Which indeed did appear to be the case, for subsequent to that incident, Pat and his six-inch-high companion appeared to be having the time of their lives! Rarely a night went by now but they’d discuss it and with a grin so wicked coming to that shining litde enamel face you would think that everything they were saying was every bit as real as if it were happening. A small gray hand tugged Pat’s sleeve and, with that strange expression clouding his features again, the gay-colored percussionist said, “And then what I’ll do is—I’ll creep into his room after you, okay?” as Pat tapped his closed fists together and enthused, wild-eyed, “Yeah, Little Drummer Boy!!”
There was a delicious feeling in his stomach, the like of which he had never known before, as Pat—as though observing himself—moved slowly across the floor of his father’s—or as he was now known, “The Hog’s”—bedroom. His snoring for all the world as two large sheets of corrugated cardboard torn in two.
“Now Pat! Now!” whispered his friend and confidant—and, now, conscience—his sharpened bayonet tip gleaming in the moon’s pale spectral light.
Pat could feel every muscle in his body begin to tighten. He was ramrod-stiff as he stood by the wardrobe.
“Captain Victor McNab!” he declared. “You have been found guilty by this court and the sentence of death has been pronounced upon you. How do you plead?”
The solitary beat on the small red and blue drum seemed to enfold the entire room.
“I said—how do you plead?” repeated Pat in tones which were unyielding.
The first faint echoes of a fragile, lonely melody began to issue from between two rows of wooden teeth.
Ta ra ra ra ra ra ra—bump a bum bum
Me and my drum!
Pat knew in his heart that it could not possibly be but it seemed to him that with the first two notes of that piercing, haunting melody, all those sad, hurt souls whose lives Captain Slaughter (one of their increasingly more colorful names for his father) had ruined (a euphemism, surely, considering most of them had been heartlessly dispatched to their eternal reward) were right there with him in the library. High walls of shadows surrounded him.
“I said—how do you plead?” he had demanded to know that fateful night so many years before.
The racking cries of pain and strangled gurgling that issued from his father’s throat as he shot up in bed clutching his ears and throat were, despite Pat’s protracted psychological preparation for it, close to—it is pointless to deny it—unbearable.
“That was all so, so long ago now, of course,” murmured Pat to himself as he leaned on the gatepost the following morning, looking down the garden. He ran his finger along the top of the stone pillar which was covered entirely in the most beautifully delicate lacework of snow. “Sad thing is,” he said, his breath condensing in the hard, sdii air, “you always hope there’s a way out, and if Mammy hadn’t gone to Dublin that day, he might still be alive. But another way of looking at it is that that’s the way it’s meant to be.”
His eyes shone as he held up the small companion in his right hand and stared fondly at the litde beads of melted snow on his rose-red cheeks. The paint of his drum had long since flaked and faded.
“There is no other way it could have been,” his old pal seemed to say. “No other way, friend. He made it inevitable.”
It seemed as yesterday now, when the inevitable had begun. Pat had been doing his homework at the kitchen table when his mother arrived back from Dublin. She put her head around the door and said, “Look at that! Well, who’s a busy fellow now!” as she tiptoed up behind him and cried, “Guess what I’ve got for you!”
Pat nearly fainted when he saw her open the package.
The uniform was almost exactly like his pal’s, right down to the last detail—the knee britches sparkling white and a beautiful, swallow-tailed scarlet coat with brass buttons. Pat could not believe his eyes as he stared at himself in the bedroom mirror. He gasped.
“Mammy! It’s exactly like him!”
He kissed his small toy—instinctively—and slipped it into the pocket of his military tunic. His mother hugged him.
“We’ll have a good Christmas yet, you and me—and to hell with—him! Won’t we, love?”
Pat had nodded so Fiercely he feared his head would come rolling off.
What fun they had some days later—his father was in Carrickmacross. Mammy marching up and down the field with her arms swinging and Pat directly behind her beating a tattoo.
“Ta ra ra ra ra boys oh boys!” sang his mother proudly.
“More, Mammy! More!” cried Pat.
“Rup pup pup pum pum me and my drum!” went on his mother.
“Oh, Mammy! This is the best day of my life!” cried Pat McNab as his mother enveloped him in her large arms, crying, “Pat McNab, my litde drummer boy!” smothering his forehead in kisses.
That his visit to Carrickmacross should have been cut short was fortunate for the captain but of course would prove ultimately tragic for Mrs. McNab and her son. Although that was not how it seemed as they fell in the door of the house that evening, laughing together until the tears flowed down their faces. Anyone observing them would have assumed them without question to be hopelessly intoxicated, mother and son or not.
“Oh, Pat,” cried his mother—out of sheer exultation—”you’re an awful man! The drumming out of you!”
“And then, Mammy—,” squealed Pat, almost catching his tailcoat in the door—”you nearly tripping over the thistle!”
It was not to be very long before they sensed a particular presence within the room and found themselves confronting a tense, familiar shape blackly enthroned in a wingbacked chair.
“Victor!” cried Mrs. McNab—haplessly. “We were just up the town getting the messages!”
