VIVA DADDY
Like his car, Daddy was missing a starter, a spark plug or something. Daddy had a number of Vauxhall Viva cars during the seventies and early eighties in Ireland. We would be getting rid of one useless Viva, only for him to emerge from the darkness of the voluminous garage driving another one.
“Awhh, not another Viva” we groaned aloud as Daddy’s grin and side-burns appeared. This Viva was only a different color. The never-starting in the morning thing was the same. We kids would push the car with our bare hands sticking to the frost on the rear boot. Sometimes we let it run down the Cock Hill by gravity where Daddy had parked it overnight with a stone under the wheel to prevent it rolling down the steep slope on its own.
If it didn't start on the hill, then we had the much harder push on our own level street past an assembly of watching P&T telecom’s workmen. I put my head down between my extended tiny arms and hoped for a break this morning and that the car would start before we reached them. I was ashamed. A brown-colored disarray of bog-men held up the wall, smoking & sniggering at our struggles. Only one man sometimes helped- his two sons went to Daddy’s school. We continued to push the car to escape velocity, chug-chug while Daddy jiggled the clutch and the choke.
Daddy was headmaster in a two room National School out the country. The other junior teacher was Mrs B. Mammy had something against her. Maybe it was envy that Mrs B. kept her job as the junior female teacher and Mammy had given her similar teachers job up. Mammy was a trained teacher but she didn't last the assault course of the coarse thicks in her country school. Over taxed by the government as well, she retired to bed, forever. Too sensitive and too caring for others in her own way, I figured later. After we left Mammy off at her National school down a side road, Daddy doubled back, driving towards his own school picking up his pupils along the way. There was a notorious teacher and kiddie-sports molester in the town I lived in. He drove a tiny Mini Cooper picking up ever more kids to squash into it for ‘training’ or running practice. Kids whispered of what he was doing to some of them but they still got in the car when he pulled up at the top the street. I hung way back, even I had heard the talk of him (and I knew nothing).
Parents never copped onto him but he must have gone too far, there was a kerfuffle amongst the townsfolk. My Dad was part of the teachers union ejection posse. I tried to over hear and find out what happened but got the usual “Make us a cup of tea there Callan, John, Bernard” him saying all of our names together.
The crush of children’s legs in the car caused the open milk carton to spill over. It was the leftover breakfast milk Daddy had brought for his tea. The smells of sour milk, damp country children and cow-shit was a lingering irritation to me. Daddy was perfectly happy though, as long as he had a cup of tea in his plump hand. Daddy teased one of the children that he gave a lift of a mile to everyday about borrowing a scythe or hedge cutter this one time. We needed to trim our overgrown garden bushes. There was silence in the car and I realized something hard and grasping about these country folk. They would take the free lift to school alright, but kept tight reins on what was theirs. I wondered then why Daddy carried them around for, why not let them walk?
Dad was a nice man but not an engaged teacher. His weakness maybe wasn't noticed before or the parents had to make do. He yapped away fluently to the inspector in Irish which must have been important but otherwise he just fudged about with his roll books, reading the papers, drinking tea and running the slides on the projector. He really believed we would somehow magically absorb the words from the ‘Sean’s verbs’ (Irish irregular verbs in a story form) directly from the posters on the wall.
The previous headmaster in the next parish over was work friends with Dad. I met him and his wife up in Patsy Boyle’s this one time I was getting a t-shirt for a Summer holiday. I was small and thin, going on fifteen. I wanted to flee from the shop when they ’asked after’ my parents. I didn't know how to answer. Anything but the truth that Mam was in bed mostly (always!) I hated that my parents had me cover up for them. This woman was at one time described by my mother as her best friend. But it wasn't just the equivocation- I had a dread feeling that made me feel queasy in a way I had never before. And some time later this man murdered his wife, cutting her hand off. After her death Mam got even more paranoid and she would hide all the sharp knives. “Mam, will ya stop taking all the knives, we need them. At least give us one.”
Daddy instituted some sort of homework accountability thing where the parents would sign a note book that the kids had done their homework. The other kids laughed cause they got their older sisters & brothers to initial and sign. But I would do my homework and wait. And he never, ever checked if I was doing my homework. It wouldn't matter if I did or didn’t do it cause I would still be waiting for him to notice or pay any heed to if I did my homework, so I would.
