“No call to be busting poor Patrick’s chops, Neil,” Liam said. “I told you he’s incorrigible in his mother hen ways. No doubt he got it into his head one day I was all set on my way to croaking, and needing family gathered for the watch. He only meant the best.”
“Then you’re not sick?” Ruby asked.
“Not especially so,” Liam said. He picked up his wineglass, clinked it against Ruby’s, smiled, and said, “Bonny, I’m going to appeal to your finer sensibilities …”
“Say what you want. I’ll decide if it’s appealing.”
“Oh yes, she’s a right peppery darling, Neil,” Liam said to me, clucking his lips. Then, to us both, “Here you are now—home, as you rightly say. Can we not try making the most of it? I told you I’m in no grave condition, but I’m also telling you I haven’t got so many years left of being so alert and robust as you see me now.”
Ruby turned and looked at me, her chocolate eyes relenting. We could have been a mind-reading act. Ruby was telling me she was tired and wanted a restful way to think about all this, and knew I wanted the same. I have seen cops who were longtime partners communicate in this remarkable way. In the police business, this is a sign of “true marriage.” Until now, I myself have never experienced this, on or off duty; until now, neither the phenomenon nor the phrase have caused my palms to sweat.
“You were always full of good stories about the people here when I was a kid and you came visiting in New York,” I said to Liam. “But I don’t remember your ever telling a story about your own brother. Let’s hear one tonight.”
“A good story—about your father? He was an upstream swimmer.” Liam shook his head. “From the day he was born, Aidan changed everything and everybody around him. Now, it’s the helpless nature of some people to make a commotion of themselves. That’s all right, I guess, as long as they realize they’re different—and that most others are happy enough to be docile and obedient. But the trouble is, most people just naturally don’t like the upstream swimmers. Most people resent that what’s too different from them. For the likes of your father, it’s a vexing life then.”
“You’re saying you can’t tell me anything good about my father?”
“Nae, but I am saying I cannot keep the talk of a proper delectability for the supper table.”
“He’s heard a tough story or two in his time,” Ruby said on my behalf. “Where do you think Hock’s lived all his life? In a house like this?”
The sound of Liam’s and Snoody’s skittish laughter would have been right for a cemetery. Liam asked, “Tell me, Neil, did you really and truly come here to dig about in the family’s old mash?”
“I did,” I said, realizing for the first time this was really, truly so. “And I don’t mind smelling stale cabbage.”
“Fair play then, I did promise we’d talk of Aidan, and I’m a man of my word. I tell you what I told your bonny, I would steal from you, but I would never lie.” Liam looked at Snoody, then at the food on the table, both of which had ceased steaming. “But first, might you pass a hungry old man some lovely potatoes and such so’s to build up the story-telling energy?”
We all filled plates then. Liam told us to “tuck in,” and so we quickly did away with Moira’s supper. I was hungrier than I imagined, and so was Ruby. Uncle pronounced us “fine trenchermen.” When we had finished with the food and wine, Snoody went over to the dumbwaiter. Moira had sent up two big pots of tea.
“Put a color of whiskey in mine,” Liam said to Snoody as he poured.
When we all were fixed with the tea, colored all around, we settled back in our chairs, our expectant ears tuned to Liam. He hesitated briefly. Then with a great sigh, he reached into a breast pocket of his coat, removed a letter-size ecru envelope fuzzy around the edges with age, and flattened it out on the table in front of him.
And after a long look at me that contained in it the whole heavy load of Celtic history, the beginning of my own family saga flowed from Uncle Liam’s lips, easy and musical as a stream.
Yet for all their cool and placid beauty, Irish streams are treacherous, too. They are relentless mountain killers, after all, cutting deep and moving slow through ages-old stone, then plunging into violent waterfall.
Chapter 19
“Any telling of the story of Aidan Hockaday must begin with understanding the meaning of the land down County Carlow way. The land where Aidan was born, the land he deserted when he became a man.
“If you think this brutal judgment of my dear younger brother, I confess he only followed my lead, for this is the very premise to my own life’s tale. Aye, it’s the curse of us—two harps who could not stay true to their right place.
