The Young Are Desperate: two novels

The Young Are Desperate

Two novels

The Crooked Cross and The Florentines

by Brendan Kennelly

Copyright 2013 Brendan Kennelly

Cover design by Ana Plasencia Ferrer

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Table of Contents

The Crooked Cross

The Florentines

Classic Irish Odysseys by Dr Giuliana Bendelli

The Crooked Cross

If life in little places dies,

Greater places share the loss;

Life, if you wish, may not be worth

One passing game of pitch-and-toss;

And yet a nation’s life is laid

In places like the Crooked Cross.

Chapter 1 The girl and the god

The village was built in the shape of a cross. Old Mickey Free the singer had said: ‘If the good Christ came on earth again, He’d be crucified right here, and you’d have a mad parcel o’ bastards yellin’ for His holy blood like a pack o’ hounds in the wake of a hare.’ But Mickey Free had a cutting word for everything and everybody, and very few took notice of anything he said. It was held that he had been born with a bitter tongue in his head; that his whole life found expression in a tide of invective against humanity and that, apart from those moments when he used his voice to sing beautiful love-songs, his sole joy was to rail against mankind with sustained, sour eloquence.

‘The only mistake God ever made was when He made this place,’ he would say, lounging against the wall of a house in the centre of the village.

Our story begins on a hot June day. Deevna lay sprawled in the heat, a cross-shaped village, of odd, ill-shaped, dead-looking houses. Some were thatched in the old style, some slated; all seemed soaked in a heavy despondency as if some totally melancholy spirit brooded over the place. There was little sign of life; an odd dog lay here and there, in the middle of the dusty road or on the pavement. Flies feasted on fresh horse-dung outside a public house, and the buzz of their relish produced a faint hum in the summer air. Apart from this, there was no sign of life. It might have been the Sahara desert rather than the South of Ireland; it was silent enough and almost hot enough.

Along the white ribbon of road leading from the South, a girl was walking. She was Sheila Dark O’Donovan from the Maharees, a lissom girl with dark hair falling the length of her back. She wore a light brown skirt and a white blouse, half- open. The whiteness of her firm breasts was just visible and her hips moved rhythmically as she walked. In her right hand she held a small, bright red shawl. There was grace and poise in her walk, and her blue eyes roamed from field to meadow and from road to sky with quick, intelligent sweep. She was all alone and had been since she was twelve years of age; she was alone but not lonely. She had independence and self-confidence. She could measure a man with a look; deduce what he was and what he did with practiced rapidity; disturb him or console him with the words she whispered to him, when he had crossed her palm with silver.

For Sheila Dark was a fortune-teller, known from the Reeks to the Shannon’s mouth for the queer knack she had of hitting at the truth. A dangerous talent!

She swung into Deevna and began to walk through the village. She walked not on the pavement but right in the centre of the road. Her step was lightness itself and there was no evidence of fatigue in her. A light coat of dust filmed her shoes, betraying the fact that she had been walking quite a distance. The Maharees were a good throw from Deevna. She had been in Deevna before; hence the confidence in her gait.

A red setter sprawled in the June sun, lifted its head and barked at her. Then it growled fiercely and lunged towards her. Sheila Dark stopped and looked at the red brute, which became surly and silent; it lowered its head and started to slink away. Sheila flicked her bright red shawl as though in contempt and continued her walk.

A pair of human eyes watched her now. They belonged to an eighty-year-old ex-sailor who lived alone in a thatched cottage in the main street; a man with a million yarns, and a fund of wisdom that had won the respect and admiration of all. His own heart filled with admiration now as his eyes followed the rippling body of Sheila Dark. He wondered at her. It was so seldom one saw a good-looking girl in the village now; they had all emigrated to England or America. Everybody spoke of emigration as Ireland’s major problem. It was a problem and the answer to a problem. It was a tradition and a need. That was it. It was like some sort of burning inner necessity in the life of every boy and girl in the village—a vital impulse that made it imperative for them to pack their bags and go. It had drained Deevna of almost all its youth, sucking the vitality from it as a bee sucks honey from a flower. That was why the eyes of the old ex-sailor—who was known quite simply as the Sailor—opened as wide as the brown old wrinkled skin around them would permit. The old man admired the lithe, sinuous figure of the girl, as though she were some sort of visiting goddess come to animate the dead village. The Sailor sat in a chair well in the shade, from which his eye could span the entire street. His look was rivetted to the girl’s body as she walked in the road centre. The Sailor was concentrating, and wishing he was sixty years younger. A black cat, huddled in the man’s lap, purred contentedly.

