by Tim Buckley
Emily eventually showed up just as dusk was falling, covered in dust and dead midges. Nathan showed her out onto the stoop and went to get her a glass of wine, discreetly leaving her and me to whatever would follow. She went over to where Cara was sleeping soundly in her crib. She stood staring at her for a moment, kissed her softly and then turned to me.
“I’m sorry, Wilde,” she said, in a whisper. “I didn’t mean…”
She looked as though she might cry.
I put down my glass and put my arms around her. We stood in silence for a few moments, her face buried in my shoulder.
“What is it, Em? What’s up?” I said, holding on to her.
“It’s the disease, Wilde – Pierce’s. I think it might be in some of the vines. Some of the leaves look dried out and there are green islands on some of the canes. I think… but, I don’t know. I know it’s got into the Morris vineyard, it’s getting closer. And the flies are everywhere, the last few days they’ve been all over everything and I can’t keep them away. I don’t want to spray, not now. I don’t know what to do, I just don’t know what to do.”
I rubbed her hair and kissed the top of her head, any lingering exasperation dissolving at the sight of her tears.
“Look,” I said, “you’ve done as much as you can, maybe it’s time to get some help? Let’s call in an expert from Margaret River, yeah? Let’s get someone in who knows about this stuff, who’s seen it before.”
“But I want this to be mine, Wilde, really mine. I don’t want people to drink my wine and say I just paid someone else to do all the work, you know?”
“I know that – but you have to know when to call for help, too. You can’t expect to be the world’s leading expert just yet, you’ve only been here five minutes.”
She snuffled a laugh through the tears, and nodded into my shoulder. I loved her so much, I ached for her when she was sad and I’d have done anything to make it all all right.
Sensing the truce, Nathan reappeared with Carly and a bottle of wine.
“Come on, love,” Carly said, taking Emily gently by the arm. “Let’s get you cleaned up before dinner, eh? We’ve got a lot of food to get through and not much time!”
10
I was the youngest in my adoptive family and so I bore the brunt of the playful torture usually meted out to the runt. I knew that was part of the deal and I knew too that, whenever I got myself into a scrape, the boys would have my back and would stand up for me on the football pitch or at school. But even as a child I had a sense that they were just playing a role that was somehow expected of them, maintaining their own kudos rather than acting out of any sense of sibling loyalty. Even though they included me in every part of their family life, and even though Eoin went to every length to make me feel like his own, there was no doubt in my mind that I was different. That even though I belonged to this family, I would never really belong in it. I’d often envied Cathal and Seán the certainty of their place in the world but I knew it wasn’t really my place. And so without ever being aware of arriving at the conclusion, I always knew somewhere in my gut that the day would come when I would leave and strike out on my own. It wasn’t ingratitude or resentment, far from it, it was just that it never occurred to me that I had any right to a stake in that place. The farm that my father had left behind had been carved up and sold off and what remained could barely support one family, let alone four. Over the years, the two family homes had been knocked back into one and there was no question of the old farmhouse being mine. I would never blame Eoin for losing the land or the cattle. That there was anything left at all was down to him and I never questioned that this was Eoin’s house, Eoin’s land, Eoin’s stock. I never spoke to anybody about it – I just assumed they thought that too.
So it was when I was seventeen years old that I left home and went to university. A state grant and evenings collecting glasses in a pub paid for a lean enough life but I loved it and even loved the hackneyed romance of a student’s hand-to-mouth existence. In the early days, I would get the bus home every Friday and land back in the city late on Sunday nights with bags of leftover food and whatever few quid Eoin could afford to give me. But as time went on my trips to the farm became more and more sporadic. As they did, I felt less that Eoin missed my help on the farm and more that Mairéad was somehow happy to have her own family back, for however much longer that might last. Although it was nothing anybody ever said or did, there was an equilibrium in the house that my visits home seemed only to disturb. During my second summer I stayed in Dublin and took jobs in the city to pay my way for the year ahead and soon I was even revelling in my own meagre self-sufficiency.
And then, during my third year, I got the call to say that there had been an accident.
Eoin had been spreading slurry on the pastureland down by the river. He’d come back to the house at the end of a long day in the fields but, after he’d had a cup of tea with Mairéad, he had decided to go back out for another hour or until darkness fell to try and get finished before the rain that was due the next day. Mairéad tried to convince him to call it a night but the boys were away at a hurling camp in Kilkenny and he was afraid that, on his own, the rain would beat him. So he went back out into the yard to recouple the tractor and the muck-spreader. Nobody can be sure what happened next but the neighbour that came to answer Mairéad’s panicked calls for help is fairly certain that a faulty handbrake slipped on the tractor and it rolled back, pinning him to the muck-spreader behind. The brake, he said, had been causing trouble for a while, he remembered Eoin complaining about it a few weeks before. Maybe it was just a matter of time. Maybe it could have been one of the boys pinned between tonnes of metal. I know that Eoin would have preferred to die than to bury one of his sons and then blame himself for the rest of his life.
