GALLEY BEGGAR PRESS SHORT STORY PRIZE 2021/22

CONOR CRUMMEY
‘The Good People’

I SAT ON MY STOOL with the night’s fourth stout in front of me. Teach Ruairí was unusually lively that evening. Shrill laughter rose from circles of teenagers shouting over each other. A gaggle that shouldn’t have been near a pub stood at the pool table, watching two lads play a game. One of them was a wee short lad who pranced around the table like a marsh-ghast, trying to put off the one whose turn it was. The other, a tall, cocky looking fella with red hair, hoisted a leg up on the table like he was for fucking the pocket.

This wasn’t Teach Ruairí as it normally was, now. This was strictly a late August state of affairs. When these swarms of kids came up from the city for the Gaeltacht colleges. They rode in on their buses just two weeks ago. Their wee gremlin faces pressed to the glass looking at me like they were on safari. One stuck his bare arse to the glass.

I turned seventy-six last Sunday. Lately I’d felt the old road to Teach Ruairí stretch a few miles longer. Used to be every evening I’d leave the house at half past seven and be at Ruairí’s for a quarter past eight. Ruairí would have the stout settling when I walked in. I still leave Kit after supper at half past seven, but now it’s creeping towards quarter to nine when I’m settled at my table in the pub. Ruairí waits now until I get there before he pours. 

The Gaeltacht lads had changed out of their county tops and had the shirts on tonight. The girls had lathered themselves in orange and had the ponytails pulled back. A few teachers and ceannairí patrolled and made sure none of them had anything other than coke in their glasses. The kids didn’t need drink though. They had that summer confidence that they bring up here with them from the city.

I was contemplating the remaining mouthful in my glass when I felt the counter of the bar shudder beside me. From the corner of my eye I saw two arms emerging from one of those trendy lumberjack shirts. The sleeves were rolled up over thick, hairy wrists. These belonged to Fintan, a teacher who came up from the city with the kids.

 ‘Ack Barnie, you’re here,’ he said, with that buzz-saw city accent. All harsh vowels and swaggering sexiness. It made me self-conscious of my own drawl, like I have a mouthful of porridge. I muttered some class of hello.

‘Great to be up again, so it is,’ he went on. ‘Nice group of kids we’ve got this year.’

I looked up at his big, yellow smile. You wouldn’t have guessed he was from the city. He had that same wind-smacked complexion we wear up here. Still a full head of wiry brown hair. The real show-stopper, though, was his eyebrow. I say eyebrow, singular. It ran from east to west like a monstrous river across his forehead. It was hard not to be impressed by that thing. It was a dictator’s eyebrow. It was trembling with malevolence at me now. I forced myself to look down from it and into the bad yellow eyes. The man had a curial arrogance about him.

‘Kit not fancy getting the dancing shoes on tonight?’ he said.

My eyes went back to the dregs of my glass. The rumours about this fella had been flying around for years. They said he’d half the town rode. They said he’d volunteer with the readings in mass for to pick out his prey. His mouth would be talking St Paul but his eyes would be scanning the church. He’d make eye contact, so when they went up for communion it was him on their mind as they pushed the tongue out.

‘Bit of a trek for her these days, hai,’ I managed.

I saw the smirk in his eyes and cursed the involuntary ‘hai’.

‘Shame,’ he said, ‘She’s missing a good oul Saturday night Ruairí’s rí-rá.’

I felt the Guinness rise and I lurched from my stool.

‘Tell her I was asking for her!’ I heard behind me.

*

Out in the cold I tramped down the gullet of the valley. I stopped when the pub was gone behind me and the rest of the town had yet to appear. I breathed in lovely eldritch night. She’s a different place at night altogether. By day it’s all summer noise and colour. Flames of honeysuckle and montbretia lick the hedges. No third rate poet ever passed the fields without the word ‘verdant’ coming to him in a bolt of inspiration. The place whores herself out by day. At night it’s different. The mountains are monstrous silhouettes. The green pales to the colour of illness. Much closer to what you’d call a moor, with it draped in moonlight and the weight of something older and hostile lying over it. The place has an honesty to it at night.

Kit was riding Fintan. That was a near certainty. My seventy-one year old wife was hoisting herself on top of a hairy múinteoir in his forties. I tried to process this thought. I was never an Olympian in the riding department, but I’d not disgraced myself either. I’d done my best to be attentive and communicative, like. I’m not a jealous man by nature but I can tell you, the thought of that eyebrow taking up my Kit’s horizons, blocking out the sun like a hairy eclipse, and her reaching a thundering, Protestant orgasm. Any man would be sent to Ruairí’s taps.

