Collected Short Stories (3 page)

Next to God I love thee

Dear Ireland, my native land!

‘It's a glorious thing,' he said, ‘to die for Ireland, to die for Ireland!' His voice got very shaky when he said this and he turned his back and looked into the press. But Brother Gabriel is not in the school now; if he was he'd be good to me, because our Johnny died for Ireland.

The road to the cemetery was lined with people. Little boys that were at my school lifted a fringe of hair when the coffin passed. The trams were stopped in a big, long line – it was nice to see so many at one look. Outside the gates of the graveyard there was an armoured car with no one peeping his head out. Inside it was very still and warm with the sun shining. With my Daddy I walked behind the carried coffin and it smelt like the new seats in the chapel. The crowds of people were quiet. You could hear the cinders on the path squanching as we walked over them, and now and again the horses snorting.

I began to cry when I saw the deep hole in the ground and the big castles of red clay at the side of it. A priest, with a purple sash round his neck, shovelled a taste of clay on the coffin and it made a hard rattle that made me cry sore. Daddy had his head bowed and there were tears in his eyes, but they didn't run down his cheeks like mine did. The priest began to pray, and I knew I'd never see Johnny again, never, never, until I'd die and go to Heaven if I kept good and didn't say bad words and obeyed my Mammie and my Daddy. But I wouldn't like Daddy to tell me to give away the pigeons. When the prayers were over a tall man with no hat and a wee moustache stood beside the grave and began to talk. He talked about our Johnny being a soldier of the Republic, and, now and then, he pointed with his finger at the grave. As soon as he stopped talking we said the Rosary, and all the people went away. I got a ride back in a black cab with my Daddy and Uncle Pat and Uncle Joe. We stopped at ‘The Bee Hive' and they bought lemonade for me and porter for the cab driver. And then we went home.

I still have the pigeons and big Tom Duffy helps me to clean the shed and let them out to fly. Near night I give them plenty of corn so that they'll sleep long and not waken Daddy in the morning. When I see them fattening their necks and cooing I clod them off the slates.

Yesterday I was lying on the waste ground watching the pigeons and Daddy came walking towards me smoking his pipe with the tin lid. I tried to show him the pigeons flying through the clouds. He only looked at them for a minute and turned away without speaking, and now I'm hoping he won't wring their necks.

The McKinleys all went down to the station to meet their Aunt Suzanne, who was coming to take care of them now that their mother was dead. Mary, the eldest, was fifteen; Annie was eleven; and wee Arthur was nine. They boarded a tram at the foot of the street, and after much pleading and hauling, Arthur got them to go up on top. He loved the top of the tram, to kneel on the ribbed seat, and to feel the wind dunting his face or combing his hair.

Today he leaned over the iron railings looking down at the top of the driver's cap: the cap was shiny and greasy, and a large lump knuckled up in the centre. Arthur tried to light a spit on it when Mary wasn't looking, but at last she spied him, slapped his hands, promising that never again would she come on top with him. The kneeling on the seat had imprinted red furrows on his knees, and he fingered them till a sandwich-man caught his eye. He stood up, staring at the walking triangle of boards, watching the legs of the man and wondering how he could see out. When he asked Mary how the man could see, Annie chimed in: ‘You're a stupid fella! Did you not see the peep-hole in the board?' Arthur made up his mind there and then that he would be a sandwich-man travelling round and round the streets, just like a motor-car.

At the station they had to wait, Mary telling and retelling Arthur not to be forgetting his manners, occasionally taking his hands out of his pockets, and pulling down his jersey. Overhead arched the glass roof, pigeons cooing along the girders and sparrows chirping in and out. Three taxi drivers sat on the running-board of a motor reading a newspaper, and near them a cab horse fed wheezily out of a nosebag. There was plenty of time, and Mary put a penny in a chocolate machine, letting Arthur pull out the drawer. The chocolate was neatly wrapped in silver paper, but when she went to divide it, it was so thin that it crumbled in her hands.

As Arthur ate his chocolate he was fascinated by a huge advertisement – a smiling girl poised on a white-rigged bottle that splashed through the sea. He could read some of the words, and Annie helped him to read others, but when he asked unanswerable questions about the bottle, Annie told him to look out for the train and play at who-would-see-it-first coming in along the shiny lines.

A bell began to ring somewhere, and the taxi drivers got up, dusting their clothes. Mary moved along the platform, the steel bumpers and the noisy trucks of the porters filling Arthur's mind with terrifying wonder. Presently there came a thundering rumble and the train came panting in, smoke hitting the glass roof with all its might.

Mary fidgeted: ‘Now you two, hold on to me tight. Don't get lost! Look out for Aunt Suzanne! She's small; she'll be in black! She has a … She has a … She has a … Oh, I see her! There she is!' People hurried past, brushing roughly against wee Arthur till he was ready to cry from fright, but Mary's gleeful shouts sent a breathless weak excitement over him. And then, as if she had jumped out of the ground, he was looking up at Aunt Suzanne.

