A Coat for St. Patrick's Day

by W. B. READY

DAN FURLONG, every morning until the children were grown, would wake up around five o’clock and wonder what time it was. The entire household was quite incapable of maintaining a clock in good punctuality. Within a week every clock that they ever obtained would become a liar, so that Dan would miss a shift of work as a result, or the children would be late for school, or Monsignor Phelan would have to talk back to himself at Mass, because his altar boy, Jerry Furlong, had trusted a clock and so was not at the side altar to serve him. Right and left and fore and aft of the Furlongs there were clocks and watches ticking away with monotonous regularity, but somehow they all broke step when the Furlongs got a hold of any of them, so it was to hell with timepieces in that household. Not one of the family would have trusted the sundial in the Vatican gardens, and small blame to them.

Every morning, then, around five o’clock, Dan Furlong would lie awake blinking at the dim ceiling, wondering whether he was early or late or just right. The few warm waking minutes were a great delight to Dan, as they are to most men, and he used to ponder in them. Since the last St. Patrick’s Day, when he had worn his herringbone coat, and his companion the Usher had worn his Irish frieze, their sartorial splendor had often been the subject for his pleasant contemplation. For years the two of them had been shabby leaders of the parish contingent for the procession, but now they both possessed coats that would outwear them both. It was a warm, secure feeling.

Then, with a groan, Dan would roll out of bed, away from his sleeping wife, pull his cricket cap more firmly on his head, for Dan believed that the head deserved a covering just as much as any other part of the sleeping body, straighten his tie, which he wore in bed to keep his throat in good fettle, and stumble across to the window. When he got there he would push it open, draw up a chair, and sit in wait shivering, like a hunter.

Dan would sit like a hunter, and his voice would be his gun. Along the road outside, there would come some gently whirring cyclist on his way to early work. As he passed Dan’s window his cycle would often rear like a cow pony before a swaying rattlesnake, for from the window, the until now silently gaping window, there would come a shout like a bullet. It threw normal men from their saddles, and it harmed the feebler ones. Dan always shouted the same thing, for all men in the dark were Joseph to him, so his shout was “Joseph!” and it was a halt sound clear and strong. It never failed.

When the cyclist had picked himself up, and lifted up his vehicle, and had looked around for the projectile voice, Dan would go on in a more normal conversational tone: “What time is it, Joseph?”

There would always be a discernible pause after that. Then from the dismounted rider there would come: “I think it’s about five o’clock.”

Dan would squirm testily on his seat at that. “Sure I know that. It’s about five. If you haven’t a watch of your own will you step over to the barber’s shop opposite and look at the clock hanging up in the window, there’s a good fellow. Here, you can prop your bike up against our railing there.”

This rarely led to an altercation, unless it was very wet and stormy. Generally the dismounted one would prop his cycle up, and go across and peer in at the barber’s window.

While he was peering Dan was prone to shout at him angrily: “Light a match, man! How in the name of God do you expect to see a clock in the dark?”

After all this, when the time had been given, generally monosyllabically, and the cyclist had driven muttering away, Dan would formally arise. This consisted of taking his tie off and hanging up his cricket cap on a hook behind the bedroom door. Going down, stretching and scratching, wearing his Welsh flannel nightshirt, he would start m-m-meeeing and humming quietly to see it his pipes were in good tune, for Dan was very vain about his voice. He used to sing the Offertory motet nearly every Sunday at the High Mass. He really did have a good powerful baritone voice, but it was not deserving of all the attention that Dan gave it.

By the time that he had got the fire going and the bacon fried on the gas stove, and the tea wetted, Dan would be in great shape. The room would be rocking with the reverberations of his voice. The crockery used to dance on the dresser when he put his head back and gave out with his favorite Ave Verum. There was a tremulo piece in it, where he got up to corpus natum de Maria Virgine, that was so powerful that the children and Mrs. Furlong used to hear it in their sleep, and it would turn them over smiling.

