We Were Rich and We Didn't Know It Read online

  As she grew older Nurse Byrne’s hearing began to fail.

  “Will you stop whispering for God’s sake? What’s the matter with you?”

  She spoke louder, repeated herself more often. Whenever she passed me on her bike in the town she screeched, “When you were born you had the loudest cry I ever heard, Tom Phelan, and the biggest b-o-t-tom, too.” And she rode on, leaving me at the mercy of the lads who had heard her. “Big Arse Phelan! Big Arse!”

  Near the end of her days, Nurse Byrne bought a car and became the terror of the town’s children and dogs. She had grown so small that she only saw a slice of the world between the dashboard and the rim of the steering wheel.

  When she died, it was as if a mountain had been moved off the horizon during the night. The Cock Robins of the town once again swaggered in the domain that had been hers for forty-odd years. Most of the babies she had pulled out were at her funeral.

  It wasn’t until her headstone was put up that the town discovered that Nurse Byrne’s name was Katherine.

  4

  IN THE FARMHOUSE KITCHEN

  In our farmhouse on Laragh Lane in Mountmellick, the kitchen was also the dining room, the children’s playroom, the sitting room, the workroom, the place where turkeys and chickens were plucked, and where new litters of pigs were kept warm in cardboard boxes while Dad broke off their front teeth with pliers to prevent them from biting their mother’s teats.

  The only source of heat in the house was the kitchen fireplace. The bedrooms and parlor were cold and damp, and we slept with our school clothes folded between the sheets to have them warm for the following morning. Hot water bottles were used for most of the year. All dry overcoats in the house served as extra blankets.

  On Saturday nights in our kitchen, preparations were made for attendance at mass the next morning: Dad shaved, Mam polished shoes, Dad washed the children, Mam dried us and fine-combed our hair for fleas, and Dad trimmed our nails.

  Early in the evening the big black cast-iron pot—also used for boiling gruel, potatoes for the pigs, Christmas puddings, and Monday-morning laundry water—was hung from the crane above the fire. Because the hard limestone water from the well made it difficult to work up a lather, the pot was filled with soft water from the concrete tank at the wicket door.

  “But I saw worms wriggling in the tank.”

  “Sure, what’s a few boiled worms?”

  While the water heated, Mam placed a basin, towel, shaving brush, yellow soap, comb, and folded newspaper on the table in preparation for Dad’s weekly performance with his razor. Then she sat at the fire, with her back to the place of Dad’s high-wire act, and shined the shoes. As if the smell of Kiwi polish activated an alarm in his brain, Dad stood up and walked into the boys’ room. He returned with the wood-framed, tilting, shaving mirror.

  The money box on top of the dresser was never touched by the children; neither was the Sacred Heart lamp, the key to the kitchen door, the serrated bread knife, Mam’s rod hanging beneath the mantelpiece, the door latch of Uncle Jack’s room, the sugar bowl, the matches on the mantel, or the key for winding the clock. But above all else, Dad’s razor was so much off-limits that I imagined it was a murderous weapon with a mind of its own, ever watchful for flesh as it lay in its lair in the drawer under the mirror. It was a wild animal that only the strong hand of a man could control, but even in the strongest of hands, it could still sink its teeth into the face of the shaver.

  When Dad lifted the paraffin lamp off its nail on the wall and placed it beside the mirror, the shadows in the kitchen changed, robbing it of its familiar, comforting qualities. The atmosphere became colder, and the anticipation of Dad’s derring-do caused the hairs on my neck to move.

  My four siblings and I gaped at Dad shaving as if mesmerized by a snake’s twitching tongue. Down the side of his face the razor loudly scraped, leaving in its wake a clean, pink swath. I held my face within my palms as Dad’s cheeks and jaws appeared from under the soap.

  I had often helped Dad as he slit the throats of turkeys bound for the Christmas market, and so I grasped the seat of my chair when he dragged his razor down his throat, not even slowing as it approached his Adam’s apple, and bumped over it like a bike going over Rourke’s Bridge. Then the razor was climbing back up his throat to clear the stubbles the downward passes had missed. The slopes of his Adam’s apple were ascended and descended with no regard for safety. With thumb and index finger at each side of my throat, I pressed against my skin to save him from slicing into a pulsing artery. More soap was brushed on and the fingers of Dad’s left hand were used to make level the passage of the razor across the hilly surfaces of his chin. When he lifted his nose to get at his philtrum, exposing his nostrils in the mirror, my sister put her hands over her eyes and bent her head to the table.

