This Is Happiness Read online

  Good Friday was then a day of almost universal quiet. Consider it. Some beautiful things have perished. A hush was laid like an altar linen over the green townlands, and not just during the three hours of the Agony and the veneration of the Cross. The pubs were closed. Only work that was absolutely necessary was done, there was no construction, no horse was shod, because no nail could be driven, a commandment that endured in Faha until the boom, when the Church had collapsed and electric nail-guns turned to a fable the visceral realities of Calvary.

  Faha being Faha, there were exceptions. Poaching, already widespread, was on Good Friday licensed by Christ, and lads young and old dug worms and took off for the river with rods actual or improvised. In acknowledgement that Easter Sunday required you to look your best, barbers and drapers were allowed to stay open. A haircut on Good Friday, Doady said, kept headaches away for a year. By some uncertain logic, Jack, the cobbler, was also the village barber. Short back and sides was the omni-cut, the common appraisal after was scalped, the cropped lines and the white skin at the back of men’s necks making them look boyish and prepped for the guillotine. In Boylan’s drapery, the fine weather provided a double boon, first because in Faha the proverb was reversed, you saved for a sunny day, and second, no woman had an outfit thin enough for this heat.

  In the morning, Christy was not in his bed. The blankets were folded at the foot of it, and he and his suitcase and all sign of him were gone.

  ‘He went out early,’ Ganga said. ‘Joe heard him.’ He patted the dog under the table in the garden.

  ‘Did he say where he was going?’

  ‘Did he, Joe?’

  Was he coming back? I didn’t ask. On a seventeen-year-old, indifference is both common mask and shield, and remoteness was a native trait then.

  I did feel the loss of him. Why had he gone? Why had he said nothing? At the cards, he had said the electricity work was suspended until after Easter, but not that he was going anywhere.

  Briskly tidying the breakfast back into the house, Doady announced that after confession she might take a look into Boylan’s.

  ‘Be no harm find a hat,’ she said. If fishing for compliment, she caught none. She would also visit the graveyard. They were Ganga’s not her dead that were there, but he was allergic to cemeteries and guarded against the grief that arose from too much reality.

  ‘Say hello for me,’ he said, hunting for a fishing rod.

  ‘You’ll be in the church at three,’ she called, but all that was left of him was his whistling.

  She looked at me, a vexed look. The forthrightness that was natural in her wanted to say: You’ll be in the church too, but the pact she had made with my grandfather forbade it, and instead that imperative flew in a wordless glint across her glasses. She clutched the war-chest of her huge handbag and headed out.

  When they were both gone, I sat in the kitchen. The front door open, a ladder of sunlight footed on the threshold, a hectic of birdsong. There was every reason to feel natural joy in the world, but for the one that makes it accessible. When your spirit is uneasy, stillness can be a kind of suffering. And when you’re young, the unlived life in you, all that future, urgent and unreachable, can be unbearable.

  When I was young, I meant.

  I write this now, having spent a lifetime trying to be, by which I mean the best version, a thing dreamed by those stricken with imagination. Not that you ever quite know what that is, still there he is, that better man, who remains always just ahead of you. I write this now, having come to realise it’s a lifelong pursuit, that once begun will not end this side of the graveyard. With this I have made an old man’s accommodation and am reconciled to the fruits of a fruitless endeavour. I don’t torture myself with my failures, but when I was seventeen I did little else.

  That Good Friday I was in four minds, maybe five. What was I doing there? What exactly was I hoping for? Where would I go now? Should I not just return to the seminary?

  I sat inside the door, stewing on the edge of the splendid day.

  After a time, Brendan Bugler came to make a call for the vet. A shambles of a man, dogged with ill fortune, he had the slit eyes and tobaccoed teeth of a desperado. Waiting to be put through, he told me a calf born on Good Friday was lucky. When he was done, he apologised for the fact he hadn’t the coins for the call. He’d make good again, he said.

  Eventually Joe returned, and, a breathless minute or two after, Ganga, with an eel alive in a bucket. ‘Supper, Noe.’

  Whistling, he changed his clothes, tying his bootlaces, and betraying no hint that his grandson not going to church was an embarrassment.

