced the book’s title in letters of fire. Beneath a flaming building, tiny figures, including ant-sized firemen clutching a hose that seemed alive, recoiled in terror. Pat sipped his wine and, as if addressing Hektor over the top of his novel, remarked, “What’s funny, of course, is that poor old McGaw wasn’t actually
from
Town of Liars! If perhaps he had been, there might have been a chance he’d have had more sense!”

It now appeared as if Pat was addressing the small mound of ash piling up in the center of the ashtray.

“Isn’t that right? Isn’t that right, Bat? Oh indeed and it is surely!”

He tapped the book’s glossy cover and continued: