Reading in the Dark

by Seamus Deane

  They all left except my parents. My father was at the table again. My mother was standing at the kitchen press, a couple of feet away, her shoes tight together, looking very small. She was still crying. My father’s boots moved towards her until they were very close. He was saying something. Then he moved yet closer, almost stood on her shoes, which moved apart. One of his boots was between her feet. There was her shoe, then his boot, then her shoe, then his boot. I looked at Smoky, who licked my face. He was kissing her. She was still crying. Their feet shifted, and I thought she was going to fall, for one shoe came off the ground for a second. Then they steadied and just stood there. Everything was silent, and I scarcely breathed. Smoky crept out to sit at the fire.

  That was my first death. When the priest tossed the first three shovelfuls of clay on to the coffin, the clattering sound seemed to ring all over the hillside graveyard, and my father’s face moved sideways as if it had been struck. We were all lined up on the lip of the grave which was brown and narrow, so much so that the ropes they had looped through the coffin handles to lower it into the tight base came up stained with the dun earth. One of the gravediggers draped them over a headstone before he started pouring the great mound of clay in heaves and scrapes on top of the coffin. The clay came up to the brim, as though it were going to boil over. We subdued it with flowers and pressed our hands on it in farewell as we had pressed them on the glossy coffin top and on Una’s waxen hands the night before at the wake, where one candle burned and no drink was taken. When we got back, the candle was out, and my mother was being comforted by aunts and neighbours who all wore the same serious and determined expression of compassion and sternness, so that even the handsome and the less-than-handsome all looked alike. The men doffed their caps and gazed into the distance. No one looked anyone else in the face, it seemed. The children appeared here and there, their faces at angles behind or between adults, fascinated, like angels staring into the light. I went up to the bedroom where Una had lain and sat on one bed and looked at hers and then buried my face in the pillow where her pain had been, wanting to cry and not crying, saying her name inside my head but not out loud, inhaling for something of her but only finding the scent of cotton, soap, of a life rinsed out and gone. When I heard noise on the stairs, I came out to see my uncles lifting the third bed from that downstairs room up over the banisters. They told me to stand aside as they worked it into the room and put it beside the bed where she had been sick. The wake bed was better; it had a headboard. Now Deirdre or Eilis would have one to herself.

  Una came back only once, some weeks later, in early October. My mother had asked me to visit the grave and put flowers on it. They would have to be wild flowers, since shop flowers were too expensive. I forgot until it was almost four o’clock and getting dark. I ran to the graveyard, hoping it would not be shut. But it was too late, the gates were padlocked. I cut up the lane alongside the east wall until I reached the corner where the wall had collapsed about two feet from the top. It was easy to climb over, and inside there was an untended area where the grass was long and where I had seen flowers growing before. But there was not a one, not even on the stunted hedgerow beneath the wall – not a berry, not a husk. I pulled some long grass and tried to plait it, but it was too wet and slippery. I threw the long stems away into the air that was already mottled with darkness, and they fell apart as they disappeared. Running between the little pathways that separated the graves, I got lost several times before I found the fresh grave and recognised the withered flowers as those we had left a short time before. I pulled the wreaths apart, hoping to find some flowers not so badly withered, but there were very few. A torn rose, a chrysanthemum as tightly closed as a nut, some irises that were merely damp stalks with a tinge of blue – that was all. But I couldn’t get them to hold together with the bits of wire from the original wreaths, so I scooped at the ground and put them in a bunch together, pressing the earth round them with my foot. All the while, I was saying her name over and over. Una, Una, Una, Una, Una. It was dark, and I felt contrite and lonely, fearful as well. ‘I have to go,’ I said to the ground, ‘I have to go. I don’t like leaving you, but I have to go, Una.’ The wall seemed far away. I got up off my knees and rubbed my hands on my socks. ‘I’ll come back soon.’ I set off at a run, along the dark pathways, zig-zagging round headstones and great glass bells of airless flowers, Celtic crosses, raised statues, lonely, bare plots, another even fresher grave, where the flowers still had some colour even in the shrivelled light that made the trees come closer. She, it was Una, was coming right down the path before me for an instant, dressed in her usual tartan skirt and jumper, her hair tied in ribbons, her smile sweeter than ever. Even as I said her name, she wasn’t there, and I was running on, saying her name again, frightened now, until I reached the wall and looked back from the broken top stones over the gloomy hillside and its heavy burden of dead. Then I ran again until I reached the street lamps on the Lone Moor Road, and scraped the mud off my shoes against the kerb and brushed what I could of it from my clothes. I walked home slowly. I was late, but being a bit later did not matter now. I didn’t know if I would tell or not; that depended on what I was asked. I knew it would upset my mother, but, then again, it might console her to think Una was still about, although I wished she wasn’t wandering around that graveyard on her own.

