His Father's Son: To save the son he loves, a desparate father must confront the ghosts of his past

by Tony Black

  “Get in yeer teams,” said the brother. “We have half an hour before the Mass.” Marti had wondered why he had said about the Mass. There would be no Mass for him surely because Mam had said he wasn’t to go to the Mass. “And remember the rules of the game: play fair,” said Brother Declan. “The rabble ye are will have enough to confess after the Mass as it is.”

  Marti knew there would be no Mass or confession for him, because Brother Michael had said tis an agnostic ye are, Driscol, and the Church is no place for the likes of ye. Mam had said the Church wasn’t for them. It was for the likes of Aunt Catrin, who would gladly spend a day wearing her knees out for a sideways glance from some queer hawk in the next pew or, hope upon hopes, a gunner-eyed approval from the priest. Mam would have the women’s look for making the milk sour whenever she spoke about the Church and Marti knew she would get mad angry if he ever even said a single word to her about the Church.

  When Brother Declan spoke about the Mass again, Marti got very confused. “The Mass will have two special little sinners attending this day already sure. Kelly and Driscol will have plenty to confess after it, isn’t that so?”

  Pat nodded and said, “Yes, Brother Declan.”

  Marti looked at Pat and didn’t know what to say and then the brother said, “Is it mocking me ye are, Driscol?” Brother Declan had the whistle to his mouth before Marti could speak, and when he blew it in his ear the ringing started again and the entire class of boys stopped where they were and froze like a lot of statues. “I’ll have a response from ye, boy, or is it a wrap in the snot locker like yeer friend you are after?”

  “No,” said Marti.

  “No, what?”

  “No, Brother,” said Marti and when he looked away, Pat was shaking his head, with the wide eyes. “I mean yes, Brother. I have plenty to confess, after the Mass.”

  21

  It was an awful morning, cold and damp, wet and windy. Joey looked out at Dublin’s grey streets and thought there would be people all over Ireland staring at the sky, saying it’s a terrible, terrible morning – sure it looks like it’s been up all night. It was just like the Irish to make a joke of their weather. The seasons ranged from bad to worse – if you could call them seasons; didn’t it just get wetter and wetter only. The same could be said of the place Joey had come from just five weeks ago, though half a world away it was the other way round. A gale took the breath from his lungs and the coldness of the day reached a part of him that hadn’t felt a chill like it in a very long time.

  The second his feet touched Irish soil, Joey knew he was in a very different place. The peculiar Irish lilt was everywhere and sounded familiar enough, but it was somehow strange to his ears after all this time. A drunk did a jig in the street whilst an old tug’s horn sounded on its way round the dock. Joey was one of the first off the ship. He knew why he was there, in the one place he had said he would never be back, but even the thought of seeing Marti again for the first time in weeks wasn’t enough to stop his mind nipping with the task ahead of him.

  He shuffled his way along the wet streets, tipping his bag from shoulder to shoulder, making sure he had always a tight grip of the Superman picture. It would be a long trek to Kilmora, down on the coast. He had no money for the train, no job to go to, and no digs to go to either. He dug his hand in his pocket and looked at the few crumpled notes he had left after changing currencies. There was enough for a few days in a guesthouse at the most. Maybe a week or so in some cheap hostel or other. He would have to hitch in the rain. He would have to be bloody lucky too, to catch a ride the whole way. Nobody in their right mind would go to Kilmora if they didn’t have to, he thought.

  He slumped through the streets, the rain making his bag heavier as he lugged it from side to side, shoulder to shoulder. He tried to keep moving through it but then he felt himself taken off balance for a second and his feet slid beneath him. His arms were thrown out to break his fall and the bag was hurled onto the wet road; there was a loud clatter in front of him and Joey saw the Superman picture skiffing along the road.

