An Irish Christmas Feast, page 39
‘I have to go,’ she said, ‘Limerick’s coming up.’
He rose when she did and walked with her to her seat where she recovered her bags and her coat. He took the bags in hand and made his way towards the exit.
‘Will I see you again?’ she smiled embarrassed by her courage.
‘I hope so,’ he answered.
‘Have you got a biro?’ she asked.
As he wrote her Dublin phone number on a slip of paper he spoke without raising his head. ‘I hope you’ll be in when I ring you,’ he said.
‘If I’m not,’ she said, ‘you must ring again and again.’ Then she was gone.
He found a vacant seat and a place for his suitcase and drifted into an uneasy slumber from which he did not waken until he arrived in Trallock. He looked at his watch. ‘Time for another drink,’ he said.
His mother never went to bed before midnight. His sisters and brother would be awake expecting him. Despite many lapses over several Christmases their faith in him never wavered.
In a downtown pub he joined with a party of friends from his boyhood. After midnight had passed he reminded himself that he should go home. He was fully aware of the pattern into which he was falling. It was exactly the same as the past several Christmases. He was forced to admit that while he had a shilling in his pocket he was a compulsive avoider of home and family. He knew that his relationship with his mother was on the line and yet when he was asked by his friends if he was having another drink he confirmed that he was. He often asked himself if he was an alcoholic but he would always provide himself with reassuring answers. He could, for instance, go off the juice any time he wanted. He was popular with his friends. He had a good job in the Department of Industry and Commerce. His superiors had no complaints to make about him. Okay, so he owed a few pounds. He owed money to his mother. Frantically he searched his pockets. The presents which he had purchased and given away had taken their toll on his finances; so had the drinks he purchased.
In recall he realised that nobody had brought him a single drink all day, not until now. His needless extravagance with total strangers had left him with no more than a few pounds. Thank God he had purchased a return ticket. He remembered one very large order for which he had paid that morning in the pub near the station. A group of friends had joined his poor people at the next table. Introductions followed and he found himself paying for their drinks. He had been shocked at the price but he had insisted despite the protestations of the recipients. Phrases like ‘ah you’re too decent!’ and ‘he has a heart o’ gold’ started to drift back to him through the alcoholic excitement of the morning. Now he was left with a single five-pound note. Aenias had had eighty pounds starting out. He might not be an alcoholic but he was without doubt a wanton spendthrift. It would have to stop. He recalled the previous Christmas when his mother discovered he was broke and that this was the reason he stayed in bed over the holiday.
‘I’m not being hard on you Aeney,’ she told him, ‘there’s no need when you’re so hard on yourself. You’re just like your father, spending all you have on strangers and no thought for your own. How nice it would be for your brother and sisters if you took them to the pictures. If you had a car you could take us all for a drive.’
He had laughed bitterly but inwardly at this. A car! That was rich when he couldn’t even afford a bicycle. The man behind the bar counter was calling time. Aenias looked at his watch. Mother o’ God! Five o’clock in the morning! Where did the hours go! All victims of the season he told himself, the same as his money. As he walked home with his suitcase rattling he insisted to the stars overhead that he was just a creep. He found the key of the front door and tiptoed upstairs to bed. There was no sound in the house.
Later when he woke it was still dark but his watch told him that it was the darkness of the afternoon of Christmas Day. Why had nobody alerted him! The least they might have done was to call him for the mass or for his Christmas dinner. Downstairs his brother and sisters assured him that they had called him repeatedly but that he had been in a stupor every time. They placed his Christmas dinner in front of him. It was still hot but the pain in his head saw off his appetite. He pecked at the food and asked about his mother. When he didn’t wake she had rented a cab and gone to her sister in the country. She might not return for a few days. She had not been feeling well. They were careful to lay no blame on him.
