by Phelan, Tom;
As Pops went into the darkness near the door, he responded to Barlow’s question in a tired voice. “I’ll tell you all together when everyone gets their clothes on and comes into the kitchen. Put on your socks and shoes, the weather has changed. Everything’s damp.”
The children sat around the kitchen table shivering, the three boys with hands buried in crotches, the cold kitchen reminding Barlow of the Lambs’ warm kitchen and the lovely smell when Missus Lamb grated nutmeg into the curranty-cake dough on Saturday nights.
Kits, the youngest, clung to her older sister, AnneMarie, whimpering like a puppy seeking comfort at its mother’s belly.
Four half-sized tea chests cluttered the floor, the silver paper still lining the insides, Ceylon stenciled in black letters on the outsides. On his knees, Pops drilled into the sides of the thin plywood boxes with violent twists of his penknife’s blade. He poked short lengths of strong twine into the holes and made carrying handles. When Missus Bracken came out of the bedroom with her arms full, Pops looked up and said, “Barlow, help your mother with the sheets.”
As he folded the bedclothes with Mother, Barlow felt the body warmth still lingering in them. Mother pressed the sheets into one of the tea chests, and then stood at the end of the kitchen table, her hands folded on her belly beneath her apron.
“Tell them now, Pops,” she said.
Pops, still kneeling on the floor, put the long, strong, dirt-inlaid fingers of one hand on the edge of the table. He glanced up at Mother at the other end, lowered his eyes to the tabletop and spoke very quietly.
“We’re all going to England,” he said.
The five children looked down at him, their mouths like gawping perch in the canal on a hot day, blind to the impaled red worm. There was a long, long silence. Pops eventually lifted his head as if to check whether anyone had heard him. He was crying, and the children had never seen him crying before. Out of the corner of his eye Barlow saw his mother bringing the apron to her face.
AnneMarie asked, “When, Pops?”
“Tonight, Annie,” he said, using his pet name for her. “Mister Coss will be here with his motor at one o’clock.”
Whether it was from the sleep still in their brains, or whether it was from being stunned by the news, the siblings continued to gape at their kneeling father.
“Why, Pops?” AnneMarie asked, and Pops was unable to answer. He kept swallowing, and then Mother said, “There’s no more work here for Daddy, AnneMarie. There’s work in England, and we’ll have money.”
Without any sign that it was on the way, a sob jumped out of AnneMarie. Tears shot out of her eyes onto the table, and an animal wail followed immediately after the sob. Barlow started crying, wailed like AnneMarie. Then the others joined in, and then Mother was on her knees crying too, seven foreheads on the backs of hands around the kitchen table. The sound of the wailing rose and fell, turned and fled higher in a fluid motion like a flock of starlings in an autumn sky blindly following the rules of group movement. Perhaps crying out loud—bawling—was the best curative at that moment; perhaps it drained off some of the shock and left everyone with clearer heads to deal with what was ahead, although none of them could imagine what was ahead, not even Pops and Mother. The crying finally eased off, and it was as if the flock of starlings had glided to rest in a leafless ash tree.
It was Kits who helped dispel the spell of anguish, who made everyone laugh nervously with her innocent question. “Are we going all the way to England in Mister Coss’s motor car?”
“We’ll be in the motor as far as Dublin,” Mother said. “Then we’ll be on a ship, and then we’ll be on a train.”
“A ship, a train, a motor,” Kits said with excitement, and her innocent expectations were a weak drizzle of sanctifying grace on the family.
When the delft and pots were packed between the clothing, Barlow helped his father tie strong twine around the tea chests, carried them out to the side of the street with Pops while Mother and the children put on their coats and hats.
Tile Town was dark and silent; the first blanket of winter dampness had descended with its penetrating chill. The church clock struck one and the lights from Mister Coss’s motor came around the corner at the end of the street. He must have been waiting for the sound of the church bell, listening with his window open. Like a stealthy, large black cat, the motor came toward the waiting, silent family. In less than five minutes the luggage was in the boot and tied on the roof and everyone was in the motor making space for each other.
