I read a poem years upon years later written by William Butler Yeats. Lord God it knocked the breath from my body and the words from my mind. It was about another Robert, though his name was not mentioned in the lines of the poem but in the explanation beneath, written by some professor of such things. Major Robert Gregory, the poem was presumed to be about, the son of Lady Gregory, and he for all the world by the sounds of it the very self-same as my Robert. A boy from a big house told he had a fealty and a duty to a foreign land by virtue of the blood in his body. The boy in the poem didn’t hate his enemy nor love his king; Kiltartan was his country, the poor of that place his people. That’s out there beyond Gort in County Galway. We went there for a spin one Sunday, and drove down into Coole Park to see the swans and the famous names carved into the trees. I got a terrible lonesome feeling. Your man Yeats couldn’t have known the thoughts that were in that boy’s head as he flew his fighter plane towards the heavens but my soul be damned if he was too far wrong.
There’s many a family of this place and here around lost a son or a brother or a father but never could they raise a stone or a cross in their honour. Their memories were buried in silence and shame. The Colemans, being free to fight for England, could commission plinths and plaques from the best of masons and fix them firm to the earth. And why wouldn’t they? Why wouldn’t they do their damnedest to keep on to their dear Robert in some way, in cold stone and carved words.
One of the Donnells of Gortnabracken came back, shell-shocked and nearly deaf. He made no bones about where he’d been and would stand aside for no man, regardless of rank or station. He’d set his face to hell and hadn’t flinched. But still and all he’d be silent for weeks and months at a time, hunched and white, then all of a sudden he’d be shouting and roaring around the pubs and streets, standing and kneeling at the wrong times in Mass and saying his prayers too loud and laughing, thinking the rest of the world was gone the same way as him. His brothers did their level best to quieten him, and his parents were warned by the Volunteers who by then had become the IRA to keep a rein on him; Father Fitzwilliam even beseeched from the pulpit on his behalf. The sacrifice he made, what he gave of himself; fighting in a just war blessed by God, and his right mind left behind him in Passchendaele.
I heard that boy of the Donnells – what’s this his first name was? – say more than once how there was a good many men of his battalion shot for not wearing their hats opposite officers or not saluting them properly or for other such niggardly transgressions. The Irish lads were dirt to them, nothing, not even human. Men that left this parish and ones like it, imagine, decent poor men that took themselves away from these green fields and rolling hills, to fight against a Kaiser for a king, were shot by little jumped-up Johnny Englishmen for not having their uniforms on properly, or for falling asleep, or for not lepping quick enough over the tops of trenches into the teeth of death. He was sent off for a finish to live with an old uncle that was left a childless widower above in Templetuohy. I heard he began drilling young lads up there for the IRA and that he blew himself to smithereens trying to make a barrel-bomb to roll out onto the road in front of a truckload of Black and Tans.
There wasn’t a coffin to be got here, you know, for a full year once that First World War ended. The Spanish flu was brought back by soldiers, and laid waste to all about. All the weak were taken: babies and old people and anyone already disposed to frailty or sickness. And many a strong man and woman that was never sick a day in their lives. No resistance, you see, it blew through them the very same as the wind through the girders of the railway bridge between Ballina and Killaloe. I clearly remember the day of my seventeenth birthday, going on the trap with my father to town, and seeing a line of coffins at the bottom of Queen Street, and another row started where that one ended, of poor souls shrouded in blankets and sheets, rosary beads draped across their breasts. And the Foleys in the sawmill yard working night and day to provide short planks for makeshift coffins, and the priests and the curates stepping along the ranks of dead, anointing them. The stench, I’ll never forget, of rotting things and incense. The hums and chants of prayers, the wailing cries.
I heard a man say years upon years later on a television programme that that was all needed by humankind, all that death. It was Nature’s way of pruning back excess, of ensuring bounty. That was needed, says he. The world was short of orphans. The earth was short of human flesh and bones. Lord, but isn’t it a sight altogether the things people say, the things they think they know, the certainties they carry about for themselves. As full as ticks with satisfaction at their own smartness.
I’ll die soon, I suppose. I’ll hardly get a look at this new millennium that all the hullabaloo is about. The world will go haywire by all accounts, the minute it turns 2000. Machines will all turn off, or go quare on people, or something. I’m as well off out of it if that’s the case. Robert Coleman is eighty years dead, imagine. That beautiful boy from the big house who walked many a summer day along the far bank of the stream that served as a border between my father’s tiny freehold and his father’s estate of two or three thousand acres. Who talked and laughed across the whispering water, and always waved back at me as he started up the hill towards home.
The House of the Big Small Ones
TRUE AS GOD. True as this pint before me. I told Busty McGrane go fuck herself. Straight into her face I told her. Years ago this was when all they had was the pub and the little shop counter at the front of it and only the bare bit of milk and bread and ham and newspapers being sold there that time and even only scarcely that. Before the big swanky Mace come along and the yard full of pumps under a canopy. Only the one lonesome pump that time and no diesel even. Farmers only used diesel them days anyway and all had their own tanks. I was only a puck, sixteen or seventeen. Says to myself Right, I’ll set out early on for this cow how things is going to be between us. Few hundred pound them days a man could be in Australia and all set up. Didn’t need no job at all off of that wan. Was me doing her the favour.
So there we was on a Sunday evening fine and sunny and a thirst in my throat like sandpaper was rubbing the inside of it and it a bank holiday Monday next day and Mickey Briars and Alphonsus Reilly and all them lads that was all off the next day shouting over at me from inside in Ciss Brien’s that I was only a boy, a bare chap for that orange crowd, and wanting to know was I a fuckin gom altogether or what was I and Busty McGrane standing before me reading me from a height over the dust in the yard and it being rose good-oh by every passing car and truck and destroying her windows and all the stuff inside in the shop was covered entirely in grit. Hers was the only shop in the country them days opened Sundays. And there I stood and her two tits heaving up and down before me while she screeched, mesmerizing me. How am I meant to keep dust from rising, I asked her. Hose it down, says she, and the screech of her near split me in two. Piss on it for all I care! And she poked a long finger into my chest. Well, if she did! Says I to myself, I can die a man or live a child, and I turned around to her and lifted her out of it. Busty, says I – and that alone, calling her Busty and not Mrs McGrane fair vexed her – says I, Go on. Away. And fuck. Yourself. Real slow, like that, straight into her face. And I thrown down my sweeping brush and strolled fine and slow with no look back away from her across to Ciss’s, her main competition as things were then, and was landed up a pint straight the second I walked through the door in congratulations though I wasn’t even strictly of age, but then you’re only a man when you start to act like a man. True as God I done that. And she never once barked at me since. Not like all them young wans she’d have shitting themselves scared of her, doing their few hours for their bit of pocket money, handing out cones to children and standing idle at the tills looking out of their mouths. True as God. Ask Mickey Briars if you don’t believe me.