I came home to bury him and watched from somewhere outside myself as my uncle lay in the coffin in the front room. I walked behind the hearse that took Eoin’s body the mile or so down the narrow lane, past the fields where his cattle stood chewing, watching, and on to the church. I stood in that church and listened to the same mantras poured out by the bereaved. Afterwards I stood in the windswept cemetery beside my parents’ graves and I listened to the same words of hope and faith in the resurrection of the dead to stand in paradise with their God. And to stand side by side, said the priest, with his brother, reunited again and together forever. I heard the same words and the only difference was that I knew now what they meant and I knew I believed none of them. I stood in the front room for another wake and watched the same people stand awkwardly again and reminisce over sandwiches and bottles of warm beer, the walls closing in around me and the tie around my neck choking the life slowly out of me. I watched Mairéad and the boys, watched them grieve. I wanted to be with them but, although Eoin had been like a father to me, he wasn’t and so I couldn’t feel their pain – not this time.
It was a couple of weeks later, after I’d gone back to Dublin and life had begun to settle back into its old routines, that I had a call from Eoin’s solicitor. I had met him a couple of times back when he’d come to the house during Eoin’s battles with the bank but that had been years before and I didn’t even know that he still did work for Eoin.
“I’ve arranged with Mairéad,” he said, in his south Tipperary lilt, “that we’ll read the will next Tuesday. It’ll be in my office in town. You’ll want to be there.”
“Honestly, Gerry,” I said, “it’s not really my place, is it? I’m grateful for whatever he’s left to me, but this is a family affair and I’d feel like I was imposing. And sure, you can just let me know afterwards, can’t you?”
“Listen to me now, boy,” he said, “I knew Eoin and I know that he considered you part of the family. As much as the two boys, maybe. He’d have wanted you to be there – expected you to be there. And so do I.”
“But…”
“Tuesday at three. Don’t be late.”
>
So I took the train to Thurles and sat staring out at the rain that lashed the windows in waves. Gerry had made me feel guilty and that was the only reason I was going. It was always Eoin who had made me feel like family and I wondered now if that had been to mask something that he saw in the others, something close to resentment, maybe? It had never been obvious, that was true, but maybe that was because I’d never been looking for it. In the visits I’d made back to the house since leaving home, I realised that I’d felt more and more like an outsider. The boys didn’t really include me in their world like before and wasn’t Mairéad a wee bit cooler with me, a little more closed off from me? I dismissed the thoughts as paranoia borne of all of the changes that were unfolding, but they sneaked back into my head and by the time the train was pulling out of Templemore, I was thinking of forgetting the whole thing and getting on the next train back to Dublin.
And perhaps I should have done just that.
“Listen, lads,” Gerry said when we were all sitting down in his little office above the library, “before I go through this line by line, I’m going to just tell you what it says in a nutshell. Because I’m telling you now, there’s no use fighting about this here, it’s done and you should all respect Eoin’s wishes.”
There was some uncomfortable shuffling and, out of the corner of my eye, I saw Cathal glance over nervously at Seán.
Gerry put on his glasses, gathered the sheaf of papers from his desk and took a breath.
“Look, Eoin has left the farm to you three boys, in equal parts. Mairéad will have the house and the yard for as long as she lives in it, the sheds and the machinery will be shared between the three farms. If there’s any dispute, Eoin appointed me to mediate…”
“Any dispute??!! Any dispute??!!” Cathal jumped out of the chair, his face bright red with rage. “Breaking up a small farm in three? How’s that even going to work? Sharing the sheds, sharing the milking machines? Sure, that’s just crazy talk…”
“Sit down, Cathal,” Gerry said, thumping the desk, “sit down right now!”
“That’s my land, Gerry! Mine and Seán’s!” Cathal shouted, then he turned to point a finger at me. “We’ve always worked it and we’ve been looking after it while you’ve been off living the high life. It’s because of your father that we lost the biggest part of it, and now you’re getting what’s left, what’s rightfully ours?! No way! No fucking way!”
He pushed the chair over and stormed out of the office. Seán ran after him, glowering at me as he left. Mairéad said nothing, just stared at Gerry, and I knew then that Eoin hadn’t spoken to her, that this was as much a surprise to her as it was to me and to the other two. It’s a cliché that land is at the root of every Irish fight, but maybe clichés are only clichés because they’re usually true. So Cathal blamed my father for all that had happened, for losing his land and maybe, even, for working Eoin into the ground and under that fresh mound of damp earth on the hillside.
“It’s not mine, Gerry,” I said. “It belongs to them. Do whatever you have to do, but I don’t want what’s theirs.”
“Ah Jaysus,” said Gerry, rubbing his forehead and shaking his head, “you can’t just do that. You can’t just dismiss Eoin’s last wishes, isn’t that right, Mairéad?”
She said nothing, just stared straight ahead and out the window into the Market Square below and over to the mart where they had taken away Eoin’s cattle a few years before.
“There’ll be more taxes to pay and there’ll be the legal fees—” he went on, but I cut him short.
