He’d usually stop by our house on his way home from town and take up position in the kitchen doorway, obstructing our passage from house to yard. If we children were indoors when he arrived then we were virtually under house arrest, and if we happened to be in the yard then we’d have to prolong our play until he left. Either way we were too afraid to squeeze past him.
He’d give mother the lowdown on the latest gossip. He carried with him an encyclopaedic knowledge of every family in the parish, seemingly stretching back to St Matthew’s book of generation, when Judas begat Phares and Zara of Thamar; and Phares begat Esrom; and Esrom begat Aram. …
Robert was in his element if he had a death to announce. He’d stand there, my captive mother nodding and sighing, while he rattled out a tracery of the deceased’s ancestral connections with all the skill of a master genealogist. He’d pick up tributaries of names and details, and join them to the main family flux with facts and dates, while mother listened patiently. She had somehow to simultaneously keep track of the rising scones and those convoluted histories without causing offence.
‘His mother would have been a Martha McAtamney from outside Ballymuck,’ Robert would intone, ‘who got married on a son of the Buffer McVeighs – or were they the Butcher McVeighs? Anyway they owned a couple of farms out by the lough shore until one of the Mickey McSquirtys married into them in nineteen and fifty-two and that was the end of it all.’
He would pause for breath and emphasis, and to test mother’s attentiveness. If there was one thing Robert disliked it was inattentiveness in his audience. Too many years spent in front of oscitant pupils had made him uncompromising. Mother had learned this lesson too and was ever alert.
‘Is that so?’ she’d say. ‘I thought the McSquirty girls were fine lassies.’
‘Not a bit of it! Didn’t the Lily wan turn the young boy’s head completely, put him to the bad altogether, lost the head and the two farms and the pair of them drunk it out. Aye, a bad pack. It was in the breed of them that wee weakness was there. Then another of them married a Dan McFadden. Dy’mine him? I say he was a Dan McFadden!’
The voice would have risen to a whine because mother had turned, perhaps to rescue a scone in the nick of time. But in a second she’d be back, feigning interest yet again with a placatory comment.
‘You don’t say, Robert. Is that so?’
‘Aye, them McFadden crowd weren’t up to much either.’
The litany would continue. Each sentence marching out to the beat of an invisible drum.
‘He was a son of a cousin of an uncle of Stuttering Paddy’s. Y’mine him, a low set, stout boy with a squint, dragged the leg a bit, nivver out of the pub either. Used to see him spraghalling up Mary Pat’s back, stotious.’ (By which he meant that he’d often observed the character in question staggering into Mary Pat’s public house by the rear entrance.) ‘Couldn’t get enough of that drigging. His mother would have been a half-sister of Jamie the Snout’s. She would have been a Thompson to her maiden name.’
‘Thompson, that sounds like a Protestant name, doesn’t it?’ mother would say with sudden attentiveness.
‘Aye, it is, but the oul’ boy was a turncoat, back in nineteen and forty-seven. He had an illegitimate wain to a daughter of Johnny the Slap’s, a wee fat lady, wasn’t too right in the head. A kind of a clatt of a blade from up the country or y’know deed begod it could have been down the country, can’t mine right, put him astray altogether. The priest had to be called and didn’t they fine him dead in a sheugh outside Ballygosidewards at half five in the morning on the fifteenth of June nineteen and thirty-six, stiff with drink more than anything else.’
‘Is that so Robert? God, that drink’s a terrible curse.’
‘Aye. Sure they say when a man gets a feed of that poison he doesn’t know whether he’s living or dead. Tarra stuff. … A bad crowd, aye. And that was the end of that.’
There would follow an uneasy silence while mother ingested all this information and Robert raised his cap, to scratch his crown with the middle finger. He’d replace it an inch or two more towards the back of his head with an air of satisfaction, pleased to have had his say so heatedly and eloquently.
‘Aye, that’s the way the oul’ thing goes,’ he’d remark while studying a patch of ceiling.
My mother, eager for closure and fearful he might start up again, would offer something like: ‘God, I can’t believe that Wee Jamie’s gone. He was a harmless cretur.’
