Bend for Home, The Read online

  To top the coincidence my mother took the turn to the left that doesn’t exist and eventually found herself in Cootehill. These things happen. That’s how it is. She followed the words of the song. And despite Myles the Slasher having been elsewhere, the monument to fiction still stands outside Kit Daley’s door. That’s how it’s done.

  Call it by another name and people it with souls from another world.

  *

  Sergeant Moran was sergeant of the guards in Finea for a long period. His family and ours became very close. He had a large family. The older ones were friends of my sisters, but a number of the younger children were dreadfully handicapped.

  The story of their suffering made a huge impression on the Slacke ladies.

  The mother often spoke with grief of Mrs Moran. After each birth, she grew more and more reclusive. Each pregnancy brought on terrible fits of depression, my mother told me. And at the thought of another pregnancy ahead her spirits would wilt. She prayed, my mother said, to pass child-bearing age as others prayed to enter heaven.

  She braved the sympathy of the village with a heavy heart and eventually never went up the village to shop. Maurice, one of her older sons, grew fond of my father, and my father, in turn, began looking after the Morans. He’d arrive on duty in the morning carrying loaves and potatoes and boiling bacon and eggs and butter. Mrs Moran stayed in the married quarters.

  Bless you, Guard Healy, she’d say and retire.

  Maurice clung to my father while Sergeant Moran sat in full uniform by his desk going over and over lists, frantically scribbling events of note in Kilcogy, Togher, Castletown and Finea.

  For long periods of silence the two men sat hunched over the fire in the dayroom. They stood in the dark opposite dance halls, and walked the village through storms in their greatcoats till they were foundered. Then they’d return and sit by the fire again, water running from their caps and coats onto the hearth.

  From the private quarters the healthy children and the distraught younger ones made their way into the dayroom. And lo and behold you, said my mother, if he didn’t do there what he didn’t do at home! My father helped the older girls feed the infants, scalded nappies on the stove, changed underpants and warmed their milk bottles. Often the sad sergeant would stand in the doorway watching his underling rear his children. My mother would saunter up the village with my father’s dinner under a cloth on a hot plate. She’d come in, she often told us, to find her husband playing with the Moran children in one of the cells while Maurice, wearing my father’s Garda hat, was sitting up on duty on the Sergeant’s high stool.

  He spent more time with them then he did with us, she’d recall. It was a terrible cross.

  In the evenings the Sergeant and the Guard would stroll the village, part at the monument and meet again at the bridge, each with a bicycle lamp cupped in his hands. Swans careered overhead on a journey from Lough Kinale to Lough Sheelin. A shotgun went off. They’d return in time to put the children to bed, then look into the fire in the dayroom and toe the ash.

  There’d be a shout from the married quarters. An infant would stand on the threshold.

  None of the handicapped were long for this world, my mother told me years later. Not one of them reached the age of reason.

  They were carried off to the graveyard in homemade coffins on the shoulders of the policemen. Neighbours shied away. The names of the dead children were read out at Sunday Mass, and their names sounded strange to the ears of the villagers. They were people who had never been seen and yet they had lived among them for a few short years. They were phantoms when they lived, but when they died, they suddenly became real live human beings.

  As for the others, said my mother, the Moran children all did well and are scattered around the world.

  But Maurice, she said, never forgot your father’s kindness.

  He cycled to school in Granard, did his lessons by Guard Healy in the dayroom, went out with him on duty. He spent half his days in our house. I remember Maurice arriving first thing in the morning to our door. I thought of him as the older brother I never had, as Tony was then long gone abroad. He taught me how to ride a bike and walk on my hands. In the summers he forked hay, brought turf in to a shed at the back of the lonely barracks and walked his mother along the river. He dug the garden with my father.

  He was a scholar, my father would say.

  He told Guard Healy he wanted to be a priest, so great preparations were made. It was as if it were happening to his own son. It meant that we would not be seeing him for a long time. While he was still young he went off to a seminary down south to be a priest on the Missions. Summers, he’d appear home looking strangely adult in a worn suit. He’d prop books written in Latin and Greek on the desk in the dayroom. In the afternoon my father and he would head up the river discussing things. Sergeant Moran retired. Himself and his wife left Finea. And so we lost touch. He died. She died. The others of the family we rarely saw again. Maurice disappeared out of our lives. Your father missed him sorely, my mother said. When he fell ill in later life, it was Maurice’s name he would shout out in the middle of the night.

