On the day she made her way into church, she removed her shoes and walked the whole way through briar and gorse, through muck and dung, through cow pasture and sheep meadow, staying at the edges of the road when she got closer to town, waving at the people who passed in their cars, so that her feet picked up all the strew and sluice of the ditches. The sedge and the bloom and the hedgerows were thick and bursting with color.
Molly and I walked in the road, at the edge of the macadam in our clean Sunday clothes.
Mother had made me polish and wear my good shoes. She shooed us away pleasantly when we came too close and smiled and told us to stay out of the muck and to watch our clean clothes. It was the happiest I’d seen her in some time.
By the time we got to church, her feet were black as coal. She walked into church barefoot, laughing like a young girl. Her eyes shone. The slap of her bare feet echoed on the tiles. A few of the men standing by the font blessed themselves and turned away.
Molly and I shifted restlessly in the nave, watching our mother in the queue before the altar. The line moved forward slowly and then it was her turn. Father O’Brien looked up and paused when he saw her, his hand poised over the washbasin. I won’t wash your feet, Moira McDonagh, he said, and his voice was firm.
Mother smiled. You’re showing yourself for the hypocrite you are, then, Father. Her voice carried across the tiles, echoed off the cement. The line behind my mother staggered and shifted, bent and twisted as parishioners sought for a better view. I took my sister’s hand and led her into the pew; together we sank down on our knees and bent low and small. I lowered my head on my hands and pretended to pray.
Father O’Brien poured the water quickly and I knew he would have liked nothing better than to heft the bucket and dump its contents over my mother’s head, but even as she genuflected and bowed she continued to stare at him and smile—and such a smile! Father O’Brien lifted the ladle and quickly doused her feet, once, twice, three times while rapidly reciting the prayer as Jesus had done for his disciples near the end, and then he was done. He took her foot roughly in his hands and she leant back and raised it to his face so that she could watch all of him as he toweled dry one and then the other. Behind them, people shifted and murmured.
Father O’Brien’s face was brightly flushed; sweat streaked his forehead and poll. His stole seemed to be choking the life from him. When he was done my mother held her foot raised for a moment and then slapped it hard down upon the tile with a damp smack. She looked down at her bare feet approvingly. Now that they were clean and shone white, she took her shoes from her bag, placed them upon the floor, and stepped into them.
Thank you, Father, she said, and when she bowed she gracefully lifted the hem of her skirt, a curtsy more than a genuflection. All eyes followed her as she made her way to our pew, all except Father O’Brien’s. He rose to his feet, pulled the stole from his neck, and handed it to Father Keene, his assistant. His hands were shaking and I noticed for the first time that he had palsy, that he was actually an old man. He stared at the ceremonial bowl, at the foamy, muddied water there, then at the wet footprints upon the floor. Absently, he wiped his hands upon his chasuble. He turned and walked toward the sacristy, and the door closed slowly behind him.
One of the altar boys returned with a bowl of clean water and white towels draped over his arm. The sound of Father Keene’s rich Kerry accent traveled on the stone, his voice soft yet sonorous with the words of prayer. He worked patiently and tenderly, it seemed then, and his face had the look of all the apostles I’d ever heard of in scripture. Late sunlight spilt through the stained glass, bathing both priest and penitent, so that they seemed transformed somehow, the swollen veins, the blisters and calluses, the deep dirt entrenched beneath the nails, the wrinkled flesh, and Father Keene’s smooth white hands moving the soapy water gently over them.
I turned to Mother. She stood at the end of the pew watching, a smile upon her lips. And it was not cruel as I’d seen before. This was content—tender even—as her eyes traced the way Father Keene’s hands graced the people’s feet. She turned back to us, raised her eyebrows so that her eyes were large and caught all the roseate light in the vestibule. Shadow submerged to the edges of her, into the reaches of the church, so that her face seemed to occupy all.
Are we right then? she asked. Shall we go? And she strode up the side aisle to the back of the church and her feet passed across the tile with barely a sound. At the top of the church she turned, genuflected, took water from the holy water font, and blessed herself before she opened the wide wooden doors and stepped out into the fading light.
