Pádraig’s daughter is at home … Máirín at home! Are you sure she’s not on holidays from school? … She failed at school. She failed! … She’s not going to be a schoolmistress at all … Oh, bad scran to her! Bad scran to her! …
Nóra Sheáinín’s grandson from Mangy Field has gone off … On a ship out of Brightcity … He got a job on board … He’s taking after his granny if he’s fond of the sailors …
Say that again … Say it again … That Nell’s grandson is going to be a priest. The son of Big Brian’s daughter going to be a priest! A priest! That cocky little blackguard going to be a priest … That he’s gone to a seminary … that he wore the soutane at home … And the collar … And a huge great big Prayer Book under his oxter.2 That he was reading his office going up and down the new road at Flagstone Height! You’d think he wouldn’t become a priest straight off like that … Oh, he’s not a priest yet, he’s only going to college. The devil a priest they might ever make of him, Máirtín Pockface …
Yes, what did Big Brian say? … Don’t be mumbling your words but speak up … You don’t like to, you say! You don’t like to … On account of Big Brian being related to me by marriage! He’s not related to me. He’s related to that cocky sister of mine. Out with it … “My daughter has money to spend on making priests.” “To spend on priests.” The streak of misery! … Out with it, and to hell with you! Hurry up or they’ll have carried you off with them again. Surely you don’t think I’m going to let you into this grave, a man who’s infested with bedsores for the past nine months … “Unlike Caitríona Pháidín’s son …” Out with the rest of it, Pockface … “who hadn’t enough to put a little rag of a college petticoat on his daughter …” Brian the wretch! Oh, Brian the wretch! …
The devil flay you! You’re mumbling again. Nell sings “Eleanor of the Secrets” going up the new road every day! Clear off, you raw-arsed Pockface. You seldom brought good news, nor did any of your kind….
3
— … Do you think this is the War of the Two Foreigners? …
— … Me giving the Gaelic Enthusiast a word for each pint and he giving me a pint for each word …
Over and back again the following day. The third day he brought the car to rest his bottom in. The journey over and back was tiring us.
“Pól, dear,” said my mother to myself that evening, “the hay should be reasonably dry by now.”
“Arrah, how could it be dry, mother dear?” said I. “It’s impossible to dry that weedy old hay …”
I was two weeks at it before I made meadow cocks of it. I let it out3 of the cocks again, then turned it, gave it another turn, and then top-turned it.
That’s how it was when the sudden shower came, as the two of us were in Peadar the Pub’s. I had to let it all out again then to give it some more sun. Then I cleared the ditches, knocked down the stone walls and built them up again. I cut the grass margins, the ferns and the briars. I made gullies. We spent the best part of a month in the field altogether, except that we were over and back to Peadar the Pub’s in the motor car.
I never saw a decenter man. And he was no dimwit either. He took between twenty and thirty Irish words from me every day. He had lashings of money. A high-ranking job with the Government …
But one day, when he went over without me, Peadar the Pub’s daughter brought him into the parlour and hoodwinked him …
I missed him terribly. A week after he left I was laid low with the sickness that killed me … But, Postmistress … Hey! Postmistress … how did you know he hadn’t paid for his lodging? You opened the letter my mother sent up after him to the Government …
— How did you know, Postmistress, that An Gúm wouldn’t accept my collection of poems, The Yellow Stars? …
— Indeed, you don’t deserve any sympathy. They’d be published long ago if you took my advice and wrote from the bottom of the page up. But look at me, my short story “The Setting Sun” was rejected by The Irishman, and the Postmistress knew about it …
— And the Postmistress knew about the advice I gave Concannon about maiming the Kerry team, in the letter I sent him two days after the semi-final …
— How did you know, Postmistress, what I wrote to the judge about the One-Ear Breed the time I went to law with them?
— And, Postmistress, how did your daughter, who’s postmistress herself now, know before I knew it myself, that I wouldn’t be allowed into England, and that T.B. was the reason? …
— You opened a letter Caitríona Pháidín sent to Mannion the Counsellor about Tomás Inside. The whole world knew what was in it:
“We’ll bring him to Brightcity in a motor car. We’ll make him drunk. If you had a few good-looking girls in the office to excite him, maybe he’d sign over the land to us. He’s very fond of the girls when he’s merry …”
— Ababúna! …
— You opened letters a lady in a bookie’s office in Brightcity used to send to the Small Master. You’d have the tips for the horses before he got them …
— You opened a letter Caitríona Pháidín sent to Big Brian offering to marry him …
— Ababúna-búna-búna! That I’d marry Brian the wretch …
— Indeed, Postmistress, I had no reason to be grateful to you. You always had the kettle on the boil in the back room. You opened a letter my son wrote to me from England telling me he married a Jewess. The whole country knew about it, and we never said a word about it. Why would we? …
— You opened a letter my son wrote to me from England to say he married a black. The whole country knew about it while we didn’t mention it to anybody …
— I wrote a letter to Éamon de Valera, advising him on the sort of proclamation he should send out to the People of Ireland. You kept it in the post office. It was an awful shame …
— All the love letters Pádraig Chaitríona wrote to my daughter, you opened them beforehand. I myself never opened one of them without seeing where you had torn it. Honest! They reminded me of the letters I used to get years before. I got the postman to deliver them into my own hand. Foreign fragrance. Foreign paper. Foreign writing. Foreign stamps. Foreign postmarks that were poetry in themselves: Marseilles, Port Said, Singapore, Honolulu, Batavia, San Francisco … Sun. Oranges. Blue seas. Golden complexions. Coral islands. Gold-embroidered mantles. Ivory teeth. Lips that were aflame … I’d press them to my heart. I’d kiss them with my lips. I’d shed a salt tear on them … I’d open them. I’d take out the billet doux. And then, Postmistress, I’d see your clumsy, greasy fingermark on them. Ugh!
— You opened the letter I sent home to my wife, when I was working on the turf4 in Kildare. There were nine pounds in it. You kept them …
— Why wouldn’t I? Why didn’t you register it? …
— Don’t you think the oldest resident of the graveyard should have something to say? Permission to speak. Permission …
— Indeed, Postmistress, I have no reason to thank yourself or your daughter, or Billyboy the Post who used to give you a hand in the back room. After I came back from London there wasn’t a letter I got from there you didn’t open. There was an affaire de coeur, as Nóra Sheáinín would say. You told the whole country about it. The priest and the Schoolmistress — my wife — heard about it …