When the Furlongs first moved in, the neighbors on either side of them shouted and beat their walls with hammers until Dan heard them above his own voice, and they begged him to desist. Dan was very contrite about it. He said that in future he would sing sweet and low. After a few days of that the neighbors asked him to go back to full-throated singing, for Dan’s low sweet song used to percolate through their walls like a growling menacing sort of thunder, and their dogs and cats would start scratching and whimpering outside their bedroom doors, pleading to be let in; the terrified animals would gnaw the woodwork in their frenzy, thinking that some new and horrifying sort of electric storm was coming up. Now most of the people around groaned, put the light on, and started reading as soon as the first “Joseph!” toppled over the cyclist.

Dan would sing Palestrina or Gregorian chant as he pulled on his moleskin trousers in front of the kitchen fire. Over his head would go his gray singlet and shirt, and around his neck he would wrap his sweat-rag of a scarf. While he was dressing, his mug of tea and his plate of fried bread and bacon would be steaming on the mantelpiece before him. When he had finished his meal, and had a nip of the crayture from the heel of the week-end bottle, he would pull on his reefer jacket and his brokenpeaked cap, the uniform of the Cardiff dockwalloper. Through the kitchen, out through the hallway, he would push his cycle, and holding it against him he would roar a rousing to the still sleeping household. It was a muted roar ever since the milkman Connors said his horse dropped dead outside the Furlongs’ the first day that he heard it, but there was still a trumpet-like quality to the blast that got the family stirring. Then out into the still dark and muggy morning Dan would wheel his cycle, to join the converging lines of cyclists who were making for the dock gates.

2

THE way that he mounted his cycle was in the manner of all the dockers. They did not regard cycling as a recreation, but as a means of getting to and from the docks. Their cycles often threw them, and cycles generally were considered something like unfriendly animals. Dan used to prop his cycle up against the curb, walk away a piece, and then come up on it from behind, somehow crawling on, pushing madly at the curb with the foot that was not clawing at the pedal. He would go from side to side of the road in a sort of zigzag until he had gained the mastery, and then he would straighten up and somehow jog along, slowly and shakily.

Whenever he came to a corner he would put his hand out, and would go around it like a plane banking. Every morning he would draw up to the curb at the home of the Usher Casey, and the two of them would slowly ride on together. The Usher was slight and ginger, quiet and gentle, where Dan was loud and burly, truculent, a joker. They had been raised in adjacent houses, they had started squirting water on the tipping coal together, they had become partners as tippers, and they had graduated in the same year to the job of coal-trimming. They knew each other so well that they had little to say to each other as they rode along, but within a few blocks they were surrounded with cycling dockers, and they would all be greeting one another. Unless it was summer it would still be dark and the consequent misdirected hailing could shake the houses that they were passing worse than did the streetcars. In sorting out where Johnny was, or who was sick in Timmy Deasy’s house, or where was Larry Ryan, there was a clamor that, was louder and less sweet than a pack of hounds in full cry.

The dockers, most of the time that they were talking to themselves, or to one another, had to contend with the clang of boilermaking, or the crashing of tipping coal, or the welding of steel plates, so that even in the quiet early morning streets they contended with the absent noises. Ift Dan was feeling chipper or there was plenty of work piling up, he was wont to break into a hymn as they neared the dockyard gates, so that the whole ruck of dockers would pedal past the gate custodian to the tune of an Asperges or maybe a Magnificat.

Since last St. Patrick’s Day, however, Dan and the Usher had been feeling so contented that they just jogged along on their cycles, leaving the commotion to the others. All the others were very much of the same pattern as the Usher and Dan.

The Mauler Sullivan, years ago, had got the contract for the dock labor on the Cardiff docks, and he had made the Welsh quaysides sound like those of Cork and Waterford and Dublin. There was an instance of one Welshman getting a job of the Mauler. He said that his name was Slavin, so the Mauler hired him. When the dockers found out that his real name was Evans they christened him Shamrock, and he worked among them happily for years. The poor fellow, the bold Shamrock, fell down his own chimney one stormy Christmas Eve, attempting to clear an obstruction that was causing it to smoke, and he broke his neck, and that was the end of him.

“Poor old Shamrock,”said Dan Furlong when he heard of it —he was working at the time, all coalbegrimed and sweating — “poor old Shamrock. Not content with becoming an Irishman the social climber had to try to be Father Christmas.”