‘Aye, that’s the way it goes,’ Robert would add after a long pause. ‘Comes to us all, boys a dear. S’pose a body would need tae go tae a wake and funeral – on account of Big Frenkie. And that means a mass card havin’ to be bought. Pity a body couldn’t buy a wheen of them in bulk; you’d save a quare bit, so you would.’
There was the phantom Frenkie again; his name seemed always to emerge when someone had expired. Either he was a very gregarious man or had spread his seed far in the course of an ill-spent youth.
On one occasion, however, Robert got things confused. He announced to mother that a mutual acquaintance of theirs – one Lizzy McCrudden or ‘Lizzy the Dizzier’ – had died. In a state of shock she sped posthaste to Draperstown to buy the obligatory mass card. Imagine her astonishment when on the return journey she met Lizzy pedalling her bike into town. There had obviously been two Lizzy McCruddens in the locality – either that or Robert, disgusted at the slow death-rate in the parish and having no shocking news to report, had made it up by way of compensation.
Yet fate was to get its own back on Robert. He himself made the pages of the Irish News, though not the obituaries column. One bright August morning, while he trundled along ’twixt Draperstown and his homestead, rations in the boot and eyes steady on the road, Robert’s car was hijacked.
As the Anglia mounted the first hill out of town, a man toting a gun jumped from behind a hedge and ordered Robert to stop. He’d been hijacked by a member of the Provisional IRA. The Provo took possession of the car and sped off, leaving the Master dazed and stranded in the middle of the road, his arms raised in an attitude of surrender.
Mother was out at the clothes-line at the time, awaiting Robert’s regular visit. She was astonished to see the Anglia flying past the gate, doing, she estimated, a very respectable, rip-roaring 90mph.
The car was found two days later with everything intact, save the groceries; the gunman had obviously been hungry. Robert dined out on this story with tremendous frequency in the days that followed, re-enacting the drama for the butcher, the baker, the candlestick-maker and whoever else would listen.
He’d play the twin roles in the drama: himself and the Provo. My mother and I heard it more often than we cared to.
‘He jumped out of that hedge like a fox,’ Robert would tell us yet again. ‘“Get out quick, out quick, out quick,” says he. Begod, y’know I think he said it five times. Aye, as if a man needed to be told five times, wi’ a gun pointin’ at his head.’
‘God, what did you do atall?’ mother would enquire yet again.
‘Well, what could a body do but put me hands up in the air? And I put them up good and high too, and y’know, God, he was in the car and away like a whitred before I knew it, the rips and roars of him, you’d a heard him in Cork, begod. That wee car’ll niver be the same again, so it won’t.’
‘To hell with the oul’ car, Robert, isn’t your life more important than an oul’ tekelin?’ my mother would say, voicing my own thoughts.
‘Aye well, I suppose,’ he’d venture, not at all convinced.
‘Well, did you get a good look at him?’
‘Aw aye. A young hairy bugger, down the back and round the face and everywhere you looked. Should have been in a zoo, aye locked up. A zoo would have been the best place for that boy. God, it’s a wile thing when a man can’t conduct a wee bitta business without havin’ to come through the like a that. What’s the country comin’ to anyway, anyway, anyway? The whole place’s gone to hell completely.’
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sp; He’d then wait for the praise and sympathy he felt was his by right. Mother wouldn’t disappoint him.
‘God, Robert you’re a tight one. I would of died on the spot, so I would, as true as God.’
For weeks afterwards Robert was the hero, and the humble Anglia had at last experienced the passion and fury of life in the fast lane – something Robert would never know.
Life in Northern Ireland has changed a great deal since that incident. So much so that it’s alleged that the same hirsute, gun-toting Republican became a member of our recently formed Legislative Assembly up at Stormont, pronouncing with gravitas on the morals of the nation. I can feel Robert beginning to rotate in his grave as I write these lines.
Occasionally the Master had other reasons for waylaying mother. He needed her help when dealing with his problem brother Edward. Edward had a liking for an alcoholic beverage or two – which was not at all surprising given that he had to share living quarters with Robert, which cannot have been easy. The Master rarely touched a drop himself. Edward’s relationship with the booze was therefore sporadic and for that reason all the more intense when he got the chance. Robert could not ‘be doing with this atall, atall’. He spent a great deal of his time pronouncing on the morality of others, after all, and could ill afford the taint of Edward’s profligacy.
