Quench the Lamp Read online

  He was a beautiful little dog who never grew very big, but what he lacked in size he made up for in intelligence. He could do everything but talk, though in any case the two of us did not need conversation because we communicated perfectly without words. We went rambling together through the fields and he chased rabbits just for the fun of it because his legs were too short to catch them and even if he had he would have been more surprised than them. We had races up and down the meadows and when I buried him in hay he quickly burrowed out and cocked his perky little head sideways almost saying, “You can’t fool me, I’m too smart.”

  When we children went swimming in the river Capeen came too and he loved coursing through the high rushes of the inches to dry himself after his swim. He ran home before us, his stubby black tail darting in and out around the thistles that grew in the wet fields by the river. He conveyed us towards school every morning but came no further than the crab-tree at the bottom of the first field, where he was waiting again every evening. In the mornings he looked sadly after us but in the evenings he went mad with delight at the sight of us. I scooped him up to hug him and he almost tore the hair off my head with his dancing paws and swept his moist tongue all over my face.

  A great sense of adventure filled his heart and he loved investigating new places, which sometimes led him into corners from which he could not extricate himself. Once when peering curiously over the top of the deep lime-kiln he toppled in and my father had to put down the long hay-barn ladder to rescue him. On the way up the ladder my father scolded him for his stupidity but Capeen, who was always bubbling with fun, licked his face in thanksgiving and, as a final token of appreciation, knocked my father’s cap off so that he had to go back down again to bring it up.

  Capeen did not like the greyhounds and barked at them, teasing them to chase him; then he would run into some small corner which they could not fit into and from his safe bolt-hole he would growl out at them. Darkie, a gun dog trained to raise snipe and woodcock, was his friend and sometimes they went hunting together with my father. Capeen just went along for the fun of it but was smart enough to do exactly as he was told.

  He and the cats waged continuous warfare; sometimes he chased them and sometimes they chased him, but one cat he never chased was old Minnie, because he had learnt the painful lesson that whenever she got her claws into action she would leave a mark. Some mornings he jumped into the creamery cart and went to the creamery with my father. He enjoyed the journey into town and sat imperiously on the setlock looking contemptuously down at the town dogs which snarled up at him. My father loved him because, as he said himself, he was “a real smart little fellow”. But he was the bane of my mother’s life and Bridgie threatened regularly to “bate sense into him”, because his one great weakness was for washing which was flapping in the breeze; sheets waving above his head provided sweet temptation which he could never resist. He swung back and forth on the washing until Bridgie, who was ever on the look out for him, brought him down to earth with a fine hard slap across the tail. He would then scamper off and hide under a bush at the bottom of the garden with only his nose in view, while he waited until such time as he judged it safe to make a comeback.

  He broke all the rules of the house and got away with it. Some cold nights I sneaked him upstairs and he slept at the foot of my bed. When I estimated that my mother was about to come to say goodnight I covered him with a pillow and, smart fellow that he was, he never gave the game away. When we sat at the table for meals on a long stool that seated a row of us, Capeen sometimes lined up with the rest of us. When Bridgie saw this she would roll her eyes to heaven and declare, “Glory be to God, where will I see that dog next? I know where I’ll see him: kneeling on top of the altar-rails with his tongue out waiting to receive – there’s nothing beyond that fellow. Ye should take him to school because he is wasting his time around here.”

  One summer evening no Capeen waited at the crab-tree as I returned from school. We were puzzled but not unduly alarmed. It was a Monday, so he could have been under his bush doing penance; or he could have gone hunting with Darkie, as sometimes they went off on their own. However, on investigation we found that he was not under his bush and Darkie was lying by the front door, so after a hurried dinner we began to search the hay barn, the stables, the stalls, but there was no trace of him. We went out into the fields and called but no answering bark came. The search went on for hours and after the cows had been milked the adults joined in and even Bridgie, her bag apron wrapped around her head, helped in the search.

  That night when I said the rosary I begged God to mind Capeen because I did not like the idea of him being alone in the dark wherever he was. I went to bed with a heavy heart but deep down hope still flickered. I tried not to cry because that would have been to give in and abandon hope, and that was too terrible to think about. But when I moved my leg under the spot where Capeen sometimes sneaked in to sleep it was hard to hold back the tears.

  When I woke the next morning it took a few seconds for the previous evening’s happenings to flood back to me. I jumped out of bed hoping to see that he was running around in the yard, but only Darkie was out there, sleeping in their usual corner. That day in school passed like a nightmare, and coming home that evening and arriving at the crab-tree to find no Capeen dancing in delight was worse. My father was waiting for me at the gate.

  ‘We found him,” he called, and for a second my heart was bursting with joy. “He’s dead,” he said simply. “He got caught under the gate in the bottom meadow and the gate must have slipped and killed him.”

  I could not believe it; it was just too much to take in. How could such a stupid thing have happened? There was a pain inside me and a hard lump in my throat and I squeezed my eyes to blink back the tears.

  “Where is he?” I whispered.

  “He’s in his manger,” Dad said.

  He lay stretched out cold and rigid on the hay with blood at the corner of his mouth. My tears ran down on top of him.

