The Dirty Dust (38 page)

—I'd have keened you a lot better, only I had a frog in my throat that day. I had keened three others the same week …

—It wasn't a frog or hoarseness, but drink. You were scuttered
mouldy with the stuff. When you tried to start up with “Let Erin Remember” as you always did, out came “Will Ye No' Come Back Again?” …

—No it wasn't, it was “Some Day I'll Go Back Across the Sea to Ireland” …

—I'd have keened you, Black Bandy Bartley, but I couldn't get up out of the bed that time …

—Bloody tear and 'ounds, Biddy Sarah, it doesn't matter a pig's mickey if he is keened or not! “Ho row, Oh Mary …”

—And how come, Biddy Sarah, that you never came to keen Caitriona Paudeen, seeing as they sent for you?

—Yes, tell us why you didn't come to keen Caitriona? …

—You had no problem going to Nell's house, even though you had to get up out of bed …

—I hadn't it in me to refuse Nell, and she sent the car as far as my front door for me …

—Hitler will take the car from her …

—I'd have keened you alright, Caitriona, no doubt about it, but I'd hate to be in competition with the other three: Nell, Nora Johnny's daughter, and Blotchy Brian's young one. They were whining and whimpering and huffing …

Nell! Nora Johnny's daughter! Blotchy Brian's young one! … The three you got St. John's Gospel from the priest to kill me. I'll burst! I'll burst! I'm going to burst! …

—… Hey Jack, Jack, Jack the Lad! …

—… Goo Goog, Dotie. Goo Goog! We'll have a bit of a natter now alright …

—… What would you say, Redser Tom, about a man whose son married a black? I'd say he's as much of a heretic as his son …

—Could be, you know, could be that …

—The sins of the children are visited upon the fathers …

—Some say they are, some say they aren't …

—Wouldn't you say now, Redser Tom, that any man who drank forty-two pints was a heretic? …

—Forty-two pints. Forty-two pints bejaysus. Forty-two pints …

—I did that, I drank the lot of them …

—Fireside Tom was knocking around with heretics …

—Fireside Tom. Fireside Tom bejaysus. You'd have to be a very wise person to know who Fireside Tom was …

—To tell you the truth, I wouldn't be that sure either about the Old Master, Redser Tom. I'm very wary of him for the last while. I'll say nothing until I find out more …

—A body would be well advised to keep its clap shut in this place. All the graves have huge ears …

—I have my doubts about Caitriona Paudeen too. She swore black and blue to me that she was a better Catholic than Nell, but if it turns out that she had the evil eye …

—Some people said she had, some people said …

—That's a pack of lies, you foxy fool …

—… Ah come off it, Master, you know full well he's going to die. Look at me who never had nothing wrong with him, and I died same as the rest of them! I went off just the same as somebody who had …

—But seriously, though, Tom, do you think he is going to die? …

—Don't you know full well, Master, that the weeds will be up through his ears shortly! …

—Are you sure, Tom?

—Don't worry one bit about it, Master. He'll die, no doubt about it. Look at me! …

—With the help of God, the shithouse slug!

—Ah, come off it, Master, isn't she gorgeous …

—Oh, the strapper!

—Do you require any spiritual assistance, Master? …

—No, I don't. No, I don't, I'm telling you. Leave me alone! … Leave me alone, or I'll chew your ear off! …

—Son of a gun, come here 'til I tell you, Master, I heard it said that she used to have jobbers knocking around in the kitchen, while you were stretched out on your dying bed …

—
Qu'est-ce c'est que
jobbers? What the fuck are jobbers? …

—Fireside Tom is not a jobber because he has his own plot of land. Nor the Bally Ser man either. He had some land on the top of the town that was the best you'll ever get for fattening cattle. But Billy the Postman was a kind of jobber. All he ever had was the Master's garden …

—Billy used to be hanging around all right, Master. I often heard him stirring things up when he came in asking for you …