  We could hear the church bell ringing. Sam Cregg marched past the front door.

  ‘Joe, you stay with Noe.’

  Joe was exhausted from the excitements of the fishing and lay on the cool flags.

  When you’ve been raised inside a religion, it’s not a small thing to step outside it. Even if you no longer believe in it, you can feel its absence. There’s a spirit-wound to a Sunday. You can patch it, but it’s there, whether natural or invented not for me to say.

  When Ganga was gone, I couldn’t bear the quiet, or the company of the eel slithering in the bucket. I went outside. I looked left to the village and the spire of St Cecelia’s, right to the slow flow of the sparkling river. The countryside had an emptiness that felt utter, and it was not impossible to imagine complicity between heaven and earth. The church bell tolled a final time.

  All of the small decisions of my life have been led by reason, but none of the important ones, so there’s no reason I can offer now why I crossed the yard then and went inside the lower cabin. A dim once-cowshed, it was packed with old tools, buckets, broken pieces of harness, busted hair-sprouted ass collars, leathers, handles, handleless heads of shovels, hammers, forks, two-, three- and four-pronged, bent out of line by close encounters with the unforgiving, retired bronze-winged sleans, rusted cans of oil, open jars of grease with raisin flies, lamps oranged with rust, old boots, some singular, some in pairs, planks, boards holed and unholed, rods of osier, balls of hairy twine, loops of rope, forged flanges, a metal badge embossed P. Daly, Kilmihil, and multiple other pieces of iron, to what end impossible to say, the entire cabin a catch-all of a hundred years of country living and a more-or-less exact replica of the inside of Ganga’s mind.

  Twenty minutes later, having found what I was looking for, I was back at Blackall’s yard, working the loose and clanking arm of the pump until it seemed the earth could not have such depth, when suddenly the water glugged and shot out. From the bucket of Ganga’s lime, it made puff up a pale cloud that burned the back of my throat. Work was not permitted, I knew, but there is a natural wilfulness in youth that is consummate, damnation be damned. That Good Friday afternoon, in the trapped sunlight of an unvisited courtyard, I worked as hard and fast as I could, whitewashing the moment into my memory where it would remain the rest of my life, painting the unfinished ends of Blackall’s outhouses until they gleamed.

  Mrs Blackall did not appear. Whether she noticed or ever knew, I don’t know. She knows now, I suppose.

  14

  Christy did not return. Although in Ganga’s mind, where all stories worked out for the best, he was probably gone visiting family or relations for the holiday and would be back soon, I knew this was not the case. He had come because of Annie Mooney, and now he was gone for the same reason. I knew it was true.

  After the hiatus of Good Friday, as if a switch was thrown, Faha woke up thrumming. Light-headedness from the fasting combined with the imminence of the feast day to provoke an emergency of preparation. It was discovered that nothing was ready, and soon people were on the roads, by horse, cart, bicycle and boot, under an imperative to secure the last essentials. These were as various and unaccountable as human nature. Each family had its own best ware, and small peculiarities that they thought of as normal. This being Faha, normal ranged from the simple to the baroque, and had direct or tangential connection to the seasonal
theme of eggs – lemon placemats, napkins the colour of egg-yolks, small salt-and-pepper hens that only came out for Easter, but weren’t they just the perfect job? More obscurely paschal, a brass menorah bought in Kilrush market from a Limerick trader who sold it as antique Easter ware, an ornamental plate showing sheep grazing, and a silver salver, preserved who knows how, hidden from thieves in a tea chest and taken out twice a year for the goose or the lamb. Everywhere, a world of tokens, individual and abstruse, but none pass-remarkable, because all were in silent accord on the primacy of the Church holiday and that you had to go all-out for something as unearthly as Resurrection.

  To this end, now were needed: ladles, linen tablecloths, lidded tureens, gravy boats, cake stands, candlesticks, egg cups, doilies, napkins and a small viscid ocean of mint jelly. It was understood that upon these finishing touches hung the substance of glorification, so none were disregarded and a brisk commercial holy hysteria had its heyday.

