The Man of the House

As a kid I was as good as gold so long as I could concentrate.
Concentration, that was always my weakness, in school and everywhere
else. Once I was diverted from whatever I was doing, I was lost.

It was like that when the mother got ill. I remember it well; how I
waked that morning and heard the strange cough in the kitchen below
From that very moment I knew something was wrong. I dressed and went
down. She was sitting in a little wickerwork chair before the fire,
holding her side. She had made an attempt to light the fire but it had
gone against her.

“What’s wrong, Mum?” I asked.

“The sticks were wet and the fire started me coughing,” she said;
trying to smile, though I could see she was doubled up with pain.

“I’ll light the fire and you go back to bed,” I said.

“Ah, how can I, child?” she said. “Sure, I have to go to work.”

“You couldn’t work like that,” I said. “Go on up to bed and I'll
bring up your breakfast.”

It’s funny about women, the way they’ll take orders from anything in
trousers, even if ’tis only ten.

“If you could make a cup of tea for yourself, I’d be all right in an
hour or so,” she said, and shuffled feebly upstairs. I went with her,
supporting her arm, and when she reached the bed she collapsed. I knew
then she must be feeling bad. I got more sticks—she was so economical
that she never used enough—and I soon had the fire roaring and the
kettle on. I made her toast as well; I was always a great believer in
buttered toast.

I thought she looked at the cup of tea rather doubtfully.

“Is that all right?” I asked.

“You wouldn’t have a sup of boiling water left?” she asked.

“’Tis too strong,” I agreed, with a trace of disappointment I tried to
keep out of my voice. “I'll pour half it away. I can never remember
about tea.”

“I hope you won’t be late for school,” she said anxiously.

“I’m not going to school,” I said. “I’ll get you your tea now and do
the messages afterwards.”

She didn’t say a word about my not going to school. It was just as I
said; orders were all she wanted. I washed up the breakfast things,
then I washed myself and went up to her with the shopping basket, a
piece of paper, and a lead pencil.

“I’ll do the messages if you'll write them down,” I said. “I suppose
I’ll go to Mrs. Slattery first?”

“Tell her I’ll be in tomorrow without fail.”

“Write down Mrs. Slattery,” I said firmly. “Would I get the doctor?”

“Indeed, you'll do nothing of the kind,” Mother said anxiously. “He’d
only want to send me to hospital. They’re all alike. You could ask the
chemist to give you a good strong cough bottle.”

“Write it down,” I said, remembering my own weakness. “If I haven’t it
written down I might forget it. And put ‘strong’ in big letters. What
will I get for the dinner? Eggs?”

That was really only a bit of swank, because eggs were the one thing I
could cook, but the mother told me to get sausages as well in case she
was able to get up.

It was a lovely sunny morning. I called first on Mrs. Slattery, whom
my mother worked for, to tell her she wouldn’t be in. Mrs. Slattery
was a woman I didn’t like much. She had a big broad face that needed
big broad features, but all she had was narrow eyes and a thin pointed
nose that seemed to be all lost in the breadth of her face.

“She said she’ll try to get in tomorrow, but I don’t know will I let
her get up,” I said.

“I wouldn’t if she wasn’t well, Gus, and she gave me a penny.

I went away feeling very elevated. I had always known a fellow could
have his troubles, but if he faced them manfully, he could get
advantages out of them as well. There was the school, for instance. I
stood opposite it for a full ten minutes, staring. The schoolhouse and
the sloping yard were like a picture, except for the chorus of poor
sufferers through the open windows, and a glimpse of Danny Delaney’s
bald pate as he did sentry-go before the front door with his cane
wriggling like a tail behind his back. It was nice too to be chatting
to the fellows in the shops and telling them about the mother’s
cough. I made it out a bit worse to make a good story of it, but I had
a secret hope that when I got home she’d be up so that we could have
sausages for dinner. I hated boiled eggs, and anyway I was already
beginning to feel the strain of my responsibilities.

But when I got home it was to find Minnie Ryan with her. Minnie was a
middle-aged woman, gossipy and pious, but very knowledgeable.

“How are you feeling now, Mum?” I asked.

“I’m miles better,” she said with a smile.

“She won’t be able to get up today, though,” Minnie said firmly.

“I’ll pour you out your cough bottle so, and make you a cup of tea,” I
said, concealing my disappointment.

