Athy written by Mick Beville
“Shackleton! Jesus… that’s all you ever fekin hear around here so. If the truth was told, Shackleton wasn’t an Athy man at all.” Jack O’Keefe placed his long neck stout bottle on the oak kitchen dresser and started with some agitation to rummage through the drawer in search of an audio cassette tape. “Fekin Elvis, the drawer’s full of fekin Elvis” he continued, scattering the audio tapes in all directions.
“Who were you hoping to find in there?” asked Gerry Toomey, as he casually topped up his glass of stout at the kitchen table.
“Awe for Christ’s sake,” snapped Jack! “I’m looking for Liam O’flynn. The feckless bitch has only smothered me Planxty tape with her pile of Elvis shite.”
“How is Maurine by the way?” asked Gerry.
“Hear it is…” continued Jack, paying no mind to Gerry’s prying.
Jack O’Keefe had inherited the old forty acres, along with the house and horse business, from his father, as likewise his father had from his own father.
‘‘The good times will come again’ Jack had pleaded, when Maurine tried in vain to balance the household debts, against the pittance that came in from the riding school. When Maurine had told him that she’d had enough and was leaving him, it was like his world had suddenly ended.
It was two years after Jacks wife Bridget had died from breast cancer that Maurine had first approached him in Ryan’s Bar. At thirty seven she was the same age as Jack’s youngest son Tom, a fact that in it self did little to ease the tension that already existed between father and son.
When Maurine gave birth to Padraic two years later Tom had already left the farm to join his brothers Jimmy and Mat in London
Eight year old Padraic snuck out of his bedroom and sat in the dim light at the head of the stair, leaned his shoulder against the corner of the wall and listened intensely as his father and Gerry Toomey talked through the drone of the uilliann pipes in the kitchen below. The tears that had soaked Padraics pillow after his mother’s departure had now for the most part turned inwards. He would wake sometimes to the shock, that her leaving him hadn’t been just a bad dream. Under his pillow he kept a book of Poems by WB Yeats that belonged to her. Although he had no understanding of its content, the book it self was her. Padraic would look at the word ‘Yeats’ and he could hear her voice saying it. He would smell the pages and imagine her in the bed along side him reading it to him.
He remembered the night that Gerry Toomey had gone into her bedroom room, and how he had heard them argue about his father, and then later after Gerry Toomey had left, his mother had come into his bed, held him in her arms and sobbed.
His thoughts were jolted and he scurried back onto the upstairs landing. It was the shadow of Gerry Toomey crossing the foot of the stair on his way to the toilet. Padraic knew Gerry’s Toomey’s shadow better than he knew the man him-self. The toilet was directly underneath the bare floorboard of the landing and Padraic could hear the plastic seat being lifted and the sound of Gerry’s piss as it hit and missed the bottom of the porcelain. He held his breath and kept as still as a stone until the cistern started its flush. He thought some more about how his mother didn’t like Gerry Toomey coming in the house. And then he thought about how grown ups thoughts were such an intriguing mystery. How their conversations, like the pages of Yates poetry, were somehow calling out to him and that if he could only reach a little harder that everything would be reveal itself.
The Planxty tape had stopped now and he could hear the clinking of bottles as his father reached into the pantry for replacements.
“He’s not an Athy man at all so” continued Gerry from back at the table.
“Who are you talking about now?’ Jack asked.
“I’m talking about Liam O’flynn the piper. He’s no more an Athy man than Shackleton. At least Shackleton was born less than a mile down the road...” Jack said nothing. Instead he took the bottle opener from the drainer and opened the two long necks.
The subject of Shackleton had festered between the two men since the pub trivia on the previous Tuesday night when Gerry had ridden Jack over his lack of general knowledge.
“You do know the Guarda will be asking questions,” continued Gerry without qualification. Jack knew that Gerry was referring to Maurine and was taken aback by the brazenness of his tone.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” he snapped angrily.
“It means Jack that people in this century don’t just disappear off the face of the earth, not without serious questions.”
Padraics attention sharpened with the mention of his mothers name and he quietly slid the seat of his pants down two more steps to get a better listen.
Jack thumped his fist on the table. “You just can’t feking leave well alone so.”
“It had to be said Jack,” replied Gerry. “The whole towns talking about her, for Jesus sake, there’s even some who think you have her buried up here in the field”
Conscious that their conversation may be overheard, Jack reached and pulled the kitchen door closed.
“That’s all them fekin gob- shites ever want to do is to talk about the things they know nothing at all about. She’s gone. Good riddance to her I say. She could be in Memphis
With the kitchen door closed, Padraic returned to his bed. The words ‘buried up here in the fields’ ran around inside his head. He tried to make sense of the words being associated with his mother’s name. He took out the book of poems by Yeats from under his pillow and randomly opened it at a poem called 'Death'. The word ‘Death’ struck him like a hammer. He had heard his mother telling a woman who had quoted the marriage vow, 'untill death us do part', to her, that ‘there was more than one kind of death. There was death of love; death of respect and worst of all, death of hope'.
‘Death’
Nor dread nor hope attend
A dying animal;
A man awaits his end
Dreading and hoping all;
Many times he died,
Many times he rose again.
A great man in his pride
Confronting murderous men
Casts derision upon
Supersession of breath;
He knows death to the bone-
Man has created death.
A shiver passed through Padraics body and he slammed the pages closed. He had reached out as he had reached out many times for an understanding of the text. Only this time it was different. This time the text had answered him. ‘His mother really was in Memphis
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