by Seamus Deane
‘Sacred Heart,’ she whispered, ‘Ena.’
Then Uncle Phonsie appeared behind her.
What is it?’
Ena was lying back on her bed, her eyes stuck open, her hands scrabbling at the coverlet. She started to gasp again, then coughed sharply. It sounded like a fox barking. This time, I moved from the bedside towards the wall, brushing at my shirt. There was a sudden rush of noise, as though someone had turned on a radio. Bernadette was crying as she washed her sister’s mouth and face, squeezing the facecloth into the reddened water that shone in its white enamel basin on the floor. Phonsie disappeared. Then, almost immediately it seemed, the stairs rumbled with running feet and shouts. A doctor came, his stethoscope dangling; then a priest, unscrolling a purple stole.
‘Go home and tell your father to come down here this minute. Quick as you can.’ They all spoke at once, urging me out.
I went down the stairs three at a time and out into the street where a stiff wind blew, full of the wild smells of the river and the sweetness of the nearby bakery. In the flat light of the evening, everything seemed pale. A man laboured uphill on a bicycle, standing on the pedals, his clothes creasing up at the back and then smoothing out with the effort. I could hear his breath drowning in his throat and then coming free again as I ran past him and took a short cut through the side-streets to the back field. The yard gate was bolted, so I hopped over the wall and jumped clear of the rose-bed below. As I landed my father came out of the shed.
‘Ena,’ I said, ‘Ena’s sick. They sent me to tell you.’
He came close and bent down to me. The wind tugged at my hair and rattled the shed door behind him.
‘Look at you, child, he said, ‘Look at you. You’ve got her blood all over you.’
His huge hand touched my cheek. My mother appeared, knowing something was wrong, and came hurrying down the yard.
‘Look at him, Mother. Look at him. That’s Eno’s blood on his shirt; they sent him up like that. Christ, she’s taken bad again. She must be … ’
And he ran after his voice into the house to fetch his jacket and was gone.
At Ena’s funeral, after the grave had been closed, Liam motioned me to get in close behind some of the men who were standing around in knots, talking. We would listen and then move away, choking with laughter at their accents and their repetitions. For it wasn’t talking; it was more like chanting.
‘Man dear, but that’s a sore heart this time o’ year, wi’ Christmas on top o’ us and all.’
‘It is that, a sore heart indeed.’
‘Aye, and at Christmas too.’
‘Och ay, so it is. Sore surely.’
They would tug their caps forward by the peak and nod their heads in unison, shuffling their feet slowly.
‘Did ye see Bernadette, now; the younger sister?’
Was that Bernadette? She’s far changed now.’
‘Far changed indeed. But sure she’d be shook badly now by that death.’
‘Aye, the manner o’ it. So quick.’
‘Still, you can see the likeness to the brother. The dead spit o’ him.’
‘Which brother d’ye mean?’
‘The lost one. Eddie. The wan that disappeared.’
‘I never saw him. Is that who she’s like? Isn’t it strange now, the way families …’
Liam and I had stopped laughing. We both listened, but they said little before my father appeared. He motioned us over to him.
‘Now there’s a double sore heart,’ said one of them as we moved off. ‘The oldest boy gone, God knows where, and now the youngest sister. Never had good health, God help her.’
He took us to his parents’ grave, where we knelt and prayed. 23 December, 1921 for his father. 28 December 1921 for his mother. Their names were blurred on the weathered stone. The graveyard was almost empty when we stood up. Below, the curve of the river disappeared into a high incoming fog that was swelling out of the north Atlantic. My father said nothing, but his mouth looked congested.
So Eddie looked like Bernadette. That was something. But Bernadette, to my eyes, looked like my father. ‘Stamped from the same die, what do you expect?’ my mother said. Had she ever seen Eddie? As I asked I wondered that I hadn’t thought to put this obvious question before. Hardly at all, was her short answer. But that means you did, I persisted, so was he like my father? Very like? Somewhat. She was stalling so I switched. Tell me about the feud. Had Eddie anything to do with that? Child, she’d tell me, I think sometimes you’re possessed. Can’t you just let the past be the past? But it wasn’t the past and she knew it.
