Irish Literature - House of Mourning and Other Stories

was pregnant when they were summoned to the church hurriedly. Iarla’s father wore his fisherman’s wellingtons at the wedding.
    The grouping for photographs taken at a reception at which the reel ‘Salute to Baltimore’ was played on an Excelsior accordion—but not any of the photographs Iarla’s mother subsequently framed on the parlour flock wallpaper—wallpaper with pattern made by powdered wool: a beaming lady with clubbed hair and roll fringe, in zebra-stripe dress, holding out a tender yellow-and-faded-scarlet rectangular box of Kodak film.
    Back in a breac-ghaeltacht —mixed Irish-and English-speaking district—she had a miscarriage picking seaweed.
    Herrings between July and February, mackerel between April and July. New potatoes after July, basil near the carrots in summer, turnips September–October, the pig killed in autumn, winter cabbage, a knife on the cement for the goose near Christmas.
    A finger was put to the back of the goose when it was killed so the blood went to the neck. After six hours in water the feathers fell off.
    Women bathed their feet in the water corpses had been washed in because they thought it was holy water.
    Uisce coisricthe .
    In the parlour of their bungalow on a tóchar —causeway—was a picture of The Irish Brigade before Battle —their ancient tricolour sent back from France to the new Irish Free State and blessed anew by Father Pigott on St Patrick’s Day in Cork.
    The ruin of Daniel O’Connell’s parents’ house was near, though he himself was born in an emergency in a neighbour’s cottage.
    They’d kept a print of the Pretender James III there. When wives were sought for him in Europe, one was rejected because she was a dwarf.
    O’Connell was fostered to his uncle Hunting Cap, who made a fortune smuggling silks and brandy.
    He sent O’Connell’s cousins to France to join the Irish Brigade and O’Connell himself to France to study Condillac and Helvétius, where François Boucher had shortly before painted John the Baptist in a Turkish delight-red cloak as if he’d got a loan or endowment from a king and Marie Antoinette had requested Philip Astley and his son John—the English rose—to bring the circus that Philip had introduced to England at Halfpenny Hatch, Lambeth Fields in 1768, to France.
    Iarla’s family had a book in their parlour beside the Pye wireless with the name Athlone on it, about O’Connell, published in Ave Maria Lane, London.
    O’Connell with hair en brosse in front beside the stream where his father used to put out salt pans—vessels for getting salt by evaporation.
    Iarla’s mother had lovely American clothes when he was a child.
    Her proudest possession a paisley shawl, the kind Pier Angeli wore, victim of a broken engagement to Kirk Douglas.
    But one night she came upon two battling rats in her room and they turned on her.
    She defended herself with a lighted candle and her clothes horse went on fire, her American clothes, including her paisley shawl.
    However, a Charlie Chaplin brooch from Baltimore survived, which was appropriate as Charlie Chaplin, his wife Oona O’Neill and their passeggiata of children frequently holidayed in the area.
    Ties of maple red, ties the red of a bull’s rosette, ties the red of the red grouse’s wattle, ties the red of the chough’s legs—Iarla wore these as a child for occasions like Confirmation— faoi láimh eaispaig (under the Bishop’s hand)—Morning of the Assumption.
    The National School teacher would keep a heavy girl, who excelled at making diamond-pattern bed covers, behind in the afternoons to feel inside her skirt.
    She’d tell her parents she’d been kept behind for misbehaviour and they’d beat her.
    In the town, under a red sandstone mountain called the Giant’s Arse because it was shaped like buttocks, was a butcher, Mr O’Muirgheasa, who marched by himself down the street with a red flag every May Day.
    He’d met and conversed with General de Gaulle when he’d visited the town.
    Mr O’Muirgheasa claimed he’d never gone to Mass since he was a child, when the County Mayo librarian, Letitia Dunbar-Harrison, was boycotted because she was a Protestant.
    Despite his irreligiosity there was a statue in his butcher shop; no one could make out whether it was Mary or a figure from Celtic mythology: a woman in white tunic, blue veil, a severed male hand on her left shoulder.
    A leatherback turtle had crawled up the main street as far as the azure Player’s Please