The Dead School (6 page)

But he wasn’t gone mad at all. He was just as happy as Larry, and there was nothing wrong with that. He picked daisies for his mammy, helped her carry the bucket to the well and spent all
day chatting to her about what he was going to do when he grew up and went out into the big wide world far away. He was going to be a doctor, a priest, a soldier and a sailor, he was going to have
a million jobs. ‘What am I going to do with you at all?’ said Evelyn as she drew the needle in and out of the grey woollen sock, then stroked his cheek and said, ‘I’ll make
some tea.’ Then they’d sit together sipping their tea, just Mammy and Raphael and Our Lady on the window ledge smiling over at them and saying, ‘I am proud of this happy and holy
family.’

Then – whee! – off into the fields again to sing eggs and hairy again and to play ball with Daddy who was coming up the lane with his coat thrown over his shoulder. ‘I’m
the best!’ cried Raphael, as he kicked the ball away into the trees. ‘I’m even better than my daddy!’

‘Oh, no, you’re not!’ shouted Mattie as he chased after him. ‘I’ll soon show you who can kick!’

And you should have seen Raphael’s eyes when the ball went sailing over the tops of the trees.

‘My daddy’s famous!’ he cried ecstatically.

And he was – didn’t he win the reaping race? All the men for miles around came with their canvas bags and sickle hooks and beneath the burning sun moved like
clockwork machines as they cut their way through the cornfield. ‘Oh, please God, our daddy’ll win!’ cried Evelyn as she squeezed Raphael’s hand. By noon they were halfway
and Evelyn and her son raced to him with the bottle of cold tea stoppered with a twist of cardboard and a warm cake of soda bread, dabbing his forehead with a cloth as they cried shakily,
‘You can do it, Daddy! You can do it!’ and as he said later when it was all over it was their words had done the trick, for when the whistle blew once more he was like a man possessed
and his sickle was a blur as he tore through the field for them and them alone, then at last his red arms triumphant in the air as he cried
‘Criochnaithe
!’, and it was over, over
at last, and was it hard to keep the tears out of your eyes as you saw your daddy being lifted on high and all the men of the county crying ‘Mattie Bell has bested them all!’ bearing
him across the bridge and off down the road until they came to Clancy’s bar and the doors were thrown wide open as Mattie called, ‘Pull out a stool for Evelyn and the little man they
call Raphael!’

A man with a nose like a sunburnt potato leaned over and said to Raphael, ‘You must be a proud young buck this day,’ and Raphael smiled as he sipped his glass of lemon soda and then
just looked up and beamed, ‘I am.’

Then afterwards in the flickering shadows of the tilly lamp, proud once more as Mattie held his wife’s hand and looked into her eyes as he sang the song he had sung to
her on their wedding day, a song that told the story of a love that had sadly gone away never to return. ‘Did you ever hear a tune that was sung so well?’ remarked Pony Brennan to the
man beside him. ‘I’m telling you now, that man could charm the birds down out of the trees.’ ‘As well as show every man jack in this townland how to reap a field of
corn,’ came the reply. His father’s eyes were still closed as he sang,

In the window a giant moon with heavy-lidded eyes and outside the night so full of peace. The fire throwing out shadows that wrapped about you like shawls and in behind a cloud
of perfumed smoke, Uncle Joe remembering a face from long ago.

‘Come on, now, Mattie, that’s the stuff! You’re the man can sing!’

It was the saddest song Raphael had ever heard. The girl who lived beside the Anner river went to America and was never seen again. She died far away among strangers, far from her little
brothers or sisters. That night Raphael couldn’t get her face out of his mind and that was why he said a hundred prayers, for her, but also in thanks because he wasn’t faraway among
strangers but being looked after by his mammy and daddy and surrounded by people who would never be strangers and who if anything happened to you would always look after you, like Pony Brennan and
Uncle Joe and all the people who had been at the reaping race and everyone who said when you were going down the road, ‘That’s Mattie Bell’s lad! That’s young Raphael! There
you are, son!’