  “Bugger it,” he said. A little rain and mud was spattered on the picture’s glass, which had cracked clean down the middle. “Ah no way. I take ye all the way from Australia and the first day in Ireland ye smash.” His heart sank when he thought of Marti’s broken picture – wasn’t it just a terrible thing to do to the boy, bring him it broken. He couldn’t bear to look at the damaged picture and shoved it beneath his arm.

  When he picked himself up and went to the wet streets again there was no attention paid to the thumb he held out. He felt sure he would have a better chance of a lift once he made it out a bit further. One of the busier roads or some well-used lay-by was needed for the ride, he thought as he lifted his feet, heavy as boulders, one after the other.

  The further he got from the city the more the landscape changed on him. The greenness of the fields was as he remembered it, so bright it burned into your eyes if you stared at it, but the mist-swathed hills were more alive than he could ever recall. There were hares seen running in the bracken browns and soft violets, and Joey felt the tingling of a homecoming inside him. The dry, dusty reds of Australia seemed a million miles away.

  Ireland was home and he knew it, but sure wasn’t the place he was raised no place for Marti. The deeper he got into the country, the saturations of rain, the fields of potatoes and the rusted heaps of farm machinery all reminded him of his own godridden childhood. He felt the pain of Marti being so close to his own miserable memories. The boy would have no notion of the things he had seen, how could he cope with the likes?

  Joey remembered the nightmares he’d had after starting school and finding out there really was a place called Hell. His mam had said it often enough but wasn’t it only a word, the way she said it. The brothers had used more words to describe the place and by the time he got to bed at night he would hear the words over and over. “Hell’s tongues of blooded flame lashing spinning balls of fire into your belly; the filth of a thousand putrefying souls filling your nostrils; the disease-ridden flesh and entrails of sinners flooding your very own lungs and the Devil himself, poking and stabbing your eyes with the tips of his burning hot trident again and again and again for the sheer pleasure he found in it.”

  The first time the nightmares came he woke frozen to the bed, drenched in his own sweat. He was too scared to scream even, for fear that the very ground beneath would open up and swallow him whole to Hell. He lay in panic for minutes and then he ran as fast as he could for his mother and father’s room. He had glimpsed the very depths of Hell, had he not; surely they would understand.

  A young Joey poured out the details of his nightmare, and his mother watched his distress with a look of worry, glancing sideways to her husband and back to her tearful son. The room fell silent and suddenly Joey’s father shot out of bed like a cannon had fired him towards the boy. His face was red and his eyes were two dark holes ringed in white rage.

  “Before God himself, ye better pray the Devil has a place in Hell for ye,” he said. His father lifted him by the hair and dragged him back to bed; his mother followed, begging him to let the boy go, but he had the fury of all the ages in him.

  “Come crying to me in the night, would ye,” he said, and Joey was thrown onto his bed, his father’s great hand lifted high above him. “I’ll beat the fear out of ye … the Devil himself will look a fine prospect before ye come crying to me again.”

  Joey saw his father’s hand fly down on him and when he felt it on him his whole body was shaken. The hand came down sharp and fast. Even when his mother tried to come between the hand and her son, it didn’t stop. Joey could still remember his father’s huge hand striking him, his mother’s cries when she got in the way and was struck herself, and the red print of the hand on him as he lay in bed crying softly, too sore and too scared to sleep, more terrified than ever he was of Hell or the Devil himself.

  An old cattle mover skidded to a halt on the road in front of Joey and the h
orn was sounded. The truck was empty, but had obviously been full of beasts recently, the smell of their confinement lingering above the diesel fumes spilling from the back. A bogman with mud caked on his face and a dirty tweed cap pushed back on his head roared out, “Where ye going?”

  “South.”

  “Get in … get in,” called out the bogman.

  “One second. Let me get my things.”

  He got into the truck’s cab and tried to appear friendly. He was grateful for the lift and to be out of the rain. “Howya, the name’s Driscol. Joey Driscol.”

  “Hello so,” said the bogman. He made no attempt to reveal his name, but Joey didn’t mind. When it came to pleasantries, bogmen were known to be as tight as a cod’s arse at forty fathoms. “Jaysus, yeer as wet as a field. Have ye no coat?”

