Бетти Смит - Maggie-Now

If she had turned up in the old days when he and Rory-Boy had been friends, he would have told Rory-Boy that it looked as though she were carrying a tray before her on which were two loaves of unbaked bread. Rory-Boy would have laughed and inspired Patsy to build up the story.

"And sure," he would have said, "the buttons on her waist look alive the way they do be fighting all the time to get out of the buttonholes. And the third one from the top goes in and out like a eye that does wink at you all the time."

But there was no Rory-Boy as friend; no one to talk to like that; no one to laugh with. So he saw no fun in Biddy.

She revolted him.

The two matched mares revolted him, too. When he washed or curried them and the skin rippled beneath his hand, it gave him the creeps. He hated their coarse eyelashes. He wondered why they needed such big yellow teeth only for oats and hay. He was disgusted by their ankles, which seemed too thin to support the heavy bodies. And tears of indignity filled his eyes when the horse's rump 'before his face blotted out the light of the day as he stood there braiding red ribbon into a coarse-haired tail.

He hated the manure which he had to garner each day to deploy around the base of the snowball bushes in the yard because The Missus had told him, with fright in her face, that it must be done because the Illmps were pure gold to the bushes and would make the flowers icy blue in colon He hated the tiger cat that lived in the stable with the horses to keep the rats and mice away. He hated the way the cat sneaked around the stable all night. Often, he would have given it a good, swift kick but he was afraid its yowls would bring The Boss's 1 4]

wrath down on him. He squatted on his heels when he saw the cat, tail upright, come weaving toward him hoping for a stroking. Hands on knees, Patsy glared into the cat's yellow eyes and the cat glared into Patsy's blue eyes. The cat was the first to turn away. Patsy was expert in the game of outglaring the cat.

Each day, Patsy had to walk the horses four times around the block for exercise. He had to wear a bibbed apron, made of mattress ticking, while he walked the horses. How he hated to wear that apron!

The first day's walk was full of incident. Some kids playing hookey from school followed him yelling: "Mick!"

and "Greenhorn!" and "Why don't vou button your dress in the back?" They got sick of that soon enough and went away.

An ambulance bore down on him. He had to get himself and the horses up on the sidewalk to avoid being run down. An intern or doctor leaned on the strap in the back. Patsy stared at the visored cap on top of a pompadour. He'd never seen a woman doctor before.

Then a COp came along and gave him hell for standing on the sidewalk with two horses.

"Try that again," suggested the cop mildly, "and I'll run you in. You and the horses."

A street walker, off duty and returning from shopping, invited him up to her flat to see her birdie. He blushed raspberry red until he saw that she NV: IS actually carrying a box of freshly purchased birdseed.

She does lie having a birdie ii, a cage after all, thought Patsy. And may all the saints forgive me for thinking the other way.

The third time around the block, he saw a brassy blonde leaning out of a window. Her unconfined breasts bloomed out of her kimono and lumped on her arms which were folded on the window ledge. Patsy stared at this bounty with stars in his eyes.

'Tis as they say, he thought. America is a free country.

Everything is free.

But she made shards of his pleasure by calling out: "Hey, Mister! Your petticoat's hanging down. P.H.D."

Then he had to stop while one of the mares obeyed a call of nature. He was shamed to death. A street cleaner appeared from nowhere with cart, broom and shovel.

to''] "Good day to you, officer," said Patsy ingratiatingly.

"Son of a bitch!" said the street cleaner bitterly, as he started to clean Up.

As Patsy led the horses away, he thought: He 7nea~zt the male for no man in the world could call me that and live to tell it.

He had other duties. He had to sweep the sidewalk and stoop and rake the yard daily. He put the filled garbage can at the curb at night and impaled the filled trash bag on a spike of the railing around the house. He beat the rugs and washed the windows and stretched the lace curtains on the frames. In short he had to obey The Missus' bidding anal Biddy's Shims.

Three times a week he took a wooden bucket and walked ten blocks to a slaughter house on North Street where he got kidneys or a liver or a couple of hearts or other variety meats which were given away free. Once a week, on slaughtering days, he brought home a bucket of fresh blood. Moriarity seasoned it with pepper and flavored it with lemon juice and drank half of it as a tonic.

T he other half was mixed with various ingredients and made into a fearful thing called blood pudding. Patsy could hardly get it down. Biddy stood over him and made hhn eat it, assuring him that it would give him stren'tll.

"I been eating it three years," she said' "and I can lick a ox."

"I don't want to lick no ox," he said.

Cohen he had an idle moment in the day, he sat on a three-legged stool in the stable with a coffee grinder between his knees and ground up some of the horses'

oats. Biddy treated it like oatmeal and made it into a breakfast gruel. Patsy, as well as the other members of the household, had to eat a bowlful of it each morning because of Moriarity's theory. The Boss figured that if horses grew strong on oats, human beings could attain the strength of a horse by eating the same oats.

"Is it a nation of giants," Yatsy asked Biddy, "he would have walking the streets of I.rook1N7t1 and all with the same braving horse laugh he does ONE'."

The steamship man c ailed on Patsy each payday and Patsv gave him two dollars, which the man marked in a little black book.

"Only fifty-eight dollars more," the collector had said after the first payment. "you'll be paid up in a vear."

[421 "I don't want to stay here a year," Patsy had told him. "I

don't like it here. I want to go back to Ireland."

"No reason why you shouldn't after two years."

"Two. .? "

"A year to pay off your passage here and a year to pay off your passage back."

Two years before he could go back or two years before he could send his mother passage money. No. He couldn't wait. He'd save every penny…. To that end, he got an empty cigar box from Van Clees, a young Dutch cigar Walter from whom Patsy bought a Seamy clay pipe once in a while and a sack of tobacco. Patsy nailed the cover shut and cut a slit in the cover. He dropped his savings in the slit.

The savings accumulated very slowly. Patsy was not extravagant and his needs were few enough, but there was always something to buy. Aside from fifteen cents a week for clay pipes and tobacco, he had to pay ten cents twice a week for a shave at the barber's. He couldn't afford to buy a straight razor and honing strap. A haircut once a month cost twenty cents. A nickel went into the collection plate at Mass each Sunday. Then he needed socks and a union suit and another shirt and a Sunday tie and pomade for his hair. There was a beer or two of a Saturday night not that he was a drinking man. But he liked the conviviality of the saloon where voices were raised in song and one could count on a grand fight starting up once in a while. But he did manage to save a dollar a week.

Mary asked him kindly- had he heard from his mother.