“Wisha, I'll do that for you, child,” said Minnie, getting up.

“Ah, you needn’t mind, Miss Ryan,” I said without fuss. “I can manage
all right.”

“Isn’t he great?” I heard her say in a low wondering voice as I went
downstairs.

“Minnie,” whispered my mother, “he’s the best anyone ever reared.”

“Why, then, there aren’t many like him,” Minnie said gloomily. “The
most of the children that’s going now are more like savages than
Christians.”

In the afternoon my mother wanted me to go out and play, but I
wouldn’t go far. I remembered my own weakness. I knew if once I went a
certain distance I should drift towards the Glen, with the barrack
drill-field perched on a cliff above it; the rifle range below, and
below that again the mill-pond and mill-stream running through a
wooded gorge—the Rockies, Himalayas, or Highlands according to your
mood. Concentration; that was what I had to practice. One slip and I
should be among those children that Minnie Ryan disapproved of, who
were more like savages than Christians.

Evening came; the street-lamps were lit and the paper-boy went crying
up the road. I bought a paper, lit the lamp in the kitchen and the
candle in the bedroom, and read out the police-court news to my
mother. I knew it was the piece she liked best, all about people being
picked up drunk out of the channels. I wasn’t very quick about it
because I was only at words of one syllable, but she didn’t seem to
mind.

Later Minnie Ryan came again, and as she left I went to the door with
her. She looked grave.

“If she isn’t better in the morning I think I'd get a doctor to her;
Gus,” she said.

“Why?” I asked in alarm. “Would you say she’s worse?”

‘Ah, no,” she said, giving her old shawl a tug, “only I’d be
frightened of the old pneumonia.”

“But wouldn’t he send her to hospital, Miss Ryan?”

“Ah, he might and he mightn’t. Anyway, he could give her a good
bottle. But even if he did, God between us and all harm, wouldn’t it be
better than neglecting it? ... If you had a drop of whiskey, you could
give it to her hot with a squeeze of lemon.”

“I’ll get it,” I said at once.

Mother didn’t want the whiskey; she said it cost too much; but I knew
it would cost less than hospital and all the rest of it, so I wouldn’t
be put off.

I had never been in a public-house before and the crowd inside
frightened me.

“Hullo, my old flower,” said one tall man, grinning at me
diabolially. “It must be ten years since I saw you last. One minute
now—wasn’t it in South Africa?”

My pal, Bob Connell, boasted to me once how he asked a drunk man for a
half-crown and the man gave it to him. I was always trying to work up
courage to do the same, but even then I hadn’t the nerve.

“It was not,” I said. “I want a half glass of whiskey for my mother.”

“Oh, the thundering ruffian!” said the man, clapping his
hands. ‘Pretending’tis for his mother, and he the most notorious
boozer in Capetown.”

“I am not,” I said on the verge of tears. “And ’tis for my
mother. she’s sick.”

“Leave the child alone, Johnny,” the barmaid said. “Don’t you hear him
say his mother is sick?”

Mother fell asleep after drinking the hot whiskey, but I couldn’t
rest. I was wondering how the man in the public-house could have
thought I was in South Africa, and blaming myself a lot for not asking
him for the half-crown. A half-crown would come in very handy if the
mother was really sick. When I did fall asleep I was wakened again by
her coughing, and when I went in, she was rambling in her speech. It
frightened me more than anything that she didn’t recognize me.

When next morning, in spite of the whiskey, she was no better, the
disappointment was really terrible. After I had given her her
breakfast I went to see Minnie Ryan.

“I’d get the doctor at once,” she said. “I’ll go and stop with her
while you're out.”

To get a doctor I had first to go to the house of an undertaker who
was a Poor Law guardian to get a ticket to show we couldn’t pay, and
afterwards to the dispensary. Then I had to rush back, get the house
ready, and prepare a basin of water, soap, and a towel for the doctor
to wash his hands.

He didn’t come till after dinner. He was a fat, slow-moving,
loud-voiced man with a gray mustache and, like all the drunks of the
medical profession, supposed to be “the cleverest man in Cork if only
he’d mind himself.” From the way he looked he hadn’t been minding himself
much that morning.

“How are you going to get this now?” he growled, sitting on the edge
of the bed with his prescription pad on his knee. “The only place open
is the North Dispensary.”

