by Sara Dillon
She phoned me first. Dad’s just gone, he’s gone, she said.
He hadn’t wanted any of us to die first. My sister Marie had done that, but apart from her, he was determined none of the rest of us would.
You’ll be fine without me, he used to say to Gramma.
When Jack wished him many happy returns on his last birthday, he had said, No, not for me, Jack.
He wrote me, quoting Jefferson on death, like a summer shower, not to be feared and yet not to be wished for.
The night he died there was a terrible thunderstorm; the lightning lit up the house, the rain fell horribly across the lawns.
I want to get drunk, I said, and Gramma didn’t even mind. It was a sensible response. I poured everyone brandy, out of one of Daddy’s decanters.
I had asked him to tape the story of his life, and after he died, I found the blank tape and the tape recorder on the table by his favorite chair, all ready to go.
Airports; 1994
I told Seanie when I’d be arriving.
Already, I dreaded the job and the Law Faculty building; dreaded meeting my new colleagues, having no idea what they wanted or expected from me. I still imagined that I would be going out every weekend to Galway to spend time with Seanie, to hang out in Turlough, to start over again in the rainy fields.
I need to ease into it; I want to be in the West a while before I head to Dublin.
Whatever you need, pet, Seanie whispered into the phone, ready for all eventualities.
I thought he knew I was coming into Shannon; I’d made it so plain, I will be in the West first, I’d said, over and again. I couldn’t face Dublin right off the bat, I’ll be in Turlough, I had said.
I arrived as one does, into the surprise of an abrupt change in the weather, the light, the lingo, pushing my cart full of bags, as after all, I was planning to stay until my Christmas visit home. I looked around tentatively, wondering which direction Seanie would come bounding out from. I pushed, then stopped, and looked, and wondered. But Seanie was nowhere to be seen. The crowds quickly scattered and dispersed, floated away into the early morning mist. I stood with my mountain of bags, looking around with a bit more annoyance in evidence now, looking at my watch, checking it against the airport clock, making a face, I have no doubt.
And so the first hour passed, and the second.
I went through all possible scenarios for Seanie being this late. I was inherently disorganized; had I given him the wrong date? But we had just spoken several days ago; there was little chance he had got the date mixed up. He wasn’t that terribly busy; the idea of an emergency or an unexpected obligation didn’t ring true.
At some point, however much I disliked the telephone, I would have to phone Seanie’s house and find out where on earth he was.
The airport had lost its early morning buzz and mystery. It had gone quiet, workaday. A few planes came in from English cities; the airport staff passed by, gossiping and laughing.
He-llo? Seanie’s mother answered, her voice on the telephone sounding far away, fearful.
It’s Catherine, Mrs. Mannion. I was wondering where Seanie might be.
Well, isn’t he with you? He left to get you last night.
Last night? It wasn’t making sense to me.
He went off to Dublin, to meet you, she said, vaguely accusatory.
Of all the incredible, moronic things. I looked at the bags piled high on my cart; the clock on the wall; and thought of my letter on official letterhead, telling me that I was the first choice of the committee, and what my salary as a newly minted Irish civil servant would be.
Holy God, I managed. If he phones, tell him I am at Shannon, and will he phone and page me there?
Hours passed before I heard from him. I had wandered around, in and out of newsstands, in and out of the restroom, in and out of the open plan restaurant. The planes from England came and left again. I knew clearly that I couldn’t stand Seanie, absolutely could not stand him and never wanted to see him again.
Yet there I was, waiting for him to page me.
What the hell happened? was my opener to him.
Ah, pet, I couldn’t believe it. Since you were going to work in Dublin, I just thought.
Well, do you have the car? Can you come and get me? It would take several hours, but at least it would be progress.
I didn’t bring the car at all. Mammy thought my tires might get slashed. Sure, I took the bus.
So where did you think I was?
I wasn’t sure.
He asked me could I get to Dublin on my own. I pushed my bags around from counter to counter until I found someone who could tell me the bus schedules. I remember pulling and tugging my huge bags onto busses, changing, waiting, standing in line.
I had told Seanie I would meet him at Heuston Station at such and such a time, and eventually, after the various busses and cabs, I was dropped off at the appointed locale overlooking the grey Liffey, me and my mountain of bags and my letter of approval.
I sat on the biggest of the bags and put my head in my hands. I wasn’t sure where Seanie would be, or why I was meeting him. Some drunks walked past and made remarks: You need someone to carry your things, love, or the like.
Pretend you do not see me, I shouted at them. Pretend I am not here, I am invisible to you!
Somehow or other, I found him, at the end of that ridiculous day. He told me he had got us a guest house to stay in, lovely and clean. But it was gloomy and depressing, and I told him I wanted to go back to Turlough and spend some time sorting myself out before looking for a flat in Dublin. So we made our way to the Turlough scene with whatever fortitude I could salvage, the country bands, the after-hours chipper.
My tone had become hectoring with him, more or less overnight. I could see the madness of it unfolding before me; would I stay a year, or three? Would I move here, would I bring him around to my cousins? He still lived with his Mammy on the farm, and went off to his job most days. He told me that Mammy would turn the farm over to him in due course; that his brother Eamon had moved into town with his family ages ago and had no designs on it. Mammy was tall and tough as nails, and wore flowered dresses very youthful for her.
