The Visitors (7 page)

—I won’t tell them, Tess, I promise I won’t ever tell anyone—

And I never did tell that Kevin Lyons’s hands shoved my sister’s blouse out along her raised arms and the same hands reached around my sister’s back and unclipped her bra and tossed it like a cigarette butt into the meadow. Nor did I tell that I saw my sister unbutton Kevin Lyons’s shirt and shove it over his shoulders and down his arms like she was skinning an animal. Nor did I say my sister reached in and pulled Kevin’s cock out through the zipper she had just unzipped and she laughed and kissed him fiercely on the mouth before she leaned over and gave him his first blow job.

The adults made no inquiries with regard to the why, the how, the what. The adults just went to work. We were banned from going to the river for the rest of the summer. Mascara, blush, and eye shadow were burned on the range. Pinups of pop stars on the girls’ bedroom wall were ripped down and burned. Teenage magazines the girls read were burned. Tess had borrowed those magazines from school friends. And
Tess’s scrapbooks were burned. I forget what she pasted into them, but she had quite a few. The adults didn’t touch her paintings. Those stayed, one here, one there, on that otherwise bare wall. And the pink skirt vanished from the wardrobe. I’ve no clue what the adults did with that. And one morning my father took the platform shoes into the far corner of his garden and pounded those daring heels to bits with a crowbar. Then he picked up each shoe and tore off the cheap flashy straps and buckles, and he cursed under his breath when he flung them at his raspberry bushes.

The Lyons family had their troubles. Kevin vanished for three days. One story was that he stayed with his uncle Roger, and because Michael and Roger didn’t speak, Michael never visited Roger. But I think the real story was that the eldest son hid out in hay barns and stole eggs from henhouses and ate unripened blackberries and crab apples. Every morning of the three days he was missing, his father and my father had the same solemn conversation in our yard while they smoked and half-glanced at each other across the bed of Michael’s Nissan truck.

—Any sign of him, Mike? asked my father.

—Not a sign or a word, Tom.

—You didn’t ring the Guards, Mike.

—I’d like to not bring them on me, Tom.

—It’s good you didn’t do that. He’ll pipe down, my father said.

—Didn’t we all have to, Michael said.

—He’ll be back in no time. Don’t I know it, my father said.

—I was trying to train him, Michael said. —Now God only knows what’s going to become of him.

—He’ll pipe down, he will, my father said.

—Odd fucking life, ha! Michael said.

When Kevin did come home his parents bought him new clothes that we considered cool—a snug Dingo denim jacket, flared Dingo jeans, a wide leather belt, platform shoes.

Then it was autumn. The red tractor brought the hay pikes in from
the meadows and we forked the hay high in the barn. Potatoes were dug and pitted. The autumn rains and the wind returned. The cows stopped giving milk. The evenings grew darker and colder. The two sheepdogs didn’t sleep on the cement yard anymore; they curled up in the warm barn when the stars appeared above the elms and frost sparkled on the cement yard—and at last I was on the red bus. What I had dreamed about for so long. I wore my Confirmation jumper, pants and shoes, and I sat on the top deck, where the tough and the cool sat. I wanted very badly to be one of them, though I discovered soon enough this was never going to happen, but I didn’t want them picking on me, and so you learned how to pretend, you learned how to flatter, and you learned how to act like you didn’t care. Anthony sat upstairs, on the long backseat. That’s where the girls who smoked sat. Anthony ignored me. That’s the kind of brothers we were then and the kind we’d be.

Kevin was king of the bus and king of the schoolyard. Boys wanted to be his friend. Girls turned capricious when he appeared. Every lunchtime he fought who challenged him and he fought who he challenged. The fights happened between the two prefab schoolrooms, which were far from where the teachers ate lunch in the main school building. His fighting method was to kick his opponent in the head, then get that dazed opponent in a headlock, force him to the ground, and kick him in the head some more. Tess was on the bus. She sat on the bottom deck, beside the bus conductor. Not even Kevin messed with him. Our parents demanded that Tess sit there. She was repeatedly warned to bring no more trouble upon any family.

In the schoolyard I was one of Kevin’s targets.

—Will you look at small Jimmy Dwyer, he’d shout.