We walked home slowly; there seemed to be no hurry now. Cars slowed for us but she waved them on, calling out pleasantly. Vesperal birds sang from thickets and the fields hummed with such peaceful reverberations that it might have been a Sunday. Mother began to hum some tune or other, and I watched her calf muscles tensing and tightening as she strode.
I wanted to ask her about the foot washing and why the need to shame Father O’Brien in such a way, and how could we ever face going into the church again? I wanted to ask her what it felt like to have her feet washed by him, the man she hated and despised. I wanted to know if she felt closer to God now or if she believed the washing had taken away all her sins. I wanted to know if she thought she might truly be better.
And then she looked back at me, and her gaze was that of watching Father Keene bathing the parishioner’s manky feet. I smiled and almost expected her to reach out her hand and gather both of us into her arms. But suddenly she turned and walked quickly on.
Mammy? Molly said, but our mother didn’t slow or look back. Her pace quickened, urgent suddenly, so that we rushed to keep up. Mammy? she said again but Mother was no longer listening. She began running through the ditch, through gorse and thicket, her calves splashed with muck. Brambles tore at her skirt, scratched her pale legs.
We rounded the bend and the fields curved toward us. Cows leant against fence posts and, at the sound of us on the road, turned from rubbing their crusted shanks. My mother called to them: Pat! Deirdre! Willie! Shay! The cows, pushing their hard straining faces between the barbs of wire, stared at her, no spark of recognition, or even affection, in their eyes—and my mother, oblivious to that emptiness, still calling: Matt! Oh Sheila! Deirdre! Pat! Oh Shay! I’m home, I’m home, I’m home! And my sister and I, holding tightly to each other’s hands, watched from the far side of the road as our mother rushed forward to embrace them.
The first time I called for DeBurgh it was a fine spring day. The gorse shone amber at the edges of the field. Honeysuckle lay bent by the wind further up the valley and the wild brake crowded all the paths down to the river. When I took the boat out at night, my traps were full of eels, constricted in upon one another. It was a time for living things, yet when DeBurgh climbed the stairs through the late slanting sun—so that he seemed to dissolve in light between the rungs of the banister—and stepped toward my mother’s room, he paused. I thought that only Molly and I could smell the vomit that underlay the strong disinfectant smell of Dettol, but of course I was wrong. There was a smell of disease that nothing could drive out, not the washing or the scrubbing or the burning or the airing out, and on such a day it stilled DeBurgh and his talk. He stood in the doorway and wouldn’t budge, and stared beyond the door frame.
DeBurgh was a big man: his head grazed the lintel and he blocked all light from the hall. And at first I thought it was fear or shock that held him.
It’s the pain, I said, that’s all it is. She just needs something for the pain.
I was grateful that DeBurgh didn’t ask, that the sight of my mother perhaps had driven the need for questions from him and he merely reacted in the way that he had been trained to do, that he had spent much of his life doing. My mother was in pain and something had to be done. The large hands that I watched turn a calf in a cow’s womb reached for her, and I had to resist grabbing for him and hauling him back. He looked into her eyes, touch
ed her stomach gently, making a circle, squeezing it in the shape of a bread box. He checked her pulse.
She’s had morphine before?
I nodded. In the hospital, I think.
DeBurgh’s voice caught and when he spoke again it sounded rough as gravel. Then that’s what we’ll give her so, he said and wiped at his eyes, rubbed a thick forearm across his brow. I was surprised that he had needles with him: syringes, hypodermics, clean towels. He drew the morphine from a small glass vial. I looked at his hands, thought of the dirt upon them, the sanitization of the needle. He caught my eye. Don’t worry, he said, it’s fine. She’ll be fine.
Molly looked on from the threshold as DeBurgh and I held her, as he injected the morphine. Her arms and legs thrashed, her nightdress billowed out, and she screamed. Molly turned away, pressed her face into the wall, closed her eyes, put her hands over her ears, and began to moan.