  “Ah, no,” said Joey.

  The bogman crunched the gears of the cattle truck and pulled into the road. He was still looking at Joey, shaking his head and giving no thought to his driving or others who might be on the road. “Jaysus, without the coat ye must be froze,” he said.

  “I’m too soon arrived from Australia. I think it’s the Vitamin D I have in me or something. I don’t feel it cold at all.”

  The bogman looked like he hadn’t understood a single word. “I couldn’t stand going about with no coat. I’d be froze. I would. Ye need a coat. Ye do.”

  “Ah well, sure maybe I’ll get one when my luck changes … Are ye going far?”

  “Yeer not going to put chat on me, are ye?” Two crossed lines appeared on the bogman’s forehead.

  “Ah, no,” said Joey. “I can see yeer a man of few words. Will ye go through Kilmora, though?”

  “I will.”

  “Grand so, that’ll do me.”

  The bogman squinted at Joey from beneath his dirty tweed cap and Joey smiled back. You could grow potatoes on this fella, he thought, in fact roses probably – wasn’t he covered in manure. He opened the window and tried to get a bit of air into the cab.

  “Ah now … I don’t like the windows played with. Close it up,” said the bogman. “Close it up.”

  “Oh, sorry.” The stench was powerful stuff. Joey wondered would he be seeing a repeat of breakfast, and then he remembered he hadn’t eaten. On the ship he had thought missing breakfast was a mistake when he had little money in his pocket but now it seemed like a blessing entirely. He tried to breathe through his mouth and covered his nose with his finger, and the bogman looked far from offended – in fact, he looked none the wiser at all. They travelled in silence, only the occasional rustle of the newspaper Joey had taken from the dashboard with the bogman’s say so.

  The paper was an eye opener, he thought. It was full of stories about the Irish economy, which was flagging entirely, but sure hadn’t that always been the way. Even when the papers said jobs and riches were coming round the corner he never saw any sign of them. Politicians were great at spinning a yarn but sure wasn’t the globe awash with Irish youngsters looking for work; it made him wonder what he had come back to. The whole world had let in people like him for the last five hundred years, and just what would they have done back when they had the famine if great starving boatloads were turned back? None of it filled Joey with high hopes, and when he arrived in Kilmora he realised he must have been reading the paper, cover to cover, for close on two hours.

  “Jaysus, are we here already?” said Joey.

  “Tis Kilmora.”

  “Well, thanks for the lift. I would like to give ye something but, well …”

  “Go way outta that,” said the bogman, and Joey was happy his gratitude was enough for him.

  When he hoisted his bag back onto his back he tried to take as wide a look as he could at the village. There were changes in the place for sure – it looked the same size, but somehow seemed to have turned into something else entirely. Everything was where he remembered it. There were houses and buildings had changed colour with fresh paint, but they were all where he knew them. Most of the bigger houses had been turned into shops selling Aran jumpers and green rugby shirts and silly tricolour hats with IRELAND embroidered across the front.

  There were houses he remembered from years back that had taken boarders, now with signs saying GUESTHOUSE swinging above their doors. Old cray pots and tattered fishing nets had been tied up outside the houses to make them look quaint, but Joey thought it was all far from natural. Sure, any fisherman would be embarrassed beyond the life of him at the state of those nets.

  When he walked the streets he saw faces he didn’t recognise, and some of the faces were definitely foreign tourists. He felt like a tourist himself, like he was just visiting, and then he started to panic. There would be faces he remembered soon enough; this was Kilmora, sure, didn’t his own father and mother live here. He felt the heart galloping in him. He knew Marti could be here and he wanted to find him, and then all his nerves were clattered together and he saw a face he did recognise, right in the middle of the village, over by the water fountain and the cross.

