of Christ, as I said,” said Kelly.
“Most understandable then that you could not finish your journey with that heavy frame,” said the old man, “and most commendable that you were able to struggle back this far with the dreadful weight.”
Kelly stood taller immediately, as he heard his plight described. He beamed. “It was nothing. And I’d do it again, save for the string of bones above me ass. Begging pardon, your Honor.”
But already his Lordship had passed his kind if tremulous gray-blue, unfocused gaze toward Blinky Watts who had, under either arm, like a dartful prancer, the two Renoir peach ladies.
“Ah, God, there was no trouble with sinking into bogs or knocking my spine out of shape,” said Watts, treading the earth to demonstrate his passage home. “I made it back to the house in ten minutes flat, dashed into the wee cot, and began hanging the pictures on the wall, when my wife came up behind me. Have ya ever had your wife come up behind ya, your Honor, and just stand there mum’s the word?”
“I seem to recall a similar circumstance,” said the old man, trying to remember if he did, then nodding as indeed several memories flashed over his fitful baby mind.
“Well, your Lordship, there is no silence like a woman’s silence, do you agree? And no standing there like a woman’s standing there like a monument out of Stonehenge. The mean temperature dropped in the room so quick I suffered from the polar concussions, as we call it in our house. I did not dare turn to confront the Beast, or the daughter of the Beast, as I call her in deference to her mom. But finally I heard her suck in a great breath and let it out very cool and calm like a Prussian general. ‘That woman is naked as a jay bird,’ and ‘That other woman is raw as the inside of a clam at low tide.’
“‘But,’ said I, ‘these are studies of natural physique by a famous French artist.’
“‘Jesus-come-after-me-French,’ she cried; ‘the-skirts-half-up-to-your-bum-French. The-dress-half-down-to-your-navel-French. And the gulping and smothering they do with their mouths in their dirty novels French, and now you come home and nail ‘French’ on the walls, why don’t you while you’re at it, pull the crucifix down and nail one fat naked lady there?’
“Well, your Honor, I just shut up my eyes and wished my ears would fall off. ‘Is this what you want our boys to look at last thing at night as they go to sleep?’ she says. Next thing I know, I’m on the path and here I am and here’s the raw-oyster nudes, your Honor, beg your pardon, thanks, and much obliged.”
“They do seem to be unclothed,” said the old man, looking at the two pictures, one in either hand, as if he wished to find all that this man’s wife said was in them. “I had always thought of summer, looking at them.”
“From your seventieth birthday on, your Lordship, perhaps. But before that?”
“Uh, yes, yes,” said the old man, watching a speck of half-remembered lechery drift across one eye.
When his eye stopped drifting it found Bannock and Toolery on the edge of the far rim of the uneasy sheepfold crowd. Behind each, dwarfing them, stood a giant painting.
Bannock had got his picture home only to find he could not get the damn thing through the door, nor any window.
Toolery had actually got his picture in the door when his wife said what a laughingstock they’d be, the only family in the village with a Rubens worth half a million pounds and not even a cow to milk!
So that was the sum, total, and substance of this long night. Each man had a similar chill, dread, and awful tale to tell, and all were told at last, and as they finished a cold snow began to fall among these brave members of the local, hard-fighting I.R.A.
The old man said nothing, for there was nothing really to say that wouldn’t be obvious as their pale breaths ghosting the wind. Then, very quietly, the old man opened wide the front door and had the decency not even to nod or point.
Slowly and silently they began to file by, as past a familiar teacher in an old school, and then faster they moved. So in flowed the river returned, the Ark emptied out before, not after, the Flood, and the tide of animals and angels, nudes that flamed and smoked in the hands, and noble gods that pranced on wings and hoofs, went by, and the old man’s eyes shifted gently, and his mouth silently named each, the Renoirs, the Van Dycks, the Lautrec, and so on until Kelly, in passing, felt a touch at his arm.
Surprised, Kelly looked over.
And saw that the old man was staring at the small painting beneath his arm.
“My wife’s portrait of me?”
“None other,” said Kelly.
The old man stared at Kelly and at the painting beneath his arm and then out toward the snowing night.
Kelly smiled softly.
Walking soft as a burglar, he vanished out into the wilderness, carrying the picture. A moment later, you heard him laughing as he ran back, hands empty.
The old man shook his hand, once, tremblingly, and shut the door.
Then he turned away as if the event was already lost to his wandering child mind and toddled down the hall with his scarf like a gentle weariness over his thin shoulders, and the mob followed him in where they found drinks in their great paws and saw that Lord Kilgotten was blinking at the picture over the fireplace as if trying to remember, was the Sack of Rome there in the years past? or was it the Fall of Troy? Then he felt their gaze and looked full on the encircled army and said:
“Well now, what shall we drink to?”
The men shuffled their feet.
Then Flannery cried, “Why, to his Lordship, of course!”
“His Lordship!” cried all, eagerly, and drank, and coughed and choked and sneezed, while the old man felt a peculiar glistering about his eyes, and did not drink at all till the commotion stilled, and then said, “To Our Ireland,” and drank, and all said Ah God and Amen to that, and the old man looked at the picture over the hearth and then at last shyly observed, “I do hate to mention it—that picture—”
“Sir?”
“It seems to me,” said the old man, apologetically, “to be a trifle off-centered, on the tilt. I wonder if you might—”
“Mightn’t we, boys!” cried Casey.
And fourteen men rushed to put it right.
Tomorrow’s Child
He did not want to be the father of a small blue pyramid. Peter Horn hadn’t planned it that way at all. Neither he nor his wife imagined that such a thing could happen to them. They had talked quietly for days about the birth of their coming child, they had eaten normal foods, slept a great deal, taken in a few shows, and, when it was time for her to fly in the helicopter to the hospital, her husband held her and kissed her.
“Honey, you’ll be home in six hours,” he said. “These new birth-mechanisms do everything but father the child for you.”
She remembered an old-time song. “No, no, they can’t take that away from me!” and sang it, and they laughed