Sheila Dark knew the Sailor was staring at her and she enjoyed it. ‘The Sailor,’ she thought, ‘he stared at me like that several years ago.’ The Sailor was half-crippled, and could leave his chair only with the help of two sticks which he referred to as his children. He loved them and he hated them. To him, Sheila Dark was a symbol of life, the strange miracle in vein, blood and bone. To Sheila Dark, the Sailor was a smelly wreck of a man—a blurred memory in her brain when she had taken silver from him years ago, and had whispered to him in her thirteen-year-old’s voice that his disability was like a bad dream that would disappear one fine sunny day. Sheila Dark would tantalize a saint, more than Kitty in the song had pestered St Kevin. She walked on down the street, approaching a public house, at the door of which the owner, Goddy O’Girl, was standing.

Goddy had a long brown beard. The village children said he was like the picture of God in the holy books, so they called him Goddy. He was a magnificent figure of a man but his spirit was as tame as a mouse. He feared his wife Gretta. They were married twenty years and no children had graced the union. Gretta bored him terribly; he had the same effect on her.

Tame-spirited, he was a bit of a dreamer. He liked comparing his life to things. He compared it to a fly on the face of a fresh cowdung, battling with its little silver wings, trying vainly to release itself from the foul mass of putrid matter. The more it struggled, the more hopelessly entangled it became. Its very struggle was the symbol of its defeat. So, philosophically, Goddy decided to accept both his fate and his wife. Sometimes his entire soul yearned to give Gretta what was known locally as ‘a notorious kick in the arse.’ But a blend of fear and prudence prevailed over his secret impulse. As a result, Goddy O’Girl was a tamer but a more peaceful man.

He was about to turn back into his pub where a lone customer, Patrick O’Brien, known as Paddyo, was drinking a pint of stout, when he saw Sheila Dark stepping up the road, a woman of lilting loveliness. She saw him at just about the same time and knew him instantly—Goddy O’Girl, the man with the figure of a god and the heart of a mouse.

After the hot road, Sheila Dark felt in need of a cool drink, and so she headed straight for Goddy. Her little caper with the Sailor’s impotence was over. This was something new.

For the first time in years, the blood rose to Goddy’s head. By Christ, but she was lovely. Gretta was already only an unpleasant voice, fast fading away.

‘Goddy O’Girl, cross my palm with silver and I’ll be for telling you the things that happened you over the five years gone, and the things that are waiting for you over the next five years coming.’ No word from Goddy. There’s nothing like a word from the right woman to knock the wind of talk out of a man.

‘Goddy O’Girl, cross my palm with silver, and I’ll give you the truth in return.’

No word from Goddy.

Sheila knew she had him in the heel of her fist. She could spin him over like a top, and whip him into whirling speed or tottering slowness with the sweet or bitter lash of her tongue.

Sheila Dark flicked her bright red shawl under Goddy’s nose. It roused him. She had moved near to him, so that he could smell her. There was a strong, fresh smell from her; the natural perfume of warm limb and rising breast. It was a smell steeped in a clean animality—a raw, naked and beautiful thing. It invaded Goddy’s nose, and entered his head and stomach. It filled him; it gripped his guts like a fist, and captivated him in willing helplessness.

‘Who is she?’ he thought.

‘Who are you?’ he asked.

Her dark eyes flickered lightly over his bearded face.

‘You’re a fine hairy man,’ she said.

‘Who have I?’ he asked again.

Her eyes fell. His eyes dropped to her half-open white blouse, scarcely covering her breasts. Goddy knew they were creamy- white, snowy things with red roses at the centre.

‘Sheila O’Donovan from the Maharees. I’m a fortune-teller.’

