A Tiny Stage

Short story
By Shane Connaughton

Iraq was a disaster; news a blood count; reality TV further from reality than fantasy; films - inner-city scumbags trying to make a coup on dope.
There was another life. I never believed there was such a thing as an ordinary person or an ordinary place. Above the car mirror were lines from Louis MacNeice -
“Do local work which is not at the world's mercy
And that on this tiny stage with luck
Might see the end of one particular action.”
They were a totem. A holy icon. I didn't often have to look at them.
The border country beat away like a secret heart. No one owned it. I walked to Florence Court, climbed Cuilcagh, sat on Wattlebridge looking at the Finn.
Just this rainy summer I wandered into a turf bog. In the distance were ghostly gigantic windmills. A low geography had saved the bog. Lakes, rivers, flooded bottoms kept builder-barons at bay.
A rutted lane gave access from a narrow road. A machine had just about made it in. No young man would any longer cut turf with a winged spade. The machine had spread the wet turf out in rows fifty yards long. As the turf emerged a wheel nicked it into sods. The springy ground looked as if it was covered with a massive bar of chocolate.
The bog wasn't on a map. It was known as the Red bog. The owner, a tall man, wiry, weather-worn, in his late fifties, told me so. With his wellingtons turned down, and thick crinkly fair hair sweeping back from his forehead he looked out of date. He wore a string vest. He wasn't married. His parents were recently dead. A house, a bog and some meadows were his inheritance. You had to come past the house on the way in. It was a big stone house with stone outhouses and a yard. A flock of Rhode Island Reds pecked about and a collie lay in under a dead tractor. The house had seen better days. In a shed doorway was a rusty bucket and old whitewash brushes. A spick and span era ended with the parents' death.
Ben was his name. I helped him foot the turf. It was backbreaking. His back curved and seemed hardy as the length of bog oak lying by a drain. He had a quiet way of speaking, calm, as if nothing much happened round there that was important. It was like the way he walked - an amble. In the distance I could see the white gable-end of a cottage. I asked him who lived in it?
He looked towards the cottage and was silent before he replied. He told me a man had lived there, a "bachelor man". This man went into Lisnaskea one day to buy a new plough but he came back with a woman. They got married.
“They shouldn't have got married. That man beyant there, he shouldn't have done it. Because he and the wife couldn't agree. And were always fighting. He was a fighter and she was too. You marry to have a partner, a friend, to do everything together and not hide anything. The wife began to study the law books. She had a car. The boot was full of big books. There's a lane up to the house, you can't see it from here. He pulled his tractor across the lane so she couldn't get out in her car. But anyway she took him to the law and he lost half his land.”
His pale eyes looked into the distance. The sun was shining, dragon flies helicoptered about, a lark soared up the sky. You wouldn't have imagined such an idyllic spot could harbour such passions. He looked warily towards the house. He was a bachelor man himself. It held a warning for him, or an excuse maybe. He had strong arms, a strong frame, a turf bog, land, cattle, a big stone house, hens, an old dog and he was on his own. The place was called Drumlaney. I asked him why it was called that?
“Why? Someone named it that and that's all about it. We should have had the Irish language sorted out at the beginning.”
“Why?”
“Sure having signposts in Irish only - how is a foreign man going to find his way around and him lost? The Normans come in here first and the English come after. That's how the English come here.”
I asked him did he ever go into Lisnaskea himself?
“Only now and again.”
He asked me was my father alive.
“When he starts wandering, you'll know his end is near hand. They do that. My father, I had to shave him, like. He'd give me the odd punch. I couldn't touch him, like. He was very frail. He could bully to the last. He thought he was still boss-man. One day I caught him with one a them magazines. Nude women showing all their private places. Spread as wide as that gap there. He must have hid it in the hay shed. They think they are still the men they were in their youth. They want it again. But they can't have it. One day I come across him wandering about in the field. He stumbled about. He looked shocking wild. He was trying to live the past. Counting all the cattle he owned one time. He looked up at the sky, his eyes real wild, his hair standing. Then he come back into the house. He died that night. When they go wandering it's a sure sign. When they look at the clouds, it's the end. That's how you can tell. Round here that's the way it happens.”
He walked out to the lane, taking big steps across the rows of turf.
I was on my own now. The day was warm, soft, the air pure. Away across the bog, miles away, I could see smoke rising high from the cement factory in Derrylin.
A car came bumping along the lane. A man got out. When he shut the car door it was the only noise that day. Straightaway he started working. Bending to the turf, raising most of them off the ground by resting two sods across the two on the ground, then two on top of those two and so on until there were twelves sods in each.
And maybe one across the top. They'd dry that way, the sun on them, the wind going through them. Once they developed a skin rain couldn't ruin them.
I ambled over. This man was in his seventies, small and very sturdy. A stout leather belt held up his trousers. His hair was grey and black. His head was a solid block. His features were strong and country as a potato. Neatly rolled up shirt sleeves revealed very strong arms. His hands were big and brown. He saved the turf for old times sake. His wife had loved turf. She had died ten years before.
“I took her on a holiday to places round about she'd never seen. And all the time we never knew she had a brain tumour. We never had one row in all the years we were married. Not a serious one anyways. We had nine children and no money. She never minded when I had to sign on the dole. The happiest times were when we never had a penny. She was too nice. Too easy. Thank God I never lifted a hand to her.”
