Solar Bones

by Mike McCormack

  even if Darragh’s admiration was delivered in a language I could hardly understand, his grasp of my mother’s proud humility and her fearless assessment of her own life was hopefully a lesson of some kind to him, certainly it had made some sort of impression as his face was still fixed in such an expression of wonderment when he got home that Mairead took a look at him as he passed through the kitchen, asking

  what happened to that lad and

  it was only when I opened my mouth to explain that I had any clear idea myself of what had come to pass, telling her that

  Darragh was shown that there are more things in heaven and earth than he has dreamt of, Onnie broadened his mind for him, she broadened mine as well so she did

  she was in one of her philosophical moods

  she was a lot more plain-spoken than that, she gave him something to chew on for the rest of his days

  good god, all that in one short visit

  all that in two sentences with

  the Angelus bell still ringing in my ear

  the last reverb of its tolling vibrating within me a full twenty minutes after it sounded and

  why these bleak thoughts today, the whole world in shadow, everything undercut and suspended in its own delirium, the light superimposed on itself so that all things are out of synch and kilter, things as themselves but slightly different from themselves also, every edge and outline blurred or warped and each passing moment belated, lagging a single beat behind its proper measure, the here-and-now beside itself, slightly off by a degree as in

  a kind of waking dream in which all things come adrift in their own anxiety so that sitting here now fills me with

  a crying sense of loneliness for my family – Mairead, Darragh and Agnes – their absence sweeping through me like ashes

  sitting here at the table and

  something in me would be soothed now if, at this moment, Mairead or one of the kids were to walk through the door and smile or say hello to me, something in me would be calmed by this, a word or a smile or a glance from my wife or children, to find myself in their gaze and know that I was beheld then, this would be something to believe in, another of those articles of faith that seem so important today, a look or a word, enough to hang a whole life on, something to believe in during

  these grey days after Samhain when the souls of the dead are bailed from purgatory for a while by the prayers of the faithful so that they can return to their homes and

  the light is awash with ghouls and ghosts and the mearing between this world and the next is so blurred we might easily find ourselves standing shoulder to shoulder with the dead, the world fuller than at any other time of the year, as if some sort of spiritual sediment had been stirred up and things set adrift which properly lie at rest, the light swarming with those unquiet souls whose tormented drift through these sunlit hours we might sense out of the corner of our eye or on the margins of our consciousness where

  you need to have faith in these things, a willingness to believe and elaborate on them so that

  it always gladdened me to find that the part of me that was always a true believer has not died, that part of me Mairead calls the altar boy and who, after all these years, is still alive within me and clutching his catechism, still holding to the truths which were laid out in its pages

  who made the world

  God made the world

  and who is God

  God is our father in heaven

  and so on and so on

  to infinity

  the whole world built up from first principles, towering and rigid as any structural engineer might wish, each line following necessarily from the previous one to link heaven and earth step by step, from the first grain of the first moment to the last waning scintilla of light in which everything is engulfed in darkness, the engineer’s dream of structured ascent and stability bolted into every line of its fifty pages, so carefully laid out that any attentive reading of it should enable a man to find his place with some certainty in the broadest reaches of the world, a tower of prayer to span heaven and earth and something which a part of me has never grown out of or developed beyond

  the altar boy with his catechism

  instead of

  the man of faith I tried to become at one time

  that difficult, comic interlude in my life, which I spoke of

  four or five years ago – hard to recall the exact context in which the subject arose or why I chose to bring it up, but it was probably something Darragh said that panicked me into revealing it, the subject welling up inside me before it came blurting out one evening when we were alone in the sitting room, my two years in the seminary sounding incredible in the father-son intimacy of the moment – incredible in any circumstance – and being seized upon with a clinching spasm of fear when I saw the shock immobilise Darragh’s face for an instant as a long frozen moment stalled between us before he paled further and tipped sideways on the couch like a large doll, hooting and guffawing with genuine laughter for a full minute before he could pull himself up and give the news a more considered reaction, finally saying

  it makes sense though, that explains a lot

  does it

  yes, you’re an engineer, maths and physics and suchlike, but it was always a bit of a mystery where all your references came from, all the poetry and philosophy that overtakes you from time to time, but now I know, it was all part of the old ecclesial schooling, am I right

  yes, the great books were part of the training

  and you had two full years of that

  yes

  so what caused you to throw it up, was it the dark night of the soul, Christ no longer visible and –

  it would be nice to think it was something that heroic, that my soul had been put to the test, but it wasn’t like that, it was more a gradual leaking away of conviction

  maybe it was a mother’s vocation, that’s why it didn’t stick

  no, it wasn’t a mother’s vocation, it was all my own doing

  and were you a pious child, your little face always turned to the heavens

  I was an altar boy

  every rural lad was an altar boy, surpliced and soutaned and swinging a thurible, it didn’t always grow to a vocation