So broken was my father’s family that it felt to me like a catastrophe you could live with only if you kept it quiet, let it die down of its own accord like a dangerous fire. Eddie gone. Parents both dead within a week. Two sisters, Ena and Bernadette, treated like skivvies and boarded in a hen-house. A long, silent feud. A lost farmhouse, with rafters and books in it, near the field of the disappeared. Silence everywhere. My father knowing something about Eddie, not saying it, not talking but sometimes nearly talking, signalling. I felt we lived in an empty space with a long cry from him ramifying through it. At other times, it appeared to be as cunning and articulate as a labyrinth, closely designed, with someone sobbing at the heart of it.
THE FEUD
February 1950
The feud, the feud. I dreamed of the farmhouse, sunlit and wide, pungent and clean, and of the shy shore-cattle straying on the sand far below, nimble and heavy, the seaweed glittering wet on the shore and drying into mulch on the fields, its foul beach odour dried out to a bitterness in the air.
All the sounds of all the seasons entombed that imagined farmhouse, the white road curled endlessly around it, the skies paused day by day, season by season, in its windows and yet it remained empty, no voice or footfall imaginable within it, except the remembered thunder of my father’s feet across a wooden floor and the sensation of being lifted into the air past the slashed light of a window. There must be a cold-water tap outside in the farmyard, I told myself, a manure heap quivering with insects and inner heat, a fox gliding in the dark towards the hen-house with the wind lifting his smell behind him in a soft plume. The suite of imagined odours ran with the screening images, like the background music in a film, and then both would fade and leave me in the still air of the bedroom where I lay with an open book over my face and a sense of frustration marauding in my head.
My father sang as he washed the dishes and scoured the saucepans.
Where Lagan stream sings lullaby
There blows a lily fair,
The twilight gleam is in her eye,
The night is on her hair.
That was a Donegal song, he told me. An old man from Termon used to sing it and his grandfather’s father heard it, way in the days before the Famine. It wasn’t the River Lagan, the one that flowed through Belfast, just a stream that ran all over the place before it fed into a tributary of the River Foyle. How did he hear it, I wanted to know. Was Great-grandfather a song collector? No, no, the old man who sang it was a roadworker. One day, he gave Great-grandfather directions to the mountain road that ran towards the Poisoned Glen, way out in West Donegal, near Gweedore, and Great-grandfather bought him a pint in a nearby public house. It was there that the old man stood up, took off his cap and sang the song. What did Great-grandfather do? He was a buyer for a grocery firm in Derry He made contracts with farmers for dairy produce, vegetables, that sort of thing. But the Famine ruined all that. And then the Great War ruined everything later again, for your father, isn’t that so? I asked, bending under the sink for a drying cloth and hearing my voice boom a little in the space where the U-pipe took the water into the drain in the back yard. He must have nodded and then he hummed again. This time I sang the second verse to his humming.
But like a love-sick leannán-sidhe,
She has my heart in thrall,
No life I own nor liberty
For love is lord of all.
; I couldn’t reach the high notes, and all the grace notes had gone a-quavering, but he smiled anyway and tousled my hair, then laughed when he realised his hands were still soapy and wet. I rubbed my hair with a towel, my eyes blinking a little from a soap bubble that had burst on my eyebrow. ‘Good song, that one,’ he said. I nodded and said I would love to go into Donegal more often, to that place where Great-grandfather – no my great-great grandfather – had heard it, that place called Termon; or even where Grandfather’s family lived, up there in the hills near the Gap of Mamore, further up the Inishowen peninsula. Some time I would go there, he promised me. Some day he’d take me. To the farmhouse, the one with the rafters? I could still remember the day we were there. It’d be great to see it again. I knew then he was going to tell me something terrible some day, and, in sudden fright, didn’t want him to; keep your secrets, I said to him inside my closed mouth, keep your secrets, and I won’t mind. But, at the same time, I wanted to know everything. That way I could love him more; but I’d love myself less for making him tell me, for asking him to give me a secret, for having sung a verse of his song, for the accident of having been the one with the flecks of his dead and maltreated sister’s blood on him.
