Wild Decembers (8 page)

“What was her name?”

“I’m ashamed to say I forget.”

They looked at the little ruin, absorbed into and dwarfed by the brooding wilderness, and at the wild garden, the only testament to a woman whose name nobody remembered.

In the river below, a salmon rose up out of the water, bowed like a bright sword thrust up into the air, then down in the water again and up again, glinting, playful.

“That salmon has been all around the world,” he said.

“Like you,” she said.

The summit had the emptiness of desert, no trees, no birds, no shelter, a vista of dun brown, the two of them standing so close as if they had coalesced and his voice quiet, ruminative, telling her how he had always wanted to come back because his mother had kept the memory of it alive for them and had instilled in him the certainty that one day he must go home.

“Some of this was her dowry,” he said, and wished that he could have brought her back before she died.

“What was she like?”

“Lovely . . . She had a beautiful voice. There was a song she used to sing about a young girl in the grounds of a castle. . . ‘The Castle of Dromore.’ Maybe you know it.”

“I don’t.”

“I’ll try and find it for you,” he said.

“Do you feel you have come home?”

“I do now, here . . . With you . . . But not otherwise. I’m not liked . . . They say I’m bad news. I don’t know why.”

Without asking, he took off his jacket and draped it around her. “You’re freezing,” he said. A quick shiver passed between them, lonesome in its wake. Bending, he broke off a stalk of tough grass, ocherish in colour, and gave it to her. A braided keepsake.

R
EENA IS IRONING HER HAIR
, her cheek almost resting on the ironing board, ironing strip after strip of it as if it is a long garment, then smelling the clean soapy smell and envisaging the thought of him tossing it. The fire is on, the flames cracking and playing on the whitewashed walls, making funny-bunny shadows. They have opened a bottle of the tonic wine and put it in the hearth to warm, loot got from Desi the publican for a kiss in the back passage of the hall. Mad to see her garters. She has the Sunday ones on for Bugler, black lace with red rosebuds.

Here in their little abode he will stand, in the middle of the floor probably, look around, screw up his eyes, and stroke his beard, surprised at how cushy it all is. They will have candlelight for that extra romantic touch. Her hair completely ironed, without even a crinkle, she starts to pin the organza bows and stands before the long mirror puffing out her pink cheeks as if she is blowing bubbles or balloons. She can’t stop kissing him in her mind, good kissing, wild kissing, not like the peck she gave Desi, with his stained teeth and his stained tongue, trying to make a dinner out of it.

“Will you stop that moping and get some clothes on you,” Rita says, hurrying in and flinging down the groceries—sliced bread, butter, chicken and ham paste, and a home-made apple pie with the design of a cross on the browned pastry.

“I think I’m in love,” Reena says, fixing the last little bow onto her temple for that cutie look.

“Don’t talk shit.”

“Suppose, Reet, suppose he fell in love with me and me with him and we had a baby.”

“You listen to me, this is business . . . Do you hear . . . Business.”

“I hear you.”

“Hay . . . And grass. Then grazing . . . Then a weeny little bit of a field . . . Then a field.”

“You’re the brains, Reet.”

“And you’re the brawn . . . Wait till he sees your bubs.”

“Wouldn’t you like a dip of his wick?”

“If I want a dip of his wick, I’ll have it.”

“Suppose! Suppose I fell in love with him and you did too . . . We’d be clawing each other and scratching each other’s eyes out.”

“Get dressed,” Rita said for the second time.

“I’m all itch. I’m roasting.”

“Go out and douche yourself in the river.”

“You were the one that first spotted him down at the docks . . . You said he had limbs on him that would crack a woman’s thighs. Tell me, Reet, will I wear a petticoat?” she says, affecting flounder.

“Of course you’ll wear a petticoat . . . You’ll wear the camisole, bloomers and petticoat combined . . . Our dear dead grandmother’s.”

“With the little buttons!”

