Foggage Read online

  “‘I’ll starve John Bull,’ said De Valera. ‘I’ll starve him till he bellows for Irish beef.’ And then he promised us a land flowing with milk and honey, but we’ve drunk little of the milk and tasted less of the honey. A hoor’s son in a black overcoat. It’s the judgement of the Almighty that he’s as blind as a bat,” his father called after him.

  When he went down to the kitchen, Maureen was mixing the hens’ feed. He carved a thin sliver of beef and rubbed it round inside the mustard pot with his forefinger. It was a nuisance having to go all the way to Roscrea for mustard, but there was no alternative—it was, after all, not merely a condiment but a preserver of life.

  To give him his due, his passion for mustard had more to do with medicine, as he conceived it, than gastronomy. He saw the first glimmer of light in a Dublin pub after the 1970 All-Ireland hurling final, when an old man who looked pale as death asked him for a pint of stout.

  “I’ll buy you a pint and welcome if you promise to buy me one back,” he replied.

  “I’ll do better,” said the old man. “I’ll share with you the secret of longevity, but I’m so parched that I can say no more till you’ve wet my whistle.”

  He drank the pint in one gulp and, laying the tumbler on the counter, whispered in Kevin’s ear: “Tell it not in Cork, publish it not in the streets of Rosmuck, lest the daughters of Erin rejoice.… I am a doctor, an unfrocked doctor, unfrocked by the Minister of Agriculture more than twenty years ago because of my brilliance as a biochemist. In the course of an experiment on the role of Bacillus cholera suis in swine fever, I discovered that bacon is carcinogenic. Do you know what that means?” He winked at Kevin.

  “No.”

  “It means that bacon bears the seeds of cancer, and that, my friend, in an agricultural country is political dynamite. You know that ninety per cent of Irish farmers never eat anything for dinner but boiled bacon and cabbage, and if the truth became known the bacon industry would be as good as dead. The Minister of Agriculture, fair play to him, was the first to see it, and he put pressure on the Minister of Health to have my name struck off the register. I was willing to take my case to the highest court, but no counsel would look at me. They all thought I was a raving lunatic. But I promised to tell you my secret. All meat is cancer-bearing except beef, but bacon is the worst offender. The only part of a pig that is free of cancer is the liver, and that you can fry and eat with impunity. But if you take my advice, you will eat no meat, beef included, without the accompaniment of English mustard and a raw onion to kill the bucko. A boiled onion is no good, and neither is French mustard—they’re both too mild, you see, to kill the seeds of destruction. And now I’ll have another pint if you’re buying.”

  Kevin felt that he was too amusing to deny him a drink, so he bought him a second pint and a third, and all the time they explored in detail the biochemistry of carcinogenic bacon. Convinced at last that his friend was light in the head, Kevin rose to go.

  “You may be a bad chemist, but you’re a grand talker,” he said, shaking hands.

  The old man caught his sleeve and winked. “When did you last hear of a rabbi dying of cancer?” he asked fiercely, nodding his head as if he had said the last word on the subject. Kevin soon forgot their conversation, but five years later, soon after the death of his mother, it came back to him when he read in a local paper a letter from a housewife making the same claim for mustard and raw onions as had the “unfrocked” doctor. He had been an eater of boiled bacon all his life, but after reading the letter his thoughts turned to beef. At first he found it flavourless, but like many a late convert he soon repudiated his past tastes with a fervour denied even to his mentor.

  “There is something I didn’t tell you, Kevin,” said Maureen as she sat down at the table.

  “What?” he asked when she failed to proceed.

  “I’m pregnant.”

  “You’re sure it isn’t cloudburst?” He laughed.

  “What’s that?”

  “False pregnancy in goats. The nanny swells up, but after five months she releases a cloudy liquid and the ’pregnancy’ goes away.”

  “Don’t make jokes, Kevin. Coddin’ is catchin’, and I’m dead worried.”

  “For God’s sake, have a bit of sense. How can you be pregnant now? Haven’t we been doing it day in day out for the last three years?”

  “I always took care, flushing out your seed when I felt more like sleep. I’ve no idea how it could’ve happened. All I know is that I’m a month overdue. Soon I won’t be able to go to Mass on Sunday without everyone knowing.”

  “We’ll have to do something about it,” he said slowly.

  “What can we do?”

  “You’ll have to go to England till it bursts. I’ll send you money every week, and you can come home in two years’ time with no one the wiser.”

  “And what am I to do with the child?”

  “Leave it in a home in England if it’s a girl, and bring it back with you if it’s a boy. You can tell the neighbours that you got married and that your man died in a road accident. If it’s a boy, it will be the best thing that’s ever happened to us. I won’t have to leave the farm and all my tractors to Concepta’s little brat, Breffny.”

  “I’m not going to England with this burden. I’ve never spent a night away from home, and I’ve heard terrible things about London. I read in The Express only yesterday that one in ten children born there is a bastard.”

  “All the more reason for going!”

  “Don’t make fun of me, Kevin. Can’t you see I’m troubled?”

