by Anne Griffin
‘I can’t possibly do without you today, Hannah!’ Amelia Dollard said, as she fiddled with the flowers in her hallway where my mother waylaid her, her eyes never once rising from the carpet. ‘I’ve told you, Thomas is coming home and bringing the Lawrences. His school friend and his parents. They’ve been so good to him, through all of this, taking him on weekends and such, so we can’t let him down. Poor Thomas – we don’t often see him and what with Hugh away … well it’s the only time he can get home. And we simply can’t do without your apple tart. You’ve made enough, I hope.’ Less of an enquiry than a demand, Amelia Dollard strode away, leaving my mother alone, looking at her hands, clasped on her aproned stomach.
I was tempted to call out to her. I heard it all, you see, through the open front doors. I’d been ordered to assist the gardener with the flowerboxes in the windows at the front of the house. Instead, I watched my mother turn, tilting her head back in an effort to reverse the flow of tears, and walk back to the kitchen. It was Jenny who arrived later, as my mother, with the mounds of baking complete, put on her coat to leave. She caught her at the back door, she told me that evening. I heard my mother’s cry. Her wail rose above the rooftop, screeched over the tiles and down the walls to pound my head and shoulders as I trimmed the trees at the sides of the front door. I knew it was Tony. My legs weakened and I stretched a hand to a branch to hold me up. At that very moment a car pulled up to the house. I didn’t turn my head, knowing who it was in an instant. I heard Thomas’s boasts as he fussed with the car and hall door.
‘1700s, maybe? Not exactly sure, but Father would know. Unfortunately, he’s not around today. London, you know, bit of business. This way, this way.’
He never acknowledged me. Small mercy. If he’d as much as breathed in my direction, I might finally have landed him one. When the hall door shut, I spat on the ground after him, cursing them to hell. I was gone then. Half crazed, I ran the long way home at some speed, not wishing to pass my mother or sister. I burst through our front door, then into Tony’s room.
‘No, Maurice,’ my father shouted, as he struggled to hold me back when I reached the bed. He held my arms, but like a man possessed I kept lurching forward. Eventually I wrangled free of him, firing my father back against the wall and fell on to Tony’s frame. There was nothing but bone, no meat, no hefty muscle. Nothing. Every scrap, wasted away. I lay there, holding his skeletal arms, letting my anger go the way of his soul, up and up, until there was nothing left, just a pitiful murmur, that felt like it wasn’t mine.
My father and May pulled me away when they heard my mother arrive. Her surviving children stood together, watching her enter. It’s an awful thing, to witness your mother cry. You cannot cure nor mend nor stick a plaster on. It is rotten. I wanted to tear out the pain of it. It took every ounce of restraint I had not to run from the room and charge through the fields damning those bastards, that bitch and her precious son, who had denied my mother her goodbye. My father stood above her with one hand on her shoulder and the other on her back. That weathered, veined hand moved up and down with the rhythm of her sorrow all afternoon, never once resting. His own grief in check. I wonder, as the years went on, when my father found himself alone, did the weight of Tony’s loss stop him in the fields and lower him to his hunkers? Did he ever lay his hand on the earth to steady his body that heaved at the injustice of it all? But that evening it was my mother’s cries that filled the house. On and on it went for what felt like hours, thrashing at her small frame, refusing to recede until the priest came. Even then, only quietening enough so she could hear the prayers.
That night was the longest I’ve ever known. Sleepless, save for snatches filled with furious dreams in which I was running, running from something or someone. I could feel the panic in my chest when I woke each time in a startle, unsure of where I was, pushing myself up out of my mother’s chair where I’d fallen asleep by the range. Finally knowing I was at home, I’d settle back against the headrest and stare into the darkness, the emptiness of a life without Tony – my support, my rock.