“With the little buttons.”

“Reet . . . Suppose he doesn’t come after all this.” “He’ll come . . . He’ll come . . . I know when a man is hungry or thirsty.”

“Jesus . . . I’m upside-downy . . . I’m all goosepimples.”

“Douche yourself and be quick about it.”

It was by the light of a lantern that Bugler threw out the bales of hay and watched them jump, jostling each other, like tough opponents jumping for a ball. “Ye’re as good as men.”

“We’re better,” Rita said. The talk then got on to men and women, the difference between the sexes, and soon it was to the married men who were back on the game and a new masseuse, who insisted that her clients completely undress since she undressed herself.

“We saw her through the window . . . Guard Cuddity was there for his bad back,” Reena said.

“Ye’re terrible women altogether.”

“We’re terrible women altogether,” Rita said, taking the pitchfork from him as the work was done.

He brushed the hay off himself and kicked the dust from the toes of his shoes while he waited for his money, a half smile on his lips.

“You’ll come in for the tea?” They both said it.

“I won’t . . . I’m rushed off my feet.”

They began goading him then, asking him was it so that he couldn’t trust himself with any woman, and especially not with gorgeous specimens like themselves.

“I’ll come some Sunday when I have time.”

“You’ll come now . . . We can’t let you go without a bit of supper,” Rita said, ignoring his excuses and telling the world at large that men who live alone are right fools, don’t even know how to fend for themselves.

“Friends . . . Friends,” he said, raising his arms in some sort of appeal.

“We’ll unchain the dog,” Rita said, pointing to a gaunt mongrel at the opposite end of the yard, whining with hunger.

“Is he vicious?”

“He’d eat you,” she said, and laughed, and linked him across to the house.

Low-lit candles in little clumps and a blazing fire were what met him. As he looked around they pointed to some heirlooms, jugs and vases along the dresser, a sausagey cushion of velvet to keep the draught out, and then with coquetry Rita pulled a cloth away to show him the apple pie, made with her own humble hand.

“Well?” Reena said, her eyes on him, dancing, shining, two shades of yellow in the iris, like a cat’s.

“Oh, very nice,” he said, and watched her take a knitting needle, warm it in the fire, and then dunk it into the wine. She whirled it a few times, took it out, the red liquid dripping off it, and held it to his nostrils.

“It mulls it,” she said, winking.

Soon they had him sitting down, drinking, talking of store cattle, the risks, the way the prices changed in the marts from one week to another so that a person never knew, and milking itself going out of fashion.

“I love milking . . . It’s my therapy,” Rita said.

“It’s your therapy,” he said. He knew he should get out.

“I’m all itch, Reet.”

“Why don’t you change, love . . . It’s the fecking hay. It gets into the pores.”

In the candlelight amid bursts of laughter he saw garments being pulled off and pelted across the kitchen, a jumper, a vest, a flowered cotton skirt, which she had to peel down, nothing left but a garment that was knickers and slip. She walked across and stood before him, her breasts in the candle flame pink, pink shelled, yet with the sturdiness of gourds when she held them.

“Can you open the wee buttons?”

“What’s this . . . the Black Arts?” he said, half-blasé.

“Are you afraid of us?” Rita said in his ear.

“Ah, no, he’s shy . . . I love a shy man,” Reena said, taking his hand in hers to undo the eight tiny mother-of-pearl buttons from the navel down.

Naked now, she begins to dance, her hair, then her head, then her torso working themselves into a frenzy, the various organza bows dropping of their own accord and the kitchen now like some den of malarkey and wantonness. Jumping onto his chair to reach for the melodeon that was above the mantelpiece, Rita has one foot on the seat of the chair and the other locked into his groin. She paused. Then his hand of its own accord went under the skirt to where she was stark naked.

“Is this an invite?” he said, the hand just resting there, feeling the cool of the flesh in contrast with the warm bush, his blood starting to pump.

