Liam O'Flaherty - Irish Portraits - 14 Short Stories

Finnigan, on the other hand, was a huge heavy man, with a rosy, fat face, sleepy blue eyes and a sandy moustache. He never smiled. He hardly ever spoke, and when he stood still anywhere he always crossed his arms on his massive chest. He once drank four pints of Guinness’s porter without drawing breath.

Suddenly Hanrahan clapped his hands together, opened his mouth wide and began to laugh without making any noise. Tears began to glitter in his little eyes. Finnigan looked at him stupidly with his mouth open.

“What’s up?” said Finnigan.

“I know how we can get drinks,” gasped Hanrahan at last. Tears had begun to run down his sallow cheeks with laughter. Then he was seized with another fit and doubled up against the fence, mumbling: “Oh, my side, I’m afraid I laughed too much, oh, my side.”

“Foo,” said Finnigan, shifting his back to get a more comfortable stone in the fence for the support of his shoulder blades. Then he opened his mouth again to speak, but forgot what he was going to say before he could say it, owing to laziness and the heat of the day. He subsided against the fence in silence, like a bladder out of which the wind is escaping slowly. He crossed his legs and dropped his chin on his neck.

Then Hanrahan suddenly became serious. He came over to Finnigan. Putting one hand on Finnigan’s chest and the other hand on the fence he reached up and began to whisper in Finnigan’s ear. He was whispering a long time rapidly. When he had finished Finnigan shook his head several times, scowled and said “No,” with great emphasis. “Now look here,” said Hanrahan in an irritated tone, “listen to me.” He began to whisper again. Gradually the look on Finnigan’s face changed. The scowl vanished. The fat, red cheeks, with little white flakes on them from sunburn, broke into creases. He opened his mouth and guffawed three times, just like this: “Haw,” then a gasp and then again “Haw.”

“D’ye see?” said Hanrahan, digging him in the ribs with his elbow.

“Yes,” blubbered Finnigan, laughing down in his chest heavily. “I… I see what ye mean now.”

“Well, are ye game to do it?” said Hanrahan.

“Would I get arrested?” asked Finnigan, with his forehead wrinkled and a suspicious look in his eyes.

“Devil a fear of ye,” said Hanrahan. “Who’s to know the difference.”

They were both silent for a long time, almost a minute. Hanrahan was watching Finnigan’s face anxiously. Finnigan was looking at the ground, his forehead wrinkled, his mouth open, his eyes staring vacantly at something to the left of him. At last he looked up and said, “All right I’ll do it. Where?”

“Here. Here where ye stand,” cried Hanrahan excitedly “Now mind what I told ye. Just do what I told ye. Now go ahead. It’s dead easy. Leave the rest to me. Just do what I told ye. Hurry. Go ahead, man.”

Finnigan cast a suspicious glance about him and then he let himself fall heavily down by the side of the fence. He made a terrific, crumbling, brushing, dull noise falling. He was wearing grey heavy frieze trousers, a navy blue jersey and heavy hob-nailed boots that were white with caked mud and dust. He lay in a cumbersome soft mass on the ground, lying on his stomach. He gripped his stomach and began to yell. He bellowed like a bullock. Hanrahan rushed over to him, tried to turn him on his back, shook him and then jumped to his feet.

He ran out into the middle of the road, waved his hat into the air and began to shout: “Help, help. A doctor, or he’s dead. Help, help,” People rushed out of Mrs. Curran’s public-house crying: “What’s the matter, what’s the matter?”

“He’s got the colic,” shouted Hanrahan, rushing over to Finnigan and going down on his knees. “He’s got the colic. My God, if I had only a drop of brandy for him.” He began to rub Finnigan’s stomach furiously. Finnigan writhed and bellowed with monotonous regularity.

“What is it?” cried Mrs. Curran, a short, stout woman in a black dress, with a silver watch hanging on her right bosom from a black satin strap. Her son had become a General in the Free State Army and she gave herself “airs,” as the people said. She pushed up through the crowd until she faced Hanrahan and Finnigan.

“Mrs. Curran,” cried Hanrahan pathetically, as he took off his hat. The crown of his head was completely bald. Some half-drunken man in the crowd giggled and cried: “Oh sweet Virgin, isn’t the full moon out early this quarter.” “Mrs. Curran,” continued Hanrahan, holding his hat in his hand, “may yer soul rest in Heaven and save his life with a drop of brandy. An’ didn’t he soldier under yer son General Curran an -”

“Mary,” called Mrs. Curran shrilly, “bring out a noggin o’ brandy, quick.”

Hanrahan raised his hands and eyes to Heaven and murmured a blessing on Mrs. Curran. At the same time he nudged Finnigan with his right knee. Finnigan bellowed and began to kick the ground with his heels. He made a noise like an earthen floor being beaten with a heavy hammer. The same half-drunken man who had remarked on Hanrahan’s baldness began to laugh, but somebody else told him to shut up and asked him whether he was a Turk or what. A quarrel started and the greater part of the crowd surged away down the road after the two men who had begun to quarrel.

Then the girl came running out with a noggin of brandy in a tumbler. Hanrahan grasped the tumbler. Holding the tumbler in his hand he began to thank Mrs. Curran again. But the sight of the brandy was too much for Finnigan. He stopped bellowing and gripping his stomach. He sat up suddenly.

“I must drink yer own sweet health, Mrs. Curran, first -” Hanrahan was saying, when Finnigan reached out over his shoulder and grasped the tumbler. A few drops of the brandy spilled as Finnigan wrenched the tumbler from Han-rahan’s hand. Then at one gulp he swallowed it, every drop of it.

“Scoundrel,” yelled Hanrahan, gripping Finnigan about the body and biting at him with his teeth all over the chest. “Son of a wanton,” he hissed between bites, “robber, may yer bones be sucked dry in hell by hungry little devils, you -”

But Finnigan jerked himself up and swung Hanrahan aside against the fence. He rose to his feet slowly and ponderously with Hanrahan hanging to his jersey. He looked around him foolishly.

“I’ll have ye arrested, the two of you,” cried Mrs. Curran, beside herself with rage at the trick that had been played on her. The crowd was laughing.

Finnigan, as soon as he heard the word “arrested,” opened his eyes and his mouth, looked about him wildly, struck at Hanrahan blindly and missed him. Then he yelled and started off at a bound through the crowd, headed westwards towards the road leading to his native village four miles away. He left a large strip of his blue jersey and of his cotton shirt in Hanrahan’s bony fingers. He ran up the road, the hobnailed soles of his boots almost hitting him in the broad back as he ran, his back all ripped open and naked in parts, with remnants of his clothes slithering about his body. The people yelled with laughter. Even Hanrahan forgot his anger and laughed.

But Mrs. Curran did not laugh. She kept shaking her fist at Hanrahan and shouted: “I’ll have ye arrested for fraud unless ye pay me for that noggin of brandy. So I will.”

“Yerrah, is it out of yer mind ye are, woman?” cried a fat farmer, with white side-whiskers. “Is it a mangy drop o’ brandy ye’d put in front of a good laugh. Here an’ be damned to ye is the price of yer whiskey. Come on,” he added to Hanrahan, “begob, yer worth a drink for that.” And he burst out laughing again.

“Begob an’ he’s worth another from me,” cried another farmer. “Have one on me too, the curse o’ God on ye for a humorous cratur, Hanrahan.”