The Train of Small Mercies Read Online Free

mostly useless with the cooking. Instead, he played the role of regal host, making sure everyone’s glasses stayed filled with the bitter ale they served or whiskey, and mostly by telling stories.
    â€œDid I ever tell you about what my brother did to me when I was five years old?” he would say to a table after setting down their plate of soda bread.
    Or: “Did I ever tell you about the time my father’s bull got loose and made it to Dublin?”
    â€œDid I ever tell you about the time Old Man Dyer went and grabbed a hatchet after me?”
    â€œDid I ever tell you about the time I nearly drowned while sitting in a bucket?”
    Some of the stories he told his customers bore some scrap of truth, but he enjoyed the fuller freedoms of making up stories from whole cloth. His wife had long ago grown bored and irritated by his endless stories, and if he and his brother hadn’t opened up a pub so that he could tell them to someone else, she claimed she would have gone mad. But Maeve hung on to every word of every tale—even the ones she had heard countless times, even when the stories deviated dramatically from their last telling. Sometimes, that was for the better. At a young age she understood that when her father winked as he spoke, he had broken any obligation to stick to the facts, and she, too, found this possibility joyous.
    â€œDaddy, did you know that Jack Moan came into school with a balloon where his head was supposed to be?” she said to her father one night as he was putting her to bed.
    â€œYou don’t say,” he said, and even in the darkness she could see his face lighting up.
    â€œIt was a red balloon,” she said, “and since that’s my favorite color, I didn’t tease him the way other children did.”
    â€œThey teased him, did they?”
    â€œYes,” she said. “And one boy tried to pop his head with a pencil, but I took the pencil away and said to leave him be. It was a very red balloon, and I thought it looked nice, and for the rest of the day I had to protect him so nothing would happen to it.”
    â€œOh, that makes me so proud,” he said. “Raised you right, I have—and your mother.”
    Maeve nodded that that was indeed true.
    Soon Maeve and her father found themselves trading stories at every turn, and he was so impressed with her imagination that one night, while attending to a dying fire in the stone fireplace, he said to his wife that their Maeve might have found her calling. “Maybe she’ll go on to write plays, or write stories same as Joyce,” he said. “I don’t see why not, with the mind she has. Why, just the other day she was telling me about—”
    â€œIt’s all just foolishness,” said his wife. “And please for the love of God don’t be telling me that her fantastical stories are the thing that she should set her sights on—that that’s what to do with her life. She’s telling lies is what she’s doing, and lying is a sin. Or have you forgotten that? It’s one thing to have you telling her all the crazy tales of things that happened to you that never happened at all. That may work for your sodden customers at the pub, but do you have to encourage the girl to spend all her time thinking of the same kind of silly rubbish? Really, Larney, what are you thinking?”
    In the mornings Maeve was the first to wake up, tending to the littlest girl, and when she had diapered her she crept into her parents’ bedroom and looked to see if he was awake yet. If he wasn’t, she would tiptoe out again, but not before her mother, eyes wide open, could say, “So I’m of no interest at all to you, is that it?”
    As Maeve got older, her body remained as flat as a post, but she was pleased about this, since she had no interest in any of the boys she knew. Instead, she liked working at the pub, cleaning and drying glasses. She had become