by Seamus Deane
‘What’s so funny?’ he asked.
We giggled the more.
‘Pair of headcases, that’s what ye are.’
But he was smiling broadly.
‘This whole area, from here back to the river, is going to be industrialised,’ he told us in a half-whisper. He had wanted us to see it because he had come here often as a child, with his parents, for his mother had had relatives in this part, although they were long gone now. They were well-off too, those relatives. Two servants and a pony and trap. He remembered his father and Eddie sitting up in the trap, his father holding the reins, and Eddie whistling to the horse to make it go. On another day, he remembered Eddie being lifted on to the horse’s back, and how it paced round slowly at first with Eddie jogging on it; then Eddie dug his heels in, and the pony broke into a gallop across the greensward in front of the house, with his father and other grown-ups running after him and shouting. But Eddie kept on going, ducking his head as the horse went under a line of trees, whooping and waving his arm in the air. He was a wild one, Eddie.
Now, he said, he wished he could remember if this was the church they came to sometimes on a Sunday on those visits. He looked around as he said so, and so did we, as if some memory would return to us too. The saints in the stained glass looked mournfully down upon the altar, and a cherub strained upwards above gaping apostles towards a sunburst of Holy Ghost light. But he couldn’t be sure. I knew this was his last visit here, as it was our first. I imagined the church bell ringing through the wet foliage outside, and my father as a small boy walking towards it, Eddie on a horse behind him, his parents sedately bringing up the rear of the small procession, the sea conquering the coastline beyond in wave after wave.
‘Eddie was never killed in that shoot-out,’ he said suddenly and looked away from us immediately.
He had said it, and I felt calm as death. Liam said nothing. The sentence disappeared into the church, then reappeared inside my head. We had to say something. Liam asked what happened then, if he wasn’t killed? I could have embraced him for asking but I wanted to stop him too. For once, I knew more than he did. Than either of them did. It was like being a father to both of them, knowing more. I looked straight in my father’s face, and it was hard to see him squint with the effort of telling us his heavy, untrue story. I wanted to touch his cheek with my hand to relax the muscle that appeared on it and touch the greying bristles that were visible in the curious light. His chin was down as though he were tucking a violin under it.
‘No, he wasn’t killed in the distillery He was an informer. His own people killed him.’
Now he had said it all, and a great shame and sorrow was weighing his head down towards the front of the pew. He wasn’t looking at us. Raindrops scattered on the pale side windows and clip-clopped on the ground. I could see Eddie, plain as day, on horseback, one arm raised, the horse leaping with its head down, like a rodeo animal. I rubbed my hand on my wet face. I should stop this. Mother, I should stop this. You should stop this. Would it be worse? ‘Daddy,’ I said internally, ‘I know it’s too late but go back a few minutes, back into the church and the rain and say nothing. Never say. Never say.’
He was talking all the time, forcing it out of himself, and Liam’s face was white as a star beside him. Informer. Betrayed his companions. Why he did it could not be known. His brother. Thank God his parents were not alive to see it. It was so stale a secret, like a gust of bad breath, and the way the three of us were crouched together in the middle pew of the church, like conspirators, with the sun beginning to shine, and the birds cheeping and warbling again, it was like a false relief, as though the church were a machine that had stopped throbbing to let the world come in again around its becalmed silence.
‘Does Mother know?’ Liam asked.
He nodded.
‘Is that why she’s been so upset? Did you just recently tell her?’
He shook his head. She had known since just after they were married. After? I wondered at that. How had her father felt when he heard whom she was going out with, whom she was going to marry? Did my grandmother know too? Would she not have done something? It should never have been allowed. It was worse than the breaking of the laws of consanguinity that we learned about in Christian doctrine class. It was a blood feud, more than the other one in my father’s family. This was the real feud. The word had earned its keep at last. The farmhouse feud seemed ridiculous now. But not to him. Not unless I said something. Oh, Mother, what did your parents say when you told them you were going to marry Frank? The big gom, walking into it, innocent as a lamb, believing he had a dirty secret inside him, telling her after she was married to him. And did she know then, did she pretend she was hearing it for the first time? No. I couldn’t believe that. I wished he had told her beforehand. It would have made him more innocent. I would have loved him even more. But I couldn’t afford to love him any more than this, otherwise my face would start to break up into little patches and I would have to hold it together with the strap of my helmet. Please, Liam, ask no more questions.
