Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt

I can't leave the pile of rags alone with a useless money order because the pile is an old woman, Mrs. Gertrude Daly, all twisted with every class of disease you can get in a Limerick lane, arthritis, rheuma- tism, falling hair, a nostril half gone from her jabbing at it with her fin- ger, and you wonder what kind of a world is it when this old woman sits up from the rags and smiles at you with teeth that gleam white in the dark, her own teeth and perfect.

That's right, she says, me own teeth, and when I rot in the grave they'll find me teeth a hundred years from now all white an' shiny an' I'll be declared a saint.

The telegram money order, three pounds, is from her son. It has a message, Happy Birthday, Mammy,Your fond son, Teddy. She says, A wonder he can spare it, the little shit, trottin' around with every tart in Piccadilly. She asks if I'd ever do her a favor and cash the money order and get her a little Baby Powers whiskey at the pub, a loaf of bread, a pound of lard, seven potatoes, one for each day of the week.Would I boil a potato for her, mash it up with a lump of lard, give her a cut of bread, bring her a drop of water to go with the whiskey? Would I go to O'Connor the chemist for ointment for her sores and while I'm at it bring some soap so she can give her body a good scrub and she'll be forever grateful and say a prayer for me and here's a couple of shillings for all my troubles.

Ah, no thanks, ma'am.

Take the money. Little tip.You did me great favors.

I couldn't, ma'am, the way you are.

Take the money or I'll tell the post office you're not to deliver my telegram anymore.

Oh, all right, ma'am.Thanks very much.

Good night, son. Be good to your mother.

Good night, Mrs. Daly.

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When Mam comes looking for him I don't know what to say to her. I don't know how to look at her and I keep my eyes off to one side. She says, How's the job? as if nothing ever happened in Laman Griffin's and I say, Grand, as if nothing ever happened in Laman Griffin's. If the rain is too heavy for her to go home she stays in the small room upstairs with Alphie. She goes back to Laman's the next day but Michael stays and soon she's moving in herself bit by bit till she stops going to Laman's altogether.

The Abbot pays the rent every week. Mam gets the relief and the food dockets till someone informs on her and she's cut off from the Dispensary. She's told that if her son is bringing in a pound a week that's more than some families get on the dole and she should be grateful he has a job. Now I have to hand over my wages. Mam says,A pound? Is that all you get for riding around in all kinds of weather? This would be four dollars in America. Four dollars.And you couldn't feed a cat for four dollars in New York. If you were delivering telegrams for Western Union in New York you'd be earning twenty-five dollars a week and living in luxury. She always translates Irish money into Amer- ican so that she won't forget and tries to convince everyone times were better over there. Some weeks she lets me keep two shillings but if I go to a film or buy a secondhand book there's nothing left, I won't be able to save for my fare, and I'll be stuck in Limerick till I'm an old man of twenty-five.

Malachy writes from Dublin to say he's fed up and doesn't want to spend the rest of his life blowing a trumpet in the army band. He's home in a week and complains when he has to share the big bed with Michael,Alphie and me. He had his own army cot up there in Dublin with sheets and blankets and a pillow. Now he's back to overcoats and a bolster that sends up a cloud of feathers when you touch it. Mam says, Pity about you. I'm sorry for your troubles. The Abbot has his own bed, and my mother has the small room. We're all together again, no Laman tormenting us. We make tea and fried bread and sit on the kitchen floor. The Abbot says you're not supposed to be sitting on

319 kitchen floors, what are tables and chairs for? He tells Mam that Frankie is not right in the head and Mam says we'll all catch our death from the damp of the floor.We sit on the floor and sing and Mam and The Abbot sit on chairs. She sings "Are You Lonesome Tonight?" and the Abbot sings "The Road to Rasheen" and we still don't know what his song is about. We sit on the floor and tell stories about things that happened, things that never happened and things that will happen when we all go to America. There are slow days at the post office and we sit on the bench and talk. We can talk but we are not to laugh.Miss Barry says we should be grate- ful we're getting paid to sit there, bunch of idlers and streetboys that we are,and that there is to be no laughing.Getting paid for sitting and chat- ting is no laughing matter and the first titter out of any of us and out we go till we come to our senses and if the tittering continues we'll be reported to the proper authorities.

