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| ISBN-13: | 9781582435008 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Catapult |
| Publication date: | 04/14/2009 |
| Pages: | 368 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.10(h) x 1.10(d) |
CHAPTER ONE
The Old Man of the Sea
One Thursday afternoon, an ancient man selling apples knocked at the door of our house in Dublin. He appeared to me to be about ninety. His hair was thin and white. His back was stooped, his expression was vague and humble, and he held his hat in one of his hands. His other hand rested on the handle of an enormous basket of apples that stood beside him. My mother, who had opened the door at his knock, stood staring at him. I peered out past her. I was nine. The first question that came into my mind was how did that thin old man carry that big basket of apples--because there was no one in the vicinity, as far as I could see, who might have given him a hand. The second question was how far had he come with his burden. I am sure the same dismayed speculations were in my mother's head, but she had no chance to ask him anything, because as soon as the door began to open he began to talk--to describe his apples and to praise them and to say how cheap they were. After every few words he paused, not so much to catch his breath, it seemed, as to collect his wits and to assure himself that the door was still open and that we were still listening, and, perhaps, to make certain that he himself was still standing where he thought he was. As soon as my mother could with politeness interrupt him, she said hastily that she would take a dozen apples for eating and a dozen for cooking. She got two large bowls from the kitchen, filled them with apples, and paid the old man. She left me to close the door. I watched him shuffle down the tiny tiled path that led to the sidewalk. He closed our gate carefully behind him and started to open the gate next door, but I was quick to tell him that our neighbors were away. He nodded without looking at me, and continued on his way. I hurried into the front sitting room. From the window there, I could see what luck he had at the four other houses that remained for him to visit. By the rapidity with which he retreated from each door, and by the abrupt manner in which he pulled the gates to after him, I judged that he had sold no more apples.
I charged off down to the kitchen. My mother was already peeling the cooking apples. My Uncle Matt, my mother's brother, was standing in the door to the garden, smoking a cigarette. My little sister, Derry, was sitting on a chair and trying to clasp her hands behind its back.
"I suppose you took every apple he had in the basket," my uncle said to my mother.
"Oh, no," I said quickly. "He had most of them left, and he didn't sell any more. We must have been the only people who bought any."
"What did I tell you?" my mother said, not taking her eyes from the apples. "God help him, it would break your heart to see him standing there with his old hat in his hand."
"A half a dozen would have been enough," my uncle said amiably. "Now you've encouraged him, he'll be on your back the rest of your life. Isn't that so, Maeve?"
"Like the Old Man of the Sea," I said, but they paid no attention to me.
"You ought to be ashamed of yourself," my mother said to my uncle, "always thinking the worst of everybody. This is the first time I ever laid eyes on him, and I'd be very much surprised if he ever turns up here again. It's not worth it to him, dragging that big basket around from door to door."
I was thinking of the old man who had attached himself to Sindbad the Sailor. I was thinking how helpless and frail the old man had looked when Sindbad first encountered him, and how, after Sindbad took him on his back to carry him, the old man grew heavier and heavier and stronger and stronger, until, when it was too late, Sindbad began to hate him. It was a story that had fascinated me, especially the description of the old man's cruel, talonlike hands and the way they dug into Sindbad's shoulders.
On the following Thursday, the old apple man again appeared at our door, at the same time in the afternoon. When my mother opened the door, he was standing as before, with his battered hat in his hand and his thin shoulders stooped and the basket of apples beside him, but this time on top of the basket were balanced two large brown paper bags, full of apples. He bent over painfully, lifted the bags, and offered them to my mother, saying something we did not understand. He had to repeat it twice before we caught it. "A dozen of each," he was saying.
My mother started to speak but changed her mind, turned away, got the money, paid him, and took the apples. I stood at the door and stared at him, hoping to catch in his faded eyes a glimpse of the villainy that had possessed the old sinner Sindbad found on the beach, but this old man seemed to have no sight at all. Again I watched him from the front sitting-room window, and then I joined my mother in the kitchen.
"He didn't go near any of the other houses," I announced. "I suppose he was afraid they wouldn't buy any."
