Father Huck Balance stood in full vestments, scowling at the dog as the wind wrapped his stole around his face. He had been swinging the thurible fairly hard, and milky incense was now spewing out of it in a dense, Catholic fog. Rain was beginning to fall, and the smell of ozone mingled with the sweet musk of Mass to create an uncanny feeling of everything being out of place. It was the kind of grey, half-started day you’re always reading about in Irish short stories, where strong, unreasonable men attend the rural funerals of even stronger and less reasonable men. This was weather fit for killing your uncle, or nearly-but-not-quite bringing the wake house to a standstill by confessing your love for the widow of the departed, a woman you haven’t seen since that last time, so many years ago, that you, our author, are certainly about to describe in some detail. But we were not gathered by a hillside grave, nor huddling toward a country wake. We were standing outside our house waiting for the priest to bless our new twenty-six-foot ABI Award Superstar caravan. It was July 1992, just nine months after my mother’s death. By this point, I was likely so inured to Catholic rituals – and my family’s common deployment of them – that events like this, though interesting, even exciting, didn’t seem particularly odd. I’ve since realised that most families did not have priests out to the house to bless their caravan; it was more the sort of thing that bishops would do at Dublin airport with the plane carrying the Irish football team to a major tournament.
Even for a family like ours, who were fairly used to priests calling round, seeing one in full regalia, just walking around our house and garden, was a thrill. It was a cousin of that confusion you get when you spot a teacher in the supermarket. Here the feeling was multiplied, since Father Balance arriving in his full rig produced the opposite effect of a teacher sighted in the wild. Outside of school, teachers could seem pathetic and drab, shorn of the power that hung about them in their natural habitat. I once saw Mr Johnston in West Side Stores. A man who breathed fire and crushed souls from 8 until 3 each day, now pondering, dead-eyed, whether to buy a 3-for-2 pack of Rootin’ Tootin’ Cottage Pies, or a shop-soiled Vegetable Varmint Vegan Lasagne. Father Huck, by contrast, brought the magnificence of his station with him, as if Christ’s power was not just all-encompassing but conveniently portable. On secondment to this outpost, he transplanted the gravitas of his own, greater universe to the spot between our house and the garage, projecting it entirely onto the large caravan in front of him. As we pulled our sleeves down over our hands against the cold, he stood implacable and resolute, broadcasting the solemnity of God in the very same place where, just twenty-five minutes earlier, our dog, Nollaig, had been eating his own shite.
Nollaig was no longer ingesting effluent, but still refused to honour that half-state of reverence the rest of us were attempting, the type of quiet awkwardness that’s general when you have Mass in a weird place and everyone tries to act as though it’s perfectly normal. He was barking and growling, as if mocking the events unfolding in front of him. Father Balance said nothing, but I thought I caught a glint of contempt in his eyes at each interruption. What, he seemed to say to our dog, is so funny about a priest blessing a gigantic caravan in the rain? I presume the smell of the incense was what was bothering Nollaig. Either that or Mr Devenney, our otherwise kindly neighbour, had landed us with one of Ireland’s few Protestant sheepdogs. Such dogs could, of course, sow discord among the others, annex the lands of Catholic cows and march provocatively past contested field routes each July. On the plus side, most farmers agreed, Protestant dogs would probably be more willing to put in a shift on Sundays.
Whatever his denomination, Nollaig – Christmas in Irish – had long established a reputation as something of a cheerful arsehole, and was less a beloved pet than an uncaring brute who tumbled through our lives like a demented frat boy in an American campus comedy. We all pretended we liked him, perhaps out of fear he’d steal our lunch money or push us into a drinking fountain. He’d been a gift for my sister Mairead the year before my mother died, although a combination of his spirited nature and Mairead’s being just seven led to her slowly being forgiven of prime responsibility, and it was instead assumed that he was the family’s problem. He ate everything he could get his paws on, and several things he should never have been able to. He once savaged a frozen chicken that had been in one of the two big chest freezers we had in the garage. How he managed to open its lid, which was large, heavy and stood four feet off the ground, is still a matter of speculation. When Conall was two years old he grabbed Nollaig’s lead in a fit of misplaced affection, and Nollaig shot off at such speed that the baby of the family was jolted, Buster Keaton fashion, off the ground. For a few seconds he trailed behind our dyspeptic hound in mid-air, fully horizontal, as his little fist gripped the tether now hurtling him toward certain death. In the end, Conall got away with a few cuts and bruises, but for him, my parents and most of the rest of my family, it was extraordinarily traumatic. Personally, I consider it one of the best things I’ve ever seen, and feel as though it made the rest of Nollaig’s bad behaviour broadly worth it. In any case, whatever his thoughts on virgin births or the holy catechism, there was just as much a chance Nollaig was dismissive of priests due to general misanthropy rather than outright sectarianism. In the end, I’m happy to presume our dog was a prick, not a bigot.