They were an Irish society, and they were as conspicuous among the pervading Welshry as are horses amid city traffic, and just as the horses have no desire to turn themselves into motorcars, the Irish had no desire to change themselves either. They were happy as they were. Especially so were the Usher and Dan since they had got their topcoats, for they had both been needing them and had had no hope of getting them until the very eve of St. Patrick’s Day.

3

THE previous winter had been a hard one. With the advent of the thirties fewer and fewer ships were coming in to load up with Welsh steam coal, and the whole area was hit by the depression. Cash buying became a thing of the past, any sort of buying was cut down to a minimum, and such as there was was done on the Kathleen Mavourneen system, the credit system, and indeed God knows that it did look as though it might be for years and it might be forever before all the payments were made. Such credit as the two families possessed was needed for the children’s clothing, and then, with no money at all involved, both the Usher and Dan were set up for life with topcoating.

It meant a lot to both of them, since they led the parish men, as their fathers had before them, in the annual St. Patrick’s Day procession. Shabby, they felt ashamed, but now, as long as they lived, they knew that they could walk like kings, and so it was that Dan Furlong’s spirit was serene when he woke of mornings, and why the two of them were so quiet and so contented at the docks.

In their genteelly tattered despair, as a last throw, they had turned to their relations, and out of this gamblers’ chance had come the coats that were to let them lead the procession like a pair of draggled peacocks for the rest of their walking days, the heartbreak of their households and their own delight.

The Usher had gone to his father, a retired old shipwright. He hated begging, but he wondered whether the old man could see his way clear to putting a down payment on a coat for him. God knows he did not like to ask it. His father had pledged his own house to cover the mortgage of Usher’s only a year ago, and the few shillings that he had went on the horses every week, or on the Irish Sweep, hoping for a stake that would send Usher’s eldest boy, Willie, through University. Still, the Esher had to tell his plight. The old man stirred a little uneasily at Usher’s tale. Then he reached a moment of decision. “Jeremiah,” he had said. He alone gave the Usher his proper name. “Jeremiah, I have a topcoat upstairs that I haven’t worn since you were a wee one, meaning to leave it to you when I passed on. It’s an Irish frieze coat. It was the last one Jerry Coghlan made, thirty years ago, before the shakes cut off his tailoring. They don’t make coats like that any more, son. I’ll bring it down, so that you can march proudly and properly in my old place, as steward in the procession.”

The old man heaved himself up out of his armchair, thumped upstairs, and soon returned with the coat. The Usher gasped for air as the camphorated covering hit him, but the old man slit it open and pulled out the coat. It needed an effort on his part to lift it, so heavy was it, and he laid it on the table and stepped back almost reverently for the Usher to look at it.

The Usher gazed at it with respect, then he picked it up and put it on. He buttoned it up, and it buttoned all the way to the neck, in an archaic sort of fashion. It had velvet lapels and collar, and its original black color had become green with age around the shoulders, but it was a great, hardwearing overcoat. When he rubbed the quality of the sleeve the Usher said, and meant it, “Begod, Dad, they don’t make coats like this any more.” The old man was satisfied with the reception that Usher had accorded what was to be his legacy. There was only one thing wrong with it, as far as the old man could see, and that was that the coat had been made for him, who was a far bigger man than the Usher. He looked at it critically.

“It’s a bit on the big side, son,” he said, “but no matter. Don’t let any of them tailors get their hands on it for alteration. Sure they’d steal some of that stuff off the coat, and put some shoddy stuff back. They’re crooks, all of them, since Jerry Coghlan, may the Lord have mercy on him and on all the souls of the faithful, departed. Will you take it with you, son? Or will you leave it here for St. Patrick’s Day?” The Usher could not bear to part with the coat, so he said that he would wear it home, and home he went proudly. There was such a smell of camphor emanating from it that people turned and looked after the Usher as he walked along, but it was little that they could see of him. The coat reached down to his ankles, and the shoulders of Usher kept slipping through the neck of it, so that it was as if a dark-colored bell were swinging along, with wee Usher as the clapper.