“I’ll go, doctor,” I said at once.

“’Tis a long way,” he said doubtfully. “Would you know where it is?”

“I’ll find it,” I said confidently.

“Isn’t he a great help to you?” he said to the mother.

“The best in the world, doctor,” she sighed with a long look at
me. “A daughter couldn’t be better to me.”

“That’s right,” he told me. “Look after your mother while you
can. She’ll be the best for you in the long run. ... We don’t mind them
when we have them,” he added to Mother, “and then we spend the rest
of our lives regretting them.”

I didn’t think myself he could be a very good doctor, because, after
all my trouble, he never washed his hands, but I was prepared to
overlook that since he said nothing about the hospital.

The road to the dispensary led uphill through a thickly populated poor
locality as far as the barrack, which was perched on the hilltop, and
then it descended between high walls till it suddenly almost
disappeared over the edge of the hill in a stony pathway flanked on
the right-hand side by red-brick Corporation houses and on the other
by a wide common with an astounding view of the city. It was more like
the back-cloth of a theatre than a real town. The pathway dropped away
to the bank of a stream where a brewery stood; and from this, far
beneath you, the opposite hillside, a murmuring honeycomb of factory
chimneys and houses, whose noises came to you, dissociated and
ghostlike, rose steeply, steeply to the gently rounded hilltop with a
limestone spire, and a purple sandstone tower rising out of it and
piercing the clouds. It was so wide and bewildering a view that it was
never all lit up at the same time; sunlight wandered across it as
across a prairie, picking out a line of roofs with a brightness like
snow or delving into the depth of some dark street and outlining in
shadow the figures of climbing carts and straining horses. I felt
exalted, a voyager, a heroic figure. I made up my mind to spend the
penny Mrs. Slattery had given me on a candle to the Blessed Virgin in
the cathedral on the hilltop for my mother’s speedy recovery. I felt
sure I'd get more value in a great church like that so close to
Heaven.

The dispensary was a sordid hallway with a bench to one side and a
window like a railway ticket office at the end of it. There was a
little girl with a green plaid shawl about her shoulders sitting on
the bench. She gave me a quick look and I saw that her eyes were green
too. For years after, whenever a girl gave me a hasty look like that,
I hid. I knew what it meant, but at the time I was still innocent. I
knocked at the window and a seedy, angry-looking man opened
it. Without waiting to hear what I had to say he grabbed bottle and
prescription and banged the shutter down again without a word. I
waited a minute and then lifted my hand to knock a second time.

“You'll have to wait, little boy,” the girl said quickly.

“Why will I have to wait?” I asked.

“He have to make it up,” she explained. “He might be half an hour. You
might as well sit down.”

As she obviously knew her way round, I did what she told me.

“Where are you from?” she went on, dropping the shawl, which she held
in front of her mouth the way I had seen old women do it whenever they
spoke. “I live in Blarney Lane.”

“I live by the barrack,” I said.

‘And who’s the bottle for?” she asked.

“My mother.”

“What’s wrong with her?”

“She have a bad cough.”

“She might have consumption,” the little girl said cheerfully. “That’s
what my sister that died last year had. My other sister have to have
tonics. That’s what I’m waiting for. ’Tis a queer old world. Is it
nice up where ye live?”

I told her about the Glen, and she told me about the river out to
Carrigrohane. It seemed to be a nicer place altogether than ours, the
way she described it. She was a pleasant talkative little girl and I
never noticed the time passing. Suddenly the shutter went up and a
bottle was banged on the counter.

“Dooley!” said the man, and the window was shut again.

“That’s me,” said the little girl. “My name is Nora Dooley. Yours
won’t be ready for a long time yet. Is it a red or a black one?”

“I don’t know,” said I. “I never got a bottle before.”

“Black ones is better,” she said. ‘Red is more for hacking
coughs. Still, I wouldn’t mind a red one now.”

“I have better than that,” I said. “I have a lob for sweets.”

I had decided that, after all, it wouldn’t be necessary for me to
light a candle. In a queer way the little girl restored my
confidence. I knew I was exaggerating things and that Mother would be
all right in a day or two.

