A Son Called Gabriel Read online

  “Oh, stop your damned crying,” I said aloud, and gritted my teeth until they hurt.

  A few minutes later, the headmistress came out and rang the brass bell, and I went inside. Another lunchtime was over, but something had changed forever. I really hadn’t known I would never fight. But now I knew, and the boys did, too. Henry knew he could hit me and I would not fight back.

  That night, I told my mother I’d been in a fight and walked away from Henry.

  “That was the right thing to do,” she said. “You won the fight because you did that, Gabriel. You’re the winner and a real man as a result.”

  I did not feel like a real man. Nor did my mother have the power to make me the winner. Only the boys had that power.

  “It’s come to fighting now,” she said to Daddy later. “Should we speak to Henry’s mother, or the teacher?”

  “Quit your talking. This’ll toughen the lad up. He can’t run to teachers about things like that. It’ll only make it worse. He’s got to learn to hold his own.” Daddy rubbed his large nose for a moment with a finger blackened by the oily grease of the truck he drove, then said to me, “You’ve got to stand up for yourself and not let that Henry Lynch push you around. Fight back like a man. Real men stand their ground, Gabriel. They don’t run away under any circumstances.”

  I looked over at my mother, but her eyes stayed fixed on the TV screen.

  Two

  After Granda Harkin died in May, there was a huge rumpus because Uncle Brendan didn’t come home for the funeral. Granny Harkin was heart-sore for weeks afterward because he hadn’t come, which made Auntie Celia even angrier with him. I overheard Mammy say to Daddy that Brendan was a priest, should know what was proper, and wasn’t he the right bad article? When I asked why Uncle Brendan was a “right bad article,” she got angry and told me to mind my own business.

  In the middle of all the tears and anger, Uncle Tommy, Daddy’s other brother, got married. Mammy said the neighbors would talk, as he was marrying so soon after Granda’s funeral, but Uncle Tommy decided to go ahead, because the priest was booked and “good money” had been paid for the hotel reception.

  After their honeymoon in Wexford, Uncle Tommy and his new wife moved into our house, and I didn’t understand why. Nor did I like it, because James and I had to leave our bedroom and share Caroline’s. When I asked my mother, whose stomach was growing very big, she said they were staying until their new house was built.

  “When it’s finished, they’ll leave and things will get back to normal ’round here, thank God,” she said. “Until then, you’ll be extremely nice to your new Auntie Bernie.”

  Pleasant for the most part, our home was a one-story bungalow with three small bedrooms, a living room where we watched TV, and a kitchen with tan-colored tiles, sky-blue cupboards, and a square table that could be opened and made larger when needed. One sky-blue cupboard was a larder where two plastic buckets stood on a concrete shelf on one side: a faded red one to keep the milk bottles cool and a blue one for our drinking water. It was my job every Saturday and Sunday to fetch water in the blue bucket from the spring in our fields. We also had a sitting room, the prettiest room in the house. It had shiny white bird ornaments that Uncle Brendan had given my parents as a wedding gift, a round brass mirror above the fireplace, and a dark red sofa and armchairs that felt, but didn’t smell, like leather.

  “Give your auntie a hug,” Daddy said to me, as we were watching TV on their second night in our home.

  “I don’t want to give her a hug.”

  I was still cross about her moving in and, what’s more, I had sneaked into my bedroom that morning and found her sleeping on my side of the bed.

  “Luksee, Gabriel, do it,” he said.

  Caroline was on my aunt’s knee, fingering the white beads Auntie Bernie wore around her neck. They had once belonged to her dead mother and Auntie Bernie used them to hide a raised brown mole with a hair in its middle. She was always asking Mammy if the mole was changing color, until Mammy was black in the face. Auntie Bernie always put Caroline and James on her lap. She never asked me to sit there; not that I wanted her to, because her perfume was fierce bad.

  “Gabriel thinks he’s too old for hugs, don’t you?” Auntie Bernie said. She began to straighten Caroline’s hair ribbon.

  “When will you be leaving our house, Auntie Bernie?” I asked.

  Her fingers froze on the ribbon.