I’ve no memory of getting ready the next day. How any of us turned ourselves out as smartly as we did I’ve no idea. The funeral was hushed and solemn, as you’d expect. Our tears fell on the wooden pews and our black clothes. Our grief not rising above a whisper until the prayers ended and we rose to bring Tony to his grave. As we men left our seats, my mother emitted a moan so despairing that I had to hold on to the back of the seat as it swept into me, causing my knees to buckle. She stood, supported by Jenny and May, linking her awkwardly, one behind and one in front, corralled between the seat and the kneeler, waiting to step out, to follow behind as we raised her son aloft and bore him down the aisle. As we carried the coffin from the church door, I heard wheels crunch on the gravelled drive.
The Dollards.
The car stopped at my rear. Father Molloy, to my horror, halted our procession as the footsteps approached. I watched him bow his head quickly in the direction of the newcomer.
‘Father,’ Amelia Dollard said.
The crunching continued until it stopped behind me. Bold as you like, wedging herself between mother and son, once again. She took my mother’s limp hand and held it as if it mattered to her, my sisters told me later. But my mother didn’t raise her head or squeeze her palm. Didn’t move a muscle. For those seconds, as Dollard’s voice mumbled to my rear, I thought of my father. I imagined his head leaning against my brother’s coffin. Eyes closed against the insensitivity and embarrassment of this woman, wishing he could touch the fair hair of his boy one last time; arms aching and knotted hands reddening under the weight of death. I wanted to scream at her to get away, to stop her playacting, her hypocrisy. And then she was gone, just like that. The engine started and that was it. Father Molloy signalled, and we moved on.
I was sixteen when we buried Tony in the Meath heat. We listened to the prayers, joined in when required, mumbled the decade of the rosary and watched as the earth took him. Then, we walked away.
From that day on there was little left of my mother, of that gentle spirit that had once been hers. She never returned to the Dollards, neither did I. We coped without their money. I worked the land with my father. My mother stayed at home, hardly ever leaving. Our weddings were her one exception, May’s, Jenny’s and mine. Never uttered a word at them, though, never raised a smile. When I look back now at the photos, I see her weary, empty face and wish I could touch it, to soothe it. My father generally stood stoically by her side. His hand on the small of her back, I imagine, staring into the camera, demanding it to notice there was one guest missing. What conversations passed between husband and wife in the years following Tony’s departure, I’ve often wondered? What might Sadie and I have said to one another had you died leaving us behind, forever caught in a loop of memories, inventing your future, lamenting all that you would never know? Or perhaps a silence might have descended – a delicate layer of protection holding us together, cocooning us away from the ugly awful truth of life and death, its gaping wounds, its noxious smells.
It’s so hard to lose your best friend at any time, but to do so at such a young age was pure cruel. At sixteen I was heading into my life. Having travelled those precious years with Tony by my side, I now had to venture forth into the most significant of them alone. Without his guidance, his cajoling, his slagging. It didn’t feel possible.
‘He’ll always be here, Maurice,’ my father told me, the day we came home from the burial. We stood at Tony’s door looking at the empty bed as he held his hand over his heart. When he left to join the women in the kitchen, I too moved my hand to my heart. I pressed in hard as I could, trying to reach Tony, to turn on the switch that would tune him in.
‘Big Man, ya gobshite.’
He came in, loud and clear.
And I laughed into my closed eyes, laughed down into my boots and into my fingers that had found him. And as true as I am sitting here holding this drink in these wrinkled, dried out hands of mine, h
e’s never left me since.
* * *
After Tony died it was me who was set to inherit the land. One of the best things my father ever taught me as I worked with him was to embrace change. I watched him clear boundary walls before the war, turning it to tillage. After it was all over, he had it back ready for grazing, quick as you like. Dairy, that was his big thing then. He saw pound signs on the hide of every cow, and in every drop of milk they yielded. He had my heart broken with all the questions about how the Dollards had run their dairy when I had worked for them. I’d no desire to remember a thing about them, but he had me pestered until he knew everything I did. His sums done, before long we had the beginnings of our own herd.
