Rain on the Wind, page 15
They tied two or three coats together and they made them into a sling. At least Mico did, and his father. Two or three knots and then they got them under him and they wedged his neck and his head with pullovers and shirts and shorts that were thrown at them and they brought him slowly to a low wall and they carefully climbed the stile there, with Big Micil and Mico in front and the two students holding him behind, and they got on to the road and they crossed the green sward of the geese and they brought him into Mico’s house.
His mother rose startled from the fire with her hand going to her heart and her face going pale as the red boy’s, but then she saw the figure of her eldest son coming in behind and she went forward to them.
They placed him quietly on Mico’s bed. There was never a flutter from his eyes. The short red lashes lay like two gashes on his white cheeks. Delia brought a basin of water and she washed the blood from his hair and she dabbed very gently at it where it was still oozing from his skull. ‘Don’t do any more now,’ said the student who was beside her. ‘Wait now until they come for him.’
‘Tell me,’ Mico asked from the bottom of the bed. ‘ Is it serious?’
‘Well,’ said the other looking at him uncomfortably. ‘I don’t know. I’m not a doctor yet. But anything to do with the head could be serious. It’s just as well to be cautious.’
Padneen was out in the kitchen, still in his shirt and togs, his gigantic legs throbbing with muscle and the mud of the Swamp still on them. He was waving his hand. The sweat was pouring from him and he’d raise a large hand now and again to wipe at the worry of his forehead, and to use his blunt fingers to swipe the beats of sweat from his eyebrows.
‘Lookit,’ he was saying, ‘I’d cut off me right hand from the wrist so I would before I’d hurt a hair a Peter Cusack’s head. Listen! This was how it was. We both went for the ball and up we go for it and then he must have jostled me from below because the hurl swung in me hand and I heard it hittin’ him. Christ, honest to Christ, if I meant to hit him, I tell ye.’
‘Look, look, now, Padneen,’ said Micil, coming down from the room. ‘Will you be aisy, will yen? Sure nobody in the world thinks that you meant to hit him. It was just an accident. We could all see that it was just an accident.’
‘But listen, Micil,’ Padneen persisted, ‘ye don’t understand. I was goin’ up for the ball and he was goin’ up for the ball, and he must a jostled me or somethin’ because …’
‘Silence, O Meara,’ said Pa then, in a fierce sort of whisper. ‘ It was an accident. Silence now; sir, before I take the stick to you.’
‘Yes, sir,’ said Padneen, forgetting to assert his manhood.
‘Here, get that boy a drink, someone,’ said Pa then. ‘Or it’ll be another ambulance we’ll have to be getting.’
Tommy went to the dresser and took a white mug from it, one with a scarlet rose painted on it and he dipped it into the water-bucket on the table behind the back door.
‘Here, Padneen,’ he said, ‘ drink it up.’
Padneen took it with a shaking hand and sank his red face into it.
There was a silence then in the kitchen. So silent was it that you could hear the ticking of the clock hanging on the wall. A clock with a smoke-blackened face and a pendulum, that swing-swung with the whitewashed wall as a background. So quiet that you just heard that, and the slight snore coming like a sleeping man from the other room.
Pa went out through the half-door, with his stick swinging. The numerous little boys gathered out there with their mouths open and their eyes wide – where had they come from so suddenly? Had they been grown from the green grass? Had they burrows, secret ones, in the soil? How on earth could the green be empty of boys half a minute ago and now be full of boys?
‘Depart!’ said Pa, holding his stick out in the direction he wanted them to go. They went.
Had it been any other time, Big Micil might have laughed.
But not in this silence. A terrible thing to see a young man like that dodging and darting like a red-haired rabbit one minute and the next minute he’s snoring on the green grass. A good boy too. One that Big Micil liked. A sharp tongue on him and a fella that was always asking questions. About the sea. About the fish. How are nets made? How do they catch them? What’s the international ruling about the size of the mesh? What do you get for a cran of herring? A cran of mackerel? How far out have you to go before you strike the cod? Do you sell the fish to the factors, the cod-fish with or without the liver? Things like that, and you answered it all, and then he’d be away telling you a story that would be very clever indeed and maybe bawdy so that you laughed at the crinkles that came in his own eyes.
