MURPHY’S HAT.

By Tom Kroejer

For almost five years I lived in the South West of Ireland, Kerry County, Ballingskelligs, where the waters of the Ballingskelligs Bay lit up the mind so that the population always had a smile on their faces – also while they spoke which made them almost unintelligible for a new arrival like myself; no lip-reading there.

They probably also owe their smiles to the good Irish beer Guinness and, of course, to a sense of humour which is a vital necessity in a climate that is usually rainy, stormy or wraps everyone in a big cloud for a week or two. So from their upturned mouths came soft, singing English, as if they were playing invisible clarinets.

Danish graphic artists usually travel south, I rode west, and the people of Ballingskelligs were astonished at this new arrival to an island from which many were still emigrating. So one of the first evenings that I am in Mains Pub, and is just deciding that this is one of the most beautiful bar views I have ever seen – behind the pool table are large windows and a glass door facing the back yard which ends abruptly by the slope down to the sea whose currents form bands in shades of blue, and then the eye follows the blue, green and violet silhouettes of the mountains on the other side of the bay - one of the guests in the pub, a man with thin, white hair and long, gnarled fingers comes over and starts questioning me, in the manner in which the Irish excel – that is a friendly and whole-hearted loquacity which results in the fact that by the time the Pub closes they know everything about you without having disclosed the smallest thing about themselves. But the cut just behind the third joint of the right index finger reveals that he is house painter, when there is work to be had, and as I have the same education we get into conversation easily; if indeed a drunken and singing quivering of the lips and my two-syllabic English, taught to me by Johnny Wayne from westerns on TV may indeed be called conversation. He looks at me sadly, shakes his white hair and asks me what on earth makes me move to Ballingskelligs?

-“It’s because it’s so beautiful here” I answer and make a gesture including the bay and the mountains.

-“Be that as it may, we can not eat the beauty, so what of it, what do you want here?”

-“I can”, I reply, as if I am one of those people who takes bites of the moon.

-“What is that you can do?” he asks.

-“Eat some of the beautiful. First I paint it, then I sell the paintings, and then I buy food.”

In order to underline the fact that artists not only eat, but also drink the beautiful and in an inexcusable fit of sentimentality I order a pint of Guinness for everyone in the bar: for the painter, for my namesake Tom who comes to the Pub every day in a bulldozer on caterpillar treads, for Murphy, the guy in the big cowboy hat, for Max whose wife is expecting their eighth child and who is the most abstemious person in the Pub because he has to go home every day at five o’clock to milk the cow, and for Joshy.

That was a never recurring mistake, for the Irish is a proud people who does not accept charity from a newcomer, and they all therefore immediately ordered one for me – six large glasses of black beer suddenly stood in front of me on the counter. They must have laughed their heads off over me – the big, international artist who plays a smart alec and buys everybody beer, and then has to crawl home along the creek.

Joshy who let a house out to me, was not just the developer of the district, maintaining roads, building new houses, but was also auctioneer and had a way with women and he did business in the same high spirits as he flirted.

When Joshy was out to find a house for me to let, we first drove far into the mountains to two remotely located houses and as soon as we had gotten out of his cross-country land rover, an old, hunched up man in a black, creased suit with bristling hair and arms flailing, came out shouting:

-“Don’t sell our land to the English! Don’t sell our land to the English!”

Even though the rent for the second house was cheap, I felt compelled to explain to Joshy that the house I wanted had to be in walking distance from the Pub, as I really liked to drink. The next house he showed me was close to the Pub; it was a little better than the first one, but very low-ceilinged.

We then saw a newer house, which turns out to be one of the three that Joshy owns. Afterwards I gathered that he had only shown me the other two houses to sell me his own; he had nothing whatsoever to do with the other two.

It was the quintessence of a house – a door in the middle, some windows, a roof and a chimney; just like the houses in Duckburg, and I lived in Daisy Duck’s house. But I resigned myself to the fact that it was only everybody else who saw the house from the outside, I went around it and looked out over Ballingskelligs Bay. That this was visible outside too is beside the point. The view was so breathtakingly beautiful that one gets the feeling of being the only person seeing it, the clouds, the mountains, and the ever changing light so that everything changed colours as often as always.

