I Could Read the Sky Read online

  These are the people who saw Da from the time of his birth. They saw him by the river. They saw him play his flute. They saw him courting. They saw the arc of his strength rising and falling. Some were with him in the fields of England. You can see in the look of all of them the weight of their work and the weight of those around them being born and dying. If I could see past that look inside into their heads I would take out all that they ever saw of Da and make it into a long movie I could watch. I would watch him dance. I would watch him on the deck of a boat. I would watch him walking in the lane with Ma when they were young.

  Between the people in the pews and the men kneeling in the back is the young Protestant boy was taking lessons from Da in the flute. He wears a black suit with not a crease to be seen in it and a black tie with gold stripes. His fair hair is combed very neatly across the top of his head. He has the look of being asleep with his eyes open. His arms are out before him and he is holding Da’s flute. Before the priest says his prayers over the coffin the boy is to walk up the aisle and leave the flute down on top of the lid.

  I look now at the coffin with Da inside. I can see the shine on the nails which seal him in. I think of a question and I turn to ask him. I think of what I saw in England and how I can describe it to him. I think of a tune I want to play for him. The way the wind moves through the wall and blows the leaves over the stones, the way the priest speaks the prayers, the way Dermot’s shoulders are drawn down to the ground, they are all like this because he is gone. Ma is looking at the priest like she can read the future on his face. Her lips are tight, almost white, her eyes pinched. She could be carved from ice. He is gone from the world, we are thinking. I think too as I sit by his coffin that I will never again have such respect for a living person and now that he is no longer here I will not be able to stop things falling from their places. A sadness reaches like a clawed hand into my bones and organs. It fills the spaces between. It is heavy and strong. I believe that this sadness can never leave me.

  The priest comes down to the foot of the altar and nods his head at the back of the church. I turn again and look back at the boy. He begins to walk forward. The way his legs move it’s like he’s stepping over uncertainly balanced stones in a stream. Once a week he left his father’s vicarage and travelled eleven miles on the bus to Da to learn to play the flute and eleven miles back again in the evening. Da was amazed by him, Ma says, by his seriousness, by the way he asked about the music, by the way he held the flute when he went to play. You’d think it was a holy relic, Ma says. Da talked about him through the week and waited on his arrival. I look at the boy’s eyes. They still seem to have the look of sleep on them. The whole of the church is watching him. His eyes go then onto the coffin and grow wide. He breathes in like he can’t quite catch the air. His right leg seems to go from under him, he opens his mouth and he says the word “I”. His voice is high and sweet. It sounds like the beginning of a song. This is the love he has for Da. He begins to fall then. Hands reach out to him and he tries to right himself by grabbing at the pews. But he can’t. As he falls I see on his face his look of unconsciousness and grief. A fine stream of blood runs from his top lip as he lies on the wooden floor of the church. The flute rolls from his hand down the aisle towards the coffin.

  18

  WHEN THE TAILOR comes to the door he’s eating a raw potato. His underclothes are all one piece, reaching to his wrists and his ankles. The buttons are open. You can see the lines of the bones in his chest. Hair grows over his eyes, from his nose and across his face like rushes overtaking a disused field. He blinks his eyes in the light. There’s a kind of terror in them.

  “Is it you?” he asks me.

  “It is.”

  “What ails you?” There’s a shrillness to his voice like he might cry or as though he fears the answer might harm him.

  “I would like a suit.”

  “A suit?”

  “A suit for Mass and for travelling and for attending dances.”

  He looks into my face like I’ve asked him a riddle. Then finally he speaks.

  “All right so,” he says.

  Inside the house smells of fallen trees soaked with water. It is dark, just a small oil lamp burning. Newspapers cover the windows. Over a picture of the Pope with a gold frame he’s taped a handkerchief, but you can still see the veined and ringed hands folded together. The dresser, a table and chairs are pushed into a corner with a sheet thrown over them. There’s a harness and a small plough. By the fire, his chair, with newspapers for blankets. The loom stands alone in the centre of the room, not a trace of dust to be seen on it, the fine tone of the wood looking warm in the lamplight.

  The Tailor puts on his trousers and shirt and jacket. He passes a comb through his hair. From a drawer in the table under the sheet he takes a tape measure and kneels down before me, stretching the tape along the inside of my leg.

  “It’s six years since I made a suit,” he says.

  He drifts like a mist around to my back and then writes the measurements on the wall.

  “The shop is the only place good enough for them now,” he says.

  I watch his brown fingers forming the figures, the strands of hair trailing across his head, his bare ankles going down into his shoes. The shoes have no laces. I look at the tins ranged along the window-ledge, the walls green with damp, the newspapers he lies under at night. He turns then, his breathing like a sleeping dog’s, his watery eyes looking into mine, his mouth opening and closing as he tries to find speech.

