Friday Follow-up

Weekend reading by the light of the Wolf Moon

Hello again! To begin with today here’s a wonderful photo of the Wolf Moon as it appeared on the South East coast of Ireland. The picture was taken by a dedicated reader of What’s the Story?

Wolf Moon, Rosslare Strand, 24 January 2024

And because I mentioned La Fontaine’s fable of the wolf who disguised himself as a shepherd on Tuesday I thought you might enjoy American poet, Marianne Moore’s (1887-1972) version of the fable. She translated all of the fables, at the suggestion of W. H. Auden, whose poem, ‘Law Like Love’, featured here two weeks ago.

THE WOLF PLAYS SHEPHERD 

A wolf who had not got his share, it would appear. 

Of sheep pastured near his wood. 

Said to himself, “I’ll play the fox and make guile my care.” 

Assuming a novel attitude. 

Putting on a shepherd’s smock, he then took a cane 
Or crook, to make the inference plain, 

And shepherd’s pipes to aid the ruse. 

Glad of any touch that might appear of use, 

He was all but tempted to print upon his headgear, 

“This is Giles, the shepherd, whose sheep are grazing near.” 

Demureness concealing his wolfish look. 

Apart from furred paws crossed on his shepherd’s crook. 
Hairy Hypocrisy crept up in his false gown. 

Good Giles, the real Giles, lying prone as if sunstruck 

Was lost in a dream on the down. 

His dog muter than the Pan pipes he kept with his flock. 
And the sheep fast asleep — or say nearly every one. 

Hypocrite of course took care 
To lead sheep into his snare imperceptibly 
And thought that his voice ought to lend his garb verity — 
Essential to his pseudo-character. 

But he miscalculated there. 

He could not counterfeit a shepherd’s gentle voice; 

His kind words, which filled the woods with a raucous noise. 
Served to involve him in despair. 

All woke as if he had fired a gun — 

Sheep, dog, shepherd, everyone. 

The poor wolf was in a fine plight. 

Impeded by his shepherd’s gown. 

Neither able to run away nor fight. 

A counterfeit’s sure to be exposed to the light. 

A wolf is a wolf in every pulse; 

No use pretending something else. 

---

As I mentioned a few newsletters back, I will begin posting an unpublished novel here. It’s written as a sequence of letters which, I hope, lends itself to the serial form.

This is the opening letter of FAMILY LINES:

LUCY

I

20 May 1980

Dear Deb

Since the day you left they’ve been telling me to write. Get it off my chest, big as that is. Everyone has a theory these days. I’m half afraid to go out for fear I’ll be hit with a new one. It was your age. The Leaving (Ha! That’s a laugh. I want to say you left . . . that was the real leaving). The prize. Even the weather. “Sure the rain in this place would drive anyone around the twist.” (Wha? Who says that’s where you went?)

  You can imagine the rumours and the gossip. You could have done us the favour of leaving a note. A line. A word. Not just a big black hole. If asked I say you joined the circus. You should see the look on their faces. They think I’m the clown that should have skipped.

  When they said write I looked at the old diaries Aunt Marge gave us for Christmas, regular as Christmas itself. Remember the way she said, “Every young lady should keep a diary”, as though we were in a Jane Austen book? You believed her and away you went, filling in those diaries every night, locking them with the tiny golden key you kept pinned to your bra. Like the key to your heart in Ma’s soppy old song.

 Mine were – are – mostly blank. But you know that. You wanted me to fill in mine so that we could swap them at the end of a week or a month. No way was I doing that, Sis. I might as well tell you now that I did look at yours sometimes. A pin was all it took to wiggle open the catch. You needn’t have bothered carrying the golden key around with you. And the mirror writing. Well that wasn’t hard to figure out either. Making a mystery where there was none. The mystery now is that you took some of the recent diaries with you. Didn’t you? Or did you destroy them? I’ll probably never know.

  I found all my empty diaries where I had left them in a box under the bed. Not sure why I kept them. But I’m not going to use them now. This way: writing letters that I’ll never send, helps to fool me into believing you still exist.

  Marge gave you a piece of a page from one of her own diaries for your collage and we squinnied up under the light to try to decipher it. She was too smart for us. Hieroglyphics of her own invention. I tore a page out of a copybook. No secrets there, only 4 out of 10 because Mrs. Cullen liked Wordsworth and I didn’t. Told me I had no soul. So what?

