The Big White Coffin
by
Brendan Gerad O’Brien
*****
PUBLISHED BY:
The Big White Coffin
Copyright © 2010 by Brendan Gerad O’Brien
***
A story from the collection Dreamin’ Dreams
***
The Big White Coffin
For years we blamed Pat Hurley. He’s the one who told us about cannibals.
We were sprawled out on the dusty floor of our secret hideout during the long hot summer of 1956. A fierce heat wave had developed out in the Atlantic and the first place it hit was the West coast of Ireland.
Pat said the temperature was up in the hundreds outside. I was seven going on eight and Pat was already eight which made him the oldest so we believed him.
A rare breeze filtered through the cracks in the walls and fanned us for the briefest of moments. And the flies that constantly flitted around Pat hummed contentedly.
‘Isn’t it strange how you don’t see any cats around the town anymore?’ Pat declared suddenly, his voice as drippy as a half-melted ice-cream. ‘Now the Chinese have opened that restaurant in High Street.’
‘Why’s that, so?’ I asked.
‘Duh! Because the Chinese eat the cats, don’t they?’
‘They do not!’ I tried to lift my head to see if he was being serious, but I was just too drained.
‘They do too!’ Pat insisted. ‘Shur if you go there for a Chicken Chow Mien, won’t you find little furry paws in it? Now how many chickens have you seen with little furry paws on them?’
Pat roared at his own joke.
‘That’s an awful thing to say, Pat Hurley.’ Rita Fitzgerald had a sob in her voice. ‘The poor little animals - I don’t believe a word of it.’
Rita was the only girl allowed into our secret hideout. Mainly because she was the prop forward in the Kerry Junior Ladies Rugby squad, but also because she could beat the living daylights out of anyone who tried to stop her.
‘Well, what about in the jungle, so?’ Pat propped himself up on his elbow. ‘They eat people in the jungle.’
Pat said he’d heard it on the wireless. A plane had crashed in the Borneo jungle - wherever that was - and when the rescuers got there they couldn’t find a single body. A tribe called The Cannibals had eaten them!
We were all stunned, shocked into a kind of stupor by the terrifying images that whirled through our imagination. It was like a Movietone Newsreel stuck in a loop, going round and round and getting wilder by the minute. When I looked at my little brother Joe his eyes were as wide as saucers.
The next day two men came to our house. The little fat one was sweating heavily and the tall one bent down to our level with a grin that showed a mouthful of enormous teeth.
‘Hello there,’ he cooed. ‘Is your daddy in?’
Joe shot behind me. ‘I ...’
‘Who is it, Liam?’ Daddy came out from the kitchen rolling up his sleeves. He beamed when he saw the two men and wiped his hands in a tea towel.
‘Ah, shur tis yourselves, is it?’ He greeted them with a nod. ‘Have you brought it with you?’
‘We have,’ the little one said. The tall one grinned down at us again.
‘Now will you get out of the way, boys?' Daddy waved his hands like he was conducting an orchestra. ‘Or the lads will be falling over you.’
The three of them went out to a van parked in the street. After a few minutes they came back carrying a long white box between them.
‘What’s that?’ I asked Mammy.
Mammy was sitting on the stairs. She looked dreadful. She’d been getting awfully fat lately. Now she was so big she had to sit down every now and then to rest. Her face was all red and clammy.
‘Look, tis nothing for you boys to worry about.’ She sounded irritable. ‘Why don’t you just go outside and play like all the other children?’
***
Later, back in the hideout, Joe looked very worried.
‘I don’t like that big fella. Did you see the cut of his teeth? I bet the Cannibal Tribe have teeth like that.’
‘What was that big white thing they were carrying into your house?’ Rita Fitzgerald rolled her eyes in wonder.
‘A coffin,’ Pat Hurley declared loudly, and he had a strange glee on his face.
Joe groaned. ‘Shur why would they be carrying a coffin into our house?’
‘It’s probably for your mammy.’
‘What?’ Joe yelped. ‘Why?’
Pat sat up and scratched his head. The flies still flitted around him.
‘Well, just suppose!’ His eyes squinted with a sinister glint in them as they moved slowly to each one of us in turn. ‘If they are from the Cannibal Tribe, they’ll be wanting to eat her. But not all at once, though. They’ll want to be picking away at her, a little bit at a time, taking some home for their families every day. So they’ll need somewhere to keep her, won’t they?’
Joe’s eyes were even bigger than saucers now.
‘But why would they want to eat my mammy?’
‘Will you look at the size of her?’ Pat was warming to the theme now and he rose up onto his knees for effect. ‘Shur isn’t that why they chose her out of all the women in the town? There’s enough meat on her to last them for a whole year.’ He guffawed loudly then fell backwards in a fit of laughter.
It was now late afternoon and Pat Hurley’s mammy was calling for him to come in for his tea. Her banshee screech could be heard all over the town and it was the signal for all the kids to go home as well.
Joe and I traipsed in through our front door and were immediately overwhelmed by a thick grey haze wafting down the hallway from the kitchen.
We peered warily around the door and the first thing we saw was the two plates of burnt toast on the table.
Daddy was standing by the old black range with his arms in full swing as he battled with some eggs in a frying pan. The kettle was bellowing steam and making the lid rattled frantically, and the fat in the frying pan was spitting out all over him.
Daddy cursed and danced out of the way. He scooped the eggs out of the pan and plopped them onto the black toast. Then he spotted us through the chaos.
‘Ah, there you are. Sit down, sit down.’
