How’s Bobby doing? I asked.
Bobby?
Bobby Sands. It’s been fifty-two days.
Father shook his head. It’s freezing, so it is, Michael. You shouldn’t be going out at all.
If you could find some news on the wireless about it, I said, about the hunger strikers, something good, it might cheer her up.
My spikes clacked on the worn lino. I was already dreading the cold but not as much as standing there talking to him, or listening to her sobs moaning in the stairwell. I knew Molly was awake as well, staring into the dark, listening. We both knew that Father’s return changed nothing. Mother’s illness consumed her more and more each day while his legs would atrophy and be useless. Their hopes and dreams and promises to each other and to us had been broken. I resented my mother as well; the both of them deserved each other.
I’ll have a fire going for you when you get back, he said, and I saw his eyes. He was staring at my legs with something that resembled longing.
Thanks, I said and closed the door behind me.
I crossed Murphy’s pasture and ran the dark fields along the river. It was cold, the air had weight and substance to it, and I shivered. My toes were soon numb. I clenched and unclenched my fingers. Air whistled from my lungs. The ground fell away around me, and there was only the slightest hint of a dark sky above a darker horizon, with Venus shining brightly in the east. I breathed the land in and it carried me, and I forgot I was running at all.
At the bend of the road a trailer stood upturned, old rotted beets spilling out like severed heads piled atop one another. Father’s legs would continue to weaken. He could walk for now but soon he would not even be able to do that. Someone would have to lift him, bathe him, and dress him. He would need a wheelchair. I shuddered, not at what he would become but at the fear he must feel. I couldn’t imagine Father frightened.
Since the accident his hair had grown soft like a child’s, and white as down. He seemed to have shrunk while I had grown. I knew Father dreamed of the accident and in his dream nothing changed: He was in a tunnel one hundred and fifty feet below the city; there was an explosion, and the makeshift lights went out. Deadly gas filled the drilling holes, swept through each chamber containing men, and in the dark his friends died around him. They moaned and cried out, choked to death on their own vomit. I would like to believe that for the first time in a long time Father thought of us.
Running past Flaherty’s fields, the hounds all asleep. I imagined Lugh drunk and curled up in the small gable cottage by the road, gleaming with frost. Beneath the gutters, ice sheets the tops of his rain barrels.
Past the sleeping horses and the high crumbling peak of Flaherty’s barn, through the gate, and along the old wire down to the stone walls and the small burn, barely wider than my hurdle across, cold water splashing against my calves, and on through shimmering phosphate-lit fields. Climbing the hill, old Mrs. Molloy’s to my left and, behind her, the rows of tall ferns lighting the way with their bright smell.
Quickly over a stone stile, hitting the ground and then running again. Brown fields scarred by the plow line mile after mile, the dim glow of the town bobbing up and down in the distance.
Cows grunting, big bay draft horses standing asleep beneath corrugate shelters. Up through the woods and flying now, branches whipping past, up the rise and then the last hill before the town, up and over, slowing only slightly and the black of the River Barrow before me, my heart pressed hard and thrumming against my chest.
In the town, fog shrouded the streets; it climbed the worn, slick-gutted stones along the river walls and slinked along the quay. Water slapped the rocks and a buoy clanged farther up the river. Gulls huddled on the roof of the river galley, tremored in and out of shadow and streetlight like a single breathing thing. Light flickered behind the red curtains of Ryan’s Pub and I heard singing within. I had forgotten that it was Thursday and everyone had received the dole money and the pubs should have been closed but they weren’t.
A bottle smashed and voices whispered lustily from a dark street corner. A laugh. A moan. A rustle of clothing. A man and woman pressed and struggling against the flat of an alleyway wall behind the rear door of the pub. I saw the almost perfectly rounded moon of a woman’s shocking white bottom trembling, kneaded like dough by large ruddy hands; the sudden, exposed, secret sliver of moist flesh and the swollen paleness of the other. I heard, Hurry, Eamonn! Hurry!
