When All Is Said(18)
That night was the longest I’ve ever known. Sleepless, save for snatches filled with furious dreams in which I was running, running from something or someone. I could feel the panic in my chest when I woke each time in a startle, unsure of where I was, pushing myself up out of my mother’s chair where I’d fallen asleep by the range. Finally knowing I was at home, I’d settle back against the headrest and stare into the darkness, the emptiness of a life without Tony – my support, my rock.
I’ve no memory of getting ready the next day. How any of us turned ourselves out as smartly as we did I’ve no idea. The funeral was hushed and solemn, as you’d expect. Our tears fell on the wooden pews and our black clothes. Our grief not rising above a whisper until the prayers ended and we rose to bring Tony to his grave. As we men left our seats, my mother emitted a moan so despairing that I had to hold on to the back of the seat as it swept into me, causing my knees to buckle. She stood, supported by Jenny and May, linking her awkwardly, one behind and one in front, corralled between the seat and the kneeler, waiting to step out, to follow behind as we raised her son aloft and bore him down the aisle. As we carried the coffin from the church door, I heard wheels crunch on the gravelled drive.
The Dollards.
The car stopped at my rear. Father Molloy, to my horror, halted our procession as the footsteps approached. I watched him bow his head quickly in the direction of the newcomer.
‘Father,’ Amelia Dollard said.
The crunching continued until it stopped behind me. Bold as you like, wedging herself between mother and son, once again. She took my mother’s limp hand and held it as if it mattered to her, my sisters told me later. But my mother didn’t raise her head or squeeze her palm. Didn’t move a muscle. For those seconds, as Dollard’s voice mumbled to my rear, I thought of my father. I imagined his head leaning against my brother’s coffin. Eyes closed against the insensitivity and embarrassment of this woman, wishing he could touch the fair hair of his boy one last time; arms aching and knotted hands reddening under the weight of death. I wanted to scream at her to get away, to stop her playacting, her hypocrisy. And then she was gone, just like that. The engine started and that was it. Father Molloy signalled, and we moved on.
I was sixteen when we buried Tony in the Meath heat. We listened to the prayers, joined in when required, mumbled the decade of the rosary and watched as the earth took him. Then, we walked away.
From that day on there was little left of my mother, of that gentle spirit that had once been hers. She never returned to the Dollards, neither did I. We coped without their money. I worked the land with my father. My mother stayed at home, hardly ever leaving. Our weddings were her one exception, May’s, Jenny’s and mine. Never uttered a word at them, though, never raised a smile. When I look back now at the photos, I see her weary, empty face and wish I could touch it, to soothe it. My father generally stood stoically by her side. His hand on the small of her back, I imagine, staring into the camera, demanding it to notice there was one guest missing. What conversations passed between husband and wife in the years following Tony’s departure, I’ve often wondered? What might Sadie and I have said to one another had you died leaving us behind, forever caught in a loop of memories, inventing your future, lamenting all that you would never know? Or perhaps a silence might have descended – a delicate layer of protection holding us together, cocooning us away from the ugly awful truth of life and death, its gaping wounds, its noxious smells.
It’s so hard to lose your best friend at any time, but to do so at such a young age was pure cruel. At sixteen I was heading into my life. Having travelled those precious years with Tony by my side, I now had to venture forth into the most significant of them alone. Without his guidance, his cajoling, his slagging. It didn’t feel possible.
‘He’ll always be here, Maurice,’ my father told me, the day we came home from the burial. We stood at Tony’s door looking at the empty bed as he held his hand over his heart. When he left to join the women in the kitchen, I too moved my hand to my heart. I pressed in hard as I could, trying to reach Tony, to turn on the switch that would tune him in.
‘Big Man, ya gobshite.’
He came in, loud and clear.
And I laughed into my closed eyes, laughed down into my boots and into my fingers that had found him. And as true as I am sitting here holding this drink in these wrinkled, dried out hands of mine, he’s never left me since.
* * *
After Tony died it was me who was set to inherit the land. One of the best things my father ever taught me as I worked with him was to embrace change. I watched him clear boundary walls before the war, turning it to tillage. After it was all over, he had it back ready for grazing, quick as you like. Dairy, that was his big thing then. He saw pound signs on the hide of every cow, and in every drop of milk they yielded. He had my heart broken with all the questions about how the Dollards had run their dairy when I had worked for them. I’d no desire to remember a thing about them, but he had me pestered until he knew everything I did. His sums done, before long we had the beginnings of our own herd.
‘By the time the year 2000 hits we’ll be the biggest dairy farmers in Leinster, feeding the hordes of Dublin. We’ll keep their tea breaks flowing,’ he told me. He thought he’d live forever. Sometimes I wondered might he make it myself. A horse of a man. But he never even smelt a whisper of the twenty-first century. He went in sixty-three. Collapsed in the fields one day, fencing. Mam, now she made it ’til seventy-five. Lived with us, right up until just after you were born. She needed the nursing home by then. She’d forgotten us all, except Tony. She’d constantly ask us when we visited her, if Tony was still down the fields and when he’d be back so she could get his tea ready. Over and over, she’d ask and we’d oblige: