Collected Stories (33 page)

I didn't think myself he could be a very good doctor, because, after all my trouble, he never washed his hands, but I was prepared to overlook that since he said nothing about the hospital.

The road to the dispensary led uphill through a thickly populated poor locality as far as the barrack, which was perched on the hilltop, and then it descended between high walls till it suddenly almost disappeared over the edge of the hill in a stony pathway flanked on the right-hand side by red-brick Corporation houses and on the other by a wide common with an astounding view of the city. It was more like the back-cloth of a theatre than a real town. The pathway dropped away to the bank of a stream where a brewery stood; and from this, far beneath you, the opposite hillside, a murmuring honeycomb of factory chimneys and houses, whose noises came to you, dissociated and ghostlike, rose steeply, steeply to the gently rounded hilltop with a limestone spire, and a purple sandstone tower rising out of it and piercing the clouds. It was so wide and bewildering a view that it was never all lit up at the same time; sunlight wandered across it as across a prairie, picking out a line of roofs with a brightness like snow or delving into the depth of some dark street and outlining in shadow the figures of climbing carts and straining horses. I felt exalted, a voyager, a heroic figure. I made up my mind to spend the penny Mrs. Slattery had given me on a candle to the Blessed Virgin in the cathedral on the hilltop for my mother's speedy recovery. I felt sure I'd get more value in a great church like that so close to Heaven.

The dispensary was a sordid hallway with a bench to one side and a window like a railway ticket office at the end of it. There was a little girl with a green plaid shawl about her shoulders sitting on the bench. She gave me a quick look and I saw that her eyes were green too. For years after, whenever a girl gave me a hasty look like that, I hid. I knew what it meant, but at the time I was still innocent. I knocked at the window and a seedy, angry-looking man opened it. Without waiting to hear what I had to say he grabbed bottle and prescription and banged the shutter down again without a word. I waited a minute and then lifted my hand to knock a second time.

“You'll have to wait, little boy,” the girl said quickly.

“Why will I have to wait?” I asked.

“He have to make it up,” she explained. “He might be half an hour. You might as well sit down.”

As she obviously knew her way round, I did what she told me.

“Where are you from?” she went on, dropping the shawl, which she held in front of her mouth the way I had seen old women do it whenever they spoke. “I live in Blarney Lane.”

“I live by the barrack,” I said.

“And who's the bottle for?” she asked.

“My mother.”

“What's wrong with her?”

“She have a bad cough.”

“She might have consumption,” the little girl said cheerfully. “That's what my sister that died last year had. My other sister have to have tonics. That's what I'm waiting for. 'Tis a queer old world. Is it nice up where ye live?”

I told her about the Glen, and she told me about the river out to Carrigrohane. It seemed to be a nicer place altogether than ours, the way she described it. She was a pleasant talkative little girl and I never noticed the time passing. Suddenly the shutter went up and a bottle was banged on the counter.

“Dooley!” said the man, and the window was shut again.

“That's me,” said the little girl. “My name is Nora Dooley. Yours won't be ready for a long time yet. Is it a red or a black one?”

“I don't know,” said I. “I never got a bottle before.”

“Black ones is better,” she said. “Red is more for hacking coughs. Still, I wouldn't mind a red one now.”

“I have better than that,” I said. “I have a lob for sweets.”

I had decided that, after all, it wouldn't be necessary for me to light a candle. In a queer way the little girl restored my confidence. I knew I was exaggerating things and that Mother would be all right in a day or two.

The bottle, when I got it, was black. The little girl and I sat on the steps of the infirmary and ate the sweets I'd bought. At the end of the lane was the limestone spire of Shandon; all along it young trees overhung the high, hot walls, and the sun, when it came out in hot, golden blasts behind us, threw our linked shadows onto the road.

“Give us a taste of your bottle, little boy,” she said.

“Can't you have a taste of your own?” I replied suspiciously.

“Ah, you couldn't drink mine,” she said. “Tonics is all awful. Try!”

