a shower of cunts and nothing but
his curse upon us that day with both of us standing there looking at each other in disbelief, not knowing what to do and when I took a walk around the house I saw that he had the curtains drawn in every window and the back door locked with no way in so there was nothing for it but to leave, we’d come back and try again in a couple of days but then
he sold off all his livestock and hens leaving just himself and Rex alone in the house now with the two gates coming into the yard barred also, secured with two balks of timber tied from pillar to pillar so that the postman had to climb up over the sod fence and walk down the path to shove the letters and mass cards under the door which was bolted also and
all this happened before Onnie’s month’s mind mass
by which time also he had begun to show the first signs of letting himself go, growing a beard that bristled out from his jaws in a way that threatened to engulf his whole head – a genuinely shocking sight on a man who had been clean-shaven his whole life but who now would not hear a word against it saying that his father had had a beard and his father before him had had one and so too had our Lord – a better man than either of them – and if a beard was good enough for those men then it was good enough for him also and that was an end to it just as it most certainly
marked the point at which he really began to neglect himself, not eating right and no wash or shave either, with the same clothes on him day in, day out while he grew thinner and thinner inside them, the shirt slack over his narrow chest and the trousers barely hanging on his hips – but the hair and beard still growing, thickening like a furze bush around his head – and no fire or heat on in the house anymore so that it got damp and filthy with black mould growing down the walls and nothing but the smell of piss meeting me at the door those few times he let me in to see him with a few bits and pieces to find him sitting there in the dark, all alone in the glare of the television screen looking at Bosco or some other kid’s programme and a can of fly spray on the table when
one evening he fell asleep in front of the open fire, sods burning and coals falling onto the hearth and he woke up to find his wellingtons soldered to his feet, melted in the heat around his ankles and he would have been in serious trouble only he had good wool socks on under them and he managed to hobble to the kitchen table where he got out the bread knife to cut them away, socks and trousers and wellingtons lying in a heap in the middle of the floor, the smell of burnt rubber thick in the air as
I stood appalled in the murk of that room and said
you can’t live like this
like what
like this, the state of the place
and you’d know how I should live
I know that there has to be something better than this and
a look came over his face which stopped me
I saw her last night he said
you saw who
Onnie, I saw Onnie
Jesus Christ, Dad, Mam’s been dead for three months and
I woke up last night and she was standing at the end of the bed looking at me – she had two bags of shopping with her and do you know what she said
she’s dead, Dad, I know it’s hard
she said, go over and see the state of the grave I’m lying in and
I’ve told you before, we’ve been through this – you can’t put a headstone on the grave yet, you have to give the ground time to settle – eleven months to a year, that’s the usual waiting time with
his eyes brimming as if his broken heart had opened some spring which flowed up through him and him standing there alone in the half-light of the kitchen, the dog out eating the grass along the margins of the road and
sometimes, if you were passing you might see him at the gable of the house, leaning on the stick and smoking, watching the cars going to town in the evening but, if you stopped to talk to him over the fence he’d take off like a frightened hen and you’d hear him pulling the bolts on the door from the road and you could imagine him sitting there alone in the waning light of the kitchen, watching the television, wasting away in confusion and neglect while winter closed in around him and the television stayed on but the bulbs started to go out in one room after another as doors were closed for the last time on these same rooms with bottles and unread newspapers piled up on the chairs and the dresser and the sofa under the window, while all around him the house gradually came apart with paint peeling and curtains fraying and doors swelled in their frames from the dampness
till the day
I stood outside the barred gate pleading with him to sign a grant application form so that he could get the house renovated, the whole thing sealed and insulated, windows and doors and the whole lot painted, all he had to do was put his name to the bottom of the application form, that’s all he had to do, I’d look after the rest, organise the paperwork and contract the job out to a registered builder, all he had to do was sign his name, but would he sign
would he fuck sign
I will in my fuck sign, he said, from inside the gate,
I’ll sign fuck-all or put an X on anything either, he roared, coming here with your forms looking for signatures – by Jesus, you must think I’m fierce innocent if you expect me to fall for that one – but I’ll tell you one thing now and not two things – I know well what your game is – I’ll sign that form and the next thing I’ll find myself in the county home and this house will be sold out from under me and yourself and your sister dividing it up between ye, isn’t that what you’re up to, isn’t that what you’re after
it’s not what I’m up to and it’s not what I’m after and
like fuck it’s not – take your application form and your grant and your contracts and fuck off back to where you came from and
that’s the thanks I got
standing outside the gate waving the form at him, begging him to see reason and telling him that it was only for his own good and that this was the right thing to do and all I wanted was that he’d have a roof over his head and warmth – a small bit of comfort living on his own and, my hand to god, I had no intention of putting him in the county home or any other home for that matter because this was his home, I knew that, no one wanted to put him away and