‘So was your mother. Come in for a drink. I know you now.’ He turned and walked into the pub, upset.

Sheila watched his splendid back, smiled and walked in after him. Inside, Paddyo was just relishing a mouthful of stout. He was sitting on a high stool, his back to the counter, facing the door. He had his glass balanced on his right knee; this feat was the result of long practice, and Paddyo boasted that no matter how drunk he was, his sense of balance remained perfect. And that, as Paddyo said, was ‘one of the characteristics of genius.’

He cast a roguish eye over the two who had just come in; having overheard their brief conversation, he was in a position to launch the offensive. When able to do so, Paddyo always spoke in verse of a sort. The poet, as he said, sat at the right hand of God. So now, surveying Sheila with a genial eye, he half-chanted:

‘Come in, dark woman from the Maharees

With your step more light

Than a feather in a breeze.’

‘Welcome to Deevna,’ he said, lapsing into prose. ‘I remember your mother. A fine cut of a woman with hair as red as yours is black. But your father was a wild bastard, God resht him. He’d drink whiskey and porter from morning to night and he’d pick a fight with his own shadda. He stretched two policemen here the night of a Races wance, even though he was pist drunk at the time. And God be good to his soul but he was a great drinker.’ Sheila’s face hardened. Instantly, she disliked this man. He had too much talk. His familiarity was of a kind that offended and disgusted her, but long experience had taught her that she must never show her dislike. She remained silent.

Goddy O’Girl was inside the counter now, his eyes on the girl’s face. He noted the clean brown of her skin, the firm, set beauty of her mouth and the rather high cheek-bones that indicated a purity of breeding rare among Irish people, who, being largely a peasant race, are squat, heavy and thickly-built rather than lithe and sensitively-fashioned. He wished with all his heart that Paddyo was a thousand miles away or tied to the floor of hell, so that he alone might have the pleasure of talking to this dark- haired beauty from the Maharees. Ten minutes ago, Deevna had been to him a symbol of death itself, of decay, disease, corruption, stagnation, apathy and total sloth; but now the entire scene had changed. He glanced to the door at his left. Gretta was in there. That was the kitchen, where his wife rummaged and slouched about for most of the day. If she should come out . . . He pushed the thought out of his mind, and found himself saying—

‘What’s your drink, girl.’

‘A pint.’

He bent to fill the glass. Paddyo said to Sheila—

‘Here’s a stool. Plank your four bones on top of it.’

‘I’d rather stand,’ she answered.

Paddyo took his glass from his knee, swallowed a draught of stout, and replaced the glass with the practiced delicacy of a connoisseur.

‘You turned out to be a grand girl, God bless you. Bejasus but I’m gettin’ old. I knew your father when your backside was only the big of a good shirt-button.’

Goddy cursed Paddyo under his breath. Why the hell wouldn’t he finish his drink and clear out? The man was always talking, and he didn’t care what he said. When he thought of a thing he was out with it straight away.

Goddy pushed the pint towards Sheila. There was a creamy top on it. A Roman collar. A priest in the family. She said nothing but raised the glass to her lovely mouth and drank at length. When she removed the glass, a ring of creamy foam encircled her lips. Goddy watched it. She licked it off with her tongue.

Paddyo was at it again. ‘You have a great name out of you for the fortune-telling, I’m told. Oh there’s a great art in that.’ Goddy wanted to say something.

‘’Tis true,’ he added, ‘great brains are needed for a job like that.’ Paddyo turned on him.

‘Brains! What d’you know about brains? All your brains are hangin’ from between your legs, and damn bad use you’re makin’ of ‘em!’

Any other man on earth might have taken offence at that. But not Goddy. Sheila let the crudity pass. She began to despise both these men; Goddy a little more than the other, perhaps. Paddyo cackled on:

‘Come tell me my fortune my darling dark woman

And spin me your words with their message of calm,

Come sorrow or laughter, my darling dark woman,

I’ll press my bright silver right into your palm.