A thin Guard named Foley walked the town front checking to see that all the drunks were home and no publicans were cheating the law; he moved toward Ryan’s as if he could smell it. His hat was pulled tight over his head, his face hard and resolute. Only his large ears ridiculed the effect. He eyed me suspiciously as I passed. I knew the look: There’s McDonagh’s young one. Better keep an eye on him. I hacked a gob at the ground before him and kept on running.
I followed the stretch of the river and its scudded water toward the last of the lights angling through the mist toward the dark and silent country. I cut across the fields, muck splattering wet and cold on the back of my legs. Two miles of hard running across the barren fields misted with tulle fog and I was on the hill overlooking Christchurch, my lungs burning as if they’d been blistered by a welding arc. Everything was dark and still. A row of three halogens along the mainway, opposite the church and the graveyard, cast the only light in the village—a warm circle in the center of the road leading people home to their beds, like what the soul must look like when one gives it up to God.
This was where we would all be buried, where Oweny and his son and Grandmother and Grandfather were already waiting, beyond that pale amber shade, where the wide sycamores were, their leaves stirring softly now like the faraway broadcasts from Belfast that Mother listened to.
Father’s body would return to the West where he was born. Or perhaps he really would be buried in America. It was my first real moment of considering him truly gone. What kind of son was I at all?
I stopped at a grotto to the Virgin that lay nestled in the side of a hill, and I said a prayer for my mother and my father although I knew it would do no good. My words frosted the air. The Goddess’s weather-beaten face, worn smooth and soft, shone beatific in the moon glow. Hers was an altar of rowan branches, wildflowers and moss heather, lichen, and pools of bog water, the type of old-country shrine that once dotted the lanes and hillsides.
Wrapped in thorns yet serene and calm, the Goddess assured me that everything would be all right, if only I believed. But the thing was, though I wanted to believe, I didn’t.
My reflection shivered upon the pool’s surface, resistant and numb. I tried to think of ancient things because I knew this was what Mother would do; I imagined fires burning on hilltops through the nights during the harvest feasts of Samhain and Bealtaine, that old coming together of earth and flesh, of river and sky and air, of finding God inside and everywhere about us. My mother had always drawn strength from this, but there was nothing here but the smell of ash and loam, of rotting potatoes and cow shit. I stared into the pool, trying to see the light in the darkness and the way to my soul.
At dawn the next day I again ran the fields into town, and from the hill over the River Barrow I saw my father for the last time as he boarded the bus for Dublin. He emerged from Sullivan’s, where two years before I had waited in the predawn gloom with my mother for a similar bus that would take us to him. I knew from visiting the pub with Lugh that nothing had changed. It still smelled of cigarette ash and smoke-bilged wood; of the spilt beer and stale sweat of old men. A mist moved along the waterfront and at that distance Father shimmered in the smoky light, and he looked as if he were young again, as if I might have evoked him from my dreams after all, and as if his homecoming had never been.
And though I could no longer see him, I waved. I wished that I had come to wait with him; I wanted badly to have hugged him and to have said good-bye. A pale watery sun spilt over the top of the town, on the spires of the cathedral, and down the pubs on Mary
Street. Father’s bus crossed the bridge over the Barrow and rumbled slowly down the Waterford road past Stanton’s Trucking and Fitzgerald’s Fertilizer.
I smelled the chemicals of the tannery and the hops of the old brewery. Morning traffic moved sluggishly along the docks. The sun sat on the squat terrace houses above St. Mary’s ruined transept. JFK had stood here once, out on the corner of Sullivan’s, and said proudly that this was where he was from and where he would still be if his great-grandfather had never left and become a bootlegger in America. He’d pointed across to Stanton’s and Fitzgerald’s, the places where he would most likely have worked, had he stayed. I knew lots of lads who worked in both places, and I tried to imagine JFK in their places, covered in grease or lung-choking phosphates. He had returned, he said, because in one’s heart one never really left.
