Return to Killybegs Read Free

overcoat. He’d even slipped stones into his cap. These were the shards of rock he was gathering the night before in the quarry. He was walking towards his end when his heart had stopped. He wanted to die like the ordinary men of Donegal, to walk into the sea until the water took him. He was leaving, stuffed with his earth, without a word, without a tear. Just the wind, the waves and the light of the dead. Padraig Meehan wanted this legendary end. My father left the world a poor wreck, his face pressed against the frost, and his rocks, for nothing.

2
    When my father died, people turned away. Misery was contagious. It was bad luck to watch us walk by. We were no longer a family but a pale, straggly herd. My brothers, sisters and I made a pitiful troupe, led by a she-wolf on the brink of madness. We’d walk in single file, each of us holding on to the next by the end of a coat. For three months we lived on charity. In exchange for cabbages and potatoes, we helped out at the presbytery. Róisín and Mary used to scrub the floors of the corridors on their knees. Seánie, wee Kevin and myself used to wash windows by the dozen. Áine, Brian and Niall would help in the refectory and my mother would sit on a bench in the corridor, baby Sara nestled against her, hidden between shawl and breast. I wasn’t miserable, or even sad, or envious of anything. We lived off the little we got. In the evenings, my brothers and I used to fight the gang led by Timmy Gormley, the self-titled ‘king of the quays’. A dozen young lads, broken like us, pieced together. They were nasty, hot-tempered, and about as tough as toy soldiers, shocked when their noses would bleed. They called us ‘the Meehan gang’. Father Donoghue used to break us apart with a hazel rod. He had no time for our laughter and was even less tolerant of our after-dark shenanigans.

    In the winter of 1940, I went to work on the bog with Seánie. Every day for two months. We used to help cut the turf with a spade and load the mules in spring and at Halloween, but this was the first time we had worked in the cold. The farmer needed extra hands for bringing in the harvest. The mud no longer sucked our shoes off but the cold water and ice turned them into cardboard. There were about twenty of us young lads in the ditches. The farmer called us his ‘hired hands’. It was nicer than calling us his orphans. We were frozen and shaking, our sods heaped up in our arms, heavy as a dead friend. In return for the work, the boss would give us some turf, bacon and milk. No money. He said that money was for men and we had no need to be drinking or smoking.
    Joseph ‘Josh’ Byrne was the bravest of us all and the youngest, barely six years old. For nine hours a day, he carefully piled up his frozen sods and then ballasted the tarpaulin that protected them. And he sang, too. He gave us a little bit of heaven. With his singing we became sailors, our hands working with his voice, cutting the earth as we would have hoisted the sail. He sang in step with arms crossed, under the rain, in the wind, in Irish, in English. He sang while tapping the ground with his foot. He hadn’t yet learned how to read or write, so his words would stray at times. He’d invent rhymes and words and make us laugh.
    His father had run off and his mother was dead. Josh had been raised by his sisters, the only boy amongst muddy skirts and greasy aprons. He wanted to be a soldier, or a priest, something that would be useful to men. He was frail and needed glasses: he’d be a priest.
    When he wasn’t singing, he was praying for us. Out loud, at the edge of the ditch, as though standing beside a grave. In the morning, before taking up the shovels, we would listen to him on our knees. In the evening, when the Angelus rang at St Bridget’s, he used to say the Hail Mary, his eyes wide with shock if our lips remained closed. Father Donoghue was fond of him. He called him ‘the angel’. Josh was his altar boy and