He told them how he had agonised about their presents and that he had no money either. He was truly ashamed of himself but they gathered round him and told him they loved him. They still had their Christmas monies, presents from neighbours, from aunts, uncles and cousins, dollars from America and English pounds galore. They heaped it upon him and to give him his due he faithfully recorded every penny he borrowed. The fact that he already owed them never entered the picture. In a few weeks he assured them he would repay every penny. He would go off the drink and he would never embarrass anybody again, particularly at Christmas. They told him he never embarrassed anybody in his life and that the money they gave him was a gift and that he was to forget about it.
They went for a walk round the deserted town stopping at each of the three churches to visit the sacred cribs where the infant Jesus lay, serenely, in his cot. The sisters Rita and Fiona, fifteen and fourteen, linked arms to their older brother throughout while Tom, the younger brother, brought up the rear. After an hour they returned to the family home where Aenias managed to finish most of the turkey and stuffing he had been unable to stomach earlier. Afterwards the foursome played cards and still later Aenias regaled them with city tales, largely humorous but sometimes unbearably sad. As the night wore on Aenias began to look at his watch with increasing regularity. His listeners guessed that his anxiety for drink was getting to him.
‘Why don’t you two go for a drink?’ the older sister suggested to the brothers.
‘Well now,’ said Aenias with a chuckle, ‘that would be the very last thought in my head.’
‘Me too,’ Tom put in, ‘but if my mother finds out life won’t be worth living for the rest of the year.’
‘There’s nobody here going to tell her,’ Fiona assured him, ‘provided of course ...’ and she left the phrase hanging as Aenias looked speculatively from one sister to the other.
‘Provided what?’ he asked.
‘Well,’ Fiona explained reluctantly. ‘He puked into the kitchen sink the last time and never cleaned up.’
‘I promise I won’t ever again do that,’ tom assured her. ‘I was green then.’
‘Of course you were.’ Aenias clapped him on the back. ‘I puked in the kitchen sink myself when I was seventeen and you can be sure that very few sinks have escaped a good puke at this time of the year.
‘What time will you be back?’ the younger sister asked.
‘We’ll be back in an hour at the outside,’ Aenias promised.
‘We’ll wait up then.’ The older sister’s tone carried a trace of uncertainty. As the brothers left Aenias kissed both sisters and promised he would be as good as his word but again the pattern remained unchanged except that Tom had more than enough by the time midnight came round. Aenias would follow much later. He fell in with his companions of the previous night. They were pleased to see him. Those in big groups who failed to buy their rounds eventually found themselves isolated. It had been an established fact for years that Aenias always saw to his round and generally bought more than his share. Aenias left the premises where he had spent seven consecutive hours at six o’clock on the morning of St Stephen’s Day or the Wren’s Day as they still called it in the locality.
Aenias did not rise on the following day. The same dull headache assailed him when he awakened at noon. He declined all offers of food or drink and fell into a deep sleep from which he did not wake until nine o’clock that night. He missed the colourful wrenboys’ bands with their spotless white uniforms, their tinselly, peaked caps and their painted moustaches as well as all the traditional singing and dancing for which they were justly famous.
Aenias crept round the room on tiptoe and located his trousers. He searched the pockets and found only a handful of silver. The pockets of his coat were not nearly as productive. He went back to bed. He could not face the group, who would surely be in the public house by now, without the price of a round at least. He realised that his brother and the girls were waiting downstairs but he did not have the heart to face them. Filled with self-loathing he reminded himself for the umpteenth time since he came home that he was nothing more than a creep.
‘I’m gone beyond redemption,’ he said in a whisper, ‘and that’s a terrible thing to say at Christmas.’
He woke several times during the night. It was still dark when he started to get ready for the train. As he shaved he winced at the smell of rashers frying downstairs. He prayed that his mother would still be away. Hardly home yet he told himself. She would have confronted him already. He could have spent another day at home, even two days, but his time had come. No money and no zest and no hope.
He put on a brave face as he went downstairs. He rushed out to the back kitchen when he beheld the enormous display on his plate. It was colourful as it was plentiful with cubes of black and white puddings, sausages nicely browned, a little burning here and there which was the way he liked them. He didn’t deserve such sisters. Then there were tomatoes in abundance each sliced into equal parts, and liver. Where the blazes did they get the liver on a holiday morning and at such an hour! Gently he embraced sisters and brother, relishing their healthy appetites as he tinkered with the toast for which he had asked.