‘Ah, there’s a great wan! I made it up ages ago for another fortune-teller of the McCarthy clan. A fine whipper of a woman she was too. We were all daft out of our minds tryin’ to get her into a hayshed or into a summery meadow, but she was as slippery as a fairy-woman. I needn’t tell you we all got the hell of a land when she upped and married a commercial traveller with a Sunday suit and a motor-car. Ah, she was—’

Goddy interrupted. He wanted to be in the picture.

‘And they had twelve fine children, I heard.’ Paddyo resented being interrupted.

‘Which is more than can be said for yourself my dear an’ dacent Goddy O’Girl. There you are after twenty years of marriage to Gretta Lacey that swallowed the salmon-bone and lived through it, and you without a child or the sign of a child to offer for it. They say you don’t know how to do the trick.’

Goddy squirmed. This he had feared above all other insults. A childless marriage was a terrible thing in Deevna. It met, not with sympathy, but with ridicule and a horrible bantering mockery that must have cut to the quick any man of ordinary sensitivity. Paddyo had no mercy.

‘There is one thing that I would tell ye,

’Tis the secret of a woman’s belly;

Too much is too much and enough is enough

But catch her while she’s young and make the treatment rough.’

Paddyo laughed boisterously. He held the whip hand and he enjoyed it. Goddy began to hate this man with the perfect sense of balance, the facile words and the detestable rhymes. But of course Goddy would never show it. He was one of those men who are born to be kicked around.

Sheila Dark looked at him and the burning contempt in her eyes was scarcely concealed. And, she thought, such a fine- looking man too. Children thought he looked like God. The irony of it!

Paddyo was enjoying his jibe. He was one of those men to whom mockery of others’ faults and weaknesses is second nature, and he revelled in piling it on.

‘If you’d like me to do it, Goddy, I’ll show you. I’m a good neighbour, you know. You can have the faith and the hope and I’ll have the charity.’

Paddyo leaned forward, as if to emphasize his raillery. ‘’Tis aisy to do it, wance you have the knack. I can manufacture a child any time at all I feels like it.’ His eyes glinted with pleasure.

‘All I have to do is to put two stones under my tongue and wear the peak o’ my cap over my right eye while I’m on the job, and there I lave you . . . ’Tis as simple as walkin’ out the door.’

Paddyo looked at Sheila.

‘Am I right or am I wrong?’

He didn’t wait for an answer, but drank some stout and returned the glass to its seemingly precarious perch on his knee.

The temper was mounting in Sheila Dark O’Donovan but as always, she had it perfectly controlled.

Paddyo was at it again:

‘Come tell me my fortune my darling dark woman

And spin me your words with their message of calm,

Come sorrow or laughter, my darling dark woman,

I’ll press my bright silver right into your palm . . .

‘And to prove it, here you are.’ And he pulled a little pile of coins from his pocket, selecting a few silver ones.

A sense of her profession immediately enveloped Sheila: personal likes and dislikes vanished. There was silver to be won and a fortune to be told. For the moment, nothing else mattered. She advanced to meet her client. The ritual began.

‘Throw silver across my palm,’ she said.

‘I’d sooner throw a leg across yourself,’ darted back Paddyo. Goddy winced. He felt hurt; to banish the feeling, he believed he should do something. So he picked up a couple of dirty glasses, walked to the sink with them and turned on the tap in order to wash them. He cursed silently as he noticed that only a thin trickle of water fell from the tap. The bloody pump at the reservoir was giving trouble again. And in this heat, Goddy O’Girl hated sticky glasses. They made his hands filthy and clammy. He no longer felt hurt. Glumly, he watched the thin trickle slowly fill a dirty pint glass. Then his eyes lifted to run over the beautiful figure of Sheila Dark. God, but she was enough to put a man’s head spinning. And that chatty obscene bastard Paddyo was putting silver into her palm.

‘More,’ she said simply.

Paddyo added another sixpence.

‘Come on now,’ he said, ‘you have enough there to keep you talkin’ for an hour.’

Sheila Dark took Paddyo’s hand in hers.

Goddy winced again. Sheila looked at the open palm with a look of intense concentration on her face. With the forefinger of her right hand, she traced certain lines in the palm of Paddyo’s right hand, a knobbly, gnarled creation which was peacefully cradled in Sheila’s left hand. She gave one the impression that all her mental faculties