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> The Stingy Man's Coffin
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The Stingy Man's Coffin
The Dillon family lived in the Midlands in Ireland near the Bog of Allan.
John Dillon was a big, strong but stingy man; in fact the locals called him 'an beal bocht' – the poor mouth. In contrast to this his wife Brigid was a small, neat, pretty and generous woman as was their daughter Yvonne.
The land around there was very boggy. The Dillons lived in a cottage by the road, on a tapering strip of land with the house at one end and an oak tree at the other. It was a small house with a living room and kitchen downstairs with a narrow staircase leading up to two tiny, dark bedrooms
above. They had no electricity and water had to be collected from the well in the garden.
John Dillon looked mean and he was mean – very mean and miserly. In fact, he was so mean that when his wife Brigid died, instead of buying her a decent oak coffin as was the custom and burying her in the church cemetery, he bought a cheap coffin and buried her at the bottom of the garden near the oak tree. Yvonne was very upset at this poor treatment of her mother – she complained but to no avail and in the end had to accept it.
It wasn't that he had no money – in fact he had a fistful of gold coins which he kept in a leather pouch hidden in a secret hole behind a brick, just to the right of the fireplace. And every night when his daughter went up to bed he would take out the brick and withdraw the pouch to count his money. One, two . . . twenty-one, twenty two . . . And if he heard his daughter coming down the stairs he would hide the pouch under his jacket and tell her to go back to bed and not be spying on him. When he had counted the money he would furtively put it back in the hole and replace the brick.
But then one night, about six months after her mother's death, while John was counting his money Yvonne came down the stairs to say that she was feeling ill and to ask him whether the doctor should be called.
The first thing John thought of was the cost of the doctor: “Don't be worrying, you'll be alright, go up to bed.”
She looked pale and wan – but she did as her father bid her. After a little while he could hear her groaning and then she came down again looking really dreadful and asked him once again to get the doctor. He said: "Don't be trying to spy on me, go on up to bed." Once more she did as she was told and he could hear her groaning for a while, but then there was no more sound from her.
Later when he went to bed himself he looked in on her – and found her lying half in and half out of her little bed. She was silent and he felt her little face which was clammy and very cold. It took a little while to dawn on John that his daughter Yvonne was in fact stone cold dead!
Well, he was very upset, but he stuck to his principles and priorities and he buried Yvonne at the bottom of the garden beside her mother. Beside rather than on top of her because you could not safely dig a deep hole due to the boggy nature of the soil.
Late in the night after the funeral there was a fierce storm. There was wind and rain just like the night of the big wind in ’87. The following day people were busy sorting things out and so did not notice that John Dillon did not come to the ‘shibeen’ – little pub, to get his pint and a few ounces of tobacco. But when he didn't come the next day or the next, people began to wonder, so they decided to call on him. He lived just out of the little village and when they arrived at the narrow end of the little homestead they noticed first that the oak tree was down and then that in the middle of the garden was a coffin. They went in the gate by the house and then noticed another coffin halfway in and halfway out of the front door. When they looked into the house they saw John Dillon rigid in his chair with eyes staring out of his head and his mouth wide in a grin of terror. One hand was raised as if to protect himself and the other seemed to be pointing towards the coffin, which was half open.
In the coffin was Yvonne, serene in death with her hands joined together – this is normal practice in Catholics – but what was not normal was that on closer inspection, instead of holding on to rosary beads Yvonne was clutching a leather pouch.
When they prised open the corpse's hand they found the pouch half full of gold coins. And when they eventually counted the money they found there was enough to buy a new oak coffin for Yvonne and her mother Brigid and to bury them together in the church cemetery. As for John, there was no money left so they used the wood from the two cheap coffins and buried him at the end of his garden where the oak tree used to be.
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