An Irish Christmas Feast, page 37
‘I remember years ago,’ Maggie recalled, ‘to have been sitting in the commercial room of the Manklefort Hotel in Dublin with my brother Thady and his girlfriend. The lights were low at the time and we could barely make out each other’s faces. The lights had been dimmed on the instructions of the night porter who warned us to keep our voices down because members of the garda síochána were on the prowl for illegal patrons. Shortly after he left, a passing car threw its lights through a gap in the window curtains. A shaft of this light fell on my brother’s face and suddenly his features were transformed into those of my father who had died the year before. If I didn’t know better I might have imagined that he had returned briefly from the dead to be with us. Then the lights were gone and the image disappeared. I remember I had never been so lonely after that brief glimpse of his face.’
‘Well you’re not lonely now.’ Matt gently placed his arms round her and drew her close.
On the following evening after Maggie had questioned all her sources she placed her findings before her husband. He neither hummed nor hawed until she had put the facts before him. It was her wont to persevere with all her narratives without pause and instead of being bored or disinterested as some might be, Matt found himself well informed at the end of the proceedings and entertained as well.
Maggie never lingered over her revelations no matter how interesting or how salacious they might seem. Matt would settle himself at the outset and on this occasion he was well pleased for she was a woman who never lied. Of course he would have to admit that he found a certain unique musicality in her voice that he found in no other. There was also a deep warmth and never, that he could recall, had there been the least stridency or harshness. It had occurred to him on a number of occasions that it might be his affection for her that made him feel so enraptured. Still he remained convinced that an independent adjudicator would give her full marks if there was a competition for housewives’ tales.
She had, apparently, discovered the identity of the mysterious woman whose face in the car light had brought about Gerry’s fainting spell. The woman was a first cousin of Gerry’s late wife Pegeen and had returned home to her native parish a few short days before in the hope of meeting the man for whom she had pined since the day her cousin had married him. She had not come home for the funeral as she felt that it might have been an intrusion on her part and besides there was the protocol involved. If Gerry’s affections were to be successfully transferred from his late wife to that wife’s cousin then a period of at least six months should be allowed to pass. Consequently she had postponed her return until she could bear her burden no longer. She had been mortified when Gerry had collapsed after her face had been revealed to him. She had hoped that he would stop and chat or even take her in his arms but that had been a wild dream or so she admitted.
‘What I propose to do,’ Maggie confided to her husband, ‘is invite her here for Christmas dinner and allow herself and Gerry to renew their relationship. I know, I know what you’re going to say. You’re going to say that it wasn’t much of a relationship to begin with but my answer to that is that you cannot quench a love that burns as brightly as Noreen Meeke’s and, on the other hand, Gerry will die from loneliness if he doesn’t find a partner soon.’
Maggie folded her arms as she waited for her husband’s appraisal. It must be said here, however, that there were many in the town who regarded Maggie as a consummate busy-body and a fully-fledged meddler. There were others, and this body included her husband, who saw her as an incurable romantic and an amateur matchmaker whose only aim was to bring lonely people together in holy wedlock. By way of arbitration Matt took his wife on his lap and kissed her gently as he complimented her on a fine afternoon’s work, ‘for,’ said Matt, ‘you have accomplished two important things. You have solved a mystery which might well hang over us for many a year and you have sown the seeds of love. What more could you do on behalf of the ignorant and the lonely, on behalf of all the unfulfilled in love and knowledge? How blessed I am to have for a wife such a wonderful creature.’
Maggie beamed and blushed although she was well aware that her husband often used flowery language when he paid homage to her.
Christmas dinner at Coumer’s was a rare success. Noreen Meeke was an instant success with the children and Gerry, always a favourite, added to an afternoon of unpremeditated joy. By the time the Christmas and New Year festivities ended the relationship between Gerry and Noreen was on a firm footing.
