Short Stories

The Fiddle Lesson by Michael Fitzgerald

1.
The climb from the back of the house up to the main road was a steep one, made even more precarious by winter’s early darkness. T.J. Burke left the house promptly at six with the battered fiddle case beneath his arm and assorted music sheets tucked into the front of his trousers for safety. The cold of the evening hit him with a sudden fierceness. He held the collar of his coat round his neck with his free hand, which numbed immediately, and began to pick his way slowly up to the stile.

The forecast was snow, but so far it had been too cold and now there were tiny blobs of white clouds scattered around the moon. Everyone else was seated around the fire listening to the wireless. His grandfather was listening to the news of the places he had never been, hunched, staring into the flames, rolling the cigarette in his overgrown fingers – nodding at relevant times. Nobody spoke. There was only the sound of dishes being scattered in dishwater.

11
Father Byrne also stared into the fire. His hands were still shaking and his eyes felt like there were two fingers shoving them into the back of his head. He poured another brandy and sat back on the old writing desk that had been with him most of his life. There was nothing working today. All he would remember about Confession was the bad breath through the grill.

And now the fiddle lesson. Why in God’s name had he suggested it at all ? Oh there was promise. The boy had good fingers, but ambition ? Nobody seemed to have any ambition here. All they ever did was sit around indoors and talk low in the winter and in the summer they sat around outdoors and talked low as if they had some big secret. It was like one continuous big secret that nobody else would ever now. He saw a stranger today climb out of his car and go into a shop down there. Everyone stood aside and let him be served first. He could have been a murderer ! “Good morning Sir….safe journey now…can you manage?” No ambition !

111
Father Byrne was already becoming a great puzzle to T.J., with his snowy hair and piercing eyes. He had been going to lessons for four months now and still could not understand the man. The priest’s personality seemed to alter with no prior indication whatsoever. Sometimes he could be agreeable, sometimes bad-tempered. He could also be totally inaudible at times and once he even fell asleep and dropped his fiddle. This alarmed T.J. at first, but the old priest began to snore and T.J. felt he must have been tired after the Confessions. So he checked the sound-post on the fiddle and went home.

He thought about the impending snow. One day last year he had to go to school walking in a gully left by the tyre of a tractor., The snow was piled above him on either side. In his schoolbag along with his well-fingered copybooks, were the compulsory three sods of turf for the school fire. Everyone brought their own heat. Very few people went un-ambushed for those few days The postman who was walking, Mr. Grogan from the Credit Union and of course, the nuns were very easy targets as they went about their evening prayers.

There was the stroke of genius by the local ‘big fellas’. At times like these, the snow on the mountains attracts a lot of people in cars. They look down on an unusually white Dublin and frolic around having a family outing in the falling snow. Then, many of them realise their cars are stuck and they have to abandon them. So – the ‘big fellas’ walk the two miles to the Wicklow border and the owners come back after the thaw to find their cars stripped to empty shells. He wondered how many of these stories Fr. Byrne ever heard in Confessions.

1V
Tomorrow was Sunday Mass too. First the nuns and then the village. Up at 5.30 fighting with the darkness, the cold. It was getting harder. A cigarette first maybe, lying on his elbow. Then he would hear the river. You always became conscious of the river. You always heard it last thing at night and first thing in the morning. Out on the creaking landing – down to the fire lit by a novice.

And hail, rain or snow, they would always be there, wearing the same Sunday clothes, sitting in the same place almost. They would look up at him with their expectant faces, the young at the back, the old at the front. All hung in inbuilt reverence. Until the sermon. The sermon seemed to throw the whole congregation into a fit of coughing. It was like a temporary release from something, as if they had rid themselves of a great burden.

It was no problem to write. He normally scribbled it in the sacristy having listened to the news or tied it to a forthcoming feast day or event. Sometimes he went up with just an idea and built it in his mind and let it flow. It was no problem – except for the coughing.

But now his eyes were throbbing, that wet pain left behind by a night’s brandy and the cure wasn’t helping. He was feeling drowsy and he knew he should have eaten. Thoughts and memories began to wander, as they always did when he was tired, and the shadow of the fire danced on the wall. He stood up from the desk with its cigarette burns and stains. Perhaps an early night after some simple revision with the boy. Pick on something that he was unsure of still, like “The Christmas Eve Reel”. Walk up and down the room for a while.

V
Two days after the Palm Sunday procession about four years earlier it had rained. Michael Burke had been lucky that day. All the lettuces and scallions were down and the hedge had been cut to a reasonable length. It had taken a while, but he stood and smoked a cigarette in the rain and watched the silver cobwebs on the hedge.

