A man told me my paperback was a grate book - just great for lighting a fire in the grate! This will fix him - it's a kindle....
Peggy's
Secret
Streets
of Birdsong
Buteo
buteo
&
Other
Short Stories
©
Pat Mc Namara
writing
as Lazarian Wordsmith 2019 2020
This
is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events,
locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s
imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual
persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Peggy's
Secret
Cill
Malogue was a village on the outskirts of the planted town. The
English arrived late in the 1600's and founded their Burrough Town,
wrote a charter, set up a council and built their Protestant church.
Later the Huguenots also arrived and built their dwelling houses, set
up their own church and their industries. The native Irish were no
longer living in County Laois and County Offaly, but lived in Queen's
County and King's County. They built their own Catholic Church in the
village, and anglicised the Gaelic name so that the English could
pronounce it. Along the road a half mile away they used a scraggy
field, near the river, as their burial place. To frustrate the
English or French they named it Reilig. In Gaelic the cemetery.
Over time mourners
followed the coffin on foot to this place and buried the dead there.
As time passed and society changed, the bare footed peasants became
the farmers and craftsmen, the planted became the prosperous
merchants, and their children became the new generation of the next
century, when motorised hearses carried the dead, but from then up
until today the locals still walked behind the hearse.
They talked, smoked
and slow marched along, over the new railway bridge to the graveyard.
"He didn't last
long, when they opened him up."
"Bloody cancer,
it's the family disease, got the mother and the father, two sisters
and his brother: Billy. He was only twenty or so, no life at all,
just a youngster really. It even passed on to the next generation,
the nephew who lived with them got it as well. The Big C."
Through the crowd
the conversations wavered, wafted and, as the final destination
arrived, waned. Then low voiced whispers only.
"Yer man there
from Dublin, is he a nephew?"
"And a
nuisance, the other two are in the car behind with Peggy. Jonnie and
Peggy only saw that side, when one or other of them wanted something.
A sack or turf to impress the neighbours with the smell of good bog
turf, or a sack of vegetable for their occasional dining
experiences. I heard them spoofin' one time I got close enough to
hear their whispered conversations. Bloody paranoid that someone
would hear them, looking around like they were afraid of shadows."
" Mollie's
children?."
"Aye. Don't
forget the father, the footballer, he had a bit to do with the action
there as well. They don't have his temperament though. Scratchy
Briars the lot of them."
"I remember
Molly when she was young, a smasher, no wonder she married the best
man around."
"Quite! We're
away now, they're hoisting him out."
More to come tomorrow....
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