7.05 p.m.
First Toast: to Tony
Bottle of stout
There’s stirrings out in the foyer. Looks like the boys in all their finery are beginning to trickle in. I’ll not have this place to myself for much longer.
‘Another stout, there,’ I say to Svetlana who looks like she’s having an attack of first-night nerves. ‘Keep that seat for me there. Don’t be letting those lads take it. The best seat in the house.’
It’s time for the little boy’s room. One of the perks of being eighty-four, your legs get regular exercise from all the toilet trips.
‘By the neck, yes?’ she asks, as I’m heading off.
‘Listen to you and the lingo,’ I call back to her, not letting on my concern that I’ve left my trip a little too late, ‘by the neck or the arse, I don’t care, just make sure it’s still in the bottle and from the shelf,’ I say speeding up.
‘One of these?’ she says, halting my escape.
Can she not sense the danger?
‘Aye,’ I say, starting again.
‘Glass?’
Heavens above.
‘No, sure stick an auld straw in it and I’ll be grand,’ I call back to her.
‘You joke right?’
I wave a hand as I disappear from view.
There were four children in my family. Four was relatively small, I suppose, for that time in Ireland. There were families of nine or ten or more all round us. We must have seemed odd. Two adults and four youngsters to a two-bedroom cottage. A luxury, almost. Tony was the oldest, then there was May and Jenny and me, the youngest. A year, maybe two, between the lot of us.
You never knew your Uncle Tony. He was long gone by the time you arrived. ‘Big Man’ – that’s what he called me. I know that’s what I became, six foot three and built like a house. But back when that nickname stuck, I was far from it. At four, I was the tiniest of things compared to the towering giant of him, or so he seemed to me. I imagine my little steps beside his on the road or round the farm. Always running to catch up, three of my little trots to his one stride. All the time him chatting to me, telling me about the hens we were feeding or the carrots we were planting in Mam’s little garden or the ditches we were clearing. The man loved the land as much as my father. And I’d be looking up at him, trying not to trip while taking everything in, trying my best to remember, to show him I could do it too, relishing his praise.
‘Now you have it,’ he’d say, ‘aren’t you the great man.’
Despite my best efforts to keep pace, I’d inevitably fall or do myself some kind of injury trying to carry buckets that were far too big for me, just to be like him. He’d come back then and hunker beside me.
‘You’ll be better before you’re twice married,’ I imagine him saying, brushing me down, hugging me maybe, lightening my load then and slowing his pace for a while. You’d swear he was decades older than me, the way he used to mind me. But he was only five years my senior.
I’d have worked well into the evening with him, had I been let. But somewhere along the way my mother would come to fetch me.
‘I’ll be there in a minute,’ he’d say to my protests, as she carried me back in. Me with my hands outstretched to him trying not to cry for fear he’d see what a baby I was. And would you look at me now, still at it, battling those tears.
I’d wait by the window in the kitchen for him then. Getting up and down on the bench, despite my mother’s scolding, until he and my father finally finished their day.
I remember once when Father Molloy visited the house. Like all adults he was curious about what I wanted to be when I grew up. It seemed an odd type of question to me, I mean, the answer was so bloody obvious:
‘Tony,’ I said.
I couldn’t fathom why he and my parents laughed so much at my reply. I walked out of the kitchen, leaving them there with the hilarity of it all and the good china.
The name ‘Big Man’ stuck from our school days. Tony had been walking the half-mile to the one-roomed school for a fair few years before I joined him. Rainsford National School – engraved in an arch over the front door – that’s what Tony told me it read, as I proudly passed under it on my first day. Tony had me wound up the whole way there with the thoughts of how exciting it would be, what with all the children from around gathered in one place. I don’t think I’d slept a wink the night before, either.
‘Tony,’ I whispered to him beside me in the bed, not wishing to wake Jenny and May, who slept behind the curtain that divided the room, ‘does Patrick Stanley go to the school?’
‘Of course he does.’
‘And Mary and Joe Brady?’
‘Sure, what other school would they go to?’
‘And Jenny and May?’
‘Would you stop your messing and go to sleep or we’ll be going nowhere tomorrow,’ he said, pucking me with his elbow.
I was up first the next day, asking the same stuff all over again. I walked in Tony’s shoes, literally, that day. His hand-me-downs. I’ve no idea whose shoes he got. I strode through the school door, staring around in awe of the place that would make me as clever as my big brother.
‘Well, now, and who do we have here?’ a voice boomed as I entered. ‘Another Hannigan is it? Get up here and let’s have a good look at you.’
Master Duggan hauled me up, on to a desk at the front of the room.
‘Would you look at the size of you, a big man, what? I hope we have a desk big enough to fit you and all those brains you’re storing in that head of yours.’
I was ‘Big Man’ from that moment on.
I was beaming, proud of the welcome. I watched Tony laughing, elbowing his mates. I looked at the desks and the blackboard and the few books behind me on the master’s table and felt a warmth for the place and the things that were a part of my world now. I was keen to get on with it, to prove the master correct. I shuffled my feet in anticipation and was down soon enough sitting at the very desk on which I’d stood.
Over the next couple of days the master drew all sorts on the board. We chanted our ABC’s but I hadn’t a clue that what we rhymed had anything to do with what he’d written up there with the white chalk. At first, I didn’t mind too much that it felt out of my reach while the others, even Joe Brady who was three months younger than me, seemed to eventually get the hang of it.
The only thing I truly loved and kept me running up that road every morning was the football. At break time the master rolled up his sleeves and bent expectantly between the jumper goalposts. Or when nothing was coming his way, ran between them shouting:
‘Would you kick the thing?’
‘Mark him, mark him.’
‘Pass it, man!’
The girls played with a skipping rope outside the back door, out of the way of the ball. Their laughter and scolding of those who weren’t playing properly reached me as I hurtled around the yard in a muck sweat of pure delight. I hadn’t played much football before that. We had the hurls at home, but football was the master’s game. I gave it all I had. A good man for a tackle. Thought nothing of diving in. And if Tony had the ball, well, I was stuck to him, all hands and legs, pulling out of whatever bit of him I could get a hold of.
‘Stop, would you?’ he’d laugh. He was like King Kong swatting away those planes. Put his hand on my forehead, the fecker. Holding me at arm’s-length so I couldn’t get near him. My arms flailing nevertheless. I fell, a hundred and one times. Blood and bruises. But it was of no consequence, it didn’t dampen my enthusiasm.
‘Good man, Hannigan. Up you get. That’s the spirit,’ the master called from the goal.
I couldn’t get enough of his encouragement out there on our makeshift pitch. A welcome change from his silence and frustration at my efforts in the classroom. No amount of him reminding me which letter was ‘b’ and which one was ‘d’ helped me remember, let alone grabbed my interest. My enthusiasm for the books slipped down, away from me, like my fallen knee socks. In those moments all I wanted was to lay my head on the refuge of the rippled wooden desk, to feel its shiny surface from years of varnish and fingertips, and close my eyes.
His piling on the praise in the playground worked a treat. On I’d charge again, not giving a damn about any prospective injuries. But I was forever disappointed when he called time and took the ball and walked towards the back door. My stomach sinking at the thought of the darkness in that room, let alone the depression in my head.
I improved very little with my letters over the years despite everyone’s efforts, especially Tony’s. I spent most days with my head fuzzy, not able to catch up or understand the things on the board or on the page. Numbers weren’t so bad. They made some sense. I could add and subtract and, in time, multiply. Tony saw my progress and pushed me on. All the way to school and all the way home, we’d practise. He’d make a game of it, making sure I knew my money and the time, so that Mam and Dad and Master Duggan might let me be. He tried with the words too:
‘Think of a “b”, like it’s a stick man holding a ball in front of him. And a “d” is a dumbo hiding the ball behind him.’
I’d try to hold that in my head, ‘ball, in front, dumbo behind’. And it worked, when the letters were on their own and not in the middle of words or at the end. That’s when everything started to swim around on the blackboard or on the page and I couldn’t order them or the sounds in the right place.
I punched Tony once on our way home when he wouldn’t let up pushing me to get it right.
‘Would you give over saying you’re stupid, Big Man, you’re as able as the next fella.’
‘Go ’way,’ I yelled, as he doubled over. ‘I am so stupid,’ I called back as I ran off into the bit of a forest that, back then, stood at the front of our house.
I’ll admit that behind my tears, I was impressed that I’d managed to floor him. But as I ran, weaving my way through the trees, trampling on the fallen leaves and branches, the shame of it crept up on me. My exhausted body finally came to a stop at a clearing that faced west out across the Dollards’ land. There, I screamed out my fury so loudly that I was sure its power reached over those fields, up the hills and down as far as Duncashel.
