Authors: Patrick O'Keeffe
The rest of it Hannah heard from Coleman Daly.
My father took off his coat. He folded it and placed it on the bench, and he rolled up his shirtsleeves, loosened his tie, and stared at the cows grazing in the meadows across the tracks. Coleman strolled out of his office and sat himself beside my father. Coleman lit a cigarette then unbuttoned his coat. They said they’d seen neither hide nor hair of each other in a dog’s age. Then they talked about the fine weather. And they didn’t mention the horses. My father lost interest in them the same time he did the Sweet Aftons. But Coleman was trying to find out what business my father had at the Junction. The Dublin train was an hour away, the Cork train even longer, and Coleman hadn’t seen my father at the Junction in years, not since he picked me up at Christmas, or when I had summer holidays from the bar—nevertheless, Coleman wrangled it out of my father that he was waiting for Michael Lyons.
Coleman knew well who Michael Lyons was. Michael, Coleman, and Coleman’s first cousin all worked in the copper mines, and of course Coleman knew Michael was long gone, but Coleman later told Hannah he thought our father was talking about Michael’s son. Coleman did not know the names of the Lyons children, or what they were up to in their lives, but he would have known Una to see her. At one time he saw her in the same way he saw me, heading back and forth to Dublin on the train.
Coleman never married and some teenagers called him a queer behind his back. I don’t know if Coleman was gay. When I think of him he is standing beside Auntie Tess, looking authoritative in his blue uniform with the shiny buttons. He enjoyed waving his flag at the incoming and outgoing trains, wishing the people who got on and off a good day, and doling out information with regard to times and connections. This job was heaven compared with the copper mines. And there’s little fear of mercury poisoning at Limerick Junction. But Coleman finally figured out that the Michael Lyons my father was waiting for was the dead one, and so Coleman excused himself and went into his office and looked up my sister’s number in the phone book and rang her and said her father was at the Junction dressed like a lord and waiting for someone who has not been alive in a very long time.
—Tom Dwyer will have a mighty long wait, Coleman said.
He laughed then. Laughed to be kind. Doing his best to temper things.
Hannah drove like a lunatic to the Junction. Her son buckled up in the backseat.
—Ye all brought me no luck. Ye cost me and your mother way too much. All the good and the not so good I did for yer sake.
Our father made those remarks on the way home. The last he said twice. Hannah ignored them. She’d never allow remarks like those to sink in and harden and darken over time like coal. And it took me a while to drag them out of her.
—But what did he say to you in the car, Hannah. He must have said something.
—I forget, Jimmy. He did say things. He was raving, I told you I forget.
—You don’t forget, Hannah. Tell me the things he said—
And so Hannah gets him home. She rings the doctor. The doctor arrives. Fluid in the chest. And something along the lines of dementia. What’s to be expected at his age. A storm in the head that will in due time exhaust itself. Dreams turn into distress when the hands and the mind are idle all the day long. A few days’ rest and there should be improvement. If not give a ring. The doctor told Hannah things like that.
He died two mornings later. Hannah was bringing him his tea, boiled egg, toast, and the newspaper. Her husband had left for work. She could still hear his car going out the path. The child was asleep. And the moment she opened their room door she said she knew he was gone up to heaven to be with our mother. The room felt freezing cold and this caused her to drop Auntie Tess’s tray. Which made this massive clatter and broke right down the middle. Split like a brittle bone. The egg, the mug, the tea, the toast, the unopened newspaper tossing and splashing across their floor. Hannah ran down the blue corridor to the hall and rang the ambulance. Next she rang her husband’s job in Shannon and left a message. (This was before everyone owned a mobile phone, but not too long before.) Then she rang Tess and Anthony. They were only a few hours away. Next she rang Stephen. He was still living in Berlin, and could easily catch a Ryanair flight to Shannon. But Hannah had no way of ringing me.
