Authors: Patrick O'Keeffe
And my cousin had the blue eyes and the thin, long bottom lip of my father. My cousin did say he knew from a young age that he was adopted, but he had no desire to meet my aunt until his adoptive mother finally convinced him that it was the proper thing. My aunt and he met twice, in the space of three weeks. This was ten or twelve years before. I never mentioned my aunt’s death to him. And I didn’t say that the time they met would have been around the time she died. I don’t even know if he knew how my aunt had died. My cousin’s name was Sean.
And I never got the chance to tell Eamon that Sean had agreed to see me only out of politeness. Like the best way to be rid of me was to see me. The family who raised him was more than kind. He was blessed with them, Sean said. His mother and father were his real mother and father. I was sitting on a couch in his sitting room. His wife and two children were playing in the kitchen. Crashing plastic blocks followed by the children’s yelps. When I’d rang the doorbell the wife answered. Stout, college-educated, country-raised, which you knew by the way she spoke, she didn’t look at me when she led me to that sitting room couch and left. Five minutes later, Sean arrived with the tea tray. Collar and tie, the shirt creased and buttoned at the wrists. He put the tray on the coffee table between us. I stood when the door opened. We awkwardly shook hands. He sat into his armchair and rested his arms along its plump arms. His fingertips clawed at the fabric and I made this jokey remark about how nice it was to see a cousin I never knew existed. He didn’t find my remark one bit funny. He looked out the window at the sea. His face turned pale, the fingertips clawed away. I’d
made the remark because I was nervous. Sitting on that couch. Rubbing my palms together. Like I might wipe away my dead aunt’s blood. But my hands would stay stained with her blood every day from that one on. Like it was me and not some stranger who knelt beside her on North Frederick Street after the bus did its dirty work. My beautiful aunt, who said no to the plot. No to this one long, dull wank of a life.
And not once during that short visit did Sean smile.
But who can blame him?
—A very sad woman. Suffering for her mistakes, Sean said in the end.
—But she would have been delighted to see you, I said. —She would have looked forward to it for such a long time—
—A woman who couldn’t control herself. I didn’t have much to say to her—
—She took me and my brothers and sisters for walks in the fields when she visited in summer, I said. —She knew the names of the wildflowers. Every one of them. Very hardworking. Kept to herself. So I’m told.
—My children need to be in bed, he said.
He stood and opened his sitting room door.
—Passionate was what she was, I said.
I was standing, talking to his back. Then I looked down at my opened hands. They were shaking. My sore thumb was throbbing.
—That’s a very fancy way of putting her appetites, he said.
Beyond him his lavender wallpapered hallway. I made fists of my hands and shoved them down my pants pockets. I faced the sea and grunted like an animal.
—The smell of the sea is lovely, I said.
But the smell was foul.
—I don’t mean to be mean, but I’d like if we never talked and never saw each other ever again, he said.
—You don’t ever have to worry about that, I said to the sea.
A shout came from Eamon. I looked over to see a shower of yellow
jackets swarming around his face and many more shooting out from underneath the shingles. Yellow jackets crawled up and down his bare arms and climbed through his long hair. They made a ferocious sound. A sound as loud as me shouting that his ladder was tottering. And the paintbrush fell from his hand and the bucket of paint clattered onto the stone path. And when he fell backward I was still shouting.
On his way down his head hit a crotch in one of the maples, and the instant it hit, his legs jerked out, like in a tap dance, and when he landed on the stone path, I was watching the bloodstain on the maple, and if his body made a sound when it hit the path, I did not hear it, and I don’t remember climbing down the ladder, but when I was on the ground, the other painter was kneeling by him. He was crying and begging.
I ran in the back door and dialed 911 on the hall phone, and then ran down a corridor along a narrow rug and stood on a sunlit wooden floor in a room lined with stuffed wooden bookcases and carefully walked around a glass coffee table covered with magazines, and picked up a caramel-colored cushion from a long and finely wrinkled leather couch that sat before a stone fireplace, and when I turned from the couch I stopped to look at a framed poster on the left side of the fireplace. For three or four minutes I stared. Squeezing the cushion under my arm. Though I often think I never saw that poster in that house. That the poster had caught my eye in some store window I passed on a Boston street, and in the mess called time it ended up here. The poster was a painting by Rothko. I found this out three years later when I was turning the heavy pages of an art book late one night in the library of a community college I attended for two years when I first arrived in Michigan. There was blue and green in the painting. I leaned over and kissed it.