Pursued by Nollaig, Father Balance raised his hands and approached the caravan with grave intent. Birds squawked and gravel crunched underfoot as he stepped forward to mutter a blessing. He swung the thurible around the wheels and then the windows, and then round the back, as if there was a pre-set routine for such things, an off-the-peg setting for a caravan blessing that was second nature to any priest. Within a few minutes the deed was done, and we dispersed in the joyful knowledge that some small part of God’s portable power was now embedded in our caravan.
Such were the perks of knowing so many priests. When I was a child, it seemed as though my dad knew every priest in Ireland. This is because he knew every single priest in Ireland. Irish priests happen to be my father’s specialist subject. By this, I do not mean the Irish priesthood, as in the history and customs of that institution (though on that topic, too, he is undeniably strong). I mean the literal, individual priests. Each of them. By name, location and family connection. Ireland’s small population, combined with my parents’ energetically devout Catholicism, put them on friendly terms with most of Ireland’s clergy during that extensive period of the twentieth century when Ireland was a net exporter of priests.
It’s worth explaining just how comically, parodically Catholic my parents were. They weren’t just avid churchgoers and committed in their home lives, they also gave readings at Mass and served as eucharistic ministers, handing out communion to parishioners. They worked within various Catholic-flavoured remits: charities, prayer groups and councils that gave a papist slant on marriage, vocation and youth outreach. My mother spent her entire professional career teaching in Catholic secondary schools, and my father volunteered as treasurer of our Catholic primary. More memorably still, there was a short period in the late nineties when he taught computer skills to the nuns who lived in the attached convent. We more than once visited Catholic sites like Lourdes and Knock on family holidays and experienced the true scalding heat of boredom at large, outdoor Masses in the wind and rain of holy fields. Before I was born, my parents took the opportunity to embark on a cross-continental trip that took in not Florence and the Louvre, Barcelona or the Algarve, but the many and splendid Marian shrines of Europe.
There was also, let’s be honest, the fact that they had eleven cardigan-wearing little children, arguably the most solid credential that exists within Catholicism short of holy orders. They were paragons of piety, and aspired to raise the lower-middle-class ideal of a good Catholic family. If only one of us had managed to spot a statue of the Virgin Mary riding a bike or smoking a fag, it’s a fair bet my mother would be a saint by now. Unfortunately, after the golden years of the early twentieth century, during which it seemed that barely a week went past without such a sighting, the boom was over by our time, strangely coinciding with the advent of reliable compact photography.
It’s sometimes hard for me to work out whether we were ourselves especially holy, or if we simply lived through a particularly holy time for my mother, when her faith gained greater expression in the face of death. I was well into adulthood before I realised that in every single memory I have of my mother, she was living with cancer, or the fear of its recurrence. But while it does seem that her faith was strengthened by her illness, it’s also true that she was very committed to begin with. The Catholicism of my parents leaned less on dogma and more on a generalised sense of gratitude, humility and fellowship, and an emphasis on family and community. They didn’t go for diatribes about hell, sin, masturbation and abortion. We did hear about that stuff in school and at Mass – most especially abortion, which was almost always described as part of ‘the culture of death’, to use the church’s favourite phrase of the time – but even then only infrequently.
