Bend for Home, The Page 4

  Tom Keogh brings a pail of milk across to Ledwidge’s. He stops on the return journey midway across and rights his hat. A bread van comes over the bridge. The pump is turning. I fall in love with Sheila Ledwidge, whose father owns the post office. My cousins from England drive the local boys mad. Aunty Bridgie’s daughter, Patricia, came here during the war years and didn’t want to go back to London. She knows all the people in the village from her school days here.

  I go into Fitzsimon’s and have a dish of culcannon with the haymakers. Real butter melts in the centre of the spuds. There are scallions and kale and milk fresh from the byre through the potatoes. Mrs Fitzsimon’s says: Take more. Hay is being saved. To watch the men means moving through streams of seed. The bad things that happen make people memorable. A death paints the village white. Gerry Fitzgerald, son of Sonny, sits on a step drinking ice-cream soda. Noel Kiernan is kicking ball with Gerry Coyle. Do you hear me looking at you? says Mr Clarke. And he sent me down the village to curse his neighbours. There is another eclipse of the sun. We gather in the middle of the village and look up through blue-tinted paper.

  Roosters begin crowing wildly as the dark flies over the village. Dogs run for shelter. Midges stop. Then there is a long silence. A twilight crosses the land. A shadow.

  *

  I know there is something wrong. My father’s breathing grows laboured at times. He scuffs his nose with a bright handkerchief. His lean face is troubled. There’s visitors at all hours. They begin putting away things in the house. Sometimes my mother is gone for days to Cavan.

  Tom Keogh sits in the kitchen with my father. There are bottles of Guinness warming before the fire. The men hold their hands to the flames.

  It’ll be a different world, says Tom.

  It will.

  You’ll be missed.

  I fall down the stairs. My father carries me up on his shoulders.

  What were you doing? he asks.

  He sits on the edge of the bed to reassure me. He feels my arms and my legs.

  There’s nothing broke, he says. What were you doing?

  I was listening.

  Listening, were you?

  Yes.

  And what did you hear?

  Things.

  What things.

  This and that.

  If you hadn’t been listening you wouldn’t have fallen.

  He tucks me in and tiptoes away. Sonny Fitzgerald comes round with a bottle of whiskey. Seamus does a recitation of Dangerous Dan McGrew. My father cuts strips of boiled bacon in the scullery. I sit on the top of the stairs again. The men go down the path as dawn breaks. I walk out to Brian McHugh’s and sit in his high-ceilinged kitchen. He lets me look down the barrel of his rifle. We wade through reeds. He puts a finger to his lips. We go down on our hunkers. But whatever he thought was there never rises.

  You’re taking the high road, he says.

  I am, I say.

  But I don’t know what he means.

  Miriam arrives from Cavan with Sheila Reilly in their Loreto uniforms. They sit in the sun on the window ledges and go up the Green Hill to pick wild flowers for the table. Una takes down a curtain from the window. Miriam that evening packs clothes upstairs and takes them away. My father stands in his garden and leans on a spade. He is puzzled. The pom called Croney walks the wall and sits on the pier of the gate. Uncle Seamus arrives in his sweet van. Into it go the things from the living room. The house is slowly emptying.

  I know something is wrong.

  Noel Kiernan and me walk to school. The Gurns join us. At the church we wheel right instead of left and go mitching. We go out the bog road behind a ditch. Then make our way into a hay field and run from cock to cock. We duck and weave till we’re in a field opposite the school. We watch the classroom windows and eat each other’s sandwiches. Noel Kiernan has ham, Noel Gurn has jam and I have eggs. We watch the other schoolchildren playing at the eleven o’clock break from behind a group of ash trees.

  An ass suddenly rears. He kicks me in the head. I came to by myself in a field where primroses were growing. That is the feeling.

  *

  There is a do in Sonny Fitzgerald’s. All the village are there. My father and mother go up together. She is in a brown dress and white sandals. He has on a wide-trousered navy suit. It’s late summer.

