Irish Literature - House of Mourning and Other Stories

all-consuming, wound-oblivionizing harvest.
    Our mad aunts, the young man thought, our mad selves.
    Lady of Laois, ikon from this incumbent, serf-less, but none the less, I expect, totally Russian storybook blinding harvest, pray for the night-sea, neon spin-drift, jukebox-beacon café wanderer.

Ties

    1
    The Forty Steps led nowhere. They were grey and wide, shadowed at the sides by creeper and bush. In fact it was officially declared by Patsy Fogarthy that there were forty-four steps. These steps were erected by an English landlord in memorial to some doubtful subject. A greyhound, a wife? If you climbed them you had a view of the recesses of the woods and the places where Patsy Fogarthy practised with his trombone. Besides playing—in a navy uniform—in the brass band Patsy Fogarthy was my father’s shop assistant. While the steps were dark grey the counter in my father’s shop was dark and fathomless. We lived where the town men’s Protestant society had once been and that was where our shop was too. And still is. Despite the fact my father is dead. My father bought the house, built the shop from nothing—after a row with a brother with whom he shared the traditional family grocery-cum-bar business. Patsy Fogartliy was my father’s first shop assistant. They navigated waters together. They sold silk ties, demonstrating them carefully to country farmers.
    Patsy Fogarthy was from the country, had a tremendous welter of tragedy in his family—which always was a point of distinction—deranged aunts, a paralysed mother. We knew that Patsy’s house—cottage—was in the country. We never went there. It was just a picture. And in the cottage in turn in my mind were many pictures—paintings, embroideries by a prolific local artist who took to embroidery when she was told she was destined to die from leukaemia. Even my mother had one of her works. A bowl of flowers on a firescreen. From his inception as part of our household it seems that Patsy had allied himself towards me. In fact he’d been my father’s assistant from before I was born. But he dragged me on walks, he described linnets to me, he indicated ragwort, he seated me on wooden benches in the hall outside town opposite a line of sycamores as he puffed into his trombone, as his fat stomach heaved into it. Patsy had not always been fat. That was obvious. He’d been corpulent, not fat. ‘Look,’ he said one day on the avenue leading to the Forty Steps—I was seven—‘a blackbird about to burst into song.’
    Patsy had burst into song once. At a St Patrick’s night concert. He sang ‘Patsy Fagan.’ Beside a calendar photograph of a woman at the back of our shop he did not sing for me but recited poetry. ‘The Ballad of Athlone.’ The taking of the bridge of Athlone by the Williamites in 1691 had dire consequences for this area. It implanted it forevermore with Williamites. It directly caused the Irish defeat at Aughrim. Patsy lived in the shadow of the hills of Aughrim. Poppies were the consequence of battle. There were balloons of defeat in the air. Patsy Fogarthy brought me a gift of mushrooms once from the fields of Aughrim.
    Patsy had a bedding of blackberry curls about his cherubic face; he had cherubic lips and smiled often; there was a snowy sparkle in his deep-blue eyes. Once he’d have been exceedingly good-looking. When I was nine his buttocks slouched obesely. Once he’d have been as the man in the cigarette advertisements. When I was nine on top of the Forty Steps he pulled down his jaded trousers as if to pee, opened up his knickers and exposed his gargantuan balls. Delicately I turned away. The same year he tried to put the same penis in the backside of a drummer in the brass band, or so trembling, thin members of the Legion of Mary vouched. Without a murmur of a court case Patsy was expelled from town. The boy hadn’t complained. He’d been caught in the act by a postman who was one of the church’s most faithful members in town. Patsy Fogarthy crossed the Irish Sea, leaving a trail of mucus after film.
    2
    I left Ireland for good and all 11 October 1977. There’d been many explanations for Patsy’s behaviour: an aunt who used to have fits, throwing her arms about like seven snakes; the fact he might really have been of implanted Williamite stock. One way or the other he’d never been quite forgotten, unmentioned for a while, yes, but meanwhile the ecumenical movement had revived thoughts of him.
    My mother attended a