  My older brother, Liam, settled the issue for me. I met him in the street and told him instantly. At first he was amused, but he got angry when I wondered aloud if I should tell my mother.

  ‘Are you out of your head, or what? You’d drive her mad. She’s out of her mind anyway, sending you for flowers this time o’ year. Sure any half-sane person would have said yes and done nothing. Anyway, you saw nothing. You say nothing. You’re not safe to leave alone.’

  All night, I lay thinking of her and hearing again the long wail of agony from my mother halfway through the family rosary. It made everybody stand up and Smoky crawl back under the table. I wished I could go in there with him but we all just stood there as she cried and pulled her hair and almost fought my father’s consoling arms away. All her features were so stretched, I hardly recognised her. It was like standing in the wind at night, listening to her. She cried all night. Every so often, I would hear her wail, so desolate it seemed distant, and I thought of Una in the graveyard, standing under all those towering stone crosses, her ribbons red.

  READING IN THE DARK

  October 1948

  The first novel I read had a green hardboard cover and was two hundred and sixteen pages long. On the flyleaf my mother had written her maiden name. I stared at it. The ink had faded, but the letters were very clear. They seemed strange to me, as though they represented someone she was before she was the mother I knew, who might not even have been the same person who wrote the shopping lists and counted up the grocer’s book every week and rolled her eyes and said what I took to be prayers and aspirations under her breath. Underneath her name, she had written Eucharistic Congress, Dublin, 1932. I didn’t know what a Eucharistic Congress was, and when I asked the answers seemed very vague. They all seemed to be about St Patrick and a Count John McCormack, who sang a hymn called ‘Panis Angelicus’ over and over again, for most of 1932 as far as I could understand.

  The novel was called The Shan Van Vocht, a phonetic rendering of an Irish phrase meaning The Poor Old Woman, a traditional name for Ireland. It was about the great rebellion of 1798, the source of almost half the songs we sang around the August bonfires on the Feast of the Assumption. In the opening pages, people were talking in whispers about the dangers of the rebellion as they sat around a great open-hearth fire on a wild night of winter rain and squall. I read and re-read the opening many times. Outside was the bad weather; inside was the fire, implied danger, a love relationship. There was something exquisite in this blend, as I lay in bed reading while my brothers slept and shifted under the light that shone on their eyelids and made their dreams different. The heroine was called Ann, and the hero was Ro
bert. She was too good for him. When they whispered, she did all the interesting talking. He just kept on about dying and remembering her always, even when she was there in front of him with her dark hair and her deep golden-brown eyes and her olive skin. So I talked to her instead and told her how beautiful she was and how I wouldn’t go out on the rebellion at all but just sit there and whisper in her ear and let her know that now was forever and not some time in the future when the shooting and the hacking would be over, when what was left of life would be spent listening to the night wind wailing on graveyards and empty hillsides.

  ‘For Christ’s sake, put off that light. You’re not even reading, you blank gom.’

  And Liam would turn over, driving his knees up into my back and muttering curses under his breath. I’d switch off the light, get back in bed, and lie there, the book still open, re-imagining all I had read, the various ways the plot might unravel, the novel opening into endless possibilities in the dark.

