Short Fiction of Flann O'Brien (Irish Literature) (16 page)

“You,” she said sharply to Tim Hartigan, “get a chisel or something and break the panelling away at this seam!”

Frowning, Tim bent among the tools. The Doctor, still jovial but a little concerned, intervened.

“But, my dear, that’s finished work—I mean, it would be a pity to break it up.”

Tim carefully handed a chisel and hammer to Sarsfield.

“Quite so, Doctor. It would also be a pity for one of your workmen to lose his life.”

After a nod from his employer, Sarsfield inserted the chisel-edge at a scarcely perceptible seam and began his crude hammering until rending sounds concluded with a ragged gap torn in the panelling. MacPherson peered in.

“Quick, boy,” she cried, “break down some more towards the floor and get him out. He’s in there, on his back!”

Confusion of work and voices ensued until Tim found himself behind the panelling dragging the comatose Billy to his feet and manhandling him towards the light of the ope—and final rescue.

“Well, good Lord,” the Doctor said, gaping, “how on earth could he build himself into the wall? The tiny nails are driven in from the outside. Goodness me, this is the limit. How do you feel, Billy?”

MacPherson, hands on huge hips, was grim.

“Doctor, did you help him with this job? Did you give him an injection for his tendons?”

Billy was sitting disconsolately on the floor, only partially conscious.

“He’s coming to,” Sarsfield cried.

“I certainly gave him a little help,” the Doctor said pleasantly. “That verruculose affliction could put a delicate job like this all wrong.”

“You’d better put this man to bed,” MacPherson said to Sarsfield, “and then let us have a rest in your library, Doctor.”

“With pleasure, my dear,” the Doctor replied with total recall of his good humour. “Those careless little chaps would need somebody to mind them all the time.”

At first undecided, Tim followed his principals to the library, happy that he had earlier put away his own books and drinking utensils. MacPherson sat by the fire, putting the stethoscope on the desk while the Doctor produced the Locke’s and three—yes, three—glasses. MacPherson drank appreciatively, apparently judging that the situation was one of some small triumph for her.

“My dear Doctor,” she said, “forgive me if my manner over this little mystery seemed a bit brusque. But human suffering disturbs me. That is why I feel that the money at my disposal must be applied to the amelioration of man’s lot in general.”

“By the ingestion of sago, my dear?”

“That is one way, the fundamental way for Ireland. But it is not by any means exclusively a matter of the stomach, of diet, or even of the startling change in the national scenery. With vast countrywide plantations of sago pine there will be, for example, a new wild life in Ireland. . . .”

The Doctor clapped hands.

“My dear girl, how charming! You do excite me. In my Army days—indeed, in all my younger days—the hunt was a preoccupation with me which almost made my work take second place. I never enjoyed shooting at people, matteradamn whether they were niggers or coolies . . . but tigers! Ah!”

MacPherson contrived the ghost of a smile.

“Well, in my own younger days,” she said, “researching sago in the wilder parts of Sumatra and the Malay Peninsula, I had to be on my guard against some very large fierce creatures such as the Asiatic elephant, the bison and the rhinoceros, and several kinds of bear. . . .”

“Jolly good, by Jove!”

“But these large mammals would scarcely find sustenance in Ireland, even if they were allowed to kill and eat the people. But the smaller wild animals can be deadlier. The sago rat is indigenous in any territory where the pine grows. The tapir, the sambhur and the siamang, a strange sort of anthropoid ape, will probably appear here. Also the crab-eating macaque, I can see that flourish in Connemara. I would not be sure of the Asiatic tiger and black panther coming here, for they are very wide-ranging and predatory creatures, but many smaller jungle cats and wild boars may be expected. There would be no counting the breeds of alien birds which would roost in the sago pines. . . .”

“Ah, my dear lady—blue partridge, argus pheasant and the cotton teal, I sampled them in the eating-houses of Hong Kong.”

“Yes, Doctor, but a thing not to be ignored will be the swarms of new insects, house-monkeys and quadruped snakes and, glory be to God, the din will be something new to this country, particularly at night.”

There was a brief silence of reflection.

“Are you sure, my dear Crawford, that this . . . this bouleversement of hemispheres, to so speak, is worthwhile in the mere interest of changing the potato for sago in this country?”

MacPherson put down her empty glass smartly.

“Of course I do. Don’t millions of people live under such conditions in the East? What would happen if they were all to decide to emigrate to America?”

“Hmmm. That would be a bad show. Have another drink?”

“Thanks.”

“Tim?”

“Thank you, Doctor.”

“I must be getting home, Doctor, very soon. I have letters to write and notes to make. So charming meeting you.”

The Doctor beamed genuinely.

“Ah, my dear Crawford, for me it has been a supreme pleasure and honour to welcome to these poor parts the wife of my dear friend Edward Hoolihan. I will ask Sarsfield Slattery to drive you home in my car.”

