by Seamus Deane
‘What’s wrong with my mother?’ I asked him one day, for she had just left and was shaky and upset every time she came.
Oh, he replied, she had her troubles but she’d be all right. Why does she keep talking about Eddie? I asked him, lying, for she had never mentioned him at all since that one occasion, now two weeks back. He roused himself at that and pretended to wonder too, but was uneasy and asked me what she had said. Only his name, I told him, and that there was something terrible. But Eddie was my father’s brother and was long since disappeared, so what could it be now? What could she know now that had begun to trouble her? But she had sworn me to silence, I told him, for she knew she could talk to me and I would say nothing.
Not even to your father?’
I knew to say it.
‘Especially not to my father. She said that. But I shouldn’t even talk to you about it; it’s only that I’m worried about her.’
I pressed and pressed through long afternoons until he tired and slept and Katie came to shoo me away and let me go back to my family, sometimes overnight, for I was getting too pale and too bound up with him. Even though my mother was beginning to be ill by this time, and visiting my grandfather less and less, I still longed to get back to him, to keep at him until he told me what was going on, what had happened. I was getting nowhere when the priests intervened.
Father Moran arrived in the bedroom one afternoon, escorted by Katie, his bright stole over his shoulders and a little box in his hand. Katie was bearing a lit candle in one hand and a bowl of water in the other, with a white napkin draped over her arm. I should have realised this was going to happen, for the room had practically been fumigated that morning, despite Grandfather’s protests.
‘Father, here’s Father Moran to have a chat with you…’ Katie began.
He was one of the hearty priests.
‘Sure, the man doesn’t need me. I thought you said he wasn’t well, Katie? You’re the picture of health, Mr Doherty But now that I’m here, I might as well … ’
Grandfather had moved in the bed with a kind of terror. Pointing at Katie, he quavered, ‘Get that man out of here. When I want a priest, I’ll ask for one, not before. Get him out.’
‘Och, Mr Doherty, c’mon now, this is just a friendly visit … Listen, son,’ bending towards me, ‘you run along downstairs now. Off you go.’
He pushed me in the back.
‘Let that wee fella stay here. Katie Doherty, I’ll never forgive you this. Bringing him in like this without warning.’
I was pushed out, and the door closed. I stood there to listen, but the priest opened the door again, raised his finger and said, ‘Off you go, downstairs, until you’re called for.’ I went down and listened to the sound of voices: Katie’s, Father Moran’s, Grandfather’s scarcely audible. There was movement of chairs on the floor above and then a silence. Katie and Father Moran came down the stairs. She was distressed, and he was slightly flushed. They came into the kitchen, and again I was told to get out, this time to the backyard from where I could see them through the window, standing in the middle of the kitchen, talking. Father Moran left, and Katie called me in to tell me she had to go down to my mother’s straight away, and I was to sit with Grandfather who was, Christ knows, a heathen if ever there was one, and she didn’t know what she could do, with the disgrace and the shame of it, the things he said on his deathbed to the good priest, Sweet Heart of Jesus, what was to be done? She bustled into her overcoat and went off.
Grandfather was shaking. That bitch of a daughter. That black-avised priest. Those vultures, waiting for your strength to ebb and coming in to claim you and frighten everybody else left alive with their victory. Now he knew what Constantine had gone through. Sure when he needed them, they were no use to him. When he fought for Ireland, who condemned them more? What was the hold they had over the women anyway? And on and on. I was horrified at what he had done but the horror was striped with pride. He was holding out. But he was exhausted.
‘Don’t let them get me at the last moment, son. Don’t let them.’
‘No. I won’t,’ I answered, having no idea how I could stop them.
‘Promise. Ah, how can a child like you promise? What can you do?’
‘I’ll warn you if I know they’re coming.’
He half-smiled at that and reached out for my hand. I held his, for he had no strength, and it was thus that he fell asleep.
