Read Online The Butterfly Cabinet by Bernie McGill - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Bernie McGill
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they wouldn’t need so much accommodation.” Well, jeepers, Anna, if I was quicker on my feet, I’d have gone over and walloped him with my blackthorn stick. It’s a good job
The Val Doonican Show
came on and distracted us. Isn’t Val great? “Paddy McGinty’s Goat,” you couldn’t beat it. Give me that over Nana Mouskouri any day.
You look well, Anna, pink cheeked, and getting rounder in the face. Do you like being back? You must worry when you see things like that on the TV, worry about bringing a child into the middle of it. I can understand that. But you’ll be fit for it, you and Conor together. You’re from good strong stock, the pair of you.
I want to tell you about Conor’s grandfather Alphie—Alphie McGlinchy. Oh, Conor never knew him, he was gone long before he was born. He died when Conor’s father, Owen, was only a baby. He was a very impressive-looking man was Alphie. The first time I saw him, he’d come to see the master about a job: rode up to the house one day on the most gorgeous bicycle any of us had ever laid eyes on. We all poured out of the kitchen, Peig with a patch of flour on her chin, and the men appeared from the stables and the fields, and we stood around him, looking at him and his bicycle. It was a remarkable contraption, all black and shiny like a beetle, and with a leather seat mounted on some kind of crisscrossed complicated metal spring. He explained that this was to take the bumps out of the road, to soften the ride, he said, and then he winked at Peig and the men laughed, and Peig blustered off into the kitchen, wiping her hands on her apron, the color rising in her cheeks.
It was an amazing thing to see him balanced upright on that two-wheeled beast of a machine, circling the yard from the coal house to the cellar and appearing back again like a magician, and of course Peig’s head at the passage window because she couldn’t
not
look at him; none of us could resist.
He had a white straw boater on his head with navy blue stripes in it and a matching striped cravat that hung down his starched shirt like a ribbon. A white handkerchief in his breast pocket and a watch chain that disappeared into the inside of his four-buttoned blazer. His mustache curled a bit at the edges and his eyes looked straight into you. He smelled of tobacco, not the sort the men put in their clay pipes, but the sort that you rolled: cigarette tobacco; exotic. He said I could sit on the bar if I liked, but then Peig called me in and said, had he nowhere to go, and gave off to the men for standing around gawking all day when they should have been working. Then she went back into the kitchen and tripped over the wood basket and nudged the dinner pot and sloshed water all over the fire and near put it out, and all the time pretending she wasn’t a bit interested in him or had paid heed to a word he was saying. Peig knew him from before; they’d grown up together. Both their families were from Burnside; their fathers were on the boats. I don’t know what went on between them before he’d gone away but you could tell there was a spark there still.
He had a dent in the side of his head the like of what you’d see in a pot that had been hit up against the range. You could have put your finger in it, it was that deep. Madge whispered to me that he got it when he fell in a ditch one time he was running from the peelers and the stump of a tree went into his head. Feeley said he was running from a girl’s father who said he’d kill him if he got him. I don’t know what was true, but every time I looked at him I had a wish that I could take the lid off him and hit that hollow out with a ladle. I know that doesn’t make any sense, but there you go. I wanted to smooth out his brow; I had a yearning to fix him.
The only work there was going was in the fields and in the yard, but he didn’t seem bothered about getting his hands dirty. Nobody knew how he’d made his money or if he really had any money
The Val Doonican Show
came on and distracted us. Isn’t Val great? “Paddy McGinty’s Goat,” you couldn’t beat it. Give me that over Nana Mouskouri any day.
You look well, Anna, pink cheeked, and getting rounder in the face. Do you like being back? You must worry when you see things like that on the TV, worry about bringing a child into the middle of it. I can understand that. But you’ll be fit for it, you and Conor together. You’re from good strong stock, the pair of you.
I want to tell you about Conor’s grandfather Alphie—Alphie McGlinchy. Oh, Conor never knew him, he was gone long before he was born. He died when Conor’s father, Owen, was only a baby. He was a very impressive-looking man was Alphie. The first time I saw him, he’d come to see the master about a job: rode up to the house one day on the most gorgeous bicycle any of us had ever laid eyes on. We all poured out of the kitchen, Peig with a patch of flour on her chin, and the men appeared from the stables and the fields, and we stood around him, looking at him and his bicycle. It was a remarkable contraption, all black and shiny like a beetle, and with a leather seat mounted on some kind of crisscrossed complicated metal spring. He explained that this was to take the bumps out of the road, to soften the ride, he said, and then he winked at Peig and the men laughed, and Peig blustered off into the kitchen, wiping her hands on her apron, the color rising in her cheeks.
It was an amazing thing to see him balanced upright on that two-wheeled beast of a machine, circling the yard from the coal house to the cellar and appearing back again like a magician, and of course Peig’s head at the passage window because she couldn’t
not
look at him; none of us could resist.
He had a white straw boater on his head with navy blue stripes in it and a matching striped cravat that hung down his starched shirt like a ribbon. A white handkerchief in his breast pocket and a watch chain that disappeared into the inside of his four-buttoned blazer. His mustache curled a bit at the edges and his eyes looked straight into you. He smelled of tobacco, not the sort the men put in their clay pipes, but the sort that you rolled: cigarette tobacco; exotic. He said I could sit on the bar if I liked, but then Peig called me in and said, had he nowhere to go, and gave off to the men for standing around gawking all day when they should have been working. Then she went back into the kitchen and tripped over the wood basket and nudged the dinner pot and sloshed water all over the fire and near put it out, and all the time pretending she wasn’t a bit interested in him or had paid heed to a word he was saying. Peig knew him from before; they’d grown up together. Both their families were from Burnside; their fathers were on the boats. I don’t know what went on between them before he’d gone away but you could tell there was a spark there still.
He had a dent in the side of his head the like of what you’d see in a pot that had been hit up against the range. You could have put your finger in it, it was that deep. Madge whispered to me that he got it when he fell in a ditch one time he was running from the peelers and the stump of a tree went into his head. Feeley said he was running from a girl’s father who said he’d kill him if he got him. I don’t know what was true, but every time I looked at him I had a wish that I could take the lid off him and hit that hollow out with a ladle. I know that doesn’t make any sense, but there you go. I wanted to smooth out his brow; I had a yearning to fix him.
The only work there was going was in the fields and in the yard, but he didn’t seem bothered about getting his hands dirty. Nobody knew how he’d made his money or if he really had any money
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