Emerald Germs of Ireland (19 page)

Initially, the toy’s appointed custodian was so taken aback that his reply was litde more than a dry, inaudible husk of sound anonymously lodged at the back of his throat. But soon, through a supreme effort on his part, this formed itself into the word “What?” a tingling beginning at the base of his spine as soon as the completed sentence—phlegmatically delivered by the miniature military man—”We’re going to have to kill him” reached his ears.

Pat’s heart began to beat with great rapidity. Counterpane tassels were attacked with some fierceness.

“But how, litde tin soldier? You’re just a peaceful litde drummer boy! Surely it would be impossible for you to kill someone!” he pleaded.

The litde drummer boy nodded.

“Yes it is, Pat,” he said. “But I’ve seen it done so often I really think I could be of some help in that area!”

Pat’s eyes brightened as the moon’s light glanced off them.

“You could?” he said.

The military man/toy nodded again, with a renewed enthusiasm that was unmistakable.

“Yes! I could keep watch and if you got frightened I could encourage you to keep going, saying, ‘Do it now, Pat! Do it!’ and so on.”

Pat clutched the coverlets close to his chest.

“Oh, litde tin soldier! Little drummer boy! No!”

“And play the drum so you’d keep going until the deed was done!”

“Tin soldier! It’s impossible! I can’t! I simply can’t!”

The miniature percussionist’s voice was low and tender.

“I saw your mother crying today,” he said, adding ominously, “again.”

Pat plunged his head into the pillow.

“I hate him!” he wept bitterly. “I hate my father!”

“He punched her in the stomach. I saw him!”

“Why! Why does he do such things?” howled Pat.

“I saw him make her crawl around on all fours with a potato in her mouth. It was terrible!”

“No! Please tell me it’s not true!”

“He made her call him general. ‘Call me general!’ he said. ‘General, Pat!’”

“He’s not a general!” squealed Pat, leaping up in the bed. “He’s only a stupid old captain!”

It was but moments later that a familiar, booming voice rang out across the landing.

“What the hell’s going on, waking up the whole house on a Christmas night!”

The door of the bedroom shot open and Pat found himself confronted by a slavering hulk in a dressing gown. Stabbing its index finger fiercely in the direction of the small, brightly colored figure now clutched tightly to Pat’s chest.

“Give me that thing!” snapped Pat’s father.

The painted metal figure spun in the air, smacking against the wall and making a heartrending
ping
noise as it did so.

Quite which mistake Captain McNab had made that night he was
never to know, Pat found himself reflecting now, all these years later, as he stared, glitter-eyed, into the heart of the library fire. And not without the hint of a smile, either! What he had not realized, of course, and possibly was incapable of doing, was that following the perpetration of such a heinous act, the effect on his son could not but be inevitable. And so it was to prove, for now Pat—why he simply didn’t care what happened! “As a matter of fact,” he recollected now, “it was as if my father couldn’t have done me a better favor! Bestowed on me at last my own personal and private Christmas! Belonging to me and the only person who mattered to me in the entire universe—the Little Drummer Boy!”

Which indeed did appear to be the case, for subsequent to that incident, Pat and his six-inch-high companion appeared to be having the time of their lives! Rarely a night went by now but they’d discuss it and with a grin so wicked coming to that shining litde enamel face you would think that everything they were saying was every bit as real as if it were happening. A small gray hand tugged Pat’s sleeve and, with that strange expression clouding his features again, the gay-colored percussionist said, “And then what I’ll do is—I’ll creep into his room after you, okay?” as Pat tapped his closed fists together and enthused, wild-eyed, “Yeah, Little Drummer Boy!!”

There was a delicious feeling in his stomach, the like of which he had never known before, as Pat—as though observing himself—moved slowly across the floor of his father’s—or as he was now known, “The Hog’s”—bedroom. His snoring for all the world as two large sheets of corrugated cardboard torn in two.

“Now Pat! Now!” whispered his friend and confidant—and, now, conscience—his sharpened bayonet tip gleaming in the moon’s pale spectral light.

Pat could feel every muscle in his body begin to tighten. He was ramrod-stiff as he stood by the wardrobe.

