Goosefoot

By Patrick McGinley

Patrick McGinley is able to do what few novelists can: write stories and characters that are drenched in place (specifically, rural Ireland), and yet totally devoid of cheap sentimentality. His landscapes have the edgy, ludicrous beauty of a dream - unstable and prone to capsize into nightmare.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: Jul 2, 2012
• ISBN: 9781448209590

Patrick McGinley

Patrick McGinley (b 1937) is an Irish novelist, born in Glencolumbkille, Ireland. After teaching in Ireland, McGinley moved to England where he pursued a career as a publisher and author. Among his strongest literary influences is his Irish predecessor, author Flann O'Brien, who McGinley emulates most noticeably in his novel The Devil's Diary.

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Patrick McGinley

Goosefoot

To Patrick Heekin of Garaross,

for remembered laughter

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

A Note on the Author

1

The postman took off his cap and wiped his forehead with the back of his pudgy hand. A hog’s back of a hand, a civil servant’s hand, smooth and hairless without a hint of bone.

It’s a warm day, he said.

It’s a long day, she replied. And to think that it’s only noon.

Tomorrow will be longer.

He handed her a foolscap envelope from the Registrar of Cork University, threw his leg on his bicycle, and rode off with lazy wobbles while she read the printed letter in the shade of the oak in the lane. It was an old oak, crippled with arboreal rheumatism and choked with ivy that gave it the look of an evergreen in winter. The ivy bound the bole like fine whipcord tightening about a throat. She pulled at one of the cords but it gripped the bark with invisible tentacles that refused to desist from the stubborn work of strangulation.

As she expected, she got a first in her degree. The professor had told them that firsts were rare, and she had told herself that upper seconds were just a shade too common. No one, not even a genius, could be certain of a first, he said. And now that she had got it, she had to admit that she was pleased. It would mean nothing to her father and mother and two brothers, but it would make Uncle Lar smile and feel her biceps with his thumb. Her father emerged from a field of ripe barley, the tattered jacket on his shoulder half covering bright-red galluses.

The post came, he said.

Yes.

Did he bring anything in the line of news?

No, not news.

Did he bring anything at all?

Only a letter for me.

A brown envelope. Never open a brown envelope till the day’s work is done. It’s always been my policy and so far I’ve never been mistaken.

I’m going over to Uncle Lar’s, she said.

You spend your life at Lar’s. He turned away.

Uncle Lar was in rolled-up shirt sleeves, changing a tractor wheel in the yard. Tall, trim, and wiry, he straightened slowly when he saw her and took the weight off his left leg, his bowleg, which he normally supported with a hazel stick. Lar without his bowleg would not be Lar. It gave him the air of a ship’s captain, and it went well with his steady blue eyes and short white hair.

You’re just in time to give me a hand, he smiled. As a man grows older, tractor wheels grow heavier.

They worked together for fifteen minutes while he regaled her with a story about a simpleton in the next town-land who could never remember which way the treads of a tractor tyre should face.

I passed my exam, she told him when they finished.

Good girl yourself. He took her hand and pressed her biceps with his thumb.

I got first-class honors, which is more than I expected or deserved.

So you’re now a Bachelor of Agricultural Science. How many letters is that?

Six. B.Agr.Sc.

I knew you had it in you. You’re the first of the Teelings who left the land to learn about it, and that calls for a celebration. We’ll all go to Roscrea on Sunday evening for a meal—you and me and your father and mother and Austin and Patsy. How’s that?

Austin and Patsy won’t come. They’d prefer a meal at home.

I only want to please you, Patricia. Say what you want and I’ll pay for it.

Then I’ll cook Sunday dinner here and we’ll invite Desmond Deeny as well.

The best ideas are the simplest, said Uncle Lar, guiding her into the house.

He was her only uncle, but in truth he was more like an ideal father, perhaps because he was a bachelor with no family of his own. In early manhood, he had been a sower of wild oats, drinking and gallivanting and making love to loose women. As he was the elder son, he expected to be left the farm, but one St. Patrick’s night two neighbors carried him home from the pub and left him lying dead drunk in the middle of the floor. Her grandfather, an austere and sober man, was so dismayed at the sight of his son that he told him he had outstayed his welcome in the ancestral lodge, that he would never get a chance to squander his patrimony, that the land and house would go to his younger brother, who was now her father.