Maybe I should have stuck out the town school. I went there for a short time to try it out cause I was lonely and wanted friends closer to where I lived. It wasn't bad but was isolated early on at this new town school too and I was sort-of loyal to the much easier life with Daddy. My younger brother got away from Daddy’s school and had a much better grasp on the practical life and made friends in town too. He was much more resilient and dismissive of sentiment than I was. I was a dreamer, happy in a world of my own making. Daddy was in his own world too, snoring on the chair with the big library book that I had gotten him left open on his leg.
I jostled roughly with one of the bigger boys on the playground and Dad noticed. Later on Daddy slapped him in the empty classroom and we saw and heard it from outside by lifting ourselves up to the window. Was Daddy standing up for me by hitting the boy? I knew the boy, he was in my class, it was just a scrap. It was confusing now and I felt muddled up. The other pupils accused me with their eyes. It was hard being the Masters son. And a townie. I had caused this.
There were new books used in the town school that Daddy started using too. The replacement teacher in the adjoining parish had the hang of school subjects, things that weren't only Irish and religion, like Daddy leaned on. Dad wasn't great at teaching Maths. Mammy continued to ‘give out’ about Mrs B., but what was Mam doing to teach me maths? I was weak at mental arithmetic half-heartedly trying to improve using the new book. This mental arithmetic weakness plagued me for years in secondary school.
Daddy and I were in the car going to school one time and he began grasping at his chest. I thought he was having a heart attack. “Daddy, let’s go home” I said. We turned the car around, away from school and towards town, doctors and hospitals. Later some of the local families on Dad’s route stopped sending the kids to Daddy’s school and opted for the slightly further parish. They had a replacement headmaster there with updated ways. Mammy said something about Dad feeling stressed and he eventually took early retirement. Years previously he was offered a much better teaching situation in another county but had been persuaded to stay in the small school. Mam scorned his decision that condemned her to live in this town.
I got fierce pains in my chest too. I really thought I was dying. But no one listened, I was the quiet one and not supposed to be any trouble. My chest pain happened when I was in bed at night or sometimes during the late afternoon. I would need to hold myself rigid while the stabs pierced my chest. It may have been stress or indigestion but whatever it was, made me believe I was about to die right there in my neglected sheets-never-changed bed. I would lie still to let the piercing feeling subside, too much in pain to move and afraid to move. No one would listen “You’ll be grand, make us a cup of tea there will ye” was all the response I got. I was used to dealing with my troubles all alone. And in the dark of night, I told the wall my loneliness and watched as the passing cars headlights traced lines across the ceiling. This was the only mute and muddled answer I was ever to receive.
Mrs B. once asked me to participate in the local country parish variety show. I was to mime along to the words of the song ‘The Laughing Policeman’. I would go in everyday to the other classroom to rehearse with her. I felt special with the sunlight coming in and having an adults attention for a rare time. I sat off to the side of the classroom looking at the begonia plant up close and the views out through the big tall windows. She would press play on the tape recorder and I would sing along to the laughing policeman song. This was going on for weeks. There were plans being made for my performance but slowly, slowly, Mammy picked this little jolly apart. Never directly telling me not to, but ever so emphatically letting me know her view and expectations by speaking loudly as if on stage. “Seamus, why wouldn't he sing it himself” she would ask in a forced and artificial voice in the kitchen, insinuating I should sing it solo without the backing tape, but there was no other musical accompaniment on offer so really I knew she didn't want me to sing it at all.
She made me all confused and I couldn’t figure things like this out. She wouldn't be a mother to me and she wouldn't let anyone else be one to me either. What would have been the harm? I wanted to do the show, I was nervous but I wanted to do it. I obeyed her implicit forbidding though and again I couldn't even get to say that it was Mammy who didn't want me to do it. I had to be ‘persuaded’ until I agreed it was what I wanted too. So, much nearer to showtime and after all the rehearsing I went in one morning and I had to tell Mrs B. that I’m not doing it after all. The end of the laughing policeman skit. I wasn't even convincing myself. My head was down, my voice flat as I repeated Mammy’s reasons that I had heard her say out loud. That was that. There ended the fun times and my chance of appearing on stage for the first time. Mammy never left a mark or a bruise but death and disappointment followed along after her for any of my hopes or dreams.