  “Well, you can’t stay here. If you drop a child, the neighbours will know it’s mine, because you haven’t been seen with any other man. You know what that means, don’t you? Incest punishable by imprisonment, not to mention the disgrace.”

  “The child may not look like you,” she pleaded.

  She looked haggard and unfriended, lines of worry showing round her kindly eyes and mouth. He wanted to comfort her, but he still could not believe her.

  “You mean I’m not a colour-marking breed?” he asked.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “If you take a cow to a Hereford bull, her calf will have a white face; and if you take her to an Aberdeen-Angus, her calf will be born black. A Shorthorn bull, on the other hand, leaves no definite colour mark. Are you saying that I may be a Shorthorn?”

  “There’s no good talking to you in this mood.”

  “It’s a pity we’ve been born before our time. In a few hundred years incest will be as common as ditch water and as dull too. You see, when they first started inbreeding cattle, the Holy Marys said it was incest, that it was against God’s law. But the farmers won the argument. They said that they were breeding the best to the best, a good bull to his sister or even to his mother.”

  “Why do you have to bring farming into everything?” she moaned.

  She put both hands to her face, and he could see from the shaking of her shoulders that she was sobbing. Awkwardly, he crossed the floor and put his hand on her arm.

  “Don’t cry, Maureen. Sure, I was only making fun. Leave it to me. I’m sure to find a way.”

  She went upstairs, drying her eyes. He slumped into her chair and stared at the nearest hedge through the curtainless window. The afternoon had darkened. The forbidding sky looked as if it were about to descend with the night and press men and cattle into the ground. His mind moved slowly over a dim tract of land, hovered for a moment before swooping on a field. His winter barley, sown in late September, was doing well; with luck it would be better than last year, when the yield was three tonnes to the acre at seventeen per cent moisture. The trick was to sow early and allow for good plant establishment. Murt Quane, who sowed in early December, had a yield of less than two tonnes, and to get that he had to sow twelve stone to the acre as opposed to Kevin’s nine. He would have to keep an eye on his cattle, though. One of his spring-calving cows was thin. He had dried her off before the others and he was
feeding her to appetite, but still she wasn’t responding. Perhaps a word with Festus O’Flaherty tomorrow evening would do the trick.

  Slowly, he rephrased the question on his mind. The real problem was not one of unwanted pregnancy but that of finding an acceptable “father” to satisfy the hypocritical convention that a woman must not give birth unless she has known a man who is not her brother. Sadly, the only men who came to Clonglass were the parish priest and the postman. The parish priest was a seventy-five-year-old misogynist who had long since slapped down his final erection; and the postman, a landless bachelor, took the post so seriously that he saw the world, women included, merely as writers and recipients of letters. He would have to find another man, a younger man, a rambling, roving man who scattered his seed along the highways and byways with ne’er a thought for the sprouting. If she were to know such a man, she could fill the house with children for all he cared. But, come to think of it, one was enough—provided it was a boy.

  Chapter 2

  Getting up from the chair, he stretched himself and went outside, still aware of the dull ache in his testicles. Henry was in the bull yard, a faraway look in his ox eye. By long tradition the stock bull at Clonglass was called Henry in commemoration of the sexual vigour of Henry VIII, and by an equally venerable tradition the bull on the nearest Protestant farm was called Alex in honour of Pope Alexander VI, who, according to O’Flaherty, knew as much about incest as incense. The present Henry was old, heavy, ill-tempered, and truculent. At night he lived in a loose box attached to which was the bull yard and service pen. He was a good bull in spite of his vicious temper, a trifle hard on young heifers perhaps and not as gentlemanly as the previous Henry, but the soul of sexual efficiency, nonetheless. After one sniff of a cow in heat, he would come on form at once, and Kevin and Maureen liked nothing better than watching him in service, giving the full power of his hindquarters to each drive, his bulbous eyes staring straight in front of him, the folds of his dewlap resting on the cow’s back, his fierce breath warming her wilting withers.

  Life was not all pleasure for Henry, however. Tethered alone in a field in summer, he would raise his head and bellow for beautiful heifers denied him by his chain; and on one occasion Kevin found him masturbating sadly against a post. He had never felt a stronger sense of kinship with Henry than he did then, and if he’d had a pretty heifer in heat he would have led her to him on the spot.

  Kevin now rested his elbows on the wall of the bull yard, wondering if Henry had ever experienced testicular pain after service. Then a shaft of thought lit up his face. He was meeting Festus O’Flaherty, the local vet, tomorrow evening, and he would tell him that Henry seemed to have a pain in the scrotum, just to see what he might say. He could not really go to Dr. Blizzard, in case the pain was connected with sex. Blizzard, like everyone else in the parish, knew that he did not go out with women; and if the pain was one that no good-living Catholic should have, the good doctor might put two and two together.