my heart clenched in my chest with a desperate love for this man who had been the hero of my life but who now was so confused he was incapable of seeing who or what was good for him, and this above all else cut me to the bone, how a man who had walked so sure-footedly through the world could now misread it so completely that he could see no good in anything anymore, not even in his own son, me standing outside the gate with my temper gone and my patience gone but still pleading with him and for myself that he should
sign the fucking form, for the love of Jesus
talking to the back of his head now because he was hobbling away down the path to the house and I watched him go inside and pull the door behind him, and even at that distance I could hear the bolts ramming home, the sound echoing through my head as I stood there a few minutes longer, hardly able to move from heartbreak and despair before I eventually pushed myself off the gate and drove back home to phone Eithne that evening and tell her what had happened, beginning a long argument with her and losing my temper, trying to convince her that I had done all I could do to help him, begged and pleaded with him, pushed the forms under his nose but it was no good, nothing was any good, there was no talking to him and
what the hell did she want me to do
what more could I do
wrestle him to the ground and force him to sign, was that what she wanted because if she thought she could do a better job she was welcome to try, I was at my wits’ end with the whole fucking thing and
and
it’s all grief, all that anger is grief, Eithne said at the other end
what do you mean grief, falling out with everyone, abusing people, that’s the funniest grief I’ve ever come across
anger is a well-known stage of the grievi
ng process so
I could feel a geyser of frustration coming to a head within me
Jesus, Eithne, don’t go giving me that pop psychology shite – I’m his son and if he can’t
if this is the way you spoke to him I’m not surprised that
I slammed down the phone, or she slammed down the phone or both of us slammed down the phone together, either way the call ended with a bang and I sat there in a rage before going to the cupboard and opening a bottle of Jameson to sit drinking in this kitchen till the early hours of the morning and that was the last word I spoke to Eithne and
it was around this time also, and for whatever reason, that he upped and
bought a new tractor
I swear to Jesus
a span new John Deere, a small 5E, about 60 hp, and with no cab on it, reminding me of the old Massey Ferguson 35 he had long ago – standing in the yard, gleaming in its green paint and god knows what it cost, I was afraid to ask him because he began talking straight away of his plans to hire out to agricultural contractors for silage-making and turf-cutting and so on, with him driving of course – this man who could hardly walk without the aid of a stick, the power in his legs gone, him near crippled with dampness in his bones – and he housed the tractor in the old shed at the end of the yard and put a fine galvanised roof over it, but that’s as much as he ever did with it because if he started it five or six times after that that was about the height of it, he never did any work with it, none that I ever knew of anyway – who was going to hire a man who could hardly walk, tractor or no tractor, he could hardly pull himself up on it – so it stayed there in the shed with the same fill of diesel it had arrived in the yard with and whenever he wasn’t gazing at it from the kitchen window he was out with a cloth wiping the windscreen or buffing the headlamps, polishing it like it was his special toy, which of course it was because this was his second childhood and all this care and attention for a fucking tractor when his own house was going to wrack and ruin about him with dampness running down the walls of every room and a scraw of black mould now growing in the bathroom but
he hardly had the tractor in the yard a month when he sat into it and turned it on and it stalled stone dead on him, no stir out of it, lights and gauges coming on all right but no spark or turn on the ignition, not a gig out of it and when, by chance, I went over to him that evening he was looking into the engine with all its mass of wiring and electronics, all confused and clueless and I had a look at it myself but couldn’t get her started so I put in a call to the garage where he’d bought it and got a man on the other end who remembered the sale and was surprised to hear the complaint and who asked the usual questions
no, the battery had a full charge
no, all the wiring was connected as far as I could see and
yes, the lights were coming up
after which he stalled for a moment before saying
leave it with me a minute, I’ll get back to you
which he did, fair play, and I took the call at the far end of the yard watching my father standing beside the dead tractor, looking upset and bewildered as I called to him
you won’t believe this
believe what
seemingly your tractor’s ignition has been disabled by satellite
what
yes, by satellite, an anti-theft device
they’re saying I’m a thief
no one’s saying you’re a thief
I’m not a thief
there’s been some delay in your payment registering, so their system has no record yet of a transaction, as far as the system is concerned the tractor is stolen and
so it is saying I’m a thief
it’s not saying that, it’s a security device fitted to a lot of plant and farm machinery, it’ll be switched on in an hour and
with nothing else to be done we turned to look up at the sky as if we might spot that enabling pulse or spark from on high, neither of us with any clue what we were waiting for, whether or not the satellite was in some sort of stationary orbit over us or whether we had to wait for it to rise above the horizon before it would reach out across the heavens and turn the ignition on our tractor and