It was dark by the time I headed home that evening. My stomach told me it was about six o’clock when I walked through the door and heard the clatter of the tea things. My family’s chat quietened as I slipped on to the end of the bench at the table. But my mother continued to fill the teacups like there was nothing untoward at all. I didn’t dare lift my head, hoping they might all have the decency to ignore me. As I concentrated on my hands twisting in my lap, I heard my knife rattle against my plate. I looked up to find a slice of soda bread newly landed there. Tony. I didn’t need to look to know, but still I raised my eyes to find his smile and wink.
Master Duggan wasn’t the worst, I have to give him his due. When I hear the stories now of what kids endured back in those days, I’m lucky I wasn’t beaten black and blue or worse. As the years went on it was like we came to an understanding, him and me, that he’d leave me alone when it came to asking questions, if I never made trouble. He never pushed or embarrassed me. Never stuck me in the corner or once called me lazy. I believe he simply didn’t know what to do with me. We were together on that. Most of the time I asked if I could be excused to go to the toilet. Not that we had toilets, but it became our code, when he knew I needed a break. I roamed around the back of the school, over the wall in the fields, wandering up and down, looking out on the countryside below, seeing the neighbours at work. I’d go back after a good long stint out in the fresh Meath air, to listen and watch the others succeed and belong.
There was this one lunchtime, I must’ve been about seven, when I decided I’d had enough. Three years I’d been trying at that stage. By then, Tony had only a couple of months left in school. He was twelve and once June came he was leaving to work the land full-time with our father. The football had been particularly good that day. I had been brilliant. In my memory, I had scored every goal, made every deciding tackle, even getting the ball from Tony once or twice. I was a genius. And then the master called a halt to proceedings to get us back inside. I knew then, at that moment, that I couldn’t. It felt like a weight had been planted on my head, not allowing me to move. I sat on the low wall that marked the school boundary, breathing heavily, watching the fallen-down socks and bruised legs of the others scurry and kick their way through the door. I could see the master looking at me. But he didn’t move; instead he called Tony and whispered something in his ear. I watched them watching me, before the master headed on inside and Tony trotted over.
‘Alright, Big Man? Come on, we have to go in.’
‘I want to go home,’ I said.
‘You can’t be doing that. Come on, the master will be waiting,’ he said, heading on again.
I said nothing, not moving an inch.
‘Listen,’ he said, returning, his hand now between my shoulder blades, pushing me off the wall and ahead of him with some strength, ‘the day’s nearly over. We’ll be out of here before you know it.’
I near fell in the door of the classroom, with the force of his pushes. I walked slowly by each table, my finger trailing along every one, to get to my seat, where I stayed for the long afternoon with a big sulky head on me.
‘I hate it,’ I repeated, over and over on our way home.
‘It’ll get better.’
‘Yeah, right. Well how come I’m still as stupid as the day I started, then.’
I ran ahead of him, like it was his fault. Ran all the way back into the house. Flew in through the kitchen, ignoring my mother’s gaping mouth and was down with the dust balls under the bed before she had time to stop me. Refused to come out. Lay there, picking at the threadbare rug that half-covered the cold concrete floor, listening to the muffled talk seeping through the slats of the latched wooden door.
‘What happened, Tony?’ Mam asked, when he eventually landed in.
‘Nothing. Seriously. Nothing happened. I don’t know what’s got into him. I’ll sort him.’
Tony sat down by the bed bringing me the glass of milk and buttered soda bread my mother always produced after the school day was over and before we headed off to find our father and the work he had lined up for us. Tony placed his plate beside mine. When there was no sign of me coming out he pushed mine in under a little further. I ignored the food for as long as my stomach let me, then I reached to take bits of the bread. Eventually I pushed them and myself back out and sat beside Tony. We said nothing. Just ate and looked at my sisters’ bed opposite. Made to perfection, not a pillow or blanket out of place, the crochet-knitted cover, made by Jenny and May over the previous winter, that gave weight and warmth at night, spread smoothly on top.
‘Do you think we should make one of them?’ Tony said. ‘One of those crochet covers?’ I looked at him like he’d gone mad. ‘Like I know women are good at all that kind of stuff but I don’t see why we couldn’t do it. It’d be fierce warm in the winter.’
‘I’m not taking up knitting so people can laugh at me even more.’
‘Hold on, Big Man, that’s not what I meant.’
‘Yes it is, you think all I’m good for is women’s work.’
‘Ah now, Maurice, that isn’t what I was saying at all. And no one is laughing at you, either.’
‘Oh yes they are. Joe Brady called me a dumbo yesterday when I got the spelling wrong.’
‘So that’s why you hit him,’ he laughed, impressed. ‘He’s no feckin’ genius anyway. He can’t even tie his laces for feck sake. And have you seen the state of his ears? I mean no man with ears that stick out like that has a right to call anyone a dumbo.’
Despite myself, I smiled.
‘Come on, Big Man. We’ll figure this out, OK? Me and you, right. Me and you against the world, yeah?’ He got me in the gentlest headlock and ruffled my hair. ‘You’ll be grand.’
But I wasn’t. And every morning after, they had to pull me kicking and screaming from my bed. My father was pushed to limits that were not naturally him.
‘Get out to blazes, ya pup.’
He pulled at me until there was nothing left in my grip of the leg of the bed and I gave way. I stood crying in my nightshirt. Screaming the odds, telling them I wouldn’t go back. My mother had to dress me with me holding my body as stiff as I could. I refused to take a crumb of food and went to school defiant and starving.
Day after day, Tony walked by my side still trying to encourage me. While my parents had long given up coaxing and pushing me out the door, Tony never stopped telling me I was full of greatness. People didn’t really do that back then, encourage and support. You were threatened into being who you were supposed to be. But it was because of Tony’s words that I made that journey to school every day and suffered through the darkness, when my brain felt exhausted from not knowing the answers. I didn’t want to let him down, you see. Couldn’t let him know that I knew I was totally and utterly thick.
Even after he’d left school, Tony walked by my side every day to the door, enduring my silence. It was the only way I’d go. It had been his idea that for as long as our father could spare him the twenty minutes, he’d walk the road every morning. In the classroom I never raised my hand or heard the sound of my own voice. I would sink so low in my seat that I was sure if you were standing at the back of the room you’d think no one sat there at all.
It took three more years before the master decided to walk the road to our farm. It was after school and I was already home, busy with the chickens. When I saw him in the yard I hid behind the coop. My mother came out, wiping her hands in her apron, looking worried. They spoke briefly before she pointed towards the lower field to where my father and Tony were working and off he went. Tony came up not long after.
‘What does he want?’ I asked, coming out from behind the coop and running alongside him as he made a steady pace towards the back door of the house.
‘I’ve no idea. I was told to go back up to the house for tea.’
‘For tea? It’s not that time. It’s about me, isn’t it?’
‘I told you, Maurice, nobody told me anything. I’m starving. Listen, I’ll be out in a minute. Go on you back to the coop.’
I did as I was told and returned to lean up against the wooden slats, to brood my way through all kinds of possibilities. The worst of which involved me being shipped off to some home for people who couldn’t read one line of a book without breaking into a sweat. I walked in circles around and around the coop, kicking at the chickens whenever one ventured out and got in my way.
‘Don’t worry, Big Man, it’ll all be OK,’ Tony said, coming out after a bit, the remnants of my mother’s soda bread still lingering around his mouth. But his eyes couldn’t hide his concern, no matter how much he smiled.
‘Whatever he says, Maurice, it’ll be OK, you know that. We’ll figure this all out together, right?’
I kicked at the straw, not able to raise my eyes to him.
‘Big Man, come on now. What is it I always say to you?’
I kicked again, refusing to be shaken from my silence.
‘You and me against the world. Isn’t that it? Come on, say it, Big Man. Let me hear you.’
‘You and me…’ I mumbled, my head still down, the sole of my shoe scuffing the earth, not wanting to repeat his bloody refrain any more. Because the truth of it was, there was no ‘him and me’ in this war, it was just me and my stupidity.
‘… AGAINST THE WORLD,’ he chanted, ‘that’s it.’ He gave me an encouraging puck to the shoulder.
We stayed in the coop until my father and the master came into view, walking slowly up the hill, deep in serious conversation. They stopped at the haggard wall to finish whatever it was occupied them. Then my father nodded, tipped his cap and watched him leave the yard. He looked over at Tony then, and beckoned him with the tilt of his head. He didn’t look at me, but simply turned back down to the field with my fate in tow. Tony laid his hand on my shoulder and whispered:
‘Remember what I said, me and you,’ then fell in behind my father.