‘Lookit,’ said Padneen, his voice muted instinctively to the silence of the house. ‘It was an accident, I tell ye … I was goin’ for the ball.’
‘Ah, shut up, Padneen, for Jaysus’ sake,’ said Tommy.
Padneen looked at him with his mouth open and then sank his hair into his fiercely rubbing hands.
This will put Peter out of the running for the finals, Tommy was thinking, and with Peter out of the running there is no doubt at all that I will get all the firsts. He was really the only opposition, and with the exams coming up in two weeks, he would have hardly recovered before then. Maybe that’s a hard thing to be thinking, but after all, he had plenty of time. He’s not like me, a scholarship boy that has to scrimp and scrape to find the price of the pictures, the price of taking a girl to a hop in the Aula Maxima; to find the price of the heavy tomes you needed as you came nearer and nearer to the goal of your desires. He didn’t have to study like me in a small kitchen with the light of an oil lamp; with the eternal smell of fish in your nose, or tarred ropes, and he didn’t have to tumble into a hard board-like bed at two o’clock in the morning with your eyes aching and you tossing and turning on the straw mattress, with the big heavy sweating body of your brother lying inanimately beside you. How he hated that bed and the body of his brother! This would be a first-class honours degree and there had been a few hints that he might be asked to stay on as an assistant lecturer. Sixty pounds a year as well as the prizes he would win for the first places. With that a man might even be able to get a small room in town and live there. Except for the mother it would be easy. She would fuss so. But he came first with her. Well, we’d see. It was tough luck on Peter. But there was always next year for him. What did it matter to him? With a home like he had. Carpets on every room in the house. Comfortable furniture. These seemed like petty things but they weren’t really. Maybe it wasn’t fair to be thinking like that now but after all he was a rationalist. Nil nisi bonum boloney, as that chap had said. Well, he’s out of the race now, anyhow, he thought. There’s a clear field ahead of me now and good hunting.
He raised his head then and saw Pa looking at him coldly.
Tommy was startled for a minute and pulled himself up straight beside the dresser. Then he relaxed again. How could that old fake know what I was thinking about?
Pa turned and went up to the room on his toes.
Mico was leaning on the rail of the bed. Delia was still dabbling at the cut and the young student was standing at the small window with the lace curtain parted, straining his head, listening, hoping it wouldn’t be too long until the ambulance came, because he didn’t like the look of Peter at all at all, only you didn’t say things like that. The first instinct of a doctor to keep your own counsel.
He looks awful bad now, Mico was thinking. He looks shockin’ bad now, God, so he does. It seemed like a dream that some short time ago he had been looking at him leaping, and now here they were in the small room with Peter stretched on his quilt and his face as pale as the feather of a goose and he snoring. Mico didn’t like that snoring at all. That’s bad news, he said. But sure they couldn’t kill Peter. Nothing under the face of God’s earth could polish off Peter. Not and as lively as he was. The quick darting body and brain of him like a snipe in front of a gun.
And then he heard the whine of the car coming across the green, and out of the corner of his eye saw the student turning from the window.
Gran was outside with the ambulance, the only man. with enough sense to wait at the corner so that he could direct them where to go. They’d have been all over the Swamp now, but for Gran.
Jo’s face was as white as the wall. She was panting.
The nurse and the driver were very efficient.
No words from them. Just actions.
