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

in the face, furious at being mocked by a lying hooligan. But the judge, who himself liked a drink, was lenient that day, or else had enjoyed the repartee, so that Sacko got off on the grounds that the break-in was not serious, and what were a few missing eggs to a prosperous person known as Eamonn the shopkeeper.
    “Christ, there’s no stopping him now,” Carnero said, staring at the photograph of Sacko in an ill-fitting blazer with brass buttons and steel-rimmed glasses that he had worn for effect.
    Although the next item that I read out did not interest Carnero, he listened, anything to loll and keep idle. Did it, Iasked him, outshine my own more pallid pieces, about bogs and bees and butterflies?
    On the west coast of Ireland between Clare and Kerry lies the mouth of the Shannon with Loop Head Peninsula on the Clare side aggressively spearing twenty miles out into the ageless and relentless foe, the Atlantic. Elemental wars of wind and water have vanquished all its supporting land fortifications to north and south and the great Shannon flood, allied with the ocean, has attacked the rear or landward end and all but isled it. Greyly and ever narrowingly the Peninsula lances out with its beetling cliffs, flanks to the Peninsula at Killala, whereon it carries a lighthouse from which, like the grand old warrior it is, it flashes the chivalrous warning, “Beware! I break the ocean, I wreck ships.”
    It was time to go back home. If on the return journey I saw the same lucky butterfly, then the composition I was intending to write would soar. It had rested on a rock, and was opening and shutting its wings repeatedly, wings like jewels, deep violet with a dusting of marcasite, and it kept doing the same thing, the opening and the shutting of the wings, like a coquette, drunk maybe from the nectar it had just tasted on berries, or perhaps to entice another of its kind.

    Then one wet night, as we sat by the fire, our dogs began to bark like mad, and we were surprised that any visitors would set out on such a night. We waited and waited, yet nobody knocked. Eventually my mother went out to the back kitchen, where a letter had been slipped under the door. It was that dreaded thing, an anonymous letter. She read the first lines aloud. Carnero was to be seen in our woods, with the doctor’s maid, each night after he left the public house. The subsequent lines were so shaming that my mother called my father out ontothe step and shut the door so that I would not overhear. When they came back in, she said, in a dire whisper, that Carnero would have to be given his walking papers. If that happened, we were truly sunk. He ran the place. He milked, he foddered, he plowed, he harrowed, he killed a pig twice a year, and on summer Sundays wrung the necks of cockerels for Sunday’s dinner, which consisted of boiled chicken and a white sauce with parsley.
    Piecing together the contents of the anonymous letter and Carnero’s terrible tryst, I went wild with jealousy and feared for his soul, having no regard for hers. The only punishment I could wreak was to refuse to accept the bars of chocolate and, moreover, not speak to him. I can’t remember how long this sulk lasted, except that we learned that the maid, having been locked in a box room by the doctor’s wife, was later summarily dismissed.

    Then one day, years later, the unthinkable happened. Carnero gave notice that he was leaving. He was going to England, where his cousins had fixed him up in a job with the railway company. One minute, as my father irately put it, he was going to Cambridge, and the next minute it was Oxford, and there was much sarcasm as to which university he would be attending. But as the day of his departure got nearer, the reality of it hit us. My mother began to panic and no longer listed his failings, his lack of hygiene, his emptying his po pot, which was a tin can, through the window at night onto a bit of flag that was permanently slimy as a consequence,