City of the Tribes, page 24
‘What did I tell you! What did I tell you!’ exclaimed Softshoe, hugging himself, counting the increasing shillings in his pockets. Gaeglers’ pockets didn’t jingle. He was a note man.
‘Contain yourself, Softshoe,’ said Gaeglers. ‘The evening isn’t over. We will go now and plunge a bit on the sixth.’
‘It’s a set-up,’ said Softshoe. ‘Wait’ll you see.’
It couldn’t last, of course. These things never do. There is always the unpredictable. A brindle bitch was to be the winner of the sixth race, and so she should have been, but a black and white dog came out of the box and ran the same as if he was drinking rocket fuel, and it was over.
‘Softshoe!’ said Gaeglers ominously.
‘But he couldn’t!’ said Softshoe. ‘He couldn’t! He ran fair and square.’ Gaeglers was benevolent. He could afford to be.
‘All right, Softshoe,’ he said, ‘I forgive you. We will call it off now that the run is broken. That was a fast dog. Let’s go back to the kennels and have a look at him.’
Softshoe was disconsolate. ‘But it shouldn’t have happened,’ he kept saying. ‘He should never have won. It’s not right.’
Not only had the dog won, but he had set up a record.
They went back to the kennels. It was here that Gaeglers was really shocked. There was a man in a trench-coat talking to the owner of the black and white dog, and not only was he talking to him, but he was putting a lot of notes into his hand; and not only were they notes, but each one of them was a fifty pound note; and not only was there one of them, but there was twenty of them! Gaeglers couldn’t believe his eyes. Softshoe nearly had heart failure.
The two men shook hands, and then the man in the trench-coat took the lead of the dog and away with him. The owner shouted after him, ‘Man, but you have a bargain. Wait’ll you see!’ Then he started to wet his fingers to count the notes in his hands.
‘Hello, Jack,’ said Gaeglers.
‘By all that’s holy, Gaeglers,’ said Jack, ‘I hope you’re not moving in on the dog business, too.’ This amused him. He slapped his legginged leg with his free hand and then shook Gaeglers’ hand with it. ‘Jack,’ said Gaeglers, ‘is that a thousand pounds you have?’
‘That’s right,’ said Jack. ‘Did you see him go? He’s a great dog. It nearly broke my heart to sell him.’
‘Do you mean to say,’ asked Gaeglers, ‘that you got a thousand pounds for one little greyhound?’
‘That’s right, Gaeglers,’ said Jack, ‘and sold him cheap but, thank God, I have a few more like him. You should start training greyhounds, too, Gaeglers,’ he went on. ‘I have a lovely young one at home now that will turn into a winner. He’s a son of that one. It’d be good for you, Gaeglers. Get you up early in the morning and make a fortune for you if you have patience.’
‘I’ll take him,’ said Gaeglers. ‘How much?’
‘Here, Gaeglers,’ said Softshoe frantically, pulling at his sieve. Jack was looking at Gaeglers.
‘I’m not fooling you, Gaeglers. This will be a good dog, if you work with him. You’ll get more than your money back. I’ll let you have him for twenty pounds, no more, no less. I know what I’m talking about. I’d like to see you in the dog business.’
‘Let’s go and see him,’ said Gaeglers.
That’s how Gaeglers got the greyhound. He was an all-black dog with a splash of white on his chest, and a sort of hump on his hindquarters. Gaeglers didn’t want to take him. He’d have taken any other of the litter in preference to him, but Jack insisted. ‘You can have any of the others for nothing, Gaeglers,’ he said, ‘but the black one is the boy. I know. Thousand pound dogs are few and far between, but he’ll be one. You’ll see!’
So Gaeglers took him and called him Jet.
It’s very difficult to love a greyhound. They are so lean and miserable, and when you want to pat them there’s no satisfaction to your palm because they seem to be all skin and bones. They are not very good at minding babies either, if you had any babies. They have sort of cold eyes, and Gaeglers, who had never owned a dog in his life, decided that greyhounds were purely commercial propositions. He got enough information to write four heavy volumes on how to rear, feed and train the dog. He assimilated some of it, discarded the rest, ended up by thinking he knew more about it himself than any of them, and constantly in front of his eyes he saw a thousand pounds.
He’d need it.
Jet was hungry looking, but he seemed to have a tape worm. He could eat four times his own weight, and all that the food did was to press his bones against his skin. Until he became used to it, Gaeglers thought that the hump on his hindquarter was repulsive. He fed him the best wheaten bread with a little treacle, as well as two eggs a day; also chopped lamb’s liver. ‘A prince of the royal blood isn’t better fed than him,’ Gaeglers told Softshoe. ‘He’s costing me over a quid a week and he still looks like a dehydrated rat.’
