COFFIN AND COIN
I
For two days and nights the neighbours came in, prayed by the bedside,
drank bowls of tea, smoked long white clay pipes and departed, only to
return later and renew the same performance. A coffin and coffin-bearer,
the latter shaped like a ladder, the sides of which were cushioned to
ease the shoulders of the men who carried it, were procured. On the
rungs of the coffin-bearer a number of notches, three hundred and
fifty-two in all, told of the bodies carried on it to the grave. The
bearer had been in service for many years and had been used by most of
the families in Frosses. The man who made it was long dead; number
seventy-seven represented his notch on the rungs.
On the morning of the third day Oiney Dinchy and Micky’s Jim lifted the
dead man from the bed and placed him in the coffin. Before the lid was
screwed down, Mary Ryan knelt over the coffin, gripping the side near
her with thin, long fingers, which showed white at the joints, and
kissing her husband she burst into a loud outcry of grief. Norah, more
reserved in her sorrow, knelt on the floor, said a short prayer and then
kissed the face of the corpse as her mother had done.
The lid was fastened, but here an interruption occurred. The wife wanted
to look at her husband for “just one other minute.” With a gesture of
impatience old Oiney Dinchy, who was discussing the best means of
catching flukes and tying the coffin, lifted the lid again and stood
silently by, his hat drawn down well over his eyes. Mary Ryan gave vent
to another outburst of grief; the coffin was again closed and lifted on
the wooden bearer. An idle child was busily engaged in counting the
notches.
“Seventy-seven; that’s for the man who made it,” someone was saying.
“Listen, Micky’s Jim,” whispered Mary Ryan as the youth passed her,
going towards the door with a basket of pipes and tobacco.
“Well, Mary, what is it?” Jim asked.
“Was this a good year beyond the water?”
Jim went yearly to the potato-digging in Scotland, taking with him a
squad of men and women from his own country, and over these he was
master while they were at work.
“It was not so very bad,” said Jim cautiously. He was afraid that the
old woman might ask the loan of money from him.
“Next year I have a mind to send Norah.”
“And not to make a nun of her, after all?”
Norah was piling peat on the fire, lifting them from the floor and
dropping them into the flames. As she bent down Jim noticed every
movement of her body and paid very little attention to the words of the
old woman. Norah, having finished her task, stood upright; Jim waited
eagerly for a repetition of her former movement, but seeing that she was
weeping he turned his attention to the task of getting the coffin
through the doorway.
Norah would be a light girl for heavy work on the Scottish farms, Jim
thought, as he stooped down and lifted a rung of the bearer. Could he
take her with him? That was a ticklish question. She was clever with
the needles, he knew, but she had not done any heavy manual work for
the last two years. Learning lessons was to Jim an idle task. But the
movement of her body, and especially of her legs when bending over the
fire, appealed to Jim. The grace of her carriage, the poise of her head,
the soft hair that fell over her shoulders, all these found favour in
the eyes of the healthy young man.
“My cripes, I’ll take her with me next year!” he said under his breath.
He spoke in English and had learned many strange oaths abroad.
II
Outside a large crowd of people were waiting; the women dressed in red
flannel petticoats and woollen shawls, the men in white wrappers and
corduroy trousers. The coffin bearer was raised on high; four men placed
their shoulders under it; a bottle of holy water was sprinkled over
bearers and burden indiscriminately; the men and women crossed
themselves many times, and the mournful procession started.
Mary Ryan stood at the door and watched it wending its way across the
dreary, uneven fields, past the Three Rocks, now getting lost in some
hollow, again rising to the shoulders of a hillock, the coffin swaying
unevenly on the shoulders of the bearers, the red petticoats of the
women in the rear shaking in the breeze. The widow, almost too weak to
move, was with difficulty restrained from going to the churchyard.
Norah, having arranged the hassock in the corner for her mother, had
followed the procession, and now the old woman thought that she could
detect her child a quarter of a mile away, following in the rear of the
party. Micky’s Jim, who had not gone away yet, was engaged in sorting a
rope on the thatch which had been blown askew by the wind of the
previous nights.
“I’ll overtake the funeral, Mary,” he said when he completed the work.
“I was just making the thatch strong against the breeze and I have tied
a broken rope.”
“Mother of God be good to you, Jim, but it is yourself that has the
kindly heart!” said Mary in a tremulous whisper. “Could you take Norah
with you beyond the water next year?”
Jim called to mind the movements of the girl’s body when she stooped to
lift peat for the fire, and the remembrance filled him with pleasure.
