Graveyard Clay- Cré Na Cille by Máirtín Ó Cadhain

Author:Máirtín Ó Cadhain
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9780300203769
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2016-03-17T04:00:00+00:00

3

—… Do you think this is the War of the Two Foreigners? …

—… Me giving the Gaelic Enthusiast a word for each pint and he giving me a pint for each word …

Over and back again the following day. The third day he brought the car to rest his bottom in. The journey over and back was tiring us.

“Pól, dear,” said my mother to myself that evening, “the hay should be reasonably dry by now.”

“Arrah, how could it be dry, mother dear?” said I. “It’s impossible to dry that weedy old hay …”

I was two weeks at it before I made meadow cocks of it. I let it out3 of the cocks again, then turned it, gave it another turn, and then top-turned it.

That’s how it was when the sudden shower came, as the two of us were in Peadar the Pub’s. I had to let it all out again then to give it some more sun. Then I cleared the ditches, knocked down the stone walls and built them up again. I cut the grass margins, the ferns and the briars. I made gullies. We spent the best part of a month in the field altogether, except that we were over and back to Peadar the Pub’s in the motor car.

I never saw a decenter man. And he was no dimwit either. He took between twenty and thirty Irish words from me every day. He had lashings of money. A high-ranking job with the Government …

But one day, when he went over without me, Peadar the Pub’s daughter brought him into the parlour and hoodwinked him …

I missed him terribly. A week after he left I was laid low with the sickness that killed me … But, Postmistress … Hey! Postmistress … how did you know he hadn’t paid for his lodging? You opened the letter my mother sent up after him to the Government …

—How did you know, Postmistress, that An Gúm wouldn’t accept my collection of poems, The Yellow Stars? …

—Indeed, you don’t deserve any sympathy. They’d be published long ago if you took my advice and wrote from the bottom of the page up. But look at me, my short story “The Setting Sun” was rejected by The Irishman, and the Postmistress knew about it …

—And the Postmistress knew about the advice I gave Concannon about maiming the Kerry team, in the letter I sent him two days after the semi-final …

—How did you know, Postmistress, what I wrote to the judge about the One-Ear Breed the time I went to law with them?

—And, Postmistress, how did your daughter, who’s postmistress herself now, know before I knew it myself, that I wouldn’t be allowed into England, and that T.B. was the reason? …

—You opened a letter Caitríona Pháidín sent to Mannion the Counsellor about Tomás Inside. The whole world knew what was in it:

“We’ll bring him to Brightcity in a motor car. We’ll make him drunk. If you had a few good-looking girls in the office to excite him, maybe he’d sign over the land to us.

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