The boys talk about her under their breath.Toby Mackey says,What that oul' bitch needs is a good rub o' the relic, a good rub o' the brush. Her mother was a streetwalking flaghopper and her father escaped from a lunatic asylum with bunions on his balls and warts on his wank.

There is laughing along the bench and Miss Barry calls to us, I warned ye against the laughing.Mackey,what is it you're prattling about over there?

I said we'd all be better off out in the fresh air on this fine day deliv- ering telegrams, Miss Barry.

I'm sure you did,Mackey.Your mouth is a lavatory.Did you hear me?

I did, Miss Barry.

You have been heard on the stairs, Mackey.

Yes, Miss Barry.

Shut up, Mackey.

I will, Miss Barry.

Not another word, Mackey.

No, Miss Barry.

I said shut up, Mackey.

All right, Miss Barry.

That's the end of it, Mackey. Don't try me.

I won't, Miss Barry.

Mother o' God give me patience.

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Take the last word, Mackey.Take it, take it, take it.

I will, Miss Barry.

Toby Mackey is a temporary telegram boy like me. He saw a film called The Front Page and now he wants to go to America some day and be a tough newspaper reporter with a hat and a cigarette. He keeps a notebook in his pocket because a good reporter has to write down what happens. Facts. He has to write down facts not a lot of bloody poetry, which is all you hear in Limerick with men in pubs going on about our great sufferings under the English. Facts, Frankie. He writes down the number of telegrams he delivers and how far he travels.We sit on the bench making sure we don't laugh and he tells me that if we deliver forty telegrams a day that's two hundred a week and that's ten thousand a year and twenty thousand in our two years at the job. If we cycle one hundred and twenty-five miles in a week that's thirteen thousand miles in two years and that's halfway around the world, Frankie, and no won- der there isn't a scrap of flesh on our arses.

Toby says nobody knows Limerick like the telegram boy.We know every avenue, road, street, terrace, mews, place, close, lane. Jasus, says Toby, there isn't a door in Limerick we don't know.We knock on all kinds of doors, iron, oak, plywood.Twenty thousand doors, Frankie.We rap, kick, push.We ring and buzz bells.We shout and whistle,Telegram boy, telegram boy.We drop telegrams in letter boxes, shove them under doors, throw them over the transom.We climb in windows where peo- ple are bedridden.We fight off every dog who wants to turn us into din- ner.You never know what's going to happen when you hand people their telegrams.They laugh and sing and dance and cry and scream and fall down in a weakness and you wonder if they'll wake up at all and give you the tip.It's not a bit like delivering telegrams in America where Mickey Rooney rides around in a film called The Human Comedy and people are pleasant and falling over themselves to give you a tip, invit- ing you in, giving you a cup of tea and a bun.

Toby Mackey says he has facts galore in his notebook and he doesn't give a fiddler's fart about anything and that's the way I'd like to be myself.

Mrs. O'Connell knows I like the country telegrams and if a day is sunny she gives me a batch of ten that will keep me away all morning and I don't have to return till after the dinner hour at noon.There are fine autumn days when the Shannon sparkles and the fields are green

321 and glinting with silver morning dew. Smoke blows across fields and there's the sweet smell of turf fires. Cows and sheep graze in the fields and I wonder if these are the beasts the priest was talking about. I wouldn't be surprised because there's no end to the bulls climbing on cows, rams on sheep, stallions on mares, and they all have such big things it makes me break out in a sweat to look at them and I feel sorry for all the female creatures in the world who have to suffer like that though I wouldn't mind being a bull myself because they can do what they like and it's never a sin for an animal. I wouldn't mind going at myself here but you never know when a farmer might come along the road driving cows and sheep to a fair or to another field raising his stick and bidding you, Good day, young fella, grand morning, thank God and His Blessed Mother. A farmer that religious might be offended if he saw you breaking the Sixth Commandment forninst his field. Horses like to stick their heads over fences and hedges to see what's passing by and I stop and talk to them because they have big eyes and long noses that show how intelligent they are. Sometimes two birds will be singing to each other across a field and I have to stop and listen to them and if I stay long enough more birds will join till every tree and bush is alive with birdsong. If there's a stream gurgling under a bridge on the road, birds singing and cows mooing and lambs baaing, that's better than any band in a film. The smell of dinner bacon and cabbage wafting from a farmhouse makes me so weak with the hunger I climb into a field and stuff myself with blackberries for half an hour. I stick my face into the stream and drink icy water that's better than the lemonade in any fish and chip shop.

