A Son Called Gabriel

by Damian McNicholl

  There was a silence.

  “God accepts him.”

  “He might, but no fuckin’ way am I.”

  There was a high-pitched screech of metal against metal.

  “I tried to make a man of him.” Father hammered something. “Him going off to university in London will make it worse. The English are all poofs.”

  My body went cold as alabaster.

  “Brendan told him it’s okay.”

  “Why am I not surprised? Aye, he’s got Brendan in him, doesn’t he?”

  “Brendan’s not a homosexual.”

  “I mean the way he made people’s life miserable.” Father coughed. “Well, I didn’t take that fella under my roof only to find out I’ve raised a queer.”

  I shook my head like a dog with an ear itch to clear the ringing in my ears.

  “It’s as much my roof as yours, Harry. And you were glad to take Gabriel in at the time.”

  “We should never have adopted him.”

  The ringing grew intense. My parent’s voices melded into the background. I staggered away from the truck, overturning the can of engine oil.

  Mammy emitted a stifled cry, like a wounded fox, as she stared at me from the front of the lorry. “Gabriel!”

  “What’s this stunt you’re pulling?” Father asked, cleaning his hands with a rag.

  “Uncle Brendan’s my father?”

  Mammy let out another wounded cry. The rag dropped out of Father’s hand. I ran out, rushing past Caroline and James, who were walking toward the shed.

  Raindrops bounced on my head as I sprinted across the hayfield. Tears streamed from my face. A herd of grazing cattle scattered in terror. Leaping over a barbed-wire fence, I entered another field containing stacked bales of hay. I raced up to a stack and hurled myself against it, pushing my face into the prickly hay. The bristles stabbed my cheeks and forehead and it felt good. I kicked and beat at the hay wildly with my fists. Bales tumbled. I scratched my skin and didn’t care. Ropes securing three bales split open and the hay scattered on the grass and over my school uniform.

  “Gabriel!” Caroline shouted. “Where are you? Come back!”

  I raced to the road and then kept running. At the church, I darted into the telephone box, jammed coins into the slot, and dialed. The air was stale and forbidding, as if warning me I shouldn’t call. I knew I shouldn’t, but didn’t care.

  I’d been sitting on the church wall for two hours, darting back and forth between the wall and a laurel hedge when cars drove by, in case people wondered what the hell I was doing.

  “Hiya, Gabriel.”

  I looked up to see Mr. Kelly, clad in a rubber mackintosh, approaching on a bike.

  His gaze went immediately to my swollen, red eyes. Just then, Richie pulled up in a red car. I sprang off the wall. Mr. Kelly peered inside, making me suddenly conscious of the shortness of Richie’s hair. The only times you saw hair that short were on the American GIs who ran a communication base on top of mountain near Duncarlow, the local policemen, and British soldiers. I ran over and got in the car.

  “Drive,” I said, slamming the door.

  “Are you alright?” Richie asked, squeezing my knee.

  “I hope I didn’t get you in trouble calling the barracks.”

  “It’s okay. Sorry about the wait.” His eyes scanned the road and hedgerows. “I was out on patrol.”

  “Were they suspicious a fella with an Irish accent was calling you?”

  “I said you’re a bloke who finds me cheap music in Belfast.”

  The rain had stopped by the time we got to an isolated mountain road Richie knew. Walking across the heather and spongy earth, we reached the top of the hill and trekked along the crest until we came to an outcrop. The lights of a small town twinkled in the heart of the valley. Beyond, the gray water of Lough Foyle lay heavy against the backdrop of the Donegal hills across the Irish Republic’s border. Richie put his arm around my shoulder.

  “They lied to me all these years,” I said, after I finished telling him everything that happened. “I’m not their son.”

  “Technically, they didn’t lie,” said Richie. “They just didn’t say anything . . . like you didn’t say anything about being gay ’til tonight.”

  I jerked back my head.

  “Finding out you’re adopted isn’t like finding out you’ve got terminal cancer, is it?” He smiled grimly. “Let’s be real.”

  “You can’t understand.”