Lar never touched drink again. Shortly afterward he left for Australia and in fifteen years never once wrote home. Then one fine morning in the summer of 1950 he turned up in Killage, took a room in Phelan’s Hotel, and said that he was looking round for a farm. As he had nothing else to do, he spent his time going to land auctions, fishing on the Delour, and listening to farming talk on market days. Within six months he had bought the farm next to her father’s and enough machinery to make the best farmers in the parish green with envy.

Her uncle and father wasted no love on each other. They were opposites who could only reject what the other stood for. Her uncle had a better farm than her father, and a better way of working it. He had three tractors whereas her father had only two old horses. Her uncle’s farm had a history of good husbandry whereas her father’s was rundown from years of carelessness and neglect. Her uncle was the soul of sobriety and industry, with an effortless ability to improvise and find new uses for things that other men in their ignorance discarded. When the mirror in his bathroom broke, he took the wing mirror off an old van and suspended it on a piece of string for shaving. He had a genius that enabled him to give at least three useful lives to every object about the house. He would fill a gap in a hedge with an old bedstead or bicycle frame, and he would not do it out of meanness but because it complemented the pattern of life as he saw it. A seed fell on the earth and became a turnip, and the turnip made flesh and bone in a whitehead bullock. A bedstead bore the brunt of twenty years of tumbling and tossing, and when it could bear it no longer it stopped the whitehead bullock from breaking through a hedge into a field of young barley.

Her father on the other hand was a sour, disappointed man who spent too much money in pubs on market days and too much time in bed in the mornings. Without her mother, he would have gone bankrupt long ago. It was she who pinched and scraped while the family was young, and thinned fodder beet and built trams while her husband recovered from his hangovers. And it was she who, in spite of her husband’s humorless objections, allowed Patricia to visit Uncle Lar at the weekends when she was only a schoolgirl of five or six.

Uncle Lar took to her at once. On market days he bought her special sweets called bull’s-eyes and brandy-balls; at weekends he took her to Roscrea in his Ford Prefect and bought her fish and chips and vanilla ice cream; when she was ten he taught her to drive his light tractor and how to tie a fly for fishing on the Delour; and when she was thirteen he prevailed on her parents to let him pay for her education in the convent in Mountmellick. She disliked boarding school, but she did not blame Uncle Lar because he came to see her with a parcel of goodies once a week. Then, when she was seventeen, he asked her if she would like to go to university; and when she said yes, he told her that too many girls read languages and too few agricultural science. She had never been drawn to languages but she had excelled at physics and chemistry, so after she had thought about it she felt attracted to a subject which must surely be the preserve of men. Uncle Lar was delighted. He paid her fees and sent her a modest cheque which unfailingly arrived on the first Monday of every month. Uncle Lar had made her what she had become. He had molded her more surely than any of her teachers, and he had left her with a legacy more precious than land—an awareness of the existence of men like himself, so remote from the common run that a base or ignoble thought never enters their minds.

Her father and two brothers were reluctant to come to the dinner, but as usual her mother’s will prevailed. Austin said he wasn’t hungry; Patsy said he had to mend the stroke-haul; and her father said that Lar’s dinner would be on the dry side, that he would sooner sup with the devil than a teetotal brother. Her mother reminded him of all Lar had done for his daughter and told them all squarely that she would never again lay a meal before anyone who reneged.

Lar presided at table like a baron in his baronial hall. He placed Patricia on his right and Desmond Deeny on his left and told the rest to sit where they liked. Then he carved the beef sirloin in his shirt sleeves, while her brothers and father made covert conversation at the other end of the table. The teetotaller surprised them. He provided a bottle of wine for Patricia and her mother and lashings of ale for the men, but he himself sipped a glass of the morning’s milk. During the meal, he talked only to Patricia while her father and brothers behaved like silent vivisectors bent over the muddled remains of their handiwork.

Her mother, leaving most of the wine to Patricia, kept eyeing Lar like a hen with a sideways tilt of the head and expressed immediate and total agreement with everything he said. Lar, however, was not the man to acknowledge it. He made a string of harmless jokes and turned to Patricia as he laughed with a deliberate distension of his high stomach. Finally, he hooked a thumb in his galluses and with a thrust of the chin addressed the painting of Daniel O’Connell above her father’s head.

This is Patricia’s day, he began. The beef we’ve eaten was roasted by her, and the soup she made came from a recipe in an old newspaper I brought back from Australia. The apple crumble was the best I’ve had since my mother, God rest her, died. I mention this to remind us that Patricia was a good cook before she became a good scientist.

