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Bonaventure

DERMOT walks towards the hardware store counter, past bins of nails and screws, a stack of boxed drill presses, feeling like the commonplace country man gone wrong. Everything’s modern in Galway now. The counter girl has on lipstick and two welts of blue eye shadow as if she’s at a bar on the night of a dance. And the customers, milling about in plumbing and electrical supplies aisles, seem Dublin-sophisticated. It’s getting hard to tell the locals from the tourists, the group queuing at the counter a barrage of rain jackets and wool sweaters. Somewhere behind Dermot a mobile phone rings, is answered with a man’s brisk “hello.”

Dermot tugs at his jeans where they sag at the waist. Runs his right hand through his hair, which won’t sit properly to begin with. He’d caught a glimpse of himself in the rearview mirror of Mrs. Sullivan’s VW. She’d picked him up when the Mini ran out of petrol and gave him a once over when he settled in, a sorry-your-good-days-are-gone-by-ya followed by a look that said
whatever does a wee thing like that Canadian see in you?
Mary Sullivan,
Dermot knows, works in the kitchen at the big hotel in Spiddal, the place Abbey’s been trying to get work. She knows everyone’s doings. Dermot’s often wanted to say to her, “I’m not so bad,” and, “look at yourself.” She’s fifty and soft around the edges—thick brows, a double chin.

“Is it you, Mr. Fay?”

“It is.”

“Need a lift in?”

He’d hoisted the petrol can.

“I’ll take you.”

Took one last look at the Mini where it sat on the side of the road. Opened the door and got in.

“Now is it at the Lisheen Bar or the petrol station that I should drop you?”

At another time, even thirty years ago, he and the widow Sullivan might have been tossed together by circumstance, by lack of alternatives. Except now there is Galway, a micro-Dublin, expanding up and down the coast, population growing in leaps and bounds. A city so sophisticated and tourist-friendly it’s closing in on that other hub on the far side of the Island. Nothing but options now. Dermot remembers back to when there were three pubs in Galway. Now there are fifty, with piped fiddle music coming out of the stereo speakers that hang over the doorways, playing out into the streets, hoping to lure the tourists in.

In the queue at the hardware store, Dermot leans forward, tries to steal a glance at the watch protruding from the sleeve of the man in front of him. It occurs to him he’s missed decades,
and now, after Abbey’s leaving, after the botched down-on-one-knee proposal, he is compulsive about clocks. It’s 2:25 in Galway, and in Dublin Abbey is probably at the end of the lunch rush, leaning against the bar, drinking water from a pint glass as she was the afternoon last autumn when he stopped by Connor’s to say hello. It is 2:25 and Dermot is mired in it, in accounting for the minutes, the three days that have passed since he walked up the bay road, the Mini and Abbey parked somewhere behind him. At Trinity he taught whole centuries in the scope of a term, entire lives rounded out nicely in the course of an hour.
Bonaventure was born in 1217, he wrote about the externality of the world, an argument against Aristotle’s theology. These are the documents that remain. This is a Victorian interpretation, this is what we can glean from said article now
. And time would wheel by at his will, all he had to do was close his mouth on the thirteenth century and open it up again starting with the word “Today.” Bonaventure in his wisdom had argued that everything which begins to be, begins by way of motion or change. And back then Dermot thought there was truth in it because he was in motion, time reeling by him, bullheaded, the future almost, nearly there.

Back at the cottage the ringer on the phone is still turned off. Abbey might have called a hundred times and he’d never know it. Once last night he was tempted to pick it up, see if he’d find her voice there at the other end. But he doesn’t want to talk to her, not yet, and he isn’t sure why. She’s been strange since the funeral; that is to be expected. But Abbey has never said much about her family, as if her parents have nothing to do with her now, as if they are a part of the past. No, something else has come between them. And Dermot can’t place what it is.

Ahead of him the man with the watch, broad-shouldered, moves forward a few steps as the queue shuffles along. Dermot tilts his head, the watch in plain view. 2:26. 2:27.

