An Irish Christmas Feast Read Online Free PDF Page A

Eve, moving off with a day’s provisions at first light and not returning until long after dark.’
    â€˜It’s your face that attracts them,’ a boozing companion had observed earlier in the day when a man I had never seen before shot from a shop door and seized me by both wrists. He was a powerfully built fellow but, alas, a victim of the most excruciating halitosis. He held me fast for several minutes while he recalled the treachery of the wife who had abandoned him without warning for an amorous greengrocer.
    John J. Mulholland did not hold me by the wrists but his ample frame overflowed a bar stool between myself and the exit. He was pointing at his neck around which was a crimson weal which might well have been caused by a hangman’s rope.
    â€˜It’s not what you’re thinking,’ he smiled grimly, ‘and if you are patient you shall discover how it came to be where it is.’
    I indicated to Mikey Joe that I wanted another whiskey. If I was going to suffer I would do so in comfort. My nemesis had also brought his stool nearer, totally eliminating every means of escape. The whole business had begun with the aforementioned paternal grandfather, one Jacko Mulholland, a trousers’ maker with a tooth for whiskey and a profound hatred of Christmas.
    When our tale begins Jacko was a mere thirty years of age. Both parents had died young and from the age of sixteen onwards he was left to fend for himself. Neighbours would explain in their good-natured neighbourly way that a general resentment for all things tender and sentimental had set in shortly after the demise of his father and mother.
    â€˜Say nothing to him about Christmas,’ they would advise strangers who had no way of knowing about his bereavement, ‘and whatever you do, do not wish him the compliments of the season.’
    As is the way with neighbours they were patient with him when he reacted viciously to the least mention of the Yuletide season. They told themselves that his grief would diminish with the passage of time and they would regularly trot out the old adages; time is a great healer and the years cure everything and so forth and so on but they were disappointed when, after fourteen of those very same years, he persisted in ignoring the arrival of Christmas.
    His kitchen windowsills and his mantelpiece were bare. None of the accumulation of Christmas cards so evident in the houses of his neighbours were to be seen in the Mulholland home. When a card arrived from a friend or relative he immediately consigned it to flame in the Stanley number eight.
    â€˜How dare they!’ he would mutter to himself before returning to the stitching of the rough and ready trousers in which he specialised. Sometimes he thought of Mary Moles who lived just down the street and who was still unattached although she need not be for she was a trim cut of a girl with pleasant features and a virtuous name. She could have been his. All he had to do was ask. It had been understood. Their names had been linked since he started to pay her court but she grew tired of his moods and his own attitude hardened the longer the rift between them lasted. She would not marry another and neither would he but they cherished each other no longer. Concerned neighbours shook their heads at the woeful waste of it all. The entire street felt the pain of it and the entire street prayed that it would come right in the end.
    â€˜They’ll be too old soon,’ one old woman said at which another and then many others nodded sagely and concurred. In time the situation came to be accepted and the affair became part of the history of the street.
    At this stage in the proceedings John J. Mulholland excused himself on the grounds that he had to visit the toilet. I could have vacated the scene there and then but I was hooked as indeed was my genial friend Mikey Joe. We spoke in undertones lest our voices carry to the toilet. Mikey Joe confided that he