At dusk a taxi brought us to a B and B on the outskirts of Shannon. Away from the industrial roadway with its lorries of coal and fertilizer and stout hurtling back and forth to Dublin and Cork, the silence seemed like a suspended thing dropped softly upon us. I spent the night in a strange bedroom, down the hall from my mother, stretched across the sagging mattress on my belly, staring out the parted curtains. The lights of planes shimmered over the Atlantic, magically sparkling out of a darkness of cloud and sea and sky—and then others, slowly burning alight in the gloom, one after the other, in staggered rows all through the night.
In the morning we rose before dawn once more and took a taxi to Shannon, passing fields glowing white with mist and quiet industrial estates and sleeping tenements and bowed corrugate hangars with their backs turned against the flat plains of the West beyond.
Do you think he’ll recognize me? I asked. Even as I said it I thought Mother might snap at me, tell me to stop asking such stupid questions, but she paused and, considering this, smiled instead.
Of course he’ll recognize you, sure you’re his son.
At the airport I walked past sleeping bodies curled here and there in the rows of plastic seats, or lying prostrate on the carpeted floors. A young woman slept sitting against a wall, suitcase at her side, legs drawn up tightly to her chest. I stared at her dark head resting on her knees, the pleated skirt drawn tight against her hips. As everyone slept, a cleaning lady worked a Hoover, her shoes echoing on the wide tiled floors, whispering on the lengths of worn carpet.
The fields beyond the wide glass windows were moored by mist. Everything was chill, yet waking and warming slowly. Light punched through the clouds in long slanting beams, and I hoped, as we waited outside customs, that such beauty would make Father come home to the South, and to us.
As we waited, my mother stared at me, and, no longer sure if her looks were of tenderness or contempt, I went and stood at the railings before the wide windows looking out at the runway. Over the darkness of the western horizon, a light emerged, pulsing urgently toward us. I rushed to tell Mother.
There’s lights, there’s lights.
Whisht, and sit down, Mother said. It’ll be hours before his plane comes in. But she stood and took my hand and we walked toward the observation deck, and there it was, the plane from America, churning along the runway now—I could hear the whine and shudder of its jet engines reversing even through the heavy plate glass—and the plane was slowing, slowing, and then slanting toward us, its fuselage and burgeoning undercarriage gleaming with the first glints of sunrise.
I can’t stay, Mother said—I can’t face this man.
I stared at her, convinced that I had misheard.
What?
I said, “I can’t stay.” She clenched her hands; her brow furrowed. She looked about the airport, toward the long corridor, the hall and exit, the dark rain-misted dawn beyond.
He’ll have you back to me in a fortnight, she said. He’s not taking you with him, he promised. I shouldn’t have come at all. What on earth was I thinking, she said, angrier now. Her eyes turned from the exit to the lounge and the waiting room, scanning the airport’s width and breadth, and then she paused and exhaled, as if with relief. She took my hand and I held fast to my bag as she led me to a Guard who sat at a bench sipping from a mug of tea, his cap resting on the table before him.
She handed me to the Guard, muttering something about the boy’s father coming in on the next flight and unable to stay because she desperately needed to make the Dublin train, and fled off down the walkway into the vast corridor beyond, her figure a racing shadow on the stone white walls. I looked at the stranger noisily slurping his tea next to me and waited for another—no less strange—to come like a crashing pummeling stampede or like a floating visitation through the doors of customs.
The Guard was a morose man with a bright bulbous nose who seemed completely unperturbed. The minutes passed and then it could have been hours. He stared at me for a while, then pursed his wet lips and gestured with his head. Is that your daddy then? he asked, and when I turned, the doors had magically opened and Father stood there with my aunts and uncles who’d come from America on either side of him, and I nodded, surprised. Father crossed the distance between us in just a few steps and took me in his arms and I thought of Mother’s words: He’ll have you back to me in a fortnight. He’s not taking you with him.
