Irish Literature - House of Mourning and Other Stories

miner telling me that miners always put Vaseline in their hair before going down into the mines. The Traveller boy was wearing wellingtons the colour of sard.
    ‘You’ve no choice,’ said his father, ‘but to buy a caravan and move into it.’
    The boy’s father got a little caravan for me and I moved into it.
    The hazelnuts were on the trees by the river the day I moved into the caravan. In being moved from house to caravan I found out the boy’s name, his father referring to him. Finnian. A hawk had brought St Finnian the hand of an enemy who had tried to slay him the previous day.
    A middle-aged single woman who had connections with the Travelling people moved into the cottage in which I’d been living and they started banging on her window at night. She couldn’t sleep. A room was found for her on Maiden Street in Newcastle West. I’d often see Traveller boys with piebald horses on Maiden Street in Newcastle West.
    Shortly after I moved into the caravan a little boy with a Neopolitan black cowlick and onyx eyes knocked at the door. ‘I heard you like books. I have murder stories. Will you buy some?’
    ‘Do you want to buy a mint jacket?’ asked Gobán, a Traveller boy with a sash of down growing on his lips who lived in a caravan near Finnian’s. He was wearing a plenitudinous pair of army fatigue trousers. He went into his caravan and brought it out. It was malachite-cream, double-breasted, almost epaulette shouldered, with a wide lapel.
    He and Finnian would often come to my caravan and I’d get them to read poems.
The nineteenth autumn has come upon me
Since I first made my count:
I saw, before I had well finished,
All suddenly mount . . .
    Both Finnian and Gobán were in identical Kelly-green fleece jerseys. ‘Will I tell you a joke?’ said Gobán as Finnian read. ‘Stand up and be counted or lie down and be mounted.’
    Finnian and Gobán and I would have tea, and half-moon cakes and coconut tarts I’d buy in Limerick.
    Sometimes when Finnian would be out lamping for rabbits at night he’d knock at the caravan door and request Mikado biscuits.
    The boys would come at night and tell stories; of the priest who used to go on pilgrimage to Lough Derg and bring a bottle of Bushmills around with him on the days of pilgrimage; of the local woman who dressed in religious blue, spring gentian blue, and broke into the priest’s house one night and put on his clothes; of the single Traveller man with the handlebar moustache who lived in a caravan and had a bottle of Fairy Liquid for ten years; of Traveller ancestors who met up with other Travellers they knew from Ireland on Ellis Island before entering the United States; of a relative of Finnian’s who went to America, joined the American navy and was drowned while swimming in Lough Foyle during the Second World War when his fleet was stationed there.
    ‘Long ago in West Limerick,’ said Finnian’s father, ‘they had rambling houses—went from house to house telling stories.’
    Every year settled Travellers in Ireland—buffers—make a long walk to commemorate the days of travelling. One year it was Dublin to Downpatrick, County Down. Despite the insults, the contumelies heaped against Travelling people, you keep on walking.
    On December twenty-first, the winter solstice, Finnian and Gobán and Gobán’s smaller brother Touser brought a candle each and put them in the menorah in my caravan and lit them against the winter emerald of West Limerick. Touser had a fresh honey blond turf cut, a pugilist’s vow of a body.
    A rowing boat with a red sail had gone down the river that day.
    Patrick—Patricius—had once lit the paschal flame in this country.
    When he couldn’t sleep Caesar Augustus would call in the storytellers and as we had tea and Christmas cake they told stories and jokes and in the middle of stories and jokes came out with lines from Traveller songs—‘I married a woman in Ballinasloe,’ ‘I have a lovely horse’—and, the lights of cars flashing in the caravan, it was as though all four of us were walking, were marching through the evening.

Shelter

    They’re seasonal. Like the laughing goose.
    They come to the art-deco shelter on Sunday evenings in January.
    Boys from Greenmount in the south of Cork city in Manchester United bobble hats, baseball caps with slogans like ‘Whip Me’ or ‘Yankees,’ Crusaders’ headdresses from Dunnes Stores, cowls. Many of them with blotched faces like the spots on the woundwort