  Chapter 3

  Joe and Eileen are having a row on the doorstep of their galvanized house. I used to love to sit in there and listen to the rain with the chaos all around me. Rain on a tin roof spirits you away.

  But when his parents argue Tadhg Keogh gets dizzy. Once Uncle Seamus gave him cigarettes and he got sick. He stood in the village like a clocking hen because he was afraid to go home. At last he went down to Sheridan’s house. Old Mrs Sheridan had taken to the bed. She used to sleep all day and read almanacs and American magazines sent home by her dead brother’s wife at night. So Tadhg slipped past the two elderly Sheridan sisters who were sitting by the kitchen range, and went on unnoticed into their mother’s room.

  He climbed into bed beside her and watched the ceiling going round. He fell asleep in her heat, and got up when he felt better. When he appeared in the kitchen Biddy asked: Where are you coming from?

  I got in behind your mother, answered Tadhg, because I was too sick to go home.

  Glory be, said Sissy.

  The old lady, in her nineties, had never found him in her bed, like our neighbour hardly cared when the doctor climbed into hers. The village was always sleeping around. You’d never know who you’d find beside when you’d waken.

  Tadhg Keogh was a great traveller, my father maintained, but not as great as his father Joe who completed one extraordinary journey. For the day he was arguing with his wife on the step of the house, Joe cracked twelve matches and when they were lit he shoved them into Eileen’s face.

  Matches? I asked my mother.

  Matches, she nodded.

  Eileen ran to get the guards. My father was on duty in the station. When he came up the village there was no sign of Joe. He’d disappeared entirely. They checked Ballywillan for fear he might be trying to get the train to Mullingar. But he was not to be found. He’d taken with him the only loaf of bread in the house and a pot of gooseberry jam.

  The fecking haverel, shouted Eileen.

  Aisy, said my father, but she was demented.

  Joe was gone the following day, and the day after that, and the day after that again. On the fourth morning, Eileen was sitting having her breakfast, and enjoying her husband’s absence, even beginning to feel glad he was gone, when a stone dropped into her bowl of porridge from a hole in the ceiling.

  It was Joe dropped that stone. His bread had run out and he was above in the rafters mad with the hunger. The sight of her eating below was the last straw. Then he came down, and Tadhg made for our house. And even though I was not born at the time, still I felt I was there to greet him.

  *

  I mind to see a man hanging from a tree. Maybe I didn’t see a man but heard it from my mother. Whatever she saw I saw it again through her eyes, as I do now, writing this down.

  But I know it happened during Mass and I saw the rope. I can see the noose swingi
ng this side of the repair shop where all the bicycles stood – upside down, sideways, without pedals, without wheels, with damaged spokes, saddleless. A butcher’s table under the window. A foot-pump. Spiders’ webs. A tin advertisement for tobacco on the wall.

  A body hanging from a tree in his Sunday best.

  Then one day some of the young men in the village went off to Aden. My brother went with them. Aden did for Finea what Scotland did for Donegal. Each mantelpiece had a photograph resting against the wall of young men in shorts. There were bunches of primroses in vases from the Orient on windowsills. Tea sets of bone china decorated with dragons on ancient dressers. Postcards with photos of the pyramids sitting on the radio.

  My father sits down at the table to write to Tony. The lamp flares. His script is long and loose. He writes of happenings in the village. My mother, in a handwriting that slants to the right, adds her love.

  My sister Una falls off a hayshifter, down between the shafts and under the horses hooves. I am sitting holding tight to the hay rope on the top of the cock. She is very pale. It gave everyone a fright. A boy ran in front of a car and was knocked out. The petrified driver ran for the guards. When my father came up the village it was me he found lying there.

  *

  The man who rose the umbrella over his naked body died naked sitting on a smothered pig. And in the galvanized house Tadhg was sick again with the flu and couldn’t make it to the evening devotions that began Lent.

  So when his parents came home he called from his sickbed – What are the regulations? – for fear some new and finer penance might have been introduced.

  Joe stuck his head round the door and said to his son: There’s no fast for lunatics.

  *

  There were as many wonders in Finea as there were in Fore up the road where dead monks strolled round at night and water flowed uphill. Westmeath had its share of fame. It was to a small business in Mullingar, capital town of the county, that Joyce dispatched Bloom’s estranged daughter in a brief haunting aside in Ulysses. Joyce too succumbed to the scourge of the broken family, and it was to the same town that he had once come to sing second to John McCormack in a feis, that he sent the fictional Millie, as years later Ireland would send their unmarried mothers to Castlepollard.