He didn’t. We sat there awhile. I knew my father had been praying a little but somehow I hadn’t heard him. Liam’s face was composed. He was feeling grown-up, I thought to myself. He can take this into himself better than I can, that’s what he was thinking as I saw him look at me, and I knew I looked as thrown as he expected me to be.
My father sighed and got up to leave. Then it occurred to me.
‘How did you know about Eddie? Who told you?’ I asked, even though I wanted it all to be over. But it couldn’t be over until he told me everything.
‘I wondered when one of you was going to ask that. I knew eight months after it happened, from my sisters, Ena and Bernadette, when they got out of the farmhouse near Buncrana, where they’d been mistreated, and got up to Derry They were there, in the farmhouse, the night after the fire. That’s where they brought Eddie – or where Eddie brought them, that’s where they interrogated him, that’s where they took him away from to his death. They were the last to see him.’
He talked on about it, but, though I heard what he said, it seemed so obvious now, yet so incredible as well, that I could not absorb it, locate it there, at the farm, where it had happened, recognise what the farmhouse meant to him.
‘So,’ Liam asked, ‘what were we doing there when we were small? What was that all about?’
It had to do with the aunt dying and leaving in her will some possessions from his parents’ home. He had gone to collect them, but to no avail. They would yield nothing.
He and Liam moved down the aisle, still talking. I was slow to follow them.
We went out into the sunshine and walked home. I stayed close alongside him the whole way, even though I knew that he too was believing – partly for the wrong reasons – that I was upset and clinging to him, walking in the lee of his hurt. When we came into the kitchen, my mother looked up and the whole history of his family and her family and ourselves passed over her face in one intuitive waltz of welcome and then of pain.
CHAPTER FOUR
MOTHER
May 1953
My mother moved as though there were pounds of pressure bearing down on her; and when she sat, it was as though the pressure reversed itself and began to build up inside her and feint at her mouth or her hands, making them twitch. I knew now, or thought I knew, what it was, especially when I watched her eyes follow my father with such fear and pity that I wondered he didn’t stop dead and realise there was something wrong, something she wanted to be forgiven for. I couldn’t tell him if she didn’t. I couldn’t even let her know that I knew. It would make her more frightened, more depressed. I longed to find some way to give her release, but could think of nothing; every set of words that came to my mouth felt lethal. I would come in to find her at the turn of the stairs, looking out the lobby window, still haunted, but now with a real ghost crouched in the air around her. She would come down with me, her heart jackhammering, and her breath quick, to stand at the ra
nge and adjust the saucepans in which dinner simmered, her face in a rictus of crying, but without tears.
She was always on the stairs, usually at the lobby window, looking out, whispering to herself, sometimes crying out an incoherent noise. Once, when I came up, she turned to me, her eyes wet.
‘Burning. It’s burning. All out there, burning.’
She flapped her hand at the field beyond the window. Then she turned away again, her mouth working like a muscle in her still face.
It was always like that. Even at night, we would be wakened by voices and come downstairs to find her sobbing in the backyard, freezing in her nightdress, resisting my father’s attempts to lead her back in.
‘What is it, love?’ he would ask.
‘Burning; it’s all burning,’ she would cry, dragging her hand away from him and going a few steps away, her arms clasped round herself; staring towards the sky.
‘Come to bed; you’ll get your death of cold; c’mon now, there’s a love.’
But she would shake her head and keep staring beyond, her face shiny with tears.
