Was he lookin for a bathe in the medical then? Lugh laughed.
I grunted, felt the sheep’s warm heart through her wide rib cage. Jaysus, I said. He could do with one all right.
Lugh grinned. Wipe those freckles off the little knacker’s arse!
He’d been off the bottle for two months and was in better spirits for it. The hell with the devil, he said, and the hell with the priest for that matter as well. He hesitated.
You and Cait Delacey then? He raised an eyebrow as thick as a beetle. I tried to fight it, but a smile broke at the edges of my mouth; I couldn’t help it. Blood warmed my face.
I nodded and turned to push the sheep up the incline and out of the wash. The stubborn thing didn’t want to go; I pushed and pounded on its hindquarters and finally it bounded up the ramp, shaking itself and spraying me with muck. Lugh pulled a pack of Players from his dirty overalls, lit a cigarette, and tossed the match into the pit.
Cait’s a fine young one. She comes from a fine family. Don’t let any eejit tell you otherwise. Too many people around this town love talkin shite. Never mind what they say about her mammy and your daddy. They’d do half as well as the Delaceys if they’d only mind their own bleedin business. It’s that feckin Cork culchie prattlin from the altar every Sunday that started the whole thing. By God, I’d like to get my hands on him, so, wring that fat neck of his. I’d throttle the whingy bastard.
Lugh shook his fist at the air and then, holding his hands out before him, mimicked choking Father O’Brien, the tendons in his forearms quivering. And then he mimicked Father O’Brien being choked, his head shaking between the hands on his neck, his tongue lolling from his mouth, his eyes rolling. Father O’Brien’s shrill, high-pitched Cork accent whinged out of Lugh’s lips: Oh dear God, no, Luuugh, sweet Jaysus and Mary Mudder of Gawd, Luuugh, all the saints help us, saaave us, and preseeerve us, Luuuugh, don’t kill me, pleeease don’t kill me. I hacked with laughter. My knees were weak, my eyes tearing.
Oh God, stop, I said, clutching my stomach. Stop, I’ll feckin die, so I will.
Lugh leant against the wall to catch his breath, laughing. What a cunt, he said, taking a long drag on the cigarette. The ember sparked bright as a flaming coal. After he exhaled he pointed at me, the cigarette between his middle fingers dropping ash; his features seemed pinched and sallow in the fading light.
And don’t mind that little bollocks, he’s got way too much feckin time on his hands. A good stint in the army would put him on the straight and narrow. When I was in the Guards, we had a way of dealing with boyos like that.
We passed the cigarette back and forth—a chill breeze brought the sound of tractors, the smell of wet muddy earth, moss, and pending rain. Crows as black as forged metal, like dirty coat hangers, drifted low on the slate sky—and though I didn’t smoke, I understood then why someone might.
We’ll do the rest of them tomorrow, Lugh said and rubbed his hands together briskly. I have to bring the cows in for milking. He gestured to the sheep in the draining pens above the wash. Put them in the shed, put the heaters on, and I’ll see you in the morning.
Will you be all right?
Lugh looked at his hands, held one steady, and smiled; I thought the skin looked raw and blistered but he seemed proud of his ability to hold it straight. As if to reassure me, he said, I will, and if not sure John Powers will lend me a hand. He winked and handed the fag back to me, pushed the sheep between us back into the holding pen with a kick of his Wellington, and loped to the milking sheds, his boots silent on the moss-lined cobblestone.
I exhaled the cigarette smoke contentedly, although if my mother smelled it on my breath she’d skin me alive. Warm, amber electric lights clicked on and hummed mechanically. The compressors of the cow-milking units thumped into life. Flaherty’s hounds were at it again, bellowing away as someone passed on the road below. The sky was graying with twilight, and the queued sheep, now mere flickering outlines, pressed against the pens, waiting expectantly.
