Frank McCourt - 'Tis

Her husband, Uncle Pa Keating, doesn’t sit at the table at all. He’s over by the coal range with a mug of tea and all he does is smoke cigarettes and cough till he’s weak, clutching at himself and laughing, These feckin’ fags will kill me in the end.

My mother says, You should give ’em up, Pa, and he says, And if I did, Angela, what would I do with myself? Would I sit here with my tea and stare at the fire?

She says, They’ll kill you, Pa.

And if they do, Angela, I won’t give a fiddler’s fart.

That’s the part of Uncle Pa I always loved, the way he doesn’t give a fiddler’s fart about anything. If I could be like him I’d be free though I wouldn’t want his lungs the way they were destroyed by German gas in the Great War, then years working in the Limerick Gas Works and now fags by the fireplace. I’m sad he’s sitting there killing himself when he’s the only man who ever told the truth. He’s the one that told me don’t get caught taking tests for the post office when I could save my money and go to America. You could never imagine Uncle Pa telling a lie. It would kill him faster than gas or the fags.

He’s still all black from shoveling coke and coal at the Gas Works and there’s no flesh on his bones. When he looks up from his place by the fire the whites of his eyes are dazzling around the blue. You can see when he looks over at us he has a special fondness for my brother Michael. I wish he had that fondness for me but he doesn’t and it’s enough to know he bought me my first pint long ago and told me the truth. I’d like to tell him the way I feel about him. No, I’m afraid someone would laugh.

After the tea at Aunt Aggie’s I’m thinking of going back to my room at the National Hotel but I’m afraid my mother will get the hurt look in her eyes again. Now I’ll have to doss in my grandmother’s bed with Michael and Alphie and I know the fleas will drive me mad. Ever since I left Limerick there hasn’t been a flea in my life but now that I’m a GI with a bit of flesh on my bones I’ll be eaten alive.

Mam says, No. There’s a powder called DDT that kills everything and she has it sprinkled all over the house. I tell her it’s what we were sprayed with from small planes flying over our heads in Fort Dix so that we’d be saved from the torment of mosquitoes.

Still, it’s crowded in the bed with Michael and Alphie. The Abbot is in his bed across the room grunting and eating from a paper of fish and chips the way he always did. I can’t sleep listening to him and thinking of the days when I licked the grease from the newspaper that held his fish and chips. Here I am in the old bed with my uniform hanging over the back of a chair with nothing changed in Limerick but the DDT that keeps the fleas away. It’s a comfort to think of the children who can sleep now with the DDT and not have the torment of the fleas.

The next day my mother tries for the last time to get Uncle Pat, her brother, to move up to Janesboro with us. He says, Noah, noah. That’s the way he talks from being dropped on his head. He won’t go. He’ll stay here and when we’re all gone he’ll move into the big bed, his mother’s bed that all of us slept in for years. He always wanted that bed and now he’ll have it and he’ll have his tea from his mother’s mug every morning.

My mother looks at him and the tears are there again. It makes me impatient and I want her to take her things and go. If the Abbot wants to be that stupid and stubborn let him be. She says, You don’t know what it is to have a brother like this. You’re lucky all your brothers are whole.

Whole? What is she talking about?

Lucky you are to have brothers that are sensible and healthy and never dropped on their heads.

She cries again and asks the Abbot if he’d like a nice cup of tea and he says, Noah.

Wouldn’t he like to come up to the new house and have a nice warm bath in the new bathtub?

Noah.

Oh, Pat, oh, Pat, oh, Pat.

She’s so helpless with tears she has to sit down and he does nothing but stare at her out of his oozing eyes. He stares at her without a word till he reaches for his mother’s mug and says, I’ll have me mother’s mug and me mother’s bed that ye kept me out of all these years.

Alphie goes over to Mam and asks her if we can go to our new house. He’s only eleven and he’s excited. Michael is already at the Savoy Restaurant washing dishes and when he’s finished he can come to the new house where he’ll have hot and cold running water and he can take the first bath of his life.

Mam dries her eyes and stands. Are you sure now, Pat, you won’t come? You can bring the mug if you like but we can’t bring the bed.

Noah.

And that’s the end of it. She says, This is the house I grew up in. When I went to America I didn’t even look back going up the lane. ’Tis all different now. I’m forty-four years of age and ’tis all different.

