Pat’s Story by JM Synge

I chanced upon this story a long time ago while I was pretending to study for a B.A. at the University of Cape Town. It immediately appealed to me because it was so improbable it could only have been related as factual by a narrator who derived ironic pleasure from testing the credulity of his audience.  

Here is the story, which was recorded by Synge on a visit to the Aran Islands off the west coast of Ireland around 1900.

One day I was travelling on foot from Galway to Dublin, and the darkness came on me and I ten miles from the town I was wanting to pass the night in. Then a hard rain began to fall and I was tired walking, so when I saw a sort of a house with no roof on it up against the road, I got in the way the walls would give me shelter.

As I was looking round I saw a light in some trees two perches off, and thinking any sort of a house would be better than where I was, I got over a wall and went up to the house to look in at the window.

I saw a dead man laid on a table, and candles lighted, and a woman watching him. I was frightened when I saw him, but it was raining hard, and I said to myself, if he was dead he couldn't hurt me. Then I knocked on the door and the woman came and opened it.

'Good evening, ma'am,' says I.

'Good evening kindly, stranger,' says she, 'Come in out of the rain.' Then she took me in and told me her husband was after dying on her, and she was watching him that night.

'But it's thirsty you'll be, stranger,' says she, 'Come into the parlour.' Then she took me into the parlour—and it was a fine clean house—and she put a cup, with a saucer under it, on the table before me with fine sugar and bread.

When I'd had a cup of tea I went back into the kitchen where the dead man was lying, and she gave me a fine new pipe off the table with a drop of spirits.

'Stranger,' says she, 'would you be afeard to be alone with himself?'

'Not a bit in the world, ma'am,' says I; 'he that's dead can do no hurt,' Then she said she wanted to go over and tell the neighbours the way her husband was after dying on her, and she went out and locked the door behind her.

I smoked one pipe, and I leaned out and took another off the table. I was smoking it with my hand on the back of my chair—the way you are yourself this minute, God bless you—and I looking on the dead man, when he opened his eyes as wide as myself and looked at me.

'Don't be afraid, stranger,' said the dead man; 'I'm not dead at all in the world. Come here and help me up and I'll tell you all about it.'

Well, I went up and took the sheet off of him, and I saw that he had a fine clean shirt on his body, and fine flannel drawers.

He sat up then, and says he—

'I've got a bad wife, stranger, and I let on to be dead the way I'd catch her goings on.'

Then he got two fine sticks he had to keep down his wife, and he put them at each side of his body, and he laid himself out again as if he was dead.

In half an hour his wife came back and a young man along with her. Well, she gave him his tea, and she told him he was tired, and he would do right to go and lie down in the bedroom.

The young man went in and the woman sat down to watch by the dead man. A while after she got up and 'Stranger,' says she, 'I'm going in to get the candle out of the room; I'm thinking the young man will be asleep by this time.' She went into the bedroom, but the divil a bit of her came back.

Then the dead man got up, and he took one stick, and he gave the other to myself. We went in and saw them lying together with her head on his arm.

The dead man hit him a blow with the stick so that the blood out of him leapt up and hit the gallery.

That is my story.

In The Life of Henry Fuckit, Henry has a conversation with Harry Bergson in which the telling of tall stories is touched upon.

“My whole life became a sham. After a few years I had become a compulsive liar, a pathological confabulator. At first it started as humorous exaggeration, light-hearted tall stories told for the sake of entertainment. Then I began to see these creations in my mind as a way of impressing and manipulating. I began to lose track of what I had said to whom. I even began to believe some of my own embellishments and fabrications."

"What kind of things did you lie about?" As an inveterate manipulator of reality himself, Henry was curious to hear more about someone else's ability to invent.

"Oh, at first, it was pretty harmless stuff. It was more like boastfulness than downright mendacity. My sporting and academic achievements, progress at work, sexual prowess - that sort of thing."

Henry was not impressed. "Sounds as if you were a bullshitter. Plenty of those around. On a far more creative level is the teller of tall stories. You tell a story that is fantastic or exaggerated but almost plausible. The skill is in placing it just beyond the bounds of logic, so that an intelligent listener is able to pick up the clue that makes the story nonsense or an impossibility. The drawback comes when you have an audience too stupid to get it. You find yourself faced with an irritating dilemma - do you allow them to swallow the crap you've been dishing up, and thereby turn yourself into a cheap liar, or do you labour on, heaping one absurdity upon another until they finally see what you're up to, and in the process turn subtlety and wit into coarse buffoonery?"

The full exchange can be read on my website here.

To view my longer pieces, you can find me on Smashwords here.