A few of the train cars had the names of states in big letters. Ohio. Montana. Oregon. He was telling Zoë about a bus trip he took one winter’s day from Maysville, Kentucky, to Detroit. When the bus arrived in Detroit his connecting bus to the Upper Peninsula had already left. Two in the morning, freezing cold, the bus station mobbed with stranded travelers, he sat on a bench outside all night and waited for the morning bus.
—And what were you doing around here then, I said.
In the mirror he was staring out the window to his right.
—Picked apples up north, he said.
I didn’t mention that apples weren’t picked in the U.P. in the dead of winter.
A car windshield on the other side of the tracks shimmered between the crawling train cars. It blinded me, but I kept staring into it, turned the music up slightly, and tapped my fingers on the steering wheel. He and Zoë were talking about some ocean town in Florida I’d never heard of.
You hurt her but you don’t know why
You love her but you don’t know why
Five days after Brendan and I arrived in Michigan, I rang Hannah. Brendan was at his new job, we had just got the phone connected, and after Hannah and I talked, I went outside. I’d walked a few streets before the freight train stalled me, and when it passed I climbed the embankment teeming with pine needles, chicory, crabgrass, discarded beer and wine bottles with faded labels, beer cans, and empty cigarettes packs. How did it all end up here? Maybe from people like the man I was driving to see his aunt. Him and the forlorn that wandered down after dark to stare at the rails in the moonlight. Rails shining like the scalded blade of a butcher’s knife. I walked for a while along the tracks but stopped every now and then to stare out at the town. Insects buzzed. The sky was blue and foggy. Crows circled the four or five church spires. And all around were clusters of trees. And I remember thinking how changed this scene would be when the leaves fall, for who knows, good or bad, what the fuck’s ever going to transpire.
—He dressed up in that old suit and found his way back to the Junction. Completely off his rocker, Jimmy, Hannah said on the phone.
Then she broke down. She was talking about our father. He was buried seven days before.
—He never changed, Jimmy, she said. —Not one bit. But he loved his grandson. He did. In the end he wanted to spend all his time with him.
—Christ, Hannah, was what I said.
—You have to ring Tess. Do you hear me, Jimmy—
—I hear you, Hannah. I’ll ring her—
—The boys are always fine, but ring Tess—
—I told you I’ll ring her—
—She is dying to hear from you, Jimmy—
—Is she all right?
—She’s fine, but you have to ring her, are you listening to me, Jimmy—
—I’m listening, Hannah, I promise I will, but tell me what happened—
—He put on that old suit, Jimmy. The last time he put that thing on was for Mam’s funeral, and before he arrived at the Junction, he ended up at his home place, and before that he was in at Breen’s. He says to me that morning he wanted to go home, and I said to him he was at home, but he says home where he was born and raised, his real home, up on the hill with Auntie Tess and Hannah, and I said to him, Jimmy, how can you say things like that, and he says Michael will give me a lift there if you don’t have the decency to oblige me, says it in that mean way of his, and I says to him, Jimmy, who is this Michael fella you are going on about, and he says, who do you think, Miss, are you that much of a fool, is it five ungrateful fools I have brought into this world, Michael Lyons, who do you think, and I says straight out to him, Jimmy, that Michael Lyons is dead and gone with years, dead and gone since I was a girl, so Michael Lyons will be giving you or no one else a lift anyplace.
Hannah told him to go back to bed, to try to sleep, she had the child to take care of, she would bring him his tea in a while, and bring him his dinner when her husband came home from work, she was going to roast a chicken. Peas in the garden bursting out of their pods like a fat man in a shirt way too tight.
She shut his bedroom door and went about her work. He got out of the bed and opened the wardrobe and put on the good suit, his tie, his good shoes, picked up his walking stick, sneaked down the blue corridor, out the front door, and across his dead wife’s flower garden. My sister was chatting with the child in the kitchen. She had the radio up loud. She enjoyed the gossip on the morning talk shows.