  The English teacher read out a model essay which had been, to our surprise, written by a country boy. It was an account of his mother setting the table for the evening meal and then waiting with him until his father came in from the fields. She put out a blue-and-white jug full of milk and a covered dish of potatoes in their jackets and a red-rimmed butter dish with a slab of butter, the shape of a swan dipping its head imprinted on its surface. That was the meal. Everything was so simple, especially the way they waited. She sat with her hands in her lap and talked to him about someone up the road who had had an airmail letter from America. She told him that his father would be tired, but, tired as he was, he wouldn’t be without a smile before he washed himself and he wouldn’t be so without his manners to forget to say grace before they ate and that he, the boy, should watch the way the father would smile when the books were produced for homework, for learning was a wonder to him, especially the Latin. Then there would be no talking, just the ticking of the clock and the kettle humming and the china dogs on the mantelpiece looking, as ever, across at one another.

  ‘Now that,’ said the master, ‘that’s writing. That’s just telling the truth.’

  I felt embarrassed because my own essay had been full of long or strange words I had found in the dictionary – ‘cerulean’, ‘azure’, ‘phantasm’ and ‘implacable’ – all of them describing skies and seas I had seen only with the Ann of the novel. I’d never thought such stuff was worth writing about. It was ordinary life – no rebellions or love affairs or dangerous flights across the hills at night. And yet I kept remembering that mother and son waiting in the Dutch interior of that essay, with the jug of milk and the butter on the table, while behind and above them were those wispy, shawly figures from the rebellion, sibilant above the great fire and below the aching, high wind.

  GRANDFATHER

  December 1948

  Brother Regan was lighting a candle in his dark classroom at the foot of the statue of the Blessed Virgin. Regan permitted no overhead lights when he gave his Christmas address in primary school. Regan was small, neat, economical. He had been at Una’s funeral earlier that year, along with several other Christian Brothers from the primary school.

  ‘Boys,’ he said.

  After he said ‘Boys’, he stopped for a bit and looked at us. Then he dropped his eyes and kept them down until he said, more loudly again,

  ‘Boys.’

  He had complete silence this time.

  ‘Some of you here, one or two of you, perhaps, know the man I am going to talk about today. You may not know you know him, but that doesn’t matter.

  ‘More than twenty-five years ago, during the troubles in Derry, this man was arrested and charged with the murder of a policeman. The policeman had been walking home one night over Craigavon Bridge. It was a bleak night, November, nineteen hundred and twenty-one. The time was two in the morning. The policeman was off duty; he was wearing civilian clothes. There were two men coming the other way, on the other side of the bridge. As the policeman neared the middle of the bridge, these two men crossed over to his side. They were strolling, talking casually. They had their hats pulled down over their faces and their coat collars turned up for it was wet and cold. As they passed the policeman, one of them said, “Goodnight,” and the policeman returned the greeting. And then suddenly he found himself grabbed from behind and lifted off his feet. He tried to kick but one of the men held his legs. “This is for Neil McLaughlin,” said one. “May you rot in the hell you’re going to, you murdering …”’

  Regan shook his head rather than say a swear word. Then he went on.

  ‘They lifted him to the parapet and held him there for a minute like a log and let him stare down at the water – seventy, eighty feet below. Then they pushed him over and he fell, with the street lights shining on his wet coat until he disappeared into the shadows with a splash. They heard him thrashing, and he shouted once. Then he went under. His body was washed up three days later. No one saw his assailants.

  ‘They went home and said nothing. A week later, a man was arrested and charged with the murder. He was brought to trial. But the only evidence the police had was that he was the friend and workmate of Neil McLaughlin, who had been murdered by a policeman a month before. The story was that, before McLaughlin died on the street where he had been shot, coming out of the newspaper office where he worked, he had whispered the name of his killer to this man who had been arrested. And this man had been heard to swear revenge, to get the policeman – let’s call him Billy Mahon – in revenge for his friend’s death. There was no point in going to the law, of course, justice would never be done; everyone knew that, especially in those early years. So maybe the police thought they could beat an admission out of him, but he did not flinch from his story. That night, he was not even in the city. He had been sent by his newspaper to Letterkenny, twenty miles away, and he had several witnesses to prove it. The case was thrown out. People were surprised, even though they believed the man to be innocent. Innocence was no guarantee for a Catholic then. Nor is it now.

