The Boatman and Other Stories

by Billy O'Callaghan

  Angie, in a white short-sleeved chiffon blouse with its string-drawn collar a good four inches undone and a wool skirt the colour of French mustard that came to just below the knee, blew out the match she was holding and came and put her arms around me. We kissed, and I caught cider and cinnamon from the shampoo she’d earlier used, as well as a hint of wine on the tip of her tongue, but the stench of the match, slightly sulphurous, lay against everything.

  ‘You’re late,’ she said, finally slipping free. ‘You didn’t forget that Brian and Liz are calling, did you?’

  ‘I didn’t,’ I said, releasing her. ‘Sorry. I couldn’t get away. It’s just been that kind of day. And then the traffic was so heavy.’

  She turned to the window, and the long red-stemmed candle set into a chunk of holly-clad beech or elm, and struck another match. The candle’s wick took the flame, guttered and steadied, and a bright sheen spread across the windowpane, sealing us off from the world. Her feet were bare on the taupe carpet, and I tried not to stare but couldn’t help myself. Even after eight months of marriage her details continued to astound me.

  I dropped down onto the settee, and held a hand out to her. She looked at me, but remained out of reach.

  ‘I need to get something into the oven. Liz always puts on such a spread.’

  ‘Just for a minute,’ I said. The fairy lights made her seem restless. ‘They’ll be late. I told you. The traffic is heavy tonight.’

  With reluctance, she came and sat beside me on the settee. I put my hand to the small of her back, but she either ignored it or had already grown so used to my touch that she did not react. I could feel the bones of her through the chiffon, and it was in my mind to mention the accident but something about the serenity of the room and the stillness of the moment made me hold my words. And happy, I suppose, or at least content, we sat there together for a minute or more, watching the tree, the lights, the soft burn of the candles. Then the telephone began to ring, and she stood and left the room.

  A Death in the Family

  At sixty-two, I am already old. Brittle as the sticks we used to gather for kindling, voice careful now and full of draughts, skin like hide. There’s not much that I can keep down – a boiled potato mashed into milk, a slice of bread and butter, a mug of tea if it has been left to cool. A problem with my stomach. Hospital is occasionally suggested, where I could be more comfortable and properly looked after, but I’ve heard of abattoirs talked about in the way I think of hospitals, and I’ve had enough of those places, I’ve seen what they did to my sister, Annie. Nobody mentions the other word, and I don’t want to hear it spoken, but that’s what we’re all talking about in our silent ways. So instead of doctors, nurses and a bed in some white room, I take pills crushed into powder, and the odd glass of brandy and sugar, and that’s all the treatment I’ll allow. Pain or not, I’m fine where I am, for however long that will be. I am inside, shielded from the rain and cold, I have a nice fire, a couch that is comfortable enough on the nights I can’t make the stairs, and my daughter and her husband doing what they can, which is more than should rightfully be expected of anyone. And I have my grandson, Billy: six years old, as naturally feral as any cat and the apple of my eye. This is a place I know by heart, having taken my first breath in the little roadside cottage not thirty yards from where I sit now and where my older sister, May, still lives. The place where we were all born and where most of us died, going back to my own grandmother.

  Billy is full of questions, full of interest in the stories I tell. He loves to hear about ghosts, fairies and the banshee, and the Black and Tans, and about my father, who’d fought in the Boer War and who, as a way of putting food on our table, had enlisted again, in settled middle age, when the fighting broke out across Europe. Billy sits at my feet, his small, curious fingers plucking at the buckles of my shoes, and listens, head inclined, eyes the wide, ash-blue colour of cloud in storm, while I speak of the things my father told me. Of the officers in Africa who’d wept over the horses that they were forced to leave behind, and how after boarding a boat for home, they’d watched some of those same beautiful animals wade out into the tide and swim, neighing screams through the white wake in desperate rage against the separation, swimming until finally, half a mile out to sea, exhaustion turned meat to lead and the only mercy left was for the sobbing men to draw their pistols from their buttoned holsters. Or of the day back during the Civil War when there’d been fighting on the outskirts of Douglas, up in Moneygourney and along the Passage Road, and May, then only about the age that Billy himself is now, had stood at the little gap in front of our cottage and shouted ‘Up de Valera and up the IRA!’ as the soldiers marched past. In response, one of the men, a hard-faced fellow with shorn red hair and his clothes caked in mud, picked her up and carried her through the village on his shoulders, which sent the heart crossways in my mother because the soldiers were dressed rough and plain and there was no way to tell whether they were one side or the other, whether they’d celebrate or be offended by the child’s cheer. From the floor Billy listens to every word, not smiling but transfixed, and even though some of what I say may not be strictly suitable for the ears of one so young, he doesn’t seem to mind.