I bunched up my coat and tried to make out shapes in the dark of the fields. You’d call it desolate if you didn’t know the place and had only a visitor’s eye. Maybe you report home that it was vast and grey, but had its own kind of beauty in a way. But gorse and heather and wren are teaming with life all. And other things breathe misty mischief over it come night-time. They make the landscape change in an instant. Mist will roll over the mountains while you’re bent tying a shoelace. You’ve no hope of keeping your bearings then. That’s true even if you’re from here. We’re no mystical guides. We’re permanently lost ourselves and we look it.

I fumbled in my pocket for the headlamp Kit bought me for Christmas. I scoffed at it at first but the thing had kept me out of a few ditches. I strapped it round my forehead and flicked the switch. The halogen light fired up and fifty marble eyes roared out of the dark at me. I stood frozen. They baa’d. Sheep in the headlamp, Jesus God. Twenty of them at least. They stood stock still like they’d been caught in some cultish ritual. Fuck knows what sheep get up to at night.

I stared back at them and fingered the top of a wooden fence post that separated the narrow road from the fields. The end beneath the ground would be sharpened to a point. I pictured myself thrusting the sharp end into the base of Fintan’s skull, the part of us where the baby softness never really hardens. Picture pushing your finger into rotten fruit. That’s how he would fold around the post. The nearest sheep stared at me with his big, empty eyes. Probably I wasn’t the first lovestruck fool he’d caught wondering the road from Ruairí’s at this hour.

I went out of my way to stop at the school on my way home. It was a small, whitewashed building. We had walked David there every morning. They used it as a Gaeltacht college in the summers now. It had been roaring with city kids all summer. It lay as quiet as everywhere else now. I walked to the closest window. In the classroom, the desks had been arranged in one big circle. Some game at the end of their lessons, probably. A stray jumper had been left behind on a chair. Everything in the room was the same sad, moonlit colour. I drew back from the glass and saw the reflection of shrunken face, with the blue lips and the white eyebrows and the eyes full of tears.

* 

Kit was in her chair despite the hour. We were both at that age where neither slept more than a few hours any more. She looked these days like an illustration of an old lady from a storybook; all cardigan and eyeballs. She sat curled forward like a prawn.

I laid a hand against the living room wall. It always took a minute to readjust after having all that dark and badness bearing in on you on the way home. Some low embers remained in the grate and I moved to stand by them. Kit had her mobile phone out now.

‘David sent us a photo of Colm there on the whatsapp,’ she said.

She held out the phone towards me and I stopped to look. A small, beautiful boy beamed a gap-toothed grin. He stood at the front door of a large, modern house, wearing a moss green primary school jumper. His pride radiated through the screen.

‘They took him to get his uniform for starting the Gaelscoil,’ Kit said.

‘They shouldn’t be allowed to call it a “Gaelscoil” up there,’ I said. ‘You wouldn’t have heard a focal of Irish out of any of them in Ruairí’s there.’

‘Ack, they’re here to have fun,’ she said.

‘Oh, so I’ve heard,’ I muttered.

I regretted that immediately and looked back down into the embers. I didn’t look back to find out whether she’d reacted.

The image of Colm, my grandson, stayed with me. I thought of the teenagers in the pub, their impossibly carefree faces. Their faces blended together, blended with Colm’s. I put a hand on the mantelpiece for support.

‘Do you remember those stories we used to tell David,’ I said. ‘About the Sí and the changelings and that?’

‘Some story to be telling a wee boy,’ she said.

‘Do you ever think…’ I tried to get a clear sight of the thought in my head, but the fog was rolling over it. ‘Does it ever remind you of that? With the kids they bring up here I mean. And our own kids…’

I kept my gaze on the fire.

‘You’re away talking rubbish again,’ she said. ‘I shouldn’t be showing you pictures when you’ve had a drink.’

The children’s faces evaporated and that the image of that eyebrow came to me again. I looked on at the embers. I hardened my face and tried to manifest a wounded nobility. I imagined myself as a lord that would demand answers of his wife in due course. At last I turned to the chair, but Kit had fallen asleep.

*

That night I am broken on the dream-wrack. The scene plays out as though in an old flick-book animation, buffering and skipping; Kit’s skirts fall about her, then she is horizontal in all her waxen loveliness and a younger man pumps fluid, heavy thrusts. Pink shapes covered in diesel sheen, writhing in mists. Sweat gathers on a hairy forehead and Kit is delivered into fire.