She and her husband didn’t work in the Tampax factory anymore. The Tampax factory had relocated to someplace in Mexico, but her husband worked for a French airline out at Shannon Airport, and Hannah worked weekend night shifts in a bar, in Tipperary town, and she raised the dry cattle.
He headed out the path to the road and was only moments on it when a neighbor, Big Johnny Ryan, stopped to pick him up.
I took the red school bus with Johnny’s son, who was called Little Johnny, called that since he was a child, and will be by them until the day he dies, though Little Johnny was the tallest boy on the bus. He became a Guard in Waterford city.
Big Johnny was at least one generation below my father, and I’m thinking that my father and Big Johnny’s father, also known as Big Johnny, were friends, or at least they would have chatted to each other while they waited in line at the creamery, back when they both took the milk there in a horse and cart.
My father asked Big Johnny would he mind giving him a lift back the road to Breen’s.
—Not a bother, Tom.
My father went into Breen’s. Big Johnny went about his business. He had his farm to take care of. A farm with all the modern equipment. Big Johnny made a very good living from farming, for he had many acres. And that’s forever key.
Big Johnny’s daughter married a German she met in Dublin. They were attending medical school and after they were graduated they moved out to LA, where the German died five months later in a boating accident on the Pacific. And after Big Johnny’s daughter buried him she rang her mother and father and told them she was coming home inside the year, and never again was she going to leave. Big Johnny and his wife had a bungalow built for her. Far back from the road, up high on a hillside. The most panoramic site on all of their land. But the week before the daughter was due to arrive home and move into the bungalow, which had a new Honda Civic parked underneath the sycamores out front, she rang her father and mother to say she had joined an order of nuns. She was going to spend the rest of her days helping the troubled people of Rwanda.
Oh, her treachery, they all said, to treat her mother and father so cruelly, them who had wasted all that money building and furnishing that bungalow, not to mention the medical school bills, the brand-new Honda, and the heap of money they would have got for that fine site, but in the end, they all agreed, the real blame was with Big Johnny and his wife. From the start they’d spoiled her, so she knew no better, because, they all said, when you make too much of children they grow up to be heedless, ungrateful brats.
Abandoned the beautiful bungalow remained. The thistles, nettles, and dock leaves grew tall around it. Weeds taller than the windowsills. Dust settled on carpeted floors, new armchairs, couches, beds, dressers, mirrors, and so on. And the lovely Honda cloaked in a thick layer of sycamore dust. The tires deflated. And the same tall weeds around the house grew around the Honda. Then late one Friday night a gang of drunk and high teenagers from the new housing estate outside the village made their way up there. Their purpose was to steal the Honda, but they failed to get it to start, which bothered them to no end, and so they found rocks and smashed every window in the car, and they also located a hatchet, or one of them happened to have one handy, and they hatcheted the outside and the inside of the car to ribbons. But still they weren’t satisfied. They went in search of more rocks and they lobbed those through every bungalow window.
Strangers and a few neighbors kno
cked on Big Johnny and his wife’s door and offered to either rent or buy the bungalow, fix it back up themselves, but Big Johnny and the wife said no one would ever live up there. That was that. And every day Big Johnny and his wife drove by the bungalow, more than once, they did, and they never turned their heads. They let on that all that trouble and pain looming down didn’t exist.
My father sat in one of the back seats at Breen’s and ordered a small Powers and a half pint from the barmaid. He knew the barmaid’s father and grandfather. He knew the men sitting back there. Men the same go as him, who he’d gone with to National school. Old-age pensioners who complained bitterly about the new housing estate the council had built outside the village that housed the thugs from Limerick city. Children running around this so-called estate. Children loud and filthy like animals. Those people brought the crime and the drugs. There was never any trouble here before that lot invaded like a shower of rats. Never an hour of trouble did we have. Tinkers held higher morals than that lot. And they would have all agreed that this was usually the case with people raised in the city.