I did, and I spat it out hastily. It was awful. But after that I couldn't do less than let her taste mine. She took a long drink out of it, which alarmed me.

“That's beautiful,” she said. “That's like my sister that died last year used to have. I love cough bottles.”

I tried it myself and saw she was right in a way. It was very sweet and sticky, like treacle.

“Give us another,” she said.

“I will not,” I said in alarm. “What am I going to do with it now?”

“All you have to do is put water in it, out of a pump. No one will know.”

Somehow, I couldn't refuse her. Mother was far away, and I was swept from anchorage into an unfamiliar world of spires, towers, trees, steps, and little girls who liked cough bottles. I worshipped that girl. We both took another drink and I began to panic. I saw that even if you put water in it, you couldn't conceal the fact that it wasn't the same, and began to snivel.

“It's all gone,” I said. “What am I going to do?”

“Finish it and say the cork fell out,” she said, as though it were the most natural thing in the world, and, God forgive me, I believed her. We finished it, and then, as I put away the empty bottle, I remembered my mother sick and the Blessed Virgin slighted, and my heart sank. I had sacrificed both to a girl and she didn't even care for me. It was my cough bottle she had been after all the time from the first moment I appeared in the dispensary. I saw her guile and began to weep.

“What ails you?” she asked in surprise.

“My mother is sick, and you're after drinking her medicine, and now if she dies, 'twill be my fault,” I said.

“Ah, don't be an old cry-baby!” she said contemptuously. “No one ever died of a cough. You need only say the cork fell out—'tis a thing might happen to anyone.”

“And I promised the Blessed Virgin a candle, and spent it on sweets for you,” I cried, and ran away up the road like a madman, holding the empty bottle. Now I had only one hope—a miracle. I went into the cathedral to the shrine of the Blessed Virgin and, having told her of my fall, promised a candle with the next penny I got if only she would make Mother better by the time I got home. I looked at her face carefully in the candlelight and thought it didn't seem too cross. Then I went miserably home. All the light had gone out of the day, and the echoing hillside had become a vast, alien, cruel world. Besides, I felt terribly sick. It even struck me that I might die myself. In one way that would be a great ease to me.

When I reached home, the silence of the kitchen and the sight of the empty grate showed me at once that my prayers had not been heard. Mother was still sick in bed. I began to howl.

“What is it all, child?” she cried anxiously from upstairs.

“I lost the medicine,” I bellowed from the foot of the stairs, and then dashed blindly up and buried my face in the bedclothes.

“Ah, wisha, wisha, if that's all that's a-trouble to you, you poor misfortunate child!” she cried in relief, running her hand through my hair. “I was afraid you were lost. Is anything the matter?” she added anxiously. “You feel hot.”

“I drank the medicine,” I bawled, and buried my face again.

“And if you did itself, what harm?” she murmured soothingly. “You poor child, going all that way by yourself, without a proper dinner or anything, why wouldn't you? Take off your clothes now, and lie down here till you're better.”

She rose, put on her slippers and an overcoat, and unlaced my shoes while I sat on the bed. Even before she was finished I was asleep. I didn't hear her dress herself or go out, but some time later I felt a cool hand on my forehead, and saw Minnie Ryan peering down at me.

“Ah, 'tis nothing, woman,” she said lightly. “He'll sleep that off by morning. Well, aren't they the devil! God knows, you'd never be up to them. And indeed and indeed, Mrs. Sullivan, 'tis you should be in bed.”

I knew all that. I knew it was her judgment on me; I was one of those who were more like savages than Christians; I was no good as a nurse, no good to anybody. I accepted it all. But when Mother came up with her evening paper and sat reading by my bed, I knew the miracle had happened. She'd been cured all right.

