Irish Literature - House of Mourning and Other Stories

the pier. The foal would sometimes go off on a little journey, a little adventure, and the mare, tied, would whinny until his return.
    I went to the United States and after my return in the spring I found the flat I’d been living in had been given away. I moved into another flat in the same house. It was unsatisfactory. Cycling to the pier I’d watch and listen for the little boy. There was no sign of him. I wondered if his family had moved on, if he was in England. Then one day at the end of April he rode to the river on his horse. The time for swimming the horses had come again.
    Up and down the Traveller men swam their horses. Steel greys—white horses with a hall of dark grey on them, Appaloosas—speckled Indian horses, skewbalds—batty horses, piebalds.
    Handsome horses with sashes of hair on their foreheads. A man with round face, owl eyes, stout-coloured irises, hard-bargained-for features, in an opaque green check shirt, spat into the water as he swam his horse. On his forearm he had tattoos of a camel, a harp, a crown.
    The boy when he brought his horse to the water had a new bridle on her, viridian and shell pink patterned. He told me of the things that happened while I was away. In February the otters had mated by the pier.
    I found a cottage in the hills outside the town and the boy’s father who had kettle-black eyebrows, piped locks, roach hairstyle, wore a Claddagh ring—two hands holding a gold crown—on his finger, drove me there.
    I put a reproduction of Botticelli’s Our Lady of the Sea over the fireplace, her jerkin studded with stars.
    ‘Say a prayer to St Mary,’ an English boy, the son of a painter, who cycled to a flat of mine in London in an apricot T-shirt, said to me.
    The cottage was near a church but despite that fact I soon found that local people were knocking on the back windows at night, cars were driving up outside the house at night and hooting horns.
    I’d cycle to the river everyday. There were roads like Roman roads off the road through the hills. ‘Finbarr Slowey bought a house there and brought his wife and children,’ a Traveller man with Indian-ink-black hair and Buddha-boy features who was at the river with his strawberry roan, told me, ‘and they drove up outside his house at night and hooted horns. If they don’t want someone to live in their village they hoot horns outside their houses at night.’
    Many sumach trees grew in this area as in the Southern States and I kept thinking of the Southern States. The bunch of antebellum roses; the tartan dickie bow; the hanging tree beside a remote bungalow with a dogtrot. The brother of a friend of mine from a Civil Rights family was killed by the Ku Klux Klan on the Alabama-Georgia border. This area was very similar to the border country of Alabama and Georgia. Great sheaves of corn braided and left out for hurling victors; boys in green and white striped football jerseys dancing with girls at the Shannonside to the music of a platform band; the shadow of a man in a homburg hat at night.
    ‘The IRA’s up there,’ said the Traveller boy, ‘And vigilante groups. They tar and feather people.’
    At night when I’d be trying to sleep people would stand behind the house and bang sticks. I didn’t think there was any point going to the guards. A guard with black lambchop sidelocks and a small paste-looking moustache came by at about eleven o’clock one night and asked me if I was working.
    I couldn’t sleep at night. I didn’t see the Traveller boy by the river so I sought him out. I always thought his family were settled Travellers but when I enquired in the cottages near the river they said: ‘He lives in a caravan up by the waterpump.’
    A long sleek caravan with gilt trimming, occasional vertical gilt lines, flamingo shadows in the cream. Behind it, on the other side of the road, was a flood-lit grotto. His mother was standing by the window—buttermilk blonde hair, mosaic face over a shirt with leg-of-mutton sleeves—above the layette, the celestial cleanliness of aluminium kettles and pots laid out for tasks. She wore a ring with a coin on it. There was a little blonde girl with yellow ducks on her dress and a little boy with cheeks the yellow and red of a cherry and eyes a turquoise that looked as if it had just escaped from a bottle. On the caravan wall was a framed colour photograph of a boxer with a gold girdle and on a cupboard a jar of Vaseline. I remembered an English girl whose father was a