‘By the time the year 2000 hits we’ll be the biggest dairy farmers in Leinster, feeding the hordes of Dublin. We’ll keep their tea breaks flowing,’ he told me. He thought he’d live forever. Sometimes I wondered might he make it myself. A horse of a man. But he never even smelt a whisper of the twenty-first century. He went in sixty-three. Collapsed in the fields one day, fencing. Mam, now she made it ’til seventy-five. Lived with us, right up until just after you were born. She needed the nursing home by then. She’d forgotten us all, except Tony. She’d constantly ask us when we visited her, if Tony was still down the fields and when he’d be back so she could get his tea ready. Over and over, she’d ask and we’d oblige:
‘Soon, he’ll be back soon.’ She’d sit back contented then, but within two seconds would be back at it: ‘And where’s Tony?’ It would have been kinder to have taken her sooner. But I wonder in those years after my father died, when she had her mind, how she dealt with his passing. I never asked her how she coped losing the person she knew best. The person who accepted her humanity and all the failings that came with it. The person who loved her unconditionally. The person whose hand was always there to hold. I wish now I had.
Rainsford lay on the border with the city. Transport costs were low so we could afford to be competitive with the big milk buyers. We were in demand. Even managed to land the Gormanstown Army Camp contract. That was a good one. The stability of that set us up rightly. Allowing us the security to keep edging on, borrowing and expanding more and more. Although there were years after my father died when the milk prices were rotten. I came through it though, buoyed along by selling some bits of land.
In the late fifties, you see, we had begun to buy up little plots wherever we could find them. Farmers with their bags packed ready to leave for England, desperate to take what might be offered. We borrowed, counting on the economic tide eventually turning in our favour. We handed over the criminally small payments to those boys heading off, asking was there anyone else around in the market. If we were given a tip, we went straight there, arriving at the next deal with cash in our pockets. Some slammed their door on our insult. But others took it, ready to trade in their farming life for that of barman or labourer or miner. I often wondered, did those hands that pocketed our cash ever ache for the touch of the soil as they held the smooth glass or the cold concrete or the dusty coal of their new lives? At night in their dreams, did they move with the rhythm of a scythe or reach to calm the hind of a cow before milking?
The canniest move I ever made, not that I knew it back then, was buying that strip of land on the outskirts of Dublin, not far from the airport. It was in the sixties, got it for buttons. Little did I know how high its value would reach as time went on. I sold it for a small fortune in the end. Prime zoned land. My intention was to keep it in pasture but when I realised what kind of gold my cows were standing on, I decided to dangle it out there, to see who’d bite.
‘This is ridiculous, Maurice. Would you not call a halt to it?’ Sadie complained at me one evening over the bidding war that had ensued. ‘It’s shameful, that amount of money being talked about. It’s only a couple of fields. Kevin can’t believe the madness. He says the country is heading for a crash, with this Celtic Tiger.’
Well, you can imagine how I took that.
‘Is that what he says now? You can tell him the next time he calls from his ivory tower over there that I will in my arse call a halt to it.’
‘Please don’t curse in my house.’
‘Listen, if those boys want to keep raising the stakes and battling it out, I’ll not stop them. No matter what little Lord Fauntleroy has to say about it. And tell me, will you be objecting when the sale buys you that new kitchen you want?’
‘You’ve enough money already to buy new kitchens for the whole of Rainsford. And don’t be calling your son that, he deserves better from you.’
In the end I lied. Told her they’d offered €500,000 below what I actually got. Her heart and her conscience, nor yours for that matter, couldn’t have taken the truth. But I’m sure my father and Tony danced a jig, the day the money finally landed in my bank account. Pure magic, son.
And as for all the Dollard land that lay over our boundary wall? I was twenty-one when the hearse drove Hugh Dollard to his chapel. I stood in line on Main Street with the town. They were all out, their heads bent in reverence to the man most of us had served at some stage or another. The town hushed as his coffin made its way through the corridor we’d formed. When it came within inches of me, I turned one-eighty, to face O’Malley’s butchers.