LUNDY BURNS
December 1952
So his last days began. I listened to him talk, went deaf, listened. At first, there was nothing but lament. Then there was admiration for my father as a boxer and the night he won the Northwest championship with a blow in the last round when he was miles behind on points, his eyes cut and closed, his nose broken. I knew that, but heard it again in smaller detail. He described how he cleaned his linotype machine after the night shift, leaving it gleaming; how the smell of ink still reminded him of the basement darkness he walked into every night, especially noticeable when it was summery and bright outside. How he could tell if his wife, Lizzie, my grandmother, was hiding something from him because he knew her breathing so well, as if he had a stethoscope to her breast – when she was worried there was always a throb visible in her left temple – and how ashamed he was he had not let her see how he loved knowing her like that, watching her tenderly behind his husband’s mask.
One Friday night, when I was longing to get back home for the white fish soup my mother always made and the weekly comic-cuts from Uncle Phonsie’s shop, Grandfather came out of a long, chest-heaving sleep and looked wildly about him. It was the eighteenth of December. Raindrops, highlighted, were sliding in slant ocelli across the windowpane. Lundy, I knew, would soon be burning in effigy from the stone pillar above the city walls, on the hill opposite. The pillar was topped by a statue of Governor Walker, the defender of the city in the siege of 1689; Lundy, the traitor, swung always on the hero’s pillar, a hanged giant, exploding in flame to the roll of drums from the massed bands below, out of sight behind the walls, although their banners poked up and fluttered in the stone-wet dark. We would watch for the moment when Lundy’s crotch exploded in a burst of rockets that streaked away in several directions at once. Then the flames climbed on him with sudden avarice. Christmas felt close from then.
I propped Grandfather up in bed. ‘He’s lost the will to live.’ That was the whisper among his sons and daughters, who had sat so often by him, looking at him intently but talking about him as if he wasn’t there. He lay there in a collarless, cream-coloured simmet that exposed the scrawniness of his throat and threw his severe features into relief. He looked at and through me at such times. To his children, he was both pathetic and autocratic, crumpled and unforgiving as he lay there, not losing his power to those around him but drawing it back into himself, taking it away with him, reefing it round him like a sheet. To me, this was beginning to look like what they meant in religious class when they spoke of a soul in torment.
This evening, he didn’t know where he was when I switched on a bedside light. He groaned, looked around wildly for a moment. Then he settled. In the ensuing silence, I heard the first rolls of the Orange bands swell, the drums in a long rallentando. ‘Close that window, for Christ’s sake,’ he said suddenly, ‘I don’t want to hear those savages with their tom-toms.’ The window was closed, but I pretended to close it again so that I could look out across the house tops to the huge figure lolling on the pillar, flames crawling upward from his feet. I turned round to catch the tail of Grandfather’s anger as it disappeared into his eyes. For a moment, he had looked threatening.
There was a flaw in the air. I felt it enter me as I breathed, and it made my heart murmur a little frantically before I could exhale it. His face before me altered from Roman-calm to puckered; he was odourless as a statue lying there that night, although usually I could smell his old age, like the tang of alcohol degrading in the clean air. The drums rolled loud and then were stifled as we exchanged looks, and my instin
cts rose to the bait that had so often been withdrawn just as I reached it.
‘Only your mother knows it all. I had to tell someone, especially her, but now I’m sorry. She can’t understand, she can’t forgive, and I don’t want forgiveness from the likes of Moran.’
Eddie was dead, he told me as the drums rolled and rolled again. He had been executed as an informer. An informer. And I had thought that Eddie had got away. But my father knew; that’s what he knew. That his brother was an informer. Did he know Eddie was dead, that he had been executed? There was a soft swish of rockets and a far-off shout. You’re going to tell me, I said inwardly, addressing my absent father, you’re going to tell me, after all these years, and I know already. Yes. All right. But why is my mother so upset? She knew. And she knew my father knew. He must have told her. What’s so new and terrible in here? Now I know my father’s secret, but what’s my mother’s? What has it to do with my father’s? Grandfather lay back for a moment. He wasn’t going to confess to any damn priest, he said. But he’d told my mother. And now he’d tell me. For she would never tell my father or me, and it had to be told. He wished he could tell my father the whole story What story? I was standing, almost shouting at him. What story? He shut his eyes and he told me, told me. He, Grandfather, had ordered the execution. But he was wrong. Eddie had been set up. He had not been an informer at all. He told me who the real informer was.
