by Thomas Lynch
IF THE BOOK I first had in mind was made more difficult by the ethnography of everyday life hereabouts, something Yeats wrote in a letter to Maud Gonne affords a kind of guidance. “Today I have one settled conviction ‘Create, draw a firm strong line & hate nothing whatever not even (the devil) if he be your most cherished belief—Satan himself’. I hate many things but I do my best, & once some fifteen years ago, for I think one whole hour, I was free from hate. Like Faust I said ‘stay moment’ but in vain. I think it was the only happiness I have ever known.”
The bookish habits of Michel de Montaigne ought likewise to be imitated. (Already I’ve become more tolerant!) The essai, as the sixteenth-century Frenchman named it, is less a certainty and more a search, an attempt at sense-making, a setting forth, as if in a boat of words, to see if language will keep the thought afloat; a testing of the air for what rings true, an effort at illuminating grays.
We are told he retired to his library at a certain age and made his way among its books, endeavoring to understand his species by examining himself. “Each man bears the whole of man’s estate,” he wrote, and figured humanity could be understood by the scrutiny of a single human. As it was easiest, he chose himself and began to look. He was among the first ethnographers of the everyday. Whereas Augustine gave us his Confessions, in Montaigne we get, as his present-day disciple Phillip Lopate says gorgeously, “more of the cat examining its fur.” We get his table fare and toilet habits, his favorite poets and his favorite books, what he thought about the sexes, his take on the weather. From the tiniest of details, he essays the real, the human, and the true.
THIS BOOK WAS begun in my home in Moveen, in the easy early months of 2001. It was shaped between funerals and family duties over the next two years in Milford and was finished over the late winter and early spring of 2004 in northern Michigan, at a home we have on Mullett Lake, a half-hour south of the Straits of Mackinac. In each location, the “cancer of time,” the duties and routine of the everyday follow something like Montaigne’s regimen. I wake early, make the coffee, read the e-mail and the New York Times online, check the Irish Times and Clare FM, cook up some Odlums Pinhead Oatmeal. “Aptly named,” my loved ones sometimes say. At 7:30, I listen to The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor on the radio, a kind of writerly morning office or book of days during which he says what happened on the date, lists the birthdays, reads a poem.
Our calendars, once full of feasts of virgins, martyrs, and confessors, now are crowded with unholy days. The day they struck our shining cities; the day we leveled theirs; the day they killed our innocents; the day we did the same to theirs. So to have a poem and some better news, every day, is no bad thing.
Yesterday was the day they put Galileo on trial for claiming that the earth revolved around the sun. “You can think it,” the pope told him, “just don’t say so out loud.” “E pur si muove . . . ,” the astronomer whispered, alas to no one in earshot.
And today is the birthday of Thomas Jefferson, born in 1743 in Virginia, we are told, and “though he had grown up with slaves, and later kept them himself, his first legislative act was a failed attempt to emancipate the slaves under his jurisdiction. He later said, ‘The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise . . . in tyranny. . . . The man must be a prodigy who can retain his . . . morals undepraved by such circumstances.’ ”
And it’s the birthday of Samuel Beckett, your “cancer of time” man, born on Good Friday in 1906 in a suburb of Dublin, who said of his childhood, “I had little talent for happiness.” In 1928, he left for Paris to become James Joyce’s acolyte. In 1937, he was stabbed in the chest by a pimp named Prudent. He visited his assailant in prison and when he asked the man why he had attacked him, Prudent replied, “Je ne sais pas, monsieur.” “I do not know, sir,” became a prominent refrain in Waiting for Godot, his most famous play—in which, most famously, nothing happens.
We do not know. Such is the dilemma of the everyday. We rummage among books and newspapers, watch the fire go to ash, pace the room, walk out into the day that’s in it, watch the snow give way to humus. The loons return. The first insuppressible flowers bloom. We find in our theatres and times, like Vladimir and Estragon, that life is waiting, killing time, holding to the momentary hope that whatever’s supposed to happen next is scheduled to occur—wars end, the last thin shelf of ice melts, and the lake is clear and blue, like the ocean we are always dreaming of crossing, we get it right, we make it home—if not today, then possibly tomorrow.