It is a pity that the austere and abstemious Robert never allowed himself the pleasures of drink or courtship. Frivolity was a stranger to him. I feel sad that Robert, with all his money, knowledge and that dry sense of humour he had, did not permit himself the joy of sharing it. He might have had a different life entirely. In fact I’m sure of it.
You could easily tell when he’d come to discuss the misdeeds of the errant Edward rather than a death or the weather. He’d adopt a brooding stance in the doorway, his florid face and uneasy manner signalling a deviation from his fixed routine. My mother, reading him accurately, would ask what was wrong, and he’d simply respond with: ‘It’s him.’
It was an idiosyncrasy of father and Robert that they’d never use the other’s first name. The personal pronoun was employed instead, which often led to some confusion. So mother would have to lob a guess.
‘Who? James?’
And Robert would glare at her.
‘Naw, him!’ he’d retort. ‘That other boy.’
Since there were just the two of them it could only be Edward, so after an ‘Oh, Edward’ from mother, he’d move on.
‘I don’t know what’s to be done with him, anyway, anyway, anyway.’ Another mannerism was to put stress on the last word in a sentence and repeat it several times when voicing annoyance.
‘Went out the morning there to find him splayed out on the hay,’ Robert would continue. ‘Bottle of Powers up to the head, gluggin’ away like a dosser. What’s to be done atall, atall, atall?’
With the outburst over, mother would take control, and ring the doctor. Dr O’Connor would then prepare the necessary paperwork for Edward’s swift admission to the substance-abuse clinic in Derry. Later in the day the guilty Edward would appear at our house looking tired, emotional and – dare I say it – happy. Robert, accompanied by father, would convey him in the Anglia to ‘detox hell’.
Robert visited us by day; Edward would invariably show up in the early evening; we’d be part of his ceilidhing routine at the homes in the neighbourhood. He liked it best when my father was not around. He could drop his guard then and be himself.
Edward always seemed to me to be the most approachable, and the sanest, of the brood. A positive side effect of his desire for the drink was that it rendered him more genial than his brothers. He had spirit in more ways than one.
He worked and passed his leisure hours in bibbed overalls and a checked shirt whose collar points were permanently curled under the pressure of his chin. In Ballinascreen and the surrounding locality the customary headgear of the farming man was a cloth cap. It was a multipurpose item: it kept the hair in place, covered baldness and a slipshod grooming routine.
I saw Edward’s world as stretching no farther than home and farm. He plunthered and pedalled the lanes and roads, living within these narrow perimeters. He experienced the spring showers, the summer heat, the falling leaves and snow and was unaware that these shifts of the seasons were the only change he’d be likely to experience.
When given the tea he’d talk and slurp, pausing only to take alligator bites of the bread. It seemed that he’d have barely started before the cap would be shoved back onto his head. He’d lean back on the chair and belch loud his appreciation.
There were times when he’d lighten the monotony of his life with music. Particularly when laid low with the booze – and with our parents out of sight – he’d pitch high on the harmonica, squeezing out notes that surged into melodies we children could identify. That mouth organ brought forth his cringing inner self, a beauty that had never been allowed to breathe. Sometimes we’d spoil it all by joining in with paper combs, all of us sounding like a swarm of bees in a jam jar.
On hearing the latch lift and our parents’ footsteps in the hallway Edward would swiftly stow the instrument in the bib of his overalls, we’d discard our combs and reluctantly return to the heavy, gloomy atmosphere that preceded father like a thundercloud. With that, Edward would be gone, the ceilidh over.
And at one stage Master Robert, envying Edward’s musical skill and never one to be outdone, bought himself a fiddle. In the evenings he’d fill the doorway and our kitchen with a blare of rasping discordancies. He’d stand there, the elbow sawing wildly, the raincoat going crazy with such alien exertion, and so inveigle my hapless mother into a ‘Name That Tune’ contest she could never win.
After each frenzied movement Robert would stop and ask, ‘Now ye know what that’un was, don’t ye?’ And mother would try vainly with: ‘The Mountains of Mourne?’
‘Not atall,’ Robert would remonstrate heavily. ‘Boysoh, how could that be The Mountains of Mourne? What kind of ears have ye on ye atall, atall? It’s Are Ye Right There Michael, Are Ye Right? Here, listen again.’
