Bend for Home, The (2 page)

Guard Healy kept an acre of cabbages and potatoes behind the house in Finea. For fertilizer he used waste from the outdoor toilet, manure from Jack Fitz’s cattle and ass droppings. The crop he divided with the village.

He’d hang the jacket of his uniform on the bough of an ash tree and dig. He was an expert, my mother maintained, on the heel of a spade. With a slap of the other side of the shovel he backed up the drills that ran straight along a length of string tied to two paling posts at either end of the field. In the evenings he’d stand in the garden smoking. Seagulls thrashed in the sky.

We were out in the winter unearthing a few spuds from the pit, which was covered with old straw and turf, when suddenly a rat leaped out. He pinned him to the earth with the prong of a grape. I mind my father and me out at Derrycrave bog. When the cart was turning, one of its wheels slipped into a bog hole. The ass reared. I slid along the driver’s plank. The cart lurched. The ass’s eyes and my father’s eyes were wild. But they got it righted.

The wet clunk of the shovels begins. I find wild bilberries. We start tossing the sods of turf. Then someone sights her coming. Mammy is coming. She’s coming the straight bog road that leads to Castlepollard. Whatever she’s carrying in one hand is wrapped in white linen, in the other hand she dangles a pail of buttermilk. When she reaches us at last we sit around on the dry sods.

Westmeath is relaxing all round us.

Westmeath men are lying back and looking at the sky. Sheelin is quiet and blue. Insects keep up a mischievous drone. Everyone is wonderfully sated and tired. Mother heads off. Each Monday evening she goes to Ballywillan station to get the train to Cavan for fair day of a Tuesday. The mother’s side has a business there – a bakery and restaurant called the Milseanacht Breifne. She serves at table and washes up after the Northern cattle dealers.

So while she’s away he comes up early from the station to put us to bed.

It’s still light. He goes back out for a drink. A wind stirs the trees. The ivy shies to and fro. It’s like lying in a bed of rustling leaves. I am amazed at the sounds of the village. Brian Sheridan coughing. Charlie Clavin closing his half-door. Charlie Clavin’s black Ford. The bicycle repairman still at work. A swan going over. Eventually I pick his step out from the others at closing time.

He says goodbye to men on the street.

He slips the catch. Coughs. Touches a chair in the dark. Leaves his shoes aside. Comes up the stairs in his grey woollen socks. I prepare. He enters the room quietly and undresses. Throws his big Garda coat over the eiderdown and gets in beside me. The bed rustles. There’s only the sound of the ivy. I pretend to be sleeping. First I breathe in the sweet gassy smell of the Guinness. Then I wait for it.

Soon the match flares up. The cigarette glows. I watch him mesmerized. His satisfaction is entire.

At the green pump outside Kit Daley’s in the middle of the village there is a monument raised to Myles the Slasher. On the first of August they used to hold a parade in honour of him. He belonged to the Breifne O’Reillys, high chieftains of Cavan, and defended Westmeath against the enemy.

In the struggle, after killing hundreds, both his arms were chopped off. But despite this terrible mutilation, which I used often imagine above in my bed, he continued to fight on to the last with a sword gripped between his teeth. It was an enemy sword that had been swung with a death-stroke to decapitate him but he clamped his teeth on it and fought valiantly on.

I know the spot he fell on the bridge. It was on the Westmeath side, in a little alcove.

There’s a song by Percy French called “Come Back Paddy Reilly to Ballyjamesduff”, seemingly written about a cabman who used to collect Mr French, the road-engineer, from the railway station there. Then the cab man went off to America and things were never the same. Hence the title. One of the verses goes:

But it can’t be done. No matter how you try you can’t turn left at the bridge of Finea, unless you go up Bullasheer Lane which leads eventually to the banks of floating reeds on Kinale. Some make a case for the old Carrick road which passes the weeping walls of Carrick Church that stands in a quarry, but the Carrick road is to the right. It’s all cod.

For the sake of a song Percy French got his geography amiss. Even road-engineers are capable of giving wrong directions in order to get a couplet true. And that’s how I found out writers not only make up things, but get things wrong as well. Language, to be memorable, dispenses with accuracy.

And it was much later that I found Myles the Slasher never stood on the bridge of Finea at all. Revisionism has caught up with him. Historians now say he was off fighting with the King of Spain at the time.

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.

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 swinging 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.