  The past has become close enough to taste, to make a shape beneath my touch. Some mornings, I rise up out of sleep and find myself braced for the long-ago woollen mill’s early hooter to rouse the first shift’s workers, and tightly tuned to the remembered sense of a body next to me, a husband who has been missing from my bed almost twenty years now. I hear voices in my head, and if they are simply memories rather than ghosts then I also think they share an essence. Time passes but doesn’t get far, and maybe for some of us, for those of us nearing our own precipice, the dead still sing.

  Lately, I suppose because I have such a willing young audience but probably also because I have begun to see ends in everything, I can hardly stop thinking about Jimmy, the youngest of my brothers and the closest to me in age, who died as a child, a boy of just eleven. I’d glimpsed death prior to his passing, with neighbours or the family members of friends, because in a village as close-knit as ours, at that time, the unravelling of every stitch was felt. But Jimmy was my first experience of death up close and as an overwhelming thing. I watched it come, and linger, and I saw the hole it left behind. And so many years later, on the other side of a lifetime, it’s all still there, barely a turn of the head away. In pieces, so that the story can be compressed, because nothing back then happened fast, but in detail so vivid and resonant that the world around me now feels dulled by comparison. And this is the time to remember.

  Jimmy was the wildest one of us. We were probably all wild, but while age tamed the rest of us, or took us in different directions, he seemed only ever fully alive when running, or clambering up a tree in search of birds’ eggs or chestnuts, or walking in tottering baby steps, arms outstretched, across the top of some crumbling wall. Looking back, I see that he was born for boyhood, that it was not for him merely a passage but the destination. There are some like that, with appetites only for the sweet. And forever trailing in his wake, Puck, his pet goat and constant companion, a patchwork creature all spindle-limbs, short-curled horns and grinning, bleating face.

  * * *

  The day leading up to his death was among the longest and most terrible I’ve ever known. When you are young, waiting is a kind of torture. Our cottage had two rooms to house eight of us, a living room with an open fireplace and a sliver of bedroom, yet on that day we each felt divided by miles and about as alone as it was possible to be. There was just so little to be said. Jimmy had moaned and wept in pain through the previous day and finally lost consciousness some time during the night, and while he curled on his side in the bed by the window, breathing in strums, we’d all either sat or lain awake, afraid of the silence but more afraid of breaking it, certain that a finish was near. My father and mother perched on hard chairs at his bedside; my sisters and I, just paces away behind a dividing curtain, huddled
together on our shared pallet bed, holding hands and trying hard not to meet the shine of one another’s eyes; and through in the living room, the boys, Dixie and Mata, who had to be up early for work in the Mill, stretched out by the fire.

  In the morning my father stood in the middle of the living room. He’d taken Jimmy’s accident badly and the previous few months had seen a hard change in him. His skin had greyed to match his thinning hair and begun to hang from his bones, and his eyes were always now a second or two late in finding their focus. Seeing him standing there in the room, shirt half unbuttoned and trousers held up by their braces, I had the impression of a tree about to fall, that same slow, inexorable lean. Annie had water boiled and pressed a mug of tea into his hands, and he looked at it and at her and started to drink in quick, soundless sips, hardly registering its heat.

  When he finished, he handed back the mug and went through again into the bedroom, and some minutes later my mother appeared and settled in the armchair beside the fireplace. It was a cold morning, and the fire had yet to properly catch, and we all sat around, watching the small blue and yellow flames bubble among the hazel sticks and the broken clods of turf.