*

Despite the season the sky in those weeks was white and disapproving as a sober eye. The sabre-long grass that bordered the roadside bobbed and threatened in the wind. The place had sharpened her edges. I stopped to catch my breath by the T-junction at the top of the road. The statute of a blue-cloaked Madonna stood in a whitewashed shrine. I used to tell Colm you had to salute her like she was a magpie, or the Sí would grab you. David didn’t like me telling him that, even though I told him the same when he was a child.

I didn’t like to walk the new road. Every time I did I pictured David’s car disappearing into the distance and Colm’s little face pressed to the back window. It was more like a pipeline than a road. Like some big oil company had stuck it down to steal all the vitality out of the place. But the petrol station was on the new road and I wanted to look at the petrol station.

Myself and Kit had owned the station from 1965. Back then there just the two white, waist-high Esso pumps off the tiny gravel road, and the little hut off to the side where we took the money. We’d let David count out the change for the customers. Then we had an offer from the big Topaz that we always regretted taking. We didn’t know when we sold that the new road was planned. The Topaz people knew. David finished up his schooling and took the new road to the city. He married Ciara there and they had Colm there and they come back and visit sometimes.

I walked off the road and approach the forecourt of the petrol station. A massive canopy covered it all, white along with edges with the Topaz lettering in blue and yellow. Twelve pumping stations stretched between the ground and the ceiling of the canopy. Gaeltacht kids came in and out of the Eurospar that was part of the station now, carrying Lucozade and crisps.

I walked over and scratched my shoe off the bit of ground where the old white Esso pumps used to stand. Back then we’d get the odd knock on the door at midnight asking us to come open up so they could have a litre to get them home from the pub. I’d walk down and fill a can from the pump for them then head back to bed. They took the Esso pumps out when they paved the forecourt. Kit reckons someone else will come take it off them and make it all electric soon.

I recognised two of the city boys from Ruairí’s pool table. They walked across the forecourt carrying hurls, tapping a ball to each other as they walked. The taller, red haired one held a carton of eggs in one hand and the hurl in the other. He caught the ball on the end of the stick and let its weight settle for a second, then flicked it back with the one hand to the other boy, who let the ball find the end of his own hurl and balance there. They danced along like this on their toes, the ball floating from one to the other. As I watched I felt the old dread come on. My chest tightened and my vision blurred. The sadness of that ball bouncing from stick to stick like it would never drop.

I turned back towards the Eurospar. Through the windows I saw an unmistakeable head float past the shelves and towards the door. That eyebrow was like the grille of a steam train barrelling down the track at me. I walked round to the side of the shop before he saw me and leaned against the wall to catch my breath. He crossed the road with a stride twice as long as a normal man’s. Every step like he was clearing a fence. I leaned against the wall and closed my eyes and wished the day away.

* 

The Gaeltacht colleges had only a week left, giving these last evenings in Ruairí’s a romantic urgency. Instruments had been procured and tunes had been struck up in the front corner of the bar. The crowd pressed in to the corner with the musicians. Time was kept on knees and tables and the bar counter. A bodhrán throbbed a fast rhythm and a guitar strum raced along side it. A fiddle picked up the reel to yelps of approval.

I sat behind the crowds at the bar, a tumbler of a tea-coloured liquid half-emptied. Ruairí cast a concerned glance my way. When I walked in earlier his arm was already extended for the stout glass, but I gave a shake of the head and pointed to one of the special Powers bottles on the top shelf. The seal on these bottles was broken and the liquid was a shade darker than their brothers on the shelf. This was the poteen that Ruairí’s son made. It wasn’t something the law would bother with anymore, but Ruairí still stained it with teabags and kept it hidden out of a sense of tradition. He poured just a sip’s worth first. It tasted like the bog it came from. ‘Quare stuff,’ I said. He wheezed a laugh and filled the glass. He didn’t smile when I pointed to it the second time, nor the two after that.

The room was doing a bit of swimming, in fairness to him. The crowd were stamping feet and twisting hips to the music. The bar was coming unmoored. I could see the two lads on bodhrán and guitar and I recognised them as the two lads that had been hurling the ball to each other outside the garage. They were grinning at each other and soaking in the yelps of approval. They looked beautiful beyond belief. They made eyes to a table of girls and laughed with a lightness that would break your heart.