I’ve missed you, Father said. His eyes were bloodshot. He shook his head as if he were holding back tears. The Guard stepped forward and asked him for identification, and Father untangled himself from me and brandished his wallet and it seemed the most natural thing in the world; while I might have liked a flourish, an indignant outrage, there was nothing—he didn’t even ask where Mother was. McDonagh, Father said to the man in a way that only an American would say it, with the steadfast assurance that what one wanted could be gotten if one wanted it and only demanded it loudly enough. And the Guard, satisfied that my father was who he said he was, walked away, back to his tea.
My somber aunts and uncles from the West gathered about me with their moans and sighs of melancholy and mourning and ineffable sadness and wrapped me up in it so that I felt smothered and trapped and small, but in that moment, I welcomed it all completely. Father took my hand in his—so familiar in its size and strength—and we strode toward the taxi stands, where a rental car was waiting.
play the reel slowly
Summer 1979
Dark clouds that suggested rain held off all day until we had made it into the West, to Connemara, and then, when it did rain, it made the landscape look harsh and resolute, uninhabitable, in the manner I remembered it as a child. I watched through the car window as rain swept down the glass, in awe of it all.
A few sheep lay huddled miserably by the roadside. Others roamed around the remains of cottages, or squatted in the far barren pastures that dotted the mud-brown plains. Here and there a faded, whitewashed cottage with smoke curling thinly up from its chimney broke the vast windblown landscape, old dung heaps and a cruach of turf crumbling against its stone walls.
Colie was the only one who spoke in the car. He sounded like a tour guide, full of reading and history that he’d never known as a child, or as a man, here. This is the way it would have looked to the first Normans to travel beyond the Pale, he said, grinning. And as it had to the historian Siculus in his reports back to Rome. The Romans gave up after that, decided this island wasn’t much use to them, that it wasn’t worth the effort. We took their heads and put them over our doorways, for that’s what we used to do. I don’t suppose I’d stay with a welcome like that.
The car topped a rise and in front of us rose the expanse of the bog, mottled with gnarled and craggy cairns, straggled lines of mortarless rock walls, enclosing small fields no larger than animal pens—the suggestion that each small pen had once held sheep or cows, or been a plot for growing meager vegetables. A wind swept across it all and shuddered against the car.
Finnoula crowed, They were clever, those Romans. The English could have learnt something from them. We could have learnt something as well. Colie, you can have your bog and your heads. Give me electricity and indoor plumbing please, and I’ll be very happy. Thank you God.
O Dia, Teresa said softly, sure I didn’t think I’d be coming back to this so soon.
The road grew more and more desolate as we wound our way inland, where nothing lay turned by the plow. We drove over russet, coal-colored slopes, and giant boulders pressed up from the bog against the side of the road. Now and then we passed a lone stone cottage, roofed with rotted thatch or rusted corrugate, and nothing about it, no trees or sedge to break its harsh, isolated outline.
We passed an old slate church with heavy mullioned windows and a single granite cross and if it hadn’t been for the manicured graveyard at its side and the peal of the bell for Mass as we passed, I might have imagined there was no one left to pray there. Father stared out the window as the bell sounded and bles
sed himself.
For a while we climbed into a hilly country, over deep worn lanes, intermittently broken by recent yet potholed macadam, high sedge banks on either side, heavy with dripping moss and ferns and flowering gorse shining bright and yellow in the sharp slants of sunlight.
We descended once more and passed over a narrow stone bridge. Here and there along the edges of the stream broke woods of a sort of scrub brush and blackened fir. By the time we made it to the cottage, bronze bracken and mottled bramble gleamed with the sinking sun. A dull light came into the west and shone through the clouded windows. A narrow cow path wound its way across the bog. Nothing stirred over the vast expanse save a clotted tuft of sheep wool waving on a stretch of barbed wire strung between a gap in the rock walls. In the distance a plume of charcoal gray smoke rose from the seaweed processing plant beyond the island ferry station.
Squinting, Father looked out over the plain. A mhac, will you look there.
What is it? I asked.
A cow? No, it’s a horse, by God, will you look at that.
