I was in Carlow last week, doing a job, he said, a rich American who needed his walls plastered. He paid forty pounds a day, served me lunch and supper. I was there all week from dawn to dusk. Had to hitch rides back and forth on the Dublin road and never got back into the town until after ten every night. A bit too tired then to be fishing, I think.
I looked at him. He’d recited the facts as if they were a shopping list. I blinked, frightened by his stare but unable to turn away, and was thankful when he took up his mug and finished his tea in one greedy gulp, then pushed back his chair with a squeal, rose, and took up his cap.
I was out on the river last week, I said quickly, breathlessly, as if I had to speak and he had to hear it; I needed to know, I needed to know.
Uncle Brendan paused, inhaled, and worked the cap down over his brow.
Where’s your boat? I asked.
Uncle Brendan glared at me. I chopped it up, he said, and used it for firewood.
You did not, so you didn’t.
He stared toward the door, his jawbones whitening. As if he was dismissing me, as if I had just crossed a line from which there was no return. As if he was sorting figures in his ledger to work out an impossible balance, and when he turned away from me, I knew that I, too, had become a figure in that ledger.
There’s a good lad, Michael, mind yourself now.
He waited and I knew it was my last warning. My mouth hung open but it was as if I’d forgotten how to breathe. Still, he stood there waiting, his shadow in the lamplight black and hard on the floor. My mouth moved but nothing would come, and I felt tears forming at the edges of my eyes. I swallowed and tried to breathe again. I looked toward Mother, who shook her head sadly and then closed her eyes. My uncle made his way to the door, his boots dragging on the lino. The door closed softly and then he was up the gravel at the gate, working the latch in such a familiar but strange way, this man that I thought I knew but did not know at all. My heart thrumming in my ears sounded louder and louder, and though I wanted to speak, to shout, to scream, it all felt so far inside me that I would never be able to reach the words in order to pull them up and say, Murderer, you murderer.
Why, Ma, I managed. Why?
But Mother didn’t respond. She lowered her head and quietly began to gather up the dishes. Molly ran the hot water and turned on the electric. Outside, dusk came on quickly and mist settled upon the fields. Down by the river my boat was rocking against its ties, and the first of the nightjars began sounding from out of the woods far away.
The walls in Greelish’s stone shed pressed against each other; crumbling joist posts burst from mortar bowed with the pressure of the sinking roof. I swung the light of the paraffin lamp about the shed. Angles of blackness and peaks of rotted straw rising to the low ceiling. Rats rustling in the narrow shadows.
I turned and looked about the shed and my lamp swung shadows into the low corners. I placed the lamp down and began digging through the straw, drawing up great clumps of it in my hands. I struck something hard, and when I laid back the straw, there was the oilcloth shining blackly.
I reached down and pulled the bundle from the hole; below lay more tarps, one upon the other, descending deeper and deeper. I undid the tarp slowly, drawing the oiled bindings through the grommets and then easing the covering back.
In the meager light with the paraffin spitting, the machine gun looked smooth and polished and powerful. As I ran my fingers along the metal, I heard a dozen radio announcements from Derry and Belfast, television images of bloodied shooting victims and fiery car bombs in the Shankhill and the Bogside. A hundred screams of pain and rage, hundreds of years of hatred, and my family a part of it all.
I buried the gun again, filled the hole, and smoothed the straw back over it. When I was done I sat with the smell of guns and oil, animals and mortar and damp stone, and suddenly felt very tired, as if I could fall asleep there, curled up with old murders and vendettas and so many ghosts I could not count them. I leant back against the wall. The paraffin hissed as it ran low, strange bends of light glancing across the thick metal and the darkness growing steadily on all sides, until the flame upon the wick trembled and went out. I sat there and wondered if someone were to open the small door to the shed and see me crouching in the shadows, my eyes glittering back at them from the darkness, what type of animal might they consider me?
