Irish Literature - House of Mourning and Other Stories

the end of the summer of 1967, when I was sixteen, I started swimming on my own volition.
    In early February the wild celery and the hemlock and the hart’s-tongue fern and the lords and ladies fern and the buttercup leaves and the celandine leaves and the alexanders and the eyebright and fool’s watercress came to the riverbank or the river. There was the amber of a robin among the bushes who watched me almost each morning.
    Here you are surrounded by the smells of your childhood, I thought, cow dung, country evening air, the smell the grass gives off with the first inkling of spring, cottages with covert smells—the musk of solitary highly articulate objects—and a mandatory photograph on the piano. My grandmother lived in a house like the one I lived in now. She had a long honed face, cheekbones more bridges, large eyes, Roman nose. She was a tall woman and spoke with the mottled flatness of the Midlands.
    Here’s to the storytellers. They made some sense from these lonely and driven lives of ours.
    When I was a child in hospital with jaundice there’d been a traditional musician who’d been in a car accident in the bed beside me. There were cavalcades of farts, an overwhelming odour as he painfully tried to excrete into a bedpan behind the curtains but the insistent impression was, in spite of the pain, of the music in his voice, in his many courtesies.
    You heard the curlew again. ‘The cuckoo brings a hard week,’ they said in Connemara. One year was grafted onto another. ‘March borrows three days from April to skin an old cow,’ they’d said a month earlier, meaning that the old cow thinks he’s escaped come April. Two swans flew over the Deel and the woods through which golden frogs made pilgrimages among the confectioner’s white of the ramson—wild garlic—flower, soldering stories.
    On a roadside in County Sligo once I sat and had soup from a pot with legs on it with a Traveller couple. Now I knew what the ingredients were—nettles, dandelion leaves.
    With May sunshine I started to go to Gort to swim each day. Traveller youths swam their horses in the spring tide, up and down with ropes, urging them on with long pliable horse goads with plastic gallon drums on the end. One of the Traveller youths had primrose-flecked hair. Another a floss of butter-chestnut hair. Another hair in cavalier style. ‘You’ve a decent old tube,’ said the boy with the primrose-flecked hair.
    During the day I noticed his hair had copper in it.
    One evening during spring tide I saw him stand in a rose-coloured shirt, not far from cottages, by the river where it was bordered by yellow rocket float down.
    The first poppy was a bandana against the denim of the bogs of West Limerick.
    In the evenings of spring tide when the Travellers came along and swam their horses I was reminded of St Maries which I’d visited twenty years before, when the Gypsies would come and lead their horses to the water on the edge of the Mediterranean. To Saintes Maries had come Mary, mother of James the Less, Mary Salome, mother of James and John, and Sarah, the Gypsy servant, all on a sculling boat. There were bumpers by the sea and in little dark kiosks jukeboxes with effects on them like costume jewellery. Lone young Gypsy men wandered on the beach, great dunes on the land side of the beach. A little inland, horsemen with bandanas around their noses rode horses through the Camargue.
    Back briefly in the river pool one evening I found the Traveller youth with the cavalier hair shampooing himself after a swim. His underpants were sailor blue and white.
    Later that week when I came to Gort the boy with the primrose-flecked hair was there alone with his horse, a Clydesdale, ruffs at his feet. A few days’ growth on his face, he was naked waist up. There was the imprint outline of a tank top—the evidence of hot days, his nipples not pink—hazel, a quagmire of hair under his arms, freckles berried around his body. His body smelt of stout like the bodies of young men who gathered in my aunt’s pub in a village in the Midlands when I was a child. A rallying, a summoning in the body to dignity.
    I am in the West of Ireland, I thought. Illness prevents me from seeing, from looking. Like a soot on the mind. Sometimes I raise my head. Like Lazurus recover life—especially vision.
    One Friday evening as I cycled home from Gort the youth with the primrose-flecked hair introduced himself ‘Cummian.’ And he introduced the other two