The crowd blurred and swirled. Space opened beside the boys. There he was. Fintan, a fiddle wedged between shoulder and jowl. His eyes were closed and the mean eyebrow curled and snarled and jumped with the reel. He whipped the bow across the fiddle brutally. The kids were loving him. It occurred to me that Kit would have seen the children look at him that way, as he ran laps around the pitch with them or led them in the ceilís. Maybe that was why she had creaked her hips open for him. I felt another scald of earthy liquid go past my throat and the bar shuddered underneath me. Hands beat out the rhythm of the reel on the bar and everyone around me was smiling. Fintan flashed an evil, yellow grin to the lads and drove the song on harder.

 ‘Here, Ruairí,’ I brandished my empty glass at him.

‘Would you not just have a Guinness instead, Barnie?’ he said.

I drew my face into the sternest grimace I could.

‘Not fucken dignify that with a response, hai,’ I said, holding the glass out until he drained the bottle into it.

The poteen simmered at heart-level now and I felt a powerful class of melancholy. I looked back to the man resting with the fiddle in his lap and the sheen of manly sweat on him. I descended carefully from the stool and tightrope walked through the haze to where he sat. The two kids were playing on, a slower ballad. I caught familiar snippets, saw in my mind a nobleman’s wife and her gypsy lover running across a moonlit field. I opened my eyes. I hadn’t realised they were closed. Fintan was looking up at me with half a smirk. I must have walked quicker than I thought because my breath was caught in my chest and the room spun.

‘Have you no fucken shame at all?’ I think I said.

I felt that every eye in the place was on me. Or maybe they weren’t and no one heard. Maybe I didn’t speak at all. Fintan was looking at me with what could have passed for concern. He didn’t speak. I tried again.

‘Done a quare amount of living, so I have, and not so that some fucken eyebrow could make a cuckold of me.’

I couldn’t be sure if I said these words or if the bar heard them because the roar of blood and music was in my ears and the room was spinning and faces were twisting into hideous, unreadable grimaces. Fintan sat still and impassive. I looked around the bar to see who had heard. A city voice like Fintan’s carried from somewhere.

‘Ack Jesus, Barnie, if it’s a bit of bucking you’re annoyed about there’s others you should be talking to. You’ll be ringing up decades worth of múinteoirí if you go that way mate. A few ceannaire too if word’s to be believed.’

I spun back again. He was sitting still like he’d said nothing. Again I looked around me to see who had heard. The two lads had finished their sad ballad and were quickening up to jig pace now. Feet stamped again all around me. Faces began to materialise around us. Children’s faces, leering through the poteen fog. Fear gripped my chest and I couldn’t meet their evil, changeling eyes.

‘Is he alright?’ someone asked.

‘Ack aye,’ the eyebrow said, ‘He’s just tired, aren’t you Barnie?’

*

I rounded the corner from the pub at as close to a run as I had in me. I went down the loose-pebbled path and stopped at a low stone bridge. It was hip-high and no more than a few feet long across a running brook. I took in great gulps of night and tried to let its stillness come into me. All was black and cold now. Silver birch trees bent into a lattice-roofed cave over the bridge and made the sound of the gentle water thunder all around me.

I’d stop at that bridge with David on the way to school with him. I taught him how to listen out for how the sound of the river changes on either side of the bridge. The north side the treble clef, south the bass. My own father had shown me how to throw a stick in on one side then to run to the other to watch it sail out with the current. I’d shown wee Colm how to do it when David brought him here for his holidays. The face on the boy, happiness like a precious thing. He kept thinking it’d work if he threw it from the other side too.

I walked to the top of the path, back to the schoolhouse. It lay corpse-still again. Kit was happy for David when he moved to the city. We’d had it better than our own parents, running the petrol station instead of scraping the earth. Our son would have it better than us, and his son better than him again. Progress. Maybe Colm would come back in the summers to go to the Gaeltacht college himself when he was old enough. My heart fairly fucken broke at that thought.

*

The petrol sloshes into the red plastic can. The sun beats down so hard it feels like the whole place could go up. I have a pig of a hangover but I’m used to these fumes. I squint around the forecourt and see myself and Kit sitting outside in our folding chairs. We are young and enjoying the sun and the quiet after the few cars that stopped on their way to work are gone. David runs through the grass just off the road, a bottle of Football Special sloshes out over his hands as he runs. I screw the hard black plastic lid on the petrol can and the vision dissipates. 

* 

I had gone back to Guinness in Ruairí’s. I took one of the round, one-person tables in the corner, instead of my usual place at the bar. The two lads who had been playing music the other night were back at the pool table. Short-arse had the cue between his legs and was thrusting it in ginger’s direction.