I left him and went straight home, home, where I could never talk to my father or my mother properly again.
Two days later, Grandfather was taken to the hospital, semiconscious, almost completely disabled by a stroke. He lay impervious to the world, to the visitations of the priest who did the daily rounds, to the visits of his children and grandchildren, to the nurses and doctors who were simply going through the motions, keeping him as comfortable as possible while everyone waited for the end. It came quickly. He died in his sleep. I saw him in the morgue, shrivelled inside his coffin like an ancient child, and then we all bore the whole routine again – the wake, the carrying of the coffin to the cathedral the night before the funeral, the requiem Mass (which I knew he would have scorned), the long traipse across the Lone Moor Road to the cemetery the priests out ahead with their sashes slanted across them shoulder to waist, the women watching from the pavement, for they did not walk at funerals, the gravediggers with their stained spades, the prayers at the graveside, the tears, the wind slicing through us, the relief. I was sick with apprehension through it all, hoping that with his death the effect of what he had told me would magically pass away or reduce, even though I knew it could not but re-embed itself in my mother and go on living. We were pierced together by the same shaft. But she didn’t know that. Nor was I going to say anything unless she did. And even then, when it had all been told, I had the sense of something still held back, something more than she knew, something Grandfather had cut out.
I pretended to my mother that I believed she was so upset just because of Grandfather’s death and that I was encouraging her to talk to me about him – as I tried to do – so that she might feel better. It was easier when Aunt Katie came in, because she talked readily, even with a sense of liberation, about him. At first, they would go on and on like theologians, arguing that he must have received the grace to die in the faith, for the priest had blessed him and he died so peacefully. Other times, they would be upset to think that he had refused the Last Sacraments, that he went to eternity without having had his sins forgiven. At that thought, they would weep. ‘Unforgiven, unforgiven,’ they would cry I would have a sudden sense of the scale of the lives these women lived as I watched them dab at their eyes, or sit with their hands over their faces, their shoes wrinkled and turned inward toward one another, in a circle. The dimensions of that other world opened around me and my stomach contracted. It was no use saying to myself that I believed none of this. There it was, a vast universe in which Grandfather’s spirit moved lightless, for ever extinct, for ever alive to its own extinction, while his daughters mourned within the tiny globe of this kitchen and the world he had so austerely left. They would sit silent then, while the lids of the saucepans trembled on the range and the bubbling water gargled.
They also remembered Grandfather’s weekend drinking binges that suddenly stopped. Katie remembered seeing him one Monday morning, standing at the sink, emptying a bottle of whiskey down the drain, his face averted as though he could not bear to watch. It was clear in her mind, she said, because that was the week, in July 1926, Mcllhenny went to Chicago, leaving her pregnant with Maeve. When she said McIlhenny’s name, just that, just his surname, she made a noise that sounded like a curse. My mother drooped her head and Katie just nodded at her, sympathetically, though it seemed to me that it was Katie who deserved the sympathy. Not a drop of alcohol, said Katie, passed her father’s lips after that. Was it the Mahon trial, was it just before, just after that? Katie was eight years younger than my mother. She always deferred to her superior knowledge about the past. But my mother said no, it wasn’t then, it wasn’t even near then, it wasn’t on account of that. Sure he stopped drinking several times, every two or three years. He stopped in 1921. Even before the Mahon trial. But he started again, maybe a year later. Maybe he had stopped for good in 1926. She couldn’t remember now what the reasons were, why he stopped drinking so suddenly and then would just as suddenly start again. I stared at her and saw the lie spreading across her face like a change of expression. I knew what had stopped him drinking in 1922. It was after Eddie, and Eddie was after the Mahon trial. And in 1926, it was the discovery that McIlhenny was the informer, that Eddie had been innocent. She was turning the wedding band on her finger and looking at the floor. I hated having to love her then, for it meant I couldn’t say or ask anything, just go along with her, watch the gold ring shift back and forth on her finger, thinking, she’s switching me off now, now she’s switching me on; I want you to know now, I never want you to know, I never want you to want to know, I never want to know if you do know. The ring gleamed on and off. She put her right hand over her left and the ring disappeared under her strong fingers.