None of the passengers had been in a motor car before, except for Pops; he’d been in Paddy Kavanagh’s lorry when Paddy was drawing sand from the Ridge for the new reservoir. But despite his motorized traveling experience, Pops, like the rest of the family, felt his stomach heaving into his lungs every time Mister Coss’s motor sped over a hill in the dark.
The significance of the giant step that took them from Tile Town to Bradford in Yorkshire hit home most painfully on the children’s first day in an English school. The English children pointed to their clothes; they did not understand the speech of the Irish villagers. After Barlow trepidatiously asked for directions to the lavatory, his teacher asked him if he spoke any English. It was made brutally clear to them that they were smelly and raggy. They were lost in a warren of unfamiliar buildings and systems, and on the second day they left their flat crying, Mother encouraging them with promises that everything would quickly change for the better.
And so they all survived to some degree, except AnneMarie and Ned, the father. AnneMarie never found her way out of the thickets of strangeness. From being the most outgoing of the family, she quickly sank into black and prolonged moods. Three years after the move from Ireland and two days before her seventeenth birthday, she walked the four miles to Shipley and drowned herself in the Aire—lost angel of a ruined paradise, she left no message.
But she did leave six people forever changed, Pops more than anyone. With AnneMarie’s suicide, he began a slide into depression that ended with his death eighteen months later in a red-bricked asylum with two thousand beds. He weighed six and a half stone at the time of his death, and the hospital people gave his dentures to Mother in a pre-used, brown envelope, a cancelled stamp with the King’s head on it. They buried Pops with AnneMarie in a crowded cemetery in Bradford. Besides themselves there was no one at the funeral. It was a withering blow for Mother, who had never before even imagined that a funeral could be so poorly attended. At the graveside she howled like a dog whose litter has disappeared and can’t be found.
The four children and Mother stumbled on for several years before they found their feet. Mother got a job in a bacon factory—big bits of pig carted in one end and carted out the other end in thin slices, weighed and packaged. As the children got older they got jobs and contributed to the running of the rented half-house. As their second Christmas in Bradford approached, Barlow sent Mikey Lamb a parcel of twenty-seven English comics that had already passed through many hands.
By the time Barlow graduated from university, Mother had became a supervisor in the bacon factory where she oversaw the high jinks of two hundred men and women from Trinidad and the adjacent islands where the natives play cricket. When she had begun in the bacon factory as a floor sweeper, she had worked there for two months before she realized the Islanders were speaking English. When she eventually retired, some of the old hands congratulated her for working so hard to learn English.
Kits eventually married a decent man who was a teacher like herself. One of the brothers, Liam, ended up as the manager of the factory where Mother had worked. The other, Anthony, became a well-loved secondary teacher in Bradford, and he married a nurse who had been born in Fermoy in County Cork.
16
In the Sunroom
In which Patrick Bracken wonders if he has unsettled Elsie and Sam Howard by unwittingly resurrecting a sad remembrance.
“IT’S STRANGE HOW THE MIND holds onto odd details,” Patrick said, “how some insi
gnificant things refuse to sink out of sight in our memory and stay afloat despite our best efforts to sink them—like Pop’s teeth in that torn, brown envelope.”
For a while there was silence in the room until Sam said, “That’s not a happy story, Patrick.”
Elsie said, “It was a terrible price to pay to survive—AnneMarie and your father. The death of a child; your mother left by herself to cope . . .” Elsie’s voice trailed off, and she looked over at Sam, but Sam was not looking at her. He was gone into his own thoughts, looking at something in a dark clump of shrubs in the garden.
Elsie turned to Patrick and, with movement of hands and pursing of lips, tried to convey something that Patrick did not understand. When he did not respond to her gestures, she stood up and went to her husband. She put her hand on his shoulder and asked, “Would you like another cup of tea, Sam?”
Sam dragged himself back into the sunroom. He put his hand on Elsie’s hand. “No thanks, Else. I’m fine. Fine.” He looked at Patrick. “I wandered off there for a minute, didn’t I, Patrick? Sometimes I wonder if I can feel Doctor Alzheimer breathing down the back of my neck.”