She would set out the tea with lettuce, and sliced tomato and salad cream.
This is our culture, Catherine, now, she would tell me, poking the air with her fork, a reference to the teatime cuisine.
The castle; 1990s
Up the winding road I went to the Law Faculty; then back down again, walking always, in the rain, early, late, in the constant rain.
I sat at the Dean’s enormous desk in the front room of the restored castle, overlooking the rest of the university, most of it designed as it happened by a Polish architect during the Cold War—what about that for a choice?—and asked him, But what do you want me to teach?
Perhaps it didn’t matter to him. I was to teach something or other. Something international; something about Japan, New York, about being a citizen of the world. A bit hard to prepare for that.
Well, now, Dr. Darcy, Catherine, why don’t you read the GATT with them?
I fell to my task with a mad devotion. I sat on the bed in the student room I was renting until I could find a flat, turning the pages of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, making notes, copious notes, turning the back shelves of the library inside out in my insistence on finding every scrap I could, as the days ticked down towards the starting line. GATT, GATT and more GATT. And thus began my international trade career, born in terror.
On weekends I took the train to Roscommon where Seanie would collect me. There was a distinct chill from the direction of my former Galway friends as they sought to show their disapproval of Seanie. Seanie’s Mammy, Mrs. Mannion, occasionally put me up in a spare room in their house. On Saturday evenings we would all sit about and listen to Fáilte Isteach and then Seanie and I would take to the roads, out and about in Turlough and environs, listening to country music.
All I really want you to do is tea
ch me to jive, I told Seanie. Jiving was the swinging style of country western dance they did in East Galway, all of them experts at it from an early age. I had never learned it properly in the old days; I was merely faking it when I tried. I asked him, repeatedly, and in that hectoring way I used with him. Yet he resisted. He would try to jive with me, but not teach me. Just follow your feet, he would say, meaninglessly. Swing now, and now, with emphasis.
Seanie was good at it, jiving. They all were. They learned with sisters and cousins, in sitting rooms and kitchens, from the time they were little, until it was second nature, like walking. The fact that Seanie wouldn’t teach me to jive, systematically, until I had mastered it, was placed on the ever-growing list of grievances I had against him.
I never missed a weekend in visiting Clement. He was still in the old monastery that overlooked the exact place he’d been born, the very house. I never went out to Turlough without phoning him, without getting someone to drop me over, and he would have out on a little table in the parlor a small glass of brandy and an ashtray. Rain or shine, he met me at the door with the same look of delight. It had come as a real surprise to him that I had come back to Ireland to live and work.
As for Seanie, Clement only said, probably without meaning it for a moment, He seems a nice lad, Cat. He amused me with his imitations of each of our cousins, as well as the other locals and even the superior of the order; for instance, your man who went to America on a Chuesday and returned on a Tuesday. He pitched his voice high and blinked to make me laugh.
I told him that I hated law, hated it with a passion, and that I would learn Irish; somehow I would master it.
I’d say you will, he would say, agreeing with me, giving me the benefit of any doubt.
It wasn’t as if I’d lost contact with him over the years; I managed to sneak over now and again during vacations, being struck each time at how good it was to see our boys in thick wooly jumpers park the cars at Shannon, the salt wind in their hair. I even brought Gramma and Daddy a few times, sometimes went on my own, and I would see Clement without fail, he with a broad smile on his face, welcoming, ironic, arms out to catch me. Cat, Cat, he would murmur, as if in heaven to see me again.
And each time we had to say goodbye, he would walk out onto the high garden, the black dog running after him, and wave his hand up high, navy blue sweater over his habit, smiling and shouting, Next year in Timard, Turlough!
Over and again, week after week, I would walk up the gravel path of the monastery and ring the bell. The outer vestibule was tiled in chilly black and white; the sun would appear and disappear through the slotted glass.
There you are, he would say, laughing under his breath, And how are you getting on in Dublin, Cat?
It was a familiar enough question, as so many went to Dublin for work; but as applied to me, how odd and unexpected. Had he ever imagined I would live there, or be so much talked about again?
But things in Dublin were cold and nasty. Some in the Faculty referred to me as an “exotic;” others hardly spoke. I was given tutorials on the English Sale of Goods Act. I went into my office even on weekends, walking up the hill to the castle, opening the great door, up the deserted stairs. The ivy grew thick and fast, covering over my windows in short order. I wrote up reams of notes, on the passing of the title as the goods cross the ship’s rail, on marine insurance, on bankruptcies and thwarted international purchases, letters of credit that moved forward with the power of a freight train.
I found a flat, of which I used only one room, scrunched up on the side of my bed alone, still in all my valor trying to start over and forget, reading Dubliners and Portrait of the Artist, right from the moo cow and Dante’s velvet hairbrushes, one green and one maroon.