At the counter, Dermot orders ten dozen posts and a measure of wire to surround the field. He doesn’t ask the price, can’t imagine what he’s doing. Parcelling up the land with money he doesn’t have. Easy enough to say the bungalows are driving him to it—Holiday Plans that’ll house Dubliners in the off-season and tourists in the summer. Bord Fáilte books them on the net, in the tourist offices, the airports. Already he can see it, the nodding and waving from the gravel drive, “what’s your dog’s name?” asked again and again in varying accents, an endless parade of foreigners loading the family into their rented cars as they tip their caps at the Irishman next door. Maybe a fence will keep them from coming up to the windows, keep kids from straying into the yard. And, once the land is fenced, Dermot could rent it out to a local farmer. A source of income that would pay for the fence in a few months. The field, gone to seed, just stands there at any rate, Fitch’s cows wandering over through gaps in the old stone wall, the grass growing in leaps and bounds around them.

There’s comfort in this—coming into town, standing in a queue, a reminder that he can function, measure up. A reminder that these are his people and they know him. “Fay,” he says, as the girl writes up his order. She cracks her gum and with every stroke of the pen the bangles on her arm jingle.

“Address for delivery?” She looks up. And then he sees it—or maybe not—a smirk, flickering across her face. And what can she mean by that?
Old man
, or
dirty old man, I know about you and she’s half your age
, or
my sister goes to Trinity and we all know
. Either way, if it is there, it’s fleeting, because already she’s holding the pen out in the air, looking to the next person while Dermot signs his name.

Driving north towards home, puttering along between the stone walls that line both sides of the road, Dermot lets the BMWs and Euro sports cars whisk by him; half the drivers on mobiles or blaring music out their windows. If his own stereo was working he might enjoy some music, maybe Dylan, but all he’s got is a tangle of wires hanging down under his dashboard. When he comes to a clearing with no stone walls, just a flat field view to the bay, he pulls over to the side of the road. Sits there, looks out at the thousand colours of grey. Tries to measure the distance a particular wave covers before it rests. Five herons cross over, swooping west, the last two flying towards the water. A truck rumbles by on the road. Down the way a tugboat lolls on its tether. Dermot catalogues everything as if the inventory might have value, as if one day he will be asked to account for his time. But time itself seems malleable. Today the beach is clear and unmarked, even though yesterday a family may have been out there, the son skipping stones, throwing sand at his sister, the parents walking with a fixed distance between them. Even though that existed, there is nothing like that now; everything is washed over. It comes to him like a new idea taking shape, although he has always known it, let it sit like an ulcer in his gut: it’s who we are in this minute that matters. Now; who we are. An unmarked beach, save for the worm holes, the “s” marks that surround them, from their turning before they go in.

The McGilloway Girl

THE afternoon of the wake Deirdre McGilloway stands on the edge of her mother’s stoop, the shadow of her pregnancy falling over all four of the walkway steps. The baby starts to kick again.

Helen Brennan, who taught Deirdre when she was in school, pads down the far side of the street carrying two bags of groceries in cloth sacs. Seeing Deirdre, she looks both ways down the quiet road, steps out tentatively between parked cars, comes over.

“Sorry to hear about your mother,” she says from the sidewalk. “She was a good hen.” Deirdre smiles at her and nods, but remembers it was Brennan who’d complained to the general post master that her mother was too lackadaisical with the post. It took three days for the post to reach a Dublin doorstep on average, but Helen Brennan claimed that if a letter was mailed on a day Eileen was working, it would take four or five. This from a woman who only taught math passably, who shouldn’t have been allowed to work with kids past the fourth grade.

“If there’s anything I can do.” Helen Brennan smiles again. Deirdre knows Brennan has never liked her much, even when she was a girl. The word, if she remembers correctly, written in tight print on her school report, was “precocious.”

“Thanks, Mrs. Brennan.” And she smiles at her, at her nearly white hair, at the silk scarf tied around her neck, at the bags hanging down by her ankles, at her freckled hands. Mrs. Brennan’s hair is pinned into curls near her temples and it occurs to Deirdre that the woman might actually be setting her hair for this evening’s wake, that it’s something Brennan would get dressed up for. Her mother’s wake an occasion; her mother’s death a reason to go out.