As she spoke these words, despite the pristine excellence of his expertly tailored regalia, Pat McNab had fancied himself covered entirely from head to toe in slime.
His father’s snarling cough filled the kitchen with ease.
“Messages,” he intoned gravely.
“Yes,” replied Mrs. McNab.
It was plain that her voice was filled with pure terror.
“Of course,” replied her husband. “And I see you bought something.”
He paused.
“For your son,” he added, acidly.
“Sure it was only a litde present, Victor. A little something before he goes back to school.”
His father’s words were cold as tombstones.
“And that’s what you’d like him to be, is it? A son of mine a litde nancy drummer boy, stomping about the place with litde sucks to humiliate his father! Is it? Is it!”
“No, Victor!” squealed Mrs. McNab.
“‘No, Victor!’ Well by God it’ll be ‘no Victor’ by the time this Christmas is out! C’mere, you!”
Within seconds, each brass button had been gruffly torn from the coat and the coat itself ripped from Pat’s back. As a consequence of which the litde drummer boy fell from his pocket, clanging musically onto the dies of the floor. Instantaneously, his father picked him up and began to cuff his mother violently with it before flinging it out the open window, once more to be swallowed up by the vast Siberia that was the McNab garden.
Words cannot describe what ensued that day. “The horror” delineated by Conrad in his tale of Congolese insanity would be but an approximation.
It was to be a defeated and badly injured Pat McNab who whiled away his holiday hours, racked by hopeless sobs as he poked the snow-dusted hogweeds and battered dock leaves that dotted the arctic wastes which had taken his friend forever with a piece of broken suck. He was heartbroken that he could be so close and yet so far away! Hoping in vain for the play of sunlight upon a bayonet-dp that would reveal for him the location of his cold and lonely grave, the hard-crusted pit into which his shortish metal pal had been so callously cast. But it was not to be that evening—indeed, fourteen such finger-numbing garden-combing searches were to take place be
fore his companion’s eventual discovery—and the cry that erupted from the depths of Pat’s being to cleave the cosmos was truly heartrending.
“So many years past,” thought Pat McNab as he finished raking the fire and went to the window to contemplate the once more still and tranquil countryside. He smiled. “So many years and now at last, thank God, a kind of peace has come over the earth.”
As it had to her, his mother Maimie, eventually, that Christmas so long ago. He smiled as he thought of her falling through the bedroom door that fateful night after “the incident,” clutching her throat with the vomit pouring out of her mouth in a dun-colored stream. A feeling of great calm encompassed him as he stroked the head of his pint-sized companion and gazed upon his glazed eyes and time-worn face. (There was a piece of grass in his ear and beneath his right eye there was a tiny scratch of paint which gave for all the world the impression of a tear.) Pat stroked him and said, “I know some people say litde tin soldiers have no feelings. That it’s all in your imagination. And maybe it is. Maybe it is, litde tin soldier, friend of mine and thus to be for all time.”
Pat kissed the top of the small head and replaced the figure in his pocket before going upstairs, repeating as he did so, “Maybe it was all our imagination.” A consideration to which he gave much thought many months later, searching that very same pocket which had become the toy’s home, to discover what can only be described as the vastest of holes and the hugest of absences.
But that was not how it seemed that Christmas night as the bedroom door creaked slowly open and a moonlit shadow fell upon a pillow where Captain McNab now lay asleep, the peace which he had for so long denied to others plainly etched upon his face.
At first, Mrs. McNab proved inconsolable, sobbing hopelessly by the kitchen window. Pat did his best to comfort her.
“It’s going to be all right, Ma,” he said. “I promise you. He’ll never bother us again.”
“But I loved him, son,” she protested. “You don’t understand. You shouldn’t have done it!”
Pat winced and, despite himself, found himself being quite caustic with her. He clamped his fingers about her shoulder.
“You’ll have to stop saying that, Ma!” he cried. “It’s not fair! He ruined our Christmas! He ruined everything!”
His mother took his hand in hers and dabbed her eyes with a Kleenex tissue. She nodded.
“I know, son, I know. It’sjust that I wasn’t expecting—”
The sight of her dead husband prone on the pillow with a snapped drumstick protruding from each ear and the shiny spike of a bayonet smeared with blood inserted in his throat came shooting into her mind anew and it was all she could do not to begin sobbing once more.
Pat smiled and his eyes twinkled. He squeezed her shoulder.
“I promise you, Ma,” he said. “Everything will be all right from now on. You’ll see.”
It was dusk and the last flakes of snow were falling as Pat sat at the kitchen table. In the center of it stood his friend, angled drumsticks at the ready—a little bruised, perhaps but who cared! After what had seemed an absence of centuries! How magnificent life, Pat thought, could sometimes be, against all the odds, to deliver up one’s memories as pure and unblemished and pristine as they had been even in one’s dreams! He shook his head. For a tiny second, he fancied his litde friend’s right eye winked, as if to say, “Correct, Pat!”