An hour later, the whole family sat around the long kitchen table for our tea, Tony showing no signs of distress at having to go through it all again.
‘Master Duggan thinks you might be best working the land, Maurice,’ my father announced, ‘says you’ve grown grand and strong and that you’d make a fine farmer, like your big brother here. Well, what do you think? You’re not one for the books anyway. Am I wrong?’
I let the seconds slip by, swallowing the bread in my mouth, imagining it slipping down my throat sinking into the pit of my stomach.
‘No,’ I mumbled in reply, not lifting my eyes from the plate. My head nearly stuck in it, I was hunched that low.
‘Well, good, that’s that then. Your mother will make enquiries at the Dollards’ farm and see if they’re in need of an extra pair of hands. No school tomorrow so. You’ll work with us ’til something sorts itself out.’
My embarrassment hovered in the air between us, circling the teapot, the milk jug and the bowl of hardboiled eggs. I found it hard to swallow any further. Closing my eyes, I gulped at my tea, wolfing down my shame.
‘Big Man,’ Tony whispered later in bed, as we lay in the dark, ‘this is a good thing. School’s not for everyone. The land now, that’s a whole different story. See those hands of yours, that’s what they’re made for.’
I lifted my hands to my eyes, trying to examine them in the pitch dark. I knew he was right this time, but still I’d wanted to be so much more, for him most of all.
People used to say the Dollard house was beautiful, not that my mother ever did, though. She worked there too, you see, in the kitchen. To a ten-year-old boy, on his first day at work it was nothing but creepy. My mother walked me over, she talked at me all the way. I was too distracted by the chestnuts that littered our path through the fields to take much notice. More specifically it was the conkers inside waiting to be cracked open. Huge, perfect beasts for thrashing Joe Brady’s meagre offerings. I caught some of her words, though: ‘manners’ and ‘respect’. But the reality of the life ahead didn’t hit home until I was stuck under the watchful eye of the farm manager, Richard Berk. A stern man, a man well trusted by Hugh Dollard, the head of the house. Over my six years under his care, I often saw the two of them huddled together, heads almost touching, whispering. At ten, I had grown tall and was nearly as big as Mam, five foot two. I was broad and as strong as Tony. Berk hadn’t hesitated in taking me.
My mother worked in the mornings, helping the cook with the baking. Ten loaves of bread a day, mainly for the staff. For the Dollards, she made apple tarts and scones and much fancier affairs when they had guests. On our way across the fields, my mother always sang a tune: ‘Goodnight Irene’ was her favourite. I sang along with her. She loved to hear me sing, she said. A couple of years before, she’d signed me up for Father Molloy’s choir. I was put standing on the altar with the other recruits, all girls. Not a note came out of my mouth. Petrified I was, at the very thought of any kind of public performance. I was sent home never to return. It didn’t stop me from singing along with my mother whenever we were together, though. I knew them all: ‘Boolavogue,’ ‘I’ll Tell Me Ma,’ ‘McNamara’s Band.’ In later years, I dazzled Sadie with my talent. I even sang you to sleep once or twice when she was at her wits’ end. I’d stroke your forehead and off you’d go. Nowadays, I sing into the wind at the foot of her grave.
My mother was softly spoken. What words she said were to the point. Nothing wasted. Neither was she one for smiling. I remember her laughter because it was rare. Sweet and quiet, embarrassed for intruding almost. My uncle John, my mother’s brother, brought home a banana from London on a visit, once. We’d never seen one before. He placed it on one of her willow plates, remember them? I think we still had some when you were little. Anyhow, there it was, placed right in the middle of the table like some precious jewel. My mother looked at it and laughed. Clear and melodious it was, like a song thrush. As each member of the family arrived to see the peculiar-looking fruit, my mother’s laugh started up once more. I willed others to come so she wouldn’t stop. I moved as close to her as I could, to taste and feel her happiness. I remember my head pushed in against the material of her apron, closing my eyes to hear her joy and feel her body vibrate. Irresistible. But, whatever chance I had of hearing her laugh at home there was no hope of it at work.
The Dollards were not kind to each other let alone to those who worked for them. My father was convinced it was their gradual demise in wealth and power over the previous fifty years that did it.
‘It’s the rent he misses. None of them can abide the fact we have our own land now.’
Their house hung heavy with the disappointment of the small farmer winning the right to own holdings, however limited, under the Land Commission. Inside especially, from the bits I could see anyway. Red was about as colourful as it got and, even then, it seemed to be the darkest shade possible. But it was the family portraits that were the worst. Massive paintings of unhappy people, dressed in blacks and browns, with grey-black backgrounds that wouldn’t have looked out of place in a funeral home. I worried for my mother being exposed to that six mornings a week.
‘We need the money, Maurice,’ was all she’d say on the matter.
I remember this one time, I must’ve been about twelve, no more than thirteen, I’d say, I was helping Pat Cullinane carry in logs for the fireplaces into the back hallway. I could hear a bit of lively banter going on in the kitchen.
‘You want to make sure his Lordship doesn’t catch you at that,’ Pat called in.
‘He’s away off,’ the cook replied, coming over to lean against the door frame.
‘When the cat’s away, is that it?’
‘Well, it’s not often we get the chance. Are you coming to join us?’
Pat had begun to wipe his feet on the mat when a fist pounded on the far door that led to the main part of the house, slamming it back against the wall.
‘I don’t pay you to laugh,’ it said, loud and scary enough that I froze to the spot with a pile of logs in my arms.
It was Dollard himself, most definitely not away and most definitely blind drunk. Swaying in the doorway until his arm clutched the frame and propelled him into the room. Everyone was quiet, keeping their eyes on the floor. Pat and me, hidden in the hallway, had a small chance of escape. But when Pat took a step backwards bumping into me, didn’t I drop the bloody logs. Dollard turned our way. And like he was a fit young lad and not the old overweight mountain he appeared, he charged across the room. I caught the fear in my mother’s eye as she tried to move but was halted by the cook’s floured fingers gripping at her elbow. Dollard’s slap stung hard and loud against my cheek, knocking me back on to the woodpile.
‘Useless boy.’
Dazed though I was, it was the cook’s white hands holding my mother back that I looked for. Through Dollard’s swaying legs, I saw my mother’s hand rise to her mouth. But thankfully, she didn’t move. I lowered my head and rubbed where Dollard had struck, as his weight still loomed. And then from out behind the man’s bulk, stepped a boy no older than me. I knew him to see, of course, he was the son and heir of the throne, Thomas Dollard, but this was my first ever interaction with him.
‘Pick them up. Now!’ he roared, pointing at the logs.
His spit fell on my hands and face as his words still shook inside my head. By now, I was one big petrified mess. I moved to stand, but the terror meant I fell forward on to his feet. He kicked away at me, one right in my ribs.
‘You cretin. Move.’
I stood and steadied myself as best I could. I began to pull together the fallen logs, piling them with the others. I took my chances and glanced towards my mother and saw the cook turn her back to the sink.
‘Next time I see you damage my father’s property, you’ll know all about it.’
‘Thomas!’ Dollard slurred, ‘I’m master here. You run along and play with those dolls you like so much. I’ll deal with this, thank you very much.’
‘They’re not dolls, Father. They’re soldiers,’ Thomas’s voice shook, his eyes wide at the insult from his father.
‘They look like dolls to me.’
Thomas blinked. Long, hurt, hypnotic blinks. I was so taken by them, that I hadn’t realised he’d turned his attention back to me. His eyes, steady now, staring. I braced myself for another blow. But he simply turned and left, disappearing through the kitchen. Dollard senior, catching my relief, grabbed me by the neck and hoisted me high – my face now level with his, my legs dangling mid-air. I shut my eyes against his rank breath. But next thing, didn’t the fecker drop me. I looked up to see him wobbling and shaking. One hand covering his eyes, the other reaching for the steadiness of the wall. Blinking rapidly, staring in at the kitchen then back at me, like he was unsure of his surroundings. Still on the ground, I looked away from his embarrassment. Seconds later, I heard him stumble across the kitchen, knocking some pots as he went. The door beyond banged shut. Everything was dead quiet for a second and then my mother was standing over me in a panic.
‘Maurice, Maurice, would you look at me?’ She was on the floor, my face in her hands, examining the damage.
‘Stop Mam. I’m grand. Sure he barely got me,’ I said, getting up.
But I was put on a chair in the kitchen and mollycoddled, nevertheless, until Pat had had enough:
‘He’s grand now. Come on, let’s get this mess cleared up out here.’