"I suppose he was," my mother said dismally. "But I didn't want two dozen apples today. The most I would have taken was a half a dozen. And I didn't want to say it the other day with your Uncle Matt here, but he charges more than McRory's." McRory's was the store around the corner where we bought our groceries. "Oh, well," said my mother, "maybe they're better apples." But she left the bags unopened on the kitchen table.
"He was depending on us," I said.
"Oh, I know that very well," my mother said. "I was a fool in the first place, and now I'll never get rid of him. If he turns up next Thursday, I'll take a half a dozen and no more. I'll have the exact money ready."
This resolution cheered her, and she spilled the apples out on the table.
"They are very good apples," she said. "I wonder where he gets them."
"I wonder where he comes from," I said.
"Oh, the poor old Christian," she said. "And he probably has to walk all the way."
"Unless he could find someone to carry him," I said.
"Not with all those apples," she said in surprise.
"He looks very tired," I said, trying to remember if his fingers were talonlike.
"Why wouldn't he look tired?" my mother said. "He's a very old man."
The next Thursday, she had the money ready in her hand when she answered the old man's knock. She hardly had the door open before she spoke.
"I only want a half a dozen apples today," she said clearly, smiling at him. I smiled, too, to show that we meant no harm. He already had the bags in his arms and was lifting them up to her. It was a step down from our front door to the path, so that, although she is a small woman, he appeared smaller than she. She gravely repeated what she had said and shook her head at the bags.
"Just give me a half a dozen," she said, and I could not have told if she was still smiling, because I was staring at the old man. He seemed about to cry. My mother suddenly reached and took the two bags, and hurried away, calling to me to get the money and pay him.
"Now what'll we do?" I asked her when he had gone.
"Oh, it isn't that I mind the apples so much," she said, "but I don't like feeling I have to buy them."
"Did you see that his basket is always full up, except for the apples we take?" I said.
"Oh, I suppose he only goes to the ones he's sure of," she said bitterly, "and you can't blame him for that. He's only trying to get along, like everybody else in the world."
The following few Thursdays, we put up no fight, but I did notice that the old man's fingers were not at all talonlike. They were short and stubby, with bulging knuckles.
Then one Thursday afternoon about three months after we had bought the first, fatal two dozen, my mother decided, everything having gone wrong that day, that she would put her foot down once and for all.
"Now look here," she said, "I'm buying no apples from that old fellow today. Even if I wanted them, I wouldn't buy them. Even if he breaks the door down, I won't answer it."
Derry and I exchanged a glance of anticipation. We were going to pretend we weren't in. We had done that before when unwanted callers came, and we enjoyed it very much. We liked keeping rigidly quiet, listening to the futile knocking at the front door, and we especially enjoyed having our mother at our mercy for those few minutes, because we all felt sure that the least squeak we made, no matter where we were in the house, would betray us to the straining ears outside. Then there was always the sense of triumph when at last we heard our little gate clang shut again and knew that we had defeated our enemy. This time, however, there was an extra suspense that we could not have explained. We were all in the kitchen when the old man's knock came. Our kitchen was separated from our front door only by the length of a small, narrow hall, so we shut the kitchen door, We heard the first knock, and then the second, and then the third. Finally, the old man knocked several times more in rapid succession. Derry and I began to reel around, giggling helplessly, and my mother gave us a reproachful look. She was distressed anyway.
A familiar scratching noise came to our ears, and we gazed at one another, aghast.
"He must have got in somehow," my mother said in a fearful whisper.
I opened the kitchen door very gradually. "He's got his hand in the letter box," I whispered over my shoulder to the others.
In the middle of the front door there was a wide slot through which the postman pushed letters and papers so that they fell inside on the hall floor. On the outside, the slot was protected by a brass flap, and the old man had lifted this and was trying to peer into the hall. We knew very well that the slot gave only a limited and indistinct view of the hall, but we were unreasonably startled to realize that he had found an opening in the house. Suddenly he began to shout through the slot.
"He's roaring mad!" Derry whispered. "He'll kill us all."
"Can you make out what he's saying?" asked my mother, who was appalled.