“And you could not in all the world have found a greener nor lovelier place as Carlow. It was all our kin ever knew, since way back to the darkest times when we and every other Irishman were getting about on all fours. God planted us Hockadays in that loam there, it was said, along with his trees and flowers and green grass. The whole clan respected this holy arrangement—up until your father, Aidan, and me, who spit in God’s face, so it was also said.
“Glorious the old Carlow soil was. It’s still fragrant in my dreams. How I see it in my sleep—soil black and creamy as Guinness stout. Our own wee patch of it nourished generations of us, in spite of the great pestilences the demons of hell delivered to
Ireland, by which I’m saying the English and the landlords and the great famine. Our father’s father’s father’s father broke the rocky crust with his bare hands. All our souls lay buried in that earth; yours, too, Neil. Do you see? The land is close to something sacred.
“So saying all this, why in the world do you suppose I and your father would break faith? My reasons are dreary, as you’ll see by comparing them to Aidan’s.
“Now, I can tell you almost everything there is to know about your father, for his birth is one of my own first memories. I was seven years at the time … That’s a long stretch between babies in an Irish house, which tells you something about how your grandparents regarded one another …
“Well, old as I am, I still see clear the day that Aidan finally come to join me. All raging purple and gasping for life, he was—and nae bigger than a titmouse.
“It was the misty time then, late into October, when the winds off the Wicklows hang over the fields and villages like damp woollens. My mother—Finola, may God rest her—lay in the birthing bed all through the night before, moaning and rubbing her big hard belly, and sweating like a spring thaw. I know her suffering intimately, for young and scared as I was, it was me laying there beside her for comfort. All I could think to do in her agony was mumble the only catechism I knew by heart, which I did, over and over until my throat went sore.
“Daddy stayed downstairs on a cot made up in the kitchen. He required an undisturbed sleep for the morning’s chores. There was only him with the big strong hands for such work, I at the time being a good three years off from being able to do my part. Besides which, Myles Hockaday was a renowned gentleman, and he was only being considerate by absenting himself in this delicate instance. His breath, you see, had the yeasty stink to it from drinking a new batch of poteen he and his mates had cooked up in the still back of our byre.
“I myself could scarcely stand his stench. Surely it was no fit breath to be wafting over a poor wife ready to burst. And so it fell to a young boy to watch over his mother’s labor, night and day. Daddy told me, ‘Stay by her, Liam, like you was a good and faithful duckling. But when our mum’s belly goes to rumble, leave her quick and come running straightaway to me.’
“Her time come in the lonely gray of morning. Daddy was outside already, he’d just nice be starting to tend to our cow and the pigs. There was an awful bleezer going on, so bad the windows were banging like drunkard’s fists, and the wind so stiff it was blowing the sleet sideways. It wasn’t the storm that waked me, though. Nae, it was mum’s howling from pain—or so I thought until I shook sleep from my eyes and saw different.
“She had kicked the bedclothes off her, and pulled her nightie clear up to her swelled chest. And there she was on that stormy morning, and howling out all the saints’ names and struggling to see beyond the top of her belly to some frightful thing between her splayed-open legs.
“Whatever it was made my lovely mum’s face go fearful, ugly. I was sore afraid to look, but she made me. ‘Quick now, Liam,’ she said to me, with the tears streaking down her face as fierce as the sleet outside, ‘see down below me gut and tell us if I don’t feel it coming out!’
“So I looked. And all I saw at first was a mess of bloody gush covering her womanhood. I turned away, disgusted like. My stomach was all mewly, my head felt like it was floating off my shoulders.
“Mum was screeching, ‘What is it, Liam? What is it?’ I told her I had to run to Daddy, like he said. But she told me, ‘No—there’s no time for him. Look down there, tell me exactly what you see!’
“Now, I could hardly believe the sight: a tiny pair of purple haunches, wriggling like a madman. I said to Mum, ‘Why, it’s baby coming out—rump first!’ She screamed, ‘Holy Mary, a breach birth!’
“Lord, this frightened me so! No more than a month earlier I’d seen our cow drop a dead calf that breached. I’d no idea the same could happen to humans.