Oweny died in his old Morris Minor at a crossroads leading from the pub. He’d just won a match of darts; the three large salmon he’d caught before dawn glistened in chromium blue on the floor. As he squinted into the sun there must have been only a slight quick pain high up in his chest that seemed to race up his throat and out his eyes until his vision clouded and there was nothing but fading dancing shapes like silver arcs of water skittering across the dark surface of a rushing river. But when he fell forward onto the steering wheel, and the clutch slipped, and the car lurched forward into the crossroads and eventually stalled with his head hanged across the dash, and the car smelling of the sea, he was miles and miles from water.
I stood below the single oak in the graveyard. His sons Canus and Joe lowered him into the black ground. It was a cold day although the sun was full in the blue sky. Mother looked pale and shaken. She held onto Molly’s hand as if Molly were a buoy keeping her afloat.
I hated my uncle then, hated him and loved him, and desperately wanted him back. But they had begun to cover him—earth rained down on the coffin like hailstones. The spades clanged hollow against each other. Wind whipped the trousers around my legs. The field was a green river pushing this way and that. The oak groaned above and I looked up into its pale limbs reaching toward the blue sky. I blessed myself and prayed for Oweny, and for Blackie, for Father in America, and for the rest of my family, and lastly, I prayed for myself, although it seemed like the most selfish thing in the world to do.
September 1980
Every Friday we walked single file, a column of God’s holy soldiers, down from the school into Listerlin Village to the church where we performed the Stations of the Cross, dutifully, carefully, meticulously. With the master and the nuns hovering behind us, we reenacted the tortuous ordeal of Christ, the anguish and the betrayal. At each station we had to contemplate not only our prayers but also each cruelty imposed upon Jesus. If the proper contemplation was not observed, we would be forced to repeat the Stations from the beginning and so revisit Jesus’s sufferings for our sins all over again. It was never ending: we were constantly sinning, we always had been, and we always would, and others would pay the price by suffering for our sins. It was enough to make you sick with anxiety and fear. I did not want to see Christ die again and again, and imagine that I was responsible. Fridays at lunch I did not eat, for when I did I’d usually end up vomiting it all up again at the edges of the hurling fields behind the toilets, and, as long as small babbies were dying of the hunger in Biafra, that was a sin, too.
Lugh would come and get me and drive me home in his dented, muck-stained lorry that smelled wetly of Bran, his wolfhound, who sat high on the torn leather upholstery surveying the country like a bored and regal sentry. If Lugh had touched a drop at all, he’d be singing—some familiar Irish song about rebels or emigration and the never never of coming back; songs about the loss of land, the loss of love, but most of all, songs about forced exile and longing for Ireland. Then there were older songs, retellings of heroic sagas and woeful lamentations. I didn’t know which was worse. We were betrayed by the land, the clergy, sometimes by each other, but always by the English, on and on and on. I groaned and Bran stared at me, his thick matted coat stinking to high heaven, and I wondered what in God’s name he’d been rolling around in and how Lugh could put up with it.
Lugh was a lean wiry man, his face as blustery as the winter in the country, the hue of beets spilt on a road white with snow. He enjoyed the chance to get away from Flaherty’s and often took roads I had never traveled upon; it sometimes seemed that not only had we journeyed through all of Tullogher, but also most of Wexford and Kilkenny. Whistling, he eased the lorry lazily around the narrow twists and bends of the country roads, up and down so that my stomach rose to my chest. He didn’t seem to mind at all that I was sick or that Bran and his lorry stunk like a bogged-up jacks.
He pointed out historical sights, towers and church ruins, a graveyard overrun with wildflowers and long grass, a
stone fortification, hills, the sites of famous, important deciding battles that had shaped the history not just of the Nore Valley but of Ireland itself. There was Celt this and Viking that and Norman this and Anglo that, not to mention the Fenians, the Great Hunger, An Gorta Mor, when people died in the ditches wasting away from starvation, their mouths green with trying to eat the grass, and the English eating like royalty off our food. There was rebellion after failed rebellion, the Uprising, a Treaty, the Free State, Civil War, the death of Collins, and finally, Dev’s Republic, and the mess it was, too, with the right fucking that bollocks had given it. The whole time Lugh spoke, I’d be groaning, pressed against Bran, who was nestled against me as if I were a pillow for his giant stinking head.