A commercial lorry driver on his lunch break was reading a newspaper and eating a sandwich at the bar. My father approached him. The lorry driver did not know my father, but he knew Hannah and her husband. My father asked the lorry driver if he’d mind driving him to the place where he was born; it was only back the road a bit. The lorry driver said no problem. He finished his lunch. Off they drove.
When they arrived less than ten minutes later, my father rolled down the lorry window and stared up the long and steep path that led to the cottage where he and his two sisters were born. The land Aunt Hannah sold before she went into the City Home. My father could not really see the path against the summer bushes and the weeds, but he went on staring up there for a while before he turned to the lorry driver and said he’d had his fill of it. He’d had his fill of it for a long, long time. Then he asked the lorry driver if he’d mind driving him back to the Junction, which was fifteen or so miles away. The lorry driver’s destination was Tipperary town. So no trouble at all. Sure the Junction’s on the way.
The lorry driver left my father off in the Junction car park. My father took his wallet from his back pants pocket and handed ten euros to the lorry driver, who took it after some pestering, though he later offered it to Hannah, when he was telling her this. Hannah took it. If she learned anything from her parents, it was that every fucking penny matters.
My father went into the Junction. He walked down the long platform and sat on the wooden bench. Behind his head was the tourist poster of Beautiful Ireland. The one with the farmer tending his sheep on a hillside. That one because I remember it. This was one of those days when the summer feels jaded, days you can still wear short sleeves, but the nights are cool enough that you can get under the blanket and sleep like the dead, and all afternoon the lazy dust floats in the sunlight and the evening shadows are longer and darker.
The rest of it Hannah heard from Coleman Daly.
My father took off his coat. He folded it and placed it on the bench, and he rolled up his shirtsleeves, loosened his tie, and stared at the cows grazing in the meadows across the tracks. Coleman strolled out of his office and sat himself beside my father. Coleman lit a cigarette then unbuttoned his coat. They said they’d seen neither hide nor hair of each other in a dog’s age. Then they talked about the fine weather. And they didn’t mention the horses. My father lost interest in them the same time he did the Sweet Aftons. But Coleman was trying to find out what business my father had at the Junction. The Dublin train was an hour away, the Cork train even longer, and Coleman hadn’t seen my father at the Junction in years, not since he picked me up at Christmas, or when I had summer holidays from the bar—nevertheless, Coleman wrangled it out of my father that he was waiting for Michael Lyons.
Coleman knew well who Michael Lyons was. Michael, Coleman, and Coleman’s first cousin all worked in the copper mines, and of course Coleman knew Michael was long gone, but Coleman later told Hannah he thought our father was talking about Michael’s son. Coleman did not know the names of the Lyons children, or what they were up to in their lives, but he would have known Una to see her. At one time he saw her in the same way he saw me, heading back and forth to Dublin on the train.
Coleman never married and some teenagers called him a queer behind his back. I don’t know if Coleman was gay. When I think of him he is standing beside Auntie Tess, looking authoritative in his blue uniform with the shiny buttons. He enjoyed waving his flag at the incoming and outgoing trains, wishing the people who got on and off a good day, and doling out information with regard to times and connections. This job was heaven compared with the copper mines. And there’s little fear of mercury poisoning at Limerick Junction. But Coleman finally figured out that the Michael Lyons my father was waiting for was the dead one, and so Coleman excused himself and went into his office and looked up my sister’s number in the phone book and rang her and said her father was at the Junction dressed like a lord and waiting for someone who has not been alive in a very long time.
—Tom Dwyer will have a mighty long wait, Coleman said.
He laughed then. Laughed to be kind. Doing his best to temper things.
Hannah drove like a lunatic to the Junction. Her son buckled up in the backseat.
—Ye all brought me no luck. Ye cost me and your mother way too much. All the good and the not so good I did for yer sake.