One of my neighbours was the author Michael Kerby and we often met on the little dirt road that runs up the mountain, past my house. Michael was an old man and his doctor had advised him to take a walk up the mountain every day, and I was often on my way down to the Pub.

Michael knew the weather forecast by watching the sky over the sea, and as a true author he knew the names of every being, plant, bush or flower. So if time had been a wind, it would always be dead calm when I met Michael, regardless of how the weather was.

One day, as we are talking, the topic of memory comes up and I ask Michael if he remembers the day he was married, Michael and his sweet little red-haired wife?

-“Oh, our wedding day” Michael replies “I remember it very clearly, indeed, as it was yesterday, it was a very unusual day, not only because it was our wedding day, let me tell you what happened! – Mary and I are talking to the vicar in his office just before the marriage ceremony and he passes me the ring of gold and says:

-“Michael, here is the gold ring, take good care of it; you will need it in a moment”. Then I sit and look at my future wife and the gold ring between my thumb and index finger and suddenly the atmosphere so seizes me, the agitation of seeing into the promised land of love itself in the shape of my beloved through the whole of the 24-carat gold ring that I become so over-excited that the fingers squeeze the ring so spasmodically that it suddenly slips and gravity flings it in a curve towards the linoleum floor of the vicar’s office. Disbelievingly we all see the ring roll across the floor and under a huge short-legged bureau made of oak wood. The vicar, who is very eloquent, is the first one to recover his voice.

-“Damn it, Michael, the ring you big fool!” and my little beloved exclaims in a voice that is almost inaudible but tearful:

-“Heavens, what should we do now?” Flabbergasted I look at the vicar, who is trying to pull out the ring, first with an umbrella then with a golf club - but to no avail.

Then he gets up and, as the clergy always do when they are in real difficulties, he turns his eyes to the sky as if to call upon the assistance of god himself and suddenly the curtains which hang on brass curtain rings catch his eye. He darts onto a chair, pulls one down, hands it to me saying:

-“Michael, this will have to do now; besides, all the guests have been at the Pub all morning so they won’t notice anyway.”

I take the ring which clasps three of Mary’s delicate little thick fingers easily. But the vicar was right, no one noticed that it was only a brass curtain ring; and don’t you know - we have lived happily ever after, as there was never any gold between us, see?”

Others have told me the story later. Already the next morning, when Mains Pub opens, Michael gathers the first of thirsty, the morning shift, and stands a round of Guinness. The morning thirsty are very surprised and the beer is drunk in utmost silence because no one has seen Michael in the Pub for the past five years, and they are wondering what kind of a heavenly, successful wedding night might change the behaviour of a man so fundamentally and they drink in silence, looking enviously at him out of the corners of their eyes.

But, alas, everything has a prosaic explanation, because Michael asks them to follow him to Don Gaile to help him move a heavy bureau away from the wall in the vicar’s office. They come along, perhaps mostly out of curiosity, still silent, for the mere fact that the author Michael Kerby makes an appearance at the Pub is more than adequate as subject for conversation for the coming weeks. So nobody asks why Michael is moving the vicar’s bureau. Michael is not too keen either, to tell anybody that his dowry was a brass curtain ring; he has more than enough imagination to envision what that would result in: he would become that nucleus around which all enjoyment would revolve and that he himself would be the worst one to fabricate laughable stories about himself, just because all the others were doing it. The bull’s brass ring was on the groom’s dick, etc. And that was all because of the confounded ring that he had saved up to buy, by not drinking with them for the past five years.

When they enter the vicar’s office they are immediately offered a large whiskey, the vicar is not to keen either, to recount the story about the false ring, and when the whiskey has been drunk and they have stood around for a little while with the empty glasses in their hands and looking at the heavy oak bureau, emptied of its contents of bed linen, the whole situation becomes almost sanctified. Everybody is having the same thought: Will whiskey be poured again at ten o’clock this morning in the vicar’s office, owing to Michael’s moving of a bureau?

