After they left the coffin before the high altar in the church, some of the mourners crossed the road to Luke’s Bar. There, Philly bought everybody a round of drinks but when he attempted to buy a second round both Luke and Jim Cullen stopped him. Custom allowed one round but no more. Instead he ordered a pint of stout for himself and Fonsie, and John shook his head to the offer of a second drink. Then when Philly went to pay for the two drinks Luke pushed the money back to him and said that Jim Cullen had just paid.
People offered to put the brothers up for the night but Fonsie especially would not hear of staying in a strange house. He insisted on going to the hotel in town. As soon as they had drunk the second pint and said their goodbyes Philly drove John and Fonsie to the Royal Hotel. He waited until they were given rooms and then prepared to leave.
‘Aren’t you staying here?’ Fonsie asked sharply when he saw that Philly was about to leave him alone with John.
‘No.’
‘Where are you putting your carcass?’
‘Let that be no worry of yours,’ Philly said coolly.
‘I don’t think a more awkward man ever was born. Even Mother agrees on that count.’
‘I’ll see you around nine in the morning,’ Philly said to John as they made an appointment to see Reynolds, the solicitor, before the funeral Mass at eleven.
Philly noticed that both the young Cullens and the older couple had returned from the removal by the two cars parked outside their house. Peter’s house was unlocked and eerily empty, everything in it exactly as it was when the coffin was taken out. On impulse he took three bottles of whiskey from one of the boxes stacked beneath the table and walked with the bottles over to Cullen’s house. They’d seen him coming from the road and Jim Cullen went out to meet him before he reached the door.
‘I’m afraid you caught us in the act,’ Mrs Cullen laughed. The four of them had been sitting at the table, the two men drinking what looked like glasses of whiskey, the women cups of tea and biscuits.
‘Another half-hour and you’d have found us in the nest,’ Jim Cullen said. ‘We didn’t realize how tired we were until after we came in from looking at our own cattle and Peter’s. We decided to have this last drink and then hit off. We’ll miss Peter.’
Without asking him, Mrs Cullen poured him a glass of whiskey and a chair was pulled out for him at the table. Water was added to the whiskey from a glass jug. He placed the three bottles on the table. ‘I just brought over these before everything goes back to the shop.’
‘It’s far too much,’ they responded. ‘We didn’t want anything.’
‘I know that but it’s still too little.’ He seemed to reach far back to his mother or uncle for the right thing to say. ‘It’s just a show of something for all that you’ve done.’
‘Thanks but it’s still far too much.’ They all seemed to be pleased at once and took and put the three bottles away. They then offered him a bed but he said he’d manage well enough in their old room. ‘I’m used to roughing it out there in the oil fields,’ he lied; and not many minutes after that, seeing Mrs Cullen stifle a yawn, he drank down his whiskey and left. Jim Cullen accompanied him as far as the road and stood there until Philly had gone some distance towards his uncle’s house before turning slowly back.
In the house Philly went from room to room to let in fresh air but found that all the windows were stuck. He left the doors to the rooms open and the front door open on the bog. In the lower room he placed an eiderdown on the old hollowed bed and in the upper room he drew the top sheet up over where the corpse had lain until it covered both the whole of the bed and pillow. He then took the iron box from the cupboard and unlocked it on the table in the front room. Before starting to go through the box he got a glass and half filled it with whiskey. He found very old deeds tied with legal ribbon as he drank, cattle cards, a large wad of notes in a rubber band, a number of scattered US dollar notes, a one-hundred-dollar bill, some shop receipts ready to fall apart, and a gold wedding ring. He put the parchment to one side to take to the solicitor the next morning. The notes he placed in a brown envelope before locking the box and placing it back in the cupboard. He poured another large whiskey. On a whim he went and took down some of the matchstick figures that they had looked at the night before — a few of the sheep, a little pig, the dray-horse and cart, a delicate greyhound on a board with its neck straining out from the bent knees like a snake’s as if about to pick a turning rabbit or hare from the ground. He moved them here and there on the table with his finger as he drank when, putting his glass down, his arm leaned on the slender suggestion of a horse, which crumpled and fell apart. Almost covertly he gathered the remains of the figure, the cart and scattered matches, and put them in his pocket to dispose of later. Quickly and uneasily he restored the sheep and pig and hound to the safety of the shelf. Then he moved his chair out into the doorway and poured more whiskey.
He thought of Peter sitting alone here at night making the shapes of animals out of matchsticks, of those same hands now in a coffin before the high altar of Cootehall church. Tomorrow he’d lie in the earth on the top of Killeelan Hill. A man is born. He dies. Where he himself stood now on the path between those two points could not be known. He felt as much like the child that came each summer years ago to this bog from the city as the rough unfinished man he knew himself to be in the eyes of others, but feelings had nothing to do with it. He must be already well out past halfway.
The moon of the night before lit the pale sedge. He could see the dark shapes of the heather, the light on the larger lakes of sedge, but he had no desire to walk out into the night. Blurred with tiredness and whiskey, all shapes and lives seemed to merge comfortably into one another as the pale, ghostly sedge and the dark heather merged under the moon. Except for the stirrings of animals about the house and a kittiwake calling sharply high up over the bog and the barking of distant dogs, the night was completely silent. There was not even a passing motor. But before he lay down like a dog under the eiderdown in the lower room he remembered to set the alarm of his travelling clock for seven the next morning.
In spite of a throbbing forehead he was the first person in the dining-room of the Royal Hotel for breakfast the next morning. After managing to get through most of a big fry — sausages, black pudding, bacon, scrambled eggs and three pots of black coffee — he was beginning to feel much better when Fonsie and John came in for their breakfast.
‘I wouldn’t advise the coffee though I’m awash with the stuff,’ Philly said as the two brothers looked through the menu.
‘We never have coffee in the house except when you’re back,’ Fonsie said.
‘I got used to it out there. The Americans drink nothing else throughout the day.’
‘They’re welcome to it,’ Fonsie said.