Bend for Home, The (3 page)

Uncle Seamus tells of a wake that took place up the road. The man who died had for the previous month been digging up his American relations that were buried, one as recent as the previous spring, in various graves in the cemetery. Then he set to reburying them in the one plot.

Over the years corpses had been sent home from the States to be buried near Finea, and the family abroad had wired over sizeable sums to their one remaining relation at home, Matt Reilly, so that proper tombstones could be raised. He had tipped Yankee cousins he never knew into unmarked plots, put a wooden cross into the ground and gone on drinking sprees in Granard.

He wrote back describing the fine blue gravel from Harton’s quarry that he’d spread over the dead, how the best masons had worked on Connemara marble, he spoke of massive attendances at Church for the funeral masses. In truth the priest and himself, and a couple of neighbours called in to carry the coffin, were the only ones present at the graveside.

The lies went on undetected till a certain uncle, lately retired from the fire service in New York, spoke of coming over to Ireland to view the family graves. This drove Matt Reilly into a fury of construction. He put on his overalls, and along with the idiot son of a neighbour, he walked to the graveyard with a spade over his shoulder and began digging up the dead.

He bought a new plot and the old skeletons were dropped into it. Himself and the idiot sat supping tea surrounded by ghouls. The stench of decomposing flesh reached the roadside. The horrified priest watched what was happening from his presbytery window with a handkerchief to his nose. Matt Reilly did a deal with a mason in Kilnaleck for a mighty tombstone, he ordered the gravel from Harton’s, cleaned his shovel off a clump of grass when the last Yank had been buried and fell over dead himself.

In his inside pocket was £200. With this the neighbours ordered
a hearse from Granard, dug up the grave again to inter Reilly himself and held a wake in his three-roomed cottage. The dead man was dressed in a bobtail coat and put into a bed in the side room, a hard hat was placed on his head, and they said he looked himself. You were always a generous soul, said Bernie Sheridan. Up Idiot Street, said Mary Ellen Flynn. Whiskey and ham and Guinness arrived and a roaring fire was set. The house was thatched with straw and sparks caught the thatch. The house went up in flames, and the mourners ran from the building. Then they remembered Matt Reilly was still within.

Two men rushed through the cottage and rescued the corpse. He was taken across and placed under a tree. Someone spread a coat over Matt to keep the morning dew off him. Then everyone went home. Next day the hearse from Granard trundled up the quiet village and pulled to a halt outside the black remains of the building. The undertaker was flummoxed. He stood on the road not knowing what to do till a neighbour woman came and led him to Matt Reilly. By the time he’d been placed in the coffin the villagers had arrived on their bicycles to accompany him to the graveyard. The funeral cortege set off.

The grave he’d dug for the Yanks Matt now found himself in. Soon after this the mason added Matti’s name to the tombstone. It was erected on a quiet summer’s afternoon. And not long after that the fine blue gravel from Harton’s was spread.

It’s night-time and I can hear voices on the path. I look down from the window to see my father and two other men. They’re carrying lamps. A pike the length of the path is stretched out. I find later he was a record forty-four pounds. One man takes a saw and cuts the fish in three. What part we got, I don’t know. They had been out shooting in Kinale when this big pike, like a whale, began following them. He shifted out of the reeds in the wake of the boat.

When they came in, he was still with them.

So they shot him.

Kinale is still one of the best pike lakes in Europe. The Germans know that.

It has the strangest underwater you have ever seen. The bottom one minute is sandy and only a couple of feet away. Then it’s green
and swirling and six feet away. And then with a race to the heart you row over nothing. That nothingness can scare people. I’ve known a man in the horrors oar for shore when it happened. That stretch of water was too much for him.

I’ve found that nothingness in my dreams. And in my love affairs. When you feel trapped in someone else’s memory. When suddenly your keel glides over bottomless water. Out of its depths recently came a bible-stand, which now sits in the Dublin Museum.

The forest of reeds, the snipe, Brian McHugh’s kitchen. The mouth of the river where the girls showed us their private parts if we would show ours and we did and everything was studied very closely. And it can still bring a tremor to the voice.

There were pissing competitions. And other things.

