As Mammy poked the fire, golden flames sprang up and began to dance. “You didn’t hate Henry as much as you led me to believe, did you?”
I searched my father’s eyes as he entered.
“They’re gone,” he said.
“It can’t be.” Mammy dropped the poker and it continued to rattle on the tiles as she sank into her chair. “Tragedies like this don’t happen in Knockburn.”
A silence arose, broken only by the sucking noise of trapped water as my father shuffled out of his Wellingtons, his wrinkled trouser bottoms soaked black.
“That means the funerals will be on Friday,” she said. “I feel so sorry for that poor woman. A drunk for a husband, not a penny to bless herself with, and now this catastrophe to deal with.”
I heard, but my brain couldn’t take it in. Henry was dead. He was dead in real life. Dead meant no tomorrow. Dead meant polished coffins with shiny handles that no one wanted. It meant heavy clay and darkness. His coffin was made and lay waiting for him. Dead. It had been made while he’d eaten his breakfast this morning. It had been made and lain waiting while he’d read his composition this afternoon in class.
“Where did they find the bodies?” Mammy asked.
“They found the wee boy . . . the one who’s at school with Gabriel—”
“Henry,” Mammy said.
“Aye, they found his body in a very deep part of the river with his brother on top of him.”
His body. Daddy said “his body.” Henry was no longer a person. He and his body had been a whole person, but were now separate.
“The water carried him under and his sweater was badly snagged in the open door of an old car wreck,” Daddy said. “I think the brother must have been trying to save him and got exhausted.” Another short silence started up. “They’ve taken the bodies to the morgue.”
“Was he wearing a red sweater with dogs on it, Daddy?”
“Aye, it was red.”
I saw every Labrador on his sweater. It was Henry’s favorite, though it was too small for him now. He’d stretched it until it was thin and very wide at the bottom.
“Thank God it’s none of our children,” Mammy said.
“I don’t want Henry dead!”
Mammy jumped and clutched her chest.
“He can’t be dead,” I insisted. “His coffin can’t be made yet.”
“God wanted Henry and Gerald to come home,” she said.
“No, that’s not it. I prayed to God that He’d take Henry in a car crash, but He drowned him instead. God listened. That’s why he’s dead. He’s dead because of my Henry prayers.”
The curls of Mammy’s auburn hair were loose, because she hadn’t put rollers in her hair for a few days; her eyes had little red lines in their whites. She looked old. Dead. I stared at Mammy’s eyes, saw how the jagged red lines looked like tiny forks of lightning crossing the whites. Henry is dead. is He is not in his body anymore. He is no longer a person.
“It’s not your fault,” Mammy said. “God doesn’t grant requests like that. He doesn’t listen to boys who ask such things.”
“How do you know?”
“He knows because boys and girls are always asking for things like that.” She nodded at my father. “Tell him that’s the case, Harry.”
“Henry had a great big smile on his face when we found him,” said Daddy. “It was terrific. That definitely means he was happy to go home.”
Because Henry had been in my class, Mammy said I had to go to the wake, even though I was young. Henry’s parents didn’t own their home like we did. They rented a council house and paid monthly rent to the government. The walls didn’t even have wallpaper. They were painted pale blue. The net curtains were dirty with smoke and there wasn’t a picture on the wall, not even one of the Sacred Heart or the Virgin Mary.
The grown-ups sat with long faces in the living room. Old and young men were together, some with flat caps with grimy peaks perched on their knees. They spoke in low voices as the women served tea and sandwiches or passed around silver trays filled with cigarettes. The air was heavy with sadness.
Their bodies were in a bedroom. As I approached, my heart started beating so fast, I thought it was going to burst from my chest. Sweat broke out all over my body. My hands felt clammy. Two gleaming coffins lay on the twin beds, a white one with bronze handles for Henry and a brown grown-up one with silver handles for his brother, who was almost a man. A thick yellow candle burned on a table between the beds. Its golden flame flickered back and forth in a draft caused by people as they walked about and peered at the bodies. Mr. and Mrs. Lynch sat in rickety chairs before the candle.