“When next summer comes round, I’ll see, Mary Ryan,” he answered. “If
there is a place to spare in the squad I’ll let you know and your Norah
will have the very first chance of it.”
“Mother of God bless you, Jim, for the kindness is in you!” said the old
woman. “It is me that is the lone body this very minute, with never a
penny in my house and not even the old curragh left to me to make a
penny by.”
“Well, I’m off, Mary,” said Jim. “The coffin is going out of sight and
they’ll be needing new blood under it.” He hurried across the fields,
his long legs covering an enormous spread of earth at every stride. Over
the brae he hurried, and at the turn of the road halted for a moment and
looked back at Mary Ryan’s cabin. The woman still stood at the door, one
hand shading her eyes, looking towards the Frosses churchyard, which lay
more than three miles away. “Thinkin’ that she could get anything for an
old curragh!” he muttered contemptuously, as he resumed his stride.
“She’s an old fool; but Norah! Ah! she’s a soncy lass, and she was good
to look at when making that fire!”
III
The graveyard, surrounded by a stone wall, broken down in several
places, served as a grazing plot for bullocks, donkeys, and sheep, as
well as for the burial place of the dead. A long walk, lined with
stunted hazel bushes, ran half-way through the yard, and at the end a
low stone vault, hardly higher than a man’s head, stood under the shadow
of an overhanging sycamore.
The funeral procession was delayed on the journey, and Father Devaney,
round-faced and red-cheeked, stamped up and down while waiting its
arrival. He had come all the way from Greenanore and was in a hurry to
get back again. The morning was cold and caused him to shiver a little,
and when he shivered he clapped his hands vigorously, the palm of one
against the back of the other.
His large mansion, complete now and habitable, had not been fully paid
for yet, and most of his parishioners were a pound or two in arrears;
when this money came to hand matters would be much better. Old Devaney
had developed a particularly fine taste in wine and cigars and found
these very expensive; and at present he called to mind how James Ryan
was two pounds in arrears with the mansion tax. The old priest knew that
this money would never come to hand; the widow was ill, no word had been
heard of Fergus for years, and Norah Ryan was a light slip of a girl who
would probably never earn a penny. Devaney knew all the affairs of his
flock, and he stamped up and down the graveyard, a little angry with the
dead man who, being so long in coming to his last home, had kept him
waiting for thirty minutes.
The funeral came in sight, creeping up over the brow of the hill that
rose near at hand, the bearers straining under their burden as they
hurried across the uneven ground, with the coffin rising and falling on
their shoulders like a bark in a storm at sea. The gate of the graveyard
was already open; the procession filed through, Father Devaney stepping
out in front, his surplice streaming in the wind. The good man thought
of the warm dinner waiting for him at home, and being in a hurry to get
done with the burial service he walked so quickly that the bearers could
hardly keep up with him. On the floor of the little vault in the centre
of the graveyard the coffin was set down and the basket of snuff, pipes,
and tobacco was handed round. All the men took pipes, filled them with
rank plug and lit them; the older women lit pipes also, and everybody,
with the exception of the priest and Norah Ryan, took snuff.
“Hurry up!” said Father Devaney. “Ye can smoke after ye do yer duty. It
would be well if ye were puttin’ yer hands in yer pockets now and
gettin’ yer offerin’s ready.”
Immediately a stream of silver descended on the coffin. All the mourners
paid rapidly, but in turn, and the priest called out their names as they
paid. A sum of ten pounds seventeen shillings was collected, and this
the priest carefully wrapped up in a woollen muffler and put into his
pocket.
“Now hurry up, boys, and get a move on ye; and open the grave!” he
shouted, making no effort to hide his impatience now that the money was
safely in his keeping. He felt full of the importance of a man who knows
that everybody around him trembles under his eyes. Three or four young
fellows were digging the grave and joking loudly as they worked; a crowd
of men stood round them, puffing white clouds of smoke up into the air.
Many of the women were kneeling beside graves that held all that
remained of one or another near and dear to them. Norah Ryan stood
alone with the priest, her dark shawl drawn over her white forehead, and
a few stray tresses, that had fallen over her face, shaking in the
breeze.
“It is a black day this for you, Norah, a black day,” said the priest,
speaking in Gaelic. Two tears coursed down the girl’s cheeks, and she
fixed a pair of sorrowful grey eyes on the man when he spoke.
“Don’t cry, girsha beag (little girl),” said the priest. “It is all for
the best, all for the best, because it is the will of God.”
