Liam O'Flaherty - Land

A man put his head out of a second-floor window after Flatley had knocked.

“Who’s there?” the man said.

“I’m looking for Liverpool Joe,” Michael said.

“I’m your man,” said the other. “Give a foot to the door. I’ll be down as soon as I get dressed.”

Flatley pushed open the door and entered the house, followed by Michael.

“God save all here,” Michael said.

There was an old woman crouched on a stool in a corner of the hearth. She picked up a pair of tongs from a heap of yellow ashes that surrounded the embers of a spent fire.

“Get out of here,” she shouted, brandishing the tongs.

“Keep quiet,” Michael said. “We have business with a man upstairs.”

“Oho!” said the old woman, quickly becoming friendly. “So it’s the Fenians that’s in it. ’Faith, you’re welcome, Michael O’Dwyer. Come on over and I’ll give you a sup of ale out of the jug.”

There were several eating tables in the large room. One table was covered with a cloth, on which lay the remains of a meal. A stairway led to the upper story from the far corner.

“He’s afraid of me,” the old woman said in disgust, as Michael made no move to accept her invitation. “Ah! Woe! There was a day when young men weren’t frightened of me.”

She took a jug of ale from the hob, spat into the fire and drank. Her grey hair hung in disorder about her face and her enormous breasts lay exposed through her torn shift. Her naked feet were speckled with yellow ashes. She wore her skirt rolled up to the waist, showing a number of fine lace petticoats.

“I get frightened myself,” she said, “when anybody comes in late at night, ever since Sarah Burke and her brother attacked me last winter. They put a table over my belly and then they danced on the table. They stole two shawls that were never used twice, twenty-four bundles of flannel and it thickened, six score of eggs and five yards of calico. The police said it was delirium tremens I had, when I reported the outrage. The devils! They have it in for me, because I smuggle arms for the Fenians.”

There was a patter of feet on the stairs. Then an agile little man came into the room.

“I’m Joe Crimmins,” he said, walking rapidly across the floor to Michael. “Liverpool Joe they call me. I’m easy to recognise.”

He pointed towards the empty socket of his left eye. The other eye was small and very intense, like the eye of a bird. He was about sixty, a withered little man with a sharply tapering skull. He wore a blue suit and he had a yellow muffler twisted round his neck.

“Did you bring the money?” he said to Michael.

“What information have you got, Crimmins?” Michael said.

Crimmins rubbed his thumb rapidly against the tips of his fingers.

“I asked you a question,” Michael continued in an even tone. “I only talk when I see the colour of a customer’s money,” Crimmins said.

“Oho!” said the old woman. “Joe is a clever fox. He’s been smuggling guns to me now for twenty years, but I never yet got the better of him.”

“A man has to be clever in my business, Sabina,” Crimmins said in a conceited tone. “I’ve smuggled more guns into Ireland than any other man in the business. I’ve smuggled them into England, too, from the Continent. I’ve sold guns to the Fenians, to the Chartists and to whoever cared to buy them. Yet I’ve never been caught.”

“Show him the ‘cat,’” Michael said to Flatley. “Maybe that will make him talk.”

Flatley pulled the whip from under his jersey and flicked it before the little man’s face.

“Jesus!” Crimmins said in an awed whisper.

“May the cholera not go past the two of ye,” the old woman said. “Is it going to kill poor little Joe ye are?”

She got to her feet with surprising agility and rushed at Flatley with a short club that had lain concealed beneath her petticoats. She lost her balance after a few steps and fell to the floor, where she lay motionless on her stomach.

“Give him a little touch across the legs,” Michael said to Flatley.

Crimmins seemed to be hypnotised by the whip. His solitary eye was distended and his right shoulder was raised high up in a grotesque attitude. He broke from his trance when he saw Flatley raise the whip. He threw himself on his knees at Michael’s feet.

“I have a weak heart,” he said. “The least touch of the ‘cat’ would kill me. You can have the envelope for nothing.”

“On your feet, then,” Michael said. “Hand it over.”

Crimmins got to his feet and took a large envelope from his breast pocket. Michael took it and walked over to a lighted paraffin lamp that hung on a nail in the wall.

“You coward!” screamed the old woman as she struggled to her knees.

“I have to be careful, Sabina,” Crimmins whined.

“You’ll have to be careful of me, then, you rat,” the old woman said as she stood erect.

She spat on her club and added:

“Now, then, Liverpool Joe, where’s my share of the necessary?”

“Don’t let her come near me,” Crimmins said to Flatley.

“Butcher paid you, but he didn’t pay me,” the old woman cried. “The extra five sovereigns were to be my share. Where are they?”

“Shut your mouth,” Crimmins hissed as he edged towards the stairway.

Flatley ran over to Michael and said in a tense whisper:

“Did you hear what she said about Butcher?”

Michael nodded as he continued to read the documents he had taken from the envelope.

“Don’t let her come near me,” Crimmins screamed as he ran up the stairs.

Cursing under her breath, the old woman trudged up the stairs after him.

“Will I stop her?” Flatley said to Michael.

Michael shook his head without taking his eyes from the documents.

“For the love of God, save me,” Crimmins shouted from above.

He became silent. The old woman reached the top of the stairs. She paused there for a little while. There was dead silence in the house. Then they heard the thumping of her club as she moved across the floor. Suddenly there was a wild shriek, followed by a dull thud. Then again there was silence.

“Let’s go,” Michael said.

On the following morning, Julia McNamara announced to her parents at breakfast that she was ready to marry the man they had chosen for her.

“You can have your wish now,” she said bitterly. “I’ll marry Jim Clancy any day you want. From now on, it doesn’t matter to me what I do.”

Having made this statement, she sat bolt upright in her chair and stared fixedly at a point on the wall like a demented person. Her mother hurried round the table and embraced her with cries of woe.

“God have mercy on us, daughter,” the mother said. “Don’t frighten me by staring like that.”

Julia made no response to her mother’s words.

“Now, isn’t that a proper caution?” the father said. “They pretend that something terrible has happened and they blame me for it. It’s enough to drive a man crazy.”

He peered over the rims of his spectacles across the table at his wife and daughter.

“It’s always like this,” he moaned. “It’s been like this all my life. Anything I want badly turns out to have a bitter taste when I get it. For more than a year, Julia, I’ve been praying to the Blessed Virgin for you, asking her to put sense into your foolish head. Now when you seem to have been given a little sense by those above, you behave in a way that makes me feel a criminal.”

He jumped to his feet, struck the table and shouted:

“Sit down, Sarah, and stop spoiling that ungrateful daughter of yours. If I had taken a rod to her, same as I should have done, she wouldn’t now be giving me sleepless nights. Bad cess to you, Julia, in any case. For the past six months you have made your mother and me a pair of show-boards in this parish and you running after Michael O’Dwyer with no more modesty than if you were belly naked. Michael O’Dwyer, indeed, a man that wouldn’t give you so much as the heat of his breath on a frosty morning. Signs on, when he began to court that French girl over at the Lodge, he avoided you just as if he owed you money. By the Book! I’m a friend of the Fenians and as staunch a patriot as you would find in the country. That’s a far cry, though, from wanting to have an outlaw for a son-in-law. There is a limit to everything. That young man will likely swing at the end of a rope like his father before him. It’s not respectable marriage he wants, but blood and woe. Broken-hearted about that madman, is it? Sure, he hasn’t let you come within an ass’s roar of him since he got a whiff of the French girl’s perfume. Stop looking at that wall now. If you don’t quit staring like that, I’ll …”