My Father's Wake Read online

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2017 by Kevin Toolis

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  Da Capo Press

  Hachette Book Group

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  Originally published in Great Britain in 2017 by Weidenfeld & Nicolson, an imprint of The Orion Publishing Group, Ltd., a Hachette UK Company

  First U.S. Edition: September 2017

  Published by Da Capo Press, an imprint of Perseus Books, LLC, a subsidiary of Hachette Book Group, Inc. The Da Capo name and logo is a trademark of the Hachette Book Group.

  The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

  Typeset by Input Data Services, Ltd., Somerset, Great Britain

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.

  ISBNs: 978-0-306-92146-9 (hardcover); 978-0-306-92145-2 (ebook)

  LCCN: 2017948124

  E3-20180106-JV-NF

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Mortalities

  Whispers

  Origins

  Voices

  Unravellings

  Intimations

  Exiles

  Ruins

  Catastrophes

  Changelings

  Drifts

  Hades

  Gestations

  Tombs

  Gatherings

  Forebodings

  Silences

  Fragments

  Landscapes

  Vigils

  Remains

  Burdens

  Keening

  Rites

  How to Love, Live and Die

  Acknowledgements

  By Kevin Toolis

  For Sonny, and other keepers of an ancient faith, and Dea, who never stopped believing.

  ‘The generations of men are like generations of leaves. The wind scatters one year’s leaves down on to the earth, but when spring comes the luxuriant forest produces other leaves; so it is with the generations of men, one grows as the other comes to end.’

  Iliad, 6–145

  MORTALITIES

  In the narrow room the old man lay close to death.

  Two days before he had ceased to speak, lapsed into unconsciousness, and the final vigil had begun. The ravages of cancer had eaten into the muscle, leaving a starved skeletal husk. In the bed the body lay awkwardly propped; the skull and limbs crucified at jarring angles. The open eyes were cloudy, their tissues dried; the seized mouth a scabby parched red hole. The heart beat on and the lungs drew breath but it was impossible to tell if he remained aware. Above the man’s head, to the right on the whitewashed wall, a cheap print of a ruddy-faced Jesus Christ, his heart exposed and arms outstretched, offered eternal salvation to his followers.

  Just after dawn on the longest day, the breathing grew hectic. The skeletal ribcage heaved with irregular breath, the wheezing lungs gasping for oxygen, failing into silence and then, against expectation, rising again. The death rattle had commenced. The bean chaointe pronounced; the moment of death was close. A nine-year-old boy was hurriedly despatched to gather in the last of the man’s sons. Boy and son returned to find ten watchers crammed shoulder tight within the spartan room, all staring at the tangle of limbs. A rasping breathing filled the air.

  Huh, huh, huh.

  In the silence of the watchers… huh, huh, huh… that panicked drowning sound… huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, HUH, HUH, HUH… rose to a crescendo then plummeted, free-falling, into an agonising void.

  And then began again.

  Huh, huh, huh…

  This death was not veiled but a rite within an Irish clan.

  I stared around the room at these watchers: at my nine-year-old nephew Séan who had come for me; at my heavily pregnant cousin Bernadette; at the seer, my matronly Aunt Tilda who now led us in the wake, the woman of wounds, our midwife of death; at Nora, the elderly neighbour who sold eggs; and at other witnesses to whom I had never spoken. I wondered what they sought to gain from the moment of death of this man. Of Sonny. My father.

  The seer broke out in prayer and began to recite the Five Sorrowful Mysteries of the Rosary.

  Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee, blessed art thou amongst women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.

  As one, the watchers returned her chant. The tight single-bedded room, no bigger than a prison cell, filled up; the song of voices overwhelming the stuttering rhythm of Sonny’s lungs.

  Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death.

  The sound boomed off the ceiling, off the white-washed walls, the concrete floor, the glass cover of Jesus Our Saviour, reverberating, louder and louder, filling every orifice.

  Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee, blessed art thou, amongst women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death.

  Verse, after verse, prayer after prayer. Keening.

  For years as a child, in one gloomy Catholic church after another, I recited that prayer, running the words together like a hollowed verbal conjuring trick until I could say HolyMaryMotherofGodprayforus… sinners now… andatthehour… ofourdeath in four seconds flat.

  Words breathed but emptied of meaning.

  Now, I was home on the island off the coast of Ireland’s poorest county, Mayo, in the furthest western reaches of Europe, for the hour of this death.

  Home on an island of elemental fury, a rock citadel in the great ocean, where huge Atlantic storms break onshore, scouring the landscape and destroying everything not anchored down. The wind howling, wailing, car-door-wrenching. At night as you lie in bed awake, the storm surging in assault, striking at the rattling roof, the shaking windows, to suck you out, every living soul within, up into the maelstrom. The great ocean, a hundred yards away, was alive and malevolent, the surf a cascading white fury. The waves lashing every headland, surging, turning, daring you just close enough to capture you for the depths. My godfather, a shepherd, and two of his companions were swept to their deaths rescuing sheep on what had started as a clear winter’s day.