Every now and again people walk down the side road, and more often than not Deirdre recognizes their faces but can’t place them exactly. A girl with a red balloon stares at Deirdre from the opposite sidewalk as her mother drags her along by the hand. All morning trucks have come and gone, loaded with building materials for the Tele Gael set that will become a soap-opera village. Last month a sound studio went in on the secondary road. There are more power lines now than Deirdre remembers. Last night she’d stuck her head in at Hughes; people she didn’t know were there. A dog stood wait outside the door. She’s been in Dublin for five years. Even when she’d come back to visit she’d only really come to see her mum. They’d head into Galway, to the shops. Although sometimes, if Liam was around, Deirdre would hit the pubs with him after he got off work at the bog.

The baby is kicking up a storm. Deirdre’s blood sugar is low; since the phone call three days ago she hasn’t kept much
of anything down. The turkey sandwich Keating made her sits on the table, barely touched, but the fresh air, at least, is doing some good. There’s nothing to do in the house anyway. People she barely remembers came over to tidy up under Keating’s guidance. Chairs were set up in the living room. Cellophaned trays of food miraculously appeared on the buffet and the dining table. Twenty cans of beer are sitting in the sink on ice and the fridge is filled with a dozen bottles of wine. A keg of lager was dropped off by Niall and left in the utility closet. In the back room a load of laundry was started. Things Deirdre hadn’t even seen, let alone touched, were put away. Maybe all that she has left of her mother is in there, in the smell of those clothes. She should have washed them herself, not sat down in the middle of the chaos trying to swallow bites of a sandwich she had no desire to eat.

The maternal instinct is to nest, but Deirdre McGilloway has other things on her mind. The body is coming from Galway in the next few hours to be laid out upstairs. The next time she sees her mother, the woman will be dead. Two months ago Eileen McGilloway was standing on this very porch, decidedly living. Deirdre had come home to tell her about the baby, to make sure she’d be okay with it. She was seven months along and still not sure who the father was, although there were two or three likely guesses. Her mother was angry for an hour; the clock on the mantle had never been louder. Then Eileen had picked up her keys to go into Galway and look for a stroller.

“Come on.”

“That’s it?”

“Why make a fuss? It’s done.”

——

What Deirdre wants now is to go home. She wants her mother to walk out of the kitchen; she wants, selfishly, for things to be as they were. It’s hard enough being single and pregnant. Even in Dublin the idea still raises eyebrows. Deirdre thought she’d have to give up her flat when she left the travel agency and went on Mother’s Allowance, that she’d have to find a room mate. But her mother had offered to make up the difference, said that they’d work it out together. And so far they had.

Standing on the edge of the porch, one arm wrapped around the porch column, feet perched precariously close to the edge, Deirdre starts rocking. Starts swinging out over the steps, her belly a kind of ballast. She gets up a good swing. The back and forth motion is soothing. Under her weight the porch creaks and something about that makes Deirdre feel good. She swings out again and comes sharply back, her fingers slipping in increments on the column. She swings forward to where she started, almost falling. Stops. Catches her breath. Realizes she could have gone over.

There is No Night

THE city goes about its business. Statues cast shadows from the boulevard and the tourists look up. People cross against the light. One car honks and then another. On O’Connell Street at a queue for the bus, Abbey reads over the list in her hand: “Things for Foreigners To Do in Dublin.” A few months back Dermot made her an agenda. He itemized where to go, and in what order, and made a few notes underneath about what she should look for: the bullet holes on the front of the GPO, the Behan manuscripts in the Irish Writer’s Museum, Bryne’s, the best fish and chip shop in Ireland. Against his will Abbey’d made him add the Guinness Brewery. Last month when she worked a week at Connor’s she went to The National Museum, Phoenix Park, Kilmainham Gaol.

Abbey’s first day back at work was busy, the lunch rush non-stop. There was a queue from the
PLEASE WAIT TO BE SEATED
sign to the door for most of the evening. Dan, the head chef, and a royal prick, was a bastard all night. Sometime around seven, when Abbey was late
picking up a meal, he pointed a butcher knife in her direction and called her a cunt. His Northside accent combined with a general inability to fully open his mouth meant that “Ye cuntche ye” was more or less what came out. Abbey smiled back at him and said in her clear Canadian accent, “Sorry, I’m busy, but maybe some other time?”