Brendan and I took eight or nine days to drive from Boston to Michigan. We took the New York State Thruway. I forget why that route, but we stopped in Utica, Syracuse, and Buffalo, where we visited parks and battlegrounds, read inscriptions on the statues of generals and soldiers, and read about our refugees who built the canals and started the unions, and about the Indians who once owned the whole shebang, but were slaughtered, starved, and tricked out of it. A
downpour hit us in Erie, Pennsylvania, and we stopped in the breakdown lane for almost an hour. It was like oil pouring down, the thickest, darkest, most blinding rain I’ve ever witnessed, and I sometimes think this was when he died, though I also think that thinking is nonsense. The morning after was filled with brilliant sunlight. We walked along the shore and looked across the calm lake to Canada. The sky was a shrill blue. We stopped in Ashtabula because of the Dylan song, we ate corn dogs, and I might have spent another day in Cleveland staring at the rubbish of rock stars. We took turns driving the Chevrolet Camaro. Four days before leaving Boston, we’d bought it from a guitarist I met in that bar on Central Square. On a few Sunday evenings he and I hung out in the foul alleyway behind the bar. He told me about the blues while we smoked opium. And that was the furthest you ever escaped from them. By the time we got to Buffalo the car floor was littered with the wrappers of burgers, French fry cartons, Coke cans, empty cigarette boxes, beer cans and bottles. I drove the Ohio Turnpike. Did it all the way in the left lane.
Two days before I left Boston, I rang Hannah to say Brendan and I were heading inland. It was going to take a few days. Hannah said I was mad for the road. My mother used to say that—mad for the road—but not once in a good way. And Hannah told me she’d run into Nora Lyons in Limerick city, she’d given Nora my phone number and address, and Nora was going to give them to Kevin. I told Hannah I’d recently run into Kevin on the street.
—How was he, Hannah said.
—Oh, fine, you know, I said.
—Small world, Jimmy.
—Maybe too small, Hannah.
Hannah said the news was Kevin was getting married to someone rich, and the Lyons family was flying over for the wedding. I said Kevin told me. Hannah asked if I was invited to the wedding.
—How’s the father? I asked.
—A bit odder than usual, Jimmy.
—Well, I have to fly, Hannah, but tell them all I asked for them.
• • •
—You can move forward now, my dear.
Zoë nudged me.
—Thank you, my dear.
I turned the music all the way down.
—Hang a right. Follow the tracks out of town, Zoë said.
She turned to him and said her mother’s father was a freight train driver.
—He was born in Martins Ferry, Ohio, Zoë said. —My father’s father emigrated from southern Italy. He lived on the Lower East Side of Manhattan before settling in the Bronx, which is where my father was born.
—Don’t know much about my people, he said.
—My mother’s father was a devout Baptist, but when my mother became a teenager she could not abide the religious stuff, Zoë said. —She told me she put it all behind her the day she went to college in Boston. She went there on a scholarship and met my father her sophomore year. He was also on scholarship. They traveled to Italy together their junior year. My mother used to say that in Italy you really fall in love and you stay that way—
—Drove a truck once, he said.
—How cool, Zoë said.
—You drove it where? I asked.
—Drove all over. Drove it five years, he said.
—And what did you do after that? I asked.
—Worked with horses out in California. Ended up in Lexington, Kentucky, for a time.
—I didn’t know you had anything to do with horses, I said.
—You and Walter aren’t friends that long, my dear, Zoë said.
I looked over at her. She smiled and put her sunglasses on. In the mirror he was staring out the same window. He and Zoë began to talk
about horses. Zoë knew about them. We passed the laundry where I washed the flour from my work clothes, the coffee shop where Zoë and I often met, and where I sometimes met other people from the university. And we passed the brightly lit liquor store where the large bottles of Chilean wine were the cheapest in town.
Zoë took off the sunglasses and told me to hang a hard right at the next light. I did and we were in a neighborhood I had never been in before. The houses were painted in bright colors. Trimmed shrubs and flowers grew in the smallish yards. Children’s bicycles lay flat on the sidewalks, but there were no children in sight. The bicycles were pink and yellow. Ribbons hung from their handlebars like feathers from a headband. Maples blocked the sunshine. Their shadows moved coolly over my face. Next we were driving down a narrow street of small decrepit houses that all looked the same. Yards were barren patches. No trees grew on the sidewalk, and the tiny porches were chockablock with all manner of shit. Adults sat talking and smoking on porch steps. Their feet were almost on the sidewalk. I drove slowly. I was afraid I might hit one of the laughing children who ran along the cracked sidewalks and into the street.