  And with the wind comes the rain. Bucketing, drenching rain, for months on end. Swallowing the ocean, the earth, the hills, the horizon, in a bleary, grey stinging assault. Pouring, pouring, from the sky in deluge. Black mile-high sheets of falling water sweeping in from the western horizon, bursting on the sodden earth before roaring back down heather hillsides into the ocean. The sky too another vast ocean; often grey or darkening black with rain-laden clouds, but sometimes pink, scarlet red or blue. Or shimmering with light as sun-lanced pillars of gold burst through an overcast sky onto grey waters. Or the air filling up with mist showers and the whole world, sea, sky, earth, glimmering back in a mirror of silver light.

  And then there are days when the sun blazes as a God chariot rising from behind Minaun mountain over the ocean in a great arc before descending in a blood red orb into the ocean behind Croaghaun mountain. Yellow lilacs rocket skywards from the bog, and meadows sway with golden buttercups and wh
ite daisies. The sea turns green glass, the wind stills, and dolphins leap in the surf so close to shore you could easily swim out to them. Like a smoky perfume, the smell of peat turf lazily drifts over the village and the blue-eyed sheepdogs of Dookinella deliciously spread themselves on the tar and gravel road to cool their molten bodies.

  As Sonny lay dying we had another kind of weather: humid, hazy days, the entire village consumed in sea mist. We were unable to see further than the garden gate: all land, sea and sky shrouded in a still blanket that made night and day one. We were becalmed. Waiting for his heart to stop, the wake, his funeral, the church, the grave. Waiting for the death of this very ordinary man. Waiting, I thought, to start again. Resume Life. As it turned out, nothing else I have ever done or will do was more important than those precious days.

  I had come home to the island, and our village, Dookinella, Dumha Cionn Aille in Irish, the sandy bank at the head of the cliff, nestled on the foreshore of the great Atlantic Ocean. An island furthest to the west, closer to the sunset. Home to an arcadia of small farms and wild mountains, where the roar of ocean surf never ceases and flocks of sheep wander freely on the roads; migrating nightly along the ocean’s edge to pasture on the hills, before returning in a dawn pilgrimage to the sweet grasses of the lake shore. Passing tractor drivers on the road, their narrow cabs crammed either with small children or dogs, sometimes both, wave a friendly salute to oncoming cars for no real reason other than to say hello.

  Returning to a village where the last roads of Europe ran out into the ocean and the same dogs lie in wait in the long grass by the side of road guarding passage. Barking and chasing after strange cars as if driving out a foreign enemy. Home to the stone ruins of the past, the old clachans of drystone houses broken open to the elements, their descendants scattered across the face of the Earth. I was back in a patchwork of tiny green fields, divided and further subdivided for the last 200 years. Home to a house built by Sonny and my grandfather Patrick in the 1930s. I was standing in the same whitewashed room where my mother, Mary Gallagher, had given birth to my brother, standing too amongst the watchers, and where Sonny now lay dying. Home to a village where the bloodlines crossed and mixed generation after generation, and where our own small sept, clan, was part of the very naming of the land, Dookinelly Thulis, in the first nineteenth-century maps.

  And the line of my fathers and mothers, and their forefathers and foremothers, ran back three centuries.

  I was related in blood to all of these watchers, though many of them I barely knew and could never recall their names. Some I had met as a teenager at the local dances, at Mass, walking back the shore, at weddings and in the local bars. I stumbled before their profuse ‘Welcome home’s, their easy grace of kinship, their uncontrived acceptance of my life beyond the island–failure or success. And their uncanny ability to name me and chart the genealogical web–cousin, second cousin, second cousin to your grandfather–that we shared.

  Holy Mary…

  Yet I was a stranger here, a traitor in my Irish skin. As a child and teenager I had spent every summer ‘home’ on the island, roaming the beaches, working on the bog or making hay, drinking in the bars or riding pillion on Padraig Mac’s Honda to distant dance halls–the Wavecrest, the Valley or the shed-like Bunacurry Ballroom–in search of teenage romance. I even had a few island girlfriends. But amidst these watchers, my Irish clan, I stood apart and together, just as I stood apart and together with my father all my life, a treacherous child of his exile.

  I also grew up in the stone streets of a city of half a million strangers, a world away from this ancient land. Another creature. In the city I studied philosophy at an old university; my teachers rightly taught me to question the appearances of all things. I lived and worked in a land of words, urban strangers, tall buildings and blocked-out horizons. The tools in my hands were notebooks, pens and keyboards, not the hammers, chisels and shovels the islanders used to gouge at the soil. I was far from the sight of the earth, the burl of the wind on your face, the snatch of a car door in a gale and the sound of a shore. I lived in the surrounding of foreign lives, meshed in the gyre of descending plane engines, the fractious meld of traffic, the recoil of sirens somewhere in the night and the star blinding wall of street lamps. The noise of the world, the pavement echo of stranger’s words, was as different as it could possibly be from Dookinella.

  In Dookinella, I was struggling to understand what the watchers saw or wanted in Sonny’s death. How could these relative strangers relieve the burden of these agonies? What need for this public stage? I wanted the watchers to go away and leave Sonny’s dying alone. But it was all too late. Sonny’s wake, long before his death, had already begun. And we–my dying father, brothers and sisters, and the watchers–were being swept forward within these ancient rituals. The days that followed would forever change my understanding of the meaning of life, and my own death.