Before his parents died, he told me, they used to sing that and other songs together. Eddie was the sweetest singer. I had known he would be. When his parents became ill, they were taken away immediately to the Fever Hospital in the Waterside, across the Foyle, on the other side of the Craigavon Bridge, and he never saw them again, not even at the wake, for the coffins were closed. When the funerals were over, he remembered coming back to the house and finding a lot of the furniture gone already. All the bedlinen was burnt. The house was fumigated and then closed up and the children were all divided between relatives. That’s when his sisters went to live with their mother’s sister and her husband, in the feud farmhouse in Donegal. It was then, too, that Eddie went away, without warning. My father never saw him again, although he was told Eddie had enlisted down south in the IRA. He couldn’t remember how he was told. All he remembered was that the whole world he had known was swept away in a week, in two weeks. He was a child one moment; the next, he was in charge of a whole distraught family of children. He was only twelve, and Eddie, five years older, had gone. He was now the eldest member of the family. He got a job as messenger boy in a hardware store, owned and managed by a Protestant, Mr Edmiston, who sacked him after he had asked for his first raise in five years. It was after that he started to box for a living; later still, he got the job he still had, as a labourer working to an electrician, in the naval base. The children were scattered to the four winds, he said, and at the mercy of anyone and everyone. Uncle Phonsie and my father stayed with cousins, and he remembered his aunt putting out her hand at table to stop Phonsie reaching for the butter. ‘You eat margarine,’ she told him, ‘butter’s for the children of this house only.’ They left that night, he said, his face reddening slightly even at the memory, stayed in a hostel, and within a week he had rented a room in the Carlisle Road for himself and arranged for Phonsie to go to live with other relatives who promised to treat him as one of their own. And they did. He stayed in that room for four years, living on porridge, potatoes and buttermilk, working, training, starting to box in the ring. Everything in the family home disappeared into the houses of relatives, even down to the photographs. At the time, they were told everything had to be burnt; but that was true only of linens, sheets, towels, that sort of thing. Later, they were told it was the least they could have done, to hand those things over to help pay for their keep. The house was sold. The children never saw a penny of the money. When he visited that farmhouse, he found the place was full of books, furniture, pictures from his parents’ home, and his sisters, Ena and Bernadette, were sleeping in pallet beds in a shack beside the hen-house. That’s why he’d never even wanted to see those people again. And he never wanted us to have anything to do with them either. And in the meantime, Eddie was fighting for freedom. He shook his head bitterly at that. Freedom. In this place. Never was, never would be. What was it, anyway? Freedom to do what you liked, that was one thing. Freedom to do what you should, that was another. Close enough to one another and far apart as well.
I looked at his bowed head and his large hands, pink-clean from the soapsuds. I wanted to ask him about Eddie to see if he’d tell me, but I didn’t want him to tell me only because I asked. He looked up at me, smiling, to say: ah well, it was all blood under the bridge now and I should bother no more with it. I hesitated, then told him I was going out to see if anyone was sailing a kite out in the back field, for the wind was up and it was still bright. But there was no one there, so I spent the evening shooting needle-pointed arrows into the back gate with a bow made from a young tree branch; retrieving them, shooting them, obscurely satisfied only when the arrow struck the wood with a thud and stayed there quivering in a brief and tiny song.