—Oh, the tramp! The slinky sneaky skank! …

—Be that as it may, Master, the truth must out when all is said and done. The Mistress is gorgeous. Myself and herself would be down in Peter the Publican's. His nose was stuck in everything and everywhere his legs could carry him! I met her up at the Sharp Ridge on the mountain road, just a few months after they buried you. “Goo-Goog, Mistress,” I says. “Goo-Goog to you to, Fireside Tom,” she says. I didn't get any chance to have any kind of a chin wag, as Billy the Postman comes down on his bike having delivered his letters …

—… They say if you don't fill in the first papers correctly that it's a doddle to disqualify you from the dole after that. The Derry Lough Master filled it in for me that first time the dole came along. He scribbled something across the page in red ink. Long life to him, they never took the dole from me since! …

—But they took it from me. The Old Master filled my form in. He did nothing apart from drawing a stroke across the paper with his pen. I've no doubt, but he didn't do it with red ink either …

—The Old Master was always very touchy when he was thinking of the Mistress. I'm not sure if you ever heard what he'd get up to just staring out the window madly penning letters to Caitriona!

—But she never got anything from it, the Mistress, couldn't he just fill up a dole form properly! …

—I always got eight shillings. The Foxy Cop did it for me …

—Just as well. He was riding your daughter on the nettle-infested fields of Bally Donough …

—I was completely deprived of the dole. Somebody wrote in to say I had money in the bank …

—God bless you, anyway! People are happy when their neighbours do well. Do you see there, Nell Paudeen's daughter who was getting the dole for yonks, even though his scrubland was valued more than two pounds, and Caitriona dumped him out …

—He never earned it! He didn't deserve a penny of it! He had money stashed away in the bank and he was still getting fifteen shillings dole every time. She must love it, the bitch! …

—I hear what you say, as you put it, that you had a dollop of dole …

—You got a good slice of dole too, Tim Top of the Road …

—No wind ever blew, Tim Top of the Road, that didn't make things better for you. The stray sheep, it always wandered into your fold …

—The wodge of wood that wandered into the shore on the West Pier, you can be sure you grabbed it …

—And the seaweed on the strand …

—And the turf …

—And the bits and pieces …

—Everything that was left round and about the Earl's house, you snatched it up …

—Didn't you hang on to the darkie's leg that the Earl had? I saw one of your chicks being born on the sly, and you made a balls of the cover on Caitriona's chimney …

—Even if it was the priest's sister who was up and away and whistling and showing off her arse in her jeans, she still hung out with your son …

—Hey, do you hear the tailor bullshitting and boasting? You made a jacket for me, and a bus would get lost in it …

—You made a pants for Jack the Lad and nobody's legs would go into it, apart from Fireside Tom's …

—God knows …

—Not a word of a lie, love, but my feet slid into it, no problem, just right …

—Easily known that's how it would be, and then you bring your clothes to the Half Eared Tailor who stabbed me! …

—But what's the point of talking, you carpenter from Gort Ribbuck? Didn't everyone see Nora Johnny in the coffin you made for her …

—… She was the very first of the Toejam gooey gams that ever was laid in any kind of coffin …

—She'd have been better off without that coffin, Caitriona. She was as full of holes as any chimney that Tim Top of the Road made …

—I couldn't do anything about your chimneys, as you didn't pay me …

—I paid you …

—Well, grand, fine, if you paid me, there were four others for everyone who didn't …

—I paid you too, you chancer, and you fucked up my chimney a lot more than you ever fucked it down …

—You paid me, fine, as you say, but there's another family whose chimney I repaired just before that, and but do you think I ever got as much as a sniff of the money they owed me …

—Is that why you screwed up my chimney, you chancer? …

—But I told you to get a small chimney brush …

—And I did. Top to bottom, but you left a mess …

—I hadn't a clue, as you say, who would pay me or who would not. A local woman comes up to me and says. “We'll have the priest,” she said. “The chimney smokes away when there is an east wind. If there was an east wind when the priest came, I'd be ashamed. Nell's chimney smokes with every wind.” “I'll stop it smoking with the east wind, just as you say,” I says. I just redid the top of it. “You'll see now,” I says, “that there'll be no smoke with the east wind, just as you say. I'll say nothing about that, as you're neighbours and all that, just as you say. A pound and five shillings”' “You'll get it on market day, with the help of God,” she says. Market day came, and I didn't get my pound and five shillings. What a hope! I never got as much as a whiff of a sniff of my money …