**********

There I was standing by your bed again last night watching the covers rise and fall. You had no call to be crying. You were the Best Young Artist in Leinster. That was worth five hundred quid. And a new easel and paint box (“a bit Sunday painterish” you said). Your family tree was miles better than the rest with their boring portraits of their boring families, including the budgie, or the diagrams that looked like a biology lesson. I liked the way you put bits of all of us in there: Dad’s colour sample, Ma’s play script, Nana’s bridge score card, Aunt Betty’s postcard of the Berlin wall and one of Grandpa’s Indian leaves, and a big fat ‘?’ for Granny and Granda Kane, for me a piece of newspaper because I said I wanted to be a journalist when I leave school (I might be revising that plan now after the number of them that’s come knocking on the door since you left) and for yourself, a piece of the first dress Ma made you. That upset Ma, you know. Afterwards. She began to read all sorts of things into it. Well, one thing really, a big round B for baby.

  Last night I climbed into the bed and clasped my arms around you. To stop you falling apart. Would it have made any difference if I’d done that six weeks ago? That night I was helpless.

  “Deb, Deb,” I whispered. “Are you sick? Will I get Ma?”

  Your head shook side to side on the pillow.

  Stupid me. Ma was the problem, wasn’t she? The prize didn’t change anything. Oh sure she enjoyed the fifteen seconds of fame – smiling like the Queen Mother and accepting the congrats as if she was the winner – but that didn’t make you an artist. You were going to be a teacher, according to her book. And Da kept his trap shut as usual. I was afraid to touch you. I switched on the bedside light but it didn’t make any difference so I switched it off again. I got back into bed, lit a fag and sat blowing smoke rings in the dark. Maybe it the naggin of vodka we’d swigged in the loo at the prizegiving party that had made you weepy.

Ma and Da didn’t understand your picture. They were hoping for a nice holy family to hang over the mantelpiece, all of us grinning like monkeys. They weren’t likely to hang the collage, and they haven’t. Instead, now your portrait haunts every newsagent and post office noticeboard, and every Garda station from here to Ballyremote.

  We wake up every morning with a list of questions in our heads. Have you run away? Eloped? Joined the Moonies? Are you pregnant? Have you been kidnapped, raped, murdered? And by evening we’re worn out with wondering but no wiser. These nights when the sobbing interrupts my sleep I imagine you’re communicating with me from wherever you are but when I wake up it’s my own eyes are crying.

**********

Three fags later you had stopped crying and fallen asleep. It was the deathliest hour between night and day. The one when people die in their sleep. No sun, no moon, only silence and stillness. I slid out of bed to check that you were breathing. As I leant close a waft of heat rose from your body. You were tilted away from me and the covers had slipped from your shoulder. Lightly as I could I bent over and brushed your skin with my lips where I guessed your tattoo to be. You had asked for a special butterfly, blue and green, not just a black outline. Ma had some conniption that day! She said it was vulgar and cheap and that you’d regret it, mark her words. Do you regret it now?

 I bit that arm once and the mark stayed for weeks, mainly because you kept picking at it to keep the scab going and make me feel guilty. But you had earned it – forcing me to grope in a drain for the shopping money that you had dropped. You knew that Ma would take your side against me. I catch her looking at me sometimes these days, and I know she thinks I know more than I’m letting on. I don’t know how to convince her I don’t know any more than she knows. If you know what I mean. Or care. When I’m more than five minutes late in from school she’s practically on the phone to the gardaí. Then she reads me the riot act. We’re all paranoid now. Thanks to you.

 There are days now that I think I hate you for putting all this stress on us. On me. I’m sick of people asking me about you or pointing me out as “the one whose sister ran away” and then making up their own stories about you and me and the rest of us. What’s nearly worse is the teachers being all nice and sweet to me. I’m not sure how to handle that. I can just hear the staff room gossip about us. Ma and her theatricals, Da and his failed business, me and my big arse and bigger mouth. Did you hate us all that much?

**********

The next morning your face was all lumpy and blotchy from crying. My tongue was hanging down to my knees after all the fags.

 “What’s up?” I asked you when you doused your face with freezing water.

  “Nothing,” you gurgled. After you had surfaced and were patting your cheeks dry your nose wrinkled and you said, “This place smells like a fucking ashtray.”

  “You’d better wash your mouth out after that bad word,” I laughed, relieved that you sounded normal. “I couldn’t sleep.” I showed you the ashtray.

  “Jasus, you’ll burn us all in our beds.”

  You opened the window wide letting April fly in from Siberia to plunge a knife in my lungs. I coughed like an old fella. Your eyes rolled to the ceiling. Miss holier than thou. My arse.

  “So what’re you going to do with the prizemoney?”

  “Not lend any of it to you, for a start.”

  “Sorry for asking,” I raised my hands in surrender.

  But you had left the room.

------------------------

Let me know what you think of this and whether you would like to read more about Lucy and Deb.