Bend for Home, The Read Free

scribbling events of note in Kilcogy, Togher, Castletown and Finea.
    For long periods of silence the two men sat hunched over the fire in the dayroom. They stood in the dark opposite dance halls, and walked the village through storms in their greatcoats till they were foundered. Then they’d return and sit by the fire again, water running from their caps and coats onto the hearth.
    From the private quarters the healthy children and the distraught younger ones made their way into the dayroom. And lo and behold you, said my mother, if he didn’t do there what he didn’t do at home! My father helped the older girls feed the infants, scalded nappies on the stove, changed underpants and warmed their milk bottles. Often the sad sergeant would stand in the doorway watching his underling rear his children. My mother would saunter up the village with my father’s dinner under a cloth on a hot plate. She’d come in, she often told us, to find her husband playing with the Moran children in one of the cells while Maurice, wearing my father’s Garda hat, was sitting up on duty on the Sergeant’s high stool.
    He spent more time with them then he did with us, she’d recall. It was a terrible cross.
    In the evenings the Sergeant and the Guard would stroll the village, part at the monument and meet again at the bridge, each with a bicycle lamp cupped in his hands. Swans careered overhead on a journey from Lough Kinale to Lough Sheelin. A shotgun went off. They’d return in time to put the children to bed, then look into the fire in the dayroom and toe the ash.
    There’d be a shout from the married quarters. An infant would stand on the threshold.
    None of the handicapped were long for this world, my mother told me years later. Not one of them reached the age of reason.
    They were carried off to the graveyard in homemade coffins on the shoulders of the policemen. Neighbours shied away. The names ofthe dead children were read out at Sunday Mass, and their names sounded strange to the ears of the villagers. They were people who had never been seen and yet they had lived among them for a few short years. They were phantoms when they lived, but when they died, they suddenly became real live human beings.
    As for the others, said my mother, the Moran children all did well and are scattered around the world.
    But Maurice, she said, never forgot your father’s kindness.
    He cycled to school in Granard, did his lessons by Guard Healy in the dayroom, went out with him on duty. He spent half his days in our house. I remember Maurice arriving first thing in the morning to our door. I thought of him as the older brother I never had, as Tony was then long gone abroad. He taught me how to ride a bike and walk on my hands. In the summers he forked hay, brought turf in to a shed at the back of the lonely barracks and walked his mother along the river. He dug the garden with my father.
    He was a scholar, my father would say.
    He told Guard Healy he wanted to be a priest, so great preparations were made. It was as if it were happening to his own son. It meant that we would not be seeing him for a long time. While he was still young he went off to a seminary down south to be a priest on the Missions. Summers, he’d appear home looking strangely adult in a worn suit. He’d prop books written in Latin and Greek on the desk in the dayroom. In the afternoon my father and he would head up the river discussing things. Sergeant Moran retired. Himself and his wife left Finea. And so we lost touch. He died. She died. The others of the family we rarely saw again. Maurice disappeared out of our lives. Your father missed him sorely, my mother said. When he fell ill in later life, it was Maurice’s name he would shout out in the middle of the night.

Chapter 3
    Joe and Eileen are having a row on the doorstep of their galvanized house. I used to love to sit in there and listen to the rain with the chaos all around me. Rain on a tin roof spirits you away.
    But