There’s a certain type of person - we all know at least one - who goes through life, constantly being lumbered with the blame for everything. Like the farmer’s wife who finds herself in hospital twenty miles away on the day the milk happens to curdle and her husband is heard to grumble into his pint of stout, “Shur if she’d had the chil’ at home like all the rest o’ them, then the cows wouldna been put aff with strange hands.”
My brother Joe was one of those. Always copping for the blame, whether he’d had a hand in the actual mischief or not, his was surely the pivotal influence in any event that failed to turn out as it should. Sometimes, to be sure, he was at the back of the devilment, but there were others, when even the most agile mind would be sorely stretched to see how the catastrophe in question could somehow be linked to the action or inaction of this small and only averagely mischievous boy. Such was the case, or so I’ve always thought, with the scandal of the pink ribbons.
Imagine if you will, two small, excited boys on Boxing Day, galloping up and down the street on broom handle horses, lassoing stray cattle, fighting off ‘pachees, circling the wagons and ‘winning the West’ three, four, five times over in the time it took their mothers to wash up the dinner dishes and call them in for the end of the Christmas pudding. Hi Ho Silver, John Wayne and Paint Your Wagon all rolled into one.
The Western theme had been running since Christmas morning thanks to the mind-boggling generosity of Santa Claus that year (or the mind-boggling run of luck Mickey Campbell’s father had had in the bookies on Christmas Eve) who had placed the most authentic looking Colt .45 in young Mickey’s stocking suspended from the fireplace. Barely dressed, shoeless and with only one sock in place, Mickey had come banging on our door at seven in the morning, already struggling to spin the heavy weapon on his trigger finger and eager to have Joe’s participation as bandito, gringo, Sheriff; it was of little import who the characters might be, as long as there was someone to shoot or shove forward at gunpoint.
By Boxing Day, the two boys had explored every possible use and appliance of the firearm. Locks had been shot of trunks and jailhouses, men saved from meeting their Maker by a bullet skilfully slicing the noose. Even I was sufficiently bewitched by the shiny barrel (that really spun) and the glossy, red grip of the butt, embossed horses rearing on either side, to allow myself to be dragged by the hair down the full length of our hall as Mickey and Joe threw the gun to each other in a strategic rescue from injuns that they assured me were hiding in the coalhole.
It was Joe who remembered that sometimes, “in the pixtures”, men who were slightly less given to bloodshed and violence would use the gun just to knock people out cold.
“Look-ed Mickey, like this” he said, slicing the gun downwards close to Mickey’s ear. “Now you fall down, like yer knocked out, and I get back on me horse with the moneybags and ride aff.”
It was then that a passing stranger, nobody from our street, laughing at the actor-come-director, stopped to offer friendly advice.
“No, no, son. Yer houldin’ the gun the wrong way roun’ to knock a fella out.” So saying, he took Mickey’s Colt from Joe and placing the barrel in the boy’s grasp explained. “Y’see the grip is that much wider and heavier so if you whack a man that way…”
“Like this?” asked Joe, turning to seek the stranger’s approval and thereby totally missing - or rather, finding, his mark.
Instant ructions ensued; blood, redder than the gun handle and all the brighter in Mickey’s blonde curls and a gash the size of an almond in the back of his skull. Accusations were hurled right and left between the two families - not least at Mickey’s Da for being down the bookies in the first place - and the helpful stranger had all the cover he needed to simply disappear in the kafuffle.
Still, once they had Mickey stitched up at the hospital and it was confirmed he was none the worse for wear, things returned to normal with equal speed. Mickey and his scar (and Joe) even gained a sort of semi-heroic status for a while when they went back to school at the end of the holiday.
It was years later, at least twenty, when Mickey Campbell gained a less welcome notoriety in the same community. Whispered reports at first, then finally a court case and his name in all the papers, identified him as the flasher who exposed himself to teenage girls on their way to school; seven o’clock in the morning and a ribbon, usually pink, tied around his fully extended member.
His mother was mortified, of course, but there were mitigating circumstances, he wasn’t to blame, she would explain to anyone who would listen: “You do know he had his skull smashed in when he was a young lad? Oh, yes, indeed. That young hooligan, Joe McGivern. If it wasn’t for him…”