Colie slowed the car and we looked toward the east. Across the brown undulating fields the rain-blackened knoc whipped this way and that, and in the middle of it all something lay writhing. The animal reared and stretched up its long white neck and bellowed. We could hear it plainly from across the bog—it sounded human—and I shivered.
What’s happening, Da?
The bog has it, Michael. The bog is taking it down.
My aunts and uncles were silent. I couldn’t understand us watching it and doing nothing.
Isn’t there something we can do for it?
My father shook his head. No, there’s nothing we can do for the poor thing. It’s gone.
I looked through the glass again, and Father began to talk about all the sheep and cows they’d lost in the bog. How they’d often searched through the night for them but what the bog claimed was hers; she’d give everything up, he’d say, when she chose, when we were long gone and dead and buried in her ourselves.
He told me that when he was my age, or younger—ten, he thinks—his favorite pony, a fine brindle, wandered into the bog and when Father found him it was already too late. At first the animal thrashed and flailed and then its movements slowed until it became quite still, as if it had resigned itself to its fate. He saw its head for a time craning its white-dappled neck from the bog hole to stare at him.
I remember its eyes most of all, a mhac, Father said. It’s the eyes I remember. For years I waited for the bog to give up that horse, and for it to come back to me. I was that daft as a boy. Sure isn’t that soft altogether?
Colie pressed the accelerator and the car moved slowly forward but the image of the horse stayed with me, and the car became oddly silent. Even Colie was still. As we climbed the hills toward the dark mountains, I had a full view of the plain falling away behind us and I saw that the horse wasn’t gone: it was still thrashing, its pale neck thrust to the sky, its mouth parted in rictus and one final horrific wail, even as the bog sucked it down.
Rory lay in the open coffin next to the bed I shared with Father, and I imagined that I could hear him breathing in the night, that his breath was Father’s breath and the two were merged indistinctly from each other. When my father’s chest rose I stared toward the window of the room and the open coffin with the meager moonlight slanting across it, revealing the white satin lining and the very top of Rory’s chest. I imagined that it moved ever so slightly with Father’s every inhale and exhale. The smell of camphor filled the small room. The candle flickered in the window. And I imagined it was Rory’s hoarse breathing filling up the room, all the old, empty spaces of the house.
Earlier in the day Father had asked me all the ways I’d remembered Rory. He asked if I remembered the time Rory picked me up and I sang with him. You were only three at the time, Father said. Do you remember? There was an eagerness in his eyes as if my memory of Rory might in some way make him live again, or affirm all his own memories of him. I nodded, but I didn’t remember. I knew Rory in the way that I knew fables and myths and folktales and superstitions. I knew him through the stories I’d heard Father tell of him, through the pain I now felt at Father’s loss, and the vague, distant sense of someone familiar holding me as a child.
Rain banged on the tin roof. The house was cold and damp, although my aunts and uncles had had a fire burning in the hearth night and day since we’d arrived. It felt like a place only the dead could occupy. I closed my eyes and pulled the covers above my head, and trying to feel my father’s warmth beside me, I lay one of my legs across his own, and then the queer thought came to me of Rory staring out from his coffin into the dark and he, too, afraid to sleep and in need of comfort.
Father and his brothers rolled the wet brackish earth over the coffin and the priest muttered the prayers in Irish. Thin-shanked heifers looked on, chewing wild grass. Wind moaned through the gorse, stirred bones in the black Connemara slough. The Maamturks and Twelve Bens rose still and dark to the north, lightning flaring on their heights like beacons. Father searched the road and the fields stretching for flat miles till the sea. He looked to the Atlantic, where gray rollers crashed against the rocks, and America must have seemed very far away.
At the house, neighbors came and went, smelling of whiskey, and I held the door for them. They touched my shoulder, tousled my hair. There’s a grand lad, they said, sure you’re the spittin image of himself, God bless us and save us. And with their blessings and the touch of their hands still warm upon me, I watched them swaying from the wind and the drink, down the narrow road, over the rise, and toward the gray sea.
