The Dirty Dust (24 page)

—The thundering bitch …

—“I was heartbroken after the Old Master,” she said …

—Oh, the whore of a thundering bitch! … If you only knew, Poxy! Ah, but you wouldn't understand. There'd be no point in telling you …

—Well, anyway, Master, the truth is the bed was too hard …

—Will you hump off to hell hollering on about that bed, and just listen to her! … Oh, the things that that bitch of a one said to me, Martin! …

—I know that's all true, Master …

—The pair of us sitting down in Crompaun. The gentle susurration of the suds caressing the rocks at our feet. A young seagull calling to his father and mother to thrill about his first flight, not unlike unto a shy bride approaching the altar. The shades of evening sliding across the shafts of sunlight on the crest of the waves, like the young kestrel slowly shaping to snatch the unready. The oars of the currach returning from its fishing grounds plashing in the water. She's in my arms, Martin. A wisp of her gorgeous hair gently touching my cheek. Her hands are around my neck. I am quoting poetry:

“Glen Mason:

Rock high, sun facing.

We slept all evening

On its sward and apron

“‘If you come, my love, come like one creeping,

Come to the door that admits no creaking

If my father asks who it is I'm seeking

I will say it's the wind outside that's keening.'”

Either that or reciting love stories, Martin …

—I get that alright, Master …

—The Sons of Uisneach, Diarmaid, and Gráinne, Tristan and Isolde, Strong Tom Costello and Fair Una McDermott, Carol O'Daly and Eleanor Aroon,
The Hot Kiss, The Powder Puff
…

—I get that too, Master …

—I bought a car straight up, Martin, just to take her out and about. I could hardly afford it, but I thought she was worth it anyway. We'd go into the pictures in the Fancy City, to dances in Derry Dav, to teachers' meetings …

—That's all true, and up the Hill Road, Master. There was that day when I was going for a creel of turf and your car was planked there at the side of the road at Ardeen More, and the two of you over beyond in the glen …

—OK, forget about that now, Guzzeye Martin, until some other time …

—But for all that, Master, I also remember that day when I got the news about the pension. Not one of us in the whole house had the least clue, by the mebs of the Devil himself, what it was about. “The Old Master is the boy for us.” I says. I went on over to Peter the Publican's place and stayed there until all the students had gone. I went back then. When I got back to the schoolhouse all I could hear was moaning and groaning and sighing. “I left it too late,” I says to myself, “pretending to be proper, according to myself. He's gone off home.” I gawked in through the window. Saving your presence, Master, there you were with her, bonking and beasting away …

—I wasn't. I wasn't, Poxy Martin, no I wasn't.

—Ah, but you were, Master, there's nothing better than telling the truth …

—Good for you, Master! …

—You have no reason to be ashamed, Master.

—Who would ever have thought it, Breed? …

—We were sending our children to him, Kitty …

—If the priest had caught him, Joan …

—It was Whit Sunday, Poxy. I had the day off. “We should go
down to Ross Harbour,” I said to her, after dinner. “Getting out and about will do you no end of good.” She did. We went. I really thought, Martin, that I knew what she was all about, that night on Ross Harbour … The long summer day was fading in the west after its long labours. Both of us were lovingly stretched on a rock observing the stars glittering on the shiny surface of the sea …

—Yes, I get that too, Master …

—Gazing at the candles being lit one by one in the houses shining on the far side of the bay. Gazing at the whisk of the will o' the wisp wending on the seaweed on the well of the tide. Gazing at the sparkly dust of the weather coming in from beyond the mouth of the harbour. I can tell you, Martin, on that wonderful night I felt myself part of all those stars and lights and flashing phosphorescence and the wonder of the weather and the sweet soughing of the surf and the elevation of the air …

—Ah, yea, sure, I get it all, Master. That's the way it is …

—She swore to me, Martin, that her love for me was deeper than the deep blue sea; that she was more faithful than the rising and the setting of the sun; more permanent than the ebb and flow of the tide, than the stars and the mountains, that her love for me predated tides, and stars, and mountains. She swore to me that her love was of a piece with eternity itself …