  “He looks like a pig,” she said.

  When Dad finally finished, he hung the lamp back on its nail, and the familiar comfort and warmth of the kitchen returned.

  Back at the basin, Dad lathered his hands. Then, like a starling in a loch of water on Laragh Lane, he scrubbed his face and ears and neck, his face almost in the basin, drops of water in the air around him. Then he scooped water over his head, and washed his hair with the yellow soap. When he’d rinsed out most of it, he poked his ears with his thick farmer’s fingers.

  “Nan,” he said, and Mam dipped a saucepan into the pig pot, cooling it with mugs of cold water from the kitchen bucket. She held the pan over Dad’s head, the soapy water falling into the basin like liquid icicles pouring off the eaves of a thatched roof on a long day of heavy rain. Then Dad toweled himself with the same intensity he applied to everything he did: his head became the center of a flurry, a whirlwind towel chased by two hands full of impatient fingers.

  Next he ran a close-toothed, flea-catching, ivory comb through his soft hair, inspecting it for victims after each pass. If he found one he squashed it between his thumbnail and the ivory, the tinny click bringing a protesting grunt from my sister. Then before resuming the hunt he wiped the comb on the arse of his trousers.

  When he had stowed away the mirror and cleared the table, Dad put on his cap and went out to the dairy to fetch the two-handled galvanized bath. The bath was also used for the Monday morning laundry and as a carrier for apples and potatoes. Once a year it was positioned beneath a lifeless, hanging pig to catch its intestines when Mister Lowndes slit its belly from nave to chaps with one drag of his knife.

  To our boggish tongues the bath was a “baa.” It was three feet long with fifteen-inch sides, a handle at each end. Giving loud instructions for everyone to stand back, Dad lifted the pig pot off its hook over the fire, carried it to the baa in the middle of the floor and, using his cap to grasp one of the three legs, tilted in most of the water. Steam billowed to the clothesline near the ceiling.

  Soon Dad was on the floor beside the baa, roughly scrubbing a child’s body.

  “Ow!”

  “Well, if you didn’t get your insteps so dirty . . .”

  When my turn came and the stinging soap was rubbed into my hair, I clamped my eyes shut until the saucepan delivered its cascade of flushing water. Then I stepped out of the baa into the towel on Mam’s lap at the fireplace. When she had dried me, brushed my hair straight, and used the ivory flea-catcher, I was unseated to make room for the next child. Those few moments in her lap within the radius of the fire’s heat were like soaking in a bath of warm, silver grace.

  In pajamas and shoes we lined up to have our nails cut. Using scissors large enough to trim a box hedge, Dad examined each finger for signs of nail biting. When an accusation was made and a lie of denial told, the accused received a slap on the back of the hand; the evidence of biting was pointed to, the accusation was repeated, and the truth was told.

  “You’ll have to tell that lie in confession.”

  Our Saturday night ablutions completed, Mam and Dad lifted the bathful of used water onto two chairs facing each other “to get it out of the w
ay,” and then we were sent to bed, hot water bottles under our oxters.

  Years later I realized Mam had bathed in the baa water after we children had gone to sleep.

  5

  THE TURKEY IN THE CUPBOARD

  Our kitchen dresser had three shelves atop a wider cupboard with two doors. The lower two shelves held the everyday delft, and the top one displayed three Willow pattern serving dishes with hairline cracks in the glaze exposing the brown clay beneath. Along the dresser’s crown, a row of chipped mugs and cups holding small bits and pieces, saved “just in case,” hung on hooks. A tin cigar box on top of the dresser held the petty cash and important papers like dog and bull licenses; up there, too, were catapults taken from misbehaving boys.

