Irish Literature - House of Mourning and Other Stories

shirts.
    A common prize for football winners was Holland linen caps with ribands.
    Shortly after Queenie Waithmandle left, I held my father’s hand at a Sunday rugby game.
    The bulbous vein around the forehead, like a trajectory, the bald head, and yet still—the beauty.
    One of the players that day was a young man with a roach like a duck’s egg who’d been Queenie Waithmandle’s lover.
    When my father was a youth with cherry-auburn hair, field-green eyes, freckles big as birds’ eggs, with a Shakespeare collar, a young British soldier was found shot dead by the River Suck where the otters run, with a picture of Marie Lloyd in his pocket, who once came out on the picket line on behalf of the most lowly of Music Hall workers.
    The British soldiers used to play rugby and hack one another—kick one another’s shins—in the mental hospital grounds, in tiger-striped jerseys, the sforzandos from the field heard by the riverbank.
    Fathers and sons, it’s a smell from the genitals, a smell from the earth.
    Sons come from sexuality—homosexual or heterosexual or a mixture. So your sexuality, homosexual or heterosexual, has to be protected. Sometimes there are people who would destroy it. So this means leaving one country for another. Or leaving that country and going back to the other. On my return to Ireland, by the River Suck, in the place where the young British soldier was found shot dead, beside a clump of dandelion leaves—dandelion leaves cleansing for the liver and kidneys—I found some larks’ eggs—olive-white, speckled with lavender grey, with markings of umber.

Iowa

    At a booth table in a bar in Iowa, a nearby field of early Quaker graves, stones with no name on them, under snow, an exile from Clare, in an Eskimo parka, who teaches students, some of them as tall as Arthur Rimbaud, over a rainbow-rayed cocktail, told me, during a brief stopover on a Greyhound bus journey, about the colossus of a garda sergeant with earthed barley-sugar hair and eyes that were the grey-blue of his uniform—a goalkeeper who’d won six gold medals—who used to cycle a Darley Peterson of army green to a remote rocky swimming place in Clare during the Second World War and seduce the boys among the white thrift, the bird’s-foot trefoil, the kidney vetch, the white rock roses, the buachalán —ragwort—the scarlet pimpernel, a brief Dionysian dispensation about this place—boys with lobster-coloured body hair holding broadcloth shorts or knit briefs or olive-drab briefs with V-notches to themselves in a moirdered way, while a harem of lamenting seals looked on.
    The man returned one winter from his university in Iowa, where he had a girlfriend, who wore glitter jodhpur boots, who’d lived in a monkey colony in the mountains before fleeing the Chinese Revolution, with whom he went to look at the Colombian sharp-tailed grouse and the whooping cranes, and revisited the swimming place—the boys in the nearby town in their laurel-green school jackets like the boys from Plato’s Symposium now—a few cubicles newly built with a lifebuoy alongside them, a porpoise thrashing in the mica of sleet in the winter rain.
    In a local speakeasy he’d been told the story of how the paediatrician widow of a Royal Irish Constabulary inspector, murdered in County Wexford in 1920, after his death presented a painting she’d purchased in Edinburgh to the Jesuit community in Dublin and that recently the painting was discovered to have been by Caravaggio who loved painting boys.
If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea;
Even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me.

    Frederick Rolfe, Baron Corvo, took photographs of naked Italian boys.
    But the garda sergeant took photographs of naked Irish boys and had them developed by an accomplice in Ennis, where the Code of the Irish Constabulary had been printed in 1820.
    Boys with rousse-auburn hair and cranberry pubic hair. Walnut hirsute. Heron’s features or faces like young kangaroos. Some with hair the orange of the pheasant in ascent. Others with Creole curls. Many with identical passion-fruit lips.
    Frequently a Woodbine cigarette in the mouth of a nude. A few of them reclining like lizards. One or two in yachting caps like the man on the Player’s cigarette packet and nothing else.
    There were nudes in sunglasses. Nudes with Lucania bicycles. Nudes with hurleys.
    It was hurling in east Clare and football in west Clare