“Captain Victor McNab!” he declared. “You have been found guilty by this court and the sentence of death has been pronounced upon you. How do you plead?”

The solitary beat on the small red and blue drum seemed to enfold the entire room.

“I said—how do you plead?” repeated Pat in tones which were unyielding.

The first faint echoes of a fragile, lonely melody began to issue from between two rows of wooden teeth.

Pat knew in his heart that it could not possibly be but it seemed to him that with the first two notes of that piercing, haunting melody, all those sad, hurt souls whose lives Captain Slaughter (one of their increasingly more colorful names for his father) had ruined (a euphemism, surely, considering most of them had been heartlessly dispatched to their eternal reward) were right there with him in the library. High walls of shadows surrounded him.

“I said—how do you plead?” he had demanded to know that fateful night so many years before.

The racking cries of pain and strangled gurgling that issued from his father’s throat as he shot up in bed clutching his ears and throat were, despite Pat’s protracted psychological preparation for it, close to—it is pointless to deny it—unbearable.

“That was all so, so long ago now, of course,” murmured Pat to himself as he leaned on the gatepost the following morning, looking down the garden. He ran his finger along the top of the stone pillar which was covered entirely in the most beautifully delicate lacework of snow. “Sad thing is,” he said, his breath condensing in the hard, sdii air, “you always hope there’s a way out, and if Mammy hadn’t gone to Dublin that day, he might still be alive. But another way of looking at it is that that’s the way it’s meant to be.”

His eyes shone as he held up the small companion in his right hand and stared fondly at the litde beads of melted snow on his rose-red cheeks. The paint of his drum had long since flaked and faded.

“There is no other way it could have been,” his old pal seemed to say. “No other way, friend. He made it inevitable.”

It seemed as yesterday now, when the inevitable had begun. Pat had been doing his homework at the kitchen table when his mother arrived
back from Dublin. She put her head around the door and said, “Look at that! Well, who’s a busy fellow now!” as she tiptoed up behind him and cried, “Guess what I’ve got for you!”

Pat nearly fainted when he saw her open the package.

The uniform was almost exactly like his pal’s, right down to the last detail—the knee britches sparkling white and a beautiful, swallow-tailed scarlet coat with brass buttons. Pat could not believe his eyes as he stared at himself in the bedroom mirror. He gasped.

“Mammy! It’s exactly like him!”

He kissed his small toy—instinctively—and slipped it into the pocket of his military tunic. His mother hugged him.

“We’ll have a good Christmas yet, you and me—and to hell with—him! Won’t we, love?”

Pat had nodded so Fiercely he feared his head would come rolling off.

What fun they had some days later—his father was in Carrickmacross. Mammy marching up and down the field with her arms swinging and Pat directly behind her beating a tattoo.

“Ta ra ra ra ra boys oh boys!” sang his mother proudly.

“More, Mammy! More!” cried Pat.

“Rup pup pup pum pum me and my drum!” went on his mother.

“Oh, Mammy! This is the best day of my life!” cried Pat McNab as his mother enveloped him in her large arms, crying, “Pat McNab, my litde drummer boy!” smothering his forehead in kisses.

That his visit to Carrickmacross should have been cut short was fortunate for the captain but of course would prove ultimately tragic for Mrs. McNab and her son. Although that was not how it seemed as they fell in the door of the house that evening, laughing together until the tears flowed down their faces. Anyone observing them would have assumed them without question to be hopelessly intoxicated, mother and son or not.

“Oh, Pat,” cried his mother—out of sheer exultation—”you’re an awful man! The drumming out of you!”

“And then, Mammy—,” squealed Pat, almost catching his tailcoat in the door—”you nearly tripping over the thistle!”

It was not to be very long before they sensed a particular presence
within the room and found themselves confronting a tense, familiar shape blackly enthroned in a wingbacked chair.

“Victor!” cried Mrs. McNab—haplessly. “We were just up the town getting the messages!”

As she spoke these words, despite the pristine excellence of his expertly tailored regalia, Pat McNab had fancied himself covered entirely from head to toe in slime.

His father’s snarling cough filled the kitchen with ease.

“Messages,” he intoned gravely.

