The Giant, O’Brien

‘Jesus!’ Claffey said. ‘I am getting weary of the catalogue of furnishings, so I am. A hand plucks back the curtain and she sees—’

‘—a yellow-skinned babby, its skin wrinkled, its eyes rheumy—’

‘Much like he must have been,’ the red-head said, indicating Vance.

‘—so ugly she had never seen a child like it, and her gorge rose, and she said—putting aside all common politeness, such was the strength of her feeling—I don’t know that I can touch it. Then the man and woman again spoke to her, and their voices were low and whispering and they seemed to hold in them the same shivering note of the harp-string and the melody of the golden birds bowing on their perch—and they said, cooing to her, There’s nothing the matter with the child, except want of nourishment.

‘And the woman shook her head, saying, If that’s the manner and appearance of a king’s son, my own fair child should be emperor of the earth and skies. But she pitied them, and she pitied the yellow baby, and so she lifted it from the cradle of velvet and ivory, and laid it to her blue-veined breast. And all the while her own child lay sleeping in the arms of the woman so richly dressed, and lay so quiet and still that it seemed he was under an enchantment.’

‘Which indeed he was,’ the red-haired woman said. Again she plucked nervously at her kerchief. ‘You could see it coming a mile off.’

‘I wish you’d be quiet, mother,’ Pybus said.

‘Yes,’ Jankin broke off from his play with the pig. ‘I want to hear, I want to hear. It is not the demon tale we thought it was.’

A man laughed. ‘They are simple, these. Come over the water just now.’

But the other shushed him, the blind man saying severely, ‘It is seldom, in these debased days, we are able to hear a tale told in the antique fashion, by a gent of such proportions.’

‘So when the yellow child was laid to her breast, he took a fierce hold, and drank greedily, and she cried out, Oh, you did not say he had teeth! Surely, blood is springing from my tit!’

‘Dear, dear,’ Vance said satirically. ‘What the female sex have to endure!’

‘Ah, my dear, he has but one tooth, one tooth only, said the queen, soothing her. He will suck me dry! the young woman cried. Feed him but one minute longer, they coaxed, and then you shall have a soft bed to lie in all night, and a goosedown quilt to cover you, and in the morning we will give you seven gold pieces, and shoes to your feet, and in no time at all you will be in Galway among your own people.

‘So, thinking of the bed, and the quilt, and the shoes, and the gold, she let the yellow child drain her. The moment it was done, it flinched away its head, like a rich man offered a dry crust. And the queen took it from her—and all at once, she felt her eyelids droop, her legs weaken—and that was the last thing she knew.’

‘Now you will hear the coda,’ said the red-head. ‘I feel I could whistle it. It is no pretty tune.’

‘Morning came at last. She woke, and put out her hand to stroke the feather bed—’

‘But felt,’ said the blind man, ‘only a mulch of leaves.’

‘It was cold, and the harp-string was mute, and only a common sparrow of the hedgerows sang in her ear. She opened her eyes, sat up, looked around her—and the hand that had smoothed the bed grasped a handful of weeds, too rank to feed a cow—’

‘And her baby?’ the freckled girl said. Her fingers parted her curtain of hair. Her voice was sharp with anxiety.

‘She is twelve years old,’ the red-head said. ‘Excuse her. She has not heard many tales.’

The Giant shook his head. ‘Then this is a sad one, for a beginner. For the young lady, who last night was in the hall of kings—now her feet are in the ditch, her mouth is dry, there is muck in her hair and her belly is empty. And she cries, My babby! Where is he? She casts around, but her rosy babby is not to be seen—and then from the hedge she hears a little bleat—’

The red-head laughed. Time to run.’

‘—and looking into the hedge what should she find but the yellow child, its skin flapping, its eyes running and its nose snuffling, its evil pointed teeth grinning at her, and its wizened arms held out to fasten about her neck.’

‘Well?’ asked a woman in the shadows. ‘Did she turn and walk away?’

‘I think not,’ the red-head said. ‘It’s the hand you’re dealt, isn’t it? She’d pick him up. It’s what women do. She was a fool, and well-intentioned, and just a little bit greedy, and isn’t that like most of us?’

Jankin gaped. ‘What happened to her babby? Did she get him back?’

‘He was never seen again,’ the Giant said emphatically.

There was a long silence.

Jankin broke it. ‘Do you know what I think? I think, if she had not made the remark about the child’s ill-looks, and said that about her own child being an emperor, I think they might well have seen her safe back on the road and a penny in her hand. For they are decent-minded people on the whole, the gentry, but they will not stand for spitefulness.’

‘In my opinion,’ said the red-head, ‘when the old man first offered her a gold piece, she should have said, Show us the colour of it, then grabbed it in her hand and run.’

