“I’m damned if I can make out what happened, Pat! It hits me bet. A woman her age—disappearing like that! Is your mother inside by any chance? A lot of people have been saying they haven’t seen her about lately. Maybe she could throw some light on the subject!”
“No. She’s gone away to America. I mean England, for a week. She’ll be back in a month.”
“I see,” replied Smiler, his hand making a rasping sound against the bristles of his chin as he rubbed them reflectively.
“It’s a mystery—that’s all I can say!” replied Pat, an image of the persistently inflating whale-woman appearing at the back of his mind, rising from his rock and stretching himself as the remains of his cigarette twisted and spun in the air. “It’s like these fellows who never took a drink in their lives, laying down the law for everyone else, and before you know it they’re down in Sullivan’s rising trouble and roaring and shouting and driving everybody half-daft with their stupid songs! What I mean is—you think you know somebody and then they go and do the opposite of what you expect. When all’s said and done, life never really does tend to conform to expectations, does it, Smiler?”
Pat was pleased to hear himself saying this. He had read it in a book once.
“There’s no knowing,” mused Smiler, shaking his pipe and assuming for a passing moment what he took to be the stance of a learned philosopher. “It’s just that you’d be afraid when you’re used to seeing someone and then you don’t—you’d be afraid they might have got themselves murdered or something.”
“I know what you mean, Smiler,” replied Pat, adding, “With some of the things you read in the papers these days.”
“This is it,” was the laborer’s rueful reply.
“Still—who knows?” went on Pat as he turned to go back inside. “Maybe one day she will show up. Till then, I suppose all we can do is hope.”
“I suppose you’re right, Pat. I suppose so,” agreed Smiler, a trifle confused by Pat’s unexpected sympathy and warmhearted neighborliness—for, after all, this was not the reaction which the “rumors” would have led one to expect (what with there having been, at the very least, seven different reports of “sightings” of Mrs. Tubridy in the vicinity of the McNab household).
But finding it all the more heartening for that reason, which was why he found himself smiling (not that it took very much to elicit this response—hence his nickname), and why he ended up whispering a little prayer for the vanished woman’s soul—”Wherever she may be, God love her”—as he picked up his clippers and returned to work, a briskness entering his step as he set off down the road which led to the town, already over two hundred yards between him and the dim but well-kept kitchen where Pat McNab—now bent double, and with tears, not only of mirth, but it has to be said of triumph also!—coursing copiously down his cheeks, continuing to repeat to the recalcitrant cork of a johnnie Walker bottle which fiercely resisted his best efforts, “Come on, you effing effer! Come on, you boy you!” before at last its life-giving contents swooshed gaily down his throat, his upraised arms then seeming to embrace the entire sky as once more he serenaded the world with those precious words that had set him free
Come day go day
Wishing my heart it was Sunday
Drinking buttermilk all the week
Whiskey on a Sunday!
as outside, upon a carpet of leaves which had somehow arranged itself on the windowsill, a chorus of small and beady-eyed birds paused to chirp in unison.
The Turfman from Ardee
For sake of health I took a walk last week at early dawn
I met a jolly turfman as I slowly walked along
The greatest conversation passed between that man and me
And soon I got acquainted with the turfman from Ardee.
We chatted very freely as we jogged along the road
He said my ass is tired and I’d like to see his load
For I got no refreshments since I left home you see
And I am wearied out with traveling, said the turfman from Ardee.
Your cart is wracked and worn, friend, your ass is very tired,
It must be twenty summers since that animal foaled
Yoked to a cart where I was born, September forty-three
And carried for the midwife, says the turfman from Ardee.
It was an ordinary day in the middle of September and Pat was busy in the kitchen doing the dishes. He was listening to the news but there