Vendors and tinkers were setting up their stalls for market. The bird-shat statue of the pikeman from the Rebellion of 1798 gleamed dully. A drunk stood on the slimed, river-washed stones by the Old Quay, pulled himself out, and began pissing exuberantly into the river.
It took a while and I had to use paraffin, but I knew that when Flaherty’s bales caught, everything would go quickly after: the ladder, the beams, the joists, the buttressed cross sections, and then the roof itself. It was sometime after midnight. The lights were off in the Flaherty farmhouse and the hounds were still. The shed was warm and moist from the heat of the day. It felt like the glen at dusk, smelling slightly as if animals had just passed through: of moss, and manure, and sweet honeysuckle and fennel. I hesitated with the sensation and, in that moment, was suddenly scared for what I was about to do, scared that even though he was gone, my father would still pay for the things I did. I beat the bales with a stick to drive out any animals. Rats rustled through the depths, and when that was done and there was silence, I threw the flaming book of matches onto the doused straw.
Father had once said that you had to pick your battles and that he’d never been much good at it. He was forever paying for the mistakes he’d made. I watched the flames spread and then consume Flaherty’s shed, and I thought of Father never ever coming back. Timbers blackened and hissed and began to smoke. Corrugate metal twisted and warped and screeched as it tore from nails.
In making Flaherty pay I also knew that I was giving myself over to the country, to everything my father had despised about it, and everything I would never be able to break free from and leave behind. I had given myself over to older tragedies and the never never healing of wounds.
I knew there were all kinds of ways to find ourselves and to lose ourselves in the country, full of old ghosts and old hate. The mythologies that Master Dunne taught us in school, Aunt Una’s superstitions, even Father’s and Lugh’s drunken songs told me this. As much as I wanted to let go of this history, I could not. When I slipped over Flaherty’s borders through his ditches and his black silage, I was Queen Maeve of Connaught come into Ulster with her men, seeking revenge while everyone dozed beneath a magic spell of sleep.
I stole back across the fields quickly. There was no moon and I couldn’t see a thing before me. Once over the stone wall and splashing through the small burn that dissected the properties, I felt more secure. The water was running fast and came up to my calves. It was cold and I paused for a moment to wash my face and hands of soot and paraffin.
I felt light-headed and sick, and knew that I had stayed too long after the fire. My lungs felt heavy and wet. I gagged twice and then vomited bile into the water. I was sweating even as I stood in the chill current. I bent and splashed my face with water, held my cold hands against my mouth and nostrils until I could breathe again and the nausea had passed. I exhaled deeply and straightened.
Clouds passed invisibly and then stars were shining brightly; the spring constellations were clear. Venus was at its fullest. After a moment, I looked back the way I had come. I couldn’t hear the fire but I could see it. The peak of the shed rose out of the darkness, red above the black hedgerows, and in the heat, it shimmered like an illusion. Flaherty’s hounds had begun to howl. Smoke drifted ghostlike over the fields but the wind was coming from the northwest, driving it as if it were a curtain falling across the stage of some tragic play. Lights were coming on in the farmhouse; they were pinpricks, like the stars themselves, shimmering through the hedges. I stood invisibly in the dark and watched with a certain satisfaction as the shed’s roof collapsed into itself—ashen timbers jutted flaming from the exposed hole, and pale smoke turned black.
Flaherty came out of the farmhouse wearing an old coat over his pajamas; his hair was plastered to one side of his head. He stood in the center of the courtyard roaring orders at his family, shouting for someone to bring Lugh from his bed in the gable cottage to help douse the flames. It was Friday and Lugh would have been dead to the world after returning from the pub; he’d be in a stupor so great nothing would wake him.
I had no worries of the flames spreading to the animal pens or to the other sheds—the large cobblestone courtyard separated them and the wind was bending the flames in the opposite direction. I splashed through the burn and followed the stone wall that climbed the rise to our house.
