Hanging with the Elephant (8 page)

‘My father had this herd, and his father before him,’ the farmer would be saying. And then he would turn to take a glance at the field and he’d be broken. ‘They’ll all have to go,’ he’d say, the words whispered and the tears welling
and overflowing in his eyes. And their crying often made me cry.

I spent years wrapped in sorrowful lament, posing as a melancholic poet in my college days, affecting the airs of a devout saint in various churches in later years, and when alone I released myself with tears that would fill a lake. But as I gazed at my mother’s chair, I felt like I had a stone in my chest and no matter what I touched I couldn’t cry.

F
OR THE FIRST month after my mother died in July 2012, I walked about the world with a new lightness. It’s not something I admitted to anyone, but I felt a sense of exhilaration to be above ground when someone so solid and enduring as Mother was now no more. Then after a certain time, issues began to arise. Letters started coming in the door. There were all sorts of institutions that needed forms to be filled in and evidence submitted to establish that this person was now legally dead. Most importantly, her death certificate needed to be completed.
And then I needed to fill in forms in order to close her bank account and to close down her social welfare file and to repay the two weeks’ pension that had inadvertently gone into her account on the day of her death and to close the account with the nursing home. And the solicitor wanted to know what was going to happen to the house. There were forms surfacing everywhere. But the house was the most important issue.

My mother had left the house to my brother and me in equal parts, but my brother intimated to me that he wanted to give me his share as a gift. I was moved by his generosity, and I accepted. But the house didn’t feel like mine. Or his. It was still hers; a dark enclosure where she had brooded in silence for forty years.

The solicitor phoned and asked if I could deliver the death certificate as soon as possible so that they could sort out probate on her estate. I should pick it up at the register office, he said, which was in a small building at the gates of Cavan General Hospital and happened to be just across the road from Glenasmole. So a week after the funeral, I returned to Cavan, drove past the wrought-iron front gate, rusting at the sides and at all the joints, and saw the nameplate on which ‘Glenasmole’ was hardly visible because of the moss and green slime. In the register office, I spoke to a woman behind the counter and filled in the forms and got the certificate. Then I brought it to the solicitor’s office, and that was an end of it.

But on the way home, driving past the house again and seeing its closed gate and vacant upstairs windows, I decided to go inside for no particular reason. It was my first visit since the day of the funeral and this time I decided to examine things in more detail.

From the sunroom at the back of the house I passed through the kitchen, a room she had insisted on carpeting about ten years before she died, because her feet got cold on the bare tiles. The Sacred Heart picture on the wall was faded and the ink scrawl that marked her husband’s, her own and her children’s names had been erased by time. A round tin of Roses chocolates sat on the table. But none of these things disturbed me.

In the drawing room, Pope Benedict XVI stared at me from a postcard on the mantelpiece; the German theologian leered out of the frame with eyes that my daughter had once observed were very creepy. But that didn’t disturb me either.

His photograph was flanked by long-legged African birds, like herons, carved in black ebony. They had been brought from Nigeria in 1966 by Father Pat, a distant cousin.

There were pictures of ‘the two boys’, as she called me and my brother, in First Communion suits beside the birds. A bland landscape painting of an English meadow hung over the mantelpiece. An electric heater with fake flames behind dark glass was tucked into the fire grate. A small
television sat on the coffee table in the opposite corner. A cream nightdress hung across the back of the high armchair. A bundle of Sunday newspapers lay on the floor, yellowed by two years of sunlight. The standard lamp under which my father had once read his books was still plugged in and a bookcase in which he had locked away his precious books stood in the corner. I peered through the glass and wondered where the key might be; not that there was much of interest in there apart from old Catholic apologists from the 1930s and a few accountancy volumes that he had read for his examinations many years earlier – and a long brown envelope containing his will. The sofa that no one had sat on for years was piled high with pillows, bed linen and nightdresses. The card table was dusty. It had come originally from my grandmother’s house, a dull, broken antique that spent some years in a shed. Mother had had it restored by the Robinson brothers in Killeshandra and when she brought it home, she glowed with happiness to have such a memento of her own mother.