When he said this, there were tears in his eyes and he lifted his strong brown right arm and slapped it hard with his left hand. As if punishing the very thought. It was a strange moment.
“I went down after she died. Very down. I'm still down. I pray to God. It doesn't matter if you're Roman Catholic, Protestant, anything, the man above is there for everyone.”
From the age of fifteen, he said, he'd played football as a “tramp” player, that's what he called it, going from club to club in Monaghan, Cavan, Fermanagh.
“I knew Willie Doonan. He was a Half Acre man from Cavan town. He joined the British Army. I played against the Gunner Brady. The Gunner put me in hospital with four busted ribs. They put a bellows yoke over me to stop the ribs puncturing me lungs. The Gunner was the best. In the pub if you met him, he'd be delighted to see you. It was an honour to get busted be the Gunner. Ah now, Ireland is not the same. She's gone.”
He told me he “bruk” with his family when he was fourteen and a half. He took to the roads on his bicycle. He rode all around the Ulster coast -
“From Dundalk to Belfast, the Glens through Antrim, Donegal”.
He worked for farmers. They paid him two shillings or half a crown a day.
“Me bike was good. And I had a good tent.”
I hadn't been able to work out his accent. It was neither Cavan nor Fermanagh. But when he said tent, I knew. He was from a tinker background. He was an easy man to listen to. He told me one day he'd met a man in Shercock called Chambers. He was offered the task of cleaning a foot high of dung from an outhouse. There was a small window in the outhouse and he had to shovel the dung out through that window into the yard. Chambers left him to get on with the job and when he returned and saw the job he'd done, he couldn't believe it.
“You could have ate your breakfast off the floor it was that clane.”
He told Chambers he wanted two shillings.
“Some men give me half a crown.”
Chambers offered him a pound.
“A whole pound.” He wouldn't take it.
“That's too much money for me. I'm an aisy man.”
Chambers gave the pound anyway. As he was walking away from the house, wheeling his bike down the drive, Chambers called him back.
“Will you work here with us full time?”
“No, Sir. I like the road. The freedom.”
“Will you not try it for a week? What's your name?”
“Tom. “
A little girl came out the front door. He decided to stay for a week.
Mr. Chambers was a Protestant. A preaching man. He told Tom he'd drop him off at the Catholic chapel every Sunday and pick him up on the way home from his preaching.
“Mr. Chambers was the best man I ever worked for. I was there six months. One evening having the dinner, Mrs. Chambers says to me -
‘What's wrong,Tom? You're not eating.’
‘I'm leaving tomorrow, Missus.’
With that, Nancy, the daughter, the young wee girl, I took her everywhere on the bar of me bike, carried her on me back round the yard, took her in the horse and cart, doing the milking she'd sit on a stool beside me ... Nancy ... she jumped up from the table and leapt on me, holding me, then ran upstairs bawling her eyes out. Mrs. Chambers says to me, no Tom, you can't go, Tom, and Nancy in that state. So I told her, tell you what I'll do, says I, I'd stay another week and then I'd disappear without letting on. Just go without saying goodbye.”
He paused and bent to the turf again. He had rhythm and strength. It was as near poetry as labour could get. He straightened up and looked at me. As if judging me.
"Thirty years after leaving Mr. Chambers, I was in a pub in Fivemiletown. A woman came up to me.
'Do you know me?' she says.
I studied her.
Be God,' says I, 'I've seen them green eyes somewhere before. Nancy. Nancy Chambers.'"
Had I not wandered into the back-of-beyond, that tiny stage, I would not have heard that story. With it's amazing Hollywood moment. I helped him foot his turf then walked out with him to his car.
A herron sailed down the sky, banked lower and lower, then disappeared behind a hazel scrub.
Tom, just before he drove off, told me about his father-in-law who took part in the battle of Clonfin during the War of Independence against the Black and Tans. The IRA laid an ambush. Men were shot dead and some were left for dead. His father-in-law went to England years later when it was all over. To Birmingham. He went to a pub one evening for a drink. A man stared at him. Every time he went to the pub this man was there, staring at him. An Englishman. Quietly, one evening, the Englishman came over and spoke to him.
“Don't worry, mate, don't worry about me, it's all over now, but were you ever in the IRA?”
“I was.”
“Were you at Clonfin?”
“I was. Why?”
“I thought so. How could I ever forget the face of the man who gave me a drink when I was left on the road for dead?”
The man had been a Black and Tan and had been shot in an ambush. Tom's father-in-law taking pity, gave him a drink of water. Whenever he went into that pub in Birmingham, the former Tan always came over to him with a pint.
Again the turf bog, this tiny stage, had come up with something special.
He turned his engine off when I asked him about his wife. He’d met her locally and settled down not far from the turf bog.
“We met and married in two months and walked to the chapel the morning we got wed. And walked back home and had a cup of tea. The same as an ordinary day. We didn't have a penny to our names. My father-in-law liked me. Because I was good to his daughter. Nine children we had. When he lay dying, he was blind. But when I walked into the room, he says, ‘Tom is here anyways.’ He felt me in the room.”
When I was going home I went out past Ben's house. The stone house and stone sheds and big yard. And the rusty bucket with the whitewash brushes.
Ben was sitting on the dead tractor, staring into space. The collie dog was in the middle of the yard barking at him. Maybe he was waiting for the luck that might see the end of one particular action.