Irish Literature - House of Mourning and Other Stories

Yorkshire wagon with green dado, near the river.
    ‘I’ve been here fourteen years but I’m moving tomorrow to a field near Horan’s Cross,’ he said, ‘The children torment me. I hit some sometimes and I was up with the guards over it. We were blackguards too. They used to wash clothes on stones in streams. There was an old woman who used to wash her clothes and we’d throw stones at her.’
    Looking at the river he said: ‘A young butcher and a young guard used to swim to the other pier, practising for the swim across the estuary in the summer. I used to swim the breast stroke, the crawler. But then I’d put on swimming togs and go out and stand in the rain. It was as good as a swim.’
    There’d been another caravan parked beside the old man when I first came to live in a caravan nearby and an Englishwoman lived in it sometimes dressed as a near punk—in an argyle mini skirt with a chain girdle—and sometimes as a traditional Gypsy with a nasturtium yellow shawl with sanguine dapples and a nasturtium yellow dress with sanguine dabs on it which had attennae.
    In my first few weeks living in a caravan by a field there was the blood translucence of blackberries, the mastery of intricate webs, the petrified crimson of ladybirds on nettles.
    On one of my first mornings the guards arrived in plain clothes. A guard with jeans tight on his crotch banged on the door. ‘Mrs Monson has objected to you,’ he said referring to a woman who lived in a cottage nearby.
    In my first few weeks in a caravan I realized that living in a caravan there was always the laceration, the scalding of a nettle on you, the tear of a briar, the insult of a settled person. But you noticed the grafts in the weather, mild to cold in the night, fog to rain. You saw the pheasant rising from the grass. Close to the river you were close to the hunger of the heron, the twilight voyages of the swan, the traffic of water rats.
    In the night there was a vulnerability, a caravan by a field near a main road, a few trees sheltering it from the road, the lights of cars flashing in the caravan, a sense of your caravan’s frail walls protecting you.
    Coming to live in a caravan by a field near a main road was part of a series of secessions.
    A few weeks after I’d come to live in West Limerick I was gathering firewood in the wood behind my flat, yellow jelly algae on the logs, sycamore, maple, ash wings on the grass, when a little boy in a frisbee and a shirt with chickens wearing caps and flowers and suns on it, came up to me on a bicycle. His hair had the gold allotted to pictures of the Assumption of Mary in secretive places. The sky over the river was a brothel pink. ‘Pleased to meet you.’ When I raised my axe a little he dashed away.
    Sometimes as I walked in the fields in the winter I’d see him, tatterdemalion against the trunk of a rainbow. Dogs were often digging for pigmy shrews in the fields.
    One day he was in the fields with two greyhounds of a friend on leashes, one white with marigold mottles, the other fleecy cream and tar black with a quiff on the back.
    In the spring he knocked on my door. ‘I’m looking for haggard for my horse. I wonder can I put a horse behind your house?’ He had a seed earring in his right ear now.
    ‘If I be bereaved of my children, I am bereaved.’ Sometimes on summer nights when I swam in the artificially created pool in the fresh water part of the river behind my house he’d be there. On one side of the town bridge the river was fresh water. On the other side it was tidal water. He’d be leaping from the high cement bank with other Traveller children. Ordinarily he looked boxer-like but in swimming togs I saw that his legs were twig-like—almost as if he was the victim of malnutrition.
    ‘On your marks, ready, steady, go,’ he’d command the other children. ‘Did you ever tread the water?’ he’d ask me. Meaning being almost still in near-standing position in the water.
    In the early autumn when I’d go to swim on the pier in the tidal part of the river he’d often be there with his horse, shampooing his horse’s tail. The horse was a brown horse with one foot bejewelled with white and with a buttermilk tail. The boy’s features were hard as a beech nut or an apple corn now. He’d look at me with his blueberry and aqua-blue mix eyes. ‘I can’t swim her now. She’s in foal.’ The foal when it came was sanguine coloured. The boy left both of them in a meadow on the town side of