Mother sat at the kitchen table shivering in Father’s donkey jacket; she smelled of brandy and cigarettes and cow shit. You’re drunk, I said. She bared her teeth, and her eyes shone. She licked at her lips and said, And you’re just like your daddy. The fields were darkening behind her; long slow rolling flashes of lightning turned the sky silver over the town. Give me your coat, I said and reached out my hand. You’re drenched.
I threw the jacket over the clothes rack before the cooker. Mother tottered as she pried her oversize Wellingtons off and dropped them on the mat in the scullery. The hallway seemed to recede behind her and the door looked very far away.
I’ll make us some tea.
She sat heavily and chewed at her mouth; her lips were cracked and swollen. She shook her head. God, are you just like your daddy. She laughed. Do you recognize your daddy in her at all?
I stared at her.
He fucked her mother and then hopped a plane to the States. Ran away. She laughed again, crazy and high-pitched, made a flapping gesture with her hands. Left us both.
I lit the gas beneath the cooker, watched the flames. Will you stop that rubbish, I said and then sighed. It’s not true. You know it’s not.
Do I? Ask anyone in town, they’ll tell you. You think so yourself.
Since when do you listen to them? They can all go fuck themselves.
Ah, sure, it’s gas isn’t it. You’re her bleedin brother, Michael. Do you believe it?
That’s not funny, I said.
It wasn’t meant to be, it’s the truth.
How would you know the truth? Half the time you don’t even know what effin day it is.
I do know it—I just do.
Why are you doing this? Is it out of spite, is that it?
You could ask your daddy if you wanted, but I doubt he’d reply. There’s powerful truth in silence. She stared toward the window, and I couldn’t tell if she was staring at her reflection or the fields beyond. She looked back quickly, and it startled me.
What do you say, Michael? Would you like it if she were your sister?
I looked at her then, and she wasn’t smiling. Her eyes were dark, unforgiving. She wanted me to say something but I didn’t have the words for her. I turned toward the window.
You know, Michael, you’ve always had a knack for seeing what you wanted to see. I suppose you and your father are the same like that, but it doesn’t matter all that much now, does it?
You’re a liar, I said. She laughed and pulled from her bottle. She drank it down, and when it was empty she threw it in the sink.
Rain began to pelt the windows. The cats jumped onto the windowsill and pressed their faces against the glass, turned their bodies aslant to the rain. Their mewling sounded tiny and far away, pitiful really. I watched the rain come hard, drench them until their small bones protruded, their ears pressed back against their heads, yet still they bunched there, staring at me miserably through the glass.
It grew darker and the light dimmed in the room so that I no longer saw the cats, only their small dark shapes. Every so often, a flash of lightning turned all of them white like a negative burnt upon film: their eyes embers, their mouths small and dark and pleading. I don’t know how long I remained there, but the rain seemed to have eased up, the storm moving toward the east and out to sea, and the room had turned cold. Mother had gone to bed. I stared at the cats mewling softly, at their plastered skulls, and now that it no longer mattered, I went to get them in.
The light changed only slowly over the town as I waited in the phone booth to make my call. I looked down the gray street that sloped to the river and at the men ente
ring and exiting the pub. It was almost dusk and everything shone slick from a recent rain, and the voices of children and dogs at play carried over from the Bosheen. Mothers tried unsuccessfully to call Declan or Pat or Sean into supper—their shrill voices echoing across the Estate between flapping sheets and drying nappies. A group of strays ran barking down the hill, with two boys dressed in red-and-black Man United jerseys chasing after them. An oncoming car had to downshift and halt on the road until they passed, jeering and cursing and barking at the driver. As the car motored up the road, its engine revving high, I turned away from its lights.
I dialed the number, and when a voice came on the other end of the phone, I hesitated. Finally, I asked, Can I speak to Guard Foley?