Gradually Mother stopped fighting; her breathing deepened. Soon she closed her eyes and was asleep, and Molly sat on the bed by her side.
DeBurgh shook his head. My Margaret, six years it was this Easter, and she was in terrible pain. She lay medicated till the end. I advise you to get your mammy into the hospital as soon as you can but I can’t make you. You have to call Dr. French and get him up here to take a look at her.
She’s been in the hospital. She won’t go back. We can’t call Dr. French. He’ll have her put away.
Jay, they’ll have my head if they find out I’m doing this. He ran a large hand through his hair. Rain banged against the glass, rattled on the empty spaces between the slates. They did fuck-all for Maggie, he said, still looking at my mother. God save us, he said and rubbed his face hard. Call me when you need to mind, and I’ll do what I can.
I nodded and thanked him and looked vacantly toward my mother. DeBurgh didn’t move. He stared at my mother as if he were seeing someone else, and I imagined that it was his dead wife he was seeing. DeBurgh told me that Mother would be all right, that she was strong, that everything was fine. Maggie, he said, didn’t have much of a chance, and then he told me how much better the hospitals were these days, how no one needed to be sick if they chose not to, that doctors now could do all sorts of miraculous things. Then he fell quiet, and for a moment I forgot that he was there.
I can see why you wouldn’t want your mammy going back there, he said finally. I can’t believe how backward we are in this feckin country. He moved toward the door. Sure you’d think we was in the Dark Ages.
I woke to the moon filling up all the dark places in my room and for a moment I was still dreaming that Father had returned and that any minute I would hear him coming down the lane, or his soft footfalls on the stairs come to say good night, but then I realized I wasn’t dreaming. Father was home, had been home a fortnight, and with this realization came the keen, sharp edge of pain. We had not gone to the airport to greet him, nor waited by the train. Unannounced, he stumbled home late one night, come to settle his bank accounts, he said, and auction off his share of the land. He’d already been drinking, and when he stepped through the door he looked at us all as if we were strangers—it had, after all, been almost two years. There had been an accident six months before; he wasn’t well, he said, and he waved at the air as if his illness defied articulation—he neither expected nor wanted our pity—or as if we were phantoms he might simply wave away, but that was before he saw how sick my mother was, before the word cancer was uttered like a curse.
Still, now, I woke for him, as expectant and hopeful as a child that he would soon be home. My bones were jangling live coils and my veins felt so hot they could burn.
I rolled toward the window. Beyond our field the raked silhouettes of farmhouses and sheds, the ruin of a tractor, stood as dark sentinels and there was not a sound. No dogs barked, no cats mewled, not a single car moved on the Tullogher road—silence; and then, my mother’s sobs from down the hall. She’d been listening to talk on the wireless of the hunger strikers in the North again. A brief squall lifted a shale slate off the roof, scattered its broken remains in the lichen-bloom of cobblestone below. Rain from the night before shook from the trees and spattered the glass. It was late April and yet summer seemed so far away.
Then there was the squeal of the rusted iron gate as it was flung wide and Father’s staggered footsteps loudly dragging the gravel. Every night since he returned, I heard his drunken song—of a young Irish boy dying alone and scared in a green field somewhere in France—come swelling down the boreen. And I wondered how long it took for Father to walk the three miles home on his damaged legs, his sad song drifting out across the dark, mist-covered fields and returning just as empty and alone to his ears as he stumbled on.
Tonight he was not singing. I sat at the edge of my bed, listening to the silence, and then pulled on my shorts and spiked running shoes. My footsteps padded the landing and I paused at my mother’s open door. The air in her room was still and stale, as if no living thing had stirred it in such a long time. Mother had been right all along; her grace, her stay from the illness had merely been a reprieve, and now it seemed we were paying for the time she’d been given. But I couldn’t feel either blessed or thankful for that. I ached and seethed with something I could put no name to.