“Was that nice?” she said as she took down the melodeon and sat on a wooden barrel, her legs wide apart, and began to play a rousing medley. Reena danced with abandon, using her hair as if it was some fetish, and splaying open her fingers to show vivid hennaed crevices. Almost twice she fell, then staggered, regained her balance, and eventually she threw herself upon him, her arms coming around his neck, her legs girdling his middle as she kissed him repeatedly with a repertoire of lewd and coaxing words.

He felt the other one undoing his laces, then his shoes being taken off and his socks as he dug his buttocks into the back of the chair to stop her from removing his trousers.

“What’s all this?” he said.

“Two for the price of one,” Rita said, and began to fumble, saying where in hell’s name was that codpiece, and finding it, she measured it in her mind, then from under a vase got the ruler and measured him for fun, telling her sister not to forget it, to make a note of it for her little table of measurements in years to come.

“Give a poor man a break,” he said then.

“Draw the shades, Reena dear,” she said, and crossing she dragged a folded mattress from under the milk stool, unrolled it, and flung it down.

“I’m an engaged man,” Bugler said, reaching for his shoes and socks.

“Bollocks . . . You rode the songstress in her father’s saddle room, we heard.”

Caught like that and with Rosemary coming before the summer, he feels trapped.

“Look,” he began, getting earnest. “Why don’t we sit and talk and have a glass of wine like good friends.”

“Strut your stuff, Reen,” Rita said. It was the cue for Reena to lie out on the mattress, lift her hair above her head, and then, with each and every articulation of arms, legs, and limbs, try to entice him over, the movements reflected on the wall as limbs of flame, inflammatory.

“For God’s sake,” he says, rising. Rita, having divested him of his trousers, is now hanging them on the kitchen clothesline next to the broderie anglaise garment. She stands back from it then with a little song.

As I was going to the fair of Athy
I saw an aul petticoat hanging to dry.
I took off my drawers and hung them thereby
To keep that aul petticoat wa-rm.

Reena is now propped with cushions and stroking a georgette scarf to add to her enticements, moving and arching, serpentine, a corpus of different pinks, all of her in a quiver and the mouth emitting little gasping sighs. He stares with a prolonged and mesmerised stare.

“Better than the lakes of Killarney,” Rita says from behind his back, and pushes him forward as Reena’s arms come up to lessen the thud of his fall on the thin mattress.

“Sweetheart,” and she holds him a fraction above her so that she can see him seeing the gluttony that is in her eyes.

“The business,” Rita says, settling herself on the barrel with her melodeon.

“His coconut’s shrunk,” Reena says from the floor.

“Nurture it.”

“Will you clip back my hair . . . It’s in my mouth.”

“Good girl . . . The Resurrection and the Life.”

From time to time Reena lifts her face to breathe or to arch her neck, Rita watching with a rapt attention, the accordion on her lap, half opened, with now and then random notes of stray music coming from it until the moment she feels drawn to crouch down, her voice now a repetition of urgencies—“Give it to him, Reen . . . Give it to him . . . The rich reluctant bastard. Show him who wears the trousers in this hideaway house.”

“When he wakened it was almost light; a slit of it came through the crack in the shutters which she had drawn. He saw himself up and dressed and off out, gone, and Jesus, the mess. He would have to knock a few quid off the hay to keep them from spilling. They were sound asleep, two bodies clasped together in a mimicry of galling innocence, a strand of Rita’s long hair under his elbow as he eased his way out. On the barrel the half-open melodeon, strangely obscene, the fawn semi-parted pleats as if about to start up again and jinx his getaway. He saw her eyes, narrowing, scheming, darting from his face down the length of his body and up again. It was Rita wide awake.

“What time is it?” he said as nonchalantly as he could manage.

“It’s morning,” she said.

“Morning,” he said, and crawled out to pick his own clothes from the jumble of garments in the corner. His trousers were still hanging up.