Donal Ryan: The Thing About December

All about him in that house were the ghosts of heroes, and here lay he, a lonesome gom, letting them all down.

JANUARY WAS LONELY and slow and drawn out as a rule, no matter what Mother said about it. The first day of February is the first day of spring, Daddy used to say, as if you could dictate to a season when it was to start. More would contend spring began in March, but the way Daddy used to say it, looking up at the sky as if to see was God listening, to remind him to send the new season, his words would nearly make the world warm up.

The calving would always start in earnest at the start of February. One year, when he was only a small boy, five or six, Daddy and Johnsey and Mother gave half a night outside in the barn with a cow whose calf was coming and the calf was breech. That meant she was turned the wrong way. She was trying to reverse into the world, Daddy said. Daddy reached right in to the poor roaring heifer’s insides and pulled her calf out by the legs and set it gently on the hay. She shook and wobbled and tried to walk, and then she lay down and died. She was too early, Daddy said. Johnsey cried for the little early calf but Mother told him that calf was steeped lucky. A certain number of calves had to be brought up to heaven each spring because God had a beautiful farm above around the stars where they could live and play and never know cold nor hardship and that had made him feel better.

THE AIR WAS COLD but soon the sun would get over the effort of climbing up from behind the mountains and would start its short day’s work before slipping back down below the earth again. Johnsey liked the way the world looked and felt on a cold, clear early morning: crisp and clean and seemingly emptied of all other life. On his walk to the village Johnsey often imagined that he was the last man left alive after some mad professor let off a bomb that made every other human dissolve into dust and there was only himself left and a handful of young girls like the ones on Home and Away . Johnsey would have to save them from the animals that had turned wild from hunger. He’d march about the place with Daddy’s shotgun strapped to his back and the cartridge belt around his waist, and the young ladies would follow behind him and adore him, their saviour.

Daddy’s shotgun was still kept just inside the attic trapdoor at home, asleep in its leather holder, on a soft bed of insulation. You could smell a mixture of wood and metal and oil off of it when you picked it up. A Winchester, under-and-over, two black sideways eyes. A cold and heavy thing, you could nearly feel its dark weight through the ceiling. He often thought of the shotgun these days. Daddy had showed him how to fire it properly when he was fourteen, gripped firm, snug against his shoulder. Then he had taken him to the river field and pointed out a rabbit, cocked up on top of a rise, sniffing the air. He had helped him with his aim and told him be steady, to aim for the head, to take his time. When they collected the dead rabbit and Daddy congratulated him on his fine clean shot, he’d have given the whole world and everything in it to go back three minutes in time and leave that little rabbit to his lovely happy spring day in the meadow.

Mother knew well, when they arrived back to the house. She felt the pain in his heart, just as if it was her own; Look at him, Jack, for God’s sake, he’s as white as a ghost. He’s not cut out for that type of thing.

Sometimes you didn’t know how you would feel about doing a thing until you went and did it. And then it’s too late; you can never ever undo it.

THE JOHNSTON BROTHERS who delivered fruit and vegetables to the co-op were there before him, one of them hopping from one foot to the other and clapping his hands together like it was feckin Antarctica or something and the other sitting in the cab of their big green lorry smoking a fag. The hoppy one had a nose that no man’s face should have to support. His back was bent, as if the burden of that massive snout was forcing his head forward and down towards the ground. Johnsey often caught himself staring at it. Then he’d realize his mouth was open and the big-nosed brother had stopped talking and a blind man could see Johnsey had been staring at his nose, but there was a word for the effect that that nose had, Johnsey knew … hypnotic ! That was it. Imagine being hypnotized by a nose!

If Daddy had ever seen that fellow’s big auld Dublin nose, Johnsey knew, he would have made a great skit out of it. He would have said something to Johnsey like I bet that lad nose a lot about vegetables! And he would have dug Johnsey with his elbow and said it again, and then Johnsey would have gotten it and he would feel weak from laughing. And then at home Daddy would have to describe the nose to Mother and the way he would describe it would be so funny, Johnsey would get to have the whole big laugh again.

The other lad was lanky and sneaky-looking with a head of tight curls and long fingers gone yellow from the fags. He would always try to make a fool of Johnsey and would say things like he needed a loan of a skirting ladder or a glass hammer or a sky hook and would Johnsey ask Packie for him, but Johnsey was wise to all of them by now, he’d heard it all before. While he was talking and trying to cod him he’d be looking over at Bignose and winking and Johnsey would try to laugh with them but really it wasn’t that funny.

When Packie arrived in he was like a dog, ranting and raving about the government and he straight away started pulling and dragging at the four-stone bags that Johnsey had stacked up lovely and neat. Those sneaky bollixes are trying to pull strokes, did you weigh them bags, no you didn’t, sure what do you care, you get the same pay no matter what, take out them weighing scales, throw those bags up one by one, Lord it’s a sin to have to pay you good money to stand there like a gorilla scratching yourself.

Packie was forever going on about the wages he was forced to pay Johnsey and the terrible injustice that was being perpetrated on the small business with this minimum wage malarkey. Well if it came in he could sing for it, Packie said. There was a thing in there in that law that said lads without their full faculties weren’t entitled to it, anyway.

Johnsey wasn’t exactly sure what faculties were but he knew there were no bits missing off of him on the outside, so it must be something inside him that Packie thinks is not right and stops him from getting the minimum wage. Johnsey knew what minimum meant: a point, below which you could not go. There weren’t as many flies on Johnsey as Packie made out. He knew all about the new law coming in. But what about it, Packie knew no law only his own, and points below which you may not go would not apply to Johnsey.

THE DAY DRAGGED on and on like Tuesdays often do — it’s a nowhere day, Daddy used to say — it’s not at the start of the week or in the middle or the end, it’s just the long day before the hump. The hump is Wednesday. Wednesday always made Johnsey think of a little bridge that you had to run over to get from one end of the week to the next. Johnsey’s weekdays were nearly all the same: up in the morning, in to work, lunch in the bakery, back to work, finish work, get dog’s abuse on the way home from work, try not to cry, home, eat the dinner, look at television with silent Mother, up to bed, read his book, fall asleep thinking about Daddy, or girls, or hearing back his own thick words, and off we go again, dead tired and full of emptiness.

At lunch he would go to the Unthanks’ bakery and Himself would give him a lovely roll still warm from his oven and he’d put ham and cheese in it, and give him a Danish pastry for after, or a jam doughnut. The thought of the bakery made the day slow down even more; the warm bread smell and the little tables set out with the red and white tablecloths, the look of the Unthanks, and they smiling at him from behind the long wood counter, the pictures on the wall that hadn’t changed since Johnsey’s childhood and the feeling of gentleness that was always there. Even when the place was full and people were sitting drinking their tea and eating their sandwiches or cakes or buns in every seat and all along the window on the high stools and there was a big queue at the counter as well for the fresh warm bread, there was always somewhere to sit for Johnsey, because Herself would bring him in to her own kitchen and always make a big song and dance of him. It was never like the chipper, where sometimes fellas jumped in front of Johnsey and once, after Johnsey had paid for his burger and chips and was walking out the door and his mouth was watering just thinking about the treat ahead of him, a lad kicked his bag from his hands and it flew through the air and landed in the middle of the street and his chips were everywhere, all over the ground, and a dog ran straight over and ate his burger in one big gulp.