‘God help us, hard to imagine.’
I miss Daddy, I really do. It seems that, these days, all I do is missthings. And I miss so much. The smell of the fresh, cold morning air in Kilmarra. The sky in June, raspberry-coloured sunsets bursting with rain down over us. Your sister’s plum pudding and my fingers trembling on the buttons up the back of your dress.
The most exquisite green grass, filling a thousand fields before me. My parents’ graves. Having potential. Having patience. Your shadow on mine. Daffodils on the kitchen table in spring. The wreath on your door at Christmas. And you. Above everything, you.
Today, I miss my father. And suddenly, I miss the caramel irises that struck me yesterday and reminded me that I am a man.
‘It was a good night, wasn’t it?’
I try again to keep some momentum going, so that I am not lost to memories for a minute longer. Let’s try to have some fun, and talk about last night. Let’s hear why Tom left you out of our story.
Anna starts to cry. Quiet at first, but she allows herself to get louder. And then she encourages herself to get more animated. With such a fresh sadness, it’s as though Daddy only died this morning, and not all those years ago. Almost as though she knows that I’m going to mention you, and needs a way to avoid it. They think I should be over you by now. How could I get over you when I’m hardly even allowed to mention you?
Anna was so happy coming to bed last night, whispering to Peggy that she was excited about Ballycrea. Look at her now. Tom lets out a big, rumbling sigh. The type he lets out before a fight.
‘I’ve made four friends at school already.’
Peggy tries, and I feel bad for her. All this up and down, she is probably seasick from our unpredictability.
I remember when she was only a thought. Before she became a living person. When the big shame came over our family. Daddy was seven years dead, and Mammy was newly pregnant. I was nineteen then.
It was all too much to handle at the time. Tom went off the deep end when he found out. Ballistic doesn’t begin to describe it. He was determined to stick Mammy in a convent, like she wasn’t our Mammy at all. There were long, late nights spent fighting back and forth about it. About her. For Tom, it was simple. Mammy had committed an unforgivable sin, and ladened us with an unthinkable shame. The only solution was to send her to the nuns. I understood that, I suppose I still do. But there was something about it that I just couldn’t move past: she was our Mammy. The same woman who changed our nappies and fed us and looked after us after Daddy died. Who were we to exercise any authority over her? If another family had made the decision, I could have justified it for them no bother. But I couldn’t do it with my own mother.
Obviously, Tom felt differently. He was never warm with Mammy again. I suppose he couldn’t cope with the idea that she was a person, a woman, beyond his mother. Beyond his control. Look, it didn’t sit right with me either, but I knew we had to get on with it. I was better able to navigate the situation. Better able to take on the shame. But it took over Tom. Existing under the immense weight of that shame, I later realised, was existing under the immense weight of the church. ’Twas around that time I fell out of step with god and his son.
If she wasn’t going to the convent, the only other option was for Tom to stand in complete control of her. Making her pay for her mistake every day. He once told me that her situation had caused difficulty with his deep-set belief that anybody can be granted salvation. If he had dug a little deeper, he might have realised that the real difficulty was believing that he could be the one to grant that salvation. As he demonstrated on Mammy.
It hit Anna the heaviest. Seventeen years of age, always the baby ofthe family, suddenly, not the baby anymore. It’s safe to say she has spent her life looking for something to fill the void of Mammy’s undivided attention.
She sat permanently at the foot of Mammy’s bed for those nine months, and has not forgiven Tom. I doubt she ever will. I doubt he particularly cares, when he accomplished what he set out to do: bury the shame of Mammy’s transgressions deep, deep in the ground. She lived for seven hours after Peggy was born. Tom refused to call for a priest or a doctor.
And while he might feel some regret for the way he treated her during her last months, I can’t imagine his stance on the whole thing has changed much. A part of him will still be ashamed of her.
I was never particularly close with Tom again; until you died, and he was one of the few people who could take my weight. My forgiveness in exchange for his support. It got us past a rough patch. It’s bringing us back to each other.
When I think back to that time, I remember the stress of being found out the most of all. Voices in the pub asking where Mammy was gone. Rumours that she was in hospital, or in hiding, or with cousins in Tipperary. Father Lynch peppering his services with the outcomes for unmarried mothers, the fate of bastard babies. Our feeble attempts at pulling together a story, wondering whether it was easier to lie for Mammy or just cast her aside. I wish I knew you then. I wish you had been around, to be good to my mother in the ways that I never was.
We never found out about Peggy’s father. Whoever he was, he never owned up to it when Mammy was alive, so what good would it have done him to own up to it when she had died? I had my suspects, of course I had, but my nerve always buckled before I could confront anyone. Anna has still never acknowledged that this man exists somewherein the world. As though Peggy was born of some immaculate conception. As though our mother wasn’t capable of sin. That’s the sort of attitude that Mammy wouldn’t have discouraged. That pregnancy really was made to be the shame of her life. She was the pious sort of woman who might have seen dying in childbirth as a harsh, but ultimately fit, punishment. It’s all so heavy to think about. ’Tis times like this I would like to find a bit of solace in god. Oh well.
‘Put on the radio there, Peg.’
I say, unable to cope with the silence anymore. Unable to think anymore. Let me be the child’s father. I’ll look after her. She leans into the radio, fiddling with the dials, trying to escape the static.
‘Era Tom, that thing is fecked.’
‘Why don’t you fix it, so?’
The form is bad. Maybe tomorrow, I could go down to the town with him, and we could inquire about renting a television. Then, we could bring the whole world into our house, and bring ourselves into 1965, and leave everything that has passed behind us. I think Tom would be glad to hear that I want to come into town with him. I think they would all be glad to get a television. Maybe I’ll ask him now. If everybody gets riled up over it he won’t be able to say no.
But just as I open my mouth to speak, he puts out his fag and gets down on his knees, and calls us for the rosary.
‘Would anyone go down to the pub?’
I ask, willing to go and socialise to avoid praying.
‘We offer this rosary for our father, Joseph O’Leary, on his birthday.’
With steel in his voice, he begins his show. I’ve no choice but to get down on my knees and join him. And the girls have no choice but to follow me.
