The End of the Record

[If there is a single element that I look forward to in an Irish story, besides the marvelous language, I would call it magic. Sean O'Faolain was one of the first great Irish writers who didn't become an exile from Ireland. I first encountered his stories in my twenties and I read every one I could find. This one, "The End of the Record," is especially short and especially strange. And with it I wish you all a Happy St. Patrick’s Day.] 

The news went around the poorhouse that there was a man with a recording van in the grounds. He was picking up old stories and songs.

‘And they say that he would give you a five-shilling piece into your hand for two verses of an old song,’ said Thomas Hunter, an old man from Coomacoppal, in West Kerry, forgetting that five-shilling pieces were no longer in fashion. ‘Or for a story, if you have a good one.’

‘What sort of stories would them be?’ Michael Kivlehan asked sceptically. He was from the barony of Forth and Bargy, in County Wexford, and had been in the poorhouse for eleven years.

‘Any story at all only it is to be an old story and a good story. A story about the fairies, or about ghosts, or about the way people lived long ago.’

‘And what do he do with ‘um when he have ‘um?’

‘Hasn’t he a phonograph? And doesn’t he give them out over the wireless? And doesn’t everyone in Ireland be listening to them?’

‘I wonder now,’ said  Michael Kivlehan, ‘would he give me five shillings for the “Headless Horseman and the Coacha Bowr”?’

Thomas Hunter sighed.

‘One time I had a grand story about Finn MacCool and the Scotch giant. But it is gone from me. And I’d be getting my fine five-shilling piece into my fist this minute if I could only announce it to him.’

The two old men sat on the sides of their beds and tried to remember stories. But it was other things they remembered and they forgot all about the man outside who had set them thinking of their childhood.

The doctor had taken the collector into the women’s ward to meet Mary Creegan. She was sitting up in bed, alone in the long room; all the other women were out in the warm sun. As the two men walked up the bare floor the collector was trailing a long black cable from a microphone in his hand, and the doctor was telling him that she came from a place called Faill-a-ghleanna in West Cork.

‘She should have lots of stories because her husband was famous for them. After he died she went a bit airy so they had to bring her to us. ‘Twas a bit tough on her at first. Sixty years in the one cottage – and then to finish up here.’ They stood beside her bed. ‘I brought a visitor to see you, Mary,’ he said in a loud voice.

She did not appear to see them. She was humming happily to herself. Her bony fingers were wound about an ancient rosary beads. Her white hair floated up above a face as tiny and as wrinkled as a forgotten crab apple. All her teeth were gone so that her face was as broad as it was long: it was as if the midwife had pressed the baby’s chin and forehead betweeen thumb and forefinger. The doctor gently laid his hand under the tiny chin and turned her face towards him. She smiled.

‘Put down the kettle and wet the tay,’ she ordered.

The doctor sat on the bed; so did the collector.

‘‘Tis down, Mary and two eggs in the pot. This poor man here is after coming a long way to talk to you. He’s tired out.’

She turned and looked at the stranger. Encouraged by a brightening spark in the depths of her eyes he turned aside and murmured quietly into the microphone. ‘Reggy? Recording ten seconds from . . . now.’

‘It’s a bad road,’ she said. ‘Ask Jamesy is he keeping that divil of a cow out of the cabbage.’

‘She’s all right,’ the doctor cried into her ear. ‘Jamesy is watching her. Be talking to us while we’re waiting for the tay. You told me one time you saw a ghost. Is that true?’

She looked out of the window and her eyes opened and narrowed like a fish’s gills as if they were sucking something in from the blue sky outside. The collector stealthily approached her chin with the microphone.

‘Ghosts? Ayeh! Ha! My ould divil of a tailor is forever and always talkin’ about ‘um. But, sure, I wouldn’t heed him. Bummin’ and boashtin’ he is from morning to night and never a needle to be shtuck in the shtuff. Where is he? Why don’t you ask him to be talking to you about ghoshts?’

The doctor looked across the bed at the collector and raised his eyebrows.

‘Maybe you don’t believe in them yourself?’ he mocked.