“Sorry for your troubles,” said my father. He shook Mrs. Lynch’s hand and then her husband’s.
“Harry, my men have been taken from me,” said Mrs. Lynch, her voice just a croaky whisper.
“It’s God’s will, but it’s hard,” Mr. Lynch said. His fingers were orange-brown from smoking, a thing he shouldn’t have been doing, because he was poor and on the dole.
Mrs. Lynch was dressed in a black frock and stockings, her eyes swollen with dark rings around them, her face and hands as white as Henry’s coffin lid. Soon, that lid would be wet and mucky. Soon worms would crawl over it.
“Come and have a last look at your wee school friend,” Mrs. Lynch said.
“Sorry for your trouble, Mrs. Lynch.”
I offered my hand, but she didn’t take it. The coffin was lined in pale yellow frilly cloth and looked cozy. Henry’s face was smooth, but paler than I remembered, and his hair was still frizzy and swept away from his closed eyes. He wore clothing that was also pale yellow. A white, glossy-backed Holy Communion book was tucked beneath his clasped hands and his rosary beads were wound like a rope between his joined fingers.
I stared at his fingers, at the hangnails and lines in their skin. I was surprised his fingernails had been cleaned. I couldn’t believe they were the same hateful fingers that had tightened to fists and often smacked me. Nor was Henry smiling, as my father had said. His lips were thin and closed tightly and a piece of cotton wool peeped from one shiny nostril. What’s cotton wool doing in his nose? I wondered. Had drowning made his nose bleed? Had he bled in the morgue? His eyebrows were still dark and curly. I wondered why I hadn’t before noticed the very thin scar running through his right eyebrow.
I could not take my eyes off Henry’s death face—it was the same and also not the same. Henry was not a person anymore. He and his body were separated. I looked at the face, spotting a mole I’d never seen before, and I wondered what he’d say if he saw me looking at him so closely. I was looking at Henry’s death face, at the little white scar in his eyebrow he’d have known about and the cotton wool stuck in his nostril, and he’d never know. Henry would never know what his last face looked like.
Suddenly, I felt an urge to reach inside and touch his stilled fingers. I grasped the one he’d jabbed my chest with so often. It was cold and felt like a chicken foot. I whipped out my hand.
“Will you remember Henry in your prayers?” Mrs. Lynch said.
I didn’t speak.
“Will you miss your little friend?”
Again, I didn’t speak.
“Gabriel, will you never forget your friend?”
My father coughed twice and narrowed his eyes when I looked up at him.
“I won’t, Mrs. Lynch. I won’t forget him.”
Nine
One Saturday afternoon, it felt like Henry had reached out from his grave to attack me one last time. His death created a vacancy in the Knockburn under-twelve Gaelic football team. It was late in the season and the team was doing well in the league. The boys were driven to their games in an old dented minibus and James was first to see it pass through our main gate. He ran into the kitchen to tell our father that Ciaran Bradley, the team manager, was walking to the door.
“Hiya, Harry,” Ciaran said to Daddy. He entered without knocking. “I’ve just picked up Fergal. We have a game at three o�
��clock and I’m in a tight jam. I wonder if you’d see your way to letting your eldest boy act as a substitute for us.”
“This one’s got two left feet and can’t play football,” said Mammy.
Ciaran had a face in the shape of a triangle with a bulging forehead and pointy chin. He always wore the same moss green sports coat that rode up at the back because he carried so much loose change in its front pockets.
“A bit of running about will be good for the boy,” Ciaran said, nodding at me as if he were my best friend.
My father ran his fingers slowly through his hair.
“To tell you the God’s truth, Harry and Eileen,” Ciaran continued, “if you could let him come, I’d be eternally grateful, like. We have two players off sick and the Kelly twins, our real substitutes, are having extra tuition on account they’re not doing so good on their eleven-plus tests. So I’m in a tight spot, like, and can’t find anybody else at such short notice.”
“I don’t have any football shoes, do I, Mammy?”