After that, Thomas, the son, never left me alone. Beat the living daylights out of me. I took years of that shite from him. He taunted the other lads for sure, ordered them around like he was the man. Once, he made Mickie Dwyer move bales of hay from one side of the yard to the other and back again for the whole afternoon. Even Berk had enough of him that day and read him the riot act. But because I had witnessed his shaming at the hands of his father, I received special treatment. Being the youngest of the workers didn’t help either. But to be truthful, I could’ve taken him with one blow, but I never fought him, never rose to his taunts. I let his fists fly unanswered, knowing not to risk our jobs or my mother’s safety – it was her I worried most about.
It was of little consolation to me that Dollard senior beat him. We all knew it, everyone who moved in that place knew. I often passed a window and heard him going at it. I couldn’t stand the sound of Thomas’s pleas. That upset me more than his father’s violence. Pitiful. A thing I was sure I’d never have done. Sometimes I’d hear Rachel, the little sister, trying to intervene and every now and again succeeding on his behalf.
‘No, Daddy. Stop it!’
I imagined her swinging from Dollard’s tree trunk of an arm as he swiped at Thomas. Sometimes but not often, as I recall, the mother, Amelia, even tried.
‘Hugh! Please let him go. This isn’t fair, and you know it,’ she begged, on the day I got this scar, right here just below my eye. I was fifteen. I was passing alongside one of the open downstairs windows. As the lace curtains billowed out into the summer breeze, I caught a glimpse of Thomas’s face. Red it was. Lips pulled back, his teeth jammed together. Dollard had a good tight hold of him in a headlock. The mother stood a little ways off, her hands twisting.
‘Don’t talk to me about fair, Amelia,’ Dollard shouted at her, ‘don’t you dare lecture me about what’s fair!’
I’d seen and heard enough to scarper. I might’ve managed it had Berk not blocked my escape, sending me to the milking sheds to muck out. I may as well’ve stood in the middle of the yard and called for Thomas to come get me. Quicker than I’d thought possible, Thomas was there at my back, a hunting crop in his hand. As I turned he struck me with it, the metal end slicing into my cheek. When I fell to the ground holding my face, he kicked my stomach again and again and again. Kicked like he’d never done before and with a strength that felt new. I endured every strike, every drop of his spit. Not a moan left my lips.
‘Thomas, stop it!’
I heard Rachel’s pleas as she stood at the shed door.
Curled up, I was, one hand on my face, the other trying to shield my body, not daring to look at him. I could hear his exhausted breaths heaving above me. His blood dripped on to my hand from the wounds inflicted by his father. I waited. She waited. But no further blow came. I watched his boots turn and walk back to the door, to his sister. His bloodied hand took hers. She looked at him like he was some stranger, a man she was not sure it was safe to go with. They left but not before she glanced back at me. After, I stretched my hand out to the straw and wiped what I could of his spit and blood away.
Berk administered the stitches. No anaesthetic, no disinfectant. Sat where I had fallen with a needle threading my face. He sent me home. A whole two hours off in compensation for having the shit kicked out of me and a scar: a memento of how lucky I was not to lose an eye. My mother bathed the wound, cleaning it as best she could. Later, as I lay on my bed in the lower room, I listened to the hushed voices of my parents in the kitchen, knowing they were talking about me. Tony stood at the foot of the bed, leaning against the closed door.
‘He’s nothing but a gobshite, Maurice,’ he said, ‘if I could get my hands on him I’d knock him into next week.’
‘Ah, Tony, don’t go doing anything now. There’s the jobs to think of—’
‘Feck the jobs, Maurice. No one has the right to do this to you.’
My father’s knock came to the bedroom door. Tony stood away to let him through.
He stepped in and looked at us both. His face drawn and serious.
‘There’ll be enough of that kind of talk,’ he said finally, his eyes firmly on Tony. All the while Tony’s refused to lift from the ground, knowing full well that he could curse and threaten all he liked but nothing would change with the likes of the Dollards. And true to form, I got up the next morning with half my head bandaged and went across the fields as normal.
Months later, I was walking to the back paddock along by the house when I heard Dollard senior’s shouts again. My heart sank, I can tell you. I walked on as quietly and quickly as possible. This time Thomas had his back to the opened window of an upstairs room. His hands were behind him, folded into fists. As I passed right under him, one of his hands opened, releasing something that landed right in front of me.
‘But Father, I didn’t take it. I didn’t!’ I heard him whine.
Without thinking, I reached down and grabbed the shiny thing from among the stones, putting it in my pocket and continuing on my way, smooth as you like. If I’d known back then how that decision of mine ruined the lives inside that house for generations to come, not least Thomas’s, I wonder would I have walked on, stepping over its pull, its power. But all I knew then was revenge. If this small theft, I reasoned, of whatever it was I held in my pocket could inflict even a small moment of the pain Thomas had meted on me with his beatings and his disgust, then it was most definitely my due.
Despite the growing distance, I could still hear the yells and panicked replies of Thomas as something or someone hit the floor. I didn’t look back. When I was safely clear, I ducked in behind a tree. And there, taking it out of my pocket, I saw it for the first time – a gold coin, with the face of a man I didn’t recognise and writing I didn’t even try to understand. Heavy and solid, quite impressive. I turned it over for as long as I dared. Throwing it up and down once or twice, before pocketing it again and smiling to myself.
Five hours later when I walked back the way along the same path, Pat joined me.
‘Would you look at that bleeding eejit,’ he said. We could see Thomas scrambling about under the same window from earlier. ‘He’s lost some coin or other of the father’s. The old man’s going mad, says he’ll disinherit him if he doesn’t give it back. Reckons he robbed it on purpose.’
Thomas caught my eye as we passed. I looked away like I always did despite feeling an unfamiliar power. When out of sight, I smiled to myself as I caressed the metal lying snug and happy in my pocket with my thumb.
Oh, they looked under every bush and plant and in every pocket and bag, alright. That evening we were all lined up before we left for the day. But I was no fool. I’d it hidden in the nook of a tree that lay near our boundary wall. Even still, I was terrified when Berk approached me in the queue. He stood staring at my scar. My confession bubbled up behind my lips as his hands delved in my pockets and ran over my body. I held firm though, never gave away a thing. Disappointed, he passed on to Mickie Dwyer.
The next day mother and most of the kitchen staff were ordered to strip Thomas’s room and the room in which the argument had happened; the labourers were ordered to search the yard below. The world stopped while we hunted on hands and knees over stones and clay and dirt and grass for something they would never find. Thomas ran between both groups.
‘Have you not found it yet?’ he moaned, standing above me, close to tears, pulling at his hair.
‘What did it look like, sir?’ I sat back on my hunkers and looked up at him.
‘Gold, you dimwit, gold. Berk, what kind of imbeciles do you have working for you?’
He charged after the farm manager like he expected an answer to his question. I found a thruppence and ran up to him.
‘Sir. Sir. I found it,’ I said, with not one shred of guilt about me.
The relief on his face was something to behold. But it was the misery that returned, as he looked at my copper offering, that was worth the wallop across the head from Berk. He ran from me, from Berk, off into the house.
Although we were questioned continuously over the coming days – the labourers by Berk and the housemaids by Dollard senior himself – it seemed without conviction. Everyone knew Dollard believed Thomas guilty. He’d washed his hands of him it seems. Sent him away within days and true to his word, disinherited him. At the time it struck me as odd that it was never reported to the police. As it turned out, they couldn’t have, given how Dollard had come by it. But I wasn’t to know that back then.
For weeks following, I was petrified they’d arrive at our door and ransack the place. But Tony had taken care of it for me, as he’d taken care of so many of my worries before. Assured me, they’d never find it under his pillow:
‘Sure, who’ll come near me when they find out I’ve got TB?’
Tony’d got consumption earlier that year. I hadn’t a clue that cough of his was anything other than the usual hallmarks of winter: chills and runny noses and sore throats waylaying us like they always did. It went on for weeks, though. Not shifting, not stirring. Barked through the day and into the night. Sometimes it woke me but mostly he suffered on his own as I turned to the wall and dreamed my dreams. I was always a good sleeper back then. Dead to the world, oblivious to all about me until my body decided it was time to wake. I wonder now if I’d been a lighter sleeper, might I have caught Sadie, two years ago just before her last breath was taken, and pulled her back to me.
‘Mam, is there nothing we can do about Tony’s cough?’ May complained one day. ‘It’s keeping me awake. I’m making a hames of this bread, I’m that tired.’
But there had been no need to alert my mother to Tony’s debility. I’d seen her watching him for days: as he crossed the yard slower than usual and coughed at the dinner table and slept in the armchair after the tea.