She had never heard Uncle Lar speak so seriously before. He stared ahead as if he were looking at the future, and with a heavy hand on one of hers he told them that though she was a woman she reminded him of nobody but himself as a young man. She was a Teeling. She had a mind of her own. And she would take life like a withe in her hands and bend it in the curve that best pleased her. Hadn’t he done just that himself, and hadn’t he said that she had taken after him.

I said that this is Patricia’s day, he continued. But it’s my day too, and I know she won’t mind sharing it. I’ve known her since she was no higher than my knee. She began making tea for me when she was hardly old enough to hold a teapot, and as I watched her grow up I told myself over and over again, there’s nothing in the world that that girl couldn’t turn her hand to. She worked hard at school and she played hard when she came home in the evenings. She had the knack of never giving too much time to anything. She did everything with equal ease, as if in teaching her you were only reminding her of something she had known before. When she was ten, I taught her to drive a tractor, and before she was twelve her hands were strong enough to milk a cow better than I could myself. Often as she came up the lane with the calves, I would say to myself that she was all the Teelings that ever lived rolled into one, and, God forgive me, I also said once or twice, it’s a pity she isn’t a boy. I take my folly back today because she has grown into a handsome young woman who could take and keep her place in any company in any civilized country. Her life is now before her. My only regret is that I haven’t days to see her come into the fullness of it.

He removed his hand from hers and raised his glass of milk before the company.

Now, he said, I ask you to drink to her health and happiness, because happiness is what she gives to all of us. To Patricia, then!

An indistinct murmur rose from the three silent men at the end of the table. Desmond Deeny echoed Uncle Lar, and her mother said, Good health and good luck.

Patricia didn’t know what to say. She turned to Uncle Lar, who was smiling at her, and she placed her hand over his splayed fingers on the table.

I could never make a speech as good as Uncle Lar’s, she laughed. But I’d like to thank him for giving this dinner for me and for what he said about the cooking. And I’d like to thank him for educating me and for coming to see me in the convent in Mountmellick with parcels of food on days when he had better things to do. I can never repay him. All I can say is this: To Uncle Lar, may he stay strong and live long because he deserves to.

When they had drunk Uncle Lar’s health, he looked at the painting of Daniel O’Connell once more.

I’m an old man, or almost an old man, he said. I’ll be sixty-nine in September, and though I’m healthy, thank God, I need more rest than I used to. I have three men to do the work, but someone has to keep an eye on them because they’re only human, and someone has to make sure that the right things are done at the right time. I long ago decided that I would leave my house and farm to you, Patricia, and now I have a proposal to make. I would like you to come to live with me and run the farm as if it were already your own. I’m still too active to sign over lock, stock, and barrel today, but until the right time comes I’ll pay you a salary as good as any you’d get in any job you care to do. You’ll be your own boss, coming and going as you please. You’ll be doing work you know and like, and with a bit of luck what you learned at university may turn this into the best farm in the midlands. I’m not trying to interfere with any plans you’ve already made, Patricia, but I hope you’ll take up the offer. If you do, you’ll make an old man happy and you’ll be doing yourself a good turn at the same time.

A stricture of silence gripped the air. Her father raised his head as if in wonder; her mother stared, willing her to reply; and Desmond Deeny half smiled his habitual smile of wistful innocence. Patricia’s hand went to her throat, not to adjust her chiffon scarf but to tug at the whipcord she felt, must surely be there. As the pleasure of surprise suffused their faces, she sensed her future as she had conceived it vanish into a swallow-hole at her feet. Her instinct was to flee, but she turned to Uncle Lar, to the blue that seemed to swim in the iridescent liquid of his eyes. His short white hair was thick all over, unlike her father’s, which was thinning on the crown. His face was leaner than her father’s and harder too, the face of a man who had lived cleanly, who had not let himself become bloated and raddled from too much drink or soft from lack of exercise and too much food. However, his years were tellingly expressed in the down-turned corners of his mouth, in the single line that scored each cheek, and in the knots of flesh that lay like the nodules of leguminous roots under the skin on both sides of his chin. It shocked her slightly to realize that it was the first time she had noticed them.

It’s good of you to think so highly of me, Uncle Lar. There’s nothing I’d like better than help you run the farm, but I feel I’m not yet ready for the farming life. I’ve had five restrictive years in Mountmellick and another three in Cork, and now I’d like to spend a year or two in a place I’ve never lived in before. I was thinking of taking a job in Dublin. It’s a real city, bigger than Cork, which is a city only to Corkmen. It is the kind of place, I hope, where I might wake up with new thoughts every day.