But the miracle happens again, as it says in the Bible: ‘the believers shall find bliss’. The vicar pours the whiskey, it will all soon be revealed anyway when the bureau is moved, and the ceremony is repeated until the bottle is empty. They put down their glasses and lifts the bureau from the wall and everybody is staring at a mouse-hole in the panel and while the vicar turns his eyes to the sky once more, now quietly thanking god, Michael rapidly tears the front page of Irish Times, crumples it up and crams it into the mouse-hole and tells them to put the bureau back. And Michael and the vicar thank them heartily.

On their way back they discuss the incident intensely, why Michael has taken the job as mouse-hole sealer in the vicar’s office upon himself; even though it is understandable that the vicar does not want the mouse to meddle in his religious doings, no one is able to explain why the hole has not been sealed from the other side of wall – where the Sullivans live, since they do not have an expensive, heavy oak chest-of-drawers to move and the painter points out cunningly:

-“The vicar’s whiskey took a load off my shoulders – maybe they should have used that instead of newspaper.”

Left behind in the office, Michael and the vicar debate whether they should go and ask the Sullivans if they happened to have seen a gold ring come rolling over the floor yesterday afternoon, around church time. They quickly agree, however, that it would be a waste of time as the Sullivans occupy the poorhouse of the church with twelve children.

Now Michael often walks up to Don Gaile past the Sullivans to see if any change should have occurred – if the children have had new clothes or if they have gotten a TV-antenna - and as he is standing there, looking over the hedge, the front door suddenly opens and out comes the cat with a mouse in its mouth and around the mouse’s neck is a the golden ring; it flashes in the sunlight and blinds him with a reflection of gold. But his “here kitty, kitty, kitty” has no effect on the cat trying to find a place to eat in peace and quit. Then he starts chasing it towards the Mains Pub.

The door to the Mains Pub is open and the cat slips inside, but inside by the fireplace William’s dog is lying and it gives tongue very loudly making the cat flee to the back of the room and jump onto the pool table in the middle of a game. One of the shepherds playing is so annoyed with a cat in the middle of their game that he swings the cue over the cat making it let go of the mouse which slips into a hole and slides down in front of the glass window in the pool table where it crouches by ball number five. It all happens which such speed that nobody sees the mouse. They continue their game and now Michael comes rushing into the Pub, for the second time that week.

After having nosed about in the Pub for a while looking for the mouse, he suddenly catches sight of it between pool ball two and five and he decides to put two coins on the pool counter, which is the manner in which to reserve the next game. But the two shepherds politely draw his attention to the fact that two coins are already placed there so he has to control his impatience.

When they reach the final shot, in pool consisting of the white ball hitting the black one which rolls down a pre-destined hole, he fumbles and the shot is too hard sending the ball flying from the pool table. As he replaces the ball on the table he seizes the chance to dip it in his whiskey to make it more difficult for his opponent who is smoking a cigarette, bending over the table. Just as he makes the shot an ember from his cigarette falls on the ball which is set on fire and a flame runs across the green pool table, hits the black ball which goes directly into the predetermined hole. Every person in the Pub turns around and looks at each other, no one has ever seen such a flaming master shot.

Now the balls are going to be replaced on the table and one of the shepherds gets down to his knees and places two coins in the little chute, and as he does so he catches sight of a mouse sitting between ball five and two and he exclaims loudly:

-“I’ll be damned; there’s a mouse between ball five and two!”

The other one looks at him and shakes his head.

-“Maybe you had better stop drinking now, Billy, you sound delirious”, and as he says ‘delirious’, placing the balls on the table, the mouse bites his finger and he swings his hand with the mouse wildly and cries:

-“Damn! It was a bloody mouse!”

The mouse lets go of his hand and while it floats through the smoky air of the Pub, I will have to freeze the picture and tell you about Murphy who is sitting next to the big fireplace with a pint of Guinness and a whiskey.