  Mam used the surface of the cupboard below the shelves as her workbench. Inside the cupboard she stored the bread baker, pots, saucepans, frying pan, and a sack of flour. Every spring she tidied these to one side and made a nest of soft barley straw in the empty space. When one of her turkey hens sat down in the middle of the farmyard in a state of broodiness and refused to move, Mam gathered her up, placed her on the nest, and closed the cupboard door.

  The next morning Mam left the cupboard open until the turkey came out. The bird was calmly steered to the kitchen door, where she tripped over the shallow step. The moment she entered the graveled yard, one of the children chased her to the dunghill in the haggard. There the turkey stood, pointed her tail to the sky, and sent out a blast of turd that landed ten feet away, leaving a contrail of stinky steam. After she had adjusted her feathers, she was driven back into the farmyard. There she was introduced to two battered tin saucepans, one filled with water, the other with a mash of crushed oats, chopped hardboiled eggs, potatoes, and dandelions.

  She ate in solitude, but because memories of gang-feeding with her siblings when she was a chick were etched into the turkey’s brain, she gobbled up her mash as if making sure she would be the one fittest to survive. Then she stuck her beak in the water, trapped a drop, and lifted her beak to the sky to let the water flow down her gullet. She did everything quickly, Uncle Jack said, because she couldn’t stop thinking about her nest.

  Full to her wattles, she trotted back to the kitchen door, cocked her head, and listened. When she heard nothing, she nervously stepped in, fell down the two-inch step, jerked her head, and blinked her purple eyelids. She walked over to the dresser, all the while scoping out the kitchen for a predator waiting to pounce. Then she poked her head into the nest, which now contained fourteen brown-speckled white eggs. Mam had bought the eggs from Alice Burns, whose boar regularly impregnated Dad’s sows. Turkey cocks can be vicious and dangerous to children, so Mam did not keep one when we were small.

  Without hesitating to ponder the miraculous appearance of the clutch of eggs, she straddled the nest, sat down carefully, and fussed until every egg was under her feathers. Mam, who had been sitting still at the end of the dresser, quietly closed the door, and everyone in the kitchen moved again.

  Each morning for the next twenty-eight days, when it was time for the hatching turkey to go out, everyone in the kitchen played statues. When she came off her nest, she stood still as a stick on the cold kitchen floor. Then, when she saw it was safe, she walked to the kitchen door, stumbled over the shallow step, and strode out into the farmyard. One of the children immediately chased her to the haggard, the bird running like a person with their arms tied to the sides of their body.

  Turkeys normally do their jow countless times a day wherever they happen to be. But a clocking turkey makes her jow once a day, when she comes off her nest. So every morning in the kitchen, there were complaints about driving the turkey out to the haggard.

  “Why do I always have to see her stinky dung squarting? Ask Eddie to do it.”

  “I fed the ferret last night and his dung is stinkier than the turkey’s.”

  One time when I steered the turkey out to the dunghill, Dad and Uncle Jack were working in the haggard. The bird let fly a squart with a trail of steam rising off it like smoke off a burning stick.

  “That must tear d’arse out of her,” Uncle Jack said.

  “The child, Jack!” Dad said, nodding toward me.

  Once, the turkey thought she saw a fox in a dark kitchen corner, and in her fright she flew up toward the light in the window. She bumped into the glass and fell onto her back, her claws entangled in the lace curtain. Hanging upside down with her wings fluttering, she sent everything stored on the wide windowsill scattering onto the floor—caps, pixies, gloves, newspapers, the Irish Messenger of the Sacred Heart, a ball of wool with two knitting needles stuck in it. She squawked like she was being murdered. Mam folded the wings against the turkey’s body and calmed her down by putting the head in her armpit. Then she told my sister to untangle the curtain from the turkey’s claws; in dread of touching the scaly feet and sharp nails, she obeyed with a squinched-up face and nervous fingers, whining, “Why do I always have to do it?”

  Fortunately, this happened when the turkey was on the way back from her daily toilette.

  During the third week of hatching, Mam put the eggs in a basin of warm water she had tested with her elbow. If an egg floated it was fertile; if it sank it was rotting, and my brothers and I fought for the joy of splattering it against the cow house in a shower of dark yellow stink.