Outside, the other painter had folded up a drop cloth and covered Eamon up to the neck. Paint from the can was splashed all over the place. I gently lifted Eamon’s head and fixed the cushion underneath it. His pupils moved rapidly, and when I laid his head back, blood spread
along the cushion. I wiped my bloody fingers on the edge of the drop cloth. I remember thinking that was one fucking cushion no one would ever again sit on, lay their head on, or lay their back against. The other painter was saying a Hail Mary. The gardener was kneeling and saying it in Spanish. I didn’t know then that his prayer was the Hail Mary. The ambulance sped up the driveway. Sunlight glimmered in the still maple leaves. The fresh coat of paint on the house looked ravishing. And the fat stone boy pissed away at his leisurely pace, like he was keeping time.
Zoë walked over to him and said her name. They shook hands. When he said his name he tugged at the bill of the cap. Zoë reached into the tote bag for her sunglasses. She slipped them on and stepped out of the shadow of the house, into the bright sunlight. He picked up the backpack and the flowers. I had opened wide the two car doors. There was a whiff of flour when I did, but there was no flour dust on any of the seats. That morning I’d taken the car to the gas station and filled the tank, checked the fluids, and done a mighty hoovering job. Zoë politely asked him if he’d rather sit in back or up front. He said back, and then Zoë and he had a few words about directions. She turned from him and stared at me across the car roof, and she smiled when she said she would navigate.
—Fine by me, I don’t have a clue, my dear, I said.
She placed the tote bag at her feet. He moved into the middle of the backseat. I watched him in the rearview mirror. The white t-shirt beneath Una’s red shirt. The hair around the ears newly clipped. And I remember thinking when I backed down the driveway that afternoon that I had dreamed up the conversation he and I had about Kevin Lyons—
needs and wants you to go see him
—but when the car was in the street I knew our conversation had been real, like the two sloppy lines of cars and SUVs parked beneath the dusty maples. Zoë rolled her window down. I rolled mine. There was a tape in the deck. It had been jammed in there for a while. I put the volume on low. In the mirror, he rolled up his sleeves and curled his right arm around the backpack and drew it to him. The flowers were sprawled across his lap.
I drove under the long roof of maples, turned right at the end of the street, made a left at the United Methodist church, where the tiger lilies were fading, then another right and another left, and at the bottom of that steep street the freight train lights flashed and the barrier came down.
The freight train came through town at the same time every afternoon. I used to hear it from that flat. And when it came through at 12:40 in the morning, I often heard it. Zoë half-turned and asked him if he traveled much by train. He said he could not remember the last time he was on one, he took the bus. His face in the mirror, when he was speaking, made me think that for some to live was to be constantly fucked over. And I hated it in me: that in one breath I pitied him, but in the other I despised him, because of that message he’d brought to my doorstep. Zoë was talking about her aunt, her mother’s sister, who had moved from a Chicago suburb to Florida. Zoë hadn’t seen the aunt in a long time. Then Zoë turned and asked him his aunt’s age. He said he couldn’t remember. The train cars clattered past. Many were badly rusted, but many had this beautiful graffiti. In what cities or towns did they do it? What time of the day or night did they chance it?
I’d made a plan to ring Stephen, Hannah, and Tess. I hadn’t spoken to any of them in a very long time—but Hannah might know something about Kevin Lyons, because news about us who’d left often found its way back, though whether the news was true or not was another story. And Stephen was best friends with Seamus Lyons in National and vocational school, but I wasn’t sure if they kept in touch after Seamus and Tommy moved to London to work in hotels, and Stephen ended up going from Manchester to Berlin, then to Sydney, with a blond Australian woman he’d met late one night on a train during an ecstasy trip in Prague. And I needed to ring Tess. Tess always rang more than the others did. She’d rung around Easter—but you were busy with school and the bakery.
A few of the train cars had the names of states in big letters. Ohio. Montana. Oregon. He was telling Zoë about a bus trip he took one winter’s day from Maysville, Kentucky, to Detroit. When the bus
arrived in Detroit his connecting bus to the Upper Peninsula had already left. Two in the morning, freezing cold, the bus station mobbed with stranded travelers, he sat on a bench outside all night and waited for the morning bus.
—And what were you doing around here then, I said.
In the mirror he was staring out the window to his right.
—Picked apples up north, he said.
I didn’t mention that apples weren’t picked in the U.P. in the dead of winter.