—She said that, Master! …

—She said that, Poxy Martin. She said that, by the hammers of hell! … But hang on a minute. I was on my deathbed. She came in and she had just made the Pilgrimage of the Cross, and she sat down on the edge of the bed. She took my hand. She said that if anything happened to me her life would not be worth living, and her death would not be a death unless we should both die together. She promised and pledged no matter how long she lived after me that she would spend the rest of her days done down and depressed. She promised and pledged that she would never marry again …

—She promised all that, Master! …

—She swore and asseverated, Poxy Martin! … And despite all
that she had the poisoned serpent in her heart all that time. I was only buried a year—one short miserable year compared with the eternity she had promised me—and there she was swearing fealty to someone else who wasn't me, someone else whose kisses, not mine, were on her lips, and someone else's love that wasn't mine in her heart. Me, I was her first love and her husband, me laid under the cold sods of the grave and she hot in the arms of Billy the Postman …

—True, hot in the arms of Billy the Postman, Master! I saw it myself … We have to forget about a lot of things, Master …

—And now, there he is on my bed, and she giving him gung-ho and giddy-up and go-for-it, looking after him from morning to night, going on retreats for him, sending for doctors, three of them, from Dublin, to look after him …

… If she had sent for even one doctor from Dublin to look after me, I would have been all right …

—You'd never believe what she told me about you, Master? I went into her with a bag of spuds just a week after you were buried. We were talking about you. “That was terrible news about the Old Master,” I said, “and there was really no need for it. If he had stayed in bed with that flu, and looked after himself, and drank a few quaffs of whiskey, and sent for the doctor at the beginning …” “Do you know the real truth, Poxy?” she says to me. I will always remember exactly what she said, Master. “Do you know the real truth, Poxy Martin, all the doctors in the world couldn't save the Old Master. He was too good for this life …” That was it, bejasus, Master, and she said something else that I had never heard before. I think it's an old saying, but I can't be sure. “He whom the gods love, dies young …”

—The bitch! The witch! The cuntinental cow! …

—De grâce, Master. Speak nicely if you please. Don't be like Caitriona Paudeen. The chaplain came to visit her one day. He was new in the parish. He didn't know where Nell's house was. “Nell, that whore,” Caitriona said. Honest! …

—You tramp of the Toejam trollops! You so-and-so! … Hey, Margaret! …

—… He was there ready and waiting for Blotchy Brian collecting his pension every Friday. “You'd be well advised to grab a fist of insurance for yourself from now on, Briany,” the wretch says. “Who knows, any one of these days you might go the way of all flesh …”

—“There's no guarantee that that useless old crockery wouldn't take out insurance himself,” Blotchy Brian said to me one Friday in the Post Office, “or on anything apart from Nell Paudeen's little pup who used to come in regularly and sniffle around on Caitriona's floor.”

—I was over with Brian myself getting the pension the day he was buried.

“The insurance lad didn't last too long after, either,” I said.

“There he is heading away there now, the sewer sucker,” Brian says, “and if he goes up, he'll piss The Man Above off with his never-ending guff about the accident that happened ages ago, and trying to get him to insure his holy and angelic property against the pyromania of yer Man Below. And if The Man Below gets it, he'll piss him off getting him to insure his few embers against the wiles of yer Man Above. They both of them couldn't do any better to that louse lackey than what Fireside Tom did to him: every time he didn't want Nell's cattle on his patch of land, he drove them into Caitriona's, and then Caitriona's cattle into Nell's …”

—Did you hear what he said when that headbanger Tim Top of the Road died?

