Collected Short Stories (30 page)

‘Come on, Kevin, and we'll hiss the dogs on them,' Rita would urge indignantly.

‘Pretend you don't hear them,' Eileen would advise.

‘They'll change their tune when Daddy shows us how he does his tricks. Won't they Eileen?'

‘I'm sure they will.'

But with each day that passed Dandy displayed no mysterious inclination to do anything out of the ordinary. Kevin's friends ceased coming near the field, and in school they often challenged him to race his prize pony against one of their old donkeys. They never wearied in their taunts and mockery.

He grew to hate the school, and one evening as he followed his father round the stables, beseeching him to get the pony to do a trick, his father shouted at him to give over and give his head peace sometime: ‘I don't know how he does his tricks and I don't care. You're never satisfied with anything. Away and ride him round the fields and don't bother me any more!'

The next day he didn't go to school. He pretended he was sick. He stayed away for three days. He wanted to forget about the pony's tricks but, when he returned to school, the boys wouldn't allow him to forget. They mimicked him with cruel exaggeration: ‘When it begs for bread give it a loaf with jam on it … It's the cutest pony in Ireland … It can do sums that'd puzzle the master.'

But the following day, St Patricks's Day, the miracle happened. Rita and Joan were playing near the orchard, fixing a swing to an ash-bough when they heard in the distance the sound of the Lough Neagh Flute Band, that was marching to the opening of a new sports ground near the chapel. They threw down their ropes, raced to the gate, closed it, and stood up on the bars to await the band.

Kevin was on the topmost bar and by turning his head he saw the band as it came along. The band-leader, out in front in his blue uniform and white gloves, was twirling a pole with a silver knob that caught the sun; and the sound of the flutes and the big drum swamped the noise of the marching feet of the bandsmen and the stumbling feet of the boys who straggled at each side of the road.

The sticks drubbed with furious rapidity on the kettle-drums, and their sounds ribbed out and belaboured the air with a frantic tizzing and frangling that forced Joan to draw back in fear.

The band came abreast of the gate and Kevin looked down at it, seeing the fingers hopping madly on the flutes, and the tiny cards of music with their printed notes like wriggling tadpoles. A boy with spectacles clashed cymbals together, the kettle-drums rolled out once more, and the air pranced with vigorous delight. The band passed the gate, but Joan who was peering fearfully through the hedge screamed out: ‘Look! Look what Dandy's doing!'

Near the roadside hedge Dandy was parading round in a circle, nodding his head, lifting his forefeet with exaggerated precision and increasing his pace to the roll of the drums. And then at the sudden cessation of the kettle-drums and at the deep incoming beat from the big drum he rose up on his hind-legs, pirouetted and boxed the air.

The roadside hedge was now lined with heads at all levels, laughing and cheering the pony. And the bandsmen marched on, and their leader tossed up his tasselled pole, twirled it dexterously to the cheers behind him and strode ahead with ceremonial pomposity. Dandy followed the band on the inside of the hedge but at the end of the field where a fence blocked his way he halted with one foreleg raised like an equestrian statue, his ears pricked towards the dwindling sound of music.

Tearing across the fields to him came the three children shrieking with delight.

In school the next day everyone was talking about him and of the strange acts he had performed for the Lough Neagh Flute Band, and after school six or seven boys bolted down their dinner and set off to see for themselves the tricks of this wonderful pony. When they arrived at the field the two dogs were nowhere to be seen and the boys scrambled through holes in the hedge and raced up to Kevin and Rita. Eileen was in the field, too, holding Joan by the hand.

In front of the pony's head Kevin stood with an empty milk can and a stick. He was hammering at the bottom of it, but the pony, with the vacant saddle on its back, was showing no interest in the unrythmical sound. Kevin's friends drew closer to him and pulling pencils from their pockets they held to their mouths like a flute, ran their fingers along them and began to whistle. Kevin flogged away at the can with his stick. The pony shook itself, turned his back on them and began to graze.

‘Dandy!' Kevin shouted, and he jerked the reins till the pony faced them again.

‘Ach, he's stupid,' one of the boys said with disgust.

‘He's the cutest and cleverest pony in Ireland.'

‘Everybody knows it,' Kevin said.

‘Make him give you his paw.'

‘Make him lie down and die.'

‘Make him do some damned thing and not keep us standing here all day.'

‘Nobody's asking you to stand here all day!' Rita said pertly.

‘Give us a ride on him.'

‘We're not allowed to,' Rita said, tossing her head.

The boys laughed and elbowed one another, and one of them lifted a lump of sod and threw it at the pony.

‘Just for that we'll not get him to do any tricks!' Kevin said.