It was made of polished mahogany, a central stem branching into four delicate legs. The table itself was square, but could be folded to half its size, with drawers underneath for the cards. The drawers had eventually filled up with bottles of cough mixture, tablets, tubes of ointment for her legs, a white raincoat, a pack of cards and some rosary beads. And the table too had gathered dust for two years. The cream wallpaper was falling off the walls
behind a drinks cabinet in the opposite corner, which she had taken from her brother Oliver’s house when he died – though Oliver never drank in his entire life and I always thought it was an unusual memento by which to remember him. But he was an enormous figure in my mother’s little world, and he had achieved great success as a civil servant, eventually becoming the secretary to three presidents. When I was a child, he was the benchmark of dignity, success and ethical standards in our family. He had lived alone in a semi-detached house on Croagh Patrick Road in Dublin, and I had marvelled at the timer on his cooker, which could trigger the hot plates at the stroke of noon to heat potatoes, and have them ready for his lunch when he walked in the door to the red Formica table in his little kitchen, a stone’s throw from the president’s residence.

Every summer, he had holidayed on the Aran Islands, speaking Irish and reading books. His feet had spread in his sandals and he found it difficult to get them back into the stiff shoe leather when his holiday was over and his presence was once again required on the lush carpets of Áras an Uachtaráin. Now he sleeps, enfolded in the arms of his own mother and beside his father on a slope in Cullies graveyard, side by side with girls who died in the Poor Clare Orphanage fire, and all the other remembered and unremembered heroes of Cavan town. I often drove Mother out to put flowers on his grave, close to where a new road has been cut through the drumlins and which
shortens the journey to Enniskillen and on which the traffic flows day and night, and trucks honk their horns and the noise is carried in the wind into the graveyard and across the tombstones of the resting dead.

In the hallway of Mother’s house, the wallpaper was also in tatters from the dampness that had inched up behind it from year to year, and the floor, where I remember red and cream tiles in my childhood, had been carpeted with a dizzy paisley design on a cream background. A yellow two-bar electric heater sat idle at the first step of the stairs, sitting there since a care worker had noticed that the flex was frayed and had insisted on taking it away, so that it wouldn’t cause a fire. Mother had thought she was robbing it, so the care worker had left it alone, where it remained for years. But none of that upset me.

I was uneasy about opening the dining-room door because, for two years, Mother had slept in there, when she could no longer negotiate the stairs, before finally surrendering to the prospect of ending her days in a nursing home.

The sideboard on the left was cluttered with wedding gifts from that sunny day in late August 1950 – although nothing had been polished for years and a film of dust clung to the little spouts and delicate handles of the teapot and the gravy boat, the salt and pepper canisters, the sugar bowls and little trays for fish knives. On the mantelpiece, there were more photos of her sons and two vases with
plastic snowdrops and a machine for making espresso coffee, which she got from someone in Saudi Arabia but which she had remained convinced was no more than an ornament. An enormous mound of old clothes was piled in the far corner. It was like a refuse heap in a charity shop, and it was impossible to get into that part of the room. Behind all the rags was a hi-fi black box record player, which had been my father’s pride and joy when he was in the gramophone society in the 1950s. The members would meet in the Farnham Arms Hotel every fortnight and, at each meeting, a different member would play a selection of their favourite records while the others listened. I heard my father once say that he particularly enjoyed the evenings when the local doctor was in charge, because he loved opera and brought recordings of many famous arias, and he could bring
La Traviata
or
La Bohème
to life. The librarian was fond of music too and she would often tell me how wonderful the previous night’s recital had been, describing the music in detail, while she stamped my copy of
Treasure Island
or
Kidnapped
when I went in for a new book after school. How anyone could describe a movement of classical music in terms of mountains, valleys and soft breezes astonished me, and her enthusiastic descriptions inspired me to take out my father’s records sometimes from the shelves beneath the black box and listen to Gilbert and Sullivan or the piano music of Chopin.