  “That’s very rude,” my father said. He winked at Uncle Tommy.

  “This house is too small and Mammy said she’ll be very happy when your new house is finished and things can get back to normal ’round here.”

  Auntie giggled, high as a flying kite, as she pushed Caroline off her lap.

  “I said no such thing,” said Mammy. “Honestly, the lies children dream up.” She looked at me sharply. “Don’t tell lies.”

  “We’ll be leaving in a few months,” Uncle Tommy said, and smiled as he played with his dark ginger sideburns, which ended near the bottom of his cheeks. Uncle Tommy was forever twisting and playing with them and Auntie Bernie was forever telling him to stop. I liked his sideburns, and also liked feeling the hard bump when he bent his arm and told me to feel his muscles. His lower arms had reddish hairs just like the Chelsea players. They felt silky under my fingers when he grabbed my arms and swung me ’round and ’round in the garden until my head spun. I liked him to do that, even though I was now seven years old: my shoes would fly off and the cool air would rush into my striped socks, right between my toes, and when he set me down, I’d be drunk with dizziness. That made him laugh. I’d clown about and pretend to be really drunk, until my father would start talking to him and he’d forget about me.

  Uncle Tommy and Daddy were Granny Harkin’s sons. Caroline, James, and I were powerful scared of Granny Neeson, our other grandmother, because she never smiled and was so sour-faced. Her face was almost square and she had a red sty in the corner of her right eye that I hated looking at, yet saw every time she asked me a question because it would be rude not to look at her. We had to be very quiet when we visited her, too. She liked neither noise nor children.

  Even my father didn’t like visiting Granny Neeson. When we had to visit, he always made excuses to go places with Joe, his best friend, and that always caused enormous arguments. Mammy would shout at him in the scullery, he’d roar back an answer, and then she’d say he didn’t want to visit because her family wasn’t good enough for the Harkins. When she got really cross, she screamed. She’d scream that Granda Harkin had never liked her, even when he’d come to her, cap in hand, to ask for the big favor and she agreed to help the Harkins out.

  “Who the hell are the Harkins but a bunch of damned sheep farmers with bad land at the end of the day?” she’d always say during a fight. Daddy always told her to shut her mouth, because she’d promised never to repeat anything about the “big favor,” and then he’d grab pots and bang them against the draining board of the sink. Caroline, James, and I hated the banging and we’d gather in a ring in the middle of the scullery. At these times, my father would never pick Caroline up and hug her when she started crying. She was forgotten. I’d pray for it to stop, which always worked, even though it took a while. Then my mother would come to me.

  “I’m sorry, Gabriel,” she’d say. “I don’t know what I’m saying when your daddy makes me this mad.”

  I didn’t know what she was talking about, either. I asked about the “big favor” once, but her voice sharpened and she warned me not to be nosy. She’d only been getting back at my father, she’d say, and my granda had been “a holy man, may God have mercy on his soul.”

  Visiting Granny Harkin was much easier. She lived only two miles away and James, Caroline, and I were allowed to go there when we pleased. Her home lay at the end of a long gravel lane winding through purple heather and looked like a white shoebox with a thatched roof. Pink, sweet-smelling roses as big as men’s fists grew on one side of the front door. Uncle John, my godfathe
r, lived with her because he wasn’t married.

  Though we didn’t like to talk about it too much, Caroline and I agreed Granny Harkin’s house wasn’t as tidy as Granny Neeson’s. Uncle John’s sheepdog had fleas, stank quite a bit, and slept under the kitchen table. Also, her ragged sofa cushions were never straight, the cream range was never shiny, and the top of the walls and white ceiling were black with turf soot. Uncle John didn’t do any housework because he was a man, and Auntie Celia, my favorite cousin’s mother who had a shop in Duncarlow, was far too grand to come out and help Granny, whose leg was bad.

  When I visited alone, I liked to sit at the green Formica table and watch Granny take off her elastic hairnet and undo her bun. Her hair was long and shiny and looked like Caroline’s, except that the ropes were silver, not black. Sometimes she allowed me to brush it, if I promised not to do it hard.

