The Best Travel Writing 2011 - James O'Reilly [67]
“Those two fellas aren’t the full deal.” She tapped her temple with her left index finger. “If I was to be kind to them, I’d say they’ve haven’t been right since their parents died and that was over twenty years ago. If that Declan fella and his crazy brother had gone to a match maker as I suggested to them years ago, two good women would’ve sorted them out and they wouldn’t be having drunken fisticuffs in bars and be staggering out the road from Killybegs plastered in the dead of night. I don’t know how many times they’ve missed being run over, not to mention the numbers of times they’ve both fallen off that wee bridge over the river near their place. There’s hardly a trout in that river that doesn’t know what they look like.”
I refrained from laughing, because neither she nor her husband thought what she said funny. I was nevertheless intrigued by her reference to match making. I had once listened to a radio program about the role of match makers in remote parts of Ireland. Traditionally, children worked on the family farm until their parents died, by which time they were in their fifties or sixties and had a house and land and no one to share it with. It was an acute social problem and, in many instances, middle-aged men and women lacked the social skills to form relationships. Often, they turned for help to men known as match makers. The late Irish playwright, John B. Keane, a renowned matchmaker in the West of Ireland, claimed he had made hundreds of matches. If a woman in her sixties sought his help finding a partner, he asked her three basic questions. If she answered all three positively, his task of finding her a mate was made easier. First, he would ask if she was happy to marry a man “with a baldy head.” Then, he would inquire if she would be content with a man with no “bars in his grate”—teeth. Last, and what he deemed the critical question, was whether she could marry a man who would not consummate their marriage. Many men were not interested in sex and just wanted companionship and a woman to cook and clean like their mothers and sisters had done.
“If a woman answers yes to my third question I have no problem finding her a match,” John B. Keane would say.
The apparition on the road more than matchmaking was on my mind as I poured Patrick Dempsey a second cup of tea and thanked him for the turf. I was still reluctant to tell him about the apparition so I asked him if he knew who left the fish and eggs outside the cottage. He glanced out the window and smiled.
“Those were probably from Jimmy the Natural. I should’ve told you about him,” he said, staring at me over the rim of his cup. “Sure it slipped my mind, didn’t it? But you’ve no need to worry. The Natural means you no harm. If anything, I’d say he’s taken a liking to you. He can be a wee bit like a child, you see, and he doesn’t look at the world the way others do.”
He removed a pipe and a worn leather tobacco pouch from his trouser pocket. While I waited anxiously, he methodically filled the pipe with tobacco and, using his right thumb firmly pushed the tobacco down into it until it was flattened beneath the rim. Then he held a lit match over it until it nearly burned down to his fingers. With a smile of satisfaction, he gripped the pipe between uneven teeth stained by years of stale tobacco smoke and inhaled until the tobacco glowed like a tiny volcano. Slowly removing the pipe from his mouth, he exhaled with a contented sigh.
“You mustn’t worry yourself about the Natural,” he added, casually placing the pipe in his mouth and pressing his teeth against its stem like it was a well-used prop. For the next ten minutes, he talked non-stop about The Natural, pausing at times to re-light the pipe until he tired of it and put it aside.
He explained that Jimmy the Natural was in his forties and lived with his elderly