I knew I didn’t look well. Didn’t smell well either, if I’m being honest. My breath tasted sour and petrol fumes clung to my clothes and skin. I rotated the glass and watched the spume lap around. The petrol can sat by my foot. The two lads at the pool table threw glances my way. One cupped his hand around the other’s ear and whispered something. I considered the pint and petrol can again. When I looked back they were gone.

The petrol can had been getting strange looks over the course of the week. I’d taken to carrying it around with me, to the shops, for my walks up and down the old road. I left it on the steps on my way into mass and picked it up again on the way out. The fantasy had entered my head of throwing it over Fintan on the street. Crisping him up like a Malaysian, leaving him a little pile of ash with his eyebrow sitting on top. I was torn between using a lighter or a match. A match would be easier to get out of the way myself, but the lighter would be less futtery. It was a bit more Hollywood too. Had a bang of Clint off it. The timing was the issue though. My hands weren’t the most nimble anymore.

After thinking through the ins and outs, immolating the man himself seemed a logistical nightmare. I wandered the old road again. I stopped again outside the school. David’s school. The one he hadn’t sent his own son to. It was full now of city kids, roaring over each other in English. I felt the reassuring weight of the petrol can in my hand. It would hurt me too, it being the school David had gone to. But it was the host that the parasite was feeding on. I would come at night. I’d set the match then walk back down to the bridge and watch the fire-glow at the top of the hill make a bloody ceiling of the clouds.

*

I walked over the bridge. The current babbled with minor notes this evening. That gorgeous starlit stillness was about the place again. I imagined what it would feel like with the heat of the fire in front of me and the cold of the night behind. I knew this would colour everything that came before it. It didn’t matter how well I had lived. It didn’t matter that I was happy in those moments. I’d only be able to look back at it through this lens now. I began to unscrew the cap on the petrol can. Maybe David would bring Colm in to visit. It’d be pretty glamorous having an arsonist for a grandfather.

Time was jumping ahead. I could smell smoke already as I emerged from under the roof of birch trees. The school was just above the crest of the hill now. As I approached, I heard a gentle thud, like a man was tapping the flat of his fingers on a table in time with a tune. Another thud followed it. I could make out whispers as I crested the hill. Another soft thud.

Two figures stood before the school. One drew its arm back and then hurled it forward. A projectile sailed from their hand and thudded against the wall of the school. The two cackled. I walked closer and they turned at the scrape of my boots on the loose gravel. I tried to place them for a moment before I recognised them. Short-arse and ginger. They looked even younger now than they had then. They stood rooted to the spot. The tall, red-haired one had a lit cigarette in the corner of this mouth. The wee one held a box of eggs in his hand.

‘Oh fuck,’ said cigarette.

‘Scooped,’ said eggs.

Their eyes glittered with badness. I thought of a story we told David. Na Daoine Maithe. The Good People, who’d have children led astray on St John’s Eve, have them mounted as horses to storm away over Ireland in their terrible host. I felt I could see the shimmering shapes on the boys’ backs.

‘What’s he doing with that?’

I looked down at the petrol can in my hand. It felt light as air. I lifted it to my chest and placed my other hand beneath it. I continued towards them. The tip of ginger’s cigarette glowed red. They were no more than three feet from me now. The smaller one was hopping from foot to foot.

‘Here, mate,’ he began, ‘Don’t be touting on us.’

Ginger took another drag of the cigarette. The fire on the tip brightened. I took the can and lurched my arm forward towards them as powerfully as my bones would allow. The petrol danced through the air for an age. It had this gorgeous rainbow slant and the promise of fire that made time slow. I drank in the incomprehension on their faces. 

The stillness returned. No flames disturbed it. The cigarette lay doused on the ground. There was only dark and the fumes of petrol. The boys stood there, drenched and shocked. One sniffed at his shoulder.

‘What the fuck?!’

‘Stupid munchie cunt!’

They started towards me but I was gone before they knew it, down the path and over the bridge. I moved with swiftness granted by something older than I. The mists rolled in and I dived down roads few knew. I knew the footsteps behind me would fade. I knew the place would spirit me away beyond the school and the children, beyond the pub and the petrol station, beyond any physical evidence of man’s having been here. They would not catch me. They would run through the mists and realise too late that it was they who were pursued. I would leap from the mists atop their backs and drive them before me as my host. Around Ireland, around the moon. I ran through gorse and nettle and heather and sedge. Wrens ducked and dived around me and birch trees masked my escape. The night closed in and there were just the howls of a distant wind. On the horizon, the faintest halo of warmth left just enough light to make out the meanness of the mountains, and the infinity of stars and the faint icing sugar galaxies and the sheer fucking blackness in between and everywhere else.