—Take a good long look at Fatso Dwyer, he’d shout.

I skedaddled. Skedaddling being the only skill you fully mastered at that technical school. But how many times did he knock you down on their schoolyard? He sneaked up behind and tripped you and the instant your fat belly hit the gravel and dust filled your nose and your eyes clamped shut and the world as you saw it and felt it detonated like
a bomb inside your stupid head he planted his right foot on your stunned heap of a body. Then boisterous laughter from him and his followers shot up around you.

One morning in the metalwork room he shoved a compass needle fully into your left arse cheek. Laughter and pointed fingers followed you for the rest of that day. In the boys’ bedroom that evening your mother walked in and saw the dark stain on the Confirmation pants that you’d thrown onto the floor and you turned from your mother, who then saw the even bigger dark stain on the white underpants that were stuck to you, and you turned back to your mother, who tightly folded her arms and asked what mischief were you up to at that school.

—Boys messing in the metalwork room, you mumbled.

—Of all the people I know, you need to stay far away from those kinds of boys, she said, and left the room.

One October evening he laughed and danced along the bus aisle. I was sitting halfway down. He stood over me, reached into the left breast pocket of the jacket, and pulled out a shiny packet. He shook the packet before my eyes.

—You know what I have here, young Jimmy, he said.

—I do, of course, I said.

I brushed the packet from my face and watched the red leaves spinning against that dirty bus window. Boys and girls clapped their hands, banged the backs of seats, and howled. Beyond the spinning leaves, the mobs of cattle. The shining patches of water in fields and bogs. The red rusting roofs of hay barns. For what the fuck do you do? You could tell yourself that humiliation on a rickety bus crammed with howling, smelly teenagers in a cowed place was nothing compared with the lives of starving African children, but the adults were happy those starving children existed; starving children gave them the perfect tool for control.

—You don’t fucking know, Fatso, he said, and he pushed the package under my nose. I again pushed it away, and I was smiling when I stared at the spinning leaves.

—A French letter, he said. —I’m keeping it for your fine sister. I’ll use it on the two of them, when I get them in the same corner, and I’ll get them in the corner. Mark my words. I’ve noticed that the younger one of the Dwyers is budding at last—

—Fuck you, I said, and sprang out of the seat.

I’d like to think I swung at him, but what a joke that is. Kevin Lyons could trounce me, do it in seconds, but it was the week after this that he was expelled from school. During lunch, the wheels of the English teacher’s French car were punctured with a penknife. Kevin was blamed, though who knows if he was the one who did it or if the teachers just needed someone to blame. The news went around the schoolyard that when the English teacher, who was also the mechanical drawing teacher, accused Kevin, he laughed out loud and held up his middle finger to the teacher.

You liked that teacher. The only one you did like. He told you once you were good at mechanical drawing. And he told you that you weren’t a bad writer, but you needed to practice very hard. You stored up those things, along with all the others.

The evening he was expelled, that English teacher took him into the science room and locked the door. I was in the group of boys standing outside. The English teacher allowed us to stand there. He was teaching us a lesson. Beyond that door, the sounds of fists, grunts, the clatter of falling things. Then silence, and seconds later the key turning, the door opening. Kevin stood in the doorway. I did not see the English teacher. He was sitting down in there. He was catching his breath. Kevin’s hair was wet with blood and sweat and plastered down on his forehead. The left eye was blackened. Blood from his upper lip dripped onto the collar of the denim jacket. We stared in silence, awe, and dread. Like a rabble, we stared, the upturned plastic chairs behind him, glass from broken beakers at his feet, his bloody, bruised face, and the right sleeve of the jacket nearly torn off. The jacket that helped to make him. He had tried to beat them, but they weren’t to be beaten, and seeing him in the doorway that evening, I felt for him. And I
looked up to him. I did, because I despised the adults even more than I did him.

The crowd parted. He walked on through. He gripped the torn sleeve. The bloody mouth smiled.