A car windshield on the other side of the tracks shimmered between the crawling train cars. It blinded me, but I kept staring into it, turned the music up slightly, and tapped my fingers on the steering wheel. He and Zoë were talking about some ocean town in Florida I’d never heard of.
You hurt her but you don’t know why
You love her but you don’t know why
Five days after Brendan and I arrived in Michigan, I rang Hannah. Brendan was at his new job, we had just got the phone connected, and after Hannah and I talked, I went outside. I’d walked a few streets before the freight train stalled me, and when it passed I climbed the embankment teeming with pine needles, chicory, crabgrass, discarded beer and wine bottles with faded labels, beer cans, and empty cigarettes packs. How did it all end up here? Maybe from people like the man I was driving to see his aunt. Him and the forlorn that wandered down after dark to stare at the rails in the moonlight. Rails shining like the scalded blade of a butcher’s knife. I walked for a while along the tracks but stopped every now and then to stare out at the town. Insects buzzed. The sky was blue and foggy. Crows circled the four or five church spires. And all around were clusters of trees. And I remember thinking how changed this scene would be when the leaves fall, for who knows, good or bad, what the fuck’s ever going to transpire.
—He dressed up in that old suit and found his way back to the Junction. Completely off his rocker, Jimmy, Hannah said on the phone.
Then she broke down. She was talking about our father. He was buried seven days before.
—He never changed, Jimmy, she said. —Not one bit. But he loved his grandson. He did. In the end he wanted to spend all his time with him.
—Christ, Hannah, was what I said.
—You have to ring Tess. Do you hear me, Jimmy—
—I hear you, Hannah. I’ll ring her—
—The boys are always fine, but ring Tess—
—I told you I’ll ring her—
—She is dying to hear from you, Jimmy—
—Is she all right?
—She’s fine, but you have to ring her, are you listening to me, Jimmy—
—I’m listening, Hannah, I promise I will, but tell me what happened—
—He put on that old suit, Jimmy. The last time he put that thing on was for Mam’s funeral, and before he arrived at the Junction, he ended up at his home place, and before that he was in at Breen’s. He says to me that morning he wanted to go home, and I said to him he was at home, but he says home where he was born and raised, his real home, up on the hill with Auntie Tess and Hannah, and I said to him, Jimmy, how can you say things like that, and he says Michael will give me a lift there if you don’t have the decency to oblige me, says it in that mean way of his, and I says to him, Jimmy, who is this Michael fella you are going on about, and he says, who do you think, Miss, are you that much of a fool, is it five ungrateful fools I have brought into this world, Michael Lyons, who do you think, and I says straight out to him, Jimmy, that Michael Lyons is dead and gone with years, dead and gone since I was a girl, so Michael Lyons will be giving you or no one else a lift anyplace.
Hannah told him to go back to bed, to try to sleep, she had the
child to take care of, she would bring him his tea in a while, and bring him his dinner when her husband came home from work, she was going to roast a chicken. Peas in the garden bursting out of their pods like a fat man in a shirt way too tight.
She shut his bedroom door and went about her work. He got out of the bed and opened the wardrobe and put on the good suit, his tie, his good shoes, picked up his walking stick, sneaked down the blue corridor, out the front door, and across his dead wife’s flower garden. My sister was chatting with the child in the kitchen. She had the radio up loud. She enjoyed the gossip on the morning talk shows.
She and her husband didn’t work in the Tampax factory anymore. The Tampax factory had relocated to someplace in Mexico, but her husband worked for a French airline out at Shannon Airport, and Hannah worked weekend night shifts in a bar, in Tipperary town, and she raised the dry cattle.
He headed out the path to the road and was only moments on it when a neighbor, Big Johnny Ryan, stopped to pick him up.
I took the red school bus with Johnny’s son, who was called Little Johnny, called that since he was a child, and will be by them until the day he dies, though Little Johnny was the tallest boy on the bus. He became a Guard in Waterford city.
Big Johnny was at least one generation below my father, and I’m thinking that my father and Big Johnny’s father, also known as Big Johnny, were friends, or at least they would have chatted to each other while they waited in line at the creamery, back when they both took the milk there in a horse and cart.
My father asked Big Johnny would he mind giving him a lift back the road to Breen’s.
—Not a bother, Tom.
My father went into Breen’s. Big Johnny went about his business. He had his farm to take care of. A farm with all the modern equipment. Big Johnny made a very good living from farming, for he had many acres. And that’s forever key.