“Just get it done, Gerry,” I said, quietly. “Eoin meant well but it will never work. This is the only way, you know that as well as I do. Let me know what you need me to sign, but you have to make this right.”
I stood up, picked up my bag and turned to Mairéad. I paused, the right words wouldn’t come.
“I’m sorry about all this, Mairéad,” I said. “I wish things were different.”
“I know,” she said softly, and I walked out and down the stairs onto the street.
I haven’t spoken much to Mairéad or Seán since that day – not because I won’t but because there’s nothing much to say. I’ve spoken to Cathal, of course, but that’s a story for another day. I’ve never even been back to the house to collect the few bits and pieces of mine that are still there. Or at least the few bits and pieces that I left there – maybe they’ve been thrown out by now or packed in cardboard boxes to rot in the shed. Mairéad still lives in the house, Cathal married and built a house on the land. Seán and his wife still live in the house with Mairéad, he’ll be there until the day he dies. I send them cards on their birthdays and at Christmas with my bits of news. Mairéad sends me a card from the three of them signed in her own handwriting and that’s all there is now. That’s all that’s left of my family.
11
I thought that it was just Brendan at his curmudgeonly best when he said to me that it’s easy, when you move to a beautiful new place, to romanticise it. It’s easy to forget that, like everywhere else in the world, it probably has its own issues and its own ugliness.
“Remember, Wilde,” he said, pointing a warning croissant at me over a coffee on the morning of my break-up with Round Tower, “when you’re not installed in the community and you’re still loitering on the periphery, you’re not part of the local conversation. It’s only when you’re part of that conversation that you really hear the news, the news that you never see on the television or read in the papers.”
I know we did. Romanticised it, I mean. We got up every morning and opened the curtains on a new day under a hot sun and wondered how it could ever get better than this. Even in winter, maybe even more in winter, the chill in the air or the threat of rain on the wind had its own smell, its own mystery. There is an exoticism in being somewhere new, somewhere a million miles from where you grew up, somewhere you used to read about in schoolbooks in a leaking prefab in an Irish country school that smelled of peat and pig shit. The first day I went up to the lighthouse, I felt that childish wonder. I stood on the cliffs and looked out to sea and thought of the time Eoin took me to the Cliffs of Moher.
“Imagine, gosson,” he said to me, as we looked out over the Atlantic, “imagine that the next parish is in America!”
The next parish, I thought, standing there on the Cape, might be Java or Mauritius or Madagascar or Christmas Island, and the thought made me feel small and thrilled me at the same time.
But exotic is like a sea fret that hides the ugliness of reality and, when the sun burns away the mist, that ugliness is laid bare. Once you really settle in a new community, once you get to know people and become known to them, the mist is burned away. The ugly everyday encroaches on the idyll that you once inhabited alone. Now, people foist on you news of the plans for a new social housing site and the no-goods that it will surely bring to town. Or the farmers they’re sure are dumping effluent in the bay. Or they tell you about the row that’s brewing over the new school uniforms and wait for you to take a side so that they can tell everybody else whose side you’re on, even though you could scarcely care less. Because not caring is not an option either. However much you might want to, you can’t bring down the mist once more. You can’t un-introduce yourself, you can’t wave a wand that makes you an invisible stranger again. Because new strangers are a curiosity but old strangers are a slight, an arrogant threat. And that’s when you realise that exotic is just another word for different, that every different has its own shit and all shit stinks.
For us, our first steps onto the social minefield came early in our first summer. We’d met the Gregsons one evening while walking into town to have a drink and maybe get some dinner. They lived, as I said, on the way into Clovelly and we’d exchanged nods a couple of times. That evening, there was a strong breeze blowing and the air smelled of a distant storm. All the way into town, Emily looked like a bad dancer, her hands flailing as s
he alternately tried to keep her summer skirt from Marilyn Monroe-ing and her hat from flying off on the wind. As we passed the Gregsons’ house, her hat finally flew off and into their garden while she held down her skirt with both hands and squealed.
We buzzed on the intercom and Bonnie Gregson came out to retrieve the rogue headdress. We chatted for a while at the fence and it turned out that they were taking part in a sailing regatta the weekend after. Emily had done some sailing during some part of her scattered childhood and so we were invited along for a day on the water.
All of which was fine, and it was a beautiful day out in the bay, floating about so lazily that I couldn’t really tell when we were racing and when we weren’t. The problem turned up a couple of days later when I had to go to the dentist, having somehow lost a filling. Tom Masters was the only dentist in town and I’d been to see him once before. I’d bumped into him a couple of times in town, in the shop or in the pub, and we’d chatted about this and that and so I was a bit surprised to find him offhand and, honestly, a bit rude. I tried a couple of times to make conversation – never easy with an instrument of torture in your mouth – but gave up when he responded with a monosyllable or a grunt. I’m pretty sure too, in retrospect, that the whole thing could have hurt a lot less than it did.
I was telling Nathan about it through swollen cheeks and he smirked a knowing smirk.