  Some months earlier, towards the end of summer, Jimmy was over along the Churchyard Lane, plucking ivy from the old high wall of the Protestant graveyard for the goat to eat. They’d quickly cleared the little that could be reached from ground level and, in order to access the thickest clumps, he climbed up onto Puck’s back and then raised himself to standing height. Gripping the wall with one hand and with the other trying to tear loose the fronds of ivy, he had no way of keeping his balance once the goat reared, and was pitched backwards, landing badly on the low kerb separating footpath from road.

  I don’t remember if Jimmy spoke of it later, and I know for certain that my father never mentioned it, but even if one or both of them had, words are not pictures and have no way of accounting for how clearly the scene plays out in my mind. I sometimes wonder if it was because we shared the same blood, and if kin might be connected in ways that nobody can yet quite understand. I was not there, but they were, and that seems to have been enough, because I can feel the colour of the day and the leathery skin of the ivy leaves, and I can see the goat, unable to bear such a burden, jolt in pain, and Jimmy, for that second flailing in search of balance, one hand scraping at the wall, the other ripping away a swathe of ivy, the leaves waxy and burnt yellow from a long summer, the ropy tendrils dry and weak. And then hitting the ground, hard enough to jerk the breath from his small body, and seeing only soft blue emptiness above the mesh of the graveyard sycamores. A cracking sound, loud as the crunch of a dropped egg, followed after some hesitation by the cautious press of Puck’s damp muzzle against his ear and neck; and, in response to his bladder heaving itself empty, a bubbling of tears, driven by fear and shame, to rupture clarity.

  Minutes or an hour later, the sound of boots pounding the road at a run, and my father crying out from yards away, throwing himself down onto his knees, afraid to touch and yet in the same instant swallowing Jimmy up into his arms, against his chest, asking over and over, ‘Oh Christ, lad, what have you done to yourself?’ even while sighing assurances that everything would be all right, that boys were forever falling off walls and out of trees and were always up again and running races in no time flat. But his jarring stare told a different story, because he’d made it through the fighting at Modder River, Loos, Flanders and the Somme, and knew by sense and smell the wounds that were likely to heal and those that wouldn’t.

  The back was broken. John Looney, a bonesetter from Shanbally and a cousin of my mother’s, came to the house, but there was nothing to be done. ‘Leave him be, Mary,’ he said, outside on the road. ‘He couldn’t have fallen worse. Give him the bed, and leave him be. He’ll do no better in a hospital. All you can do is sit and talk to him, hold his hand. You won’t have him long. Months, I’d say. Maybe half a year. But not much longer.’ My father stood beside my mother, clenched with rage, eyes dry from pondering space, hating the certainty of the truth.

  And the bonesetter knew his business. Within weeks, Jimmy’s condition had deteriorated to the point where he was in constant pain. He tried to remain upbeat but the strain had begun to show and on the worst days he could only speak in hisses. By the new year his spine had bent him into a foetal curl, a contortion that forced him to sleep in what was almost a sitting position, propped up with coats and chair cushions. Worse still, if worse were possible, something had got into his bones, a festering that caused him to cry out in the night at the least wrong movement, and it was hard on everyone, having to watch, having to live with that, and to see him suffering so much.

  Because there was nothing else that we could do to help, we gave our time, taking turns to sit with him and Puck, whose stubbed head rested on the mattress beneath his hand. I suppose the variety of the conversations kept him going, the boys, Dixie especially, rambling on about hurling or drag hunting or the road bowling up in Scairt, and Annie bringing in all the news and gossip from the Mill, about who was fighting or doing a line with who in the village. May could hardly be near him without crying, but she took her turns the same as the rest of us and would perch on the end of the bed and, with her eyes closed, sing all the songs she knew for him, ‘The Old Rustic Bridge by the Mill’ and ‘The Coast of Malabar’ and ‘The Stone Outside Dan Murphy’s Door’, tears lathering her smooth, round cheeks. She had a voice like a bird in those days, and loved to sing almost as much as he loved to listen, though he’d have pretended otherwise.

