I longed to hear Michael’s jokes, the sharp rhymes, and his daring laugh at the punch lines, when he gripped his knees and his greasy John Garfield curl toppled down his forehead, and then his fingers shooting up, hastily fixing that clump back into place. During the telling of those jokes, my father sucked his lips in, his forehead was long and wrinkled, and at the punch lines, a smile flared at the corners of his mouth. It flared for seconds only—a smile so quick that you’re still not sure you ever saw it, like something shining brightly and rapidly falling down a country sky on a dark night.
Michael died the spring after he built the pump house. A male neighbor told us about the death. The neighbor’s name is gone, but I recall the rap of his knuckles on our opened door. It was a Saturday morning, in August, between nine and ten. We were eating breakfast. My oldest brother, Anthony, had just arrived back from the creamery. My father was sitting in his chair and reading the newspaper Anthony had brought from O’Shea’s, and while my father read, his hand darted from behind the paper, and his finger, broken the year he worked on building sites in London, tipped the cigarette ash onto the blackened top of the white range.
Anthony sat at one end of the kitchen table. I sat at the other. Stephen, the youngest, sat next to me. The hood of the red secondhand Massey Ferguson 35 crammed the kitchen window. A fly buzzed around the marmalade jar. A knife was sticking out of the jar. Hannah, my youngest sister, was washing dishes. Tess, the second eldest, was cutting bread at the table. My mother was frying eggs. She pressed the spatula down hard on each egg and shouted at me and my brothers to stop complaining, because even if the undercooked or overcooked egg was not to our liking, any sort of egg was better than no egg.
Seconds before the knuckles touched the door, the two sheepdogs barked in a way that warns you a stranger has entered the yard, and at the knock my mother dropped the spatula, ran her hand through her black hair, quickly retied her apron, then dashed down the short hall to greet the neighbor, and before she led him in she shouted at the dogs to pipe down, and when he was in she invited him to sit in the chair across the range from my father, the chair Michael sat in. But the neighbor didn’t sit. He stood close enough to me that I smelled cowshit and old sweat, and he shoved his dirty balled-up cap from one hand to the other and bit down on his bottom lip, his cheeks reddening and his eyes shifting from the floor to my father and then to my mother, who stood by him with her arms folded. Her eyes had that look that said this man was not bearing good news.
—Hello, God bless, he eventually said. —Lovely weather. Hello to all the lads. But sorry to have to stop in but, at such a frightfully bad time of the day but, and sorry to have to be the one with the news, but God rest him Michael Lyons died at the table this morning. Didn’t even get to finish his mug of tea. Didn’t even open the boiled egg. Nora in an awful state. Mercury in the blood. Picked that up in Gortdrum all them years back. Still in the system. So they’re saying anyways.
Every pew in the church was full at Michael’s funeral Mass. We knelt halfway up the church. Hannah was beside me; Tess was next to her, then my father and my brothers. My mother knelt behind me. Kevin was first up the aisle. All I recall is a sports coat flapping open. Next came Nora. Michael’s older brother, Big Roger, had his arm around her back, his hand clutching her left side, her dress was ruffled around his fingers, and her head looked snug in Roger’s armpit. She pressed a balled-up paper hankie to her mouth, and the black veil she wore looked like the one my mother was wearing. The twins were next. They wore dark suits, wrinkled white shirts, and bow ties. Una was last. She walked slowly, chin up. The dark raincoat reached her knees. Her tights were black and a velvet band held her long hair back from her forehead. After she passed I hopped up, stared, and my mother jabbed her fingers into my right arse cheek. I turned to her. Through the veil the solemn eyes declaring: Kneel down, don’t bring attention to yourself, know your place, don’t disgrace us, don’t disgrace me.
I don’t remember seeing Una again for five years. The news was that she was a bit distant, she’d her father’s eye, and she’d secured a place in the civil service, which was the sort of job bright young women and men aspired to.