Insofar as evil was ever mentioned to me as a child, it was less in relation to touching myself or fancying boys and more to do with present, quotidian sins, like making fun of people with disabilities or becoming involved in paramilitary violence. On this latter point, my parents were particularly clear. Contrary to the narrative often pushed by outside chroniclers of the Troubles, the sectarianism we saw everywhere growing up was not so much religious as tribal. In Derry, a Catholic didn’t mean someone who had internalised the virgin birth and the transubstantiation of Christ’s corpse into a sliver of cheap, waxy, haunted wafer. Catholic in the common parlance merely meant someone who was born of Catholics, no matter what their feelings about Christ’s literal existence, or their opinion on the Second Vatican Council. The Catholics who made up the IRA were almost exclusively Catholics in this sense, and the same was true of all the Catholics mentioned on the news after each round of murders. They were Catholics in that they were not Protestants, and vice versa. My parents, on the other hand, were Catholics in the more full-strength prescription of the term, and lived the values of tolerance, kindness, mercy and forgiveness that perhaps organised Catholicism didn’t represent at the time.
The local farmers were less forgiving of Nollaig than we were when he graduated from mauling frozen chickens to killing and eating their sheep. It shouldn’t have been surprising, perhaps, since he had for a while been growing more bold, nipping at visitors and issuing growls and even bites that had long since progressed beyond playful. One cold, wet Sunday – again adding fuel to the whole Protestant theory – Nollaig killed a sheep a few fields over and was put down. I don’t believe a vet was involved; it was instead agreed that Nollaig should be presented to the farmer himself, so that he could have a full, frank conversation via shotgun. We weren’t exactly distraught, but our neighbours threw street parties. We suddenly had that disquieting realisation that everyone within an eight-mile radius had hated him as much as they loved us. I guess it was the dog-owner’s equivalent of when your friend breaks up with her boyfriend and everyone finally tells her that his beard is disgusting and that podcast of his is going nowhere.
Perhaps inevitably, we entered into a rebound relationship, taking in an Alsatian/Labrador cross named Bruno, who was everything Nollaig hadn’t been. Bruno was a girl who we initially thought was a boy, hence her name. We twigged she was a girl when it became clear she was pregnant. It seemed as though she had come from nowhere, but now I wonder if she had been a stray notch on Nollaig’s bedpost who, after keeping as far away from her psycho ex as possible, swooped in and nicked his bed once he was out of the picture. She was quiet and kind-hearted and immediately proved more popular than poor Nollaig, but often flinched from contact, especially from men, which made us think she’d had a troubled time of it. Desperate to love and be loved, I saw in her a kindred spirit, and doted on her unreservedly. Since my mother’s death, we each sought the opportunity to project our neuroses onto the family pet, and here was one that finally seemed aware of our presence. For those of us suffering a lack of attention, we adored her steadfast fascination with everything we did. For those of us who wanted space, we had a little underling we could chase from any rooms we entered, with an alacrity that suggested we might want to do the same to some of the house’s human occupants.
I think I just wanted someone I could repeatedly express my love for, without having to think too much about why, exactly, I needed it so much. I should be clear, this wasn’t Bleak House; my family were open about how much we loved each other, and my father especially. It’s just he probably would have been freaked out if I’d said it four hundred times a day, which is, approximately, what I needed to do at the time. An oddly co-dependent little friendship was forged. I cared for Bruno by treating her very kindly, and she cared for me by not taking off. Two pitiful little eejits, each sad in their own way. I performed those tasks a motherless child might imagine a mother would do: walking beside my furry little infant, saying ‘I love you’ and ‘I’ll never leave you’ and ‘do not eat that dead bird, it’s been at the side of the road for two weeks’.
When her litter finally arrived, these instincts went into overdrive, and I looked on each of her offspring as my personal responsibility. Like some little Irish Oedipus, I mapped new frontiers of dysfunction by casting myself as Bruno’s mother, son and, now, proud father to her eleven pups. While they were little more than squirming, wriggling caterpillars, too small to open their eyes, us Wee Ones handballed them to and fro, sizing them up and allotting each an equal sequence of cuddles and pattings, courting near constant admonition from my father that we treat them a little more gently. Had he not been on hand, I fear more than a few would have been squeezed to death. It was clear we were not especially attuned to the finer points of animal husbandry, as we discovered one particularly hot day when Conall became flustered at the thought of them growing parched, unspooled the hose by our garage and directed a torrent of water directly into the kennel to ‘cool them down’. The next thing we knew, he’d sent a squadron of bemused little pups sailing on a river of soaked bedding, hay and hundreds of their tic-tac-sized turds. But they survived, and soon their eyes were open and they were yapping and squealing like actual little dogs, and producing copious amounts of larger, more substantial, shite.