  By Fahaean good fortune, in cardboard boxes on the deep, top shelves in Bourke’s and Clohessy’s was an absolute everything, or a compromised version. No one went without.

  Both butcher shops had a line out the door, and in tight bundles of brown paper expertly trussed with white twine came not a small herd’s worth of spring lamb. It was an hour before the blood would start seeping, and men who had stopped into pubs for more than just the one could be told by the brown stain of the lamb’s leg under their arm. Across the street from the two butchers’ shops, in McCarthy’s Hardware, bashful men in raw new haircuts stood waiting to get carving knives edged.

  You were inside the engine of Easter. With the enduring magic by which a people, on budgets thin as air, not only survive but celebrate, the feast was everywhere being readied. Breads, sweet loaves and cakes of all kinds were underway. Come early from Africa, heralds or harbingers of the summer, twists of swallows dipped and swooped with bird delight over gardens Barbadian with the black scent of molasses or the golden one of caramelised sugar.

  To Doady a handful of neighbours called – ‘You don’t have a fist of cloves for the ham, Aine, I suppose?’ ‘There isn’t, by any chance, a spare saucepan in the house?’ All were accommodated.

  There were telephone callers too, a troop of handle-crankers, waiting to be put through, and then, in a foreshadowing of technologies yet undreamt, looking into the big black Bakelite receiver to see down the line the face on the other side, shout their Happy Easter and tell who had died.

  As well as callers, we had a visit from Mrs Moore. Nominally, Mrs Moore was my grandmother’s occasional housekeeper. A humped widow of Methuselah, Mrs Moore could recall the origins of the village when the tide withdrew and the fish were flapping on the grass. If she had the time she could relate the whole of the parish history. She knew first-hand the thousand days of rain, the fur time of the midges, and the ciúnas mhór, the Big Quiet, when the women in Faha stopped talking to the men. It was one of the wonders of Faha that Mrs Moore remained above ground. She retained a flawless internal roll call of the dead and their relations, could outdo the Annals of the Masters and was better than the forty dusty volumes of the parochial records that existed up to the time of the fire, the rescued fourteen that existed up to the time of the flood. She knew who was in which grave, and who in the one below that one (and the ones below those too, who were working their way back to the surface through the self-raising agent of a colloquy of worms fat and contented from passing through life, until chosen by Simon of the Kellys as best bait for the smirking salmon passing in the river). Mrs Moore lived long enough to become an unofficial consultant on the dead when the time for seeking ancestors came. In her habitual tricolour of green gaberdine, orange headscarf and off-white judge’s wig, Mrs Moore landed, clutching a large bag from which, with great seriousness, she emptied tins, jars and bottles of various cleansing solutions, two of her ‘clean’ rags, a ball of wire wool, and Flo, the world’s saddest feather duster.

  Mrs Moore made Doady look young, which may have been a subterranean reason for her employment. Another may have been that she was a smoker. No sooner had she landed than she had to have the one, a Wild Woodbine, and Doady always joined her. Though Mrs Moore wheezed and sputtered and was prone to the bad chest, though her skin looked like linoleum, the features of her face scrunching together to escape the smoke, it was the weather was the culprit. She held the record for ash-balancing. She would work with a burning cigarette held out ballerina-style in one hand, a tower of ash she didn’t need to look at building nicely while she dusted, or performed a slow-motion version of same, the dust in no danger, until the tower was certain to fall, and at the last moment, as though it were a smoking extension of herself, she would bring the cigarette to her small mouth and suck like the damned. She would draw on the cigarette and the smoke-coloured dashes of her eyebrows would float up and leave no doubt that from ashes to ashes was her destiny, and not such a bad one at that.

  At cleaning she was not expert. She had her system, always did the same jobs in the same order, she had a great fondness for wax-papering the top of the stove, but often lost her way mid-task leaving a trail of opened bottles, tins and rags, that Doady followed, topping and capping, adopting a tone less stern than herself to call, ‘O Mrs Moore?’

  ‘Is that where it got to?’