The woman who Mammy sometimes referred to as her ‘best friend’ was by contrast never done pushing her kids onto the stage. They were forever up on a chair at some talent thing. Mammy had stopped me going on a holiday to County Mayo with my next door neighbor friend as well. I had asked Mammy to go. She vivisected my dream holiday with my best friend and painted a terrible picture of a wild and rainy wilderness in Mayo with nothing to do- “what if you fall off a cliff “ stuff. “There’s nothing there” indicating how I was supposed to feel the same way as her. The next door neighbors mother grew frosty as I told her uncertainly why I wasn’t going. Mammy always had me carry her emotional bag of shit.
“It was his own decision” Mammy could say primly over the fence, not leaving her ‘prints’ again. But I had wanted to go. The Mayo holiday away and the laughing policemen might have been good for me. Could she never encourage me? Instead she poured her special salt on me- the little snail - to make me shrivel up. I should have done these things that Mammy didn't like anyway. But how could I? The worst thing was, the very worst thing about this method was that once Mammy had killed off the little chance of fun for me, she went right back to not even noticing I was there. Neglect was on the menu and obey was the rule- don't do anything she doesn't want you to.
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Daddy had been hit by lighting. “Was that true Daddy? - were you really hit by lighting? What did it feel like? Is it like the time I put my finger in the plug for the Christmas lights and got a shock? Is it like that? “
Mammy whispered to us that Daddy had mistreated her when we were all too young to remember. “Ask your brother” She said tersely. She repeated that Daddy wasn’t around during her labor, choosing a game of golf on the links course. Ironically right across from the hospital itself. He was accused of abandoning her too during the rearing of the kids for games of bridge. I’m sure he probably did leave her to it. He was a happy cabbage of a man. He grew up with Irish speaking servants from the Gaeltacht areas to pick up and carry for him. He had little notion of how houses were run, cleaned or children reared. Before Daddy had a family, he played poker with country folk and they creamed him. Then he bought a tiny book on poker odds, and as his game began to improve he found he wasn't as popular at the card games as before.
He moved on to play bridge with the posher townies instead, where he was alleged by Mam to be monumentally slow. He is mentioned in the archives of the local paper as winning some competitions in both golf and bridge. This sort of thing enraged Mammy and I remember them having sprawling vicious hand to hand combat; her talons extended. These loud fights moved up and down through the three story house; battles raged in and out of rooms, doors closed, shouts and screams rose up from the hall and sometimes most embarrassingly - Mam went out onto the street for a good roaring and crying session. Mammy dragon was in a class of her own after her big daytime rests. Her paroxysms would proceed in gasps and eruptions of passions through the day & night. Mam would eventually burn out and then afterwards spend days pleading with Daddy to “make up with me, Seamus, make up with me” She would wheedle that “I wasn’t taking my tablets”
I was hiding away in ‘the little room’ during a lot of this, peeping out when the action moved away. Like counting the time between the lighting and the thunder I’d judge if it was safe to come out by listening to the various noises and outbursts below. The small room as we called it was a low ceiling room half way up from the second landing, floor 2 1/2. I didn’t know if anyone even noticed I was hiding in there among the book shelves and the encyclopedias. I read poems and writings by Padraig Pearse a revolutionary Irish man and teacher. During a lull in one particularly loud and harsh parental battle I stood out on the landing and looked up at the ceiling extending above me and I resolved not to get married. If this is marriage I don't want anything like this. I think that decision stopped me making healthy connections when I started going out with girls. I was in a defensive un-trusting state, worrying- what if all girls are mad, harsh and poisonous like Mammy?
My sister was to use the term of the day ‘not well’ and went from a flat and zombie affect to raging around the house armed with her hurley/camogie stick. I had to run fast up the stairs or flee out of house to keep safe. She had a kind of mythical Fionn McCumhall like celtic warrior battle frenzy. Our internal doors were of solid wood and I had a special keep-me-safe technique to jam the door closed using my foot as a wedge and holding the handle at the same time while outside my heftier sister cried out in rage and hit the door a good few hard clatters with the ash club.