  And for me it was a pleasure, if a sad one, to be able to sit with Jimmy, to discuss the horses that Mr Jago and some of the other men brought to the forge, and how they’d often come across to Jimmy’s window for a chat and to ask if there was anything he wanted or needed from the city the next time they were in.

  ‘I can look for nearly anything,’ he’d tell me, and I’d nod, having heard him often enough from the other room. ‘Maybe a few sweets, sir, if it wouldn’t be too much trouble. The nice ones that you brought me a couple of weeks back. If they still have ’em. I have a fierce appetite altogether for bullseyes. And if you ask them for a bit of brusk, they’d probably throw it in for nothing. Sure it’s only the dust of the broken sweets, but you’d love the way it crackles in your mouth. God, that’s some beast you’re after bringing in to the forge there, Mr Jago. You’d nearly need a ladder to be getting up into the saddle. A hackney, is it? He’s mighty, but I’d say a devil for throwing shoes. I wonder did anyone ever write a book about horses, at all? I’m stone mad altogether for reading, you know. Especially books with loads of pictures. I don’t even mind if they’re drawings.’

  He had such a roguish way of grinning, a mischievous, gap-toothed innocence that always made me want to play along and to adore him all the more. Because lifting his head was becoming increasingly difficult, he’d twist himself so that he was seeing me from at least one eye, and the near corner of his mouth would lift, dimpling his left cheek, until there was nothing for me to do but smile back and melt for him. And if I ached in those moments to coat his cheeks in kisses, then I was also battling the urge to flee, to run out into the Hall Field where I could throw myself down in the long grass and weep without being seen.

  In the months since his fall he’d gathered a decent library of books, two dozen or so, which he kept in a small plywood crate at the foot of his bed. Picture books of dogs, birds and horses, novels like Peter Pan, The Jungle Book, Tom Sawyer and Treasure Island, books about the Wild West and Africa, even a book of ghost stories that he’d sometimes read aloud to us so that he could laugh and tease us when we at least pretended to be terrified.

  Whenever my mother had a few free minutes, and whenever she could bear it – which wasn’t often, though she was a strong woman in most other ways – she’d take up one or another of the books, usually The Wind in the Willows, it being his favourite for the creatures in the story, and especially the sweet pastel depictions of toads, rats,
badgers and weasels that lit the pages. In slow, halting fashion, she’d read aloud a random page or half a page, missing as many words as she got and accepting his gentle corrections at every stumble. And after she had finally closed the book again and reached for his hand, letting the gesture take the place of the things she couldn’t find to say, he’d mumble a passage from the scene between the Wayfarer and Ratty that he’d pored over often enough to know by heart, though he had over time broken it up and made his own of it: ‘For the days pass and never return, and the south still waits for you. Take the adventure, heed the call. ’Tis but a banging of the door behind you, and you are out of the old life and into the new.’

  * * *

  The year ended, and all the talk seemed to be of leaving behind everything that had gone before, the fighting and bloodshed, the dividing politics, and concentrating instead on a good future. Nineteen thirty felt like a fresh start, with room ahead for hope. But such optimism didn’t penetrate our walls. The cottage for us had become a purgatory, and the sense of dread lay thick within its shadows. Our voices lowered, even when the living room was full; conversations choked on themselves. My father in particular had become a fraction of the man he used to be. He took to standing in the doorway or, if the rain was coming down, to leaning straight-armed on the windowsill, his trance tied to our little front garden’s few square feet of earth and the green stalks of daffodil waiting for their time to flower. I watched his back from across the room, and understood that he was thinking of other days, of those times in his life when stillness meant a shallow grave in strange dirt or, in its own way almost worse, having to spend another night, or an hour, or five minutes more back in the flooded trenches with the steely-sour combination stench of blood, earth and rotting flesh and the relentless screaming of the famished rats and those men whose faces had been shot mostly away. I watched him and wanted to stand with him, to put my arms around him and squeeze until his very bones realised that he was not alone, that we were all broken but broken together. But he had become untouchable.