  There was pantomime to it. But like everything in Faha, something more too. Eventually I learned that it was Ganga who had first hired her, when the last of his sons had left and his wife had fallen into a silent suffering that in those days was not called depression and did not exist in any discourse but devastated just as many. On remote houses in the rain a spirit-conquering loneliness fell, and entered, and, though front doors were kept open, it would not easily leave. I learned that Mrs Moore was my grandfather’s surprise and understood that she was the least likely emissary of love, his way of acknowledging to Doady that he knew she was afflicted, and company would be a balm. Knowing that Doady would refuse any such, he had presented it as charity. Knowing that Mrs Moore would not accept charity, he had presented it to her as an act of kindness to his wife. The few pence Ganga paid Mrs Moore I expect were her only income.

  As was the way these things were transacted in Faha, the arrangement operated on one level, while being truly another. So as not to hurt her feelings, Ganga and Doady preserved the pretence that Mrs Moore was still an excellent house-cleaner. And not to hurt Doady’s, Mrs Moore preserved the pretence she was there to clean. She was a fixture for many years. On the stormy night of the census in 1956, Mrs Moore was under my grandparents’ roof, took three years off her age to list it as seventy-five and in the comedy of statistics was categorised as Serving Girl.

  All peoples disadvantaged by the chance of geography devise ploys to outfox circumstance. Among the virtues of being a forgotten elsewhere is the fact that everything has to be invented first-hand, and all needs met locally. Faha was no different. It had one of everything. You just had to know where to look. In the cleared centre of Maureen Mungovan’s parlour there operated a hair salon, which, in the days before electricity, meant pots of water simmering on the hearth, buckets for head-dipping, and a mirror framed by two smoking paraffin lamps. Maureen herself was a Mona Lisa, that is, she was not classically beautiful but had conquered time and preserved forever the face she had at thirty. As the ashen look of Lent came to an end, a legion of women filed in to Mungovan’s for a do. Hair-colouring was still in its infancy then, there was nothing of what the next ten years would bring, but a foresighted frontiersman, a salesman by the exotic name of Oscar Sloane, had come through Faha with a range of bottles and a Tint Card ‘for all known hues of human hair’, he said. ‘Plus some in Excel shades,’ he added, knowing womankind the more adventurous sex and novelty a better sauce than chocolate, with the result that several new blonde, brunette, red- not to say orange-headed women came out of Mungovan’s that afternoon.

  Some women, living the hard-edged adventure of the penniless, resorted to home-styling. Because i
t was mostly through newspapers that people caught glimpses of the greater world, styles were inspired by the pictures in the picture houses and the illustrations in the ads in the Clare Champion, which showed the latest look of ten years ago. In an unfair feminine paradox, it turned out that those women with straight hair wanted curls, those with curls wanted straight. In half the houses of Easter Saturday afternoon, curlers were critical. In the other half, makeshift prototype straighteners, flatteners, calmers, anti-wave, anti-bounce and -flounce potions of all sorts, concocted from what I could tell out of the ingredients of cake – oil, milk, sugar and eggs – lent an air of experimental baking.

  Doady was in the former. Although in normal times I never knew her to have an ounce of vanity, all her pride reserved for Kerry people and Kerry things, after a stray comment from Mrs Moore when she was leaving, the idea took hold in Doady that for the Feast of the Resurrection her hair should have ‘a bit of a lift’. She owned no curlers and did not wish to borrow on two counts, first because she wanted the privacy of reversing the styling in case of a disaster, and second, if successful, the reveal as she walked in and up the Long Aisle would provide one of those redeeming moments that all women who have married into hardship crave. Undeterred by the absence of curlers, she began rooting around in drawers to improvise some.

  ‘I’ll make ’em,’ Ganga said.

  ‘Out of what?’

  ‘Pegs.’

  ‘Pegs?’

  Whether vexed by the lack, or the greater gall that her husband thought everything could be resolved in a trice, Doady threw both hands out as if shooing her hens. ‘Go away. Go away and leave me in peace.’

  Momentarily, Ganga forgot his wife’s intransigence. ‘I’ll have ’em made in jig-time.’

  ‘Pegs in my hair! A nice look that’ll make for Easter.’