Although both were people who might be fairly described as reserved they were soon linking arms in the streets and boreens of the parish and by the time the first salmon started to run before the beginning of the fishing season there was talk of a Christmas marriage. The good doctor and his friend Gerry were unusually successful, landing a ten- and twelve-pound salmon respectively with two-and-a-half inch blue minnows. The water was right for the colour and the size of bait and on the second day of legal fishing Gerry landed a second fish with the same lure. This salmon was presented to the parish priest Canon Coodle, himself a retired fisherman but now too elderly for the vicissitudes of flood-waters and gravelly streams. Long tradition obliged the first angler who bagged his second salmon of the season to present it to the parish priest. In cases where the angler might be in need the canon always paid the going rate but Gerry would not countenance financial reward.
‘Tell the canon to say a prayer for me,’ he informed Mrs Hanlon after she had accepted the fresh fish on her master’s behalf.
‘I’ll do that Gerry,’ she had promised, ‘and I’ll say one myself as well.’
The spring and summer went by and in the middle of September Gerry found himself gainful employment in Folan’s timber-yard. Shortly afterwards he became engaged to Noreen Meeke and a fortnight before Christmas, to the day, the pair were married free, gratis and for nothing by the legendary Canon Coodle himself.
‘Don’t forget in my obituary,’ he wagged a cautionary finger at his friend Matt Coumer, ‘to tell them about the eighteen-pounder I landed in Shanowen the very day after I was made canon of this parish.’
Matt promised the outstanding catch would be resurrected for the occasion but added the rider that should roles be reversed the nineteen-pounder he bagged at the Black Stick on his second day out must not be excluded. It was not the first time it occurred to the canon that anglers were inordinately proud of their catches and why wouldn’t they be he thought defensively to himself when the average weight of a spring fish was roughly eight pounds.
As Christmas drew near the love and compassion, often buried out of sight in men’s hearts, began to flow so that by the time Christmas Eve came round there was an unmistakable air of goodwill and generosity all over the parish. The dour became cordial, the gripers grew cheerful, the grim grew gracious and so forth and so on until it seemed that a Christmas of untold joy was at hand. Every household radiated happiness, except one.
It had come to pass that Noreen Meeke the blushing bride of Gerry had ceased to blush, the laughter to which she had been addicted before she married vanished from her lips after marriage. In short Noreen was anything but meek and poor Gerry who was surely entitled to his fair share of marital bliss became once more a martyr to the matrimonial state. She had begun to natter early one morning as he dressed for work. The morning was dark and gloomy enough as it was without the addition of human woe to drag it down further. Gerry said nothing. He went to the side of the bed and he kissed his babbling bride to silence. Afterwards he went straight out the door to his place of work at Folan’s timber-yard. He prayed that by the time he returned for his lunch she would be her old self once more but it was not to be.
There was no lunch but down from the room came a powerful verbal barrage which made Gerry believe for a moment that his late wife had been reincarnated. Trembling he opened the bedroom door and was gratified to see that it was his new wife who occupied the bed from which she was still holding forth. All the abuse wasn’t directed at Gerry although it would be true to say that the greater portion of it was. She excluded none of his friends or neighbours reserving the choicer profanities for Matt and Maggie Coumer but most heinously of all she announced in a powerful voice that the flames of hell were not hot enough for Canon Coodle, his housekeeper and the two curates, a quartet, incidentally, on whom until this time nobody had laid a hard word.
Vainly Gerry tried to calm her. He spoke with the utmost tenderness and reassured her of his undying love. He spoke of the wonderful Christmas they would have and of the happy times after that. He endeavoured to calm, cajole and canoodle her but all his physical efforts were rejected and all his blandishments fell on deaf ears. he spent his entire lunch break with her. That evening Matt paid her a visit and prescribed some medication.
At ten o’clock that night, without a word to anyone, Gerry betook himself to an ancient water-keeper’s lodge above the river bank. It was situated about two miles outside the town and was hidden from every approach by dense natural growth. he made several journeys during the course of the night and early morning until he had accumulated sufficient clothing and utensils to meet his needs. He prepared a fire from some timber and tinder he had brought with him. He slept until noon and when he had breakfasted he spent the remaining day-light hours walking along the river bank. He had brought his rods and lines and lures with him on his final journey to the lodge. He would spend the weeks ahead preparing his fishing gear.