Elsie went back to her chair. “Doctor Alzheimer is not within an ass’s roar of your neck, Sam, never mind within breathing distance. You know and I know where you were wandering, and it’s all right. Just don’t use Alzheimer as a cover-up. Alzheimer’s is nothing to be funny about.”
Howard held out his hands to fend off his wife’s words. “All right Else. All right.” There was impatience in his voice.
“I’m sorry, Patrick,” Missus Howard said. “You probably feel we’re speaking around you, and that is not polite.”
Patrick did feel as if the Howards had been speaking around him. He wondered what had introduced the distraction into the sunroom. He decided he would wait for the go-ahead from either of them before he continued with what he knew about Father Coughlin and Lawrence Gorman. Whatever it was that had arisen between Sam and Elsie took several minutes to settle back into place. He was surprised that Elsie allowed the silence to linger so long, wondered if she was trying to force something out of Sam.
Finally, when Sam did speak, Patrick felt that his question was just a sound to break the silence, “The others, Patrick, the other ones you spoke to before you came to us to hear what we have to say—was it difficult to get them to talk about all this?”
“Generally no,” Patrick said, and he used Sam’s verbal rattlings to repair the rhythm that had been upset. “A few were reluctant, but once they got going it poured out like water spilling over the lip of a spring. Only once did I find myself laboriously pulling teeth . . .”
17
The 3,367th Journey Home
1951
In which the great white missionary, the Reverend Father Jarlath Coughlin, arrives in Gohen from India and is met at the bus stop by his brother, Eddie-the-cap, and his sister, Bridie, who carries his two suitcases to their new car.
LABORIOUSLY PULLING A CLOUD of blue smoke along the ground after itself, the green bus loudly moaned its way across the Plain toward its final stop outside Gohen’s Central Hotel. It was a bus with half its face missing, as if a giant with his giant penknife had cut out a front corner. Toward its rear end, tied in six places to the wooden roof rack, a canvas cover rippled and snapped in the wind and lent the bus an air of urgency which it did not possess.
On the sides was painted a golden logo of concentric circles with trailing and forward tangents—an abstraction of a speeding snail with its house on its back conveying the promise of meteoritic conveyance of passengers all around Ireland. Beneath each logo were the initials C.I.E.—Coras Iompar Eireann, Ireland’s Transport System.
Sitting in the part of the bus missed by the giant’s knife sat Joe Corrigan in his silver-buttoned, dark blue uniform and peaked cap. Since he had steered the bus out of Portarlington and onto the last stage of this day’s journey, Corrigan’s thoughts of things to be done when he got home were making him weary; park bus in Bill Moore’s shed, ride bike two miles home, say hello to Missus, change into old clothes, eat colcannon and two fried eggs, get up on bike again and head off with Missus to the bog to cut a few barrowloads of turf. Then home again in the ten o’clock’s twilight on the bike. “God! I hate this time of the year, this rushing home, rushing the colcannon, rushing out again.”
Before he got the bus job, Joe Corrigan had loved working on the bog with the lads. Going there to take care of the turf was going on a picnic—the hard work in the freshness of the heathered air giving a fellow a roaring hunger; boiling the kettle over a hot fire of bog deal; spooning the mixed tea and sugar into the boiling water; sitting on the turf bank drinking mugs of strong, sweet tea and eating lashings of homemade bread plastered with homemade butter, and if a fellow was lucky at all, a handful of fresh scallions laced with salt. The loud laughter of the lads.
But this rushing to get the bog work done in the few evening hours that were now available to him had taken all the joy out of bog work. And the midges came out in the evenings when the weather was right for them—clouds of them, millions in each cloud, tiny bastards with teeth of eels. A fellow could rush to the bog and leave five minutes later because the fecking midges were out. Corrigan had once heard someone disparagingly referring to a miserable village as the place where the midges et the bishop. With one hand resting lightly on the steering wheel, he grunted at the remembrance. At some other time he would have smiled at the image of the bishop beating off the clouds of insects with his miter and his maniple.