Anyway, behind the striking new pump house the top branches of the poplars swept back and forth like water on a strand. My mother whitewashed the pump house. She made plans to plant shrubs around it. Plans that never came to pass. But cool springwater rushed rapidly and silently through buried pipes, up the fields, into water troughs, and we didn’t have to schlep buckets of water to cattle from the old well, all the way up those fields. We also had water piped into the kitchen. The last job Michael did was install the stainless-steel sink and the immersion heater. My mother talked endlessly about the fine hot water in the kitchen tap. How lucky she was in her life. How good God was to her. My dead mother was in heaven.

In January 1988, Brendan and I finally made up our minds to apply for Donnelly visas to the States. It was a Saturday night and a Sunday morning, and we were eating chips under a crowded awning and watching people like ourselves walk across O’Connell Bridge.

—Where will we go if we get one?

—People are heading to Boston, Brendan said.

—We’ll be a statistic, I said, and we laughed.

Brendan lived with his parents in Cabra. He had a steady girlfriend, with a job that she liked fine. She didn’t want to go anyplace. Brendan and I had jobs, many didn’t, but our jobs bored us. I still worked in the bar. He worked in the same printing shop as his father. Back then, Brendan and I were best friends, but we haven’t talked since the day I drove him in the Camaro to Detroit Metro Airport, though at the airport gate we put our arms around each other and promised to keep in touch. Back then, in Dublin, we went to the bars. Brendan read Freud and Nietzsche, and he told me about them and I read them, and in the bars we talked about them, and how boring life was, the way young people do, and that night under the awning, Brendan said if he got a visa he’d go and have a bit of fun, try to save some money, then come back and marry. I said I’d suss it out as I went along. No. I forget what I said, although I don’t forget that Una Lyons was huge on my mind, but I kept it to myself, I never even told Brendan—even though more than a year had passed since she and I had last seen each other.

Brendan and I got visas and we planned to leave for Boston inside
three months. Stephen was still in Manchester, Anthony was in Killarney, and Tess was nursing in Cork. I rang and told them I was going. The Friday before I left, I took the train down to say good-bye to Hannah and my father. On the train sat young people like myself, visiting places they still called home—places that had stopped being that the day they took the train out of there. I bought a novel at the station but put it aside, because spring sunlight flashed through the train car, and beyond the window calves suckled cows in green fields, and farmers sat atop tractors and plowed their fields and gardens, and the crows and the jackdaws preened in the fresh clay and feasted on the fat worms the plows threw up.

Hannah picked me up at the Junction. Coleman Daly was on the platform. He lowered his orange flag and asked Hannah how our father was keeping.

—In great form, Coleman, Hannah said, and thanked him for asking.

The train was sneaking toward Cork. Coleman gently poked my chest with the butt of the flag and said he hadn’t seen me in a long while, how was things with me? I turned from the train and cheerfully said I was heading off to the States. Coleman shook my hand, wished me luck, then stepped back, pulled off his cap, stared at the platform floor in a morbid way, and said it was a tragedy that young people had to go to that country again, since that’s a cruel country, if you think about it, people go stone mad over there, go to all extremes, he himself had the chance to go out there once, fare paid, the works, but he knew that country wasn’t for him, but saying all that, he had so many relations out there with so many years, and though he didn’t know what states they lived in, or what they did to make a living, he was dead sure they were doing frightfully well.

On the drive home, Hannah said our father was not in the best of moods. He grumbled about his children not visiting, but he still took his walks, he read the paper, he had his appetite.

I asked what he’d said when she told him I was going to the States.

—That you’re the sort who’s happy no place, Hannah firmly said.

I turned from my sister and watched the road. A few minutes passed.

—He took this fit last week, Jimmy, and burned these things on the range. I wasn’t going to tell you, and I’m not going to tell the others—

I turned to my sister.

—Like what things, Hannah?

—Things he kept in their room, Jimmy. I walked into the kitchen. He was standing over the range. The lid off and the flames flying up and the smoke filling up the kitchen—remember them tins of biscuits Mam’s friend in London used to post to us every Christmas when we were young?

—I do, of course.

—So there he was, Jimmy, pulling things out of four or five of them tins, and shoving them into the blazing range. The tins were filled to the brim and lined up along the top of the range—

—But what things are you talking about, Hannah!

