Wild Decembers Read Online Free PDF

gelignite the size of a candle, a detonator which is a little brass cylinder full of fulminate of mercury, and, finally, a length of fuse cord about five or six feet long. The fuse cord was at one end inserted into the detonator, it was closed—sometimes with the teeth—and stuck into the stick of gelignite which had already been inserted into a hole in the rock. It was packed with clay to make it airtight, the cord hanging out from it, then the fuse was lit and you got behind a stone wall or some safe cover, and with luck the rock would shatter to pieces and blow all over the field. That kind of work is history. People just hire a mechanical digger or a bulldozer, but let me be the one to say that there was something exciting about that wait behind the wall, the first sound of the blast and bits of stone flying up like birds, solid birds that could kill you with one blow.
As for the present, our way of life is changing, but some things remain the same. Take the bogs, the blanket bogs, as they are called; they are sacred places and the storehouse of our past. To dig deep into a blanket bog is to cut through time to unearth history. There is layer after layer of living vegetation. The peat is a haven for wildlife of every kind. Were you to explore it you would find more birds and beasts and insects than there were in Noah’s Ark. No one cuts turf now, as they say we do not have the summers anymore to allow it to dry. Laziness. Yet in one sense we are preserving our past. We may not be the richest county, but we have more memories and more mystery by far.
Joseph

 
     
     
     
    E VENING IN THE TOWN . Strains of music pulsing out. Husky notes. Pounding notes. Thu-thump. Thu-thump. Thu-thump. Near. Far. The dinner dance. Love on the cusp. The sweets of sin. Hotel doors wide open for casks of porter to be wheeled in.
    “You’d think it was Christmas,” Noreen says.
    “It won’t be long now,” Eamonn replies.
    In the street levity, expectation. In the lanes, kids with old curtains and straw hats, in hiding, to scare the grown-ups. New blouses hauled out of carrier bags. Satin with little pearl buttons that come undone. Platform soles to kick out the beat. Mothers ironing white shirts for their wild colonial boys. Streamers, pale primrose, pale pink, flung up to the rafters. Noreen on a ladder tacking their scalloped ends to the cornices, a stout arm, her full breast heaving.
    “What about your man?” It is Eamonn talking to the monk, a frocked figure in a stained-glass window, shades of a time when the premises were a convent.
    “Put a frill around him,” from Noreen. Eamonn goads her to give the poor sod a little birdie. She stretches higher, thighs bare, braced.
    “I bet he’d like a one-to-one.”
    “Wouldn’t we all.” Noreen says.
    Comfort in that. A dance is for a one-to-one.
    By nine o’clock the place will be packed, a cave of colours, blues, magentas, heads of hair still wet with a mermaid’s wetness, men in white shirts, fledgelings in the doorway, eyeing the form. Mick Bugler too, in a red bandit-style shirt. Cries and hollers. Howya Dessie, Howya Gussie, Howya Pat. Howyas. Fields forgotten. Cattle forgotten. The price of cattle forgotten. The pits of slurry, the gassy issue of ammonia quite quite forgotten. Diversion. The sweets of sin. You only live once.
    “The nuns used to be starving . . . They could ring a bell for alms, but they were too proud.”
    “The creatures.”
    “I wonder if McQueen had to have it desanctified when he bought it . . . Got it for a song.”
    “Desanctified . . . With the things I see here. Five and six on that banquette . . . Wife-swapping,” Eamonn tells her.
    From her a shriek of laughter, with a tinge of indignation and modesty.
    Black frost all day, the ground, the fields, rock solid, and the roads treacherous, but nevertheless there will be a crowd on account of the dance being for a good cause. The cause of charity. The sweets of sin. Out the back road