Saints and Sinners Read online

  Saints and Sinners

  Stories

  Edna O’Brien

  NEW YORK BOSTON LONDON

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  About Saints and Sinners

  With language that is always bold and vital, Edna O’Brien pays tribute to the universal forces that rule our lives. In the story “Send My Roots Rain,” Miss Gilhooley, a librarian, waits in the lobby of a posh Dublin hotel, expecting to meet a celebrated poet and occasional correspondent while reflecting on the great love who disappointed her. The Irish workers of “Shovel Kings” have dreams of becoming millionaires in London but long for their quickly changing homeland—exiles in both places. “Green Georgette” is a searing dissection of class, through the eyes of a little girl; “Black Flower” takes on the Troubles by way of the tentative relationship between a former prisoner and his sponsor. “Old Wounds” illuminates the importance of family and memory in old age.

  For my friend

  Luke Dodd

  Shovel Kings

  IN ONE LAPEL WAS a small green-and-gold harp, and in the other a flying angel. His blue jacket had seen better days. He wore a black felt homburg hat, and his white hair fell in coils almost to his shoulders. His skin was sallow, but his huge hands were a dark nut brown, and on the right hand he had a lopsided knuckle, obviously caused by some injury. Above it, on the wrist, he wore a wide black strap. He could have been any age, and he seemed like a man on whom a permanent frost had settled. He drank the Guinness slowly, lifting the glass with a measured gravity. We were in a massive pub named Biddy Mulligan’s, in North London, on St. Patrick’s Day, and the sense of expectation was palpable. Great banners with HAPPY ST. PATRICK draped the walls, and numerous flat television screens carried pictures of the homeland, featuring hills, dales, lakes, tidy towns, and highlights of famed sporting moments down the years. Little votive lamps, not unlike Sacred Heart lamps, were nailed in corners to various wooden beams and seemed talismanic on that momentous day. Only three people were there, the quiet man, a cracked woman with tangled hair gabbling away, and myself.

  Adrian, the young barman, was chalking up the promised delights, large Jameson at less than half price, teeny dishes of Irish stew and apple cake for free. Moreover, the governor had left a box full of green woolly hats and green scarves that were reserved to be given to the regular customers. Adrian was young and affable, asking if I needed more coffee and wondering if the quiet man, whom he called Rafferty, would like a refill, in honor of the day. Much to the chagrin of Clodagh, the spry young assistant, Adrian indulged his nostalgia by playing “Galway Shawl” on the jukebox, over and over again.

  The coffee that I had been served was dire, but I lingered, because of being early for an appointment, and picked up a newspaper that was lying on the vacant table next to me. Disaster and scandals featured prominently. Further unrest was reported in a northern province of China; an actress was pictured being helped out of a nightclub in a state of inebriation; another photograph showed her arriving only a few hours earlier wearing a white clinging dress and perilously high heels. A hostage who had been released in some African bush after sixty-seven days in detention seemed dazed by the posse of journalists who surrounded him. I looked at the weather forecast for New York, where I had often spent St. Patrick’s Day and stood among milling crowds as they cheered floats and bands, feeling curiously alone in the midst of all that celebration.

  My appointment was with a doctor whom I had been seeing for the best part of a year and who had just moved to this less salubrious part of London, had left his rooms in Primrose Hill, probably because of the rent’s being exorbitant. This would be my first time at this new abode, and I dreaded it, partly because I had left, as I saw it, fragments of myself behind in that other room, with its stacks of books, an open fire, and an informality that was not customary between patient and analyst. Sitting there, with an eye on the wall clock, I kept checking on this new address and asked Adrian about such and such a road to make doubly sure that I had not gone astray. Yes, he knew the man, said he had been in several times, which I took to imply that my doctor liked a drink.

  Meanwhile, Clodagh was bustling around in an emerald-green pinafore, reciting a verse for all to hear:

  Boxty on the griddle,

  Boxty in the pan,

  If you can’t make the boxty,

  You’ll never get your man.

  The light from the leaded-glass panels danced on her shadow as she flitted from table to table, extolling the miracle of the boxty potato bread and dragging a duster over the round brown tables that bore the mottling of years and years of porter stains.