The Drunkard

I
T WAS
a terrible blow to Father when Mr. Dooley on the terrace died. Mr. Dooley was a commercial traveller with two sons in the Dominicans and a car of his own, so socially he was miles ahead of us, but he had no false pride. Mr. Dooley was an intellectual, and, like all intellectuals the thing he loved best was conversation, and in his own limited way Father was a well-read man and could appreciate an intelligent talker. Mr. Dooley was remarkably intelligent. Between business acquaintances and clerical contacts, there was very little he didn't know about what went on in town, and evening after evening he crossed the road to our gate to explain to Father the news behind the news. He had a low, palavering voice and a knowing smile, and Father would listen in astonishment, giving him a conversational lead now and again, and then stump triumphantly in to Mother with his face aglow and ask: “Do you know what Mr. Dooley is after telling me?” Ever since, when somebody has given me some bit of information off the record I have found myself on the point of asking: “Was it Mr. Dooley told you that?”

Till I actually saw him laid out in his brown shroud with the rosary beads entwined between his waxy fingers I did not take the report of his death seriously. Even then I felt there must be a catch and that some summer evening Mr. Dooley must reappear at our gate to give us the lowdown on the next world. But Father was very upset, partly because Mr. Dooley was about one age with himself, a thing that always gives a distinctly personal turn to another man's demise; partly because now he would have no one to tell him what dirty work was behind the latest scene at the Corporation. You could count on your fingers the number of men in Blarney Lane who read the papers as Mr. Dooley did, and none of these would have overlooked the fact that Father was only a laboring man. Even Sullivan, the carpenter, a mere nobody, thought he was a cut above Father. It was certainly a solemn event.

“Half past two to the Curragh,” Father said meditatively, putting down the paper.

“But you're not thinking of going to the funeral?” Mother asked in alarm.

“'Twould be expected,” Father said, scenting opposition. “I wouldn't give it to say to them.”

“I think,” said Mother with suppressed emotion, “it will be as much as anyone will expect if you go to the chapel with him.”

(“Going to the chapel,” of course, was one thing, because the body was removed after work, but going to a funeral meant the loss of a half-day's pay.)

“The people hardly know us,” she added.

“God between us and all harm,” Father replied with dignity, “we'd be glad if it was our own turn.”

To give Father his due, he was always ready to lose a half day for the sake of an old neighbor. It wasn't so much that he liked funerals as that he was a conscientious man who did as he would be done by; and nothing could have consoled him so much for the prospect of his own death as the assurance of a worthy funeral. And, to give Mother her due, it wasn't the half-day's pay she begrudged, badly as we could afford it.

Drink, you see, was Father's great weakness. He could keep steady for months, even for years, at a stretch, and while he did he was as good as gold. He was first up in the morning and brought the mother a cup of tea in bed, stayed at home in the evenings and read the paper; saved money and bought himself a new blue serge suit and bowler hat. He laughed at the folly of men who, week in week out, left their hard-earned money with the publicans; and sometimes, to pass an idle hour, he took pencil and paper and calculated precisely how much he saved each week through being a teetotaller. Being a natural optimist he sometimes continued this calculation through the whole span of his prospective existence and the total was breathtaking. He would die worth hundreds.

If I had only known it, this was a bad sign; a sign he was becoming stuffed up with spiritual pride and imagining himself better than his neighbors. Sooner or later, the spiritual pride grew till it called for some form of celebration. Then he took a drink—not whiskey, of course; nothing like that—just a glass of some harmless drink like lager beer. That was the end of Father. By the time he had taken the first he already realized that he had made a fool of himself, took a second to forget it and a third to forget that he couldn't forget, and at last came home reeling drunk. From this on it was “The Drunkard's Progress,” as in the moral prints. Next day he stayed in from work with a sick head while Mother went off to make his excuses at the works, and inside a fortnight he was poor and savage and despondent again. Once he began he drank steadily through everything down to the kitchen clock. Mother and I knew all the phases and dreaded all the dangers. Funerals were one.

“I have to go to Dunphy's to do a half-day's work,” said Mother in distress. “Who's to look after Larry?”

“I'll look after Larry,” Father said graciously. “The little walk will do him good.”

There was no more to be said, though we all knew I didn't need anyone to look after me, and that I could quite well have stayed at home and looked after Sonny, but I was being attached to the party to act as a brake on Father. As a brake I had never achieved anything, but Mother still had great faith in me.