The Death of an Irish Lass Read Online Free Page A

McGarr supposed that the gesture and all the convivial talk he could hear in the tight-packed barroom were remnants of the summer feeling that used to suffuse country society when relatives returned to bring in the hay or cut turf, or fish for lobster and mackerel. Few emigrees returned now, but McGarr knew the bonhomie sometimes surfaced. For a few weeks in the summer the men spoke to strangers like McGarr. They even sang songs, and the very brave might buy a foreign woman a drink and flirt with her a bit.
    “Thank you kindly. You’re a good man. My name is McGarr. Peter McGarr.”
    “Michael Daly is mine.” The man’s hand engulfed McGarr’s. “Stranger here?”
    McGarr nodded and reached into his shirt pocket for his smokes.
    Daly tried to beat him to it, though, and, in pulling his packet of cigarettes from his jacket, opened the top, and they spilled all over McGarr and the wet top of the bar. “Jesus, I’m an oaf,” he said.
    McGarr started picking them out of his lap.
    Daly bent for the others that were on the floor. “Well, have one anyhow.” When he straightened up, he said, “Have two.”
    The bartender was picking the others off the bar. He chucked them into the bin in back and gave Daly a reproving look.
    McGarr said, “I can only smoke one at a time.”
    “Take two,” Daly insisted. “Go ahead.”
    “But I’ve got my own.” McGarr slapped his shirt pocket.
    “No—I insist. Take another.” He pushed his large hand at McGarr. It was bristling with cigarettes.
    McGarr smiled and said, “All right.” He placed the second cigarette behind his ear where the man could see it.
    The man stuffed the other cigarettes in his coat pocket and struggled to pull out a box of matches.
    McGarr already had a match lit.
    As did the bartender, who held the light to the end of McGarr’s cigarette. Again he gave Daly an admonitory glance.
    “Where’s yours?” McGarr asked before he put out his match.
    “Oh—I don’t really smoke myself. I found them in the booth.” He jerked his thumb over his shoulder. “Last night. Just before closing.” To conceal his embarrassment, he asked, “Are you married?”
    That made McGarr remember he should be listening for the telephone.
    “I hope you’re not thinking of proposing, Michael,” the bartender said, and several of the men close by laughed.
    Daly turned red.
    McGarr smiled and considered Daly closely. Only then did he realize that he and the man were roughly the same age. If anything, Daly was younger, but given his dress and manner he might well have been mistaken for a pensioner. The battered cap, the dark woolen jacket, the vest below, and the wide pants and brogans made him seem like a nineteenth-century man stranded in thetwentieth. The society that had sustained the simplicity of good men like the Michael Dalys of the past had now vanished. “Yes, I’m married. And you?”
    Daly shook his head. He was now looking into the foamy head of his pint of porter. “Any nippers?”
    “Not yet. We’ve only been married a few years.”
    “Keep trying,” said Daly. “You’ve got to work at it.”
    The bartender had had enough of him. “And how would you know, Mick? The most you’ve ever seen of a woman was the scabby legs of a tinker wench on a wagon.”
    Again the other men laughed.
    Daly reddened.
    The phone was ringing outside in the kiosk. McGarr said, “That’s the missus now,” and rushed out to answer it.
    “What’s up?” asked Noreen, in a voice so faint and squawky McGarr could barely hear her.
    “You sound like you’re halfway around the world.”
    “What? I didn’t catch that.” The connection was bad at the Dublin end too.
    “Can you come out here?”
    “What?”
    “Can you come out here?” He had to shout.
    “Where are you? What happened?”
    McGarr didn’t want to explain his presence in Lahinch there where half the people on the street might hear. “Lahinch. The weather is beautiful. You can meet me at the usual