His right hand, holding the beer, is gloved and I have always assumed that he wore the black glove to prevent Murphy from getting frost-bitten hands from all the ice cold pints until I heard the story:

He had promised his mother on her deathbed never to touch alcohol again!

When the mother died Murphy inherited two farms and he was currently drinking up number two. Murphy drank and read imaginative literature and told stories at the Pub and he was the only Irishman I ever met who had read the Danish author Pontoppidan. And every afternoon he sat at in the same spot next to the fireplace with his big cowboy hat beside him.

One afternoon, when a local rock band was playing Bob Dylan, Murphy sat in the middle of the band and behaved as nothing had happened with his pint and his whiskey, because the only spot where there was space enough to place the band was in front of the fireplace, around Murphy’s regular table.

Of course the mouse with the golden ring ends up in Murphy’s hat where it slips up the sweatband and it all happens so quickly that nobody knows where it went. And that was a real stroke of luck; otherwise a sport called ‘mouse-tossing in hat’ would probably have been invented immediately.

As it is, Murphy feels the whiskey and several pints starting to mix with the natural fatigue that overwhelms those who do absolutely nothing around noon. He drinks up, takes his hat and walks towards the exit in order to spend the next couple of hours in the sweet arms of a nap, just as usual. On the way out his mind tosses up for a last pint in the bar – one for the road – and the two sides of the coin have probably been blanked over time.

Michael is at the bar, having a whiskey on the house, a gesture on the part of William, the owner of the Pub and bartender because the author frequents the Pub for the second time in a week – after five years. William hopes that the whiskey will help him get the underlying reason as to why Michael apparently has forgotten their discussion five years ago completely and he wonders whether marriage may cause spontaneous amnesia. He is a bachelor himself.

But Michael has not forgotten anything. He clearly remembers Williams impertinent remarks when he was discussing the reasonable in the Pub’s giving the farmers credit for years – until their only means of paying was to pay with a piece of land – the reason why Mains Pub had become one of the big landowners of the district. William had called Michael an amateur scribbler who knew nothing about real life – especially business life.

Michael still hopes to catch the mouse and the precious gold ring and of course he has not mentioned the reason to his visit, as he does not want the others to go mouse hunting too. William has indeed been wondering, not only at the reason for his visit but also at Michaels nervously wandering eyes which constantly keep all the corners of the Pub under observation like fish eyes, but William thinks that it is probably a occupational damage, plain author paranoia of missing something by accident which then would be forever lost to world literature.

Disapproving, therefore, William sees Murphy turn around and sit down on the bar stool next to Michael, place his hat on the counter and order another pint of beer. Murphy is running up his bills for the second year in a row. William starts to carefully pour the pint, quietly hoping that Michael will have left when Murphy is to not pay. Michael, Murphy and the other guests silently contemplate the unrivalled solicitude of Williams pouring of Murphy’s pint. When it is done at long last, and resembling fully the pint depicted on the Pub’s diploma for well-served Guinness, and just as William is sitting it on the counter next to Murphy’s hat, the hat jerks 20 centimetres to the left – and William gives such a start that the half of his masterpiece splashes out of the glass.

William gapes at the hat, which has started to move along the counter very slowly, puts the glass back under the tap and says:

-“Murphy, your hat is about to leave you!”

Without even looking at the hat Murphy replies:

-“Oh well, then it surely returns soon.”

No event, conceivable or inconceivable, has ever made Murphy lose his composure, and true enough, when he finally looks up, the hat is back and while he is wondering at the fact that everybody is suddenly gaping at his hat, the mouse again slips under the sweat band. Murphy puts his hat on his bald pate, which is the original reason for always wearing a hat, a big American hat with an upturned brim. He is terribly annoyed by his hat having everybody’s attention, because it really takes a man to wear such a hat – especially in the very windy southwest of Ireland. He has often had to suffer the indignity of collecting his hat from the counter of the bar on Saturday mornings because it had been blown right of his head by the wind on the previous evening, as he was making his way home, gloriously drunk. Someone will always find his hat and bring it to the bar where it then lies as silent evidence: - Yesterday, Murphy was pissed again! But the worst thing is that the hat often winds up in the creek where the water will shrink it, and then he has to go home, balancing it on the top of his head, and then write another letter to his brother in Texas, begging him to send a new one - and it is not easy to keep making up stories why the last one has perished too. One was eaten by a bull, the next one simply put out to sea – and the farm has burned down on several occasions.