  He massaged the back of my neck. It felt good, lessening the resentment I felt towards him.

  “I’m not belittling it, but seems to me you’ve still got parents.” Richie shrugged. “I don’t. Mum’s dead and I never see my old man anymore.”

  Wrenching a stalk of grass from the rocky soil, I twisted its wiry stem around my finger.

  “A chap I messed about with once told him I was gay. Dad confronted me and then threw me out on the street.”

  I mulled this for a moment. “My father . . . fuck, he’s isn’t that anymore.” I glanced at Richie. “What is he now?”

  “He’s still your old man. He’ll probably work his head around the gay thing, in time.” Richie tousled my hair. “You’ll have to do the same about them. You’re a man now.”

  “So many bloody secrets. Their shitty secret.” I looked hard at Richie. “Our secret.”

  “I’m up with honesty, like I told you,” he said, “but our secret, you have to keep from them.” He smiled. “’Til we’re together in London.”

  Despite Richie’s words, I sat numb in my bedroom as Mammy explained how Uncle Brendan had helped Granda on the farm before he went off to the seminary and how, during that period, he’d met a girl at a dance and gone out with her.

  “It was against your granda’s will, as you already know. He used to say, ‘All decent Knockburn families have a priest and the Harkins aren’t going to be any different.’ Brendan was his last hope, until he got the girl into trouble.”

  “I’m a bastard.” I’d never pondered the true meaning of that word. It was used ubiquitously, the first word rolling off boys’ tongues at school when they hurled insults. Now, it sounded so harsh and clinical.

  “Don’t say that, Gabriel.” She sat on the bed beside me and laid her hands on my shoulders.

  “My father is my uncle, and my uncle is my father. And you? Who are you to me?”

  She opened her mouth to reply, her eyes mirroring the hurt I’d just administered.

  “Who are you to me?” I asked again.

  The hideous reality swept through me again and I shrugged her hands off my shoulders, rose impetuously, and crossed to the window, where I stared vacuously out at the landscape.

  “I’m a family disgrace,” I said, watching my words turn to mist on the pane.

  Mammy came quickly to me and turned me around. “I’m your mother. That’s who I am. Nothing can change that.” She embraced me. “Not your being gay or adopted. It’s love and a lifetime of experiences that make us mother and son, not an act of intercourse and a birthing.”

  “Where’s my real mother?” I willed her to keep holding me, even though I’d just knifed her heart again.

  “She’s dead,” Mammy said. “You were born prematurely by Caesarean section and the operation went wrong. The anesthetic went to her brain. They didn’t know until it was too late. Your . . . your mother wasn’t a local girl, and she wouldn’t marry Brendan. She said getting pregnant was a big mistake and that she wasn’t going to make it any bigger by marrying a man she didn’t truly love. She planned from the start to give you up for adoption, and your father and I had been married a year and . . .” Her eyes focused on my face. “Gabriel, don’t think for one moment you weren’t wanted. I wanted you.” The fight was back in her eyes. I hadn’t vanquished her. “I wanted you from the first moment I set eyes on you.”

  I didn’t speak.

  “It was all planned when the family found out she wanted to give you up,” Mammy continued. “Brendan wouldn’t hea
r of you being adopted by strangers. He put down his foot, so your granda suggested Daddy and I adopt you, because we were married.” She laughed mirthlessly. “The neighbors were already wondering why I wasn’t yet pregnant. You know how they expect it within a year of marrying around here, otherwise the gossip starts up there’s something wrong, that the wife’s barren. Your granda said I should wear maternity clothes and nobody would bat an eyelid. He said that way the whole thing could be resolved, because nobody would find out and Brendan’s disgrace would be kept inside the family.”

  She squeezed me and then let go. “Gabriel, it took me a while to agree to that. And I’ll be honest and say I didn’t want to do it at the beginning. But then I thought about the baby . . . I thought about you, and how you had a right to have a loving family. Your father was all for it, too.”

  “Granda asked you to do this?”