“We’ll kit out with shoes, shorts, and a sweater,” Ciaran said to me.
“Get your bag,” said Daddy.
“I’ve also got to work for my eleven-plus, just like the twins.”
“Get your things and out you go to the bus,” he said. “You need toughening up and a bit of rough fun will do the job.”
Matters had now gone beyond the point where huffing could help. I fetched my dusty sports bag from the wardrobe and wiped it off, not that I needed to take it because I’d nothing to put into it. As I walked toward the minibus, the boys peered, their heads tilted sideways like a bunch of hens examining dirt that they’d just raked for bugs.
“I’m glad you could come,” said Fergal. “You’ll be able to say you helped us win the cup if we get to the finals.”
The boys were already kitted out in black, white, and gold Knockburn jerseys. Phelem Welsh was sitting next to Fergal, so I sat beside Stuttering Anthony. They were very civil and, after a few minutes of teasing me good-naturedly, forgot I was among them and discussed football tactics.
Throughout the journey, I remained quiet and stared into the passing fields. It was as if the boys were talking from a great distance and I was a spectator. My mind flipped between the moment when I might have to step onto the field and my father’s last remark. Thinking of that helped lessen my fear. My father just didn’t know or understand me.
It was as if a heavy curtain suddenly parted and I saw how differently he treated James and me. He treated Caroline far better, too, though she was a girl and fathers had a soft spot for daughters. But James was a boy. And yet it was me who had to do all the hard work about the house. In winter, I split logs that were too thick with a hatchet whose handle was too long. He made me weed lawn borders in summer and cut grass with a push mower that wouldn’t cut lard because he wouldn’t sharpen it, just like he never mended the roof of the generator shed. I had to wash his car in freezing weather using water so icy, my hands turned red and cold. And not once did he say, “Well done, Gabriel,” when I’d finished. James was now almost seven, the very age I’d been when Daddy’d first given me these jobs, yet he didn’t order him to help me. Nor was my brother scolded when he refused to do his own chores.
The football game was every bit as horrid as I thought it would be. Sitting beside Ciaran on a damp bench in a borrowed Knockburn jersey that smelled of stale sweat, I watched boys race like clowns up the field after a sodden leather ball. Now and again, as they reached the opposing team’s goal, Ciaran would leap off the bench and urge one or another of the players to sink it into the net for a goal or over the H bar for a point.
Twenty minutes into the second half, Ciaran decided to try me out, because they were winning by such a wide margin. The ball felt cold and slick as it mashed into my chest. I seized it with my hands but, before I decided what to do with it, an opponent smacked hard into my shoulder and tore the oily thing from me as I tumbled to the grass. The ball passed quickly up the field from player to player and was finally lobbed into our goalmouth. Even though we were winning, two of my teammates shook their fists and cursed me out.
It didn’t help that Ciaran watched my every move. I felt I had to keep running about like a frisky puppy even when the ball was nowhere around, otherwise he’d think I was just plain lazy. His eyes watched as I fumbled my hand-to-toe moves when I did have the ball, and it never went in the direction I aimed when I kicked it. It spun off to the side or, worse, landed in the hands of an opponent. The piercing shriek of the referee’s final whistle was sweet music. I walked off the mucky field determined never to be on one again.
“That wasn’t half bad, Gabriel,” Ciaran said, his downward-pointed jacket pockets jingling as he ran up to me. “You’re a nifty wee runner. We’ll work on the kicking and ball handling skills.”
“If he knew how to kick straight, it would help,” Phelem Walsh said. “He’s good for nothing, right Fergal?”
“That’s enough, Phelem,” said Fergal. “He’s never played before. You need to give him a chance.”
Phelem looked hurt and I was happy. I was happy because it was the first time Fergal had stood up for me.
The following Saturday, I waited by the window in the living room until I caught sight of the minibus and then I dashed out and went to the hay nest in the pigsty. I pulled down my pants and tried to read one of Noel’s magazines, but I couldn’t concentrate. For what seemed like hours, my father, James, and even Nuala called out for me. James called my name once from near the curved tree I liked to climb. I feared he’d come and look in the pigsty. After their calls stopped, I waited five minutes more in the dark quietness interrupted only by the throaty chirps of a curlew in the far-off bog.