  That evening we dug his grave in the animal graveyard under the old apple tree at the bottom of the orchard, and Darkie and Minnie came with us. I hated Darkie then because he was alive and Capeen was dead and I felt that in some way he should have looked after Capeen better. I blamed myself, too, for not having found him the night before when perhaps he had still been alive.

  We lined a timber apple box with one of Bridgie’s torn sheets and placed him in it; in death he seemed bigger than he had been alive. We eased his coffin down into the ground and covered him with soft brown earth. The apple tree stood at the head of the grave with leafy arms outstretched in the shape of a cross. On its bark with hammer and chisel we carved his epitaph in letters as large as the trunk could accommodate: GOOD BYE CAPEEN.

  If Ever A Man Suffered

  LICENCES WERE REQUIRED for dogs, bulls and guns, yet my father’s cut-throat razor was covered by no such permit and lay in a harmless looking slim black box on top of the tall press in the kitchen. It had a six inch long, paper-thin blade that curved off at one end and hooked into a white bone handle at the other, and it folded back into this handle when not in use.

  Every Sunday morning after breakfast my father reached up to the top of the high press, took down the black box and placed it on the ledge inside the window. The front window of our kitchen was set in a recess with a deep ledge running all around it, and this was the altar of his weekly shaving ritual. He transferred a black leather strap from the side of the press to a rusty hook beneath the window-ledge before demanding, “Where’s my shaving mug?” It was always in the same place, on the top shelf of the press beside the big meat-dish, but it seemed he could never find it without being told. Inside the mug was shaving soap and a soft bristle brush in a bone base.

  Having lined up his equipment on the ledge he lifted down a small mirror that hung beside the clock and asked, “Is that bloody kettle boiling yet?” The kettle was, of course, always boiling at this point in his preparations, but because he cou
ld never fill the shaving mug without the kettle spout overshooting the top of the mug and causing him to be blinded in a shower of ashes when the water hit the fire, my mother intervened and placed the mug of boiling water on the ledge with the rest of his accoutrements where it promptly fogged up the mirror.

  “How the blazes can I shave when I can’t even see my cursed face?” he said in eloquent thanks for her help.

  Off came his cap and coat and, reduced to his striped shirt and waistcoat, he pulled a creaking sugán chair up in front of the window and commenced the operation. His cap hung off one corner of the back of the chair and over the other corner my mother placed a small towel. The biggest towel in the house she spread across his knees. He reached down for the leather strap and, finding himself too close to the window, he jolted the sugán backwards, knocking his cap on to the floor. He then stretched the strap to its full length and moistened it with a thumb dipped in the bowl of water; if the water was too hot he spat on the leather instead. When he judged the strap to be just right he opened the black box and unfolded the cut-throat. Catching it by its delicate, bone handle he lightly flicked it up and down the ebony strap; the silver blade of the razor gave a soft, swishing, sensuous hiss as it glinted in the morning light.

  To judge whether the blade had reached the necessary sharpness he required a hair, with which his own head could not oblige him as he was completely bald. So I dangled in front of him a long, light hair which I had eased from the top of my head and he lanced it with the razor, which was then pronounced ready for action. He dipped the bristle brush into the mug of warm water and sloshed its dripping head across the shaving soap. When he had worked up a fine white lather he brushed it all over the lower half of his face. This gave him a benevolent, Santa Claus appearance but there the similarity ended because this Santa was volcanic and started to erupt as soon as he applied the razor to his face.

  The razor took on the character of a deadly enemy as it moved across his chin, bringing lather and hair before it and blood behind. He waved it in the air, viewed his ravaged visage in the foggy mirror and swore at it, “You bloody bastard, are you trying to kill me?” A battle of sorts ensued and as my father’s temper worsened so the razor became blunter and the floor around him disappeared under dollops of white shaving lather streaked with blood and speckled with hair. The towel that my mother had hung on the back of his chair to absorb this residue was long forgotten. After each fresh onslaught he ran his fingers along the blade and swished the lather on to the floor. Gradually his face emerged, pink and tender with bloody nicks which he patched with bits of newspaper.

  Shaving and first aid completed, he folded up his razor carefully and wrapped it in its faded yellow tissue-paper before returning it to its box. The performance was over for another week but the leading man had no intention of cleaning the stage. Retrieving his cap from the snowy floor he went upstairs to get ready for Mass, leaving that end of the kitchen in a chaos of shaving soap, water, towels and bits of discarded newspaper.

  Once and once only my sister Clare and I were foolish enough to disrupt his shaving routine. It was the first Christmas at which we had a really good-sized Christmas tree and we had acquired tinsel for it from the Miss Bowlers’ shop and stood it into the window recess in a butter box filled with stones. That Christmas morning, coming home from early Mass, we were met by a strange sight. My father was pinned against the window with the Christmas tree on his back and tinsel hanging off his ears. In shifting it out of his way to give himself room he had unsettled the tree’s temporary rooting system, and in the middle of his shaving session it had tilted forward on top of him, balloons bursting and the Christmas fairy taking a nose-dive from the top into his shaving mug. When we ran to his rescue we were met with a stream of language which was hardly in keeping with the season of goodwill.