  “Gabriel, you and Caroline are the picture of your uncle Brendan when he was your age,” she said as I brushed. “He was the handsomest man in Knockburn. Aye, your granda had to hunt the girls away. When he was a teenager, they were forever trying to kiss him.” My grandmother looked out over the fields for so long her eyes watered. “Oh, it’s hard, Gabriel. Nobody but your poor old granny knows how hard it is.”

  “But when you look at me or Caroline, then you can still see him, Granny,” I said.

  It was stupid to say that. I didn’t have black wavy hair like Uncle Brendan or Daddy. Mine was dark brown and straight, I had a cowlick for a fringe, and my eyes were hazel, not gray like my father’s.

  “Even if I don’t have the wavy Harkin hair.”

  “It doesn’t have to be wavy to be Harkin hair.”

  “Mammy says it’s too soft and corn-stalk straight to be Harkin—”

  “Your mammy’s arse and parsley. Jesus, you have the Harkin hair . . . and you and Caroline have Brendan’s and your daddy’s brains, as well. So that mother of yours needn’t be going about the country saying that you haven’t got Harkin hair.”

  I always said something like this if we were alone when she talked sadly about Uncle Brendan. It made her stop crying. She’d forget to be sad and her face would redden and tiny balls of spittle would fly from her mouth and spark on the table as she spoke. Granny was very kind and holy, but liked Caroline and me better than James because he had the square face and shortness of the Neesons. Sometimes, she gave Caroline and me a half-crown apiece, but only gave him a shilling. That made Mammy mad, but my father would only laugh.

  “I hope he’s happy in Kenya, Gabriel,” Granny said, and she sighed hard. “Ouch! Jesus, Gabriel, don’t brush my hair so damned hard or you’ll leave me with none.”

  “Sorry.” I brushed in silence, because Granny was thinking about Uncle Brendan in Kenya again.

  “Yes, he’s been away long enough,” she said. “He should come home where he belongs. The whole thing’s forgotten. He can get a parish here. Sure, they’re crying out for priests in Ireland. I don’t know why the hell he has to stay in that godforsaken place when there’s a loch full of souls in need of saving here. Aye, he should just come home to his mammy.”

  “What’s forgotten, Granny?”

  She said these things when she talked about Uncle Brendan, but every time I asked about the forgotten thing, she wouldn’t say what it was. She’d say “all’s well” or “my dotage is starting, Gabriel,” and all I could get was Uncle Brendan wouldn’t come home and she wanted him home. Not even Cousin Martin could find out what she was talking about, if he happened to be around when she said these things.

  Once, Granny had cried really sorely, because it was Uncle Brendan’s birthday and she couldn’t see him. I’d never seen her crying so hard. As soon as I’d gotten home that afternoon, I’d told Mammy and asked why Brendan didn’t come to see Granny and what thing was forgotten. After sitting on an armchair and drawing me in front of her, she’d made me repeat word for word what Granny and I had been talking about.

  “Your grandmother is starting to lose it,” Mammy had said after I’d finished, “and I want you to promise me you’ll ask no more questions about this ever again. If you don’t promise, I’m stopping you from going up to visit her alone.” She’d also made me cross my heart never to bother Granny with that sort of question.

  I came out of my thoughts about Mammy and the forgotten thing when Granny cleared her throat. “Your godfather’s taking my lambs to the market this afternoon,” she said. “Yours will be also be going, so I’m going to give you your wee fiver today.”

  Every year she gave me a lamb—this year I’d named it Bonny—and when market time came ’round, she gave me five pounds. Of course, I always wanted to take the lamb home and make it my pet, but she’d only allow me to see it a few times throughout the summer.

  “I’m old now and don’t wish my lamb to go to the market this year,” I said. “So I won’t take the fiver, if you don’t mind.”

  She took the brush from me and laid it on the table. “That’s not possible.”

  Granny made a plait, swirled it into a bun, and put on the hairnet again. It was silly that she brushed her hair only to tie it up the same way again. She hummed as she pushed the sticking-out bits underneath the net. I waited until she’d finished and looked at me again.

