Hospital, County Limerick, Ireland
“Don’t be worrying. She’ll be gone in no time.”
“Jimmy. You’ve been saying that for a month now.”
This was the truth. Jimmy Donovan had. The subject of his observation and the others’ curiosity was a short woman, a girl really, of medium girth and frizzled hair of some variety of light brown and rust. She had a name, and it was Kathleen O’Rourke.
The place in which his observation was made yet again was a small tavern in a small town dab in the middle of Ireland, and he was its proprietor. Jimmy gave it the name “The Golden Calf” when he bought the place some four years earlier.
Though there were those who considered it blasphemous, to him it was a mere play on the fact that the neighboring farms survived on their cattle and cows and it was what allowed them to weather the Famine. Jimmy Donovan was not much concerned about the church-going sorts who crossed the street rather than acknowledge his establishment since they were not the sorts that would cross the threshold no matter what name he gave it. No, those would never enjoy his little laugh, though even Father Crowe was known to make an appearance on a Saturday night after hearing a round of confessions, confessions consisting chiefly of coveting various things of thy neighbors, and sometimes coveting said neighbor herself.
And then there was Kathleen O’Rourke. Her fate was sealed the Monday evening when she was born just over seventeen years before. England or America. Those were the choices she would have since she was unlikely to catch the fancy of the eldest son of a family who would be inheriting his father’s leasehold. No. England—Liverpool or maybe the factories in Manchester. Perhaps America, most likely New York or Boston.
The Golden Calf was dark even in midday. In the summer, when Kate O’Rourke was engaged in her venture there, its windows were open and the sounds of those passing by entered and, worse, so did the smells of the horses. But everyone in Hospital—that was the name of the place—was long accustomed to it so paid it no mind.
The room where she sat was reached through the bar. It had a low ceiling with beams up/down and across, and groups of small tables and chairs were sprinkled about. There was a small stage, on which the boys sat with their instruments on the weekend, performing their impromptu concerts of the ballads of the hopeless causes that the Irish Catholics seemed heir to—that everyone in the town was long accustomed to hearing—and the town folk would join in the periodic singing accompanied by a dram or so of Guinness or whatever other ale that Jimmy could get cheap from the vendors who passed through every week or so.
But Kathleen was never at one of those sessions. She had taken about a month earlier to showing up early in the afternoon. No one knew why she started doing that, and all assumed that it was with her mamma’s permission. Which in itself was strange since there were always chores to be done and it was universally acknowledged that idle hands were the devil’s workshop.
Kathleen’s hands were never idle. Each afternoon, she walked in.
“Good afternoon, Mr. Donovan,” she would say with a nod, then walk through to a table in the corner in the rear and sit in a chair with its back to the wall and a view of the side street. She carried a satchel, which she placed on the chair by the wall. She removed a stack of blank papers and put them squarely on the table. She reached into the bag and removed some four or five pencils, which she arrayed in a row to the right of the paper, their tips pointing up. She reached in again and out came a small sharpener, which was carefully laid above those tips. Finally, she extracted a small stack of papers on which there was her neat script. This was placed to the side of the original stack of blank pages opposite where the pencils were.
We know this routine because it was observed by everyone else in the tavern. Those at the bar in the other room stood at the entrance to watch, and all were silent as Kathleen O’Rourke did what she did, ignoring what they did. When finished, she lifted the satchel from the chair and put it on the floor, and then nodded at her handiwork. This was the signal for the others to return whence they came except for Jimmy, who stood a table or two from the one selected.
“Mr. Donovan. May I have a pot of tea and milk, please?”
“Right away, Miss O’Rourke,” was the answer, and off he turned to the bar where the makings of a pot of black tea awaited him. When the water was at a boil, he poured it into the pot and placed it on a tray. He positioned whatever biscuits he bought in the morning at Mrs. Ryan’s bakery on a small plate and added them to the tray with a cup and saucer and cruet with milk, which he carried into the tavern and to Miss O’Rourke’s table. There, he put the pot on the table before lifting the cup and saucer, the milk, and finally the biscuits and put the lot one by one on the bit of free space on the table. He placed a strainer across the cup and poured the tea, then shaking the strainer slightly and lifting it to a small plate on the tray, his movements carefully watched by the girl, impatient with the interruption.
“I am much obliged to you, Mr. Donovan. Now I must turn to my work.”
With that, Mr. Donovan nodded and returned to his duties.
There was rarely another soul in the room where Kathleen sat at that time of day, lunch having been served and cleared earlier. If anyone was there, they will have been forewarned to leave Kathleen’s table alone. No one was sure how that began, but it did, and it drifted into the law of the Golden Calf.
Once, early on, Mrs. Ryan herself was passing by when she saw Kathleen through the window, it being a nice fall afternoon and Mrs. Ryan being done with her bakery for the day.
“What are you writing dear?” she asked.
“I am writing my novel, Mrs. Ryan. Don’t you see?”
Mrs. Ryan saw but did not see if you know what that means. It was enough, though, for word to get about Hospital that Kathleen O’Rourke was writing some sort of novel, and the view as to what it was about varied among the townfolk.
Peter Walsh, who was in Kathleen’s class at school, asked her some days later straight up: “I hear you’re working on some sort of novel. What is it about?”
It was a question in the minds of everyone in the village other than Kathleen O’Rourke, who had no thought of what it was about. It was her novel. She had read a number on her own, sitting in the barn’s hayloft or squinting by a candle in the living room or in the bedroom she shared with her younger sister and thought that if these other women and this Dickens fellow could write a story, surely she could too.
But, she thought, to do a proper job she must do it seriously. She told her mama that if her chores were done and school was out she would head to the Golden Calf and write her novel. Her mother took this declaration as a joke and told her daughter that as long as her chores were done and school was out, Kathleen could write her novel. Her father was not so pleased but would not cross his wife on matters concerning the children; when she decided something he gave his tepid approval for the plan.
Kathleen accumulated bits of her allowance for this purpose, and when she accompanied her father to Limerick City in the summer, he accompanied her to a stationery store. She told a clerk her plan to write her novel and after the clerk received a nod from Mr. O’Rourke he proceeded to array what he called the “tools of the trade,” and assembled them on the glass counter. Spread across were reams of paper and pencils and sharpeners.
“Would you like some pens too?”
“I haven’t used one,” the girl said, “but I should like to try,” and with that, some long and short and medium sized pens and ink were added to the items. When the clerk totaled them, Kate found herself short by several pennies, but her father agreed to “lend” her the difference, and the clerk gave her a satchel—no charge—to carry her possessions in exchange for her promise to provide him with a copy of the novel when it was published, which promise she readily gave.
As she sat at the table at the Golden Calf the first day, with Jimmy Donovan confused as to what the girl was doing there, she had the paper and pencils and sharpener arranged as she thought best. She, of course, had no second stack of papers since she had, of course, yet to write a word of her novel. But there was room enough for that stack as it grew and grew, as she expected it would.
If you enjoyed this piece, please follow Joseph P. Garland on Twitter @JPGarlandAuthor.