‘You’ll sleep in our room tonight, Tony,’ she told him, the day he had lifted his hand to his chest.
‘Mam, I’m grand, sure that honey drink you made me is working mighty.’
‘No matter. You’ll be in the upper room. We’ll take yours. Maurice, you can take the chairs in the kitchen.’
What I didn’t know until after he died was that my mother had watched her younger brother Jimmy die of the same thing. People didn’t talk much of things like that in those days. Death and illness were sacred and silent, not to be stoked and stirred. But it seems for years she’d been on alert, watching us with our coughs and colds, ready to pounce. Ready to begin battle with the demon that had taken her favourite brother. With Tony, her time had finally come.
She washed the sheets and eiderdown from our bed that day. She and my father slept fully clothed under a blanket until they finally dried. Meanwhile I set up my chairs, one facing the other, in the kitchen. A blanket and my mother’s winter coat around me. It was a while before I fell asleep that first night. I listened to Tony’s cough, his constant call, as I tried to figure out what this change in sleeping arrangements meant.
The next day was a Sunday as I recall, and my father left in the trap when it was still dark and returned two hours later with Doctor Roche. I watched from the shed, as they went inside. I ran to Tony’s window, to try to hear his fate. Jenny and May came out soon after. The three evictees stood in the blowing rain, waiting.
‘It’s got to be,’ Jenny whispered to May, as we huddled under the dripping thatch, leaning into the frame of the window as far as we could.
‘Don’t say that, Jenny. Don’t be wishing it on him.’
‘I’m not doing that, for heaven’s sake. I’m just saying, that’s what young Wall died of and Kitty told me that’s how it had started.’
‘Quiet, Jenny, Tony might hear.’
Later, we went to Mass in Duncashel, not the usual local church, in order to drop the doctor home. I felt sorry for the horse having to cart the lot of us that distance. Tony didn’t come. We journeyed in silence. In the pew, I watched my parents pray in concentration. My mother’s eyes shut tight, her wrinkles bunched up with the effort, as her busy lips tipped her folded hands.
After we got home, silence reigned. Jenny, May and me wandered about, waiting to be let in on the mystery. We never went near the shut door of the upper room where Tony slept. We moved between our bedroom and the kitchen, eventually deciding on the most sedate game of twenty-five I ever remember. After a while the girls rose to help Mother with the dinner while my father never lifted his head above his Sunday paper.
‘Tony has consumption,’ he said later, as we stared at our dinner plates. ‘But you’ll not say a word to anyone. Do you hear? As far as the world is concerned that boy has broken his leg from a fall in the field. Do you understand me now?’
The three siblings stole a glance at each other, then nodded our collusion.
‘The doctor won’t say a word to anyone. He wants us to move Tony to the upper shed. He’s afraid of it infecting the lot of us. But we’ll tend him here. He’ll not be put out…’ My father broke off his words and balled up his fists and pushed them deep into his pockets. ‘You girls will look after Tony in the mornings when Mam is working,’ he continued after a bit, ‘the doctor has told her what to do. Rest is the best cure, he says. We’ll not lose him. We’ll not lose that boy.’
The word went out Tony had broken his leg. If people knew the truth, we’d have been done for. TB was as contagious as gossip. The Dollards would have let us go there and then. As it turned out, none of us picked it up, although I do believe it lingered with my mother and that’s what hurried on her own death, years later. It was hard, keeping it a secret. People called. Well-wishers. Not often, mind, but the odd time, a neighbour would drop by. Jenny or May would run to meet them in the yard and make up all sorts before they got close to the house:
‘He’s not in great shape today. Sorry now, and you after coming over.’
‘He’s in a lot of pain. I’ll let him know you called. It’ll do him the world of good to know you’re thinking of him.’
‘He’s up there now trying to do those exercises the doctor gave him, but he’s frustrated; you know how it is.’
I’m sure after a while people began to suspect. But no one ever asked us.
The only time Tony was left on his own was on a Sunday when the rest of us headed off to Mass. Despite being away from him for those couple of hours, that time was still all about him. I did some pleading for his salvation myself as I held the host in my mouth. To my left and right, I knew the others were doing the same.
The doctor told us to feed him ‘nutritious’ food and give him stout every day, for the iron. Tony was thrilled at the prospect. But of course, it all cost money. Nutrition back then meant red meat and vegetables. We had the carrots, cabbage and potatoes growing out in the garden. Often that’s all we had. White meat was not so much of a problem, what with the few chickens we had running ’round the yard. When one got too old to lay, well, then she ended up on our plates. The red stuff was more difficult. Every now and again though, a bit would be found from somewhere. We didn’t begrudge him an ounce, that’s not to say we didn’t lick our lips as it roasted in the range. When I went up to him one evening, he told me to shut the door, all conspiratorial like.
‘Here, Big Man, have this,’ he said, as soon as the latch had lowered. There in his fist, in his handkerchief, he held a chunk of beef.
He must have had it there since dinnertime.
‘Ah Tony, I can’t be taking your food.’
‘Jesus man, they were stuffing it into me. The size of it. It was like there was a whole cow sitting on the plate. Take it. I kept it for you.’
‘They’ll kill me.’
‘I reckon they take little bites themselves. I could’ve sworn there was a hole in that piece when Jenny brought it in,’ he said, smiling at me. ‘For God’s sake man, sure you’re holding down two jobs now having to work with the auld lad when you get home from that place.’
All the doctors in Ireland would’ve been having heart attacks watching me take that from his spotted handkerchief, but I tell you now that morsel tasted like heaven. As cold and squashed as it was, it was pure tasty.
It felt wrong after all those days and years of Tony walking beside me to school, encouraging and supporting me, that I had to leave him in the bed every morning to go to the Dollards. I always left it till the last minute, hanging around chatting and messing with him when he was up to it, before my mother dragged me out the door. I went with a heavy heart, my boots feeling like they were filled with the weightiest of stones, slowing my path away from him. If I’d had my choice it would’ve been me waiting on him, bringing him his dinner, standing over him with a bowl when he was coughing his insides up, helping him up from the bed and getting him settled on the chamber pot so he could do his morning duty. The rest of the world could have mocked and jeered me all they liked but I would’ve done that and more for him if I’d been let.
I refused to allow the women to tend him all the time. I’d run all the way home from the job to grab his tea tray and bring it up before any of them had the chance. Gone, before Mam, long home from work by that stage, had time to protest. Although, I knew she approved as I caught her grin before I scarpered. Outside Tony’s door, I’d hold the tray with one hand under it and knock with the other.
‘Enter,’ he’d call, like he was lord of the manor. ’Course, he knew it was me, ’cause I’d have given him my trademark rap on the bedroom window, five beats, as I flew in home earlier.
‘Is that lazy fecker not up yet?’ I’d say in the hallway as I hung up my cap, loud enough so he could hear.
I’d smile at his reply and lift the latch. But God forgive me, every time I saw his hollowed-out face, it was a shock. It was always, always, like I was seeing it for the first time. The laughter gone out of me, only the remains of an embarrassed smile that admitted how bad I was at keeping up the pretence that there was nothing wrong with the brother I adored and that he wasn’t just one more cough away from leaving us.
‘Big Man,’ he’d say or splurt.
‘Still codding us that you’re sick, I see.’
I’d take my seat beside him on my mother’s chair, the one her mother had bought her when she married. If Tony were strong enough, I’d put the tray on his lap and he’d feed himself. But as time went on he wasn’t able to even pull himself up, and so I’d break up the bits of bread and feed it to him as he lay propped up slightly by a pillow. If he were in the eating humour, which wasn’t often, I’d put the bread anywhere but near his mouth. It made us laugh. It wasn’t that funny, I suppose, when I think of it now, but it was all we had.
Often, he was too weak to join in with my nightly updates on how my day had gone. I got used to the sound of my own voice, telling him what was going on over the boundary wall.
‘What I find mad, Tony, is that our own fields can’t be that different from theirs. But you should see the size of the stones I was pulling from those acres over there today. Boulders they were. Boulders. My back is near broken from them.’
Mostly he lay there listening. Not always able to reply.
‘Dollard senior’s getting worse, if that’s possible. Since he sent Thomas packing he’s like a briar. Apparently, the mother and daughter are no better. The cook says none of them are speaking now. I don’t know, a disinheritance over one bloody coin!’
I felt no guilt that it was me and the coin lying under my brother’s head that had caused Thomas’s banishment. Tony was the only one I ever told about the extent of what Thomas had done to me. The beatings. The constant fear of them. I wore the scar for all to see but no one, not my mother or father or sisters, had ever asked how I was about it all. And do you know, neither would I have wanted them to, I would have felt like a right eejit telling them how much it still stung. But sometimes as Tony lay sleeping, his face wincing with pain, I went over it.