She was a small woman, not as tall as Mary, with a black plush coat, a yellow crinkly face, and a black hat skewered with enormous hat-pins. But as he looked down below her coat, he saw something funny: he saw one boot, and where the other should have been was a ring of iron. Mary nipped him: ‘Aunt Suzanne's speaking to you.'

‘And who's this?'

‘That's Arthur.'

‘A lovely little boy. God bless him,' she said, touching his cheek with a cold hand.

‘And what book are you in?' she added.

‘Third,' Mary replied for him.

‘Third! Well, now, isn't that a great little man! … And this is Annie. Well, well, she was only a wee baby when I saw her last – a lovely, wee baby. Tut, tut, tut, how the time flies!'

Annie relieved her of a band-box; Mary took her black, glossy bag, and linking her by the arm they began to move off along the platform. Occasionally Aunt Suzanne would stop and say: ‘Well, well, it's just like old times again!' But the clink of the iron foot on the pavement made Arthur twist and turn so that he could see how it moved. When Mary saw him gaping she scowled at him, and for the moment he would look in front, fixing his gaze on a horse or a tram, but always there came the clink-clink of iron on stone, and always he would turn his head and stare at the foot, then the iron, the boot again, and then the …

‘Walk on a minute, Auntie. Arthur's boot's loosed,' and Mary pushed Arthur to the side and began to untie his laces and bow them tightly again, until Aunt Suzanne and Annie were out of hearing. ‘Now!' she said, pointing a threatening finger at him. ‘If I-get-you-looking at Auntie's leg, there's no telling what I'll give you. Do you hear me? Come along and be a good boy. You'll never get out with us again! Never!' She tightened up his tie and pulled him along by the hand.

Into a tram they got, Annie and Arthur sitting opposite Mary and Aunt Suzanne.

‘No, no, child, dear, I'll get them,' said Aunt Suzanne when the conductor came along. Mary handed the tickets to Arthur, but he only turned them over in his hand, and then his eyes swivelled to the iron foot that didn't reach the floor. And then he looked up at his Auntie's face and stared at it fixedly. Below her hat were two wings of grey hair, and from the corners of her buttony nose were two deep lines, making a letter A with her mouth. There were a few white hairs on her chin, and her eyes were brown and sunken. Suddenly the eyes narrowed, and Arthur returned his Auntie's smile. He decided that he was going to like her, but he hoped he hadn't to sleep with her because of her iron leg.

Passing up the street he felt that all the wee lads would be gazing at his Auntie with her clop-clink, clink-clop. If she'd only cover it with a stocking and put pasteboard inside it, nobody'd hear it or know what it was. Suddenly he left them and ran over to three of his companions who were standing with their hands behind their backs looking at a baker's horse. To show off before his Auntie he ran under the horse's legs and out by the other side.

‘Holy misfortunes, what a child!' said Auntie Sue, frightened to a standstill.

‘Arthur!' yelled Mary.

Arthur came running back and Mary gave him a stinging smack on the jaw. ‘You've been working for that this day!'

All the way to the house and into the house, he sobbed and sniffed: ‘Wait'll me Da comes home till ye see what ye'll get!'

‘That's just it,' said Mary. ‘Me father has him spoiled!'

‘Sh-sh-sh, big little mans don't cry. Tut-tut,' pleaded Auntie Sue. ‘Give me my bag till you see what I have for you – and none for the rest,' she added, casting a wink at Mary and Annie. When Arthur heard the happy rustle of paper, his sobs became less frequent, and when he received a piece of sugarstick coloured like a barber's pole he sat on the fender sucking contentedly, and even suffered Mary to wipe his face with a damp cloth.

Aunt Suzanne rested on the sofa looking with admiration at the clean tiles on the floor, the white-scrubbed table, and at the mantlepiece where two delph dogs guarded a row of shining brassware: horseshoes, two candlesticks, a rigged ship, and a three-legged pot containing a bunch of matches. ‘Yiv the place shining,' she said proudly. ‘Did you do it all by yourself, Mary? … You and Annie. Och, och, but it's nice to see two sisters agreeable.'

Mary took the band-box and the glossy bag and put them in a room off the kitchen, and while she poked the fire to hurry on the kettle, Annie spread a clean newspaper on the table and laid down the cups and saucers; Aunt Suzanne stretched herself out on the sofa, and wee Arthur was sent out to play till the big people had finished their tea.

From the table they could see, through the curtain on the window, the red-bricked houses on the opposite side of the street; and many a question Mary had to answer about the neighbours – the gossipy ones, the friendly ones, and the borrowing ones.

Just when they had finished their tea, Arthur came crying into the yard and battered impatiently at the scullery door.

‘What's up now?' said Mary, letting him in. He didn't answer, but ran to Auntie Sue. She took him in her arms and nursed him, but he scratched his cheek on a brooch in her breast and cried all the more.

‘What's wrong, my pigeon? What's wrong, my darling? Tell your Auntie Sue.'

‘The wee lads called you iron-hoof and cork leg,' he whimpered.

‘There's a cheeky lot of gets about this place,' said Mary. ‘Wait till I get my hands on some of them.'

‘And what did you say to them?' Auntie asked, shaking him to and fro.