Mam, Dad and my sister were roaring and shouting, they were all struggling and fighting outside the bathroom during one vicious row when they grabbed my sister by her long brown hair and heaved her bodily down the stairs. But it took the both of the parents to manage it. After some of these violent episodes my sister would be the one brought off to the hospital. We would after an interval have to go and dutifully visit her in Dublin. If I was the ‘quiet invisible one’, she had the much worse role as ‘the sick one’. At least I was left alone and abandoned, her mind was interfered with and appointed into the role of a mentally ill scapegoat of sorts. She must not have been able to ‘go along to get along’ like I did and become invisible. Mammy needed to impose her own iron will on my sister to much damage. We would visit and walk along unending tall tiled corridors to eventually see this depreciated thing slumped in a chair, supposedly my sister. Doped to the gills she sat silently with a lit cigarette in her always trembling tar fingers. The un-smoked cigarette had an inch of drooping ash still clinging onto the end. We watched and waited for the long cylinder of ash to fall. I wondered if it was Mam that should have been in the hospital, not my sister.
One of Mammy’s major gripes was that she was sold a bill-of-goods by her in-laws. She was ten years younger than the handsome public-singing romantic-hearted Seamus; her eventual husband. She displayed a gullibility and naivety throughout her life and fell for Seamus’s auld glossy gab and his courting during lifts in the car to Cavan for her teaching job. They both were from the same small town in Mayo so it was handy for her. However, no one had warned her that Daddy was quite a cabbage. He had been hospitalized several times for severe bipolar depression before they met (and she was never told). And maybe was even on the strong stuff like the lithium or the Largactil. Shit like that would tranquilize a large field beast, no problem, but still Daddy functioned. Ok for him, he was all happy and friendly to what Mammy snarkily called ‘his people’ out on the street and completely oblivious to the dirt, debris and shit we lived in at home.
So Mammy felt deceived. No one told her that Daddy was hospitalized in the decade before Mammy married him and he had reputedly been treated with Electric Shock Therapy. I am not sure what that meant specifically but I imagined it was like a wired up bathing cap, something jammed in the mouth and a guy in a white lab coat with big old dials. This meant that every once in a while Daddy had to go in for a six week stay in Saint Pat’s Hospital in Dublin to have his meds balanced out. Then he came back and he was affably unresponsive. Mammy driving for once up & down from Dublin with us quiet and me glad to see him with my gift of sweets. I often took his side and felt sorry for him. Mammy was unfair to him and I didn’t think she loved me either, so who could I bind or bond to? I cast in my emotional lot with Daddy and I played sports that Daddy was interested in. Daddy and I would go for long walks around ‘the triangle’ in the early evening and come home by the Cock hill. We would walk down the back lane to come into the kitchen by our yard and sheds. But for all my loyalty, Daddy would never return the favor. He was a genuflecting ‘Igor’, enforcing every whim of Mammy’s. She and him could fight like savages but then when called upon he would do enforcer on us.
So there were two of those mad bastards against us. How could we ever have a clean house. They were in it together. We had no chance. If even one parent was slightly gone in the head we might have a chance but the two of them were in a competitive filth match. In their poker match of life, she ‘saw’ his steaming teabag dumped out on the table and ‘raised it’ with two rotting banana peels, an apple core and a half eaten crust of soda bread.
They both pissed wherever they wanted. Hardly in the toilet or bathroom. Daddy in the sink a lot of the time, the disgusting bastard. The green film in his bedroom sink was, I won't even go there. And mammy always pissed in potty’s or old bits of tins like she was still in her no-toilets 40’s wartime Mayo. The smell! All Mammy’s used dirty smelly menstruation pads were cast into in a cupboard facing us in the toilet. The door was hinged and the lock was broken so if you went for a crap or if a visitor happened to use the bathroom, the pink door always yawned open no matter how many times or what way it was pressed in to reveal the stinking pile of used red and brown mother blood napkins. I was so challenged by my parents and the house dirt and soil. I never wanted to have people around. “Is that your kitchen?” one possible new friend asked when mammy had shown him through the kitchen to the back. I was mortified and embarrassed. Open ground and swallow me up please, I pleaded with a deaf God.