Michael, who have quietly added mouse to hat and summed up a gold ring, now politely asks Murphy if he may try on his smart cowboy hat, please.

Murphy pretends to have heard nothing, and Michael tries again:

-“Let me see your smart hat, Murphy”.

-“Why?”

Michael realizes that he cannot explain it, it would only sound as a bar joke, and just says:

-“I would just like to see it, that’s all”.

Murphy shakes his hat sadly, that is the worst nonsense he has experienced in quite a while. But at the same time the other guests start interfering.

-“Let Michael see your hat”

-“He can bloody well look at it where it is – for heavens sake”.

Murphy’s pint is ready and he takes it with both hands and is about to gulp some down when the painter catches at the hat but accidentally flails the air with his long crooked fingers as Murphy, quick as lightning, draws his head back, but at the same time the new pint splashes down Michael’s waistcoat in a black cascade. Murphy puts the glass on the counter, and the knuckles of his hands are as white as the painter’s face!

-“What the devil are you up to, can’t you leave a man’s hat alone?”

And Murphy is just about to land a fist on the painter’s forehead when he starts perspiring profusely, a strange, malodorous, yellow type of perspiration which trickles down the cheeks so he has to wipe away the perspiration with his handkerchief.

Everyone in the bar realizes that the situation is deteriorating into a fight, something that is really very rare. The last fight occurred several years ago when one of the two peacocks belonging to the Pub had pecked at William’s mother’s nose till it bled, whereupon the audience had divided into two teams: one that was determined to put down the bird at once, and one that believed that it was not proper to wring the neck of a peacock just because of a bleeding nose.

It was obvious to everybody that this day was of the wholly unlikely kind, one on which just anything could happen; the vicar had offered them a whole bottle of whiskey because of a mouse hole; a cat had run into the Pub, though any normal cat would know that Hubert was always lying in front of the fireplace, just inside the door, but as if that was not enough, it had barged into a game of pool; Michael, the author, had shown up at the Pub the day after his wedding to have whiskey and Murphy’s legendary hat had moved back and forth on the counter, as a nut in a fruitcake it had danced the polka, so one would think it was haunted by a ball lightning.

William, who was once a Baptist priest in the USA where he had acquired a thorough knowledge of the supernatural, namely that it did not exist, says diplomatically:

-“But dearest Murphy, they only want to see the cord drive you have installed in your cowboy hat, show them the trick, alright, and then there is whiskey for everybody on the house”.

The latter remark was thoughtless, stupid even, because now everybody wanted to see Murphy’s hat trick and have the free whiskey so everybody tries to get hold of the hat, and Michael in front as the big mouse hunt suddenly becomes inevitable in his mind’s eye.

Thus, Michael is the first to go down, brought down by a blow to the forehead – then the painter, where after the rest of the guests hurriedly make off to the parking lot to a respectful distance from the entrance to the Pub, where Murphy stops for a moment wondering at the decline of morals, this obvious contempt for a man and his hat, before he sets out for home.

I cannot remember whether Murphy has been described as a bit of an eccentric earlier in this story, but ever since his death of his mother he has been a bit odd, a hermit, not counting the 25 cats who co-inhabited his home.

When he is finally home, ready for his belated nap and has placed the hat on the cupboard in the entrance hall, all of the 25 cats are standing around the cupboard, meowing affectedly, as if the cats, like the people at the Pub, have contracted a case of hat craziness. Murphy looks at the cats and at the hat, then he takes the hat to investigate it more closely and suddenly he sees the head of a mouse with a thick gold ring around its neck peep out from under the sweat band, and quick as a salmon he replaces the hat on his head, imagining, just as quickly, the mouse escaping him and being eaten all up, including the gold. Now some good advice is worth gold. He cannot go to sleep with his hat on. And the vision of the gold ring renders him thirstier than sleepy so he decides to go back to the Pub and reconsider the situation with a pint of Guinness within his reach. All the cats are ravenous and follow him.

