Country Girl: A Memoir by Edna O’Brien Read Free Book Online

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    Carnero went to the pub each night, or rather, one of the several pubs, depending on the welcome. Remarkably for a small one-horse town, there were twenty-seven public houses, three grocery shops, one drapery, one chemist, no cinema, and no library. Carnero struck oil when an elderly publican skidded on the cobbles in his own yard and needed help lifting the hooped wooden barrels of porter. Carnero got to be his adjutant and in return had free drink, but to ingratiate himself even more, he stole wood and timber from us and had a blazing fire in that bar that lured customers away from other premises.Every Saturday night he would bring me a bar of chocolate, dark chocolate with a white filling, or milk chocolate with raisins and almonds, along with Peggy’s Leg, which was sweet, cinnamon-colored, and sticky. Since I was fasting a lot to save our family from various disasters, I kept these things in an attaché case, which I would open from time to time, as might a shopkeeper, resolving not to eat them. The taste and texture of the Turkish delight surpassed all, and even thinking about it often made me break my resolve. I would open the suitcase and eat two whole bars in a gulp. My other indulgence was, with my bare hand, to scoop some of the trifle that my mother had put to set in a glass bowl on the vestibule floor and then, to hide my crime, flatten the surface with the back of a soup spoon to make it smooth again.

    On Saturdays in summer I would be sent to the bog with Carnero’s lunch, which consisted of thick slices of soda bread that was buttered, with sugar sprinkled on because of his sweet tooth. The tea, already milked, would be in a bottle. I loved that journey. Mad Mabel never set foot there, and there were no men or hobos lurking to try and get one behind a wall for a kiss, which they called a “birdy,” as they fumbled with one’s coat and skirt. Already, in my daft ambition to be a writer, I was studying nature so that I could submit pieces to the local weekly newspaper. There was an anonymous scribe, of whom I was jealous, who wrote articles about storms and seabirds and shelving sea cliffs. That was in the western part of the county on the Atlantic Ocean. We were inland, and I thought Drewsboro the loveliest, leafiest place in the whole world. On either side of the track there were grassy banks full of wildflowers and burdock and flowering weed, bees buzzing and disporting themselves in and out of those honeyed enclaves, and the smellof the nettles so hot. Birds swooped in random gusts, and butterflies, velvet-brown, maroon, and tortoiseshell, their ravishing colors never clashing, never gaudy, moved in the higher strata, like pieces of flying silk.
    When I got to the entrance to the bog, Carnero would be beckoning to me to hurry on, because he had “hungry grass.” The bog itself (another venue for my future composition) was a vista of colors that stretched miles and miles to the next parish, where we could see the slate blue of the church spire. The cut turf was still black, but the sides of the turf banks were a blacker black that oozed bog water, and the heather, blasted by winter winds, bloomed purple and purple-brown. A tall fringing of soft-green sedge circled the lake where waterbirds nested and let out occasional shrieks of alarm. On the brackish water a few yellow irises, sun-shot and golden, left one in no mistake but that it was high summer. He didn’t like the tepid tea, so, pulling heather by the roots and using a few birch branches, he started up a fire to heat it in a billy can. The smell of the fire in the open air was so clean and the thin smoke drifted up in sputters. I had a surprise for him. “What, what?” I kept stringing it along. It concerned Sacko, who was both his friend and his rival. I had brought a newspaper, wrapped around the bottle of tea, in which Sacko’s rash adventures were graphically relayed. Carnero lay back, rolling his tongue repeatedly over