—Things! I don’t know! I don’t want to know. I knew I shouldn’t have said a word to you—them small copybooks, Jimmy, that he once bought at O’Shea’s, but he turns from the range and says to me this should have been done before his wife and Michael left him—

—And what did he mean by that—

—Your guess is as good as mine—

—But, Hannah, you said something to him—

—I told him to go ahead and burn whatever he likes, Jimmy, but try not to burn the house down, and I opened the kitchen windows and the back door and the kitchen door, and I went down the hall and opened the front door to let the heat and the smoke out.

Hannah sighed. I lit a cigarette and handed it to her.

—He’s a lunatic, I said.

—He’s our father, Jimmy.

I said I was sorry, then said we should put it out of our heads. Hannah said she already had. And so I asked about the other things, and
she said the cattle were fine, her part-time job in the Tampax factory in Tipperary town was fine, and things between her and the boyfriend couldn’t be better. The boyfriend was a neighbor. He worked as a fitter in the same factory. And when Hannah pulled up in front of the house she said they were going to marry inside the year. They’d already picked the children’s names.

—That’s great news, Hannah, I said.

The next night Hannah took him his supper in his room. She came back to the kitchen and said I should give him a while to eat. You know how he likes to take his time. Yes, I do. Was I in the mood to face him? No, never. Was I in the mood to say good-bye? A thing that had to be done. We were sitting at the table. I poured the tea. Hannah put biscuits on a plate. The telly was turned down. Hannah went through the people who were sick, dying, had got married, expecting before they got married, expecting but not married, who was new to the dole, who had left and where they’d gone to.

—You heard, I suppose, that Una Lyons is going to London, Hannah said. —She’s marrying some English fella she met in Dublin.

—I didn’t hear that, but good for Una, I said.

—You won’t bother contacting Kevin in the States. He’s out there a while now, doing well, so I hear.

—We were never friends, I said.

—I think he’s where you’re going, Hannah said.

—We’ll see what happens.

—I hope you talked to Tess.

—I did, don’t worry, Hannah.

—I should go down, Jimmy, and see how things are with him.

Hannah stood and opened the kitchen door. I was right behind her. She went down the blue corridor. I walked through the hall and out the front door. In the middle of the yard I knelt on one knee and petted the sheepdog. Her companion had died a few weeks before. Then I stood and walked to the edge of the yard and stared down the paddock. Weeds thrived around the pump house. Its roof and walls were covered
with ivy. The poplars were very still. I turned from all of that and went back and knelt again and scratched the sheepdog’s head. I whispered in her ear that I was sorry that her companion had died. The sheepdog wagged her tail and I headed around the back of the house. Where the wood was chopped and cut looked the way it did in my head. I passed the kitchen-sink window and stood at the barbed wire and stared up the field. The cattle were lying underneath the bushes. I took a few steps along the wire and found a rusty thorn and I shoved my thumb down very hard on it then shoved the thumb into my mouth and sucked the blood. Next I was staring through the back window at the kitchen table. Tea going cold in mugs. Biscuits not touched on a plate. The slumped sleeper couch against the wall opposite was once Auntie Hannah’s bed. The dull and ignorant aunt you never warmed to. Above the couch, their smiling wedding photograph and next to that a black-and-white National school photograph of us in black turtlenecks. We looked like the Beatles on the cover of their second album. My mother’s friend in London posted those turtlenecks. Hannah walked into the kitchen with Auntie Tess’s white tray—that’s what we called it. I don’t know if Aunt Tess brought it on the train from Dublin one summer or if she posted it—Hannah’s head was down like an altar boy’s. I sucked my thumb again and went in the back door and crossed the kitchen and stood at the kitchen sink and washed my thumb and then washed his plate and cup and I washed the tea mugs and put the biscuits back in their packet and wiped my hands on the tea towel and stared for a while through the window at the Galtee Mountains. Then I looked down at my thumb. The blood had stopped. The skin was swollen and purple. Hannah said she was taking him down his mug of Complan. And she’d give him the tablets for his frail heart.

—When I come back up you go down and put it behind you, she added.

—Thank you, Hannah, I said.

Hannah came up.

—I’ll go down, I said.

—It won’t kill you, she said.

—It might kill me, I said.