Glory be to God, Patricia, but you’re the strange girl, said her mother in dismay.

I’m sorry, Uncle Lar.

You must follow your nose, Particia, or you’ll live forevermore with regrets, said her uncle. If you have a hankering for the city, you must satisfy your lust. So we’ll do without you for a year, but no longer. We want the girl we know. We don’t want you picking up alien ways.

When they had eaten, she accompanied Desmond Deeny into the yard where he had parked his Land Rover. He was a young man, sinewy and tall like herself and confident in his belief that The Forestry, at which he worked, was a great life. He had no land but he had a bungalow, and he hoped that one day she would share it with him. She liked Desmond. She liked the easy rhythm of his dancing, his lively, shining eyes, and his self-assured insistence that life was simpler than most people made out.

The dry June morning had turned to drizzle that wrapped them softly like a light cloak, making her wish for sunshine and a swim with Desmond in the Delour. The water in the deep pool would be cold and constricting, and the sun shining between the trees would warm her shoulders as she came out and cast running shadows on his glistening skin. She looked across the nearest field at Friesian calves swishing white-tipped tails and at Uncle Lar’s tethered bull standing with his muzzle up, sniffing pleasure in the damp air.

Lar is right, Desmond said. If you go to the city, you’ll never be the same again.

He didn’t say that.

You’re risking everything. If you go, you may never come back.

I’ve spent the last three years with my nose in books. I feel like a calf with two heads, and I want to go to a place where I’ll be alone for a little while. I want to put distance between myself and what I’ve come through.

But think of the land, Patricia. Think of the land. How many young girls would give their right arm for the chance to jump at what you’ve been offered.

She knew that he loved her, that he meant well, but unbeknown to himself he was trying to fence her round like a farm. The arid restrictions of university life which he had not experienced lay like a paling between them. She remembered one of the lecturers, a shy bachelor who had taken a fancy to her and who cycled to college every morning in a rumpled raincoat and turned away whenever a woman threatened to look at him. With his back to her, he told her one day that she was too clever for the outside world, that her future must lie in the intellectual excitements of postgraduate study; and now as she looked at Desmond, she transformed an involuntary twitch into a laugh and told him that she wanted to go to a dance in Borris on Friday.

I’ll call for you at eight, he said, getting into the Land Rover. I’ll have to keep an eye on you from now on. When word gets round that you’re a landed woman or nearly, the plot is bound to thicken.

Her uncle was alone in the house when she returned, her parents and brothers gone home.

Let me do the washing up, Uncle Lar, she said.

What kind of job do you hope to get in Dublin? he asked too directly.

I don’t know.

I knew you had something up your sleeve, and that’s why I told you about the farm—to give you a sense of responsibility. You won’t do anything rash when you know you have land behind you.

What rash thing could I do? she laughed.

I’ll leave that to you.

In Dublin I’ll be near Bray, she smiled. I’ll be able to nip out to Greystones to see if it’s changed.

He laughed lightly, then allowed his features to freeze into a mask of serious concern.

In Dublin you won’t meet the right men. You won’t meet farmers, you’ll meet gurriers who never slipped in pigsh.

But I can easily arrange for them to slip in pigsh.

You’re an attractive young woman with an appetite for change and excitement. Don’t stay away too long.

He put a hand on her shoulder and, though she was as tall as he was, she felt like a little girl.

I’m not a simpleton, he said. The city isn’t the only place of temptation. In the country there are men who might think more of the land than the landowner.

She spent the rest of the afternoon with her uncle and brought back his cows from the moor for milking. The drizzle had stopped and the evening air smelled of trees, grass, and wet clay. Though it was a Sunday evening with a beginning and an end, it stretched backward in time to merge with all the other Sunday evenings she had known in the country since she was a girl, Sundays of quiet, of minutes passing emptily, of longings now forgotten. The cows swished white tails, tore at the selvage of grass in the lane, or tried to mount one another in randy playfulness, while in a field of winter barley a neighbor was picking up doped crows and stuffing them into a sack. For a moment she paused to watch him but what she saw was the swirl of tide over black rocks. On the southwest coast you could stand on a cliff and, looking toward Florida or Spain, inhale the perfume of free-playing winds on the sea. But the midlands enveloped you like a womb. Here was a hidden Ireland, a darkly secretive landscape whose only hint of other worlds was in the sunset clouds on the horizon, reflections of far-off cities, Valparaiso or maybe Rome. She tapped the rump of the hindmost cow with a switch and watched them push forward suddenly with their heads up.

It was