  I watch them go. Horses and asses drawing carts pass by. All stop at Sonny’s. Men in smart rig-outs come over the bridge. The police sergeant and the two guards come up the village together. Women cross the village street with steaming trays.

  There’s music.

  There is.

  I can hear men singing that night on the street. Someone got sick on the hill and groans wildly. The kitchen fills up with voices. I sit at the top of the stairs. The men imitate beasts roaring. I can hear people urinating against the side of the house. Croney is barking on the path. My mother steers my father upstairs and leaves the gang below.

  Blessed God, said my father, where are we?

  You’re at home in Finea, she said.

  That’s right, he replied.

  That’s right, she says. Then she quotes out of the blue:

  Good evening, John

  your shirt is gone

  and your wife

  won’t be home

  in the morning.

  Next morning my father does not put on his uniform. He hangs it away in a closet. I don’t know why. Through ill health he was retiring early I would learn years later. He takes my hand and we go down along the river, over the stile and on out to the mouth where the perch bask, shoals of them, watching for small fry entering or leaving Kinale; duck glide out from the reeds and leave a shimmer behind them; an old boat rots; a dragonfly drones; my father sits on a spread handkerchief, pulls up his trousers and lights a cigarette.

  We’re going away, he says.

  I know that, I said.

  Aha!

  Who’s going?

  All of us.

  When?

  Soon.

  To where.

  To Cavan.

  I don’t want to go.

  He flicks the match to and fro, breaks it and and throws it away.

  You may not want to go now, but after a while you’ll be all right. He wipes back his hair. And we’ll always be able to come back.

  We will?

  Yes.

  How often?

  Often as you want to. The house will still be here.

  We look out at Kinale.

  *

  In later life I made Sheelin into the Atlantic. Kinale, I’ve never got to the bottom of. It’s got secrets that shouldn’t be told. A time that can’t be given back, but is, continuously. I always smoke a cigarette in the dark before sleeping, and all I’ve ever written about has a bridge, a man in uniform, a woman who takes the reins of a business. A girl at Loreto. A girl at the Poor Clares. In behind are the silent ones, my sisters, the brother. They too have their Finea, more complete than mine, being older.

  What happened is a wonder, though memory is always incomplete, like a map with places missing. But it’s all right, it’s entered the imagination and nothing is ever the same.

  Chapter 7

  I knew it was time to go one day. A dusty afternoon saw Charlie Clavin turn his old black Ford about and stop at our gate.

  The mother and Una had gone ahead to join Miriam in Cavan. So there was only myself and my father. We were sitting in the cold kitchen when the horn blew. A few battered suitcases were all that remained to be transported and a half-bag of seed potatoes. My father stacked them in the boot, then he toured the house once more. All we could see on the walls were the square shapes where pictures had been. The drawers in the dresser were empty. There was a smell of mould in the small living room now that the furniture had been removed. He lifted his shaving things off the scullery window. He tried the back door. We walked through the bedrooms and he checked the windows.

  That’s that, he said, and closed the small green gate.

&nbs
p; I sat in the front with Charlie, my father got in behind. Then I called the dog. Croney was perched at the front door. I whistled. Reluctantly he came up the path, leaped onto the wall and sat on the gate-pier. I lifted him down onto my lap. Noel Kiernan looked on. Brian Sheridan waved. Tom Keogh waved. We went by the monument, over the bridge and by the barracks, and on past the forty swans on Finea Lake, the engine groaned on the long ascent as we climbed out of the valley, the car shook and Charlie stamped the accelerator, but soon we were high up, ticking over nicely, with Kinale to our back and Lough Sheelin to our right, and the whole of Westmeath and Cavan opened up before us.

  We drove past the galvanized dance hall in Kilcogy where my father did night-duty, the handball alley at the crossroads in Mullahoran where he often played with the uniform of his jacket hanging on a side wall, and up through Ballinagh village. On the last stretch of road to Cavan Charlie let the car drift onto the wrong side of the road. Just as one of Harton’s lorries was bearing down on us, he swung the steering wheel and we came to a stop on our correct side.