‘Maurice,’ he said once, spluttering away, giving me a fright ’cause I thought he was asleep, ‘someday, achmm, achmm … someday that fecker’ll get his comeuppance.’
‘Take it easy, Tony. Here, take the water. Mam won’t like me getting you riled up like that. You weren’t supposed to hear all that anyway.’
He took the water and gripped my hand that held the cup. He held my eyes, his breath catching.
‘Maurice … it’ll come right, wait and see.’
When Tony slept with me beside him in the chair, his breath struggled to take in what it needed, growing more laboured with each day that passed. I’d sit watching the rise and fall of his sunken chest, willing it to cop on and right itself. The amount of prayers I said sitting in that chair, would have made my mother proud; decades upon decades of the rosary, my eyes squinting shut, asking God to get on with working a miracle. I’d stay like that ’til I fell asleep too and my father came to tap me on the shoulder and send me off down to the kitchen to get some tea myself before going out to do the jobs he couldn’t do alone during the day. I’d rise and lay a hand on Tony’s shoulder then, my parting words always the same.
‘You and me, against the world, what? You and me.’
Every Sunday evening without fail, we crowded into his bedroom. The war of course had been raging away over beyond for years. And in 1946 the papers were all about the aftermath and how the world would change, and how the horrors in Germany would never happen again. The recriminations and rebuilding projects in Europe were in full swing and my father read it all to us from the paper he had bought after Sunday Mass. Squashed into Tony’s room, with borrowed chairs from the kitchen, we listened to my father’s voice read out stories of the world beyond us and beyond the secret of Tony’s illness. After, we gave our own opinions and summations, disagreeing with the other or agreeing that de Valera had played the right card. Tony joined in when he could. But often I think he wanted to simply drift off to the sounds of our voices.
We knew we were losing him. It was like he was sinking into the bed, he had become so thin. Disappearing before our eyes. There was nothing to be done by us or the doctor. His life ebbed away from our laughter and our care. I continued to sit with him, despite the awfulness and despite my tears that sometimes fell no matter how hard I tried to stop them.
‘Ah Maurice, ya big girl,’ he said, breathlessly one evening having woken to find me sitting beside him all red eyed. He nearly choked on the weak chuckle he managed. I laughed, a big hearty laugh. We were gone again then, laughing away the tragedy of it all.
I never saw my mother look so thin as in those last few weeks before he died. Up at the crack of dawn, even though she might have sat by Tony’s side the whole night, catching snatches of sleep through his distress. We’d be gone over the fields then to earn the money to buy the rich food to save him. The only morning she asked to be excused was the day he died.
‘I can’t possibly do without you today, Hannah!’ Amelia Dollard said, as she fiddled with the flowers in her hallway where my mother waylaid her, her eyes never once rising from the carpet. ‘I’ve told you, Thomas is coming home and bringing the Lawrences. His school friend and his parents. They’ve been so good to him, through all of this, taking him on weekends and such, so we can’t let him down. Poor Thomas – we don’t often see him and what with Hugh away … well it’s the only time he can get home. And we simply can’t do without your apple tart. You’ve made enough, I hope.’ Less of an enquiry than a demand, Amelia Dollard strode away, leaving my mother alone, looking at her hands, clasped on her aproned stomach.
I was tempted to call out to her. I heard it all, you see, through the open front doors. I’d been ordered to assist the gardener with the flowerboxes in the windows at the front of the house. Instead, I watched my mother turn, tilting her head back in an effort to reverse the flow of tears, and walk back to the kitchen. It was Jenny who arrived later, as my mother, with the mounds of baking complete, put on her coat to leave. She caught her at the back door, she told me that evening. I heard my mother’s cry. Her wail rose above the rooftop, screeched over the tiles and down the walls to pound my head and shoulders as I trimmed the trees at the sides of the front door. I knew it was Tony. My legs weakened and I stretched a hand to a branch to hold me up. At that very moment a car pulled up to the house. I didn’t turn my head, knowing who it was in an instant. I heard Thomas’s boasts as he fussed with the car and hall door.
‘1700s, maybe? Not exactly sure, but Father would know. Unfortunately, he’s not around today. London, you know, bit of business. This way, this way.’
He never acknowledged me. Small mercy. If he’d as much as breathed in my direction, I might finally have landed him one. When the hall door shut, I spat on the ground after him, cursing them to hell. I was gone then. Half crazed, I ran the long way home at some speed, not wishing to pass my mother or sister. I burst through our front door, then into Tony’s room.
‘No, Maurice,’ my father shouted, as he struggled to hold me back when I reached the bed. He held my arms, but like a man possessed I kept lurching forward. Eventually I wrangled free of him, firing my father back against the wall and fell on to Tony’s frame. There was nothing but bone, no meat, no hefty muscle. Nothing. Every scrap, wasted away. I lay there, holding his skeletal arms, letting my anger go the way of his soul, up and up, until there was nothing left, just a pitiful murmur, that felt like it wasn’t mine.
My father and May pulled me away when they heard my mother arrive. Her surviving children stood together, watching her enter. It’s an awful thing, to witness your mother cry. You cannot cure nor mend nor stick a plaster on. It is rotten. I wanted to tear out the pain of it. It took every ounce of restraint I had not to run from the room and charge through the fields damning those bastards, that bitch and her precious son, who had denied my mother her goodbye. My father stood above her with one hand on her shoulder and the other on her back. That weathered, veined hand moved up and down with the rhythm of her sorrow all afternoon, never once resting. His own grief in check. I wonder, as the years went on, when my father found himself alone, did the weight of Tony’s loss stop him in the fields and lower him to his hunkers? Did he ever lay his hand on the earth to steady his body that heaved at the injustice of it all? But that evening it was my mother’s cries that filled the house. On and on it went for what felt like hours, thrashing at her small frame, refusing to recede until the priest came. Even then, only quietening enough so she could hear the prayers.
That night was the longest I’ve ever known. Sleepless, save for snatches filled with furious dreams in which I was running, running from something or someone. I could feel the panic in my chest when I woke each time in a startle, unsure of where I was, pushing myself up out of my mother’s chair where I’d fallen asleep by the range. Finally knowing I was at home, I’d settle back against the headrest and stare into the darkness, the emptiness of a life without Tony – my support, my rock.
I’ve no memory of getting ready the next day. How any of us turned ourselves out as smartly as we did I’ve no idea. The funeral was hushed and solemn, as you’d expect. Our tears fell on the wooden pews and our black clothes. Our grief not rising above a whisper until the prayers ended and we rose to bring Tony to his grave. As we men left our seats, my mother emitted a moan so despairing that I had to hold on to the back of the seat as it swept into me, causing my knees to buckle. She stood, supported by Jenny and May, linking her awkwardly, one behind and one in front, corralled between the seat and the kneeler, waiting to step out, to follow behind as we raised her son aloft and bore him down the aisle. As we carried the coffin from the church door, I heard wheels crunch on the gravelled drive.
The Dollards.
The car stopped at my rear. Father Molloy, to my horror, halted our procession as the footsteps approached. I watched him bow his head quickly in the direction of the newcomer.
‘Father,’ Amelia Dollard said.
The crunching continued until it stopped behind me. Bold as you like, wedging herself between mother and son, once again. She took my mother’s limp hand and held it as if it mattered to her, my sisters told me later. But my mother didn’t raise her head or squeeze her palm. Didn’t move a muscle. For those seconds, as Dollard’s voice mumbled to my rear, I thought of my father. I imagined his head leaning against my brother’s coffin. Eyes closed against the insensitivity and embarrassment of this woman, wishing he could touch the fair hair of his boy one last time; arms aching and knotted hands reddening under the weight of death. I wanted to scream at her to get away, to stop her playacting, her hypocrisy. And then she was gone, just like that. The engine started and that was it. Father Molloy signalled, and we moved on.
I was sixteen when we buried Tony in the Meath heat. We listened to the prayers, joined in when required, mumbled the decade of the rosary and watched as the earth took him. Then, we walked away.
From that day on there was little left of my mother, of that gentle spirit that had once been hers. She never returned to the Dollards, neither did I. We coped without their money. I worked the land with my father. My mother stayed at home, hardly ever leaving. Our weddings were her one exception, May’s, Jenny’s and mine. Never uttered a word at them, though, never raised a smile. When I look back now at the photos, I see her weary, empty face and wish I could touch it, to soothe it. My father generally stood stoically by her side. His hand on the small of her back, I imagine, staring into the camera, demanding it to notice there was one guest missing. What conversations passed between husband and wife in the years following Tony’s departure, I’ve often wondered? What might Sadie and I have said to one another had you died leaving us behind, forever caught in a loop of memories, inventing your future, lamenting all that you would never know? Or perhaps a silence might have descended – a delicate layer of protection holding us together, cocooning us away from the ugly awful truth of life and death, its gaping wounds, its noxious smells.
