Our Casualty, and Other Stories / 1918

by George A. Birmingham

“That time he neither blessed himself nor said a prayer, but slipped into the water, and off with him, swimming with all his strength. They didn’t see him, for they were too busy with their playing to take much notice, and of course they couldn’t be expecting a man to be there. Without Anthony had shouted they wouldn’t have heard him, for the sea was loud on the rocks and their own singing was louder. So Anthony got there and he crept up on the rock behind them, and the first thing his hand touched was one of the cloaks. He didn’t know which of them it belonged to, and he didn’t care. It wasn’t any one of the three in particular he wanted, for they were all much about the same to look at, only finer than any woman ever was seen. So he rolled the cloak round his neck, the way he’d have his arms free for swimming, and back with him into the water, heading for shore as fast as he was able.”

“And she followed him?” I asked.

“She did so. From that day till the day she left him she followed him, and she did what she was bid, only for one thing. She wouldn’t go to mass, and when the chapel bell rang she’d hide herself. The sound of it was what she couldn’t bear. The people thought that queer, and there was a deal of talk about it in the island, some saying she must be a Protestant, and more thinking that she might be something worse. But nobody had a word to say against her any other way. She was a good enough housekeeper, washing and making and mending for Anthony, and minding the children. Seven of them there was, and all boys.”

The easterly breeze freshened as the night fell I could see the great eye of the lighthouse blinking at me on the weather side of the boat. It became necessary to go about, but I gave the order to Peter very reluctantly. He handled the head-sheets, and then, instead of settling down in his old place, leaned his elbows on the coaming and stared into the sea. We were steadily approaching the lighthouse. I felt that I must run the risk of asking him a question.

“What happened in the end?” I asked.

“The end, is it? Well, in the latter end she left him. But there was things happened before that. Whether it was the way the priests talked to him about her—there was a priest in it them times that was too fond of interfering, and that’s what some of them are—or whether there was goings-on within in the inside of the house that nobody knew anything about—and there might have been, for you couldn’t tell what one of them ones might do or mightn’t. Whatever way it was, Anthony took to drinking more than he ought. There was poteen made on the island then, and whisky was easy come by if a man wanted it, and Anthony took too much of it.”

Peter paused and then passed judgment, charitably, on Anthony’s conduct. “I wouldn’t be too hard on a man for taking a drop an odd time.”

I was glad to hear Peter say that. I myself had found it necessary from time to time, for the sake of an old friendship, not to be too hard on Peter.

“Nobody would have blamed him,” Peter went on, “if he had behaved himself when he had a drop taken; but that’s what he didn’t seem able to do. He bet her. Sore and heavy he bet her, and that’s what no woman, whether she was a natural woman or one of the other kind, could be expected to put up with. Not that she said a word. She didn’t. Nor nobody would have known that he bet her if he hadn’t token to beating the young lads along with her. It was them told what was going on. But there wasn’t one on the island would interfere. The people did be wondering that she didn’t put the fear of God into Anthony; but of course that’s what she couldn’t do on account of his having the cloak hid away from her. So long as he had that she was bound to put up with whatever he did. But it wasn’t for ever.

“The house was going to rack and ruin with the way Anthony wouldn’t mind it on account of his being three-parts drunk most of the time. At last the rain was coming in through the roof. When Anthony saw that he came to himself a bit and sent for my grandfather and settled with him to put a few patches of new thatch on the worst places. My grandfather was the best man at thatching that there was in the island in them days, and he took the job though he misdoubted whether he’d ever be paid for it. Anthony never came next or nigh him when he was working, which shows that he hadn’t got his senses rightly. If he had he’d have kept an eye on what my grandfather was doing, knowing what he knew, though of course my grandfather didn’t know. Well, one day my grandfather was dragging off the old thatch near the chimney. It was middling late in the evening, as it might be six or seven o’clock, and he was thinking of stopping his work when all of a sudden he came on what he thought might be an old petticoat bundled away in the thatch. It was red, he said, but when he put his hand on it he knew it wasn’t flannel, nor it wasn’t cloth, nor it wasn’t like anything he’d ever felt before in all his life. There was a hole in the roof where my grandfather had the thatch stripped, and he could see down into the kitchen. Anthony’s wife was there with the youngest of the boys in her arms. My grandfather was as much in dread of her as every other one, but he thought it would be no more than civil to tell her what he’d found.