it was easy to feel foolish standing there on the wet concrete looking up at the grey sky, neither of us with anything to say as the moment deepened to that feeling of helpless stupidity when there is nothing you can do before he threw up his hands and turned for the house without a word, the wild head on him and the hobbling walk
where are you going
but no word out of him as he pulled the door behind him and it might be hindsight putting this shade on the whole thing but I’ve always believed that was the moment he parted company with the world, both of them with nothing to say turning their backs on each other because
a couple of weeks later he was found lying on the concrete walk outside the house by a neighbour over the village, Mattie Moran, who was on his way into town to collect his dole when he spotted him from the road and pulled over to hop in across the wall and go down on his knee beside him, putting his ear on his chest to hear if he was breathing before picking him up and laying him into the back seat of the car, stick and all, telling me afterwards that
it was like lifting a bundle of sticks – there was more meat on a sparrow’s ankle and he
drove him to the hospital where he stayed for the next three weeks and they washed and fed him while they ran all those tests which finally revealed the pancreatic cancer that would kill him within a couple of weeks, by which time there was less than six stone of him in the bed and only that he still had the wild head of hair on him you could hardly see his face in the middle of the pillow, but I combed it and did my best to tidy it and then I put him in his grandchild’s confirmation suit because he was now so shrunken none of his own would fit him and we lowered his coffin into the grave beside Onnie on the twenty-seventh of November and I stood there with Mairead and Agnes and Darragh beside me, the four of us huddled together in the chilly sunshine reciting a decade of the Rosary, the First Glorious Mystery, the Resurrection, our murmured prayers carried away on the breeze and while standing there, on the lip of his grave I thought that this was surely a day for the big questions
life, the universe, the whole fucking thing
nothing less seemed adequate to the moment and I did indeed find myself sifting through the sorrow of his last year and wondering to myself whose idea of justice was satisfied in his final confusion and humiliation and to what end or purpose had he been allowed to waste away in such confused, ragged ignominy, these questions sifting through my mind beneath the murmured responses to the Rosary but
I must have been wrong
it was neither the time nor the place for such questions, for I stood there under a November sky that had turned the colour of concrete and watched the gravediggers shovel the soil over his coffin when a man came up to me and said
I’m sorry for your loss, but he wouldn’t swap places with us now, he’s with Onnie and that was all he cared about and
he was hardly three months buried when I went into Coffey’s and ordered a plain granite headstone and border with black and white quartz gravel to be put up before the month was out, which drew another call from Eithne, giving out to me that she hadn’t been consulted and that it was too soon to put up a headstone plus a whole slew of other things and I told her that she shouldn’t feel left out, that I would split the bill with her, she shouldn’t worry about that and
you know well that’s not what I mean she said
do I, well I’ll tell you this – it won’t be your bed he’ll come sitting on the end of when he comes back to haunt
for Christ’s sake Marcus, she said
so I banged the phone down once more and it would be a full six months before I talked to her again, when she called to the house and put out the hand-of-peace with tears and hugs, her anger well behind her, mine also burned away, and telling me that she had been to the graveyard and that she appreciat
ed the job I’d done, a really nice job and that it suited them both, not flashy in any way and thanks for writing
Erected by the Family
that was nice, she appreciated it and sure enough she pulled out her pen and wrote me a cheque for half the cost of the whole thing and there wasn’t another word said about it as we sat there realising for the first time that we were without a father or mother and
does that make us orphans now, Eithne wondered, sniffling into a hankie, do you think
we might be a bit old for that, two middle-aged adults with families, I think those things rule us out but
I’m not so sure, I didn’t know there was an age limit on it, besides, I feel orphaned and
her face softened into grief, both parents gone in little over a year, that’s hard, that’s very hard and
it is and it was
twelve months which pushed us into a brother-sister intimacy new to both of us, with a desire to reach out with phone calls and texts passing between us just to make sure we were all right, even if that was precisely the question we never asked as we kept our messages to a deadpan of information exchange and gossip, jokes and quips, these bland words hiding and nurturing this new and baffling need for each other which grew from our shared loss, nothing odd in it, the fate of half the world, but none the less desolate for it, which even as we sat there in the sitting room that day was not anything we could foresee, me and the sister reaching out to each other and
still
still something twitchy and indistinct about this day
now into the early afternoon, twenty to one by the clock on the wall and
that buzz in the radio sounds as if the signal is coming through a blizzard of interference, some sort of grainy impedance breaking up the songs no matter what station it’s tuned to, national or local, every voice and melody reduced to a grainy burr of static, nothing coming through at all but the certainty of being wholly displaced here in this house, my own house and the uncanny feeling of dragging my own after-image with me like an intermittent being, strobing and flickering even while
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