‘I said you hadn't a cork leg,' he replied, bursting into more tears.

‘There, there!' consoled Auntie.

‘Maybe God'll give some of them a bad leg before very long,' put in Annie.

‘God forbid, child dear; sure, they're only childer and mean no harm.'

They were relieved when Arthur stopped whimpering, for they never knew at what time their father would step in on them and find wee Arthur in tears. It was late that night, however, when he came home from work in the flour mill, and they had all gone to bed except Auntie Sue.

Whilst he shaved in a looking-glass hung to a nail in the mantelpiece, his face under the gaslight, he kept up a chat with her. Later, he talked about old times and about Armagh, where Susie came from; then he fell silent, looking at the flames nodding and leaping in the fire and the flakes of soot shivering in the wide chimney. She, too, fell silent with her hands joined on her lap, looking at the wrinkles of flour in his boots, and thinking of his poor wife, her own sister. And then, without preface, he turned to her: ‘Tell me, Susie, are you off the bottle?'

‘Off the bottle!' she started. ‘Not a drop of strong drink has wet my lips this many a long year. I forget the taste of it – that's the God's truth, Daniel.'

‘I'm glad to hear that. It's the divil's own poison. Poor Katy, God be good to her, would be here now only for it.'

‘Aye, aye,' she sighed, taking a handkerchief and dabbing her eyes.

He looked at her awkwardly for a minute and said: ‘You'll be dead tired after your journey … Be good to the childer, Susie, and keep a tight eye on wee Arthur … Good night, now!'

After the first week or two Arthur and Auntie became great friends. He no longer stared at her iron-leg, and no longer paid heed to its stamping up the stairs or its clinking across the tiles. Auntie Sue was good to him and paid him halfpennies for gathering cinders. With a battered bucket, a piece of cardboard covering the hole in the bottom, he would go out to the waste ground at the back of the small houses. There the neighbours flung out their ashes, cabbage stalks, and potato-skins. He would squat for hours on his hunkers, rummaging with a stick for the blue cinders, until the bucket would be nearly filled. Then up with him carrying the bucket in front with his two arms under the handle. Aunt Suzanne would open the yard door at his knock. ‘That's the man! Them'll make a grand fire. There's nothing like cinders,' and out would come the black purse, and a penny or a halfpenny would be squeezed into an eager hand.

Then, one warm day, when Annie and Mary were down the town, Arthur wanted to earn a penny for the pictures, and, as usual, he took out the bucket to gather cinders. The cinders were hot under the sun, and near him bare-footed boys sat with pieces of mirror glass, reflecting the sunlight into the cool corners of the houses. Men, waistcoats unbuttoned, sat with newspapers over their heads, and on the yard walls thrushes in their cages sang madly in the sun. Dogs lounged about with hanging tongues and heaving sides. But Arthur worked on.

The sun scorched down on him and a creak came in his neck, but only a few cinders lay in the bottom of the bucket. He sighed, wiped the sweat from his face with the sleeve of his jersey, and hoked on.

He felt thirsty and came into the yard, where the tiles burned under his bare feet. All the doors were open, but the air was still. Two fly-papers covered with flies hung from the clothesline in the kitchen. He padded around for Aunt Suzanne and pushed open her room door; and there she was sitting on the bed with a black bottle to her mouth.

‘Aw, give's a slug.'

‘Merciful God, where did you come from? You put the heart out of me!' She twisted the cork into the bottle and slapped it tight with the heel of her hand. ‘Pwt-th-t!' she said in disgust, making a wry face. ‘Rotten medicine! Worse than castor, but poor Auntie has to take it.'

She went to the sink in the scullery, the splashing tap spilling coolness into the air. Arthur held the wet cup in his hands and drank noisily. He drank it all and finished with a sigh. She gave him a halfpenny. ‘Don't tell your Da that poor Auntie has to take medicine, he'd be vexed to hear it. Now go and gather your cinders.'

Later he returned with an almost empty bucket and found Aunt Suzanne snoring on the sofa. He started to sing loudly so as to waken her, and she got up and vigorously poked the fire which the sun had almost put out.

‘Give's a penny for the pictures?'

‘If I had a penny I'd frame it, and you with no cinders.'

‘Go'n,' he whimpered, ‘or I'll tell me Da about your medicine.'

‘Get out of my sight! Do you think I'm made of money!' she said crossly, watching the dust from the fire settling on the mantlepiece.

‘Go'n!'

She lifted the poker in anger, and Arthur raced into the yard. He barricaded himself in an old hen-shed and started to sing:

Boiled beef and carrots,

Boiled beef and carrots,

And porter for Suzanne.

He was innocent of the cruel implication, but it riled Auntie Sue, and she hammered at the door with the poker and flung jugfuls of water in at him through the slits in the boards. ‘The divil has the hold of you, me boyo! Wait'll your Da hears this and you'll catch it!'

He yelled louder; and, thinking of the neighbours, she went in and left him. He heard the bar shoot with finality in the scullery door and her last words: ‘You'll not get in the night! Go on, now, about your business.'