  Sorry about that, Guard Healy, said Charlie.

  We sat a few moments in silence. Charlie got out and shot the starting handle into the front of the car. He turned her once, twice, and looked at us with beads of sweat on his brow. The car took on the third take. We bombed into into the empty streets of Cavan.

  It was half-day in the town.

  *

  I remember standing outside the closed Market House after the car stopped. There was a smell of seeds, oil and cement. I looked up and down the street – not a soul moved, signs swung in a breeze, the sun shone on one side of the street, a stray dog skidded to a stop outside Provider’s and smelt the bottom of the door.

  Croney began to whine. My father and Charlie crossed the street with the cases and rang the doorbell. My mother came to the door. They called me across. We walked the long hall, then the dining room and into the private living room. Everyone was there – Una, Miriam and Aunt Maisie. The table was piled with food. Charlie Clavin put his cap on his knee and ate.

  I sat near Charlie and when he was ready to go I accompanied him to the door.

  My father paid him in the hall. Charlie tipped his cap. He turned the starting handle and was gone. So there we were standing at the front door, looking up and down the street till he led me in by the hand. I went up the back garden with Croney and found a gooseberry bush.

  I saw a lad in the garden next door.

  Who are you? he asked.

  I’m Dermot Healy, I said.

  I’m Dermot Burke, he replied.

  There can’t be three Dermots, I said.

  Who’s the other one?

  Dermot Kinane.

  I don’t know him.

  He’s my cousin.

  We climbed up the back garden and onto the Gallows Hill, then down into the nun’s graveyard behind the Poor Clare Convent. The sight of the tall stern crucifix among the trees astonished me. We climbed a tree as dusk fell. Lights came on all over the town of Cavan.

  *

  That night I slept like a man in a boat going upriver on strange waters. I ate a bar of chocolate in the dark and drank Cidona. I had my own room and my own light. Next door I heard the Burkes screaming as their grandmother beat them. They called for her to stop but it only got worse. I could hear the slap of the strap plain as day across their backsides.

  When it was over I felt enormous relief. I went out to listen on the stairs but could hear nothing. All sound carried up the entry from the dining room below. I could hear the ladies and my father talking. The radio. My sisters going to bed. No ivy stirred on the window. There were no lake birds calling out.

  The village sounds which used help me sleep were gone.

  The tick of bicycles in Finea was gone. The rooster was silenced. The braying ass was far afield. I missed the door of the outdoor toilet closing behind my father. The sound of my mother singing in the scullery. Odd footsteps returning from Sonny’s. Instead I heard a drinker wheeling his bike down Con Reilly’s entry. I hear Con rolling a barrel indoors. A car backfired on Main Street. The bells that rang out the hour were very close. Lorries cruised past. A wooden gate closed and a bolt was shot home. Maisie laughed. Mother came out of the kitchen and opened the bakery door to check the fire in the range. My father shovelled in coke.

  I stood at the window and looked over the roofs. I saw old Miss Reilly stand at her little window. She had a tiny face and wild grey hair. She rested her hands on the sill and looked away into the dark. She stood there for maybe twenty minutes, as she did every night, watching something deeply buried in her subconscious.

  Then just after I’d fallen asleep I heard my door open.

  Are you all right, Dermot? whispered my father.

  Yes, I said.

  *

  After my father left I could not sleep. So to get to sleep I walked up the village of Finea. And all the insignificant things returned. I noticed flowerpots, lamps, upholstered chairs, the colours of front doors. I went by each house and named who lived in them to myself. I called out the names with fondness. Sometimes I’d be asleep by the time I reached Coyle’s. Sometimes I’d only have to go as far as Doherty’s. On good nights I’d need only cross the bridge. On the worst nights of all I’d have to travel again that whole journey we’d made with Charlie Clavin and then I’d arrive back to where I was cowering in the immaculate dark.