Everyone would be awake, huddled at the back door, watching them both in the yard: he with his raincoat over his pyjamas, she slippery in the light and dark, moving always towards the blackness beyond the range of the kitchen light. Then, always, when he reached her down there near the yard wall, there was a murmuring and a sobbing, and his arm would black out her shoulders as it went round her. And they would come up towards us, she with her head bent, all of us retreating into the kitchen, out to the foot of the stairs in the hall, as he led her to the fold-out bed and persuaded her to lie down. I could see her shiver as the blankets were drawn over her and he came to shoo us up the stairs to bed, his face heavy and graven, the stubble visible on his cheeks.
‘What does she mean?’ I would ask him. ‘What’s burning? What’s the matter with her?’
‘It’s a kind of sleepwalking,’ he would say, ‘dreaming. She’s upset; but don’t worry, she’ll come round and be all right.’
‘What’s got her upset?’
‘It’s losing her father. And it’s brought Una – losing Una – back in on her too.’
We were all frightened. Also, I was ashamed. When I saw her wandering around the house, touching the walls, tracing out the scrolls of varnish on the sitting-room door with her finger, or climbing wearily up the stairs to gaze out of the window, my cheeks burnt and the semi-darkness seemed to be full of eyes. She was going out from us, becoming strange, becoming possessed, and I didn’t want anyone else outside the family to know or notice.
Besides, I always had the feeling that there was someone else who had died, someone besides Una, or my mother’s father or mother, or Eddie, someone I knew of, someone secret for whom hope had long been lost. And it had something to do with my father. Something made worse by his having told us about Eddie being an informer. I could understand, but only in part. There was something missing. My mother’s grieving was so inconsolable, I thought it must be for a lost soul, someone woven into the fires of hell the way gas was into a flame. I used to sit beside her at the grate and watch the coal burn. After a piece started to smoke heavily, there would be the tiniest hiss as the flame took. She would see me watching.
‘See that?’ she’d say. ‘The pain is terrible. The flame is you, and you are the flame. But there’s still a difference. That’s the pain. Burning.’
Then she would weep again. Sometimes she’d let me hold her hand as she cried. Sometimes she’d brush my hand away and sit rigid, with only the tears moving on her face until she was wet under the chin and the skin in the valley of her throat looked liquid.
The doctor came and gave her pills and medicines. She’d take them and become calmer, but her grief just collected under the drugs like a thrombosis. When it took over, overcoming the drugs, her body shook and her eyes glimmered with tears that rarely flowed but shone there, dammed up in her tear-ducts, dangerous. She was in such pain she could not cry, only wish that she could. I could touch her, run my finger over the curve of her forearm, rub my thumb against the inside of her wrist with its thick blue vein, and she would seem to feel nothing. ‘This is my mother,’ I would say to myself. ‘This is my mother.’ I dreamt of a magic syringe that I could push up into the inside skin of her arm and withdraw, black with grief, and keep plunging it and withdrawing it, over and over, until it came out clear, and I would look up in her face and see her smiling and see her eyes full of that merriment I thought I remembered. Her hair was cold. Her skin was stretched glossy on her bones and tightening with wrinkles. ‘Oh, Jesus,’ my father would say under his breath, the holy name hissing in his mouth like snakes in a pit, ‘Oh, Jesus, Jesus, where have you gone, love?’ He tilted her chin very gently to lift her face to the evening light, and she would respond with the tiniest of uninterested smiles. As he withdrew his hand, and she lowered her face again, I thought – he thought – that she said, ‘Burning, burning,’ but it was really only a noise she made, and all her noises had come to sound in our ears like that word, and when my father sigh-heaved himself out of the chair, making my nose sting with all the salty, chalky smells of the docks that were folded into the wrinkles of his dungarees, he too sounded as if he were saying that word even though his voice was just a hum in his throat. I’d put my hands down inside my socks, as far as my ankles, and grip the bones and tighten myself up for a while before I could walk away from her tilted face and her quietly folded hands and the troubling chill of her black-grey hair.