And off he’d go with another torturous rendering. When Robert finally left, mother would heave a great sigh of relief and say: ‘God I hate tae see him comin’ with that bloody fiddle. Sounds like he’s scraping an ashplant over the arse of a bucket, so it does. Has he no sense?’
But Robert could neither accept defeat nor take a hint, no matter how many scoreless results mother had chalked up. He persisted until finally all the strings broke, much to his annoyance and her delight.
LEAVING THE SUNLIGHT FOR THE GLOOM
Arthur, the oldest McKenna brother, I never got to know; he died before I was old enough to form an opinion of him, but my memory is of a remote figure, tall and stern, the nose a bumpy outcrop on a craggy face. He wore a felt hat like father’s and a long, belted gaberdine which made him look very sinister and unapproachable. I saw him once in a far field, shaking a stick and roaring at a cow, which didn’t augur well.
On Arthur’s demise James became the guardian of the family home: a brooding, two-storey dwelling about a mile from our house. This was where my father and his siblings had been born. It was a strange, silent place with a disquieting air about it as if some baleful event had caused everything to atrophy long, long ago.
The house never seemed occupied somehow. On approaching it you got the feeling that at some point in the dim past its dwellers, moved by some supernatural calling, had suddenly got up and wandered off into the fields, never to be seen again.
But as you drew nearer you found that someone, against his better judgement, had decided not to heed that call from the other world, and was therefore doomed to languish in the house, regretful of that decision. That person was Uncle James.
The back door was always agape yet the clucking hens in the yard were the only signs of life. Those sinister lines in Flannan Isle come to mind.
We stood a moment, still tongue-tied:
And each with black foreboding eyed
To leave the sunlight for the gloom.
His yard bore the unvarying features of all the homesteads I knew. The machinery of agribusiness stood about like pieces of sculpture in an outdoor museum. Here: a tractor with the unhitched vertical of a trailer at its rear. There: a defeated hayshaker, blistering and rusting under the hot sun; and a proud baler, forged and new, which obviously did not belong.
The yard was bounded by white-distempered barns, with doors of faded green opening into odd degrees of darkness. As a child I dared not venture beyond those openings for fear of a door slamming shut behind me and locking me in for ever.
Often when we went for a walk on Sunday evenings mother and I would make a social call, but James, forever the misanthrope, didn’t see it that way. On hearing our approach he’d appear on the stone step, filthy tea towel in hand, and enquire with a suspicious eye what it was we were ‘down about’. No ‘Hello, how are you?’ here. Friendliness would have meant he approved of us, and that would never do.
Like his brother Arthur, James was tall and grim, hair sticking out from under his cap like ticking from a burst sofa, left eye bigger than the right as if a phantom monocle was permanently wedged in the socket. He wore the regulation uniform of the farmer: laced up boots, plaid shirt, serge trousers with a pair of braces hoisting them high off ankles and paunch, the whole ensemble creased and defeated looking. Most of this apparel would have been bought from an army surplus stall, at a knockdown price, on a fair-day in nearby Maghera. Precious cash was never wasted on necessities like clothing.
Only when he’d assured himself that his money was safe and that we hadn’t come to borrow his precious Morris Minor would we be admitted inside James’s lonely homestead. He spent most of his time in the kitchen. I remember every detail of it; the features of that kitchen have stayed in my head like a lacklustre woodcut.
It appeared as though my uncle was more a caretaker than a dweller. No effort had been made to make the place homely. The atmosphere was stale, lacking warmth or welcome. In the kitchen a fire roared and a clock ticked. Even back then I could see the potential that would lie for ever unrealised. The flagged floor and blazing hearth had a brashness about them which didn’t quite belong – all that shameless shine and vigour which spoke of merriment and laughter and tankards raised in toast. The floor, polished with the feet of spiritless generations, wanted to be danced upon and explored in all its fullness. And the hearth wanted to warm a whole host of flickering otherness. I could see a Breughel gathering taking shape: wenches in straining bodices, cavorting with their skirts held high; thigh-slapping young bucks in velvet and brocade, making risqué gestures in the shadows. The air craved lively music to cut across the silence and the solitary lamp high up on the raftered ceiling begged for the chance to strike it all to life.
My Mother Wore a Yellow Dress Page 12