TL
APRIL 13, 2004
MULLETT LAKE
MILFORD
MOVEEN WEST
THE BROTHER
Every so often the brother calls, ranting about having to get on a plane, fly over to Shannon, drive out to West Clare, and cut a finger off.
I blame myself for this.
“Not the finger again, Pat,” is what I say.
He says he wants to leave it in Moyarta—the graveyard on the Shannon estuary where our people are buried in the ancient parish of Carrigaholt. He wants to leave his severed finger there—a part of himself—against the loneliness: the low-grade, ever-present ache he feels, like a phantom limb, whenever he’s away from there too long. Will I come with him? He wants to know.
I blame myself for this. I know how it happens. I know it is only going to get worse. Lately he’s been saying maybe better a thumb.
“Better yet two thumbs, Tom! That’s it, both thumbs—one for the future and one for the past—there in Moyarta, that’s just the thing. One for all that was and all that yet will be. . . .” He’s waxing eloquent and breathing deeply.
“Never mind the thumbs, Pat,” I tell him, but he knows it makes a kind of sense to me.
There’s something about the impulse to prune and plant body parts on the westernmost peninsula of a distant county in a far country that goes a step beyond your standard tourist class. The brother is nothing if not a great man for the grim reaping and the grand gesture.
Maybe you’re thinking the devil of drink, but neither of us has had a drop in years.
Big Pat swore off it decades ago, as a youth at university. He’d been given a football scholarship to the University of Dayton. He was a tight end and a good one. At six foot five and sixteen stone, he was fit and fast and difficult to tackle. Between games and his studies he would drink in the local bars, where invariably some lesser specimen would drink enough local lager to feel the equal of him. Pat found himself the target of too many drunken Napoleons—little men determined to have a go at the Big so as to make themselves feel, well, enlarged. He had bottles bashed over his head, sucker punches thrown, aspersions cast from every corner by wee strangers looking for a fight. After breaking a man’s nose and spending a night in the lockup, Pat swore off the drink for the safety of all and everyone concerned. So he comes by his theory of thumbs quite soberly and knows that I know what he means to say.
IRELAND HAPPENED TO Big Pat in 1992 the way it happened to me in 1970, as a whole-body, blood-borne, core-experience; an echo thumping in the cardiovascular pulse of things, in every vessel of the being and the being’s parts, all the way down to the extremities, to the thumbs. The case he got, like mine, is chronic, acute, and likely terminal. The symptoms are occasionally contagious. He became not only acquainted with but utterly submerged in his Irish heritage—a legacy of Lynches and O’Haras, Graces and McBradys, Ryans and Currys, and the mighty people he married into—shanty and lace-curtain tributaries of a bloodline that all return to Ireland for their source.
Of course, there are more orderly ways to do it.
You can dress up one day a year in the shamrock tie and green socks, haul out the beer-stained jacket, get a little tipsy cursing the Brits and the black luck of the draw into the wee hours from which you’ll wake headachy and dry-mouthed the next morning and return to the ordinary American life—the annual mid-March Oiyrish.
Once, as luck would have it, I found myself in Manhattan for the St. Padd
y’s Day Parade. I stepped out from my hotel into 44th Street near Fifth Avenue thinking it was a day like any other. It was not. Maureen O’Hara was the Grand Marshal. There were cops and crazies everywhere. Cardinal O’Connor, may he R.I.P., said Mass in St. Patrick’s, and I had to cancel a meeting with editors downtown. The sheer tidal force of Irishry, or of Irish impersonators—one hundred fifty thousand of them—all heading forty-some blocks uptown made perambulation against the grain of the parade impossible.
For most people, this Marchy excess is enough: the pipers and claddagh blather, the cartoon and caricature of what it means to be Irish and American. The next morning everyone returns to business as usual.