I kissed her cheek and she mine, and I went through the kitchen doorway and shut the door behind me. I switched the light on and stared down that blue corridor my mother had painted. I think I helped her paint it, or that’s something I’d like to think—the short blue corridor that saw no daylight unless the bedroom doors were open—and that night I went down it I swear I smelled his sweat from all his years of hard work. Sweat that insulated him like a coat of armor. Like the shell of the turtle. This thing you forever wanted to run away from. A way you didn’t ever want to be. Back then when I slept in the bedroom with Stephen and Anthony he was the last to go to bed. Every night he knelt at his chair for an hour and prayed. When he got up he checked the back and front doors then slowly walked down the blue corridor in socks his dead wife had darned too many times. His rosary beads curled like a rattlesnake in the drawer behind his chair. Back then I waited for the almost soundless click of the kitchen door handle and his stockinged feet on the corridor floor. I stayed awake to hear. And those sounds still trap me in the oddest places—like waiting in the check-in line at an airport, or walking down a crowded American city sidewalk, or sitting alone with a book in the quietest corner of a used bookstore.

That Sunday night I dreaded my few cowardly steps. Past the room on the right where I once slept with my two brothers. Three big boot holes in that door from when Anthony once wanted in and Stephen and I wouldn’t let him. Hannah and Tess’s room on the other side, where Hannah now slept on her own.

I knocked on his door. He said to come in. I put one foot in the room, kept the other in the corridor, pulled the door against me like a shield, stuck my head in, and squeezed down on the door handle.

—Take your weight off that handle, it’s in a tender way, he said.

I let the handle go, but I didn’t move.

He was sitting in his chair beside the bed. His back was to the
window. The chair usually faced the window. He liked to stare out at his dead wife’s untended flower garden—his thin pale legs with the long and winding blue veins, the walking stick on the floor by the chair, and the red dressing robe that fell a few inches below his knees. The robe had black burn holes from the Sweet Aftons he’d stopped smoking the week after his wife died.

—You didn’t come in to see me last evening or all day, he said.

—You were sleeping. Hannah thought it best not to disturb you, I said.

—So many are concerned about my well-being, he said. —What a lucky man I am. But you haven’t been down to see us in a very long while.

—Busy in work, I said.

—You were always a great one for the work. When are you going back?

—Early train tomorrow, I said.

—A very short visit. Like the Holy Father himself, he said. —So when are you going away?

—The end of the week, I said.

—You’re afraid to come into the room. You could at least dignify the man who raised you with that much.

I opened the door and planted my feet in the room. He told me to close the door but to be extra careful of the tender handle. I did as he asked.

My mother’s Mass shoes were on the small rug next to the bed. She bought that rug in Dublin years ago. Mothers and their children had traveled there by bus on a zoo day trip the Irish Countrywomen’s Association organized. It was springtime. My first time visiting Dublin. And it might have been my mother’s. I forget so much. And get so much wrong. On the dressing table their battered prayer books and his rosary beads. On the walls, the pictures of the Blessed Family, Padre Pio, and Saint Francis, who once sat atop the television. The heavy red curtains Auntie Tess sent from Dublin were open. The curtains reached the floor. The same sort of curtains hung in the boys’ and the girls’
bedrooms. It was dusk. A blackbird was singing. He raised his face. That smile appeared. He said the blackbird sang morning and evening. He scattered bread crumbs along the windowsill for her. The blackbird was his wife saying hello.

—But all so soon, what day did you exactly say, or did you tell me that? he said.

—This Friday, I said.

—And why, he said.

—Why what, I said.

—Did Daly take the hearing from you at the Junction?

—The hearing’s sound, I said.

—You have a job, he said.

—I don’t like it anymore, I said.

—Aren’t you the plucky fellow, he said.

—I wouldn’t know, I said.

—You know it only too well, he said. —When I was your age, so many went off. The Christmas cards arrived for a few years with a few scribbles you could barely read and then them cards stopped arriving. People go away and don’t come back. Only too well I know that myself—

—It’s not that way anymore—

—Do you think it’s a fool I am!

—That’s one thing I never think, I said.

—Well, that’s good to hear, so what exactly do you plan on doing when you arrive there? And how long do you intend on staying there?