The house was silent. I took off my clothes and smelled them, inspected them for any damage or marking, but there was none; they were just wet. The fire in the grate had not died down completely. I spooned another shovel of coal upon the orange embers, though I knew we could not afford even that, and pulled the clothes rack before the grate and hung my clothes over it. They would be dry within a few hours. In the scullery, I toweled myself with a washcloth from a basin of cold water and made my way up the stairs to my bedroom, suddenly aware of my footsteps loud and resonant on the creaking wood. Counting them: one two three four five, falling heavier and heavier, I clung weakly to the banister, the souring of adrenaline like brass in my mouth. I paused on the landing, and the sound of my footfalls reverberated like an echo in my head.
My mother’s room was dark, and she was bundled beneath the bedclothes even though it was a mild night. A meager fire crackled softly in the room’s hearth.
In my bedroom, I pulled on pajamas and, almost feverishly, climbed into bed. The sheets were cool and clean and I was glad for them. I felt immensely tired, as if I’d gone at Flaherty’s shed with an ax instead of a match; I felt as if I would sleep for a week and there would be no dreams. But I did dream. Ancient war chariots were turning the earth to muck. Northern hills were burning to ash, and the Connaught rivers were running with blood. Drums pounded the air and horns cried as horses spilt their guts into the fosse and the sphagnum. I slept through Flaherty’s shed burning and the howling of Flaherty’s hounds and the wail of the fire engines from Rowan. In my dream, the Host were on the wind and Queen Maeve was screaming bloody murder and exacting revenge at last.
It was late spring and warm and I sat at the Delacey’s kitchen table for the first time. The older children had left and moved into the town; JJ and Aisling were working in Waterford and Noel and Martin had taken jobs in Dublin. Rollie had joined the army and was stationed in the Middle East with the UN. Everything seemed sparse and untouched, as if not one person had sat at the table or cooked in the kitchen since Mag died; there was no trace of another’s presence in the room, not even the lingering scent of cooking. A requisite picture of the Sacred Heart, the light glowing a sooted crimson, hung on the far wall, along with a picture of the Pope; a St. Brigid’s cross; a Drexel fertilizer calendar showing well-fed and presumably happy cows feeding at an outdoor trough before a new gleaming red Ford tractor. Everything had the sense of being polished, as if waiting for the owner of the house to return, but when that might be, no one knew, and so everything seemed prepared for the unknown and the unexpected.
Daddy’s up in Dublin with solicitors, Cait said, as if to explain why I was allowed in the house, or perhaps to allay her own fear that I was there; John would never have allowed it.
Jay, I said when I looked about the place. Cait nodded and ro
lled her eyes. She put the kettle on the cooker for tea. We’re here to study, she said and went upstairs to get her books for an Irish language exam that I was sure to fail.
It’s useless anyway, I called after her. Her footsteps were on the stairs and then on the floorboards above me—and I imagined what the room she slept in each night must look like, the bed she lay upon, the dresser containing all her underwear. And I thought of darker things, of the narrow hallway to the room where her father had murdered his wife.
I sat at the table and fidgeted; I thought of all the work it required of Cait, and of the other sisters and brothers, to live in and occupy such a space. To go on pretending nothing was wrong or, at least, nothing they could affect or change. China glared from a red dresser; even the corner boards and skirting gleamed as if freshly painted. Nothing stood out of place, no shoes or muddy boots left on a mat by the scullery door, no clothes left to dry on a rack before the old cast-iron Argyle cooker.
I expected to see pictures of Mag, but there were none. No clues to the past, to the existence of a mother at all. Nothing except for the milk bottle of Penthanol, the bovine euthanasic that Cait had told me of. Her father had fed Mag small amounts of it in her food and tea for months, and now it remained on the windowsill, catching the last rays of light. I looked away from it but it remained, sparkling amber at the corner of my eye, a reminder of what John was capable of doing if he were pushed to it.
I fidgeted some more and was glad of Cait’s footsteps on the stairs. She dropped the heavy bound books on the table and sighed, quizzed me quickly, and though I knew the answers I feigned ignorance. Now that I was here with her, I had no desire to study at all, and I knew that if I were difficult, she would soon give up.
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