Or you might, after years of threatening to make the trip, get together with some other couples from the ushers’ club and take the standard ten-day tour, bouncing in the bus from the Lakes of Killarney to the Blarney Stone with a stop at the Waterford factory, a sing-along in Temple Bar; you’ll get some holy water and retail relics at the Knock Shrine and some oysters in Galway, where you’ll buy one of those caps all the farmers are wearing this year, and spend a couple hours in the duty-free, buying up smoked salmon and turf figurines, Jameson whiskey and Belleek before you fly home with the usual stories of seeing Bill Clinton or Bono in a bar in Wicklow or the man with the big mitts and droopy earlobes you met in a chipper in Clogheen who was the image of your dearly departed mother’s late uncle Seamus, or the festival you drove through in Miltown Malbay—fiddlers and pipers and tinwhistlers everywhere—the music, you will say, my God, the music!
Enough for most people is enough. Some photo-ops, some faith-and-begorras, maybe a stone from the home place, a sod of turf smuggled home in the suitcase, some perfect memories of broguey hospitalities and boozy light—something to say we are Irish in the way that others are Italian or Korean or former Yugoslavian: hyphenated, removed by generations or centuries, gone but not entirely forgotten, proud of your heritage—your Irish-Americanity.
Enough for most people is enough. But Pat was thrown into the deep end of the pool.
He landed in Shannon for the very first time on the Sunday morning of the 29th of March, 1992. A few hours later, instead of hoisting pints or singing along, or remarking on the forty shades of green, he was helping me lift the greeny, jaundiced, fairly withered body of Nora Lynch tenderly out of the bed she died in, out of the house she’d lived all her life in, out through the back door of her tiny cottage, into the coffin propped in the yard, on sawhorses assembled for this sad duty.
While most Americans spend their first fortnight tour rollicking through bars and countryside, searching none too intently for ruins or lost relations, Pat was driven straightaway to the home that our great-grandfather had come out of a century before, and taken into the room in which that ancient had been born. For Pat it was no banquet at Bunratty Castle, no bus ride to the Cliffs of Moher, no golf at the famous links at Lahinch, no saints or scholars or leprechauns. It was, rather, to the wake of Nora Lynch, late of Moveen West, Kilkee, County Clare—her tiny, tidy corpse laid out in a nunnish blue suit in a bed littered with Mass cards, candlesticks, and crucifix assembled on the bedside table, her bony hands wrapped in a rosary, her chin propped shut with a daily missal, folks from the townland making their visits; “sorry for your troubles,” “the poor cratur, Godhelpus,” “an honest woman the Lord’ve mercy on her,” “faith, she was, she was, sure faith”; the rooms buzzing with hushed talk and the clatter of tableware, the hum of a rosary being said in the room, the Lenten Sunday light pouring through the deep windows. Big Pat stood between an inkling of the long dead and the body of the lately dead and felt the press of family history, like the sea thrown finally against the shore, tidal and undulant and immediate. He sighed. He inhaled the air, sweet with damp-mold and early putrefaction, tinged with tobacco and turf smoke, hot grease and tea, and knew that though he’d never been in this place before, among these stones and puddles and local brogues, he was, in ways he could neither articulate nor deny, home.
He and his Mary, and me and mine, had booked our tickets two mornings before when the sadly anticipated word had come of Nora Lynch’s death at half-twelve in Moveen, half-past seven of that Friday morning in Michigan, March 27, 1992, four months into her ninetieth year, one month after she’d been taken to hospital in Ennis, six weeks after our father had died in the middle of the February of that awful year.
We had buried our father like the chieftain he was, then turned to the duties of the great man’s estate when word came from across the ocean that Nora had taken a turn for the worse. Two days of diagnostics had returned the sad truth of pancreatic cancer. The doctors were anxious to have her moved. In dozens of visits to Moveen since 1970, I had become Nora’s next of kin—a cousin twice removed, but still the first of her people ever to return to Ireland since her father’s brother, my great-grandfather, had left at the end of the nineteenth century. Neither her sisters nor her sisters’ children had ever returned. Her dead brothers had left no children. Nora Lynch was the last—the withered and spinsterly end of the line until, as she often said, I came. Two decades of letters and phone calls and transatlantic flights had tightened the ties that bind family connections between Michigan and Moveen. So when it looked like Nora was dying, they called me.