My mother stands in the kitchen singing in a voice popular when she was young – a scatter of notes on thin ice – and in a tone contriving to sound world-weary, yet very educated:

All her life she harboured a terrible fear of insanity. At fourteen she was sent to work as a maid at an asylum outside Dublin for the wealthy female mad. Maisie, her sister, was working there as well. She too would fear insanity throughout her long life. The girls were put into a room together.

On her first night there my mother heard screams, lurchings and wild disputes. The disturbances seemed to come from the inside of her head. She climbed into Maisie’s bed and cried. Next morning at seven the head nurse called her name. Maisie headed off to make beds. Winnie was placed in the strange kitchen. From there she heard wild screeches from the dining room.

The cook handed her a tray of dishes filled with porridge. She stood with the tray in her hand.

Well, go on, said the cook.

I can’t, said my mother.

They won’t touch you.

I want to go home.

Go, commanded the cook, and she threw open the door.

Mother entered with the tray. She expected a hush to fall, that all these crazy eyes would turn in her direction. Instead the ladies in their housecoats continued with their silences and unfocused conversation. She left down a plate before Mrs Small, which Mrs Small promptly returned to the tray.

Whisper, said the lady beside Mrs Small.

Yes, said mother.

Mrs Small does not take porridge.

Oh.

She just takes tea. Isn’t that right, Mrs Small?

Mrs Small did not reply. The other ladies ate with glee. Some wore heavy jewellery. Others outdoor clothes. All had handbags. Mrs Tige clutched my mother’s arm and asked about the world outside. Lady Cheevers gave her sixpence and requested a trap to the fete. The women, when they gathered in the dayroom, spoke of horses, christenings and the Royal family. My mother ran a mop down a corridor between private rooms that smelled of urine, sweet perfumes and strong female odours.

She was not allowed to speak to Maisie.

Then she had to go and wash the ladies. For the first time in her life she looked on another grown woman’s nakedness. Shamefaced she scrubbed their backs while they sat in the huge bath, cut their toenails and brushed out their grey hair. She was in Mrs Pherson’s room when a knock came to the door. Outside stood Mrs Flood decked out in a prim suit. She was carrying a po of piss swathed in Christmas wrapping paper.

Please, will you give Mrs Pherson my esteemed regards, said Mrs Flood, and handed my mother the chamber pot.

In innocence my mother did as she was told.

Mrs Pherson undid the wrappings.

What is this? she asked.

Appalled, my mother threw the contents out the window. She left the chamber pot back to Mrs Flood. A few days later Mrs Flood was back at Mrs Pherson’s door again.

Please, will you give Mrs Pherson my esteemed regards, said Mrs Flood and she proferred the chamber pot.

I can’t take it, said my mother.

Why ever not?

Oh, Mrs Pherson is not here today.

She’s not in residence? asked Mrs Flood.

Yes, that’s right, said my mother.

Tell her
we
will return when she is next in town. And the old lady took off with the po held before her like some prized antique.

The doctor came to Mrs Small. She was having difficulty in swallowing. He left pills but still her tongue was swollen. Each day it grew larger till the woman could not get anything down but liquids. It was my mother’s job to feed her though a straw. Relations came and went. Mrs Small grew thin as a rake.

Is there anything you really want? my mother asked her.

I’d like … the words refused to come.

Yes.

I’d like … to dye …

No, you won’t die.

I’d like to have …

Yes?

My hair … My hair …

Go on.

My hair dyed, she said.

So that night my mother rinsed the dying woman’s hair and dyed it black. Mrs Small looked at her new self in the hand mirror. She smiled at my mother. Next morning she was dead.

My mother goes past in a cart to the dancing class in Togher. A man with the cure for worms stands in the hall, and when later he touches your head, and mumbles his prayer, and you open your eyes, you feel you have been swimming underwater in some exalted place. He gets up on his bicycle and rides off, a timid man, with a passion for owls.

My father was a Roscommon man from Elphin. He joined the guards, like many others who had been active in the IRA, in 1922, some months after the Free State was declared. He was stationed at first in Cavan town, then later in Finea.

Up the village lived the Slacke girls. Their father was the old Victorian Thomas Slacke, a retired RIC sergeant. The RIC had been regarded not only as British but Protestant as well, and the girls had suffered taunts at school because of the uniform he wore. Despite his second name, Tom Slacke was a strict Catholic who had gone for the church as a young man but then chose policing. He was a voracious reader of history, gospel stories and mannered fiction.