‘You don't know how! You don't know how!' they chanted.

‘Don't I! I could get him to do thousands of tricks!'

‘Get him to do them! Get him to do even one!'

‘Go on home out of this,' Eileen said, noticing that Kevin was nearly in tears.

‘We'll go when we're ready. You think because you're at a convent school you can order us about,' one said, and they giggled and stumbled against her. ‘I'll get the dogs and they'll fix you!' she said, and on hearing this they fled down the field and on to the road where they hung about, shouting and jeering through holes in the hedge.

Rita lifted Kevin's stick, marched over to the pony and mounted him smartly. She tapped him with the stick and he suddenly took fright and galloped down the sloping field. She was bounced about without grace or rhythm. She tried not to scream, and as she was joggled off she held on to the reins and was dragged along the ground.

She heard a volley of cheers from the road and she scrambled to her feet and lashed out at the pony with her stick. And suddenly the pony rose up stiffly on its hind legs, grimaced horribly, the silver bit in its mouth and grass between its teeth.

‘Rita! Rita!' Eileen yelled as she and Kevin ran down to her. Eileen snatched the stick and broke it in two, the pony still pirouetting, and breathing with a fearful choking sound.

‘Now you see how you get him to do his tricks! You see it now!' Eileen said in a broken voice. ‘It's horrible, horrible,' she cried, waiting for the pony to cease its painful caperings.

‘There, Dandy! That'll do! Down, please, down!' she said soothingly, and at that moment she saw the fear of punishment in its dark eyes, saw the cruelty that produced circus joys.

At last, exhausted, the pony placed its forefeet on the ground. Its sides heaved rapidly and little patches like snow gathered at the corners of its mouth. It stood still, subdued, motionless with expectant fear.

Rita was crying and rubbing her knee, and Joan was helping her to pick the pieces of crushed grass from her frock.

Kevin stared dumbly, now at the pony, and now at the broken stick lying at Eileen's feet. He was thinking of something, something that puzzled him. But what it was he did not know.

Michael McLaverty was one of the quiet masters of Irish letters. He wrote eight novels between 1939 and 1965, including the critically acclaimed
Call My Brother Back
(1939) and
Lost Fields
(1942). Despite his undoubted talent as a novelist, however, McLaverty's essential gift was for the short story. His reputation as a master of the form was secured in the 1930s and 40s by the publication of two short story collections,
The White Mare
(1943) and
The Game Cock
(1947). These two collections contained classics such as ‘Pigeons', ‘Look at the Boats' and ‘The Wild Duck's Nest' and, along with the novels, established McLaverty as an important and influential writer.

Born in 1904, McLaverty attended, like Brian Moore after him, St Malachy's College in Belfast. He took his BSc and MSc at Queen's University Belfast before training as a teacher at St Mary's College, Strawberry Hill, in London. As a young man, he began to write, inspired by the memory of childhood holidays on Rathlin Island, off the Antrim Coast in the far north of Ireland. Rathlin made an indelible impression on him, forming the background to many of his early stories of children and the dispossessed. He remembered and celebrated, too, the town of Toome in County Antrim, near the home of his grandparents; Belfast where he brought up his own family; and County Down, where he spent holidays, wrote many of his most famous stories, and chose to be buried.

Much of McLaverty's best work was produced while he had full-time teaching responsibilities; he disciplined himself to write at the end of each day. Taking early retirement in September 1964, he believed he would be able to give more time and energy to his creative work. Unfortunately, however, he faced the artist's deepest fear: a blank page, on which he could make no mark. Roy McFadden's poignant picture of his friend, in his poem ‘D-Day', captures the moment:

He groomed his desk, dusted with deference

The touchy typewriter;

Discharged and fuelled fountain pen,

And tapped the paper square:

Adjusted to celestial audience.

But it was not compelling. Undismissed,

The centipedal street

Occluded with occurrences.

While he, irresolute,

Contended with the self's recidivist.

The shock of this unexpected silence brought about a profound sadness, settling into depression from which, in addition to a heart condition that required the fitting of a pacemaker, McLaverty suffered periodically until his death in 1992. Moreover, his Hopkins-like scruples over the possible effect of his work on the spiritual life of his readers worried constantly at him, stifling the flow of the later novels as he sought to preserve his audience from moral taint. Although one final, critically unsuccessful novel,
The Brightening Day
, was published in 1965, McLaverty effectively wrote no more after his retirement.