It’s so hard to lose your best friend at any time, but to do so at such a young age was pure cruel. At sixteen I was heading into my life. Having travelled those precious years with Tony by my side, I now had to venture forth into the most significant of them alone. Without his guidance, his cajoling, his slagging. It didn’t feel possible.
‘He’ll always be here, Maurice,’ my father told me, the day we came home from the burial. We stood at Tony’s door looking at the empty bed as he held his hand over his heart. When he left to join the women in the kitchen, I too moved my hand to my heart. I pressed in hard as I could, trying to reach Tony, to turn on the switch that would tune him in.
‘Big Man, ya gobshite.’
He came in, loud and clear.
And I laughed into my closed eyes, laughed down into my boots and into my fingers that had found him. And as true as I am sitting here holding this drink in these wrinkled, dried out hands of mine, he’s never left me since.
After Tony died it was me who was set to inherit the land. One of the best things my father ever taught me as I worked with him was to embrace change. I watched him clear boundary walls before the war, turning it to tillage. After it was all over, he had it back ready for grazing, quick as you like. Dairy, that was his big thing then. He saw pound signs on the hide of every cow, and in every drop of milk they yielded. He had my heart broken with all the questions about how the Dollards had run their dairy when I had worked for them. I’d no desire to remember a thing about them, but he had me pestered until he knew everything I did. His sums done, before long we had the beginnings of our own herd.
‘By the time the year 2000 hits we’ll be the biggest dairy farmers in Leinster, feeding the hordes of Dublin. We’ll keep their tea breaks flowing,’ he told me. He thought he’d live forever. Sometimes I wondered might he make it myself. A horse of a man. But he never even smelt a whisper of the twenty-first century. He went in sixty-three. Collapsed in the fields one day, fencing. Mam, now she made it ’til seventy-five. Lived with us, right up until just after you were born. She needed the nursing home by then. She’d forgotten us all, except Tony. She’d constantly ask us when we visited her, if Tony was still down the fields and when he’d be back so she could get his tea ready. Over and over, she’d ask and we’d oblige:
‘Soon, he’ll be back soon.’ She’d sit back contented then, but within two seconds would be back at it: ‘And where’s Tony?’ It would have been kinder to have taken her sooner. But I wonder in those years after my father died, when she had her mind, how she dealt with his passing. I never asked her how she coped losing the person she knew best. The person who accepted her humanity and all the failings that came with it. The person who loved her unconditionally. The person whose hand was always there to hold. I wish now I had.
Rainsford lay on the border with the city. Transport costs were low so we could afford to be competitive with the big milk buyers. We were in demand. Even managed to land the Gormanstown Army Camp contract. That was a good one. The stability of that set us up rightly. Allowing us the security to keep edging on, borrowing and expanding more and more. Although there were years after my father died when the milk prices were rotten. I came through it though, buoyed along by selling some bits of land.
In the late fifties, you see, we had begun to buy up little plots wherever we could find them. Farmers with their bags packed ready to leave for England, desperate to take what might be offered. We borrowed, counting on the economic tide eventually turning in our favour. We handed over the criminally small payments to those boys heading off, asking was there anyone else around in the market. If we were given a tip, we went straight there, arriving at the next deal with cash in our pockets. Some slammed their door on our insult. But others took it, ready to trade in their farming life for that of barman or labourer or miner. I often wondered, did those hands that pocketed our cash ever ache for the touch of the soil as they held the smooth glass or the cold concrete or the dusty coal of their new lives? At night in their dreams, did they move with the rhythm of a scythe or reach to calm the hind of a cow before milking?
The canniest move I ever made, not that I knew it back then, was buying that strip of land on the outskirts of Dublin, not far from the airport. It was in the sixties, got it for buttons. Little did I know how high its value would reach as time went on. I sold it for a small fortune in the end. Prime zoned land. My intention was to keep it in pasture but when I realised what kind of gold my cows were standing on, I decided to dangle it out there, to see who’d bite.
‘This is ridiculous, Maurice. Would you not call a halt to it?’ Sadie complained at me one evening over the bidding war that had ensued. ‘It’s shameful, that amount of money being talked about. It’s only a couple of fields. Kevin can’t believe the madness. He says the country is heading for a crash, with this Celtic Tiger.’
Well, you can imagine how I took that.
‘Is that what he says now? You can tell him the next time he calls from his ivory tower over there that I will in my arse call a halt to it.’
‘Please don’t curse in my house.’
‘Listen, if those boys want to keep raising the stakes and battling it out, I’ll not stop them. No matter what little Lord Fauntleroy has to say about it. And tell me, will you be objecting when the sale buys you that new kitchen you want?’
‘You’ve enough money already to buy new kitchens for the whole of Rainsford. And don’t be calling your son that, he deserves better from you.’
In the end I lied. Told her they’d offered €500,000 below what I actually got. Her heart and her conscience, nor yours for that matter, couldn’t have taken the truth. But I’m sure my father and Tony danced a jig, the day the money finally landed in my bank account. Pure magic, son.
And as for all the Dollard land that lay over our boundary wall? I was twenty-one when the hearse drove Hugh Dollard to his chapel. I stood in line on Main Street with the town. They were all out, their heads bent in reverence to the man most of us had served at some stage or another. The town hushed as his coffin made its way through the corridor we’d formed. When it came within inches of me, I turned one-eighty, to face O’Malley’s butchers.
‘Shame on you, Maurice Hannigan,’ Mrs Roche said, after the procession had passed.
‘I’ll not be made a liar of,’ I answered, ‘and don’t look at me like you never cursed them like the rest of us over the years.’
‘Your mother would be disgusted if she knew.’
‘Oh, she knows, I told her that’s what I was planning,’ I said, muscling my way down the street, through the onlookers, who one by one, began to hear news of my crime as it trickled down the line. What I hadn’t said was that my mother had made no reply when I told her earlier what I was going to do. She’d simply handed over her list of messages and turned back into the house in silence.
‘Have you no respect for the dead?’ Roche called after me, playing to the crowd, encouraging them to join her in my condemnation.
I stopped and turned to her.
‘You blessing yourself as he passed isn’t going to make them treat you any better, Mrs Roche. They’ll still pay you the same pittance for the washing.’
‘You’re nothing but a scut. Someone will put manners on you one of these days, Hannigan.’
‘I look forward to them trying,’ I said, bringing an end to our public debate, turning once again for home.
‘You’re not a patch on your brother. He knew manners.’
I didn’t look back to her final and cruellest blow but stretched myself as tall as I could and strode away. When out of sight, I closed my eyes. She was right, Tony was by far a better man than me. I didn’t like to think of him up there despairing and ashamed of his brother.
‘I couldn’t pretend, Tony,’ I offered in my defence, mounting my bike, with the few messages under my arm and pedalling my way home.
Even before he’d died the Dollard fortunes had been slipping. Some said it was gambling, others bad investments. To me, it was payback. By sixty-three we’d already bought Moran’s land, then Byrne’s and finally Stanley’s, until my land surrounded Dollard’s on three sides. Slowly, I began to eat into theirs.
The strategy for buying their land was the same as with any other man. Offer low. But with them, it felt extra exhilarating. Invariably, the price I paid was paltry. Every couple of years they sold off a little more and each time my offer got lower. Until, that is, the last time.
One evening back in the early seventies, I opened my door to a young man I’d never set eyes on before.
‘Good evening, Mr Hannigan,’ he said, with a smile so wide it caused me to wince. ‘I know these things are normally left to the agents, but I felt I had to come talk to you myself about your recent offer on the Dollard land.’
‘And you are?’
‘Forgive me, I’m Jason. Jason Bruton. I’m married to Hilary.’
He put out his hand.
‘Hilary?’
‘Yes, Rachel Dollard’s daughter Hilary?’
Let me go back, son. Thomas’s sister, Rachel, who’d all those years before stood and watched her brother inflict that scar on my face had left the house as soon as she was old enough. Was she even sixteen? I’m not sure. Went off to marry Reggie, some English toff. Not wealthy as it turned out and so they ended up back at the house after a few years with Amelia, the mother, after the Dollard senior died. They had one daughter, Hilary. And this Jason Bruton was Hilary’s husband. When I offered him nothing to this news of who he was, he continued anyway, pulling back his unshaken hand, looking at it to make sure he wasn’t mistaken, ‘as I was saying, this land business—’
‘Business. Now there you have it – business, not charity. Just in case that’s what you’re here for.’