Our father made those remarks on the way home. The last he said twice. Hannah ignored them. She’d never allow remarks like those to sink in and harden and darken over time like coal. And it took me a while to drag them out of her.
—But what did he say to you in the car, Hannah. He must have said something.
—I forget, Jimmy. He did say things. He was raving, I told you I forget.
—You don’t forget, Hannah. Tell me the things he said—
And so Hannah gets him home. She rings the doctor. The doctor arrives. Fluid in the chest. And something along the lines of dementia. What’s to be expected at his age. A storm in the head that will in due time exhaust itself. Dreams turn into distress when the hands and the mind are idle all the day long. A few days’ rest and there should be improvement. If not give a ring. The doctor told Hannah things like that.
He died two mornings later. Hannah was bringing him his tea, boiled egg, toast, and the newspaper. Her husband had left for work. She could still hear his car going out the path. The child was asleep. And the moment she opened their room door she said she knew he was gone up to heaven to be with our mother. The room felt freezing cold and this caused her to drop Auntie Tess’s tray. Which made this massive clatter and broke right down the middle. Split like a brittle bone. The egg, the mug, the tea, the toast, the unopened newspaper tossing and splashing across their floor. Hannah ran down the blue corridor to the hall and rang the ambulance. Next she rang her husband’s job in Shannon and left a message. (This was before everyone owned a mobile phone, but not too long before.) Then she rang Tess and Anthony. They were only a few hours away. Next she rang Stephen. He was still living in Berlin, and could easily catch a Ryanair flight to Shannon. But Hannah had no way of ringing me.
Brendan and I took eight or nine days to drive from Boston to Michigan. We took the New York State Thruway. I forget why that route, but we stopped in Utica, Syracuse, and Buffalo, where we visited parks and battlegrounds, read inscriptions on the statues of generals and soldiers, and read about our refugees who built the canals and started the unions, and about the Indians who once owned the whole shebang, but were slaughtered, starved, and tricked out of it. A downpour hit us in Erie, Pennsylvania, and we stopped in the breakdown lane for almost an hour. It was like oil pouring down, the thickest, darkest, most blinding rain I’ve ever witnessed, and I sometimes think this was when he died, though I also think that thinking is nonsense. The morning after was filled with brilliant sunlight. We walked
along the shore and looked across the calm lake to Canada. The sky was a shrill blue. We stopped in Ashtabula because of the Dylan song, we ate corn dogs, and I might have spent another day in Cleveland staring at the rubbish of rock stars. We took turns driving the Chevrolet Camaro. Four days before leaving Boston, we’d bought it from a guitarist I met in that bar on Central Square. On a few Sunday evenings he and I hung out in the foul alleyway behind the bar. He told me about the blues while we smoked opium. And that was the furthest you ever escaped from them. By the time we got to Buffalo the car floor was littered with the wrappers of burgers, French fry cartons, Coke cans, empty cigarette boxes, beer cans and bottles. I drove the Ohio Turnpike. Did it all the way in the left lane.
Two days before I left Boston, I rang Hannah to say Brendan and I were heading inland. It was going to take a few days. Hannah said I was mad for the road. My mother used to say that—mad for the road—but not once in a good way. And Hannah told me she’d run into Nora Lyons in Limerick city, she’d given Nora my phone number and address, and Nora was going to give them to Kevin. I told Hannah I’d recently run into Kevin on the street.
—How was he, Hannah said.
—Oh, fine, you know, I said.
—Small world, Jimmy.
—Maybe too small, Hannah.
Hannah said the news was Kevin was getting married to someone rich, and the Lyons family was flying over for the wedding. I said Kevin told me. Hannah asked if I was invited to the wedding.
—How’s the father? I asked.
—A bit odder than usual, Jimmy.
—Well, I have to fly, Hannah, but tell them all I asked for them.
• • •
—You can move forward now, my dear.
Zoë nudged me.
The Visitors Page 10