—Isn't that exactly what I told you, Dotie, that Caitriona never paid nothing. Honest! …

—Why in God's name would I pay the chancer—Tim Top of
the Road—to put a few planks on the top to call them with smoke signals! Even though it was a west wind, it was nothing like the blast that blew the day the priest came. It would have whipped the child from the fireside, that west wind. When Tim Top of the Road was finished with it, it wouldn't even draw a puff of smoke except with the east wind. I offered to pay him, if he did the same job on the winds as he did with Nell's chimney. But he wouldn't lay a hand on them, ever again. It was Nell, the bitch, who pulled a fast one on him and sold him a pup …

—That's true, Caitriona, Tim Top of the Road could be easily fooled.

—Anyone who bought my seaweed.

—To tell you the truth, Caitriona, it wasn't Tim Top of the Road who was at fault with your chimney, however bad he is, but it was Nell who got St. John's Gospel to look after her own chimney …

—And to blow the smoke over to Caitriona's, just because she thought she could get at Blotchy Brian …

—Hoora! Hoora! I'll burst! I'm about to burst! …

—… I could sue him because he poisoned me. “Drink two spoonfuls of this bottle before you go to bed, and then fast again,” the murderer said. Fast my arse! I was just lying down on the bed …

—Bloody tear and 'ounds, didn't you just lie back and die! …

—“Ha!” he exclaimed to me, as soon as he saw my tongue. “Huckster Joan's coffee …”

—“I never had either pain or sickness, dear,” I says to him one day when he was inside in Peter the Publican's place. “That may be so, Fireside Tom,” he says, “but you're still swilling too much porter. Porter isn't good for someone your age. You'd be far better off with the odd half-one of whiskey.” “That's brilliant, that's what I used to drink all the time!” I said. “But it's getting scarcer and dearer all the time.” “Peter the Publican's daughter will give you the occasional half-one anytime,” he said. She sure did, no doubt about it, and anything else
I wanted, but from the second one onwards she charged four pence, and from the sixth eighteen. The doctor that Nell brought in from the Fancy City insisted it was the whiskey that done for me, but myself and Caitriona Paudeen thought it was the priest …

—God doesn't want us to say anything bad about our neighbours …

—He said to the Old Master: “You are too good for this life …”

—Shut your mouth, you grabber! …

—The doctor in the hospital, he stuck the bottle under my nose as I was stretched out on the table. “What's that, doctor!” I asks. “It's only a gadget,” he says …

—Bloody tear and 'ounds one way or the other, wouldn't it be grand just to lay down on a bed and die, as Blotchy Brian says, instead of being stretched out on a trolley in the hospital and never get up again, and he as chopped up as the free beef that Clogher Savvy's butcher had.

—… “Up there's the problem,” I said. “Up there in my chest.” “No it's not up,” he said, “it's down, down there in your legs. Take off your shoes and socks.” “No need for that, doctor,” I said. “The problem's up here. It's up here in the top of my chest.” He took no notice then or now of my chest.

“Throw off your shoes and your socks,” he said. “There'll hardly be any need for that, doctor,” I said. “There's nothing wrong with me down there …”

“If you don't whip your socks and shoes off pronto,” he says, “I'll see to it you're in a place where they'll get them off fast … It would be hard for you not to be infected,” he said. “Did you ever wash your feet since you were born?” “Down by the shore, doctor, last summer twelve months …”

—I was all bunged up in myself. Completely bunged up. People are very reluctant to say anything about it. “I'm very reluctant to admit that to you, doctor,” I said. “It's not very appropriate.”

—So it goes, as you said. I sat up again. Manning from Minlough was in the next bed, as he always was. “I didn't think they were going to carve you up for the next couple of days,” I said … “Here, wake up,”
says I, “and don't be like a sack of potatoes any longer.” “Leave him alone,” the nurse said. “When you were taken down to the operating room, he got all sentimental, like. We didn't put as much sugar on the knife for him as we did for you. That's why he hasn't come round yet.” Those nurses never put a tooth in it, as you say yourself.