When I'm finished delivering the telegrams there's enough time to go to the ancient monastery graveyard where my mother's relations are buried, the Guilfoyles and the Sheehans, where my mother wants to be buried. I can see from here the high ruins of Carrigogunnell Castle and there's plenty of time to cycle there, sit up on the highest wall, look at the Shannon flowing out to the Atlantic on its way to America and dream of the day I'll be sailing off myself. The boys at the post office tell me I'm lucky to get the Carmody family telegram, a shilling tip, one of the biggest tips you'll ever get in Limerick. So why am I getting it? I'm the junior boy. They say, Well, sometimes

322 Theresa Carmody answers the door.She has the consumption and they're afraid of catching it from her. She's seventeen, in and out of the sanato- rium, and she'll never see eighteen.The boys at the post office say sick people like Theresa know there's little time left and that makes them mad for love and romance and everything. Everything.That's what the con- sumption does to you, say the boys at the post office.

I cycle through wet November streets thinking of that shilling tip, and as I turn into the Carmody street the bicycle slides out from under me and I skid along the ground scraping my face and tearing open the back of my hand.Theresa Carmody opens the door. She has red hair. She had green eyes like the fields beyond Limerick. Her cheeks are bright pink and her skin is a fierce white. She says, Oh, you're all wet and bleeding.

I skidded on my bike.

Come in and I'll put something on your cuts.

I wonder,Should I go in? I might get the consumption and that will be the end of me. I want to be alive when I'm fifteen and I want the shilling tip.

Come in.You'll perish standing there.

She puts on the kettle for the tea.Then she dabs iodine on my cuts and I try to be a man and not whimper. She says, Oh, you're a great bit of a man. Go into the parlor and dry yourself before the fire. Look, why don't you take off your pants and dry them on the screen of the fire?

Ah, no.

Ah, do.

I drape my pants over the screen. I sit there watching the steam rise and I watch myself rise and I worry she might come in and see me in my excitement.

There she is with a plate of bread and jam and two cups of tea.Lord, she says, you might be a scrawny bit of a fellow but that's a fine boyo you have there.

She puts the plate and the cups on a table by the fire and there they stay.With her thumb and forefinger she takes the tip of my excitement and leads me across the room to a green sofa against the wall and all the time my head is filled with sin and iodine and fear of consumption and the shilling tip and her green eyes and she's on the sofa don't stop or I'll die and she's crying and I'm crying for I don't know what's happening

323 to me if I'm killing myself catching consumption from her mouth I'm riding to heaven I'm falling off a cliff and if this is a sin I don't give a fiddler's fart.

We take our ease on the sofa a while till she says, Don't you have more telegrams to deliver? and when we sit up she gives a little cry, Oh, I'm bleeding.

What's up with you?

I think it's because it's the first time.

I tell her, Wait a minute. I bring the bottle from the kitchen and splash the iodine on her injury. She leaps from the sofa, dances around the parlor like a wild one and runs into the kitchen to douse herself with water.After she dries herself she says, Lord, you're very innocent. You're not supposed to be pouring iodine on girls like that.

I thought you were cut.

For weeks after that I deliver the telegram. Sometimes we have the excitement on the sofa but there are other days she has the cough and you can see the weakness on her. She never tells me she has the weak- ness. She never tells me she has the consumption.The boys at the post office say I must have been having a great time with the shilling tip and Theresa Carmody. I never tell them I stopped taking the shilling tip. I never tell them about the green sofa and the excitement. I never tell them of the pain that comes when she opens the door and I can see the weakness on her and all I want to do then is make tea for her and sit with my arms around her on the green sofa.