“But thank you so much. We will meet again in a few days. I want to talk to you about another most important by-product. I mean sago furniture.”

And thus a meeting, so strange in its sequel, came to an end that evening.

7

On reaching Poguemahone Hall, Tim Hartigan parted from the new chatelaine, picked up in the hall an airmail letter addressed to himself and made his way to his kitchen quarters. He was tired, and intestinally a bit irked by spent whiskey. He went to bed, rekindled his pipe and opened the letter
.

Dear Tim—It’s beginning to be the devil out here. More gushers are blowing their tops about every third day and I don’t believe I manage a total of more than 15 hours real sleep a week, quite alone and in perfect peace, peace that was possible only by reserving an entire floor of the Blue Water Gulf Hotel in Corpus Christi with a squad of my own private cops to keep Press and TV scruff away and to block all telephone assaults. It’s not that I’m short of assistance and offers of help. Those offers are so continuous and persistent and descending on me from every quarter in such a deluge that my nerves by now are pretty well in flitters. A Jesuit Father, Michael Peter Connors, managed to get himself invited up to breakfast with me on the pretext of getting a sub for a new convent of the Little Sisters of the Stainless Eucharist in Dallas (of course I’m still as much of a sucker for the old Church as ever I was as a simple farmer at Poguemahone) and when he pulled out some sort of an illuminated book for me to sign so that I would be remembered in 10,000 Masses that are to be offered in the convent chapel for benefactors over 25 years from the opening date, a little box of .357 Smith and Wesson slugs fell out into his damn plate of bacon. I knew them and the box because I have one of those rods myself. I pressed a secret buzzer at my foot under the table and when two cops bounced in and frisked my Jesuit he turned out to be a cousin of Congressman Joshua Hedge—a real friend of mine in Washington, I think. This silly bogman didn’t plan to shoot me, of course; he just wanted a cheque, no matter a bugger to whom payable, so as to have some notes to play with and maybe buy himself a vacation in Europe. I gave him fifty bucks in notes but warned him I’d give Hedge a prod about him. It looks to me like everybody in this Texas goes about fully armed and any man in the habit of carrying readies in his pocket has a quiet bodyguard about as near to him as his underwear—he wouldn’t go to the lavatory without a gunman on guard outside the door. I needn’t tell you I carry an old-fashioned Colt 45 myself
and know how to use it
—got lessons and half an hour’s practice every day for a fortnight from the Marshal at Fort Worth, a Clareman named O’Grady. I carry a couple of grut balls, too—little bombs about a thousand times worse than tear gas but with no effect on the thrower (yours truly) who takes just one grutomycin tablet every morning. Don’t write to me here in Corpus Christi as my GHQ is still Houston. I have moved from the Old Mexico mansion and now have 7 floors in the Houston Statler, and please make a note of that address. George Shagge, the Laredo steel-man, wants me to buy the whole damn hotel and settle in but I don’t know, I think I’ll wait a bit. Some of my oil tickles in Arizona have suggested that this State is sitting on a bed of uranium and maybe Texas won’t be my last home. But I like it here. This territory is so big and so bulging with treasure under the ground that a man feels he’s neglecting it just by being in any one place. Oil means hundreds of miles of big-bore pipeline, some to my refinery at Houston and others to new refineries I am putting up at Galveston and Sabine, and also at Pensacola in Alabama—we can’t move oil to the west and east coasts except by tanker. The railroads here are all in the hands of crooks. I’ve taken over a firm making drilling rigs in Tulsa, Oklahoma, for by jiminy I have options on 1,858 sq. miles of fresh territory here in Texas where the tests have been more than good. Total no. of H.P. derricks at work just now is 731. Two fellows I know here are running for Governor in the neighbouring State of New Mexico—Cactus Mike Broadfeet and Harry Poland—and I’m quietly backing both because that’s the way business goes here. This whole State is alive with hoodlums and politicians, and when was there any difference between those two classes? I’m as busy as buggery but I’m not slow—I play the Kennedy R.C. ticket and I’ll be just another brave U.S. Catholic as soon as my citizenship comes through—Cactus Mike says I’m perfectly right and that this great State of over 7 million souls is entitled to a Cardinal and if he is elected Governor in New Mexico he intends to park some fixers and use money (mine, I presume) in Rome. By God, if he wants to serve the Cross that way, why shouldn’t he since he serves or used to serve the fiery cross with the KKK outfit—and now with an election next door there’s no shortage of those gunboys in nightshirts putting the fear of Jesus into the niggers. You might think I’m now long enough in the U.S. to have a few friends here and there but honestly, Tim, I’m lonely as hell and have to keep fighting like a Trojan to keep away from the licker. Some of my buddies, as they call themselves, may be all right under the skin but I just don’t have the mental machinery to tell which of them are bums or hoods. They have all a profound, sincere, undisguised interest in money—MY money, I’d say—and I needn’t tell you they mostly want it to prop up poor prostitutes in homes, teach the alphabet to blind cripples, found new Orders of nigger and octaroon nuns and make absolutely certain that the Democrats will never lose this State. Cactus Mike Broadfeet has a button up certifying he has given 24 pints to the Our Lady of the Lake Blood Bank at San Antonio but maybe the button means he swallows 24 pints of corn licker a week for by God you’d swear his face was on fire. As I think you know, the only way to get about this territory which is bigger than all Germany is by air. I’ve two machines of my own, a jet and a turbo-prop, but I’m nervous as a kitten up there, even if every flyer and cop I have took an oath on the Douai to play straight. Four of my boys have been shot up in the last 10 months and a girl that types for me got so savagely mugged that the New York hospital that now has her says she’ll never walk or stand up again. The mobsters here have no respect whatsoever for womankind. With a State election coming up nearby the night riders have got mighty plentiful and Harry Poland has made the crack on TV that Cactus Mike Broadfeet would be the ideal man for Governor of Oklahoma except that he has trench mouth, his love for the Democrat Party is phoney, he has a bordello in the sacristy of his First American Church of the Plymouth Presbyterians
and
his expectation of life is short—that last a thing Poland has referred to the Attorney as a threat of assassination. Somehow I feel Cactus Mike will pull this thing off because he is a real prairie Texan, owns a big chain of shirt factories through the west coast and the word has been spread that Harry Poland is a Jew from Lithuania, though he wears a holy medal in gold he got from Cardinal Spellman and never touches meat on Friday. He has cotton scrubshops at Austin, Amarillo and El Paso but the boys say his real call is the drug business and that he was linked up with the Mafia outfit Cosa Nostra. He certainly takes snow himself for the good of his health and that’s about the colour of his face if not of his soul. Do you know, I’m nearly mad enough to run for the chair of Governor of one of the States here only I’m not a citizen yet. What I DO wish badly is that yourself could come out here and give me a hand at running this big booming oil mess-up but of course you can’t with all that important work on your hands back there at Poguemahone. By God though I need a real Irishman out here. Things will be easier later on though, when I get some sort of a real
organisation
working—that’s the big, true, business word, ORGANISATION. By the Lord, we have enough juice hereabouts to oil the wheels if only we had the wheels there and organised to turn.

