The year following his dismissal, Dermot stayed on in the city trying to keep a Rathmines flat he couldn’t afford, pretending his circumstances hadn’t changed, although there were pubs that wouldn’t serve him, and a woman who, upon seeing him, made the sign of the cross. He took to the drink because it was expected, then because it was needed. Michael had put him up when the flat was let out from under him; he’d been two months back on rent, and everything he owned, a couch, table and books, was stacked into Michael’s living-room corner. Dermot left town the morning he received Sophie’s letter. Packed two bags and caught the first bus near Michael’s flat. Felt purposeful, but then didn’t know where to get off. Rode the 15A for three hours until the conductor ordered him to pick a stop. He sat on the curb near Georges Street, watched people coming and going. Beside him, two boys ate a bag of toffee. The older boy offered him one and he took it. He read the letter again. Truth be told, he hadn’t expected it, was angry that Sophie felt he had to be informed. He imagined she must want something from him. He read the letter again and again on the way to the bus station. Got on the first coach headed out of Dublin, formed a response in his head. When he felt ready to take up a pen they were already closing in on Clifden. The gears shifting as the bus groaned up the hill from Roundstone, then stopped at the rise to pick up an old man and his grandson. The boy was about three. The old man pulled him up the steps with his hand held out behind him. They sat in the front seats and the child hung over the railing, looking not at the road, but down at the floor. A woman carrying a cello case boarded at the crossroad beyond. Sophie had included a return address but Dermot never replied. He folded up the letter and the bus clambered on. He was thirty-four.
Flagon lets out a series of clipped barks and Dermot squints trying to make out who it might be at the edge of his field. When the boy steps out of the shade of the ash tree, Dermot sees it is Sean O’Riordan come to start the fence. A young girl trails behind him, maybe four or five years old, with a mess of curly auburn hair and quick, curious eyes. The eyes settle on Dermot. Already he craves a drink; instead, he looks around as if a pile of wood planks, a wire bale, might materialize out of thin air. He and Michael had told the boy Monday, but Dermot meant next week.
“Hiya.” Sean puts out his hand.
“Right.”
Dermot kicks the old tennis ball towards the house and Flagon takes off to chase it. It settles in the gorse that cropped up a few years back under the ledge of the kitchen window. Dermot’s been meaning to clear it. The girl lets go of Sean’s hand and walks over to it. Roots around in the grass. The Border collie wagging her tail.
“Mind yerself.” Sean starts towards her, but the girl pulls out the old ball, lifts it up for him to see, grinning.
“That’s Mary. I’m looking after her,” the boy says, glancing around the yard.
“I haven’t got the wood posts yet,” Dermot says. “I meant for you to come next week.” Still, he could have tried for the posts. Yesterday Dermot had asked Fitch if he could take some of the wood from his old byre which was mostly in planks out behind the house. The neighbour was gruff, didn’t think the fence was a good idea. It made him suspect that Dermot is selling.
“Is it the work next door?” Fitch had nodded in the direction of the bungalows. “The tourists?”
“No, no, it’s not the tourists.”
Fitch stepped out onto the porch and Dermot had to move back a pace.
“I’m thinking of getting a horse.” It was ridiculous to say it, a flat-out lie. “For Abbey,” he added, which also wasn’t true.
Fitch eyed him a minute. “It’s the tourists driving me.” He looked over Dermot’s shoulder towards the cottage and scratched his head. The shadow from the bungalows nearing the road. “In the sixties I taught at the College.” He studied Dermot’s face. “Worked with Canon McAlinney who’d started the Gaeilgeoirí. An aunt of the Folans’ worked in his house. You’d know the students. Niall’s father, for one. And Niall came too, though I was retired then. We had great times.” A minute passed. “Now they’re all writing scripts for Tele Gael. Sobalchlár as Gaeilge.”
On the porch, Flagon, her tongue slung over the side of her mouth, watched Fitch as he pulled his hands from his pockets, turned to go in. Often he gave the dog handouts.