Three weeks in, I was woken by a distant whine, and followed the pups’ mewling cries to the top of the road. It was just before dawn, and raining hard. I found them huddled beneath a shipping container by the customs checkpoint, and climbed under to inspect them. There was more than enough space for me to sit there cross-legged, and as I did, they gambolled into my lap, their drenched bodies patting me all at once like a sad applause of frightened little hands. There was no sign of their mother, although I could hear her barking in the very same field of sheep that had done for Nollaig. I sat there in the full horror of their abandonment, holding these soaked pups and crying. Daddy was soon alerted to my absence and a little while later he arrived for me, sending Dara and Shane back for a towel to grab the litter. He told me Bruno’s instructive instinct had kicked in and she’d likely brought the pups up there to hunt sheep, but finding they preferred to flop around uselessly in the rain went on without them. Sister Annette took me out of class the following day to tell me, in the curious terminology used in such cases, that Bruno had been ‘worrying sheep’ and ‘had had to be destroyed’. Even as a child, the idea that chasing sheep ‘worried’ them seemed preposterous, conjuring images of flocks pacing back and forth, of flighty ewes biting their nails. And as for ‘destroyed’, I didn’t even know where to start with that one. They were talking about Bruno as if she were an asteroid hurtling toward Earth, or a nuclear warhead. I imagined piles of bold dogs, stacked like a cache of decommissioned paramilitary ordnance. I’ve since been told this isn’t too far off the truth.
I wonder now why they had to tell us at all, but then I suppose, unlike with my city friends, they couldn’t pretend she’d gone to live on a farm. Perhaps they could have reversed it and told me she had been sent to live in a council high-rise in town, but that apparently never occurred to them. Our neighbours didn’t throw parties this time, and even the farmer who was forced to report her gave his condolences to my father, since he knew it would be a heavy blow. I was inconsolable for weeks, and it doesn’t take a particularly deep grasp of psychology to work out what I saw in these eleven helpless infants, senselessly deprived of a mother. It was pretty heavy-handed stuff but, what can I say, God’s a bit of a hack sometimes.
While my parents would not have agreed with that statement, their Catholicism was less dogmatic and more a happy-clappy Christian fellowship-type thing; all summer camps and trendy books written by cool priests with nice hair. Not that we were too outwardly zealous. We’d see Americans on TV crying in church or speaking in tongues and reflect that even the most ardent Catholics we knew were more likely to mumble their way through the rosary. That kind of ostentatious religion just didn’t seem to suit Northern Irish Catholics. American evangelicals seemed to treat God as their best friend, and American Catholics in Irish and Italian gangster movies treated him as a reclusive weirdo who had an ungovernable obsession with their genitals. Catholics of the English upper classes, like Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene, were even weirder, obsessed with blood and candles, and appearing to think of their godhead as an occult dominatrix who issued pellets of shame and guilt like a giant, sadomasochistic Pez dispenser. That wasn’t how most Northern Irish Catholics would have framed it. God was a boring but avuncular boss, or a more senior friend from work, someone to whom you’d be polite if you bumped into them down the shops, but most certainly not one you’d wish to spend time with outside office hours. Our version of carefree papism was the kind where everyone stuck their heads down for the prayers and said very little, but occasionally a laughing priest might tell you about a recent go he’d had on a bouncy castle and how, in a funny kind of a way, isn’t our Lord Jesus a bit like a bouncy castle, when you think about it?
We went to Mass every Sunday without fail, and did confession, communion and confirmation, but everyone did that. My second week at college was actually the first time I’d ever gone two weeks in a row without attending Mass. I never went regularly again. I had been more involved with the church than most of the kids in the parish, since our family did the readings every few weeks, and as more of us went off to university the pool of available readers was winnowed to those of us who were left, so we’d each end up doing four or five a year. Giving the readings did manage to eradicate any embarrassment I had about public speaking, which was useful in later life. I had used all that embarrassment up by the age of thirteen, which was the last time I used the stool that was placed by the lectern for smaller speakers. Having misjudged the effects of a recent growth spurt, I ascended the stool to discover I was now fully three feet above the microphone and my gangly frame and arched back gave me the look of a professional basketball player bobbing for apples. Mortified, I ignored the laughter – the loudest of which was coming from my own siblings – and gave both readings as the world’s tallest man, refusing to climb down even as I stood in silence while the Hallelujah was sung from the back of the church.