"He's saying, `Apple, apple, apple,'" I said.
Derry and I collapsed into hysterical mirth. My mother bundled us out into the garden and came out herself.
"Have you no heart?" she said. "To laugh at an unfortunate old man who probably never gets enough to eat!"
"Now we're really not in," I said, "because we're out in the garden."
Derry joined me in screeches of laughter.
"If I thought he could hear you," my mother said fiercely to us, "I'd murder you both."
"Well, it's too late to answer the door now," she added. "I couldn't face him after this. I'll make it up to him next week."
There was sudden silence--no knocking, no shouting.
"He's gone away," my mother said, in a tone of guilty relief.
At that moment, the tousled head and avid eyes of the woman next door appeared over the wall that separated our garden from hers. "Mrs. Brennan!" she shouted. She had a powerful voice. "There's an old fellow outside with apples for you. He says he's been at your door for a half an hour. He says he comes regularly and he knows you're depending on him. I told him you were in the garden. He must be back around at your door by now. There he is."
There he was. The knocking had started again.
"Oh, God forgive me!" my mother cried. "That old villain! He must have known I was hiding from him."
"What are you hiding for?" our neighbor shrieked. "Do you owe him?"
"Oh, no," my mother said indignantly, "but I don't want any apples."
"Well, why don't you just tell him to go about his business?"
"I will, of course. That's what I'm going to do."
"Just give him a piece of your mind for making a nuisance of himself and shut the door in his face," commanded our neighbor, with relish.
My mother went into our kitchen, took her purse in her hand, and marched to the door, with Derry and me following. The old man was a pitiful sight. He had forgotten to take off his hat, and his eyes glittered, whether with anguish or with anger it would have been hard to say. He pushed the two bags of apples rudely into my mother's arms without looking at her. She opened her purse to pay him and gave a cry of distress: "Didn't I go and pay the grocer only an hour ago, and I'm fourpence short!" She handed him the money and showed him that it left her purse empty. "It's all I have in the house at the minute," she said.
He grabbed the money, counted it, and gave her back a dreadful look of contempt. Then he lifted his enormous basket, which was, as always, full to the brim, and turned his back on us. This time, we all stood in the front sitting-room window and watched him. He didn't close our gate, and he scuttled slowly off down the street as though he couldn't get away from us fast enough.
"First, he thought we were making fun of him," my mother said, "and now he thinks I was trying to bargain with him. He might have known I'd make it up to him the next time."
She, who never tried to bargain with anybody in her life, was filled with shame.
"Next week, we'll have the door open for him before he knocks," I said.
But the following week there was no sign of the old man, and he never came near us again, although, filled with remorse, we watched for him. One afternoon, my Uncle Matt dropped around to see us, and my mother, in a confiding mood, told him the whole story.
"Well, I could have told you," he said, grinning.
"It wasn't so much the apples, you know," my mother said.
"Oh, no," said my uncle. "You'd have liked him to come to your door and ask straight out for money, like the rest of your beggars."
My mother was noted for her inability to refuse food, clothes, or money to anybody who came to the door.
"How many times must I tell you not to call them beggars," she said angrily now to my uncle. "They're just unfortunate, and I wouldn't be so quick to laugh at them if I were you."
"Well, you're well rid of him," my uncle said. "And I may as well tell you now that I saw him strolling down O'Connell Street the other morning wearing a suit of clothes that I couldn't afford to buy, and not an apple in sight. There's your poor old man for you."
"Now how did you know it was him?" my mother cried skeptically. "You never saw him at all."
"Wasn't I here the first time he came to the door? I was standing in the middle of the kitchen, and you had the hall door wide open. Of course I saw him."
"Well, you're making all that up about seeing him on O'Connell Street."
"I saw him, and I passed close enough to touch him. He had his married daughter from Drumcondra with him."
"And how do you know she was his married daughter from Drumcondra, may I ask?"
"Oh, you couldn't mistake her," my uncle said airily. "I knew her by the way she was wearing her hat."
"That tongue of yours, Matt," my mother said. "I never know whether to believe you or not."
For my part, I believed every word my uncle said.
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