They went on talking about Grandfather. My father, God rest him, said Katie, was softer with me that time than he ever was before, than I could ever have imagined he could be. I suppose he felt sorry for me. God knows I felt sorry enough for myself, left pregnant like that. She stopped then and they sat in silence. But we’ve been through that often, she went on, and you don’t want to hear any more of it. Though I wish to Christ I could understand why that man disappeared the way he did. My mother kept her face down. Her hair was greying. So Katie didn’t know either. She looked at my mother for a moment, moving her top lip over the bottom one. She looked more than eight years younger. Her hair was still brown and curly, her skin was still fresh. She turned to me, smiling.
He wasn’t much of a footballer himself, but he was a great organiser and he could see talent when others couldn’t, she said. Football. Football. Katie wasn’t interested in football. He said you could turn out a good wee player, she told me, smiling again. I nodded. The compliment was greater now that he was dead. He couldn’t change his mind, or have it changed for him. He ran two clubs, Arsenal and Celtic Strollers, a red-and-white strip for one, green-and-white for the other. I fancied the red more but politically I was for the green. ‘Get rid of the ball,’ he would shout at me from the sideline. ‘Cut the fancy stuff. Pass it.’ But I would hold it until somebody up-ended me with a sweeping tackle and I would get up to see my father laughing and my grandfather glowering. Football was a dance, not a game. But Grandfather didn’t think so. I couldn’t have cared less. My mother was off the hook now on the question of when and why her father had stopped drinking. Did you do that on purpose? I asked Katie silently while smiling at her and recalling the weight of the full-back’s tackles lifting me off the ground. One minute Grandfather’s amiss in eternity, the next minute he’s shouting from the sideline, my father huge beside him and my right leg is numb as I get up from
the cindery pitch.
FATHER
February 1953
Out of the blue, Father suggested that Liam and I accompany him on a walk to Culmore Point and then take a rowboat across the river to where they were going to build the British Oxygen plant. It would be as well, he said, to have a stroll around there before the building work started, because that whole side of the embankment was going to disappear in a short while. We agreed. When we hired the rowboat, the sky was darkening, and a wind was whipping up, then dying away in strange half-shouted echoes that ricocheted along the banks down towards the estuary. He was strong but didn’t row well, and the boat was soon slipping sideways on the glassy current, then straightening as the wind came streaking in, lifting us and the waves in buckling ups and downs. Rain and spray prickled our faces. He sat in the middle, and we were at either end. I pulled the straps of my leathery black helmet tighter under my chin and watched Liam rise up and disappear below my father’s moving shoulders as we slipped and shuddered our way across. By the time we reached the opposite bank we were soaked, and the rain was coming down fast and serious. We took shelter under some trees for a while, but they soon began to shed their water loadings on us too, so we simply walked through the rain amidst the loud and glittering trees on the embankment path. He said little, just urged us on now and then as we cut inland towards Ardmore. The rain lifted away, the sunlight lay piebald on the path for a brief time, then the rain shuttered us in again. It was a dogged walk.
We finally took shelter in a country church that lay open on the curve of a road, separated thereby from its village. We sat in its tinted darkness, the rain dripping from us in clock-steady drops, watching the reds and greens on the one stained-glass window behind the altar go into depressions of their brightness as the sky outside darkened and small artilleries of thunder rattled in the distance. My father sat with his raincoat on the pew beside him, staring at the Sacred Heart lamp burning in its chained vessel above the altar: crimson, scarlet, crimson, steady, flickering, steady. Liam pulled off his helmet, and his red hair stood up in spikes on the crown of his head. He slashed the helmet sideways, and a scattering of water flew across the tiled floor. That pleased both of us, so I did the same. My father moved at that and suggested we sit down for a while and that we might even pray a little. ‘Say a prayer for your mother,’ he said. ‘And one for me, while you’re at it. It can do no harm,’ He smiled mildly at that, so we both knelt down and made to pray, in awkwardly devotional attitudes. ‘Oh, c’mon, don’t make a meal of it,’ he laughed, ‘you can pray as well without trying to look like little saints.’ We sat up, but I felt enormously shy. The little church was watchful, not sure of the strangers who had entered into its squat peace. We both giggled. He leaned across in amusement to look at us.