  19

  MA WON’T STOP moving her hands since the funeral. She smooths creases, picks at threads, straightens hair, folds newspapers, polishes spectacles, pokes the fire, ties her laces, adjusts pictures, feeds the dog, shoos hens, opens drawers, tugs at stockings, marks time to aimless tunes. It’s like there’s something mechanical inside them that won’t let them rest.

  “Do you think will Dermot be all right in the town?” she says.

  She’s on the edge of a wooden chair by the fire. Everyone in the room is looking out the open door seeing nothing. No one answers.

  “He’s gone to get a new gate for the field with the two cows. I hope he remembers the white thread I asked him for.” It’s like her head’s a crossroads with traffic passing through. “I told him not to take a drink,” she says.

  She turns now to me.

  “Tell me again about Joe.”

  I have to tell her how his room was the time I went down to Ipswich to see him, was he thin, the condition of his skin, how much drink he was taking.

  “Did you try the police?”

  “They wouldn’t know.”

  “The register for people voting?”

  “He doesn’t vote.”

  “The hospitals?”

  I don’t answer her. She drums with her fingers against the wall.

  “It was the same way with my Uncle John. The day after the farm went to my father he put some clothes in a bag and went out the door. How could they know then that they’d never see him again? Fine man. They say he had the strength of a dray horse. Everyone came home from England was questioned. Anyone going over would try to have a look. They said prayers. And you know what happened to him. He was found three months after he died in a room in Northampton. They had to put on masks to go into the room. There was a photograph of the island where my grandmother came from on the wall. There wasn’t even the money to bring him home to be buried. He was forty-two years in England without a word sent home. It was like he walked into a cloud and vanished.” She gets up and reaches for the kettle but then sits down again. “He’s one man I’d like to have met,” she says.

  Dermot’s wife can’t take any more and she goes into her room and closes the door.

  “Couldn’t you put an ad in the paper?” she asks me.

  She mumbles something that sounds like a prayer.

  The next day she stays late in bed and only gets up to see me to the door. She’s getting pains in her shoulders, she says. Then she s
teps back to have a look at me in my new suit. “It’s fine work,” she says. “I didn’t think he had it in him.” Outside the sky is low and very dark and the wind is flattening the grass and the smoke as it comes out of the chimney. Anyone in the road is keeping to themselves. All the doors in the townland are closed. “Bad day,” Dermot says more than once on the way to the station. I take from my pocket a photograph of Da Matt gave me from the day Da won the prize in Dublin. He’s holding his flute out before him. It’s like nothing could ever have too much weight in his hands. Matt’s eyes are on him and so are the woman’s in the cloak and rings. She has one hand raised a little like she wants to ask him something and she’s smiling in a way that might please him. Her eyes are lit up and looking only at him. I would like to know what she thinks of him but not what she is trying to ask him because this photograph seems to have no past or future. I hear a cry then, like that of a dog trapped in a hole. There is a smell of fire. We turn a corner in the cart and we’re passing above the Tailor’s. I can see him in his white underwear taking a lunge at something. He has an axe in his hand and he is moving around before a fire. He lifts the axe and as we move away now I can see what he is doing. He is breaking his loom into pieces and he is throwing the pieces onto the fire.

  20

  IN THE BEET factory in Ipswich I took the name J. Brady after the name was written in the back of the coat Ma bought me at the Fair. When the paymaster asked me what the J stood for I nearly said Jupiter because I was thinking of P. J. and his desire for a telescope. But I said “Joe” in time. Each Sunday morning after Mass I went to a different place for a drink but no one had heard of Joe. “What other names did he use?” asked a man from Tipperary.

  Working in the beet factory was like sitting inside a wet hayrick on a hot summer’s day. There were small windows up by the ceiling where you could see the blue sky and the presses gave off a fierce heat and steam. You’d be drenched wet working and it seemed you were breathing only steam. I never liked when they put the red beets in a salad, the way they tasted or the stain they left on the plate. There were machines for carting the beets, machines for extracting the sugar and machines for smashing what was left into pulp. I stood stooped over with an open canvas bag waiting for the pulped beet to come rushing down the chute. I filled the bag until it reached a hundredweight, stitched it closed and left it so it could be taken away and fed to cows. I’d rather do the feeding than the filling of bags. It was a short season, but I learned to sew.