The thick curtains admitted no light; I no longer remembered what color they used to be. Rarely did she open them and then only at night. Sitting before the window, she often stared out at the niter-lit fields glowing beneath the pale hoof of the moon. The room would be dark but for a fire burning in the grate and a small slant of light cast across her face and lap. Her mouth would be moving soundlessly in prayer, her hands bound in tight-wrung invocation.
Now she was a dark shape bundled beneath thick blankets, turned away on her side. The wireless intermittently spat static with news from Long Kesh. A small fire, barely more than embers, smoldered in the grate of the fireplace. I crossed the room and placed a log upon it; when it flared I covered it with a shovel of coal. I did not look at her face when I passed back.
I turned off the wireless, listened to her for a moment again, then, after closing her door softly, I tiptoed downstairs.
Father was sitting in the armchair by the fireplace, half in shadow; only the glow of his cigarette told me he was there. From the wireless, the closing show on Raidió na Gaeltachta: more wailing, more moaning from the west of Ireland. Three thousand miles away in America and this was what he could not let go of. Listening to this music, I knew what he meant when he said what it would do to him to return here. A kind of death, he called it once.
The smell of black porter and gray smoke rose off damp, drying wool. I envisioned a pub full of men like my father, dying in their living. In the dark I knew that he was staring at the pictures above the mantel but I did not know what memories they evoked—what it was he was looking for but could not find, no matter how much he drank, or smoked, or stared.
There was a picture of him taken in America, high above the Boston skyline, grinning on an I beam while the city spread out far below him; the curve of a slow-moving river like a bend of gray-brown rope lashed out at the sky. Next to this, a picture of him taken at the airport in his new suit. He had asked an American cop to take his picture and he looked so proud, so young and strong and smelling of America, as if he believed nothing could touch him, or us, ever again. There seemed to be no end to the money he had managed to save. But that was before my mother’s illness, before he was with Mag Delacey, and before the accident in a construction tunnel that took the best of his legs.
I moved quietly toward the door and he coughed.
Are you off running? he asked. There was no sound of drink in his voice. I stared into the blackness, searching for his eyes.
I am.
You’ll catch your death, Michael. I can’t understand why you do it at all.
Even my name sounded awkward in his mouth, as unfamiliar as the word Father in my own. I stared at him as he fretted the knees of his trousers. He couldn’t seem to contro
l what his hands did anymore, not since the explosion.
Y’know, you needn’t have come back, I said. Not for our sake, in case that’s what’s worrying you. I said this although I knew he was thinking of dead American men, crushed and burnt and buried men, and he amongst them, one hundred and fifty feet below. He was incapable of keeping such thoughts from his mind and I wondered why I was being so cruel to the man I had once loved so.
No, I didn’t, he began, it’s not that. He shook his head. Your mother, I understand, we do the best we can, what else can we do? We do our best with what God has given us. I’ve tried to do my best—I swear to God that I have, but—Michael, you just don’t know —.
I don’t know? I laughed and shook my head. I don’t know. God, that’s a gas, so. Of course I know. Sure, you’ve done your part, you can leave as soon as the mood suits you. Back to America. I spat the words and waited for him to respond. Can’t you now?
Please, Michael, I’m leaving in the morning. It was a mistake me coming back, I know, but your poor mother —.
Don’t talk about my mother. You know nothing about it.
His exhale was long and slow and pained but I wouldn’t relent, not now. You made a promise to me once, I said. You said I’d be out to America to see you and everything would be better—do you remember that? You said to trust you.
And now, don’t you?
No. I don’t.
He stared into the black grate of the fire, at the flame-scorched brick, and was quiet. The clock ticked over the mantel, echoing and enlarging the silence that remained. A gust of wind rushed down the flue and scattered a handful of ash; it brought the smell of rain and damp, moist brick. Father shifted his legs with difficulty. I looked away.
Tomorrow he would leave as he had left before. In the beginning there would be phone calls and letters and some money but gradually they would trickle away to calls on our birthdays, cards at Christmas, and then, nothing at all. Did you hear anything on the wireless about the hunger strikers? I asked, although I knew being back in the country for just a fortnight, the troubles in the North were the last thing he cared about.
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