I LANDED IN Ireland on Ash Wednesday morning, March 4 that year, and drove from Shannon to the cathedral in Ennis, joining a handful of coreligionists for the tribal smudge and mumbled reminder that “you are dust and unto dust . . . ,” et cetera, et cetera. Then out the road to the County Hospital, a yellow stucco building trimmed in white, behind a wall on the north end of town at a corner on the Galway road. I remember the eight-bed ward of sickly men and women and Nora in the far corner looking jaundiced and tiny and suddenly old under crisp white linens. Four months before, we’d all celebrated her eighty-ninth birthday in Mary Hickie’s Bayview Hotel in Kilkee with cakes and tea and drinks all around. P. J. and Breda and Louise and Mary and me—there in Kilkee—all singing, “Happy Birthday,” and Nora not knowing what to do. She’d never had a birthday party before.
And here she was now, a season later, the mightiness gone out of her, wasting away in the corner of a county ward, dying, according to the doctors, of cancer. And I remember wanting to have the necessary conversation with her—to say out loud what we both knew but did not want to speak, that she was not going to be getting any better.
“The doctors tell me they think you’re dying.”
“We’re all dying, Tom. I just want to get home.”
“Home is where we’ll go then, Nora.”
I asked the doctors for a day or two to organize some care for her in Moveen. I spoke to Dr. Cox, who promised palliative care. I spoke to Catherine O’Callaghan, the county nurse, who promised to come by in the mornings. I spoke to Breda and P. J. Roche, her renters and defenders, who promised to oversee the household details, and I spoke with Anne Murray, a young unmarried neighbor, herself a farmer and forever my hero, who said she would stay the nights with Nora. I got a portable commode, a wheelchair, sheets and towels, fresh tea, bland foods, the Clare Champion. I called the priest to arrange a sacramental visit. I called home to see how the children were doing. I’d left my Mary with four teenagers in various stages of revolt. I promised to be home as soon as I could. “Do what you need to do,” she said.
Once Nora was home from the hospital, the borders around her days became more defined by familiarity, gratitude, cancer, and contentment. She moved between bedroom and kitchen, sitting hours by the fire, half-sleeping in bed, whilst neighbors and professionals made their visits. Old friends came by to trade remembrances, old grudges were forgiven or set aside, old grievances forgotten or reconciled. After a sustainable pattern of care had been established in the house, I said my goodbyes to Nora on March 13, my dead father’s birthday, and returned to my wife and children in Michigan to wait out the weeks or months it would be.
We deal with love by dealing with the ones we love, with s
ickness by dealing with the sick, and with death by dealing with the dead.
And after Nora died, it was the brother Pat who came to help me conduct her from one stone-walled incarnation to the next. We carried her out of her cottage to the coffin in the yard and processed down to the old church in Carrigaholt where Fr. Culligan, removed from his tea and paperwork, welcomed her with a decade of the rosary. The next morning Pat sang at Mass and followed us to Moyarta, where the Moveen lads had opened the old vault, built in 1889 by Nora’s grandfather, our great-great-grandfather, Patrick Lynch. In the century since, it has housed the family dead, their accumulating bones commingled there in an orange plastic fertilizer bag at the side of the grave. And after the piper and tinwhistler played, and after Fr. Culligan had prayed, and after we lowered her coffin into the ground, we replaced the bag of our ancestors’ bones, Nora Lynch’s people and our own, three generations of kinsmen and women, and rolled the great flagstone back into place. Our Marys repaired to the Long Dock Bar, where food and drink had been prepared. And we stood and looked—the brother Pat and me—from that high place—the graveyard at Moyarta—out past the castle at the end of the pier, out over the great mouth of the Shannon whence our great-grandfather had embarked a century before, and landed in Michigan and never returned, out past the narrowing townlands of the peninsula, Cross and Kilbaha and Kilcloher, out past Loop Head and the lighthouse at the western end where, as the locals say, the next parish is America.
IT WAS THEN I saw Pat’s thumbs begin to twitch, and the great mass of his shoulders begin to shake and wads of water commence to dropping from his eyeballs and the cheeks of him redden and a great heave of a sigh make forth from his gob and the hinge of his knees begin to buckle so that he dropped in a kind of damaged genuflection there at the foot of the family tomb into which poor Nora’s corpse had just been lowered.