‘Quite. Well, I’d like to call a spade a spade also,’ he said, clearing his throat. ‘Yours is the only offer we’ve received. I could stand here and say we have another buyer. But you are no fool, as is plain. Therefore, I’ve come to ask that you consider bringing up your offer, not of course to the selling price but to one that is more … reasonable.’
‘Well now, Jackson—’
‘Jason. It’s Jason.’
‘And tell me, why might I want to do that?’
‘May I come in, Mr Hannigan? To talk this over further, in private,’ he said, looking about him as if my house was right in the middle of a housing estate.
‘You may not,’ I replied, pulling the door in closer behind me, emphasising my position and ensuring Sadie might not overhear.
‘I see,’ he said, drawing in a considered breath and then laughing. ‘They did tell me this was a waste of time. Rachel and Reggie. And yet here I am, wishing I’d listened to them.’
‘How’s your uncle-in-law?’
‘My uncle-in-law? Thomas you mean. I’ve no idea. I don’t hear much about him. Did you know him well?’ he replied, clutching at whatever straw I was willing to throw.
‘You could say that.’
‘He’s in London. Got married again.’
‘Did he now? Did he murder the first one?’
‘I … I…’
‘Listen, John. You’ve no idea how brave you are to stand at my door asking me for more money for them,’ I said, jabbing my finger in the direction of the house. I paused as we held the other’s eye. ‘Now, unless you’re telling me something I don’t already know about that land, I see no reason why I would “up” the offer.’
That fairly shut him up. Or so I thought. He swallowed hard, readying himself for the battle he’d never wanted.
‘Decency, Mr Hannigan, that’s why. Your offer is criminal, no other word for it.’
I hadn’t expected that.
‘I thought if we talked it over man to man you might see your way to being fair. But it appears I’m not always right. I know when to admit defeat.’ And off he went.
I liked him.
‘Five.’ I called into the darkness.
‘Pardon?’ his voice replied, before his body stepped back into the reach of my porch light.
‘I’ll give five thousand more. For you, mind, and that pair of balls you have. Much more impressive than any Dollard male could ever boast.’
I hoped Tony was listening.
The land was worth so much more. I knew it. He knew it. A part of me wanted to invite him in, to have a whiskey and thrash it out further, but I got over that quick enough. He stood there, looking at me, ever so slightly dazed.
‘I’ll ring my man in the morning, to tell him of our gentleman’s agreement. You might want to go back now and tell them how you wrestled it out of me,’ I added.
But before he could take a step, I called him back.
‘But tell me this, Jason. There’s not much land left over there now. What’s the plan, when this lot of my money runs out?’
He didn’t answer straight away but looked at me from squinted eyes. Eventually, he said:
‘A hotel.’
‘A hotel is it? Well, holy shamolie. Now there’s something this town could do with, what with all the tourists we have.’
‘I’ll have you know, Mr Hannigan, my family has been in the hotel business for a century. If anyone can turn this God forsaken backwater into a tourist destination, it’s me.’
I liked him even more.
I smiled and closed the door. Leaning up against its frame for a moment, I considered this new departure in the Dollard fortunes.
‘Who was that, Maurice?’ Sadie asked, coming out from the kitchen with you waddling behind her.
‘That, my dear, was Jason, the hotelier. He’s got big plans for this town. We’re getting ourselves a hotel.’
When I met your mother, it felt like she’d filled a small piece of the hole that Tony’d left behind. Certainly, her love took the edges off his loss a bit. It was like bubble wrap in a way. Keeping him safe and settled within me, the sharpness gone. But as mad as it sounds, I sort of resented her for robbing that little bit of him from me.
Hand on heart, in all my years without him, not a day has gone by without me chatting to him about the cows or the price of feed or whether I should buy or sell a piece of land. The Sunday game, now that’s one of our big things. He sits on my shoulder, pointing out where the players are going wrong. Such a bloody perfectionist when it comes to hurling. Addicted to it, when he was alive. Gone, every Sunday and every summer evening to play on the pitch above by the church. He dragged me along with him, even though I hadn’t the heart to tell him I didn’t share his passion. I played alright, but not like him, not with that soul, that drive, like he was fighting for Ireland’s freedom.
‘You don’t have to, Big Man, you don’t have to come. I get it,’ he told me one Sunday as we set out for the pitch. I must’ve been about fourteen.
‘What are you talking about? I wouldn’t miss it for the world. Watching you make a complete eejit of yourself on that pitch is the highlight of my week.’ He slapped me on the back and off we went, our hurls over our shoulders.
Only the other week when we were watching the Carlow–Westmeath match he said to me: ‘You were good you know, Maurice, better than me, if you’d put your mind to it. I’d have given anything to have had your talent. But you couldn’t’ve been arsed.’
But one evening, Sadie found me out at the car staring into space, looking all worried. We must have been married a good while by then. I don’t know where you were, were you even born at that stage? I thought my mind was beginning to let him go, for good. You see, I was driving home and looking out over our fields that ran a good bit of the road before our turning, when I saw him. Bent down, his arms digging away. The old brown shirt on him, like he’d always worn. I jammed on the brakes. Just before the driveway. I walked back the way to look for him, but he was gone. When I drove up the final bit to the house, it struck me that I hadn’t thought of him that whole day or the day before. His name, his spirit had not passed within one inch of me from the moment I’d risen until the apparition in the field.
‘Maurice, what’s happened?’ Sadie asked, coming out the front door, looking at me. She must’ve heard me pull up and been watching from the kitchen window.
I hadn’t realised I was crying until she lifted her hand to my cheek.
‘Nothing, nothing,’ I replied, coughing my tears away, moving my head out of her reach, ‘I’m grand, woman. It’s just the wind.’
I couldn’t look at her. I was convinced she’d replaced him. And I couldn’t bear it. Couldn’t bear losing what little I had left of him in that brain of mine. I walked away from her over to the sheds. Pretended at doing something, looking at the tractor, possibly. I waited until she’d gone back in the house and then I let those tears fall. Big bucketfuls of them. Holding on to the wheel arch, leaning in, feeling like the legs might just give way. One ear cocked for the back door opening again. No one came. Eventually, I pulled myself together and went off into the house to sit for the dinner and to give your mother the excuse of a flu for my puffy eyes and weary body. But the whole evening I couldn’t even glance in her direction.
I stayed in the bedroom for the evening, left her alone with the telly. I pulled out the old shoebox I had from under the bed. Dug through it and found as many photos as I could of him. I sat there on the floor, old negatives and pictures around me, staring at my favourite one: the one where we were sat in front of the butter churn outside the upper-room window of the old house. A creamy haze of a photo, curled in so much by then that I had to hold the edges back to see him properly. His left hand was raised to block out the sun. I concentrated on his face, trying to embed it in my brain. But the more I tried the more I failed. I had myself in such a state that Sadie had Lemsips, paracetamol and Vicks VapoRub all lined up. In the end I gave in, took the lot and went to sleep. I dreamed of the picture that night – Tony sitting on our old kitchen chair and me standing to his rear. My lower half hidden by the churn, my chest puffed out, smirking proudly. My hand lay protectively on Tony’s shoulder, holding on for dear life, refusing to let him rise, although he tried. In the end I remember his words like he was actually beside me.
‘Alright, Big Man, let me be. I’m not going anywhere.’
The next morning, I rose, knowing he’d never leave me again. Sadie was amazed at my recovery. Quizzed me on the exact concoction I’d taken for future reference. For years after we had to abide by my made-up instructions of that supposed cure whenever any of us caught a cold or flu.
But it’s his living presence I’ve missed the most since your mother’s left. And no amount of talking to him in my head can take the place of being able to see the man, to touch the skin and bone of him, to hear him sup a pint in Hartigan’s. What I wouldn’t give for just one hour of his company. No need for much conversation at all. Our elbows on the counter. A bottle of stout each in front of us. Half empty glasses. Looking out at the town. Tapping our feet to the music on the radio or laughing over the madness of the world. The company of the trusted, what? Being understood without having to explain and not having to pretend all is fine. Being allowed to be a feckin’ mess. The feeling of his pat on my back as he passes behind me to go to the jax. Is it too much to ask for a simple resurrection?
But I’m grateful for those years I had him. Isn’t that why I’m sitting here? Giving thanks for a man who shaped me, guided me, minded me and, most of all, taught me to never give up. But he’s fierce quiet today, son. Hasn’t said a word in my ear this whole time. I wonder, has my plan finally baffled him into silence.