On top of the black box there was a photo of Uncle
Oliver in a tuxedo, black overcoat and white scarf. It would have infuriated my father if he had seen Oliver smiling on top of his precious black box, but Father was long dead when the photo was put there, and by then Mother had forgotten what the black box was for. Oliver is beaming with joy in the photograph as he holds his arm around a young woman in an evening gown. He looks surprised and pleased at the camera, though he never married or spoke of any woman in romantic terms, which made it another strange memento by which to remember him.

Another television set had been placed in the corner of this room on a rickety wicker stool, so Mother could view it from the bed. Not that she needed high definition at that stage. She had lost interest in the material world. But I think she still needed images out there in the room to distract her from the things in her own mind. Two rolls of toilet paper and a bottle of air freshener sat on top of the television, within reach if she was sitting on the commode next to it.

Saint Bernadette viewed all this from a picture above the commode. It was a framed picture I had owned when I was a priest in Fermanagh, given to me by a woman who had been to Lourdes hoping to find relief from cancer or at least serenity on her deathbed.

In the centre of the room was a single bed, with a mattress which I had bought the same day as the chair. The electric blanket was off, but still plugged in. The sheets were
crumpled, and the duvet was half rolled down. I pressed my hand into the pillow, making a dent, and then I could really imagine she had just moved the duvet away and got out of bed a few moments earlier. I suppose I should have sorted all this out when she first went into the nursing home, but I didn’t.

On top of the little locker beside the bed there were various bottles of tablets, and empty Maalox bottles and an unopened naggin of brandy, and more handbags and a rosary of gaudy purple beads and a glass beaker that had once held Mother’s teeth while she slept. There were prayer leaflets honouring saints, and memorial cards for various relations and friends, and three pictures of Padre Pio praying with his wounded hands joined before his face.

Inside the locker at the very back, behind more bed linen, my fingers found another rosary; old black beads with a gigantic crucifix which had been woven around my grandmother’s fingers as she lay dying in a house on Bridge Street in 1963, and which my mother had cherished after that funeral.

I took the beads with me as I returned to the kitchen and placed them on the table beside the tin of chocolates. When I opened the round glass door of the washing machine, more nightdresses fell out on the floor, and I could see other small things inside which terrified me so I pushed them all back in and closed the door again.

Saucepans, pots and two frying pans sat on the small
cooker. And on the chair beneath the window, I noticed a red plastic basin, with a face towel draped on the side. There was a toothbrush, a tube of paste, a bar of soap sitting on a plastic dish in the basin. The Rayburn had once been fuelled by coal, and rarely went out and it was there that she used to cook chicken soup when I was a child, but in her seventies she had no one to cook for anymore, and the coal buckets were heavy, and what she ate herself she could heat in the microwave or boil on a small electric cooker in the back kitchen. But no smoke had risen in the Rayburn chimney for thirty years to disturb the crows that nested there. On top of the Rayburn, there was only a black kettle from my grandmother’s world, a large packet of toilet rolls and half a dozen plastic bags with Dunnes Stores printed on them.

She saved bags each week when we went shopping because she hated paying the extra twenty-two cents for a new one. But we always forgot to bring a bag, and were obliged to buy one more each week. So the bags piled high on the Rayburn beside a blue plastic folder that contained the care workers’ notes and log book. Every event that had happened in the house was written in there – what work had been done, what conversations or arguments had taken place, and what physical and emotional condition my mother had been in. It was a backup to contradict any false accusations that Mother might make about having been mistreated, robbed or neglected by the care worker.

I sat down on a hard chair at the table and took the black rosary beads in my hand and pressed them to my lips with a reverence that was more nostalgic than true. Like many other people in Ireland, I had outgrown the devotions of my childhood, the fervour that gathered us together in the shelter of a church. I suppose if I could have cried even then, it might have helped.