—“Sweet Jumping Jesus, boys, St. Peter had better be looking after his keys from now on, or this new blow-in will have filched them from him in no time …”

—And I'll tell you one thing for nothing, do you know what he said to Fireside Tom when Caitriona died:

“Thomas, my beautiful angel,” he said, “Yourself, and Nell, and Baba, and Nora Johnny's young one will have to be constantly calling into the Celestial Smithy to get their wings mended, that is, if God grants that you be allowed around the same place as herself. I'd say I only have a very slim chance of getting wings, though. Caitriona
never thought me good enough. But do you know what Thomas, my gentle dove, you'd have no problem at all with anything broken if I could get myself a little cubbyhole of my own near her …”

—Ababoona! Brian next to me to torture me! God forbid! What would I do at all? …

—The Postmistress told me that she couldn't open any letters when I died she was so busy with the telegrams …

—My death was in the newspaper …

—My death was in two newspapers …

—Listen to the account of my death in the
Daily News:

“He was of an old and highly renowned family in the area. He played a significant part in the national movement. He was a personal acquaintance of Eamon de Valera …”

—This is the description of my death in
The Irish Observer:

“He belonged to a family that was very well liked in the area. He joined the Fenian Scouts when he was a boy, and after that he joined the Irish Volunteers. He was an intimate friend of Arthur Griffith …”

—… Coley told the story of “The pullet who was born on the dung heap” at your wake, also.

—You're lying! That's a disgusting story to tell at any respectable wake! …

—But, wasn't I listening to him! …

—You're lying, you were not! …

—… A row at your wake! A row at a wake where there were only two old pensioners!

—And one of them as deaf as Fireside Tom when Caitriona was trying to persuade him to come to visit Mannix the Counsellor about the bit of land.

—All true, and every vessel in the house was overflowing with holy water.

—There was a row at my wake …

—There sure was. Fireside Tom took it upon himself to say to Blotchy:

“You've drunk enough of Ned of the Hill's buttermilk since you came in, Tom, that you must have enough already for churning.”

—There were two barrels at my wake …

—Three at mine …

—That's true, Caitriona, there were three of them at your wake. That's the bare honest truth for you, Caitriona. There were three of them there—three fine big ones—and a few shots from Ned of the Hill's magic waterworks also … And even if I was the oldfella, I still drank twelve mugs of it. To tell you God's honest truth, Caitriona, there's no way I would have swilled that much if I knew that my heart was a bit dicey. What I said to myself was, as my eyes were staring at the pints of porter: “Wouldn't it be a lot better for this guy to buy a colt rather than to be getting pissed with shit artists …”

—You pompous piss artist! …

—That's what they were. Some of them were laid out smashed drunk on the ground in the way of everyone else. It even happened that Peter Nell fell on top of the bed you were laid out on, Caitriona. His leg was gone, the one that was injured.

—The sneaky swill slurper!

—The best of it all was when Breed Terry's youngfella and Kitty's son started beating the crap out of one another, and then smashed the round table before they could be separated …

—Holy fuckaroni! Ababoona! …

—I split them up. If I knew then that my heart was a bit dicey …

—… It appeared to me, anyway, that you were laid out in the proper traditional way, unless my eyes were deceiving me …

—Then your eyes didn't see the two crosses on my breast …

—I had two crosses and the scapulars …

—Whatever they had on me, or they didn't have on me, Kitty, it wasn't a dirty sheet like there was on Caitriona …

—Ababoona! Don't believe a word from that mangy maggot's mouth …

—… You had a coffin that was made by the little scutty carpenter from Gort Ribbuck. He made another one for Nora Johnny and 'twas as small as a bird's cage …

—Your coffin was made by a carpenter as well …

—That may be so, but it wasn't the jobber from Gort Ribbuck,
but a proper carpenter who had served his time. He had qualifications from the Tec …

—My coffin cost ten pounds …

—I thought yours only cost eight pounds: just like Caitriona's one …

—You're a liar, you microphallic muppet! I had the best coffin from Tim's shop …

—Little Kitty laid me out.

—Me too, and Biddy Sarah keened me …

—Then she didn't make a very good job of it. There's a kind of a lump in Biddy's throat and it doesn't melt until about the seventh glass. Then she starts up with “Let Erin Remember” …