In January 1984, I moved to Dublin. Una had been living there about two years. My mother often chatted with Nora after Sunday Mass, and in one of my mother’s letters was Una’s address, and my mother wrote that I should visit Una; the mothers agreed it would be grand for us to see someone from home. In another letter, my mother asked that when I did visit Una to let on nothing about the you-know-what. This you-know-what concerned Big Roger and Nora. Big Roger began visiting Nora not too long after Michael died. People saw Big Roger’s car coming and going and they saw Big Roger walking in and out of the cottage. In another letter, my mother said that Roger Lyons’s car was stationed in a brazen manner outside you-know-who’s cottage. By “brazen manner” she meant the car was parked in front.
Una’s flat was in a three-story shabby Georgian house on Drumcondra Road, next to the canal bridge, Binns Bridge. I lived off Drumcondra Road farther down, on Botanic Avenue, and one Sunday afternoon, in late July, I put on my black drainpipe pants and a shirt I’d bought in a shop on Talbot Street the week before and headed up the high and wide footpath, with the grassy slope and the old trees to my left, and the B&B with the shamrock sign on the pole to my right, and pushed open her small iron gate with my hip. A messy hedge spilled over the crumbling left pier. The yard was one gray cement slab. I walked across it, pressed her bell, shoved my hands back into my pockets, then took one hand out and fiddled with my pants zipper. The peeling gray paint on her door looked like the main door to my own flat. I counted three full minutes, and was turning to leave when I heard the harsh turning of locks. The door opened a bit, her face appeared. I stared at the door then the cement slab. There was perfume, the brand I never knew, the scent I can’t describe, but also in the hall was the smell of yesterday’s boiled cabbage, a smell you came across then only in flats where country people lived.
She opened the door all the way. Her hair was short at the back and her fringe was gelled and spiked above the forehead. My own hair looked something like this. She wore a white short-sleeved blouse with a frilly collar, two strings dangling from the neck, and a tight wine-colored skirt. I said my name and something about my mother saying that I should visit, that Una’s mother said the same thing to my mother. By then I was staring at her pale and lovely made-up face.
—I only live down the road from you, like a twenty-minute walk, I said.
—I know who you are. You’ll have a cup of tea, Jimmy, she said.
She smiled.
—I don’t want to be a bother, Una, it being a Sunday and all that—
—You’re not a bother. Can’t you come up?
—I will, if you like, I said.
Her flat was on the second floor. Two high windows faced Drumcondra Road. Emulsion white bare walls. Below the window opposite the door was a small sink, a single cabinet to the left of it, a hot plate and a short counter below it. The floor there was covered in blue and white tiles that were stained with large splotches of brown paint that to this day make me think of a clown’s face. Under the other window was a dressed single bed. A stack of women’s magazines on it, three pairs of shoes underneath it, a lamp and a few novels on the small bedside table. On a low shelf between the two windows were more books and a small black-and-white television with lopsided rabbit ears. Behind the door, a round table and two chairs. She told me to sit in one of the chairs, and she went and filled a kettle.
She brought the tea things over on a tray, unloaded them, took the tray back, opened the cabinet, and returned with a plate of ginger biscuits. She sat in the other chair and said that she didn’t remember seeing my face on the school bus, and that she sat on the bottom deck. I said I sat on the top, and she would have left by the time I started, and that my first year was Kevin’s last year, and she said she did remember
seeing Tess on the bus and in the convent schoolyard, but they had different friends, and so they hardly ever spoke, and she then asked if I went to the convent or the tech. I said I went to the tech for a few years, and she said I was lucky to go there, because the nuns and brothers were pure savages. I said I had heard all about that from Tess, but the technical school had its share of savages, and there were no brothers or nuns there. She stirred the teapot, asked if I liked Dublin.
—I like making my own money, I said.
—So glad to be out on my own, she said.
—The same here, I said.
—Do you go down home often?
—Heading down there soon for a week’s holiday to help out with the hay, I said.
