Irish Literature - House of Mourning and Other Stories

tree were fairy lights in the landscape. The pegwood threw a burgundy shadow onto the water. With flood the reflection was the cinnabar red of a Russian ikon.
    One day in early November Cummian was on the pier with his horse alongside a man with a horse who had a sedate car and horse trailer. The grass was a troubled winter green. The other man, apart from Cummian, was the last to swim his horse.
    ‘He likes winter swimming,’ Cummian said of his. ‘Like you. He’d stay there for an hour. And he’s only a year.’
    With the tides coming in and going out there was a metallurgy in the landscape, with the tidal rivers a metallurgical feel, something extracted, called forth. A sadness was extracted from the landscape, a feeling that must have been like Culloden after battle. On Culloden Moor the Redcoats with tricornes had confronted the Highlanders.
    ‘Why do you swim in winter?’ asked Gawalan who was with Cummian one evening.
    ‘It’s a tradition,’ I said, ‘I used to do it when I was a boy,’ which was not true. Other people did it. I did it later, on and off in Dublin.
    Jakob Böhme said the tree was the origin of the language. The winter swim sustains language I thought, because it is connected with something in your adolescence—the hyacinthine winter sunlight through the trees on the other side of the river. It is connected with a tradition of your country, odd people—apart from the sea swimmers—here and there all over Ireland who’d bathe in winter in rivers and streams.
    A rowing boat went down the river one afternoon in late November, a lamp on the front of it, reflection of lamp in the water.
    Gawalan and Colín went to England. They’d go to see female stripteasers first in the city and then male stripteasers.
    With November floods there were often piles of rubbish left on the riverbank. A man in a trenchcoat, with rimless-looking spectacles, cycled up to the pier one evening. ‘I hear them dumping it from the bridge at midnight. It kills the dolphins, the whales, the turtles. You see all kinds of things washed in farther down, pallets, dressers.’ He pointed. ‘There used to be a lane going down there for miles and people would play accordions on summer evenings. A boxer used to swim here with wings on his feet. There was a butcher, Killgalon, who swam in winter before you. He swam everyday up to his late eighties.’
    The river’s been persecuted, vandalized I thought, but continues in dignity.
    Early December the horse swam in the middle of the river, up and down, and I swam across it. The water rubbed a pink into the horse.
    Hounds, at practice, having appeared among the bladderwort on the other side, crossed the river, in a mass, urged on by hunting horns.
    A tallow boy’s underpants was left on the pier. Maybe someone else went for a winter swim. Maybe someone made love here and forgot his underpants. Maybe it was left the way the Travellers leave a rag, an old cardigan in a place where they’ve camped—a sign to show other Travellers they’ve been there—spoor they call it.
    Towards Christmas I met Cummian near his cottage and he invited me in. ‘Will you buy some holly?’ a Traveller boy asked me as I approached it. Cummian’s eyes were sapphirine breaks above a western shirt, his hair centre parted, a cowlick on either side.
    There was a white iron work hallstand; an overall effect from the hall and parlour carpets and wallpaper and from the parlour draperies of fuschine colours and colours of whipped autumn leaves. He sat under a photograph of a boxer with gleaming black hair, in cherry satin-looking shorts, white and blue striped socks. On a small round table was a statue of Our Lady of Fatima with gold leaves on her white gown, two rosaries hanging from her wrist, one white, one strawberry; on the wall near it a wedding photograph of Cummian with what seemed to be a pearl pin in his tie; a photograph of Cummian with a smock of hair, sideburns, Dom Bosco face, holding a baby with a patina of hair beside a young woman in an ankle-length plaid skirt outside a tent.
    We had tea and lemon slices by Gateaux.
    Christmas Eve at the river a moon rose sheer over the trees like a medallion.
    Christmas Day frost suddenly came, the slope to the water half-covered in ice. In the afternoon sunshine the ice by the water was gold and flamingo coloured.
    Sometimes on days of Christmas the winter sun seemed to have taken something from the breast, the emblem of a robin.
    Cummian did