“Selling?” Fitch asked again, from the other side of the threshold.
“A horse.” Dermot didn’t know what else to say.
“Well, take the wood.” He’d offered it, gave Dermot the go-ahead to clear it away, cut the beams into posts. Dermot could have started on it over the weekend but he’d yet to organize himself, still had to buy the wire. And now, here is the boy, kicking dirt around with his boot, waiting.
In his pocket Dermot finds a two-Euro coin. He extends it to the boy, as thanks for trekking out. Sean bounces it once on his palm, then sits down on a grassy patch of the yard, rests his elbows on his bent knees. Over by the house Flagon is chasing the girl around, eliciting a high-pitched giggle. Still uncertain of what to do, Dermot gives Sean a once-over: big cuffs at the bottom of his jeans, a bomber jacket, short hair, a tough look on his face. Then he turns and takes in the yard to see what the boy’s seeing, how it looks to a stranger. There’s the cottage, the thatch coming up near the front, the cracked window on the side wall, the light yellow curtain that Abbey’d put up over the kitchen sink. Against the wall there’s a rusted bicycle, a number of plastic buckets under the trough, the initials DF scrawled on the side of them in black marker. A plastic bag of compost for the garden. And just behind the house, an almost invisible clothes-line. Two of Abbey’s shirts, three pairs of silky underwear suspended in the yard. Sean looks over at them and it occurs to Dermot that he should have taken them down.
Mary throws herself over Flagon’s neck, much to the Border collie’s dismay. The second time she does it, Flagon backs up, and the girl falls over the dog’s head, thunks down onto the dirt, gets up laughing.
“Wednesday, then?”
Sean looks up. “What time?”
“Noon?”
“All right.” And with that the kid stands up, wipes the back of his jeans. Takes the coin he’d been given, puts it back in Dermot’s hand.
The Sky on Its Axis
HEADING home across the back field, Sean tugs Mary along behind him. She’s breathing through her mouth like she always does. By the time they get to the bridge he can hear her panting. Coming up to old St. Éinde’s Sean walks around a hazel thicket, takes Mary into the church over the rubble of the western transept. The stones he’s been piling up by the side chapel are still there. The stink of the place remains the same: take-away containers in the corner of the close, two old sleeping bags in the chapel. Travelers hole up there some nights in good weather. Under the fourth pew on the left Sean and his friend Clancy keep a Lilt bottle filled with gin, a plastic bag tacked under the seat beside it containing rolling papers, blem, and a few acid tabs. Clancy’s brother gets the weed from a guy in Cleggan, the blotters from a cousin in Athenry.
Sean’s been coming to the church more often lately. If it’s dark and no one else is around he smokes a joint or drops some acid and leaves some money in its place. Then he goes out to the old stone wall that surrounds Éinde’s, takes three or four of the bigger stones from the top. Hauls them over to where Fitch’s field butts up against the church property. Climbs the fence, Fitch’s cows raising their heads. If he looks around long enough he can usually find a few more stones in the grass. He dumps them into a big pile. Then he starts arranging them. The acid kicks in. The sky tilts on its axis. The cows grow horns, the lights in the distant houses become eyes. The stones turn into constellations, his fingers running a commentary as he sets them down, so that Sean can look at his hands and listen to what each finger has to say: you worthless bastard / I’m with him / what’s the square root of seven-hundred and twenty-nine? / will ya look at Mary Conroy’s tits / who’s there? who’s there?
And when he’s done there are who
le constellations in Fitch’s back field, laid out in the leaning grasses. Some nights if Sean looks straight up it’s an exact reflection: stone for star, as if light shot down from the sky, hit the field, and was fixed there. A way of stopping the world. Even if just for a few hours.
“Are you cold?” Sean looks around the church, the damp wood, the puddles. Spots a pot without a handle at the foot of a column. He decides to take Mary home. There’ll be something on the telly. He can make them lunch. She lifts up her arms asking to be carried but he takes her hand instead. They start off slowly, Mary turning to look at the church as they head across the field. If he wanted to, Sean could tell her the story of how after she was born, a month too early, Sean’s mom brought him with her to Saint Éinde’s. He was twelve. Mary was in Galway Hospital. His father was … where? At the pub? No, he was at Uncle Jack’s getting the highchair.