  “Why not?” I gave her my biggest Harkin smile.

  “It’ll go to the market and you’ll get the money.”

  “What will it do at the market?”

  “It’ll be sold and taken to another place.”

  “Why not let it stay in Uncle John’s fields?”

  “Who’s saying they’re your uncle’s fields?” My grandmother hobbled toward the door. “Aye, I’m not dead and buried yet.” She stopped after she’d opened it. “I’m just going outside for a minute. Put on the kettle for tea.”

  I peeped out the side window. The cream-colored paint on the dusty sill was cracked and bulged in the corner where rain had leaked in. Granny stood in the little garden and fumbled underneath her long skirt. She hunkered down in front of the blood-red-and-green stalks of her rhubarb patch. Granny always peed there during the daylight, which was a reason I pretended I didn’t like rhubarb jam when she wanted to make me a sandwich. As she was pulling up her knickers, I put the dented kettle on the hob and, meeting her at the door, told her I was going up to the mountain to see Uncle John. I ran off in case she tried to make me eat.

  Granda’s old carthorse with the star and three white socks was grazing in the meadow and I stopped to watch him. “Hello, aul Rory,” I shouted, but he was deaf. Uncle John didn’t put him inside the shafts of the blue and orange cart and let me ride with him like Granda had done. He’d bought a tractor with the armfuls of money he’d got in Granda’s will. Rory wasn’t needed anymore.

  I thought about Granda for a moment. I thought about him sitting in his favorite chair near the range, watching me watching him from the other chair as he puffed on his pipe. I could see his gray hair, his hazel eyes, the brown spots on his hands, and his curly pipe now lying on top of the window pelmet. His pipe lay dusty and forgotten on top of the pelmet and his overalls and Sunday suit were on hangers in the storage room. They didn’t have his smell anymore. His suit now smelt damp, the cloth cold and limp between my fingers.

  When I reached Half-Mile Hill, I saw Uncle John near the sheep-dipping pen. A helper—wearing dungarees that must have been too big, because he’d tied a hay bale rope around his waist—was with him. As I drew closer, I could smell the sheep shite. The ewes were running about with bulged and rolling eyes, glistening round marbles dropping from their dirty arses because Uncle John was grabbing their lambs and shoving them into a smaller pen. Uncle John dragged an ewe roughly by its small horns up to a pot of bright red paint and jammed its head between his legs. His fat tummy almost touched the sheep’s back as he bent over and grabbed a stick from the paint pot with his crooked fingers, broken years ago in a Gaelic football game.

  “Where’s my lamb, Uncle John?” I asked.

/>   He continued to form the “J” of his “JH” mark on the sheep’s side. “Over in the other pen.”

  The sheep bucked, and he cursed and yanked its fleece. I ran over to the smaller pen and, grasping the smooth metal side rails, jumped up on the narrow concrete ledge and looked about for her. Lambs bleated in every corner. Two were scared witless, many had horn buds popping from their heads, but all the ones with black-and-white faces looked the same. The helper came over with another, fumbled open the narrow gate to the pen with one hand, and dragged it inside where it skidded on the shite after he set it free.

  “Which is my lamb?” I asked.

  “What are ye on about?”

  “Where is the one my grandmother gave me?” I looked behind to see if Uncle John was still marking the sheep before turning back to the man. “There’s so many of them. How do they get to the market?”

  “We take them in that trailer over there. Do you want to come? We’re leaving in an hour or so.”

  The trailer was small, about twice the size of a horsebox, with slatted sides. I couldn’t see how all the lambs could fit into such a tiny space.

  “All the lambs fit in there?”

  “Aye.”

  “How long do they stay at the market?”

  “Until they’re sold and taken to the abattoir.”

  I loved the sound of that name. “Will the lambs run as free in the aba . . . abavar as on this mountain?”

  The man’s eyes narrowed, and creases as puffy as the wrinkles on my school shirt formed at their sides. “You’re quite the joker.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Uncle laughed.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Sure you know as well as I do they’re shot and sliced up nice as pie so your mother can buy a chop or two for your Sunday dinner.”