  But the best place of all to stop at was Kit Daley’s door. Here there was quiet. I stood on the cement surround of the pump. The village was sleeping.

  BOOK II

  The Sweets of Breifne

  Chapter 8

  The next day I woke at eleven in the strange house. I studied the bathroom. I ran the taps in the bath and the sink. Then coming back I opened the doors of all the bedrooms and peered in. I counted five bedrooms. I studied the photographs of old Slackes that hung on the walls of the corridor. I stopped at the altar that stood in an alcove at the top of the stairs. A Christ, with his head bound in thorns, dripped real blood, behind huge thick glass. I went into the upstairs sitting room. It had a deep reddish carpet, a long sofa, armchairs, a large radio, a tall photograph of Thomas and Elizabeth Slacke, a sideboard stacked with silver. There were two strange paintings of rivers.

  I opened the final door quietly. A whiff of stale powder emerged. There was Aunty Maisie seated on a chair before the three mirrors of her dressing table.

  She was brushing back her hair.

  Yes? she said. Who’s there?

  It’s Dermot.

  And what do you want, pray?

  I was trying to find my father.

  You’ll not find your father in my room. Are we to have no privacy here? she asked sternly.

  I got lost.

  Go downstairs. And kindly close the door.

  I found my way to the shop. My mother was behind the counter. She had a new blue rinse in her hair. I stood on the street and was mesmerized by the crowds. Then, suddenly, up the middle of the street came the town crier, Tommy Keyes. A few children followed him. He rang his huge bell, then roared something incomprehensible. I watched him, amazed. I held the handle of the hall door tight.

  Dermot, my mother called.

  What?

  Go inside and have breakfast. And tell the girls that Tommy Keyes says the water will be switched off at two.

  I opened the tearoom door.

  No, she said, go by the entry.

  All the downstairs windows were barred. The beater was churning in the bakehouse. The potatoes were boiling in the kitchen. Mary sat me down in the private dining room before the huge mirror. I studied myself closely. I asked for Finea loaf. That was square bread all of a piece with a bronze cap and a crisp bottom. What the girl had offered was the sliced pan.

  There’s no such thing as Finea loaf, she said.

  There is, I said.

  I never heard of it, she said.

  As I sat there in the dark room in front of the mirror people pass
ed to and fro. They walked through the room I was in, and again through the other room in the mirror. I stood in the yard with Croney. The day was filled with clashing delft, the pounding of the rollers as the bakery girls beat the dough, the rattle of the industrial mixer, big as a cement mixer, as it churned and whipped sponge-cake mix and butter-cake mix. Batters spluttered. Creams were piped. The tall geyser in the kitchen sent spouts of steam onto the wet, heavily glossed ceiling. Lard hissed on the pan.

  The door to the restaurant swung to and fro, trays of fries went out to the farmers; trays of meringues, eclairs, fairy cakes, apple squares, soda farls, piped horns, chocolate tops, apple tarts, sponge cakes, cherry cakes, carroway seed cakes, birthday cakes, sultana cakes, brown bread squares which were triangles, went down the entry.

  The buns were stacked in the glass-fronted shelves under the counter, the cakes went into shelves on the wall, the window was stocked. My mother measured out spoonfuls of tea from a tea chest behind the counter into little white bags. It was one and a half spoons for a single, and three for a double. Then the bags of tea were sent into the kitchen, stored in a biscuit tin and emptied into the teapots as the need arose. This way the amount of tea a customer got was rigidly controlled.

  Butter patties sat in a bowl of water on the kitchen window.

  What’s your name? asked Josie Rahily as I looked into the bakehouse. She was piping hot chocolate. Bees swarmed round her. The bees were everywhere. Miss Smith, with rags to protect her hands, lifted a tray of fairy cakes out of the oven.

  Would you like a bun? she asked me.

  No, I said.

  Why not?

  I don’t like sweet things.

  Well, you’ve come to the wrong place and that’s a fact.

  I wandered the house until at last I found my father. He was up the garden setting the seed potatoes.

  You had a big sleep, he said.