Sometimes Daddy would come home from meetings on youth engagement or vocations outreach, re-energised by the mission of getting kids to love the church, and use us as an impromptu little focus group he could bounce ideas off. Sitting at the dinner table, he’d affect a ponderous air and wrestle with the task of making young people think Christ was ‘cool’. Should Father Bun Hanratty mention Oasis more in his sermons, perhaps? Maybe the church could pretend that Jesus Christ was the mysterious one in a boy band or – now squinting at some notes written in scrawly fountain pen – lived in Planet Hollywood. Would we like that? Would we like it if Jesus Christ wore a leather jacket and lived in Planet Hollywood? Because if we did, it was suggested, my dad could make that happen.
Some priests knew us so well they would drop by unannounced, as when Father McKenna and Father McLaughlin took a jaunt out to the country on a whim and sidled up to our house on bicycles. Ireland has spent the past thirty years shedding its attachment to the Catholic church faster than any other country in Europe, but even if we continued to secularise for a century or more, we would likely still agree that it’s always nice to see a priest on a bicycle. There is just something pleasing, something primal, iconic and utterly silly about the image. Possibly only a tandem could have bettered it, perhaps decorated with stickers of favourite saints.
On other occasions, a priest’s arrival could be more surprising, as when we returned home from an all-day trip to visit Auntie Kathleen in South Armagh and found Father Finbar Staples sitting in the living room watching Match of the Day. He had arrived earlier that afternoon and, upon discovering we were out, jimmied open our kitchen window and made himself at home until we returned, several hours later. What’s truly astonishing is not the event itself, but how muted our response to it was. At the time, it didn’t seem all that strange that he’d done this, certainly not to my dad, who was just happy to see an old friend, and even apologised that there wasn’t much to eat in the house. We were dispatched to make tea and cut up some fruitcake for the poor Father, who was likely wasting away on the meagre rations of crisps, biscuits, a ham sandwich, a jar of olives and three beers he’d had to make do with in our absence. For his part, Father Finbar didn’t seem even remotely embarrassed by any of this, and happily threw himself into a catch-up with my father – a man whom, prior to breaking into his home, he hadn’t seen in three or four years. When it came time for Father Finbar to take off, my father apologised again, as if it was poor form of us to have been absent, or at the very least not to have had the house fully stocked with priestly provisions. It was as if once you were baptised Catholic, you tacitly understood that your home was a waystation for any passing priest and the houses of rural Ireland were a tasty network of clerical birdfeeders. My dad still isn’t really sure why we find this story so funny, save for the final verdict it provided on Elmo’s qualities as a guard dog. Upon discovering a man in black was fumbling with our kitchen window, Father Finbar maintained she had done nothing more than lick his hand and nudge his forearm.
Elmo was Bruno’s daughter, and probably the best dog we ever had. She combined Bruno’s quiet temperament with a more outgoing personality and, her abilities as a watchdog notwithstanding, a keen intelligence. My father was particularly strident when it came to championing her IQ, and he quickly established a working theory on her failure to stop our clerical intruder. Elmo could, so my father insisted, intuit that Father Finbar was a friendly figure, but if he had been someone with malign intent she would have dealt with him differently. As always, when it comes to my dad’s theories of canine intelligence – for they are many and varied – no real detail was forthcoming on exactly what Elmo would have done in this circumstance. Called the police, perhaps. Such was the power of Elmo’s personality that even her failings were repurposed into strengths, and such was her charisma that we all went along with it.