  He must have thought that County Westmeath had about it that sense of separation, of inwardness, of dullness even, that was necessary to portray a guilt over unfinished things. For it is the halfway house between the magic realism of the West and the bustling consciousness of the East.

  *

  When I was three I ate a pound of homemade butter. I mind to see it in a dish come from Granard. It looked delicious. I took a long time eating it, thinking of things, sitting up at the edge of the table on my own.

  The window to the garden was behind me, the table in front of me and the turf-fireplace to my left. On the windowsill opposite which looked out on the street, the radio sat forever tuned to Athlone, the centre of Ireland. It was the radio prompted me to eat the butter. Its various voices gave you spells of faintness, unquiet dreams, and brought hunger on. You knew night had fallen by its sleepy sound. You knew dinner-time and breakfast-time by the timbre of the voice broadcasting.

  Walton’s brought men in from the fields.

  But who was talking the day I ate the butter I’d love to know. When mother came back from the pump with a bucket brimful of water I was puking furiously. Doctor Galligan told my mother that I’d live. Then he told her I was overactive.

  Give him things to do, he advised.

  She put me to bring in a few sods of turf from the shed to the back door. Then she forgot all about me. When eventually she opened the door a man-high pile of turf fell in. I had brought half the winter stack across the yard, followed by the hens. And was bringing more. And would have continued to this very day if she hadn’t stopped me.

  It was grand relaxed work. All Westmeath people are very relaxed if they are doing something that is both useless and extraordinary.

  *

  Jim Keogh, brother of Tom, oars by Church island with three English fishermen. A wedding party stands on the driveway at Crover House Hotel. Uncle Seamus comes in the door with three duck he took out of the back of the sweet van.

  Lovely, says my mother.

  He hands me a penny toffee bar. Mother begins plucking the duck. Uncle Seamus sits by the fire a while then heads up to Fitz’s to meet my father when he gets off duty. Jack Healy comes to the pub in his uniform, puts his Garda cap on the counter and calls a bottle of Guinness and a Power’s whiskey. They talk of snipe. It goes past closing time. The lights are dimmed. The outer door closed. Men sit with bottles at their feet before the flaming fire. When my father goes to the toilet Seamus tells Fitzgerald and the others what’s afoot, then Fitzgerald quietly lets him out the front. Seamus looks up and down the village. Then he bangs loudly on the door.

  Guards on duty! he shouts, imitating Sergeant Ruane, who had recently been appointed to the village.

  The men in the pub pretend to run for the back. My father coming out of the toilet darts upstairs. He meets Mrs Fitzgerald.

  The bloody sergeant’s below, he whispers.

  Come in here, she says.

  They step into Fitzgerald’s upstairs toilet. Downstairs Seamus enters the small bar.

  Well, Mr Fitzgerald, he says loudly.

  Good night, Sergeant Ruane, Fitzgerald answers.

  Have you had men on the premises?

  No, Sergeant.

  The men snort with joy. Seamus puts a finger to his lips.

  Explain these glasses to me?

  I didn’t get cleaning up.

  And can you explain this cap, Mr Fitzgerald? Seamus shouted loudly.

  Upstairs, my father raised a hand to his head in dismay.

  No, Sergeant.

  This would be a guard’s cap, wouldn’t it, Mr Fitzgerald?

  It looks like one.

  I’d be obliged if you stopped where you are, Seamus ordered, while I conduct a search of the premises.

  Fitzgerald pointed overhead, and Seamus ascended the stairs. He went by the bathroom and knocked on a bedroom door.

  Are you in there, Guard Healy?

  He opened the door and closed it. Went on to the next room. Knocked on the door, opened it, banged it closed. Onto the next. The same. Then with loud footsteps he approached the toilet. He tried the handle. The door was locked. He banged twice.

  Come out now, Guard, he said.

  Inside my father was frozen with fear.

  Excuse me, said Mrs Fitzgerald, but I’m using the toilet.

  Have you a man in there?

  I have not.

  I know you’re in there, Guard, he said. Come on out now, Guard Healy, and do the decent thing.

  My father sat on the bowl and sweated.

  If you don’t come out I intend to stop here till you do.

  This is private property, said Mrs Fitzgerald.

  And I’m on duty, said Seamus. I’d be obliged if you let that man out.

  My father indicated to Mrs Fitzgerald that all was lost. She turned the key and my father timidly undid the latch. He opened the door and saw Seamus there.

  God blast you, he said, you nearly gave me heart failure.

  Chapter 4

  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 de
ad, 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.