I was stupid to be kind to Daddy and ever get myself in trouble with Mammy. She was a champion decade-long grudge holder. Dad had been abandoned in the nursing home without a visit from Mammy for going on three years. On a visit home from wherever I was at the time he made pre-arrangements with the hospital unbeknownst to me. I was to bring him into town. The nurses had known this and they asked me to do this ‘trip out to town’ for him as soon as I arrived. I wasn't sure of all this. He was decrepit and had gone down-hill very badly from being stuck in the home all the time, and even before that. He wasn't agile or stable. He hadn’t got proper clothing for the rain. The nurses dressed him up anyway in a rag-tag array of left-over clothing from already deceased country-men and we wheeled him on out.
He was horridly stiff and weak. It was like trying to get a metal ladder into the front seat of a small car. My budget small car rental size. I was thinking in a half-serious way of letting down the back seats and we just slide him in like a plank of wood. Somehow we folded him into the front. In town the rain rolled down like sheets of wet cling film and I pushed the borrowed wheelchair into a cafe for a cup of tea. He had his own plans and once that informality was complete he determined it was time to get done what he had wanted and had planned to do. We wheeled up the slight incline to the Allied Irish bank. Once there he fucked my mother for the very last time by leaving half his pension in his own account and diverting the remaining half into her account. She had previously been getting the entire amount. This would enrage her. And who was to blame? Yes, me the gobshite.
She blamed me for that pension thing, like I was the one had planned it. It probably didn’t matter. Sometimes she would just start at me for no reason- breathing fire and her wings flapping. I hadn't ‘done’ anything, I had been asked to bring ‘my aged father’ out on a visit to town and then he did what he did at the bank to make Mammy visit him or pay attention. Three years without a visit. She would get annoyed if I asked her if she ever went out for a visit. “Sure why would I go visit him, no one visits me! He has everything handed to him, looked after hand and foot by nurses, while I am on me own here in the cold” Maybe it was a fair point.
Years later Dad was still in the nursing home and I came from USA on my once a year visit. Mammy had ‘taken a set’ on me all of a sudden after being friendly for a while with our mostly cordial and ok late night chats on the phone. And so she after never visiting him for months suddenly decided, that this is the week she would take up 24/7 roost at his bed-side, to perversely prevent me seeing him during my short visit. I knew the way into his ward so didn't need to stop or ask directions. Mam was there ahead of me though and immediately started up a yipping noise, raising up his long plastic crutch in threat over me. “You’re not wanted, go back to America” She says. I made my appeal to Daddy who was propped up in bed. I declared that he would want to see me; but he took her side without hesitation and agreed that he didn't want to see me either. Turning his head aside so as not to see me and attend to his now returned wife. “I don't want you here, you can go off now” he said, even though I was the cause of Mam’s rare visit. I was used to the multiple layers of their rejections and had to accept it as writ, walking back up the corridor and out; but feeling it again now makes me scared of their blithe indiscriminate hurting of me and my pretty little life all through. I was nothing of much value to them.
On a previous visit way years before I had married, I was traveling by bus and I had bought a pair of good shoes up the town for my Dads special needs. They were not cheap at one hundred thirty euro for him. Again I did this by request of the nursing staff cause no one else was in visiting him. The shoes were to get transformed with special lifts to level out his leg lengths while his hip operations were in process. I was caught for time as I had to catch the afternoon bus in order to make my flight. Before I got on the bus I handed off the shoe box to my older brother who promised to deliver them. “Of course” he said and of course he immediately didn’t, he capitulated surrendering and handing them over to Mammy that very same evening. I was so annoyed with him. The shoes never got to Daddy and I discovered them rotting in the hallway hoard a decade later after Mam had died. She couldn't even let him have his shoes. “I’ll bring them out” she would snip. And never did. She was a great equivocator and always the deliverer of a great and heavy nothing. She was a void herself. Un-fillable. Unknowable. Lovable? I tried to in my own remote way. That could be a chapter. How to love a void and not have your heart die while doing it.
The night Dad died I was online a few hours earlier in our apartment in Brooklyn wondering if he had enough water. I have these feelings and ideations that are very strong, premonition like. I had the distinct intuition he was having trouble getting liquids so I was researching drinking cups for the elderly or disabled. I must have developed some of my mothers all-knowing intuition, a kind of certainty that I could see or sense the next thing coming. Other times of course I was an idiot mown down by advancing evils like a blind man wandering off a train platform.