He called on Dan on his way home with it. Dan was sitting in the kitchen, with his music in front of him and his pipes going strong as he m-m-meed a new Introit for next Sunday. Mrs. Furlong put her face in her hands when she saw the Usher, and hustled the three younger children out into the scullery, where they all started laughing over something. Dan looked at the coat silently. He sat a full minute silently letting the sight of the Usher in his topcoat sink in. Then he said: “By the Sweet and Suffering Man, Usher, you’ve got a coat there, Begod it’s a grand coal, man. You want to work your shoulders a bit to keep the neck of it up, but it’s a topcoat the bishop couldn’t buy these days.”

Dan sighed, and took his spectacles off. He went on: “You know, Usher, God has been good to us. Here we were yesterday a pair of ragged-arsed dockers, and today we both look like a pair of Solomons.” He raised his voice. “Jerry, are you studying upstairs there? Can you hear me?” By this time the Usher was holding down the cups that were dancing on the table. “Are you up there, Jerry boy?” Dan winked at the Usher. “Bring down my new topcoat, there’s a good lad.”

Dan turned to the Usher. “You see, Usher, I’ve not been idle either. I went around to my brother Joe and put it to him fairly and squarely. You know Joe is doing well with his insurance peddling and only five children. I told Joe that since remembered time the elder Furlong and the elder Casey had marched ahead in the St. Patrick’s Day procession, and that it was up to him to lend me a coat. Begod I hadn’t put the bite on him since Christmas, and he came through. Wait now, here’s Jerry with it, and you’ll see it.” Dan grinned delightedly as son Jerry brought the coat in, with a schooled straight face. “Begod, Usher, Joe can kiss this coat good-bye. It’s a lovely coat, man, too good for Joe. Wait now, till you see me in it.”

Dan picked up the coat, which almost shimmered in the electric light. If was a herringbone tweed of such a pattern that only an uninhibited movie director would wear it in this country. Joe was a frustrated artist, and this purchase had been his last revolt against his bourgeois wife and life. He was glad when Dan called for it, and he lent it for good, so he hoped. Dan put it on. It was a double-breasted coat, and it would have been tight for the Usher, for Joe was a scrawny wee fellow. Dan had to let out his breath to get into it, and then he could fasten only the bottom button. The sleeves were crawling up his arms like live things. He looked expectantly at the Usher, and his expectations were rewarded.

The Usher, standing there in his greening frieze tent of a topcoat, spoke out his admiration. “Bedam now, Dan, that’s a fine bold coat. It fits snugly, too. There won’t be a pair of such dapper stewards from any of the parishes next Sunday.” Away went the Usher, glad that Dan had been lucky too. Nora Casey, the Usher’s wife, looked at him when he came in proudly, and her eyes filled with tears, but she said, somehow, “Yes, Usher, that’s a grand coat.” What else could she say, or what could Mary Furlong say? They were grand coats.

Dan and the Usher led the parade upon the following Sunday. It was the turn of their parish, the dockers’ parish, to take the vanguard, and boldly they stepped out. They were all festooned with shamrock that had been blessed and distributed after the morning Masses, and their derby hats were atilt, and they swung their stewards’ wands like shillelaghs — and they were wearing their coats. Dan’s coat was so tight around him that it made him high-step, and any gust of wind blew the Usher’s coat against his legs so that he would have lost his footing if the coat had not borne him up. They were a pair of peacocks all right, although their wives wept quietly as they saw them pass, and their children blushed. The worst apprehensions of their families were not realized, for after the procession they both put away their coats in camphorated wrappings for the next year. They were too good for every Sunday wear.

The coats were a sort of turning point for the Usher and for Dan, and for all the dockers. The work began to pick up, their children started to graduate, the Furlongs got an electric clock that Dan suspected but respected, so that cyclists passed his window unscathed in the mornings. Dan and the Usher and their like were so sure of themselves that they raised their families decently, somehow paid off the Johnny Fortnights until Kathleen Mavourneen came to mean a song again, and through all their dirty hard and dangerous docker work they walked sure-footed to a happy death. Even if they borrowed sometimes they were always good security.