Bend for Home, The Read Free Page B

there.
    *
    The man who rose the umbrella over his naked body died naked sitting on a smothered pig. And in the galvanized house Tadhg was sick again with the flu and couldn’t make it to the evening devotions that began Lent.
    So when his parents came home he called from his sickbed – What are the regulations? – for fear some new and finer penance might have been introduced.
    Joe stuck his head round the door and said to his son: There’s no fast for lunatics.
    *
    There were as many wonders in Finea as there were in Fore up the road where dead monks strolled round at night and water flowed uphill. Westmeath had its share of fame. It was to a small business in Mullingar, capital town of the county, that Joyce dispatched Bloom’s estranged daughter in a brief haunting aside in Ulysses . Joyce too succumbed to the scourge of the broken family, and it was to the same town that he had once come to sing second to John McCormack in a feis , that he sent the fictional Millie, as years later Ireland would send their unmarried mothers to Castlepollard.
    He must have thought that County Westmeath had about it that sense of separation, of inwardness, of dullness even, that was necessary to portray a guilt over unfinished things. For it is the halfway house between the magic realism of the West and the bustling consciousness of the East.
    *
    When I was three I ate a pound of homemade butter. I mind to see it in a dish come from Granard. It looked delicious. I took a long time eating it, thinking of things, sitting up at the edge of the table on my own.
    The window to the garden was behind me, the table in front of me and the turf-fireplace to my left. On the windowsill opposite which looked out on the street, the radio sat forever tuned to Athlone, the centre of Ireland. It was the radio prompted me to eat the butter.Its various voices gave you spells of faintness, unquiet dreams, and brought hunger on. You knew night had fallen by its sleepy sound. You knew dinner-time and breakfast-time by the timbre of the voice broadcasting.
    Walton’s brought men in from the fields.
    But who was talking the day I ate the butter I’d love to know. When mother came back from the pump with a bucket brimful of water I was puking furiously. Doctor Galligan told my mother that I’d live. Then he told her I was overactive.
    Give him things to do, he advised.
    She put me to bring in a few sods of turf from the shed to the back door. Then she forgot all about me. When eventually she opened the door a man-high pile of turf fell in. I had brought half the winter stack across the yard, followed by the hens. And was bringing more. And would have continued to this very day if she hadn’t stopped me.
    It was grand relaxed work. All Westmeath people are very relaxed if they are doing something that is both useless and extraordinary.
    *
    Jim Keogh, brother of Tom, oars by Church island with three English fishermen. A wedding party stands on the driveway at Crover House Hotel. Uncle Seamus comes in the door with three duck he took out of the back of the sweet van.
    Lovely, says my mother.
    He hands me a penny toffee bar. Mother begins plucking the duck. Uncle Seamus sits by the fire a while then heads up to Fitz’s to meet my father when he gets off duty. Jack Healy comes to the pub in his uniform, puts his Garda cap on the counter and calls a bottle of Guinness and a Power’s whiskey. They talk of snipe. It goes past closing time. The lights are dimmed. The outer door closed. Men sit with bottles at their feet before the flaming fire. When my father goes to the toilet Seamus tells Fitzgerald and the others what’s afoot, then Fitzgerald quietly lets him out the front. Seamus looks up and down the village. Then he bangs loudly on the door.
    Guards on duty! he shouts, imitating Sergeant Ruane, who had recently been appointed to the village.
    The men in the pub pretend to run for the back. My father coming out of the toilet darts upstairs. He meets Mrs