  When I think of Derbyshire I think of the blue fog in the mornings and the miners walking through it. Why they seemed so lonely I don’t know for they were often laughing. They were taking gouges out of the hills the way you’d take off the top of an egg with a knife. We were putting up screens for the washeries. Black Johnny Fortune was on that job. A tall mournful local man they called Drizzle. The Horse McGurk who played the banjo. And Francie Meehan. He called himself Gallagher after a Donegal hurler and I called myself Rose after one of the men made the flute that was buried with Da. In the digs we were put sleeping in the same bed. He was very long and he always lay on his back and when I woke in the morning the first thing I’d see were his white feet pointing at the ceiling. Sometimes they’d twitch like a fly had landed on them. “Oh those feet,” I said to him once. He looked at me like the two of us were out on a mountainside in the rain. “I know,” he said. “There’s nothing worse than another man’s body.”

  Inside a tent at the Goose Fair in Nottingham I sat on a long bench with Francie and his cousin Martin from Glenties watching a boxer named the Tornado taking a challenge from a black man fighting in his trousers and vest. It was summer and outside the women were all about in their light dresses. But still it was great crack in the tent. For two pounds you got three rounds in the ring with the Tornado and if you beat him you got ten. He had put down a farmer’s labourer and a steeplejack but the black man had him foxed. He picked and he opened until the Tornado’s arms began to drop. Then he tore into him. The punches were on him like a handful of stones thrown against a wall. He let go with a right to the side of the face then and the Tornado went down, a wave of blood flooding out from his mouth.

  “Now,” said Francie, turning to me. “Put those arms to good use. You’re the man for it. He’s weakened for sure.”

  We’d had two pints and shorts each before we went in and we’d be going for more after. There was a heat under the tent that made me feel loose and strong. The veins were up in my arms and the blood moving through them. I felt I could lift the ring if I had to. I stood up. Francie and Martin handed me a pound each. I was thinking of the way Da filled a sack with sand and showed Joe and me how to get the power into our punches with our legs. I held up my hand with the banknotes and went up into the ring. I thought I could be like John Joe was in the train and frighten the Tornado with the size of my arms but when I handed over the money and was introduced he looked me in the eye and winked. We stood facing each other. I led with my left and was looking to bury the right into the centre of his gut. I threw six punches and he pushed them all away. He was like a man clearing slow-moving bees that were annoying him on a summer’s day. He bounced two jabs off my forehead and threw a right in under my eye. It was like having logs land on you from the sky. He got me under the arms then and pushed me against the ropes.

  “Where are you from, boy?” he said. I told him. “Didn’t I know it? I’m only two parishes away. Now go down easy when I hit you and we can go for a pint.”

  “The last man beat you and so will I,” I said. I was thinking of the ten pounds and the way Francie and Martin would be looking at me. I pushed him away.

  “Don’t you know the two of us are partners?” he said.

  “Some partner that opened a hole in your mouth,” I said.

  “Whenever we fight we keep a small balloon filled with dyed water in our mouths,” said the Tornado. He seemed to be pleading with me. I moved in on him and threw a right that flew a foot clear of his head.

  “Have you a wife and family?” he said.

  “No.”

  “Isn’t it truly pitiful the things I have to do?”

  I took a jab on the top lip, he crouched low like he was going to bring his right up all the way from the floor and then he hit me with a straight left I never saw square on the point of the chin. I went down like a crow shot from the sky. It’s strange how it doesn’t hurt when you get hit clean.

  I don’t remember the name I used in Nottingham. We had a good night in the bar after the Goose Fair, the black man telling us all about sparring with Sugar Ray Robinson in America. We were working on a road that time, me on one side of the tamper levelling the concrete, Francie on the other. We had plenty of money even after sending some home and we drank it all. Cleary I think it was I called myself, after a priest.

  In Kent we had the job of destroying air raid shelters. They were the devil, some of them, with steel running through the walls and roof. Francie got hit with a lump of concrete flew off the end of the jackhammer. The blood ran down over his eye and he looked at me like the world should be ready to mourn him, but I told him it wasn’t half the blow I got from the Tornado at the Goose Fair when he threw me into the ring, and he stayed quiet then. The orchards were lovely to walk past on a Sunday, the scent of apples. There was a girl there. Margaret Bracewell. She worked in a shop selling newspapers and sweets. I stopped in the evening and stayed sometimes for an hour. She lived with nuns in Dorset through the war because of the bombing and they were very kind to her, she said. They taught her all about working with lace and in the time she was there, she said, she made an altar cloth. She had lovely small hands. We went walking one Sunday along lanes and over hills and past orchards smelling of apples talking all the time, but when we got to the gate where she lived I had more thoughts running in my head than I could account for in my mouth and I stood in the road and said nothing. I remember the way she sighed. I remember the way she shrugged her shoulders and walked up the path to her do
or. Her cheeks were like the apples. In Kent I took the name Patterson, after a town in America where relations of Ma’s lived.