  true – but with me there was an element of astonishment, a sense of participating in something grand and mysterious and I wanted a deeper part of it and that took me to Maynooth

  where God finally showed Himself to you but gave you the two fingers instead of the guiding hand

  it was more of a voice telling me to cop myself on

  you were only codding yourself

  something like that

  he had great patience, Agnes – did you know this

  know what

  Agnes crossed the room, flinging herself in a tired heap into an armchair where she picked up a magazine and began to flick through it

  that dad was nearly a priest

  what

  Dad – Fr Marcus Conway, a man of the cloth, a sky pilot

  no way

  yes way – which order did you sign up to, was it one of the preach- ing or teaching ones

  neither, it was just to be an ordinary parish priest

  that’s a pity, I could well imagine you in one of the preaching orders, a man who laid down the party line – possibly the Dominicans, you’d be good banging on with the Malleus Maleficarum and

  though they were younger at the time both of them were always keen to display their wit and reading, the title for house brainbox still up for grabs back then as

  it explains a lot though, Agnes said

  so I’m told

  something I could never understand – how a farmer’s lad like you ended up with someone like Mam, more exactly how an engineer won the hand of a cultured girl like Mam

  yeah, Darragh said, how does a stint in a seminary equip you to go about wooing a girl steeped in French existentialism –

  that’s my point, Agnes continued, ok, my theory is that God took
pity on Dad – He foresaw that he was going to try it on with her, but He knew also that as things stood he didn’t have a chance – she was way out of his league – so He lured him into a seminary to tool him up with poetry and theology and philosophy so that he wouldn’t get steamrolled when he finally met her but

  I don’t buy that, Darragh replied, clearly irritated by the way Agnes had made such headway with the subject, irked at how quickly she had picked through its possibilities and

  how would reading Aquinas and the church fathers make head- way with Mam

  even if that was all he ever read – which I’m sure it wasn’t – it was still enough to enable him to fight his corner when he met a young woman who could quote Sartre and de Beauvoir, chapter and verse, in the original French

  I don’t remember our courtship being so gladiatorial

  of course you don’t, that’s because God took you under His wing and tooled you up with The Song of Songs before turning you loose – all that time you thought you were in a seminary to get close to God, but in fact you were only training for the day when you’d meet her –

  she’s right, Dad, you had to be made worthy of her and that’s how it was done, two years of schooling in the broad humanities so that you would be fit for her when you met and when your training was done, God absented himself from the scene, gave you the back of His hand and a shoe in the hole and

  that’s what happened, Darragh concluded his nose now well out of joint on account of Agnes’s better read on the whole thing

  that’s my take on it, she concurred

  and two years after you sign up, God shows you the door dressed up as a crisis of faith so you jump back over the wall, your head filled with all that good stuff for when you meet this educated girl who’s travelled the world and who, if you don’t play your cards right, will tell you to piss off in three different romance languages and

  I was relieved my admission hadn’t phased or embarrassed them, and the deft way they had made light of the whole thing gave me hope that there was something in the experience that would stand to them down the road, but it

  was strange also to me that the conversation revealed nothing of the confusion and anguish I had experienced at the time, not to mention my foolishness on realising that a child’s awe and trepidation would never evolve into a faith and that I had made a mistake that would cost me two years, a stretch of time which back then felt like an epoch but that now, from the distance of middle age, seems little more than a brief but gloomy interlude spent among the rooms and corridors of that seminary with its grottoed walls and parquet floors, one among a large drove of pale young men drawn from all over the country, some genuinely intent but more, like myself, there in a mood of hopeful bafflement to bury myself in some stumbling quest for a god whose presence resolutely faded the harder I strove towards him and who did nothing to acknowledge my search, so that my faith petered out in time

  ordinary time, festive seasons, days of obligation

  a gradual leaking away of all conviction which now appears to have been mercifully rapid but which, at the time, manifested itself in length and breadth as a kind of ashen desert, which left me scalded in spirit, but merciful enough to leave unscathed that part of me which found something comic in my quest so that I stood blasted and sore but laughing at myself in a wasteland that stretched through the parquet corridors of the seminary, where the walls echoed with my own laughter –

  what the hell was I thinking of

  and along which there was nether a single nook nor corner in which I could get away from myself and even if Agnes was correct – she was – and I did acquire enough reading to give me some chance with Mairead – a stiff dose of poetry, the geometric conceits of the metaphysicals always appealed to her sense of symmetry and balance – it would be quite some time before its worth became obvious, hidden as it was beneath a burning skin of shame so that when I returned to the home place after two years with neither dog-collar nor parchment – the spoiled priest slinking home – it weighed heavily on me that I may have brought some ignominy on myself or my family, but with nowhere else to go and nothing to do I did indeed return, where, after a few weeks

  the offer of a job as a gardener with a pharmaceutical company came up, a firm that had just opened a facility in Westport – manufacturing solvent for the cleaning of contact lenses – and I spent a full year there with three other gardeners raking gravel and tending verges around the warehouse and laboratories, shaping those flower beds and rockeries that were their corporate pride and joy and for which they would win several awards after