Before anyone knew they were there, Peter was rolled in a blanket and was in the stretcher and the stretcher was shoved in on its grooves and was away with the nurse inside unrolling bandages from the rack, and Jo beside her, sitting on the other stretcher, holding things for her and her eyes glued to the pallid face of the red-haired man, and nothing at all in her mind only a great fear and a great prayer, all mixed together, and her actions automatically efficient, and her answers to the nurse automatically efficient. And the car rolled softly up by the fishing boats, and across roads and in and out narrow streets, silently and knowledgeably, as if every inch of the roads were known with the pain of the speed that went with them, and they rolled at last in through the gates, and the tyres crunched on the gravel and the doors opened behind and Jo smelled the flood of disinfectants from the gaunt building and shortly afterwards sat on a wooden bench outside a room, sat with her back straight and her eyes on the green distempered walls opposite her, and she was still full of fear and full of prayer.
Mico went over to Peter’s parents.
Peter’s father, the nice quiet pseudo-fierce man. And Peter’s mother, fluffy and nervy and fluttery, but nice withal, treating you with so much kindness that she would kill you, living for a word of commendation or praise or love from the lips of their son.
How would she take this now?
Very well.
As if Peter was there in person to hide her. As if he would be there to josh her back to sensibility if she put one of her small feet a single inch over the borderline. Just a catch in her throat and a fear, a stricken look of fear in her eyes, and then the reaching for her coat with the fur collar that came down nearly to her ankles most unfashionably, and Peter’s father going out in nothing but his white hair and his weather-beaten face. He got the car out of the garage, a small car, the inside of it redolent with the smell of dead trout and salmon and the fluttering feathers of shot game, and the upholstery of it covered with the hairs of the Irish setter that had as close a nose for a bird as a froth was on a pint.
They waited a long time in the room with the polished table until after a lifetime the door opened and the tired man with the white coat stood there.
He was thin and his face was thin and the hair on his head was black and going thin too. He closed the door and rested against it. He was tired. They got up from their seats and looked at him. It was like a scene from a silent film.
‘He’ll be all right,’ he said then. No lift to it. Just a statement. Peter’s mother fell back on the couch then and she started to cry, silent tears that flowed like a waterfall through her fingers. And Jo had to sit beside her again and say, ‘ Now, now,’ and Mr Cusack shifted from foot to foot and his face got redder and redder and Mico was afraid of his life that he was going to cry too, but he just raised a finger like a sausage and rubbed his nose from side to side and ‘ Humph’h’-ed and went over to the doctor and shook his hand and then went back and got Mrs Cusack up from the couch and out the door.
‘You can see him in a few days,’ the doctor said, as he ushered them into the hall and out into the cold dawn. ‘He had a little concussion. A few weeks here. Then you can take him home. Nothing but rest. No excitement.’
‘Doctor,’ said Mr Cusack, ‘I’ll tie him down in the bed.’ Grimly.
‘Good morning now,’ said the doctor, and watched them get into the car and waited until it had chugged-chugged importantly towards the main gate.
Then he sighed and turned back into the hall.
Thin skull – that was the trouble, he was thinking. So near the brain. Hope it will be all right. It should be all right. But these are dangerous places. We know so little about them really. But anyhow it was a good job even if I say it myself. Touch and go really. Aye, a good job.
Jo said a peculiar thing to Mico as he left her at her own gate.
‘Mico,’ she said, ‘do you know a thing I’m after seeing now?’
‘What is it?’ he asked.
‘Maybe because it’s the dawn,’ she said. ‘It was dawn then too. But long ago do you remember when we were caught on that island? When we got off it was like this except it was raining. And I looked back there. And I thought that thorn tree was shaking a fist at us.’
Mico felt a cold shiver up his back.
‘For the love of God,’ he said, ‘ will you not be talkin’ like that? Peter is better, isn’t he? It’d take more than a clout on the sconce to kill Peter. It might even quieten him down a bit,’ he said, trying to raise even a glimmer of a smile on her.
A wan smile. ‘Goodnight, Mico,’ she said, ‘and maybe after this now they would leave us alone.’
He waited until the door closed on her before he left and turned for home. The slender masts of the fishing boats were silhouetted against the rising sun. It feels, Mico was thinking, like a thousand years.
Chapter Ten
THEY CAME HOME in the early light of the autumn morning.
The wind was over their left shoulder so that the brown sail was well distended and pushed the heavy boat over the sea at a steady deceptive speed.