  “I told you, your granda was a very determined man. He thought only to save the Harkin name. He ruled the roost; everyone did his bidding. And for all his praying and holiness, he went to his grave never forgiving Brendan for what he’d done. That’s why Brendan didn’t come home for years, even for his father’s funeral. Your granda was full of useless Harkin pride and Brendan was bitter. They never made up.”

  “I’m responsible for all this bad blood. I’m responsible for the disgrace.” Scenes from my childhood and youth flashed before me. Now, I understood why Granny had compared me to Uncle Brendan so often in my youth. Now, I understood why they’d been evasive when I’d asked about the circumstances of Uncle Brendan’s leaving, and why Mammy had been so furious that night when she’d caught me eavesdropping at the door. “I’m a disgrace.”

  “I’m your real mother and I want you to understand something: you’re no disgrace. You’re my son.” She touched my cheeks. “You were part of me from the moment I saw your cheeky little face in the pram. You had the plumpest little hands, which you kept making into fists like a boxer.” Mammy laughed, but her eyes were focused inward. “I loved you from that moment. It was as if I’d carried you. I felt no different when I had Caroline.” She squeezed my shoulders. “That’s the truth.”

  Mammy’s gaze was now in the present. She regarded me without flinching. “Everyone agreed that the whole thing was to be forgotten and never discussed. You’d become your daddy’s and mine. When anyone official needed a birth certificate and could see you were adopted, your father and I would explain the inconsistencies to them and that you didn’t know about it and weren’t to be told—unless you found out.” Mammy paused. “And now your daddy’s let it out. I feared Caroline might, but it was your daddy.”

  “Caroline knows?”

  “She discovered the birth certificate two years ago. She brought it to me and demanded an explanation. You know how she is, Gabriel. At first, she was very sad and cried, but then she saw the right thing had been done and agreed not to say a word.”

  My sister knew about me. My knees trembled so uncontrollably that they threatened to buckle.

  “Your father doesn’t even know Caroline found out.”

  My sister had known something about me for ages that I hadn’t. I felt violated. “Mammy, I need to be alone.”

  “We’ve made a terrible mistake. Please forgive us.”

  “I had a right to know.” My voice shook. “Caroline knew.”

  Mammy left, and I threw myself on the bed. My mind fizzed with a thousand thoughts. Granny Harkin was still my grandmother. But what were Granny Neeson and Aunt Peggy to me? Did James and Nuala know and my mother just wasn’t saying? Had she told them and sworn them to secrecy, as she had Caroline?

  I felt hopeless, adrift. My past was a lie. No matter what Mammy had said about her love for me, I was not of her blood. The bonds of love between a mother and offspring, unquestioned because they form inside the womb, had had to be formed externally between her and me. And Father? The bonds between he and I had never developed, and now I knew that it was because I wasn’t his natural son. Now I understood why he preferred James, why he didn’t love me like he had him. I was different. I was an obligation. He kept me at a distance because I was not of him.

  I went to the window and stood for ages watching the dusk methodically paint the clouds to oblivion. I continued to stare at the nothingness until a knock on my door brought me back to the present. My mother entered, hands clasped.

  “Come out to the living room,” she said. “James is just home from football practice . . . I’ve told him and Nuala.”

  I didn’t feel like talking or listening, but I knew she needed me to go out with her and I’d have to do it soon, anyway. The meeting—for that’s what it was—was indescribable. The best way to express how I felt is that the walls, sofa, armchairs, even the ornamental birds I’d always loved, were transmuted. Physically, they were the same items, but the way I related to them was radically different. I’d always related to them as an integral member of the family, as a natural son, as the oldest and head of my siblings, and now I was an outsider. The items were still inside and I was out.

  It was apparent that Nuala and James hadn’t known until that evening. I could see that Nuala had been crying, and she never cried. She spoke first, albeit hesitantly, and that trait was out of character, too.

  “Gabriel, this makes no difference, just like your not liking girls as much as boys doesn’t make a difference.”

  Apparently, Mammy had told them about that, as well.