That evening, standing in the door to his bedroom, Sean’s mother told him to get his shoes and come with her, give her a hand. They went out the back door and hiked across the three fields that sit between their house and the church. Sean pulled apart the barbed wire at the Greaney’s so his mother could squeeze through; she was against taking the byroad.
Once at the church, his mom walked over to where the north and east walls met. In the shadow Sean could make out shapes, objects jutting out in all directions. He went closer and saw a crutch leaning against the wall just away from the corner. Then two more. He caught a glimpse of an old coat, an arm brace, a pair of glasses with the light from the quarter moon trapped in the lens. A dozen more crutches and canes came into view as his eyes adjusted. There was a whole slew of things hanging up above on the wall, stacked or set on rusted nails that poked out of the stone. Every few inches there were divots from where the granite had come away. A pair of light blue baby pajamas lay on the ground by Sean’s right foot, holes in the sleeves and legs, the seams coming apart. Everything was damp, and the stench made him stand back. He stepped sideways onto a dog’s collar, lost his balance, almost fell. Beside him, his mother was unfolding a dish towel. Lying on her palm, on top of the white cloth, was something that looked like a short black rope, thin and curling like licorice, but dry. Like those black seed pods that made noise when you shook them. Picking the thing up in her hand, she reached out and set it over a nail. Watched to make sure it hung there, balanced. Then she said a prayer. He knew it was for Mary, so he prayed too. “Our Father, Who art in heaven Hallowed be Thy Name, thy kingdom come—” and he’d looked up to see what the black thing was doing, but it just hung there in front of them, like it was dead.
His mother’d never come back to the church, but Sean had. He knows every corner now. The crutches, the dog collar, baby clothes, the umbilical cord swept away during the first go at restoration. The Office of Public Works had wanted to rebuild the church, were starting to repair the transept before the funding was cut. Then they more or less dropped everything on the spot.
Sean thinks about those petitions often. Tries to remember what went where, how it hung on the wall. Wonders what people had hoped to get out of the act, what it felt like when they realized those things had been taken away. There is nothing now but mouldy pews and rubble, two good walls, a stash under the bench—Éinde’s falling apart stone by stone in a field that few people pass through. The grass up to Mary’s waist as they near the road, the thicket closing in.
Bonaventure
DERMOT walks towards the hardware store counter, past bins of nails and screws, a stack of boxed drill presses, feeling like the commonplace country man gone wrong. Everything’s modern in Galway now. The counter girl has on lipstick and two welts of blue eye shadow as if she’s at a bar on the night of a dance. And the customers, milling about in plumbing and electrical supplies aisles, seem Dublin-sophisticated. It’s getting hard to tell the locals from the tourists, the group queuing at the counter a barrage of rain jackets and wool sweaters. Somewhere behind Dermot a mobile phone rings, is answered with a man’s brisk “hello.”
Dermot tugs at his jeans where they sag at the waist. Runs his right hand through his hair, which won’t sit properly to begin with. He’d caught a glimpse of himself in the rearview mirror of Mrs. Sullivan’s VW. She’d picked him up when the Mini ran out of petrol and gave him a once over when he settled in, a sorry-your-good-days-are-gone-by-ya followed by a look that said whatever does a wee thing like that Canadian see in you? Mary Sullivan, Dermot knows, works in the kitchen at the big hotel in Spiddal, the place Abbey’s been trying to get work. She knows everyone’s doings. Dermot’s often wanted to say to her, “I’m not so bad,” and, “look at yourself.” She’s fifty and soft around the edges—thick brows, a double chin.
“Is it you, Mr. Fay?”
“It is.”
“Need a lift in?”
He’d hoisted the petrol can.
“I’ll take you.”
Took one last look at the Mini where it sat on the side of the road. Opened the door and got in.
