If I don’t flush I run the risk of the Old Man dragging me by the scruff of the neck to face the old brown trout and remove it by hand. There’s only one toilet, outside the back door next to the coal shed. Mornings, the Old Man parks his arse in the counting house and reads the Irish Press cover to cover. Sometimes, I watch from the kitchen window for his business to be done, and a fair number of times the shite is almost leaking out of me waiting for him. He likes to linger in the cobwebbed jakes, cursing at the latest political news, and bemoaning those friends he knows in the obituaries.
When he sees me squirm from leg to leg with panic he calls me a baby and tries to block me from the jakes. This game pleases him no end, even when I’m cranberry in the face and my eyes shrunken to pinpricks. Mam smacks him with her apron string and warns him how he’ll give me a complex.
The night I am trapped in the jakes when the coalman dumps a bag of slack in front of the door is when he really gets it from Mam. They’ve been up the village for a drink and I am stuck inside the cobwebbed toilet praying for the light to go on in the kitchen. When I hear the Old Man’s voice he's shouting about some “Slip of a lipsticky bar girl with a lazy eye and an arse like the County Cork.”
My cries go unheard, and it’s only when the door opens from the kitchen and he comes out to get some coal that he hears my thumps. The Old Man heaves the sack from the door and when he sees me shivering in the dark he has a case of sneezing that brings him to his knees. He stands up and takes another look at me, laughs and points to my trousers, and says, “By God, there’s egg on your chin, there.”
My shirttail sticks out of my trousers and he keeps laughing and laughing, so I run inside and up the stairs to bed where for the rest of the night I draw cartoons of him drowning in the North Sea.
James Claffey hails from County Westmeath, Ireland, and lives on an avocado ranch in Carpinteria, CA, with his wife, the writer and artist Maureen Foley, their daughter Maisie, and Australian cattle-dog Rua. His work appears in many places, including The New Orleans Review, Connotation Press, The Drum Literary Magazine, and Gone Lawn.
When he sees me squirm from leg to leg with panic he calls me a baby and tries to block me from the jakes. This game pleases him no end, even when I’m cranberry in the face and my eyes shrunken to pinpricks. Mam smacks him with her apron string and warns him how he’ll give me a complex.
The night I am trapped in the jakes when the coalman dumps a bag of slack in front of the door is when he really gets it from Mam. They’ve been up the village for a drink and I am stuck inside the cobwebbed toilet praying for the light to go on in the kitchen. When I hear the Old Man’s voice he's shouting about some “Slip of a lipsticky bar girl with a lazy eye and an arse like the County Cork.”
My cries go unheard, and it’s only when the door opens from the kitchen and he comes out to get some coal that he hears my thumps. The Old Man heaves the sack from the door and when he sees me shivering in the dark he has a case of sneezing that brings him to his knees. He stands up and takes another look at me, laughs and points to my trousers, and says, “By God, there’s egg on your chin, there.”
My shirttail sticks out of my trousers and he keeps laughing and laughing, so I run inside and up the stairs to bed where for the rest of the night I draw cartoons of him drowning in the North Sea.
James Claffey hails from County Westmeath, Ireland, and lives on an avocado ranch in Carpinteria, CA, with his wife, the writer and artist Maureen Foley, their daughter Maisie, and Australian cattle-dog Rua. His work appears in many places, including The New Orleans Review, Connotation Press, The Drum Literary Magazine, and Gone Lawn.
I always enjoy Mr. Claffey's work.
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