All he wished was that the girl who lived beside the Anner could have been alive so that he could share some of them with her and tell her all about them and how kind they were but she
wasn’t she was dead – she had died among strangers and would never be seen again.

Raphael was eight years old when he was made head altar boy. Father Sean told his mother that he was the best little altar boy yet. ‘You want to hear the way he does the
Latin!’ he said. ‘Will you do a little bit of it for us?’ Mattie and Evelyn asked him one day when he came home from practice. ‘I don’t know it all yet,’ said
Raphael. ‘Just the tiniest bit,’ pleaded Evelyn, and Raphael reddened. ‘All right then,’ he said and cleared his throat. ‘
Ad Deam qui laetificat juventutem
meam
,’ he said and Evelyn threw her arms around him. ‘My holy boy!’ she cried aloud and Mattie shook his head in wonderment at the beauty of the world and the gifts they had
been given by the Almighty.

In the spring the crocus came and the young lambs tumbled in the fields. In the summer you climbed up a haystack and then came flying back down again. And then what did you do?
You just turned around and climbed back up again. ‘I’m the best!’ squealed Raphael and pulled the bits of hay out of his hair.

‘Say some Latin for us!’ the boys all said because they couldn’t remember it.

‘
Introibo ad altare Dei!
’ cried Raphael.

‘Latin is good!’ the boys said. ‘We wish we knew some.’

‘I’ll teach you,’ said Raphael.

And he did. In a week they were all able to say it and off they went down the road chanting and clapping away to beat the band
Introibo ad altare Dei
.

It was good then. Of course it was. It was good being alive in those days.

Or at least it was until the War of Independence when people started getting shot right, left and centre and sometimes even whole towns were torched and left to burn away to
nothing. You never knew what was going to happen next. Just like the day Raphael was helping Mattie to fork the hay in the field when the Black and Tan soldiers came up and stood there smiling and
saying, ‘Turned out nice, didn’t it?’ They took off their caps and wiped the sweat off their foreheads saying, ‘Bloody weather in this country. Like them what lives in it
– untrustworthy, know what I mean?’ Raphael didn’t know much about the Black and Tans. He knew there was a war on all right and that Ireland was trying to win independence for
itself. But apart from that he knew nothing and to tell the truth he didn’t really care. At least not up until a couple of minutes later when the Black and Tan put his cap back on and hit his
father across the face with a revolver.

What exactly happened after that, Raphael was never able to say for sure. One of the others might have hit him with a rifle butt or something but anyway Mattie fell down and when he was on his
knees the Black and Tan said, ‘We know you’re a rebel, Bell. We know all about you and if you don’t tell us what we want to know you’re going to be a sorry man. A very sorry
man indeed, I don’t mind telling you.’ Raphael knew it was serious now and started crying but they told him to shut up or they would kill his father. So he shut up as best he could. Not
that it mattered all that much anyway because the officer said he was fed up and told him to get up and then put the barrel of the revolver to his chest and blew a hole in it. Some of the blood
from it splashed across Raphael’s face. When they were going they said to him, ‘You remember this day, son. That should keep you out of mischief.’

His father wasn’t dead yet and Raphael realized he was trying to say something to him. He fell to his knees and pleaded, ‘Daddy, don’t die!’ Mattie held his hand and
said, ‘Promise me one thing, son. You’ll always look after your mother. She adores the ground you walk on, son. Promise me you’ll be good to her no matter what happens.’

‘I promise, Daddy,’ said Raphael and then Mattie’s head tilted to one side and he died.

Raphael stood up on the legs of a newly born spring lamb and felt the fields were screaming.

The sad part of it all was that Evelyn never really got over it. It doesn’t really matter when all the preparations are being made for the funeral and so on and all your
neighbours are there to comfort you but they can’t stay there for ever. And that’s when it begins to get hard. Although you’re living in a lovely little cottage it’s like
you’re inside a sealed metal container that lets in no light. That was what Evelyn felt when she broke down crying and it seemed to be for no reason just as it did the day Raphael came in the
door and found her there in the middle of the kitchen weeping uncontrollably. Her hands were shaking and she was mouthing the word ‘Mattie’ even though there was no sound coming out.
Raphael went to her and threw his arms around her. Her nails bit into his wrist and he was afraid she would go hysterical. ‘It’s all right, Mammy! It’s all right!’ he cried
and hugged her.