  22

  Marti had never been to the Mass before and he wanted to ask Pat what would happen but he didn’t want Brother Declan to say it’s a report ye are on now for sure, so he kept very quiet and walked in line with Brother Declan’s class of boys all the way there. The church was a very old building with lots of very old glass windows with the pictures from the Bible like they had at Saint Joseph’s School. The church looked scary on the outside, thought Marti, but when everyone went inside it felt very calm entirely and the big old ceiling with the wooden beams looked nice so far away that he felt he could float up there like a bubble.

  The light came through in lovely rays and made patterns like the shapes of the windows on the floor. Nobody spoke and everyone was very quiet and sat with their hands together and looked at the front to the man who had the collar on like the brothers but was dressed all in white and not all in black. Marti liked the church inside. He wondered if Mam would let him go to the Mass all the time now, because he liked the church so much. But then he thought Mam would say no and he wondered if he would be in trouble and maybe even get the hot arse for going to the church when he wasn’t even supposed to be listening to Aunt Catrin when she talked about the church.

  All the boys from Brother Declan’s class had to go on their knees in front of the man who was dressed all in white and opened their mouths while he dipped a little biscuit in a big gold cup. The biscuit was put in their mouths and Marti wondered what it would taste like until he was told to open up his mouth and he found it had no taste at all. He made the signs that were the cross like everybody else and then he went to sit in the pews with all the other boys. Everybody seemed to know what to do and what to say, except for him. They all looked very peaceful and quiet, even the boys who made the most noise usually, and they all looked like the angels in the pictures that were on the walls.

  The church was like nowhere Marti had ever been before and even though he didn’t know what to do or what to say, he didn’t think it was at all like Mam had said it was. He had expected bad things to happen in the church when Mam had said he was never to go there, but it didn’t seem like a bad place at all. He wondered why Mam got so mad angry whenever anyone said a single thing about the church. She got so angry sometimes she would shout, even at Aunt Catrin, and he could see the look on Mam’s face when she was mad angry and he knew it was big trouble he was in for sure.

  The boys from Brother Declan’s class started to shuffle along the pew and over to a little box that looked like a shed with a pointy roof. Marti wondered why there would be a little shed in the church. He asked one of the boys was it the toilets and the boy started to laugh very quietly and said to another boy, “He thinks the confession is the jacks,” and there was more of the very quiet laughing.

  The boys queued outside the little wooden box and there was none of the usual chatter and fooling from them, and Marti wondered was it because God was watching. When the first of the boys went into the little bo
x, Marti saw there was a small seat and there was someone to talk to on the other side. He wondered who it was on the other side and what was said. Some of the boys spent a long time inside and when they came out, they looked very white, like they had been given a fright. Marti wanted to know what it was they had heard or saw and then he started to get scared every time the queue of boys shuffled forward a few more steps. All those with the white faces had to kneel and pray in the church when they came out, but some of the boys would be very quick inside the little wooden box and when they came out they had the wide smiles. Marti watched them walk straight to the back of the church and sit, looking happy with the wide smiles for all to see, and he wondered would he have the smile or the white face when he came out.

  When it was his turn to go in Marti’s hands were trembling and his heart was beating fast. He sat down on a bench and his heart started to beat so fast that he could almost hear it echo off the walls. It was very dark inside with not a speck of light to be seen, and Marti felt like he did when he had the bad dreams about monsters and would wake up scared in the night and wondered was the monster in the room with him. His voice was very low when he said, “Hello, hello is somebody there?” A tiny door appeared in front of him. It was slid across very fast and then there was the sound of a throat being cleared, and a man spoke.

  “How long has it been since your last confession?”

  It was a loud, very old man’s voice from the other side of the little wooden box. The voice sounded angry like the brothers sometimes did when a question was asked and they were in no mood for a wrong answer or to wait for the right answer. Marti wondered who the very old man was and what he should say. It was all dark and strange. He could see only a little bit of light from the side where the man was talking from and he thought it was odd entirely for a grown-up to be sitting about in some manner of dark little box.