The years went by. The buttermilk was fetched by younger brothers and sisters and I went away to college, but I was told she always asked about me. I intended visiting her, but with the carelessness of youth, I never did, and the next time I saw her was when I attended her wake. She had died in her sleep. Someone had whitewashed the bare walls of the room where she was laid out. It smelt of damp and lack of use. An old harmonium stood in the corner. The sun shone through the overgrown whitethorn hedge outside the small window and a tracery of shadows moved caressingly to and fro over the ruined face that had once turned all heads on a Sunday morning.
Her funeral was a wretched affair. Nobody stood to watch her make her last journey to the chapel. A neighbour and myself helped to carry the coffin. He had also dug the grave. The service in the graveyard was hurried and everyone left quickly but I stayed to help him fill in the sticky clay. I felt it was the least I could do.
When we had finished, we arranged the sods in a neat rectangular border around the heaped earth and he took off his cap and crossed himself, and wiped the sweat from his brow.
‘Hard to imagine,’ he said, after a pause, ‘that there was one time when she could have had her pick of any man in the country.’
‘So why did she never get married?’ I asked.
And he told me about her one big love affair with a tall handsome policeman in the local barracks. He had been promoted to sergeant and transferred to another part of the country. He had written to her, asking her to marry him and she had replied, saying she would. She had given the letter to her brother to post, but he had torn it up and thrown it over the bridge into the river. Her words of love had floated away in a hundred pieces on the brown water and disappeared for ever into the dark depths of Lough Erne. And as I stood there, I could hear inside my head her sweet quavering voice and I knew now that it was the handsome face of a young policeman that she had seen in the dead ashes of the hearth when I had heard her singing all those years ago.
I had riches too great to count,Could boast of a high ancestral name:But I also dreamt which pleased me most,That you loved me still the same,That you loved me, you loved me still the same.
When our new parish priest went to see his first local football match he let it be known to anyone who would listen that he was disgusted at the low standard of play. This was bad enough, but then he made a terrible mistake. He announced at Sunday Mass that he was going to bring a team of college boys and ex-college boys to play a special challenge match against the local Harps team.
‘They will demonstrate the finer skills of Gaelic football,’ he said.
The following Sunday the college boys arrived by bus, a thing unheard of in the Forties. They were immaculately togged out in proper football kit. Tall and lithe, they ran down the stony lane to the field fisting the ball to each other, taking great athletic leaps in the air and solo running with insolent ease.
Awaiting them were the men of the Harps. They had arrived on bicycles, still dressed in their Sunday suits. Many wore caps, and they were now togging out behind the whins that grew on the bank of the small river that flowed round the foot of the field. Off came the caps, then the upper-body clothing, coat, waistcoat, tie, detachable collar, shirt, vest. Some of them looked curiously like pandas, with sunburnt arms and necks contrasting with their fish-white bodies. Then it was on with the jersey, and immediately back on with the cap as if it were a protective talisman.
Legs that had not seen daylight since the previous match were revealed as the long johns came off, and behind the knees there was frequently a rich delta of alluvial dirt. Many wore their everyday socks supported below the knee by suspenders. These were men slowed by years of hard physical work but underneath the white skin, corded muscles rippled and they exuded an air of silent menace.
They didn’t run on to the field. They walked, with the air of men who have an important parochial duty to perform, like taking up the Sunday collection. The crowd was the biggest ever seen at a local football match. They welcomed their heroes with wild yells. The excitement was tremendous. It was clear to all except the priest what was going to happen.
At the throw-in one of the college boys leaped like a salmon to catch the ball and was immediately pole-axed by a tremendous punch to the jaw. The team-mate who went to his assistance was kneed in the back. The referee, a local man, saw nothing wrong, and that in brief, was the story of the match. Flying solo runners would be tripped, they were hacked, kicked, bruised, battered.
Eventually the college boys could take it no longer. Many were country boys themselves and they retaliated. Fights broke out all over the field. Men turned their caps back to front and rushed to battle uttering heroic warcries.
‘Don’t bother takin’ off that jersey. I’ll bate it off you!’
‘I’ll toss you where you stand!’
‘I’ve knocked better men than you out of me way to get at a good man!’
The match was abandoned. The parish priest was given to dramatics. He rushed on to the soggy pitch, his galoshes splashing the pools of water. Standing amidst the carnage he raised his arms to heaven: ‘My God! My God!’ he said. ‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph, what am I to say to the fathers and to the mothers of these young men I have brought here today?’
But one of the Harps, standing nearby, would have none of it. ‘Ah for J-----s’ sake what are you talkin’ about, Father?’ he said. ‘Isn’t there two of our men lyin’ dead in the river!’
I have a boat, fibreglass with a big engine at the back, and I often sail up Lough Erne past the island of Inishlught, which means ‘the island of the people’. I was taken there once, many years ago when I was six and a half years of age. The woman who lived there with her brother collected me from school by arrangement with my parents. She came on her old-fashioned bicycle with two bags of shopping on the handlebars and she seated me on the carrier behind the saddle, short legs dangling from either side.
‘Mind the spokes,’ she said as we wobbled off.
The road was rutted and made of gravel and when we came to steep hills, she walked, wheeling the bike, and keeping up a constant flow of conversation. To this day I can never travel that road without hearing her voice as she looked over the rushy fields and named the townlands we passed through: Kilnakelly, Coragh, Tirraroe, Coratistune, Dragh and Cornanoe. They were like poetry in my mind. The road became narrower with a mane of green grass up the centre and finally round a bend it ran straight down into the lake and I could see it sloping away underneath the water.
‘I’ll just give Tommy a shout,’ she said. ‘Tommeee,’ she yelled. Sound travels well on water, she explained. Out of nowhere, it seemed, a boat came. The oarsman shipped his oars and got out. Nobody spoke. He lifted the two bags of shopping into the boat and looked down at me. He was huge.
‘Were you ever in a boat before?’ he asked.
‘No,’ I said.
‘Are you afraid?’
‘No.’
‘Good lad,’ he said, and he picked me up under one arm, and stepped into the boat. ‘Sit at the end,’ he said.
His sister pushed us off, stepping easily aboard as the boat floated. Maybe it was the contrast with the bumpy bike ride but I had never experienced such a sensation, smooth, velvety, silken, gentle. And then he started to row. With every one of his mighty strokes I could feel the boat surge forward. It was years later when I next felt the same sensation in a boat only this time there were eight of us rowing in a sleek