Now Tim I’ve left to the last the big question never out of the back of my distracted mind these times—
how is my dear wife Crawford?
I’m sure you were pretty shook and maybe annoyed with me for the abrupt way I unloaded her on you without any right warning but Tim, you could say that girl saved my life when this sudden oil strike unbalanced me and drove me straight to the bottle. In three months I was halfway down the river on a tide of bourbon, not even the decent potstill drop you have at home, giving orders in the oil fields, signing options and cheques and hiring and firing without any proper notion of what I was about. God in his mercy saw to it that Crawford was lurking somewhere on my office staff and He inspired her to come to my side, guide my silly hand, save me from myself and get me the best doctors to be had across the whole U.S. and a first-class specialist named Dr Feodor Unterholtz from Austria. She never took her eyes off me nor let anybody else mess me up, and one night even had the nerve to order Cactus Mike out of the house. An angel in disguise if you like but still an angel. And she did not pull back when a direct sacrifice by herself was called for. As you probably know by now she is of stern Presbyterian stock but knew I would never be permanently safe, safe for keeps, unless she married me. You can well imagine the awful struggle that was there in the middle of her soul for of course she knew I was an Irish Catholic and knew the view our sort of people take of the sacrament of marriage. See the hobble she was in? I think she saw Cardinal Spellman or Cardinal Cushing or somebody on the Q.T. but I can tell you this—when the awful choice was put in front of her on a plate, Crawford didn’t flinch. No, sirreee! She took instruction from a local P.P., learned her prayers like a Castlebar schoolgirl and behind my back was received into the Church. Another soul for God, Tim—aren’t they wonderful, the ways of Providence? I was on tegretol and morphine and benzedrine and the devil knows what but I nearly fell through the middle of the bed when she told me one night everything was fixed. It made a new man of me, invalid and all as I was. I made a novena of thanksgiving to Our Lord and His Blessed Mother, and I don’t give a damn how much cynical people will jeer at all the oil and money I have, there was no trouble at all to getting Cardinal Cushing to agree to give us a Solemn Pontifical Nuptial High Mass with Gregorian Choir for the wedding. I arranged a sort of a double-take by having the Mass, wedding ceremony and the reception at the Houston Statler brought live on closed-circuit TV to the New York Hilton where a second simultaneous reception was held, with Senator Hovis Oxter and his wife Bella deputising for myself and bride, and I think you can take it from me that a good time was had by all—or by about 7,500 guests. Our honeymoon at Miami was very brief, of course, and very
careful
indeed with myself on antabus if you know what that drug is for, sweet God the smell of a cork and the poor reformed drinking man is down the Swanee.