This was not, however, the end of McLaverty's literary career. In 1968, David Marcus, influential editor of the ‘New Irish Writing' page in the
Irish Press
, asked for contributions from established Irish writers. Michael McLaverty sent him the short story, ‘Steeplejacks', and it was published that same year. Marcus's open admiration and sustained support for McLaverty's work played a key role in the publication by Poolbeg Press of a new collection of short stories,
The Road to the Shore
, in 1976 and of
Collected Short Stories
in 1978. The publication of these two collections, along with Poolbeg's reprinting of his eight novels, brought about an unexpected Indian summer for McLaverty, in which he was, to his considerable astonishment, rewarded with a new wave of literary recognition. Reviewing
The Road to the Shore
in the
Irish Press
in 1976, Sean O'Faolain described McLaverty as ‘a northern laureate' and in the same year Marcus paid tribute to McLaverty by giving over an entire page in ‘New Irish Writing' to ‘After Forty Years', a poignant elegy for lost love and broken trust which echoed in tone and theme Joyce's ‘The Dead'.

In the fleeting and precise brush-strokes of ‘After Forty Years' and as in his other short stories, McLaverty touches the truth, delicately and unerringly, never disturbing what Blake called ‘the winged life'. A dedicated disciple of Tolstoy and Chekhov, paying homage to Maupassant and Mansfield, his work reminds us that the form best suited to the Irish psyche may be, after the lyric poem, the short story. The stories in this collection, described by Walter Allen at the time of its first publication as ‘small miracles', are a timely reminder of the rare gift of a writer who never wished to put himself forward, preferring instead to let his writing, as he put it himself, ‘make its own way'.

Sophia Hillan

Queen's University Belfast

JULY 2002

Interested readers may wish to study the earlier published versions of Michael McLaverty's short stories, many of which can be found in the National Library in Dublin. Publication details are listed in the bibliography below. These earlier versions often reveal significant differences, such as the more colloquial language used in ‘Aunt Suzanne' or the radically different ending of ‘The Wild Duck's Nest'. The original published versions of both these stories, and of ‘The Boots', ‘The Turf Stack', ‘The Grey Goat', ‘The Letter', ‘The Trout' and ‘Leavetaking' may also be found in my own book,
In Quiet Places: The Uncollected Stories, Letters and Critical Prose of Michael McLaverty
(Poolbeg, 1989).

‘The Poteen Maker' first appeared under the title of ‘Moonshine', ‘The Schooner' as ‘Becalmed', and ‘Look at the Boats' as ‘The Sea'.

‘The Green Field',
Irish Monthly
60 (August 1932)

‘The Turf Stack',
Irish Monthly
60 (December 1932)

‘The Boots',
Irish Monthly
61 (May 1933)

‘The Grey Goat',
Irish Monthly
61 (August 1933)

‘The Letter',
Irish Monthly
61 (December 1933)

‘The Wild Duck's Nest',
Irish Monthly
62 (April 1934)

‘The Trout',
Irish Monthly
63 (January 1935)

‘The Return',
Catholic World
(Spring 1935)

‘Evening in Winter',
Irish Monthly
63 (May 1935)

‘The Prophet',
Irish Monthly
64 (February 1936)

‘Pigeons',
New Stories
, ed. E.J. O'Brien, 2, no. 8 (April–May 1936)

‘Aunt Suzanne',
Ireland Today
11, no. 3 (March 1937)

‘Leavetaking',
Ireland Today
11, no. 7 (July 1937)

‘A Game Cock',
Ireland Today
11, no. 10 (October 1937)

‘The Race',
Capuchin Annual
(1937)

‘Stone', ‘The White Mare' and ‘The Sea',
Capuchin Annual
(1939)

‘Becalmed',
Capuchin Annual
(1940)

‘Moonshine',
The Bell
2, no. 4 (July 1941)

‘Vigil',
Northern Harvest: An Anthology of Ulster Writing
, ed. Robert Greacen (Belfast, 1944)

‘The Road to the Shore',
Selected Writing
, ed. Reginald Moore, 5 (London, 1944)

‘The Mother',
Irish Harvest: A Collection of Stories, Essays and Poems
, ed. Robert Greacen (Dublin, 1946)

‘Six Weeks On and Two Ashore',
Irish Writing
4 (April 1948)

‘A Half-Crown',
The Bell
17, no. 5 (August 1951)

‘Uprooted',
Dublin Magazine
31, no. 3 (July–September 1956)

‘The Circus Pony',
Dublin Magazine
31, no. 4 (October–December 1957)

‘Mother and Daughter',
Kilkenny Magazine
(Spring 1965)

‘Steeplejacks',
Irish Press
, 10 August 1968, ‘New Irish Writing' section.

‘The Priest's Housekeeper',
Aquarius
(1972)

‘After Forty Years',
Irish Press
, 13 March 1976, ‘New Irish Writing' section.