Blow Behind Billy

Blow Behind Billy.

Billy McSweeney enjoyed life again. The first fortnight after the diagnosis he stayed home, and wouldn't pretend now it hadn’t hit him hard. He didn’t care if people believed he had chosen a lifestyle that gave him an ironclad shot at an early jaunt in Grannerty’s hearse.

‘Doesn’t matter what you do or don’t do, it’s all decided the day you are born,’ He always said. ‘Written in indelible ink, sorted and filed, ready for delivery.’ 

He knew about sorting and delivering after forty years as a postman. Six months into retirement and he was missing the repute of being the postman for half the parish. Back then, one o’clock had seen work finished, sitting at the bar of Grannerty’s Public House, Grocer and Undertaker. He listened to the news on the wireless, a box of untipped cigarettes beside the pint. And every day he declined Nora Grannerty’s offer of a bowl of soup and a sandwich.

‘When I’m atein’ I’m atein’, and when I’m drinking, I’m drinking,’ he’d say. He wasn’t into fancy food. When the mother was alive, there was steak only three days a week. She’d vary a bit, with bacon and cabbage or a pork chop. Now he had steak Monday to Friday with a fry in the café at the weekend.

‘It might not be my favourite, but it’s the easiest cooked,’ he told Nora when she asked about the steak.

Everybody said he’d never leave Grannerty’s after he retired. But he still arrived at one o’clock and left at three. And he still came back in at nine and left at eleven, except on Saturday when he visited the ‘Drop Inn Well’ and stayed until they decided to close.

Billy had fought for twenty years with Posts and Telegraphs to get a van with a logo and dump the black all steel bicycle. It was hard to fathom the new postman, cycling around the houses in the wind and rain. 

‘Where’s the van?’ Billy said, the day the new lad cycled up with the appointment letter for the tests in the hospital.

‘The bike keeps me fit,’ he said when Billy further questioned his foolishness. Easy known he had little for doing. 

People told Billy they couldn’t understand the diagnosis that followed and him as hardy as a goat with a lifetime out in the fresh air.  

‘It’s in the family,’ they said between themselves later, ‘didn’t his father get sick and die at fifty-five?’

Billy knew little about the father’s death and cared less. He grew up without him because the auld fella was away working in England. His visits became more infrequent until he stopped coming altogether. It was a cousin home for a holiday that told them of his death. 

‘Something inwardly,’ the cousin said.

‘We’ll all get our turn,’ Billy said, when people sympathised about his new diagnosis.

‘Neither a chick nor a child to bother him,’ they would ruminate, meaning a clucking hen and her brood at home was a surer draw to an early grave. He got on fine with women. He valuated the potential gains from getting himself a tidy little pullet after the mother died. It wouldn’t suit him. Marriage meant rushing home before the final envelope, through the last letter box, hit the floor. Then he’d have spent the evening tending to roses or whitewashing garden walls, only to do it all over again the next year.

He got close with one girl – 1960. When he passed the Posts and Telegraphs test and accepted the call to training as a postman he had to travel to Dublin to attend the course. He took lodgings with a lady in Fairview for the three months he stayed in the city. Each morning and evening, he shared the landlady’s table with Noreen, a girl just starting her career as a telephonist. She was from a rural part of Longford and they were both lonely for home. 

They got friendly over chats and went to the cinema or walked Fairview park together. She didn’t mind when he took the courage to hold her hand, or later when he kissed her. He left it at that. It wouldn’t work; not with the mother, depending on him. They wrote for a while after he returned home. But Billy soon took to whistling his way around the half parish, wearing the shirt Mother ironed under his new well-fitted uniform. He had the price of a pint and a packet of fags with the mother indoors keeping house. 

‘The most powerful man in the parish’ Tommy Joe said, when he referred to the way Billy could walk in the back door and straight up to the bedroom of a housewife, where she would have returned for a rest after the husband went to work. He would sit on the side of the bed and deliver news, whether written or verbal. Even the parish priest, for all his divine power, couldn’t walk in on a woman like that. The husbands didn’t mind.

‘She’s safe enough with Billy,’ they’d say, and dismissed the teasing of neighbours about Billy’s special deliveries. The men, mostly farmers, knew who held the power in the parish. Only too well they realised that a badly needed cheque for an EU headage grant might spend a week at the bottom of Billy’s bag if they said the wrong thing. 

He had enjoyed the week after he retired when everyone shook his hand and bought pints. There was a night with the dames of the Irish Countrywomen’s Association when they treated him to a three course meal in the restaurant. The lads from the farmers’ association had presented him with a framed painting of himself, after pints in Grannerty’s. Then things quietened down and people left him alone. The smoking ban came in and hit him hard. He cursed every time he went out front for a suck; like a schoolboy. 