My mother saw him as a distant figure of a retiring nature who spoke down to his daughters, yet was possessed of small sensitive asides. He was much older then his wife. He never drank or smoked. He had what she called the Slacke hump, which came with scholarship, and suffered in his latter days from Parkinson’s. He got on well in the village. Prior to the burning of the barracks in 1919 Sergeant Slacke had received a warning to vacate the old station. He got his family out onto the riverbank. The barracks and the living quarters went up in flames.

The Slacke family had to move into temporary lodgings while matters in the Free State were sorted out. In the new Ireland RIC members either went North to join the recently formed RUC or accepted a pension from England. Thomas Slacke retired on a meagre pension, built a house up the village for his wife and five daughters – Maisie, Bridgie, Nancy, Gerty and Winnie – his son – Seamus – and continued on with life in Finea.

The old barracks was restored and the Civil Guards occupied it. The young unarmed guards took note of the Slacke girls. They took note of the old sergeant as well, secure in his study, reading his books, at last finished with all that, while they breezed past in their new uniforms through a countryside embroiled in Civil War.

Through my mother the police forces of two different traditions met. She might have first seen my father maybe on the bridge as he set off on duty. Or maybe at the window in the dayroom of her old home. Or standing in Fitzsimon’s field looking upriver towards an eclipse of the sun the newspapers promised. Maybe even on a side street in Cavan.

I do not know. What I do know is that she flirted wildly.

While she was walking out with him in Finea she was seeing another guard in Cavan town. When my father was posted to Gowna for a year, she took up with Sonny Fitzgerald. She went out with a traveller. She was off to dances that went on till dawn. But my father persisted. He had her haunted. On the day my father came and asked for her hand she had behind his back got engaged to a Guard McLoughlin. And meanwhile she was back courting Sonny Fitzgerald who promised her a farm of land and contentment.

Now, this day, her mother told her Guard Healy was at the door.

Guard Healy! she exclaimed.

Yes, said her mother.

He can’t be.

He is.

But he’s in Gowna.

He’s back to Finea from today.

Tell him to go away.

He won’t go away. He said he’s staying out there till you see him.

What will I do?

I can’t answer that.

Well, she took off the engagement ring and threw it into the armchair opposite. Jack Healy – as these things will – came in and unknowingly sat on the ring and asked her to consider him. And often I wonder how things would have gone if Sonny Fitzgerald had been my father. I’d like to be trying that out, maybe as a buttress against nostalgia that steals material from the same source as fiction, and then leaves the reality wanting.

They went on their honeymoon to Bundoran. On their first morning there a woman joined them at the breakfast table. She was dowdy and distraught, and there were spots of blue in her brown eyes. Oh
something had happened her, something dreadful. Would they mind if she joined them?

I’m supposed to be Mrs Richards, she confided in a whisper, but I think I’m still really Milly Kane.

Jack, said my father, standing.

Winnie, nodded my mother.

Delighted, she said.

Join us do, said my father.

You don’t mind?

No, said my mother.

She sat down.

And we can all take a walk afterwards together, said Milly Kane.

That would be lovely, agreed my mother.

In sea-bright July sunshine Milly Kane walked along the promenade with them. When they stepped down onto the sands she inserted herself between the newly married couple and linked their arms. They walked the sands with the strange woman between them. They came up the main street. The noon angelus bell rang and visitors lifted off their straw hats. Milly looked into a draper’s window and broke into tears. My father gave her his handkerchief. She blew a loud clarion call into it.

You must excuse me, she said, but if you had been through what I have, you’d understand.

Then a barking dog drove her into hysterics. She grabbed my father’s arm.

Summons that devil, guard Healy, she said pointing at the dog’s owner.

Why?

That animal might have bitten me.

Sure he’s only a pet, said my father, and he leaned down and took the mongrel’s snout in his hand and wrung it to and fro. My poor fellow, he said.

They had buns and tea in the foyer of an hotel.

This is on me, said Milly Kane.

You can’t do that, said my father.

Oh but I will. Now, us two women will go to the ladies.

My mother followed the woman into the toilet under the stairs. She dabbed at her cheeks and her lips.

Men, she said, and grabbed my mother’s wrist.

Look into my eyes, she said.

My mother looked.

Can you see anything wrong with me?

My mother shook her head.