You know, Lugh said as he uncapped a small metal flask that he’d pulled from his waistcoat, during the Famine, Frederick Douglass came to see the state of the country himself, and he couldn’t believe the squalor and the death. Men and women and children starving in the ditches with the green grass juice running from their mouths, their skin like paper and their bellies hard as stone.
Lugh took a sip from his flask, smacked his lips together, and shook his head as if to clear it. He thumped the dash with his fist. A grand champion of a man, he said, Frederick Douglass, sure, Daniel O’Connell could have taken lessons from that man. He took another sip and began to hum but his voice broke.
Are you crying, Lugh? I asked.
A’course I’m not bleedin crying. My brain is just peeled and me gut is in a brutal state. He handed me the flask. Here, have some of this and we’ll see the tears come to your eyes. I took the whiskey and it warmed my mouth and throat. My stomach roiled and then calmed. When I handed back the flask, he grunted admiringly. That’s good whiskey, I said, and Lugh laughed. Michael, he said, you’re no longer our wee gossoon. I smiled but suddenly Lugh seemed very old; he’d been drinking so much lately, and for no reason that I could say, I was frightened for him.
According to Lugh, there were ancient bones buried in the sphagnum that could tell us all we would ever want to know about ourselves. Those bones spoke to us, if we listened close enough. They had their own tunes, lyrics, and songs, haunting melodies that belonged only to us, to the spoken Irish and to the old ways that persisted whether we were aware of them or not. He pointed to a rook settled upon a stile and said clearly, Préachán, his voice like a damp wind carrying heavy stones upon it, it had with it such undeniable authority and grace. I imagined the word before I saw what it meant and in the imagining I saw wonderful things—brilliant colors and a keening, thrashing sound—but when I looked, it was merely a bird, and not even a colorful one, just a rook, and a dull black one at that.
I repeated the word slowly, and he nodded and smiled. A bird, I said, but he shook his head. No, préachán. His meaning was lost upon me, except perhaps that in naming it, Lugh was giving the object of that name significance and meaning, and that the chosen, spoken word was what was finally the most important.
I knew Lugh had almost been married once, to an Indian woman during his years in the war. He’d served in the Irish Guards, a regiment of the British Army. His wife-to-be had died of cholera in Calcutta with tens of thousands of others, but Lugh only spoke of that when he was drunk. Instead he talked of the trips they had planned on taking together, to Brittany, Venice, and Umbria. But then he had been a scholar and those types of people always visited exotic places, places I imagined I would never see. To me, Umbria had the ring of ancient Alexandria to it—he often mentioned Alexandria on the rides home—a place of great thought and books and where all races of people came to learn. I didn’t like school much, but the thought of a place where you could learn as much as you wanted in whatever way you chose with no one telling you what was right or wrong sounded rare and special.
Flax hung in the air above the ditches. We passed open fields, and barbed wire stretched into the distance, clumps of wool dangling from the barbs where sheep had rubbed up against them. Dog leaves glistened from a recent shower that had come and gone, passed before we reached it, and I could see it still, moving steadily ahead of us. Cows and sheep stared big-eyed and bored, chewing as we passed. Color erupted from the ditches and the hedgerows where wildflowers bloomed. The fields were bright green and lit by the high sun so that everything appeared soft and warm and full of light.
I always wondered that Lugh never asked why I was sick, that it never seemed to concern him, but I supposed he had enough of his own reasons for leaving Flaherty’s, for driving the back roads through the country aimlessly, talking to himself, but always aware that someone other than Bran might be listening. The more I thought about this the more it saddened me. He wanted to be somewhere other than where he was now, and I wondered if it really mattered that I was here at all.
Lugh sighed long and deep as the sun began to settle over the horizon before us. He pressed the accelerator slightly, and we moved farther and farther and faster away from any roads leading home. I thought that it didn’t really matter where we were headed or where we would come back to. As long as Lugh did not stop, and only continued speaking, I could believe in exotic places and in bones that sang from the peat moss and in rooks that could be transformed into angels with magical words. I could believe that the two of us were on a journey to ancient Alexandria or the plum-sooted hills of Spanish Umbria, that the sandals of the Danaan had marked the ground our own footsteps trod, that we came from something wonderful and were heading toward something even better, and that this was reflected in the landscape and in the way Lugh twined through the countryside.