THE FORT
June 1950
Lying in the filtered green light of the high fern-stalks that shook slightly above our heads, we listened to the sharp birdsong of the hillside. This was border country. Less than a mile beyond, a stream, crossed by a hump-backed bridge, marked part of the red line that wriggled around the city on the map and hemmed it in to the waters of Lough Foyle. Every so often, we would stand up clear of the ferns and survey the heathered hills, the pale white roads winding between high hedgerows. Even when no one could be seen, we felt we were watched. When we went down to the bridge, we liked to cross and re-cross it, half-expecting that something punitive would happen because of these repeated violations.
At one end, just above the stream, there was a clump of thorn bushes where wrens turned and twisted endlessly, hooking and unhooking their tiny bodies between the close branches in dapper knitting motions. At the other end, the Free State began – a grassy road that ran straight for thirty yards and then swerved away under an oak tree into that territory where there was an isolated shop, a tin hut thrown up to exploit the post-war food shortages on our side of the border. There the cigarette packets were different, Sweet Afton Virginia in yellow and white with a medallion of Robbie Burns and two lines of the song ‘Sweet Afton’ slanted underneath across a picture of a stream, a tree, a miniature landscape. The voices of the people there seemed to us as sleek and soft as the glistening wheels of butter on the counter that had a print of a swan on their bright yellow faces. My parents’ people came from out there, in Donegal.
One afternoon, Liam and I fell asleep in the warmth of the fens and woke to a cold evening mist. We decided to go up to the old fort of Grianan, at the top of the hill. Its name meant the Fort of Light, the Sun Fort, we were told, and it had been there for a thousand years. Once at the top, we meant to go downhill on the other, shorter side by a gravel path that connected the fort to the main road below. As we climbed, the mist thickened, and the fort disappeared. We kept close together, sinking now and then into the great spongy pads of fungus that breathed lightly between the stretches of rock and thick-rooted heather. We felt smaller and smaller as the mist rose over us, swarming upward, speeding away past us, yet always arriving again at our feet, in front of our faces, before we could glimpse the lie of the ground beyond. When we thought we could hear the drone of the distant lough, we believed we were nearly there; but the sound would fade and then come again from a different direction, louder, fainter, closer, further away. Only the sudden swoop of bats feeding in mid-air told us for sure that we were near the fort. We knew they favoured the marshy land on its western side. We had often watched them come up the border stream at dusk, hurtling between the trees and then inflecting downward into the clouds of midges that vibrated on the surface. They tracked uphill, over the marshes, as night fell, and we would lose them until they arrived above the fort, squeaking minutely in their blind, curving flight. At the top, we looked into the gathering darkness that welled up towards the Donegal mountains beyond, where the horizon light still survived among streaked clouds. That was wher
e we came from, out of that profile of mountain and darkness where cottage lights twinkled, as distant as stars. Out there were scores of my mother’s relatives, all talkative, and just a few of my father’s, all silent, all unmet, all locked away in some farm with books and rafters and the feud.
The feud. Did it really start in that farmhouse at Cock-hill outside Buncrana – the one with the raftered ceiling and the walls lined with books? Was it really from the wooden floor of that farmhouse that my father swept up my brother and me, followed by my mother, into years of silence? Was it really because he had found out that his sisters were not really living in the house, but were being treated by the family as skivvies and had to sleep in an outhouse, beside the chickens? I remember the great rafters as I rose up in his arms, and the dusty road outside when he put me down, and their voices above us, and the sky above them filling with a great hammerhead cloud off the Atlantic. We never saw the farmhouse again. My father’s mother, long dead, came to our house soon afterwards, so my mother told me, and stood at the bottom of the bed as my father slept, watching him, and smiled at my mother, and touched the blankets that covered him and was gone. My mother had a touch of the other world about her. So people would say. And she seemed pleased enough to hear it.
Was that appearance at the foot of the bed a signal from my father’s mother that she was pleased with him for having rescued her children and brought them out of their bondage? My mother thought so. I did too. But then I remembered Eddie again. He had not been rescued. But he had nothing to do with the feud, had he? No. He had left soon after his parents died. And when he reappeared, it was only to disappear again in that rosy glow of exploding whiskey.