“She began keening the name of Saint Gerard. That’s the patron saint of childbirth, you know. I’m still hearing that keening of hers some nights. ‘Protect me now in my hour of need, God—in the name of Saint Gerard Majella, blessed with bilocation, prophecy and infused knowledge, your child born to as humble a house as this I’m suffering in … ’
“Anyway, Mum calmed herself by the saying of this prayer over and over again, and finally she came out of it and told me, ‘Liam, be nimble. I need you to grab hold of baby’s bum. Use both your hands and be steady about it, pull it gentle out from me so’s it’ll get the breath of life. You must be very brave and very gentle, and take care you don’t go strangling nor suffocating baby.’
“Oh, but I hated to touch the slimy thing in Mum’s loins! But I did, and worried all the while how Daddy might take the strap to me later for disobeying him.
“I had no sense of bringing a body to life, but it’s what happened. I tugged until the two tiny legs flopped out, and then I tugged some more. And Finola, she grunted like some great gassy beast, pushing and pushing.
“Then, spat from our mother’s muck, came this lumpen, gasping head. Happy birthday, brother Aidan …”
Uncle Liam had been leaning forward in his wheelchair, his slender hands folded over the envelope, picking at it from time to time. He now sat back, shifting himself. He asked Ruby, “Would you mind pouring me another tea, bonny?”
Ruby poured, dropping in a tincture of whiskey from the bottle Snoody had brought to the table. She asked, “The charming story you told, is it true?”
“But you weren’t listening, girl,” he said, teasing her. “I would steal from you, but I would never lie.”
Snoody’s nose whinnied. Liam continued.
“Well, I finally did run to Daddy after helping Mum birth Aidan. First I pulled down Mum’s nighty, and gave her plenty of wetted clean linens, then I run screaming to him about what I done.
“The two of us galloped back through the storm into the house, me with muddy bare feet racing ten steps back of Daddy and his sopping Wellies, and on upstairs to mum wiping the goo from Aidan’s mouth and nostrils so’s he could breathe easy, and singing the babe a little song. Right off, Daddy sees it’s a fine new boy, and so he says, ‘A good job, Finola—we’ve got us another spade for the bog.’
“Mum, she looked at him with a slow queer face, queer and disgusted as my own when I first seen between her woman’s legs. Daddy was there, grinning and dripping wet in his farmer’s clothes. His breath had not sweetened from a night’s sleep, and it was powerful close in the room. She says to him, stern like, ‘Nae, Myles, it’s a new free day with this birth here. Neither you nor none of your Hockaday ghosts have got the right anymore to be claiming my boys to any further life under this slave’s roof!’
“Slave’s roof! The slur against the poor castle of a man such as Myles Hockaday! Poor Daddy. How this cut to his peasant’s bones, reminding him right there in front of me how he was only forever a docile, obedient sod living with a hateful wife in his rude, drafty tenant house on a wee little rented potato field and its peat bog—with no way out that neither he nor his whole family before him could imagine. All he had was his family’s lease to the house and land, which he was honor-bound to glorify, you see. And now here was his wife, coldly mocking even that. Slave’s roof.
“Whatever pride he felt on that first sight of his second male heir flew away. Instead he took to his heart the worst shot a peasant’s wife may fire. His vanity was mortally wounded, forever and ever more.
“So poor stricken Daddy went and sat downstairs by the hearth, flipping bricks of turf onto the fire, one after the other like he was rich as a king. And leaving Mum upstairs with the mess of a new babe, and only me for assistance. Mum, she was perfectly fine on her own, all cooing and larky with Aidan. But there was I, a boy of seven freshly tortured into learning the joke of family virtue. Down by the fire was Daddy, poisoning himself with a brood that’d hang around him like a hairy black dog the rest of his days.
“I’d peek at him down the stair from time to time. Jar after jar of poteen went down my daddy’s well-worn gullet. Meanwhile, our poor cow with her udder aching from unrelieved fullness went bleating through the storm and into nightfall. And little me, I grew powerful frightened, for I saw my father cry. It’s like the world’s ending when your father cries, Neil … Ruby. It marks you for life to see such impotence.