Elmo had a grace and poise that conferred a certain nobility on her, even in youth. She lacked the impulsivity or recklessness of other dogs, as if she was in possession of information beyond their reach, giving her an inner well of confidence that stopped her from over-reacting to things. She was sincerely empathetic, and had a dozen quiet gestures of comfort she could deploy if you needed emotional support. Elmo showed my father’s softer side, since there’s no greater love than that between a taciturn rural Irishman and the dog he shouts at all day. The attachment between them was immediate, and long lasting. When I remember her, it’s at my father’s side as he undertook some task in his office; sitting sphinx-like behind the garage, watching the world go by on the main road; or snoozing on that same patch under the kitchen table where the lino sits directly over pleasingly heated pipes. As my father settled into middle age, Elmo was the ideal companion: affectionate enough that her company made him feel loved and appreciated, but sufficiently independent she didn’t really require any actual looking after.
Compared to Bruno, who had been a total homebody, Elmo was like a chirpy, self-assured little foreign exchange student. She spent most of her time ranging through the Derry/Donegal countryside, often returning to the house only for mealtimes and naps. One time she was spotted about five miles away on the Craigavon bridge, close to Derry’s city centre. On other occasions she would be dropped back in nice family cars by friendly strangers, who hadn’t just encountered her randomly but, it usually turned out, had built a relationship with her over some weeks or even months. Their children, clearly besotted, would refer to her with unfamiliar names, evincing some form of ownership over this wise and friendly dog that, unbeknownst to them, had been gaming the entire county for food. Her travels hadn’t merely been a whistle-stop tour through the borderlands’ scenic spots, but to any family home without a dog in a four- or five-mile radius of our house. I’m not sure how many families were involved, but it’s a good thing she covered so much ground as she had four or five dinners to burn off every day.
Elmo was also the first experience I had of my father’s remarkable animal telepathy skills, which he retains to this day. ‘She understands every word you say, you know,’ he was fond of telling us. They lived in complete harmony with each other. Elmo shared my father’s frustration at nuisance callers pulling into our drive with requests to buy the caravan or in the hope of persuading Daddy to become a Jehovah’s Witness. And Daddy was firmly in her corner when it came to her ongoing feud with the swallows that nested in our garage, and who took cruel delight in dipping over her with sarcastic swooping motions. While my father read nothing but good intentions into the minds of dogs, he clearly didn’t like what his avian mind-sensors picked up, and found that birds were, for the most part, obnoxious twats. ‘They know what they’re doing!’ he’d say, incensed, as they darted back and forth above her kennel like a malignant little squadron of Red Arrows.
We discovered that Elmo’s travels were not quite as PG-rated as we presumed when she had pups of her own, fathered by some unknown, distant Lothario. We gave away all but one, Sophie, in whom she delighted, teaching her to hunt by chasing not sheep but the ever-circling swallows, which were much closer and proved less hazardous prey. All looked to be going well until Sophie was a month or two old, at which point she contracted pneumonia and became gravely ill. She died on Christmas Eve, leaving us despondent and, we thought, removing some small bit of Elmo’s sunny demeanour for ever.
Priests died too. ‘Ach no,’ Daddy would say, ruffling the pages of the Derry Journal for effect as he spoke to no one in particular. ‘There’s Hustings LeFarge dead anyway.’ As with his love for Formula One, I often thought he was disappointed we didn’t share his fascination with church goings-on. We weren’t rendered dizzily incontinent by the inside track he had regarding clerical matters: who was going to a new parish, who had a new car, who’d been on the radio and who’d died – especially who’d died. Following a silence, or perhaps some mumbled words of sympathy, Daddy would expound on Father LeFarge, recounting his many-staged career with mounting astonishment that none of his own infant children were better acquainted with that time he baptised six babies that had fallen in a hedge, or spread awareness of Passion Sunday by touring the country with a kissing booth. It’s a true strength of my father’s parenting style that he always spoke to us as though we were adults, ignoring the difference in age between us and himself. However, a curious side effect of this was his tendency to grow incredulous that we were not adults and didn’t have the experience or memories he had accrued over his own lifetime. We would have to keep insisting that we knew little about the career of a ninety-year-old priest he’d last seen a few decades before we were born. ‘Where was it he was prelate?’ Daddy might then muse, addressing this query to a room of children who’d barely been out of the house, much less knew the movements of an elderly Jesuit from Sligo.
