Wild Decembers (12 page)

“You tramp.”

“For God’s sake, Joseph,” she said, and walked past him. He walked behind her, studying the glints in her brown hair, trying to read her body by the suppleness of it and by the seam of one black stocking, which was crooked where she had redonned it in a hurry. It was like a spider crawling up her leg until it disappeared under the flounced hem of her Jezebel dress.

“N
O BETTER THAN
a streetwalker,” Joseph said as he backed her against the kitchen wall. She didn’t answer, as there was no time.

She saw what was coming and that she was helpless to prevent it. In the sockets of his eyes rage, that mad rage that is the inverse of love. He struck her first with his hands, struck wildly and sometimes in his fury missed altogether. He laughed, bitter mirthless laughter, and challenged her to admit it, that yes, yes, she would have thrown herself at Mick Bugler, craven. His temper grew all the greater because she refused to answer. He struck her now viciously. Her confession was essential to him. If she did not admit it, it would lurk inside her, like a child, like Bugler’s bastard seed to contaminate her. When she refused to answer, he picked up the nearest thing—it was a clothes brush—and with the wooden back he hit her on the face, the face which had signalled its debauch. Hearing her teeth champing off one another, she thought they were cracking, and swerving to avoid him, she fell and struck her temple on the edge of the kitchen table. In some gasp of sanity he pulled back at the sight of blood.

“Holy Jesus,” he said, covering up his eyes, and she got past him and up the stairs and along the landing to her bedroom.

There was no key to the door and she stood with her back to it, feeling with her hand the blood wetting her hair and running down the side of her temple, feeling no pain at all, only the enormity of what had happened. In one hour on a sultry Sunday, a lifetime of hope and battered hope and discovery.

When she heard the car starting up, she went across to the bathroom, wrapped a towel around her head, wedged it down with an old straw hat, not once daring to look in the mirror. In the room she dragged a chair and a chest of drawers to secure the door, but knew he could break it down if he so wished. She was still sitting there when darkness came on and the cows of their own accord came into the yard waiting to be milked. There was no one to milk them, because she would not go down. Phrases of the letters came to goad her:

Look up to the barren heights
Is there any place where you have not been ravaged?

How could she have not suspected? How could she have believed that Bugler, so taciturn, would ever have expressed himself in that way? She cringed as she recalled the waiting, fanning herself uselessly with her own hot hand, rehearsing the first shy words, then that cat slinking through the grass, a black cat with a white paw, and her hissing at it and it staying there with a knowing, spiteful look, then running away, urgent like a messenger. A black cat that was supposed to be for good luck.

She now saw through it completely. There was the Crock who would have conspired with Josephine and others waiting to catch her out so that they could nudge one another at Mass, then rush up to her afterwards and invite her for a coffee to the hotel. Bugler would soon be told of it and they would all have a good laugh.

When he came home late, she shouted out the window that cows were waiting to be milked. Later he turned the knob of her door several times and then went off to bed, desperate. He was up early, earlier than usual, and he left the first mug of tea outside the door, then another and still another, telling her that they were going cold. She knew by his abject voice that he was sorry. Never once in all their childhood or youth had he touched her. The opposite. When she cut her fingers once on a razor blade that was wedged into the top shelf of the dresser, he put them in his mouth to spare her the terror of the lively spurting blood. So many little memories came to her, the pair of them swinging on a gate on a summer’s evening, hoping for visitors, going down to the riverbank to find sorrel, talking to each other from their twin beds at night, his telling her how he was her knight and would defend her against all. When each of her parents died, it was he who broke it to her, said they were gone up to heaven and looking down. She was ten and eleven then.

By evening she felt strong enough to go down. The stove was piping hot and the table laid: signs of clemency. Taking one look at her bruises, like the purple of pansies, he flinched and idiotically began to hum. Fear had come into the house and with fear comes falsity.

“Do you need a doctor?” he said, mortified.

“For what?!” she replied, and by her intimation he did not have to ask any further. He searched in the drawer then for painkillers and put them beside her plate. They ate in silence. It was cooked ham and pickles that were oversour.

Even before she went to the dairy she knew that the letters would be gone. The biscuit tin was gapingly empty, the lid thrown to one side, the bunch of thyme on the floor dirty and trodden upon. It was as if bandits had been. She sat, then, for a long time among the cobwebbed mantles and talked to herself. She was telling herself that if she could live through it, allowing each and every second of it to go inside, the expectancy, the lunacy, the bitter fall, that then she would feel it to the marrow of her being and she would be able to bear it and the hurt of it would be hers and hers alone. It was like staring at the rock face of the mountain, its greyness, its sheerness, its cold despair going behind the eyelids, behind the eyes, into self so that self and rock face were one, hope and stone, stone hopes to kill any lingering memories of Bugler.

A week later his hired hand, Boscoe, and himself went to the City Mart and he came home with a gift. It was a leather handbag, the clasp a thick knob of amber with streaks of light running inside it like sun rays. There were pockets for her keys, her comb, her money, and her flapjack, as he said.

“Miss Carruthers chose it,” he said, and because it was made in Genoa he looked up the name in the encyclopaedia and read out its characteristics, the population, the climate, and the special attractions for a visitor to that city.

She was standing in the middle of the kitchen floor, the long corded strap dangling from her wrist.