  That done, she began to pipe green tincture onto the drawn pints of Guinness to simulate the emblem of the shamrock, something Rafferty observed with a quiet sufferance. A noisy group burst in, decked with leprechauns and green gewgaws of every description, led by a tall woman who was carrying fresh shamrock still attached to a clump of rich earth. In a slightly affected voice she described writing to her old uncle several times since Christmas, reminding him that the plant must not be detached from its soil and, moreover, he must remember to sprinkle it with water and post it in a perforated box filled with loam.

  “Was it holy water by any chance?” the cracked woman shouted out.

  “Shut your gob,” she was told, at which she raised a hectoring finger, claiming, “I was innit before yous was all born.”

  As the single sprigs of shamrock were passed around, they somehow looked a little forlorn.

  A second group followed hot on the heels of the first group, all greeting each other heartily, spreading coats and bags on the various tables and commandeering quiet nooks in the alcoves, for friends whom they claimed were due. A cocky young man with sideburns, wearing a black leather jacket, walked directly to the fruit machine, where the lime-green and cherry-red lights flashed on and off, the lit symbols spinning at a tantalizing speed. Two youngsters, possibly his brothers, stood by, gazing and gaping as he fed coin after coin into the machine, and as they waited in vain for the clatter of the payout money, the younger one held an open handkerchief to receive the takings. The elder, who was plump, consigned squares of chocolate into his mouth and sucked with relish while his brother looked on with the woebegone expression of an urchin.

  I had put the newspaper down and was jotting in a notebook one or two things that I might possibly discuss with my doctor when, to my surprise, Rafferty was standing above me and almost bashfully said, “Do you mind if I take back my paper?” I apologized, offering him a drink, but he was already on his way, detached from the boisterous crowd, carrying himself with a strange otherworldly dignity as he raised his right hand to Adrian in salutation.

  Three or four weeks passed before we exchanged a few words.

  “What’s the harp for?” I asked one morning when, as had become his habit, he made a little joke of offering me the newspaper.

  “To prove that I’m an Irishman,” he replied.

  “And the angel?”

  “Oh that’s the guardian angel…. We all have one,” he said, with a deferential half smile.

  About six months after our first meeting I came upon Rafferty unexpectedly, and we greeted each other like old friends. I was on the Kilburn High Road outside a secondhand furniture shop, where he was seated on a leather armchair, smiling at passersby, like a potentate. He was totally at ease out in the open, big white lazy clouds sailing by in the sky above us, surrounded by chairs, tables, chests of drawers, fire irons, fenders, crockery, and sundry bric-a-brac.

  Offering me a seat, he said that the owner believed his presence perked up an interest in business, because once, whe
n he had been singing “I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen,” passersby had stopped to listen and, as he put it, had browsed. Nearby, a woman haggled over the price of a buckled sieve, and a young mother was in vain trying to get her son off the rocking horse to which he was affixed. The white paint was scraped in several places, and the golden mane a smudged brown, but to the boy his steed was noble.

  Rafferty rolled a cigarette, folded his tobacco pouch, and, impelled by some inner recollection, began to tell me the story of coming to London forty years earlier, a young lad of fifteen arriving in Camden Town with his father and thinking that it was the strangest, sootiest place he had ever seen, that even the birds, the fat pigeons that waddled about, were man-made. Theirs was a small room, which his father had rented the year previous. It had a single iron bed, a thin mattress, a washbasin, and a little gas ring to boil a kettle.

  The next morning at the Camden tube station, where lorries and wagons were parked and young men waited to be recruited, literally hundreds of them, hundreds of Irishmen, hoped for a job. A foreman eyed Rafferty up and down and said to his father that no way was that boy seventeen, but his father lied, insisting that he was. More heated words were exchanged, about effing cousins and so forth, but eventually Rafferty was told to climb onto the lorry, and he did. I believed (Rafferty said) that a great future lay ahead of me, but the look of despair on the lads left behind standing in that street was awful, and one I can never forget.