She puts on her coat and stands looking at her brother and I’m so tired of her moaning I want to pull her out of the house. I tell Alphie, Come on, and we move out the door so that she has to follow us. Whenever she’s hurt her face grows whiter and her nose sharper and that’s the way it is now. She won’t talk to me, treats me as if I had done something wrong by sending the allotment so that she could have some kind of a decent life. I don’t want to talk to her either because it’s hard to feel sympathy for someone, even your mother, who wants to stay in a slum with a brother who’s simple from being dropped on his head.

She’s like that in the bus all the way up to Janesboro. Then, at the door of the new house, she starts foostering in her bag. Oh, God, she says, I must have left the key behind, which shows she didn’t want to leave her old house in the first place. That’s what Corporal Dunphy told me once in Fort Dix. His wife had that habit of forgetting keys and when you have that habit it means you don’t want to go home. It means you have a dread of your own door. Now I have to knock next door to see if they’ll let me go around to the back in case there’s a window open for me to climb in.

That puts me in such a bad mood I can barely enjoy the new house. It’s different with her. The minute she steps into the hall the paleness goes from her face and the sharpness from her nose. The house is already furnished, at least she did that, and now she says what every mother in Limerick would say, Well, we might as well have a nice cup of tea. She’s like Captain Boyle yelling at Juno in Juno and the Paycock, Tay, tay, tay, if a man was dyin’, you’d be tryin’ to make him swally a cup o’ tay.

18

All the years I grew up in Limerick I watched people go to dances at Cruise’s Hotel or the Stella Ballroom. Now I can go myself and I needn’t be a bit shy with the girls with my American uniform and my corporal’s stripes. If they ask me was I ever in Korea and was I wounded I’ll give them a small smile and act as if I don’t want to talk about it. I might limp a little and that might be enough of an excuse for not being able to dance properly which I never could anyway. There might be at least one nice girl who will be sensitive about my wound and take me to a table for a glass of lemonade or stout.

Bud Clancy is up on the stage with his band and recognizes me the minute I walk in. He signals for me to go up to him. How are you, Frankie? Back from the wars, ha ha ha. Would you like us to play a special request?

I tell him “American Patrol” and he talks into the microphone. Ladies and gentlemen, here’s one of our own home from the wars, Frankie McCourt. And I’m in heaven with everyone looking at me. They don’t look long because once “American Patrol” starts they’re twirling and swinging away on the floor. I stand by the bandstand wondering how they can go on dancing and ignoring an American corporal in their midst. I never thought I’d be ignored like this and now I have to ask a girl to dance to save face. The girls are ranged in seats along the walls, drinking lemonade, chatting, and when I ask them to dance they shake their heads, No, thanks. Only one says, yes, and when she gets up I notice she has a limp and that puts me in a quandary wondering if I should postpone my own limp for fear she might think I was mocking her. I can’t leave her standing there all night so I lead her out to the dance floor and now I notice everyone looking at me because her limp is so bad she nearly loses her balance every time she steps forward on the right leg that’s shorter than the left. It’s hard to know what to do when you have to dance with someone with such a serious limp. I know now how foolish it would be for me to put on my false war limp. The whole world would be laughing at us, me going one way, she the other way. What’s worse is I don’t know what to say to her. I know that if you have the right thing to say you can save any situation but I’m afraid to say anything. Should I say, Sorry for your limp, or, How did you get it? She doesn’t give me a chance to say anything. She barks at me, Are you going to stand there gawking all night? and I can’t do anything but lead her to the floor with Bud Clancy’s band playing “Chattanooga choo choo, won’t you hurry me home.” I don’t know why Bud has to play fast tunes when girls with limps like this are barely able to put one foot before the other. Why couldn’t he play “Moonlight Serenade” or “Sentimental Journey” so that I could use the few steps I learned from Emer in New York? Now the girl is asking me if I think this is a funeral and I notice she has the flat accent that shows she’s from a poor part of Limerick. Come on, Yank, start swinging, she says, and steps away and twirls on her one good leg as fast as a top. Another couple bumps against us and they tell her, Powerful, Madeline, powerful. You’re out on your picky tonight, Madeline. Better than Ginger Rogers herself.