Lies the Mushroom Pickers Told by Tom Phelan

Author:Tom Phelan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arcade
Published: 2014-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

22

Visiting the Sick

1951

In which Bridie Coughlin tells Annie Lamb a story of her brother Jarlath’s cruelty, during which Bridie cries, and Annie is helpless to provide comfort.

WITH HER EARS AND HER SPARSE COCONUT HAIR concealed inside the brown French beret, Bridie Coughlin had begun milking the cow by furiously tugging the teats. The angry squirts whacking into the bucket trapped between Bridie’s Wellingtoned legs was metallic, raucous and high-pitched. The cow raised her far leg in warning, told Bridie to be gentle or else. The force of the squirts eased, and eventually their sound changed and deepened until the hypnotic swoosh-swoosh soothed the jagged edges of Bridie’s battered nerves.

With forehead leaning against the red-haired belly of a warm cow, her hands worked independently as they rhythmically pulled the milk out of the hairy elder. Bridie slipped into sleep for a brief second. When she surfaced, the soothing effects of the swooshing milk had been routed by the fragments of wild dreams roaring across her dream screen with the ferocity of a March hail shower. Even though the dreamy fragments dissipated before Bridie could recall any of them, they left her feeling much worse than before she had nodded off. Her fury returned.

As the cow’s supply ran dry, Bridie pulled too hard on the teats again. The cow flicked her tail into the milker’s face—a prelude to a kick. Bridie caressed the red flank and returned the cow into her bovine complacency. Still sitting on her three-legged stool, Bridie moved the milk bucket out of harm’s way. Then, in one flowing movement she lifted the sack-cum-apron off her lap with one hand, swung the stool out from under her with the other hand and stood up—a ballet dancer ankle-deep in the straw bedding of the cowhouse.

Her mind was full of her brother Jarlath in his bed in the Mater Hospital in Dublin. She swiped at her stinging eyes with the hand holding the stinking milking sack. She would not let Eddie see her crying, did not want to hear again his unrelenting torrent of words—words intended to soothe, but which only pounded her down further into her misery. She was glad it was Sodality night, glad she had an escape from Eddie and glad it was her night to visit Annie Lamb—she could spill her heart to Annie, and Annie would sit there and listen, give succor by listening. “Our Lady of perpetual succor, pray for me.”

Making sure not to turn her face toward Eddie, who was milking the cow behind her, Bridie walked out of the cowhouse and carried her bucket to the dairy. She poured the milk through the strainer into the white enamel bucket and, by the time she had rinsed her milk bucket at the pump in the yard, Eddie had untied the four cows. With a full milk bucket in hand, Eddie went in silence to the dairy, and Bridie in silence went to the pasture gate, a ritual which had wordlessly evolved over a lifetime of shared work.

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