—I think my mother misses where she grew up, Zoë turned to him and said. —As she’s gotten older she does. I wish she married again. But she won’t. She lives in a gorgeous house. The house I grew up in. My mother still finds it hard without my father. When he left, her life shrank. She says she’s too old to begin again, but she will live for thirty more years. She takes care of herself. But you must miss home, Walter?
—Don’t think about it much, he said.
—And you, James, of course, you do—
—I ran away, my dear, I said.
—New information, my dear, Zoë said.
—Your driver is a white dude from Western Europe. His life is a long, sweet wank compared to many Americans—
—Get over yourself, my dear—
—I’m sorry, my dear—
—Me, too, my dear.
We had left the town and were driving down a wide two-lane, freshly tarred road. You could see glimpses of the large houses behind ivy-covered stone walls. Lazy American flags hung on poles at the end of driveways with shut iron gates. The yellow line down the middle of the road was dazzling.
Zoë asked him about a turn. He told her and Zoë said she’d let me know. They both guessed it was five or six miles ahead.
—Dad was a preacher, he then said. —When I was born. So Mom used to say. Didn’t stay a preacher for long, don’t think.
—Where was this, Walter? Zoë asked.
—Florida, he said.
—I should visit my aunt there, Zoë said.
—You and Walter have so much in common, I said.
—I won’t, Zoë said, and sighed.
—You could, couldn’t she, Walter, I said.
I glanced in the mirror.
—Could do, he said.
—How foolish of me, Zoë said.
—We could drive down there, my dear. Follow the coastline. I have always wanted to make that trip, I said.
—It might be a challenge for this vehicle, my dear, she said.
—Look into the alien corn, my dear, I said.
—Economics, my dear, but Walter gets to see his aunt, Zoë said.
—Grateful, he said.
—An uncle on my mother’s side was going for the priesthood once, I said.
—More new information, Zoë said.
—I’ve told you this, my dear, I said.
—Go right ahead and tell it again, my dear, Zoë said.
—It happened before I was born. He was in the seminary, but he left it. I don’t know why he did, but he immigrated to this country—
—Why here, my dear, Zoë said.
—Here or England, I said. —But England was not welcoming then, but they would have shamed him out of home. And so he arrives here, marries late in life. He ended up in Vermont. Before there, he lived in Butte, Montana. He worked for a mining company. I think he did the books. Maybe the woman he married was from Vermont, and he met her in Butte. They had no kids. They lived in Burlington, I believe.
—My dad loves that town. He visits it every year, Zoë said.
—I’ve never been there, I said.
—Never been up there, he said.
—He taught in a Burlington high school for the rest of his life, I said. —But at home, because he was going to become a priest, he was going to lift the family up, give my Free State peasants some status. Then a few years before I arrived here, he died. His wife wrote some cousin in my family to tell them, but I forget how it was all found out, but his wife lived for only a year after him, she might have died of a broken heart, but when the failed priest first arrived in this country he used to send money home to the family, then one time he did not send home enough money, and my granduncle, his older brother, wrote and reprimanded him for not sending home enough cash. And they never spoke again. No money. No letters. Nothing. That was the end. But the failed priest wrote poems and ballads. He did when he was young. My mother put one in my bag when I first left for Dublin. I didn’t know it was in there. I’d never seen it before, but I found it folded in my ironed underwear when I unpacked. I still have it. This ballad about boys climbing over stone walls in the moonlight to rob apples from the oppressor’s orchard. Ha!
—Very intriguing, my dear, and, yes, I would have remembered it, Zoë said.
—You will remember the cornfields, my dear, I said.
—Directions are under my control, my dear.
I hung the right. The sun was behind us. High walls of corn grew on both sides of the road. A quiet and empty road not unlike the ones I grew up around, that country stillness, the wildflowers growing free on the headlands.
—Left up ahead. Rusty stop sign. Grateful, he said.
He fiddled with the bill of his cap. His throat made a nervous sound when he stared down at the flowers and shook them. Like when people must suddenly worry that the baby is dead, not asleep. The lovely scent from the flowers filled the car.