Murphy is a man who never had any intention of deciding anything whatsoever. He never invited the cats to live in his home; they just sort of moved in and reproduced. And when they know seem to want to go to the Pub too, well he does not care, so when Murphy plodded into the bar with an army of cats the dog receives the shock of its life. Crestfallen it steals away, abandoning having anything against cats when there are so many of them; instead it chases the two peacocks up onto the roof.

William, who has just served the painter and Michael, says as if in a sleep:

-“Well, Murphy, I see you have brought your pets” to which Murphy replies:

-“Yes, give them a pint to share, and one for me”

When a pint is clearing up on the counter, the same thing usually happens to the person who ordered it. The unusual slowly settles in the subconsciousness and Murphy arrives at the conclusion that he is in a situation with a number of favourable opportunities, with a mouse and a gold ring under his hat. Maybe the gold will simply pay his bill, but, he thinks, maybe there is more to it than all that. He asks William to make up his account.

-“What for?” William asks and looks apologetically at Michael who pretends not to see it.

-“I just want to know what I owe you, is that illegal?”

-“No, no, of course not”. William takes the book and says:

-“Murphy, you owe me 585 good Irish pounds – in all.”

Everybody in the bar know follows the situation closely, they believe they are about to witness a trade of land.

-“Can I pay with gold?”

-“Of course” William says “you can pay me in gold, diamonds, rubies, emeralds, platinum, silver or money, if you have any.”

Michael gives a start, but before he can finish his line of thought of how he should approach the matter, Murphy says, glancing around:

-“If anybody can guess what is under my hat, I will stand you all a drink”

Everybody looks at the hat, but are silent for a while, taught by experience. Then William says:

-“A cord drive, as I’ve said already”.

Murphy slowly shakes his hat,

-“there is no cord”.

Since the ice is now broken the painter gives it a try:

-“A potato?”

-“No”.

-“A loose screw?”

-“A bald pate?”

-“No”.

At that Joshy objects:

-“But you’re bald as a coot, man, that is why you wear that cowboy hat, so if it isn’t your oaf you are talking about, then…”,

Now Michael interrupts:

-“Murphy, under your hat is a mouse with a gold ring around its neck.”

During the entire conversation the mouse has been gnawing at the sweat band and as Murphy exclaims:

-“How can you possibly know, Michael?” it finishes a hole, pops out its head and looks around. But now it is stuck as the ears act as barbs, and the ring prevents it from crawling all the way out.

Murphy sees the head of the mouse in the mirror behind the whiskey bottles and says to himself that it could be nice to keep it there, in a sort of permanent way.

William starts to pour six pints and Michael is frenziedly worrying about how to explain that the mouse is his, or at least that the gold is, when the dog comes waddling back after having watched the peacocks on the roof of the Pub for a while. The dog must have forgotten all about the 25 cats because it goes completely bonkers, darting madly about biting the cats who flee to any high place: the counter, people’s shoulders, and in the turmoil the hat falls down to Michaels feet where a large tomcat immediately takes off the mouse’s head, Michael quickly snatches the bloody gold ring and puts it into his bootleg.

William cries to Murphy that he will have to vanish and take his damn cats with him; that is not necessary though, they are all gone and Murphy picks up his hat, looks inside it and then shouts:

-“Where’s the ring?” while he says to himself that it might be all in his imagination, the business with the ring.

-“What ring?” Michael asks.

-“Didn’t you see a gold ring?”

-“No – a ring – not at all”.

Murphy considers this, oh, well, then the whole thing was just a case of wishful thinking, but then he says:

-“Michael, your guess was wrong, there was no ring”.

-“Well, in that case I suppose I’m standing the round”.