Liam and I played football in the backyard, our movements quick and loud with the panic we both felt. If we fought, we did so in the same high-edged way, striking clean blows, no wrestling or snarling about. The sky sloped up into the sun and down into the stars, and she went on, scarcely moving, haunted and burning, audibly, inaudibly.
Then, at last, the real crying began, a lethal sobbing that ran its fright through us like an epidemic. Sundays were the worst. We’d come back from Mass, all spruced up, my sisters fresh and ingeminated in their light-green tweed coats, my brothers and I self-conscious in shirts and ties, with our hair sticking up at odd angles because of Liam’s advice that we should soak it in a mix of sugar and water ‘to make it sit still’.
Father was a stride before us as we went into the hall, for he could hear her sobbing, a sound that moved and wavered in phases, a stripping-off of unbearably tight panics that only found more – tighter ones – within. I wanted to run away, to flee across Meenan’s Park past the Sunday football games, past the crouching players of marbles, and the children on swings with their legs out stiff, past the card-players squatting on the broken slabs of the air-raid shelters in a pale blue trance of smoke, and on into the shuttered Lecky Road, up the long hill to Bishop Street, down Abercorn Road to the river and over the bridge into the safety of really foreign territory, the estrangement of Protestants with their bibles and the ache of the railway line curving away towards Coleraine, Portstewart, Belfast. But I also wanted to run into the maw of the sobbing, to throw my arms wide to receive it, to shout into it, to make it come at me in words, words, words and no more of this ceaseless noise, its animality, its broken inflection of my mother. Instead, I stood there and looked at her while my father pottered helplessly about her and everyone came over and touched her, petted her, stroked her hair, let tears roll on their cheeks. Eilis knelt in front of her and squeezed her, face against her stomach, but my mother’s arms hung helplessly down by her sides, and her semi-brushed hair fell sideways across her streaming face. The hairbrush lay in the corner of the kitchen where she must have thrown it. I picked it up and tugged at the strands of her hair caught in the wire bristles, winding them round my fingers, feeling them soften on my skin as though the tightness were easing off them into me. I felt it travelling inside, looking for a resting place, a nest to live in and flourish, finding it in the cat’s cradle of my stomach and accumulating there.
She cried for weeks, then months. A summer passed in a nausea of light,
and we took turns at the cooking and shopping, we all did odd jobs for extra shillings round the area – collecting scrap metal, rags, jamjars, and selling them to a dealer on the Lecky Road. His shed was always dark, mounded with piles of the stuff. In the yard behind, a cart always sat with its shafts in the air, their tips catching light. Everything else was mauve dark, and all the smells of the place came with him as he approached to look at what we had brought. He wore a begrimed raincoat, belted, with its collar turned up in all weathers. His hair was wild and wiry, his trousers ragged; but his shoes were always clean. When he gave us the coins, they chinked into our hands but they had no brightness, so dirty were they. We would wash them in suds at the sink and feel we had revealed their true value when they came up glistening brown, yellow, silver. I always felt better-paid when I put the clean coins on the mantelpiece, or showed them to my mother. She sometimes took them and put them in her apron pocket and said, ‘That’s grand. You’re good children. Good wee’uns.’ But when one of us would ask her later for the money to buy food, she would look puzzled, and we would have to fish them out of her pocket and show them to her. That often made her weep again. I was glad when the darker weather came again. It was more appropriate, especially when the wind drove the rain at a sharp slant into me as I ran from the grocer’s with a stone of potatoes, carrots, onions and a round of country butter, heavy with salt, bumping against my legs in the cloth shopping-bag. When the snow came, I fractured my arm in a spill from a sleigh that crashed into the wall at the end of the street. My mother would ask me to take the clumsy plaster-of-Paris casing out of the sling and she would caress it as though she could reach the arm inside. It felt strange to hear and see her hand move on the plaster and not feel anything except its light pressure and an itch writhing in ringworm patterns inside.