In the course of time Noreen recovered fully but she never mentioned her husband’s name or responded to queries about his welfare. If one was to judge by appearances one would have to conclude that no happier soul existed in the parish. She was well pleased with her deserted wife’s allowance and declared it to be more than adequate.
Gerry, for his part, collected his dole money by arrangement from a small shop where he would purchase all his wants for the week. The shop stood near a cross-roads about a mile from where he resided but it might as well have been a hundred for the terrain was rough and dangerous and a resort of badgers whose rooting and grunting could be heard all night. Compared to the verbal broadsides of Noreen Meeke the sounds of the wilderness were music to Gerry’s ears. Any salmon he bagged was taken to the crossroads shop which acted as an agency for a Waterford city fish buyer. Gerry ignored the other anglers who fished the waters contiguous to his domain. When saluted he grunted an acknowledgement and no more. On a few occasions from the undergrowth he spotted Matt Coumer circling the lodge but he never emerged. He blamed Matt’s wife for landing him in a second disastrous marriage and wanted no more to do with her. He allowed his beard to grow and grow it did down to his naval, grimy, grey and gruesome. He became known as the Hermit of Scartnabrock.
After ten years in the wilderness he eventually fell foul of the wet and the damp and brought pneumonia upon himself. When he failed to appear for several days his friends Matt Coumer and Sergeant Ruttle went in search of him. He lay gasping his last breath on a damp bed when they found him. He managed a smile when he recognised them. It was a smile that touched Matt to the very quick of his being.
The funeral was poorly attended save for the salmon and trout anglers who fished the river from source to mouth year in, year out. They carried the coffin on their shoulders from the church to the grave-yard where Canon Coodle spoke of the kindness Gerry had shown in his healthier days to younger anglers and to strangers who were not well versed in the ways of the river. The canon spoke of Gerry’s attachment to all rivers great and small and explained the influence the river had on himself especially when the dead man and he fished together in the past. He spoke about the tributaries which brought their own special flavour to the river. He spoke of the different tunes the river sang depending on the highs and lows of the ever-flowing waters. He explained how the river never sang the same song twice, how the casual listener might easily be duped into believing that river-song remained the same for days on end until the floods came or the waters dropped in dry seasons to rock bottom. This was not the case at all he told them. There was a subtle difference every day guaranteed by the ever-changing flow. He explained how Gerry knew these things and he told how he himself could never pass a river without stopping to inspect the water and listen to the particular tune of the river in question. Afterwards the anglers went to their favourite watering hole where they toasted the dead angler and drank their fill in his memory.
Noreen never attended the funeral. After a month she packed her bags and returned to England where she married a man who passed by a great river every day but never looked at it. That then is the sad tale of the Hermit of Scartnabrock who so unsuccessfully fished in the waters of matrimony but managed to land a few whoppers in the river of his dreams.
Johnny Naile’s Christmas
It had always been Johnny Naile’s ambition to play the role of Santa Claus. He had nearly succeeded once. He had the appropriate garments on. He hadn’t put a drink to his lips all day. He had stayed indoors from four in the afternoon. He had shaved, washed, cut his toe-nails and then his finger-nails. He had trimmed his red beard and would certainly have been the only red-haired Santa Claus ever to be seen in the village of Cushnalicka.
Cushnalicka had its assortment of cottages and bungalows, forty in all, at either side of the road-way and there were two extra houses, the presbytery and the vicarage. The new vicar, a dapper figure, spare and lean and Church of Ireland, was smiling and pleasant which immediately made him suspect.
‘Anyone,’ the Catholic canon’s housekeeper was fond of maintaining, ‘who smiles non-stop isn’t right in the head.’