Raphael was frightened. He didn’t know what to do. Only for Uncle Joe he wouldn’t have known what to do. The night he came he looked at him and frowning under his big soft hat said,
‘You know, Raphael. You know, don’t you? You’re going to have to be strong. Strong for her.’

Raphael wasn’t one hundred per cent sure what he meant but he had a vague idea. He nodded. ‘Because there will be times – and if you’re not strong – there’ll
be nobody else there for her . . . do you know what I’m saying, son?’

Raphael said, ‘Yes.’ Uncle Joe meant that if he didn’t stay strong and keep a close watch on her something terrible might happen.

‘You’ll do that won’t you, Raphael?’ went on Uncle Joe. ‘You’ll do that for her – and the memory of your dead father?’

Raphael felt a surge of pride as he stiffened and replied, ‘Yes, Uncle Joe – I will! I promise!’

‘For eight hundred years the likes of that animal that shot your father to death have been trying to break us. They haven’t managed it yet and they never will. Not while we have
young cubs like you coming up – am I right, Raphael?’

‘Yes,’ replied Raphael and tried not to think of his father’s mouth with the blood pouring out of it, and his terror-stricken eyes.

Then Uncle Joe put his arm around him and said, ‘Come on, son. It’s time we went to see the horses. I have the trap waiting outside.’

If there was one thing Raphael loved more than anything else in the world it was going to Uncle Joe’s stables to see the horses. And if there was anything better than that it was helping
to brush them and comb them and run his hands along their lovely polished flanks. He was the happiest boy in the world as he sat beside his Uncle Joe with his mother in the back of the trap smiling
for the first time since the death as Uncle Joe’s pipe sent out a great big cloud of sweet-smelling smoke and he flicked the whip and said, ‘Your father was a hero, son. You
didn’t know that. No one knew it. But he was. He died for Ireland. He’s at one now with all the loyal patriots asleep in the ground.’

Tears came into Raphael’s eyes when he heard that. Tears of pride, tears of sorrow, tears of joy.

All that day he spent in the stables with the horses, looking into their guileless glassy eyes and stroking their noble, shining necks. He was so at one with them he didn’t even realize he
was talking to himself. He was saying, ‘I’m going to make you proud of me, Mother. I’ll make you the proudest mother in the whole of Ireland!’

Which were the very words he uttered the following day as he left for school except that it was different this time because the smile that had been on his mother’s face all the way to
Uncle Joe’s farm in the pony and trap was gone now and the way she was looking at him wasn’t the way he was used to it, wasn’t the way you would expect a mother to look at a son,
more like the look you would give someone you had never seen before in your life.

When Raphael heard the sound of laughter he was ecstatic and was standing in the kitchen before he realized there was no laughter at all. In the chimney corner armchair reposed
a huge shadow. With blank eyes it considered him. By the window sitting at the spinning wheel, yet another. With a shadow-head that turned and whispered, ‘Raphael!’ It wasn’t a
bad voice. The voice meant him no harm. He knew that. But it made no difference. It was the voice of Nothing and it made tears come to his eyes. He wanted to ask, ‘Why have shapes cut out of
the dark come to steal my home?’ More than anything he wanted to ask that question. But now there was no one to ask. You were afraid to ask your mammy because she might cry and more than
anything you did not want that to happen. So you just lay there in the night-time hoping they would go away. But they never did. They just sat there, people cut out of the dark, waiting.

Once, Our Lady came to you and sat there with you as the sweat glistened on your forehead and your heart beat so fast, laying her soft hand on your forehead as she told you that it would soon be
all right because good boys who loved their mothers were always rewarded and to put your trust in Jesus Christ Our Lord. When you looked again she was gone, nothing but the night moths tapping at
the window and the ghosts of her kind words still hanging in the air.