The Misremembered Man Read Free Page A

with the remains of his master’s lunch: a chicken leg, a charred sausage and a length of bacon rind.
    Suddenly, the dog barked on hearing a familiar sound. Jamie roused himself; a motorcar was struggling up the far side of the hill beyond the house.
    Through the window he saw a welcome sight; the buffcolored Morris Minor was nosing into view. He heard the throaty rasp of an errant gearshift, as the vehicle sputtered and rocked down the incline. Presently it shuddered to a halt by the front gate. Jamie shifted in his chair, and prepared to greet his friend and neighbor Paddy McFadden.
    Paddy’s arrival was accompanied by a series of squeaks and rattles that Jamie had come to know well. First the horn was sounded in warning, then the car door creaked open on its rusted hinges. A short silence ensued while Paddy heaved his arthritic hips from the seat, banged the door shut and secured it to the trunk handle with a length of baler twine. Finally, a few crunches across the graveled yard and there he was in the doorway.
    “Fine class of a day a say, Jamie.”
    Paddy hovered on the threshold before removing his cap. He was a mild-mannered little man, badly put together—legs too short, arms too long, ears too big, as if he were being pulled in both directions by phantom bullies. He smoked fifteen cigarettes a day and drank his whiskey neat. He went through life not wondering much about anything, but he knew for sure that God had a beard and the devil had horns, and that his guardian angel had been flapping alongside him from the day he was born.
    “Not a bad one atall, Paddy,” Jamie said. “Sit yourself down there.”
    “Rose sent a couple a them pancakes.” He placed a brown paper bag on the table and made his way to the other armchair, taking a few short steps.
    “Aye so. Keeping all right, is she?”
    “Oh, the best, Jamie, the best.”
    Paddy hung his cap on the armrest and gazed about him, taking in the slack-strewn floor and dust-furred furniture: incontrovertible evidence of his friend’s failure as a housekeeper. He wondered how Jamie could live in such squalor and shuddered at the thought of what Rose might say if she saw it. His wife’s life seemed to revolve around a rigorous routine of cleaning and tending. Paddy was of the opinion that their twenty-three-year marriage had survived for the most part because early on he’d acquiesced to Rose’s desire for order and tidiness.
    When he looked at Jamie’s home, he thought that if his friend were to find himself a wife, she would need to be a woman who was very fond of housework. He was not to know, however, that there was a very good reason for Jamie’s fondness for disorder. It represented an unspoken rebellion against the enforced cleaning rituals of his childhood. Jamie would never discuss that period of his life with anyone. Not even with his closest friend.
    “She worries about you, so she does.”
    Paddy seemed uneasy. Jamie wondered what was wrong. “Who?” he asked confused. Both men, not having perfected the art of conversation, were apt to leave long silences between comments and queries so that they often forgot what they’d been talking about.
    “ Rose is worried about you, Jamie.” Paddy scratched his eyebrow and studied the roaring fire. “Aye, Rose is worried about you, so she is.”
    Jamie did not know how to respond. “Aye, I s’ppose…” He trailed off.
    Since his uncle’s death, the McFaddens, being good neighbors and friends, had become increasingly concerned about Jamie. There was a woeful silence which he waited for Paddy to break.
    “Y’know, Jamie, she said to give you…she said to give you…” He looked about him, confused. “To give you…Begod, now what was it she said to give you?”
    “To give me a call?”
    “Naw, it wasn’t that.”
    “To give me the pancakes?”
    “No, it wasn’t that either—well she did tell me to give you the pancakes—but there was something else she told me to tell you after she