“Yes,” replied Mrs. McNab.

It was plain that her voice was filled with pure terror.

“Of course,” replied her husband. “And I see you bought something.”

He paused.

“For your son,” he added, acidly.

“Sure it was only a litde present, Victor. A little something before he goes back to school.”

His father’s words were cold as tombstones.

“And that’s what you’d like him to be, is it? A son of mine a litde nancy drummer boy, stomping about the place with litde sucks to humiliate his father! Is it? Is it!”

“No, Victor!” squealed Mrs. McNab.

“‘No, Victor!’ Well by God it’ll be ‘no Victor’ by the time this Christmas is out! C’mere, you!”

Within seconds, each brass button had been gruffly torn from the coat and the coat itself ripped from Pat’s back. As a consequence of which the litde drummer boy fell from his pocket, clanging musically onto the dies of the floor. Instantaneously, his father picked him up and began to cuff his mother violently with it before flinging it out the open window, once more to be swallowed up by the vast Siberia that was the McNab garden.

Words cannot describe what ensued that day. “The horror” delineated by Conrad in his tale of Congolese insanity would be but an approximation.

It was to be a defeated and badly injured Pat McNab who whiled away his holiday hours, racked by hopeless sobs as he poked the snow-dusted
hogweeds and battered dock leaves that dotted the arctic wastes which had taken his friend forever with a piece of broken suck. He was heartbroken that he could be so close and yet so far away! Hoping in vain for the play of sunlight upon a bayonet-dp that would reveal for him the location of his cold and lonely grave, the hard-crusted pit into which his shortish metal pal had been so callously cast. But it was not to be that evening—indeed, fourteen such finger-numbing garden-combing searches were to take place before his companion’s eventual discovery—and the cry that erupted from the depths of Pat’s being to cleave the cosmos was truly heartrending.

“So many years past,” thought Pat McNab as he finished raking the fire and went to the window to contemplate the once more still and tranquil countryside. He smiled. “So many years and now at last, thank God, a kind of peace has come over the earth.”

As it had to her, his mother Maimie, eventually, that Christmas so long ago. He smiled as he thought of her falling through the bedroom door that fateful night after “the incident,” clutching her throat with the vomit pouring out of her mouth in a dun-colored stream. A feeling of great calm encompassed him as he stroked the head of his pint-sized companion and gazed upon his glazed eyes and time-worn face. (There was a piece of grass in his ear and beneath his right eye there was a tiny scratch of paint which gave for all the world the impression of a tear.) Pat stroked him and said, “I know some people say litde tin soldiers have no feelings. That it’s all in your imagination. And maybe it is. Maybe it is, litde tin soldier, friend of mine and thus to be for all time.”

Pat kissed the top of the small head and replaced the figure in his pocket before going upstairs, repeating as he did so, “Maybe it
was
all our imagination.” A consideration to which he gave much thought many months later, searching that very same pocket which had become the toy’s home, to discover what can only be described as the vastest of holes and the hugest of absences.

But that was not how it seemed that Christmas night as the bedroom door creaked slowly open and a moonlit shadow fell upon a pillow where Captain McNab now lay asleep, the peace which he had for so long denied to others plainly etched upon his face.

At first, Mrs. McNab proved inconsolable, sobbing hopelessly by the kitchen window. Pat did his best to comfort her.

“It’s going to be all right, Ma,” he said. “I promise you. He’ll never bother us again.”

“But I loved him, son,” she protested. “You don’t understand. You shouldn’t have done it!”

Pat winced and, despite himself, found himself being quite caustic with her. He clamped his fingers about her shoulder.

“You’ll have to stop saying that, Ma!” he cried. “It’s not fair! He ruined our Christmas! He ruined everything!”

His mother took his hand in hers and dabbed her eyes with a Kleenex tissue. She nodded.

“I know, son, I know. It’sjust that I wasn’t expecting—”

The sight of her dead husband prone on the pillow with a snapped drumstick protruding from each ear and the shiny spike of a bayonet smeared with blood inserted in his throat came shooting into her mind anew and it was all she could do not to begin sobbing once more.

Pat smiled and his eyes twinkled. He squeezed her shoulder.