‘Oh, yes, thank you,’ I said. It was something I had picked up in the gardens many years before. It had sat in the window niche and he had never referred to it before. But it had lain there, blue and perfect and never ageing. Yet an old thing. Many many generations of birds ago.
‘That is a robin’s egg maybe,’ he said.
‘Maybe,’ I said.
‘Or a lark.’
‘Yes.’
‘I will put it back anyhow,’ he said, swallowing again, as if his tongue were hardened at the root, his throat bulging for a moment.
‘I don’t know where all the dust comes from,’ he said. ‘I sweep it every day and there is always dust, by God there is, ancient dust. Not new dust, never new dust.’
‘No,’ I said, ‘No. Forgive me.’
He straightened a moment and looked at me.
‘What is your name?’ he said.
32
‘I don’t know,’ I said, in a sudden panic. I have known him for decades. Why was he asking me this question?
‘You don’t know your own name?’
‘I know it. I forget it.’
‘Why do you sound frightened?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘There is no need,’ he said, and taking the dust into his dustpan neatly, began to leave the room. ‘Anyhow, I know your name.’
I started to cry, not like a child, but like the old old woman I am, slow, slight tears that no one sees, no one dries.
Next thing my father knew, the civil war was upon us. I write this to stop my tears. I stab the words into the page with my biro, as if pinning myself there.
Before the civil war there was another war against the country being ruled from England but that was not much fought in Sligo.
I am quoting my husband’s brother Jack when I write this, or at least I hear Jack’s voice in the sentences. Jack’s vanished voice. Neutral. Jack, like my mother, was master of the neutral tone, if not of neutrality. For Jack eventually donned an English uniform and fought against Hitler in that later war – I nearly said, that real war. He was a brother also of Eneas McNulty.
The three brothers, Jack, Tom and Eneas. Oh, yes.
In the west of Ireland by the way Eneas is three syllables, Enee-as. In Cork I fear it is two, and sounds more like a person’s backside than anything else.
But the civil war was definitely fought in Sligo, and all along the western seaboard, with fierce application.
The Free Staters had accepted the treaty with England. The Irregulars so-called had baulked at it like horses at a broken 33
bridge in the darkness. Because left out of the whole matter was the North of the country, and it seemed to them that what had been accepted was an Ireland without a head, a body lopped off at the shoulders. That was Carson’s crowd in the North that kept them linked to England.
It always puzzled me that one of Jack’s proudest boasts was that he was a cousin of Carson. But that is by the way. There was a lot of hatred in Ireland in those times. I was fourteen, a girl trying to bloom up into the world. Fumes of hatred all about.
Dear Fr Gaunt. I suppose I may say so. Never did so sincere and honest a man cause maiden so much distress. For I don’t suppose for a moment he acted out of ill intent. Yet he moidered me, as the country people used to say. And in a time previous to that he moidered my father. I have said he was a little man, by which I mean, the crown of his head was at an equal level to my own. Bustling, spare and neat, in his black clothes and his hair cropped tight like a condemned man. The question breaks in on my thoughts: what does Dr Grene mean, he must assess me? So that I might go out into the world? Where is that world?
He must question me, he said. Did he not? I am sure he did, and yet it is only now I hear him properly, when he has left the room long since.
Panic in me now blacker than old tea.
I am like my father on his old motorbike, careering at speed certainly, but holding so fast to the handlebars there is a sort of safety in that.
Do not prise my fingers from the bars, Dr Grene, I beg you. Be gone from my thoughts, good doctor.
Fr Gaunt, from the haunts of death, rush in, rush in, and take his place.
Be present, present before me as I scratch and scribble. 34
The following account may sound like one of my father’s stories, part of his little gospel, but he never made a proper recitation of it, nor improved it a little in the telling, till it was rounded like a song. I give you the bare bones, which is all I have of it.