We edged our way to the table and sat down, looking around anxiously for a hint of the security that was always there at teatime.
‘Where’s Mammy?’
‘Your mammy’s grand. You don’t have to worry about your mammy. She’s all right.’
He poured the boiling water from the kettle into the teapot.
‘But where is she?’
‘Now, I’ve told you. Your mammy is grand. Don’t be worrying about her now. Just eat your supper before it gets cold.’
My eggs lay helpless on the charred bread, the yolks still raw and the edges burnt to a frazzle and curled up like an old doily. Joe prodded his and tapped at the bread. Daddy poured the tea.
Through the door to the scullery we could just see the corner of the big white box shimmering eerily behind the fog of Daddy’s cooking.
***
That night we lay in the stillness of our darkened bedroom, staring out of the window at a sky that twinkled with a million stars.
We’d been in bed for hours but tonight there was no sleep in us. Our minds were full of thoughts that were so strange we couldn’t even put words to them. All we could focus on was what Pat had said in the hideout - the men who came to our house were from the Cannibal Tribe, and the big white box was to keep our mammy in.
Down in the town the church bell gave one solitary ring.
‘What are we going to do, Liam?’
‘Shush, he’ll hear you.’
‘But I’m
frightened.’
‘Shur I’m frightened too. But we need to be very brave about this. We have to think about what we’re going to do, how we’re going to find out exactly what’s going on. So tomorrow when Daddy goes out to work we’ll open the box and have a look for ourselves.’
Joe groaned.
But Daddy didn’t go out to work the next day. We danced around him all morning, trying to look casual and pretending to be busy. We picked up the newspaper and put it down again, flicked through the pages of a book, went out the front door and came back in again. But it made no difference. He still didn’t go to work. It was as if he had no work to go to any more!
And for dinner that day we had a very strange looking piece of gristly meat, all pink and fatty with spuds floating in a watery kind of stew.
We had the same meat for dinner the next day, too. And the day after that!
Then the next morning Daddy put on his jacket and his cap. He went out of the door and off down the street, whistling happily as if nothing had ever happened.
Joe and I ran to Pat Hurley’s house and rapped on the door.
‘You have to help us, Pat,’ we pleaded in unison. ‘We’re going to look inside the big white box.’
‘What?’ Pat turned a pasty grey sort of colour and the flies disappeared.
‘But you’re the leader of the gang,’ we persisted. ‘Tis your duty …’
We almost had to physically drag him back to the house with us. We shuffled into the scullery in a hesitant and nervous huddle, pulling and pushing each other to the front of the line.
We’d never been this close to the thing before. It was huge. And it had a padlock on it. We looked at it for ages.
‘I know.’ Pat’s squeak made us jump after such a long and eerie silence. He cleared his throat noisily. It made no difference. He still squeaked. ‘I’ll go and get my Da’s hammer and screwdriver.’
I grabbed his arm. ‘You will come back?’
‘I will!’
***
It took us ages to beat the padlock off. We threw down the hammer and slowly lifted the lid. And we recoiled in horror.
It was the most disgusting thing I’d ever seen in my whole life. The pink flesh was dulled by the ice that had crystallised all over it. The distorted limbs were twisted in an obscene angle. And it had been hacked at until it was almost cut in two.
We stood rooted to the spot, unable to drag our eyes away from it.
‘Where’s the head?’ Pat still squeaked but this time he didn’t care.
Joe groaned and squeezed his eyes shut. ‘Don’t tell me! They’re after taking her head!’
Suddenly the door crashed open behind us.
‘What’s going on in here?’
We jumped out of our skins, slamming the lid down as we spun around.
‘Mammy,’ I cried.
‘Mammy,’ Joe cried.
‘Mammy,’ Pat cried. ‘I mean … er … Mrs …‘
I couldn’t believe my eyes. She was as thin as a brush handle and smiling sweetly at us.
‘Well, never mind that now.’ She held the door open and ushered us out. ‘Come and say hello to your new baby sister.’
Daddy was beaming all over his face and carrying a bundle in his arms.
We were rooted to the spot.
‘You know, the boys were as good as gold the whole time you were in the hospital,’ Daddy was telling Mammy between emitting strange cooing noises at the bundle in his arms. ‘They were absolutely no trouble at all.’
We were still rooted to the spot.
‘By the way, you should see the piece of meat I got from Liam Brosnan,’ Daddy continued. ‘A whole pig’s carcass, would you believe. Tis huge! It took up all the room in our new freezer. We had some for dinner a couple of times. It was really lovely.’
He paused for a second, as if reflecting on something.
‘Only, judging by the look on their faces, I don’t think the boys actually like pork!’
The End
*****
Thank you for taking the time to read The Big White Coffin. I hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it. I would be delighted if you were to visit my web site at https://www.bgobrien.com/ and let me know what you thought of it by leaving your views on my guestbook page.
Brief Bio: Brendan Gerad O’Brien was born in Tralee, on the west coast of Ireland, and now he lives in Wales with his wife Jennifer and daughters Shelly and Sarah.
As a child he spent his summer holidays in Listowel, Co Kerry, where his uncle Moss Scanlon had a harness maker’s shop, sadly now long gone.
The shop was a magnet for all sorts of colourful characters. It was there that his love of words was kindled by the stories of John B. Keane and Bryan MacMahon, who often wandered in for a chat and bit of jovial banter.
Now retired, his hobby is writing short stories, twenty of which have already been published individually over the years, and now available in his collection Dreamin’ Dreams
Gallows Field