  I left to study civil engineering the following year for no reason other than my father pointing out to me at the time that the country was in such a bad state I might as well be in education for a few more years while things were as they were, either that or go to London or America, which he advised against, pointing out that since I had no trade or qualification

  I would probably end up labouring on the pick and shovel and he did not want that for me, no he did not, so it was better to work out the rest of the year as a gardener which was good honest labour with enough fresh air in it to clear my head and sort myself out so that I could go back to study in the autumn because, as he put it

  there’s no use staying in this place, the few head of cattle and the bit of land, it’s too small to make a living on but it’s big enough for a man to go around codding himself that he’s busy and has things to do, slobbering with buckets and calves and feeding, but in the end that’s all you’d be doing, codding yourself, so my advice is to get an education, see a bit of the world, this place will always be here and

  my father’s voice with its neat way of invoking the world as a properly ordered and coherent place in which a man could find his way or take his bearings from certain signs and markers if he only did not allow his vision to become cluttered up with nonsense or things to assume outsize importance in his life, his way of

  fixing an accurate scale and placing of himself in this world as

  he would show me time and again, most memorably, later in his life when his work as a farmer and fisherman was well behind him, that Sunday afternoon when we went out on the bay for a trip, Joe Needham and ourselves, just the three of us taking the trawler for a quick run up to Clare Island where Joe had set pots for crabs and lobsters and

  it was a beautiful summer’s afternoon when we set out, a high, clear sky over us so that you could see the whole of the bay in every direction, from Westport Quay in the east, out to the horizon beyond Turk and Clare as we passed back the coast, keeping close to the shore so that the sea opened out to its full reach ahead of us and we could see across to Mulranny which, in the afternoon heat, was a blur, a distant shadow of coastline where sky and sea came together and once again the whole expanse of this blue day recalled my childhood conviction that there was nothing greater than the sea, no other width or breadth which could surpass or encompass it because the older I got and the more I had advanced in my work as an engineer the more certain I had become that

  out there, on the blue bay

  was where my sense of scale and ratio was established during my childhood, specifically during those summer months when my father and I would set off from Carramore Pier in his small currach to set pots for crab and lobster along the shoreline, a dozen pots stacked in the bows of the currach which we would string out beyond the low-water mark, pink and blue buoys riding the swell behind us as we drifted out deeper on the tide, and it was most likely during these lull periods when I would sit in the back of the currach trailing lines for mackerel or pollock and watching the land recede into the distance that I came to a full sense of the world in its broadest span, the sky overhead and the calm surface of the sea spreading out all around us while my father sat smoking in the middle of the boat with his boots pushed out in front of him, letting the currach drift on the tide, happy as I could imagine any man to be

  in the swelling immensity of the bay, with the lines cutting t
he surface of the water behind and it must have been one such mood he woke from one day to tell me the story of how, when he was a child himself

  a massive ship came into Clew Bay, a ship from god-knows-where with no recognisable flags or markings on it, a huge ship which bow-to-stern was over a mile long and with four massive funnels on it coughing up big balls of black deatach and armed with cannon and other artillery along its sides when it anchored in the middle of the bay for a full day before it fired two shells onto the mainland, whether as warning or salute no one could say, but one of them destroyed a cart-house in Durless and it was never known where the second one landed or if it did land because for all he knew it might still be orbiting the earth or still flying off into space fifty years later, after which the ship unloaded enough raw timber onto boats from Westport Quay to roof seventy houses, but only after it had been cut into workable lengths – a big job in itself as this timber was so dense and close-grained it destroyed every saw blade that was set to it, shearing teeth and buckling so many, one after another, that Kelly’s timber yard had to send to Sheffield for specially tempered blades before the job could be done, the heavy balks of timber now running smoothly through the bandsaw, but any man who ever worked on the cutting of that timber never had the full of his health afterwards because there was nothing but blue dust out of it, which lodged in their lungs and sent several of them to early graves, five or six men with young families left behind them, drifting away into oblivion the same way the ship itself left the bay, turning on its own central axis with its massive diesel engines churning and pushing it out into the Atlantic beyond whence it came and to where it returned and

  my father told me that story one day in one of those quiet moments when we were drifting from shore on a neap tide and the box in the bottom of the boat was filled with mackerel and of course it was all nonsense

  pure fucking nonsense

  but there’s never been a time since, with a clear sky overhead, that I don’t look out on the bay without the image of that ghost ship with all its timber and artillery floating across my vision and a part of me wondering to what purpose my father told me that story, what did he think I might gain from it, how was my world enriched by knowing it and if, with the passing of years, I would come to know that it was just one among a myriad number of such stories he had to tell when the mood took him, it was also of a piece with the man himself because even as a ten-year-old I knew there was something storied about himself also when