Bend for Home, The Read Free Page A

when his parents argue Tadhg Keogh gets dizzy. Once Uncle Seamus gave him cigarettes and he got sick. He stood in the village like a clocking hen because he was afraid to go home. At last he went down to Sheridan’s house. Old Mrs Sheridan had taken to the bed. She used to sleep all day and read almanacs and American magazines sent home by her dead brother’s wife at night. So Tadhg slipped past the two elderly Sheridan sisters who were sitting by the kitchen range, and went on unnoticed into their mother’s room.
    He climbed into bed beside her and watched the ceiling going round. He fell asleep in her heat, and got up when he felt better. When he appeared in the kitchen Biddy asked: Where are you coming from?
    I got in behind your mother, answered Tadhg, because I was too sick to go home.
    Glory be, said Sissy.
    The old lady, in her nineties, had never found him in her bed, like our neighbour hardly cared when the doctor climbed into hers. The village was always sleeping around. You’d never know who you’d find beside when you’d waken.
    Tadhg Keogh was a great traveller, my father maintained, but not as great as his father Joe who completed one extraordinary journey. For the day he was arguing with his wife on the step of the house, Joe cracked twelve matches and when they were lit he shoved them into Eileen’s face.
    Matches? I asked my mother.
    Matches, she nodded.
    Eileen ran to get the guards. My father was on duty in the station. When he came up the village there was no sign of Joe. He’d disappeared entirely. They checked Ballywillan for fear he might be trying to get the train to Mullingar. But he was not to be found. He’dtaken with him the only loaf of bread in the house and a pot of gooseberry jam.
    The fecking haverel, shouted Eileen.
    Aisy, said my father, but she was demented.
    Joe was gone the following day, and the day after that, and the day after that again. On the fourth morning, Eileen was sitting having her breakfast, and enjoying her husband’s absence, even beginning to feel glad he was gone, when a stone dropped into her bowl of porridge from a hole in the ceiling.
    It was Joe dropped that stone. His bread had run out and he was above in the rafters mad with the hunger. The sight of her eating below was the last straw. Then he came down, and Tadhg made for our house. And even though I was not born at the time, still I felt I was there to greet him.
    *
    I mind to see a man hanging from a tree. Maybe I didn’t see a man but heard it from my mother. Whatever she saw I saw it again through her eyes, as I do now, writing this down.
    But I know it happened during Mass and I saw the rope. I can see the noose swinging this side of the repair shop where all the bicycles stood – upside down, sideways, without pedals, without wheels, with damaged spokes, saddleless. A butcher’s table under the window. A foot-pump. Spiders’ webs. A tin advertisement for tobacco on the wall.
    A body hanging from a tree in his Sunday best.
    Then one day some of the young men in the village went off to Aden. My brother went with them. Aden did for Finea what Scotland did for Donegal. Each mantelpiece had a photograph resting against the wall of young men in shorts. There were bunches of primroses in vases from the Orient on windowsills. Tea sets of bone china decorated with dragons on ancient dressers. Postcards with photos of the pyramids sitting on the radio.
    My father sits down at the table to write to Tony. The lamp flares. His script is long and loose. He writes of happenings in the village. My mother, in a handwriting that slants to the right, adds her love.
    My sister Una falls off a hayshifter, down between the shafts and under the horses hooves. I am sitting holding tight to the hay rope on the top of the cock. She is very pale. It gave everyone a fright. A boyran in front of a car and was knocked out. The petrified driver ran for the guards. When my father came up the village it was me he found lying