  How do we become the people we are? The mystery of our lives. Born within the slipstream of our father’s and mother’s lives, we follow involuntarily in their wake. We never fully grasp the unseen currents that shift and shape; the imprint of their fathers and mothers before; the rites and cultural rituals of the preordained path; marriage, position, children; the flaws and inevitable failures of the mortal road. The onrush of our own lives, the glare of present novelty, blinds us. How much do we just re-enact variants of our forebears’ script? Mumble out the words of the same life song. By the time we believe we have seized command of our destiny we are already forged, unconsciously repeating determined patterns. Or torn by the rupture, as I was, between the city and an older, more tribal identity. In the becoming of our selves, in the confusion of the city, the mass of others around us, we think we escape the chain of lives behind us. But we never do. The baggage is invisibly passed on, transmuted into other forms, reappearing in other guises down the line; the trail of a wave, our own inexplicable response erupting somewhere within our futures. The wake of the past, our past, is always with us.

  Hail Mary, full of grace…

  I stayed silent in the song of voices. But, as we slipped into the final decade of the rosary, the grip of my past overtook me; I began to pray too. Doctors say hearing is the last sense of a dying animal so perhaps even in Sonny’s coma the sound of the rosary was a comfort–familiar voices, familiar prayers. We were singing out to Sonny, soothing him as though he were a child. A lullaby as he was falling, falling. Cradling him into death. Perhaps Sonny was beyond caring. But for us, the watchers, this keen was a sustaining ritual to control our fear, affirm our beating hearts and contain our sadness at his passage out.

  … the Lord is with thee…

  Involuntarily I prayed for Sonny, my father. I prayed hard for death to overtake him, this agony to end. And selfishly I prayed for myself.

  Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for me now and at the hour of my death.

  The final verses ended. The voices of the chorus of watchers tapered into silence, and confusion.

  Huh, Huh…

  Sonny was still breathing. We listened on in the fractured stillness.

  Huh, huh, huh.

  The emaciated body would not stop. By the bedside Aunt Tilda, whose grandmother Mariah had been a bean chaointe for decades, seemed thrown by the failure of her prediction. Tilda reached out for a pulse on the paper skin of Sonny’s withered left arm. It was faint; Sonny was alive. The frenetic breathing… huh… huh… dipped then slowed to an even rhythm. We would have to wait for death a little longer.

  The gathering broke apart. We came back into our separate selves, awkwardly embarrassed now by our present intimacy. The room was far too crowded, too close. I struggled to find a language, the words, for what had just passed between the watchers. And what I felt. Outside, dawn had come unnoticed and it was already as light as midday, though it was still five in the morning. My younger sister, Teresa, exhausted by the long vigil and the recent birth of her second child, went straight back to bed. A few watchers joined Aunt
Tilda in the kitchen for tea and talk of other dyings. Cousin Bernadette volunteered to sit vigil with Sonny for the next hour. Sonny in his death coma, even more so than his newest born grandchild, was never now to be left alone.

  I slipped away out the front door and down the road to the ocean. The beach at Dookinella runs for three miles in a long crescent from the base of Minaun to the local town with its two bars, a butcher, a post office and a shop. The beach has no real name. The islanders call it ‘the strand’ or ‘back the shore’. The eastern end of the strand begins in the wild sea coves of Minaun, cut off at high tide, untouched and unaltered by man, where jagged cliffs fall hundreds of feet sheer into the surging tide. Beyond the coves lies the beach, shaped by eternal waning and waxing tides and ever shifting sands and stones.

  The island is old, older than human time, dating long before the fossil era, the bedrock 590 million years old. The ocean, ice ages, the wind, the earth and time have created this place rather than any living thing. The cliffs of Minaun have been falling, piece by piece, into the ocean for hundreds of millions of years. And for the same number of years the ocean has been smashing, churning and breaking each rock fall, pulverising vast angular slabs into mere grains of sand. Ice ages, too, have carried their glacial till, a random debris of red and green sandstones, quartz and granites, out to sea, down the coast for hundreds of miles, and then back onto land to be pounded and polished in a million tides. Together the tide, waves and wind have swept their harvest onto shore creating a huge natural embankment of rounded beach stone–most no bigger than your fist–seven metres high and three miles long; a measureless shingle rampart. There are hundreds of millions and millions of beach rocks, even billions; without them half the island would be under the water.

  The ocean never ceases the assault of creation and destruction. At every high tide, Atlantic breakers smash down on these mounds of stone. The retreating waters then shush back to sea through now vibrating rocks just before the next incoming wave renews the onslaught. Even on a still dawn you hear the clap, boom and roar of the thudding waters break on the shoreline. If there was no one left on the planet, the indifferent surge would go on waxing and waning. Twice a day, ever since the Moon was captured by Earth’s gravity, and the oceans rose, every tide carves out a new line of struggle, a different wave pattern in the rocks; but the vastness of the rampart, the countless individual stones together, absorbs the wild ocean’s energy.