Big Johnny’s daughter married a German she met in Dublin. They were attending medical school and after they were graduated they moved out to LA, where the German died five months later in a boating accident on the Pacific. And after Big Johnny’s daughter buried him she rang her mother and father and told them she was coming home inside the year, and never again was she going to leave. Big Johnny and his wife had a bungalow built for her. Far back from the road, up high on a hillside. The most panoramic site on all of their land. But the week before the daughter was due to arrive home and move into the bungalow, which had a new Honda Civic parked underneath the sycamores out front, she rang her father and mother to say she had joined an order of nuns. She was going to spend the rest of her days helping the troubled people of Rwanda.
Oh, her treachery, they all said, to treat her mother and father so cruelly, them who had wasted all that money building and furnishing that bungalow, not to mention the medical school bills, the brand-new Honda, and the heap of money they would have got for that fine site, but in the end, they all agreed, the real blame was with Big Johnny and his wife. From the start they’d spoiled her, so she knew no better, because, they all said, when you make too much of children they grow up to be heedless, ungrateful brats.
Abandoned the beautiful bungalow remained. The thistles, nettles, and dock leaves grew tall around it. Weeds taller than the windowsills. Dust settled on carpeted floors, new armchairs, couches, beds, dressers, mirrors, and so on. And the lovely Honda cloaked in a thick layer of sycamore dust. The tires deflated. And the same tall weeds around the house grew around the Honda. Then late one Friday night a gang of drunk and high teenagers from the new housing estate outside the village made their way up there. Their purpose was to steal the Honda, but they failed to get it to start, which bothered them to no end, and so they found rocks and smashed every window in the car, and they also located a hatchet, or one of them happened to have one handy, and they hatcheted the outside and the inside of the car to ribbons. But still
they weren’t satisfied. They went in search of more rocks and they lobbed those through every bungalow window.
Strangers and a few neighbors knocked on Big Johnny and his wife’s door and offered to either rent or buy the bungalow, fix it back up themselves, but Big Johnny and the wife said no one would ever live up there. That was that. And every day Big Johnny and his wife drove by the bungalow, more than once, they did, and they never turned their heads. They let on that all that trouble and pain looming down didn’t exist.
My father sat in one of the back seats at Breen’s and ordered a small Powers and a half pint from the barmaid. He knew the barmaid’s father and grandfather. He knew the men sitting back there. Men the same go as him, who he’d gone with to National school. Old-age pensioners who complained bitterly about the new housing estate the council had built outside the village that housed the thugs from Limerick city. Children running around this so-called estate. Children loud and filthy like animals. Those people brought the crime and the drugs. There was never any trouble here before that lot invaded like a shower of rats. Never an hour of trouble did we have. Tinkers held higher morals than that lot. And they would have all agreed that this was usually the case with people raised in the city.
A commercial lorry driver on his lunch break was reading a newspaper and eating a sandwich at the bar. My father approached him. The lorry driver did not know my father, but he knew Hannah and her husband. My father asked the lorry driver if he’d mind driving him to the place where he was born; it was only back the road a bit. The lorry driver said no problem. He finished his lunch. Off they drove.
When they arrived less than ten minutes later, my father rolled down the lorry window and stared up the long and steep path that led to the cottage where he and his two sisters were born. The land Aunt Hannah sold before she went into the City Home. My father could not really see the path against the summer bushes and the weeds, but he went on staring up there for a while before he turned to the lorry driver
and said he’d had his fill of it. He’d had his fill of it for a long, long time. Then he asked the lorry driver if he’d mind driving him back to the Junction, which was fifteen or so miles away. The lorry driver’s destination was Tipperary town. So no trouble at all. Sure the Junction’s on the way.
The lorry driver left my father off in the Junction car park. My father took his wallet from his back pants pocket and handed ten euros to the lorry driver, who took it after some pestering, though he later offered it to Hannah, when he was telling her this. Hannah took it. If she learned anything from her parents, it was that every fucking penny matters.
My father went into the Junction. He walked down the long platform and sat on the wooden bench. Behind his head was the tourist poster of Beautiful Ireland. The one with the farmer tending his sheep on a hillside. That one because I remember it. This was one of those days when the summer feels jaded, days you can still wear short sleeves, but the nights are cool enough that you can get under the blanket and sleep like the dead, and all afternoon the lazy dust floats in the sunlight and the evening shadows are longer and darker.