We had an anniversary Mass in our house every year for my mother, and friends and family would come to commemorate her passing with a relatively informal service in our sitting room. It was a bit mad seeing the sofa and armchairs replaced with rows of folding chairs we’d borrow from our primary school. The ordinary running order of a Mass would be broken up with more personal touches: people sharing memories or stories, and funny, tear-jerking little films made by my dad showing old photos or camcorder footage he’d put together. These videos were the highlight, done with a care and wit that was as apt to make the room burst into laughter as tears. They also gave me the only experience I can remember of seeing my mother moving through life in anything like a normal way, of her laughing or scowling at my dad for filming her, of her saying my name out loud. The work he’d pour into them was evident in every frame, and showed not just his love for Mammy, and for us, but his love of making that love known. Never particularly solemn in the early days, after a few years these occasions became openly joyous experiences, celebrations of her life and a lovely time for the family to return to the house and be together, no matter where fortune had sprayed them across the map.
The Masses were said by Father Bun McAliskey, the priest who baptised me and oversaw my communion, confirmation and each weekly Mass. We continued to do these Masses for twenty years, until Father McAliskey did our service, said his goodbyes and stood up in church the following morning to announce he was leaving the priesthood. He received rapturous applause and the full support of the congregation, ours included; we were slack-jawed and touched by the fact he’d obviously kept my mother’s Mass as his last appointment in religious orders.
By then, Elmo’s youthful demeanour had given way to a more mature and stately poise. The grey in her muzzle transformed that youthful nobility into something like gravitas and, in the manner of an actress making do with the paucity of good Hollywood roles, she made an overnight transition from ingénue to wise old priestess. It was clear her joints were bothering her, and a rheumy film gathered in her eye that looked decidedly suboptimal. She was soon chasing birds that simply were not there. On one fateful run in 2004, a car came in bearing the news we’d feared. She’d been identified, unmoving, on the road. My dad retrieved the body and, devastated, buried her in a plot behind the garage, overlooking the field in which she spent so much of her time, with a pleasant view of the road and happily off the path of those tormenting, tumbling birds.
My father took over presenting duties the following year, since replacing a priest seemed, by that stage, as blasphemous as swapping out his beloved dog. That year the occasion was pitched as an evening of commemoration. It would be the last such service we did.
Something my dad reminds me of when we talk of my lapsed faith is that the church’s worst ideas don’t indict all Catholics. This is a sentiment with which I wholeheartedly agree, since in my experience ordinary rank-and-file Catholics are mostly decent and lovely people, who don’t literally agree with every little church teaching. But with Catholicism, you are in or you are out. You don’t get to pick and choose the bits you agree with, by definition. It’s like saying you’re a teetotaller who only drinks wine. There was once a huge movement toward creating a subset of Catholics who ‘agree with Catholicism except this bit or that bit’ and it became wildly popular with the public. It was called the Reformation, and those people are called Protestants.
A year after Elmo died, we forced another dog onto Daddy without really giving him much say in the matter, since we knew he’d say he didn’t want one. Luckily, it proved a massive and immediate success. The Labrador/retriever cross who has lived with him for the past ten years is, by some distance, his favourite child. From the gloom of loss, a bright shining star entered his orbit, and Daddy didn’t so much form a bond with her as initiate a cult in her name. Sally sends him birthday cards, ghost-written by my sister Caoimhe, which dwarf our own when they’re propped above the fireplace, crowding out the view like a ship’s sail he’s placed on the mantelpiece.
I think it’s fair to say that Sally isn’t quite as noble, wise or clever as Elmo. I got myself in a lot of trouble by claiming in a newspaper column that she lacked the intelligence God gave a sea sponge. Within minutes I was being sent images of the dog reading the Observer, with what I’m sure my father hoped I’d see as an upset expression. Unfortunately, Sally lacks the capacity to look anything other than delighted when she’s in my father’s company, so the effect was slightly undone. What Sally lacks in poise and grace she more than makes up for in being huge, hairy and filled with adoration. ‘To his dog,’ wrote Aldous Huxley, ‘every man is Napoleon; hence the popularity of dogs.’ Napoleon would be a sad demotion for my father, as Sally believes him to be God himself. And for all his religious devotion, my father is fine with that.