  Kevin always went to Killage on Saturday evenings. First he would make the round of the shops that were open late, picking up a few necessaries such as mustard and any odds and ends he felt reluctant to entrust to a woman—shaving lather, razor blades, pipe tobacco, and three bottles of whiskey to see his father through the week. After the shopping he would go to Phelan’s Hotel to meet Festus O’Flaherty, a Connemara man who had made his home in the midlands. The midland farmers liked him in spite of his accent. They said that he was a good vet, that he called a beast a “baste,” that he took sick cattle more seriously than Dr. Blizzard took his patients; and in turn O’Flaherty had nothing but praise for the farmers he served. He said that they regarded a vet’s fee as a debt of honour, that they cared for their cattle even better than they cared for their wives, and that, because of the vet’s position in rural society, they liked nothing better than buying him drinks. He occasionally even praised them for their philosophy. “Unlike Connemara men,” he would say, “midlanders take themselves seriously. When they laugh, they know it.”

  Kevin liked O’Flaherty too. He first met him in a pub after a ploughing match, and since then they had taken to meeting every Saturday evening at Phelan’s. At first they talked about cattle, but as their friendship grew they talked less about cows and more about women. Though O’Flaherty was married, he had not lost his sense of romance. He still fell in love easily, but never for more than a night at a time. Kevin had already decided to invite him to have a look at Henry, and now it occurred to him that after the diagnosis he would invite him into the house to meet Maureen. As a ladies’ man, he was a good candidate for the job. If he took a fancy to her, he would lay her quickly and cleanly and then leave her. It was a measure of Kevin’s affection for him that O’Flaherty was one of the few men he could calmly contemplate in a clinch with Maureen.

  All day on Saturday, as he wished for the evening, he was aware of his carnal knowledge of his sister like a submerged rock inside his head. Like a rock, his knowledge of her had mass or inertia. It resisted his every effort to move or dislodge it. It was there as Slieve Bloom was there or the land which he ploughed and harrowed. While talking to Maureen, he always concealed the seriousness with which he regarded their relationship, but alone in the cab of a tractor he had no choice but to confront his conscience, which told him that incest was wrong. The state said that it was a crime punishable by imprisonment, and the priests said that it was a sin punishable by spiritual death. It was the imprisonment that worried him most, however. The wages of sin might be death, but death was always tomorrow. For the hundredth time he wondered if the incest taboo was God-given or man-made. In the Book of Genesis, Lot slept with his daughters and God blessed their union with two sons. And if the story of Adam and Eve were true, it followed that we are all children of incest. But though it might be a sin to puncture your sister’s maidenhead, it was not the worst sin in the book. It was not as bad as buggery, for example, which must surely be very unhygienic. And it wasn’t as bad as bestiality.

  He put the tractor into reverse and paused to wonder if he had judged correctly. The priests claimed that in sexual sin with another person the possibility of scandal was always present. They would lean over the pulpit and thunder, “Woe unto the scandal-giver.… It were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck and he cast into the sea.” Now, the great thing about bestiality was that you could not give scandal to a beast, and therefore you might be led to think that the Pope would count it a less dangerous sin than incest. But, though no priest had told him so, he suspected that bestiality with an attractive Hereford heifer would be a bigger sin than incest with a flat-footed sister, not because the young heifer might be more beautiful than the sister but because the human body was, as Paul had told the Corinthians, “the temple of the Holy Ghost.” Therefore, to copulate with a brute beast was to commit the ultimate sin in human degradation. That was something for which he was thankful. At least Maureen was not a Hereford.

  He left the field at one and spent the afternoon doing odd jobs about the yard until it was time to feed the animals. Usually, he did not go to Phelan’s till after nine, but tonight he would go at eight and have a few pints alone before O’Flaherty arrived. After tea he washed and shaved, put on his good suit, polished his Sunday shoes with an old pair of Maureen’s knickers. At last it was time to go. His Mercedes was slow to start, so he fiddled with the choke for a moment before turning the ignition key again. He was proud of his Mercedes, which he had bought last autumn after selling his fatted calves. At first he felt self-conscious behind the big wheel, recalling the old Morris he’d had for eleven years, but soon he got accustomed to the extra width and length; and when other farmers made jokes about the amount of petrol it consumed, he would pretend he had not heard and merely say, “They’re handy yokes.” He did not drive it very often, only on mart days, on Sunday mornings to go to Mass, and on Saturday evenings going to Killage. At first he had wondered if it might be too flashy for a farmer who more often
than not would have a trailer on tow, but he soon solved that problem by omitting to clean it. After a month or so the wings and doors were splashed by cow dung and farmyard slurry, and then he felt as much at home in it as if he’d been conceived and born on the back seat.

  Festus O’Flaherty was in the cocktail bar forcing drink on a fat farmer who was obviously eager to go home.

  “Do you know the first commandment in extramarital sex?” Festus asked him.

  “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s wife,” said the farmer, trying to release the vet’s vicious grip on his arm.

  “No, no,” shouted Festus. “The first commandment in extramarital sex is ‘Thou shalt not shit on thine own doorstep.’”

  “Believe me, I believe you,” said the farmer.

  “And do you know the second?”

  “Let me go home to my wife like a good man.”

  “Do you know the second law of extramarital sex?” Festus repeated.

  “No.”

  “It is impossible to produce an erection by transferring heat from a cold body to a hot body in any self-sustaining process. Ah, Kevin, me darling, me onlie begetter of foggage and its myriad applications!”