But it was not so. But what was so was that they were together once more, and as he fingered the last few remaining currants of the Christmas pudding into his mouth, Pat McNab thought to himself how beautiful it was that, despite it all, the Christmas that would see both him and all the children of the world who had ever lived being happy in a way they could never heretofore have dreamed, had, against all the odds, been delivered unto them. As a tear at last came to his cheek and he nodded to a litde old soldier whose seasonal tattoo rang out now in the closing hours of the day as Pat took up the tune and proudly sang with him a song that would be theirs for ever, the light from the Yuletide logs flickering upon his raw and glittering cheeks, as the words “pa ra ra rup pup pum pum” rang out with a lonesome majesty in the dying light of evening.
Fly Me to the Moonz
Poets often use many words to say
A simple thing
It takes thought and rhyme to make
A poem sing
With music and words I’ve been playing For you I have written a song To be sure that you’ll know what I’m saying I’ll translate as I go along.
Fly me to the moon
And let me play among the stars
Let me see what spring is like
On Jupiter and Mars!
In other words, hold my hand
In other words, darling, kiss me.
Fill my life with song
And let me sing forevermore
You are all I hope for
All I worship and adore
In other words, please be true
In other words, I love you.
There are those who are quite emphatic that the genesis of what might be termed Pat’s “fevered imaginings” or the “loosing of his reason unto the terrain of untrameled delusions” was determined solely by a single encounter to which we have earlier referred and which took place upon an otherwise insignificant summer afternoon, when Honky McCool, his associate, saw fit to ply him with Mexican hallucinogenics. But, in all truth, it would be fallacious to assume that this alone could have been responsible for the extraordinary deliriums and general technicolor phantasmagoria which became an inextricable part of Pat McNab’s life around this time. To put it succinctly, these can only be properly understood when the night he received the solid blow to the head is taken into account. Which resulted in him pottering uncertainly about his immediate environment, gingerly touching the backs of chairs and repeating, “Ouch!” as he recalled the hurtful events of that dark and troubling night.
“It’s the pope I blame!” he murmured to himself as he stirred some sugar into his tea, wincing as the sharp pain stabbed him directly—yet again!—over his left eyebrow. “He shouldn’t have said it. Even if he did think it was true—he sdii shouldn’t have said it.”
What Pat was referring to was the statement which had been made by the supreme pontiff in an Italian newspaper called L’Osservatore Romano—reported in the Irish Press—to the effect that “if there were human beings on the moon, they would probably be like Adam and Eve in Paradise.” Pat cupped his hands around his blue-striped mug, his brow furrowing as he considered, “If he hadn’t said that, I would never have started thinking about it. About it being a beautiful place and everything. Up until then—would I ever have thought about that? No. Because the truth is, I didn’t care about the moon at all. I paid no mind to it in the wide world. The very last thing I was likely to start thinking was, ‘I wish I was up there on that beautiful orb of silver. Maybe then I’d be happy.’”
Pat touched the large turbanlike bandage tentatively and felt a wave of sadness consume him. In a corner of the window, the fat lunar sphere rested impassively—untauntingly, it has to be said—observing him like a single blue eyeball.
It seemed no time ago at all since Pat had been sitting at the bar in Sullivan’s, about three-quarters of the way through his third bottle of Macardles Ale, when he looked up from his newspaper, frowned, and remarked to Timmy Sullivan, “Timmy—do you think the pope’s right?”
Timmy flicked his lower lip against the back of his front teeth, making a “plupp” sound as he narrowed his brow and said, “Right about which now, Pat?”
Pat stared into the bubbles which had assembled on the surface of his beverage. Such was the level of activity in there that new life-forms might be being born before his very eyes. A medium-sized sparkling dome of liquid went “pop!” as Pat replied, “About people on the moon.”
“I mean, Timmy,” he continued, “about them being like Adam and Eve in Paradise and so on.”
Timmy Sullivan’s reply was insta
ntaneous and unequivocal.
“Ha ha!” he cried aloud, flicking his tea cloth across his shoulder and appealing to the other customers. “Do you hear that, lads! Sure there’s no people on the moon, Pat! Weren’t we only talking about it last night!”
Pat sighed, a litde disappointed by what he considered Timmy’s excessive and unnecessary vehemence.
“I know that, Timmy,” he nodded, “I know there mightn’t be. But I read it in the paper that the pope said if there was—if there was—they’d have to be like Adam and Eve were. They’d have to be like them.”
Pat was taken aback to find the barman’s face looming as if out of nowhere before him, to the extent that one’s iris might have been the mirror image of the other.
“Where did you read that, Pat?” he heard Timmy cry, slapping his open palm onto the marble-topped counter. “Tell me now—where did you hear all this? Go on—tell me!”
Despite himself, Pat felt a lump forming in his throat as he searched for the words which would explain his case.
“I read it here—in the Irish Pressi” he began. “He said it in an Italian paper. He said … it said …”
Timmy Sullivan slapped the counter anew and thundered:
“Pat! He said! It said! Pat—are you going to start believing all you read in the papers? Look here, Pat! I have nothing against the Irish Press, and paper men have to do their job like everybody else. But I’ll tell you this, Pat—when it comes to the moon, do you know what that man knows? Do you know what His Holiness knows about that piece of rock above yonder? Do you, Pat?”