“Now is it at the Lisheen Bar or the petrol station that I should drop you?”
At another time, even thirty years ago, he and the widow Sullivan might have been tossed together by circumstance, by lack of alternatives. Except now there is Galway, a micro-Dublin, expanding up and down the coast, population growing in leaps and bounds. A city so sophisticated and tourist-friendly it’s closing in on that other hub on the far side of the Island. Nothing but options now. Dermot remembers back to when there were three pubs in Galway. Now there are fifty, with piped fiddle music coming out of the stereo speakers that hang over the doorways, playing out into the streets, hoping to lure the tourists in.
In the queue at the hardware store, Dermot leans forward, tries to steal a glance at the watch protruding from the sleeve of the man in front of him. It occurs to him he’s missed decades, and now, after Abbey’s leaving, after the botched down-on-one-knee proposal, he is compulsive about clocks. It’s 2:25 in Galway, and in Dublin Abbey is probably at the end of the lunch rush, leaning against the bar, drinking water from a pint glass as she was the afternoon last autumn when he stopped by Connor’s to say hello. It is 2:25 and Dermot is mired in it, in accounting for the minutes, the three days that have passed since he walked up the bay road, the Mini and Abbey parked somewhere behind him. At Trinity he taught whole centuries in the scope of a term, entire lives rounded out nicely in the course of an hour. Bonaventure was born in 1217, he wrote about the externality of the world, an argument against Aristotle’s theology. These are the documents that remain. This is a Victorian interpretation, this is what we can glean from said article now. And time would wheel by at his will, all he had to do was close his mouth on the thirteenth century and open it up again starting with the word “Today.” Bonaventure in his wisdom had argued that everything which begins to be, begins by way of motion or change. And back then Dermot thought there was truth in it because he was in motion, time reeling by him, bullheaded, the future almost, nearly there.
Back at the cottage the ringer on the phone is still turned off. Abbey might have called a hundred times and he’d never know it. Once last night he was tempted to pick it up, see if he’d find her voice there at the other end. But he doesn’t want to talk to her, not yet, and he isn’t sure why. She’s been strange since the funeral; that is to be expected. But Abbey has never said much about her family, as if her parents have nothing to do with her now, as if they are a part of the past. No, something else has come between them. And Dermot can’t place what it is.
Ahead of him the man with the watch, broad-shouldered, moves forward a few steps as the queue shuffles along. Dermot tilts his head, the watch in plain view. 2:26. 2:27.
At the counter, Dermot orders ten dozen posts and a measure of wire to surround the field. He doesn’t ask the price, can’t imagine what he’s doing. Parcelling up the land with money he doesn’t have. Easy enough to say the bungalows are driving him to it—Holiday Plans that’ll house Dubliners in the off-season and tourists in t
he summer. Bord Fáilte books them on the net, in the tourist offices, the airports. Already he can see it, the nodding and waving from the gravel drive, “what’s your dog’s name?” asked again and again in varying accents, an endless parade of foreigners loading the family into their rented cars as they tip their caps at the Irishman next door. Maybe a fence will keep them from coming up to the windows, keep kids from straying into the yard. And, once the land is fenced, Dermot could rent it out to a local farmer. A source of income that would pay for the fence in a few months. The field, gone to seed, just stands there at any rate, Fitch’s cows wandering over through gaps in the old stone wall, the grass growing in leaps and bounds around them.
There’s comfort in this—coming into town, standing in a queue, a reminder that he can function, measure up. A reminder that these are his people and they know him. “Fay,” he says, as the girl writes up his order. She cracks her gum and with every stroke of the pen the bangles on her arm jingle.
“Address for delivery?” She looks up. And then he sees it—or maybe not—a smirk, flickering across her face. And what can she mean by that? Old man, or dirty old man, I know about you and she’s half your age, or my sister goes to Trinity and we all know. Either way, if it is there, it’s fleeting, because already she’s holding the pen out in the air, looking to the next person while Dermot signs his name.
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