Worse, Grannerty’s had started proper dinners, and the place was more like a restaurant with little time for the lunchtime drinker anymore. He dismissed the temptation to start drinking in the comfort of his home. 

Then the stomach started. No harm in a bit of heartburn, but when he lost the taste for a pint, it was time for the doctor. Just when he was fed up as an ordinary pensioner, the diagnosis came along. He told no one, but they all knew. All the regulars would drop over to his corner stool for a word. There was a power back in his bones.

‘What will you have, Billy?’ That was the most common greeting.

‘A pint, as usual.’ 

But he had to change to shorts on busy days, like when people drew the pension on Friday. Good advice from Doctor Burke.

‘Have yourself a half-one of whiskey if you feel bloated after a few pints,’ he said. The prescription stood to him when he was under pressure. Doctor Burke had also suggested he should drink a glass of water with the spirits, but he couldn’t start drinking water on its own at his age.

‘Poor auld Billy is just whistling past the graveyard,’ John Holmes said. ‘I sat with Billy in national school and I know he’s a worrier behind it all. Dark horses don’t change their colour.’

People told him stories he’d never heard about himself, and the things he did as a postman. Billy didn’t mind if the stories were long and repeated or they gave him credit for something that never happened. He remembered disappearing a summons for a dog licence when Eddie Hunt had reminded him about the episode. The new young sergeant had complained about getting his mail late and tried to get Post and Telegraphs to change the order of Billy’s round. He was new to the parish and wouldn’t have known that Billy got a cup of tea and a bun from Tony Sally at eleven and a mug of soup from Mary Scully at twelve-fifteen. In return, he would take the letters for posting to their families in England or America and save them a journey to the post office. They would have long faces if he stopped calling.

‘Fair play to you Billy, you brought that upstart of a sergeant down a peg or two. The title had gone to his head. You soon taught him about the balance of power around here.’

 Mattie Moran told him some story about a letter coming six months late with only a name and the post office written on it, and how he had worked out it was Mattie’s mother. It was an old friend from her time in America and she had hugged him in gratitude.

‘Do you remember Billy, before the phones came to the houses?’ Another man started. He told about the ten times his wife was having another baby in the hospital, and how Billy kept him informed of her progress. 

Billy remembered all right. Every morning, while the woman was away, the man stood at his gable waiting for Billy to pass on the road, a half mile below. If there was no phone call, Billy would stop anyway and stand up on the small parapet of Sweeney’s gulley. He waved his arms like an umpire signalling a ball wide at a football match. The man would grit his teeth because it meant he’d have to manage without his housekeeper for another while. When the call finally came to the post office, announcing the new arrival, he would drive up to regale the father with the time of birth, weight, and sex of the child. In later years, he helped him pick a name, seeing as they had already used up half a score. There would be a bottle of whiskey at Christmas from grateful customers.

It was good having the head back laughing at the stories and not having them told after he died when he couldn’t hear anything. 

‘He’s looking down now, laughing at us all,’ they’d say over pints after they buried him. Like hell he would. He’d be no more able to hear them than the butchered lamb hanging next door in McGreal’s meat shop. He had no family left to give him a proper wake in the house. Instead, he would enjoy a living wake, seeing as they knew all about his diagnosis. Nora bought him a new high stool with a back and padded seat. He had paid her for a cheap coffin and two dear barrels of porter for mourners on the big day.  

‘No king on his throne could be half so happy,’ Eddie sang a line from an old folk song. It was all back slapping then with no mention of the soggy Christmas cards he sometimes delivered on wet December days, and how the women would ate him for allowing water into his mail bag. He had no need to shovel painkillers down his gullet since he returned to his corner stool in Grannerty’s.

The foolish inquiries he endured for years had stopped. Nobody asked about notions of giving up the fags or drink. One stranger, a day tripper, thought he could help, as Billy drew everything from his fag at the front door of the pub.

‘Those cigarettes will be the death of you,’ the man said. 

 ‘They have three months to try,’ Billy replied.

 The regulars laughed; proud of their local wit.

‘You’re giving them up so?’ the visitor continued.

‘Yeah, finally giving them up for good,’ and he winked at the other smokers, as they collected one-liners to be told after his burial.

When he went back in, the lads followed and stood around his stool.

‘How are you feeling, anyways?’ Tommy Joe asked.

‘I’m in the county final, four points up, entering the last quarter, the crowd roaring, the wind at me back.’ 

Billy beamed out like a lighthouse, looking forward to the three great months ahead of him