I often wondered where my mother went the nights I was in Finbar’s house. Maybe she was out, with friends, or men, being young, or maybe she just needed a break, to be alone, away for a while from my relentless love.
BUNRATTY WAS SUDDENLY behind me and I was only a downhill and an easy straight from Shannon. I wondered at my freshness, the lack of pain in my knees and ankles. I realigned my shoulders, hips and knees, and set my face to the cool breeze, and soon I was passing the empty guard box at the airport gate.
I saw a pilot on the edge of the wide path. He was smoking a cigarette, watching me approach, leaning against the metal jamb of the gate in the fence along the edge of the hangars for private jets. He was smiling at me. A black Gulfstream sat soaking sunlight on the concrete, parked at an angle from the nearest hangar, its nose cone cocked outwards almost jauntily, in a way that made it look as though it had been parked up in a hurry, like a car left on double yellows while an errand was being hastily run. I slowed to a walk as I neared him. He breathed a line of smoke skyward and said: Hello, friend. You look tired. Come and sit and have some coffee with me. And he ground his butt with a gleaming shoe and pushed himself away from his slouch and started to walk without looking back, and I followed him.
He showed me the controls of the jet, the throttle and the tiller pedals, the altimeter and trim counter and radar screen; he offered me his headpiece and his hat and roared with laughter when I put them on, and I looked across the tarmac at the distant terminal building and the viewing area where Mam and me sometimes used to go for a day out to watch the planes take off and land, and I was sure I could see two figures there looking back at me, a dark-haired man and a fair-haired child. I looked west at the glint from the water of the Shannon estuary where it lapped across the mudflats of Rineanna, and I thought how mad it was that I was here, with this sallow smiling man, and I took a small white cup of coffee from him that was haloed by wisps of steam, and he said that he was sad this day and he would tell me why.
His father had been a hotelier, a big man who laughed a lot and helped his neighbours with their problems. He turned to Mecca and prayed when he was meant to, but he was more observant than devout, a friend to all men. His father had been accused of harbouring insurgents and was taken one night and held for an autumn and winter in a prison at the edge of their town. Visits were not permitted. His father was released one cold morning and sent walking home barefoot. He was a different man, stooped, narrowed, yellowed, curled-up and dried to cracking like a fallen leaf. His eyes seemed wider in his shrunken face; they were cast down and filled with darkness. When he spoke, he addressed the ground, in a whisper, as though afraid his jailers would hear him, and take offence, and return for him. And he shrank and shrank from fear until nothing was left, and he slipped from this life without noise.
I told him in return about Finbar. Fin – bar, he said. Finbar. This is a nice name, the name of a kind man. We’re sons of the same father, he said. We’re brothers. And I noticed then a movement in a leather holdall that was sitting open on a jump-seat near the cockpit door, and a kitten poked its white head up and looked at me, and held my eye, and disappeared again into its nest. My new friend half closed the bag’s top and whispered into the darkness of it: Sleep, little fellow.
He rose and beckoned to me to follow him through the cockpit door and he looked into my eyes and smiled sadly before drawing back a curtain that was closed across the plane’s passenger area. Two men sat slumped on reclined seats, each turned to half face the other, their heads back, their throats cut. Blood was blackening on their shirts, their mouths were open in rictuses of shock, their eyes were mercifully closed. This one, the pilot said, pointing at the dead man on the left, this one is the man who lied about my father, and had him jailed, and ordered that he be starved and beaten. And this one, he said, pointing at the other dead man, was a captain in the army of liberation that came to my village and took from my family all the things needed for living.
The kitten swished suddenly past my legs and down the steps to the tarmac and disappeared. I followed it down without looking back and ran into the afternoon sun, back towards the city. I stopped at the top of my road and looked down towards the shop with our flat above it, Jenny’s and mine, and remembered myself the way I used to be, before the thunderheads rolled in. I remembered sleep unscored by dreams of falling. I prised the key from the inside of my wristband and felt a burning where it had pressed against my flesh. I opened the wooden door and went upstairs and lay along the couch and slept, and woke in the evening, in the dying light, and saw Finbar, sitting in the armchair across from me. My runners were where I’d left them the night before, unworn, waiting. My gear was still draped on the wooden kitchen chair. My blood was darkening on the floor.
Come on, my father said. You’re okay now. Rise up out of it, son, and I’ll bring you home.
Hanora Ryan, 1998
THERE’S GOING TO be war, my father said one day in 1914. Inside in Nenagh. I spied all the bould Fenians pelting off down the hill from Barbaha this morning early. Off in to roar and bawl outside the door of the Guardian office. Up in arms over recruitment posters. Not a hand’s turn done between them, I’d say. Lord but they must have great wives. There’ll be war, says he, and he shaking his head. Mark that now, ye can. Let ye not go in gawking, now, let ye not. Stay well away from all that. There’ll be lads taken to the barracks, as sure as God.
The Nenagh Guardian was that time owned and always was all along the years before by loyal subjects of their fragrant majesties beyond and Daddy said the likes of them was always minded like heifers in calf. It wasn’t until a year or two later, 1916 I’m nearly sure, that the Guardian was bought by the Ryans who own it still to this day. (No relations of mine except like as not the way all Ryans are related if you go far enough back along the ages.)
I’ll blister ye, Daddy said, if I hear of ye inside near the place. But I saw no crossness on his face as he turned away from my brothers and my sister and me, back to his foddering. As if such a thing was possible, that he’d have ever left a mark on one of his children. My gentle father, and he all about the war, the war.
The posters were torn down anyway and stamped into the mud and more were put up and the RIC ringed a man called Waxer Walsh and roped him and dragged him down Barrack Street and a small band of Irish Volunteers went about springing him and a man was shot in the arm and that was the finish of the hoo-hah for a good long while. But any man who went about answering the call of king and country that was printed by the Nenagh Guardian on those posters and on the front page of their newspaper was told to expect no peace or place in the Tipperary they’d return to. They’d choke on the bread the king’s shilling bought, and their families with them.
Robert Wesson Coleman was five or six years older than me. He gave many a day palling with us, only half in secret. He played hurling with my brothers above in the long acre and he showed them a rugby ball one time and their eyes widened in wonder. The quare shape of it. My sister was in love with him. I suppose I was too, but though I was younger I was less inclined to be fanciful or to be overtaken fully by such things the way Mary was. My eldest brother said he hated Rob Coleman because he was a dirty English land-robbing bastard but when we heard he’d fallen in Flanders Fields my brother went out to the barn and cried.