Irish Literature - House of Mourning and Other Stories

the dodgems and gondolas and ghost trains as gaff boys in places like St Briavels in Gloucestershire.
    The Clare Champion featured one of the garda sergeant’s earliest efforts, that of a football star from Fedamore in County Limerick, with auburn cockscomb, eyes the blue of the gentians that grew in places where wintering cattle had curtailed the hazel trees, after some triumph.
    What The Clare Champion didn’t know was that at the football game at Killarn the garda sergeant photographed the football star, with the chest of an Eros the Spartans used to sacrifice to before going to war, in shorts with gripper fasteners on Dunbeg beach, the youth’s hands on his crotch, against the sea, which was the colour of shillings that magpies would steal, on a day the Irish leaders de Valera, Cosgrave and Norton took their seats at a pro-neutrality rally in Dublin, and afterwards, without his shorts, lying face down, among the purple saxifrage of the dunes.
    To ease his reservations Garda Sergeant Clohessy cited the mature Apollo Belvedere , naked but with a paludamentum —cloak—the Belvedere Torso on panther skin that had inspired Michelangelo, the boy who combats naked with a goose, Bernini’s near-naked Daniel with sideswept, cricket-boy hair, all in the Vatican Gallery.
    A youth from South Hill in Limerick, ash-blond hair and barley-coloured freckles, his left nostril murdered, cut away in a pub brawl, was among those photographed.
    Hands in the black bog rush, legs provocatively apart, head thrown back in abandon.
    As the Allies were landing in Sicily and there were riots in Hollywood, some girls with braids like Pippi Longstocking arrived in the swimming hole but they were chased away with a stick by the garda sergeant.
    People came to the sea on donkeys and carts then; crubeens—pigs’ feet—were proffered for a penny. There was a café near the main beach run by an immense Italian man, which sold sea bass, soft cod’s roe.
    An American film about Charles Stewart Parnell starring Clark Gable and Myrna Loy was brought from Limerick in cans and shown in the parochial hall, where there were photographs of Pope Pius XII and of Cardinal Franz von Galen von Löwe of Münster, and afterwards the garda sergeant’s boys mingled with the holiday-making girls from Limerick, many of them wearing flared linen trousers, and led some of them to the fields, which were a festival of orchids.
    Tramming the hay, building cocks of hay it was called then, and Christian Brothers, on leave from schools around Ireland, were employed to tram the hay.
    Garda Sergeant Clohessy even convinced a Christian Brother with cowslip-coloured hair and eyes the blue of the Peloponnesos where the two seas meet, to pose in the nude.
    A boy with a sea-cow belly took a photograph of Garda Sergeant Clohessy and in it he looks like Caesar Augustus: Roman nose; accentuated, slightly feminine lips; pennon neck; cauliflower ears.
    The previous June he’d been photographed leading the Corpus Christi procession through the town, women in coats with large collar-revers and boxy shoulders immediately behind him.
    Someone had put a bunch of cornflowers in front of a nearby shrine that told: ‘My name is Jeremiah Marriman. I built this shrine in thanksgiving for being cured. Also for my son Loughlin. Thanks be to God and Our Blessed Lady’—red, orange and white plastic flowers in front of a picture of Thérèse of Lisieux, a little statue of Christ beside a black snail with citron rings.
    The Spanish Armada ship San Esteban had floundered in the vicinity and its crew did not suffer the fate of the Spanish Armada ship whose crew had been massacred by Dowdarra Roe O’Malley in County Mayo, but had married in the neighbourhood and sometimes when Garda Sergeant Clohessy took a photograph he was confronted by an ebony-haired boy from the land of El Greco who, if he wasn’t painting portraits, was conducting lawsuits.
    Cromwellian soldiers had chopped off the head of a monk in the uplands where the hen harrier preyed on young rabbits and young hares.
    Sometimes when he photographed he was photographing boys with burnt-orange hair and Wedgwood-blue eyes who were descended from soldiers from the English midlands.
    Goats came down the slope and looked as he was photographing some boys from Limerick city with Marlovian grins and lamp-black hair who would hang about the truck stop at Harvey’s Quay in blanket trousers and seersucker shirts and stand under the