At the station the four Macksons stood dejectedly together. Aenias leaned over and whispered to Tom. ‘I am the sole owner,’ he said, ‘of the worst headache any man ever had.’
‘I’ll pray for you,’ Tom whispered back. ‘From now on I’ll pray for you all the time.
‘Pray for me!’ Aenias was about to laugh but then it came back to him, something his mother had told him one day that last Christmas they spoke together. ‘Tom’s teachers believe he has a vocation for the priesthood,’ she had told him proudly.
As they moved towards the train which had silently entered the station Aenias whispered a second time to his brother. ‘I could do with a few prayers,’ he said. He found himself shivering uncontrollably as the sisters handed him the suitcase. He felt like a man deserted and degraded as they stepped backwards, their eyes brimming with tears. The suitcase contained infinitely more on its return journey. There was a heavy pull-over and a shirt from his mother, socks, underwear and towels from his sisters and The Oxford Book of Irish Verse from Tom.
The Greatest Wake of All
Sam Toper always looked forward to Christmas. Sam’s wife and family did not. Sam looked forward to Christmas because it was a time of free drinks. If one chanced to be in the right bar at the right time one was always sure to meet merry old gentlemen and, indeed, younger gentlemen who insisted in buying drinks for all and sundry. They would even buy drinks for people they had never before seen in all their lives. Sam couldn’t understand it but because it was beneficial to him he totally accepted it. You wouldn’t have any business explaining the spirit of Christmas to Sam and need I add that expressions like ‘peace and goodwill’ or ‘come all ye faithful’ would be meaningless to him.
Down deep he understood that there was an inexplicable chemistry at work, a chemistry which ordained that stingy oul’ codgers who otherwise would not give him the time of day were prepared to press free drink on him at this particular time of year. If you were to suggest to Sam that he might more fully enter into the spirit of things if he himself bought drinks for people who were worse off than he was, Sam would be certain to double over in convulsions of laughter. From the look on his face after the laughter had subsided you would gather that it was one of the more preposterous proposals he had ever heard. Those who knew Sam well such as his wife and family and, of course, his neighbours were all agreed that Sam was a lousy creep, that he would not give you the itch if he had nine doses of it and that the idea of returning a favour was nothing short of reprehensible.
His employer, one Bustler Hearne, would have sacked him immediately after taking him on but for the fact that he could get no one else to work for him. Bustler Hearne was a bully and had beaten the daylights out of most of his previous employees for heinous crimes such as being late five minutes on wet mornings or for suggesting a rise in wages. It must however be taken into account that nobody else would employ Sam Toper because they couldn’t motivate him the way Bustler could.
Bustler’s business consisted of plucking and trussing fowl, particularly geese and turkeys, during the run-up to Christmas. For weeks before he would purchase his Christmas requirements from the fowl-rich countryside within a radius of ten miles. Of his regular employees, a Miss Dotie Tupper aged eighty-four was in charge of cash sales and another, our friend Sam, was fowl dispatcher and plucker-in-chief. Extra staff were taken on during the Christmas period. There was no such structure as a regular wage. One was paid for the number of turkeys plucked in the round of a day and woe betide the man or woman who damaged birds while plucking.
Sam was a model plucker when he put his mind to it and because he was possessed of an insatiable appetite for pints of stout he plucked like a man possessed, often earning three times as much as ordinary pluckers. Sam’s wife Moya and their seven children had no great regard for Christmas. They loved their mother and each other after a fashion but because Christmas had never been kind to them they were never generous in their praise of it. There was no scarcity of food. The requisite share of Sam’s weekly wage was put aside for Moya and would be collected by one of the older children when it fell due. Sam kept the balance so that he might satisfy his outrageous thirst.