In the time of that war there were no doubt many deaths, and many deaths that were no better than murder. Of course it was my father’s duty to bury some of these in his neat graveyard. Being fourteen I had one foot in childhood still, and one foot in womanhood. At the little nuns’ school I attended I was not indifferent to the boys that lurched past the school gates at the close of lessons, indeed I seem to remember thinking a sort of music rose from them, a sort of human noise that I did not understand. How I heard music arising from such rough forms I do not know at this distance. But such is the magicianship of girls, that they can transform mere clay into large and classic ideas.
So I was paying but half heed to my father and his world. I was more concerned with my own mysteries, such as, how to get a curl into my wretched hair. I spent many hours labouring at this with a collar iron of my mother’s, which she used to iron my father’s Sunday shirt. It was a slim, small object that heated quickly on the fender, and if I laid out my straight yellow tresses on the table, I hoped by some alchemy to tease a curl into them. So I was preoccupied with the fears and ambitions of my age. Nevertheless I was often in my father’s temple, doing my lessons as may be, enjoying the little grate of coals he kept burning there, by grace of his fuel stipend. I learned my lessons and listened to him singing ‘Marble Halls’ or the like. And worried about my hair.
What I would give to have a few strands of that straight yellow hair now.
My father buried anyone that was given him to bury. In peaceful days he buried mostly the old and the sick, but in days 35
of war he more often than not was given the corpse of a boy or nearly boy.
These caused him grief in a manner he never showed over the aged and infirm. He thought those latter deaths were simple and right, and whether the families and mourners wept or were silent at the graveside, he knew there was a sense of proper term and justice. Often he knew the old soul that was to be interred, and would share memories and anecdotes if that seemed pleasant and generous to do so. He was a sort of diplomat of grief in those instances. But the bodies of those slain in the war grieved him mightily, differently. As a Presbyterian he might be thought to have no place in the Irish story. But he understood rebellion. In his bedroom in a drawer he kept a memorial booklet for the Rising of 1916, with photographs of the principals involved, and a calendar of battles and sorrows. The only wicked thing he thought that Rising enshrined was its peculiar Catholic nature, from which of course he felt excluded.
It was the deaths of the young that grieved him. After all it was just a few years after the slaughter of the Great War. Indeed from Sligo had gone out hundreds of men to fight in Flanders, in the years around the Rising, and since the slain of that war could not be buried at home, it might be said those dozens of men were buried in my father, in the secret graveyard of his thoughts. Now in the civil war, more deaths, and always the young. There wasn’t one man of fifty in Sligo fought in the civil war anyhow.
He did not rail against these matters, he knew that there were always wars in every generation, but he gave himself to these things in a curiously professional way, since he was after all the titular custodian of the dead, as if he were a king of absences.
Fr Gaunt himself was young and might have been expected to feel a special kinship for the slain. But Fr Gaunt was so 36
clipped and trim he had no antennae at all for grief. He was like a singer who knows the words and can sing, but cannot sing the song as conceived in the heart of th
e composer. Mostly he was dry. He spoke over young and old with the same dry music.
But let me not speak against him. He went everywhere in Sligo in his ministry, he walked into bleak rooms in the town where impoverished bachelors feasted on tinned beans, and lousy cabins by the river that looked like ancient starving men themselves, with rotting thatch for hair, and little staring, dull, black windows for eyes. Into those too he went, famously, and never took flea or louse out with him. For he was cleaner than the daylight moon.
And such a small, clean man when crossed was like a scything blade, the grass, the brambles and the stalks of human nature went down before him, as my father discovered. It happened thus.
One evening as my father and myself in the temple amused ourselves before returning home to our tea, we heard a scuffling and a muttering outside the old iron door. My father looked to me, alert as a dog before it barks.
