‘He’ll grow onions.’ Fonsie shook with laughter.
‘I can’t be going out to the oil fields for ever. It’ll be a place to come home to. You saw how the little iron cross in the circle over the grave was eaten with rust. I’m going to have marble put up. Jim Cullen is going to look after Peter’s cattle till I get back in six months and everything will be settled then.’
‘You might even get married there,’ Fonsie said sarcastically.
‘It’s unlikely but stranger things have happened, and I’ll definitely be buried there. Mother will want to be buried there some day.’
‘She’ll be buried with our father out in Glasnevin.’
‘I doubt that. Even the fish go back to where they came from. I’d say she’s had more than enough of our poor father in one life to be going on with. John here has a family, but it’s about time you gave where you’re going yourself some thought,’ Philly spoke directly to Fonsie.
‘If I were to go I’d want to go where there was people and a bit of life about, not on some God-forsaken hill out in the bog with a crow or a sheep or a bloody rabbit.’
‘There’s no if in this business, it’s just when. I’m sorry to have to say it, but it betrays a great lack of maturity on your part,’ Philly said with drunken severity.
‘You can plant maturity out there in the bog, for all I care, and may it grow into an ornament.’
‘We better be going,’ John said.
Philly rose and took Fonsie into his arms. In spite of his unsteadiness he carried him easily out to the car. Fonsie was close to tears. He had always thought he could never lose Philly. The burly block of exasperation would always come and go from the oil fields. Now he would go out to bloody Gloria Bog instead. As he was put in the car, his tears turned to rage.
‘Yes, you’ll be a big shot down there at last,’ he said. ‘They’ll be made up. They’ll be getting a Christmas present. They’ll be getting one great big lump of a Christmas present.’
‘Look,’ John said soothingly. ‘Mother will be waiting. She’ll want to hear everything. And I have another home I have to go to yet.’
‘I followed it all on the clock,’ the mother said. ‘I knew the Mass for Peter was starting at eleven and I put the big alarm clock on the table. At twenty past twelve I could see the coffin going through the cattle gate at the foot of Killeelan.’
‘They were like a crowd of apes carrying the coffin up the hill. I could see it all from the car. Several times they had to put up hands as if the coffin was going to fall off the shoulders and roll back down the hill.’
‘Once it did fall off. Old Johnny Whelan’s coffin rolled halfway down the hill and broke open. They had to tie the boards together with the ropes they use for lowering into the grave. Some said the Whelans were drunk, others said they were too weak with hunger to carry the coffin. The Whelans were never liked. They are all in America now.’
‘Anyhow, we buried poor Peter,’ Philly said, as if it was at last a fact.