The Country Girls Trilogy by Edna O'Brien

Author:Edna O'Brien [O’Brien, Edna]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2017-10-23T00:00:00+00:00

11

Finally, my father asked us to fetch the doctor, because he felt faint, not having been able to eat for several days. The doctor gave him an injection and told us to ration the amount of alcohol he had. We sat with him in turns and gave him soda water with a small amount of whiskey in it—a smaller amount each time. I had not heard from Eugene or Baba and I was sick with worry.

“I’m sorry,” my father kept saying as I sat on the bed and held the glass to his lips. His hands shook so that he could not hold a glass or a razor. He cried like a child. Always after drinking, he cried for days and was ashamed to talk to anyone. His depression was frightening.

“ ‘Tis nice to have you home,” he said. “Why don’t you get yourself a cigarette? Sure all young people smoke nowadays, I know that, I’m a fairly understanding man …” And I thought of Eugene’s desk with packages of cigarettes strewn about, and Cancer is painful written in his clear, square handwriting on some of the packages.

“Go on, can’t you,” my father said, and I smoked a cigarette to oblige him. I wondered when he would let me back.

“I’m for your good, of course,” he said. “It nearly killed me the day I got that letter, to think of you mixed up with a hooligan like that.” The word “hooligan” incensed me, but I held my temper.

“I’m in the world longer than you and I know right from wrong.” He spoke apologetically and wiped his crying eyes in the sheet and blew his nose.

“I’ll be better when I go back. I’ll be careful,” I said.

“What back?” he said, rising up in the bed. “You’re not going back. You’ll get a little job here and help Aunt Molly and myself. I was thinking,” he said—and winked knowingly at me, as if he were going to say something of the greatest secrecy and importance—”I was thinking that we might open a little business down the road, redo the gate lodge and start something going. We might pull ourselves together and buy this place back.” He was quite serious.

“I’ll just go back and get my clothes from Joanna’s house,” I said, trying not to sound too eager. I’d have said anything to get away.

His grip on my wrist tightened, and he said, “We’ll go to Limerick someday, the two of us, and get you some new clothes.”

“That would be waste,” I said.

He asked for another drink, and as there was very little soda water in the siphon, my aunt suggested that I go over to Jack Holland’s and get some, before closing time. She was in the kitchen making a soda cake in a big tin basin, the cellophane packet of brown caraway seeds on the table beside her. We all liked caraway seeds in the bread, except Maura, who picked them out, thinking that they were insects or something.

I collected the empty siphons and set off for Jack Holland’s public house.

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