Although he knew the bog work would eventually have to be done, there were times when he was glad it was raining on this last stretch of the journey. But today there was no rain, there wasn’t even a wisp of cloud in sight.
“Feck it,” Joe Corrigan said aloud. “Feck it.”
For six days a week for eleven years, Joe Corrigan had driven the C.I.E. bus from Gohen to Dublin and back again. He left at seven in the morning and returned at six in the evening. All along the road between the country and the city, people told the time of day by the passing of his bus.
In a country still jittery in the triple aftershocks of the departure of the English, the Depression and the War, people envied Joe Corrigan his job. In a country where people seldom traveled outside their own townland, Joe Corrigan’s daily adventure to the big city was envied. When these envies were expressed to him, Joe Corrigan gave divine praise for his good fortune—“Sure I’m a terrible lucky man, thanks be to God.” He knew that if he simply said, “Sure it’s just another fecking job that gives a fellow piles,” people would think he was an ungrateful get.
Joe Corrigan was a counter. Anything that could be counted he counted, and he counted things because he was bored to fecking death with this fecking job. On this evening in June 1951, Joe Corrigan was making his three-thousand-three-hundred-and-sixty-seventh trip home from Dublin.
Corrigan was so familiar with the road between Portarlington and Gohen that he couldn’t have been more contemptuous of it. The straight-as-a-die Four-Mile-Stretch outside Port was a brain paralyzer. Only he was afraid one of the passengers would see him, he would read his book. Every fecking whitethorn bush, every twisted elm, every ash tree coated in ivy, every bunch of stinging nettles, the forests of cow parsley, the clumps of elder, the nests of man-eating blackberry briars, everything ugly and smelly and thorny and mean that grew on the sides of the road was familiar to Joe Corrigan, and he hated the whole lot of it. He would have to watch all this stuff going through its life cycle until the weak grip of winter finally choked it and left it to rot above its own roots.
Joe Corrigan stared into the four miles ahead, and he saw neither bike nor ass’s cart; nothing but a lonely level stretch, eight minutes of ugly, and at the end of it a feed of colcannon eaten in such a hurry that he’d get heartburn, and then the fecking bog.
He tried to distract himself in the usual way by playing the game he had devised; name every passenger remaining on the bus, even thou
gh at this tail-end of the journey there were never many people left. However, he couldn’t get his brain going, and his eyes became trapped in the surface of the road disappearing under the nose of the bus.
But, eventually, the face of one of his remaining passengers worked its way, unbidden, into his brain, a very brown head belonging to a man wearing a roman collar and a black suit. The man’s hands were brown too. He could be a foreigner. If he was an Irishman, he had certainly been living in a foreign country with a shining sun. But whether they were Irish or foreign, Corrigan had no time for clergymen; they were bloodsuckers, and he was not afraid to let his views be known. At his mother’s funeral two years ago, the parish priest, Father Mooney, had arrived late for the graveside prayers with his bag of golf clubs on the backseat of his car. As the priest headed off again while the last Amen was still clinging to the field of headstones, Corrigan had gone after him, had called him by shouting, “Hey!”
Blinded by the volatile mixture of anger and grief, the son had invaded the cleric’s facial space and chiseled out his harsh words through gnashing teeth: “I hope my mother’s funeral didn’t interrupt your golf game, father.” Father had come out colored with many shades of meaning—prick, bollicks, fucker, cunt, bastard.
“You’re upset, Joe,” the priest had responded, his face reddening.
“Fecking sure I’m upset,” Joe had spat out, and before he turned back to his mother’s still-open grave, he snarled, “Fecking priests, fecking parasites. Go back to your fecking golf where you belong. You don’t belong here, that’s for sure.”
Priests! Joe Corrigan was frightened of no man. Like Boadicea, whom he had read about in a poem, he scorned the idea of anything Roman, as well as any person who patronized. “’You’re upset, Joe!’”