A pheasant broke suddenly from the ditch, its plumage flashing blue and green, and for a moment I thought we might strike it. My breath caught and I waited for the dull impact as it broke into bloody pieces upon the lorry’s bonnet—I sensed Lugh’s foot poised over the brake—but then its wings were a wide beautiful arc spreading before and over us, and the pheasant rose and rose and left the lorry behind.
Lugh whistled through his teeth. The colors of the pheasant’s wings, the satin upon its breast, were still dazzling in my eyes, and as the image faded, I blinked to retrieve it.
Lugh laughed to break the silence and Bran’s ears went up. A bit of pheasant, ready plucked, he said. A fine meal for the supper, wha?
I grinned and he shook his head and rested his large forearm upon the windowsill. He stared in the direction the bird had flown and searched the horizon with a longing I knew he could put no name to, but which I felt I understood.
October 1980
Coming from the pictures in Rowan, Cait and I were caught in the rain. Our clothing, the threadbare country type that were often hand-me-downs, was quickly drenched and we raced across the fields and down the boreen, its ditches overflowing, to the shelter of Greelish’s with everything turning to muck around us. Cait’s face was bleached white and when we held each other she was shivering. I closed the door behind us, fixed the latch, and we waited as our eyes adjusted to the soft gray-floating light within the cottage. Rain thrummed loudly upon the roof; light and shadow flickered. Cait quickly undressed. Her wet clothes fell to the dusty, raked boards and then she stood only in her underwear.
A fading yellow bruise glowed dully on her leg. I watched the tightness of her thighs, the muscles clenching, as she stooped and burrowed into the blankets. I undressed and tunneled in next to her.
She pulled me close, rested my head on the muscle of her chest, wrapped her thighs about me, and we curled into each other to get warm. She was all hard angles, bone and sinew.
I pressed against her. Shhhh, she said, tightening her legs about me. Be still. Close your eyes and listen to the rain. She stroked my head. I watched as a bead of rainwater traced the small rise of her right breast and shimmered on its distended nipple. I wondered what she was listening to in the rain, what its soft patter upon the corrugate reminded her of.
Do you miss your mammy? I asked suddenly.
She frowned. That’s a queer question. What of her
?
Do you miss her?
Cait looked upward, through the beams and crumbling arches to the low roof of the cottage where the rain sparkled through the splintered slats like small, distant stars. Her eyes were unblinking and dark.
I don’t know that much about her. I guess I do miss her, sometimes.
Do you not remember the lambs?
She stared at me.
That spring your mother died, all the lambs that froze to death. They filled lorries with them, so.
I don’t remember, she said, shaking her head. Daddy doesn’t talk about Mammy. He doesn’t speak to us, hardly ever. Just around the holidays, or on our birthdays. He always gets us something, he’s always good about that. He won’t even bring the strap or the switch to us. I think he’s afraid. He won’t speak to me at all—he hates me.
You? What did you ever do to your father?
Nothing—she shrugged—as far as I know.
She shuddered, crushed her breasts against me.
I’m going to move to Waterford when I’m sixteen. I can get a carpenter’s apprenticeship with Anco. She chewed her lower lip. Maybe things will change then; maybe it will be easier.
At the top of the cottage rain clattered on the corrugate and we listened to it rushing down through broken gutters, sweeping against the old stone walls.
I think he killed her, Cait said matter-of-factly, and I stared at her. Mammy, he killed Mammy. Sure I know he killed her.
I found it in the cupboards after. He had it in a milk bottle and it was diluted so that it didn’t smell like anything at all. Only when I poured some of it out, then you could see it, see the way it curdled, and you knew there was something wrong with it. You could smell it, too; it smelled sweet. I remember how they used it on the sick calves when they were close to dying. I’d seen him feeding it to Mammy in her tea for months. In the end she was too weak to get up or to argue.
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