The light faded and people huddled well past dusk by the crackling fire in prayer. Father stared at me closely in the meager light. I smiled but his eyes were empty, his face blank. The fire spat embers; they smoldered bright on the cement and then blackened. Through the window, distant rain was leveling the land flat.
The bogs were quiet; not even a curlew cried. The clouds that rested above the mountains held their place. A soft rain began to mist the rusted corrugate of the outhouses and cowsheds. It tamped the earth, pressed skin to bone.
The brothers and sisters that had come from America and England stood or sat stiffly drinking tea laced with poitin; they loosened ties, removed shoes and black or red shawls, and stepped upon the stone slabs as if they were cautious of sound.
Rory’s red marbled accordion lay spooled by the hearth. Its silver and marble sparkled. The blood-red patina with the mother-of-pearl finish, the worn ivory buttons and the rich silver inlays all shone with a black, masticated matter that had stiffened between the grooves of the keys. No one would touch it.
Soiled lace curtains withered in the small cell-like windows, where candles sputtered and peaked. At the table with the red checkered tablecloth, my aunts and uncles spoke the Irish softly, their voices like flowing water. Father was amongst them but did not speak. He stared into the corners of the room as if there were something there, his eyes glancing quickly over the accordion and then moving away.
The pungent aroma of turf, dung, and oil from the paraffin lamps filled the room. Heavy wool jumpers steamed, drying after the rain. Rosary beads rattled like bones. It was cold yet no one sat by the fire. Rory’s old black-and-white sheepdog moved to Father’s side and would let no one else touch him.
Another bottle of poitin appeared on the table; soda bread and braic; a pot of steaming tea. A neighbor touched Father’s shoulders briefly and offered him prayers in Irish. Father’s shoulders were still and wide and straight, and I didn’t have to see how guardedly he raised the bottle to his lips to know he was becoming drunk; I could tell by those straight shoulders and by the way his lips pursed and by the way his eyes grew hard. He had barely slept these last few nights and the lines around his eyes were drawn tight, the hollows of his sockets deeper and darker than I had ever seen, as if he was staring at me from the depths of some deep black well.
The turf hissed and spat and rai
n lashed the slate roof. Finnoula’s hand was at my shoulder, strong and speckled with freckles like a young girl’s.
Have you et? she asked.
I nodded.
She grasped my shoulder so that I had to look at her, held my chin so that I was seeing all of her—wisps of thick red-black hair falling into her face, the deep etched lines in the center of her brow.
She asked again and, looking into her eyes, I couldn’t lie. No, Auntie Finn, I said, I haven’t, but I’m not hungry, so I’m not.
Ye have to eat, she said, and shook her head, sighing. Sure, why would you be hungry, why would any of us be hungry? I don’t know which is worse at all, the children or the grown-ups. She walked to the scullery to prepare something, her hair catching the red light of the Sacred Heart as she passed.
My aunts looked at one another across the table as Father drank. Bernadette, his closest sister, spoke first. An diabhal, a buachaill, that will do you no good at all. She slapped his hard, tensed shoulders. And then Orla, Maeve, and Finnoula: Sure you can depend on the men in times like these to go straight to the bottle. He wouldn’t be actin out like that if Mammy or Daddy were here. God rest their souls. The sisters nodded and murmured blessings all around.
Ah, sure, what harm is a small sup of the whiskey? Finnoula dissented. Teresa, the quietest of them all, smiled sadly and nodded her head. She mouthed another Hail Mary on her rosary beads and reached out and touched Father’s sleeve. He looked at none of them but twisted his face as he drank and continued drinking. He stared into the fire, at the chair, at the red accordion splayed upon the ground.
The sisters collectively murmured musha, musha and diabhal, diabhal as they talked about the brothers, how badly they had turned out, the sad excuses for men they had become. But their words were soft and filled with tenderness and seemed more to fill the slow, empty trawl of time than anything else.
In the Province of Saints Page 8