—The train on Friday afternoon is the fastest. The bus is cheaper, but it takes you all over the country, she said.
She poured my tea, then her own, and she told me to help myself to the ginger biscuits. She picked one up herself, nibbled at it, and then put it back on the edge of the plate. She said when she first arrived in Dublin she cried herself to sleep every night.
—It was so hard, because of the noise from the cars and the buses and the people coming out of the pubs late and their shouting and laughing and fighting outside the chipper up the street. And I missed my room at home so much. I missed waking up and looking out the window at the silver birches.
She was looking at me when she said she didn’t cry now, and her pale hands trembled when she said, —I suppose you heard the news about my mother and my uncle Roger.
—Not a word, I said.
—You have. Don’t lie, she said. —They all have. You know as well as I do what they’re like.
—No, I haven’t, I said.
I scooted my chair away from the table and shoved my hands into my pockets. From the footpath the shrill voices and laughter of children who lived in the Corporation flats on the canal bank. Young Dublin men walked past: You wouldn’t ride her. Yous was afraid to ride her. Yous was bleedin’ afraid.
She looked toward the window that the bed was next to.
—My uncle Roger is going to marry my mother, she said, and folded her arms. —That’s the latest news from my house.
I looked at her, then out that window. What she told me was a shock, but more shocking was that she would tell it. We’re from people who told nothing. And she didn’t stop there.
—Big Roger started visiting our house after Daddy died, she said. —He hadn’t talked to my father in years because Roger had inherited my grandfather’s farm and house, and that’s a big farm, so I saw little of Roger till Daddy died. Then I saw Roger all the time, and seeing Roger was the main reason I made sure to get good marks in the exams and get the place in the civil service. You see, Roger would walk into our house without knocking, like he was Daddy, but Daddy’d let us know he was on the way. He would sing or whistle on the path, but Roger would walk in without a scrap of manners and sit in Daddy’s chair, and my mother would order me about. And I obeyed her. I had to. After I made his dinner I made him his tea—I boiled him his spuds and peeled them and served them to him, with all that salt and butter he likes so much, and I picked up his plate and served him his dessert. Big Roger with all the land got fine and healthy after Daddy died. He kept saying to my mother, Fine land, and lots of it. Not a wet spot on it. Fine big house with enough rooms for these children and more like them. Rooms I never venture into, he’d kept saying. So you see, Jimmy—
—Jim’s what I like now, I said.
—So you see, Jim, Roger got a brand-new life, he did, but the worst of all was him visiting in summertime. He’d come in from the meadow, no shirt on him, and he’d sit in Daddy’s chair and the sweat trickled down his chest and his pig belly and the hayseed were stuck to his blond chest hair. It was terrible to have to look at him, sitting like a king in Daddy’s chair, like that was his to sit in—and I had to serve him. And I’d smell the sweat from him when I served him. I’d hold my breath, but my mother made me, my mother who would barely leave the house for months after the funeral, only to go to Mass, who wore black and cried morning, noon, and night, and then the black was wrapped up in plastic and put into the back of the wardrobe. Good meat was bought from the shop, not bacon, but beefsteak. Rhubarb tarts were baked. Custard was made every evening, because Roger liked all that. My mother and I fought like cats and dogs over the way she’d gawk in the mirror when she knew Roger was on his way, she screaming at me that I didn’t understand, but I understood well enough. She was spending more time before the mirror than I did, and this from a woman who drummed it into me that any woman who spent too much time looking in a mirror is no better than a prostitute. My brothers, they ignored it. They went outside and kicked the football around, and I could hear them outside, kicking their ball and laughing, and the two of us screaming inside, so you see, Jim, I’m happy to be far away from all that—
I asked how the twins were, but I asked only because I wanted her to keep staring out the window, arms folded, the blouse strings dangling.
—The twins will go to London, she said. —In a year or two they will. They have jobs lined up in hotels. My mother’s older sister is in London. Her son is high up in the hotels.