T.J. Burke was six and already knew bad language from the people next door. He wasn’t stopped when he used it – in fact nobody knew how to deal with it. To his grandfather he was a strange kid. He stood for hours on the stump of a tree and looked into the valley at buses and lorries.

Michael Burke was quiet, his house was quiet, Lily did all the talking – enough, he felt, for everyone. His house was also tidy and easy with whitewash all over the front and the fences. If a cow shat on the fence he just whitewashed over it and life went on,.

T.J.’s brother, Bill, who was four, was easier to understand. With his little turned in feet, he didn’t cry or shout and when he fell he said nothing. So it was a great surprise to Michael Burke when he heard T.J. singing “Ave Maria” and then he went to the window to see T.J. throwing the new lettuces under Bill’s little turned in feet. Palm Sunday did not enter into it. He just roared “Get that child out of here !” The next day, T.J. stood on the stump of a tree and spoke to nobody.

V1
There was one fine Saturday morning when Laurence Byrne cycled alone to Sandycove from his home in Rathmines. His mother had packed some sandwiches and saw him off with her usual blessing. He had few friends and, in a way, he never really set out to make any. He was very quiet and preferred his own company or maybe music and books. In fact he brought five books with him that day, he remembered – a life of Chaucer and a first hand history of the Boer War among them.

He sat for hours on that tiny alcove of beach among the children and the old men with their trousers turned up, and drifted, underlining something from Chaucer or just looking out to sea. It was getting quite dark when he headed for home and as he cycled into Blackrock, he did a most unusual thing. He pulled up in front of a bar, parked the bicycle and went inside. “A bottle of stout and a small Paddy” – for even then he looked a lot older than he was. Why he did it he couldn’t tell afterwards but, after repeating the process four times, he felt quite unable to move although his head was thinking clearly.

He stood up unsteadily and just made for the door, realising he had left the books behind. He bumped into somebody and reeled back against the wall. That person must have helped him to the street for he remembered holding on to the bicycle with his head against the wall, spinning. He could feel people watching him just as he was about to become violently ill. He woke up at 3 a.m. the next morning on Blackrock strand with his bicycle beside him. It was freezing cold and his legs were cut and bruised where he must have fallen.

V11
“There are dreams and dreams,” he said. “You can sit at home and play in the winter down there or you can play on Sundays outside during the summer while people sit on the grass. Or you can push it until it does what you want and get respected. Come to the window and look down. What do you see ?”

“Houses”.

“Do you want to spend the rest of your life down there in houses ?”

T.J. said nothing. Just stared at the damp roofs at the end of the hill.

“They spend the whole day down there, staring at buses and strangers and clouds. I want to give you an opportunity.”

Once while he was practising “Blind Mary” he looked up and noticed the priest staring blankly through the window. He finished the piece and there was silence. “You know sometimes I feel like Camus at the end of “The Plague”.

“I’m sorry, Father ?”

“Nothing, nothing. Play that again !”

It was a cosy room though where nothing seemed to match at all. It had hard high chairs with red foam covering, a couch with a faded yellow eiderdown drooped over it and a carpet that was once green. There were books everywhere. In cases, in boxes and behind chairs. Hundreds of old newspapers were piled up high beside an old writing desk and the fire always blazed loudly with crackling timber.

He remembered those comments very well because Fr,. Byrne had caught him smoking at the end of the lane on the Thursday. He lived in terror for the whole of that Friday in case news should reach his grandfather. But it never did nor was it mentioned at the lesson.

He stopped for a moment at the stile and listened for traffic. The convent bell was ringing for the Angelus.

VIII
He sat back in the couch, eyes heavy. A trickle of sweat ran back from his temple to his left ear. The Angelus bell was five minutes late again. He would have to speak to McFadden. Either the man or his watch would have to go. For a curious moment Mrs. Cussins, a former housekeeper, came into his mind, with her overbearing wine hat and her equally overbearing habit of cleaning the toilet every time he came out of it. The room was growing quieter and hotter and he could barely keep his eyes open now. He looked for a moment at the writing desk – “Vox audita perit, litera scripta manet” it was inscribed.

Everything was drawing in on him now, slowly. Everything else moved away and became nothing but an echo. He saw a series of faces – the usual ones – the same Sunday clothes.

Then another bell, somewhere at the back of his mind, a bell…

“Genuflect, bow your head”.

“Good morning, sir, have a nice trip.”

“Can you manage ?”

No ambition !