  Thankfully, everyone agreed. The platitudes commenced, just as they always do in arduous situations: how it didn’t matter one single bit; how we were still brothers and sisters and nothing would change; how we always stuck together, through thick and thin, how this would be no different. My mother started sobbing. Caroline and Nuala turned to comfort her while James and I watched. After Mammy recovered, a stream of collective memories and family jokes ensued. It was like a grotesque wake, and I the living corpse.

  “You always were different,” said James. He chuckled. “Remember how you ran away when Ciaran came to fetch you for the football match and Daddy wanted to send me in your place?”

  I remembered that Saturday as if it had been yesterday. I’d run off to the pigsty and tried to read the dirty magazines Noel had shown me. It hurt to think of it, because it had shown even then that I really was different—immeasurably different.

  More joking reminiscences ensued about how independent I’d always been. During each anecdote came a stinging reminder of how I’d never been the person I’d thought I was. I’d never been a real son, a real sibling. My mind wouldn’t stop flicking through the past. It examined scenes I hadn’t thought of for years: family conversations around the supper table about local scandals and neighbors; my parents laughing about something funny I’d done or said; their concern when I told them I felt responsible for Henry’s drowning; their fury when I’d failed my first exams at Saint Malachy’s; and the subsequent pats on the back about later successes. It was as if I was compelled to scrutinize and revalidate each memory in light of this new knowledge. Through every experience, during every moment, my parents had known. This knowing that I was not their flesh and blood made my head throb with cold realization.

  Nuala bounded over, wrapped her arms tightly around my neck, and kissed me fully on the lips. We never kissed on the lips. It was always on the cheek. I heard the hideous strangled gasps before realizing they came from me.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t know what to do. It’s not the same. You don’t know how I feel; you can’t know. None of you can. I’m adopted. Things are changed forever.”

  “Stop,” Nuala said. “You hurt me when you say that. You’re still my brother, and that will never change.”

  “Son, Nuala’s right,” Mammy said, her voice very shrill. “We’re still a family. Things have changed, but it’s still the same. We’re all feeling awkward, but that’ll pass. We’ll go on as before.”

  My gaze moved from Nuala to the gleaming ornamental birds.

&nb
sp; “Mammy’s right, Gabriel,” added James. “It’s new and awkward for all of us, but tomorrow’s another day.” He looked at Caroline, who nodded vigorously.

  “Only one thing has changed, and that thing is knowledge,” my mother said. “The actual circumstances have been the same since the day you were born, and the only thing that’s changed is your knowledge. Everything else remains just as it was. Your relationships with your father and me haven’t changed. Your relationships with your brother and sisters aren’t any different because of what you’ve learned today. Those things remain the same, and the passage of time will help you see that. Time heals all wounds, Gabriel.”

  I slide my eyes from the birds and locked them on hers. She held my gaze for a while, and then her mouth opened and her lips trembled into a smile.

  I waited alone in the living room for Father. As his car drew into the driveway, I went to the kitchen and sat at the table. It was nearly eleven-thirty. I’d banked up years of grudges for such a time as this, but instead I was tense. Earlier, Mammy had offered to tell him that I knew all about my past. I’d agreed, initially, but it was something I had to do. I was no longer a boy.

  “What are you doing up so late?” he asked when he came in.

  I could see that he was surprised to see me. He opened the fridge door, took out a bottle of milk, and raised it to his lips. I watched his throat muscles rise and fall behind skin irritated and flaky from shaving. His habit of drinking straight from the bottle had always disgusted me. Tonight, I didn’t care.

  I forced myself to keep my eyes on his face. “I understand now why you’ve always preferred James to me.” My voice trembled. “You’ve always wanted me to be just like you, and I could never be. I tried and tried, but I could never be like you. It makes sense now.”

  He regarded his big, oil-stained hands for a moment. I felt my skin tingle. Was he thinking about how I was a homosexual, or how I wasn’t his son?

  “It makes no difference,” he said. “You know that, don’t you?”

  “Granny always said I was more like Uncle Brendan. I liked the things he liked and I didn’t care about your lorries and—”