  They were driven a few miles north to where a group of young men were digging a long trench, for the electricity cables to be put in later on. The paving stones were already taken up and stacked in piles. At his first sight of it, it was hard for him, as he said, not to imagine those men, young though they were, destined for all eternity to be kept digging some never-ending grave. He was handed a shovel and told to get to work. The handle of the shovel was short, shorter than the ones he had been used to at home when he dug potatoes or turnips, and the blade was square and squat. And so I was (he said) put to digging the blue clay of London, as it was then called, blue from leaking gas and sticky, so sticky you had to dip the shovel in a bucket of water every so often, then wedge it in under the soil to try and shift it. Lads in a line, stripped to the waist because it was so hot, each man given a certain number of yards to dig, four foot six inches wide and four foot six inches deep. The foreman in his green Wellingtons walking up and down, putting the fear of God into us. A brute, and an Irish brute at that. After an hour of digging, I was half-asleep over the shovel and only for Haulie, I would have been fired. He covered for me, held me up. He was from Donegal, said the mountains and the hilly roads made him wiry, and that I’d get used to it. Two Connemara men nearby spoke only the Irish and didn’t understand a word others were saying, but they understood the foreman and the ruthlessness of him. I didn’t feel hungry, only thirsty, and the cup of milk at half past ten was a godsend. Tea was brewing all day long in a big bucket, but Haulie said it tasted like senna. Teaboy Teddy was in charge of the grub, and men were given potatoes and cabbage for the dinner, except that I couldn’t eat. By the time the whistle went in the evening, my hands were bloodied and my back was ready to break. In the room, I fell fast asleep at the little table, and my father flung me onto the bed, boots and all, and went out.

  The same drudge (he continued) every day, but they talked and yarned to keep the spirits up. They would talk about everything and anything to do with home. One lad caused riots of laughter when, out of the blue, he announced that turnips needed the frost to taste sweet. He got christened Turnip O’Mara instantly. Nicknames meant for greater camaraderie, down there in the trenches, a brotherhood, us against them, the bull of a foreman and the contractors and subcontractors, who were merely brutes to us—downright brutes. We might chance upon treasure. The legend was that someone had found a Roman plate worth hundreds, and someone else dug up a wooden box with three gold crosses, which he pawned. All we found were the roots of trees, embedded and sinewy, the odd coal bill, and rotten shells of gas piping that German prisoners of war had laid in the ’40s. On Thursdays a Cork man arrived in a green van to hand out the wages, his bodyguard, also a Cork man, wielding a cricket bat in case of robbery. Men felt like kings momentarily. I got four pounds, which I had to hand over to my father, who also made me write a letter to my mother to say how happy I was and how easily I had settled into life in London. So much so that she wrote and said she hoped I would not acquire an English accent, as that would be faithless.

  I really knew nothing of London (Rafferty said, apologetically), nothing except the four walls of the room, the broken springs of the bed, the street that led to where the wagons and lorries picked men up, and the big white, wide chapel with three altars, where the Irish priest gave thunderous sermons on a Sunday. I was full of fears, thought everything was a sin. If the Holy Communion touched my teeth I thought that was a mortal sin. After Mass we had a cup of tea in the sacristy and biscuits dusted with sugar. Sundays were awful, walking up and down the streets and looking at the dinginess of the shop fronts and dirty net curtains in upstairs windows and the old brickwork daubed black. My father went off very early of a Sunday, but I never knew where to.

  We had one book on the small shelf in our room. It was by Zane Grey. I must have read it dozens of times. I was so familiar with it that I could picture swaths of purple sage and cottonwood in Utah, outlaws, masked riders, and felons trailing each other in the big open ranges, one area peculiarly named Deception Pass. I think I swore that I would go there, because I missed the outdoors, missed roaming in the fields around home and hunting on Sundays with a white ferret. My poor mother was writing at least twice weekly, pleading with my father to come home, saying that she could not mind children, do farmwork, and take in washing, and, moreover, that she was suffering increasingly from dizziness. Eventually my father announced that he was going home, and shortly before he did, something happened. We were in the room, and the landlady called my father to the telephone, which was in the kitchen. I thought that maybe my mother had died, but no, he came back in whistling and smiling, handed me two and six and told me to go to the Italian restaurant on the high street and stay there until he picked me up. I lingered for three hours, but no sign of him. The place was shutting. They were putting chairs up on the tables, and a woman waited, the mop already sunk in a bucket of water, to wash the floor. When I got back, the bedroom door was locked. I knocked and waited and knocked, and my father shouted at me to go down the hall, into the back garden. Instead I went towards the hall door. Not long after, a tall, blond woman, wearing a cape, emerged from our room. She was not a patch on my mother. The way she picked her steps, so high and haughty, I could see that she thought herself way above us. She threw me a strange condescending smile. My father went mad when he saw where I was standing. He said nothing, just drew me into the room by my hair, pulled my pants down and beat me savagely. He kept saying the same thing over and over again as he was belting me—“I’ll teach you… I’ll teach you honor… and I’ll teach you obedience… and I’ll teach you to respect your elders. I’ll teach you I’ll teach you I’ll teach you,” raving mad at having been found out.