These sip-cups were graspable by old weak hands and had a spout. My mother had previously pushed back when I asked. ”He has loads of water and him with nurses at his beck and call” complaining bitterly and raising her pitch. “No one asks about me, your mother. I’m freezing here in this cold house. He has TV, cups of tea and three meals a day. Sure what does he need? No one asks about me- your mother. It’s always Big Daddy, and has Big Daddy got enough water. Shut up about water, he has loads of feckin water.”
He died that very night and we got that dreaded early hours call from home. Oh Christ! Ye just know it’s bad news. He actually died of thirst, indirectly. I recall the last words of Jesus. “I thirst” Daddy crucified like some sort of never-visited lithium-brained Jesus. Judas Mammy’s vinegar envy sopped up on a sponge and offered up to him on a long stick of disinterest. One for the road, Seamus.
The cause they said was a urethral infection or some kind of infection down in the plumbing - the kidneys, bladder area. I diagnosed that as linked to a water deficit. If he was able to get water he wouldn't be dry and infection-prone. Because of Parkinson’s he probably didn't even realize he was thirsty. He had no chance of filling a beaker of water from the big jug. Water would be all over the floor, his hands were that shaky. His handwriting had gone-to-fuck but he still managed to write me a scrawly letter to get me to plead with Mammy to visit him. She hated him and blamed him for running her life with his bipolar depression, four children under six and a so called life in Cavan.
We scrambled for tickets and I flew home with my wife on Delta through Philly. The economy plane was travel worn and smelt like a flying porta-potty. “I’m glad he's dead’ she admitted after the funeral. This was under heavy incoming questions from me about why she didn't let us know he was dying. She had been looking at the floor for ages during the post burial family meal in the local hotel. Like a guilty suspect cracking under interrogation she eventually looked up with a kind of smirky satisfaction. She was pleased with herself. Seamus (my dad) dead before her, and his full pension going into her account. A job well done. She was glad. She wasn’t grieving at all. She just kept looking at the floor and repeating something in a strained false voice about how widows ought to be treated better. She hadn't even told us he was dying. She went out there to his bedside and made sure no one knew while he slipped away. Some years before when I was still in Ireland he was fully comatose and his vital signs mysteriously fading away in the hospital. My older brother used his life long book learning to diagnose that Dad had Lithium salt toxicity. Bingo. Daddy came right back to life when they flushed him out. Rescued by water. She flew in a rage with me even though it was him, my elder brother who figured it out. So this later time she prayed a secretive dry-vigil over him, ‘till this time he was good and gone. No water and no interference from us this time to save him. Amen.
Mam had mentioned to my eldest brother who still lived in the town that there was a fault in the electric light in her bedroom at the top front of the house; it was flickering, switching on and off. That was her bedroom, the room the fire broke out in. She would have hardly been awake and must have got a shock. The entire house immediately became vicious with smoke from the hoarded materials stacked everywhere. She got half way down the clogged stairs to the second floor. I thought that was a pretty decent escape attempt. I am proud of her getting that far. In the toxic fug she would have been tripping over her own obstacle course of literal shit.
Her toilet had been broken and the neighbor when building had messed up the yard drain with cement affecting the drainage through the bottom floor toilet too. As a result she amassed stacks of builders supply buckets to hold her piss and shit. One of these what we called after ‘pyramids of poo’ blocked the very top of the stairway that led down to the second floor.
She would of course have needed someone professional to help her clean or repair but she like hoarders everywhere did not allow anyone in. I figured the plumbing issue out when I needed to, after she was dead. It was only the water coming into the cistern refill upstairs that was broken or needed a small repair on. The toilet exit itself worked as it should, as a drain. So she could have used it sort of, if she had known. She could have at least dumped the buckets in and washed them down afterwards with the tap water, but she hadn't figured that out. During the hard hoard clear-out I was volunteered by my aggressive younger brother and was nearly unmanned in the job. I had to lift, carry and empty her literal ‘pyramids of piss’. Even in my top of the line complete-face-covering super-mask with special hoard-strength filters & thick gloves I was gagging and groaning aloud about the fermented smell. You haven't lived until you have carried your mothers last liquified remains and poured her down her own bathroom bowl. Ashes to ashes, shit to shit.
