Irish Literature - House of Mourning and Other Stories

with me; thy rod and staff they comfort me.’ In the morning they found her body with that of other nuns among ribbons of blood in a rubbish dump by a meeting of four roads. No one knew why they killed her because after the concert a young, almost Chinese-skinned soldier had danced with her under a yellow lantern that threw out scarlet patterns.
    Afterwards Chris would wonder why her parents had not contacted her; perhaps the party with its barrage of phone calls had put up a barrier. But here, now, on the pavement, as the hearses passed, loaded with chrysanthemums and dahlias and carnations, she, this blonde, long-haired protégée of Sister Honor, could only be engulfed by the light of pumpkins which lit like candles in suburban gardens with dusk, by the lights of windows in high-rise blocks, apertures in catacombs in ancient Rome, by the flames which were emitted from factory chimneys and by the knowledge that a woman, once often harsh and forbidding, had been raised to the status of martyr and saint by a church that had continued since ancient Rome. An elderly lady in a blue mackintosh knelt on the pavement and pawed at a rosary. A negro lady beside Chris wept. But generally the crowd was silent, knowing that it had been their empire which had put these women to death and that now this city was receiving the bodies back among the flames of pumpkins, of windows, of rhythmically issuing factory fires, which scorched at the heart, turning it into a wilderness in horror and in awe.

Winter Swimmers

    Winter swimmers, you brave the cold, you know you’ve got to go on, you make a statement. A Tinker’s batty horse, brown and white, neighs in startlement at the winter swim. A man rides a horse on Gort Hill, disappearing onto the highway. Tinkers’ limbs, limbs that have to know the cold to be cleansed.

    ‘The Tinkers fight with one another and kill one another. If someone does something wrong they beat the tar out of them. But they don’t fight with anyone else. You never see a Tinker letting his trousers down,’ a woman whispered in Connemara, sitting on a wicker pheasant chair. The flowering currant was in blossom outside the window.
    A Traveller boy in a combat jacket with lead-coloured leaves on it stood outside his Roma Special, among washing machines, wire, pots, kettles, cassettes, tin buckets.
    Some day later there were lightening streaks of white splinters across the road where the Travellers had been.
    In early summer the bog cotton blew like patriarchs’ beards, above a hide, the stems slanted, and distantly there were scattered beds of bog cotton on the varyingly floored landscape under the apparition-blue of the mountains.
    I was skipping on Clifden Head when a little boy came along. The thrift was in the rocks. ‘Nice and fit.’ He wanted to go swimming. But he had no trunks. ‘Go in the nude,’ I said. ‘Ah, skinny-dipping. Are you going again?’ I was drying. ‘No, I’ll go elsewhere and paddle.’
    ‘I used to pass him in the rain outside his caravan,’ the woman in Connemara told a story before she went to mass, about a Tinker man who died young, standing in an accordion-pleated skirt, ‘sitting by a fire against the wall. “Why don’t you go inside?” I’d ask him. “Sure I have two jackets,” he’d say. “I have another one inside. I can put on that one if this one gets wet.”’
    ‘Are you a buffer or a Traveller?’ a Tinker boy asked me. On their journeys there are five-minute prayers at a place where you were born, where your grandmother died.
    There was a Traveller’s discarded Jersey in a bush. Buffer—settled—Travellers stood in front of a cottage with the strawberry tree—the white bell flower—outside.
    A Traveller in a suit of Mosque blue came to the door one day to try to buy unwanted furniture, carpets. ‘He had a suit blue as the tablecloth,’ went the story after him. Part of his face was reflected in the mirror. It was as if a face was being put together, bit by bit.
    A Traveller youth in a cap and slip-on boots which had a triangle of slatted elastic material held his bicycle in a rubbish dump against a rainbow. The poppy colours of the montbretia spread through the countryside in the hot summer. There were sea mallows between the roads and the sands.
    You felt you were nuzzling for recovery against landscape.
    The sides of the sea road towards fill were thronged with hemp agrimony. The seaweed was bursting, a rich harvest full of iodine. As I was