  ‘Well, I wasn’t even in the city in those days. But one of the priests, with whom I have since become friends, was then a young curate. He told me the story of the accused man. This man was prominent in local sporting circles and he helped in various ways to raise money for the parish building fund. One night, in the sacristy of the Long Tower Church, just down the road from here, he told the priest that he had not been to confession in twenty years. He had something on his conscience that no penance could relieve. The priest told him to trust in God’s infinite mercy. He offered to hear the man’s confession; he offered to find someone else, a monk he knew down in Portglenone, to whom the man could go, in case he did not want to confess to someone he knew. But no, he wouldn’t go. No penance, he said, would be any use, because, in his heart, he could not feel sorrow for what he had done. But he wanted to tell someone, not as a confession, but in confidence.

  ‘So he told the priest about being arrested. He told him about the beatings he had been given – rubber truncheons, punches, kicks, threats to put him over the bridge. He told how he had resisted these assaults and never wavered.

  ‘The priest told him that such steadiness in sticking to his story was a testimony to the strength a person gets from knowing he is in the right.

  ‘He looked at the priest in amazement. And then he said these words, words the priest never forgot.

  ‘“D’ye think that’s what I wanted to tell you? The story of my innocence? For God’s sake, Father, can’t you see? I wasn’t innocent. I was guilty. I killed Mahon and I’d kill him again if he came through the door this minute. That’s why I can’t confess. I have no sorrow, no resolve not to do it again. No pity Mahon shot my best friend dead in the street, for nothing. He was a drunken policeman with a gun, looking for a Catholic to kill, and he left that man’s wife with two young children and would have got off scot-free for the rest of his days; probably got promoted for sterling service. And Neil told me as he lay there, with the blood drain
ing from him, that Mahon did it. ‘Billy Mahon, Billy Mahon, the policeman,’ that’s what he said. And even then I had to run back into the doorway and leave his body there in the street because they started shooting down the street from the city walls. And I’m not sorry I got Mahon and I told him what it was for before I threw him over that bridge and he knew, just too late, who I was when I said goodnight to him. It was goodnight all right. One murdering …”’ – Regan bowed his head – ‘“less.”

  ‘Boys, in the story the priest told to me, and that I have now just told to you, look what happened. A man went to the grave without confessing his sin. And think of all the things that were done in that incident. The whole situation makes men evil. Evil men make the whole situation. And these days, similar things occur. Some of you boys may feel like getting involved when you leave school, because you sincerely believe you will be on the side of justice, fighting for the truth. But, boys, let me tell you, there is a judge who sees all, knows all and is never unjust; there is a judge whose punishments and rewards are beyond the range of human imagining; there is a Law greater than the laws of human justice, far greater than the law of revenge, more enduring than the laws of any state whatsoever. That judge is God, that Law is God’s Law, and the issue at stake is your immortal soul.

  ‘We live, boys, in a world that will pass away. The shadows that candle throws upon the walls of this room are as insubstantial as we are. Injustice, tyranny, freedom, national independence are realities that will fade too, for they are not ultimate realities, and the only life worth living is a life lived in the light of the ultimate. I know there are some who believe that the poor man who committed that murder was justified, and that he will be forgiven by an all-merciful God for what he did. That may be. I fervently hope that it is so, for who would judge God’s mercy? But it is true, too, of the policeman: he may have been as plagued by guilt as his own murderer; he may have justified himself too; he may have refused sorrow and known no peace of mind; he may have forgiven himself or he may have been forgiven by God. It is not for us to judge. But it is for us to distinguish, to see the difference between wrong done to us and equal wrong done by us; to know that our transient life, no matter how scarred, how broken, how miserable it may be, is also God’s miracle and gift; that we may try to improve it, but we may not destroy it. If we destroy it in another, we destroy it in ourselves. Boys, as you leave another year behind, you come that much closer to entering a world of wrong, insult, injury, unemployment, a world where the unjust hold power and the ignorant rule. But there is an inner peace nothing can reach; no insult can violate, no corruption can deprave. Hold to that; it is what your childish innocence once was and what your adult maturity must become. Hold to that. I bless you all.’