Selected Stories

‘It’s good you came back,’ she said.

He shook his head, realizing as soon as he had made it that the gesture was too slight for her to have noticed. He couldn’t not have come back. ‘How’re you doing?’ he said.

‘All right. All right.’

They were in the kitchen. His father was upstairs. The others would come and then the coffin would be closed and his father would be taken to the church. That was how she wanted it: the way it always was when death was taken from the house.

‘It was never good between you,’ she said.

‘I’d come all the same.’

Nothing was different in the kitchen: the same green paint, worn away to the timber at two corners of the dresser and around the latch of the doors that led to the yard and to the stairs; the same delft seeming no more chipped or cracked on the dresser shelves, the big scrubbed table, the clutter on the smoky mantel-shelf above the stove, the uncomfortable chairs, the flagged floor, the receipts on the spike in the window.

‘Sit with him a while, Paulie.’

His father had always called him Paul, and he was called Paul in his employment, among the people of the midland towns. Paul was what Patsy Finucane called him.

‘Go up to him, Paulie. God rest him,’ she said, a plea in her tone that bygones should be bygones, that the past should be misted away now that death had come, that prayer for the safe delivery of a soul was what mattered more.

‘Will they all come together?’ he asked, still sitting there. ‘Did they say that?’

‘They’ll be here by three. Kevin’s car and one Aidan’ll hire.’

He stood up, his chair scraping on the flagstones. He had asked the questions in order to delay going up to his father’s bedside. But it was what she wanted, and what she was saying without saying it was that it was what his father wanted also. There would be forgiveness in the bedroom, his own spoken in a mumble, his father’s taken for granted.

He took the rosary she held out to him, not wishing to cause offence.

Hearing his footsteps on the brief, steeply pitched stairs, hearing the bedroom door open and close, the footsteps again in the room above her, then silence, she saw now what her returned son saw: the bloodless pallor, the stubble that had come, eyelids drawn, lips set, the grey hair she had combed. Frances had been the favourite, then Mena; Kevin was approved of because he was reliable; Aidan was the first-born. Paulie hadn’t been often mentioned.

There was the sound of a car, far back on the boreen. A while it would take to arrive at the farmhouse. She set out cups and saucers on the table, not hurrying. The kettle had boiled earlier and she pushed it back on to the hot plate of the stove. Not since they were children had they all been back at the same time. There wouldn’t be room for them for the two nights they’d have to spend, but they’d have their own ideas about how to manage that. She opened the back door so that there’d be a welcome.

Paulie looked down at the stretched body, not trusting himself to address it in any way. Then he heard the cars arriving and crossed the room to the window. In the yard Frances was getting out of one and the other was being backed so that it wouldn’t be in the way, a white Ford he’d never seen before. The window was open at the top and he could hear the voices, Kevin saying it hadn’t been a bad drive at all and Aidan agreeing. The Ford was hired, Cahill of Limerick

it said on a sticker; picked up at Shannon it would have been.

The husbands of Paulie’s sisters hadn’t come, maybe because of the shortage of sleeping space. They’d be looking after the Dublin children, and it seemed that Kevin’s Sharon had stayed behind with theirs in Carlow. Aidan had come on his own from Boston. Paulie had never met Aidan’s wife and Sharon only once; he’d never met any of the children. They could have managed in a single car, he calculated, watching his brothers and sisters lifting out their suitcases, but it might have been difficult to organize, Kevin having to drive round by Shannon.

His brothers wore black ties, his sisters were in mourning of a kind, not entirely, because that could wait till later. Mena looked pregnant again. Kevin had a bald patch now. Aidan took off the glasses he had worn to drive. Their suitcases weren’t heavy. You could tell there was no intention to stay longer than was necessary.

Looking down into the yard, Paulie knew that an assumption had already been made, as he had known it in the kitchen when he sat there with his mother. He was the bachelor of the family, the employment he had wasn’t much. His mother couldn’t manage on her own.

He had known it in Meagher’s back bar when he told Patsy Finucane he had a funeral to go to. The death had lost him Patsy Finucane: it was her, not his father, he thought about when he heard of it, and in Meagher’s the stout ran away with him and he spoke too soon. ‘Jeez,’ she said, ‘what would I do in a farmhouse!’