Donal Ryan - The Thing About December

This must be the way those fellas in wars felt before the little prick of an officer blew his old whistle and they had to climb up over the top of the trench and run at the enemy. Here was he feeling that same terrible fear over a conversation . The thought of talking to a fella his own age from over the road was the same as running towards a load of mad Germans who were firing machine guns at you! Imagine that. He’d have been shot as a coward for sure. Maybe running and firing a gun and trying to avoid being blown to bits were easier things than talking, though. It was surely less complicated. If you survived, you probably wouldn’t be lying awake that night thinking did I look like a spastic running through that field of barbed wire? Are all the other soldiers laughing at me?

DERMOT McDERMOTT wanted to know could he buy out the land.

Johnsey was caught on the hop rightly. All he could do was stand there with his mouth hanging open, staring at Dermot McDermott like an unadulterated gom, while the words hopped around his brain like them balls in the Lotto. Dermot McDermott told how their milk quota was going to be doubled shortly and they wanted to be sure of the land, like. How’s it he couldn’t just tell him to go on away and have a shite for himself, there was no one going buying out his father’s land? For a finish he told Dermot McDermott that he didn’t know, he’d have to ask. He’d have to ask ! Imagine saying that. Who would you have to ask? Dermot McDermott’s eyes darted left and right and his bushy eyebrows furrowed together, as if searching for this phantom that needed to be consulted about the land. Maybe the ghost of Mother or Daddy would appear from the fireplace and say Go on out in the yard now, son, we’ll take care of this little bit of business. They would probably be better at this dead than he was alive.

WHY COULDN’T CANCER have minded its own business about Daddy? Why couldn’t Mother have toughed it out without him another while? Wasn’t it a solid fright to say that a chap could be left high and dry, with neither dinner nor bed made for him, and having to have dealings with sneaky neighbours over land and what have you? It was a fright to God and that’s for sure. Every word he had said he could hear back, clear as day, echoing around his thick skull, making him want to just turn off the lights and cover his head and never set foot in sunlight again. I’ll have to ask . Oh. Mother. Of. God.

Having a conversation like that, out of the blue, when a chap wouldn’t be prepared, could take it out of you. You had to let the thoughts about it just come and go by themselves. There was no point forcing yourself to think things or not to think things. You could do yourself damage trying to work things out too quick. There was no way he could sell the land. It wasn’t his, anyway. Uncle Michael who fell and was killed beyond in London, Granddad, Daddy, the IRA great-uncles — they were all still knocking about the place, Johnsey knew, keeping an eye. He was the end of their line, imagine. They must be browned off over that. Selling the land would be the last straw. You could be so much of a letdown and get left away with it by virtue of being a gom and not having full use of all of your faculties. To sell their land and give the rest of his born days sitting on his hole looking at the television, landless as well as friendless, that would beat all for badness.

JOHNSEY LOOKED AROUND the kitchen. It wasn’t the last word in cleanliness, but he had had it tightened up fairly okay. Dermot McDermott couldn’t be going back to his witchy old mother and telling her it was like a pigsty beyond, sure he wasn’t half capable of managing by himself. Imagine, though, if he was a bad yoke and he sold up to hell. Imagine the stuff he could buy! But there was money in a bank account belonging to Mother that belonged to him now. It was what she was paid by the insurance when Daddy died. There was also a big pile of money in the Credit Union below in the village belonging to him that Mother had put away over years. One of the aunties had told him all about it and how to go about getting it if he needed it, but what would he need it for? All that stuff to do with money and deeds and what have you was safely above in Daddy’s little office and there it could stay until some space in his brain could be freed up for such matters. Anyway, you couldn’t sell what wasn’t yours, and the land would never really be his. He could live on it and walk across it and for years he’d helped farm it, or at least he’d traipsed around behind Daddy and did his best not to balls anything up, but he was not of it the way that Daddy was. If he took money to let the land fall from Cunliffe hands he’d be a traitor and a blackguard.

Daddy had often talked about money as though it was only a nuisance of a thing that you had to pay heed to only the odd time. Mother berated him over his attitude — it was lacks-a-daisy-kel . You wouldn’t see the McDermotts or the Flynns or the Creamers beyond not minding their money. Or them Grogans below in the village, they grigged Mother no end and they having the grocery and the post office and the drapery and the hardware and the undertakers and the bar and the bed and breakfast and the garage and a farm of land and three or four more farms of land left to them (that people knew about!) and the board of the Bank of Ireland couldn’t so much as fart without Herbert Grogan’s permission, he had so much money stuffed into their accounts and he claiming expenses , imagine, every time he scratched himself because all the goms around the place kept voting him back onto the County Council and do you think for one second that Herbert Grogan would do in a month the work your father would do in a day? He would in his eye! He had cuteness coming out of his ears, though, that was the difference. He’d put legs under hens for you, that chap.

Why, Mother would demand, would a man who worked so hard have so little store in the bit of money his work made him? Daddy used to lay blocks as well as farming the land. He took what them auld builders gave with no argument. He never thought to up his rates. Was it unmanly to want to be paid properly for the pain in your back or the sweat of your brow? He had tried to show Johnsey how to lay blocks, but he just wasn’t tasty . You had to be quare tasty to excel in that line of work. Your plumb line had to be right, your hand sure with the mortarboard, your eye sharp so that you sat the block just right. Johnsey could hold a block in one hand fine, but he couldn’t lay his mortar at the same time. Or he could lay mortar but not if the other hand had to do something else. For a finish Daddy would grab the board and the block off of him and tell him go on away and tidy up, they were going. If Johnsey looked back, as a rule, he’d be shaking his head.

Mother often said to him to mind his bit of a job, it would stand to him. You had to have a job to get a job, she said. If you hadn’t really the aptitude for farming or for a professional career, you had to be punctual and conscientious and hard-working. You had to make the most of what you had. What had Johnsey? A big thick head into which travelled only black thoughts of how much he hated being here on this earth alone and a big pair of hands that were good at nothing only lifting bags of fertilizer and spuds and a heart that was cowardly and broken. How could you get past all that and into a place of reason and happiness and ease? Could your mind ever be at peace when you had to be afraid every minute of the next bark from the old dog Packie or the next smart remark or jostle or put-down or kick from Eugene Penrose? How could you call yourself a man when you came from a family of men who would face down the devil himself and you unable to face down a cross old bollix or a little smirking squirt?