I knew that Kevin had been living in Dublin for a while, so I inquired how he was.
—I don’t see that much of him, she said. —He works for this landlord, who’s also a property developer. Kevin has his own eye on a few old tenements he wants to buy—but by the way, how did you get the job in the bar? Any sort of a job is hard to come by these days.
—My father’s second cousin, I said. —He’s high up in the union.
• • •
The second cousin grew up on a farm near where my father grew up on the hill with Aunt Hannah and Aunt Tess. He left for Dublin around the age I was at this time. My father wrote him a letter about a job for me, and a few weeks later, my father was sitting in his chair by the range. He had his glasses on; the newspaper was folded at his feet, and he was reading a letter the postman had just delivered. It was a Tuesday afternoon, in early December, and I was shoving wood into the range. I’d cut the wood on a sawhorse I’d built at the end of the house. My father told me to leave that fire alone, take a gawk at this. He raised the letter and turned it toward me. Held it open like a scroll. His dirty fingernails pierced the top and bottom of it. His hands and the letter shook.
These two sentences you recall: Put him on the afternoon train to Dublin in the next three or four weeks. I will meet the young fellow on the platform at Heuston.
I was sixteen that March I’d quit the technical school. I don’t remember the day it happened, but I well remember how much I despised school. They all made that easy, right from day one in National school. And my parents were fine with me quitting; they forever needed a hand on the farm, and they themselves had stopped school early. Had to help out at home. Help out on the land. School to them was a sort of long holiday from the life of real work that lay ahead, and so they found endless farm jobs for me. But I wasn’t good at farmwork. And I didn’t like being around my father. I didn’t like his grunts, his grating breath, his daily legion of orders, but when my father ordered you to do something, you did it.
After you’d read that letter your father told you to hand him the calendar. You crossed the kitchen and took it from the nail above the television. Your sisters and brothers weren’t in the kitchen, but your mother was. When you walked in with the wood cradled to your chest she was washing the dishes or cleaning. She wasn’t baking bread, because you’d remember it. And when you handed your father the calendar they were talking about the farm jobs you needed to finish. How long those jobs might take. Your father had the calendar opened on his lap. Your mother was standing at the sink with her arms folded. The way she often stood. The way you recall her. And you were watching out that sink window at the faraway Galtee Mountains when your father chose a day in Janua
ry. He wrote his cousin back that evening, and the moment he licked the letter shut you went and stood before him and asked if you might be the one to post the letter and your father said yes then handed it to you.
The week before I left, I took the bus into Limerick to say good-bye to Aunt Hannah in the City Home. Your mother said Aunt Hannah would give you money. I sat on a chair beside my aunt’s bed and happened to mention how sad it was I’d never get to know Aunt Tess in Dublin. Aunt Hannah gripped my wrist. Her eyes rolled toward me. The eyes narrowed.
—Jimmy, she said. —Didn’t your aunt Tess fling herself under one of them city buses across the street from the Garden of Remembrance, and that was that for her. I can tell you that now, Jimmy, she added. —You’ll never live here again, but my sister, God knows, she was haywire. None of us knew what was going on inside her head at all, she kept things to herself, and your father and myself were more than glad that she did, like you have to keep what I’m telling you to yourself, but my sister did that woeful thing to us, did that to her own family, your father and mother know every bit of it, they knew about it the time it happened, but your aunt Tess, Jimmy, was the odd one, but every family has the misfortune of having one of them, and only one if they’re lucky.
Aunt Hannah let my wrist go. Her eyes were all tears. I looked from them to the low city buildings outside the window. I imagined myself sitting on a train to Dublin. All their tears and their farm jobs and their sordid secrets were falling behind me. Then Auntie Hannah shoved her hand under the blanket. I looked down. The hand scampered about like a rat. When it came out it pressed a fifty-quid note into my opened hand.
The Visitors Page 3