‘If,’ said Canon Coodle the well-beloved parish priest, ‘there is even a solitary half-penny missing from Moya’s share of your wages I will raise you aloft and turn you inside out after which I will truss you and singe you and cast you into the depths of the quarry.’ It mattered not to Canon Coodle that there was no water in the quarry hole nor had there ever been. It was the way he used his deep voice that made the hair stand on Sam’s head.
There was another reason why the young Topers had no great affection for Christmas. They were constrained by their father to work as part-time goose and turkey pluckers during the Christmas holidays when other youngsters were roving the countryside in search of holly and ivy for the family cribs. They were made to work from dawn till dark and deprived of their rightful wages by their drink-crazed father. It was too late when Sergeant Ruttle heard about it but when he did he presented Sam with three deep and accurate kicks on his booze-fattened posterior and threatened him with life imprisonment if such a malpractice ever occurred again.
After that the children started to enjoy Christmas especially when Canon Coodle found them suitable employment for a few days before Christmas. The money would be spent on inexpensive gifts before their father found out about it and demanded that it be handed over so that he might slake his unquenchable thirst.
When the three older children arrived into their middle and late teens they made contact with aunts and uncles in England and the United States and eventually wound up in New York where they found gainful employment. They would save most assiduously from their very first wage packet with a view to bringing the entire family, father excluded, to New York where they might start life afresh.
Naturally the three eldest went first. They kept their departure a secret from their father. When he found out he locked the remainder of the family out for several nights. They found refuge with neighbours until Sergeant Ruttle was informed. On this occasion, although by no means a violent man, the sergeant doubled the number of posterior kicks normally implanted. Afterwards Sam took a pledge against drink which lasted for twenty-four hours.
Life went on and then an elderly neighbour died. He was one of two brothers, pint-sized cobblers who eked out the most meagre of existences in a tiny, one-storeyed house five doors up the lane-way from the Toper abode. People who came with shoes to be repaired had difficulty in telling the brothers apart. They were aged seventy and seventy-one, always slept in the same bed, never argued, were invariably kind to each other and never missed eight o’clock morning mass in St Mary’s church in the centre of the town. Let there be hail, rain or thunder, let there be sleet, snow or storm the brothers faced the elements each morning with happy faces and cheerful hearts.
The Toper children spent much of their spare time during the winter months huddled around the diminutive peat fire in the cobblers’ shop listening to the many folktales which had been passed on from generation to generation and which now reposed in the fabulous memory of the compact cobblers of Cobblers’ Lane for it was by this name that the lane was known.
All would change in a few short years. The last of the cobblers passed on to that happy clime where wax and heelball, thongs and laces were as plenteous as the green grass on the lush pastures of planet earth and where the shining steel of lasts and awls lighted the surrounds as far as the eye could see. People no longer slept on straw mattresses and there would be no more fleas. Urban councils everywhere would provide sturdy homes with baths and toilets and sufficient rooms for modern families. But there would always be people who would look askance at houses for the poor, holidays for the poor, subsistence for the poor and enough to eat for the poor.
The cobblers of Cobblers’ Lane went by the names of Mickey and Mattie Mokely. It was Mattie who died one night in his sleep. When Mickey felt the cold form he knew that something was amiss. He called his brother gently by his name and when that failed to elicit a response he tapped him gingerly on the shoulder. He slapped him on the back but there was no reaction so he rose from the bed and lighted a candle which he held under Mattie’s nose and then under Mattie’s mouth but not the least flicker did the flame design. The younger brother donned his clothes, for now there was irrefutable proof that his brother was dead. As soon as he was dressed he bent over his brother’s ear and recited the final act of contrition. Then he called the neighbours, one of whom went for the doctor while two went for the priest because it was the custom that a lone man or woman should never go for the priest unless there was no one else available. It was believed that a lone person might be more susceptible to the wiles of the devil and might be diverted from the presbytery where the priest was always available. Old people would recount instances where loners were found drowned in nearby rivers and streams while others fell foul of unseasonal mists and were tumbled inexplicably down precipices and into crevices where they might be found many years later or not found at all. On the other hand a pair of stout men with goodwill in their hearts and rosary beads wrapped round their fingers were known to be proof against all evil.