‘Well, what’s this now?’ he said, more to himself than to me. Three men came in carrying a fourth and, as if driven themselves by an unseen force, seemed to sweep me back from the table, and before I knew what had happened, I had the back of my school dress rubbed against the damp whitewash of the wall. They were like a little hurricane of activity. They were all young men, and the man being carried was no more I would guess than seventeen. He looked a handsome long person enough, and roughly clothed, much mud about him, and grass stains from the bog, and blood. A great deal of thin-looking blood all over his shirt. And he was obviously as dead as a stone.
The other three lads were all yappering and yammering, 37
hysterical maybe, which caused a hysteria to rise in me. My father however stood darkly by his fireplace, like a man making an effort to be mysterious, his face as blank as you like, but also, I thought, ready to have a thought and act on it if necessary. For the three boys were decked with old rifles and in their pockets bulged other weapons, all haphazardly gathered up as may be after a skirmish. I knew that weapons were the scarcest currency of the war.
‘What are you up to, lads?’ said my father. ‘There’s a method in all this, you know, the bringing in of bodies here, and you can’t just carry in a boy out of the blue. Have mercy.’
‘Mr Clear, Mr Clear,’ said one of the men, a lad with a severe-looking face and hair seemingly cropped against lice,
‘we’d nowhere else to be bringing him.’
‘You know me?’ said my father.
‘I know you well enough. I know what foot you dig with anyhow, and I’m told by them that might know that you’re not against us, not like many a fool here in Sligo town.’
‘That’s as may be,’ said my father, ‘but who are you? Are you Free Staters or the other lot?’
‘Do we look like Free Staters, and half the mountain bog in our hair?’
‘You don’t. So, lads then, what do you want me to do? Who is this fellow here?’
‘This poor man’, said the same speaker, ‘is Willie Lavelle, and he was seventeen year old, and he’s after being killed up there on the mountain by a crowd of mean, unthinking vile bastards that call theyselves soldiers, but are not, and are worser to us than any Black and Tan ever was in the war just gone by. Just as evil bad anyhow. For we were so high in the mountain we were gone fierce cold and hungry and this boy surrendered to them, and us hiding in the heather all right, but nothing would do for them except to be punching and pushing him, and asking him questions. And they were laughing and one sticking his gun in 38
the lad’s face, and he was the bravest lad among us, but saving your presence, girl,’ he said to me, ‘so frightened he pissed his ould pants, because he knew, and you always do know, you know, sir, when a man is going to shoot you, so they say, and because they thought no one was there, no one was looking and no one to see their evil, they let off three bullets into his belly. And they went off merry as you like back down the mountain. By Christ when we have Willie buried we are going to go after them, aren’t we, lads? – and settle their hash for them, if we can find them.’
Then the same man did something unexpected, he burst into violent tears, and threw himself across the body of his fallen comrade, and let out a thin roar of grief that had never been heard before nor since, though it was a little temple of grief.
‘Go on easy, John,’ said one of the others. ‘We’re in the town though the bone-yard here is dark and quiet.’
But the first man continued to wail, and lay across the chest of the dead man like – I was going to say, like a girl, but hardly that.
At any rate I was up to the neck of my school blouse in horror, of course I was. My father had lost his calmness and was walking up and down quickly between the fireplace and his chair, with its few flattened old cushions of once-red cloth.
‘Mister, Mister,’ said the third man, a long thin boy I had never seen, who looked straight off of a mountainy holding, with trousers in no manner reaching his ankles. ‘You’ve got to be burying him now.’
‘I can’t bury a man without a priest, not to mention the fact that I expect you have no plot bought here?’
‘How would we be buying plots when we’re fighting for the Irish Republic?’ said the first man, wrenching himself from his tears. ‘The whole of Ireland is our plot. You can set us down in it anywhere. Because we are Irishmen. Maybe that’s something you don’t know anything about?’
39
‘I hope I am an Irishman too,’ said my father, and I knew he was offended by the remark. Truth was, Presbyterians were not much loved in Sligo, I hardly know the reason for it. Unless it was that in the old days there was a lot of that proselytising going on, with a Presbyterian mission to the west and the like, which though it had not been a raging success, had yet gathered a number of Catholics to the fold in a time of terrible hunger and need, and thereby increased the level of fear and mistrust among the people.