One Saturday I'm told to deliver the telegram to Theresa's mother at her job in Woolworth's. I try to be casual. Mrs. Carmody, I always deliver the telegram to your, I think your daughter,Theresa?

Yes, she's in the hospital.

Is she in the sanatorium?

I said she's in the hospital.

She's like everyone else in Limerick, ashamed of the TB, and she doesn't give me a shilling or any kind of tip. I cycle out to the sanato- rium to see Theresa.They say you have to be a relation and you have to be adult. I tell them I'm her cousin and I'll be fifteen in August.They tell me go away. I cycle to the Franciscan church to pray for Theresa. St. Francis, would you please talk to God.Tell Him it wasn't Theresa's fault. I could have refused that telegram Saturday after Saturday.Tell God Theresa was not responsible for the excitement on the sofa because

324 that's what the consumption does to you. It doesn't matter anyway, St. Francis, because I love Theresa. I love her as much as you love any bird or beast or fish and will you tell God take the consumption away and I promise I'll never go near her again.

The next Saturday they give me the Carmody telegram. From halfway up the street I can see the blinds are drawn. I can see the black crepe wreath on the door. I can see the white purple-lined mourning card. I can see beyond the door and walls where Theresa and I tumbled naked and wild on the green sofa and I know now she is in hell and all because of me.

I slip the telegram under the door and cycle back down to the Franciscan church to beg for the repose of Theresa's soul. I pray to every statue,to the stained glass windows,the Stations of the Cross.I swear I'll lead a life of faith, hope and charity, poverty, chastity and obedience.

Next day, Sunday, I go to four Masses. I do the Stations of the Cross three times.I say rosaries all day.I go without food and drink and wher- ever I find a quiet place I cry and beg God and the Virgin Mary to have mercy on the soul of Theresa Carmody.

On Monday I follow the funeral to the graveyard on my post office bicycle. I stand behind a tree a distance from the grave. Mrs. Carmody weeps and moans. Mr. Carmody snuffles and looks puzzled.The priest recites the Latin prayers and sprinkles the coffin with holy water.

I want to go to the priest, to Mr. and Mrs. Carmody. I want to tell them how I'm the one who sent Theresa to hell.They can do whatever they like with me.Abuse me. Revile me.Throw grave dirt at me. But I stay behind the tree till the mourners leave and the grave diggers fill in the grave.

Frost is already whitening the fresh earth on the grave and I think of Theresa cold in the coffin, the red hair, the green eyes. I can't under- stand the feelings going through me but I know that with all the peo- ple who died in my family and all the people who died in the lanes around me and all the people who left I never had a pain like this in my heart and I hope I never will again.

It's getting dark. I walk my bicycle out of the graveyard. I have telegrams to deliver.

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XVI Mrs.O'Connell gives me telegrams to deliver to Mr.Harrington, the Englishman with the dead wife that was born and bred in Limer- ick.The boys at the post office say sympathy telegrams are a waste of time. People just cry and moan with the grief and they think they're excused from the tip.They'll ask you if you'd like to come in for a look at the departed and a prayer by the bed.That wouldn't be so bad if they offered you a drop of sherry and a ham sandwich.Oh,no,they're happy to get your prayer but you're only a telegram boy and you're lucky if you get a dry biscuit. Older boys at the post office say you have to play your cards right to get the grief tip.If you're asked in to say a prayer you have to kneel by the corpse, give a powerful sigh, bless yourself, drop your forehead to the bedclothes so they won't see your face, let your shoulders shake like one collapsing with sorrow, hold on to the bed with your two hands as if they're going to have to tear you away to deliver the rest of your telegrams, make sure your cheeks are glinting with tears or the spit you dabbed on, and if you don't get a tip after all that push the next batch of telegrams under the door or fire them over the transom and leave them to their grief. This isn't my first time delivering telegrams to the Harrington house. Mr. Harrington is always away on business for the insurance company

Irish? What else would I be standing there on his doorstep in Lim- erick with a batch of telegrams in my hand? I am, sir. He says, Come in. Put the telegrams on the hall stand. He shuts the hall door, locks it, puts the key in his pocket and I think,Aren't Englishmen very peculiar.