Elmore; 2007
I remembered it and yet was in it at the same time; rather like being in Galway in that sense. I remembered everything; the way Daddy became animated, childlike whenever he came back to the Northeast Kingdom; the wildflowers we called paintbrush; the sound of the waterfalls in the woods. I had never liked waterfalls, as unwelcoming as a cold shower, could never understand why people travelled so far to see them.
Back came the warmth after all that snow and cold, all in a rush across our yard, the children saw it, too, the sun returning and the wildflowers springing up as far as you could see.
I sat at the computer in the public library in my usual way, and after a long silence, saw another message from John Merrill. It was like one of those impossibly wonderful dreams, where you are flying or being kissed by a prince.
I wrote to Calvin:
Merrill tells me he is going to have back surgery. I would like to go see him, maybe after he is better. Do you ever think of going? Do you ever think of those days? Are you hiding, or something else? Maybe it is time to tell me. The kids are well; we survived a winter.
This sounded a bit too much like Little House on the Prairie. But in fact this summer, I wouldn’t have to dread the season’s progress, fret about my age and the passing of the long days into the shorter days. I could linger over the New Fiction table at the bookshop and, even dismissing much of it as junk, I could take up what I wanted, I could bring home my books in a bag, I could get one for Emmet about a truck, one for Madina about a heroic girl in history.
It’s true, as Lily Briscoe thought, that it is terrible to want and want and not to have, and certainly I wanted and wanted and did not have. But it was better than wanting and wanting and not having, and also having to be a lawyer.
Nothing new, no coast of Cornwall, no unspoiled Greek island, just Elmore and its Moose Crossing signs. Elmore where you could lie on your back in a field on a summer’s night and look up and see a million stars, shooting, twirling. I had written a poem about Venus Over Wheelock and thought I would send it to John Merrill. He would still like it; he was still there, miraculous as it was, he was still there.
Park Baun; 1990s
After I decided to move to Ireland in the early 90s, I literally went shopping on the back roads, and that was how I found it. I had a savings bond Daddy had given me years back, worth eight thousand dollars. Una had come over to Galway for a visit and we drove together up and down the back roads, and I stood admiring the way the fields ran off down towards the far off sea, maybe suggesting that one day it would all be gone, returned to the water, but for now, the hedgerows and vistas hid their little deserted houses. Una pulled up the car in front of the empty house at Park Baun, and sighed. How she loved buildings.
It’s fabulous, she said. It was drowning in gnarled bushes and brambles and piles of old turf. No one had lived in it for years, that was certain. We wandered inside, and were struck by the smell of old concrete and long dead fires. In some rooms, the floorboards had either rotted or been pulled out, and there was simply dirt where the floor used to be. It was dead silent within; only the strong sense of an earlier form of life, its moments of high drama flattened out by time.
It was the sort of house where you should always, in fine weather, leave the door ajar.
We could see a good long way out through the hedgerows, the grass sliding off into an artificial plantation of evergreen, animals in the distance, cattle, horses; for whatever reason, we had the sense that we were being watched or soon would be.
I felt I had to have this house at Park Baun, and sent Seanie off on a mission to make my case. There were no secrets in East Galway, so as soon as Seanie entered the farmer’s parlor that evening, saying in his whispery, convoluted way that an American lady wanted the house, it was understood far and wide with the immediacy with which news is snatched and sent forth, that Seanie’s girlfriend wanted to buy it. It was assumed that Seanie would fix it up and the two of us would live there.
That was not, of course, my assumption.
The farmer agreed to sell it to me, through Seanie, for the amount of the bond Daddy had given me, the equivalent of around five thousand old Irish punts.
Una, who had gone back home to Boston, was totally on bo
ard with this news. She, of course, adored buildings, walls, rooms, chimneys. She promised that she and Sven would come and help me fix it up; they would paint, they would garden.
The sun shone through the cracked windows, and in Park Baun, a settlement of six houses, two of them completely deserted, a settlement that used to have ten or more crowded, lively households, it was the nineteenth century.
And so it started. I got hold of local workmen, and they arrived in haphazard fashion, first a drywall in one room, floor tiles in another. I stood with them and gazed at the hand carved mantelpieces; they assumed I was mad when they heard I cared about these obsolete items, as I’d instructed them never to interfere with an original feature. There was as much chat as work being done. Old fixtures from country bathrooms were hauled in, installed as well as could be, a hot press, a newish window where the old one could not be salvaged.
The moths came, and the mice, the frogs and even the foxes. Badgers were always invisible; they were said to be everywhere but managed never to be seen, even in the headlights of a car at night. Every Friday evening I drove from Dublin in the rain, arriving and starting a fire by myself, running back and forth between the enormous turf pile in the front garden, into the safety and silence of the house. The widow next door would appear as soon as smoke started up my chimney.
Tis good to have you here again, Cat. It does get lonely and I am saying my prayers all the time, she said.
Seanie brought me a sofa, dragging it behind his car on a sort of makeshift trailer. Still, it was months before I could bring myself to stay there all night. I generally got a room over one of the nicer of the pubs in Turlough instead. Seanie and I would sit in the crowded bar, and I would give out about Dublin and the Law Faculty, and Seanie would laugh, Ah, pet, I don’t know how you do it.