  A good bit after my father went home (Rafferty continued), I started going to the pub. I was feeling more independent then. I’d go to the Greek café that had been renamed Zorba and have rashers and eggs and fried bread. The kitchen was behind the counter, and the Irish lads had taught Zorba to forget the kebabs and stuffed vine leaves and master the frying pan. Then I’d go straight across to The Aran pub, pure heaven, the warmth, the red table lamps, the talking and gassing, getting a pint, sitting down on a stool, without even exchanging a word. Weeknights were quiet, but weekends were rough, always a fight, because everyone got drunk. The fights could be about anything, a girl, a greyhound, grudges, because a foreman had got rid of six men in order to hire men from his own parish, one wrong word, you know, and the punches started. First inside the pub, then in the vestibule and finally out onto the stre
et, the two heavy-weights vowing murder and the crowd of us on either side of the pavement egging them on, not unlike the time of the gladiators. When things got really bad and they were near beat to a pulp, someone, usually the landlord, would call the cops. If two cops came on foot they did nothing. They stood by, because they wanted to see the Irish slaughter one another. They hated the Paddies. When the Black Maria pulled up, the two men with blood pouring out of them were just thrown into the back, to fight it out before they got to the station. That’s what gave us a bad name, the name of hooligans.

  You see (he said apologetically), you had to be tough, on the job and off the job, even if you were dying inside. That’s how the sensitivity was knocked out of us. But it was still there, lurking. One night in the bar (and here his voice grew solemn) I saw grown men cry. It was like a wake. They were a gang from Hounslow, and they came in shaken and sat silent, like ghosts. Something catastrophic had happened, and they were all part of it, because they saw it with their own eyes. A young man by the name of Oranmore Joe was up on the digger when the hydraulic gave way and the lever slipped. He didn’t realize it for some seconds, not until he saw the big steel bucket full of earth hurtling through the air and crashing on top of a fella that was standing underneath. Knocked him to the ground and cut the head off him. Bedlam. Foremen, building inspectors, cops, a blue plastic sheet put around the scene, and men told to go home and report for work the next morning. Not seeing it (Rafferty said), but hearing about it, at first haltingly and then in a burst brought it to life, the awful spectacle of a severed head and the young man’s eyes wide open, as one of them put it, like the eyes of a sheep’s head in a pot. The worst of it was that Oranmore Joe and J.J., that was the young man’s name, came from the same townland, and Joe had actually got him the job. Was like a brother to him. A collection was taken in the pub to send the remains home. Lads gave what they could. A pound was a lot in those days, but several pound notes were flung into the tweed cap that had been thrown onto the counter. From that night on (Rafferty lamented), Oranmore Joe was a different man. He wouldn’t get on a machine again. The company bought a new machine, but he wouldn’t get up on it. He took ground work. He’d sit in the pub, pure quiet, just staring. Lads would try to cheer him up and say, “No problem Joe, no problem, it wasn’t your fault.” Except he believed it was. We’d see him thinking and thinking, and then one evening he comes in, in the navy blue suit and the suitcase, whistling, walking around the pub like a man looking for his dog, calling, ducking under the stools and the tables, and then we hear what he’s saying. He’s saying, “Come on J.J., we’re going home,” and we knew, we knew that he’d lost it, and we wouldn’t be seeing him again. A goner. “Not one, but two lives lost,” Rafferty said, gravely.