‘Well, however it may be, and however you think,’ said the Giant, ‘this happened to my own cousin, on the road to Galway, but one or two years back. And this is the story, as I had it from her own lips; and if you don’t like it, you may lengthen it by your complaints.’

There came from the company a great sigh, an exhalation; they were, on the whole, satisfied. Drink had now been taken, and Slig came down the steps with a cannikin, offering more. The cellar was warming up, with the press of extra people, and the heat of the pig, and the heat of contentious opinion. The blind man had sunk down against the wall, into a heap of rags, and he held out his beaker, his voice searching, ‘Slig? Slig? Fill us up here.’ He turned his face in the Giant’s direction. ‘Would you like to hear our ballad, big man?’

‘Certainly, yes.’

‘It is still in the making.’

‘That is the most interesting stage.’

‘So polite you are!’

‘I add it to the advantages of nature.’

‘You do well.’ The blind man paused. ‘We are making a ballad about the circumstances in which we find ourselves. Does that suit you?’

‘There was in former times a great poet who made verses upon the subject of the shovel he used to dig a road for Englishmen—so simple and pure his heart, and that object not too low. Can I then disdain your cellar, or the circumstances in which you are found?’

The blind man nodded. ‘So. Very well. I will proceed. We are making our ballad on Hannah Dagoe, a wild girl, that when the hangman came to noose her she knocked him clean out of the cart.’

‘What was her crime?’ asked the Giant.

‘Stealing a watch only, and that on St Patrick’s Day. She came out of Dublin, and her trade was milliner.’

‘Whenabouts was this?’

‘I don’t know. Some year. They hanged her, anyway. We have also a ballad of Thomas Tobin and William Harper, how William Harper was rescued from the Westminster Gatehouse by twenty Irish boys with cutlasses.’

‘And Thomas Tobin?’

‘And how Thomas Tobin was not.’

‘Did they hang him?’

‘I expect so. For Robert Hayes was hanged, though he spoke Latin like the Pope. And Patrick Brown was hanged for stealing silver spurs. Bryan Cooley was hanged, and his wife and four of his children came from Ireland to see it. Patrick Kelly was hanged, that was fifty years old, that filed coins, that made a speech about if each had their own no man would be poor. James Carter was hanged, him that was five years with the French armies, and John Maloney, that fought in Sicily, which is a hot country at a good distance but it’s not the Indies. John Norton was hanged, and him twelve years a soldier. Thomas Dwyer was hanged, that came from Tipperary and had no coat to his back. William Rine and James Ryan, Gerald Farrell and James Falconer, they were all turned off together. Teddy Brian was hanged and Henry Smith, that robbed the High Bailiff of his gold-topped cane. Katherine Lineham was hanged, but her husband was hanged before her, and Ruggety Madge was hanged, that was Katherine Lineham’s friend, and Redman Keogh, and black and damned Macdonnel that sold them all to save his neck, but they hanged him anyway. William Bruce was hanged, that stole a silk kerchief and a man’s wig off his head, and they found him in a barn, he was a man out of Armagh. James Field was hanged, him that was a boxer and the Watch were afraid of him till they came to take him in strength. Joseph Dowdell was hanged, he was a Wicklow man but fell to picking pockets in Covent’s Garden. Garret Lawler was hanged, that was a cardsharp. Thomas Quinn was hanged, and Alexander Byrne, and Dan the Baker and Richard Holland, and all of those you could find any fine night of the year drinking at the Fox Tavern in Drury Lane. Patrick Dempsey was hanged, he was a sailor, turned off when he was drunk. William Fleming was hanged, he was a highwayman. Ann Berry was hanged, a weaver turned a rough robber, and Margaret Watson, she heeded no laws. Robert Bird was hanged, and of him I know not a jot that would make a line or half of one. James Murphy and James Duggan were hanged, and their bodies cut up by the surgeons.’

‘Dear God,’ said the Giant. ‘Was the whole country of Ireland hanged, and not one spared?’

‘When the people gather they call it the crack-neck assembly. When you are turned off they call it the cramp-jaw, and the new jig without music, and dancing in the sheriff’s picture frame.’

‘It is the slaughter of a nation,’ the Giant said.

‘Katherine Lineham was what we call a hemp-widow. Her husband was a month in Newgate, and she so in love with him that every day she waited till she saw him led from the cell to the chapel, that she might see his shadow slide against the wall. O, then how he did bounce, his face to the city! Rope is the first word of English that an Irishwoman learns. Hang is the word of her husband, hang him, the thief, he is a rebel, hang him for a rogue. Dog is the word of her children, kick them out, kick them out like dogs. These are the next words: Papist, and starve him, and let him be whipped.’

They separated then; the women moving chastely to one side of the hovel, the men to the other. A low hum of goodnights, smiles in the dark. By the last flicker of light the Giant saw the red-headed woman draw the fair young girl to her breast, patting her, and he heard the tiny bleatings of sorrow and loss suppressed.

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