‘I do not believe in ‘um. But they’re there. Didn’t I hear tell of ‘um from them that saw ‘um? Aye, and often. And often! Aye’ – still collecting her thoughts from the sky above the bakehouse chimney – ‘wasn’t it that way the night Father Regan died? Huh! They called him Father Regan, but he was not a right priest. He was silenced for some wrong thing he did when he was a young priest, and they sent him to Faill-a-ghleanna to be doing penance for it. When his time came to die it was a bad, shtormy night. And when he sent for the parish priest to hear his confession the priest said he could not come. And that was a hard thing to do, for no man should refuse the dying. And they sent another messenger for the priest, and still the priest could not come. “Oh,” said Father Regan, “I’m lost now.” So they sent a third messenger. And for the third time the priest could not come. And on his way back wasn’t the messenger shtopped on the road by a woman? It was Father Regan’s own mother. “Go back,” says she, “and if the candles by his bed light up,” says she, “of their own accord,” says she, “he is saved.” And the messenger went back, and Father Regan gave wan look at him and he closed his eyes for the last time. With that all the people went on their knees. And they began to pray. If they did, there were three candles at the head of the dead priest. And didn’t the one beside the window light up? And after a little while the candle beside the fire clevy lit up. And they went on praying. And the wind and the shtorm screaming about the house, and they watching the wick of the last candle. And, bit by bit, the way you’d blow up a fire with a bellows, didn’t the candle over the priest’s head light up until the whole room was like broad day light?’

The old woman’s voice suddenly became bright and hard.

‘Isn’t that tay ready a-yet? Domn and blosht it, ye’ll have them eggs like bullets.’ She looked alertly at the two men. ‘Where am I? Where’s Jamesy? What are ye doing to me?’

The doctor held her wrist. Her eyes faded. She sank back heavily.

‘I thought,’ she wailed, ‘that it was how I saw a great brightness.’

The collector spoke one word into the microphone. The old woman had fainted. Overcome with regrets  he began to apologize, but the doctor waved his hand at him.

‘Excited. I’ll send up the sister to give her an injection. Sometimes she loves to talk about old times. It does her good.’

They went out of the empty ward, the cable trailing softly. They passed the male ward. Michael Kivlehan and Thomas Hunter were sitting on their beds. As the doctor led the way downstairs, he said, ‘When that generation goes it will be all over. Wait for me outside. There are a couple more. You might get bits and scraps from them.’

The engineer put his head out of the van and said, in the gloomy voice of all engineers, ‘That might come through all right.’

When the doctor came out again they sat with a middle-aged man from Wicklow, named Fenelon. He had been on the roads until arthritis crippled him. When he counted the years he spoke in Urdu. He had scraps of the tinkers’ language which is called Shelta. He said:

‘I often walked from Dublin to Puck, and that’s a hundred miles, without ever disturbing anything but a hare or a snipe. I’d make for Ross, and then cross to Callan, and by Shevenamon west to the Galtees.’

He did not see the microphone; he did not see his visitors; as the needle softly cut the disc he was seeing only the mountainy sheep that looked at him with slitted eyes, a thing as shaggy as themselves.

They moved on to an old woman, who sang a love song for them in a cracked voice. She said she had learned it in Chicago. She gave them a poem of twelve verses about a voyage to the South Seas. They were finishing a disc with a very old man from Carlow when the sister came out and hastily beckoned to the doctor. As they folded up the cable he came back. He said, with a slow shake of the head:

‘It’s old Mary. I must leave ye. But ye have the best of them. The rest is only the shaking of the bag.

When they had thanked him and were driving away, the collector said, eagerly :

‘Pull up when we’re out of town. I want to play back those discs.

They circled up and out of the town until its murmur was so faint that they could hear only the loudest cries of the playing children. There they played back the discs, and as they leaned towards the loud-speaker and the black record circled smoothly they could see sideways through the window, the smoke of the hollow town. The last voice was Mary Creegan’s.

‘and after a little while the candle beside the fire clevy lit up. And they went on praying. And the wind and the shtorm screaming about the house, and they watching the wick of the last candle. And, bit by bit, the way you’d blow up a fire with a bellows, didn’t the candle over the priest’s head light up until the whole room was like broad day light. . . .  Isn’t that tay ready a-yet? Domn and blosht it, ye’ll have them eggs like bullets. . . .  Where am I? Where’s Jamesy? What are ye doing to me? . . .  I thought that it was how I saw a great brightness.’

The listeners relaxed. Then from the record came a low, lonely cry. It was the fluting of a bittern over moorland. It fluted sadly once again, farther away, and for a third time, almost too faint to be heard. Many times the men played back those last few inches of disc. Every time they heard the bittern wailing over the mountains.

It was dusk. They laid the voices in a black box and drove away. Then they topped the hill, and the antennae of their headlamps began to probe the winding descent to the next valley.