‘You have to be burying him,’ said the third man. ‘Isn’t that John’s little brother there on the table?’
‘This is your brother?’ said my father.
Suddenly the man was absolutely quiet, still.
‘It is,’ he said.
‘That is very sad,’ said my father. ‘That is very sad.’
‘And he has had no priest to absolve him. Would it be possible to have a priest fetched for him?’
‘It is Fr Gaunt is the priest here,’ said my father. ‘He is a good man, and I can send Roseanne to get him, if you wished.’
‘But she’s not to say anything to him, just for him to come here, and she’s not to speak to anyone on her way, and by no means to speak to any Free State soldier, for if she does, we will be killed here. They will kill us as easily as they killed Willie on the mountain, that’s for sure. I would say to you, we will kill you if she speaks, but I am not sure if we would.’
My father looked at him surprised. And it seemed so honest and polite a thing to say, I resolved to do as he asked, and speak to no one.
‘And anyhow, we have no bullets, which is why we stayed in the heather, like hares, and didn’t stir. I would we had stirred, lads,’ said the brother of the dead man, ‘and risen up, and thrun ourselves at them, because this is no way to stand in the world, with Willie dead, and us living.’
And the young fella broke down again, pitifully weeping. 40
‘Look it, have no heed to that,’ said my father. ‘I’ll have Roseanne fetch Fr Gaunt. Go on you out, Roseanne, like I say, and run to the Parish House, and get Fr Gaunt, good girl.’
So I ran out into the windy, winter yard, and through the avenues of the dead, and out onto the top of the hilly road that sails down into Sligo, and hurried down there, and finally reached the house of the priest, and in his little iron gate, and up the gravel, and throwing myself against his stout door, painted as green as the leaf of an aspidistra. Now I was loosed from my father I wasn’t thinking of curling irons and hair, but of his very life, because I knew those three living men had seen horrors, and those who see horrors may do horrors just as bad, that is the law o
f life and war.
Soon thank God Fr Gaunt showed his thin face at the door, and I gabbled at him, and begged him to come to my father, that there was a great need for him there, and would he come, would he come.
‘I will come,’ said Fr Gaunt, for he was not one of those people that shy away from you when you need them, like many of his brethren, too proud to taste the rain in their mouths. And indeed going back up the hill we had the rain against our faces, and soon his long black coat was glistening wet the whole front of it, and myself also, and for my part I had put on no coat, but showed only wet legs now to the world.
‘What person needs me?’ said the priest sceptically, when I led him in the gates of the graveyard.
‘The person that needs you is dead,’ I said.
‘If he is dead, is all this great hurry necessary, Roseanne?’
‘The other person that needs you is living. It is his brother, Father.’
‘I see.’
Inside the graveyard the stones were glistening also in the wetness, and the wind was dancing about among the avenues, so you didn’t know where the rain would catch you.
41
When we reached the little temple, and walked in, the scene had hardly changed, as if the four living persons and certainly the dead had frozen in their spots when I went out and never moved. The irregular soldiers turned their young faces on Fr Gaunt as he stepped in.
‘Fr Gaunt,’ said my father. ‘I am sorry to call you out. These youngsters asked that you be got.’
‘Are they holding you prisoner?’ said the priest, affronted by the sight of guns.
‘No, no, they are not.’
‘I hope you will not shoot me?’ said Fr Gaunt.
‘There was never a priest shot yet in this war,’ said the man I called the third man. ‘Bad as it is. There is only this poor man shot, John’s brother, Willie. He is quite dead.’
‘Is he long dead?’ said Fr Gaunt. ‘Did anyone take his last breath?’
‘I took it,’ said the brother.
‘Then give it back into his mouth,’ said Fr Gaunt, ‘and I will bless him. And let his poor soul go up to heaven.’