He looked sharply at the girl, who, feeling uncomfortable in his
presence, longed to be away from the man’s side. She wondered why she
had not gone off to the other end of the graveyard with Sheila Carrol,
whom she could now see kneeling before a black wooden cross that was
fast falling into decay. But it would be wrong to go away from the side
of her father’s coffin, she thought.
“Any word from Fergus of late?” the priest was asking.
“No; not the smallest word.”
That Mary Ryan owed him two pounds, and that there was very little
possibility of ever receiving the money, forcibly occurred to the priest
at that moment. “Ye’ll not be in a good way at home now?” he said aloud.
“There’s hardly a white shilling in the house,” answered the girl.
“Is that the way of it?” exclaimed the priest, then seemed on the point
of giving expression to something more forcible, but with an effort he
restrained himself. “Well, it cannot be helped, I suppose, but there are
two pounds owing for the building of my new house.”
IV
“The grave is ready,” said Micky’s Jim, approaching the priest and
saluting. The youth was perspiring profusely; his shirt open at the neck
exposed his hairy chest, on which beads of sweat were glistening
brightly.
“In with the coffin then,” said the priest, taking a book from his
pocket and approaching the open grave. A pile of red earth, out of which
several white bones protruded, lay on the brink, and long earthworms
crawled across it. The coffin was lowered into the grave with a rope.
Norah wept loudly; old Oiney Dinchy remarked that the bones belonged to
her grandparents whom she did not remember.
“Remember man that thou art dust and unto dust thou shalt return,” the
priest chanted in a loud, droning voice. Norah, kneeling on the wet
ground, her head bent down over her bosom, so that her hair hung over
her shoulders, saw nothing but the black coffin which was speedily
disappearing under the red clay, and heard nothing but the thud of the
earth as it struck the coffin.
The priest took his departure; the grave was filled up and the crowd
began to disperse.
“Come away home now,” said Sheila Carrol to Norah, who was still
kneeling on the wet ground. The girl rose without a word, brushed her
dress with a woollen handkerchief and accompanied the beansho from the
churchyard.
“Don’t cry, Norah,” said Sheila, observing that tears were still falling
down the cheeks of her companion. “Everyone must die and go away just
the same as if they had never been at all, for that is the will of God.
How is yer mother this morning?”
“Much the same as she was always,” said Norah. “She cannot get rid of
her cough, and she has shiverin’ fits of late.... Hasn’t the sea the
black heart?”
“Black enough, indeed, my child,” said the beansho. “Your mother will
feel it a big lot?”
“Not so much,” said the girl. “She’ll soon be with him, she’s thinkin’.”
“At the wake I heard her say that she would be the last of the family to
die. What put that into her head?”
“I don’t know what put it into her head, but if I were to die on the wet
road this very minute I wouldn’t care one haet.” On Norah’s face there
was a look of infinite sadness, and the pathos of her words cut Sheila
to the heart.
“Don’t speak like that, Norah Ryan,” she exclaimed. “Death is black and
bitter, but there are things much worse than death, things far, far
worse.”
They had now reached a stile, and far in front the soft caishin (path)
wound on by rock and rath across the broad expanse of moor. Several
people, walking one after another, were in front; the soft ooze was
squirting under their feet and splashing against their ankles. In the
midst of the heather a young bullock lay chewing the cud, and looked
upon the passers-by with that stupid, involved look peculiar to the ox;
a moor-cock, agitated and voluble, rose into the air and chattered as it
swept across the brown of the moor.
“I’m goin’ to leave Ireland come Candlemas,” said the beansho, pulling
her feet wearily out of the mire.
“And where would ye be goin’ to then, Sheila Carrol?”
“Beyont the water.”
“Mercy be on us, and are ye goin’ surely?”
“True as death, I’m goin’,” said Sheila Carrol with rising voice. “I’m
sick of this place--not the place itself but the people that’s in it,
them with their bitin’ tongues and cuttin’ talk, them that won’t let
those that do them no harm a-be. Nothin’ bad enough that they wouldn’t
put past me, the same Frosses people. For me it’s always the hard word
that they have; even the priest himself when he meets me on the high
road crosses himself as if he met the red-hot devil out of hell. But did
he refuse my shillin’ to-day?... Even at the wakes the very people point
their thumbs at me when I go down on my own two knees to say a prayer
for the dead.... But what am I talkin’ about! Why should I be tellin’ my
own sorrows to one that has heavy troubles of her own to bear.... I’m
goin’ beyont the water come next Candlemas, anyway, Norah Ryan!”