Irish Literature - House of Mourning and Other Stories

youths. ‘Gawalan. Colín.’
    ‘You need a relationship,’ he said.
    When the tide came in in the evening again his horse had a wounded leg and he tied it to the ship rung on the pier and it would stand in the water for hours. Cummian stayed with it and he’d watch me swim and between swims he’d tell stories.
    ‘There was a man who fucked his mares. He tied them to trees.’
    ‘Someone sold a horse to a man who lived on Cavon Island off Clare and the horse swam back across the Shannon estuary to West Limerick.’
    Two Traveller brothers troubled over a horse at Gort, their voices becoming muffled. They seemed to wager the tide. The river had a mirror-like quality after rain. Late one evening Cummian was sitting in the bushes to one side with some men, one of whom was holding up a skinned rabbit. Boys would often fish on the pier with the triple hook—the strokeall—for mullet. On the far side young men would hunt for ribbits with young greyhounds. On summer nights Travellers would draw up on the pier in old cars—Ford Populars, Sunbeams. In Scots Gaelic there’s a word, duthus —commonage. That’s what Gort was, people coming, using the place in common. The winter, the dark days were a quarter I thought, now I have to face people, I have to communicate. There was often a bed of crabs on the river edge as I walked in.
    ‘If I wasn’t married, I’d get lonely,’ said Cummian one evening.
    Water rats swam through the water with evening quiet, paddling with their forepaws. The tracks of the water rat made a V-shape.
    Sometimes in the early evening there’d be a harem of Traveller boys on the pier in the maple red of Liverpool or the strawberry and cream of Arsenal or the red white of Charlton FC or the grey white of Millwall FC.
    ‘Where are you from?’ asked a boy in a T-shirt with Goofy playing basketball on it.
    ‘You don’t speak like a Galwayman but you’ve got the teeth.’
    Cummian would tell stories of his forebears, the Travelling people—beet picking in Scotland, ‘We lie down with manikins.’ That ancestor used to write poems and publish them in Moore’s Almanac for half a crown.
    Sometimes he got four and six pence. ‘Some of them were a mile long,’ said Cummian.
    ‘They used stuff saucepans with holes with the skins of old potatoes and they’d be clogged. They used milkcans especially. Take the bottoms out of milkcans. Put in new ones.’
    With his talk of mending I thought, recovery is like a billycan in the hand, the frail, fragilely adjoined handle.
    In the champagne spring tide of late July Cummian rode the horse in a bathing togs as it swam in the middle of the river.
    One afternoon there was a group of small boys on the pier fishing. One had a Madonna-blue thread around his neck, his top naked, his hair the black of stamens of poppies.
    ‘I’ll swim with you,’ he said, ‘if you go naked.’ I took off my togs. They had a good look and then they fled, one of them on a bicycle, in a formation like a runaway camel.
    Sometimes, though rarely, Traveller girls would come with the boys to the pier, with apricot hair and strawberry lips, in sleeveless, picot-edged white blouses, in jeans, in dresses the white of white tulips. Cummian’s wife came to the pier one evening in a white dress with the green leaves of the lily on it, carrying their child.
    Cummian was a buffer, a settled Traveller and lived in one of the cottages near the river, incendiary houses—cherry, poppy or rosette coloured—with maple trees now like burning bushes outside them. There’d be horses outside the Travellers’ cottages—a jeremiad for the days of travelling.
    One night Travellers were having a row on the green by the river—there was a movement like the retreat of Napoleon from Moscow, hordes milling across the green. Cummian, holding his child, looked on pacifically. ‘You’re done,’ someone shouted in the throng.
    There was a rich crop of red hawthorn berries among the seaweed in early fall, at high tide gold leaves on the river edge. Reeds, borne by the cork in them, created a demi-pontoon effect.
    A woman in white court high heels came around the corner one day as I stood in my bathing togs. ‘This place used to be black with swimmers during high tide. Children used to swim on the slope.’
    A swan and five cygnets pecked at the bladderwort by the side of the pier and the cob came flying low up on the river, back from a journey.
    In berry the pegwood, the berberis, the rowan