Bend for Home, The

  Will we take a walk to town, young fellow? he says.

  Watch the drinking, Una whispers in an aside to me.

  *

  First we chanted, my cousin Ernie and I, some mantras.

  If you don’t cut out the singing, said Joe, we won’t know when she’s gone.

  Then we sent her out on a wave of prayer. All the family were there. The sign was her hand began to sweat in mine as I held her beneath the blanket. For hours I breathed alongside her, up and down the incline, then when Joe heard the sign he called the others.

  Una started a makeshift rosary and she and Tony took the mother’s hands. We found it hard to finish a decade because we’d all forgotten the Glory Be to the Father. Now it really snowed. Her breath dropped, when we finished the prayers, into a softer key. Her eyes were seeing straight in front of her when the next breath never came.

  Anne-Marie was called. She tied up the mother’s skull in a head scarf and sat for hours with a finger on each of her eyelids. Get the teeth, she says to me. She closed the mother’s lips into a smile. Then she ordered Tony to open the window to let the soul out.

  *

  Mother died on 23 December 1993, at twenty to five in the morning. Maisie died a year later on 26 December 1994. She, too, fell against one of the blasted radiators and was found by Grainne, who slept as her companion in the bungalow. She died from that blow a while later. At Mother’s wake, prepared by the people of Kill and Cootehill, Maisie stayed up all night and would not sleep. She was indomitable. We carried Mother out of the house on our shoulders; her coffin, for such a nimble gal, was strangely heavy because our heights were all uneven. Both funerals left Cootehill and stopped first, for a moment, outside the Milseanacht Breifne on Main Street in Cavan town. The Breifne is now a building society. Locals wondered who had died. Both funeral parties were held in the same hotel, the Crover House, overlooking Lough Sheelin, the lake where the ladies went boating as girls. Both were buried in the same plot in Castletown graveyard, my mother with my father, and Maisie beside her, with her aunts and parents.

  On the far side of the lake from Crover, up the Inny river, is the village of Finea where both hearses stopped a second time for a moment outside the old family home, where my father’s funeral had paused for a moment thirty-one years ago before going on. Uncle Seamus carried all three coffins. The day my mother was buried the fields were filled with snow. After we took the bend round Myles the Slasher’s monument the house looked cold and damp and unlived in. All the trees had been cut. The ivy that used stir round the windows at night was gone. Aunty Nancy, the last surviving sister, turned away. We stopped, went on. As we climbed the hill over the lakes the Fineas joined the cortège and Brian Sheridan, who had been in Babies’ Class with my mother, came out of his one-room mobile home, tipped his cap to the funeral, and took a kick at his dog to keep him away while he fed a heel of bread to a swan he’d recently tamed.

  About the Author

  Dermot Healy was a poet, novelist and dramatist. He lived in County Sligo and was the author of A Goat’s Song, Sudden Times, The Bend for Home and Long Time, No See. He won the Hennessy Award (twice), the Tom Gallon Award, the Encore Award and the AWB Vincent American Ireland Fund Literary Award. He died in 2014.

  By the Same Author

  fiction

  BANISHED MISFORTUNE & OTHER STORIES

  FIGHTING WITH SHADOWS

  A GOAT’S SONG

  SUDDEN TIMES

  LONG TIME, NO SEE

  non-fiction

  THE BEND FOR HOME

  plays

  HERE AND THERE AND GOING TO AMERICA

  THE LONG SWIM

  CURTAINS

  ON BROKEN WINGS

  LAST NIGHT’S FUN

  BOXES

  MISTER STAINES

  METAGAMA

  A NIGHT AT THE DISCO

  poetry

  NEIGHBOURS’ LIGHTS

  THE BALLYCONNEL COLOURS

  WHAT THE HAMMER

  THE REED BED

  A FOOL’S ERRAND

  Copyright

  First published in the UK in 1996 by The Harvill Press

  First published in this edition in 2016

  by Faber & Faber Ltd

  Bloomsbury House

  74–77 Great Russell Street

  London WC1B 3DA

  This ebook edition first published in 2016

  All rights reserved

  © Dermot Healy, 2016

  Cover design by Faber

  Cover images © Dallan Healy

  The right of Dermot Healy to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly

  ISBN 978–0–571–28189–3