Mico, half sitting on the hatch, could see the town away on their left, and on either side the other boats were coming home too. They looked small and black and sparse on the breadth of the Bay, like beetles on a sheet, because the sky was grey. There was no colour much in the rising sun. It just threw a pink wisp at the clouds and then rose up behind them. He felt very tired. He felt that his eyes were dropping. His clothes felt stale. He could see his father on the other side of the boat, leaning there with his pipe in his mouth held by a hand as brown and as fish-encrusted as his own. One large arm was across his chest. He looked tired too. His stubble was heavy and was mottled with grey. There were red rims around his eyes, and his heavy shoulders were sagging. Imagine that. Even Big Micil to be feeling the dint of the tiredness!
Mico didn’t look back at his Gran with his wrinkled hand on the tiller.
He didn’t want to, because Gran wasn’t good to look at now on this early morning after three days away. He had looked at him when they set out from home, had seen the purple under his eyes, by main force and terrible will power had refrained from helping him into the boat. Holy God! Helping Gran into a boat! But there it was and somehow it would have to be faced. Not now, his mind said, we won’t face it now. Let us put it off until tomorrow. Because the truth was – the blunt truth – that Gran was no use in a boat any more.
Mico sighed.
No, better leave that. Then there was Peter and his strange.… No, get away from that. That is a terrible problem. Even thinking of Gran and his aged uselessness would be better than that.
What are we doing all this for? Mico forced himself to think then.
He looked into the place at his feet. At the boxes of fish. The hold nearly full of fish. All right. Were they worth all this? All that jumble of stiff fish, those rigid mackerel and the gurnet and the few cod and the strange fish with the head of a red gurnet and the body of an eel, plaice and a few black sole. He thought of the hours of labour that had gone into the catching of them. The two nights huddled in the hold or lying cold on the deck in fitful slumber under the stars, at a lonely quayside in the middle of nowhere. Nothing to be heard but the cry of a plover or a nightjar and in the distance, in the middle of the bleak stony land, the bark of a dog, conjuring up a picture of a cottage with a bright fire and men in front of it smoking their pipes and spitting into the ashes with warm beds to go to and wives to sleep with and to ease the grinding poverty of their living and its futility. Was it worth the toil and the tiredness and the rapacity of the men in the middle?
Ach, he thought then, I’m getting morbid. That’s the way Peter would be talkin’ and we’d be laughin’ at him. It was the way the world was made and there seemed to be no cure for it. Since the beginning of it there had been men who would grow rich and fat and fulsome like a black-headed worm on the sweat and toil of others. That was the way it was, and unless Peter hurried up and did something about it in Ireland, that’s the way it would always be.
Poor Peter! Poor, poor, Peter!
I won’t think of him any more now, Mico thought, and turned and leaned over the side of the boat and directed a dry spit at the hurrying sea.
Too well, Gran thought, I know what he’s thinkin’. And I know what Big Micil there is thinkin’ too with the smoke of his pipe blue on the air. And sure now it will have to be faced. If I’m waitin’ for them two big slobs to face it, I’d be a skeleton here with me hand on the tiller and the water in me eyes. His eyes had begun to water. Only for the last year now. He hated, to look into a mirror at himself. He never did now. He clipped his beard by the feel and kept his eyes from the pools and reflections of faces in the green sea.
It was a terrible thing to know you were getting old without having to look at it as well.
He had only to look down at his hand now on the tiller. There was a time when it had been a big hand and broad that could have bent a six-inch nail in the brown grip of it. And he knew the measure of the way his hand had fallen in was the measure of all the rest of him. He didn’t have to be told. He wasn’t an eejit after all.
All right. He knew all that. But they didn’t notice it. There was a lot of things they didn’t notice, even if by their silence they told him things they would never get the tongue to say. They kept their heads down. His big slob of a son was a terrible fella. He should have been more of a man. If he was Gran now, he’d have said it straight out. Here you, you silly old bastard, you’re no good for the sea any more.