“You can go to him if you want,” he said bashfully.

“I’m not going anywhere,” she said, quite crisp. She had missed Mass for two Sundays, and when she heard the tractor coming or going she bolted and hid behind a wall.

I
T WAS IN
Nelly’s Bar that Joseph and Bugler finally came face to face. They had exchanged heated words up by a dumper and again at the garage when Bugler tried to return a cheque which Joseph had sent him. But it was in Nelly’s Bar, with its artefacts, its old stone crocks, and its three china sleeping dolls, that Bugler would confront him and make a mockery of him. Nelly watched it all, half smiling, presiding as she did behind the counter in her cardigan and her knitted cap skewered with a big hatpin.

“Is this your dirty work, Brennan?” Bugler asked, and tossed the newspaper cutting down the length of the bar. He merely cited the odd word from it. He did not read it in full, as there was no need. People had already read it when it appeared in the parish journal and was signed “Anonymous.” Everyone knew it was Bugler because of the references to the bearded one who came like a thief in the night. There were guffaws as Bugler read out the fancy quotations—“the arrow that flieth by day or the plague that walketh in the dark”—and joking objections about the eagle with divers feathers.

“Were you trying to say something to me?” Bugler said, strolling down the bar to where Joseph sat.

“If the cap fits, wear it,” Joseph said, refusing to look up.

“Afraid to fight me?” Bugler said.

“Easy now, Mick . . . easy. He has a short fuse,” someone said.

“You call me a scorpion . . . so what does that make you?” Bugler asked, then added jocularly, “A snake. We are talking biblical, aren’t we?”

“Hit him, Joe . . . hit him.”

“He hasn’t the guts . . . Joe Chicken,” Bugler said, and then standing above him, he swore at him. “Get off my back, Brennan.”

“Get off my mountain,” Joseph said.

“It’s my mountain too . . . it’s halved.”

“Your half is only yours because your people worked for the landlords. They were bailiffs. They were hated. That’s why most of them emigrated. . .”

“Well, one of them is back,” Bugler said, taking him by the lapel and jerking him up. He struck him then, not a hard blow, more a gesture of vindication and disdain, and taken so by surprise, Joseph stumbled and hit blindly, aiming at the torso, and soon they were pegging into one another, chairs kicked back, people standing to one side, calling for it to stop, yet no one intervening, because that would mean thwarting the pride of one or the other. It didn’t seem very dangerous, just a skirmish between two men who were born enemies and no worse than any brawl in the street in the small hours of a Saturday night. When Joseph fell backwards there was alarm. Grabbing hold of the counter to get up, he touched on a tray of glasses which came crashing to the floor, broken pieces of glass scattered everywhere. As he stood up they saw that he was holding a thick shard and all was commotion then as a few of the men ringed around him appealing to him to put it down and Nelly telling Caimin, the young barman, to fly up the street to get a guard. Coming outside the counter she crossed and spoke to Bugler, who deferred to her and, picking up his hat, went out.

The aftermath became as rowdy as the brawl itself, with people reconstructing it, saying how quick it had been, how sudden and how close it got to becoming nasty. Joseph was brought to the fire, shaken, a thin rivulet of blood running down his neck, and women asking him if he was all right. Caimin, who was disappointed at the fact that it had ended so abruptly, began to describe it to the guard: the two types of punches, one an amateur and one a pro, with Bugler having the upper hand from the start, the macho, the know-how.

“Joe gave as good as he got,” one of the men said.

“Don’t be daft . . . He was nowhere near,” Caimin said, and taking the clipping from the floor, he asked Nelly if they could frame it and hang it as a souvenir of the night middleweight Brennan lost to the champion Bugler.

“Don’t mind him, Joseph . . . he raves,” Miss Carruthers kept saying. As new people came into the bar they were told different versions as to who started the fight, whose fault it was, who lost and who won. Nelly sat furious, ruing the stone jar that got knocked from a shelf and her dried flowers that were like hen meal over the floor. People pressed drinks on each other. Glasses of porter, three-quarters filled, stood like trophies on the counter, the fawn gouts of foam dimpling softly and subsiding into the yeasty brew. Joseph sat silently but with an expression of furious dismay in his eyes at the way he was being belittled.

“Bugler is a rat . . . An out-and-out rat,” one said to console him.

“I won’t allow that,” Nelly said sharply.

“That’s because he got you a gander for your goose.”

“So he did,” she said, reddening.

“And where did he get it . . . He stole it out of someone’s farmyard.”

“He’s a bad neighbour. He’s lethal,” Joseph said, for all to hear.

“So are you . . . After what you did to his dog . . . It was a lethal thing to lock him up,” Caimin said.

“His dog kept coming every night to bring our Goldie off to the woods . . . corrupting her.”

“Like his master,” Caimin said, egging him on now.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Your sister . . . She meets him in the woods. Their love nest. . .”

Joseph rose then and with a ludicrous sense of his own powers began to hit at Caimin, who egged him along, repeating the taunt, mentioning the part of the wood, the rug flung down beside the tractor, and presently they were locked in a fresh fight, with Caimin easily scoring, and for the second time in the one evening Joseph was seen tumbling backwards, except this time the trapdoor down to the cellar had been opened as crates of beer were carted up. He vanished before their eyes, down into a well, a darkness from which came the thud of his fall and then a dreadful silence.