Your mind could become separated from you altogether. Johnsey was starting to see this now. You could end up abroad in the yard, chasing it around like a madman if you were not careful. It could become free from you quite easily and fly off down its own path. There were a few evenings where he had sat watching television and had all of a shot realized he had been just sitting there, and there was nothing only blankness about him; he hadn’t been asleep or awake, he couldn’t remember what he had been looking at on the telly, and once there was a long line of dribble hanging from his chin.
ON THE WAY HOME from the mart Daddy often used tell him about some of the old boys they had met that day who lived alone in the real and true back of beyond, their little cottages stuck to the side of the mountain and not a soul coming near them from one end of the year to the next. They’d slosh around in shite up to their knees in Wellington boots that had holes in them; they’d be black with the dirt always and would only have the one pants for weekdays and one for Sundays and their weekday pants would be ready to walk off them and away down the boreen. They’d have a name for each beast in their herd. They’d be right fond of those beasts. That was the way for many a small farmer who never married. Often you’d have two old brothers farming the same land and living like two old smelly peas in a half-destroyed pod of a house. Or you might have an auld wan that had never married and she would serve as a wife to her bachelor brother. Not in every way, surely. Quare things went on, though; he knew this from things he overheard.
One day, below in the co-op, shortly after Packie had taken him on as a general assistant, he had heard a big, red-faced lady talking to two men who were so interested in what she was saying, they were bent nearly double to get their hairy old ears closer to her flapping mouth. It seemed the guards had taken a man called Formley from some quare townland in the back of beyonds Johnsey hadn’t heard of away from his farm and family. His children had been put into care. The same family were not sorry to see him go, by the red-faced lady’s account. His wife was dead but years. He had a daughter and two sons. She had been expecting, the daughter, and she only sixteen. The father was either her own father or one of the brothers. This man Formley had taken care of this bit of trouble, with a rope and a broken broom handle. The girl’s insides were ripped to shreds. Her wounds got infected, her blood turned bad, and she was near to death when the guards arrived. Her child was found wrapped in a sheet on the ground near the septic tank. The guards were only called because the man had drank what whiskey was in it after his little operation and went mad about the place and fired off his shotgun and his youngest lad made a dash for the house of a neighbour who had summoned help.
They were the bits Johnsey had heard. Putting those bits together in a way that made sense was impossible. Were they all going at her, her father who was given the job by God of protecting her from harm, and her brothers as well? The whole rest of that day, that girl’s suffering rested heavily in the centre of his mind. For a finish, he felt a sort of a weakness from thinking about it, a sickness in his stomach and a woozy feeling in his head, and he had to sit down on a pile of fertilizer bags and try and collect himself before Packie spotted him. Imagine, that jagged, broken broom handle entering her and piercing a little unborn baby and yanking it out, dead and bloody into this world.
Probably it would have been a monster anyway, the red-faced lady said. A monster? Surely be to God nothing with a baby’s pure, unblemished soul could be a monster? But there was something about that in Johnsey’s mind, something about fathers and daughters and brothers and sisters riding each other. Incest, it was called. If they made a baby it could be a retarded freak or have two heads or worse. But then, Adam and Eve’s children must have done something like that to make the human race grow, and then it must have happened again when only Noah and his family were spared from the Great Flood. Or did God let Noah’s sons’ wives live too? Even then, there would have been first cousins riding. And Johnsey had heard that used as an explanation for more serious cases of gamminess or spastication: Yerra sure, weren’t his parents first cousins?
FOR A MAN to be lonely, Johnsey knew, he did not need to be alone. People often took his hand and shook it and held on to it in the co-op, and stood reminiscing about one or both of his parents while his face burned and his other hand searched vainly for somewhere to put itself. You could be lonely even then, with a person actually standing right there in front of you, clutching your hand, saying things to you. A couple of days, it seemed there was a queue of such people. Some of them had been at the funeral but thought it would be nice to have another go at shaking his hand and telling him he was after getting an awful time of it, and he was to call up any time, any time at all, they were always at home. Their door was always open. He’d like to see their faces if he actually strolled in through their door. Hello! Here I am, as invited! I’ll ate me dinner now and have a cut of tart after it and a couple of bottles of stout and maybe have a good feel of that young lady over there, is that yer daughter, bejaysus she’s a fine girl now, and I’ll be on my way again! Woo-hoo!
They’d have a hairy conniption if he as much as set foot in their yards. Why did people go around saying things they didn’t mean?
THERE WAS an old fella, his name was Quigley, used to live away over the road and down past the small bridge and on past the weir, over towards the stud farm owned by the Black Protestant Shires. The Shires had old money. That was more valuable than new money. This old fella had a small bit of land tucked up to the side of the Shires’s walled-off ranch. He was a wild-looking man, with great clumps of hair sticking out from the side of his head and from under his cap. He wore a greatcoat tied with baling twine all year round, and Wellington boots coated with slime that he fermented all over his yard. On purpose, just to spite the Proddies, Daddy used to say, good Catholic shite. When Johnsey was small that man of the Quigleys would cycle on up the road past their gate, and he’d always have a big cheery wave, and he’d go all the way out as far as Clonvourneen. Every single evening without fail, come rain, hail, sunshine or storm, he’d make that trip. He’d pedal his old creaky, squeaky, rusty pushbike all those miles out and all those hard miles home to visit an old uncle of his who was being subvented in the nursing home out there. He’d sit beyond with him and they’d have a chat and a brandy and he’d fix his old uncle up for the night and see that he was comfortable. Daddy said he was only doing it so that when the old uncle died, he’d leave him everything. For a finish, after all the thousands of miles cycled, and all the elements braved, the man died before his uncle. The fucker outlasted him.