  When the eggs in the dresser hatched out, Mam took the tiny birds out to the turkey house in a bucket. There she fed them her special mash of chopped nettle and dandelion, egg, medicated powder, bran, bone meal, and bread until they were big enough to be steered out to the Limekiln Field to graze and scratch.

  In late summer, when the sheaves of wheat, barley, and oats had been drawn into the haggard, one of my jobs was to herd the flock of turkeys to one of the fields so they could glean the kernels that had fallen out during the cutting and handling of the cereal. For a couple of hours, they high-stepped through the short, hard stubbles like a man high-stepping through dewy grass in a pair of leaky wellingtons.

  When I drove the turkeys home to the farmyard, Mam came out and helped me count the ever-moving, tightly packed flock. If our counts did not agree, we did it again.

  Precautions, similar to making a kitchen childproof, were taken against the myriad ways the turkeys could accidentally kill themselves. Mam said, “Turkeys are so stupid they can drown by standing in the rain and looking up at the sky with their beaks open.” The calves’ water tank in the Limekiln Field was a great attraction for the birds. But when they flew up onto the rim, they lost their balance, toppled in, and went to a watery grave. Even after Dad placed a partial lid on the tank, some turkeys still managed to drown themselves. And on occasion Old Mister Fox greased his chin with turkey flesh until Dad caught him in a snare.

  Each year, Mam reared about eighty turkeys for the Christmas market and to give as gifts. The birds she sold produced a little wave of money that would float our holiday extravagances, such as a bag of coal for the fireplace and a toy for each child. The parish priest and the nuns in Mountmellick, Granny, our aunt Teresa in Dublin, our aunt Kit in England, and several others received turkeys, while friends and men who had worked with Dad during the year got a pair of chickens or a duck.

  Each December, Dad and his helpers gathered the birds not destined to be gifts, tied their legs together, loaded them into the horse’s cart, and brought them to the market in the town square. About ten days before Christmas, Dad killed all the gift turkeys. First, he folded the wings and put the bird between his knees. One year, when I was about ten, I was assigned to hold the bird’s legs projecting behind Dad to keep them still. Dad grasped the turkey’s head, bent up the neck, and cut across it with the broken kitchen knife he had sharpened on the wall of the sandstone trough. The pain and struggles of the bird went into its legs and then up my arms and into my chest. Later, when I asked Dad not to ask me to do that job anymore, I was surprised when he said yes; I had been afraid he would tell me to be a man.

  When the turkeys
had experienced the one bad day in their otherwise happy lives, they were hung upside down on iron spikes high in the dairy walls. During the week they were there, it was only my fear of disobeying Dad that forced me into the dairy, my half-hooded eyes avoiding the slit throats and purple heads.

  The turkeys were plucked at night in the pallid yellow light of the double-wicked paraffin-oil lamp hanging on the whitewashed kitchen wall. Dad and Mam and Uncle Jack plucked, each sitting on a straight-backed kitchen chair, each with a soft beet-pulp sack across their knees and a dead bird in their lap, the head hanging down and almost touching the floor, eyes closed. The sound of the feathers being ripped out was like the sound of a piece of paper being torn from top to bottom. Sometimes one of the pluckers made a tsk, meaning they had scarred the bird’s skin.

  The pluckers always left the wing feathers on because the person getting the turkey might dry the wings to use them to sweep crumbs of turf and ashes into the ash pit.

  Once, while plucking, shy Uncle Jack said out of the blue, “Gussie McFlynn rode a hin from here to Ballyfin. When he came back, he made a crack and blew the feathers off her back.”

  As the adults worked, movement in the kitchen was restricted because the breezy wakes of passing children swirled the plucked feathers up into the air, causing them to be breathed into nostrils and set off sneezing fits. And when a feather landed on the open fire, it hissed and made a foul smell like hair burning. Sometimes the flames of the oil lamp on the wall leaped up and devoured a feather that had floated across the top of its glass globe.

  Dad was the one who pulled out the pinfeathers of all the birds with pliers. He was the one who tied the feet of the naked birds together and hung them upside down again on the nails in the walls in the dairy. He also kept Mam and Uncle Jack supplied with dead birds. Dad was a great organizer. Mam once said, “If the Irish army marched into our farmyard, Dad would assign a job to each soldier as he passed by.”