The bottle, when I got it, was black. The little girl and I sat on
the steps of the infirmary and ate the sweets I’d bought. At the end
of the lane was the limestone spire of Shandon; all along it young
trees overhung the high, hot walls, and the sun, when it came out in
hot, golden blasts behind us, threw our linked shadows onto the road.

“Give us a taste of your bottle, little boy,” she said.

“Can’t you have a taste of your own?” I replied suspiciously.

“Ah, you couldn’t drink mine,” she said. “Tonics is all awful. Try!”

I did, and I spat it out hastily. It was awful. But after that I
couldn’t do less than let her taste mine. She took a long drink out of
it, which alarmed me.

“That’s beautiful,” she said. “That’s like my sister that died last
year used to have. I love cough bottles.”

I tried it myself and saw she was right in a way. It was very sweet
and sticky, like treacle.

“Give us another,” she said.

“I will not,” I said in alarm. “What am I going to do with it now?”

“All you have to do is put water in it, out of a pump. No one will
know.”

Somehow, I couldn’t refuse her. Mother was far away, and I was swept
from anchorage into an unfamiliar world of spires, towers, trees,
steps, and little girls who liked cough bottles. I worshipped that
girl. We both took another drink and I began to panic. I saw that even
if you put water in it, you couldn’t conceal the fact that it wasn’t
the same, and began to snivel.

“It’s all gone,” I said. “What am I going to do?”

“Finish it and say the cork fell out,” she said, as though it were the
most natural thing in the world, and, God forgive me, I believed
her. We finished it, and then, as I put away the empty bottle, I
remembered my mother sick and the Blessed Virgin slighted, and my
heart sank. I had sacrificed both to a girl and she didn’t even care
for me. It was my cough bottle she had been after all the time from
the first moment I appeared in the dispensary. I saw her guile and
began to weep.

‘What ails you?” she asked in surprise.

‘My mother is sick, and you’re after drinking her medicine, and now if
she dies, ’twill be my fault,” I said.

“Ah, don’t be an old cry-baby!” she said contemptuously. “No one ever
died of a cough. You need only say the cork fell out—tis a thing
might happen to anyone.”

‘And I promised the Blessed Virgin a candle, and spent it on sweets
for you,” I cried, and ran away up the road like a madman, holding the
empty bottle. Now I had only one hope—a miracle. I went into the
cathedral to the shrine of the Blessed Virgin and, having told her of
my fall, promised a candle with the next penny I got if only she would
make Mother better by the time I got home. I looked at her face
carefully in the candlelight and thought it didn’t seem too
cross. Then I went miserably home. All the light had gone out of the
day, and the echoing hillside had become a vast, alien, cruel
world. Besides, I felt terribly sick. It even struck me that I might
die myself. In one way that would be a great ease to me.

When I reached home, the silence of the kitchen and the sight of the
empty grate showed me at once that my prayers had not been
heard. Mother was still sick in bed. I began to howl.

“What is it all, child?” she cried anxiously from upstairs.

“I lost the medicine,” I bellowed from the foot of the stairs, and
then dashed blindly up and buried my face in the bedclothes.

“Ah, wisha, wisha, if that’s all that’s a-trouble to you, you poor
misfortunate child!” she cried in relief, running her hand through my
hair. “I was afraid you were lost. Is anything the matter?” she added
anxiously. “You feel hot.”

“I drank the medicine,” I bawled, and buried my face again.

“And if you did itself, what harm?” she murmured soothingly. “You poor
child, going all that way by yourself, without a proper dinner or
anything, why wouldn’t you? Take off your clothes now, and lie down
here till you’re better.”

She rose, put on her slippers and an overcoat, and unlaced my shoes
while I sat on the bed. Even before she was finished I was asleep. I
didn’t hear her dress herself or go out, but some time later I felt a
cool hand on my forehead, and saw Minnie Ryan peering down at me.

“Ah, ’tis nothing, woman,” she said lightly. “He’ll sleep that off by
morning. Well, aren’t they the devil! God knows, you’d never be up to
them. And indeed and indeed, Mrs. Sullivan, ’tis you should be in
bed.” ;

I knew all that. I knew it was her judgment on me; I was one of those
who were more like savages than Christians; I was no good as a nurse,
no good to anybody. I accepted it all. But when Mother came up with
her evening paper and sat reading by my bed, I knew the miracle had
happened. She’d been cured all right.


(1949)
Source: Collected Stories, 1981