  In Bedford I was slab laying. In Coventry it was drainage pipes. There was a site in Barnet must have been four acres anyway and there it was mostly shuttering. I carried the hod for a week in Blackheath but I hadn’t the balance. McNamara was a name I used, after the song sung by Americans. O’Neill for the great king of the North. Loss, because of the bandleader. You could be on a site those days and half of them would be calling themselves Michael Collins for the crack. I was underpinning with Francie in Chelsea. He’d be down on his knees in the dirt those days, singing.

  In Liffey Street had furniture with fleas and bugs I sold it,

  And at the Bank a big placard I often stood to hold it.

  In New Street I sold hay and straw and

  in Spitalfields made bacon.

  In Fishamble Street was at the grand old trade of

  basket making.

  He called himself Nasser to annoy the English paymaster and I was Wilson after the young boy was learning the flute from Da. It felt strange with that on me but I thought I would give it a try. Francie and me walking up the Kilburn High Road ahead of two men. “They’re from Clare,” said Francie to me out of the side of his mouth. “You can tell by the way they whistle.” They had ten years on us maybe. “You’ll not go home again boys,” called out the one with the black straw hat sitting on the back of his head, and the two of them laughed. We had digs in Cavendish Road with a landlady named Chandler. I won’t stop to think about her now. She gave us a plateful of eggs and rashers and black pudding that Sunday morning and we went straight up the road to Cricklewood in the sunlight without stopping for Mass and then into the Crown for the opening at noon. It was the day of the All-Ireland and bets were being laid and pints were flying. I left the accordion in the digs but a lad from Kerry gave me the loan of his and I played them “The Golden Castle”. We bought bottles of stout over the bar and made for Alexandra Palace with our radios, Francie, Martin, myself and another cousin of theirs, a pale little fellow called Ivan who was never before out of his own parish. All his life he’d tended sheep in the hills with his father. At Archway we stood on the pavement waiting to cross but he was trembling. “The speed of the cars!” he said. He had a drowning man’s grip on Martin’s arm. A bus stopped and when it went off again we were left in a cloud of grey smoke. “Oh Martin,” I heard Ivan say. “The bus!” I could only barely make out his shape. He bent over then and left the whole of his breakfast in the road before us. I could see the yellow from the yolk of the egg he’d eaten running through the rest of it. “The bus,” he said. “I wouldn’t mind,” said Francie, “but he only drank minerals in the Crown.” When we got to Alexandra Palace the crest of the hill was crowded with Irishmen tuning their radios to get the signal from home. We drank the stout and listened to the wild calls from the hillside as the points were scored and afterwards with the sun still pouring down on us we played twenty-fives. That was the day of the All-Ireland and I won four pounds at the cards. “Did you know they have a statue here of Oliver Cromwell?” said Francie. “I saw it myself.” We were making for Kilburn in the top of a bus. Ivan had a handkerchief in his hand made into a pouch with a length of red string. He untied it and held it out to me, a smile on him that showed all his teeth. “Earth from Donegal,” he said. “He wanted to be a priest,” said Martin. That was meant to explain it. “But he doesn’t drink enough!” said Francie and we all laughed, even Ivan. We had plates of boiled bacon and then made for the Old Bell. A small round man with an angry face under his hat came towards us with a baby’s pushchair out in front of him. There was a box on the seat and he was blowing on a mouth organ to clear a path. Anybody didn’t move fast enough he cursed them. I thought of Baby and how Da always greeted her and it caught me. We had pints in the Old Bell and pints in the Volunteer and pints in the Black Lion. That was the day of the All-Ireland and the day I had luck with me for it was the first time I ever saw Maggie Doyle. She had a dress on the colour of sand and red shoes and she was walking across the room like a cloud was carrying her, leaning a little forward, the red hair falling across her left eye, her face set, the mouth open a little, then the smile breaking first in the lines around her mouth and then up into her eyes until her whole face was alight when she sat next to a woman wearing a broad straw hat. I remember not only the way she looked when she came into the bar but the way it felt the moment before, the smoke rising from the cigarettes, the young boy selling papers, the Sligo man in the grey suit with his fiddle case across his knees and his finger tapping at the side of his brow. Francie imploring Ivan to take a short. Then Maggie and as I remember it everything around her blurs. I think she looks over at me once from her chair but maybe not. I have the accordion with me and when I play “Come West Along the Road” the Horse McGurk gets up, takes off his shirt and vest and dances around the tables with a chair between his teeth. I think of the way the lines break around her mouth when she starts to smile, the alertness of the brain behind it. “That was fine playing,” she says to me as she goes. She is looking over her shoulder as she walks away. The day of the All-Ireland. Maybe she’s been thinking of saying it since she first heard the tune.