Milly Kane looked long and earnestly at herself in the mirror. She frowned. She smiled. She took my mother’s arm. They paraded out to where my father awaited them on a white seat overlooking the sea.

You pair are my best friends, said Milly Kane.

That we are, agreed my father.

She joined them for high tea of ham and tomato in an eating house and described how her husband had walked out on her the first morning of her marriage.

We’ll have a port across the road, said my father.

He left me here alone, she said. I’m lucky I had a penny left. And how am I going to face the shame back home?

She held my father’s hand in the bar and wept.

Do I, she asked my father, have any recourse in law?

I’m sure you do, he said.

How lucky you are, Winnie, she said to my mother, to find a man like this.

That evening my father danced both women at a waltz night in the pavilion. My mother sat among the old maids. She fingered her trousseau and looked anxiously at the floor. Rain beat down on the roof and the sound from the band was drowned out. The blue spots in Milly’s eyes swam. She came to their room and sat on the bed talking, talking, talking.

If only you’d known Dicky Richards, Winnie, then you’d know how lucky you are. Dicky Richards is a proper so-and-so. It’s not right.

It’s not, agreed my father.

What would I have done if you people hadn’t arrived? I was thinking of doing away with myself.

You shouldn’t talk like that.

Oh, but Winnie. This man drove me to despair. Dick Richards. Dick Richards – I’d known him all life. All my life. And the worst thing was –
he was intimate with me
. And she broke down in tears.

Next morning a tap came to their door.

Good morning all, she shouted through the door, I’ll see you below.

God bless us, said my father.

For a solid week they had Milly with them wherever they went. And over sixty years later she was still running round in my mother’s mind.

She was a total scourge, said my mother. The only privacy we got was when we went to bed. And even that was restricted. If he’d let her she’d have got in with us. She dragged out of us from morning till night. The nerves were at her. It was
Jack this
and
Jack that.
And
oh
what a wonderful man
. You’d be sorry you got out of bed at all. And your father was too soft to send her away.

And that, lo and behold, said my mother, was our honeymoon. I thought we’d never get home.

Then a few moments later my mother added: Poor Milly, I wonder what became of her.

My grandfather had walked to court in Mullingar: now my father, some years after him, went by bicycle.

The extent of a policeman’s beat in the Republic was the same as that for a former policeman in the Empire. They went to the same courts, lived in the same restored barracks and trudged the same country lanes. But the rifles were put away. The police kept out of the Civil War as best they could. Guard Healy drilled men for the fascist Blueshirts in a field off Kilcogy. Then returned home to nurse my grand-aunt, Jane, a leading member of the Republican Fianna Fail party, when she came to spend her last days with them.

He was wary of Dev when he took over. The Economic War with England made people bitter and patriotic. TB wasted the parish. Tony was warned not to play with children from a house affected by the disease. The people said the TB stayed overhead in the cobwebs and could never be got rid of. When she’d go to Cavan my mother would take the youngest with her, drop them into a bed and head below to work. Seemingly she threw a bunch of bananas and a handful of comics to Tony when he was a child and locked him into a room. He sat reading and eating bananas all day. And my mother forgot about him.

He was constipated for over a week.

Tony fell sick with diphtheria and spent a long spell in the sanatorium. He longed to be back out with my father on the bog. He finished his Leaving and went to Aden. Then to England. He disappeared out of our lives for years and came back a stranger. Miriam was sent to Cavan to attend Loreto college and work in the Breifne. My Aunt Maisie kept the boyfriends from the door. Later Miriam married and went to live in the States.

I remember once being taken to the Milseanacht Breifne as a child. I remember the shape of the train. The white horse of the CIE cart pawing the ground outside Cavan station. The bustle below me. The long corridors in the Breifne. The board on the landing beyond the altar that went up under your foot. The huge mirror in the dining room that looked into another room.

I was in my mother’s arms. Muddy, my grandmother, was seated in an armchair in the sitting room. The windows looked onto Main Street. She was dressed in black. She was the only one of my grandparents I ever saw. The rest were long dead before I was born. Outside, a procession of brass bands was going down the street. They were celebrating Myles the Slasher for something he’d never done.

Someone lifted me up so that I could see.

He’s like the other side of the house, Muddy said, but he has your eyes, Winnie. Like diamonds in a pisspot.