“Where the hell were you?” my father said, when I walked into the house. “You’ve embarrassed your mother and me. You’ve embarrassed the hell out of all of us. I was so badly done, I offered James to go, but Ciaran said he’s too young.”
“You don’t get it, Daddy. You don’t understand me.”
“Caroline, fetch me the fucking sally rod. I’m not going to stand idle while the likes of this answers me back.” His eyes flashed like headlights turned on high beam.
As the last one had been broken over James’s arse the week before, he sent Caroline to the hedge to pluck a fresh one. I waited with Mammy and James in the tense silence. It was one of those horrible silences you never want to end because you know something worse is coming. I kept playing out the scene about to take place in my head as I looked over at my mother and tried to reach deep into her eyes. She looked everywhere except in my direction.
A few minutes later, Caroline arrived holding the thickest brute of a stick I’d ever seen. It was thumb thick. I looked at it and then I looked at her. Mammy called her a wicked hussy and ordered her to fetch a proper sally rod or she’d also get beaten.
My father thrashed me soundly. He thrashed for so long, my mother jumped up and grabbed his arm as he and I spun about the room. Still, he wouldn’t stop. He continued thrashing and cursing and thrashing while she tried to get him off me and accused him of being possessed. I screamed above the din. My legs, lower back, and arse had purplish streaks after he’d finished. I hated him. Every time my trousers touched burning skin, I hated him.
Studying in earnest for my eleven-plus exam started after the summer holidays. I was now in my final year at primary school. I was to sit the exam in November, at age ten, as I’d started school a year earlier than everyone else. Cousin Martin was now a pupil at Saint Malachy’s.
Every afternoon, Mammy sat me at the kitchen table and made me answer questions from hundreds of mock tests within a limited time period, so I’d be used to the pressure on the day of the actual exam. After each test, she marked my work and explained the mistakes I’d made. Questions about train distances traveling at certain speeds especially tormented me, because I could never calculate the correct answer. I was just no good at them.
“I want you to t
ake the rest of the day off,” Mammy said one afternoon after a very bad score. “You’re not getting one bit better at these train questions. You need some time off to clear your head. Your father and James are about to leave for Larne. Go with them.”
“Let’s do another type of question instead.”
“It’ll do you good to spend time with your father and brother in the lorry.”
The trip to Larne was long and uncomfortable. We drove for miles along narrow country roads that wound through fog-covered mountains, stopping just once at a lorry driver’s café that had filthy toilets and stunk of engine oil. During the trip, I sat on top of the hard, plastic hump dividing the driver and passenger’s seat and watched the great wipers sweep across the greasy windshield. The throb of the engine beneath vibrated my arse.
The interior of the cabin disgusted me with its cream-colored, grimy ceiling and its floor covered in oil-smeared wrenches and blackened rags. Equally as nasty were the scratched dials and the dust-caked dashboard that I was forced to lay my hands upon each time my father braked sharply. I wondered why he made me wash his car in all kinds of weather, yet couldn’t keep his own truck clean. James didn’t mind any of it. The fog lifted as we reached the flatlands surrounding Larne. The view of the faraway harbor was miserable, the water lifeless gray and the ferries crossing to Scotland dull and tiny.
James adored Daddy and was very interested in the truck. He asked questions ’til I wanted to scream at him to stop. His contentment widened the distance between my father and me. With James, he talked and laughed in an adult way about diggers and English and Irish football teams. My father never asked about my schoolwork or the books I read. He never approached when I played with my farm set. He never straightened my tie when I dressed for church.
As I listened above the throaty roar of the engine, I felt sad I couldn’t be more like my brother. I had once tried to talk to my father about these things, but my interest wasn’t there. My knowledge of lorries wasn’t deep and it showed. Our conversations always stopped quickly.
A Son Called Gabriel Page 10