You'll want to see her, of course.You'll want to see what you peo- ple have done to her with your damn tuberculosis. Race of ghouls. Fol- low me.

He leads me first to the kitchen where he picks up a plate of ham sandwiches and two bottles, and then upstairs. Mrs. Harrington looks lovely in the bed, blond, pink, peaceful.

This is my wife.She may be Irish but she doesn't look it,thank God. Like you. Irish.You'll need a drink, of course.You Irish quaff at every turn. Barely weaned before you clamor for the whiskey bottle, the pint of stout.You'll have what, whiskey, sherry?

Ah, a lemonade will be lovely.

I am mourning my wife not celebrating the bloody citrus.You'll have a sherry. Swill from bloody Catholic fascist Spain.

I gulp the sherry. He refills my glass and goes to refill his own with whiskey.Damn.Whiskey all gone.Stay here.Do you hear me? I'm going to the pub for another bottle of whiskey. Stay till I come back. Don't move.

I'm confused, dizzy from the sherry. I don't know what you're sup- posed to do with grieving Englishmen. Mrs. Harrington, you look lovely in the bed. But you're a Protestant, already doomed, in hell, like Theresa. Priest said, Outside the Church there is no salvation. Wait, I might be able to save your soul.Baptize you Catholic.Make up for what I did to Theresa. I'll get some water. Oh, God, the door is locked.Why? Maybe you're not dead at all? Watching me. Are you dead, Mrs. Har- rington? I'm not afraid.Your face is icy. Oh, you're dead all right. I'll baptize you with sherry from bloody Catholic fascist Spain. I baptize thee in the name of the Father, the Son, the-

What the bloody hell are you doing? Get off my wife,you wretched Papist twit.What primitive Paddy ritual is this? Did you touch her? Did you? I'll wring your scrawny neck.

I- I,-

Oi, Oi, speak English, you scrap.

I was just, a little sherry to get her into heaven.

Heaven? We had heaven, Ann, I, our daughter, Emily.You'll never lay your pink piggy eyes on her. Oh, Christ, I can't stand it. Here, more sherry.

Ah, no, thanks.

Ah, no thanks.That puny Celtic whine.You people love your alco- hol. Helps you crawl and whine better. Of course you want food.You have the collapsed look of a starving Paddy. Here. Ham. Eat.

Ah, no thanks.

Ah, no thanks. Say that again and I'll ram the ham up your arse.

He waves a ham sandwich at me, with the heel of his hand pushes it into my mouth.

He collapses into a chair.Oh,God,God,what am I to do? Must rest a moment.

My stomach heaves. I rush to the window, stick my head out and throw up. He leaps from the chair and charges me.

You,you,God blast you to hell,you vomited on my wife's rosebush.

He lunges at me, misses, falls to the floor. I climb out the window, hang on to the ledge. He's at the window, grabbing at my hands. I let go, drop to the rosebush, into the ham sandwich and sherry I've just thrown up. I'm pricked by rose thorns, stung, my ankle is twisted. He's at the window,barking,Come back here,you Irish runt.He'll report me to the post office. He hits me in the back with the whiskey bottle, pleads,Will you not watch one hour with me?

He pelts me with sherry glasses, whiskey glasses, assorted ham sand- wiches, items from his wife's dressing table, powders, creams, brushes.

I climb on my bike and wobble through the streets of Limerick,dizzy with sherry and pain. Mrs. O'Connell attacks me, Seven telegrams, one address, and you're gone all day.

I was, I was,

You was.You was. Drunk is what you was. Drunk is what you are. Reeking. Oh, we heard. That nice man rang, Mr. Harrington, lovely Englishman that sounds like James Mason. Lets you in to say a prayer for his poor wife and next thing you're out the window with the sherry and the ham.Your poor mother.What she brought into the world.

He made me eat the ham, drink the sherry.

Made you? Jesus, that's a good one. Made you. Mr. Harrington is a refined Englishman and there is no reason for him to lie and we don't

328 want your kind in this post office, people that can't keep their hands off the ham and sherry, so hand in your telegram pouch and bicycle for your days are done in this post office.