What’s it concerning? The Guard sounded bored and distracted. I imagined him glancing back to his dinner going cold in the back room, or a football match on the telly. I knew him, too. His name was Hennessey and he had big sideburns, black as tar, and wouldn’t lift a hand to help anyone if he could help it.
It’s concerning guns, I said and held my breath. There was a pause on the other end of the line.
Hold on, he said and then I heard him shouting for Foley.
I held the phone from my ear and Foley’s name rang in my head. The line clicked and hummed and I waited, waited with the urge to throw down the phone and fling myself out the door.
In the fading light, I imagined my uncle kneeling on the floor before me. He was wearing the same clothes as I’d seen on him the night upon the river when he’d murdered Lugh. His curly hair sparkled with river wash. A growth of dark stubble grazed his cheeks. His color was high and fair and he looked very young, as young as my father was when he left us. He smelled of the river, of fish and guts, of brine and hemp and moss, of deep rich muck and woolly sweat and porter. It was the way my uncle Oweny had often smelled.
I thought of all the times he had held me as a child, how often he had made me laugh and smile—of the great fool that he was. His eyes were wide and dark as he looked at me. He raised his head back. Below the gray line of stubble his neck looked as pale as a candle.
Beyond the phone booth twilight was coming on and the lights of the town broke in staggered rows upon the far hill. In the dark I could no longer see my uncle but I could sense his eyes upon me. Foley’s voice was calling from the telephone asking who was there, and For fucksake, Hennessey, sure he didn’t have time for such eejit carry-on, and did he get the name of the caller and, Hello, are you there? Are you there? Are you there? In the gloaming more and more of the town became illuminated, bound around its high neck where the church steeples rose and the shanties of the Bosheen began like the silver coil of a metal snare drawing tighter and tighter. Foley’s voice called urgently from the telephone as I sank down into the shadows, out of view of men leaving the pub, and I thought, Informer, Informer, that’s what I am, the phone dangling from my hand as if it were a noose I was about to lower over my uncle’s neck. I imagined it pulling taut and choking the life from him—and still, I waited.
There’s no one feckin here, Hennessey —.
Foley, I said.
Who is this?
Foley . . .
michaelmas
September 1981
In the end, we didn’t have a choice. DeBurgh had our mother admitted. And in truth he was right, and I was glad for it. In the end, the hospital was the only place our mother could be.
Aunt Una stayed with us through the days and nights. The staff didn’t seem to mind as long as she was there. She’d already told them she wasn’t shifting and they’d have to carry her out themselves if they wanted her to leave. She muttered curses under her breath but when I listened closely I couldn’t be sure that they weren’t spells and incantations of some kind. When she looked at the nurses they left quickly, they knew she meant business and they didn’t want any trouble with her.
The hospital was an old converted army barracks, something since the last war. The walls were thick and rounded and everything was painted the same puke sheen. The windows were narrow and high, the metal frames rusted, unused to opening and letting air in. Tea trolleys rattled and clattered along the painted stone floors throughout the day until dusk, when there was an immense silence. Where there was not carpeting, sound lingered and haunted shadowed alcoves, dim-lit stairwells, wide vacant vestibules. It felt much more like a graveyard than a place that healed people, and I could sense the dead there, in sound and vibration, like heavy air suggesting the onset of rain. There was nothing surprising about it—many had died there and they did not know how to leave. I could understand this; I did not want to be there any more than they did, and I wished I could leave them to their endless wanderings.
The hospital was a tall building on a tall hill. From the windows on the north side I could see most of the city below. Dour-looking mulberry bushes straddled the entrance road from the city. The grass was dull and beaten, as if the roots were rotten from reaching down into the coal mines below; everything had the ash-graying of anthracite to it. Farther on, industrial buildings converged toward the city center and church spires raked the low clouds that seemed to cover the city and move in perpetual circles above it. Large buttressed shipping cranes arced like cantilevered bridges over the gray waterfront, and from there came the trains running east to west.