  “Take that hoor’s melt of a Christmas tree off my back,” he yelled.

  We dragged the heavy, stone-filled box back and manoeuvred the tree into an upright position, thereby releasing him. But then we had to strip him of decorations which, in addition to tinsel, included a substance called angels’ hair, which was meant to cover the tree in a shimmering glow but which was not to be touched once it was in position. And there and then we discovered why not. It had wrapped itself around my father to such an extent that the only way we could remove it was by unwinding it gently and methodically, but that proved impossible because he was dancing around the kitchen in a fit of jumping rage. Finally he tore upstairs, whipped off all his clothes and flung them down with instructions to “Get that bloody muck off them.”

  Whenever he recalled that episode afterwards he would raise his eyes to heaven and sigh, “If ever a man suffered.”

  Too Hot To Handle

  EVERY SATURDAY EVENING the big old armchair just inside our parlour door was piled high with freshly washed clothes; not folded neatly but thrown there in big bundles which smelt of cool grass and fresh air. The clothes had been draped across bushes and hedges to dry, the sheets spread out on the green fields, and all came in smelling of wild flowers and the world outside, while some occasionally sported the evidence of a bird’s blessing. By evening time the pyramid of clothes had reached the point of toppling over and my hour of reckoning had come.

  I hated, abhorred and detested ironing. In our kitchen were two tables, one very large and the other of medium size; on this second table my mother baked and on Saturday it became the ironing-board. It was covered with an old, threadbare woollen blanket which was yellow with age, had three blue stripes at either end and was christened the ironing-blanket. Over it went two or three patched and holed sheets which had passed beyond further repair, and the aim was to get the holes of one to coincide with the sound parts of another.

  The iron itself was hollow and made of iron with upright iron arms at both front and back which were bridged with a timber handle. Narrow at the front, it broadened towards the back where an opening was covered by a little door that slid up and down like a guillotine, and through this aperture heaters were slipped into the iron. These were the same shape as the iron and were made of pure, solid metal; they had been placed in the middle of the fire and left there until they had become so red hot that they were indistinguishable from the red sods of turf around them. It was torture to me to have to catch one of the heaters with long iron tongs and manoeuvre it into the opening in the iron. Any tilt in the wrong direction could have drastic consequences as I held the iron firmly in my left hand while the red-hot heater wobbled dangerously at the end of the tongs in my right.

  Heater in and door closed, the iron was ready for action but at this point it was what my father aptly termed a “burning bastard”. With no such thing as a control knob you could learn to match iron-heat to material only by trial and error. And what agonies I went through in those trials and errors! The ironing-sheets were the most immediate victims and quickly took on an auburn appearance. The tails of my father’s shirts bore the evidence of many errors of judgement, for my mother always advocated testing the iron on shirt-tails first. Long, swallow-tailed and ample, the shirt-tails of the time were worn safely buried in the cavernous depths of trousers held up by braces. Even if one of the buttons which secured the braces popped, it was swiftly replaced by a nail, so there was never any chance of the shirt-tails making a public appearance and displaying iron-shaped scorches. Nevertheless, my father rained showers of curses on the offending iron whenever he was presented with yet another burnt offering.

  The iron was a constant source of torment to me, and one of the problems it presented was that it could deposit soot and ashes on whatever you ironed if you did not take care when transferring the heater into it. A dirty iron placed on a damp, white table-cloth left an ashy or sooty mark buried deep in the fabric. Another common hazard was, of course, scorched fingers or wrists; the arms of the handle heated up as well, so the whole contraption radiated heat. As the heat of the iron cooled, seeming by this time to have transferred itself into my
face and temper, it became comfortable enough to hold, but that meant that it was no longer warm enough to be effective so its companion was brought forth from the flames and the fiery agony was repeated.

  Sheets, pillow-cases and table-cloths had all to be ironed, as well as everything we wore, so the ironing was no small job. Some of the dresses were starched, and the collars of the men’s shirts were starched card-board-stiff. If too dry, starched items were impossible to iron; if too wet, the iron clung to the damp starch. One of our neighbours, the redoubtable Mrs Casey, was an expert at starching and her husband’s shirt-collar with its pristine white rigidity was always a source of wonder to me. Old Dan paid homage to this skill with a saying he had to describe a woman of exceptional efficiency: “Jakus me, she’d starch the tail of your shirt!”

  The Burial Bonnet

  NO ONE LOVED hardship like Bessie-Babe. She preferred other people’s hardship but if none was available she could always be relied upon to come up with some of her own. The way Dan put it was that she had never heard of the resurrection because she had got stuck at the crucifixion, and she was the only person he knew who would have enjoyed the agony in the garden. She was an enthusiastic and appreciative attender at every funeral in the parish, and whenever we saw her wearing her special burial bonnet we knew that someone was either dead or on their last legs. Standing at the graveside she could turn on tears like a waterfall and for months afterwards if she met the mourners she liked nothing so much as to join them in a good cry. Indeed, she became a by-word in our house: if anyone cried over something and my father felt they were overdoing it he would say, “Don’t be doing Bessie-Babe on it.”