The long life of a boy born on a rainy farm

ONCE UPON a time a child was born to elderly parents, on a tiny farm. There was no television or wireless in the humble cottage, and the roads and laneways about the house were silent and untarred. It rained for years, as the child grew up, and one day, while he was picking potatoes with his father, and his father was looking at the purple sky with great weariness, the young boy decided it was time to go away.

So he found a job in a London factory and made friends with two brothers from Co Laois, who took him under their wing, and brought him home for holidays, where he happened to meet their teenage sister who fell in love with him instantly and resolved to marry him.

He became a plumber, and a few years later, when the girl arrived in London, he danced with her, in a sleeveless shirt, and proposed marriage, and because of his trade they were able to return to Ireland to rear their children.

Like plumbers all over the world, he knew an immense number of people in his locality, and understood their worries and woes, because it is almost impossible not to confess your secrets to a man under the kitchen sink, or someone poking around in the hotpress looking for a valve.

He loved his family, and his pints, and he danced as straight as a rush with his wife, at weddings and christenings for many years, and when the children had grown up and gone away to have more babies, he got a travel pass, and before long there was no corner of Ireland that he had not seen.

So I was lucky when he agreed to put in a stove for me in August.

I was lying in bed exhausted, and envying him his good health, as he drilled a big hole in the wall and stuck the pipe in and connected it to the back of the little black stove.

“I’ve never been a day sick in my life,” he said, “thank God.” And because he lived in the Midlands, he was eager to sample the delights of a Leitrim pub at night. Being too sick I couldn’t go with him, but in the morning as he ate a hearty breakfast, he told me of all the countrymen he met and the conversations he had had.

A few weeks later he went to the doctor with a sore throat and the doctor sent him to a specialist.

And when the specialist said, “Well it’s not cancer,” he was shocked, and rang me and said, “My God, I didn’t even know they were looking for something as serious as that, but thank God they found nothing.”

And he didn’t have cancer in his throat. It was in his lungs, and liver, and other places, and when they took him into hospital one Friday night, he had barely enough breath to put his arm around his wife a few times and embrace all his children and grandchildren, before he was swept into a shadow.

In the open coffin in the front room of the house where he lived in the Midlands town, his face was white as marble and the corridor and hallway and rooms were full of neighbours in damp coats and black jackets, and the street outside was a sea of umbrellas as the rain lashed down and the people recited a decade of the rosary.

The priest waited at the gates of the cemetery the following day, the Feast of All Souls, while the sons carried their father shoulder high, and when he was put in the ground one of them sang a folk song that was blown away in the wind.

All around the graveyard old emigrants chatted with old friends from the town.

“Do you remember me?” an old man said to a woman beside me. She didn’t.

So he said, “Do you remember the two chickens? One got caught in the door. The wind slammed it and cut the head off the chicken, and then the dog ate the other one and I was crying me eyes out for three days.” Her eyes brightened and she smiled and spoke his name as they embraced.

Eventually the crowd moved off towards the town, almost with an air of joy, refreshed and encouraged by the life of such a good man, and I returned to Leitrim and lit the stove and sat looking out at the lake for a very long time.