‘Shame on you, Maurice Hannigan,’ Mrs Roche said, after the procession had passed.
‘I’ll not be made a liar of,’ I answered, ‘and don’t look at me like you never cursed them like the rest of us over the years.’
‘Your mother would be disgusted if she knew.’
‘Oh, she knows, I told her that’s what I was planning,’ I said, muscling my way down the street, through the onlookers, who one by one, began to hear news of my crime as it trickled down the line. What I hadn’t said was that my mother had made no reply when I told her earlier what I was going to do. She’d simply handed over her list of messages and turned back into the house in silence.
‘Have you no respect for the dead?’ Roche called after me, playing to the crowd, encouraging them to join her in my condemnation.
I stopped and turned to her.
‘You blessing yourself as he passed isn’t going to make them treat you any better, Mrs Roche. They’ll still pay you the same pittance for the washing.’
‘You’re nothing but a scut. Someone will put manners on you one of these days, Hannigan.’
‘I look forward to them trying,’ I said, bringing an end to our public debate, turning once again for home.
‘You’re not a patch on your brother. He knew manners.’
I didn’t look back to her final and cruellest blow but stretched myself as tall as I could and strode away. When out of sight, I closed my eyes. She was right, Tony was by far a better man than me. I didn’t like to think of him up there despairing and ashamed of his brother.
‘I couldn’t pretend, Tony,’ I offered in my defence, mounting my bike, with the few messages under my arm and pedalling my way home.
Even before he’d died the Dollard fortunes had been slipping. Some said it was gambling, others bad investments. To me, it was payback. By sixty-three we’d already bought Moran’s land, then Byrne’s and finally Stanley’s, until my land surrounded Dollard’s on three sides. Slowly, I began to eat into theirs.
The strategy for buying their land was the same as with any other man. Offer low. But with them, it felt extra exhilarating. Invariably, the price I paid was paltry. Every couple of years they sold off a little more and each time my offer got lower. Until, that is, the last time.
One evening back in the early seventies, I opened my door to a young man I’d never set eyes on before.
‘Good evening, Mr Hannigan,’ he said, with a smile so wide it caused me to wince. ‘I know these things are normally left to the agents, but I felt I had to come talk to you myself about your recent offer on the Dollard land.’
‘And you are?’
‘Forgive me, I’m Jason. Jason Bruton. I’m married to Hilary.’
‘Hilary?’
‘Yes, Rachel Dollard’s daughter Hilary?’
Let me go back, son. Thomas’s sister, Rachel, who’d all those years before stood and watched her brother inflict that scar on my face had left the house as soon as she was old enough. Was she even sixteen? I’m not sure. Went off to marry Reggie, some English toff. Not wealthy as it turned out and so they ended up back at the house after a few years with Amelia, the mother, after the Dollard senior died. They had one daughter, Hilary. And this Jason Bruton was Hilary’s husband. When I offered him nothing to this news of who he was, he continued anyway, pulling back his unshaken hand, looking at it to make sure he wasn’t mistaken, ‘as I was saying, this land business—’
‘Business. Now there you have it – business, not charity. Just in case that’s what you’re here for.’
‘Quite. Well, I’d like to call a spade a spade also,’ he said, clearing his throat. ‘Yours is the only offer we’ve received. I could stand here and say we have another buyer. But you are no fool, as is plain. Therefore, I’ve come to ask that you consider bringing up your offer, not of course to the selling price but to one that is more … reasonable.’
‘Well now, Jackson—’
‘Jason. It’s Jason.’
‘And tell me, why might I want to do that?’
‘May I come in, Mr Hannigan? To talk this over further, in private,’ he said, looking about him as if my house was right in the middle of a housing estate.
‘You may not,’ I replied, pulling the door in closer behind me, emphasising my position and ensuring Sadie might not overhear.
‘I see,’ he said, drawing in a considered breath and then laughing. ‘They did tell me this was a waste of time. Rachel and Reggie. And yet here I am, wishing I’d listened to them.’