In another six months, said Softshoe, you’ll be racing him. Think of that. The thinner he is, the better he’ll run. Won’t he be streamlined?’
Gaeglers had a good digs with Mrs B. He paid regularly and she liked him, but Jet caused a little strain here, too. She objected a bit when Gaeglers brought him home because, as she explained, she didn’t like greyhounds, and why? Because her late husband, when he’d be in a fit of the DTs, always thought that he was a greyhound, and he’d be down on all fours chasing little green men, and it was a painful recollection for her and a reflection on the dear departed. Gaeglers pointed out that this was a blackhound, not a greyhound, a different animal altogether to the one her husband had imagined himself to be, and this ameliorated her. But she never quite took to Jet, particularly since one of her cronies had talked to her about reincarnation, which she thought were flowers grown in greenhouses until it was explained to her. After that she’d say to Gaeglers about Jet, ‘He’s watching me! I know that dog is watching me!’
One Sunday when she went to get the leg of lamb out of the cupboard where she had put it, wrapped in paper, there was no sign of it. There was six pounds of meat on it. Nobody thought that Jet would be able to open a cupboard, so Mrs B. went out into the back and reviled the neighbours with a loud speech about how all thieves and robbers would burn in hell with the fat of stolen meat sizzling in their bellies. They had to eat scrambled eggs.
Until eggs started to disappear from the cupboard. It was the oddest thing.
Then, unfortunately, Mrs B. found eggshells on the other side of a neighbour’s wall, and the government code mark on the shells agreed with the numbers she had bought, she said, so she called the young male member of the neighbour’s family and she boxed his ears, roaring that he was an egg stealer, and the child’s mother came out and defended her child, and things were a bit hectic around the place for a while. Gaeglers might have suspected his dog if the dog had showed any reluctance to eat his regular meals, but he didn’t. He’d nearly bite the enamel off the tin as well as eating his food.
Then one day Gaeglers was coming home and as he went to the front door happened to look in the window, and there was the dog at the cupboard, his teeth bared and he opening the little catch. He shoved in his head then and came out with an egg in his mouth. Gaeglers went around the side of the house to watch him. He jumped the wall, then on the other side he cracked the egg and scooped the contents, and then went back again. Gaeglers followed him and roared at him as he reached in for another egg.
Well you should have seen the face of that dog!
Naturally Gaeglers should have beaten him — you can’t talk to a dog like you would to a human being — but he wasn’t up to it. He admonished him, shouted at him, and bought a new catch for the cupboard.
It was years before Mrs B. and the neighbours were reconciled.
So the time came to train the dog.
Gaeglers didn’t like getting up early in the morning (who does?), but apparently you must do this, walk the dog miles in the early morning. So he made Softshoe come along, too, even if his eyes were glued with sleep. ‘You got me into this,’ Gaeglers told him, ‘and you’ll go the whole bitter road with it.’
Outside the town, when they came to a field, he’d make Softshoe go into the field and take off running as if he was a hare. It took the dog about two months to realise that he was supposed to chase Softshoe and jump on his back and knock him on his face. Softshoe didn’t like this, but Gaeglers said he might as well get a laugh for his money. Softshoe complained about the dew on his bunions. Apparently dew is not good for bunions, even if it is good for the complexion. Softshoe’s face was buried in the dew many times, but it didn’t improve his complexion, so that’s another myth shattered, as Gaeglers told him.
I personally think they made a mistake using Softshoe as a hare. After all, the dog had limited intelligence, and afterwards, if he got used to chasing Softshoe, how could you expect him to chase a real hare? So then the only thing left to do would be to mount Softshoe on the electric rail and set him going with Jet after him. This made Softshoe go pale, because Gaeglers is a queer man. You’d never know but he might do it.
Anyhow the great day came at last when Jet was as big as he ever would be and they would have to try him out on the real thing. Gaeglers borrowed an old van (when the owner wasn’t looking), packed the dog and a long lead and Softshoe aboard, and set out for mountainy districts.
Near the foot of the mountains there are great boggy plains where hares abound. That’s what a countryman told them. ‘In there,’ he said, waving his hand at a great plain about ten miles wide, ‘there are more hares than midges, bad luck to them, and they eating the sheeps’ grazing on them. Ye’ll be tripping over them.’
Gaeglers was elated, and they set off into the plain. Well, it seems there were stacks of midges, that’d eat you down to the skeleton, but not a hair of a hare. They must have tramped fifteen miles, sinking into bogs, bitten by midges and horse-flies, and at the end of the day they were wet, squelching and thoroughly miserable. They sat on a mound to smoke a cigarette, and there almost under their feet, curled in a form, petrified with fear, Gaeglers saw the one hare.