“Well, I laid low during the worst of Daddy’s tears. Myles Hockaday was a gentleman, sure, but nonetheless he was capable of being mean, and I had the feeling more than once he was about to come strike me, or even Mum or the babe. Just to do something with his hands, mind you, since there was nothing he could do with his life.
“But he finally got hungry, thanks be to God, and this took the raw edge from his rage. He called me downstairs, sat me at the table, and cut us some bread and meat with mustard for a cold supper together. I remember him apologizing for there being no cider nor milk. ‘Sorry, you’ll be dry packing it tonight, Liam,’ he says.
“Then when we were through, he tells me why he’s acting the way he is; he tells me the meaning of his distress. It wasn’t for years that I understood this was pathetic—how Daddy’s telling me, a boy, what his pride would prevent him from ever admitting to another man.
“Daddy takes and hugs me, and confesses: ‘Forgive me, son. The shadow of the famine’s a heavy burden on all my generation. I grew up hearing the stories from my own mum and pa, and from the shanachies, too, of people right here in our own valley laying in ditches when they got put out of their houses. And with green juice running from their mouths when all they had left to eat was weeds. Forgive me, but I was taught never to live a day without the fear of all that coming back. And it’s fear that keeps us tenants to the land here, and to this house; it’s fear that’s killed our dreams of anything more … ’
“He couldn’t go on he was crying so. He left me at the table to go guzzling more of his poteen at the hearth. I heard Mum singing her lullabies upstairs. And little me, I wanted to run. But not to the arms of either one of them.
“By and by, Daddy calls me to sit with him by the hearth. He is swacked to the eyeballs now, which was his customary condition from that day forward. I dreaded to hear him talk. His drunken self-pity was no more becoming than his tears.
“He says, ‘I got something to tell you that must always be remembered, boy: it’s the English who bring us to all dead ends. There’s never been one of them born who believes us Irish to be anything more than a race of donkeys. Hate them English, boy! Drink deep your hate, drink the hate into your nerves and your flesh and your blood … ’
“Well, I mi
ght not have it exact word by word, but it’s the sense and pith of what my old man said that hair-raising day everything and everybody changed; the day of your own daddy’s birth, Neil. After that, I don’t believe Myles Hockaday uttered one more word that caused anybody in Carlow to take note of him.
“He did his work in the bog and the field more or less like always; like a good donkey, with Aidan and me to help the cause when we were old enough. Our daddy taught us the secrets of working the land like his daddy before taught him, but his heart was never in the lessons. He looked queer at us, Aidan especially; he knew that we’d leave him there as the last Hockaday on the soil, never to keep his dreamless faith, nor respect his fear of the shadow. He was dying like.
“Mum, in her spiteful ways over the years, would abet the betrayal by providing certain things for Aidan and me … That’s what daddy called it when he was drinking, his sons’ betrayal—to him and to the land, and to the souls of all the Hockadays.
“He’d say she was killing him slow but sure, but Mum would claim it was only her noble desire to liberate us; she’d argue in the night with Daddy, good and loud so’s we’d hear, ‘Bugger this land you don’t even rightly own! My boys shall know finer things than you, Myles Hockaday—things of a real gentleman’s world! They’ll not grow to be like you, walking around just to save on funeral expenses.’
“Now, he never gave her a thumping, but it seemed in some strange way like it’s what she wanted … No offense to you, bonny Ruby, but a free-tongued woman in the benighted times I’m speaking of was a spiteful creature.
“Anyhow, what she provided us first was the wireless. A very good one, it was, with a band that at night’d pick up voices in the air, like magic, from all the four corners of the earth. We’d only find out years and years later where and how Mum come to get the wireless, mind you—that and all else she got.
“The wireless, she said, was our’ears to the fine mystery and lovely treachery beyond the mountains, to all the dear sweet turbulent life far from this homely dirt and muck.’ And for all the pleasure it gave us, we only owed her the duty to ‘listen every night, boys—learn the world’s a big place, with many things to do.’
Drown All the Dogs Page 13