Mam had been avoiding me the week I was back home in Ireland that her last November. I had also arranged to visit her birth place that last-but-one day, and had even invited her to come along! If she had accepted the travel invite she would not have been in the house when it went on fire. My older brother said she was afraid of me. He said she was fearful of the questions I asked. Myself and my Mrs were looking into buying a house in Ireland, a mad dream to return to live on the West coast of Ireland like some salmon returns to the watery rocks of their birth. We were dawdling our way back to Cavan after viewing two separate cut-stone fronted village houses that morning. I still hoped to persuade Mammy to finally meet, at least for a cup of tea. I was going to be back in America in a day or two - she had to meet me! I couldn't bear it if she snubbed me once again. She enjoyed hurting me. The classic narcissistic withholding of the thing desired.
My phone rang - “Mam’s house is on fire” said my brothers voice. I yelped and separated the wife from her piles of shopping and we drove the wrong ways out of Foxford. We reversed course, confused about which direction to go but bombing along in the small car nonetheless through the narrowing hedgerows. The phone rang again. The firemen had been hard pressed to get access but they had and found her dead inside.
I cry-screamed out loud when I saw Mammy on the hospital mortuary slab a few hours later. She was still warm when I touched her arm. There she was; in the mortuary of the very same hospital where I was born of this same woman. She looked like herself, but with the very slightest of carbon tracings in vertical etchings around her nose and mouth. The tiny vertical lacings marking the inward pulls of her last overwhelming carbon breaths. Her skin and body wasn't burnt at all. Tiny orange singes around her fringe. Licks of fire on her face is what probably woke her up for the last time this afternoon around 2 pm.
“Mammy, Mammy, why didn't you meet me?”
I cried out that same forsaken thing over and over in the morgue looking at and touching the body of my slightly smoky faced mother. That was it now. She had finally won, she always won. She didn't meet me on my visit home and now she would never meet me. The final twist of the knife. I realized I would never, ever get what I had craved after for years - her love.
“Why couldn't she have met me? I came all this way” I cried out.
I told her still warm body that I wanted to explain to her in person what our plans had been. We were looking at a house in her birth place to live there ourselves, or maybe if she wanted she could stay there while we fixed up her own house. Me and my plans. She was a mastermind of hurt, this one would last.
She suspected the motives for my visit. “What is he coming back here for, sure isn't America a great place?” she asked my older brother. She had refused to even come down the street to meet me (even for a cup of tea) and then she goes and dies in a fire. This woman had genius level of cruelty and abandonment skills. Maybe it was better than meeting her and then having a fight.
Mammy looked way different after the autopsy. Oh dear God! They made her up like a butty-jawed boring dead Cavan woman. I recognized and preferred her on the marble slab immediately following the fire to the cold-meat look in her soft lined coffin. The undertaker chastised me, making me understand that she actually looks good compared to the way she was, the spatch-cocked chicken that the coroner left her as. I shut up.
In the coffin for the viewing, she was wearing the new Dunne’s Stores clothes that my wife & I had bought for her in the big store directly across the road from where she had lived. A blouse, a blue cardigan, a pair of slacks. The fire investigators were still roaming the hall in their white Tyvek suits and wellies. We couldn't discern what was her own favorite outfit in amongst the gigantic three-story hoard-pyre she went out on, or separate a funeral rig-out from the fire, water and smoke ruined clothes all through Mammy’s house. I was Johnny-on-the-spot accepting the job from the undertaker of getting the flowers and her grave clothes. This left me with a lot of questions to deal with like - does a dead mother need underpants?
© John Munnelly 2020-23
This was put out as part of my Dads Anniversary in September this year. Thanks to memoir mentor Mindy and my writing groups.
I am feeling some release from the sauce tyranny I have been under the last while. Was it a spell? If you want to encourage more of these stories please do let me know
or share this with someone.Maybe I can manage to do all the Arts, write, sing my songs and even figure a way to do the hot saucery too … but for some reason I found my writing took a back seat for a while there. Hope you like my long form memoir writing.
All the best,
John
That is very brave writing John. You are a great man.
M