He reached cautiously for the dog, brought him slowly between his knees, pointed his nose at the hare. This was the climax of all the sorrow, all the sacrifice, all the weary worry of the past year. Jet and a hare were, at last, face to face.
The hare got up and ran away.
‘Now, Jet,’ Gaegler shouted triumphantly, getting to his feet. ‘After him, boy, after him! Watch this, Softshoe.’
Jet didn’t move.
‘The hare, you son of a bitch!’ shouted Gaeglers. ‘There he is! Get after him!’ The hare was bounding over the horizon like a gazelle.
Gaeglers, I regret this, kicked the dog with his sodden shoe and roared at him. The dog’s tail went between his legs and he moved away. Gaeglers went after him. The dog ran away from Gaeglers. He was in a fierce temper. You could have lit a cigarette off him. Softshoe ran away from the dog and Gaeglers. Gaeglers chased the dog. In a few minutes the hare, the dog, Softshoe and Gaeglers were running four directions at once over three counties.
It was terrible.
The next morning Jack was surprised to see Gaeglers on his doorstep with Jet and Softshoe.
‘Jack,’ Gaeglers said, ‘you were wrong. This dog is no good. This dog will never be any good. This dog wouldn’t catch a rabbit that had myxomatosis. He’s a fraud. He has my life ruined. He wouldn’t run in a fit.’
‘All right, Gaeglers,’ said Jack promptly. ‘I’ll buy him back from you. Make up what he cost you with the purchase price and I’ll give it to you. He will be a good dog.’
‘You’re wrong, Jack,’ said Gaeglers, poking him in the chest with his finger. ‘This dog will never be any good. I wouldn’t cheat you. Just the twenty pounds I gave you for him in the first place and he’s yours. I’m out of the dog business.’
He was back the next day.
Why? Because he missed the damn dog. That’s a fact. He’s still a bit ashamed of this.
‘No, Gaeglers,’ said Jack, ‘the dog is gone. I sold him to a fellow from the south last night.’
‘Well,’ said Gaeglers, ‘that solves it. I’m well rid of him.’ But it took a little while for him to get used to being without the dog. He’d wake up early in the morning when he should have been asleep.
Softshoe was very happy that the dog was gone.
Now here’s the point of all this.
Some five years later, Gaeglers happened to be motoring down the south. His business had been profitable, but it was advisable for him to get back home. He wasn’t taking direct routes, but going back ways where he wouldn’t be too noticeable. And going through one of those by-roads in a village in the middle of the fat southern countryside, he stopped in amazement at a sight that confronted him. There, facing him on a pedestal, was the statue of a dog. The statue of a greyhound. He got out of the car at this sight and went up to look.
There was a plaque under the statue that said: To the Memory of the Greatest Dog That Ever Raced in Ireland: Eggnog. He walked around this statue. Listen, this dog was done in black stone with a white mark on his chest, and on his hindquarters there was a hump. And listen, Gaeglers swears this statue was grinning.
‘He was a great dog,’ said a voice behind Gaeglers. He turned. ‘He won five thousand pounds. There isn’t a dog lover around here that wouldn’t raise his hat to him.’ There were a couple of men behind Gaeglers gazing admiringly at the statue.
‘Where did he come from?’ Gaeglers asked them.
‘He came from the west,’ said the man. ‘Where do you come from?’
Gaeglers told him.
‘That’s where he’s from,’ said the man.
Gaeglers was flooded with emotion.
Which was why he was fined ten shillings in a local court for disturbing the peace, wilful assault, and pelting mud at the statue of a noble animal.
Jack kept out of his way for years after that. He had never had the courage to tell Gaeglers that Jet was the famous Eggnog.
My own opinion is that they should have put up a statue of Softshoe Sullivan, because the dog never could have amounted to anything only for the way Softshoe coursed him.
MODERN IRISH CLASSICS
New Island Books launched the Modern Irish Classics series in 2010 with the aim of rejuvenating the print life of outstanding literary works that would otherwise have been condemned to obscurity. For each new title added to the series, the work is augmented with an introduction by a contemporary Irish writer of outstanding talent. Each of these in their nuanced prefaces offer new perspectives, contexts and insights into these Irish literary treasures.
These classics deserve a renewed appreciation, fresh appraisal and a new generation of readers. There is no assumption that the Modern Irish Classics are the foundation of a revised canon of Irish literature, but rather the recommendations of avid literary activists and enthusiasts casting fresh light on hidden gold.
Walter Macken, City of the Tribes
