Irish Literature - House of Mourning and Other Stories

leaving Galway the last fuschia flowers were like red bows on twigs the way yellow ribbons were sometimes tied around trees in the Southern States.
    ‘Now therefore, I pray thee, take heed to thyself until the morning, and abide in a secret place, and hide thyself.’
    You felt like a broken city, the one sung about in a song played on jukeboxes throughout Ireland. ‘What’s lost is lost and gone forever.’ In May 1972 you heard a lone British soldier on duty sing ‘Scarlet Ribbons’ on a deserted sun-drenched street in that city.
    Old man’s beard grew among the winter blackthorns in West Limerick. Tall rushes with feathery tops lined the road to Limerick. Traveller women used to fashion flowers from these rush tops.
    The bracket fungus in the woods behind my flat was gathered on logs like coins on a crown, stories.
    On the street of this town the Teddyboy’s face came back, brigand’s moustache, funnel sidelocks, carmine shirts, the spit an emblem on the pavement. He had briar-rose white skin.
    ‘They’d come in September and stay until Confirmation time,’ a woman in a magenta blouse with puff sleeves whispered about the Travelling people. When I was a boy Travellers would draw in for the winter around our town.
    A pool was created in the river behind the house in which I was staying and I swam there each morning, the river, just after a rocky waterfall, halted by a cement barrier. On this side of the town bridge the river is fresh water. On the other it is tidal. Swans often sat on the cement barrier when only a meagre current went over it.
    On this side it is a spate river and the current, always strong at the side, after rain, is powerful, I did not gauge its power and one morning I was swept away by it, over the barrier, as if by a human force. I had no control. There was no use fighting. I was carried down the waterfall on the other side of the barrier to another tier of the river, drawn in a torrent. I saw pegwood in red berry on the bank. I got to the side, crawled out. In Ancient Ireland they used to eat bowls of rowan berries in the autumn.
    One morning I tried the tidal part of the river at the pier called Gort. In Irish gort means field, field of corn. It is very close to the word for hunger, famine— gorta . The flour ships from Newcastle and Liverpool used to come here. People would carry hay, seaweed to the pier. A slate-blue warehouse shelters you from view.
    When I was a boy they used to hold a rope across the river at the Red Bridge, someone on either side, swimmers clutching it and then the swimmers would be pulled up and down.
    I remembered a man drying the hair of a boy in the fall of 1967.
    I had a friend who used to swim naked when he found he had the place to himself. One day someone hid his clothes in the bushes and a group of girls came along. He hid behind a bush until they went.
    He was writing what he called a pornographic novel for a while. As we passed some Travellers’ caravans one autumn day he told me a story. A boy, a relation, a soldier in Germany, came from England, slept in the bed with him. At night they’d make love. The evenings during his visit were demure. They’d have cocoa as if nothing had happened. My friend had a modestly winged Beatle cut, wore vaguely American, plum or aubergine shirts with stripes of indigo blue or purple blue.
    A Traveller in a stove-pipe hat called to the door one afternoon and offered five pounds for a copper tank that was lying behind the house, his hand ritualistically outstretched, the fiver in it. I said I couldn’t give it to him. It was my landlady’s. The copper tank disappeared in the middle of the night.
    An English Gypsy boy with hair in smithereens on his face, his cheeks the sunset peach of a carousel horse’s checks, in a frisbee, carnelian hearing aid in his left ear, on a bicycle, stopped me one day when I was cycling and asked me the way to Rathkeale. I was going there myself and pointed him on.
    In Rathkeale rich Travellers have built an enclave of pueblo-type and hacienda-type houses. They were mostly shut up, the doors and the windows grilled, the inhabitants in Germany, the men tarmacadaming roads. A boy with a long scarf the lemon-yellow of the Vatican passed those houses on a piebald horse.
    I moved down the river to swim in the mornings, nearer the house where I lived, and swam among the bushes, putting stones on the ground where there was broken glass. There’d been a factory opposite the pool.
    When I