I watched the trains at night, their carriages igniting the rails beneath them like tinder, and I imagined that we could just as easily be on one of those train cars hurtling through the darkness, that my mother could just as easily be sleeping and we could be returning home to New Rowan.
I pressed my face against the cold glass toward the darkness beyond, my eyes searching up above the roof of the city. In my belly, I felt the weight of the trains upon the tracks, roiling slightly from side to side; I sensed their wheels hammering the rails and moving across them. When I lowered my eyes, we were passing wide straths of farmland, high hills darkly furrowed by strip mines: we were heading home.
When I returned to myself it was always a surprise to see my sister’s reflection in the glass next to mine, as if we had been sharing the same dream and both awoken at the same time. I had the sense that this occurred frequently, and perhaps that was why we never told each other about our dreams; I didn’t want to know how hers ended, if they ended differently.
We woke with the early rounds, the clatter of food trays, the giving of medicines, the taking of fluids. There was one nurse from the Caribbean who spoke long and slow yet with so much sound—she was the gentler one. And then there was the Derrywoman whose voice was sharp and quick and high at the ends. She was always sighing, as if there was so much work to be done, and all that work was hers alone, and there was no end to it. Although she was not gentle, she, too, was kind; she couldn’t help but remind us of the work we made for her, but as she complained, she rummaged through her pockets for sweets—yesterday Smarties, the day before Rolos. She had no children of her own and seemed to think even children our age needed sweets now and again. It seemed we were always hungry; nausea settled in my stomach and stayed there, and I thought of starvation. Una brought us sandwiches wrapped in cellophane from the cafeteria before it closed in the evening. They were dry, day-old things with mealy ham and crumbling cheese, but we were glad for them.
At evening, when the hallway reverberated with a quiet sob, or moan, the soft brush of a nurse’s padded plimsolls, Molly and I sat in the dark watching the lights of the city below. A whistle sounded and men and women spilt from between factory gates. Dark coal smoke churned up from row upon row of small terraced houses and gray, balconied tenements. Bells were sounding the Angelus, and, absently, I blessed myself.
The hospital room grew cold; mist clouded the window. In the next hour or so, it would be dawn. We’d watch it coming over this strange town, burning off mist that had settled across the rooftops. My sister and I held our mother’s hands. Her forehead was slick with sweat. Tears had left dark tracks down the sides of her face. The black sky fade
d, then dimmed and altered the color of the room.
I snuck into the lounge to see if anyone had left sandwiches, fruits, or Lucozade—these were the things people brought to hospitals, and I’d discovered that often they were not allowed to give them to the patients. But this time, there was nothing. The air was stale, the carpets sticky underfoot, and the Naugahyde seats worn to a sheeny luster. A young man had pulled two of the chairs together and was sleeping upon them and snoring loudly.
I returned to Mother’s room. Molly had just wiped Mother’s brow with a washcloth and was attentively watching her face. Mother’s eyes fluttered more quickly with the paling of dawn. In my mind, it seemed I already knew where she was, or where she was heading to, and I was filled with fear. Even though the nurses had warned us to keep it open, I closed the door to her room. The dead padded the hall and broke the light at the bottom of the door, and I held my breath. In my head I thought, Leave my mother alone, she’s not dead so she’s not, she’s not dead, but in my heart I felt something else altogether.
When the nurses turned on the small bedside lamp to check on Mother, I imagined our faces jumping out of the dark at them. Sometimes they forgot we were there, although we left the room rarely and only when they asked us to—when they drew the curtain around the bed and adjusted the morphine drip on the intravenous, or when they changed her bedpan, or bathed her.
On the fourth day she woke from an uneasy dream and called out our names. The change in her breathing had already woken us and we stood there waiting. She clutched at our hands almost immediately, and her grip was strong. She coughed and Molly brought her water, helped her raise her head off the pillow. She looked at us intently, as if she was back in her own room and had merely woken from some pleasant dream that she wanted to return to.
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