The canon and parish priest of Cushnalicka and several surrounding townlands rarely smiled. Neither did his curate Fr Bressnan. ‘He’s too weak to smile’, some of the less charitable of the Catholic parishioners were fond of saying when the curate’s lack of condition would be the prevailing topic.
‘Mrs Topp,’ they would say maliciously, ‘don’t believe in feeding curates. Signs on they’re never the same after a year or two in Cushnalicka.’
‘It’s a wonder to me,’ said Hannah Toben, the schoolmaster’s wife, ‘that they don’t fade away altogether or collapse entirely or be capsized by a gale.’ When she spoke in this disparaging fashion she always made sure that there was no sign of Mrs Topp in the vicinity.
Mrs Topp, a large, ambling, stern-faced widow, was the first to see Johnnie Naile as he attempted to make his way unseen through what was once described by a deceased postman as the most inquisitive resort in Western Europe. Johnnie, in full regalia, was as inconspicuous as his parish priest in full canonicals on Confirmation day. He was heartened as he drew near the presbytery that there was no sign of the housekeeper but then, suddenly, she appeared with a sweeping brush in her hand in pursuit of a heretical tomcat which had entered the sacred precincts without any invitation whatsoever.
George Cudd, the local civic guard who was also the only limb of the law in Cushnalicka, was heard to say that those who credited cats with an understanding of human language weren’t too far wrong. ‘I mean,’ he confided to Mrs Toben, ‘how else would the cat hear that the presbytery was full of mice unless it was a member of our species that let it drop.’
‘They say,’ Mrs Toben returned with equal confidentiality, ‘that all the mice of the parish does have their meetings there.’
‘I’ve heard of stranger happenings,’ the civic guard nodded.
No sooner had Mrs Topp sent the tomcat about his business than she uplifted her brush and intimated in no uncertain terms that the pathetic representation of Santa Claus which was defiling her pavement was to come to a halt forthwith. Johnny Naile’s apologetic smile revealed a mouthful of mixed molars, half of them as black as pitch and the remainder brown as hazelnuts. He was about to proceed on his way to the vicarage where he was expected when Mrs Topp confronted him a second time by forcing the head of the brush against his chest.
‘I’ll be late,’ he pleaded. ‘A promise is a promise missus.’
‘A promise,’ she called out to the street at large, ‘sure no one would expect the likes of you to keep a promise.’
‘This woman would,’ he blurted out and suddenly covered his mouth with the palm of his right hand while he endeavoured to deliver a gentle hand-off with his free hand to the resolute housekeeper. The move made her all the more difficult to shift.
‘You’d better make way for me woman because I’m comin’ through,’ Johnny shouted the warning while Mrs Topp braced herself.
Suddenly she changed her tack. Lowering the sweeping brush she forced a syrupy smile to her lips. Johnny Naile was more curious than disarmed. If Johnny’s teeth were black and brown Mrs Topp’s dentures were as white as snow but with the same tendency to shift. Shift they did with every word she spoke.
‘Ah Johnny,’ she was at her most cajoling now, ‘be a good lad and tell me who the damsel is that you’re meeting?’
‘Can’t do that missus.’ Johnny was adamant.
Mrs Topp thrust a hand under his arm and endeavoured to guide him towards the front door of the presbytery which was still ajar after the cat’s eviction.
‘No, no, no missus,’ Johnny held firm, ‘what about the canon? What would he say if he caught me in the holy presbytery? I’d be excommunicated for sure with maybe jail on top of it.’
‘The canon is gone to Limerick paying his sister her Christmas visit so you need have no fear of him. Come on now,’ she wheedled and leaned her considerable rump against him to misdirect him indoors.
Johnny Naile realised that if he was to escape he would be obliged to knock the housekeeper to the ground and while he was reasonably sure that nothing would happen to her because of her abundant natural padding he could not be certain.
‘Come on,’ she whispered. ‘I’ll pour you a nice glass of the canon’s own whiskey the likes of which you never tasted in all your born days.’
